American Elsewhere

CHAPTER TWO




Mona Bright’s been to some pretty piss-poor funerals in her day, but she has to admit that this one takes the cake. It even beats her cousin’s funeral in Kentucky, when the grave was hand-dug in a tiny church graveyard. That was a pretty medieval affair, she knows, but at least then the gravediggers were all family members, and they treated the ceremony with a little dignity. Here in this miserable potter’s field in the middle of nowhere, there is no one to attend but her and the gravedigger, a local contractor with a backhoe who currently has his rattling old vehicle parked just beside the open grave. He hasn’t even turned it off, he just has it idling. He sits on the footstep and when he isn’t wiping his face clean of sweat he is eye-f*cking her something fierce. Already she can see him formulating any number of lines he hopes might magically translate this sordid little afternoon into a quick f*ck in whichever motel is closest.

She asks him what his next job is. He is surprised, and thinks and says, “Well, they got a parking lot they need leveled off in Bayton.”

Christ, she thinks. Gravedigging at two, parking lot at three. What an interesting little county her father chose to die in.

“You got anyone else coming?” he ventures.

“Doubt it.”

“Well. You want to go ahead and get on with the show?”

“There isn’t a minister coming or anything?”

“I believe you have to schedule him.”

“So it isn’t an automatic civil service or whatever?” she asks, and laughs morosely. “I thought this was God’s country.”

“Not for free, it isn’t,” says the gravedigger.

Where they are is Montana City, Texas, which is a joke of a name: it can only be called a city in that it has two traffic lights. One is broken, but they don’t count that against it. Mona had the option of transferring her father up to Big Spring, which is bigger in the sense that a gnat is bigger than a flea, but she doesn’t see why she should foot a dime more than she has to to plant her father, Earl Bright III, deep in this godforsaken soil. After all, he was a horrific skinflint, and it feels appropriate to stick him in a stretch of earth just as begrudging and hostile as he was in life.

The gravedigger climbs into his backhoe. “You want to say something?”

She thinks about it, and shakes her head. “It’s all been said.”

He shrugs, revs the engine, and starts it forward. Mona watches impassively behind her silvered sunglasses as the crumbly clay earth tumbles down to embrace the pine coffin below.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yadda yadda yadda.


Earl, of course, had not been foresighted enough to write a will, so all of his belongings enter the complicated and cryptic world of probate. Or at least it would be complicated anywhere else, but here the judge plans to go elk hunting in a week, so they cut down the time before the heirship proceeding accordingly, because honestly, who cares.

On the appointed hour, Mona dutifully appears at the local probate court, a low-ceilinged place filled with the reek of burned coffee. It looks as if it moonlights as a VFW hall. There’s a moment of confusion when the officials see Mona, for though Earl was as white as snow, Mona’s looks are all her mother’s, so she is quite Mexican. But Mona was prepared for this—she has to be, in Texas—and the appropriate forms and badges of identification mostly quell the questions. Then they get down to business.

Of a sort. The judge is present, but he’s got his feet up on the table and is utterly absorbed in his newspaper. Mona doesn’t mind. The easier this is, the better, because she’s looking for something specific, a treasure Earl would have never parted with even in his most extreme old age: his 1969 cherry-red Dodge Charger, the pride and joy he spent most of his life on, and which Mona was forbidden from ever driving. As a teenager she often dreamed of sitting in its leather seats and feeling the motor burst to life with the push of the pedal, the vibrations of the pistons dancing up the steering shaft and into her arms. Once, on a hot summer evening when she was sixteen, she tried to steal it for the night. She hadn’t even gotten it out of the garage before he caught her. Even today, the resulting scar has not healed.

So it is a very bitter grin that blossoms on her face when the gray-faced little court officer informs her that yes, that vehicle is still licensed to Mr. Bright, and as the deceased never indicated who it should go to she can claim it if she is willing. “By God, I am willing, sir,” she says. “I am damn willing.”

“All right,” he says, and makes a note. “And what about his other properties?”

