The Missing Person

Eight

July came, summer bursting into full bloom, the long heat of arid days and the brown edge of wilt around plants. The city announced a water shortage and promoted discounts on rock-garden materials and low-flush toilets. On the Fourth, my mother and David invited me along to watch fireworks explode over the muddy dregs of the Rio Grande, but I declined. Instead I sat in a lawn chair in her tiny backyard listening to the manic end of a bipolar swing: the quiet, crickety hush that usually blanketed my mother’s neighborhood gave way to the whistle of bottle rockets, the screech of tires, the occasional backfire, hoots and hollers of people driving by. Children calling out the names of other children. A vodka and tonic sweated peacefully in my hand.

Of all the seasons, summer felt the most like childhood. I was thinking about vacations when Wylie and I were little, the four of us piling into the car for road trips to Colorado, my dad’s family in Chicago, or, once, the Grand Canyon. My father loved maps, and every night in the motel room he’d unfold one and draw a blue line over the road we’d traveled that day. One time, in a small town on the outskirts of Denver, I woke up in the middle of the night in a strange motel room, dizzy, entranced, sick with fever. My brother was breathing noisily next to me — he was a mouth breather — but he looked like a stranger, and so did my parents in their bed. Laid out on the desk was an unfolded map tracing our path from Albuquerque, heading north, but the world was a puzzle, the geography foreign: I didn’t recognize the route we’d taken or the location of home. My father rolled over and asked what I was doing.

“I’m trying to do my homework,” I told him, “but I don’t understand it.” He pressed a large palm flat against my forehead and then scooped me up. Shivering in my nightgown, I fought against him because it hurt my skin to be touched, and a minute later I threw up in his lap. He was three years older than I was now.

“And so what,” I said out loud, to myself, in the dark. I finished my drink. In a lull of quiet between illegal fireworks I heard the crunching sound of someone walking around the side of the condo. I stood up and found myself on the receiving end of a bear hug given by Angus Beam, my cheek smashed against his bare shoulder, my feet momentarily off the ground. I’d forgotten the odor of his body — part close skin, part distant chemical — and the dense spray of orange-brown freckles across his grinning face.

“Happy patriotic holiday,” he said, releasing me. “Need anything plumbed?”

“Actually, there is a strange smell coming from the garbage disposal. Like a nasty, rotten kind of smell. Can you help with that?”

“I know just the thing,” he said. “Get me a lemon and two glasses of ice.”

“You’re kidding.”

He went into the kitchen without answering. I brought him the supplies, and he cut the lemon in half with a Leatherman he pulled out of his back pocket.

“Watch,” he said. He poured a glass of ice down the disposal, switched it on — a ferocious, grinding sound — and turned on the cold water. He ground up half the lemon, too, then wiped his hands. “You’re all set.”

I stuck my nose over the sink, and the smell was gone. “Hey, it worked,” I said. “What’s the other glass of ice for?”

“I was hoping you’d make me a drink with it.”

His eyes shone. He was the only person around who ever seemed truly happy to see me. We poured vodka, tonic, ice, and lemon juice into his water bottle and went for a walk, holding hands like a couple of civilized people.

The sky was fizzing. Small green rockets popped and showered in the air, and every once in a while a big white explosion was followed by a single bang, like a bomb going off, whose sound hit me right in the chest and made me shudder. At these moments Angus squeezed my hand. We drifted through the streets, not talking much. The smell of innumerable barbecues sailed out on the night air. Cars swerved recklessly through the streets and ran red lights, their stereos pumping. Everybody seemed to be drunk. On the enclosed front porch of an adobe bungalow, the windows of the house itself dark, a dog was shaking piteously and howling in fear. I told Angus about Wylie defining “toad killer” in his argument with my mother’s boyfriend — I stumbled over the word, but couldn’t think what else to call him, really — and he practically keeled over laughing. He was wearing jean cutoffs, and when he slapped his leg his hand left a white imprint on his skin.

“Those people sound horrible,” he said when he finally straightened up. “How do you stand living in that boxy little place with the boxy little backyard and those horrible people? Why don’t you leave?”

The idea had never occurred to me, though I wasn’t about to admit it. “I don’t know,” I said. “My mom—”

“Your mom thinks I’m the devil.”

“I didn’t know you two had met.”

