The Leisure Seeker: A Novel (22 page)

Carnac stares daggers at Ed, then he rips open the envelope and reads, “Who you’ll meet at the Disneyland in hell.”

I have no idea what time it is when the phone rings. I’m not even sure where it is that I’m sleeping. I try to look at the clock, but I don’t have my glasses on. The phone rings and rings, just like at home because the kids know it takes us a long time to get to it. Finally, I manage to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Robina? This is Eric, the night clerk at the front desk. Um, your husband is down here and he, uh, seems a little confused.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. It’s just that he’s upset. First he went outside and stood by your van for a little while, came in, went back out there, then he came in asking me where his keys were. That’s when I looked up what room he was in.”

I take a breath, rub the sand from my left eye. At least he’s okay.

“Now he keeps asking me where the coffee is. I told him that we don’t have coffee until 6:30
A.M
., but he insists we have it somewhere. He’s getting perturbed.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I say. “I’ll be down there as soon as I can.”

Thank God I remembered to take the keys away from him last night.

“Where were you?” says John, in the elevator back to our room.

I’m weaving over my You-Go, still woozy from being awakened so abruptly. “I was upstairs sleeping, John.”

“I want to get going.”

I lead us off the elevator to our room. “It’s too early. Let’s try to get a little more sleep, all right?”

“Let’s get going.”

“John, it’s 4:30 in the morning. It’s too early. We’re going to get all screwed up.”

I get John settled in with the TV and a little bag of potato chips from the snack basket. There’s an old episode of
Cheers
on, which keeps him happy. I lie with him on the bed with my head propped up on the big mound of pillows we have constructed from every pillow in the joint. Needless to say, I can’t sleep anymore. It’s too soon for another pill. I consider a drink, but it’s too close to morning.

The
Cheers
music comes on with the credits. John wipes his greasy fingers on his shirt. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s hit the road.”

“John, it’s too early. It’s five in the morning.”

“Aren’t we getting an early start?”

“No, we’re going to get some sleep. We paid a lot for this hotel room and I’d like to get some use out of it.”

Two minutes later from John: “Okay, let’s get going.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” I say. “Fine, let’s get going.”

Before we leave, I take a sponge bath in the bathroom, using all the towels and washcloths, cleaning everywhere I’ve been meaning to clean for the past week. God knows, I hope I haven’t been one of those old ladies that goes around with her old lady smell. My aunt Cora was like that. People’s eyes were watering after she left a room. I told myself I’d never be that way.

By the time we leave, the hotel room is an absolute shambles. I’ve never left a room like that in my life. I’ve always practically made the bed before I left, but not this time. For one thing, I’m not strong enough this morning. Besides, for what we paid for this room, they can jolly well clean up after us.

After we gas up the Leisure Seeker, we do indeed hit the road. The early start turns out to be a good idea since we’re heading west out of Needles right through the Mojave on the original alignment of 66. Early is the best time to head through the desert.

We are the only people on the road when the sun begins to
rise. I sit in my captain’s chair in the Leisure Seeker, a Styrofoam cup of tepid gas station coffee in my hand as I watch the colors lift the night sky—violet evaporating to cherry pink, charcoal vanishing to chalky blue. The stars fade as outlines of spiky aloe and twined brush and jutting silver Sacramento Mountains emerge upon the horizon as if an Ansel Adams photograph were being developed before my eyes.

Maybe it’s because we’re close to the end of our trip that I’m getting sentimental, but I feel as though I was supposed to see this today. And John, in his madness, allowed it to happen.

I reach over and touch his arm. “Thank you.”

John looks at me, worried.

It isn’t long before the Mojave wears out its welcome. Once the sun starts its brutal ascent, the landscape changes. Desolation enters through the eyes and soon invades the vitals. I stare out at naked mountains and empty dun-colored landscape. There is brush everywhere, leached of color, large lifeless clouds of it pluming the stamped-down earth. We keep passing a certain type of cactus with long spiny branches that twist up from the ground like arthritic fingers trying to hold on to something. I remember from
The Grapes of Wrath
when Tom Joad called this desert the bones of the country. I agree, but those bones feel more like mine today, brittle and unforgiving.

