Paraíso, Page 2

  “She’s not going to, Scott,” Gary says. “She wants him. And she’s already had us.”

  Scott’s face hangs palely in the air above his dark clothes. “That’s the truth.” She can hear him panting, a hot, dry rasp.” Okay, let her go. It’s her funeral.”

  A match flares inside the car, illuminating the Mexican’s dark face from the bottom up. The lady takes a deep breath. The car idles quietly. In back of the engine noise is black emptiness, punctuated by the brilliant stars. The temperature outside the car seems subzero, the temperature of outer space.

  PART ONE

  Engine Trouble

  Perfect silence when she turned off the engine. Afternoon heat lay on the desert with a crushing weight, squeezing pale blue, yellow, and crimson blooms from some of the cactus and scrub. The straight empty highway bisected the horizon ahead and behind.

  The old car’s temperature gauge was in the red for the third time since yesterday. So the leak in the radiator was getting worse, though she could never see any water dripping or puddling. Should have had it fixed in Loreto, but she figured she could make it to Cabo on two gallon jugs of water even in a hundred and ten degrees.

  Sharp brown mountains rose in the haze to the southeast, and the air was absolutely still. She poured the first gallon of water into the radiator and started on the second before it topped out. She’d misjudged the leak badly, but the next town should be reachable. She could get enough water there to make it to Cabo, but where the hell was all the water going? Maybe evaporating into the air. The only comparable heat she’d experienced was eight years ago in the lava fields on the Big Island of Hawaii during the hundred-mile cycling section of the Ironman (she’d been shooting it for Outside).

  On her map, the next town was called Paraíso. From the high desert the highway sloped slowly down to its bright green oasis, cupped by hard brown hills and fronted by the misty blue Pacific. The place seemed eerily familiar, but then she had that feeling a lot.

  Was this the place she and her brother Peter had been aiming for when they ran away from home together more than twenty years ago? Well, she’d finally made it. It would be nice to tell him, but they weren’t talking anymore.

  Why had she chosen to come now, after all this time? Things finally had lined up nicely. Her big photo book had just come out, but she didn’t want to be around for it. Much better to be unreachable, south of the border. Her friend Dave (whom she’d made famous with a shot of his agonizing fall in the Ironman) had offered her a week of free room and board at the luxurious Twin Dolphins in Cabo, care of Adidas. She could feel the old Mercedes champing at the bit, ready to take up the challenge of a thousand-mile drive through the desert.

  How many times had she been on the verge of making this trip? It was unfinished business, but something had always come up and she’d backed off with a kind of relief. Now she was as ready as she’d ever be. Now or never.

  Dave was just a friend; she’d made it clear they’d require separate rooms, and Adidas had agreed. It was all really an excuse to make the drive at last. She’d been going through men like a bowling ball for what seemed to be her whole life. They just scattered and fell down, although Latin men—Mexican men in particular—were more of a challenge. They had an interesting edge, and she’d heard of some gringas who had never come back.

  As the car descended, the temperature eased. Large cultivated fields appeared on the left and on the right storage sheds and produce trucks with a rising sun logo and the words Del Sol. Twin lines of eucalyptus began to shade the highway as it ran along the side of the palmy valley. A vacant inspection station, a sign reading PARAÍSO 2500 HAB., a speed bump, and finally a paved town street fronted by old brick buildings with a row of young Indian laurels in a center strip. Now the temperature was actually comfortable, the lowest since she’d doubled inland from the Pacific in Guerrero Negro five hundred miles north, but the siesta had started and the street was deserted. The Mercedes was the only moving car.

  The strangely familiar scenery unrolled: the cinderblock Bancomer on the right, the Casa de Cultura in an old brick school building on the left, an open-air taco stand, a pink plastered mueblería. The rest of the main street, featuring an old hotel, a church with a plaza in front of it, more shops, a restaurant, and a small hospital, spread out in front of her as she topped a little rise. As if she’d driven through here in another life.

