Road to Paradise Read online

  No, not like that, I thought, closing my eyes, squeezing them tight so Gina wouldn’t see. More like my Emma found a place and raised me. She didn’t want to; who’d want to be saddled with a baby, with someone else’s baby? And she was once young, she told me she used to sing, and wanted to go to dance school. But then instead she found work cleaning other people’s houses. And after my father left, there was no more talk of dance or singing. Instead, she bought me a bed, and a little lamp with horses on it, because she knew I liked horses, and every night made me dinner, and washed my pillowcase with pink flowers on it. When I needed sneakers, she bought me sneakers. When I needed to go, she bought me a car.

  I didn’t know: did my mother leave and hope to come back, like Candy, and just couldn’t; or did she leave and know she was never coming back? Did her postcard words mean, I will see you soon, Shelby, or Say hi to Shelby because I’m not going to see her anytime soon.

  I couldn’t take it. I told Gina to go back to the hotel lobby and wait for me, that I would be right back. Rushing across the street to the corner, I stopped at a phone booth and dialed Emma’s number collect. It was Sunday afternoon, but the street was empty. There was no one strolling, window shopping, pushing babies along the way. Only my soul was outside. Gina had gone back to the hotel, dragging her suitcase. With my own suitcase at my feet, I pressed my head against the dirty glass.

  “Emma,” I said, when she accepted the charges, “it’s me.”

  “I know who it is, Shelby. What’s wrong?” She sounded concerned. “Where are you?”

  “I’m out on the street,” I said. “How are you?”

  “How am I? I’m fine. How else should I be? What street? How are you?”

  “Oh, fine, fine. We’re in Rapid City.”

  “South Dakota,” Emma said. “You’re so far. You sound far away. Are you having fun?”

  Forehead pressed hard against the filth of the phone booth, keeping my voice like glass too, I said, “Oh, sure. I’m having a great time. Thank you for my car.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you in trouble or something?”

  “No, no.”

  “You need money?”

  I hesitated. “No, no.”

  “How much do you need?”

  Twenty thousand dollars? “I’m okay. Really.” I couldn’t say anything, and she didn’t say anything. “How do you know where Rapid City is?” I asked instead.

  She laughed lightly into the phone. “You think you’re the only one who was ever young, child?” she said. “Once upon a time, I too traveled across the country.”

  “You did?” Why was that so shocking? “By yourself?”

  She laughed. “No. I went with my boyfriend. We were three months on the road.”

  “Three months! And then?”

  “Then, I don’t know. We must have broken up. I came back home, got a job.”

  “I can’t believe it. Where did you go?” I wanted to keep her on the phone.

  “Where didn’t we go,” she said. “Alaska. Hawaii.”

  “So funny,” I said. “And there I was thinking you’ve ever only been to Maine. With me.”

  “Well, that’s right,” said Emma. “You think the universe began with your birth.” She changed the subject. “Tell me you’re all right. Or I’m going to worry.”

  “I’m fine. Honest.” I swallowed so my voice wouldn’t break. I couldn’t explain to her on the phone what was happening to me, not when it was costing her $3 a minute to talk. “Is everything okay at home?”

  “It’s swell,” she said. “The Lambiels have moved out. They’re getting a divorce. We got new tenants now. You’d like them, they have two sons your age.”

  “Two?” I almost laughed. “Yes, but are they French?”

  “Mais naturellement, mademoiselle!”

  “Oh, Emma . . .”

  “All right, all right, this is costing me a fortune,” she said. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “I promise. You know me. You know I will.”

  “You haven’t picked up any hitchhikers, have you?”

  “I really gotta go, Emma, don’t worry about anything, bye!”

  After I hung up, I don’t know if she felt any better for my having called, but I was pretty sure I didn’t. I wished again I’d sent her a postcard from Valentine. Someone’s thinking of you here, in the heart of the Sand Hills.

  I turned to go—and gasped, startled. A homeless Indian man was standing nearly flush with me. “Hello, darling,” he said. He was a few years older than me, with long slick hair tied in a ponytail; his ripped layers of odd clothes smelled; he was very dark, round-faced, smiling. “My name is Surio. Hope you having a nice day. Do you have thirteen cents I can borrow?”

  “What?” I wiggled my way past him and onto the street.

  “Yeah, that’s all I need. My friend over there, do you see him? He’s sitting by the wall, he’s not feeling too good. Just thirteen cents will be enough for us. Have you got that?”

  He was wheedly, and polite. Why did he scare me almost worse than Erv? Because his menace was so contained.

  “I don’t have thirteen cents.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said, his manner less polite. “You’re walking around here in your expensive sandals and your expensive jewels. You don’t have thirteen cents for me and my sick buddy over there? Just come with me for a minute, come talk to my friend.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, my voice starting to shake. My gaze darted around the street. “My sandals are Dr. Scholl’s, and my beads are from Genovese Drugs.” There was no one on the street! It was a Sunday afternoon, Main Street, and there was no one except me and him. I turned out my pockets. “Look,” I said, “I’m out here just taking a walk. I brought nothing with me.”

  “Except your suitcase.”

