Snowflake, AZ Read online

  So we made our way.

  On account of Mona’s detour to find organic falafels, we was a mite behind schedule. We’d been meaning to pull into a truck stop and sleep a while, but in the end we kept on driving and everyone slept when they wanted, and I was lucky, because as night came on, I was set on the outside, with Mary on the other and Mona in the middle and it was near impossible to get any sleep in the middle.

  Detlef was driving and Finch was map-reading by a little flashlight like a pen because Detlef had taken all the lights out of the inside of the car.

  ‘Makes the vehicle thirty pounds lighter,’ he said, talking about all the unnecessary stuff he’d pulled out of it when he’d bought it. That included the AC, and I was glad it was January that we was driving for sixteen hours across the southern United States.

  I was dog-tired again as the night wore on, and Detlef didn’t have a radio left in the car, or nothing, so I just stared into the dark, waiting for sleep to come and in the end it came. Then I was out cold. At one point, something woke me and I was only half-awake but I saw that Mona had fallen asleep on my shoulder and I thought what-the-heck but then I also thought, what-the-heck, she’s just a tired lady so I let her be.

  On and off we dozed and it started to get light and we pulled into a gas station someplace to fill up. Finch took over driving and we’d only driven another fifty feet when there was a howl like the world was ending and blue lights flashing all behind us and Finch looked in the mirror and said ‘cops’ and pulled over.

  There was two of ’em. One stayed set in the police car, and I turned around and could see him, just the outline of him in the dawn light and he was on the radio. And the other cop strolled up to the driver’s window like he was real bored and tapped on the window even though Finch had wound it almost all the way down.

  Finch was real polite.

  ‘Yes, officer?’ he said and the cop bent down and looked in the window and looked at all of us and said ‘going someplace?’ which had to be just about the stupidest thing anyone ever said in the whole history of the planet and I mean untelligent, real untelligent.

  As soon as he opened his mouth I knew we was in for trouble. I saw him checking out our masks which were set on the back shelf and wondering what the heck that was all for. You could more or less hear his brain whirring.

  ‘I’m asking myself,’ he said, ‘is this vehicle roadworthy?’

  Detlef leaned across Finch and said ‘roadworthy?’ and I thought uh-oh, because Detlef started saying how it was not only legal and roadworthy but how Mr. Police Officer wouldn’t find as much as a taillight out because he checked them every single time he got in the car, and I promise you that is true. Every single time. Every single god-danged time we stopped and started that Mercedes in sixteen hours, Detlef had made a full inspection of it first.

  So I thought uh-oh, because Detlef was now explaining all this to the cop and more besides, like how his car wouldn’t make no one sick, either, and could he say the same about his prowler?

  The cop was not impressed and he leaned in the window and said, ‘Sir, I’m asking you to be quiet. I am speaking to the driver of the car,’ so Detlef started to explain that he was the owner of the vehicle, not Finch, so then the cop said, ‘Right, both of you get out of the vehicle. And I wanna see some licenses.’

  Then Finch put his arm on Detlef’s to say ‘easy, cowboy’ and Detlef was getting huffy but I was hoping that Finch wouldn’t get to the point where he was mad enough to say ‘screwit’ because I figured that wouldn’t do us no good.

  So now the cop was acting like he could read and staring at Detlef’s license and then Finch’s and then Detlef’s again and meanwhile his pal had shown up and had gotten Finch and Detlef to please put their hands on the hood of the car, gentlemen, with their legs out and back and three feet apart. All this time, Mona was set between me and Mary and she was like a volcano setting there, ready to boil. And when she came to the boil, she was out of the car without even waiting for Mary to move and the second cop said ‘whoa-now’ and then ‘ma’am-get-back-in-the-car’ and then he pulled his gun and Mona looked at him and said ‘don’t be ridiculous’ which kind of took him by surprise to have this little fifty-something-year-old lady look up at him.

  Then she turned to the first cop and she let rip.

