Road to Paradise Page 29

  “Your mother bartered you for a Frigidaire?” I finally said.

  “For a life full of Frigidaires. Everybody made out.”

  “Did they?” I said. “If everything was so hunky-dory, then why are you running away?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Candy. “It has absolutely nothing to do with the business, nothing to do with my mother, and nothing to do with Erv.” She moved to the back. “I got my own personal reasons. I really don’t want to talk about it right now.” She stared out the window. “I just wanted out. I needed out. But when I told Erv I had to go, he went crazy. I was his bread and butter. I had no choice. I had to take the film and run.”

  “Did you leave him and your mom a goodbye note?” I was big on goodbye notes. I wish my own mother had left one for me. I wish my father had left one for me. I got a note post-maternally. “Say hi to Shelby” was what I got from Lorna Moor.

  “Yes,” Candy replied. “In the empty reel case. I wrote, Erv, it’s like this. The world is big enough for you, and for me. Let me live my life. I will never speak about you to anyone. No one will ever know your name. I promise you. Just let me go, and go on doing what you’ve been doing. Big world. You in one corner, me in the other. I swear, unless something happens to me, that reel will never see the light of day. You have my word. Otherwise, it’s going straight to the police and the New York Times. Just let me go.”

  “Good letter.”

  “Yeah,” said Gina, “but something tells me Erv didn’t take her advice.”

  “Maybe he’s still thinking it over?” offered Candy. “I seriously figured it would take him and his camera guy a week or two to find it missing. I was wrong about that, judging by how quick they tracked me down. It took them no time at all.”

  Gina emitted a short disbelieving laugh. “My God, Candy,” she said. “How in the world does Jesus factor into the life you’ve been living?”

  “What do you mean?” said Candy, frowning. “Who do you think Jesus is for? Saints?”

  “I dunno. But he seems pretty far away from the life you had with Erv.”

  Candy didn’t reply, slumping into the backseat. I wished I could be a fly in the corner of her soul.

  “Candy,” I asked, “that thing you used to do . . . with men . . . for money . . . that was because of Erv, right? You don’t do that anymore, do you?”

  “Not if I can help it,” she replied.

  What to do with the minutes that the thoughts are filled by? Rather, what to do with the thoughts that the minutes are filled by? Candy’s mother? I couldn’t bring myself to think of her in any terms other than from Candy’s point of view. Candy had a mother, was the only thing I could muster. Pathetic, I know. Abortions, health problems, truancy, perhaps some bad decisions. Even impetigo, whatever the hell that was. Still. She was Candy’s mother.

  I opened the window, breathed the Nebraska air, barreling through the countryside, past Inman, pop. 22. It was flat, hot, windy. All oxygen had been sucked out of the car by Candy’s words.

  After a few more miles of road, I told her about my rock metaphor for Erv. She was quiet for a few moments. “I guess,” she said, then added, “Except for one thing. Jesus. He’s the one who makes goldfish out of stones. With Him all things that are impossible are made possible. People don’t change much, that’s true, but they can. And you don’t stop helping them, making an effort on their behalf. That can be your true nature. Just because it’s the scorpion’s nature to sting does not change the turtle’s nature to save. That’s the Jesus answer.”

  This is a consequence of being in the car for hundreds of miles. Things are revealed and reconciled without so much as a change of seating. You are shocked. Wait thirty miles. You’ll be thirsty. You’ll have time for a drink, for melancholy, for fear, for more trivia about Nebraskans, for a pervasive feeling of queasiness about the things you just heard, and then a gasp of astonishment at the geological impossibilities seen through your front windshield—ocean dunes rising out of the sagebrush grass, flat plains sloping up onto rippling sand dunes. You felt bad, you gasped for air, you picked up speed, scratched your head, moved on. What choice did you have really? Scorpions, turtles, Sand Hills, Ervs, Danas, Candies, and the voices of twenty men, singing, He brings wine to gladden the heart of man, and bread to strengthen man’s heart.

