Cavedweller (5 page)

“So much desert,” she said. She could see her face in the sideview mirror. The whites of her eyes were crossed with tiny red lines like the map on the seat beside her.

“Oh, this isn’t the real desert.” Delia skimmed sweat from under her eyes with her left forefinger. “Wait until New Mexico. That’s real desert. Saguaros and tumbleweeds. Every time I see those Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, I think of New Mexico.”

“I got to pee.” Cissy kept her eyes on the mirror.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Cissy. It can’t be much more than an hour since the last stop!”

Cissy turned to stare at Delia.

Delia floored the gas pedal. “You can pee in Arizona, damn it. I’m not stopping again until we’re out of California.”

 

 

A
rizona was much like California, more wide-open baked desert landscape. But just off the road near Quartzsite there was a vast parking lot and a big aluminum sign announcing a rock market. The lot was bumper-to-bumper, and cars were parked all along the highway. Delia slowed and pulled into a Chevron station. She climbed out of the car, rubbing her back.

“You can pee here,” she said. “And don’t go nowhere.” She limped toward the station with money in her hand.

Cissy started toward the adobe walls of the building, shit brown and crumbly, with little bits of grass sticking out all over. Dusty logs protruded from the walls a few feet above the doors, some sporting faded orange pennants hanging limply from yellow plastic cords. A Coke cooler was sitting open and empty next to the bathroom door. Cissy held her breath and went inside.

She was surprised at how clean the bathroom was. The sink shone silver and white, and the paper towels had green borders. A dark purple plastic vase contained a spray of paper leaves in autumnal shades of orange and brown. A bright poster for a kachina exhibit at the University of Arizona covered one wall. Cissy quickly went about her business and washed her hands, sniffing but not using the eucalyptus-scented soap on the counter. When she stepped outside, she saw Delia standing at the open hood of the Datsun with a mechanic who was holding the oil gauge and shaking his head.

There was a loud pop, and Cissy turned to see a bunch of red and blue balloons tied to the Rockhound Camping sign, bouncing in the warm gusts that swept trash along the ground. The balloons were faded, though not so much as the blankets and tarps that shaded the camper vans. The desert was a place full of color, but it was a whole different palette from what Cissy knew, everything bright bleached to a smoky pastel. Cissy could see row after row of flea-market stalls past the vans. People moved through the dust as she watched. A few flat, seamed faces turned in her direction. Without thought, Cissy walked toward them. These were ageless people, tanned dark, with black or white or gray hair and ropy muscles on sturdy bones. Many sat on lawn chairs in front of mobile homes, behind card tables displaying dishes and strings of roughly polished rocks. Cissy stopped under a blue tarp shading a table stacked with glittery stones. She touched a strand of dark red.

“Red tourmaline.” The woman’s breath smelled of anise and lemons. She grinned at Cissy, revealing big, perfect teeth.

“Where do you get them?” Cissy could not imagine where all this rough beauty had come from. Hundreds of strings of beads of every gradation of red and black were piled in front of her, fifty or sixty beads to a string, twenty or forty strings knotted together, all arranged so that they lay in sensuous curves like giant snakes covered with gemstones.

The woman lifted her shoulders and bobbed her head, riffling the pink scarf that was tucked under the band of her eyeshade. Her whole body seemed to quiver and bounce on springy thighs.

“Go all over. Trade. Buy at discount, sell at a little less discount.” She angled her head at the camper behind her. “Sometimes get something wonderful, never sell it at all.” She lifted one hand to a polished oblong of jade at her throat, green with yellow light trapped inside. Cissy leaned over to see the stone more closely.

“You like?” the woman said. She grinned again and reached up to push her teeth back in more tightly. “You got good a eye. What you want?”

Cissy looked down at the table. There were beads cut in odd shapes, stars and moons and faceted balls. She put her hand on a string of black stars. It was warm and almost soft under her fingertips.

