16 Sea Goat
As I got into the truck to go home my hands were shaking. I felt like something was finally becoming clear but I wasn’t sure what. Something had failed, something big and now there was a vast plain before us on which I could build anything. Jimmy spun us around on the trail rock and out onto the road.
We drove under the night sky with the windows rolled down and the cold air rushing around us. The broken speedometer bounced frantically between numbers as we barreled down the mountain. Capricorn blinked through a lattice of radio towers in the distance.
It was like the world had broken open and nothing was hidden anymore, like we were crawling all over it like salamanders. I felt my own life, a minnow in a brook silvered and fleet. I was alive for no reason at all, finally unindentured. Miro told me that he swam the Morava when it was flooding. All the landmarks he had counted on were sunken beneath the water, which just kept rising. He dove into the current and when he came up he was surrounded by sticks and card tables, shoes and bottles. He said it was as if the river had swollen with debris of his country, like it had done it on purpose to keep him from leaving. I felt that way saying goodnight to Grace.
We were on the porch and the light was broken. She hooked my fingers with hers and I felt the dark woods, filled with birthday trees, shudder. The whites of her eyes flickered like stars on the sea when she moved.
“Della…” she said and took my head in her hands, “Della.”
Her breath wet my cheek. She leaned in and said something to me in a sharp whisper. It must have been important because it seemed like she said it twice but her palms were over my ears and I couldn’t understand what it was. All I could hear was the ocean. And I thought, it’s only going to get worse. Leave. Down below this mountain the borders are tightening, the nations are shifting and through all the dangling black branches I see Grace and Cady dancing in circles. If I look down for a second, I will never go. Grace, my Broken Shield, will hold me forever. And Cady? My Clay Dog Master, my Torturer? My Brave Indian Chief? She will certainly kick me if I move and shoot me if I talk.
Tapping Jimmy’s windshield, I pointed to the rim of the valley.
“See that? Capricorn? That’s the tail of the Sea Goat.”
She didn’t raise her eyes.
“Over there,” I pointed, “Capricorn. By the towers.”
“I don’t want to talk about constellations. I don’t want to talk about anything.”
“But it’s Babylonian.”
“Della, that was the most f*cked-up, masochistic f*cking thing I have ever f*cking witnessed. I felt like I was being asked to watch your mom slice herself to ribbons.”
She had a point. If you look at Grace too long everything turns into scary little splinters but I didn’t want to get into it and lose my own momentum.
“I thought it was really sweet of you to eat the Frito pie.”
“F*ck the Frito pie!” she screamed. “F*ck the f*cking Frito pie!”
The spinning cell phone whizzed by on my left and parking lots on my right.
Jimmy rolled her window up. I started to say something and she turned on the radio. There wasn’t a clear station and several different ones came in and out of the static. A blast of Christianity, the stammering Mexican brass then nothing but free bandwidth. We turned off the freeway and eventually came to a barricade. There were packs of crickets everywhere and a large chirper sidled over.
“Where are you girls going?” he asked.
“Home,” Jimmy said,
“Where have you been?”
“At a family gathering.”
“Oh yeah, what kind?”
The kind where you celebrate the day a bus crash killed your thirteen-year-old sister because your mom believes that it is important to re-experience pain as a political construct. An anniversary?
“An anniversary,” I said.
“I’m not talking to you,” snapped the officer.
“At an anniversary,” Jimmy said.
“Look,” said Jimmy when we were through, “I need a few days.”
“Sure.”
I asked her to drop me off at an all-night Safeway. She pulled up to the curb by the sliding doors. I got out and started to say goodnight but she was already driving away. I didn’t really blame her. It just wasn’t what she thought it was going to be, being out there with them. I could have said, charisma is violence, but she wouldn’t have understood. I could have told her, there is no haven, but it’s hard to look those things in the eye. It’s hard to see Grace as she really is. She’s just too close to what you need her to be. Up until that moment I think Jimmy really believed that there was sanctuary somewhere. And not just driftwood shacks filled with sorrow, lit with oil lamps.
I stood in front of the Safeway for a few moments then went in. I have my own traditions. They have nothing to do with anyone else.
The store was empty. The meat glowed and a steel drum version of “Eleanor Rigby” echoed on the Congoleum. I went over to the customer service desk. A checker with fine brown hair, hoop earrings and tracheotomy scar walked up to me. She had a button pinned to her chest, big as a can lid, with a photo of a German shepherd puppy on it.
“Can I help you?”
“I want have my sister paged. We came in together and I can’t find her.”
“Have you looked around?”
“Yes, I’ve looked everywhere.”
I went back to the table and waited.
“Cady Elizabeth…”
The checker’s voice cracked shrill through the overhead PA.
A teenage boy unpacking a palette of potato chips looked up. That’s right, I thought, you should be looking for her, my scary Indian sister, it’s only smart. She’d slit your throat in your sleep you big sell-out. You’re lucky it’s just me here.
I waited a few minutes and walked back over and asked her to page Cady again.
“I don’t think your sister is here,” she said.
“Maybe she was in the bathroom,” I said.
“Maybe she went outside to use the phone,” she said, “there’s a pay phone on the corner.”
Maybe she’s turned into minerals that got ground into soil and line the tanks of goldfish.
“Maybe your sister will come back later…”
As a gila monster or a grass spider.
Raina believes in reincarnation.
“What about birds?” I’d asked her. “Will they all be birds again? Do sparrows become starlings, or does it go the other way? What happens after you’re a blackberry bush?”
“Well,” she said, “I think we’re here for a reason and that whatever we haven’t learned before we get to learn now. Some of us won’t have to come back.”
I’m learning how to bury rats in the back of a restaurant without tipping off the health department. Do I have to come back?
“The point is to not to get too attached,” she said.
Mirror believes in reincarnation too.
“Dude, I am totally coming back as a black chick.”
“Why?”
“Cause they’re hot.”
“You don’t get to pick. That’s the whole idea.”
“Right, you earn it. And I totally deserve to be a hot black chick.”
“What about the black chicks? What do they become?”
“Nothing. That’s it. They’re done. They’re the head of the line. Unless they shoot someone or run over a kid or something like that.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m going to be as black as a Nigerian with a huge f*cking pink Afro. It’ll be totally hot.”
I think I should be a coral reef and Credence should be a dog salmon. All those kids they blew up in that school last year should get to be silk moths or new planets.
Thinking that, I left the commercial lighting of the Safeway behind and wandered through darker and darker streets until I came again to the edge of New Honduras. Ten blocks up an emergency lamp reddened the blackness.