“We haven’t,” Angus said, grabbing my hand again.

We kept walking, in silence now, until we came to the gate of a small, run-down cemetery with crooked graves whose colorful fake flowers competed against an army of weeds. We went inside and looked around, examining all the old Spanish names. Angus was quiet, and I knew he’d decided this was a romantic and memorable context for a kiss. I didn’t think this kind of seriousness suited him as well as laughter did, and didn’t feel like being the target of his courtship, so I got it all over with by kissing him.

We stood there kissing under the moon. I touched the nape of his neck, where delicate hairs lay slick with sweat. His skin radiated heat against the palm of my hand, and his arms came around my waist to pull me closer. There was a flash of red behind my eyes.

“Let’s go to a motel,” I told him.

“We could just stay here. It’ll be gorgeous and unique.”

I stepped back, although I maintained a gentle grip on his hands. “It’ll be more gorgeous in a motel. Also, comfortable.”

“Come on.” He was grinning again, and running a hand through his hair, now all helter-skelter points. “Let’s make love in the face of death. Let’s feel alive.”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “Are you coming?”

He crossed his tanned arms. “I love the way you make unreasonable demands.”

“You’ve got a real knack for compliments,” I said.

I loved the sterile anonymity of the motel, its small bathtub and plywood dresser. We could be anywhere, I said to myself. We are anywhere. An hour later, Angus in the shower, I left a message on my mother’s answering machine.

“It’s me. Lynn. Listen, I’m going to be away for a few days but I don’t want you to worry. I’ll be fine. So will Wylie — I mean, I think he will, not that I’m with him right now or anything. Okay, see you. Bye.”

Angus went out for a six-pack of beer and a pizza, and we sprawled on the bed watching CNN. Every once in a while he’d run the palm of his hand from my neck down my back, then start over again from the bottom. I fell asleep to the weather forecast, blue currents and red arrows crossing a map of the world.

I woke up to see Angus returning to the room from somewhere. He stood beside the bed jiggling keys, his white coveralls gleaming in the shadows.

“Where did you go?” I said. “How long have you been gone?”

“I have to work today,” he said. “Want to come with me?”

“You really work?”

This seemed to offend him, and he stood up straighter, fussily adjusting the fit of his coveralls. “I told you, I’m a plumber. Today I’ve got an out-of-town job. We can go for a drive. It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t have the Caprice, remember? We walked here.”

“I went and got the van,” he said.

“The what?”

He opened the curtains, unleashing massive sunlight through which, squinting, I could make out what looked like an enormous eggplant parked in front of the room. When my eyes adjusted I saw it was a dull purple van with PLUMBARAMA written in white letters on its side. Small drips of white paint burst around the letters, symbolizing either the excitement of plumbing or the reality of bursting pipes, I wasn’t sure which. I got dressed, and short minutes later we were cruising on the highway with Angus singing along to “My Way” from the Sinatra tape he must’ve recovered, along with his hat, from Wylie’s car. He had a surprisingly pleasant voice, trained and lilting, and could hit the high notes without any apparent strain. The city spread into the desert, miles of development, chain restaurants and movie complexes and subdivisions, before petering out. On either side the land lay brown and skeletal, starved of grass or trees, under the enormous sky and the relentless sun.

Fifteen minutes later we passed a billboard with a background of lush, verdant lawns and the profile of a man in white clothes swinging a golf club: FUTURE SITE OF SHANGRI–LA. I laughed out loud.

“What?” Angus said, interrupting his performance of “Night and Day.”

“They’re building Shangri-la out here,” I said. “Did you know?”

“Oh, I know all about it,” he said, flushing red down to his neck. “Developing this land into a golf course is insane. It’s a profanation.”

“It definitely seems like an odd choice of location.”

“Albuquerque’s going to run out of water within twenty years. No water. None. The whole city shouldn’t even be here, but what are they going to do about it? Build another golf course. And do you have any idea how much water a golf course uses? Do you think they’re going to forgo the grass and use native plants?”

I guessed these weren’t rhetorical questions. “I doubt it,” I said.

“They’re leasing the land from a pueblo, and you can’t blame them. Of course they need to make money — but do they have to make it from this?”

“I don’t know.”

“It burns me up,” he said, his face so red that it might well have burst into flame.

