The Diviners

  Jeanine says, “It’s time for me to tell you the thing I meant to tell you.”

  A fantail swept out in front of the Sikh.

  “This happened when I was a teenager in Arizona. Believe it or not, I was a really rebellious girl, and there was nothing that my parents could do to keep me in the house. I wasn’t like I am now. I was running around with my friends, in their parents’ cars. We’d go driving in the desert. We drove east. Less civilization. North and east there was nothing but the reservations. We thought we had more in common with the Indians than we did with our parents. Used to spend nights out there. We’d lock the car doors, push the seats back. It made my parents mad, of course, and I’d get grounded for a month. Then I’d go right out there and do it again. I liked the reservations, especially the Navajo reservation. From the road, it was empty as far as you could see.”

  The dealer asks Ranjeet to cut the deck. They are ready for gaming. Ranjeet bets the minimum, which is fifteen dollars.

  The dealer draws twenty-one on the first hand.

  “You don’t want to be out there in late summer, because if you’re out there for very long you’re just going to cook, you know. There are stories about people who leave their baby in the car in the summer. They go into the convenience store. They come out, and the baby is like a piece of dried fruit. Or dogs. They forgot to leave the window open a crack for their dogs, and now their dogs are sun-dried tomatoes. Everyone is trying to avoid fire. You can hear it on the radio. ‘Today the alert is code red.’”

  Ranjeet draws fifteen, takes a jack from the dealer, goes over. At this rate, he will last seven or eight more hands. He looks at Jeanine, pleading, as if by pleading he can get her not to tell the story. She waits and then she continues.

  “I was going out with a boy named Philip. Philip was not a good boyfriend. My parents didn’t want me to go out with him and they didn’t like how I dressed with him or how I did in school when I was with him, and they didn’t like anything else about him. Philip had planned this party for Saturday night, and we were going to drive north, to Skull Valley. Up near the Bradshaws. Just grasslands as far as you can see. Not as dry as the lower elevations, but the fires are just as dangerous. Up in the mountains you have the pinõn and the ponderosa, and those make for good fuel. It didn’t stop us. You go through there into horse country, and then you go beyond all the horses, and then you’re in Skull Valley. We found a place off the road, where Philip and his pal Ryan and Ryan’s girlfriend, Skye, got out and set up a couple of tents.”

  Of the next three hands, Ranjeet wins two. Then he doubles down with two sevens, wins one. Suddenly he’s feeling kind of good about things. He bets forty-five dollars on the next hand, loses, and just as quickly he’s exhausted half of the stake.

  “Who wants to cook? We had some trail mix and we had a lot of beer and dope and some hummus that Skye brought. She worked at a health food store in town that nobody really patronized except us. She was always in there reading books about crystal magic. So Skye brought the only food we had, which means that we probably didn’t have as much as we should have. The first thing we did was start drinking the beer and smoking a lot of dope. Philip and Ryan started saying a lot of stuff about how they wished that Skye and I would start kissing, because they wanted to watch. Actually, I never really talked to her much, because Skye didn’t really talk. I told them that they should just lay off of Skye, but they didn’t lay off. They’d probably set the whole thing up beforehand; that’s what I think now. Let’s get the girls drunk. They had some adolescent idea that they were going to set up an orgy on this big camping trip, but obviously they didn’t know us too well.”

  “Could you please,” Ranjeet says.

  “I want to finish.”

  He bets forty-five again, draws thirteen, the number that gives every amateur blackjack player chest pains. He takes one card, and then another, and manages to work himself up to twenty, after which Jeanine watches as the dispassionate and professional African American dealer draws a six at fifteen, for twenty-one.

  Ranjeet says, “I need more funds.”

  “You’re welcome to use any funds that you have at your disposal,” Jeanine says.

  “I don’t have any funds at my disposal.”

  “Call your contacts at UBC.”

  Ranjeet says, “Let me have the credit card.”

  “Why should I give you the credit card? You’re playing like my grandmother.”

  “I am very sorry. Please finish your story.”

  He bets the rest of his chips. A whippet-thin guy with gin blossoms and a martini approaches the table, and Ranjeet waves him away.

  “I figured I should find a way to escape with Skye. So we told the boys we were going to go out into the brush to get comfortable with each other and they should come along in a few minutes, like maybe they should come along in fifteen minutes, and we would be more comfortable, we would be native girls in the brush. And then we ran off. It was dark, you know, and we could smell the campfire even while we were running away through the fields, running as far as we could, out into the prairie, and I remember thinking that I was a little worried about the campfire because of the warnings that summer. Even if the fire alerts never stopped us before. We were drunk and high, and I remember that I saw Skye smiling and laughing for the first time. We thought we would circle back to the road, laughing the whole way. We thought we knew the direction of the road, but as far as we went we didn’t see any road, and we didn’t see any cars or even any lights. We’d thought we’d hitch a ride, because no one was going to leave two girls by the side of the road at night. But we couldn’t find the road.”

  Ranjeet holds out his hand for the credit card.

  “The story is finished, correct?”

