Raven removes language and logic. Cause and effect are illusions. Raven has an unscripted life. No scrawls in the margins, and no footnotes.
Her mother has a cell phone now, but Amy is still rendered childlike and vulnerable. She presses the phone hard against her ear until the metal hurts. This is foreshadowing. Amy counts the rings. Twenty-five.
“They didn’t give me the job,” Amy begins, her thoughts spinning chaotic and circular.
“You’re surprised?” Raven laughs. “You’re not a team player. You always wanted a rank and serial number. The right uniform. Play first string for the military industrial complex.”
Out the fifth floor window ersatz palm trees are stunted by sun, and the air is oily and smeared. Outside is a slice of Los Angeles in early summer. Hills are a brutal stale green with brittle shrubs like dry stubble.
“Do you know how long it’s been?” Raven asks, softer now. “Since you called?”
“To the hour,” Amy answers. She tells her mother precisely how many years, months and days passed since their last conversation.
“I’m impressed,” Raven admits.
“You’re always impressed by the wrong things,” Amy says. “Men who add fast without scratch paper. Chess players and piano players, no matter how mediocre. Women with trust funds who sew their own clothes and bake breads.”
“I’m a simple country gal. You were always too smart for me,” Raven offers.
“I want to see you now.” Her words are sudden and tumble into the hot-stripped morning like dice hitting a wall and she wonders if she means them.
“Then get in your car. You’ll be here tomorrow,” Raven says with surprising urgency. “Just check that AA crap at the border.”
“I’ll leave half my IQ, too,” Amy offers. “As a sign of good will.” After a pause in which Raven fails to construct a reply, Amy asks, “How will I find you?”
“Ask in the plaza. Anyone can tell you where.”
Her mother hangs up. No more details. Just anyone. In the plaza. It’s like a treasure hunt. Or eating peyote and letting it happen. That’s what they did for years. Let it happen. They camped on mesas and the rims of canyons. Raven had a boyfriend with a jeep and a sawed off 12-gauge under the seat. His 9-millimeter was in his backpack, and he had a .32 semi-automatic in his pocket. A man, one man or another, who played drums or bass in a band, just returned from Australia or Japan. They stayed in the juniper forests for weeks. Finally, insect bites, sunburns and infected cuts made them return. Sometimes Raven just wanted a hot bath.
“I demand perfume,” Raven laughs, half-dressed on a plateau, her bare shoulders sculpted as if by centuries of wind and a gifted potter’s hands. “I must have musk and a new hat with an extravagant feather.”
They find towns with a hotel sporting an old west motif. Durango or Aspen, Las Cruces, Silver City or Santa Fe. Her childhood is a sequence of lead glass windows and crimson floral carpets, mahogany paneling and authentic antique saloon doors. The card tables and upstairs brothel are gone but somehow manage to assert themselves, not quite visible and completely intact. Chandeliers emit a tame filtered light like pueblo churches. Late afternoon is cool, and the amber of honey and whiskey. It’s the color of an afternoon shoot-out.
It’s the era of the commune and just before boarding school. Raven’s boyfriends have what they call business in town. They take unplanned flights to Los Angeles and Miami. Raven drives them to and from airports. Small planes land on salt flats in the desert where there are no roads, and Raven has flares, flashlights, and a basket of still warm tamales and rum in a jug. Amy is wrapped in a down blanket in the backseat. Why do they lean into one another whispering? She knows they’re dealing drugs.
Amy doesn’t confront her mother. They already speak in code, in a network of implications and arrested partial sounds like passwords. Between them, flannel and denim and gingham scraps wait to become a quilt that won’t be stitched. Plans for a house built of adobe on the mesa above Espanola that her mother somehow owns stay a rolled-up document, a parchment hollow inside a rubber band. It’s a navigational chart for a sea they won’t sail. Their ideas drift off, despoiled, weightless; they abort themselves.
Amy is leaving. She’s been accepted to a boarding school in San Diego. The provost pronounced her test scores impressive. He’s encouraging. It’s possible a college scholarship may eventually be granted. In hotel rooms with lead glass windows and red velvet curtains, she studies brochures for colleges in Vermont and Massachusetts.
In between, she just lets it happen. They return from the mesas, their vision quest Raven calls it, with their filthy clothing, ammunition and stray pieces of peyote stuffed randomly into plastic bags. It’s the best hotel in town and the bellman carries their trash bags with the gravity afforded real luggage. Raven is instantaneously elevated to Madam.
It’s usually a suite. Her mother’s boyfriend of the moment enters cautiously, his hand touching the gun in his pocket. He eases into rooms, opening closet doors and shower curtains. He glances at the street below, scanning for indications of an ambush by DEA agents, Zeta flunk-outs trying to make a name for themselves, or freelancers.
After weeks in canyons of juniper, sage, and pinion, cafes and boutiques are a fascination. It’s another form of foraging. She spends afternoons in tourist gift shops. She’s lost so much weight on their plateau vision quests, eating only dried fruit, crackers and an occasional rainbow trout, she fits into size 2s on sale racks in Pocatello, Alamosa and Winslow, where the women have either run away or gone to fat the way domesticated animals do.
In an Indian casino near the border she buys a hot pink mini skirt for 2 dollars. It feels like abraded Teflon. Eventually Raven has to cut it off her with scissors. Amy buys a silver blouse the texture of steel wool. She stumbles in neon pink spike heels and pretends she’s Brazilian.
She rides a dawn bus to work from the favala. She’s a clerk with ambitions. Her name was Gloria but she’s changed it to Marguerite. Her married boss takes her to hotels on Sundays after mass. Through the slatted terrace blinds, birds and cathedral bells in cobblestone plazas drift in, and the festive fluttering bells from old trolley cars with electric spokes that sizzle. A choir of indigenous orphans from the mountains offers an incoherent rendition of “New York, New York” and “Take Me Out To the Ball Game.” It’s mutilated by distance, intention and what resists translation. Nuns draped them in novice habits and glued gauzy angel wings to their shoulders. They’re barefoot and hungry.
Further, men in cloaks of magenta and electric blue feathers from jungle birds play flutes. In the plaza spreading beyond the cathedral, swarms of pigeons and yellow butterflies almost touch the faces of old women selling dried corn strung like beads and Chiclets arranged like miniature pyramids. Beyond, there’s something rhythmic and insistent that might be an ocean.
We are all clerks with ambitions, Amy decides then, stretching her insect bitten legs out on a brocade bedspread in a restored hotel suite in Colorado or New Mexico. She is fourteen or fifteen years old. Raven and her boyfriend are out doing business. They leave three hundred dollar bills on the brocade and instruct her to get an ice cream soda and go shopping.
Beyond town is thunder, glaciers on mountain peaks, then desert and finally San Diego Pacific Academy. Amy Gold imagines boarding school will be similar to the commune. But the sleeping and eating arrangements will be superior. San Diego Pacific Academy has desks and electricity and a library. Bells ring and they have specific and reliable meanings.