We took Route 40 out of Texas and into New Mexico, a long straight highway with little to see but dust and sagebrush along the way. Dory told us that the “famous” Route 66 had run through all the little towns down here before Route 40 was built. Route 66 had started in Chicago and run south to St. Louis and then west to Los Angeles. I wondered if it was more fun to drive than Route 40, which was just one big trailer truck after another, breezing past fast enough to knock you off the road.
“This is the dullest part of the trip yet,” Iris said. “I thought you said New Mexico was beautiful?”
“Just wait. It’s a big state.”
“Looks just like Texas to me.”
“Where are we going again?” Marshall asked.
“Now? We’re heading for the Acoma Pueblo,” Dory said. “It’s called Sky City because it’s up on a high mesa. Acoma people have lived there since 1075, which means it’s the oldest—”
Iris interrupted. “Oldest continually inhabited city in the country. You’ve said that about twelve times already.”
“Marshall was asking me.”
“Okay, I got it now,” Marsh said. “It’s special because it’s old.”
“Not just that. There’s no water source on top of the mesa so in order to live up there the people have to haul their water up. There’s no electricity either, and until recent years there wasn’t even a road. For centuries the Native American people climbed up and down the side of the cliff. In a climate this hot and dry—can you imagine?”
“Why did they live up there then?” Marsh said.
“It was very safe. They could see their enemies coming from far away. They could never be surprised.”
What a life. Not only did you have to carry water up the side of the mountain, but you never got any surprise visitors either. I wondered if my dad and Allison had given any thought lately to moving to a place like that.
“Great,” Iris said. “You die of thirst, but at least you don’t get an arrow in your back.”
Dory sighed. “Iris, I think we’re all getting a little tired of your sarcasm, aren’t we, guys?”
Marshall and I were silent as stones. Iris’s smart mouth wasn’t at the top of my list of problems. I’d spent the morning trying to rid my brain of the image of Chris and Gabriella bonded with sweat.
Iris shrugged. “Nobody else cares but you.”
“Well then, for me. Please cut it out.”
“No,” Iris said. “I don’t think I will.”
Which was about the last thing any of us said until we ordered lunch outside of Albuquerque. I’d stopped paying close attention to Iris’s eating habits because she seemed to be more normal now. Of course, the news of the school change had put her back in a seriously lousy mood, and I wondered if that would affect things. But she ordered a tuna sub and ate three quarters of it, so I decided she’d turned a corner on the eating disorder thing.
We piled back into the van after lunch and were just about nodding off when Dory pulled the car over. “Look,” she said. “There it is.”
We were stopped at the top of a mesa from which we looked across a wide, open plain toward another very flat mesa, which seemed to be made of bleached pink stone. Perched on top, we could just make out some whitish structures—the pueblo of Acoma. The four of us got out to look.
“People still live up there?” Marshall asked.
“That’s what the guidebook says,” Dory said.
“Cool.”
Iris obviously couldn’t think of anything snotty to say so she kept her mouth shut.
“How do we get up there?” I asked. “Drive?”
“No, we park at the bottom and take a shuttle bus up.”
“Let’s go!” Marsh shouted, jumping back in the car. “Come on!”
The long straight road up to the base of the mesa passed by big pink rock formations that seemed almost like man-made sculptures. We pulled into a parking lot next to a squat white building that said TICKETS FOR BUS on a sign out front, but it was hard not to be distracted by the line of vendors who surrounded the lot, all of them selling pottery. Dark-skinned men and women, young and old, sat on folding chairs with trucks and station wagons backed up behind them and card tables in front of them displaying their work. A few were talking, but most sat quietly. Two children, four or five years old, sat in the dust and played a slapping hands game. A man in a baseball cap, the only person wearing a hat in the blazing sun, carved a figure from a chunk of wood.
“That’s tacky.” Iris had found her voice.
“Shh! Iris, they’ll hear you!” Dory said.
