“Are you okay?” Eva leaned against the doorjamb.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I straightened up in here.”
“So I see.” Lucien pushed himself away from the desk and stood up, arching his back to loosen it. “It’s a lot easier to find things now.”
“Tired?”
“It was a long drive. That truck’s seat is like a board, too. To tell the truth, I was surprised it even started after sitting for so long.”
“At least you didn’t have to worry about anybody stealing it.”
Lucien laughed. “Yes, it’s a sorry-looking critter.”
“Why don’t you take a nap?”
Lucien nodded, walked to his mother, and embraced her.
“I’ll make a trip to the grocery store while you’re asleep.”
“I’ll go when I get up if you like.”
In his room, Lucien tossed his bags into the corner. The room was clean, but retained the smell of his childhood: it reminded him of jeans and frogs and board games. He stretched out on the mattress and felt his body give in to its firmness. When he was in high school he sneaked Sarah Begay into his room while his parents were away, but she never surrendered to the comfort of the mattress, nor to Lucien. He remembered her beautiful dark eyes saying no, and he always wanted to thank her because he wasn’t ready then either. He was pretty sure that even then she wasn’t a virgin. He believed that she had said no because she understood something about life. But apparently she didn’t understand enough, because she married out of high school, had three kids before she was nineteen, and looked all of forty at twenty. Still, thinking back, he would have liked to sleep with her.
He recalled the smell of drying chili peppers and the colors of the corn festival dances and he decided that being home felt good. It felt good even if he didn’t know how he fit into the landscape.
He remembered the stories his father had told him about finding the side of the pillow that held the good dreams. Even now a bad dream would cause him to turn his pillow over. Once he even exchanged his pillow surreptitiously for another soldier’s.
He heard either a raccoon or a coyote disturbing the garbage cans in the backyard. Lucien liked coyotes. They were perhaps the most adaptable of mammals, still roaming parts of Los Angeles. Coyotes were cunning and secretive and inquisitive and social. His father had liked coyotes. The old man had once sneaked back to a roadside zoo with him and released several caged coyotes. Lucien remembered asking, “What if they don’t know how to hunt?”
“Then they’ll die,” his father said as they climbed back into the truck. “But they won’t be caged. That’s why we live here, Lucien.” The weather of early fall was a reminder of how kind the high desert could be. Life up there was simply too easy, he recalled. It made the people lazy. The laziness was represented in the pots of the Indians from Taos Pueblo. Lucien remembered realizing this fact as a child of ten. He was in the Indian museum down in Albuquerque with his father and mother, standing before a glass case, and there were pots from Zuni, from Cochiti, from Acoma, all beautiful, well-formed, and full of power or love or something scary like that, and then there were the pots from Taos. “Loose,” was how his father described the lopsided vessels, but even as a child Lucien could see the disparity. He concluded then, and his growing up there substantiated his thinking, that the things which filled the pots came too easily, and so both, contents and containers, were taken for granted. He watched his friends, white, Mexican, and Indian learn that life was a slow climb up a greased pole with just enough of what you needed at hand to keep you going. The beauty of the place negated the desire to add to the beauty, to give back. Taos was a minefield of galleries, and the so-called artists seemed to be interested in underscoring their names and not in giving back. Canvas after canvas, the same, the same, the same. People came to ski and sun and pay a camera fee at the Pueblo. They came to kick up property values and see their fashionable friends at natural bakeries, came to buy silver and turquoise on the plaza, came to buy art: “Yes, this piece was done by a woman in Arizona. She’s interested in the Indian legends. She has a degree in anthropology.” But then you looked at the mountains, Lucien thought, and all of those people disappeared. It was where he grew up, this country fat with beauty.
The sun was beginning its decline as Lucien pulled into the lot of the small market just minutes from his mother’s house. He was glancing at the list as he entered, feeling for a cart, and was startled when he looked up to find his passage toward the produce section blocked by two men. Manny Archuleta and Rick Gillis stood smiling in front of the cart.
“Soldier boy,” Rick said.
“Not anymore.” Lucien reached out and shook their hands. “You guys in here for a couple cans of dog food or something?”
“Home for good?” Manny asked, his big face broken with the lopsided Elvis grin that he had cultivated in high school.
“Well, out of the army for good.”
“Shoot anybody?” Rick asked.
“Not yet.” Lucien pushed the cart past them and toward the produce. “You guys can walk with me, but I’ve got to get this stuff and get home.”
“Looking forward to some home cooking?” Rick plucked a grape from a bunch on a table, popped it into his mouth, and spat the seeds on the floor. A passing woman with a child stared at him.
“You’re a real beauty, you know that,” Lucien said.
“Sorry about your father,” Manny said.
“Thanks. That’s the way it goes, I guess.” Lucien grabbed a couple of onions.
“What are you doing tonight?” Rick asked.
Lucien laughed. “I’m sitting around the house with my mother. What the hell did you think I’d be doing?”
“After that?”
“Sleeping.”
“Nah, come on, go out with us,” Manny said. “Like old times.”
“I’m kinda beat.”
“We’ll be at the Blue Corn until late if you change your mind,” Rick said. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Well, all right then.”
Lucien watched them leave the store with a handful of grapes each.
He finished shopping, and listened to the Spanish being spoken in the lanes of packaged food. He looked at the brown faces of big-eyed children wanting cookies, wanting to get into carts, wanting to push carts, wanting. He found the ceiling lights of the market harsh.
The clouds of late afternoon were fat and flat-bottomed as if resting on a table of glass. Lucien had not enjoyed his trip to the market. It was good to see his old friends, even though he felt no closeness to them, but after his tour through the aisles he waited in the checkout line behind a woman of high fashion.
He drove the groceries home to his mother, watched her cook for him again, and listened as she told him that his father’s illness had come on quickly and that he had suffered only marginally. That was her word, “marginally,” and he wondered where she had acquired it and just what it meant. She fed him beef brisket, green beans, and posole.
“I saw Rick and Manny at the market.”
His mother nodded, said nothing.
“They look like they’re doing okay.”
“They work at the lumberyard, both of them.” She said it as if it were a bad thing to work at the lumberyard. She had never liked either of them. “All these years at the lumberyard.”
“I guess any job around here is a good one.”
“I suppose.” She drank from her water glass. “That Rick is a strange character, don’t you think?” She paused. “Are you going back to school?”
“I don’t know, Ma.”
“You could wind up where they are.”