5— DECEMBER 17-18
With grace the great eagles fly over the black forests, but the east wind flies more gracefully. Swift is the horse of the Cossacks, but the east wind is swifter. —Hans Christian Anderson
“I’ve always wanted to go to New Orleans.”
“How about Houston? Haven’t you always wanted to go to Houston?”
Adana put a pretty bare foot on the dashboard and rubbed the gloss on her big toe with her thumb.
Devon sighed. “You know, New Orleans isn’t what it used to be.”
“Yes it is – the part I want to go to anyway. They fixed it up first thing for tourists.”
“The French Quarter.”
“No, I want to go to Bourbon Street.”
“Bourbon Street’s a street in the French Quarter.”
“Ohhh,” she cooed. “You’ve been there? What’s it like?”
“It’s kinda ... small ... it’s...”
Adana put her hand in his lap and pressed on the inside of his thigh. That was all it took. “How come you been everywhere and I been nowhere?” she pouted. “I want to be a tourist. I never been a tourist before.”
Devon put his hand on her hand and pressed harder, but she pulled away.
“I’ve got a buddy in Houston,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of buddies.”
“Aw, honey.” She put her hand back on his thigh and into the mounded angle between his thighs, pressing.
“It’d be just the two of us in New Orleans. Just two tourists. Hey, we could be me and you on a honeymoon. C’mon, sweetie, pretty please?”
“Do you really want to get married, baby?” Devon felt like he’d lost a lung.
“Maybe.” Adana rubbed her hand over his chest. “Just maybe I’m getting ready. We got everything we need now. We got that whole mountain of money.” She twisted to the left and gazed at the cardboard Smirnoff box setting between two grocery bags of snacks on the back seat.
“That’s the money to buy our life in Mexico.”
“Aw, there’s so much of it, baby, and I never been to New Orleans.” Facing almost completely backwards now, her right knee on the seat and the caramel-colored skin of her thigh slipping without a hitch over the curve of her butt cheek, rosy beneath the pink of her shorts.
“Just one little peek, sweetie. C’mon. Pretty please?”
“Okay.”
She dropped suddenly back into place and stamped both feet on the dashboard, licking her thumb and rubbing the wetness over her big toes. “Oh goodie. How much longer?”
Having just passed through Mobile, he reckoned they’d be there in two hours, or less.
She was so quiet he thought she’d gotten mad, but she was only thinking about what to wear. He had to promise to stop at the next rest station and then she couldn’t remember which bag held the perfect dress.
“How about you just buy a new one in New Orleans?”
“You don’t know nothing. I still have to look nice to go into the store.”
He locked the doors and trunk of the car carefully and went into the rest station building to look in the vending machines.
In what way were potato chips and chocolate not alike.
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Adana walked. Adana walked and the men watched her. Devon wanted to watch too. No, he wanted her to lace her arm through his and then he wanted to watch the men watch her. Watching Adana walk. Walk with him. No. Not so. He wanted to watch Adana. Adana walk. Walking to her left and slightly behind he wasn’t so much a man but a security detail. The drum of her hips, the sweet smack of her foot leaving the sandal, the ends of her hair curled around her breasts, the glisten behind her knee, her mouth, her mouth, how could he savor the parts when he had to watch out for the eyes, the eyes. The eyes watching Adana walk.
She had found a red dress. Her mind made up, she had found the red dress quickly, a dress he’d never seen before, all puckers and slips. Red like a siren. Red like the sun in his eyes.
She stopped suddenly in front of a dark mirror. “Let’s go in,” she said, sliding her arm against his hip so he would take it.
Not a mirror. A store.
She guiding them to the door and he pushed it open with his free hand.
A jewelry store.
A man with a face slung forward by his nose frowned. The door behind them chimed, Do ... Re ... Mi. Adana laughed and shook her hair off her shoulders. She half-turned to Devon and let her eyes smile just for him.
The man stood up, buttoning his jacket, and Adana, smiling, dazzling, flounced across the blue carpet towards him.
“Ooo, look at those sweetie,” and Devon had the feeling he was supposed to swing his partner, doe-see-doe. She pouted. “But, I don’t want a ring today,” she said. “Not today.”
“May I help you, madam?” said the man. He talked through his nose, but Devon knew he was another thieving pair of eyes like all the rest.
“I want a bracelet,” she said. “Will you buy me a bracelet? A pretty one?”
But she wasn’t really asking him; she wasn’t even looking at him. She spun him around and he caught the scent of the hair just behind her ears, damp. The two of them were instantly in cahoots and he was cut adrift in the narrow channels of glass and blue velvet. With his hands clasped behind his back, he pretended arrogance, but really felt bored, panicky, chilled. The air rushed past his ears. He shuffled his feet. He put his hands on the counter and a fog appeared around his fingertips. Snatching them away he crossed his arms and turned to look at them. The clerk hunched like an money-counter. Adana laughed. Why was her conspiracy only for two? He had the money. He had all the money.
“Devon! Devon sweetheart, look at this!” She held her arm up and dangled her wrist.
He approached so sullenly that she laughed again and threw her arms around his neck.