Iris shrugged but lowered her voice. “They sit right here by the parking lot? We’re not even in the pueblo yet. It’s like they can’t wait to sell you something.”
“Well, they probably can’t,” Dory said. “This is how they make a living.”
We trooped inside to buy bus tickets and found we could also purchase postcards, hot dogs, Lay’s potato chips, or Coke.
Marshall whispered to me, “I’m not being mean, but it doesn’t seem like it’s real if you can buy Coke here.”
“I think this is what real is here now. Some things are the way they were hundreds of years ago, but I guess everybody in the world has junk food now.”
He thought about it for a minute, and then said, “That’s sort of cool—how some things change and some things don’t.”
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed, restraining myself once again from a fond, yet condescending, hair ruffling.
We boarded a shuttle bus and in a few minutes were headed to the top of Acoma Pueblo. A young man in a Nike T-shirt, his long black hair pulled back with a piece of leather, introduced himself as our guide, James. He was a good-looking guy, and I could tell Iris thought so too. But James never smiled at anyone—he didn’t even seem to look at any of us—and his speech was so rehearsed you felt sorry for him having to say it all again.
“Here ahead of us is the San Estevan mission church. It was built in 1629 when the first priest arrived at Acoma. In order to build the church and convent, our people had to move twenty thousand tons of earth and stone from the canyon up to the top of the mesa. There was no road to the mesa top in those days—all supplies were carried on burros or on the heads and backs of our people.”
It was pleasantly cool inside the white adobe church and a few people sat down in chairs. The four of us backed up against the chilly walls. There was something about the way James kept saying “our people” that made me feel like I didn’t belong there, that even looking at the places he described was somehow stealing something from them.
“You will notice the vigas, or large beams, overhead. You will also notice when you look across the valley from the mesa top, that there are no trees within sight. These forty-foot-long logs had to be carried for over twenty miles, up and down mountains, to reach this place.” James’s mouth clamped shut in a hard line as though he wouldn’t let out one extra word for us—he would give us only what we had paid for, nothing more. He waited for us to react to the amazing abilities of his people before he continued.
We followed James out of the church, then wandered up and down the narrow dirt roads where a station wagon and a rusty convertible were parked beside ancient houses in which wooden ladders were still used to reach the upper floors. We saw the round adobe brick ovens that the community used for baking, and the steep “stairs” that they climbed up and down before the road was built. But mostly we saw people sitting beside tables full of pottery, hoping to make a sale.
“You may stop to buy pottery quickly, or you may return to a particular vendor afterward if you see something you like. However, you may not leave the tour to buy,” James warned. “An Acoma guide must always be with you.”
Why? So we wouldn’t steal things? So we wouldn’t decide to stay?
We huddled around the display tables, looking at clay animals and bowls, vases and plates. In some booths the pottery was beautiful, carefully painted with tiny details, while in oth
ers the work seemed poorly done, hurried, in the hope of making a little money. At one table where the work was especially nice, Dory bought a beautiful white bowl with small black arrows painted all around it. I could tell James was ready to move us along, but Dory was talking to the woman artist, and I decided I wanted something, too . . . something to help me remember this haunting place where I could never belong. A young girl, maybe the daughter of the artist, was selling clay horses, not as perfect as the older woman’s bowls, but I liked that they were each different and wild looking. I decided, quickly, while Iris and Marshall were looking away, to buy three horses, one for each of us. It would be nice to give them something, too, so we would all remember.
By the time the shuttle bus brought us back down to the parking lot, we were all hot and tired. I’d stuffed the horses in my backpack, deciding to wait until the end of the trip to hand them out. We refilled our water bottles and were heading for the minivan when Dory suddenly said, “I’m going to buy something else,” and headed toward the line of parking lot vendors.
“What?” Iris said. “Mom, I’ve got a headache!”
“I’ll just be a minute.”
“Well, can we at least get in and turn on the air-conditioning?”