Five minutes later he took an exit that led past a gas station and then turned into a parking lot full of cars in front of a windowless gray building, flat and square as a storage compartment. The small neon sign outside read SUNRISE CASINO, with spikes of sunrays poking up from the o, but the sign was turned off and didn’t glow in the late-morning glare. Inside, it still looked like a storage compartment, without decorations or pictures or even a carpet, a place stripped down to the barest of uses. Country music was playing, dim and static, on a bad sound system. Against the walls stood slot machines where people of diverse race and age sat smoking and pulling levers, the smoke hanging thick as cobwebs in the air over the blackjack and roulette tables in the center of the room. With his white overalls and healthy glow Angus looked alien here, and I expected we’d draw some unfriendly stares. But as he strode by purposefully, nodding to people here and there, they nodded casually back. He’d been here before.

I followed him down a green hallway with linoleum floors to a closed door whose black sign said MANAGER. Angus turned, sudden and intent, and kissed me, then knocked and opened the door.

“Gerald Lobachevski, man of many hats,” he said, stepping inside. “This is Lynn Fleming, woman of my life.”

Reclining in a chair behind the plywood desk was the middle-aged Native American man I’d seen at Wylie’s place that first night — the same thick glasses and braided hair and turquoise jewelry. He gave the distinct impression, looking at me, of being unimpressed. I found myself reaching up to tuck my hair behind my ears.

“Wylie’s sister,” he finally said.

I sighed. “Yes,” I admitted.

“You look like him.”

I had nothing to say to this. Angus sat down on the corner of the desk, next to a stapler and a beige rotary telephone. The office had gray cement walls and no windows.

“Scrawny. Same color hair. How’d you get involved with this guy?” Gerald cocked his head in Angus’s direction.

“Gerald,” Angus said.

“I was looking for Wylie,” I said.

“Did you find him?”

“Yeah, I found him.”

“But now you’re hanging around with this guy here.”

“I guess so.”

“Well,” Angus said, “show me what you need done.”

“Do you gamble?” Gerald said to me, ignoring him.

“Excuse me?”

“Blackjack, slots, craps, roulette.”

“Not really,” I said.

Gerald reached into a desk drawer, pulled out several rolls of quarters, and held them out to me. “Give it a whirl,” he said, “while I put this fellow to work.”

I felt dismissed. “Thanks,” I said.

Back in the gaming room, I watched people playing the slots. A woman in a red sweatsuit got up from her seat and wagged her chin in my direction. “I’m going to the ladies’,” she told me. “You can have it.”

I played for a while, and there was a rhythm to the clicking of the machine and the movements of the levers, a consonance and ringing, that I imagined was as addictive as the thought of winning or losing. Apples, oranges, cherries, apples, oranges, cherries. The wild card slot. I couldn’t ever get a match, and lost all of Gerald’s money in a matter of minutes. Since it was going back to him anyway, I wasn’t too concerned. The people around me worked on their games as if in a trance, hunched over machines or tables, hardly speaking, every so often sipping from vat-sized cups of Coke. A wailing country song halted mid-lament, and “Night and Day” came on.

It was noon, and I hadn’t eaten, but there was no food at the casino. Outside, the heat was malicious and extreme, and the wind blew a blinding dust into my face as I trudged up the road to the gas station. The girl behind the register looked no older than thirteen, and she handled each transaction with superb speed, her fingers flying as she counted back the change for lottery tickets and cigarettes. There were wizened burritos baking under the light of a heating element, and some crusty yellow popcorn that didn’t look much better. I settled for a bag of pretzels and a soda, then sat down on the shaded curb outside.

It occurred to me that Angus could easily drive off and leave me here, that in fact I knew very little about him, that I didn’t have enough money to call a cab, that there weren’t any cabs around here anyway.

Trucks barreled down the road, their grilles and fenders shining in the sun.

A truck pulling a horse trailer parked at the pumps in front of me, and a stocky, dark-haired driver looked me up and down before heading inside. From the trailer came sounds of chewing and sneezing, so I went around the back to look. At least ten goats were packed tight in there, and they stared back at me and bleated their complaints.

The door to the shop opened, and the driver stuck his head out. “What you want there, lady?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just curious.”