“Oh darling. It’s so beautiful.” She was looking at the bracelet behind his back.
She removed her arms and let him hold her wrist in his hand. He made a show of appraising it as if he really knew what it was. What was it! It was silver, and maybe those were diamonds cut in squares. Yes, it was like a sparkling circle of light, but oddly masculine. Industrial. Not at all what he would have chosen for her.
“What, you don’t like it?”
“No.”
She held her hand out this way and that. She said simply, “But I do.”
The clerk smiled and his nose dipped to his chin. “The ladies always know what they want, isn’t that right, sir?”
Devon was afraid to look him in the eye.
“Please, please. please,” she said, running her hands up and down his bare arms, letting her eyes stray again and again to her wrist. “Please?”
So he paid for it with the credit card. He should have cut the card up before they left, but he hadn’t. It was in his wallet and she knew it. She knew that once they were out on the street, her unbraceleted arm securely through his own, he would crease the thing back and forth until it cracked in two. She took it for granted, this little going-away present from Mastercard, and ignored him when he threw it purposefully in the trash.
It wasn’t until they were back in the car and she slept with her face turned toward him, that he loved her again. Loved her so completely that the air went stuffy and he had to crack the window. In New Orleans, they’d ordered their martinis and tried the oysters. Weren’t oysters supposed to be an aphrodisiac? Were they supposed to look like a cunt? Cold, slimy, grey, shapeless, much too large, they were nothing like her two smooth petals and the pink pearl within.
She woke up outside of Lake Charles and held his hand as he kept them upright in the whitewater of eighteen-wheelers. The sky turned orange and green and she was quiet and watchful with him and he loved her with all his heart.
On the other side of Houston, he pulled into a rest stop and they slept for a while, her hand on his thigh. It was still dark when she woke him up and told him she had the blood and he needed to find her a drugstore or a WalMart, and then a maybe a Denny’s where they could eat something and she could take care of herself. She fell back to sleep soon after he started the car and once, she moaned.
It was early afternoon when they reached the border at Brownsville. Devon had already taken the precaution of hiding the cash in a compartment within the driver’s seat cushion. Even if they removed the whole seat, they wouldn’t find the opening without a careful, very careful search. He was sure. He was completely sure. He’d gone over it again and again, today and before they left, running his hands over the seams and joints. He’d even dusted the overturned seat with a handful of fine grey earth to disguise the unsettling.
Neither of them had ever been to a border crossing. Still, it was not at all what they’d expected. Carts, walkers, soldiers, bikes, dogs and babies strangled the motorized traffic and it wasn’t until Adana pointed to an arching banner in Spanish that said something, something Mexico that they realized they were inside.
“Or outside,” Adana murmured, looking back at the line of dingy cars following their own dingy car. “Where are we going now? Do you even know?”
“Of course I know. There’s a map under your seat if you want to look.” Why couldn’t she trust him awake like she did asleep? Earlier, smiling in her dream, she’d made a high whistling noise through her nose and he was so careful not to touch her.
“It looks like there’s only one road, and it goes south.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Isn’t it funny that there’s only one?”
“Funny how?”
“Well, there’s no choice then, is there?”
“Maybe there’s nowhere else to go.”
“The Mexicans, at least they can go the other way.”
If she trusted him, then he wouldn’t feel this sweat of unease. The car, even with its air-conditioning, wouldn’t grow stale with fog.
“Are you sorry you came with me, Adana?”
She looked hard at him for a moment, but he didn’t look back. She unbuckled her seatbelt and slid next to him.
“Oh, no sweetie. Not sorry. Not me.” She trailed her fingernails up his arm to the skin above his collar. The bracelet tinkled like ice in a glass. “You’re my honey baby, you know that. I’ll always stick to you.” She laughed from the back of her throat and he took his hand off the wheel and rested it lightly above her knee, smooth and cool and dry.
“We can’t ever go back, you know that.”
She laughed again, softer this time and let her head slide against his shoulder.
“I know it,” she said. “It means your mine, doesn’t it. All mine.”
If only she hadn’t had the blood, he would have stopped the car.
Adana picked out the biggest city on the road, Ciudad Victoria, and announced that they would sleep there in the best hotel. They talked about Mexican food, what they liked and what they hated, and Adana laughed so much that Devon forgot that he wouldn’t be able to touch her for four or five days. Car traffic was light, but long lines of open trucks caravaned along the brown road cut into brown hills. The bright orange tangerines in boxes shone like Christmas in the dust and emptiness.
But he wasn’t sorry. And he wasn’t sad in the least to be heading south on the only road. If he let it sink in a bit, it was like falling, falling through light brown, golden brown empty space. The tangle at the border made a perfect mental barrier. He didn’t have to remember. He was falling away from all of it and he felt strong—hard and supple as a rope.
Adana pointed, but he’d seen it too. A man, a young man, crouched in the ditch, his clothing bleached and coming apart in strips. Perhaps noting the separate tone of the car engine, he whirled to face them, and springing abruptlyto all fours, bared his teeth and snarled like a dog.
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