The Leisure Seeker (16 page)

I search the ground around me. There are stones in the dirt, like the kind that have made my snail’s journey so hard on my hands. I pick up three of the marble-sized rocks along with a handful of dust. My hands are so filthy now, I don’t even care anymore. I chuck a stone at John and miss. I throw another one and miss again. I throw another, much harder, and this one hits home. John gets it in the side of the noggin. I’m ashamed to say that I’m rather pleased. There is a click as it connects, at least partly, with the earpiece of his glasses.

“Ow!” says John. “What the hell?”

“John! Get over here and help me get up these steps.” Why am I doing this? It will take him at least a half hour to get over here. I just don’t see why I have to do this by myself. I throw another rock at John and it hits him in the leg.

“Aah! Quit it! Quit hitting me.” John rises slightly, clutching at the picnic table bench. Quickly, I grab more stones and keep tossing them at him.

“Would you stop it? You’re hurting me.”

I don’t say a damned thing. I keep throwing rocks at my husband. It’s angering him just enough for him to forget how feeble he is. He drags himself to his knees. I land a quarter-sized rock right in his ribs. He yowls and grabs at the top of the picnic table, lifts himself up all the way, groaning. I didn’t think we would do it this way, but this will do.

“Get your ass over here and help me up,” I say to him.

“Go to hell.”

“John, please. I dragged myself all the way here just so I could get you up.”

“I’m going to bed,” he says, rubbing his eye with a filthy finger.

“You can’t get in the van until you help me up.”

I watch him make his way toward me. He shifts and veers a little bit, probably unsteady from being on the ground for so long. But as he approaches me, his gait is better, his stride stronger, the way it usually is. Tonight was just a bad night for him. I just needed to wake him up and annoy him enough for adrenaline to take over.

He unplugs the extension cord at the van outlet and the projector clicks off. John steps back toward the door. Something in his eyes changes as he towers over me.

“You’re all dirty,” he says, looking at me no longer with anger, but with tenderness.

“Help me up, John,” I say.

John grabs one of the large metal handles he installed years ago on both sides of the door, leans forward and I reach out for him to pull me up, but instead, he bends down farther. He kneels at my feet and starts to tie my shoe. I have a hard time tying my shoes and often he has to do it for me. It’s hardly what I’m concerned with at the moment, but I’m not going to stop him if he feels the need.

John ties a sloppy but secure bow on my dirty SAS orthopedic.

“Thank you, John,” I say to my husband.

He smiles. “Hell, honey, you do all kinds of things for me.”

John leans forward and kisses me on the lips. I can feel the cracks in them, the dry skin, but they feel fine just the same. I put my hand on his bristly face. Then he grabs my arm at the elbow and pulls me from the steps.

I’m up. We’re not dead yet. My legs are throbbing, but they are steady enough to support me as I turn and grab the handle on the other side of the door with both hands. I pull my foot up onto the first tiny step, then the other foot. After a moment, I make it up to the next step.

“Wait a second,” says John. He starts brushing the dirt off my backside.

“We’re going to be out here all night if you try to sweep off my entire rear end,” I say, too tired to even laugh.

“Hush,” he says, patting, rubbing away.

So I hush and let him brush me off. Before long, I start
to feel more relaxed. My legs stop quivering. My breathing returns to normal. I did not expect a brush-down to soothe me so, but it does. John’s touch hasn’t changed through the years, still gentle, though his hands are toughened, stiffened, knobbed, and spotted with age, like everything else on our bodies. I experience a twinge of desire for him, through all the discomfort, through all the fear, through all the fatigue. I stand there on the steps, clutching the grip with both hands. I close my eyes.

We don’t wake up until 1:35 in the afternoon the next day. It’s then, when I open my eyes, that I feel as if I’ve gone ten rounds with Rocky Graziano. There are tears in my eyes before I even open them. It’s discomfort, certainly, but also the other thing, the knowing. And the discomfort only brings you closer to that.

Before we went to sleep, I took all my meds, including two little blue pills, then gave John three extra-strength Tylenol and a Valium. I locked the door from the inside. There were no late-night visits to the bathroom, no disturbances, no episodes with John. Exhaustion trumps all disease. For the moment, the body minds only its most immediate need. The rest are left to sit in the corner, unaccustomed to the lack of attention.

