Into the Valley (13 page)

26.

She woke with a thick, confused feeling, as if she'd slept while everyone else had stayed awake. Her mouth tasted like ash. The sun was trying to break through in futile hatches in the drapes.

B. lifted herself up. Somewhere in the night she had crawled to her bed. She made out the form of the girl watching her in silence. B. stumbled out of bed and grabbed the powder-blue dress off the television and went into the bathroom. As she sat on the toilet she felt the carsickness saturate every pore, juddering and expanding as she wiped herself, as she stood up. The force of it renewed as though it had only been quietly metastasizing. She dug her nails into her palms.

When she came out, the girl was watching television, the smoke from her cigarette twisting in spectral columns in the dimness. Her hair was still half in and half out of its bun, but otherwise she looked no worse for wear. As if the night had been B.'s personal hallucination.

“Whatever you're doing, I want in,” the girl said.

She was inscrutable in the smoke, staring at the television.

B. did not answer.

“My mom collects these figurines,” the girl went on. “All porcelain with gold at the edges, Little Bo Peeps and farmers and squirrels.” She paused with a cool, almost clinical expression. “She puts them in a glass case and dusts them every day. Goes to work and comes home and doesn't talk to my dad, just rearranges the figurines. I don't want any figurines, any cement factory, any goddamn pools. But you need money to be free, don't you? You need money to get away. I want money, for Jed and me.”

The girl's voice like a metal ringing in B.'s skull. The banks arranged themselves in her mind, the long fluorescent lights and neat rows of teller windows and evenly spaced islands for filling out forms. She wanted the girl to shut up so she could be alone with the images.

But the girl would not shut up. “I had my first diaphragm when I was fifteen and when my mother found it, she thought it was a strainer. For tea.
Didn't even know what it was
. Jed says it's a conspiracy they've been feeding us, like cyanide on our corn flakes.”

“Like arsenic on corn flakes.”

“Anyway, whatever you're doing, I want in. I want in on the action.” The metal ringing hammering out in waves.

“I need coffee,” B. said.

Outside, the day glared hot and smoggy yellow. Was it still July? B. did not know. In the office she poured herself a cup of coffee as the woman at the counter openly stared at her. “We're paid up,” B. said. The woman did not even nod, just continued to stare.

The girl kept up her diatribe in the car. “The only person I'd marry is Jed, but we don't have those hangups.” B. wondered if the girl had seen the
LIFE
magazine in the trash. The girl lit a new cigarette, marijuana this time. “We don't need it because I'm his old lady and he's my old man.”

“And he's sleeping with other girls right now.”

“You can goddamn take that back.” The girl jabbed the joint at B., her hair slipping from the half-bun as she spoke. “That's none of your goddamn business.”

They drove in silence for a while, the grass smoke acrid in the car.

“I'm not a prostitute,” B. said finally.

“What then? You deal? My dealer in Fontana drives a yellow Corvette and could get us into the hippest shows in L.A. You don't seem the type.”

“I'm not doing anything.”

The girl sighed, the same sigh B. imagined she gave when her mother misconstrued the diaphragm. “Fine, you're not doing anything. You're just here with a stack of bills under your seat, driving around the valley picking up girls for charity.”

“And there are blood stains,” the girl said. “On the floorboard.”

They drove through low green fields. B. no longer cared about classifying the crops. She felt somewhere in her reeling a need to make the girl stop her crazy ideas, to make her understand. “I like the banks,” B. said. “I like the colors and the furniture and the people. They're safe and quiet. It's not for the money.”

“So work in a bank.”

“You're missing the point,” B. said.

“I'm getting the point alright,” the girl said. “It's called robbing banks. Checks, right? 'Cause I don't see you pulling this off with a gun and mask. Jed tried to pass a check once and they were on him in two seconds flat. But I can see that angle being right up your alley. The diamond and the heels and the hair and all. I can see that being exactly your thing.”

“Why haven't you done any with me? Did they catch you or something?” the girl went on without missing a beat. “Well they won't recognize me.”

“I could help you,” she said. “I could help with your sickness or whatever.”

For a moment, the idea held B. Someone to take away the affliction, to lay her down and pat her hair and tell her stories. But the girl's tired face and disordered hair hardened in front of her and B. knew this girl possessed no such balm.

The teller windows returned to her. The perfect squares
of wood and glass, the soothing ivory walls. She must get rid of
the girl.

The girl was still at it. “I see how the whole lady getup is the angle now. I can do that, like last night. I can do the lady thing, no problem.”

“The dresses are dirty,” B. protested. “They're too big.”

“You said last night it fit perfectly,” the girl retorted. B. suddenly understood her as the druggist had, something out of a German fairytale, vicious and hungry, not to be let in the door.

“I'm not asking for fifty-fifty. Whatever's fair. Any bread will help. For me and Jed, for our trip.”

“We'll do the next one together,” the girl was saying. “We can trade off. I'll do it and you can see how good I am and then you decide how much. And if you don't, I'll report you.”

Everything was moving in its own dreamy, gel-like substance inside the carsickness. “I want to see the gold rush park first,” B. said. “The one the man at the gas station told us about.” She felt inexplicably that the gold rush park was the next step in the journey: the girl's threat, her chatter, the park—all of them ripples inside the thick, surreal wave that would get her back to the banks. No need for any plan. Now she understood. The banks were the only plan.

“Bunch of hicks came and missed the gold, got syphilis and died, the end.”

“I want to see the park first,” B. said implacably. “I don't care what we do after that.”

“Fine. It's your trip. But don't stall on me.”

