Play It as It Lays

73

THEY HAD TEN DAYS LEFT on the desert.

"Come out and watch me shoot today," Carter said.

"Later," she said. "Maybe later."

Instead she sat in the motel office and studied the deputy sheriff's framed photographs of highway accidents, imagined the moment of impact, tasted blood in her own dry mouth and searched the grain of the photographs with a magnifying glass for details not immediately apparent, the false teeth she knew must be on the pavement, the rattlesnake she suspected on the embankment. The next day she borrowed a gun from a stunt man and drove out to the highway and shot at road signs.

"That was edifying," Carter said. "Why'd you do it."

"I just did it."

"I want you to give that gun back to Farris."

"I already did."

"I don't want any guns around here."

Maria looked at him. "Neither do I," she said.

"I can't take any more of that glazed expression," Carter said. "I want you to wake up. I want you to come out with us today."

"Later," Maria said.

Instead she sat in the coffee shop and talked to the woman who ran it.

"I close down now until four," the woman said at two o'clock.

"You'll notice it says that on the door, hours 6 a.m. to 2 P.M., 4 p.m.

to—"

"6:30 p.m.," Maria said.

"Well. You saw it."

"What do you do between two and four.'

"I go home, I usually—" The woman looked at Maria. "Look. You want to come out and see my place?"

The house was on the edge of the town, a trailer set on a concrete foundation. In place of a lawn there was a neat expanse of concrete, bordered by a split-rail fence, and beyond the fence lay a hundred miles of drifting sand.

"I got the only fence around here. Lee built it before he took off."

"Lee." Maria tried to remember in which of the woman's stories Lee had figured. "Where'd he go."

"Found himself a girl down to Barstow. I told you. Doreen Baker."

The sand was blowing through the rail fence onto the concrete, drifting around the posts, coating a straight-backed chair with pale film. Maria began to cry.

"Honey," the woman said. "You pregnant or something?"

Maria shook her head and looked in her pocket for a Kleenex.

The woman picked up a broom and began sweeping the sand into small piles, then edging the piles back to the fence. New sand blew in as she swept.

"You ever made a decision?" she said suddenly, letting the broom fall against the fence.

"About what."

"I made my decision in ’61 at a meeting in Barstow and I never shed one tear since."

"No," Maria said. "I never did that."