  “Incorrect. Go negotiate a second mortgage on your house. That’ll give you liquidity.”

  Ranjeet walks away from the table, mumbling to the dealer that he will return in a quarter hour. Jeanine takes a drink from the first scantily clad waitress who comes by and she tips this waitress generously, feeling bad about the outfit and the hours. When Ranjeet comes back, he is furious and he is clutching a number of hundred-dollar bills. He says, “Are you happy now? I did not want to use these hundreds of dollars, because a Sikh does not form dubious associations or engage in gambling, and because these are the last dollars in my bank account, and I was saving them for the expenses relating to my son. Even if I am here and I have degraded my marriage with you, it does not mean I do not love my son, who I think will be an honorable man.”

  He places the hundred-dollar bills on the green felt, and the dealer calls over his supervisor to oversee the exchange of bills for chips. Immediately, Ranjeet bets a hundred.

  “We’re out in the middle of some prairie that should belong to someone. But we don’t see anyone or any ranch house. There were wild burros out there, according to the signs, and I was starting to think about wild burros, and I was starting to think about other animals of the mountains, you know, bobcats or javelina. I didn’t know; I was kind of worried. It was getting late. And we started calling for the boys, but we weren’t hearing anything. We weren’t hearing anyone calling back to us. I think Skye was really scared. She told me how she didn’t have any family in Arizona, how she had come out west to go to school and then she dropped out of college right away and started working in the health food store and living behind a gas station. We called out some more, and no one answered our calls.”

  He wins the first hand, and then he wins the second.

  “We figured we were going to have to stay put for the night, so that in the morning we’d be able to see where the road was and then we’d find our way back to town. We thought we needed a fire to keep the animals away from us. There could easily have been snakes out there, you know. Skye had a lighter because she smoked. If we had a fire, someone might find us, too. If people saw fires burning in the night, the fire department would get notified, and they’d come out and dowse them. So we tried
to make a little campfire circle and we went looking for twigs and sticks, and all the time we were calling out to each other so we wouldn’t lose each other on top of everything else.”

  Up a thousand dollars! A miraculous thing! A God-given thing! A thing that prepares the way for tomorrow’s work, which will involve taking photographs of the locations they are going to use for the Las Vegas episode!

  “I’m not done,” Jeanine says. “I was telling you about how we made the little campfire circle, and then when we had the little campfire, we lay down beside it and we told each other stories, like I’m telling you a story right now, and we thought we would keep each other awake, telling stories, so that we could be sure to keep an eye on the fire, or in case the boys saw the fire, or if someone else did and called the fire department.”

  Ranjeet puts down five hundred dollars with a flourish. At which point the dealer deals himself an ace and a face. With a studied calm, the dealer remarks, “Bad luck, sir.”

  This is followed by two more top-dollar bets, desperation wagers. With the remaining five hundred, Ranjeet moves down to one-hundred-dollar increments. Of these, he loses three, wins one, and loses two more.

  “You know the ending? You already know the end, so I’ll just tell you the end, which is that I woke up to hear Skye screaming. The wind had blown up, which is the special requirement of a wildfire, and Skye was screaming. I was wearing a nylon windbreaker over a halter top, and I don’t really remember what Skye was wearing, because at the moment when I woke up, Skye was already in a lot of trouble, with the campfire having blown out of the campfire ring. Skye’s clothes were on fire, and I ran over to help her. I remember thinking that we didn’t have anything at all that would be good for putting out a fire. We didn’t even have any water. We were just a pair of stupid girls who didn’t have anything and who hoped our boyfriends would turn out to be better guys than they seemed. We didn’t have any water and we didn’t have any shovels, and I could see that Skye was trying to pat the fire out on her arms and back, and I jumped on her, and I was trying to put out the fire on Skye and I could feel that I was not really getting the fire, that something was making the fire burn brighter, and maybe that was my nylon jacket burning, but I didn’t have time to pay attention to it because I looked up and I saw that there were flames all in the night to one side of us, like the night itself was burning up. Before I could even deal with Skye, I said, ‘We’ve gotta run, we’ve gotta run,’ and we were both running, and I was patting down my arms, and I remember that I was trying to put out the jacket and I was trying to figure out if I could pull it off, but I couldn’t pull off the jacket because it had already melted. The only good thing about all of this was that we could hear the sirens in the distance. We could hear where the road was, because that was the direction that the sirens were coming from, and we were running toward the sirens, and Skye was wailing, and I was running as fast as I could, and finally we got to the road, and that’s where I passed out or went into shock. And I just want to tell you, in case you ever wondered about trauma, that I didn’t forget how I got to the hospital, or the first skin grafts, and I never did forget the fire. I wake up a couple of nights a month feeling like I’m running from fire. That fire burned four days. My name was in the papers, and everybody knew what Skye and I had done and what the boys had done, which is that somehow we started the Skull Valley Fire, and after that I never went outside to a party ever again. As soon as I finished school, I came east to New York to get away from the Skull Valley Fire, from the horses in their paddocks who died because of me, because of my stupid teens. If I came east, maybe no one would know how I felt about what I had done.”