  When she saw her first human being, she had an extra-intense déjà vu. He was a strange, postcard Mexican, very tall and thin in loose white campesino clothing out of a Diego Rivera mural from the thirties and a straw cowboy hat. He was standing in the deep shade of a big Indian laurel near the church behind a red wooden pushcart laden with bottles and hung with silver bells.

  Her déjà vus were stronger than other people’s, this she knew, not that they were unpleasant—they added an interesting fourth dimension to things—but where did they come from? When did they start? How did they start? Had she really lived other lives? The first one she could remember was at thirteen, in a drugstore, picking out her first box of Tampax from a shelf of others. Her hand reaching toward the blue box with its white lettering. Click. The fact that she’d seen the exact same image before was comforting.

  She stopped the Mercedes, got out, and walked to the cart, feeling a little travelworn in jeans, faded red tee shirt, old leather sandals. Rusty Spanish from college and various Latin American photo shoots, rusty voice, as if she hadn’t used it for years. “Buenas días … I mean, tardes.” For some reason she was blushing.

  The Mexican’s thin face was half hidden in the shadow of his hat. “Buenas tardes, señorita.” Voice rusty as hers felt, like a boxer’s who had taken too many hits to the throat.

  Yes, there was a mechanic, half a block left at the end of the main street.

  A good mechanic?

  The man cleared his throat and shrugged. “Más o menos.”

  More or less. She paused, for some reason wanting to prolong the moment. And what was he selling in those bottles?

  Why, honey, señorita. He pointed over her shoulder at the serrated mountain range rising behind the town and fading into shades of lavender to the southeast. Honey from the mountains where the special herbs grow. He uncorked a bottle and handed it to her with the saddest smile she’d ever seen.

  The deal was already done. She sniffed the sharp bouquet, and his smile confirmed it. She’d take two bottles; how could she not?

  Their hands touched in the exchange with a spark she already knew was coming, and the script called for her to smile and thank him. Then she was back in the musty smell of old leather that was the interior of the Mercedes. In the rearview mirror she could see him standing hat in hand, smile bared to the full sun, watching her drive away.

  Peter Fails Once

  The first time my sister and I tried to make it to Mexico was in our family station wagon, of all things, heading for the border two thousand miles away. I was on the lam for having burned down the chapel at my boarding school.

  Here’s the truth: I’d planned to burn it down, but at 2:00 a.m. in front of the altar I’d had a crisis of confidence, stashed my fuel oil–soaked towel in a crawl space next to the sacristy, and split anyway…. It was only a few days before the Christmas holidays. Imagine my surprise when, upon arriving at the train station in my hometown five stops out on the Main Line, I learned from the Philadelphia Inquirer that the chapel actually had burned down. Jesus! If I’d stashed the towel outside in the bushes instead of in the crawl space, the hoary old building probably still would be standing. I was guilty through thoughtlessness rather than direct action: story of my life.

  I hadn’t exactly been a pillar of the school community; I had no alibi. My absence from the dorm would have been duly noted, and I assumed the alarm would have been sounded. There were two things I could do: go home and beg my parents for understanding and help, or take off on my own out of reach of the law.

  The first was literally unimaginable—the
dialogue and images just weren’t there when I tried to summon them up. What would my parents’ faces look like? What room of the house would we be in? What would I say to them and how would they answer? Blank. Impossible. The second option seemed to be all I had. I’d started down that road by leaving school in the first place, hadn’t I? But still, I couldn’t make up my mind.

  I’d turned sixteen that September but my voice hadn’t changed. I looked and sounded like a girl, something my classmates and at least one closet pedophiliac of a housemaster never let me forget.

  On the eve of my arson-by-proxy, this master had come across me alone in the shower room just before dinner, turning pink under a stream of delicious hot water. “Hurry up, you’re going to be late,” he trumpeted as I twisted a towel around my waist. I could hear his heavy feet behind me as I hightailed it down the corridor to my room, leaving wet footprints on the brown linoleum. I tried to close my door but one of his big wingtips was already inside. All I could do was turn my back on him as I took off the towel and began to put on my clothes, and it seemed I could feel his hot breath on my shoulder blades as he stood there panting a few feet away. Waiting for his touch, it came to me that I had to make a move.

