Kind of Kin (25 page)

Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | Night

In the Gloss Mountains

T
he boy talks aloud in his fever, asking questions, but Luis does not understand the english words.
It is well, my son,
Luis answers
. It is well.
Sometimes the boy thrashes about on the cold earth, coughing, pushing down the damp sleeping bag. Sometimes he moves his hurt arm and cries out. Sometimes he grows alarmingly still. Luis repeats the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, the Our Father again; many times over he prays while he bathes the forehead of the boy to make him cooler, or tugs the sleeping bag around his throat to keep him warm. Luis remembers how, when they drove away from the town with the white jail, the boy was completely silent as if he waited for something, or listened. But there was no sound except the loud grumble of the truck motor. Luis, too, said no words. Neither were there any lights of houses, only the black asphalt highway winding before them—a mountain road, similar to the roads near Arroyo Seco, but not so steep and winding, and the dark slopes of hills on both sides were only a little high. After a long time Luis said over the loud motor,
When we arrive to the house of your sister, we will ask her to telephone to your grandfather to say you are well.

The boy did not answer. Luis remembers how he glanced at the boy then, but the truck was dark and he could see nothing except that the boy was still holding his wrist. The road began to descend, going down out of the hills, and soon they arrived at an intersection where it was necessary to turn to the right or the left. Luis waited for the boy to tell him, but the boy leaned down and fumbled inside the backpack on the floorboard. He withdrew the map and the small flashlight, held them out to Luis.
I dont know the good streets to go.
With the narrow beam Luis studied the map. The boy pointed to the town where the jail was, this road going north that they were on. But now they must choose which way to turn. Luis tried to ask if the big roads would be safer from the migra or the small ones, but the boy did not know, or perhaps he did not understand what Luis was asking. Looking at the map, Luis decided to turn left.

There were several hours of driving then, many wrong turns, many stops for consultations of the map. They drove on two-lane roads in darkness, sometimes through small towns without stoplights. They saw few other cars. The journey was taking very long. Luis stopped to look at the map again, decided to go to one of the big roads. They passed through a town with plenty of streetlights, and outside the town, on the big road, many cars and trucks going north. Luis understood that it was the hour already when people were driving to work. The dark sky was thinning when the boy said,
¡Look! Tulsa
. The lighted buildings of a large city rose up in the distance. The vehicles were passing the truck on the both sides now, going so fast. Sometimes they honked at Luis driving slower and slower as the tall buildings drew nearer. The boy sat forward, watching.
I cant remember the way my uncle comes.
Luis saw an exit and drove down it. The boy shook his head.
This doesnt maybe be correct.
Then for a time they were driving aimlessly, looking at the tall buildings surrounding them, stopping again and again to wait at the red lights with many other cars. The indicator showed that they were going to need to buy gasoline soon. With what? The coins from the jar? The boy said,
Im sorry. I think I am able to know how my uncle goes but . . . is not the same. Maybe we come a different street.

Your sister has a telephone, ¿yes? We can call her.

I dont know the number.
The boy tucked his head forward, looking up.
I dont see these buildings at her house. Of her house.
He frowned, looking all around.
I think is possible we come this . . .
He pointed straight ahead. Luis drove as the boy pointed. Soon they were not among the tall buildings but driving deserted streets between low brick buildings like warehouses or factories, and then they were passing wooden houses and a few empty parking lots with closed stores. The boy seemed very lost.
Im sorry,
he said, many times, and each time Luis said,
No problem, no problem. It is well.

The bodega,
the boy said suddenly. He sat forward, pointing with excitement to a small building on the corner.
¡Here, this is the street here!
He smiled hugely at Luis.
¡I dont believe this!

And how, Luis thinks now, would anyone believe it, except they believe in the guiding hand of the Virgin? They had not had to drive very far from the tall buildings, it is true. Nevertheless, it was miraculous that Luis had driven to the street where the boy recognized the little store—which was not, Luis could see, a true bodega selling wine but a small spanish grocery. On the window was written
Food and Beer
. His heart leaped to see the familiar words. But the store was not open. Luis turned at the corner and drove along the street as the boy directed to a small yellow house almost at the end of the block. The boy indicated Luis should drive into the big yard. There were no cars here. The white curtains on the windows were closed. But the morning was early, and Luis still retained hope as the boy climbed down slowly from the truck and walked, supporting his left arm, to the front door. Many times the boy knocked and called out a name that sounded a little like his own name. After a time he returned to the truck, wearing an expression of pain. Luis came around to help him climb back into the seat.
Your wrist is hurting
.

A little.
Without doubt the boy had been hurting all the night, but he had not complained, and still he complained nothing, but his face showed pinched in the gray morning light.
I think that my sister is not here.

