My mother once took me on a trip.
I was a little kid and I think I must have been five years old or something close to it because I had just finished my first year of school, and it was right at the beginning of the summer vacation and my mother said, “We’re going on a trip.”
There was this old car that we had which I think was a blue car and she had packed it with some things like blankets and soft toys and she had made a sort of nest in the passenger seat for me, I remember, and there was a small pink dolphin on a chain which hung down from the rearview mirror and it moved and caught the light as we drove and my mother said don’t play with that and so I did and I kept reaching for it, reaching up while she was driving which must have been distracting for her and she kept saying no, and sometimes as we drove I said can I go to the bathroom and I have memories of waiting in a long line for the bathroom somewhere in some service station with a hand holding mine, which was my mother’s hand, but I have no memories of the body attached to it. I have a vague impression of a distant face.
I think she took that vacation because she thought she should and because she thought that maybe I would remember it forever and that maybe it would become a treasured memory, a sort of last-ditch attempt to give me one of those, because I don’t remember other trips after that one.
Anyway.
All I can remember of it now is waiting in line for the bathroom.
We got a lift down to La Maya with an almond salesman.
He picked us up almost right away. He was short and his hair was buzzed and he wore a green shirt which said Thompson Growers on it.
He had a truck full of almonds that he was taking from the north, where they had been grown in an almond field, to the south, where there was no way to grow almonds anymore.
He said there was no way to grow almonds there now because the climate had changed in the last ten years.
Once they had grown almonds and oranges and lots of other things in the south. Now they couldn’t because the weather was volatile and the wet seasons down there had become too wet so that all that could be grown were things that liked the wet a lot, which was mainly alligators.
Once he got to the south the almond salesman’s almonds would be made into almond cookies in a factory owned by one of the largest cookie-manufacturing companies in the nation.
The company was called Leo Fitz Confectionery Company.
They had an emblem which was a kid sitting on a cookie that was flying like a magic carpet and the kid was wearing a crown and a cape.
The almond salesman said, “It’s five grams of almonds per cookie. Twenty cookies to a pack. You think how many packs of cookies they make a day in that place. You think how many almonds they need. That’s I don’t know how many almonds. That’s good for me. That’s good for my business. All this climate change is good for my business. Things have worked out for us up north.”
He looked at us to see if we were listening.
I gave a half smile.
He said, “I’ll give you a guess how many tons of almonds I move a year.”
“I don’t know.”
“Go on. Guess.”
“I don’t know.”
“Then I’ll tell you.”
“OK.”
“Fifty.”
“Oh.”
In La Maya there was some sort of a grassy public area beside the southern beach of the city and the almond driver dropped us near it and we walked over there to find somewhere to sleep off a few of the midday hours. It was crowded and people had strung their hammocks in small spots of shade out of the heat of the afternoon, and they had set up little smoking portable barbecues to fry sausages, and children were running around topless and shouting in high voices.
The women wore long fringed skirts in bright colors. The men wore old shorts and their tanned skin sagged.
The beach was divided from the grass by a low concrete wall and people had put out scarves along its length and were sitting on them and little kids sat in rows and dangled small skinny legs.
The water seemed too blue. Pelicans bobbed on its surface. Farther north there were no pelicans but down here they were everywhere. Their heads were tucked down into their chests so that their long beaks were hidden and every now and again they flung out their wings in a burst and ran over the water to take off, batting at the surface of the water with stupid flapping feet. Then one of them would come down to land and would careen for a few feet in a great ball of spray and the others would watch it and honk in a frenzy.
I didn’t want to go down onto the beach and I hung back under the shade of the palm trees.
I said, “Someone will see us.”
“Don’t be paranoid. The police won’t know who they’re looking for. Not down here. Maybe not up there even. We put about three hundred miles behind us last night.”
He turned and tried to reach for my hand.
He said, “We wait it out down here for a little while. We play it safe just in case. You have to try to at least look like you’re relaxed. People are going to notice you, jumping around the way you are every five seconds.”
“I’m not jumping around.”
“You are. It doesn’t look right. And you’ve got bruises on your face.”
I stared at him. I said, “You’re acting so casual.”
“I’m not casual. But you have to pretend. Give people what they’re expecting. Otherwise they’ll notice you.”
Then he said, “Here, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“I don’t want a drink.”
“Then I’ll buy me one. You can sit and watch me drink it. Come on.”
Down by the water was a bar which was a small sort of shack leaning against the wall. Its roof was sheets of corrugated iron and its walls were boards of plywood. Dried palm fronds had been stapled on to make it look like it was built from palms and some of them hung off in rough clumps and showed the plywood underneath. There was a hatch in the front with a counter and on the counter there were small racks of peanuts and potato chips and a big poster showing different types of ice cream and their prices.
A sign hung above the hatch, made from a surfboard.
On it was painted the name of the beach bar: ROSA’S BEACHSIDE REFRESHMENTS.
A woman stood in the hatch and she wore a red apron and a small red hat.
She said in a monotone, “What do you want?”
Cal said, “What drinks do you have?”
“Beer. Coke. Lemonade.”
“A beer, please.”
“I can’t sell you the beer before twelve o’clock.”
“Then why did you tell me you had it?”
“ ’Cause I do. You just can’t buy it.”
There was a pause where they stared at each other. Cal said, “Coke then.”
We walked down the beach until we found a spot under a palm tree that was protected from the heat and ringed by clumps of spiked grass which stabbed at the back of my head when I lay down. The shadow patterns of the palm leaves covered the bare skin of my arms.
I closed my eyes and then there was just the soft sink and swill of the little wavelets and the yelling of the kids which seemed a long way away for some reason from down there on the ground. The tiredness made my head ache.
