One Day the Wind Changed (13 page)

The man who'd claimed to be his father had hell's own sunburn. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, one ashen disaster after the other, and apparently never shaved, though apparently he didn't produce much facial hair either. Mel didn't believe the guy was his dad, though he could have been. He came from Midland and he knew a thing or two about Mel's mom. A thing or two is all there
was
to know: Grey Goose martinis,
very
dry, three olives, starting at seven every evening. Perpetual runs in her knee-highs. What else? A genuinely sweet old gal.

“I'll take two hundred for it,” the man told Mel just before the rain started up that Friday afternoon.

Mel looked at the car in the cloudy, dust-filled light. “Title and registration?”

“Don't even
make
hatchbacks no more,” the man muttered.

Of
course
all the paper had been tossed. “Hundred fifty,” Mel said.

“Shit.” The man held out his hand.

Mel pulled the cash straight from his shirt pocket: two days' take at the trading post. “How you going to get where you're going now?” he asked the man.

The man locked eyes on the ground. “I'm sorry I run out on you,” he said. “And I'm shamed your Mama'd passed by the time I got around to missing her.” He tugged a black matchbook from the back pocket of his jeans. The cover said “Dog House Lounge, Midland, Texas.” “You ever … you know … this is where you'll find me.” He scribbled “Jerry K. Hibbings, Pop” inside the matchbook cover and handed it to Mel. He slapped the cash against the palm of his free hand. “You done your old man a favor here today. And I'm happy to help my boy get a few miles down the road.”

Nope. That last line crossed the bounds, Mel thought. Until then, the old fellow had played it pretty well. Avoiding the saccharine, avoiding details. Gliding on the sheer boldness of the approach. Hooks, simple scams-they're never as easy as they look. You ride whatever moves. After all, Mel was a fake Indian. He could accept, even appreciate, a fake dad.
Give us this day our daily cornmeal, and forgive us our price-scalping as we forgive those who scalp us
. Oh yes, the desert was full of these folks, drifters and grifters and truckers and service station vending machine suppliers with a little black market on the side, lost souls hoping to fuck up other lost souls by the most obvious and sentimental means—methods that usually worked because even a screw-job was interesting, something to talk about over tequila at the end of another sun-numbed day.

The man pocketed the cash and started walking. It wasn't for another six hours, while he lay in bed with Wilma listening to the force of the rain whip dogwood leaves against the back of the house, that Mel was tempted to go after him. Not for the dad-stuff—or to find out how the fellow had figured him for a mark, knowing Mel would tumble to the “long-lost” bit—but because he'd realized, during the evening, without thinking much about it, what throwaways they were, he and the other self-employed, high desert hipsters who met at the roadhouse after work to polish each other's detachment. They were children of alcoholics or addicts-straight from the loins of Loathing and Fear—and most of them were on their way to replicating the inebriated exploits of the missing and the dead. This, he had cottoned to tonight, as the radio warned of flash flooding and he pictured the man walking down the road, away from the trading post, was the
real
reason they'd dropped out in the middle of the wasteland, pretending to long for stability (whatever the hell
that
is, some drunken Baudrillard would shout).

The desert-huddle didn't cradle him, didn't distract him from his debts anymore. Besides—something
interesting
had happened to him this afternoon! He'd purchased a junker from a stranger who'd shown up out of the blue, out of the summer's first dirty blue thunderheads (and the shadows they cast on the land), a codger with an outlandish story that had as much chance of being true as a douser's willow stick, and they'd played it casual with each other, like they both had something to lose if the transaction hadn't reached a satisfactory conclusion.

He left Wilma asleep in the bed and walked to the dark kitchen for a glass of tap water. Rain licked the window hard, now soft the way Wilma used to run her tongue up and down his chest. He laughed at himself for imagining this. Things were finished with Wilma, just as they were over with the trading post. He'd been aware of these seismic shifts for eight or nine months now: the last time it
really
rained. Funny, how heavy the sun could sit on your skin. And the moon. Hot and cold, gripping you tight.