We will wait,
Luis said.
¿You have hunger?
The boy shook his head.
¿Thirst?
The boy nodded. Luis turned then and walked around the house, looking at the base, until he found what he wanted, a spigot, and on the ground beside it, disconnected, a coiled water hose. He screwed the hose on, carried the nozzle to the truck. The boy climbed down and drank a long time, and Luis drank. The water was very cold, metallic. He coiled the hose on the ground again, unhooked it from the spigot. They sat in the truck while the day grew stronger, though not bright, because the sky was overcast. After a time the boy slept, leaning his head against the side window. Luis, too, was very tired, but he did not want to sleep. He needed to keep watch. The truck was cold. If the sun would shine through the windows they would be warm, but the sun was hidden in an iron-gray sky. Luis unrolled the sleeping bag from the seat between them—this was not the bag with the crawling man but the dark green one with drawings of turkeys and deer on the inside—and covered the boy. Good. He would let the boy sleep. When he awakened, if the sister had not yet come, Luis would drive to the little store and buy aspirin for the boy, to help with the pain in his wrist. The shopkeeper would speak spanish, naturally. Luis would ask him for advice. Maybe the shopkeeper would allow the boy to stay inside the store until the sister would come for him. The boy could write a note at the little house to say he was waiting at the store. Then Luis could drive on in the truck to the Guymon town. Yes. A good plan. But there was one problem. The gasoline tank was nearly empty. Just to buy the aspirin Luis would have to use the coins from the jar. How would he buy enough gasoline to go to the Guymon town? Even if he would use all the coins, how much could they buy? To Americans, these coins would be nothing, a small fraction of American dollars, like centavos to pesos, he knew this already. Luis felt then the familiar weight on his chest. Another street without exit. The one most familiar. No money.

Tuesday |
February 26, 2008 | 10:45
P.M.

Moorehouse residence on Peaceable Road

McAlester, Oklahoma

M
onica
Moorehouse paced the dark length of her den in McAlester, stood a moment staring
out the sliding glass door at the freezing rain—a trillion tiny glass splinters
spilling down onto the cement patio. She turned and paced to the opposite end of
the room. The window facing the street was small, chest high, a 1960s relic. She
glared through it at the low dark ranch-style catty-corner across the street. No
lights on inside. Peaceable Road was peaceable all right—excruciatingly so. No
passing cars. No street sanders, of course. Nothing but dead ice-spangled grass,
the gleaming leafless twigs of the crape myrtle beside the window, the
glittering shards streaming down in the streetlight. She would be stuck in
McAlester till who even knew when. Charlie had already gone to bed.

She retraced her worn path between the couch and
the darkened flatscreen, which she'd clicked off in disgust during the ten
o'clock news. Good God, you'd think there'd never been ice in eastern Oklahoma.
Only every damn winter since they got here in 2000—that Christmas ice storm,
that was the worst. That's when she'd known for sure her husband had transported
her from civilization to the absolute outback. Please, please, do not let there
be another power outage, she thought. Not like that one. They'd been without
electricity for seventeen days. She had very nearly lost her mind. Monica peered
out at the yard. In the patio light the ice sheath on the Bradford pear tree
appeared to be very thin. Maybe, just maybe—if the temp would only rise a degree
or two, if the falling precip would quit falling—
maybe
she'd be able to get out of here early tomorrow morning. The
front was moving east, as the hyped-up forecasters kept saying, devastating
Arkansas, canting north into Missouri. They were welcome to it—and may the nasty
thing continue on into midwestern oblivion. Damn it, she'd
told
Charlie they needed to get out ahead of the storm! Did he
listen? Did he ever listen? The TV was still babbling in the bedroom at the
other end of the house. Charlie was almost certainly flopped back against the
pillows with the remote in his hand and his mouth open, snoring. She envisioned
herself slipping into the room and lifting the keys off the nightstand, going
out to the garage and starting the Escalade, driving across town through the
sleet to turn north on Indian Nations Turnpike, west on I-40—how far west would
she have to drive to get out of the bad weather?

Pausing beside the coffee table, Monica picked up
the remote, held it a moment, then tossed it onto the couch, where it thumped
against the leather. Charlie's Cadillac was still parked at the apartment in the
City. She couldn't leave him here without a car. Even if the roads were clear
this minute, she'd still have to wait till morning. Oh, she was so ready to get
back to the capital, the tension, and attention, the buzz . . . she
could stop by Kevin's, have a drink, find out . . .

A drink. What a good idea. Monica mounted the low
step into the dimly lit kitchen, dug under the kitchen sink for the vodka
bottle.

