“Fine,” she said, pretending to pout. “Here’s another one. Schmaltzy.”
“Better! Um... sad.”
“No, this is sad,” she said, holding up her own plastic wineglass.
“Agreed,” he laughed.
“Swill,” she whispered, dragging out the s sound, just touching his hand with her fingers, and they both giggled as they moved on to the next picture. And the next letter too, it turned out. T was for tarnished, for trashy, for tragic.
Del had made the full circuit. Even from across the room, I could see the elbows shining on his blazer. Then he turned and saw me and made a little side-nod with his head, motioning toward the door. Time to head back home. Back to the trailer.
I looked once more at the painting of the couple on the beach. I’d thought it was pretty. Still did.
I’d thought the wine had tasted pretty good, too.
But suddenly it all left a bad taste in my mouth.
A bad taste still as we drove south now.
The steep turns and drop-offs that had taken us out of Taos had given way to little villages, small homes on shaded roads, people up and about, going about their lives. I saw a couple of signs pointed toward the Santuario de Chimayo, which I’d visited when I first moved out this way, picking Northern New Mexico just because it seemed different, in every way, from where I’d grown up. I’d found out about the church in Chimayo from a guidebook I’d ordered off the Internet, learned about the holy earth there and how it healed the sick. When I’d visited it myself, I gathered up some of the earth and then mailed it off to Mama — not that she was sick, but just unhappy. I don’t know what I’d imagined she’d do with it, rub it on her heart or something. “Thanks for the dirt,” she told me when she got it.
“Do you think they’ve found him yet?” I asked Del.
“They?”
“I don’t know, Del. The police. Or the cleaning lady or a customer.”
We were nearing another curve and Del eased the Nova around it slowly, carefully.
“Probably somebody will have found him by now. Like I told you last night, I tied him up pretty good, so I don’t think he’d have gotten loose on his own. But by now...”
He sped up a little bit. I don’t think he did it consciously, but I noticed.
A little while later, I asked, “Are we gonna do anything fun with the money?”
“What kind of fun?”
“I don’t know. Clothes, jewelry... a big-screen TV, a vacation. Something fun.”
He scratched his beard. “That’s just extravagance.”
“Are you gonna make all the decisions?”
“All the good ones,” he said. He gave a tense little chuckle. “Don’t you ever consider the future?”
But again, he missed what I was saying. The future is exactly what I was thinking about.
We bypassed Santa Fe proper, and then Del had us two-laning it again on a long road toward Albuquerque: miles and miles of dirt hills and scrubby little bushes, some homes that looked like people still lived there and others that were just crumbling down to nothing. The Ortiz Mountains standing way out in the distance. We got stuck for a while behind a dusty old pickup going even slower than we were, but Del was still afraid to pass. We just poked along behind the truck until it decided to turn down some even dustier old road, and every mile we spent behind it, my blood began to boil up a little more.
I know Del was picturing roadblocks out on the interstate, and helicopters swooping low, waiting for some rattling old Nova like ours to do something out of the ordinary, tip our hand — even more so after I asked about that gallery owner getting loose. But after a while, I just wanted to scream, “Go! Go! Go!” or else reach over and grab the wheel myself, stretch my leg over and press down on the gas, hurl us ahead somehow and out of all this. And then there was all the money in the trunk and all the things I thought we could have done with it but clearly weren’t going to do. Once or twice, I even thought about pulling out that pistol myself and pointing it at him. “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” I might say, just like he would. “Just do like I ask, okay?” That was the first time I thought about it, and that wasn’t even serious.
Still, it was all I could do to hide all that impatience, all that restlessness and nervous energy. None of it helped by that tap tap tap tap tap of the mirror against the windshield. I felt like my skin was turning inside out.
“I need to pee,” I said, finally.
“Next place I see,” said Del, a little glance at me, one more glance in the rearview. I looked in the side mirror. Nothing behind us but road. I looked ahead of us. Nothing but road. I looked around the car. Just me and him and that damn mirror tapping seconds into minutes and hours and more.
We stopped in Madrid, which isn’t pronounced like the city in Spain but with the emphasis on the first syllable: MAD-rid. It used to be a mining town back in the Gold Rush days, but then dried up and became a ghost town. Now it’s a big artist’s community. I didn’t know all that when we pulled in, but there was a brochure.
We pulled up by one of the rest stops at one end of the town — outhouse, more like it. Del waited in the car, but after I was done, I tapped on his window. “I’m gonna stretch my legs,” I said, and strolled off down the street before he could answer. I didn’t care whether he followed, but pretty soon I heard the scuff scuff of his feet on the gravel behind me. I really did need a break, just a few minutes out of the car, and it did help some, even with him following. We walked on like that, him silent behind me except for his footsteps as I picked up that brochure and looked in the store windows at antiques and pottery and vintage cowboy boots. Fine arts, too. “Wanna make one last last job?” I wanted to joke. Half joke. “Get something for me this time?”
I walked in one store. Del followed. I just browsed the shelves. The sign outside had advertised “Local artisans and craftspeople,” and the store had quirky little things the way those kinds of places do: big sculptures of comical-looking cowboys made out of recycled bike parts, closeup photographs of rusted gas pumps and bramble bush, hand-dipped soy candles, gauzy-looking scarves that reminded me about the woman at the gallery the night before. I browsed through it all, taking my time, knowing that Del was right up on me, almost feeling his breath on my back.
One shelf had a bowl full of sock-monkey keychains. A little cardboard sign in front of the bowl said, “Handcrafted. $30.”
“Excuse me,” I called over to the man behind the counter. He’d been polishing something and held a red rag in his hand. “Is this the price of the bowl or of the monkeys?”
“Oh,” he said, surprised, as if he’d never imagined someone might misunderstand that. “The monkeys,” he said, then corrected himself: “Each monkey,” he said. “The bowl’s not for sale at all.”
I turned to Del.
“Why don’t you get me one of these?” I asked him, holding up a little monkey.
I tried to say it casual-like, but it was a challenge. I felt like both of us could hear it in my voice. Even the man behind the register heard it, I imagine, even though he’d made a show of going back to his polishing.
“What would you want with a thing like that?” Del said.
“Sometimes a girl likes a present. It makes her feel special.” I dangled the sock monkey on my finger in front of him, and Del watched it sway, like he was mesmerized or suspicious. “Or is the romance gone here?”
“It’s kind of pricey for a keychain.”