Into the Valley Read online

  “Well, hello,” he said. His voice was tired, neutral.

  He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Well. We got a little sidetracked from your medical care. We need to put that gauze on your foot. We’ll fix you up and get you back on the road.”

  “I’m not in any hurry. I can stay awhile.” She thought she might tell him about the checks. Maybe he could help her be done with them.

  “Well, no, you can’t stay.” He spoke to the ceiling, his voice still neutral. “I’m married.”

  “I realize that,” she replied. A distant sinking sensation went through her. “I thought maybe we could talk more. I like talking with you.”

  He did not move his eyes from the ceiling. “I have some things I need to get to. My wife is coming back soon and there are some things around the house I promised I’d work on . . . ”

  He went on about the house, its gutters or hot water heater or some other domestic concern. She lay rigid, understanding she would need to move quickly, to locate her dress, slip it on without zipping. But for the moment she did not want to move. A Johnny Mercer song came into her head. She waited inside “I’m Old Fashioned” for some clarity or consolation; there was only her aching body in the bed.

  “Good luck on your trip,” the professor said abruptly, apparently at the end of his monologue. Then she knew she must go.

  The house in the morning no longer looked quaint and comforting but disordered and stained, unwashed plates and cups on bookshelves, crumpled boxer shorts on the floor, discolorations in the rug. The charcoal nudes unmistakably thrusting, hostile. She found her heels near the couch. The African mask mocking her with its foreign, turned-up mouth and slitted eyes.

  She ran through the campus, her foot a violent sting. The Mustang was not where she thought it was. She limped down the first street and then the next, identical in its dumpiness, and began to panic—had the car been stolen, towed? Why did it all look the same?—until she found the car dirty and untouched on the first street and wondered how she had missed it. She sat hunched at the wheel. The carsickness was a single crushing shot through the hangover and wounded foot.

  She waited in the Mustang for the bank to open. A white banner draped across the top of the doors offering free toasters to new students. There was a foul smell in the car from the uneaten tacos but she did not want to handle them before going in, so she sat in the heat with the odor. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror, catching the glint of the diamond brooch in the narrow rectangle, the mussed hair and dried makeup.

  There was only one teller at the counter. A man. Disappointment passed through her. She walked through the velvet ropes to wait her turn although there were no other customers. The male teller had his head down, arranging some papers. He made her wait several more minutes.

  “Next, please.”

  “Hello. I’d like to make this check out to cash.”

  He peered at the check. “Are you visiting, ma’am?”

  “Yes. My cousin.”

  He did not smile at her. He was young, but his brown hair was thinning at the top. His face was narrow and white, his lips pale, like two aged scars in his face.

  “It’s so hot over here,” she said, trying to make small talk. “I didn’t realize. The city is so cold in the summer.”

  He nodded and did not move to open his cash drawer or ask what bill denominations she preferred. She did not like the purple pattern of his tie. He studied the check again. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment.”

  As he walked away, toward a row of desks at the back, and as he stopped to speak with another man, older and gray-haired, B. felt suddenly as if she had handed over her small child to a stranger. The male teller and the older man talked in low tones, the older man studying the check now; both looked over at B. She had an urge to run around the counter and snatch back her small child.

  “Good morning, miss,” the older man was saying as he approached her, “there seems to be a question on the account—”

  “I just realized, I’m late. I’ll have to come back.” She slid the ostrich-skin purse onto her wrist and backed slowly and casually away. She walked with the same casualness out the door. Eleven steps. Outside the sun struck her, harsh and bright. She opened the Mustang door, sat down in the seat, keyed the ignition and sped out of the parking lot in one fluid motion.

  20.

  She did not go into her motel room, just sat by the pool in the scalding sun. She cried, watching the oiled rainbow swirls in the water. A housekeeper asked if she needed the manager; she shook her head. Her shoulders and scalp burned and her feet puckered to numbness.

  The tears were not for the university man, she knew. They came from an alien, frightening place. When she finished, she dragged herself to her room, exhausted and cotton-mouthed as if coming through a desert. She lay on the bed and tried to think what she could do without the banks. What could she do without the banks? She clutched the bed, hearing the Johnny Mercer song until she fell asleep.

  21.

  She did not call him from the motel. She waited, stalling, until she was back on the road. She forced herself off at a truck-weighing station. The sun was burning on the glass of the phone booth, the glare reminding her how much time there was to kill before lunch.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Well,” Daughtry said. “Didn’t expect a call from you.”

  The concrete sidewalk radiated more heat into the glass. Sweat gathered at the base of B.’s back, between her legs.

  She tried again to remember his first name. It would not come to her.

  “How are you?”

  “You sound like shit,” Daughtry said.

  She nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see her.

  “How’s your granny?” he asked.

  “Better. Thank you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She looked down and noted the faintest film of semen still on her dress. She began scratching it off.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Daughtry said. “I didn’t mean it. Truth is I’ve missed you.”

  “Me too,” she lied. “Look, I need your help. I need more checks.” She tried to keep the desperation out of her voice.