B. took the small road back to the freeway. She pointed the car in the direction of the foothills. Leaving the valley now had its own part in the dream-gel logic. The girl chatted on, almost nervously, about how she'd stolen from five and dimes and corner stores since she was little. B. flattened the girl's voice into a distant hum. The slope rose almost imperceptibly as they drove, and then all of a sudden they were in the foothills, the anise scent in the bleached grasses and the hunched oak trees and the valley behind remote and blurred.

There were no landmarks near the sign. B. parked in the shadeless lot near a few picnic tables. The heat sucked instantly inside the car. She gathered her purse and sat for a moment, looking out the window. “I won't be long,” she said. The girl said nothing.

At the park entrance, a ranger stood in a shack. A transistor radio crackled behind him, the baseball game organ scaling up and down, the cheers of the crowd listless ripples in the heat. Under the man's ranger hat he wore dark wraparound glasses so that B. couldn't see his eyes. “It's self-guided,” he said, handing her a pamphlet. “Over a hundred years of state history in one park, ma'am. Happy prospecting.” A languid cheer whined from the game.

A lizard with no tail skittered in front of her. A series of small signs appeared along the trail: “Ten thousand men crowded the bank here in search of a dream. But the dream was elusive.” The signs went on about claims and sluice boxes and the few who struck any gold and the multitudes who left destitute. The women were cooks and madams. B. remembered reading that somewhere.

She came to a stack of pans by the river, apparently for trying your own hand at panning. She picked one up and removed the bone-colored heels and climbed slowly into the freezing water. The cold woke her up out of the dream-gel substance, made her sharp and lucid inside the spinning. She moved into the water. The edges of the cut on her foot gilled. She bent down and shoveled up the dirt and shook it around the pan. Nothing. She dumped and tried again, shimmying the rocks and sand and coming up empty again, her hands turning blue in the icy water. She tried once more, the sharp buzzing in her head and throat. It would be easy to keep trying it all day, she saw, to go on hoping and waiting for something to appear. In frustration
she tossed the pan into the water and watched it float away. She
walked out of the river to one of the oaks and sat. From her spot she saw the girl get out of the car, climb onto a picnic table, light a cigarette and lie back in the sun. B. shivered. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse reflexively for a check, forgetting they were in the glove compartment. Instead she came up with the knife from the buttes.

She examined it for a long moment. Its sleekness was
comforting to hold. She angled the blade so the sun glinted
off and it gave her a feeling of sudden reassurance, as if she could
reach into her purse and find whatever she needed. She leaned against the oak tree and let the comfort of the knife wash over her.

When she got back to the Mustang, the girl was in her seat with the door open, feet on the concrete, painting her nails with B.'s nail polish.

“You hit the motherlode?” The girl did not look up from her strokes. Her long hair was out of the bun now and back in her face. The bubblegum pink did not obscure the dirt in her nails. B. walked to the driver's side without responding.

“We should do it now,” the girl said then. “Strike while the iron's hot.” She was brushing out a last line of her big toe, swabbing the remnants with her fingernails.

B. was still at the oak tree, on a calm plane above the girl. “I don't think it's a good idea,” she answered.

“I didn't ask whether it was a good idea,” the girl snapped. “If you don't let me, I'll turn you in.”

The absurdity of the conversation, the threat, did not touch B
. She started the engine and backed out before the girl could move. “Shit, let me close the door!” The girl scrambled to get her feet in. After that, the girl remained silent for a while, having sensed the shift in mood. They drove down a two-lane road from the park and at the first gas station, B. turned in.

“You can change in the bathroom,” B. said.

“I need you to help me,” the girl said.

In the single restroom with its urinal and green flickering light, B. pulled the powder-blue dress out of the travel bag and thrust it at the girl. She got out her makeup case and haphazardly brushed eye shadow and mascara and blush onto the tan face.

“You can't wear my heels anymore.”

“Why not?”

B. ignored her. “We'll go to the nearest town with a store and a bank and get you your own shoes.”

“I'm not paying.”

B. yanked the girl's hair back into a chignon as best she could. The girl said nothing, just stared at her face in the green-lit mirror, in the warm smell of urine and mothballs.

In the car, the girl began talking nervously again.

“It's just that I don't have those housewife hang-ups, you know. He's free, I'm free. But if I come back with the bread, well, the groupies can't give him that.” She absentmindedly smoothed the wrinkled lap of the dress as she spoke.

The next town they reached was two short blocks, a Mexican restaurant and an insurance shop on one side, a fabrics and sewing supply store on the other. Next to that a clothing store. B. parked in front. She noticed as she got out that the girl was still wearing an anklet, a strip of dark leather with hanging white shells. The girl should have taken off the anklet. “Wait here, I don't want them to see you,” B. said. In the clothing store, there were outfits for everyone and everything—overalls, wedding dresses, toddlers' rompers. A crescent-shaped display of shoes for all occasions. B. chose a pair of white pumps in her own size.

The saleswoman boxed up the shoes, offering tips for the stains on B.'s dress (“Little bit of selzer, little bit of baking soda, that'll come right off.”), but B. was fixated on the anklet. It spoiled the calm from the gold rush park. The confusion of dark leather and shells and the powder-blue dress, the incongruity everywhere.

“You need to take that off,” she said slowly in the car. “Take it off if you're going to do it right.”

The girl slipped on the heels and turned them this way and that on the dashboard admiring, the shells clicking. “Got that from the Indian lady too. It's good luck.”

All at once B. remembered the antler bone on the motel room floor. Gone, no luck anywhere.