  In the afternoon, when we were finally in the northwestern part of Nebraska, amid the eternity of the stretched-out Sand Hills, Gina told us a story of two sisters who lived in Jonestown, Nebraska, in the 1800s. One Sunday they asked their mother if they could go visit their older sister who worked in town. The mother agreed. The girls left after Sunday church. The mother warned them to stay on the road, but the older girl saw some beautiful wildflowers and went to pick them, to make a bouquet for the sister she was going to visit. The younger sister helped her. The girls got off road.

  They made a beautiful bouquet, but when it came time to get back, they couldn’t find their way. It was yellow sand and blue sky everywhere they looked. They went this way, that. They wandered around. Night fell. The next morning, they walked, calling, calling. Another day passed. Meanwhile, a posse had been arranged by the frantic parents, with all the townspeople looking for the girls. On the third day, the older sister told the younger one, who was getting weak without food and water, to stay put, to sit tight, that she would go find help. So she left, the other one stayed put. Night fell, morning came. Eventually, the small girl got up and started walking.

  She was found by the posse who had been looking for them for five days. The mother, sick with grief, couldn’t even go out to search for her girls. The child was brought to her mother, and then the posse went back out. The older sister was found under one of the creosote bushes, her cardigan under her head, lying on her side, as if she knew she was lying down to die and wanted to make herself comfortable.

  “How old were the girls?” I asked.

  “The older one was eight, the youngest five.”

  “God, Gina!”

  “Yes, they were young. What did I tell you? Sand Hills.”

  Bassett, pop. 743. Jonestown, pop. 57. Straight out of the 1800s. Until Valentine, the “heart” of the hills, I thought about the girls off road and lost and their mother home grieving. I spent most of my life dreaming about getting lost, so my mother would hear of me, and be moved to grieve, to feel, to do something. To return for the funeral perhaps. How good I was at daydreaming this, of getting lost in the untouched remnants of the vast prairies that once covered all the Plains states of America and finding my mother.

  The hotels of Valentine came upon us—in resentful, isolated silence. The town was closed for lunch. It was scorching, the merciless sun beating down. Only a couple of bars were open, but I wasn’t going into a bar during the day. Out of one of these, staggered an inebriated American Indian, a corduroy satchel on his back. He followed us down the street trying to speak to us in slurred English while we ignored him the best we could.

  “We have to get something to eat,” said Candy. “There’s nowhere to stop between here and Wall Drug.”

  “How the hell do you know this?” I flung open my map of South Dakota.

  “You’ll see,” said Candy. “It’s just a sea out there. A sea of wheat waves. Beat it, cowboy,” she said to the Indian, smiling a little, her pink tank top riding up, her thin straps falling. He loitered near, not taking his unfocused eyes off her. The pink of her hair complemented nicely the pink of her top, and between them her brown eyes sparkled, far older than seventeen; my own soul was heavy with those eyes, with her life.

  We found a run-down Mexican place; we ordered burritos and ate them quietly, opening our mouths just long enough to argue whether a burrito was a sandwich or whether it wasn’t. Candy maintained it was a sandwich. Gina disagreed. “Well, if it’s not a sandwich, then what is it?”

  “A burrito!”

  “And what’s a burrito?”

  “Meat wrapped in a tortilla.”

  “Kind of lik
e meat wrapped inside bread?”

  “Kind of.”

  “So it’s a sandwich.”

  “No. A sandwich is a sandwich. And this is a burrito.”

  “Which fits the description of a sandwich.”

  “So does an Oreo cookie.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s sweet.”

  “So? The beans inside the burrito have sugar in them. They’re sweet. Maybe my burrito is an Oreo cookie.”

  “Now you’re just being silly.”

  “I’m being silly? I’m not the one calling a burrito a sandwich.”

  On and on. I wondered if I should send Emma a postcard. For some reason I wanted to. Emma had never been to Nebraska. Had never been anywhere, except that one trip to Maine we took. She had been saving her money to go visit my father in prison, but then he died and we didn’t go.

  Candy studied me, burrito in hand. “Have you sent her a postcard from anywhere else?”