  She heard him light a cigarette, the paper crumpling as he sucked. “And here I thought you just missed me.”

  The cigarette paper crinkling and exhales went on for several seconds before he spoke again.

  “What happened to the other checks?”

  “I lost them.”

  He laughed. “Now I know you’re full of shit. What is it, drugs? You got an uncle in gambling trouble?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Because it can’t be for the kicks. That would be too stupid: you don’t need the money but you wanna get dirty. You wanna be bad. Right?”

  “It’s not for kicks,” she said.

  “You’re a good girl. Period. Can’t change that. You should be glad to be good.” He exhaled. “I’d give anything to be good with you.”

  “I’ll cut you in,” she blurted out. She ignored in her mind his pained face. She visualized only the checks.

  “What happened to them?” he finally said. “You kill the account?”

  “I think so.”

  “See, now this is where I wonder what the fuck I’m doing. Giving them to you in the first place. Why I’m even thinking of continuing in this line with you, like a goddamn whipped twelve-year-old. Ditch the checks if you haven’t already,” he said. “Get rid of the ID.”

  In his tone of warning she heard only, regretfully, that she would have to abandon the false surname. She’d liked her picture beside the meaningless name.

  “I’ve missed you,” she tried.

  His voice came out low and quiet. “The first time I saw you, I thought, it don’t matter what you say to her because she’ll never go out with you. I could h
ave recited the goddamn Latin mass. You were like a painting behind glass, not the ones now but the old ones with queens and ladies in dresses, soft . . . It’s ruined now, but I keep wanting to touch the glass.”

  “Daughtry.”

  “When are you coming back to the city?”

  “I might not. I don’t know.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You wanna stay in the sticks?”

  She was silent.

  “You got no right to fuck with me,” he said in the low voice again. “I believed you, about us not being so different. So I’m asking you, please, don’t fuck with me.”

  “I get this feeling,” she said finally. “I can’t breathe, I’m going to be sick. Just walking around the city makes me sick.”

  “You should go to a doctor.”

  “No,” she said, raising her palm to the hot glass. “You see, I’m not really sick. It’s just a feeling. There’s nowhere it’s better. Only the banks make it better.”

  “You shoulda got married by now,” Daughtry said. “Had some kids. That would make it better. You shouldn’t be hanging out with guys like me.”

  She knew he was fishing for reassurance but she was too caught up in her own thoughts. “I don’t know the reason,” she said faintly. Her palm hurt on the hot glass, but she did not remove it. “I’m not trying to trick you. You’re helping me. The checks help me.”

  “You’re conning me. I’m gonna get conned in this deal, is all I see. Put out with the trash. Call me when you have a straight story,” he said and hung up the phone.

  22.

  The grocery store was off an exit. A pink rectangular building with a revolving plaster pig on top. The lot was almost empty. She sat in the Mustang, waiting to feel ready. It might not be so different from the banks, she told herself. Maybe more fun, more transporting. She could buy pints of ice cream, apples. She watched a feeble-looking man totter out with a bag in the crook of his arm. She took the checkbook from her purse and wrote “Cash” on the top one and ripped it out. Then she did not move. She wanted another bank. But the image of the thin-haired scar-lipped teller broke through this thought. She forced herself out of the Mustang.

  Inside the air felt warm, even in the frozen section. She walked aimlessly up and down aisles. The walls were dirty green, the floor dishwater-colored linoleum. The aisles were crowded with boxes and cans, all of which looked the same to her. She felt as if they were pressing in on her. She decided she did not need to look like she was shopping. At the front two cashiers chatted back and forth; only one seemed to be working. B. waited behind an elderly woman with a basket of tuna cans and celery. The working cashier looked no older than twenty, ratted hair swirled on top of her head and dyed a harsh yellow that made her skin too pink. The other looked possibly B.’s age, her jawline beginning to slide into her neck a bit. She had short hair and thick black eyeliner that came out to triangles at the corners of her eyes.

  “I don’t care what he said,” the short-haired one was saying, her arms crossed on the divider next to the register. “He’s got no job, he’s gonna get snagged by the army and probably killed. How’s he providing when you’re laid up?”

  “He’s working the harvest at Michaelson’s. And I know what you’re thinking.” The bowl of harsh yellow hair quivered on the younger one as she rang up items. “But he’s done with all that. He’s not into that anymore.”

  The older cashier shook her head, clucking her tongue.

  “We went swimming in the river last week,” the younger one said. “You know what’s funny? I haven’t been in the river since I was a kid.”

  “But what’s he like out of the river is the thing,” the black-triangle-eyeliner woman said. “Still no job, still no future. Which means no future for you, get it?”

  When B.’s turn came at the register, she asked about cashing the check.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Please, I need to cash this.” She held up the paper.

  “Charlie!” the yellow-haired girl yelled.

  A fat man emerged from an aisle, clipboard in his right hand, looking preoccupied.

  “ID?” he asked B.