Wilma knew this parting would come. Mel felt sure of that. She had once been married to a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives who, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, decided (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly—who could predict the American electorate?) that her Kiowa blood would be a career-killer. Wilma was a creature who could scissor-kick her way through any damn flood.

Mel spent the rest of the night watching her sleep, the curve of her back like the curve of a scallop shell: an object, a shape you couldn't find for hundreds of miles in any direction on this parched plain. He knew what he was leaving. But something interesting had happened this afternoon, and it made him acknowledge that nothing much had happened to him in a long time. The false, knowing apathy that was the currency of his compatriots had become real and flinty and killing. He couldn't fake it anymore: fake indifference, fake horniness.
Fake Indian
(that had been Wilma's idea, not a bad one, just another idea in a world full of the fool things, canceling each other out). The falseness had hardened on him, and he'd have to pay for letting that happen—how had he let that old man walk away?—by shedding the externals, finding his soft skin again and admitting he was just an infant, ready to bawl his guts out.

Buck's Java Stop opened at dawn and Mel was there for a tall one, Guatemalan, Room for Cream. The place was tricked up like a Starbucks, with abstract bur vaguely happy sun-faces painted on the menu board, green tabletops and chairs. Buck sold the
New York Times
(always two days late because of delivery problems) and music CDs (local artists, mostly), but from the look of things, the merchandise wasn't moving. Buck needed a fresh gimmick. An old poster for the cheap-seat theater hung, torn and curling, by the door.

At an ARCO station on the cast side of Clovis, Mel filled the Honda's tank. Less than twenty bucks! Perverse. Moderation in Oil Country, in the Republic of Natural Gas? It wasn't right! ARCO didn't even exist anymore. Mel had read this in an old edition of the
Times
. British Petroleum had bought the company out. West is east. Po Mo, man. Shifting sands.

Yesterday's rain was just a rumor now. The desert had regained its crusty surface. More than once, as he headed for the Texas state line, tattooed men in semis crowded Mel, like they wanted to run him off the road. What was this hatch backed rust-bucket doing on the good and true path?

He shook his head. He still saw things with a cynic's hard brain. But what was he feeling? Yes, what
was
that, stirring in his belly? “Buck's coffee,” he said aloud. “That's all.” Then he called himself a shallow, sodden prick. He was practicing, practicing finding the pained, soft skin.

The car sputtered and chugged. The clutch was hit and miss. It wasn't until he'd reached southeast Midland—rows and rows of refinery tanks and an electrical power station—that it dawned on Mel: the old man couldn't have walked here by now. Not that he'd remained on foot, necessarily. Or headed back here. Why would he turn around and make
himself
a mark, a target for those he'd wronged?

Mel looked at his face in the rearview. “What are
you
after?” he asked his reflection.

He found the address on the matchbook cover, stopped and asked directions at a 7-Eleven. The lounge turned out to be a boxy cinder-block building, painted pink, squeezed between two billboards: “Country the Way Country Should Sound” and “Pregnant? Call—” The lounge had no sign, only, in black paint on the front wall, DOG HOUSE, CLOSED MONDAYS.

The car didn't want to die when Mel turned the key and pulled it out of the ignition. It choked and rattled a few times, then sighed and gave up the ghost. Mel felt pretty sure it wouldn't start again, but he didn't want to know. He got out, stretched, listened to the sound of gravel under his boots, and shut the door. The air smelled of refineries, tortillas from a nearby café. The sky was a faded, norain purple, illuminated now and then by flash-lightning.

The Dog House was every lounge that Mel had ever entered. At the end of the bar sat his mother. Not his mother, of course, but it might as well have been her. Straight scotch, no rocks, instead of a three-olive martini. If she'd worn hose, the runs would have resembled interstates on an out-of-register service station map. As it was, her varicose veins did the trick.

On the far wall, behind an unused stage, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders poster, at least ten years old. Guy Clark on the box.

An avuncular man sat at a table, a “Mama's friend” character, the kind that had fattened “Mama's little kitty” over the years, which along with his athletic scholarship had helped Mel get to college.

Behind the bar, a pasty man with a big head hunched over a wet blue rag. Mel opened the matchbook in front of the man's face. “Seen him?” he said. If nothing else, he figured, he'd learn something about the fellow who'd ditched the car until the fellow turned up.
If
he turned up.

