Eduardo grimaced and squeezed his belly. “Stomachache.”
“She’s a sweet little girl,” Danny said.
“Then I drove back in my fantastic car,” Eduardo said. “That is when I bought the tequila. My gift.”
“It’s very smooth,” Danny said.
Eduardo grinned. He was happy about the car. He was going to take good care of it.
CHARITY
THEY HAD BEEN told about it ecstatically by a police officer eating a tamale at a cafe near the Arizona/New Mexico border.
“I just went out there in all that white sand and got me a dune and went up on it and looked and looked and just let it sink in, and I never saw anything like it, never felt anything like it. I think I could stay out there in that white sand for a real long time and I don’t know exactly why.”
“It doesn’t sound like something you’d want to do too often,” Richard said. The policeman frowned. Then he ignored them.
Back in the car, Janice wanted to go there immediately. They were having a look at the Southwest on their way to Santa Fe. They were both wearing khaki suits, and Richard had a hand-painted tie he had paid a great deal of money for around his neck.
They drove to the White Sands National Monument, paid the admission and went in. The park ranger said, “We invite you to get out of your car and explore a bit, climb a dune for a better view of the endless sea of sand all around you.”
They drove slowly along a loop road. Everything was white and orderly. It was as if the dunes had a sense of mission. Here and there, people were fervently throwing themselves down them and laughing.
“Do you want to get out?” Richard said. “I’ll wait in the car.”
Janice felt that she was still capable of awe and transfiguration and was uncomfortable when, together with Richard, she felt not much of anything. She was distracted with the knowledge that they were on a loop road. She studied the dunes without hope. As they were leaving, they saw something small and translucent, like a lizard, stagger beneath their wheels, and they both remarked on that.
“I don’t know what that policeman was talking about,” Richard said.
“He was trying to express something spiritual.”
“Don’t you get tired of that out here? Everything’s sacred and mysterious and for the initiated only. Even the cops are after illumination. It wears me out, to be quite honest.”
She wished she had gotten out of the car. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car. She was wearing high heels. “Let’s go back,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”
“Janice,” Richard said.
After some miles he said, “I forgot to take a leak back there.”
“Really!” she exclaimed.
“I’m going to pull into this rest stop.”
“To take a leak! How good!” she said. She fixed an enthralled expression upon him.
Outside, the heat was breathtaking and the desert had a slightly lavender cast. People were standing under a ramada, speaking loudly about family members who smoked like chimneys and lived into their nineties. Farther away, someone was calling to a small dog. “Peaches,” they called, “you come here this instant.” The dog seemed sincere in its unfamiliarity with the name Peaches. This was clearly a name the dog felt did not indicate its true nature, and it was not going to respond to it.
The road led past the toilets and ramadas through a portion of landscape where every form of plant life was explained with signs, then back out onto the highway. Janice walked along it toward a group of vending machines. She loved vending-machine coffee. She felt it had an unusual taste and wasn’t for everyone. While waiting for the cardboard cup to sling itself down and fill with the uncanny liquid, she noticed a chalky purple van parked nearby. Two beautiful children stood beside it with their arms folded, looking around as though they had a certain amount of authority. They were rather dirty and were lanky and blond and striking. A man and woman were rummaging around inside the open van. Both the man and the boy were barefoot and shirtless. The woman, who had long, careless hair, said something to the girl, who climbed inside just as the man triumphantly produced what appeared to be an empty pizza box. Janice could hardly take her eyes off them. She finished the coffee, which was now cold and tasted even more peculiar, and returned to Richard and their rental car, which had a small scratch on the hood that she had taken great pains to point out to the agency so that they would not be held responsible for it. The grille had collected a number of butterflies. Without speaking, she got in and shut the door. She’d like to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little.
As they passed the van, the man raised the scrap of box on which was now printed in crayon PLEASE: NEED GAS MONEY.
The colon in this plea touched Janice deeply. “Richard,” she said, “we must give that family some money.”
The man held the sign close to his chest, just above an appendectomy scar, as the children looked stonily into space.
“Richard!” she said.
“Oh, please, Janice,” he said. “Honestly.”
“Go back,” she said.
They had reached the highway, and Richard accelerated. “Why do you always want to go back. We’re not going back. Why don’t you do things the first time?”
She gasped at the unfairness of this remark. She considered rearing back and hammering at the windshield with her high-heeled shoes. “I want to give that poor family some gas money,” she said.
“Someone will give them money.”
“But I want it to be us!”
Richard drove faster.
“Look,” she said reasonably, “you drink a lot, Richard, you know you do. And what if you were in the hospital and you needed a new liver and the doctor finally came in and he said, ‘I have good news, the hospital has found a liver for you.’ Wouldn’t you be grateful?”
“I would,” Richard said thoughtfully.
“Someone would have given you a second chance.”
“It would be a dead person,” Richard said, still thoughtful. “It would have to have been.”
“I wish I were driving,” she said.
“Well, you’re not.”
Janice moaned. “I hate you,” she said. “I do.”
“Let’s just get to Santa Fe,” Richard said. “It’s a civilized town. It will have a civilizing effect on us.”
“That tie makes you look stupid,” she said.
“I know,” he said. He wrenched the knot free, rolled down the window and threw the tie out.
“What are you doing!” Janice cried. The tie was of genuine cellulose acetate and had been painted in the forties. It depicted a Plains Indian brave standing before a pueblo. That the scene was incorrect, that it had been conceived in utter ignorance, made it more expensive and, they were told, more valuable in the long run. But now there was no long run. The tie was toast. She shifted in her seat and stared breathlessly into the distance ahead. She thought of the little family with grave compassion.
“I’m afraid I have to stop again. For gas,” he said.
He was pitiless, she thought. A moral aborigine. She hugged herself.
They rolled off an exit into a town that stretched a single block deep for miles along the highway and pulled into a gas station mocked up to look like a trading post, with a corral beside it filled with old, big-finned cars. Richard got out and pumped gas. Then he cleaned the windshield, grinning at her through the glass.
She did not know him, she thought. She was really no more acquainted with who he was than she was familiar with the cold dark-matter theory, say, or the origination of the universe.