I took this as a sign to head back to the casino, the blown grit pelting my bare legs. I could see Angus, unmistakable in his white coveralls, standing on the naked brown land behind the building talking to Gerald, who kept gesturing toward the south. Angus was nodding, his hands on his hips, and when he saw me he grinned. Gerald, on the other hand, turned around and looked significantly less happy to see me.

“Hello,” I said. “What’s going on back here?”

“Just finishing up,” Angus said. His coveralls were spotless.

“I don’t know a lot about plumbing,” I said, “but you’re not even dirty.”

“Easy jobs today,” Gerald said. For the first time, he smiled, and his whole face changed; behind his thick glasses, his brown eyes looked suddenly warm. “A few leaky faucets is all.”

“Even so,” I said.

“I’m like a tightrope walker,” Angus said, “ and the coveralls are my net. I have them just in case, but I never fall.”

“Hah. He’s a kidder, this guy,” Gerald said to me. “I’ve seen him plenty grimy, don’t you worry.”

“So did you win us a million dollars?”

“I lost everything,” I said. “I had to sell the van.”

“Glad to hear it,” Angus said. He put one arm around my shoulder and extended the other to Gerald, who shook it. “We’ll be off.”

We walked back through the casino, Angus carrying a toolbox this time, waving to all and sundry. Most people ignored him but a few, including the woman who’d given up her slot machine for me, glanced up and smiled. She had returned to the same machine, and there was a bucket full of quarters in her lap, probably all the money I’d put into it. She saw me looking at the bucket and winked.

As we got into the van, I was still trying to figure out what Angus had been doing there. “How long have you known Gerald, anyway?” I said.

He shrugged. “Nobody really knows Gerald Lobachevski,” he said. “I just work for him every once in a while.”

“What kind of name is Lobachevski, anyway?”

Angus started the van. “His father was some Russian anthropologist — pretty famous, supposedly. Came to New Mexico to do research at a pueblo and had a little romance. He wound up leaving again before Gerald was born. I don’t think Gerald ever even met the man, but he likes having the name. He likes to be different from everybody else.”

I was going to ask more questions, but became distracted when I realized that instead of turning back toward town, Angus was driving north.

“Aren’t we going back?” I said.

“Now why would we do that?” he said, and winked. Then he turned up the music, which was no longer Sinatra but something classical I didn’t recognize.

“Because we’re in the middle of nowhere?”

“I wish that were true,” he said. “But it’s not.”

The landscape changed from brown to red, with green pine trees unfurling their branches. We were in the mountains now, and I rolled down the windows to let in the cool air. There were no houses, no towns, no nothing. It looked like nowhere to me.

He turned onto a dirt road and the van shuddered in its ruts. I looked at his freckled profile. He was leaning his head on his left hand, his elbow propped against the window, and looked calmer than I’d ever seen him.

He parked deep in the woods, the trees thick and tall, and what sunlight reached the ground beneath them was filtered thin. Angus got out, came around to my side, and opened the door. For some reason he was carrying his box of tools and for a second, looming there in his absurdly clean outfit, he looked like an undeniable threat.

“Aren’t you getting out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you going to molest me or something?”

“Excuse me,” Angus said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I believe you’ve already molested me. More than once. Could you get out now, please?”

“It’s just that I associate being alone in the woods with, like, horror movies.”

“That’s both sad and ridiculous,” he said.

I climbed out and followed him through the woods into a small clearing, where he set the toolbox down. My sandals were full of pine needles and dirt. Birds were chatting away in the trees. There was something weird about the place, and it took me a second to realize what it was. “It’s cool up here,” I said. “Much, much cooler.”

“I thought you’d like that.” He unzipped his coveralls and took them off, revealing the usual ripped shorts and tattered T-shirt. He folded the coveralls lengthwise and laid them on the ground. “Have a seat,” he said. The coveralls were still warm.

He sat down by the toolbox and opened it up. “I asked Gerald to go to the store for us while you were gambling his money away,” he said. He pulled out and laid on the ground a succession of items: a cluster of grapes, a block of cheese, sliced sandwich bread, a tomato, a can of tuna fish, a whole pineapple, a rotisserie chicken, a bottle of wine with a screw-off cap. It was a big box.

I started to laugh.

