Lady Luck's Map of Vegas Page 8

  “Right.” I laugh. “I've never been able to touch ramen soup after eating it just before I got sick.” Even the idea of ramen noodles makes me feel a little green, and I push the thought of them away.

  She lights a cigarette, blows the smoke away from me. Her vividly blue eyes focus on something distant through the plate-glass window. “I remember the first time she ran away. Dear God, I nearly died every day, wondering what was happening to her, and there you were falling apart, and your daddy crying over both of his babies—that was the worst six months of my life.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Well, at least until lately,” she amends.

  I touch her hand. “I know.” She endures it for three seconds, then pulls away, touches the pad of her thumb to the side of her nose, smokes furiously.

  “I miss her,” I say. “Gypsy. When she takes off, it's always like a piece of me is gone, too. Even when she goes off her meds, it's like that.”

  “Well, she doesn't have much to do with me, so it's not like I notice a difference. I do always worry about her, though.”

  I nod.

  The rest of the drive is dull. High desert, which means mountains on the horizon if you're lucky, but mostly open fields of dun-colored grass pinned by stands of walking stick cactus. Sometimes we see a rabbit dashing away from the road, sometimes an antelope.

  I find myself remembering the first trip. Gypsy and me taking turns in the passenger seat. My mother smoking with the window down, playing the radio, her face so focused and grim we didn't dare push too much. At lunch in some town I don't remember, we'd picked up the extra place mats at the diner, a clear outline of the United States, and we used it to fill in the license plates we saw.

  “Mom,” I say, “what the heck were we doing in Tucumcari? The rest makes sense if we were headed for Las Vegas, but Tucumcari is really out of the way.”

  “India! That was your doing! You don't remember that you wanted to drive Route Sixty-six?”

  I frown. The memory of a paper doll—a magazine paper doll?— wisps over my mind again, and evaporates. “No.”

  “Lordy! When I suggested we take a vacation together, that's all you could talk about.”

  “I think you must be mixing me up with Gypsy, Mom. I didn't even know until I looked up our plan that Tucumcari was on Route Sixty-six. Weren't we going to Las Vegas?”

  She smiles. “Oh, it was you, all right. Besides, we weren't going to Las Vegas that time. We were just doing a little tourist thing. New Mexico was close and I sorta knew the road and I figured it would be a nice adventure for you.”

  There's something in her voice and I look at her. “There was more, wasn't there?” For the first time I realize the very obvious truth, and it goes through my body like cold water. “You were leaving Dad, weren't you?”

  She looks out the window. “Maybe. Maybe not. I've never really figured that out.” In her lap, she twists her hands together. She sighs. “I was young, India. Confused.”

  “Not that young!”

  “Think about it, sweetie. It was thirty years ago.”

  In front of the car, the road dips under a vividly bright sun, making mirages in the fields in the distance. I set my jaw. “Thirty-three.” Seven years younger than I am right now.

  “And your daddy was fifty and getting older by the minute. I'm not saying I'm proud of it. I was just confused. It happens. We did go home, you know.”

  Indigestion burns against my esophagus. I rub it, thinking maybe too much fat is not a good thing just now. “Do you have any Tums or anything?”

  “Sure.” She digs in her all-purpose purse, with everything in the universe in it, and produces a roll of Rolaids.

  We did go home. There are a thousand questions in my mind, but the indigestion burns higher every time I try to phrase them, and I decide to let it go for now. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  It's midafternoon when we reach Tucumcari. It's a small town in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a main street and lots of old neon. Every year, a sign tells me, they commemorate the Mother Road with a Route 66 celebration.

  Oh, goody.

  Memories unexpectedly splash through me as I drive slowly down the main drag. Eldora grabs my arm, “Look! It's the motel we stayed in, all those years ago! Let's stay there again if we can.” I reluctantly pull into the lot. The Blue Swallow has a blue neon bird on the sign, and a little garage attached to each room.

  I stick my sunglasses on my head and stretch as we get out of the car. “I remember this!” The garages, especially. There is one for each room, making it look like an apartment complex in miniature, which completely thrilled me when I was a kid.

