I stood up and Lester’s eyes followed me. There was pity in that gaze but not, I think, for his daughter. He was feeling sorry for himself, for his loss, for his stroke. He was grieved that he was paralyzed in that room with a woman who transformed into a monster now and again.
I had brought my father’s pistol maybe to kill them. If Jolie had been my daughter I would have sent her to school with Neelo Brown; I would have tried to love her.
As I drove away from the mutated trailer I told myself that the only reason I left Lester alive was so that he could suffer a little more, so that Mrs. May could keep him breathing while she collected his Social Security checks and boiled potatoes and guzzled beer until they both ran down the drain and into the sewer.
I woke up with the sun in my eyes. I had driven out to a fairly deserted campsite at Joshua Tree National Monument and slept there in the driver’s seat of my pale blue Jaguar.
The moment I awoke I used the key to open the glove compartment and check out the ownership papers of my car. It was still mine, probably the only thing I owned. Somewhere Linda Love was looking for me and Richard Ness too. The sun was just risen and the desert held the chill from the night before. I got out of my car and went to the corrugated tin-walled camp outhouse.
A mother and father with three preadolescent boys were standing there. The boys had the jitters in their legs.
“Let the lady go first,” the youngish blond woman said when an older gentleman, dressed in army surplus, came out of the crude toilet.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Boys feel the urgency more than women.”
The father was staring at me. I was familiar to him but he couldn’t place my face. This wasn’t unusual. The odd thing about porno is that the face was usually the least memorable part of the experience. That’s why I had a false tattoo and platinum hair. Those white marks against black skin made me stand out. Maybe the father just thought that a black woman in a pale schmatta was an odd visitor for a desert campsite.
“Here with your family?” he asked me as the boys crammed into the outhouse, slamming the tin door behind them.
“No. I used to come out here with my father when I was a kid. We’d make canned chili in a tin pot on a pit fire and pour it over a paper plate lined with Fritos. I was out this way last night and figured that it would be nice to sleep under a million stars and remember my dad.”
“Not as many stars as there used to be,” the man said with only mild lament. “Now civilization is closing in and the stars are fading.”
He was an ugly man with friendly features: thin and Caucasian-brown with big dingy teeth and patchy hair sprouting from his chin. I had done a guy like that in a porno art film called Amateur Nights, made at a deserted gas station in Twentynine Palms — not that far from where we stood.
The pale-skinned wife was chubby and very pretty. She had the unconsciously haggard look of a feminine woman who lived in a house of maleness. She survived in an atmosphere of shouting, stomping boys and a man who cared but didn’t really understand.
The door to the outhouse banged open and the brood of boys tumbled out, not quite zipped up or tucked in.
“I’m Sadie,” the woman said to me. She held out a hand.
“Sandy,” I said as we shook.
“You can go in now. Albert and I have already gone.”
The aluminum toilet seat was wet because the boys hadn’t put it up. They just pulled down their pants and had swordfights into the hole — getting their piss everywhere.
I used the stiff toilet paper to dry everything and then did my business. The mess and turmoil didn’t bother me. I liked boys — always had. I liked their grins and hopes for triumph in battle. They made me laugh.
At the center of the camp was a huge pile of red boulders that might properly have been called a small hill. There were ridges and natural footholds that led up so you could climb the full thirty feet to reach the top.
I did this.
The west side of the stone hill was flanked by an eight-foot-high, twenty-foot-long stand of spiky cholla cactus. The yellowy white needles numbered in the tens of thousands and some were as much as six inches long. There was a breeze at the top of the stone hill and you could see across the desert for miles.
It was my living limbo: the place that stood between an old life that had withered and died and a new one that had no form as yet. There was nothing I’d miss from the days I’d spent with Theon and, so far, nothing I could look forward to.
The children laughed, screamed, and sometimes cried across the camping area while the mother and father used stern voices to try to rein them in. The sun burned down on me like the memory of a thousand fuck scenes under intense electric light.
I got weak and dizzy up there but refused to come down. As long as I was on that red rock hill no one, except the little family, would know where I was.
“Excuse me, miss,” the oldest of the three boys said.
He had climbed up into my little retreat.
“Yeah?”
“My mom said that you might be thirsty up here and she wanted me to bring you some water.”
He held out an ice-cold eight-ounce bottle of water. I drank it in one steady gulp.
“That was good,” I said.
“You were real thirsty,” the dusty boy said in wonder. “My parents said that you could come to eat breakfast with us if you wanted to. It’s really more like lunch but we call it breakfast because it’s still morning.”
His blue-green eyes were filled with innocent desire. It reminded me of something. I couldn’t quite remember what.
“Darryl’s in love,” Errol, the second-oldest boy, sang.
We were all sitting together at the wooden picnic bench next to the family’s campsite. White bread with bologna and mayonnaise was the entrée alongside watermelon on ice in a big Styrofoam cooler and Kool-Aid mixed up in a three-gallon jug with a spout at the bottom.
“You leave Darryl alone, Buster,” Albert Freemont told the middle son. He rubbed Darryl’s head and the boy both scowled and grinned.
“You look so familiar, Miss Peel,” Albert said.
“I live in Pasadena. Do you spend any time there?”
“No. We’re from Bellflower.”
I shrugged and stood up. I hadn’t had sex with anyone in more than forty-eight hours and it felt good — really good.
“Where you goin’?” Darryl asked.
“Darryl,” Sadie said.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t be so nosy.”
“That’s okay.” I squatted down and kissed the ten-year-old on his cheek while both brothers oohed. “I just have to get back to my life.”
“Will I see you again?”
“In this life you never know.”
I was exhausted by the time I got home. It was late afternoon and I barely had the strength to stagger through the front door and turn on the alarm system. I made it to the twelve-foot, white cotton-covered couch in the polar bear living room. There I stretched out with the pistol next to my head. Sleep came down on me like a limp corpse.
My rest was a dead thing too: an unprotected body under a ton of soil backhoed in more to hide the stench than to protect the deceased.
The color of the darkness was not black. It was a mottled and opaque gray, revealing nothing but its formless self.
The ringing phone broke through the gray from time to time, and bodiless voices spoke out. I didn’t recognize them; I didn’t care. Light sometimes pressed in from the bleak landscape behind my closed eyes. Jets passed over me. Men took turns urinating on the grave above. I moaned out loud and prayed in a language unknown to me (and maybe to everyone else). I felt pains in different parts of my body, which, at rare intervals, forced me to shift position.