“Best I could do,” Angus said. He took his Leatherman out of his pocket and started cutting up the pineapple on the lid of the box. The spiny skin fell to the ground in spirals. The sky was a flat, clean blue, and the sun was making everything glisten. He kissed me and held my hand, his own hands sticky with pineapple. I lay down on the coveralls and wrapped my fingers around the belt loops of his cutoff shorts. He smelled like water and ammonia and pineapple.

“I don’t know why we’re here,” I said.

“You really are out of touch with nature,” he said. “Not to mention the concept of hanging out.”

“No, I mean, I feel like I’m probably not your usual kind of person. I picture you with an earth-mother type who doesn’t shave her legs and hews her own wood. I couldn’t survive a day by myself in the outdoors. I don’t even know what hewing means, come to think of it.”

He looked at me, then touched my face, and his expression almost made me laugh; but then I was past it, on the other side of laughing.

“I don’t know anybody like you,” he said.

I almost choked in exasperation. New York, I wanted to say, was full of people exactly like me. With Michael, for example, I’d always known I was a type, part of a crop, one in a long line of art-history girls with the same education and wisecracks and shoes. If he could see me now, on my back in the woods with a plumber and a pineapple, he’d raise an eyebrow and smirk. In my mind I told him to go to hell, and returned my attention to the moment at hand. “I’m not an unusual person” is what I finally said. “You, on the other hand, are definitely an unusual person.”

Angus put his sticky hand on my bare ankle. “You smell good.”

“Sure, compared to the other people you know,” I said.

He kissed me, and I kissed him back. I didn’t know how long we spent there, and didn’t care. After lunch we took a nap, then went for a walk. When we got back to the van it was dusk.

I fell asleep in the van heading back to Albuquerque. When I woke up, my mouth was dry and cottony from hanging open the whole time, and I smacked my lips together, dazed. Angus was driving with one hand on the wheel and his hat pulled down over his eyes. We drove past eighteen-wheelers barreling along the interstate, past hordes of motorcycles and people hauling boats back from whatever excuse for a lake they’d managed to find around here.

Angus bought gas when we hit town, peeling some bills off a wad of cash in the glove compartment, and when he got back in the van he asked where I wanted to go.

I looked at the money; it was a ball the size of a grapefruit, seemingly composed of large bills. “I know we can’t keep staying in motels,” I said, “but the thought of going back to that apartment with everybody else doesn’t really appeal to me.”

“A motel it is,” Angus said.

We drove back to another brown room, with brown wallpaper and a brown flowered bedspread. I took a long, hot shower. When I came out, he was asleep face-down on top of the bedspread, his arms spread wide to either side. I turned on the TV and watched a silent version of a sitcom from my childhood, Angus snoring gently, but I felt restless. I picked up his keys with the vague idea of going out to get us something to eat. The parking lot smelled strongly of baking asphalt and exhaust. I got in the van and glanced in the back at milk crates stuffed wildly with tools, which Angus, apparently, had emptied out of the toolbox for our picnic. There were wrenches and hoses and a plumber’s snake and some other tools I didn’t recognize. Which is why it took me a moment to notice the gun. It was stuffed in a crate with no regard for safety, and I grabbed its long barrel and pulled it out.

Then I went back into the motel room and shook Angus awake. “Why do you have this?” I demanded.

He rolled over, his freckled face creased by the polyester bedspread. “What are you talking about?”

“A gun. You have a gun. You have wads of cash and a gun.”

“This is New Mexico. Everybody has a gun.”

“I don’t have a gun.”

“You do right now,” he pointed out. “And I wish you wouldn’t wave it around.”

“Explain this to me.”

“Fine,” he said. He rolled to his side, quicksilver fast, and he had the gun out of my hand before I knew what was happening. He pointed it at the wall and shot, the gun making a surprisingly docile sound. I walked over to the wall and saw a BB embedded in the brown wallpaper, small and silver as an earring.

“I’m a peaceful person,” Angus said, “but I spend a lot of time alone in the desert, and going alone into people’s houses. Sometimes it helps to look less peaceful than I am.”

“Oh,” I said, rubbing my fingers over the bubble of the BB in the wall. When I turned around to apologize, he was asleep and snoring again, the gun dropped to the floor.

I lay down next to him and listened to the drone of traffic from the highway, the shuffling noises people made as they moved in and out of rooms. The occasional rustle of Angus moving. The rhythm of his breath.