Around Chambless, I fumble two discomfort pills into my mouth, wash them down with cold bitter coffee. I find a half of another in my pocket and I take that, too. I just want to get
us to Santa Monica, the end of the road. We’ve got less than two hundred and fifty miles now and hopefully John will be all right for five more hours.

After a while, the scenery starts to float. The sky has brush growing from it, but it doesn’t obscure the sun any, which is high and hard now, blistering no mercy. I close my eyes, trying to shake off the dizziness. When I look into the sky again, this time I see an image of a glowing woman. I don’t recognize her at first, but then it occurs to me that it’s Our Lady of Guadalupe. Except that it doesn’t exactly look like her. She’s got a golden glow encircling her, like Our Lady, and a bright green shawl emblazoned with stars, but underneath it she’s wearing a beige pantsuit, one that looks kind of familiar. She’s also put on quite a bit of weight. In fact, Our Lady looks a lot like me, but younger. She smiles serenely at me, waves, then holds a finger over her mouth as if she has a secret to keep.

Still dizzy, I gulp the rest of the coffee that I’ve been holding in my hand for the past hour, hoping the caffeine will help keep me conscious. My hand smells acrid and smoky. I look at the cup and see grooves in the Styrofoam from my fingernails from where I’ve been clutching it. I look back up into the sky, but there’s nothing but glare. I drop the cup on the floor of the van.

By the time we get to Ludlow, I feel better. I decide that it would just be best to forget what happened back there. I feel sleepy, so I crank down the window all the way. The wind noise increases and billows of warm air rush into the car,
soothing at first, but seconds later it feels like I’m tumbling around in a clothes dryer, my head full of lint and bits of old laundered Kleenex. I roll the window back up leaving a crack of an inch and a half.

“What’s wrong with the road?” John asks me. The heat rising from the pavement keeps tricking him into tapping on the brakes.

“John, it’s nothing,” I say, scared by the cars veering around us, the occupants yelling silently behind sealed windows.

Two minutes later, he asks me the same thing. Then again and again.

At Barstow, we stop for gas and at a McDonald’s so John can eat. I suck on a small Coke to quell my nausea and clear my head. John finishes his two hamburgers, burps, and starts the van again as if he’s been programmed to do so. We head back onto 66, but not really. The old road is buried beneath us, paved over by I-15. It’s sad to think that they couldn’t have just left it alone, but progress, that obstinate SOB, is adamant about such things.

The trees are different now. They are gnarled and knobby, corkscrewed into the earth, dark spines growing at the ends of hairy, welted branches that prick the air like giant bottlebrushes. They remind me of pictures of mutated cells that I’ve seen on TV. My book says they are Joshua trees, and since I’ve traveled this way before, you’d think I’d recognize them, but I don’t.

Soon 66 rises to the surface again, but I decide that it’s time for a shortcut. We stay on I-15, which takes us through the Cajon Pass, while bypassing San Bernardino, which I’ve heard is no great shakes.

Unfortunately, the drive downhill through the pass is very steep and wide and crowded. Six lanes of traffic, all going downhill too fast. Maybe San Berdoo wouldn’t have been so bad after all. It’s not long before gravity takes over and the Leisure Seeker starts going faster and faster down the precipitous incline.

“John,” I say, watching the speedometer climb to 70 mph. “We’re going kind of fast.”

John ignores me.

Soon, we’re doing seventy-five, then eighty. We haven’t gone eighty at any point during this entire trip. The Leisure Seeker starts to vibrate.

“John,”
I say. “Please, John.
Slow down
.”

What does John do? He gets in the left lane. We start flashing past cars on my side, each one whipping by like a gasp of unfinished breath. The vibration makes my head wobble. I clench my teeth, for fear of chipping my dentures. I’m getting really scared now. I see a sign up ahead:

RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP

“John! Goddamn it!”

John says nothing. Eighty-five. Then something happens.
I stop being afraid. A calmness settles over me. I take a breath. My stomach feels better. The knot in my neck loosens and the discomfort eases. The draft at the window rises to a scream. Ninety mph. The undercarriage chatters like a tommy gun.

I close my eyes.

