Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

“That’s great,” I say, “and the northern girls?”

  “With the way they kiss . . .”

  I sing with her, walking backwards as far as I can, calling on her to raise the volume of her voice as I get farther and farther away. When she forgets the words, she sings syllables, da-da-da. When I can see the car I break into a run, and find a tissue that I’d used to blot lipstick, and bring it back to Rebecca.

  “I wish they all could be California girls,” she says, as I run up to her. “You see? No one came near me.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  We lie down on the hood of the Chevy, our backs on the slope of the windshield. I try to listen for the bends of the Colorado River, which we passed several miles back. Rebecca tells me she is going to try to count the stars.

  We pass the last Yodel between us like a joint, taking smaller and smaller bites at the end so that neither one of us will be accused of finishing it. We argue about whether or not a helicopter’s lights are a shooting star (no) and if Cassiopeia is out at this time of year (yes). When the cars are not passing us, it is almost quiet, save for the hum of the vibrating highway.

  “I wonder what it is like here during the day,” I say aloud.

  “Probably a lot like it is now. Dusty, red. Hotter.” Rebecca takes the Yodel out of my fingers. “You want it?” She pops it into her mouth and squashes it against her front teeth with her tongue. “I know, disgusting. You think it gets really hot here, hot like in L.A., where the roads breathe when you step on them?”

  Together we stare at the sky, as if we are waiting for something to happen.

  “You know,” Rebecca says, “I think you’re taking all this really well.”

  I lean up on one elbow. “You think?”

  “Yeah. Really. I mean, you could be falling apart, you know?

  You could be the type who doesn’t stop crying, or who won’t drive on highways.”

  “Well I can’t be,” I say, honestly, “I have to take care of you.”

  “Take care of me? I can take care of myself.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I say, laughing, and I’m only half joking. It is easy to see that in two or three years this daughter of mine will be a knockout. This year in school she read Romeo and Juliet, and she told me pragmatically that Romeo was a wimp. He should have just taken Juliet and run away with her, swallowed his pride and worked at some medieval McDonald’s. What about the poetry, I asked her. What about the tragedy? And Rebecca told me that that’s all very well and good but it isn’t the way things happen in real life.

  “Please,” Rebecca says, “You’re getting that weepy cow look again.”

  I would like to lie here for days with my daughter, watching her grow up in front of me, but since I am running away from my own problems I don’t have that luxury. “Come on,” I say, nudging her off the hood of the car. “You can hang your head out the window while we drive and finish counting.”

  By the time we reach the signs for Gila Bend the soil turns brick red, veined with night shadows of cacti. The sides of the road level around us so that it seems we should be able to see the town and yet there is nothing but dust. Rebecca twists around in her seat to double-check that we have read the green sign correctly. “So where is this place?”

  We travel several miles without seeing traces of a civilized town. Finally I pull to the side of the road and turn off the ignition. “We could always sleep in the car,” I tell Rebecca. “It’s warm enough.”

  “No chance! There are coyotes and things here.”

  “This coming from the girl who was willing to go to bathroom with all the lunatics hiding in the woods?”

  “May I help you?”

  The sound startles us; for three and a half hours we have heard only the patterns of each other’s voices. Standing beside Rebecca’s window is a woman with a tattered grey braid hanging down her back. “Car trouble?”

  “I’m sorry. If this is your property, we can move the car.”

  “Why bother,” the woman says, “no one else has.” She tells us that we have come to the Indian Reservation in Gila Bend, the smaller one, and points out furry lavender shapes in the distance that indeed are houses. “There’s a larger reservation about six miles east, but the tourist traps are here.” Her name is Hilda, and she invites us to her apartment.

  She lives in a two-story brick building that smells like a dormitory--federally subsidized housing, she explains. She has left all the lights on, and it is only when we are inside that I realize she has been carrying a paper bag. I expect her to pull out gin, whiskey-I have heard stories-but she takes out a carton of milk and offers to make Rebecca an egg cream.

  On the walls are woven mats in all the colors of the southwestern-rainbow, and charcoal drawings of bulls and canyons. “What do you think of her,” I ask Rebecca, when Hilda is in the makeshift bathroom/kitchen.

  “Honest?” Rebecca says, and I nod. “Well, I can’t believe you’re here. Have you lost your mind? It’s midnight, and some person you’ve never seen in your life comes up to the car, and says, Hey, come to my place, and she’s an Indian to boot, and you just pick up your things and go. Whatever happened to never taking candy from strangers?”

  “Egg creams,” I say. “She hasn’t offered us candy.”

  “Jesus.”

  Hilda comes out with a wicker tray that carries three foamy glasses and ripe plums. She holds one up and tells us they are grown locally by her step-brother. I thank her, sipping at my egg cream. “So tell me how you came to be on Dog Forked Road at midnight.”

  “Is that what we were on?” I turn to Rebecca. “I thought it was Route Eight.”

  “We turned off Route Eight,” Rebecca says. She turns to Hilda. “It’s a long story.”

  “I have all the time in the world. I’m an insomniac. That’s what I was doing on Dog Forked Road at midnight. Milk’s the only thing to soothe my heartburn.”

  I nod sympathetically. “We’ve come from California. I guess you could say we’ve run away from home.” I try to laugh, to make light of the situation, but I can see this woman whom I hardly know staring at the bruises on my wrists.

  “I see,” she says.

  Rebecca asks if there is some place she can lie down, and Hilda excuses herself to fix up a fold-out couch in the other room. She collects pillows from one closet and sheets colored with Peanuts characters from the kitchen pantry. “Get some sleep, Mom,” Rebecca says, sitting beside me on the loveseat. “I worry about you.” Hilda ushers her into the bedroom, and from my angle I can see Rebecca slip in between the sheets, sighing the way you do when you run your ankles along all the cool spots. Hilda stands in the doorway until my daughter falls asleep, and then she steps back and presents me with Rebecca’s face, in profile, lit silver and traced with the grace of the moon.

  10 J OLEY

  Dear Jane-

  Do you remember when I was four and you were eight, when Mama and Daddy took us to the circus? Daddy bought us small flashlights with red tips that we could swing around and around when the clowns came out, and peanuts-so many! the shells we stuffed in our pockets. We saw a lady stick her head inside the jaws of a tiger; and a man dive into a small bucket from a place way up in the air that I thought must be Heaven. We saw brown-skinned midgets flipping over each other, catapulted by ordinary seesaws like the one in our backyard, and Mama said, Now don’t you two do this at home. And Mama held Daddy’s hand when the acrobats did their most difficult trick, swinging on a silver trapeze and locking in midair like mating falcons for just a moment, before they grabbed another trapeze and went separate ways. I missed the trick because I was so busy looking at Mama’s hand; the way her fingers twisted between Daddy’s as if they had a right to be there; her diamond engagement ring holding all the colors I had ever seen.

  Then there was a kind of intermission, do they call it that at a circus? And a man in a green coat began to mill through our seating section, peering into the faces of the children. And suddenly a woman was standing in front of me, calling TOM! TOM! and pointing. She bent down and told Mama I was the most adorable little boy she’d ever seen, ever. And Mama said that’s why sh