  “Uh—”

  “Your suitcase and everything in it. Including possibly thirteen cents?”

  “Nothing but clothes,” I said, cursing my suitcase. “No money, no change, no cash. I wanted to stop by the bank, but it’s Sunday. I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Now can you leave me alone?”

  A car passed. He backed away one step.

  “Hey!” someone called from behind me. I turned my head. It was Candy, running across the street. Quickly she came up and put her hand on my shoulder. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Who is this?”

  Surio looked Candy up and down with great interest. “He wants thirteen cents,” I explained.

  “Hang on a sec,” said Surio, his attention firmly fixed on Candy. “There are ten trucks a day who come by looking for a girl like you, a young girl with pink streaks in her hair, riding shotgun in a yellow bird, the kind that’s parked in the alley my pal and I live in. Strange to park a car like that in an alley, not on the street, almost as if hidin’ it, but whatever. Ten truckers a day blowin’ by here for weeks, askin’ ’bout a yellow rollerskate and three pretty seat covers. Go figure.” He smiled. “Until today, my answer’s always been I’ve seen nothin’.”

  “Give him the thirteen cents,” Candy said to me, “and let’s go.”

  “I don’t have any change!”

  “Tsk. Tsk. Might need more than thirteen cents now, sweetheart,” Surio said pleasantly.

  Candy and I exchanged a look. She shook her head. “How much do you think you might need now, cowboy?”

  “Dunno. Reward for finding the car or the girl is a hundred dollars.”

  Candy whistled. “A hundred dollars, huh.”

  “Somebody must want you pretty bad if they’re willing to pay a hundred.” He stared lewdly at her even though she was wearing church clothes.

  “Let’s go,” Candy said, pulling on me, and after waving to Surio, she called out, “Tell them we’re headed to Denver, pal. Don’t forget now!”

  “A little scratch for me and I’ll keep my trap shut.”

  “Why would we pay you? We’re not looking for the car or the girl.”
r />   And in the Mustang, Candy said, “Thirteen cents, a hundred bucks, five thousand, it won’t matter. The next trucker through here will know all about us for a bag of weed.”

  And I thought that if we didn’t know all about us, how could they?

  2

  Hell’s Half-Acre

  Gina wanted to go to Deadwood. While she was waiting for me, she talked to the doorman at Alex Johnson who told her there was gambling there. “Gina,” said Candy. “There’s gambling in Reno, too.”

  Except that Deadwood was forty miles away, Gina unhappily pointed out, and Reno was 1,200. “Half an hour’s drive,” Gina said. “Come on, girls, how often do I ask?”

  “Every time you think there’s gambling somewhere,” retorted Candy. “Sorry, Gina, the Lord said, no gambling on His day.”

  “How long is it going to take us to get to flippin’ Reno?”

  “The way we’ve been driving, a month,” I said. No one laughed, though I think I was kidding.

  Needless to say, we didn’t go to Deadwood. We headed south, winding and loopy, to the Black Hills.

  “The car is trouble, Shel,” said Candy. “Real trouble.”

  “The car,” said Gina pointedly, “is not the real trouble, Candy Cane.”

  Candy ignored her. “As long as we have it,” she continued, “we’re going to have problems.”

  “You talking about the car?” Gina said. “Uh, okay.”

  “Well, then, we’re going to have problems for a long time,” I told Candy, “because Emma gave me this car. Why don’t you cut your hair, girlfriend, or paint it black, get rid of the pink, wear a hat, start with that, then worry about my car?”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s find a drugstore. We’ll buy some Clairol peroxide.”

  But there were no drugstores in the woods. The one strip mall we passed was closed on Sunday. “You see?” Candy said to Gina. “Sunday is a day off for everybody.”

  “Can it be a day off from you?” snapped Gina, back in her funk. “I didn’t think so. Funny how that works. No respite there.”

  On the weaving roads in the pines we drove, the evergreen foliage so thick and dark green that it looked black. Hence the name—Black Hills. During gray days or winters, it must be frightening to drive up and down these roads through the tall and brooding pines.

  It felt like August, and someone, maybe Gina, said it’s the dog days, because it was very hot and felt like that. We opened the windows for some air and the breeze whipped through the car, and on the radio, for the rest of your life played Ricky, don’t lose that number. Candy tried to sing along to the chorus, but got it all broken and wrong. Why did Candy’s not knowing any regular songs suddenly make me pity her so exquisitely? What are you going to teach your baby if you don’t know any songs? I wanted to ask. Where are you going to run, so you can fit in, where people aren’t going to look at you and say, what do you mean you don’t know “Hush Little Baby”?

  But she knew the Psalms. One through one hundred and fifty.

  “Candy, any Psalms appropriate for little babies?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Psalm 123 isn’t bad. Onto thee I lift up mine eyes, as the eyes of the servants onto the eyes of their masters . . . have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us.”

  “Yes, lovely,” said Gina. “So much better than ‘This Old Man.’ ”

  Through the Black Hills, past Mount Rushmore, across fake Western towns full of tourists, we rode. Down to the river.

  Should we stop at Mount Rushmore? we asked each other, and feeling pressed for time, crushed down by all manner of things, decided not to; not even decided, just kept driving. Next time, we said, full of optimistic youth, 100 percent certain there’d be a next time.

