She wonders if she can still score amphetamines in a truck stop. They’re probably just kitchen bennies. White crosses, manufactured in basement labs, and sold as the trucker’s other fuel. Last time she copped roadside speed, she got a two-day stomach-ache and the sensation that a 747 was landing on her head.
Danger excites her. Once she glided between trucks somewhere near Albuquerque, walking between the enormous cabs oily with bold unapologetic streaks of red and yellow like war paint. There are enemies and rogue bands everywhere. She notes the enormity of the wheels. The truck stop is a metal graveyard not unlike elephant and mastodon burial grounds.
We know ourselves through architecture and indecipherable charred hieroglyphics. To see the monumental trucks at rest is like watching men when they don’t know they’re being observed. Men in their natural state. Their posture softens, they slap each other on the back, show one another their rings and tattoos, and laugh often and easily.
She is with Big Jeb. He’s impatient. There’s a new girl in the aluminum trailer behind the restaurant. 15 and a natural blond from Alabama.
“It’s show time,” he says. He nudges the small of her back. It’s the way a cat rubs against your leg.
“Got any whites?” she asks in her fake southern accent, leaning into a fierce crimson cab, her lips stretched into a smile that hurts her teeth. And, of course, the driver does.
“You mad?” Big Jeb asks later.
Amy translates his question. He means angry. She says no.
“Well, don’t tell your mother,” he says. His voice is light. It’s not a threat. He’s asking for a favor.
Amy smokes a cigarette, sips vodka and smiles. She takes another drink. There is no other way to cross the Mojave, she assures herself. At 3 a.m. she turns off the highway, finds a fire road, places her gym bag under her head as a pillow and falls asleep gripping the mace in her right hand.
She wakes stiff and feverish and drives to Santa Fe, singing with ZZ Top and drinking vodka from an orange juice bottle. Did she learn that from Wade or Gus? Who coached her on the southern accent and how to carry, conceal and shoot a weapon?
“I did all I could,” he tells Raven. She is leaving for San Diego Pacific Academy. He sounds disappointed. Her mother nods sympathetically.
Amy is startled to realize that Raven’s boyfriend was serious. Was it Big Jeb or Big Sam, Hawk Man or maybe Wade? Who positioned beer bottles on sand banks with tender precision and showed her how to put bullets in them? Who captured snakes for her to shoot, and bent to demonstrate how to remove the rattles and make them into earrings? Who explained spoor on trails and how to determine what coyotes, raccoons and rabbits had been eating?
Amy didn’t encounter men with multi-syllabic names until boarding school. She was stunned when strangers voluntarily offered their last names. It hadn’t occurred to her that people reveal this information. When asked, she automatically provided an alias. Marguerite.
Amy Gold checks into a new hotel near the plaza in Santa Fe. She’s disoriented. Everything is some manifestation of adobe, cement and mud. Buildings are a tainted orange and degraded pink. Houses are set behind walls like African compounds. The walls are designed to keep the inhabitants in. They’re ubiquitous, as if mandated. Here dirt and all its forms are not only obligatory, they’re deified.
She’s erased clay in all its permutations from her repertoire. In the millennium, we survive by aliases, photo shop and selective amnesia. It’s a new spiritual expression. It’s the first global mantra. We reclaim ourselves so that we can discard and bury them. Our AOL and Yahoo versions were insipid squalid forays into the wilderness within. We know better now.
In her senior year at San Diego Pacific Academy, her elective choices were pottery studio or wood world. She chose the later. The boys built a two-story house with a graceful staircase and balconies. She made small boxes and glued sequins and chipped tiles on them. Her latches fall off. She says they’re jewelry boxes. She defends herself. She’s a clerk with ambitions and no, they don’t have to close. They’re conceptual. The wood master wants to flunk her. But she already has a scholarship to Stanford.
The swimming pool is deserted. Everyone must be buying necklaces of plastic dyed to mimic turquoise and fringed jackets made in Thailand. Or else they’re stumbling up Canyon Road in their new boots that don’t fit. Canyon Road, with it’s 2,000 galleries, features what you’ve already seen. You know what’s on the walls and pedestals before you walk in. Tourists find the familiar reassuring.
It’s landscapes of Rio Grand gorges rendered in O’Keefe reds that look like lacerations. Then the heads of Indians in bronze. And bronze horses. And bronze Indians on bronze horses. It’s the third or fourth derivative generation. Still lifes of vagina sunflowers. And landscapes reiterating their original psychedelic palette. Now they’re actually spraying them with glitter.
Amy stands at the edge of the swimming pool. The water reminds her of Hawaii. The blues are so vivid and unadulterated, the elements seem participant.
As a child, she lived in Maui for three years. Her mother was married to Jerry Garcia’s photographer. Ed. Big Ed. The ocean beyond their lanai possessed a clarity only certain sunlight, strained and purified by currents and anointed cloud configurations, can impart.
The swimming pool is the turquoise of traditional Indian jewelry. There’s an enticement to this blue, with its suggestion of revelation and sacrament, of opening an enormous chamber into the world as it once was, into thunder and stone and sacrifices designed to engender an incandescent intelligence. It’s the turquoise of time travel, camouflaged salt flats at dusk, and prayer.
This terrain renders ideas and artifacts inconsequential. That’s why everyone was moving here, the ones who hadn’t migrated to Hawaii or Mexico. But she has no interest in this obvious and generic surrender. Such a seduction would admit the squalor of her ambitions and what they imply, namely the incontrovertible value of acquiring systemic knowledge. Amy swims three hundred laps. It does not clear her head.
She sits on the bandstand in the plaza. Late afternoon is the adobe of dust and apricots. The sky is a swarm of storm clouds and two rainbows appear in precise twin arches. As they break into Cubist fragments, Amy realizes they’re the DNA of the sky. Then she looks across the plaza, directly at her mother.
“Amethyst,” her mother calls, already moving towards her, awkward and determined. They embrace and Raven smells unexpectedly sweet, like vanilla ice cream and spring grass.
Raven’s hair is entirely white and tied into a ponytail with a piece of rawhide.
Raven in dusty black jeans. Her Saturday night end of the trail outfit. And she’s profoundly tanned. It’s not a skin coloration one can receive through ordinary daily living. It’s clearly a statement, no doubt the result of pronouncing the diminishing ozone layer an establishment rumor that has nothing to do with her.
“Too many tourists,” Raven says, talking out the side of her mouth. “Let’s go.”
Amy follows her mother’s jeep along the highway toward Taos, and then off and onto a road so sudden and narrow it seems hallucinatory. They wind up a dirt road of sharp curves and loose gravel. Her mother parks alongside a tiny yellow trailer.
“It’s temporary,” Raven says, indicating the frail structure with a dismissive flutter of her left hand. “Like life.”
“Right,” Amy answers. They are proto-humans, banging on stones. Language has barely been invented. They communicate by drums and smoke singles. She follows her mother, climbs three stairs into the trailer, and pauses, all at once listless and exhausted.