On the tape, Patsy Cline sang I fall to pieces, each time I see you again . . . She’d bought it at a gas station in Glendale, it was the closest thing they’d had to the blues. How Pen would have laughed if she could see her now, singing along, she knew every word, every cowgirl hiccup, like her own heartbeat, she could hit every high note, and capture the quaver and the chin-up bravery. Patsy was Piaf in fringe and white boots. But Meredith had the Piaf, she had Louis and Django and Bing, right along with Brahms and Bartók, she’d even swept Josie’s old Merle Haggard into her net. Sitting now in a heap in Michael’s old room. I don’t think I’m coming back, Josie. She would lock up the house and never return. Fifty years from now, that stuff would probably still be sitting there, the pile of their things covered in a layer of dust thick as felt. They’d all be dead, but their things would still be waiting, the records still playable. Who would it go to when Meredith was gone? Knowing that woman, it would just go on and on. Some bank paying the taxes, the whole house silently crumbling into the ground.
She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond-dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing. She could not do what Meredith was planning, just lock the house and leave town without a forwarding address. Although she was a girl who killed the thing she loved, she could do one thing that that frightened woman could not—go to the end with him. She could take it all the way.
Traffic inched down the valley, past Azusa and Glendora. In the orange-grove days these had been real towns, each with its railroad siding and general store, but now it was one big snail track of suburb, one great sleepwalking sprawl. Yet, still, what she wouldn’t give for a piece of that ordinary life, to share with the boy she loved, like a loaf of plain, warm bread.
Out in Pomona, ghostly white balloons hung in the night sky over the car dealers lining the freeway. Weird white surreal clusters against the black, tugging at their tethers. She could feel them in her throat, in her chest. The dark batons of palm trees shot up darker than the sky. The moon rose above a bank of clouds, the great grinning Oz of a moon. Was that God, she wondered, just the man behind the curtain, working His cranks and levers? Covering His own inadequacies? Just a cheesy music video made in someone’s garage, with lots of Mole fog and uplighting?
Michael had driven this same road, past these very same car lots, these exact palms. Did he know just where he was going? Or did he rent a car from the National counter at the Ambassador Hotel and just spin the keys? East was the desert, a dead sea, salt flats, the great missile testing range. Did he know it would be Twentynine Palms, or had he just passed each exit in turn, waiting to be moved by a fatal instinct? Why not one of the eight exits of Pomona? She watched them go by. Fairgrounds, Garvey, Towne, Indian Hill. Etiwanda, why not Etiwanda? Or Montclair, or Ontario. How far did he think he had to go to meet what could have been met right there in the house on Lemoyne?
Finally, the suburbs loosened their grip on the land, the commuter traffic thinning toward Colton. She could tell, no one lived in Colton and worked somewhere else. People didn’t even commute to Pomona from here. The billboards changed from gentlemen’s clubs and car lots and overnight communities to fantasies centering on the vacation traveler, women in feathers, or else floating in pools, men in white pants playing golf. Spas and the hotels of Palm Springs and Las Vegas. Feeling lucky tonight? She couldn’t remember the last time she felt lucky. She thought of that old man, Morty, and his wife, driving out here on their way to Las Vegas, their big Caddy on cruise control, listening to Sinatra on four-speaker sound. She liked knowing he was awake down at the Four Queens in Gardena, that he’d be awake all night. She wondered if he thought of her when he visited his wife. Did he ever look over at Michael’s stone and wonder what happened to that girl in the yellow coat, who had never known anyone who’d died? Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.
The train yards in Fontana sat forlorn under orange crime lights, empty cars waiting on sidings, full ones moving slow as a dream, going somewhere with their load of steel and oranges, trains without beginning or end. But not their train, Blaise and Jeanne’s, the one that started in Paris and went through a war in Siberia to end at the sea in Harbin, China. The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake . . . Easy enough to die in Fontana, you could lie down on the tracks and be divided neatly, top and bottom. Or you could just pick a fight in a beer bar, expending the smallest insult, and let someone else do the job, bashing your skull against the concrete curb of the parking lot.
