Paraíso, Page 3

  Wow. Okay. This was new, all right, and I couldn’t even begin to process it. A protective shutter eased down in my mind, I cut my eyes sideways, then looked at my hands and to my relief saw I was still holding the scissors. “Let me finish cutting your hair,” I said after a moment or two, trying to keep my voice steady. “It looks pretty good, if I do say so.”

  She took a deep breath and looked at herself in the side-view mirror. “Not bad. Take a little more off the sides and the back.” I started snipping, and she went on. “So … what are you going to do about yourself?”

  I knew there was a major problem, of course. I didn’t look old enough to drive. The week I turned sixteen, got my driver’s license, and was soloing, I was pulled over in the Hillman Husky by a smirking cop. He was so sure the license was fake he took me down to the Bryn Mawr police station, and my father had to show up personally to vouch for me. Maybe it was paranoia, but I felt that I, not the cop, was being blamed for the whole imbroglio, and he actually had the gall to pat my head on the way out.

  But other than embarking on an intensive course of hormone shots recommended by at least one doctor but nixed by my father, who’d been a very late bloomer himself and was always in favor of “letting nature take its course,” I couldn’t see what to do.

  My sister had the answer, and I have to admit it was brilliant even though she had to bluff me into it by threatening suicide if we were caught. In the late afternoon we drove into the nearest large town, stopped at a Sears Roebuck, and had me fitted out with a dress, a dark blue long-sleeved wool number loose fitting enough to disguise how flat my chest was, and a Bonnie and Clyde black beret to cover my short hair. We told the saleslady I went to an all-boys school and was playing a girl’s part in a Shakespeare comedy.

  In the changing room mirror I could see how right she’d been: as a boy I’d looked wimpy and immature; as a girl I looked like a French gamine in a Godard art flick, a ballsy eighteen at the very least. My bare legs and neck looked tough and strong, and my face under the beret looked slightly dangerous. I grinned at my reflection and raised a fist: quelle garce! I wanted to buy a pair of hood boots to complete the look, but my sister nixed it. Heavy black shoes with medium high heels to make me taller were all she’d allow.

  Next stop: the hardware department, where we bought five spray cans of heavy-duty silver car paint along with plenty of masking tape, the plan being to two-tone the sky-blue Husky on the roof and sides ASAP. Mexico, we were on our way.

  We never made it. Our little escapade ended just outside a place called Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi, ironically enough the same place Huck Finn and Jim the runaway slave aimed to escape to, and missed in the fog.

  It was foggy, too, when we arrived before dawn and hunkered down for the day in a grove of willows on the riverbank south of town. There were fields of harvested corn behind us, but we couldn’t tell how far they went or what was on the other side. Somewhere pretty close, a flock of geese honked and gabbled like a crowd of people at a party. Fog hung and curled on the surface of the water and wrapped cozily around the car.

  My new Sears Roebuck dress, even though fairly thick wool, was drafty and cool compared to what my sister was bundled up in, so I was inside my down bag pretty fast. I could see her silhouette moving as she arranged herself, saw it freeze, heard a little cry.

  “What?”

  “Oh God, no.”

  I turned on the overhead light. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She held up a finger wet with blood.

  “Jesus. Holy shit. Did you cut yourself? What on? Show me.”

  Just at that moment, there was a fusillade of gunfire from the field behind us. The gabbling and honking of the geese changed to frantic calls of alarm, and the air filled with the sound of beating wings. Thousands of invisible birds siffled close above us on their way out over the water. All up and down the bank from us, more gunfire, more panicked geese, one flock after the next. We could hear men’s voices shouting and see muffled lights in the fog. I snapped off the overhead light.

  My sister and I lay in each other’s arms and waited. “Good,” she said. “I hope we die.”

  “What?”

  “Anyway, we’re together.”

  After a while the noises died down. “What are you talking about?” I said. “They must be hunters. The geese. They’re not after us. Now will you please show me the cut?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t. You might need stitches.”

  She didn’t say anything. Her short hair tickled my nose, and I smoothed it away.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said.

  “No it’s not.”

  “Sure it is. We can drive into town if we have to. There’s gotta be a doctor.”

  She suddenly sat up, and in the gray dawn light I could see she was crying. “Goddamn it,” I said.

  “Oh, you stupid ape. You don’t understand. You don’t understand anything.”

  I started to get very angry. “So tell me. Just tell me. Then maybe I can stop being an ape.”

  “Okay.” She screwed a fist into an eye. “It’s my period. I’ve got my period, okay?”

  I sat up myself. The word was nonsense. No one home. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “How could you have your period? Impossible. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  It wasn’t her first. The month before, she’d woken up between bloody sheets and, terrified, had gone to our mother’s bedroom door. I wasn’t surprised it had been locked—she always did lock her bedroom door at night; I’d tried to open it once myself—but my sister had called and knocked, finally pounded and yelled. At last she’d heard our mother’s cold voice on the other side: “Go away. My door and my heart are closed to you.”