This comes as a surprise. Judging by his living conditions, her father had been scratching out a miserable and penniless life in this tiny town. “What other properties did he have?” she asks.

Oh, a fair few, the officer tells her. The car, for instance, is located at a storage unit with several of his other belongings, and these are hers if she wishes. She shrugs and says, why not. There’s a small sum of cash, which she takes. There are also a few parcels of land he still owns, the officer says. These Mona turns down: she is well aware that her father has sold any land worth selling and has been living off the proceeds; the rest is unsellable scrub. The officer nods and tells her that just leaves the matter of the house.

“No sir, I do not want that flea-infested shack he was living in,” she tells him.

“Well, that’s good, because he didn’t own that,” he says. “That he was renting. This would be a house left to him in”—he checks the paper—“New Mexico.”

“It’s what? In New Mexico? I never heard of him owning a house out there.”

The officer turns the document around to show her. “Looks like he didn’t, originally,” he says. “It was left to him, but went unclaimed. In his case, it was left to him by one… Laura Gutierrez Alvarez?”

At that, Mona is almost struck dumb. Though the clerk is nattering on about New Mexico law and uniform probate law, Mona can hardly hear a word of it.

Momma, she thinks? Momma had a house? Momma had a house in New Mexico?

Then, slowly, her shock turns to rage. She cannot believe that the old bastard never told her that. For years she peppered him with questions about her mother, whom she barely remembers save for a few childhood images of a thin, trembling woman who wept constantly and stared out of windows, yet never went outdoors. Mona never knew that her mother had once had a life beyond their tiny West Texas home; yet here, recorded in the fading ink of an ancient typewriter, a paper tells her of a paper that tells her of a deed in her mother’s name, which in turn tells her of another life far from here, a life before Earl, and Mona’s own birth, and all the bitter years they spent together as her father roughnecked across the country.

“What else can you tell me about it?” she asks.

“Well… not much. There’s nothing else in the original will, which is pretty basic. I suppose your father never acted on it.”

“Never? He just sat on it?”

“Seems that way. The will itself has an expiration date of”—he checks—“thirty years.”

Something about this troubles Mona. “Thirty years from Earl’s death?”

“Erm, no,” says the official. He checks the papers. “This would be thirty years from the date of your mother’s death.”

Mona closes her eyes, and thinks—f*ck.

“What?” says the official. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah,” says Mona. “That means it expires in”—she does some math in her head—“eleven days.”

“Oh.” The official whistles lowly. “Well. Better get a wiggle on, I suppose.”

Mona gives him a prime no shit glare, then squints to read the home’s address:

1929 LARCHMONT

WINK, NM 87207

Mona frowns.

Wink? she thinks. Where the f*ck is Wink?


The question stays on her mind as she drives into Big Spring to track down her father’s storage unit. It even pushes out all thoughts of the Charger. She has never felt there was much to know about her father—and what else was there besides the bitter silences, the smell of cordite, and the Silver Bullet tallboy clutched in one hairy fist?—yet now she is given to wonder. If all this is true, if her mother really did leave him a house in a distant town, then he must have known at least a little about it—right? You don’t just inherit a house and then stick all knowledge of it away and forget about it, do you?

It strikes her as she pulls into the storage center that if anyone would ever do such a thing, it would be her daddy. He was just the type.

The storage center attendant is initially suspicious of her. Not just because she’s asking to open someone else’s unit, and has to produce a lot of documents and fumble with a lot of keys to prove her case, but also because that particular unit hasn’t been opened in over two years. Finally he gives in—though Mona suspects his objection was mostly fueled by a reluctance to get out of his chair rather than some professional honor—and he leads her through the maze of boxes and metal doors to one of the larger storage units at the far back.

“Is he dead for reals?” asks the attendant.

“He is for reals dead,” says Mona. “I’ve seen him.”

“If that’s the case, you got a week to clear all this out, just so’s you know,” he says, and he unlocks the unit and sends the door rattling up.

