She turned to Alo with a worried pout and pushed his hair back to examine his face, the bags under his eyes, the cracks that grooved his dehydrated skin. She scratched his stubble and stretched out his cheeks with her fingers. The way she was sitting on top of him made it so that when she turned to him, her breasts came right up to his face. They were solid, rubbery balloons. Her nipples poked through the white tank top. Alo nuzzled his head between them and shook it in mock despair.
“I’m soooo tired, Mom! Put me to bed! Please!” He laughed, then lit a Marlboro Red.
She took the cigarette from his mouth and put it in hers.
“Alo has throat cancer,” she declared with nonchalance. “He shouldn’t smoke.”
I understood now why his voice was so raspy.
“Shouldn’t you not smoke at all?” I asked, but Alo said he’d rather die than not smoke.
His mother rolled her broken watery eyes at me.
“It’s a lost cause,” she said, then got up and waddled to the pantry where the washer and dryer were, suddenly uninterested in our company.
“Do you remember last night at the sacred grounds?” Alo finally lifted his eyes. He got up from his chair and came close to me, warm and intimate. “You were so tight. I didn’t want to break you.”
“Break me?”
I had wanted him to break me. Because now nobody else could. Trying to remember how it happened or what had happened would only make things harder. I did not want to have that conversation. For me what mattered was that I was okay. I had no scars or bruises. I survived the loss of my virginity. I made good my escape. But now I was cold and I wanted to go back.
I imagined my parents going crazy looking for me, blaming each other, incited by my grandmother. I saw police cars piling into the casino’s parking lot, detectives taking notes, a Native American psychic conjuring visions of my alcohol-stashed backpack through her third eye. All of them devastated by my absence, rethinking all their choices.
“Can you take me back now?” I asked.
Alo came closer and kissed my lips.
I wanted to steer away from the chance of having him inside me again so I told him I was sorry he had cancer and hoped he wouldn’t have to put a creepy voice box in his throat.
“I’m not putting any box in my fucking throat,” he said with a glare. And I knew my vagina was safe.
We drove back and on the way Alo gave me a romantic tour of the Badlands, the great rocky expanse of battered buttes that stretches over the southwestern part of South Dakota. He stopped his pickup on a dirt road overlooking miles of dry pinnacles eroded by wind and water. Every cone composition formed clusters of breast-like sculptures emerging out of the earth. They went as far as I could see.
“Infinite tits, man,” said Alo. I smiled and shivered. He removed his leather jacket and placed it over my shoulders, a chivalrous gesture I didn’t know how to take in. He said I could keep it, that he wanted me to have it. It came from Germany. The Suicidal Tendencies patch on the back was very rare. We should exchange numbers. We could see each other in California. He’d like that, he said, and scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper with a violet pen he found floating between the cigarette butts. I told him I didn’t have a phone yet and wrote down my address. I knew I never wanted to see him again.
—
I rolled Alo’s leather jacket under my arm and stumbled toward the Black Elk Imperial Suite, sure I would find a team of detectives huddled around my sobbing family. I told myself I would hug my mother and tell her I was sorry for making fun of her, that packing white clothes and insisting, even crying, so that we would wear them was the right thing to do. I would reassure her that the Lakota had their ways of taking care of themselves. They had horses and rode across barren, frigid fields to commemorate their ancestors. They fasted and went on vision quests and knew how to do things the correct way. She was right. We were wrong.
When I opened the door my father was leaning against the wall in a sirsasana headstand pose while my mother read to him out loud from a yoga exercise book.
“There you are.” She turned with a radiant, vacant smile. “We were looking for you.”
No detectives. I was not happy about it.
I waited for Serena to scream, for my father to get back on his feet and slap my face savagely.
“I went on a hike. There’s a trail behind the casino,” I said.
“What a great idea.”
My mother got up, came close to me, and stroked my hair.
“Good news. Max got Dad an appointment with a co-producer who is really interested in financing a new project. Robert is out of the psychiatric ward and ready to finish the script. We’re going back to LA today.”
In the bedroom my grandmother sat on my bed while my brother played Tetris on his Game Boy. He didn’t lift his head.
“They didn’t even realize you were gone the whole night.” She shook her head as she folded my clothes into neat piles.
“I didn’t leave,” I said firmly.
Then I sat on the bed, curled up on her lap, and fell asleep.
I stayed asleep through most of the ride back. We drove without stopping because my father didn’t want to waste money on food or lodging since the casino charged us for leaving early. Outside the car window I saw smoke signals and trails infused by the colors of mutating nature: the Black Hills of Wyoming, the iridescent crystals of Utah’s salt flats, waves of neon lights in Las Vegas. We rode through the Strip. Night was not night, but a darker, permanent day, and I felt how small we were compared to all that. In the dawn effulgence we passed the low desert shrubs of Barstow and drove across the suburban Inland Empire of San Bernardino. Then traffic thickened. Freeways began climbing over each other, intersecting, shifting alignments and directions, telling us we were at the end of our trip.
I opened my eyes to the smoggy capsule that towered above downtown Los Angeles. The sunlight diluted into a thick polluted haze and I knew home was somewhere behind those freeways, off a green exit sign that looked like the one before and after it. Home was in this place. We were almost there.
7
Dear Mary, penetration doesn’t hurt! I can make love whenever I want now. I have a pain-repellent internal rubber suit and no longer want to pass through school like a ghost. I want to be seen and I want to be held. Amen.