“Go ahead,” she called back.
I got in the driver’s seat and turned the ignition so the a/c came on, but I sort of hated doing it, especially out here where some people didn’t even have electricity, for God’s sake. But we were hot, so we polluted the ancient environment in order to cool ourselves off. Still, it felt awfully good when the air started blowing. It’s not easy to be righteous.
Dory came back with a vase that must have been at least two feet tall and a foot wide. We all stared at her: There was no room for that thing is this car.
“Mother, are you nuts?” Iris said.
“Isn’t this the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? And the artist is a wonderful man. I took his name so I can contact him. He said he could send me slides of his other pots.”
“Why didn’t you tell him to send you this one? We don’t have room for it in here.”
“Oh, sure we do,” Dory said. “There’s room in the backseat.”
“No!” Marshall was getting into the act now, too. “Iris already has her junk spread out all over the place. I hardly have any room.”
“Well, Iris, couldn’t you condense things a little bit? The pot could sit right here between the two of you.”
Iris and Marsh went more or less ballistic over sharing their limited space with an object the size of a five-year-old, but what could they do? Dory had bought the damn thing—it had to go somewhere.
As Dory pulled back out onto the highway and headed north for Santa Fe, the rage from the backseat was practically combustible. Marsh and Iris were mad at their mother, at each other, and even at me, the person who did not have a giant jar wedged in next to her knees. Dory’s attempts at conversation were soon directed only to me.
“I thought we’d take a back road up to Santa Fe. It’s on that map there—they call it the Turquoise Trail and it runs through some lovely small towns, some of them almost ghost towns now.”
I opened the map on my lap. “It goes over some mountains.”
“I know. See that town called Madrid? It was almost a ghost town until a group of artists took it over and now it’s supposed to be a cute little place. I thought we’d stop there for dinner.”
“Looks kind of far,” I said.
“Oh, no. Not more than an hour,” Dory said.
Two silent, hungry hours later, we pulled into Madrid, a very small town, which consisted of half a dozen stores selling jewelry, pottery and weavings, a pizza parlor, and a small café. Without asking advice, Dory parked in front of the café, turned off the motor, and slumped back in her seat.
“Well, that was longer than I thought. And more confusing. But we’re almost to Santa Fe now.” She dared to glance into the backseat. “Anybody hungry?”
“Is this where we’re eating?” Marshall asked. “It doesn’t even look open.”
Iris slammed the car door, marched up to the café, and turned the door handle. “It’s open. Let’s, for God’s sake, eat.”
The café was small but pleasant in a rundown, hippie-dippy way. Indian bedspreads were strung across windows and flung over shaky tables. Mismatched chairs and stools were painted red and yellow. Strings of chili peppers hung from the walls, which also displayed brightly colored paintings of vegetables.
For some reason it reminded me of Franny—she would have liked a place like this—a hodgepodge that was perfectly happy with itself. Not for the first time, I wished she was here with me. Maybe even more than I wished for Chris.
The café seemed to be deserted, but after a minute a young woman came out from behind a curtain, her dark hair cropped close to her head, a big white apron tied over a tank top and shorts.
“Oh, hi! I was just closing up. Did you want to eat?”
Iris and Marshall groaned.
“Well, yes,” Dory said. “It’s only seven o’clock—isn’t that early to close?”
The girl smiled. “Not around here. We usually get visitors through at lunchtime and a few locals late afternoon, but by this time of day it’s pretty dead.”
“Oh, well . . .”
“It’s okay—I’ll stay open. I’ve got food. What do you think you want?”
“Could we see a menu?” Iris asked rather snippily.
“You could if I had one. This is what’s left: two servings of eggplant Parmesan, enough tuna for a sub or two, plenty of cheese, tomatoes, and lettuce. I could make you a salad. Or I could cook up an omelet and throw an avocado in it. Any of that sound good?”