  Turning in a circle, I get a mental picture of Gypsy and me at eleven, me in red cowboy boots and red bandanna, Gypsy in her fringed vest and moccasins, both of us agitated after being in the car all day. Can we eat pie? Can we use the Magic Fingers later on if we behave? Can we have hamburgers for supper? Ooh, look! Can we go to the TeePee Curio shop and buy something?

  My mother has a pensive expression as she gets out of the car in the twenty-first century. She brushes imaginary lint from the front of her slacks, lights the cigarette already in her hand, and exhales in a gust. “Whew! I've been wanting this for miles and miles!”

  She looks exactly right in her green blouse and headscarf and cat-eye glasses, standing in front of the fifties-style motel. “All the world's a stage, huh, Mom?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Let's get checked in.”

  The rooms are inexpensive, and I pay for two of them, so my mother can smoke herself sick if she wishes. She wants a nap, and I want to find the homeless center, so we split up. In my room, I carefully unpack my small bag, putting my underwear in the drawer, my makeup on the sink, hanging my clothes in the small closet area. When I'm finished, I neatly zip the suitcase and tuck it behind the door, and head out to see if I can discover anyone who remembers Gypsy.

  The clerk who checked us in points me to a soup kitchen down the road. Glad for a chance to stretch, I head out on foot.

  It's a lazy spring afternoon. I stroll past a diner and more motels and a tourist trap with red bandannas and fake silver and turquoise jewelry in the windows. I almost stop in, thinking that Jack would laugh over a postcard from here. I could get him a six-gun in a holster.

  Then I remember.

  Tucumcari is only a five-hour drive south of the Springs, but the climate is decidedly hotter. There are already lilacs in bloom in the yards and along alleys, the scent piercing and fresh in the late afternoon. Aside from the traffic on the road, it's quiet. I spy a low-rider in gleaming purple and green parked beside a neat, white clapboard house. A fat, very old dog waddles up to the fence as I walk by. If Jack were with me, he'd stop and talk to him.

  “Hi, baby,” I say. When the dog's tail starts to wag, I relent and hold my fingers up flat for him to sniff. He licks them, and I reach over to pet the soft, graying head. A small kindness—a concept that didn't have much space in my life until Jack came along. It's something good I'll take with me, I guess.

  The back door of the soup kitchen is standing open to the breeze, and I hear women's voices spilling out. I knock on the threshold. “Hello?”

  “We're not serving supper till six,” says a voice.

  “I'm not here to eat. Can I speak to you for a minute?”

  A bright-eyed woman with a yellow scarf over her hair comes around the corner. She's Hispanic, slim, in her sixties. “Yes?”

  “I'm looking for someone who might have eaten here over the past week or so. A woman, schizophrenic, would only have been here a week or two at most.” We are identical twins, but Gypsy takes on personas when she's delusional, and she's very good at making them seem real to observers. I never know if she'll think she's Hispanic, and speak Spanish, or Native American and wear feathers and beads. “She has really amazing hair. Nearly to her knees.”

  “Oh! Yeah. She was here, eve
ry day for almost a week.” She calls over her shoulder, “Sylvia? Remember that woman with the hair?”

  Another woman, younger by a decade, comes out wiping her hands. “Spanish woman, kinda fat?”

  I nod. Spanish this time. That helps, though I'm not sure how. It's just a way of knowing where she is in her mind, I guess. “Do you remember when she was here last?”

  Sylvia sucks on her bottom lip. “Not exactly. Was she here the night Harry had to go to the hospital? 'Member? Yeah, she was. That was what, three days ago? Day before yesterday?”

  “Monday, maybe.” The older woman looks at me. “Haven't seen her since then.”

  “Did you notice if she was by herself or with others, anything else?”

  “Is she in trouble or something?”

  “Oh. No. Not at all. She's my sister—my twin, actually—and our father died and she went off her meds and she sent me a postcard from here.” I notice I'm twisting my fingers together and force myself to drop my hands. “I'm just trying to find her so I can take her back home and take care of her.”