I can’t decide if we should try to keep moving today or stay put to rest. I think of Kevin, always the cautious one, saying to me, “Mom, if you feel tired or shaky, take it easy. That’s
when accidents occur. Everything always happens at once.” He’s right, too. Even when you’re at your usual level of misery, you can maintain a certain stability. You’re operating from a familiar place. But when you’re extra scared or fatigued or discomfortable, some other bad thing is bound to happen. The past two days confirm this theory: a flat tire, a stickup, and a bad fall. The Morton Salt girl had it right. When it rains, it damn well pours.

Yet part of me needs to carry on, to trudge forward and shake hands with our grubby destiny. Though I know that it is not to be trusted, that destiny, with his loud plaid polyester suit, his halitosis, his cubic zirconium pinkie ring. Soon enough, we will stumble into his realm where he will heartily slap us on our backs with a meaty dampish paw, smile at us with nicotine teeth and promise us—
this fate here? That’s the best one on the lot
.

Inertia makes the decision for me. I fall back into a semi-conscious state. Around 3:30, John has an accident in bed. This is the first time that this has happened. The warmth seeps toward me, snaps my eyes open. At least it gets us out of bed. My first instinct is to yell at him, but I know it was an accident. Besides, I’m too tired to get mad. I do have to get those sheets off the bed. After I head for the bathroom myself.

When I come out, John has stripped down and is trying to tug a pair of different pants over his pissy drawers. There’s other stuff on the drawers, too, but I’ll spare you a description.

“John, you have to change your underwear.”

“Ah, shut up,” he says to me.

He can’t pull up the pants because he’s sore from last night. “Go into the bathroom and wash up. You
stink
.”

“No, I don’t. I’m fine.” He keeps tugging.

This not washing has been a problem for some time. I’m fed up with it. “All right then. Let me help you,” I say. “Here, just step out of them.”

He stops struggling with the pants. “Why?”

“It’ll be easier. We’ll get you set right up.”

John lets the pants fall to the floor and steps out of them. I reach over to our little junk drawer and pull out the pair of scissors he uses to trim the bread bag ends. Since I’m behind him, he can’t see me snip through the waistband of his shorts. By the time he realizes what I’m doing, I’m down to the hem. I let them fall on the floor.

“Goddamn it. What the hell are you doing?”

“I’ll have a new pair for you in a minute.” I scuttle over to our cardboard clothes chest as fast as my throbbing legs can carry me and snatch a pair of fresh shorts. Then I grab a bar of soap and run two washcloths under warm water. Meanwhile, John is trying to pull the pants on over his bare ass.

“Just a second,” I say. “Sit down. Then we can get the pants on.” He parks his butt on our table with his thing just staring up at me. I rub soap onto one of the washcloths and hand it to him. “Here. Wash yourself off.”

He grumbles, but he does it. It’s nowhere near a good job, but it helps. While he does that, I strip the bed. The mattress is vinyl covered, so it just needs to be wiped down. Then I take
the washcloth, the crusty shorts, the old pants, and the sheets and put them in a garbage bag to be thrown away. Time to start shedding things.

John is just barely able to get the clean shorts up over his knees and over his rump. I take the other washcloth and wipe down his face and neck. Soon, he starts to enjoy his French bath, telling me how good it feels. He always hates the idea of a bath, but once you get him clean, he feels a lot better. I spray him head to toe with Right Guard, then we wrestle on clean Sansabelts and a loud Hawaiian shirt that he picks out. By then, his mood is changed.

“I feel great.”

“I’m so glad,” I say, settling onto one of the benches along our table. “Because I’m exhausted.”

“Let’s get going,” says John.

I watch as he trims the bread wrapper with the scissors that I just used to cut off his filthy skivvies. I’m too tired to stop him. “Let me get cleaned up, then we’ll talk it over.”

An hour and a half later, after counting my bruises, rinsing my abrasions, my own French bath, various ablutions, and a few close calls (the advantage of our tiny RV bathroom: you couldn’t fall if you wanted to—not enough room), I’m also ready. The problem is, I don’t know what I’m ready for. By the time we take our meds (plus a little blue for me) with a small meal of oatmeal, dried fruit, toast, and tea, it’s 5:07 in the afternoon.

