Into the Valley (5 page)

Back at the levee road,
she crossed a metal drawbridge to the other side of the river, running beside hundreds of trees with endless ghostly pods (she drove into the orchard itself and decided they were almonds). She came on a town the length of two blocks, with brick façades and an old hotel. Then farther down the levee beyond hunched old walnut trees, a dry feed store, a meat market, an old stone church.

And a bank.

She brought her focus back to the river. It was low, barely grazing the middle of the levees, still and brown as earth.

She followed the walnut trees along the road until she got too close to the capital, then veered away from the river and back out into the fields.

10.

“How do you act?” she'd asked him. “When you do it?”

“Look,” he said, “the truth is, shopkeepers, tellers—chicks especially, I hate to tell you, baby—they ain't expecting them to be fake. They're thinking about the transaction, about getting their cut or doing their job, and fake money looks like real money, and fake checks look like real checks, so why would they think any different? Why would they suspect anything unless you gave them a reason to?” As he spoke an excitement and
urgency grew in his voice, as if he were teaching a young boy the fundamentals of a ball game. “You gotta remember: you're the one who'll give it away, not the paper. I don't go in when I'm nervous. Only when I'm feeling cool. Today, normally, I would have junked it. But you were waiting in the car and I had the trip
planned and that was that. You're shaky, you're sweating, you look funny, you don't do it. This should be the most obvious thing, but people are stupid.”

“What if they stop you?” B. asked.

“You know how many steps it is to an exit. There were eighteen steps today. Twelve if I ran. I don't walk in without knowing how many it takes to get out. And usually I got heat.”

The mention of the gun did not faze her. “Does it make you feel better?”

“What d'you mean?”

“Just in general, do you like the way it makes you feel?” She felt adrenaline rising in her chest.

He paused to consider. “Maybe. Maybe it's like you feel a little smarter than you did before. Like now you're the boss. But it isn't like I do it for kicks, if that's what you mean. Anyone who does it for kicks is a fool.”

“Not for kicks, no,” she agreed.

His eyes were full of her. He pulled her in. “Let's forget about that dirty stuff. I don't think I've said a proper hello. Gotta give a pretty lady her due.” He put his fingers in her mouth to suck, and she knew she could not ask any more about the checks.

The morning she had called Daughtry about the checks, she'd seen a blue crocus during a walk. (She had not known what else to do but keep up the walks in the nice hill neighborhoods.) The blue of the flower with purple tones as if risen out of an underground pool, the miniature cups like perfect pagoda towers. Proof of the beauty of living and the grace of a higher hand, of hope unfolding. And yet it did not enter her. No part of the crocus came inside her, touched her in any way. Her head spinning on and on as if she would die. And she had thought suddenly, inexplicably, of the checks. She'd thought: the walks had not helped and the crocus had not helped but the checks would help.

And she had called Daughtry.

11.

She drove north along a two-lane road. The hot wind through the car made her body thick and slow. She came on an unkempt field. Plants tumbled on the ground in no order; she thought at first they must be abandoned. But the disorderliness continued from one field to the next, on and on, and eventually B. realized it must have some point and the heaps were tomato plants. Vines not tied up but splayed on the ground, leaves and fruit chaotic shades of green, yellow, red. An isolate string of eucalyptus trees bordered one side of the field. In its shade was a piece of rusted farm machinery (a thresher? combine?) and B. had the sudden urge to climb it.

She parked the car, walked over to the high metal engine, trying to ascertain its function to no avail, then hoisted herself up onto the dirty seat. Her bare legs hung down thin and pale near the gears. For miles in any direction the jumbled green plants, the faded blue sky. She closed her eyes, and in the warm, eucalyptus-spiced air, the radio song came into her mind, from the prom with the Brylcreemed boy:
One lovely night, Some lovely night
. She could not remember the rest. In fact, she realized, the only vivid recollection she had of the evening was the violent itch from the wire in her bustier, clawing at herself the minute she got the dress off that night, until flakes of skin drifted from her breasts and red welts swelled on her torso and her fingernails filled with blood. She stopped trying to sing the song.

