Road to Paradise (30 page)

“Why wouldn’t they pay up? Floyd’s my best friend. I wire him my money, he gets to keep half, the rest he saves for me.” Her voice was low, almost like she were speaking in the woods at night. “With him keeping half, my share is still about twenty grand. Just think about that.” She laughed softly. “Not bad for a seventeen-year-old, huh?”

“Yes, not bad,” I said. “Why did you stop? You didn’t want to do it anymore?”

“Something like that,” she said vaguely. “I said I was leaving, but Erv saw it differently. He refused to let me go.”

“Ah. Well, why would he?”

“At first I thought it was because of the money, losing his income. But his partners had other girls they could’ve used. No, for Erv it was about something else.” She furrowed her brow. “When I saw he wasn’t going to let me go easy, I tried to force his hand. I got myself tattooed so filming me would be impossible.” She smiled bleakly. “I thought that no one would like a tattooed chick.” Shaking her head, she went on. “But he just beat me and started hiring me out again by the hour, saying there were plenty of men who’d take a girl with tattoos. I know he wanted me to stay, even though he was pretty mad about the tattoos, and normally I would’ve stayed, but I
had
to go. None of my pleading, or tattooing myself, or telling him I didn’t want to do it anymore was driving home the point. I knew I had to find a way to convince him. I had to leave, and he needed to leave me alone. So I took the reel.”

“Ah. How’d that work out for you?”

“Admittedly not great.”

Gina stared intensely at me. I narrowed my eyes on the road and didn’t return her glare. What had we gotten ourselves into? Gina and I were momentarily speechless—for about thirty miles.

“He’s pursuing you,” Gina said, “because he’s afraid if that film gets out, he’s going away for life. And he’s right. You’re a threat to his entire existence. He knows if he gets the film back, he’ll be safe.”

“Yes. Which is why I can’t let him get his hands on it.” Candy tutted. “I told him and told him to leave me alone. I begged him to let me go. Is it my fault he’s stubborn and refused to listen to reason?”

“No,
that’s
not your fault,” I drew out. We were so screwed. My hands were shaking. Erv, the pornographer, knew his work was not for public consumption. His ouvre, for example, was unlikely to be released at the local movie theater. And he was in the reel of film with Candy.

“What kind of a fucked-up mother did you have?” exclaimed Gina. “Where the hell was this woman while this was happening,
while you and her boyfriend were doing this? Did you have a work studio right in the house?”

“No. We went someplace else.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right, then!”

“Look, my mom’s had a real hard life,” said Candy. “She ran away from home herself when she was thirteen, lived on the streets with her boyfriends, had one child before me who died, had some serious health problems, calcification of the kidneys, cirrhosis of the liver, her boyfriends beat her, and her sister was strangled by her newly-wed husband two months after the wedding, and,” said Candy, widening her eyes, “on top of all that she got
impetigo
.”

“What the hell is impetigo?”

“It’s some kind of a horrible skin infection,” said Gina. “Yuk.”

“She’d been living pretty dire before she met up with my dad. He was probably the nicest to her, but she was too flighty to settle down. She didn’t see that life for herself. My mother is not a very spiritual person. She’s not exactly looking for answers to things. When I came east, she was scared at first of having me with her, but then she lightened a little. Saw the potential. My money allowed her not to work, to have things she liked.”

“Like what?”

“Like Southern Comfort and cigarettes. It allowed her a new Maytag top-loading washing machine and a Frigidaire fridge and freezer. She bought the house she lived in and wasn’t a renter anymore. She bought herself a truck. I was her only child, and I made my mother’s life a bit better.”

“I don’t know how that can be,” said Gina. “She’s still with Erv.”

Candy stared at the back of Gina’s head for longer than I thought necessary, as if trying to force a quest for reflection on her own choices, but Gina was thinking only of Candy and didn’t feel the pointed stare.

“Your mother bartered you for a Frigidaire?” I finally said.

“For a life full of Frigidaires. Everybody made out.”

“Did they?” I said. “If everything was so hunky-dory, then why are you running away?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Candy. “It has absolutely
nothing
to do with the business, nothing to do with my mother, and nothing to do with Erv.” She moved to the back. “I got my own personal reasons. I really don’t want to talk about it right now.” She stared out the window. “I just wanted out. I needed out. But when I told Erv I had to go, he went crazy. I was his bread and butter. I had no choice. I had to take the film and run.”

“Did you leave him and your mom a goodbye note?” I was big on goodbye notes. I wish my own mother had left one for me. I wish my father had left one for me. I got a note post-maternally. “
Say hi to Shelby
” was what I got from Lorna Moor.

“Yes,” Candy replied. “In the empty reel case. I wrote,
Erv, it’s
like this. The world is big enough for you, and for me. Let me live my
life. I will never speak about you to anyone. No one will ever know
your name. I promise you. Just let me go, and go on doing what you’ve
been doing. Big world. You in one corner, me in the other. I swear,
unless something happens to me, that reel will never see the light of
day. You have my word. Otherwise, it’s going straight to the police and
the
New York Times.
Just let me go
.”

