Day Out of Days (3 page)

Didn’t we once have a freak show in Duarte? Wagons and rings. Right out on Highway 66 where the aqueduct begins. I remember the deep elephant smell. Peanuts in shells. The Petrified Man. Fat people poking him with pins. Only his eyes moved. The Two-Headed Calf. (Always a standby.) Bearded Lady Midget. Fetus in a Bottle. Human. Suspended. Drifting in strings of gooey yellow. Everything is coming back to me now. In Spanish.

Didn’t we once have a Gypsy consultant in our linoleum kitchen? Is that what we called her? No. Couldn’t have been. My dad believed in her, though. Before God. Before Mary. Poring through glossy High Desert brochures. Salton Sea. Preposterous mock-ups of golf courses seen through the irrigated mist of Rain Bird sprinklers. Jerry Lewis and Sinatra were supposed to appear. Him chain-smoking Old Golds. Shaking from whiskey. On the edge of which desert, he wanted to know. He got it confused with the Painted one. She couldn’t say. Wouldn’t. Why be so mysterious, I wondered. It’s only land. Her pink bandana. Sulfur smell. Rubbing sage oil into her bony wrists and all the turquoise bracelets
clacking like teeth. That was her, all right. Whatever we called her. Watching her through an open door collect her burro hobbled out in the orchard, chewing rotten avocados, pissing a hole in the dried-up leaves.

Wasn’t there once a tall gray piano player too? Gentle. He came in a bright blue suit, haircut like a Fuller brush; played “Camptown Ladies” all through the night of Great-Aunt Gracie’s death then later hanged himself in a Pasadena garage alongside his Chrysler sedan. I remember that now. Told stories of how Gracie was quite the Grande Dame; dated John Philip Sousa back in the day; seduced a Lumber Baron with her Blue Plate Special and captured hawks on weekends down in the Arroyo Seco. Everything’s coming back to me now. In tiny pieces.

What happened, now? Are you telling me that this whole history of catastrophes is the result of one night in the long-ago?

That’s what I understand.

The father came home late and smashed every window in the house with a claw hammer? Is that it?

That’s what I heard.

Ripped the front door off its hinges and then set fire to the backyard?

So the story goes.

The son then snuck out one of the broken windows, under cover of dawn, with a few books in a paper sack?

So they say.

Stepping over the unconscious, bleeding form of his father he then jumped into a Chevy and never stopped driving the rest his life?

That’s it in a nutshell.

You’d think he’d be over it by, now, wouldn’t you?

You’d think.

I’ve been crisscrossing the country again, without much reason. Sometimes a place will just pop into my head and I’ll take off. This time, down through Normal, Illinois, from high up in white Minnesota, dead of winter, icy roads, wind blowing sideways across the empty cornfields. Find myself stopping for the night outside Indianapolis, off 78, just before it makes its sweeping junction with 65 South to Louisville. I randomly pick a Holiday Inn, more for its familiar green logo and predictability than anything else. Plus, I’m wiped out. Evidently there’s some kind of hot-rod convention going on in town, although I seem to remember those always taking place at the height of summer, when people can run around in convertible coupes with the tops down. Anyway, there are no rooms available except for possibly one and that one is “smoking,” which I have nothing against. The desk clerk tells me she’d know in about ten minutes if there’s going to be a cancellation. I’m welcome to wait, so I do, not wanting to face another ninety-some miles down to Kentucky through threatening weather.

I collapse into one of the overly stuffed sofas in the lobby, facing two plasma-screen TVs in opposing corners, both tuned to the same “reality” channel showing reruns of surveillance footage from convenience-store holdups: teenagers in hooded sweatshirts, one hand holding up their baggy jeans while the other pumps nine-millimeter slugs into screaming victims, who claim they have no access to the safe. I ask the desk clerk if she can please turn the
TVs off, or change the channel, but she says she has no control over any of it. The TVs are on some kind of preordained computer system, much like sprinklers in Los Angeles or security garage lights everywhere else. I ask her if she can at least mute the sound so I don’t have to listen to the agonized groans of the victims or the raging insanity of the gunmen, but she says that she has no control over that either. I pick up a travel magazine off the glass table and leaf through it, pausing at every picture with a bikini-clad woman lounging beachside holding tall icy cocktails and staring smugly at the camera. The screams and groans and gunfire from the TVs keep repeating in looped cycles and soon lose all sense of being connected to murder. I find myself anticipating the next scream the way you would a familiar lyric in a pop song. (Here comes the high, shrieking temper-tantrum sequence just after he pops off a spray of four rapid shots.) I’m not sure how long I hang there in limbo in the lobby but it feels like way more than ten minutes.