This very second, she could jerk the wheel of the car to the left just ever so slightly, and the sixteen wheeler with the slick, shiny cab could crush her like a candy wrapper. Her hands sweated. She tried to think of something else, but she could not stop thinking how it would feel, how long would it take. Just an accident. You didn’t really have to know what you were doing. You could deny it all. I just fell asleep for a second. Swilling barbs and voddy and falling into a pool. The brave thing was to admit it. To say, I have fucking had enough. To take the fucking gun and put it in your mouth and pull the trigger. I’m doing this, assholes, and it ain’t no accident. Look, here’s how. If you were going to do it, you should know that’s what you were doing. Your eyes wide open.
She wove through the serpentine knot of freeway exchanges, the split between the 10 and 15, one heading to Beaumont, Banning, and Indio, the other moving north to Las Vegas. She felt panic, imagining Mort and Dotty turning off here, leaving her alone to continue east, she had almost believed they were with her. She drove on.
Redlands 10. She thought of Pen, growing up out here, scrappy mad and dreaming of LA so hard she could taste it. She missed her like an arm—Pen, with her great love of life, her sense of fun and her rough practicality, that gap-toothed smile. Pen had never considered taking an extra pill or five, crashing into oncoming traffic. How furious it made her to see Josie succumbing to the Loewy spell. She could never explain to Pen why she was going to Twentynine Palms, why she had to know, once and for all. Why she had to take it all the way. She didn’t fully understand it herself, but she felt if she was ever going to save that last shred of soul, she had to go into it, right up into the asshole of death.
In Redlands, a little carnival churned and blinked, a Ferris wheel, a miniature roller coaster, her favorite kind of ride. But she would not stop to investigate. He hadn’t been looking for a carnival. Carne for meat. Carnevale. The feast before Lent, getting ready for Easter, the death of Christ and His miraculous recovery.
He’d taken her to Easter Mass last spring, in a pink brick church on Vermont. It surprised her, but she liked when he got an idea in his head, to do something weird like this. She put on a nice dress and heels. “What if it happened?” he said on the way over. “What if they rolled the boulder back and found the tomb empty?” They came in late and sat in the back. The church was packed, every kind of person, hair color, fashion choice. Big flowers in front filled the sanctuary with their scent, and honey candles, full-voiced choir. The larger-than-life Christ sagged on His cross. How thin He looked, such a terrible fragility. Broken. Forsaken. The priest spoke, the congregation responded. Suddenly, everyone turned around and shook each other’s hands, saying, “peace be with you,” “and with you.” How seriously Michael had done it, said, and peace be with you. She wondered what they would have thought if they knew he was half-Jewish. A priest walked down the aisle with an altar boy carrying a bowl of water, and shook a bell-like contraption on a wooden stick, watering them with a sharp hard rap. The surprise at the cold water, amazing it didn’t raise blisters, considering who they were. Michael’s eyes shining. What was he thinking he was doing here, she’d wondered, a Jewish boy whose grandfather had to flee Nazis with the clothes on his back? But now she understood. He wanted faith, that the boulder would someday roll away, and the Son would walk free. That he would be released from the tomb he was sealing himself into.
She felt such searing pity, she had to pull over. T
he cars crashed by as she sat trying to breathe, her chest tight as a fist. Why had she not seen it? She’d just watched, without a thought in her head except when would they go and have lunch. Afterward, they’d stopped at a side altar, he lit a candle, knelt and prayed before a beautiful Virgin with flowers around her neck. Josie paid the dollar and lit a candle, but it was just a game. She thought of the Virgin over his bed in Los Feliz. Why a Virgin, instead of a Jewish candelabra or star? She had always thought it was just a piece of kitschy decor. But it wasn’t. This was the Mother he wanted to watch over him in his anxious sleep, someone who could love him without condition, take his pain away. Not one whose genius taunted him at every turn, a mother who raised him up with one hand just to cut him down with the other, who blurred all the lines, who tunneled with secret doors into his soul. He wanted to be loved purely, simply. No expectations. And she herself wasn’t free from that guilt. She had wanted things from him too, needed as much if not more.
And so, she and Meredith, the women who’d failed him, were left with their sins, and the boulder never did roll away. She sat and smoked a cigarette, the tears drooling down.
