An outcrop stood like a bare admonishing finger in the distance, ringed with purple sediment. Badlands and sandstone. The sun smacked the windshield into glare and the road appeared to liquefy, a black river across a burnt-out table of chthonic bedrock. Nothing rooted here, the dust left to grind itself to sparks.
I had to squint. And still, my eyes might snake around and catch the tail of something before it blazed away, before the whole earth vaporized in solid light. I’d cut a sidelong look and everything clicked back together, arroyos and hardscrabble. I’d come all this way from back East. I only found a trailer full of dirty dishes and a few beat-up sticks of furniture, a hogan that had long-ago collapsed, a flyblown goat carcass tied to a post.
About six-seven months ago, Mom had word that her aging father needed someone to look after him. She hoped he might have a little money socked away, and, besides, it would be a free place to shack, so she went back to live on the Rez, where she hadn’t set foot since she ran away at sixteen.
That’s all I knew, until the bill collectors started harassing me. Numbers I didn’t recognize—I don’t know how they found my whereabouts in Brooklyn. From what they said, I made out that Mom must have left a trail of debt behind her, and they thought they could hit me up to recover some of it. She was always letting her boyfriends take advantage of her, loaning them whatever money she scraped up, thinking it would keep them together. Of course, soon as they owed her, that’s when they cut out.
The road over the next crest seemed to dissolve, to hover in the air, and I thought maybe if I kept taking it, I would just rise up and hover in the air along with it. I’d smoked a little weed and finished off the last two beers in the six-pack I picked up in Farmington the night before, but I don’t think that explained the weird sense of giddiness and nausea I felt, my head a hollow space with tiny pingbacks bouncing in it, my gut queasy since the Indian road wasn’t in the finest shape.
No, I think I was almost glad I hadn’t found Mom since I had no idea what I’d say to her. I know she’d just hug me in her big arms and sob and admonish me for something, and chatter over whenever I tried to speak, and cook me too much fry bread with shredded beef and tell me I looked too skinny, why didn’t I put on some weight—I’d blow away in the next dust storm—and then she’d ask me what I’d been up to, and after I said I had the job at the marketing company still, yes, working in public relations, it was ok, I mean work was work, yeah I liked the city still, and, no, I didn’t have a girlfriend right now, no, really, I had one but we broke up over a month ago, two months, something like that, and she’d say I was such a handsome boy that I was sure to have a lot of girls after me, then we’d both grow silent, and when I got up the nerve to ask her about the bills, she’d just sob all over again, and I would make her promise me this or that, and she’d simply nod her head in agreement, giving a sullen stoic gaze while looking at the blank wall before she turned around to go back cooking at the stove; then I would stare at her long straight black hair that gave off a glossy sheen, even at fifty-something, as I inhaled the tired scent of meat, knowing my visit would never change a thing.
I felt a little giddy, nervous I mean, because Mom had left. I got to the house, and her father wasn’t there, either. I assumed his health problems, his age had caught up with him. There was some dispute whether he was really my grandfather. Sometimes Mom would claim one thing drunk, another sober. I never knew which to believe, though maybe her mother never gave her the story straight. Who’s to say? My mother’s debts, her horrible boyfriends, all these messy family issues—maybe they were a mirage, you know? Maybe I could just go back and forget them and they’d vanish.
At any rate, what was I supposed to do? I squatted there a couple days. Passed the time, alone. And then I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had to head back East. So I got in my car and started driving.
Or maybe I was giddy because the bright open spaces which stretched away promised a hollow day, a lulling hypnotism void of anything requiring much vigilance, so different than the demands of the city. I hadn’t seen another vehicle in over an hour. Or hours maybe. The road sailed straight over level ground and blurred away. Plateaus and craggy monuments on the horizon, sunbaked cracks on the stony plains. And then, I remembered—it was like a vision—I remembered that I had a wife. I was a married man. How anyone might forget something like that, I don’t know Sometimes, whole vacant hunks of the years I spent on earth kept heaving up.