  “We weren’t near a geological miracle.”

  “The Missouri? The Mississippi? Lake Michigan? Those aren’t miraculous?”

  “I’m going to dazzle her with water? Larchmont is on Long Island Sound.” Emma told me she had always liked water. She said she didn’t want to live inland. I didn’t even know if she was born in Larchmont. I couldn’t believe I never asked her that. Ah, one more thing to feel queasy over.

  “She’s going to think something is terribly wrong,” said Candy.

  There was a pause between the three of us. Was something terribly wrong? “Candy’s right, Sloane,” said Gina. “Better send nothing.”

  We sat on a little patio on Main Street in the western, nearly abandoned town. Gina and I bent our heads over the atlas, going from page 57 and Nebraska, to page 140 and South Dakota, because the atlas was foolishly and illogically arranged alphabetically, not geographically. We didn’t think Candy was right about U.S. 83. Clearly there were markings on the map that signified life. One town, another, and they were named; she should like that, she liked things named.

  Candy was paying no attention to our musings. She was scanning the street, her gaze traveling across the houses, peering at the few people window-shopping. She watched this Valentine scene intently, without blinking. “Girls, what you think? Would a town like this be an okay town for me to hang my hat?”

  We didn’t even bother looking at the street. “It’s like that old joke,” I said. “You and I are both looking at the people getting off the train. You think, how marvelous they are, look at their adorable little lives. And I think, ‘People get off here?’ ”

  She frowned blankly. “Where’s the joke in that?”

  I slapped the atlas closed. “Let’s go. Candy, why are you getting all wistful about Valentine? Aren’t you headed to Paradise?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Not permanently, duh.”

  This amused even Gina.

  “But it’s named Paradise,” Gina teased. “You’re the one going on and on about names giving value to things. How bad could it be?”

  “You don’t know everything,” said Candy. “Back when the gold rush ran like madness through California, particularly that area, some men used the town as an outpost for all kinds of unsavory activities. One of the saloons in the area was named Pair O’Dice. Get it?”

  After a few times of mouthing it to ourselves, we got it. “Exactly. So don’t wax all rhapsodic. Mike said the town is the most boring place he’d ever been to.”

  “What, all the saloons closed?” said Gina, smiling.

  “Each and every one.”

  At our car, the Indian was parked out. “You girls feel like giving an old man a ride?” he slurred, leering at Candy. He was old, probably in his late twenties.

  “Uh—no.”

  “Come on, just up to Mendosa. I’ll get out then, I promise.”

  “Where did we hear that before,” I muttered to Gina, and louder said, “No, no. We promised our mothers we wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers. Sorry.”

  Our mothers.

  He grinned lewdly. “You don’t look like the kind of girls who always listen to their mothers.”

  It was three in the afternoon! Gina didn’t even look his way as she got in the car, modestly pulling down her short shorts. It was Candy who appraised him. “Got any scratch, cowboy?” she asked—and before I could yank her by the hand, he said, “I like your little yellow vehicle. I like it very much.”

  Candy didn’t need any more prodding to slide in behind me on the driver’s side.

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “You want to get us into more trouble? Besides, it’s three in the afternoon!”

  “What, time not good?”

  “Candy,” I said, “keep your eye on the prize. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. Wall Drug by six.”

  “You’re so right,” she said. “Paul and Silas said that. Keep your eye on the prize. But I wasn’t going to sin. Just have some fun. Having fun is an admirable quality.”

  “So is prudence,” I said. I!

  I peeled away from the curb so the Indian couldn’t take down my license plate number. I didn’t get a chance to send Emma that postcard from the Valentine Sand Hills.

  After driving for a while, Gina broke the silence. “Let me ask you, Candy Cane, when you lived your nocturnal life on the Ohio River, did you ever make it to a place of worship?”

  “Every Sunday,” Candy replied. “And do not think of yourself more admirably than you ought, Gina Reed. Appraise yourself, not me, with sober judgment, recalling the measure of faith God has given you.”

  “How about if I just appraise you with sober judgment,” said Gina. “Because my faith is small. Step on it, Sloane.”