After Redlands, the road climbed into some sort of pass. In the dark it seemed lush and wooded. But on the other side, she was met by wind that shoved the car halfway into the next lane. A Buick blatted its horn. At first she thought something was wrong with her tires. It would settle for a minute, five, she thought it was gone, and then suddenly the car skidded sideways again. She fought her way through battered Calimesa, a town from the Forties, pickup trucks and small-town feel, its Bob’s Big Boy the center of visible nightlife. And all around in the flat western landscape, scattered lights winked way off in the distance. She understood people who’d choose to live like that, isolated in a dry, hard terrain, so far from comfort. People who didn’t want to love their neighbors as themselves, or rather, loved their neighbors about as much. Hard people, whose own company was even more than they could stomach.
She fought the wind for an hour, her arms weary and aching, her nerves peeled to a thread by the time she pulled into the Denny’s in Beaumont. She was glad just to be somewhere. Raw cold cut her as she left the car, all she had between her skin and the wind were a pair of dirty jeans and a sweater, a dog-torn leather jacket. Well all right. She didn’t need a five-hundred-dollar pony-skin coat, a new full-length down cocoon. You couldn’t swathe yourself in goose down when you were taking it all the way. It was cold and hard and it was her choice.
The hostess took one look at her punked-out hair and jacket and seated her away from the families, at a window where she could watch the lights on the highway, and her old Falcon with the marks of a hundred small-time bands. She ordered a burger from the bow-tied waiter, a middle-aged Latino. “You’re not from around here,” he said. “Have a hard drive?”
She smiled, declining conversation. Maybe she was wrong about the people out here. Maybe it was herself she was thinking of. The windows bowed as the wind hit them. She imagined them popping, the customers all sliced by glass, blood flowing, pooling on the patterned salmon and teal indoor-outdoor carpeting, the brightness of heart blood. Did Michael sit here in the Beaumont Denny’s with a cup of weak coffee, listening to the wind and the trains going by? It was a Dust Bowl sound, it stirred something in her own blood. She had never felt so lonely in her life as she did at that moment, listening to the train whistle cry.
A man with a gray crew cut and gray eyes and gray skin sat in a booth facing her, his hands cradling his coffee. His body was there but his eyes were a thousand miles away. She wondered what he was seeing, where those eyes had gotten stuck. She ate half her burger, but wasn’t hungry after all. The meat made her ill, the pickle. She ate a few of the fries and let the waiter bring her more coffee, she lit a cigarette and watched the gray man, a dead man in a coffee shop under fluorescent lights. The papery crinkles of his skin, the gray eyes staring at nothing. She understood just how that could happen. She understood very well. She finished smoking, her Gauloise as odd in a Beaumont Denny’s as a fur at a Fourth of July jamboree.
After Banning, there were no more towns. No roadside lighting, just the glow of rock off hardpan earth and the dark wall of mountains against sky. The blasts of wind threw bursts of sand against the thin skin of the Falcon. In the moonlight, she could see the mountain’s ghostly topography, its crushed-velour flanks. It wasn’t that the mountain seemed particularly threatening, but like the gray man, it was just eerily silent, utterly sad, untouchably distant. It was the valley of the dead, the mythic underworld, shadowy yet defined, gray on gray. Some sort of big-trunked shaggy trees sucked a living from the desert floor.
The wind batted from the left, always the left, like a one-armed boxer. Tumbleweeds flew and rolled across her headlights. And yet cars still passed at 90, 110, a Beemer, a Porsche, a Rolls, two Mercedes, a Cadillac, all heading for the oases of Palm Springs and Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage. Rich people who knew where to go, traveling in their fast, safe cars to solid destinations . . . but she knew better now. They thought they could hide in the right clothes, the right resort towns, but they were the ones who disappeared from Meredith’s photo album, one by one. They thought they’d found the safe place, the good place, that knowing how to dress and what to order would save them, but they were still out here in the night, swatted by the same giant hand, going somewhere incomprehensible. Palm Springs would not save them.
The fancy traffic turned south, but she kept hard east through the terrible landscape, dark and open as the moon. It was like something from Castaneda, wind and forms so dark they were almost invisible, but not quite. And there, in the road, a silver coyote. She swerved to miss it, fuck! The car fishtailed wildly, she suddenly saw herself flipping, ending up upside down off the side of the road. Go with it ride it out ride it out. Her father’s voice, it must have been. She steered with the skid, staying off the brakes, until the car straightened out. Her heart thumped like the bass in a gutbucket band. She would stop but there was nowhere to pull over. The fucking coyote had vanished. Maybe she should have hit it. Got rid of it once and for all.