“Avocado with an egg?” Marshall made a face before ordering a tuna sub with lettuce. Iris asked for a salad, then glanced at me and told the girl to put some tuna on the side, too. Dory got the eggplant and I went for the omelet with avocado, which turned out to be excellent.
“Miss, do you have coffee, by any chance?” Dory asked.
“Name’s Savannah. But I’m sorry—I don’t have any more water.”
“You don’t have water?” Iris said.
Savannah shook her head. “There’s no water piped into Madrid—not drinking water, anyway. We buy it, but I ran out today. There’s some iced tea left, though.”
“This town is weird,” Iris said when Savannah disappeared behind the curtain. “The only restaurant in town closes at seven o’clock and they don’t have any water. Trust you to pick this place.” She glared at her mother.
“I think it’s charming,” Dory said. “And besides, she’s being very helpful. In a bigger town they might have just said, ‘We’re closed—go away.’”
“A bigger town might have water,” Iris said.
Dory looked down at her plate and let her fork drop. “Iris, I’m really getting tired of your attitude. Even I can only take so much.”
“Even you? Like you’re some kind of saint?”
Fortunately Savannah came back out then, iced tea pitcher in hand, and poured us all a round.
“You have a long drive today?” she asked.
“From Texas,” Marshall said. “And we stopped at Acoma Pueblo, too.”
“Wow, you covered a lot of ground for one day. You’ll be glad to get to bed tonight. I guess you’re heading for Santa Fe.”
Dory nodded. “I didn’t make reservations anywhere, but I’m assuming we’ll find a place.”
“Oh, sure. Only the expensive places fill up early.”
“We wouldn’t want to stay in an expensive place,” Iris said, almost to herself.
Savannah fumbled in her apron pocket, then brought out a white card. “Here’s the place my parents run. It’s clean and there’s almost always a vacancy.”
Dory looked at the card. “The Black Mesa Motel. I like the name.”
“Black Mesa is the name of the rock behind the San Ildefonso Pueblo. It’s where my parents met.”
&n
bsp; “Are your parents Indians?” Marshall asked.
“Native American,” Dory corrected him gently.
Savannah laughed. “No, they’re just hippies. My dad is a potter and he used to go to the pueblo a lot to study Indian methods for making hand-built pots. And one day my mother was there and they met. She was on a trip with some friends from New Jersey, where she lived. But after she met my dad, she never went home again.”
“Never?” Marsh asked.
“Well, she’s gone back to visit her folks, but she says she knew right away New Mexico was her spiritual home and my dad was her soulmate.” She laughed. “That’s the way they talk.”
“Kind of cornball,” Iris said.
“Yeah, they are,” Savannah agreed. “Ya gotta love ’em, though.” She cleared our dishes and took them behind the curtain.
Dory paid her, including a big tip. “I’m sorry we made you stay so late.”
“No problem. I’ll lock up right behind you.”
She waved good-bye to us and took off her apron. As we climbed into the car, the sun was already starting to go down behind the mountains and the air was getting cool. I think we were all looking forward to settling into a place in Santa Fe for a few days and not having to ride in the car for a while.
“What a sweet girl,” Dory said. “I’m glad we stopped there.”
The minute the doors slammed closed, Iris started in. “I am not staying in some cheap old motel again—I don’t care if it is run by soulmates.”
“Hey! I want to go there! We could see her father’s pottery!” Marsh chimed in.
“Yeah, and Mom would buy it. Just what we need—more pots to cram into the backseat.”
“Put your seat belts on,” Dory said, trying to ignore them. “I just stay on Route 14 here, don’t I, Robin?”
I checked the map and showed her the route into town. We pulled out onto the shadowy old highway.
But Iris was still livid. “I’m sick of you making all the decisions. You decide where we eat. You decide where we stay. You decide we’re too poor for me to go to Forest Hill School even though you can spend money on other stupid junk like this ugly vase, which is pinching my legs!” Her tirade had developed into a full screech.