She tried instead to cheer herself with the dead buttons on the farm machinery. In the pleasurable clicks and tacks, she imagined herself in denim overalls, chewing on a stalk of wheat. She wished for an old red barn and a scarecrow but the tomato fields seemed to have no owners. In the dried grass under the eucalyptus bright orange poppies like flames stood. Hard as she tried, she could not find them beautiful. The wide petals and bare stems and sharp orange in the dead grasses jarred her.

Her eye caught the image of her naked shins on the gear shaft. Bumps of black stubble now sprouted across them. It felt lewd. In her office a new girl had arrived her entire first week without stockings, until the office manager forced her to put on a pair she kept in her desk. B. had been secretly relieved. The first protest she'd ever seen in Boston, people prostrate across railroad tracks to stop commerce to the South or Asia or some place, B. had fixated not on the cause or the chants but on the women's legs, the stockinged shins in pencil skirts and kitten heels. All the men in trousers and button-down shirts and sweaters, but the women's legs dainty across the gunmetal tracks, out of place like the poppies in the dead grass. B. had wondered how they'd lowered themselves without ripping their skirts or running their hose. (Her mother had taught her the proper manner to sit in a skirt: guide the fabric underneath, slide hands over the line of one's thighs, end with fingers folded neatly in lap; her mother had, aside from ski pants and the occasional summer capri, worn a dress every day of her life.) It had been naive, but B. had assumed in San Francisco people would be too sunned and relaxed to protest. Instead they protested all the time, in blue jeans and maxis and tunics and half naked, and B. could no longer hold on to anything in these scenes at all. She tried to avoid them.

Troubled by these thoughts, she climbed down from the rusty machine and kicked around in the fallen curved leaves of the eucalyptus, peeled off strips of blond bark. (The tomatoes
she would not get too near.) She wondered how many checks she
had in total; she'd never counted them. She got the checkbook out (she liked always to carry the ostrich-skin purse with her) and fanned it back and forth in her damp palms.

She decided she did not want to know how many there were.

A motorcycle thundered by at that moment, shattering the quiet. The motorcycles were all over the roads now, B. thought with disgust, the long pipes, the reclining riders in leather and suede.

She got in the car and drove back to one of the towns on the river. She found the old hotel, still fronted by rails for tying up horses. She lay on the poster bed until the whole room disappeared into dusk, the roses on the wallpaper turning black. Children's voices drifted through the window in the dimness, crickets bleating, somewhere a radio playing country-western. B. tried to focus on these sounds of domesticity and summer ease. She tried not to think about the bank three doors down.

She thought how much she loved the heat. In the fog and cold of the city, she had begun to forget the time of year. Was it June or December, she never knew.

12.

That night in her dream she was on the motorcycle. Dressed in black, fringe flying from her arms. The metal vibrating unstoppably between her legs. She began frantically in her sleep to feel for the edges of paper slips in boxes, to slide a check across a counter. She woke up, panting among the black roses. She reached for the antler, but rubbing it had no effect. To calm herself, she thought of what time the bank would open, which side she would part her hair, whether it would be the pink or the coral lipstick. She concentrated on each of these things until she was sure the motorcycle was gone.

13.

In the morning, she took
a bath in the crumbling hotel tub. A ring of dirt rose to the surface. The black grit under her fingernails loosened and she washed her hair. When she emerged from the tub she picked up the ivory sheath from the hanger and reluctantly packed it back into her bag. She had laid out a fresh dress on the bed, a sleeveless powder blue. She combed through her wet hair and drew on eyeliner. Her period was still trickling in. She put in a tampon and washed the browned blood from her fingertips and reached into the vinyl bag for the velvet box.

