Niagara Motel (15 page)

Then I heard someone whistle and I looked up and Meredith was standing beside a really tall black woman who was pumping gas into a yellow Mustang convertible. Meredith waved me over.

I stood up carefully so as not to crush any of the ants and walked over to Meredith and the tall lady.

“Tucker,” Meredith said, “this is Dee.”

The lady stuck out her hand for me to shake. “Pleasure to meet you, Tucker.” Dee said in a scratchy voice. Her hand was a giant's hand. She had puffed up dark-blonde hair and wore a sequined head-band with two pink flamingoes on it. Her eyelashes were so long that I knew they were fake because no one in the world actually has eyelashes that long, even in the Guinness Book.

I looked at Meredith.

“Listen, about before …” Meredith said.

“I'll just use the ladies' room,” Dee said, putting the gas nozzle back on its hook. “Back in a jiff.”

Meredith reached into her backpack. “I found my purse.” She held it up.

I nodded and bit my lip.

“Somebody gave it to the cashier. Said she just found it in the bathroom.”

“Was everything still in it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Even the money. I couldn't believe it.”

“I told you. People are usually good.”

“Maybe,” she shrugged.

“So, do you still want to come to L.A. with me?” I said.

She nodded.

“Even though it's stupid?”

“There are stupider things I could be doing,” she said.

“That's good because it's safer if we stick together.”

Her mouth curled up on one side. “You didn't think you could get rid of me that easily, did you?”

Then Dee came back smiling and hopped into her convertible without even opening the door. “This is my car, Limón,” Dee said.

“Hi, Limón,” I said. Even though I had just said hi to a car and I knew that was beyond dumb, I didn't even care because I was getting to ride in a
convertible!

“Dee's going to Vegas,” Meredith said, climbing in the back.

“That's right, sweetie. But I'm making a little pit-stop along the way.” Dee pulled onto the freeway.

“Where?” I said.

“The Grand Canyon,” Dee said and bounced up and down in her seat.

I wished that we weren't stopping at the Grand Canyon since it was just a stupid hole in the ground, and I wanted to get to L.A. as soon as possible. But you don't pass up good rides because you never know when the next one is going to come along.

I watched Dee as she drove. I looked at her face and her hands. Her jaw was sharp and boxy, and her hands were like baseball mitts. I liked being in a convertible and I liked the feeling of the wind rushing through my hair, but I got kind of squirmy and my stomach felt weird when I realized that I wasn't totally sure if Dee was a real lady or not. But I didn't know why any man would
want
to be a woman since being a man was so much easier. I snuck a few looks at her boobs and they looked big and round and squishable like nice boobs do.

“Dee,” I said.

“Yeah, honey?” She turned to me, smiling, her pink lipstick glimmering in the sunlight.

“Are you a man or a woman?”

“Tucker!” Meredith kicked the back of my seat, hard.

“Oh, it's okay,” Dee glanced back at Meredith, then turned to me. If you looked past her two-foot eyelashes, her eyes were sad and serious. She cleared her throat. “I was born a man, but I feel like a woman inside.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So sometimes I dress like a woman.”

“Even though you're really a man?” I said.

“That's right,” she said.

“How do you decide?”

“Decide what, sugar?”

“When you'll be a man and when you'll be a woman?”

She smiled and winked at Meredith in the rear-view mirror. “Well, where I grew up, where I
live
, there's really no one like me.”

“There's no one like anyone,” I said.

“That's true,” Dee said. “But what I mean is, people who are one way on the outside but feel the other way on the inside.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So, in Sweetwater, I always present as a man. But if I'm going
away or when I'm alone, if I know I'm going to be alone for a while, then I can let my inside self show, and I can dress as a woman. Dress in drag.”

“What's drag?” I said.

“Tucker, just shut up. Leave her alone,” Meredith said.

“It's all right, sweetheart. I don't mind.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Meredith asked.

“Oh sure, just make sure you roll the window down.” Dee laughed and slapped her thigh. “What was I saying?”

“Drag.”

“Oh yes. Well, drag is actually a word from Shakespeare's time. You know William Shakespeare, the playwright?”

“Not personally,” I said.

Dee laughed. She had a big cackly laugh that was contagious. “Well, in Shakespeare's time, women couldn't act on stage, they weren't allowed to, so all the female parts had to be played by men, so there would be a little note next to the actor's name that was supposed to play a woman, and it would say,
Dressed As Girl
, and that's where the term drag came from, D.R.A.G. Get it?”

I nodded.