  Miss B found her asleep in front of the door and very gently confirmed everything my sister had heard at school about girls and periods but had chosen not to believe. “You mustn’t blame your mother for the way she acted,” Miss B said. “Some women get a little … well, their feelings might get a little out of control at her age, you know.” Smiling and raising her eyebrows: “She’s very likely envious. You’re a woman now yourself.” She said my sister would be menstruating every month from now on for the next forty years or so except for pregnancies and nursing; my sister chose not to believe that either.

  We sat in the car, frozen. Every once in a while there was more honking, more shots. “‘My door and my heart are closed to you,’” I repeated finally. “Jesus. She really said that? Did you just have a really bad fight or something?”

  My sister took a ragged breath but didn’t answer.

  “She couldn’t have said it.” Our mother’s face appeared in front of me so solidly I could have reached out and touched it. “It doesn’t sound like her at all. She’s just not like that.”

  As soon as the words were out, I wanted to snatch them out of the air, snatch them back, make them disappear. Even if they were true. Because they were true. Okay, I was an ape. Even an ape could see that those words were going to change things between my sister and me for good.

  I never found out what my sister was going to say to those words. Suddenly there was a shotgun blast, nearer than any of the others, followed by the thud of something heavy hitting the ground right next to the car. We looked out to see the body of an enormous Canada goose on the grassy bank twenty feet away. In no time at all, a big man in camouflage appeared out of the mist, took the goose by the neck, and turned to look at us. He was holding a shotgun in his other hand.

  “Wall now,” he said in a kindly way, walking toward the little Husky with its amateurish paint job. “So what have we here?”

  I knew it was all over, and at that point my strongest feeling was relief. I didn’t look at my sister’s face as I admitted everything to the goose hunter, but I could feel her presence burning beside me as someone whom I frighteningly didn’t s
eem to know anymore.

  The names our mother had given us showed pretty clearly what was going on in her mind at the time we were born, or at least the name she gave my sister did. I was Peter. Peter by itself had no real significance, just one of our father’s two middle names. It was when my sister came along and she named her Wendy that her state of mind became clear. Peter and Wendy, in Neverland, on the Isle of Lost Children. Oddly enough, I always loved the idea.

  Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. A very romantic dream, no? My sister began to not live up to it when she was only a few weeks old, kicking, screaming, refusing to nurse. “I’m at my wit’s end,” I overheard our mother saying to a friend. “You know I’m afraid I really don’t like her very much.”

  Whereas true to form, I was the opposite. I was only two at the time, but I half-remember lounging on the sitting room couch with my pregnant mother, running a toy truck down the hill of her belly, being unexpectedly offered a breast, latching onto it joyfully, and associating this piercing bliss with the imminent arrival of my sister. Maybe it never happened. The fact was, though, I loved to nurse. Not many kids grow up knowing this; probably all the better for them.

  My mother and I both loved artichokes, persimmons, shad roe, Silver Queen corn on the cob, Maine lobsters, and blueberries. We loved the dawn…. I’d see her on early spring mornings walking around the place, but we’d rarely talk. We loved long perspectives: long dim hallways in hotels, long piers, long straight tree-lined roads, skyscrapers, bridges, plowed fields, flat country. Sometimes she took me on long, aimless drives or walks. We’d follow a road or trail, but it wasn’t the place they led to that really interested us.

  Glorious was one of her favorite words. So was loathe … I think she liked loathe better because of the way it rolled off her tongue, not so much because of what it meant, but I could be wrong. Anyway, she used it a lot with my sister.

  They hated each other for reasons I’m only just beginning to understand, but I’ve always known one crucial thing: I needed my sister’s hatred of our mother really to feel my own love. Two sides of the same coin.

  The Kindness of Strangers

  She had to ask a few more times before she found the garage. It wasn’t right on the street but down a sandy track in a kind of nook, hidden by palms and scrub and shaded by a huge, gnarled mimosa-like tree. There were the usual car skeletons and body parts strewn around, a little cinderblock house, and a cluttered workbench underneath a palm-frond palapa. The man at the workbench was working on an extracted carburetor and didn’t look up as the Mercedes drove in. She couldn’t help feeling slighted.

  When she walked under the palapa with an irritable “Buenas tardes,” he just increased the pressure on the screwdriver.

  She put a sentence together in her head, then spoke it. “Creo que hay un hoyo en mi radiator.”

  The screwdriver snapped free. He swore and looked up. His skin and hair were dark, but his eyes were light greenish yellow.

  When he still didn’t speak, she constructed another pair of sentences: “Necesito que llegar a Cabo está tarde. Puede usted ayudarme?”

  His eyes moved to the car. “That’s a fifty-six, right? First year they made it.” In perfect California English.

  “Wow. Ahmm … right …”

  Tapping the screwdriver on his palm while he took a closer look. “You must have a good mechanic up there in gringolandia.”

  “I do. But I think all I have now is a leak in the radiator.”

  He knelt down and looked under the car. “Don’t see any water.”

  “I know. I was wondering about that.”

  “When did you first notice the leak?” Looking up at her.

  “Yesterday.”

  “How many times have you filled the radiator since then?”

  “Maybe three.”

  He uncoiled to his feet. “Open her up.”