She carried her drink to the couch, sat in the dark
with the lavender-tinged patio light streaming in to her right, the little gray
square of streetlight at the other end of the room, the muted yellow kitchen
stove light behind her. She stared at the blank screen on the brick wall.
Charlie had bought a bunch of Jerome Tiger prints and hung them encircling the
television like a war party attacking a covered wagon. Monica patted along the
hard leather cushion until she'd located the clicker, sat holding it without
using it, like an unlit cigarette in her hand. What was the point? All evening
she'd scanned the channels. Locally, the only news was the weather. Nationally,
it was all about the primaries, a different kind of gossipy hysteria that
interested Charlie infinitely, but not her, at least not tonight. Even the
Headline News
Furies, the barking former prosecutor
and her flared-nostril sisters, were off onto a new track—some mother had killed
her children in Idaho—and the Dustin Brown story was barely mentioned. Monica
couldn't decide if this made her glad or mad, or merely depressed. In her
rapidly shifting emotions, she felt some of all three.

Charlie kept bragging about how much she'd done for
her national profile this morning, but Monica wasn't satisfied. She couldn't
feel it. She wanted to get back to Oklahoma City, hear what people were
saying—damn it, she did not want to miss another day of session! And here she
was, trapped again inside this low-slung mildewed ranch-style cavern to which
her husband had relegated her eight years ago. He'd known perfectly well she
wanted to live in something brand-new, clean and modern, not a forty-year-old
tasteless buff-brick shag-carpeted grotto that no amount of framed Indian art on
the walls was going to help. She took a sip of her vodka tonic—more vodka than
tonic, but who the hell cared? She wasn't going anywhere.

She shivered, pulled the faux Pendleton blanket
from the back of the couch and wrapped it around herself. This night reminded
her way too much of that first winter, when she'd felt like she'd just made the
worst mistake of her life, letting her husband drag her down here to Oklahoma.
Not that she'd been so crazy for Indianapolis—in fact, she had more or less
hated it—but at least in Indiana the term
winter
storm
meant snow—plowable, shovelable, walkable. Here, it meant sleet
and freezing rain, and you couldn't do anything about ice, couldn't walk on it,
couldn't drive on it. No escape. She took a long sip.

Had she really hated Indianapolis, or did she just
tell herself that now to tamp down the little nagging flares of regret?

Yes, well, as Charlie would say: What was there to
regret? Her job filing contracts at Superior Finance? Their infrequent trips to
Chicago? Certainly there'd been nothing to regret from the years before she met
Charlie—what did she have then? A lousy job running the cash register at a
Sirloin Stockade and boring night classes at Ivy Tech. The falling-apart house
on North Adams. The occasional phone call from her brother in Florida asking
about their mother quietly drinking herself to death in the upstairs bedroom.
Charlie Moorehouse was by far the best thing that had ever happened to her:
she'd known it then, knew it now. He'd been sort of good-looking, actually, back
in the day. Dark hair and bedroom eyes, or that's how she'd seen him then,
standing at the front of the classroom. She'd thought his Texas drawl was sexy.
She hadn't expected his hair to turn lank and thin so soon, or his bedroom eyes
to go buggy, or the faint little paunch he'd sported back in the 1990s to become
such a gut. Oh, never mind. Never
mind.
Charlie's
looks were hardly what mattered.

She set her drink on the coffee table and, with the
blanket draped over her shoulders, felt her way to the framed mirror beside the
kitchen divider. She could just make out her face in the glow from the stove
light. Thirty-seven. Still remarkably young for all she'd accomplished, as
Charlie constantly reminded her. People thought she was younger. Reaching up,
she fluffed out her hair. Too bad there hadn't been time to get the highlights
put in. Kevin had been right about that, as she'd seen immediately in the first
clips of herself standing in the shitty barnyard looking haggard and hungover
after the mad midnight ride from the City. Iced tea vat indeed. Even so, the
ones on the noon news had looked pretty damned good.

Oh, and she had
so
managed to outshine that aw-shucks-ma'am senator, Dennis Langley—him with
his shaggy mane towering over everybody in the kitchen, gossiping with
reporters, acting like he was just there as a friend of the family. Why, surely
he had not showed up at the highest-profile news story since the bombing as a
legislator;
why, he wasn't even any sort of a
politician
at all. Just a friend, ma'am, just a
friend. To Monica's infinite satisfaction, the darty-eyed aunt never spent one
minute talking to Langley. Some of the local news people acted way too chummy
with him, but who did the network camera crews follow around, pray tell? State
Representative Monica Moorehouse. Yes, ma'am.