The person sitting next to me was a man dressed as a woman who felt like a woman on the inside but was actually a man on the outside so had to go in disguise to be what she really was. I felt a little weird about it all, but not as weird as I had felt a few minutes before when I didn't know. And the longer we drove with Dee, the less weird I felt. Dee was Dee. It didn't really matter if she was a man or a woman. She was funny and nice and liked to sing and laugh and chew Hubba Bubba and blow big bubbles that popped all over her face.

At first I'd been nervous that maybe Dee was one of the weirdos that Gina had warned me about. But after about half an hour, I knew that Dee was not one of those weirdos. Even though she was
different, she was just like everybody else. She wanted people to like her. She wanted people to see her for who she really was inside. I started to understand what Meredith meant about feelings she gets about people. But, I think for me, it wasn't the feeling I got
about
a person, it was how the person made me feel about
myself
. Dee made me feel kind of …
fabulous
.

21

Before long, we were entering Grand Canyon National Park. Dee paid the toll and drove to the visitor centre. Then she parked Limón and we walked to the lookout point.

“Whoa,” I said, leaning over the edge of the cliff to get a better look.

Meredith didn't say anything but came up beside me and stood so close to me, I could feel the heat from her skin. The three of us looked out over the abyss.

“Isn't it
magnificent?
” Dee said. “I've always been in such a hurry to get to Vegas. This is the first time I've stopped here.”

“How often do you go to Vegas?” Meredith asked her.

“Oh, as often as I can. Las Vegas is the one place I really feel like I can be myself, know what I mean?”

I nodded, even though I felt like myself pretty much everywhere I went.

“I'd like to move there, eventually,” she sighed. “It takes a while to figure all that out, though.”

I didn't see what there was to figure out. When Gina and I wanted to move, we packed up all our junk and caught the next bus out of town. Moving is easy. Staying in one place is hard.

“I'm going to go find the ladies' room,” Dee said. “Will you kitties be all right here for a minute?”

“Yep,” I said.

Dee left and I looked over at Meredith. She had a sad-worried look on her face. “What's wrong?” I said.

“I'm the Grand Canyon,” she said quietly.

“Um,
no
… you're Meredith.”

“I feel like that,” she said, pointing to the centre of the rocky pit.
“I feel like there's this big, gaping hole inside me and it's been there for a million years and it'll be there for a million more, and nothing will ever be able to fill it up. Ever. And everyone can see it. Everybody knows it's there.”

I stared at her.

“It's like everything bad that's ever happened to me has dug a little scoop out, and so now I'm almost completely hollowed out. I'm the Grand Canyon, and there's nothing I can do about it.” She wrapped her arms around herself.

“What about the good things that happen to you?” I said. “Don't they fill it in a little?”

She shrugged.

“What do you think would happen if you hooked Niagara Falls up to the Grand Canyon?” I said.

“You couldn't do that. No one could do that.”

“Yeah, but say you could,” I said. “One million bathtubs of water a second, pouring into the biggest bathtub in the world.” I held out my arms, taking in the gigantic crater before us.

“It would fill up eventually, I guess,” Meredith said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Exactly
what?
”

“If you're the Grand Canyon, then I'm Niagara Falls.”

Meredith looked at me like I had three heads. Then her face cracked into a smile. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

She nodded and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her hoodie.

Then I gave her a hug because it seemed like the best thing to do at the time. Her body felt soft and warm against mine and a piece of her hair tickled my nose.

“I'm sorry, Tucker,” she murmured into the side of my neck.

“I know,” I said.

Then Dee ran up to us and said, “Ooh, ooh, me too!” and she encircled both of us in a hug. I could feel her thick arm muscles and the slippery material of her tube-top against my skin. Then I thought about how everyone has little Grand Canyons inside them, but everyone has little Niagara Fallses too.

Dee decided that she liked the Grand Canyon so much that she wanted to stay and do the sunset horseback riding tour. She apologized all over the place for not taking us straight to Las Vegas, but she said that she couldn't have foreseen the power that the Grand Canyon would have over her and that she knew we would understand.

“I'm sure you can find a ride here with someone,” she said. “I know you will. But on the off-chance you don't, I'll be back a little after sunset and we can go then. I'm so sorry, darlings. Do you hate me? You must.”

“It's okay,” I said. “It's no problem.” Even though it
was
kind of a problem, but what could I say? I couldn't tell Dee what to do. I couldn't tell her not to go horseback riding at sunset in the Grand Canyon.
I
wanted to go horseback riding at sunset in the Grand Canyon. But even more than that, I wanted to get to Los Angeles.

We said goodbye to Dee, and she hugged both of us again and gave us butterfly kisses with her ridiculous eyelashes.

“Good luck,” she said.

“You too,” I said.

“Look me up if you ever come through Sweetwater, Texas.”

“I will,” I said. But I knew I never would. I wouldn't even know how to find her since she'd probably be listed under her man-name in the phonebook.

