* * * *
For this big one, this last last one, Del roamed those art galleries in downtown Taos after work at the garage. He watched the ads for gallery openings, finding a place that stressed cash only, real snooty because you know a lot of people would have to buy that artwork on time and not pay straight out for it all at once, but those weren’t the type of people they were after. He’d looked up the address of the gallery owner, the home address, and we’d driven past that too.
I liked watching his mind work: the way he’d suddenly nod just slightly when we were walking across the plaza or down the walkway between the John Dunn Shops, like he’d seen something important. Or the way his eyes narrowed and darted as we rode throughout the neighborhood where the gallery owner lived, keeping a steady speed, not turning his head, not looking as if he was looking.
We had a nice time at the gallery opening itself, too. At least at the beginning. Delwood looked smart in his blue blazer, even though it was old enough that it had gotten a little shine. And you could see how happy he was each time he saw a red dot on one of the labels—just more money added to the take—even if he first had to ask what each of those red dots meant. I hated the gallery owner’s tone when he answered that one, as if he didn’t want Del or me there drinking those plastic cups of wine or eating the cheese. But then I thought, He’ll get his, if you know what I mean. And, of course, he did.
“I like this one,” I said in front of one of the pictures. It was a simple picture—this painting stuck in the back corner. A big stretch of blue sky and then the different colored blue of the ocean, and a mistiness to it, like the waves were kicking up spray. Two people sat on the beach, a man and a woman. They sort-of leaned into one another, watching the water, and I thought about me and Del and began to feel nostalgic for something that we’d never had. The painting didn’t have a red dot on it.
“With the money,” I whispered to Delwood. “We could come back here and buy one of them, huh? Wouldn’t that be ballsy? Wouldn’t that be ironic?”
“Louise,” he said, that tone again, telling me everything.
“I’m just saying,” I said. “Can’t you picture the two of us at the ocean like that? Maybe with the money, we could take a big trip, huh?”
“Can’t you just enjoy your wine?” he whispered, and moved on to the next picture, not looking at it really, just at the label.
“Fine,” I said after him, deciding I’d just stay there and let him finish casing out the joint, but then a couple came up behind me.
“Let’s try s on this one,” the woman whispered.
“S,” said the man. “Okay. S.” They looked at the couple on the beach, and I looked with them, wondering what they meant by “trying s.” The man wrinkled his brow, squinted his eye, scratched his chin—like Del when he’s thinking, but this man seemed to be only playing at thinking. “Sappy,” he said finally.
“Sentimental,” said the woman, quick as she could.
“Um . . . sugary.”
“Saccharine.”
“Okay. No fair,” said the man. “You’re just playing off my words.”
The woman smirked at him. She had a pretty face, I thought. Bright blue eyes and high cheekbones and little freckles across them. She had on a gauzy top, some sort of linen, and even though it was just a little swath of fabric, you could tell from the texture of it and the way she wore it and from her herself that it was something fine. I knew, just knew suddenly, that it had probably cost more than the money Del had stolen from the 7-Eleven the night I first met him. And I knew too that I wanted a top just like it.
“Fine,” she said, pretending to pout. “Here’s another one. Schmaltzy.”
“Better! Um . . . sad.”
“No, this is sad,” she said, holding up her own plastic wineglass.
“Agreed,” he laughed.
“Swill,” she whispered, dragging out the s sound, just touching his hand with her fingers, and they both giggled as they moved on to the next picture. And the next letter too, it turned out. T was for tarnished, for trashy, for tragic.
Del had made the full circuit. Even from across the room, I could see the elbows shining on his blazer. Then he turned and saw me and made a little side-nod with his head, motioning toward the door. Time to head back home. Back to the trailer.
I looked once more at the painting of the couple on the beach. I’d thought it was pretty. Still did.
I’d thought the wine had tasted pretty good, too.
But suddenly it all left a bad taste in my mouth.
