I didn’t know how “famous” it was, but I could make it, all right. We just had to stop by the market first. Sledgehammer was bound to have some good cuts of meat in his butcher shop.
It was nice to talk about mundane things, to act as though nothing big had just happened. I think we wound up watching “Poltergeist” on cable TV that night and eating while sitting on the couch. I was hard pressed to notice anything different about Deloy, too. Then again, we were accustomed to going from scene to scene, acting in ways each scene demanded. We were actors, I guess. Actors without applause.
EPILOGUE
OAKLYN
June
I had to slide into my wedding dress inside a porta potty.
It was the only place to change up in our little chapel of nature a half mile hike up a trail at Zion. I didn’t want to get the white sundress sweaty, so I’d carefully rolled it into a daypack that I carried up the trail. Now my attendants waited on me outside my dressing room while I cinched the waist with a rhinestone-studded ostrich belt. The cowboy boots were in Mahalia’s hands, my jewelry in Kimball Manwill’s purse. Kimball had busted out of Cornucopia along with Mahalia and helped her run Save Our Baby Brides.
“Come on,” whined Kimball. “I have to pee!”
“Go behind that rock,” Mahalia told her.
“Mahalia! I’m not a biker chick, like you.”
I had to laugh. “Biker chick.” Never in a thousand years would I have thought I’d ever be called a biker chick. I had actually thought I’d marry Giovanni and be doomed to a life of wondering where my playboy husband was—and whether or not he’d bring home venereal disease. I had thought that all men were fallible in one way or another. The holiest of men had skeletons in their closet. Life was a laboratory and we used each other as test subjects. We all had cuts and bruises to show from what others had inflicted on us.
But when I hitched my star to Levon Rockwell’s, my wounds began to heal. He didn’t inflict new ones on me. I kept waiting for it, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the big reveal that would show what a heartless bastard he was.
It never came.
I suppose I was still waiting for it that early summer day overlooking the enormous face of the Great White Throne, a monolith of white Navajo sandstone. Levon had told me that an explorer had said of it a hundred years ago, “Boys, I have looked for this mountain all my life but I never expected to find it in this world.” He said that’s how he felt about me. I was his Great White Throne.
“Come on,” trilled Kimball.
“Is anyone out there?” I shouted.
“Only everyone,” said Mahalia.
“I mean, I don’t want Levon to see me coming out of a frigging bathroom.”
“Oh. No, I don’t see him.”
“I don’t either.”
“All right.” I stepped out in my little tennis socks. The dress was tea length, and the cowboy boots would cover the rest. The boots cost more than the dress. They were studded with eight rows of maple sugar crystals, the better to match the backdrop of cliffs behind me. I quickly stepped into them in case Levon was looking. Mahalia and I went around back of the Port-a-pottie so I could put on my jewelry.
“You’ve got your vows memorized,” Mahalia assumed.
“Sort of. Kind of. Being in the public eye always makes me nervous.”
“It does?” Mahalia had appeared on television a few times on behalf of her nonprofit charity. She appeared to thrive in that atmosphere, but it made me physically ill, one reason I’d never done drama in high school. “I love it. It’s fun.”
“It’s no fun for me. Does Dingo really have to make a video of this? I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Believe you me. You’re going to want the video a year from now. Especially twenty years from now. Listen. Dad sends his regrets that he and Mom can’t come.”
I know Mahalia was trying to be helpful, but she was only making it worse. “Oh, those assholes.” It just slipped out of me. But there, I’d said it. Maybe my nerves were making me honest, like a truth serum. “They basically disowned us for living with men who are bikers.”
“I know,” Mahalia said kindly. “But think about their religious background, Oak. They’re steeped in this philosophy of what’s right and what’s wrong.”
I angrily adjusted my flashy rhinestone necklace. “Yeah, well. Their so-called monopoly on salvation is bullshit. How can a few million people alone be the chosen ones? If we don’t follow their churchly precepts, we’re damned.”