  My sister Wendy would be fourteen the next April, but instead of getting soft and curvy like her classmates she just seemed to be getting taller and more wiry. She too came in for her share of ribbing, but let’s face it: a boyish girl gets off easier than a girlish boy.

  I hadn’t planned to take her with me, assuming I actually went anywhere at all, but she was my closest friend and confidante and I couldn’t leave without saying good-bye. We wrote each other every week when I was in boarding school, so she knew how much I hated it. (I was too embarrassed to tell her my classmates had taken to calling me “Peedie Pan.”) She responded with tales of our mother’s latest atrocities, although compared to my problems they seemed pretty trivial.

  I walked from the train station to her school, about a mile, hid in the trees near the playground, and waited till school let out. It was a cold, bright, gusty afternoon but the scrubby pines broke the wind and I found a spot of sun, so it wasn’t too bad. I’d been up all night, sitting in trains or waiting for them in stations, and my mind felt incredibly focused from fatigue and adrenalin. But it wasn’t focused on anything specific, the way a car’s high beams will shine on fog.

  My sister was in the first group of girls out the door, the only one without a windbreaker or a jacket—just the black Brooks Brothers Shetland sweater with small, dark red, discreetly embroidered initials front and center I’d given her for her thirteenth birthday, over the school uniform of white blouse, blue and green Forbes tartan skirt, and green knee socks.

  I threw a pebble across the asphalt to get her attention and all five of the girls turned to look as I stepped out from behind the pine tree. Then my sister had left them and was running toward me with her loose, springy, floating, track-star strides. When we collided she was almost as tall as I was (she’d grown two inches since the summer), but her light brown hair still smelled of soap like it always had.

  “Omigod, what are you doing here. I thought your school didn’t get out till Friday.”

  “Well, there was a fire. So there.”

  She leaned back and stared into my face, and I could see a pimple or two on her forehead and around the corners of her mouth. “A fire?”

  “Yeah. They let us out early. It was even in the paper here. Didn’t you see?”

  “The paper here?” A little smile starting. “Your school’s in New Hampshire.”

  I was grinning a little myself. She might look different, but she hadn’t really changed. “Maybe they put it in because a lot of kids from here go there. I don’t know. I don’t write the paper.”

  “Was it a dorm or something? Was anybody hurt?”

  I shook my head. “It was the chapel. Burned to the ground.” Silence. Then she snorted, we were both giggling, and finally howling with laughter. The chapel. Burned to the ground. It was something about the way I’d said the words that set her off, not what actually happened—the way she said things could have the same effect on me.

  “They didn’t really let us out early, though,” I said after we calmed down. “I just kind of left.”

  “You just kind of left? Why?”

  I shrugged.

  “You left after the fire?”

  “No, before. The same night. It was just—”

  “Oh God, you’re going to get blamed for it, aren’t you?” Her blue eyes had the same lidded, squarish look as mine, but they were more direct. “You’ve got to go somewhere. If you don’t take me, I’ll never forgive you.” Of course she never asked me if I’d actually done it. She knew I wasn’t the type to burn down chapels. In fact, one of the masters had called me bland. After he said it, I’d just sat there dumbly. The answer came to me years later: how would you like being the last kid in the class to grow up?

  It was as if my sister had been waiting for this moment for years, she put the plan together so fast. She’d always had a thing for our father’s dark green 1956 Mercedes convertible—sitting in it for hours reading one of her horse books, windows rolled up around the car’s musty smell of old leather, sonorous Blaupunkt radio tuned to forbidden rock stations—and she insisted on hijacking it for our getaway. Finally, I talked her out of it: the fancy old car was so conspicuous we’d be pulled over before we went fifty miles. On the other hand, the family station wagon, a little English Hillman Husky, had been registered in my name as a birthday present, and I’d passed my driving test in it. It was clunky and inconspicuous and we could repaint it somehow. We’d stick to back roads and avoid big cities, driving mostly at night. And we’d figure out some cool disguises. Our parents probably wouldn’t call in the police for a day or two, hoping we’d turn up and aiming to avoid scandal.