And then, just a little after noon, the sheriff had
made his grand entrance, all flabby eyed from his trip, and she had mopped the
floor with him, that's what Charlie said. No challenge at all. There'd been such
a mass of people milling around, cameras and mic cords everywhere, inside and
outside the house, but Monica had had no trouble sorting out who to pay
attention to, who not to waste time on—an art the sheriff had obviously not
mastered. Anyone with a microphone to stick in his face could get a long
blustery self-serving explanation about why the boy hadn't been found. And every
tack the sheriff took, Monica followed up with her own color commentary.

She was skilled enough—and she had Charlie's eyes
and ears abetting—so that she could appear to be listening intently to the
search team captain, nodding worriedly in her tan suede western-cut jacket and
Dingo boots, while simultaneously monitoring every asinine comment the sheriff
made. Then she'd appropriate it, give it nuance, make it her own. If Holloway
got defensive about the roughed-up kid, Monica implied family child abuse. If he
talked about the grandfather's arrest, she'd mention rumors of a “deported
illegal alien family member.” When the sheriff barked orders like he was the big
high muckamuck who had everything under control, Monica would smilingly mention
to some reporter how she'd felt it was “important to be here at the search site
while Sheriff Holloway had to be out of the state on his recent media visit to
Los Angeles.” And yes, all right, by five o'clock the local newscasters were
already fixated on the weather, but they still gave her good chunks of coverage,
and cable news stayed with her right through to prime time. She'd been flawless.
Leadership was bound to be pleased. Monica gazed at her pale image in the
mirror. She ought to feel happy. She ought to feel
satisfied,
at least. Why did she feel so irritable, and restless,
and depressed?

Well, the damned weather, of course. Who wouldn't
be depressed?

Retrieving her tumbler from the coffee table, she
went to the kitchen to fix herself another drink. When she returned to the den,
she resumed her catlike pacing—patio doors to street-side window, street side to
patio, behind the couch one direction, in front of it the next. What was there
to plan for? What was there to
do
? Read bills for
tomorrow's meetings, in case they did manage to get back? No thank you. She was
too keyed up to just sit. At the moment the only thing she could have possibly
watched on TV would have been news clips of herself, and unfortunately she was
off the radar just now. Hah, she thought. Literally. In her mind she saw the
pink and purple Nexrad images jerking across the weather map in time-lapse
sequence, lurching from eastern Oklahoma into the neighboring Ozarks, again and
again. How quickly the media jumped to the next thing! And just precisely when
she'd found the perfect note, she thought resentfully. The perfect tone.

Charlie was only half right. Oh, it was about
image, certainly—who could deny that? But it was also about sound. He was always
on her to use the right words—
folks
of the
Eighteenth District, not
people;
Oklahoma
taxpayers,
not
citizens
—but from the very first news clips this morning she'd heard it:
the pitch-perfect intonation she'd been striving for. Monica wasn't naturally
husky voiced but she had learned how to keep her voice in the lower registers,
just as she'd learned how to sound smart but not too smart, how to smile
winningly but without flirtation, how to briefly, rarely, and seemingly
unthinkingly, refer to her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So yes, of course, on
the clips, she had looked right, she had sounded right, she had used all the
right words. But what most astonished and pleased her was how she had delivered
them in the soft, pitch-perfect, almost-but-not-quite Okie drawl she'd been
working on for years. And she hadn't even been conscious of trying to use it!
She had, she realized, internalized the thing at last. Oh, she'd been shining.
In those early news clips she had
owned
the story.
Then the goddamned weather swept her off the map.

Glass in hand, Monica stood again at the sliding
patio door. The freezing rain had stopped. Had it stopped? She squinted. Yes,
she thought so. The arrow on the round plastic outdoor thermometer still pointed
at 30, but it was a cheap thing they'd bought at Atwoods years ago; it always
took forever to adjust when the temperature changed. The painted-on cardinal
still looked startled, taken by surprise, frozen on his white circle. But wasn't
that water—plain glorious melted
water
—dripping from
the eaves? Oh, hallelujah. She headed for the kitchen.

One more drink, she told herself, then to bed. Even
if the roads were clear in the morning, it was still a two-hour drive to the
City, and her hair was gummy with the expensive salon product Kevin insisted she
use. She was going to have to get up early to wash it. There was no guarantee,
of course, that the roads would be clear. She switched on the floor lamp to
locate the clicker, stood squinting at the blossoming screen. Well, thank God.
The storm had apparently swept on out of Oklahoma—no hyped-up forecaster
interrupted Jimmy Kimmel. Not even one of those little logoed maps in the corner
showing Doppler radar. McAlester had dodged the bullet—no power outage this
time. The roads should be fine by morning. Hallelujah again. She sat down.