“Good letter.”

“Yeah,” said Gina, “but something tells me Erv didn’t take her advice.”

“Maybe he’s still thinking it over?” offered Candy. “I seriously figured it would take him and his camera guy a week or two to find it missing. I was wrong about that, judging by how quick they tracked me down. It took them no time at all.”

Gina emitted a short disbelieving laugh. “My God, Candy,” she said. “How in the world does Jesus factor into the life you’ve been living?”

“What do you mean?” said Candy, frowning. “Who do you think Jesus is for? Saints?”

“I dunno. But he seems pretty far away from the life you had with Erv.”

Candy didn’t reply, slumping into the backseat. I wish I could be a fly in the corner of her soul.

“Candy,” I asked, “that thing you used to do … with men … for money … that was because of Erv, right? You don’t do that anymore, do you?”

“Not if I can help it,” she replied.

What to do with the minutes that the thoughts are filled by? Rather, what to do with the thoughts that the minutes are filled by? Candy’s mother? I couldn’t bring myself to think of her in any terms other than from Candy’s point of view.
Candy had a mother
, was the only thing I could muster. Pathetic, I know. Abortions, health problems and truancy, and perhaps some bad decisions. Even impetigo, whatever the hell that was. Still. She was Candy’s
mother
.

I opened the window, breathed the Nebraska air, barreling through the countryside, past Inman, pop. 22. It was flat, hot, windy. All oxygen had been sucked from the car by Candy’s words.

After a few miles of road had passed, I told her about my rock metaphor for Erv. She was quiet for a few moments. “I guess,” she said, then added, “Except for one thing. Jesus. He’s the one who makes goldfish out of stones. With Him all things that were impossible are made possible. People don’t change much, that’s true, but they can. And you don’t stop helping them, making an effort on their behalf. That can be
your
true nature. And it will be good enough. Just because it’s the scorpion’s nature to sting, that does not change the turtle’s nature to save. That’s the Jesus answer.”

This is a consequence of being in the car for hundreds of miles. Things are revealed and reconciled without so much as a change of seating. You are shocked. Wait thirty miles. You’ll be thirsty. You’ll have time for a drink, for melancholy, for fear, for more trivia about Nebraskans, for a pervasive feeling of queasiness about the things you just heard, and then a gasp of astonishment at the geological impossibilities seen through your front
windshield—ocean dunes rising out of the sagebrush grass, flat plains sloping up onto rippling sand dunes. You felt bad, you gasped for air, you picked up speed, scratched your head, moved on. What choice did you have really? Scorpions, turtles, Sand Hills, Ervs, Danas, Candies, and the voices of twenty men, singing,
He brings wine to gladden the heart of man, and bread to
strengthen man’s heart
.

In the afternoon, when we were
finally
in the northwestern part of Nebraska, amid the eternity of the stretched-out Sand Hills, Gina told us a story of two sisters who lived in Jonestown, Nebraska, in the 1800s. One Sunday they asked their mother if they could go visit their older sister who was working in town. The mother agreed. The girls left after Sunday church. The mother had warned them to stay on the road, but the older girl saw some beautiful wildflowers and went to pick them, to make a bouquet for the sister she was going to visit. The younger sister helped her. The girls got off the road.

They made a beautiful bouquet, but when it came time to get back, they couldn’t find their way. It was yellow sand and blue sky everywhere they looked. They went this way, that. They wandered around. Night fell. The next morning, they walked, calling, calling. Another day passed. Meanwhile, a posse had been arranged by the frantic parents, with all the townspeople looking for the girls. On the third day, the older sister told the younger one, who was getting weak without food and water, to stay put, to sit tight, that she would go find help. So she left, the other one stayed put. Night fell, morning came. Eventually, the small girl got up and started walking.

She was found by the posse who had been looking for them for five days. The mother, sick with grief, couldn’t even go out searching for her girls. The child was brought to her mother, and then the posse went back out. The sister was found under one of the creosote bushes, her cardigan under her head, lying on her
side, as if she knew she was lying down to die and wanted to make herself comfortable.

“How old were the girls?” I asked.

“The older one was eight, the youngest five.”

“God, Gina!”

“Yes, they were young. What did I tell you? Sand Hills.”

Bassett, pop. 743. Jonestown, pop. 57. Straight out of the 1800s. Until Valentine, the “heart” of the hills, I thought about the girls off road and lost and their mother home grieving. I spent most of my life dreaming about getting lost, so my mother would hear of me, and be moved to grieve, to feel, to do something. To return for the funeral perhaps. How good I was at daydreaming this, of getting lost in the untouched remnants of the vast prairies that once covered all the Plains states of America and finding my mother.

The hotels of Valentine came upon us—in resentful, isolated silence. The town was closed for lunch. It was scorching, the merciless sun beating down. Only a couple of bars were open, but I wasn’t going into a bar during the day. Out of one of these, staggered an inebriated American Indian, a corduroy satchel on his back. He followed us down the street trying to speak to us in slurred English while we ignored him the best we could.