  “She's your twin?”

  I nod.

  Sylvia starts to form a commentary on that, then the other woman says, “She was with a guy. We see him off and on—I think he's a vet. An Indian from somewhere in the Midwest. Calls himself Loon.” She grins.

  I smile back. “Thanks.” I take a breath. “Did she seem okay? I mean, I know she's delusional, but did she look healthy?”

  “Yeah.” It's emphatic. “Pretty clean, really, and I noticed because, well, people aren't usually. She talked in a weird language.”

  “Right.”

  “It was like Spanish, but not exactly, you know?”

  “Really.” I frown, pondering. Could the twin language be some variation of Spanish? But how? We didn't know any Spanish in those days, though both of us studied it later, in school. “Thanks.” From my wallet, I take out my card. “If she comes through again, will you call this number and leave a message?”

  “Sure, sweetie.” Unexpectedly, the woman touches my arm and gives it a squeeze. “I'll say a prayer for her, too. God looks after those who can't look out for themselves.”

  “Thanks.” Without knowing why I add, “She's a wonderful artist, you know. Well known. Beautiful things. I wish I could spare her—”

  The sinewy hand squeezes my arm once more. “I know.”

  Chapter Twelve

  India

  When I get back to the Blue Swallow, my mother is sitting outside of her motel room in a metal rocking chair. She's smoking, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses, one foot wiggling a little bit. “Hey sweetie,” she says. “You find anything out?”

  “Yeah.” I sit down in the other chair and tell her the news. “Let's go get something to eat, huh? I'm starving.”

  She lifts a shoulder, draws on her cigarette, blows a plume of blue smoke into the still air. “Don't know that I'm all that hungry.”

  “Mom, all you had at lunch was pie cherries. You need to eat real food. Besides, I don't want to eat alone.”

  “I can keep you company, I reckon.” She stands up, stabs out the cigarette in a big metal ashtray. “Let me get my bag.”

  As I sit there waiting for her, I admire another low-rider ambling by on the old Route 66. This one is an Impala, meticulously painted with a scene of desert and mountains and magenta flowers that might be geraniums. The driver, a man in his early thirties, sees me watching and makes the front end dance. I smile.

  Eldora emerges. “Oh, that's a beauty, isn't it? I was watching the traffic and I saw a couple of others, too.” Her breath smells of Juicy Fruit and cigarettes. She has fresh lipstick on. “C'mon, then, girly-girl. Let's go get you some supper.”

  My stomach is dead empty. Growling, rumbling. I don't mind being hungry—with the hippy body I was born with, you learn to go hungry or get bigger with each passing day—but this feels as if the very marrow of my bones has been consumed and I will fall any minute into a heap on the floor. The smell of onions and hamburgers on the grill makes me dizzy.

  We're led to a booth by the windows, and as we sit down, a body memory weaves through me:

  Gypsy in her braids and moccasins, sticking the wrapper from, her straw to her top lip as a mustache. Me laughing so hard I nearly choke. Coke comes out of my nose, requiring my mother to intervene and clap me on the back.

  “Look, look, look,” my sister cried, pointing out the window to the license plate of a passing car. “Pennsylvania! We haven't got that one have we?”

  The waitress today is a sloe-eyed girl wearing two stripes of eyeliner, one black, one shiny turquoise. Her silver hoop earrings nearly touch her shoulders. “Hi. Want something to drink?” She's wearing a polo shirt and black slacks and her name tag says Diane.

  “Coffee,” says Eldora.

  “Coke,” I say, recklessly. “And two straws, if you wouldn't mind.”

  She grins, pops her gum. “Sure.”

  Looking at the menu is only a formality. My empty bones require meat. Red meat and fat and heft. “I'm having the chicken-fried steak,” I say, slapping the menu down on the Formica table.

  “I've never seen you eat so much. You all right?”

  “No lectures. I'm on vacation.”

  Her frown is quizzical. “Why're you so mean all the time, India? I wasn't about to lecture a forty-year-old woman on what to eat. You just don't usually have such an appetite.”