  “Oh.” B. remembered to widen her eyes, bite her lip. “It’s in my other purse. I’m sorry about that.” She brought her hand to the diamond brooch, stroked her shoulder with her finger. The manager scanned her with his irritated face, nodded his head and then turned the check over on the clipboard and wrote on the back. “Don’t forget it next time,” he said tiredly. B. nodded.

  The yellow-haired cashier rang open the drawer. “It was so nice at the river, Dee,” she said, not even looking as she counted out the fifty dollars to B. “Why couldn’t it be like that all the time? How d’you know it wouldn’t?”

  The bills were ragged, torn fives and tens, soft and old. B. forced herself not to pull her hand back.

  “It never stays like at the river, honey.”

  B. was out in the blinding sun with the fistful of bills.

  The cashier’s horrible hair quivered in her mind, the other’s black triangles, and the carsickness rose into her throat. None of the calm of the banks. She braced against the door of the Mustang. She wanted to lay her spinning head on the roof but the metal was blistering. The cool expansive feeling must come. She waited. A woman wheeled out a heaping cart with a red-mouthed toddler in the front kicking and screaming over the bar. The woman spoke to him in a robotically soothing voice. Her hair looked limp and dull in the sun, her face drawn.

  All the women in the valley looked tired, B. thought.

  The carsickness surged. The cool expansive feeling did not come.

  The toddler’s stained mouth shrieked. The woman tossed the bags into the back of the station wagon, still speaking as if by rote. B. held her stomach and steadied herself against the Mustang. Without thinking, she walked toward the woman as the last bag went in, the toddler shrieking almost in her ear. The woman ignored B. standing there. She slammed the rear door and pulled the child out of the cart, onto her hip. “I have some extra money,” B. blurted out. The woman gave no signal that she had heard B. She put the boy in the front seat and slammed the door, walked stone-faced back to the driver’s side. The boy’s attention turned to B. and his wailing stopped, as if a television had been switched on. The woman sat still in the driver’s seat for a moment. “I have a husband,” she said through the window. “I ain’t no charity case, so whatever born-again Jehovah’s Witness racket this is, go fuck yourself.” Then she started the engine, the toddler still fixed on B. as if she’d exploded or dropped off a cliff in a cartoon. They peeled out of the parking lot and B. stood in the exhaust.

  This time she did not feel any urge to cry. Like an automaton she got into the car. She drove with the dirty grocery store bills in her right hand. Daughtry was in her thoughts somewhere, chiding. Her skull spun; she felt the whiteness on the inside of her jaw from clenching.

  On the road back to the freeway, she passed a group of Chinese men huddled in a vacant lot in the thin shade of a pepper tree, smoking on their haunches. She stopped the Mustang. She walked over to them and threw down the crumpled grocery store bills. The men kept smoking, staring without speaking. Back in the car, she realized that she would rather at that moment be any one of them, with their strange eyes and stained teeth and dirty undershirts.

  When she was back on the freeway, she lifted her hands off the wheel and closed her eyes. Eventually she opened them again. She lowered her hands back down but did not let her foot up off the gas.

  II

  &$9

  23.

  The plum trees were endless dark masses blotting the pale blue sky. She followed the gray trunks. She focused on getting to the end of each field, each orchard. One to the next, forward motion.

  The girl from Sambo’s was not even standing when she came upon her, but sitting on her knapsack, he
r bare brown legs in the cutoffs splayed in front of her. She wore the same white peasant blouse, now with a brown suede vest over, her feet shoeless. When B. stopped the car, the girl did not look surprised or grateful, just stood up and bent into the open window.

  “You going to Reno?”

  B. shook her head.

  “Me either.”

  The girl climbed in without another word or a second look at B., settling her knapsack on the floor. She unbuttoned the suede vest and stuffed it inside, rummaged for her cigarettes and lit one.

  B. could see the girl’s breasts clearly through the peasant blouse. She pulled the car back on the road. The girl smoked and stared out the window, as if there was nothing inside the car to hold her attention.

  “I’m going to San Francisco,” she finally said on one of her exhales. “But not yet. My old man is there. But I don’t need that scene right now.” A half dozen silver bracelets clinked at her wrist as she raised and lowered the cigarette.

  “I used to live there,” B. said. “I don’t think I’m going back.”

  The girl did not seem to hear her. They passed an empty fruit stand, the bright red-lettered sign for corn & apricots today giving the impression that someone might show up any minute. Hot grainy air blew around the car, whipping the girl’s long hair.

  The girl held the cigarette between her lips and knotted the hair behind her. “We were camping for a while at the beach. My parents never took us to the ocean. Just pools. Chlorine and water wings and all that noise. Anyway, I told him he could leave for San Fran if he wanted, I was staying. He left.”

  B. could not make sense of any part of this statement. “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Fontana. Wasteland of America.” General images of the southern half of the state rolled through B.’s mind, orange groves and salmon-colored houses and women in white sunglasses. B. saw in her peripheral vision the glint of blonde hair all over the girl’s legs. Her fingernails were grimed black. They drove through an alfalfa field (she knew from the scattering butterflies), and past a small house with two date palms in front and a dead olive tree in back. B. wondered whether she’d already driven down this road.