  Maybe 99.9 percent certain.

  “You know, if I lived here,” said Candy, “you could come and visit me.”

  “Yeah, you’d be like Laura Ingalls,” said Gina. “She lived here.”

  “Who?”

  “God! Never mind.”

  “Live where? Mount Rushmore?” I asked. But Candy surprised me.

  “Well, no,” she replied uncertainly. “Not Mount Rushmore. But around here. One of these western towns, in the woods, hidden away. Tara and I could settle here, and I’d find me a job, a little apartment. She’d go to school. I’d work. And when you were off from college, you could come visit us.”

  I said nothing. Gina said nothing. Then I said, “What kind of job?”

  Candy said nothing.

  Then she said, “Making caskets?”

  Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” played on the radio, and there was no way he could hold his head without it hurting. “Stormy Monday,” when Etta James got down on her knees and prayed. “Gloomy Sunday,” when Marianne Faithfull was slumberless.

  “Boy, the DJ must have had a fight with his wife this morning,” said Gina.

  Soon we were out of South Dakota heading down a steep decline recently blackened by a severe and expansive wildfire, the ground singed for a swathe thirty miles long and wide all the way to the horizon, down to the flats of Wyoming.

  “Wyoming has spectacular mountains,” Gina said.

  I forced myself to say an ironic “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. Some of the most dramatic, most beautiful mountain ranges in the U.S. are in Wyoming. The Tetons. The Wind River Mountains. The Bighorn. The Laramie Range. It’s the Rockies, you know, and they reach up grand into this state.”

  “Should we avoid the mountains?” asked Candy. “I worry we’ll get lost.”

  “Nah. Shelby over there is like Henry Stanley.”

  “Who?” Candy turned her head to the window.

  “I think the Great Divide is in Wyoming,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

  We were just trying to make conversation.

  Candy asked what the Great Divide was. I told her it was a split in the Continental shelf that made the rivers flow east to west instead of west to east. The Great Divide, I explained, changes the orientation of the things around you.

  Candy was thoughtful. “And you can see this?”

  “Absolutely. We’re going to drive right through it. Map clearly says so.”

  “The Great Divide, huh? Wonder if there are any songs written about it.”

  We couldn’t think of any. This occupied us. “Maybe Willie Nelson?”

  Gina, though, couldn’t avoid all topics for long. “Candy, is Floyd an example of your story?” she asked. “The Judas story?” We couldn’t get our minds off his breathtaking disloyalty.

  Candy sighed, looked thoughtful. I tried to sneak a peek at her in the rearview. “I don’t want him to be,” she finally said. “I’d hate to think this was just the beginning of my sorrows. I’ve already had so many. I was kind of hoping it was the end.”

  I think it’s going to rain today. I think it’s gonna rain today. Neil Diamond thought so.

  She was quiet through Custer, a spooky place with wooden log cabins and log cabin bars nestled in the pines.

  “Maybe here?” she asked.

  “Here what?”

  “Maybe I could live here with my baby.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Dunno. Make caskets?”

  “You know, Sloane,” Gina said, “Candy may have a point. There’s a call for certain professions everywhere. Don’t you agree? I mean, for instance, every town needs a casket maker.”

  “Exactly!” said Candy.

  I poked Gina, silently exhorting her to stop.

  What would Candy do anywhere? Wasn’t that the eternal question. If we could have that figured out, I felt we could have many things figured out. Perhaps we were trying to figure out too much. We had only the day in front of us, and we were trying to imagine what we would do with our whole lives, what Candy would do. I felt as if any minute someone would yell at us: “Take human bites!”

  “Could you live here?” Candy asked me.

  I didn’t think s
o.

  “Could you?” she asked Gina.

  “If I was with Eddie, yes.”

  Candy groaned. “Honestly, Gina, maybe we need to look past Eddie. To the rest of your life.”

  “But Eddie is the rest of my life.”

  “Okay.” Candy sounded tired.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Some of the neutral feeling had gone from the car. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  Between the seats, Candy turned to look at Gina. “I got plenty of time to fall in love,” she said. “I gotta fix my life first in the here and now. Gotta get myself together, get my baby sorted out. There’ll be time enough for love.”

  There were no towns or mountains around us, just Wyoming, the silvery sagebrush sea, and flat grazing land.

  “Didn’t you say you loved Mike?” asked Gina.

  Candy tightened her mouth. She didn’t reply for a little while. I say a little while, but we moved two longitude points on the map. Where were we going? No one knew. If there were only two roads, neither of which we could take, how were we going to get from point A to point B? We had said we would stop at the next town. And here we were, looking for the next town, and that’s when Candy said, “I once thought I loved him. He was my first proper boyfriend. I’ve never really had another.”

  “He’s the father of your child.”

  “Yes.” But she said it in the tone of someone who was saying, “No.” Or “The time is 2:17,” which it was. Where in heaven’s name were we? And where were these fabled mountains? Nebraska was the Himalayas compared to these parts. The country, almost parodying life, or perhaps, life parodying the country, was constantly surprising me.