“Jerry Hibbings?” the bartender said. He squinted at Mel in the dim blue light that came from somewhere above and to the right of the bar. “Jerry Hibbings died. Long time ago. Three, four years.”

Mel blinked a few times, lowered the matchbook to the bar. He ordered a beer to cover whatever he was feeling. Well, hell. Fake Indians, fake faked fathers.

Almost certainly, the Honda was stolen. But he'd known that. All along, he'd known that the most interesting thing that had happened to him was the car itself, the precarious question of how far it would take him before it conked out or got him in trouble, or both.

He turned to his mother. She nodded, half-asleep over her scotch. He thought of Wilma in their bed—her bed—waking up without him. Always in the mornings, before their anger flared, before either of them had come fully awake, she'd reach for him under the covers just for the warmth of his body. The only real moments he knew.

Like this. This is what I came for, he thought, watching the woman shake herself awake. He also thought: all my life I've been weeping, without sound and without tears. She smiled at him. Then her attention drifted to a silver television set on a shelf behind the bar. The screen was blank. “Now,
that's
some scary shit,” she said. “Look at that.”

Mel left his beer untouched. He dropped some change on the bar. Without thinking about it, he crossed out the word “Pop” on the inside of the matchbook cover, said, “Here you go, honey,” and slid the matchbook next to the woman's drink and a soggy yellow napkin. “Jerry K. Hibbings. Just ask for me. I'll be around. I'll take care of anything you need.”

“Thank you, sweetie,” she said. She gave him the warmest smile.

He turned and left the lounge. In the gravel parking lot he opened the car door and left the key inside. A half-moon poked up, low in the west. Little tongues of flame rose from the intricate tubing and steel pipes of the refinery across the road, whose sign said, without irony, “Working hard, to bring you a Golden Tomorrow.” Mel walked.

G
riffin stopped the car on the eastern side of the bridge, near a concrete pylon black with old algae. All around the bridge, the land, crusted and mildly hilly, seemed haunted by the absence of water. Could wood and steel confess dispiritedness, Griffin wondered. The bridge appeared to be ashamed of its presence here. Splinters and rust; shadows of vines and vanished plants imprinted in the textures of the wood; the skin of the steel, rough-hewn and flaking.

The bridge had always been a mistake: built to the wrong specifications. Its pitch was too steep, causing dizziness, drivers claimed. And it swayed. Concrete, steel, and wood were not supposed to
sway
, swore Griffin's mom when he was just a boy, so she always left the car, politely but firmly, whenever Griffin's father, driving the family out of town for a picnic or a visit to nearby relatives, approached the bridge. “Ain't gonna see Glory at this rate,” Griffin's dad called to her as she slipped from the front seat. She'd grip the bridge's railing and mince forward in her fine leather heels (which she always wore, even for an outing in the wilderness). “If I get there, I'll get there
alive!
” she yelled in return.

Early on, Earl, Griffin's brother, two years older, joined her in her stilted walks across the bridge, while Griffin and his father drove its length, parked the car, and waited for them on the other side. “We coulda made it as far as Mexico City by now—coulda been sipping margaritas—if you hadn't held us up,” said Griffin's father, arms crossed and sweating on his chest.

“Don't you nettle me, old man, else I'll throw myself off this infernal contraption and then you'll be sorry,” said Griffin's mother.

Her husband told her, “It's like the two of you don't
want
to leave town.”

The family's bedrock truth. Griffin's mother never ventured more than a few miles from the place; she died while Griffin was finishing college, up in Dallas. Earl dropped out of high school when he was seventeen and went to work in the Eagle Valley Paper and Box Factory, the only job he would ever have.

Now, nearly thirty years later, Griffin had returned to Texas for his brother's funeral. Years ago, he'd heard that the river had dried up—where does so much water go?—but to see the sandy bluffs emptied of moist vegetation, to hear the heightened
zizzle
of the horseflies (no longer muffled by the rapids), to smell the bready staleness of sun-touched stones stiffened Griffin's spine and made him feel old.