  ‘You know where we are headed?’ she barked, like she was addressing Socrates on a bad day.

  ‘Ma’am, I do not—’ the cop was saying but Mona wasn’t in a mood for listening. She was in a mood for telling.

  ‘We are heading to a funeral. And we are almost there but due to matters of force majeure (she was referring to the falafels) we are a tad behind schedule. And do you know whose funeral this is? (once again, she wasn’t really asking) No? Well, we are heading to the funeral of a police officer. A young police officer, and he was the friend of all of us here and the brother of young Ash there.’

  And she pointed at me in the back seat, and I gave the cop a little wave and mouthed ‘hellooo’ and then felt kinda dumb. But no one cared about that, because Mona was explaining how Bly had died tragically in the line of duty and all we wanted to do was be there for him to say goodbye.

  And then, oh boy, then she took one mighty big risk and she said how in her life she had come across two types of cops and there was those that became a cop for others and there was those that became cops for themselves. And how Bly was one of the first kind.

  Then she stared real hard at the cop and he said nothing and meanwhile the other cop was putting his gun away and looking like he was a gawky twelve-year-old kid and the darndest thing happened. The cop, the first one, he put his fingers to his cap and said, ‘Ma’am, I’m real sorry for your loss,’ and that was how we got a police escort to the state line, breaking speed limits, getting us back on schedule and arriving at the church with time to spare.

  So we was in the middle of Mormon country again, but Jack’s church was one of the few that weren’t. We showed up at the Aurora Methodist in Detlef’s old Mercedes and it was set in its grounds in a quiet neighborhood of streets of people’s ordinary homes. The kind where their grass just runs up to the asphalt of the road and no one minds about fences too much.

  Even with our police escort, we were not the first to arrive. Fact is, most everyone else had showed up already and there was a lot of people. A lot. People liked Bly, they always did. There was Jack and Suzanne, the new woman in his life, and I was pleased to see them both, and they was holding hands, even though they were about to bury Jack’s boy, and I thought that was a good thing.

  There was the rest of Jack’s family, and I knew some of ’em, but none well. And there were a lot I didn’t know at all because while Jack might’ve wanted to adopt me, there were those in his family who had wondered, and had wondered out loud, what he was doing adopting a little cuckoo like me, Jamie’s kid, into his own family.

  Then there was some friends of Bly’s from school and there was even two cadets from the academy where Bly had been trying to learn to be a police officer. And I realized I hadn’t seen so many people in one place in months.

  We got out of the 1984 gold but rusting Mercedes and I suppose we looked like something. None of us had funeral clothes, but we’d all done our best to look smart. I was wearing my best pair of jeans that I got at the thrift store in Show Low one time, and a black hoodie. Mona was wearing a long dark blue dress and had a red raincoat on top because it was not warm. Mary was in her boots and shirts as always. Finch had on some slacks and a shirt and he looked the best of us, I guess, and Detlef was sporting a suit of some kind but it had seen better days, and he was wearing sneakers. And Mary was carrying a plastic bag with all our masks in it, in case we needed ’em, but all of us without saying figured we wouldn’t put ’em on unless we really had to.

  No one said anything to us as we made our way into the church with the other folks, aside from Jack who gave me a hug and I gave him one back while his Suzanne smiled at me and I smiled bac
k at her.

  The sermon was about running.

  The priest, he went on and on about how people run through life and are always seeking something. That’s what he said. Seeking. And they run and they run but they don’t never find what they want, because (and it was kinda obvious this was where he was headed) what they’re actually missing is God.

  Well, so he explained that even if you don’t find God during your life, it’s okay, because when you die, well, God’s there and He’s just been waiting for you to quit running all the while anyhow. He’s kinda patient like that, he’s got all the time in the world. And then some.

  Then he read this weird poem about a dog, and that went on for about a week.

  And I thought some things like what a lot of bull it was and how it had nothing to do with Bly, or dying, and how this guy had probably never even met Bly and then we went outside and they put Bly’s coffin in the ground, and he was in it, of course. It was real cold.