Mona’s eyes spring wide. The court officer described the storage unit as having “several” of his belongings, and she also recalls the term “a fair few” being used. But what confronts her in the storage unit is such an imposing pile of tottering shit that she is almost faint with the idea of sorting it. It’ll take her twelve days at least to get a quarter of the way through it.

She gets a hefty Maglite from the storage clerk and a dolly to wheel some of this stuff away. She is thankful to have driven her old truck here, as it will definitely come in handy. But it does not take long for her to spot a shape on the side of the unit, something long, with sleek angles, draped in a thick tarp. She spies a tire peeking from underneath one fold, and her heart leaps.

It takes her more than a half an hour to get all the boxes off it, but soon the powerful form of the Charger emerges from the beige clutter. When she has enough cleared she rips the tarp off, and a cloud of dust rushes up and balloons out to fill the unit and most of the pathway outside. It is so thick it cakes her sunglasses. She waits for it to settle before she removes them, leaving flesh-colored holes in her now-dusty face.

She blinks. The Charger stands before her. She has not seen this car in fifteen years, and yet it has not aged a day. It is as if it has just fallen out of a memory. Not even the dust can taint its vibrant red color, which seems to fill the unit with a merry glow.

She moves to touch it, wishing to confirm that this moment is indeed happening, when her toe catches one of the cardboard boxes and sends her tumbling over. She falls so fast she does not even have time to cry out or try to stop herself, and the cement floor flies up and cracks her on the forehead.

It is a solid hit, and for a moment she sees nothing but green bubbles of light bursting in a sea of black. Then one light begins to grow steadier, and she hears the Maglite clattering on the floor nearby. Forms calcify in the darkness, blank gray faces all stacked in a column, and on one of the faces is a word: LAURA.

She realizes she is lying on the dusty floor with her cheek on the cement and her feet up on a crushed box. The Maglite is caught in the tarp and shooting a spotlight on one box in a tower of them. But it is the box below it, the one with the word LAURA written on it in Sharpie, that Mona is most interested in. That, and the state of her head.

She sits up and touches her brow. There is a leak of blood forming there, and her fingers shine wetly. “F*ck,” she says, and looks around for something to stanch it. Seeing nothing useful, she tears off a corner of dust-covered newspaper and slaps it to her head. It sticks.

She has entirely forgotten the Charger behind her. She removes the boxes on top of the LAURA one, and pulls the lid off.

She blinks again. Her head is beginning to pound and everything feels woozy. It is hard to see into the box in the dark. She grabs the Maglite and shines it in.

It’s all papers, like the rest of the storage unit. But these are not papers she thinks her daddy would ever normally have. They are too official, too… technical. She sees the initials CNLO in a lot of the corners, next to some kind of corporate logo, and some of them are copies of graph paper with a lot of numbers and equations on them.

Then Mona spies something at the edge of the box. It is a glossy corner of a photo, she is sure. She pulls it out and examines it.

It is a photo of four women on a back porch, seated around a wrought-iron table. They are all well dressed and holding up cocktails and laughing at the camera, which, judging by the hazy shadows and soft colors, was some kind of old Polaroid. Behind the women is an impressive vista: there are tall pines mere yards away, and behind those is a wall of immense pink crags, striated with dusky crimson.

Mona does not know three of the women. But the fourth she recognizes, though never in her life did she see that face in a look of such happiness. For Mona that face was always fearful and sad, the eyes constantly probing the room as if expecting to spy some invisible intruder. But the person in the picture is definitely her mother, decades younger than when Mona knew her, perhaps lives younger, free of years of illness and sour marriage.

Mona turns the picture over. On the back, written in loopy blue ballpoint, are the words: MOUNTAINS ARE PINK—TIME TO DRINK!

She turns it back over and examines the faces. The idea of her mother, a trembling creature who needed dark, empty rooms more than life itself, having a casual cocktail with friends is beyond bewildering.

Mona digs farther into the box. There are more photos, evidently from the same roll of film, documenting the same afternoon party. They are all taken around the same house, and at first she thinks that the house is made out of stone or mud before remembering that they have adobe houses out there, don’t they? She catches only corners and stray walls of the place, but in one photo where her mother, clad in a tight, appealing blue dress, hugs a new arrival on the front walk, Mona manages to see part of the front.