  There's a spot of heat at the tip of both of my ears. “Sorry. Maybe it's just spring.”

  “Or being in love.” She winks and looks over the menu.

  “I guess.”

  She orders a grilled cheese and a bowl of beef and barley soup. I order my chicken-fried steak with extra gravy. When the waitress gathers the menus and bustles off toward the kitchen, I take the paper off the straw and twist it in the middle and lick it, then stick it to my upper lip. I fold my arms in front of me, squinching up my lip to see if it will stick.

  Eldora grins, takes the other straw and makes a V with it, sticking both ends to her chin for a goatee. She folds her arms, too. “You think she's okay?” The goatee wiggles.

  “Sounds like she found somebody to look after her.”

  “A man.” It's not a question.

  I nod, and the mustache falls off. “She's good at that, at least. It makes me feel better.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You know what I wonder, though? How does she have such good judgment to pick out men—and these are homeless men with nothing to lose—who will be good to her when she's so crazy she thinks she's an Indian? Some of my friends have all their mental faculties and pick losers who beat them, steal from them, and sure can't commit.”

  Eldora shrugs. “Who knows, honey? I'm just grateful she got that gift to balance out the rest.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  I stare out the window, remembering my bright, loving, curious eleven-year-old sister. Who might be under a bridge tonight, or camped down in some abandoned building. Or any number of other places I can't stand to think about.

  “It makes me angry,” I say to my mother. “I hate it that she's out there because there wasn't any room for her in the system. I hate it that she's one of the lucky ones and we're out here looking for her and she has good instincts and good care and she's still out wandering the streets. What kind of a society does that?”

  “I know, honey.”

  “I mean, would you send a five-year-old out there to take care of herself? No. How can the people in power not understand that a sick schizophrenic doesn't have the tools to cope with such a confusing world? How can we be so rich and so idiotically poor all at once?”

  “I know,” Eldora says again.

  “How can we build another bomb and turn out old ladies who can't remember to take their meds?”

  She pats my hand, and I realize she has heard this same soapbox speech from me at least a hundred times, from my father twenty thousand. He ranted and raved, wrote letters to his co
ngressmen and his presidents, got involved in any organization that supported schizophrenic care or the families of the ill. “I guess I channeled my dad for a minute there.”

  “It was nice to hear it.” Her smile is clear and true. “He did some good, India. Maybe it would make you feel better to get involved.”

  I raise my eyebrows, drop them. I'm a lot more selfish than my father, and Eldora knows it. But she's not out there fighting, either, is she? “Maybe.”

  We're silent for a minute, and my mother stares out the window. She taps her cigarettes and I finally say, “Go ahead and smoke, Mom. It's not bothering me.”

  “No, no.” She taps the case, draws a fingernail around the jeweled decoration. “I was just thinking.”

  “About?”

  She's silent for a while, then looks at me. “I've been wanting to tell you some things.” She bites her lip. “About when I was a girl.”

  I sip my Coke. “Okay.”

  “Well, it's kind of hard. Some of it is not very good. And I, uh, I might not have told the whole truth exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She takes a breath, lets it go. “Well, for example, I didn't grow up in Texas.”

  “What?”

  “It was Oklahoma. Elk City, Oklahoma.”

  I give her a quizzical frown. “That's a weird lie. Such a big difference between Texas and Oklahoma, after all.”

  She chuckles nervously. Swallows. “Well, yeah. I also wasn't a dancer.”

  There is something about her manner that's so alien to the bold El-dora that I'm beginning to feel a little concerned. “And?”

  She takes out a cigarette and taps the filter end on the table. “Um, well, the truth is, India, the whole childhood is something I made up. I didn't have a big old happy family in Dallas. I never had dance lessons or piano lessons or any other kind of lesson you can think of.” She meets my eyes, and for one moment I'm struck by the extraordinary color of her irises, a blue as vivid and deep as the Mediterranean.

  “So, what is true?” I ask it with a taste of copper in the back of my throat.