  Afterward we went back to Jack’s.

  He and Suzanne had moved into some new place and it weren’t big so it was full of all the people from the service and that was kinda bad because I started to feel worse almost immediately and it was also kinda good because you can get lost in a crowd, and I would estimate that 95 percent of the people there had no idea who I was, nor that I had just watched my stepbrother go into the ground, and so no one knew that I was wondering how it had come to be that we were all inside in the warm in Jack’s place while Bly was lying in a cold dark hole outside.

  We was all tired, us canaries, and I was feeling crappier by the minute. By this point I had turned into a machine for spotting places to set. I was a real hound, I mean. Whenever I went somewhere new, I was always scoping out the place I could get myself set down as soon as possible, and what’s more I had given up waiting for people to invite you to set. When you can’t stand more’n two minutes you have to take matters into your own hands, because no one says ‘would you care to sit down?’ no more, so if you don’t do something about it, you end up falling over in strangers’ homes.

  So I needed to find a place to set and as I headed on through the people in the living room, I saw a photo of me and Bly on the sideboard. And one of just me, and I looked around to see Jack and I wanted to say thanks for, well, I don’t know for what exactly, but I couldn’t see him.

  Then I set in a big sofa next to two women I didn’t know who were yakking away and I watched matters go by and one thing I saw was Detlef talking to this woman. She was a bit younger than him and he was looking awkward but smiling little smiles sometimes and she didn’t seem to mind that his suit was as old as his Mercedes and after a while I saw that she was hitting on him. Well not quite hitting, because this was a funeral and you don’t do that at funerals but I saw her handing him a piece of paper and she’d written something on it and I guessed that was her number. And I wondered if he’d ever pick up his phone and call her and if he did would she have any idea he was speaking to her on a wooden thing with plastic tubes attached to the real phone.

  There was a tapping on the window just behind my head and I saw Mary waving at me. She pulled a face and I could see she was doing bad. She held her mask up and jiggled it and pointed at the car and I knew she had had enough of people and their fragrances. I nodded and mouthed ‘I’ll tell Mona’ and she looked like she didn’t understand but she went off anyway and set in the car.

  Then outta nowhere there was this woman, standing in front of me and just like with the cop, I knew I was in trouble. You can just tell, before someone opens their mouth, sometimes.

  She was this mad aunt. An aunt of Jack’s, I mean. She was called Zelda. And, well, I don’t know what her motivation was, unless it was to be mean. She told me we’d met before and didn’t I remember and I thought oh yeah now I got it, you’re the damn bitch who said Jack was mad to adopt me. Then she laid into me about living with crazy people and for letting Bly stay there and how I was to blame for him going crazy too and not coming back to flatland. She didn’t call it flatland. She called it ‘the real world’ but I could debate you about that.

  ‘And just what is supposed to be wrong with you? You look perfectly fine to me. Decided to drop out, have we? Is that your little game? Well, don’t you think this family is going to pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong. You hear?’

  On she went, like that. And some more.

  Then Mona and Finch saw what was happening and as one we canaries decided it was time to leave so I found Jack and gave him another hug and he gave me one back though he looked kinda in shock, which I guess he still was. And all the time his new Suzanne held his hand and smiled at me real sad, but kind all at once. And while I did that, Finch was speaking quietly to the mad aunt and as we left I heard him telling her that if she knew what was good for her she’d start buying shares in Reynolds Wrap and good day to her.

  We made our way home, bowling down the freeway, across them two or three states, back west to Snowflake, and I’ll say this about America: it was beautiful, at times. Yes, it was.

  There were no incidents on the way home. No one arrested us, no one thought we was terrorists or aliens. But two days after we got back, I was coming out of the bathroom one morning and I saw Mona looking at something, and when she heard me coming she put it back in her drawer, real fast.

  Now I am not proud of what I did next but there was something about the way she acted that got me curious. And later that day, when she was outside giving Socrates an earful about something, I snuck over to the drawer she’d shut so quick.