  Checking the dipstick, he whistled a boyish fall of notes. “Look here,” he said, holding it out to her. The substance at the end was a light café au lait instead of dark oil. He rubbed it between finger and thumb. “You got water in the crankcase. Feel.”

  The substance was slightly sticky. He offered her a rag to wipe it off, and she felt he might pat her gently on the back as if she’d just learned she had cancer.

  “Jesus. How did it get in there?”

  “Probably a rust pinhole from the water pump.” He pointed to the side of the engine. “See, the pump is integrated to the block. Bad design.”

  Bad design. She swallowed and handed back the rag. “So that’s where all the water went. Into the engine.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “I guess that’s not good news, is it?”

  “Nope.”

  “What does it mean, exactly?”

  “You’d have to take the engine down and see.” Flicking his hair back with a little head toss. “Probably new bearings at least. Maybe a new crankshaft”

  “Oh my God.” She thought for a minute. “Can I get to Cabo like this?”

  “If you want to really wreck it. Better let me do the work.”

  Turning, she laid her hand gently on her car. Take the engine down. Put in a new crankshaft. A huge job, even for the Del Mar mechanic. Yet she knew nothing about this guy, not even his name. Where did he get his green eyes, anyway?

  “Well.” She gave him her brightest smile. “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. Give me a night to think about it?”

  The mechanic gave her directions to a bed-and-breakfast back across the valley in the old part of town, merrily run by a fortyish gringa named Judy and her two teenaged daughters. Wendy had left her bag in the Mercedes and hadn’t wanted to deal with the mechanic again until she made up her mind, so after a hot walk Judy’s younger daughter lent her a clean blouse and toiletries. Their three Mexican boyfriends squeezed limes for margaritas and mashed avocados for guacamole, and one of them demonstrated that if you spit on your hands you could hold a big black carpenter bee in them without getting stung. The talk was about how, the year before, a petition to have Judy and her daughters expelled for loose morals had been circulated through the town, but nothing had come of it. The Spanish word was fácil.

  When she asked about the mechanic, Judy’s first reaction was to clear her throat. Nobody said anything more.

  “Oh, my,” Wendy said finally.

  “What kind of a car do you have again?”

  When Wendy told her, her English-speaking boyfriend whistled. “Mierda de Dios.”

  Wendy arched her back, feeling his eyes on her breasts. “I was sure the old lady could make it. I know her pretty well. Anyway, so what can you guys tell me about this … ah …?”

  They all looked at each other. Finally, Judy said, “Listen. All we can tell you is just hearsay. You should really talk to someone he’s done work for, a guy they call Pancho Clamato. Clamato is a good citizen, even if he drinks too much. He won’t pull his punches.”

  Several margaritas later Wendy retired to bed. A yellowed paperback copy of Faulkner’s Sanctuary lay on her bedside table, and she leafed through it in growing horror and fascination. Why was it there … to amuse the guests? Sometime after midnight she put the book down, turned out the light, and lay there listening to a faint thudding in her ears. Definitely one margarita too many. She hugged herself and shivered in the dark and heard the church bells ring at least once before she fell asleep.

  The early morning was reassuringly crystalline—cool and still, the distant ocean calm as a lake. Pancho Clamato, blond, lanky, and dried out as a prune, was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of his house in the Barrio San Ignacio across the valley from the town when she walked up on the dusty road. He was reading a magazine and a jug sat within easy reach. A brick two-story building that looked like an abandoned school loomed across the road, and from somewhere in back of it she could hear a contented, oddly human mooing.

  A large beige dog with black undershot jaws got up from th
e porch and moved toward her. “Name’s Devil,” Clamato called. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  She walked through a gap in the pole fence into the dirt yard and stopped next to the porch. “What’s in the jug?”

  “Vodka. With a little clamato.”

  “Then you must be who I’m looking for.”

  “Uh-oh. Are you an attorney?” He looked up at the roosting buzzards in the taco palms behind the house, put down the magazine—The Surfer’s Journal—and showed a set of large yellow teeth that looked like old piano keys. “On second thought, you couldn’t be an attorney. You’re too good looking.”

  She sighed. “I’m just a damsel in distress.”

  When he learned about her car and how old it was, he literally scratched his head. Parts were going to be a problem; in his case there had been another defunct old Land Cruiser around to cannibalize. Plus, he had to admit a Mercedes was a little different than a Toyota, although of course an engine is an engine.

  She thought she could get her Hell’s Angel mechanic in Del Rey to round up the parts and air-freight them down.

  “That could take more than a month.” Clamato looked amused. “Why don’t you have him fly down with the parts? Then he can do the work himself.”

  “Wow. You must think I’m rich.”

  Clamato rocked back in his chair and grinned. “Let’s put it this way. If you’re not rich, you have no business bringing a car like that down here.”

  “Touché.” She raised her eyebrows at him.

  “There’s only one good mechanic in this town, and I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a scorpion, that’s why. You know the story about the scorpion and the eagle?”

  “I think so. Where the scorpion asks the eagle to fly him across the river and they both drown? The eagle asks why did you bite me, and the scorpion says because it’s my nature?”