* * * *
A bad taste still as we drove south now.
The steep turns and drop-offs that had taken us out of Taos had given way to little villages, small homes on shaded roads, people up and about, going about their lives. I saw a couple of signs pointed toward the Santuario de Chimayo, which I’d visited when I first moved out this way, picking Northern New Mexico just because it seemed different, in every way, from where I’d grown up. I’d found out about the church in Chimayo from a guidebook I’d ordered off the Internet, learned about the holy earth there and how it healed the sick. When I’d visited it myself, I gathered up some of the earth and then mailed it off to Mama—not that she was sick, but just unhappy. I don’t know what I’d imagined she’d do with it, rub it on her heart or something. “Thanks for the dirt,” she told me when she got it.
“Do you think they’ve found him yet?” I asked Del.
“They?”
“I don’t know, Del. The police. Or the cleaning lady or a customer.”
We were nearing another curve and Del eased the Nova around it slowly, carefully.
“Probably somebody will have found him by now. Like I told you last night, I tied him up pretty good, so I don’t think he’d have gotten loose on his own. But by now...”
He sped up a little bit. I don’t think he did it consciously, but I noticed.
A little while later, I asked, “Are we gonna do anything fun with the money?”
“What kind of fun?”
“I don’t know. Clothes, jewelry . . . a big-screen TV, a vacation. Something fun.”
He scratched his beard. “That’s just extravagance.”
“Are you gonna make all the decisions?”
“All the good ones,” he said. He gave a tense little chuckle. “Don’t you ever consider the future?”
But again, he missed what I was saying. The future is exactly what I was thinking about.
* * * *
We bypassed Santa Fe proper, and then Del had us two-laning it again on a long road toward Albuquerque: miles and miles of dirt hills and scrubby little bushes, some homes that looked like people still lived there and others that were just crumbling down to nothing. The Ortiz Mountains standing way out in the distance. We got stuck for a while behind a dusty old pickup going even slower than we were, but Del was still afraid to pass. We just poked along behind the truck until it decided to turn down some even dustier old road, and every mile we spent behind it, my blood began to boil up a little more.
I know Del was picturing roadblocks out on the interstate, and helicopters swooping low, waiting for some rattling old Nova like ours to do something out of the ordinary, tip our hand—even more so after I asked about that gallery owner getting loose. But after a while, I just wanted to scream, “Go! Go! Go!” or else reach over and grab the wheel myself, stretch my leg over and press down on the gas, hurl us ahead somehow and out of all this. And then there was all the money in the trunk and all the things I thought we could have done with it but clearly weren’t going to do. Once or twice, I even thought about pulling out that pistol myself and pointing it at him. “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” I might say, just like he would. “Just do like I ask, okay?” That was the first time I thought about it, and that wasn’t even serious.
Still, it was all I could do to hide all that impatience, all that restlessness and nervous energy. None of it helped by that tap tap tap tap tap of the mirror against the windshield. I felt like my skin was turning inside out.
“I need to pee,” I said, finally.
“Next place I see,” said Del, a little glance at me, one more glance in the rearview. I looked in the side mirror. Nothing behind us but road. I looked ahead of us. Nothing but road. I looked around the car. Just me and him and that damn mirror tapping seconds into minutes and hours and more.
* * * *
We stopped in Madrid, which isn’t pronounced like the city in Spain but with the emphasis on the first syllable: MAD-rid. It used to be a mining town back in the Gold Rush days, but then dried up and became a ghost town. Now it’s a big artist’s community. I didn’t know all that when we pulled in, but there was a brochure.
We pulled up by one of the rest stops at one end of the town—outhouse, more like it. Del waited in the car, but after I was done, I tapped on his window. “I’m gonna stretch my legs,” I said, and strolled off down the street before he could answer. I didn’t care whether he followed, but pretty soon I heard the scuff scuff of his feet on the gravel behind me. I really did need a break, just a few minutes out of the car, and it did help some, even with him following. We walked on like that, him silent behind me except for his footsteps as I picked up that brochure and looked in the store windows at antiques and pottery and vintage cowboy boots. Fine arts, too. “Wanna make one last last job?” I wanted to joke. Half joke. “Get something for me this time?”