  Inside was a box of photos. At the very top was one of a young girl in running clothes. She was dressed for a race, with a number pinned to her chest, and the photo was in color but in that old-fashioned way, like in the seventies. And there were lots of people behind her in the photo, coming and going getting ready for some race or just finished one and just as I recognized the eyes and knew it was Mona, she’d snuck up on me and said, ‘I won, that day.’

  And I felt bad and Mona waved her hand and said ‘forget it’ and I kinda got the feeling she’d been looking for a chance to talk about it anyway.

  ‘It was what that priest said.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘What he said about running. It got me remembering. See that photo, I was fourteen. I just won the cross-country race. Five miles and I won and the next person came in more’n four minutes after. Man, I could run.’

  And she smiled but I could see a ton of stuff behind that smile. She told me how she’d kept running, into high school, at the university, and even when she started work and met her husband, Mr. Lerner, and she’d kept running.

  ‘And that priest has no god-dang idea what running means,’ she said. ‘No god-dang idea. Running is freedom.’

  Then she was silent for a while and then I remembered something and said ‘Lerner?’ and she nodded and said ‘yup.’

  ‘He was my husband. We met at college but it was when we started working in the same department that we got together. We spent six years on that thing. The Mochsky-Lerner paradigm they call it now. Even though there ain’t no more Mochsky-Lerner.’

  ‘That must’ve hurt,’ I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, but Mona said ‘whut? the divorce?’ and I said yeah and she said ‘uh-huh.’

  ‘Yeah, that hurt. That was one of the last things to go, when I got sick. I’ll give him this, he hung in there for a few years before he couldn’t take it. I mean, things was real bad back then. The wheelchair an’ all. And the running, that was bad too, and that was one of the first things to go. I remember, even at the start of being sick, trying to go for a run, and then another and then another because I just could not god-darn believe I couldn’t do it anymore. And of course all I did was make myself sicker.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘you know, none of that hurt the most. You know what hurt the most?’ so of course I shook my head and she rummaged in the box in the drawer and handed me another photo. It was of another girl and
I was just thinking was it Mona or what, when she said, ‘The worst thing was my daughter.’

  So I said, ‘What? You have a daughter?’ because in all this time I never once heard her mention any kids, and Mona nodded while I looked at the girl in the photo. I guess you could see she was Mona’s. The eyes, beautiful they were, and they were exactly the same as Mona’s. There was that same look in ’em too. Like iron.

  ‘You know what hurt the most, was when my own daughter came to see me in the hospital for the last time and looked me in the eye and said, “Ma, there ain’t nothing the matter with you.” That was what hurt the most.’

  So I asked when that was and Mona said, ‘Well, oh, let me see. That would be eleven years ago.’

  Eleven years. And I thought ‘huh’ and then I wondered how much of Finch’s little polymorphism Mona’s daughter had in her. And I guess I didn’t like to think it was more than a little.

  S

  Selfish Gene

  I had a dream as I slept on the bathroom floor one night. It was still winter but spring was nearly come. In the dream, I was with Bly and we were at the wake at Jack’s place, right after we’d put Bly in the ground. But he weren’t in the ground, he was with me; he was at his own wake. In the dream, no one seemed to see him but me, and I wasn’t surprised that he was with me and not in the ground, even though I’d just seen the coffin go into the earth not a half hour before. But that’s how things are in dreams, right? All mixed up but you take it all as it is.

  And I was set with Bly on that big sofa instead of the two yakking ladies and suddenly we both had a glass of whiskey in our hands, which is funny because neither of us liked it.

  Then I spoke.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to Bly, ‘I’ve just buried my brother in point of fact.’ And then we drank the whiskey and he cried and I cried and we both cried and there was soil on our shoes from the graveside still. And it was the full moon and I argued in my head about asking Bly what he’d meant that night about O-my-Lord, but he had just died so I let it be and I let him mourn himself his own way.