Her parents had given her the diamond brooch when she turned sixteen. Her mother explained that the brooch marked her passage into womanhood; her great-grandmother had worn it at her wedding and her grandmother and her mother. The brooch was in the shape of a daisy, twenty petaled chains of diamonds glinting from a dense center, so fragile and precise and dazzling it seemed it would transform her just to touch it. They'd brought out a cake with candles and after she blew them out, her mother pinned the diamond brooch on B.'s sweater, her father looking on embarrassedly. They took a picture of B. standing alone with the brooch in front of the cake.

She could recall wearing it to the prom with the Brylcreemed boy, and to her graduation luncheon and perhaps for a college mixer or two. One night in Boston, after the kind of typical day where she had shown up for work on time and done her typing and spoken politely to the attorneys and other secretaries and even had a date later that evening (one of a string of torturous set-ups through her mother during which she had the same conversation about Back Bay and the fall foliage each time), she took the velvet box out of the drawer. She pinned the brooch to her bra and stood in front of the full-length mirror. Her upper arms were muscular, her sternum hard with bone, and the brooch in the lamplight no longer looked precise and dazzling but sharp and overladen, like a brand, a deformity growing out of her. She yanked it off, the pin catching the bra and scraping her chest. Her head began to spin. She sterilized the cut, sewed up the bra and stuffed the velvet box, wrapped in several scarves, into the back of her closet. When the date arrived, she pretended to be sick.

B. stood in front of the motel mirror. The brooch shimmered against the powder-blue dress, but the effect was remote now. She fingered the encrusted petals and noticed her thumbnail was still dirty.

The two women tellers each had long painted nails and teased hair, one blonde with softly flipped-up ends and the other brunette with a round, short style. They counted out the money to patrons, placing bills on the counter gently and politely as if setting out linens for tea.

“How far are the buttes from here?” B. heard herself asking the blonde teller.

“The buttes?” The young woman looked at her warmly, parentally, as if B. had spoken nonsense. She had hooded light blue eyes. “You mean Middle Mountain.”

“I guess so. I don't know the name. Someone told me about them.”

“They're not far, you take Twenty east toward Colusa. But I don't think you can walk in them or anything.”

“I just wanted to see them.”

The teller nodded and again smiled patiently.

B. watched the teller place the check in a drawer and draw out the cash. She counted it quickly, a flash between her pink fingernails, then counted again, dealing it out on the counter. B. noted the neat rhythm, the tidy semicircle of cash. A tendril of the teller's blonde hair fell forward. B. touched her own to make sure it was in place.

“Is there a beauty parlor around here?” B. asked. “Your hair is very pretty.”

The young woman smiled, still patient-looking. “If you go upriver. Jeannie's. They have new dryers, not too hot.” She looked at B. sheepishly. “I really like your dress, and your brooch is lovely.”

“Thank you. I. Magnin for the dress.” Now came the cool expansive feeling. B. let it spread out her back, all the way to her fingers.

“I've always wanted to shop in the city.”

“You should take a special trip.”

B. gathered her bills and put them carefully in her purse. “Thank you,” she said, and walked toward the door.

“Oh, ma'am?” B. was almost outside.

She turned around. The cool expansive feeling had settled throughout her now and the young teller floated like a pale blonde aura over the marble counter.

“You forgot your receipt,” the teller said.

B. took the piece of paper. “Thank you so much.”

“Have a nice drive.”

She walked out of the bank with five hundred dollars.

It was fine now, everything was light. Along the levee road were lines of short leafy green plants bordered by dried yellow tufts of grass. B. stopped at a fruit stand and bought a bag of blackberries. She ate handfuls as she drove, the juice on her lips and fingers (she tried not to stain the powder-blue dress). She had a song in her head from the hotel lobby, about following along on a carousel—the ornate lacquered horses going round in her mind—and she wished for the song to be only about that.