One night—this was what? about eight years ago?—this girlfriend I had at the time, Debby, she wanted to get married, it was some wild impulse, she never even talked of marrying before, so we stayed out all night and we went downtown to the courthouse in the morning, did the blood tests and everything; we had a little ceremony, just the judge and us and a clerk as a witness.
But afterward, it hadn’t changed anything. Debby and I split up another couple months on. We stopped going out as much, really. We were young and both new to the city; we didn’t fight or anything, we simply drifted apart, spending time with other people, going to different parties, losing touch. The wedding didn’t seem real to us, just a practical joke like the kind we were always playing on ourselves back then. I think it started because Debby said she’d never get married, and I said never say never, and she took that as a challenge. She liked to prove me wrong. And so we did it on a lark, a bit of stage business. For me, it was excuse to rent an outfit. To look good for the day. We always liked getting dressed up, her and I, always liked pretending to be somebody we weren’t.
One of the voices—one of the calls I received about Mom—it was Debby’s voice, I now realized. The bill collectors probably contacted her, too. They’d found some papers we signed, records or something. They thought she was my wife. She didn’t say much on the phone, didn’t give her name, just that it was important, call her back, but I thought it was a wrong number, a crank call, another bill collector. Still, the voice sounded vaguely familiar; it nagged at me. But I erased the message. I never wrote down her number.
What was Debby doing now? Where was she? What happened to all that time, those carefree days, that life when anything could happen?
The road melted off—the buttes and mesas crumbled into chaparral. The sky tinged pink and ochre and indigo, perhaps from the altitude and vast expanse, perhaps from debris in the atmosphere, who’s to say? I was running low on gas, the needle teetering near E. Luckily, I saw a sign in the distance, a shield with a star. It belonged to this rundown little gas station on the edge of the Rez.
I pulled over and tried to fill up, but the busted machine wouldn’t take my card. I went inside to pay. Fresh jerky and little woven baskets sat on the counter, wax candy sodas and these neon-green suckers with ants trapped inside, and matchbooks and mace and pens that doubled as flashlights; The Navajo Times and biker glossies along with some out-of-date road maps and dusty wrappers concealing busty porn stars lined the magazine rack; behind the counter hung dream-catchers next to rows of discount cigarette cartons. Condoms and Styrofoam coffee cups and quick-strike matches. I dug a crumpled twenty from my wallet.
When I looked up, I saw her. This girl, this woman—she wasn’t quite thirty—she looked just like Deborah. She looked like Deborah did when I first met her, a moonfaced beauty with a muscular build, wide hips, big dark eyes, and silky black hair framing her high cheekbones. I’d been driving all day, hallucinating whatever came in front of me, parched and drowsy with sun-stoke, as dizzy as the buzzards circling overhead, but I was sure this was Deborah, the spitting image of my forgotten wife. I knew it was her, it had the slow certainty of a dream, and then I heard her voice, that same voice, saying, “Hello? Something I can help you with? Do you need change for this? —Hello?”
I wasn’t going to let her go this time. “Baby,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m real sorry, baby. You don’t have to live here no more. Come with me, ok? I’m gonna make right by you. We’re gonna share everything and love each other no matter what till kingdom come, hell or high-water, and treat each other good, I promise. Treat each other like we’re fucking king and queen of earth. We’re gonna remember what’s important.”
I held out my hand for her, at first I think she thought I was trying to pay for gas, and for a second she didn’t seem like she was going to take it, my hand that is, but when she reached out, I saw the ring she wore, a blue stone flashing in the sun, a blinding spark, yes, that heirloom ring from my mother, it must be the one I’d given her years ago on our wedding day: silver inlaid with topaz, a sign we’d been meant for each other, body of my body, flesh of my flesh forever.
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Will Cordeiro has recent work appearing or forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, DIAGRAM, Dunes Review, Poetry Northwest, Zone 3, and elsewhere. He lives in Flagstaff, where he teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.
Photo: Nick Tong