“Come on, let’s go,” says John, searching for his keys.

I look out the back door and see indentations in the dirt
where we were rolling around last night. “Yes,” I say. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Good riddance to this bad country.

“What day is it?” John asks me after miles of silence and empty road.

“For God’s sake,” I say, peeved. At home, John is constantly asking what day it is and it drives me crazy. The kids buy him calendars for his birthday, so he’ll stop asking them when they come over. But calendars don’t help. How can you tell what day it is when you don’t what month it is? Or what year?

“It’s, it’s—” As I stammer, I realize that I have absolutely no idea what day it is either. “It’s Sunday,” I say, because it feels like a Sunday to me.

“Oh,” says John, satisfied.

“John, for right now, why don’t we just see if we can make it to the Continental Divide?”

“Sure, okay.”

He doesn’t care. I think he’s just happy to be driving. Actually, so am I. There are still a few hours of daylight left. We’ll just see where we end up.

“Let’s just take us a Sunday drive, John. What do you say?”

John nods.

We make it to the Continental Divide in nothing flat. All my life I have heard of it, but never really knew what it was. Simply put, it is the highest point of all Route 66 and the point at which rainfall divides. From this point, rainwater to the east drains into the Atlantic, water to the west drains into the Pacific. I read this all aloud to John, who grumbles as if he’s known it and already forgotten it five or six times over.

The sun is lowering now, getting in our eyes. I pull out my jumbo sunglasses, though I believe it is not that long till sunset. I suppose common sense would dictate that we stop for the night, but I don’t think either of us wants to, especially after only driving such a short time.

I stuff the guidebook in the fabric pocket of the door for safekeeping. “Okay, John, now let’s see if we can make it to Gallup.”

“Okay.”

We should stop for the night, but I don’t want to. After yesterday’s goings-on, I figure we can do anything we want. All bets are off. Right now, I just want to watch the red sandstone cliffs shift, change colors, and grow more vivid as the sun liquefies. The vastness of the mesas, the stillness of all this stone soothes my wretched body, makes me feel part of the earth. The angling light reveals the character of the rock, how every inch is mottled and etched with time. I look at my arm, run my fingers across the million tiny folds that cover my skin like endless lines of faded calligraphy. There’s something written in both places, but I can’t read either.

Along the road, there are a few trading posts, some still
open, even at this time of day, but most long out of business. I spy an old Whiting Brothers Gas Station, its sign collapsing into the dust. The windows are all busted out and there’s a giant bush growing where the pumps once stood. Those Whiting boys had dozens of gas stations in the West decades ago; now they’re all gone or looking like this one.

I roll down the window, enjoying the caress of the air as it grows soft and cool, mellowing the day’s swelter. I have always loved the feel of wind in my face, but love even more the sound of it rushing past my ears, blocking all else, creating a blur of noise.

Next to me, John seems content, not at all disoriented by the movement of the sun. He is focused on the road, occasionally checking the side-view mirror, not saying anything until after he takes a swig of flat Pepsi from a quarter-filled bottle he finds in his cup holder.

“Boy, am I sore today,” he says, our night in the dirt completely forgotten.

“Yeah, me, too,” I say. “Must be the weather.”

It is near dark by the time we reach Gallup, but you can hardly tell from all the neon. For a mile or two, with all the motels and signs, it feels like Las Vegas when we visited it in the ’60s, before all the casinos were crowded together, when there was still space between them, a sense of desert. Tonight, the neon signs glow warm and shimmery in the cobalt night:

BLUE SPRUCE LODGE

Lariat Lodge

ARROWHEAD LODGE

RANCH KITCHEN

MOTEL El Rancho

The last is a beautiful old hotel where lots of movie stars stayed, everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Hepburn and Tracy. Errol Flynn rode his horse into the bar. I’ve heard that it’s a classy old joint, but we won’t be stopping there tonight.

Before long, Gallup becomes a city. As we follow the old alignment, it takes us past a beautiful old theater called the El Morro. The marquee is dark tonight.