A U of lights opened before her, a wide valley, Desert Hot Springs, she saw what she had been looking for since Pasadena—Hwy 62, Joshua Tree, 29 Palms. She exited the highway and bumped onto a two-lane road that went past a little hamlet and then up into the night.
The rough, narrow road was protected to some degree from the wind, but the Falcon slowed ominously, chugging up the grade. She watched her temperature gauge rising. No lights at all, no car behind or in front. The road reminded her of the tarot card The Moon, the road winding into the dark mountains, and you couldn’t see the end. The Moon hung her tragic head. No light, no vista, the hills closed in, and she could see faces in the eroded sandstone. The claws of telephone poles menaced like the forelegs of insects. She could smell the metal of her own fear. She might blow a tire, break an axle, the car could overheat, a belt could pop—but Michael had driven this. He had felt this very thing. This was what he chose. Like a sick dog, trying to find the farthest, most remote place to do his dying. Though if she had ever seen a good place to die, this was it.
Motorcycles droned behind her, their lights glaring in her rearview mirror. Four bikers coming on fast, then they were all around her. Longhairs on chopped Harleys, wearing the leathers of their local club. The nameless anxieties of the lonely drive were quickly replaced by the focused danger of the human element, now surrounding the car. There was nothing between her and gang rape but the forward motion of the unpredictable Falcon. She had known what to do in a situation like this since she was ten years old, the acting that was more than natural, it was necessary. She forced a tired, bored look onto her face, as if she did this every night, coming home from her job cleaning rooms in Desert Hot Springs. I know you, her body language was saying. I shop with your wife at Stater Brothers. I dated your brother Spider. One of them, riding abreast of her, grinned and blew her a kiss. She raised two fingers from the steer
ing wheel in a neighborly salute. And then they took off, leaving her the vacant road.
Sweaty and shivering, she reached the summit, blessedly untenanted, and began to descend to a little town amid chaparral and tumbleweed. Welcome to Morongo Valley. Rough and sparse and without cachet. She felt a sudden fondness for its clutch of residents, dug in just under the summit. It was a place to hide out, a sanctuary for people with records, people on the lam. Bigamists and repeat offenders, women with violent husbands. A place for girls who have killed the thing they loved. But she didn’t stop at the Blue Jay Inn, though its painted wood sign said vacancy. Michael hadn’t holed up, hunkering down until the storm blew over. He had another destination in mind. He had not stopped short, and neither could she.
She fought the wind, her arms aching, but now it seemed right, it seemed almost like company. She was tired of listening to Patsy, she turned on the radio, but all she could get was TJ, and a hellfire preacher from Hemet. She fumbled for a tape from the pile on the passenger seat, Germs, X, Joan Jett . . . She wanted something bluesy but not desperate. Not Pierrot Lunaire, Christ . . . finally she came up with an old Lou Reed, it was the best she was going to do. Holly came from Miami FLA . . . thought she was James Dean for a day . . . She fought the wind, listening to Uncle Lou, his New Yorky sneer covering what junkie transsexual heartbreak, she only now was starting to imagine. Tumbleweeds paced the car out on the coyoteside, the dark thorny arms of Joshua trees implored the sterile moon.
She stopped in Yucca Valley for gas—it wasn’t a place that would have called to Michael, four lanes through a suburbanish town, not the haphazard clump of Morongo Valley—Allstate office, car lots, a Safeway store, A and W Root Beer. It was 11:00 p.m., everything was closed but the gas stations. She noticed the tow truck parked next to the garage, 24 hour service, an old-fashioned lift. Couple of junked cars and one in the bay. The man wheeled himself out from under the car, came over, wiping his hands. He had Dale written on his mechanic’s uniform. He reminded her of her uncle Dave. A small man, wiry, with a hard face, about thirty-six, but thirty-six the Bakersfield way, that made them men at twenty and old at forty. Not like the photographers and art teachers and casting agents of LA, who could be any age at all.