  As to where we were going, we both agreed it had to be Mexico. A border had to be crossed, a real border, and Canada just seemed like an extension of the United States. Our parents had taken us skiing there the last two Christmas vacations, whereas Mexico they would never have been caught dead in. Mexico was a desert. Nothing there that would remotely interest our mother, just an infinitude of dry, dusty, wide-open space. No fences, not many people, a straight black road across the plains and the red mountains in the distance.

  Neverland.

  We snuck the Husky out of the garage at 2 a.m. and drove all night through a light snowfall, listening to country music on WWVA and watching the big white flakes come at us out of a single point way ahead. By daybreak we were in Ohio farm country across the Alleghenies and found an abandoned barn where we could drive the little car inside and fall asleep in our seats.

  My sister was the first to go under, and I remember looking at the pimples on her face as she lay close beside me and wondering not for the first time what other changes were going on in her body. If there were any, and I prayed to God there weren’t, I’d be totally left out and left behind. Peedie Pan, the boy who never grew up, alone in Neverland, while Wendy flies back to the Darlings’ house, gets married, and has children of her own.

  But in spite of my prayers I knew there were changes. Thinking about them kept my mind in a churn, and what with the strangeness of everything else I hardly slept at all, although the down sleeping bags she’d smuggled out of the house (along with $150 from our mother’s purse, two bags of clothes, and one box of canned delicacies from the pantry) were cozy as could be.

  I must have finally dozed off, though, because when I opened my eyes my sister was standing with her back to me in a shaft of cold gray light from a high window, nude except for a pair of white cotton Carter’s underpants similar to those our mother oddly used to buy for me (saving her the “endless walk” to the boys department). Racehorse legs flaring into narrow hips, a long straight back widening to square shoulders brushed by butternut hair. I could see no changes. Her body looked the same as it had always looked, only more so. It looked exactly like m
ine—I’d been a track star too until my classmates started developing men’s muscles and I couldn’t compete.

  The temperature in the barn couldn’t have been much over forty, so she didn’t stand there long, only a few seconds in fact. From the open bag at her feet she whipped out a red Duofold long-john set she must have gotten for skiing, pulled the bottom on, and shrugged into the top.

  Over the Duofold top went an old plaid shirt I recognized as mine. Over the bottom a pair of button-fly Levis. Even though her back was still to me, I could tell she was fumbling with the buttons as if for the first time. White wool Wigwam athletic socks and Topsiders on her feet. Mine too?

  Then she turned and came back to the car. I pretended I was just waking up. She was looking at herself in a side-view mirror and holding a pair of scissors.

  “Good. You’re awake. I was afraid I was going to mess it up if I did it myself.”

  “Did what yourself? Are those my clothes?”

  “Cut my hair.” She grinned. “For my disguise, moron. Yeah, they’re your clothes, do you mind?”

  I grinned back and shook my head. The idea made a lot of sense. She handed me the scissors, and with a weird rush of gratification I tried to cut it as much like mine as possible. Her hair was thick and curly like mine and our father’s, so it took a while.

  “Guess what? I’ve decided not to be a girl,” she said, while I was sawing away. “I refuse to be one ever again.”

  I had to laugh, she sounded so sure of herself. Like the English king who ordered the ocean to stop rising. But I liked the idea a lot … staying children together forever, or at least just a little while longer.

  “I don’t want to be like our mother,” she said. “I’d rather die than be like her.”

  I knew they fought all the time, of course, but still I was floored by the implacable anger in her voice. “Why? She’s not so bad. She’s just …”

  My sister suddenly pulled away and turned to face me. Her eyes were narrowed and her teeth were bared—she looked exactly like our mother in the middle of a tantrum. She was hissing in our mother’s way. “Don’t you ever ssssssay that to me. You don’t know her. You don’t know anything. So jusssst shut up about it.”