Then I hear a loud
thunk
. I feel the van slow down about 10 mph. I open my eyes and see John’s hand on the transmission lever, as he slides it into L 2. Another, even louder
thunk
and a jolt as the van slows down even more. The vibration eases up as the engine of the Leisure Seeker howls, a spirit longing to be set free. I hear objects shift in the back as the speedometer slips down to sixty. John stares at the road straight ahead, grunts. He puts on his turn signal, moves over into the right lane. Someone honks at us.

I turn my head and look at the trees.

Quite suddenly, we are back on the old road. I am so happy to be off the freeway and out of the desert. I’m surprised at how nice Rancho Cucamonga is. (I think of the old Jack Benny routine—“Anaheim, Azusa, and Cuc-a-monga!”) Here, Route 66 is called Foothill Boulevard and has been magically transformed into one long lush green strip of fancy shopping centers, restaurants, and office buildings. I have to say, it’s good to see places that are thriving for a change. As we enter the town of Claremont, there is a sign:

LOS ANGELES COUNTY LIMITS

I am relieved, amazed, elated, and a little saddened to see this sign. It means we’re about fifty miles from the ocean. I realize now that we need a plan. Everything I read about Los Angeles tells me that there will be nothing but traffic everywhere. I’m not sure afternoon is the time to venture into all that. I decide that we need a place to stay tonight. I direct John toward a filling station.

“Let’s stop for gas, John. I need a pit stop.”

I decide to let John take care of the van, while I grab the keys and wheel myself into the gas station. The bathroom is the usual indescribable mess. After I get myself put back together, I head up to the counter. There’s a middle-aged gal there, with frizzy brown hair, reading a copy of
US Weekly
. She’s wearing a blue denim shirt with a Shell insignia on it.

“How are you today?” I ask.

“Oh, fair to partly cloudy,” she says, giving me a smile.

I try not to stare at the spaces in her mouth where there should be teeth. “Would you happen to know of any good campgrounds around here?”

She scrunches up her face while she thinks. That’s when I notice that Norma is also missing her eyebrows. There are just thin curved blue lines drawn where they should be. I wonder if she colors them to match her outfit.

“A few miles up Foothill you’ll see a sign for a mobile home park. Turn there and it’s just a little ways. It’s a nice little place.”

“Well, thank you so much.”

“No problem, dear. You take care.” Norma smiles again, wider now, unafraid to reveal what is no longer there.

Norma was right. The Foothill Boulevard Mobile Home Park is a lovely, clean little place, surrounded by trees, not too close to the strip malls. On the front door of the manager’s office is a carved wooden sign that reads:

GOD BLESS OUR TRAILER HOME

Soon as we drive up, someone comes right to the window of the Leisure Seeker with a clipboard and sets us up for the night, just like that. As we idle through the park to our campsite, I get the feeling that these people have been living here for a long time. A couple of the trailers are painted cute colors like turquoise and dusty rose. Some have pocket gardens or flagpoles near the front door. One even has a little fountain with running water. It’s a neighborhood. In short, I feel like we’re home. At least as close as we’re going to be.

“This is nice,” says John.

It doesn’t take us long to get things set up. After I have John pull out the canopy and put out the chairs in front, he disappears inside the van, closes the door behind him. I’ve hidden my purse, so there’s nothing much he can get into there. I decide not to worry.

I should mention that I have formulated our plan. We’re
going to stay here for a while. Of course, we’ll go to Santa Monica tomorrow just to actually make it to the end of the road. That’s important to me. We’ll get up early to beat the traffic and conquer that last fifty miles. I want to see the ocean one more time. And by God, we’re still heading to Disneyland.

I’m dozing in our sturdiest lawn chair in front of the van, when John opens the door, walks up next to me. I hear a familiar sound, a bubbly soft
pffft
.

“Hey, mister,” I say, turning halfway. “Where did you find that beer?”

He stops, looks at the can in his hand and squints. “In the fridge.”

“Would you get me one?”

“I’ll split this with you.”

“All right.” I notice a triangle of foam on John’s neck. I grab his arm and pull him down to where I can reach him. I wipe the foam off with my fingers. “What have you been up to? Did you shave?”