  We had cheered up after we ate and the rain stopped. From my nightmare at the Argosy to now was barely the breadth of half a day, and yet we, our backs hurting, my sandpaper eyes burning, and watching always for the shape of a truck, managed to be less caustic with each other. It was better.

  Too bad it didn’t last.

  I had to agree with Candy, though, and her compelling argument. The burrito was a sandwich.

  2

  Lakota Chapel, All Welcome

  Something happens to you on the road. Something happened to me. You’re driving, humming, looking around, or you’re tense and fretting, chewing your nails on the hand that’s not clutching the wheel, you’re arguing and dreaming. Meantime, the fields, the trees, the farms are passing by. Jersey and Maryland, you’re barely paying attention. Pennsylvania is familiar, Ohio full of trucks. The interstate, I realized now, is the death of all cross-country travel. You can go 2,000 miles and all things on the interstate look, smell, and feel exactly the same, the rest stops, the steel rails, the cat’s eyes, and the trucks. There is no life on the interstate. Ohio showed me that.

  Iowa, Iowa, Iowa. It rained there, and the rain washed away some of the familiar things I’d seen, the fields, the trees, the silos; the rain washed away the colors of my old life, and it rained through half of Nebraska. I was deceived by the plainness of it, the ostensible blankness of it. But somewhere in Nebraska, on an empty road, while listening to Candy talk about her torn-up past, I blinked and realized I had been transported to a different life.

  She did this to me. Nebraska did this to me.

  By the time we got to South Dakota, by the time we took U.S. 83 north, I was an unmoored ship at sea. There were no Iowan farms, or Nebraskan fields, no people, no trees, just nothing, but waves and waves of grass against the endless sky. It was like nothing I’d ever seen, ever imagined, or even begun to imagine.

  Simply, I left one life behind and entered another, one state of being, one way of understanding and entered another. Where precisely this happened I didn’t know, but I knew it was irrevocably so when my eyes saw the waves of the sea in the flowing, yellow-ochre grass of South Dakota. When I looked at Candy, she no longer looked the same to me. I couldn’t say what was different about her, the eyeliner was still
black, the bra still missing, the legs still slender and smooth. She was composed and calm-eyed, her pink hair familiar, but she simply didn’t look the same after all the things she had told me.

  When I tried to explain to the girls about South Dakota, which was the only thing I could talk about, I don’t think I did a very good job. Gina obviously thought I was crazy, while Candy looked at me like every place she’d ever seen was how I was seeing South Dakota now. “There is beauty everywhere,” she said. “He sends springs into the valleys and they flow among the hills.”

  “Beauty?” Gina said. “This burned grass is beauty? The sand in Nebraska was beauty?”

  “Oh my God, yes! Beauty,” I said. At ninety an hour on a deserted road in the middle of an ocean, the windows open wide and wind roaring in the joytruck, we blew by a town comprised of two businesses: a garage and a church. Lakota Chapel, it read. “All Welcome.”

  “This is how people describe their conversion to God,” Candy said. “They use the same language you’re using now, Sloane. They repeat Oh my God about a thousand times. They say, there I was just living my regular life, minding my own business, going about things in the same old way, muddling through, but always, imperceptibly, moving on the path to God, and suddenly exclaiming, ‘Of course! I see it now. Every old thing is not like before. All things are made new.’ ”

  Is that what I was feeling? Is that what I was trying to say? My whole chest was sick with it. “But you do see it, Candy?” I asked, my voice high, almost pleading. “You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “I see it,” she said. “I see it everywhere. In the canals of Isle of Capri, in the rush hour of Chicago.”

  “On the Iowa-80 truck stop?” Gina inquired dryly.

  “Especially there. Sun sets there, too.”

  “Sloane, close your window. I can’t hear a thing.”

  The air stopped gushing through, and now it was as if we were watching a movie again. We were behind glass, and the land was beyond the glass, separated from us, like moving pictures. It wasn’t as dramatic. It wasn’t like living it. But now I could hear Candy.