I walked in one store. Del followed. I just browsed the shelves. The sign outside had advertised “Local artisans and craftspeople,” and the store had quirky little things the way those kinds of places do: big sculptures of comical-looking cowboys made out of recycled bike parts, closeup photographs of rusted gas pumps and bramble bush, hand-dipped soy candles, gauzy-looking scarves that reminded me about the woman at the gallery the night before. I browsed through it all, taking my time, knowing that Del was right up on me, almost feeling his breath on my back.
One shelf had a bowl full of sock-monkey keychains. A little cardboard sign in front of the bowl said, “Handcrafted. $30.”
“Excuse me,” I called over to the man behind the counter. He’d been polishing something and held a red rag in his hand. “Is this the price of the bowl or of the monkeys?”
“Oh,” he said, surprised, as if he’d never imagined someone might misunderstand that. “The monkeys,” he said, then corrected himself: “Each monkey,” he said. “The bowl’s not for sale at all.”
I turned to Del.
“Why don’t you get me one of these?” I asked him, holding up a little monkey.
I tried to say it casual-like, but it was a challenge. I felt like both of us could hear it in my voice. Even the man behind the register heard it, I imagine, even though he’d made a show of going back to his polishing.
“What would you want with a thing like that?” Del said.
“Sometimes a girl likes a present. It makes her feel special.” I dangled the sock monkey on my finger in front of him, and Del watched it sway, like he was mesmerized or suspicious. “Or is the romance gone here?”
“It’s kind of pricey for a keychain.”
I leaned in close for just a second. “Why don’t you just slip it in your pocket, then?” I whispered.
Del cut his eyes toward the man behind the counter, and then turned back to me. His look said hush. “I told you last night was the last time,” he said, a low growl.
I just swayed that monkey a little more.
A woman in a green dress jingled through the door then and went up to the counter. “You were holding something for me,” she said, and the man put down his polish rag, and they started talking.
You could tell that Delwood was relieved not to have a witness anymore. “C’mon, Louise,” he said. “Be serious.”
But me? For better or worse, I just upped the ante.
“Suppose I said to you that this monkey”—I jerked my finger so that his little monkey body bounced a little—”this monkey represents love to me.”
“Love?” he said.
“The potential for love,” I clarified. “The possibility of it.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, suppose I told you that my daddy, the last time I saw him, me only six years old, he comes into my bedroom to tuck me in and he gives me a little sock-puppet monkey, bigger than this one, but looking pretty much the same” (because the truth is they all do) “and he says to me, ‘Hon, Daddy’s going away for a while, but while I’m gone, this little monkey is gonna take care of you, and any time you find yourself thinking of me or wondering about me, I want you to hug this monkey close to you, and I’ll be there with you. Wherever I am, I’ll be here with you.’ And he touched his heart.”
I wasn’t talking loud, but the man behind the counter and the customer had grown quiet, listening to me now even as they pretended not to. Del wasn’t sweating, not really, but with all the attention—two witnesses to our argument now—he looked like he was or was just about to break out into one.
“And my mom was behind him, leaned against the door watching us,” I said. “Anyone probably could have seen from her face that he wasn’t coming back and that it was her fault and she felt guilty, but I was too young to know that then. And I dragged that monkey around with me every day and slept with it every night and hugged it close. And finally my mom threw it away, which told me the truth. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me when I cried about it, because she’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend and had her own heart broken, I guess. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me. ‘Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting that.’ And I stopped crying. But still, whatever my mama told me and whether my daddy came back or not, I believed—I knew—that there had been love there, there in that moment, in that memory, you know?”
(to be continued)