She holds the picture closer. There is a number on the wall beside the front door. She squints, and though the light in the unit is bad and the camera renders everything fuzzy, she believes it reads 1929.

“Nineteen twenty-nine Larchmont,” Mona mutters. She flips back through the photos, taking in the people, the view, but especially her mother and the big house she apparently owned far away from here in some beautiful country, surrounded by happy friends.

Mona’s house, now—if she can get to Wink in time. She has not really realized it until this moment, but now that she has a picture of the thing rather than some vague, ancient papers, she understands what it is she’s walked into. Though she has never laid eyes on this house or even known it existed before, it could belong to her. To Mona, who has had a bad couple of years and has been migrating and renting a lot—and once, in Corpus Christi, even living out of her goddamn truck and bathing in a gas station restroom—the idea is absolutely crazy.

There is a knock at the door of the unit. The storage center attendant looks in warily. “Everything okay in here? Thought I heard a shout.”

Mona looks up at him, and he withdraws a little to see this short, dark-haired, dust-covered woman glaring at him with a shred of newspaper and a trickle of blood on her forehead. Mona does not know it, but the shred of newspaper blares AUTHORITIES APPALLED.

“Doing good,” she says, and her voice is raspy from the dust. She nods at the Charger. “Where can I get some gas and a mechanic for that?”


It takes most of the day to take care of Earl Bright’s last possessions. A lot of it she’ll leave for the attendant to trash. Most of the papers are about land purchases, as her father apparently tried to elbow into the speculation racket, with poor results. There are a shocking number of bowling trophies, none of them for first place. There are also some photos. Most of them are of him and his family. These Mona throws away. The pictures of him, Mona, and her momma she keeps, at least for today: she promises herself she’ll toss them too, in the morning.

She manages to sell her old truck for 250 dollars, and in her frank opinion the buyer overpaid, though she definitely does not say so. The Charger takes minimal work at the mechanic’s to get it running like a charm. God can damn her father for a whole host of things, but he was handy with a car. The only sticking point is the tires: naturally, a mechanic’s in Big Spring doesn’t have the stock to service a classic car like this, and Mona’s not interested in waiting around, so after grilling the mechanic rather mercilessly she purchases a set that should be “serviceable” until she can find a place that can get her something real. She’s pretty sure that will eliminate most of the small pile of cash she’s just inherited, but feels certain it will be worth it. When the mechanic’s done, she loads her meager possessions into the car, and she moves the most important ones last: her Glock 19, its holster, and a box of rounds.

By the time the sun sets Mona is richer than she’s been in years. Not only does she have over a thousand dollars, she now owns a flashy car, a box of her mother’s papers and photos, and a goddamn house in New Mexico.

She sits in the driver’s seat and does some thinking.

Eleven days left. Maybe fewer. She’ll have to seriously book it.


That night at the motel she orders takeout from a barbecue joint and sits on the bed eating and reading her mother’s things. Lots of them—most of them—she doesn’t understand. They look like data reports from some old computer system—the kind, she imagines, whose screen is rendered in black with dark green letters. There are reams and reams and reams of data, and sometimes there are words but she doesn’t understand a damn lick of it—“cosmic bruising” gets tossed around a lot, as well as “aphasic,” and there’s a lot of talk about “binary states,” which Mona doesn’t get. There are also some other papers, interoffice memos, all of which originate from the same laboratory: CNLO, Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory, whose name is always paired with the same corporate logo, an atomic model of an element (hydrogen, Mona guesses) encased in a drop of water, or possibly a ray of light.

And it appears her mother was once employed there, probably as some sort of engineer. She sees “Alvarez” on several of the memos, even “Dr. Alvarez.” Mona’s been getting surprised all day, but this surprises her most of all: she cannot imagine her mother having a PhD in anything, especially advanced stuff like this.