A tall, skinny woman in a cloth Pat Nixon-type coat and a blue bandana comes through the revolving doors, pulling a small suitcase on wheels. She smiles at me as she passes and I feel immediately sad for no reason that I can put my finger on. She pauses at the desk to get her key, then continues on toward the elevators, giving me a quick glance over her shoulder as she disappears down the hallway. Again, I felt this little stab of melancholy, or maybe emptiness, maybe that’s it. I stand and stretch, then walk over to the desk and ask the girl if she knows anything more about the cancellation. Not yet, she says, but reassures me that the possible guests will be calling any second now. They’re coming in from Tupelo, Mississippi, everything depends on the weather, she says. I return to the squashy sofa and collapse again. (Isn’t Tupelo where Elvis was born?) I notice the yellow spine
of a National Geographic
at the bottom of a stack and dig it out. The feature story is titled “The Black Pharaohs—Conquerors of Ancient Egypt.” A man who
looks very much like the young James Earl Jones is depicted on the cover; muscular arms crossed over his chest, with a leopard-skin cape, thick gold necklaces, and a gold-leaf skullcap with two shining falcons on the crown, staring stoically out. I am flipping through the glossy pages when I feel a tall presence beside me and a high-pitched female voice saying my name with a question mark behind it: “Stuart?” I turn to see the same skinny woman in her cloth coat but without the suitcase.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asks. I stare into her green eyes searching for something to recognize, but the same tinge of melancholy is all I find. “Nineteen sixty-five,” she says with a little sigh. “Tenth Street and Second Avenue? St. Mark’s Church.”

“I’m drawing a blank,” I confess. “I’ve been driving for days. What seems like days, anyway.”

She laughs nervously, half embarrassed, then stares at the carpet. “We lived together for a while. Don’t you remember? We’d get up every morning and sit on the edge of my mattress eating bowls of wheat germ with brown honey all over it.”

“Oh,” I say, and keep staring into her with mounting desperation, wondering if maybe I’ve snapped some fragile synapse in my brain from too much driving. The final breakdown of road madness. Right here in Indianapolis. Then she does an amazing thing. She whips off the blue bandana and shakes out a mane of red hair that topples almost to her waist. Now it all comes back. “Oh—it’s you,” I say, still unable to attach a name.

“Who?” She giggles. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”

“Of course I do.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No—”

“Then what’s my name? Come on, it wasn’t that long ago.”

“Nineteen sixty-five,” I say.

“Or six—”

“No, it couldn’t have been.”

“Maybe sixty-eight. That was it.”

“That’s still forty years ago!”

“No!” She laughs.

“Add it up.”

“Yeah, I guess it was, wasn’t it?”

“Beth, right?” I blurt out.

“No, see? You don’t remember.”

“Betty?”

“Close.”

“What then? This is wearing me out.”

“Becky!” she announces with a beaming smile and her arms wide open as if I’m going to jump up and embrace her.

“Sure—Becky. That’s right. Becky—Of course.”

“What’s my last name?”

“Oh, please—I can’t keep up with this. I’m really wiped out—”

“Thane,” she continues.

“Thane?”

“Thane. Becky Marie Thane.”

“Right,” I say.

“You really don’t have any recollection at all, do you?” she says in almost a whisper, then stifles a little chuckle. She crosses her long arms and holds her shoulders softly as though filling the blank of affection she wishes were coming from me. “I was so in love with you, Stuart,” she sighs, and her eyes drift back down to the pink wall-to-wall carpeting with pizza stains and splashed Pepsi. The violent sounds of the surveillance loop keep mercilessly repeating. I notice the girl behind the desk giving us a sideways glance, then return to the bright green glow of the computer screen. There is no escape. Becky Marie Thane lets her long arms fall to her sides in surrender, the blue bandana dangling from her right hand. I return the
National Geographic
to the glass table and then I do suddenly get a picture of that time, some fleeting
memory of a morning facing a New York window with a bowl clenched between my naked knees, and I say, just to be saying something, “Your hair is even redder than I remember,” which make her burst out laughing, suddenly happy that I haven’t abandoned the game.