Meredith and I hung around the parking lot, scouting for a ride. Finally, after about six or seven unsuccessful attempts, Meredith found a dark-haired woman wearing a blue dress who said she could take us to Las Vegas.

The woman's name was Lorena and she drove a silver Ford Taurus, which was a rental car. She looked as if she had been crying. Lorena had a Spanish accent and didn't play any music in the car. Meredith sat shotgun and I leaned my head against the back window, breathing in the new-car smell. The new-car smell is gross but somehow comforting at the same time. We drove for a while, and no one said anything. Lorena kept sniffling, and I wished that I had a Kleenex I could give her. I watched all the orange and pink rocks go by. The sun in Arizona is redder than anywhere else I've been. It hung low over the mountains and throbbed like a beating heart, bleeding red across the sky.

“What brings you to Las Vegas?” Meredith finally asked.

Lorena's jaw clenched. “My husband wanted to take me on a trip. A romantic weekend getaway, he called it. We've been having some problems,” she turned to Meredith. “You know …”

Meredith nodded.

“So, anyways, he gets me all excited about this trip, this
romantic weekend getaway
. I bring all these special outfits, I plan this trip to the Grand Canyon for us. We were going to have a picnic up there, watch the sunset. I got champagne. I got havarti. That's his favourite, havarti. But, here I am. Alone.
Why?
Because he's up all night playing fucking
blackjack
, and too tired to come out to the Grand Canyon today, that's why.”

“That's shitty,” Meredith said.

“You're goddamn right it's shitty! Who has a romantic picnic all by themselves? No one, that's who! He's the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life.” Lorena choked back a sob and then began to cry.

“I'm sorry,” Meredith said.

“You don't need to be sorry.
He's
the one who should say sorry!”

Meredith nodded.

“But he won't. He won't say it. He never apologizes for anything.
Nada
.” Lorena wiped her nose on the back of her hand and gripped the steering wheel. She blew out her breath and the air lifted up her bangs. “Sometimes, I just want to chop his dick off and throw it out the window, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Meredith said. “Totally.”

I squirmed in the backseat and pressed my legs together. Lorena was a small, sweet looking lady, but you could tell that on the inside, she held a rage.

I wondered what Gina was doing. This was the longest I'd ever been away from Gina, and I missed her, but I knew that I was doing the right thing. I couldn't go my whole life without meeting my father. It was dangerous, what Meredith and I were doing, I knew Gina was right about that, but there were other ways of living that were dangerous, too. I would be twelve soon and then I would be thirteen. And everyone knows what happens to teenage boys who don't know who their father is.

Finally, we came to the top of a hill, and I could see the city of Las Vegas shining below. It was alive with lights. When I closed my eyes I could still see them.

“Where do you want me to let you off?” Lorena said.

“You can just drop us at any of these motels,” Meredith said.

We drove by one with a fifty-foot neon pink flamingo on the outside of it. I remembered Dee's headband. “That one,” I said. “The Pink Flamingo.”

Lorena pulled over.

“Thanks for the ride,” Meredith said. “I hope things get better with your husband. I'm sure they will.”

“Either things will get better or things will end,” she said. “Either way … it will eventually be better.” She turned and smiled at me. “Hey, thanks for listening, you guys. Really. No one ever really listens to me at home. People can be so … you know.”

I nodded, although I didn't know. People were people. They could be so many different things.

“Bye, Lorena,” I said, getting out of the car.

“
Vaya con Dios, angelitos
,” she said, and gave us a small wave as she pulled away.

We checked in at the front desk, but they didn't have any rooms left with two beds.

I turned to Meredith. “What do you think?”

She shrugged. “It doesn't matter,” she said. “I'm so tired I could sleep in the bathtub.”

The first thing I did when we got to our room was check the nightstand for the Gideon bible. It was there. Then both of us brushed our teeth and got into bed with our clothes on. We were too tired to even watch TV. But it turns out that Las Vegas is the worst place in the world to fall asleep because:

             
1.
  
All the lights are so bright

             
2.
  
People are partying and yelling and singing and talking and burping and playing music

             
3.
  
You might have to share a bed with a girl

I crunched myself all the way over to the very edge of the bed so that I wouldn't disturb Meredith or touch her by accident because I didn't want her to think that I'd touched her on purpose and was
trying to get to first base with her or something stupid like that. Between that and the noise and the lights, I basically didn't sleep a wink all night.

Staying up all night is okay when you
mean
to do it, then it can be pretty fun, but when you actually
want
to sleep and you can't, it really, really, sucks. Every hour seems so long. Eventually you just want it to be morning already so you can stop trying to sleep and just get up and have the worst day of your life.