Suddenly she wanted ice cream. She could not remember the last time she'd wanted ice cream. The cool expansive feeling carried her forward. She drove to the next town and asked around at the grocery store for a parlor and when the woman at the cash register told her there was none, she bought a tub of vanilla ice cream with a fifty-dollar bill. “Is there a spoon I could use?” she asked. The woman was still counting out her change, which B. dropped into the paper bag with the ice cream. The woman frowned and shook her head. “No spoons.”

B. sat in the Mustang with the tub in her lap and scooped the ice cream into her mouth with her fingers. She tasted the bubbles in the cream, the liquor of the vanilla. It seemed in just the past few minutes the river had become bluer, the trees edged in gold. A man walked by the car in jean overalls, dirtied from some work in a field (or a barn?), whistling a tune. It sounded hopeful and familiar. Now, eating her ice cream, thinking of the driving and fields and endless road, she was buoyed. She sang the song from the long-ago prom again putting the wounding bustier out of her mind. Her singing voice was high and weak, but more of the words came back to her this time, and she was pleased that she'd put them together, as if she had locked onto something real.

When she'd had enough she left the ice cream tub on the car floorboard and climbed down the riverbank. She washed her hands and mouth and a blue jay screeched from a walnut tree. In the sun, near the water, her mind began to soar. She imagined a small house, herself in it, with light pouring through the windows, quiet all around. She walked along the riverbank and stumbled on more of the poppies. This time she picked a handful and studied them, as if to persuade herself of the beauty
of the bright flaming orange. They had no scent. She brought the bouquet back to the car and laid it on the gear shaft, next to the
antler bone. She would put them in a glass of water somewhere. Maybe in a small house, a glass of water for her poppies.

A young Mexican wearing a stained white hip apron came out from behind a building and dumped a bag of trash. B. beamed at him. She smoothed her dress and sat at the wheel; her hands and face dried in the heat. She touched her fingers again to her hair, wondering how mussed it looked, and started the engine.

For a while she passed through asparagus fields along the river. They looked at first like ferns but soon she noted the vegetable stalks underneath, and her body hummed with a kind of power to recognize a crop by herself (before the hand-painted sign advertising asparagus bunches). The ice cream and this recognition and the still-lightness from the bank kept her moving along. Then she came to the sunflowers.

The stalks were mostly green but the flowers above were dead and hanging. The bent brown heads and leaning stalks made them look like a mass of defeated people, bound to go forward. Slowing down for the sunflowers B. saw the chapel standing in the middle of them.

She parked.

When she got near the sunflowers, they made a baleful dry rattling sound, as if they were trying to talk to her. She tried not to hear this.

B. stepped inside the unlocked door, through ratted spider webs. The whitewashed wood was pocked with dirt, a single window glazed in dust. Behind the altar was a painting of the Virgin Mary. The only other furnishings were a single pew and a cross.

The air was stifling but the room was bright in a way that seemed soothing and pristine. She sat in the pew and flipped through a weathered Bible. She put it down again and folded her hands in her lap.

She had tried once or twice to go to church in the city. The only place she had liked was the Spanish mission, not a church but a museum, with its white adobe walls and frescoes, its plain, uncarved wood. She especially loved the dioramas of peaceful mission life, contented Indians feeding cows and planting corn, beneficent-looking Franciscans, the small
do not touch
signs all around. But every time she left, the transition to daylight, the brown palm fronds rotting in the median outside, the diorama figures and the Christ on the cross far away like childhood dolls, and she realized all over again, unbearably, the hours to go until sunset. So she'd stopped going to the mission too.

The brightness and calm of the chapel in the middle of the field made her think it would feel different. The Virgin Mary's beatific face not unlike the teller's. Like that of a confidante B. had yet to make. She knelt down on the
prie-dieu
, clasped her hands together, looked hopefully at the Virgin.

But as she prayed—for help with the carsickness, for guidance in the valley—the spinning returned violently. The hot unmoved air smothering her. She gripped the edge of the pew.

It had been a mistake to stop.

When she sat back in the car the ice cream was a sickly dull puddle in the carton. She pulled over and dumped it in a ditch and drove on.