“It’s not real,” she says.

“What?” I say, thinking she’s referring to something metaphysical.

“The color. Lady Clairol. Out of a bottle.”

“Oh—Well, it looks great.”

“Thanks.”

“Very … festive.”

“Festive?” She giggles and fluffs the back of her head like a movie star. Then she gets embarrassed again and twists herself from side to side.

“So, how old were we then?” I stumble on without really wanting to.

“We were kids,” she says.

“Were we?”

“
I
was anyway. I know that much.”

“Kids—yeah, I guess.”

“How many do you have?” she asks and her green eyes come to meet mine and the little twinge of sadness I’d been feeling turns to an undertow.

“You mean children?” She nods and her eyes stay hooked to me.

“I’ve got a whole bunch,” I say.

“How many?” she insists.

“Five. But not all with the same woman.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” She smiles.

“How about you?” I ask.

“Two. I have two girls.”

“Two. That’s great. Where are they?” I say.

“Here. Well, I mean—”

“That’s right, you’re from Indianapolis, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. You remember that!” She smiles.

“I remember your dad calling, back then. When we were sitting on the bed eating that stuff.”

“Wheat germ.”

“Right. He called to tell you there was a riot going on in your front yard. So it
must
have been sixty-eight, wasn’t it? That was when there was a riot every other day.”

“Must’ve been.”

“Martin Luther King and—”

“Right.”

“Everything exploding. Detroit. L.A.”

“The whole world on fire.”

“Seemed like.”

“Well.” She pauses, fishing for something more. “I didn’t mean to—I mean, I was so shocked when I walked through the door and saw you sitting here. I couldn’t believe it. I knew it was you as soon as I saw you, but … I thought, I can’t just walk on by and not say anything. You know—just go on up to my room and pretend it wasn’t you. I had to come back down and say something. I mean—all this time.”

“No, I’m glad you did. It’s great to see you.”

“What in the world are you doing here? In Indianapolis.”

“Just passing through.”

“Oh—”

“How about you? I mean, if you live here how come you’re in a Holiday Inn?” Everything stops. She goes suddenly numb and her lips start to tremble. For some reason, the background sounds seem to have gone silent, unless it’s a pause between the reels. The girl at the desk stares at us now, as though she suspects something illegal is going on.

“My husband—” she says, and halts on the words. “My husband disappeared a month and a half ago. He—just took off.”

“Oh, no,” I say.

“He took the girls.”

“No—”

“He may have left the country.” I find myself standing and making a feeble gesture toward comforting her but I’d rather be running out the door.

“Have you—I mean, do you have help?” My mouth has gone dry. “Police? Lawyers?”

“Yes, I’ve gone through all that.”

“That’s a pretty serious—I mean, that’s considered kidnapping, isn’t it?”

“It
is
kidnapping.”

“Have you got any clues? I mean—”

“We’ve followed some credit card debits, you know, gas stations, restaurants, but it’s all led to dead ends. Everything winds up in Florida and just stops.”

“Florida?”

“He has some family down there.”

“What about the girls? How old are they?”

“Twelve and sixteen. There’s still some investigation going on at the house so that’s why I can’t stay there.”

“Oh.”

“I just took a room here for the time being. I’m kind of in limbo, I guess.” She casts her arm out limply and the blue bandana flutters up like a distant flag of truce. Her eyes scan the two plasma screens as the screaming and the gunfire start up again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to lay all this on you. I just saw you sitting here when I came in and thought—”

“No, that’s okay. I’m glad you—It’s just great to see you again.”

She laughs, then breaks down, but quickly recovers herself and turns her shoulder to me. I move to console her, but she turns her back completely and crosses her arms on her chest again. The desk clerk girl is heading straight for me across the lobby with her
laminated name tag pinned to her breast and an apologetic face. “I’m sorry, sir,” she says, “but they’ve just confirmed that room I was telling you about. That ‘smoking’ room with two beds.”