  When Ranjeet has lost the last of his money, they get up from the table, taking leave of the new dealer, an Asian man with none of the complicated style of his predecessor, who is now gone on his break. It’s only when they’re passing through the maze of slots that Jeanine takes a quarter from her clutch, throws it into a one-armed bandit, pulls the lever, and waits as the alarm goes off crazily on its summit, indicating a major payout. The coins tumble into the tray below, more coins and more coins and more coins, until the tray can’t begin to contain the scale of the payout. Thousands! More than thousands! Ranjeet looks around, stunned, waiting for the uniformed employee. Jeanine says she can’t believe it, but somehow she can. Sometimes this is how it goes. Can he wait here for a second? She really has to go to the bathroom, just wait, just wait. And while he’s waiting for the money, she heads for the elevator, for the room, for the car key. It’s only four or five hours to Phoenix.

  31

  Sagebrush, creosote, ocotillo, waving fields of parched grasses uninterrupted to the horizon. The occasional juniper like a blemish on the emptiness. Even the tumbleweed doesn’t seem stagy, doesn’t seem added for effect; that’s how Vanessa knows she’s where she’s supposed to be, in a place where the wind on the rails really does howl, where the freights do rumble through the crossings for the rest of the day, where the best bar in town can’t afford a neon beer sign, where the one dilapidated market has an entire aisle of tortillas. A swirl of dust blows up around you, as if the range has a quarrel with you for cluttering its absences. You startle an antelope or a deer when you go out walking, but you shouldn’t go out walking, because no one does.

  Alpine, Texas. She’s come here to find that it’s among the last places in the country unexploited by the film business, an exploitation she now means to bring about with a vengeance. She means to line up a bunch of trailers, longer than the longest freight train, and she means to assemble a bunch of union guys who will descend on the local bars by the dozens, and she means to send extras in Mongolian outfits into this rangeland, and these Mongolians will be stabbing at one another, with the fight choreographer yelling from just offscreen. There will be helicopters hovering over all of the action, equipped with cameras and massive lenses.

  Her itinerary: first, the Gila National Monument. From there, she moved south and east. Vanessa liked it better in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and she liked it there for one reason. The Low Rider. Well, there was also the possibility of Alamogordo. Yes, Vanessa favored the idea that a Geiger counter might pick up echoes of long-ago blasts. But what Alamogordo looked like was like everything else. On the second day, they turned south toward Carlsbad. Why is it, at these caverns, that there’s always a tour guide who has to point his flashlight at a stalagmite and compare it to an elephant? No way. Cutting short Carlsbad, they decided to head east toward the Big Bend. It was a long drive, and they let themselves stop at whatever picturesque roadside beguiled.

  Then, while driving east into the dawn, in a Pontiac Grand Am in teal, Vanessa managed to stumble on this place, scarcely of note on any map, except for its state university. Alpine, TX. She had no reason to know that she’d long been yearning for such a place, a place so slow and backward and lost. Maybe the whole month of November had been bringing her near to Alpine. With each bit of bad news in the prior weeks, she had drawn closer. Fuck Dallas and its oil culture; fuck Houston and its art museums. Out here was a plateau the size of Rhode Island with only seven thousand legal inhabitants, a few starveling longhorn steer, some horses, and antelope. Heartbroken towns full of tumbleweed and excessively large pickups with tinted windows.

  Her room at the Javalina Motor Court smells like a swimming pool, and the hot water isn’t hot, and Vanessa’s stomach is knotted from the taco she ate in town, and there are a half dozen distressing messages on her voice mail, not one of them from her mother, who she still expects will call. There are the frequent messages from the department of Missing Persons. Madison, meanwhile, claims to have found a good office rental in or near to the World Trade Center. Means of Production will be closer to Robert De Niro and the other classy addresses of Tribeca. But still. There’s no cell phone contact out here in Alpine, so there’s no point in trying to return the calls now at the inflated motel rate. If you drive up into the mountains, she was told by Jack from Brewster County P
roperties, you might be able to make contact with a satellite.

  And speaking of space junk, Alpine is a known location for unidentified flying objects. So it is that Vanessa attempts to roust Allison Maiser, intern and location scout. They are going to drive into the hills to watch for UFOs. Jack knows the guy who knows where to go. It’s big business hereabouts. Vanessa saw a storefront that boasted trips for prime viewing. This sounds like something that could be worked into the script. Maybe dowsing, the skill passed down through the generations in The Diviners, was first learned from interstellar wayfarers. Maybe there should be UFOs or space aliens at the end of the story.

  Allison’s door is beige and is peeling, and the room number has come loose, is dangling upside down, revealing an aqua paint coat underneath, from a cost-conscious period of motel administration when bright colors prevailed.

  “Get up!” Vanessa pounds on the door. “I have an idea.”

  Allison sticks her nose and homely eyeglasses into a narrow space between the door and its frame. In her hand, a dog-eared paperback that she picked up in Albuquerque, Louis L’Amour.