When I closed my eyes there were buzzing needles of light on black and flashes of electric blue and nauseous purple and I opened them again because anything was better than the sickness.
I held my hand up to my face and I could see its fine details very close, the small dry cracks full of scab around my fingernails and the little scuffed flaps in the skin and the tiny whorls of my fingerprint.
Bunches of cells, that was all it was, and that was all we were, bunches of cells. Big old bunches moving about and now and again knocking into each other, and sometimes one big bunch putting an end to the movements of another and then that one falling down on the ground and other small reconfigurations of the same basic stuff eating all its component parts and building something else, or sometimes two big bunches knocking together to make another small bunch of cells that would grow and grow and keep moving around and bumping into things until they could in their turn make another bunch of cells, who could in their turn make another, who could make another, and on and on.
To one side of me Cal was lying very close. He had fallen asleep almost right away.
I studied his face and I could see the tiny lines around his closed eyes and at the corners of his mouth, their curve and fade, an eyelash lying quivering beside his nose and moving with the in and out of his breath.
Behind me there were loud voices laughing, a party of old couples who were sitting on canvas chairs on the sand down toward the tide line. They had a red cooler beside them.
The old women wore swimsuits and sun hats and the brims of the sun hats drooped.
I listened to their conversation and drifted.
“No, that was the one before this one, now she’s with Jim or Jack or what’s-his-name, the one from up near Favelle.”
“I always knew they wouldn’t last. I knew it, didn’t I say right back in January when she first started with him? I said they wouldn’t last.”
“You always know how to spot it, Elizabeth—she always knows—you did say it—you said it before with the last one—”
The voices drifted in and then out again.
I must have fallen asleep, because it was dark and Cal was shaking me awake. All the people around us had gone and in the distance two white car headlights were moving alongside the beach toward us.
I said, “What time is it?”
Cal said, “Dunno. Late. You slept for hours. That’s a warden coming and they’ll move us on. We should get moving and get you a proper bed to sleep in.”
My mouth felt dry and there was a strange taste in it. I said, “Where are we going?”
“Into town, and then we’ll go and see if we can get on one of those trains out to the suburbs. Stay at my friend’s place for the night.”
“Is that going to be all right? What if he—”
“He won’t. I’ve known him years. He’s a good friend. It’ll be all right. Come on.”
Up off the beach we waited at the roadside in the dark. The headlights came closer and stopped when they reached us. It was a white truck and the city badge was on the door.
The warden rolled down the window.
He wore a green cap and a green jacket and they had the city badge on them too.
He said, “No sleeping on the beach. It’s not allowed. It’s a city-protected area.”
Cal said, “No, Officer, we’re leaving. Fell asleep earlier and just woke up and now we’re walking back into town. Le Roi Station.”
The warden looked me up and down; he looked skeptical.
After a moment he said, “You’re going into town? Jump in the back. I’ll take you to the park gates. Le Roi’s not far from there but it’s a long way to go if you’re walking.”
“Appreciate it.”
The inside of the truck smelled cloying. An air freshener swung from the rearview mirror, it was vanilla bean or something, and beneath that the smell of old cigarette ash and fast food. The radio murmured from the dashboard. Faint voices and static.
Through the silhouettes of palms I could see the skyline of La Maya across the bay and all the buildings were lit up in flushes of color, great washing cones of spotlight beams along the walls and all in aurora colors of green and pink. The city sounds drifted out toward us over the water through the rolled-down window of the car and there were sirens and distant music and the acceleration of motorbikes. I thought about everything that was happening over there in my line of sight, locked behind walls, all the people tucked away in boxes where living happened, the families, the people, and all of them just moving about and doing whatever it was they did with themselves, pushing on, rolling on.
There was a film my mother used to like a lot and I liked it too when I was a kid. We watched it together. It was a French film about a girl living in a city and sometimes in the film she walked up to the top of a tall building and told herself things about what was happening in the city at that moment. She liked to invent fancy stories and some of them were funny; it was a comedy. The actress had short dark hair and big dark eyes and I used to imagine her going home after working on the film every day and sitting tired in an open apartment looking over water.
And of course everybody wanted pictures of her because she was pretty and slim and she was on the TV so that people knew her face.
Anyway.
When I was sitting in that truck looking across at the lights on the other side of the water I could also see the lights of cars moving around and each car had one or two or maybe more people in it, talking together or not talking or just going about the process of getting from one place to another fast, which was part of living and deemed important.
Small lives, like my own small life.
At the park gate we got out and the warden got out too and came around to the passenger door and said he would help me out.
He said, “That’s a nasty bruise on your face there, sweet.”
“I had a fall,” I said.
He looked at Cal for a long moment. “You her boyfriend?”
I looked sharply at him.
Cal said, “Yeah.”
He said it easily. He was casual. He was very good at lying.
“Might want to get that looked at. You never know with a knock to the head.”
I said, “Really, I’m fine.”
“How old are you anyway, sweet?” He was looking at me now and his look was intent.
I stared at him, swallowed.
I thought, Stop asking me things. I was not good at lying. “Twenty-one.”
He looked at Cal, who said, “We should be going. Got a train to make out to the other side of town.”
The warden opened his mouth, then he paused and closed it. He was still looking at Cal but after a moment he got back in the truck and started the engine.
From the open window he leaned out and said, “You take care. Get that bruise looked at.”
He was looking at me when he drove away.
I watched the lights of the truck fall back into the dark of the beach peninsula. In front of us on the other side of the gate was a long street and it was bright and residential and divided suddenly from the night of the park and the beach.
A few cats skulked about in the shadows under the parked cars.
I said, “How long will it take for the bruise to go down?”
“I don’t know. A week. Maybe a few. It’s big.”
“He thought you gave it to me.”
“I know.”