“Good eye. Volcano spit from Italy, bloodrock from Tennessee. Nice for not much money.” The woman nodded crisply, then caught Cissy’s shoulder and pulled the girl in close to her face. She sniffed three times, quickly and deeply, and let her air out in one long breath. “Ah.” She smiled and released Cissy.

“Black diamond is good heart stone.” The woman gripped a jagged piece of hematite and dragged it across the white paper beneath it. Two thin red lines followed the stone.

“Oh.” Cissy resisted the urge to back away from the table.

“Scratch with it, it scratches red. Grind it, make blood ink. Heart sign.” The hand dropped the stone, lifted, spread, and hovered over the piles of strings. The sharp eyes came up and looked directly into Cissy’s face. Green eyes, Cissy saw, faded a little, like the grass near the spigots under the camper’s tie-down. The woman smiled as if she could hear Cissy thinking.

“What you like, moon or stars?” The hand wavered.

“Stars.” Randall had a hatband studded with silver stars. The hematite burned silver-black in the sun.

“Ah.” The old woman thumped the card table, and all the stones moved. “Hematite is special. Egyptian mummies had headrests made of hematite. You know that? Special. Draw your hatred out.” She gathered a string of cut stars, lifted it, and extended her hand. Cissy looked into the green eyes.

“Heal your heart, girl.”

 

 

C
issy walked back to the car with a string of stars looped twice around her neck.

“Where the hell have you been? And where did you get that?” Delia snarled the words, relenting only when she saw Cissy’s face fall. “It’s nice,” she said. “Common as dirt, but nice.”

Mine, Cissy thought, flushing. She fingered the stones as she curled up against the passenger door. The necklace still felt warm and soft, but when she tried to press a nail into the shiny surface of one of the stones, it took no mark.

The engine growled loud when Delia started the Datsun. Maybe it won’t last, Cissy thought. Maybe it will stall and we’ll have to stay here. Her eyes, when they showed above her glasses, were obsidian in the hot light. Maybe we will wreck, she was thinking. Maybe she’ll run us off the road and roll the car. Her hand stroked the seat belt where it snugged into her belly. Delia’s belt was lying unfastened beside her on the folded map. Maybe she will go through the window, break her neck or cut her throat. If she were dead I could ... What? Cissy’s stomach cramped so hard, she almost retched.

Cissy twisted around and watched the parking lot and all the campers slowly dwindle away. A sign for Big Horn Trailer Park loomed up, stained red and tan with dust and blown sand. Cissy wondered if it was named for Little Bighorn, where Custer died. Cowboys and Indians, she thought, and rubbed her eyes.

“We’ll have to cut up toward Flagstaff,” Delia said. “Drive the long way through the Navajo reservation. Monument Valley is up there, the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. We’ll be able to see some of the hills from 40. All those cliffs against the sky. If there’s any moon, it will take your breath away.”

Cissy kept her face turned to the window.

“Randall and I went up to Monument Valley once.” Delia’s voice was careful. “It’s amazing. Like an open cathedral. Something to see.”

Cissy watched the sign for Buckeye coming up on the left. A cathedral, she thought. She looked out at the far red rocks, the purple and gray mountains in the distance. It was all a cathedral, open and pure and wide as death.

Delia took 17 up through Phoenix to pick up Highway 40. She spread the map to show Cissy the route. “This will take us most of the way. Forty is like Ten, goes on forever. From here to Nashville anyway.”

Cissy remained silent, and Delia put on the radio again. Twice she found stations playing Mud Dog, but twisted the dial past them as quickly as she could. She didn’t want to hear any of that. She found a stubborn rock station in Tempe playing Captain Beefheart and Steely Dan as if no one had ever died, and settled on that one as long as it would come in.

Late that afternoon they crossed Arizona into New Mexico and Cissy saw more and more Indian names. After Gallup there were Laguna Pueblo signs, with little hand-tinted posters advertising good turquoise jewelry and traditional blankets. Was Albuquerque another Indian name? Maybe it was Spanish. It didn’t matter. Delia told Cissy to close her eyes and take a nap. She wasn’t going to stop just to sleep.