She looks at a few old family photos from her father’s belongings. The one she lingers on the most was taken in front of their old cinder-block house. The house is as small and white and drab as she remembers, drenched in sun and dust. Mona, Earl, and her mother stand before the front door, smiling a little, a snapshot taken on the way to church. Mona cannot imagine who took the picture—maybe a neighbor?—but even in this moment, early in their family’s history, Mona thinks she can detect some brittleness in her mother’s eyes, something ready to break.

Mona can still remember the last time she saw her mother. Alive, that is. It took place right there, on that step in the photo. She remembers the hot, red day when her mother ventured out onto that front step—her first time outside in months—and called to Mona, playing in the yard, hardly seven years old. Her mother was wearing a teal bathrobe and her hair was wet, and Mona remembers how embarrassed she was when the wind rose and the bottom of her mother’s bathrobe lifted up and Mona saw coarse pubic hair and realized her mother was nude under that robe, just naked as a jaybird. Her mother called to her to come, and when Mona obeyed her mother knelt and whispered into Mona’s ear that she loved her, she loved her more than anything, but she couldn’t stay here, and she was so sorry. She couldn’t stay because she was not from here, not really, she was from somewhere else, and she had to go back now. Mona, terrified, asked where it was, and was it close and could she visit, and her mother whispered that no, no, it was far, far away, but she said not to worry, everything would be fine; one day she would come and get her little girl and everything would be fine. Then her mother said to stay in the yard, to just stay there until the ambulance came and took care of everything, and with one last profession of love she kissed Mona and walked back inside.

Mona’s last memory of her mother is of her walking down the long, dark hallway, teetering uneasily on pale, skinny legs, her hands mindlessly probing her ears. After that, though Mona was not there to see it (having minded her mother), Laura Bright wrapped her head in two towels, climbed into the bathtub, shut the curtain, put her husband’s shotgun to her chin, and painted the aquamarine tiles of the shower with the wet, simple matter that composed her mind and soul.

Judging from her mother’s preparations, she had evidently tried to make a clean job of it, but the grout kept a pink stain that never went away, no matter how her father scrubbed. Mona hated the house after that, and she was thankful when her father moved to a new job. And to this day Mona has never forgotten the way her mother looked when she apologized to her on that front step: she looked more sensible and saner than she had in many years. It was not until later, when Mona became a cop, that she learned how unusual it was for a woman to kill herself with a firearm, especially one as devastating as a shotgun. To this day, it still bothers her.

She keeps forgetting that in eleven days it will have been thirty years ago. Even though all of her adult life has occurred after that moment, it still feels as if it happened only yesterday, like Mona is still waiting on the front lawn, waiting for her mother to tell her to come back inside.

She remembers almost nothing of her mother apart from that moment and brief snatches of other memories that amount to nothing. Yet in this dingy motel room, with the sounds of Jeopardy! bleeding through the bedroom wall, Mona is confronted with the fact that her mother was much more than that sad, confused woman. How she got to West Texas and into Earl Bright’s life is something Mona cannot imagine.

Yet it is something Mona decides she will find out. She will go to this town in New Mexico and find out what her mother was doing there and what turned her into the weeping wreck of a human being Mona knew. And after all, Mona has no reason to stay in Texas: she’s had a rocky couple of years since her divorce, and though after her resignation the Houston PD made it obvious they’d welcome her back, she does not feel like being a cop anymore. She has become comfortable with drifting, with the endless chain of cheap motel rooms and the scents of diesel gas and watery beer. God only knows how many W2s she’s filled out for a month’s or two months’ wages. She has been all over Texas and Louisiana and, in one rock-bottom fit, Oklahoma, and though she has seen many miles she is now unsure if she’s actually found anything during her sojourn. Certainly never a house, or a car, or the ghost of her mother’s history.

Mona shoves the papers aside and starts trimming and filing her toenails (she has always taken very good care of her feet), and she watches the curtains change color with the neon lights outside.

She wonders how she will get there. She wonders what Wink is like, and why she’s never heard of it before. And she wonders if she will find any more to the stranger she has just unearthed in this little cardboard box.