Cissy dreamed of culverts and big concrete pipes, of stars and moons shining in black water, and of dark-haired women bending to scoop up beads of tears. She woke up with her eyes crusted and swollen when Delia stopped near Tucumcari. They had been making good time in the good weather, but both of them were tired and sticky with dried sweat. When the Datsun fishtailed in the slipstream of a passing semi, Delia noticed that her arms and legs were starting to feel rubbery and numb. She realized suddenly that they had not had anything but chips and Cokes since leaving Los Angeles that morning. New Mexico was dotted with diners and low mud-brown stucco buildings that proclaimed themselves “family restaurants.” Delia chose a big truck stop and pulled in close to where the semis were parked.

Salad of iceberg lettuce and tomato quarters with cubes of bright yellow cheese, chicken chili, and Texas toast. Cissy gave the food all her attention and drank three glasses of iced tea. Delia picked at her scrambled eggs and stared longingly at the men drinking beer at the bar.

“We’ll get to Amarillo by midnight,” she told Cissy.

“Why are you in such a hurry?” Cissy’s necklace glowed red-black against her throat in the fluorescent lights.

Delia used her napkin to wipe condensation off her tea glass. “Your Granddaddy Byrd is expecting us.” She looked into the glass.

Cissy put her fork down. “You called him?”

“He’s expecting us,” Delia said again. “Cissy, please. All I have ever wanted you to know is that you are not alone in the world.”

The table was dark wood shellacked so thickly that Delia could see her reflection in the surface. Her face looked like it was underwater, slightly out of focus, the murky image of a woman who had never known how to say what she was thinking. She remembered how Granddaddy Byrd had looked at her when he took her to live with him, the sullen rage beneath the grief. She remembered when she had started to sing to herself to fill the world with more than loneliness. She wiped her hand across the image on the table.

“Having family,” Delia blurted. “Even sisters you’ve never met. It’s a blessing, Cissy. You’re part of something bigger than just yourself alone. Growing up, all I had was Granddaddy Byrd.” She shook her head. “Way he was, sometimes that felt worse than being alone. Man was just about the closest thing to a rock I ever knew.”

“A rock. Well, that’s good. I can’t wait to meet him,” Cissy said.

“He didn’t mean to be like that.” Delia shifted in her chair. “He was too hurt to comfort himself or me. And he was old, too old to take on raising a child.”

“Then why did he?”

For a minute Cissy thought Delia was going to slap her. Then she said, “He had to. There wasn’t anyone else.” She wiped the table with her napkin. She could not smooth her image.

Cissy stirred her bowl of chili. She had thought chicken chili would be something special. This wasn’t special. The chicken was stringy and tough, the tomato tasted bitter, and the chili powder made her tongue feel spongy. The best thing on the table was the lettuce, and what was that? Water.

Delia got up to pay for the meal. Cissy rubbed her fingers along her necklace and pulled her elbows in tight to her ribs. In her nightmares, Amanda was a sharp-beaked, black-winged crow cawing loudly right behind Cissy’s bent neck. Dede was a wire-haired boar with razor-tipped hooves dancing close to Cissy’s bare pink feet. Cayro, Georgia, was a pit of red dirt and gray clay sloped so steeply that Cissy could not crawl free. And Granddaddy Byrd was a rock. She put her hands over her eyes and pressed hard. Stars bloomed in the dark. The backside of nowhere, the ass-end of the universe, Cayro, Georgia, and the family Delia loved more than she would ever love Cissy.

 

 

T
he back window of the Datsun had been smashed in. The trunk was popped open. There was nothing left but a box jammed between the spare tire and the jack, and the half-full Styrofoam cooler with the crack down one side. Cissy leaned over the backseat from the open door and picked through the debris. The thieves had dumped a bag of clothes on the floor.