I pad around my house in the morning, turning on faucets and lights to assure myself that the apocalypse is still self-contained over a thousand miles away at Mother’s doorstep. Texas border states have already begun rationing plans. Through their television noise, scientists and preachers scramble to understand such centralized tragedy, use incantations and formulas to predict where this may go if it ever leaves Bonita. Some claim aliens.
To be clear, I’m not speaking in metaphor when I tell you the end of the world began on my wedding day. Leaves littered Mother’s lawn. Dried bits the grasshoppers left behind turned Bonita parking lots and roads a pale green ocean. A case of wine left too long in a truck exploded. Trees stood naked, bare arms raised to the sky as if seeking answers.
Mother’s temperature gauge read 112 that day more than a year ago, but I was in love, if sweaty, in my sundress. Outside, grasshoppers crunched underfoot. We kept a broom handy to push them outside, letting three in for every one swept out. Mother, embarrassed, ran her well dry trying to turn brown grass green, as if the weather and bugs were a reflection on her and her housekeeping, not a sign of what was to come.
I fill the bathtub each night. When the faucet squeaks to life come morning, I water the plants, fill the dog’s bowl, and empty the tub, watching the clear water swirl away to nothing. Plant stalks swell and leaves droop. I wander out to check the sky for dangerous cloud formations, kneel and place both palms upon the ground. Neighbors wave, keep walking. Leaves shift in the breeze, lazy and unconcerned. My Idaho sky is blue for days. Rainbows come and go in the sprinkler’s twirl.
I don’t know if a thunderstorm would make me feel better or worse at this point, so I turn on the television. Bonita’s apocalypse is growing old for the rest of the country. No news for almost a week.
It’s probably true that we all have our own self-centered versions of when this started, when we decided to believe, or stop believing in coincidence. The tornado that ripped off a section of Mother’s roof, causing her to box her sequined tops and fall upon her knees, was weather and nothing more in my mind. Her fundamentalist upbringing wouldn’t allow her the luxury. She heard the roar of the wind twisting metal and dislodging bricks. The sky took her bobtailed cat and left her half a home. She was chastened by the rain that pelted her carpet, only to watch the clouds dry up with not a drop of relief for months on end. She looked to God for answers. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t speaking, so she looked behind her, made a list of transgressions and underlined mother in red.
I thought I had run far enough away to be sure I saw things back in Bonita clearly. I couldn’t have known that, in my flight, I would forever keep one eye over my shoulder, and in doing so would circle back again and again. When the second earthquake hit, shortly after the first round of fires I’d called plain old bad luck, I knelt in my closet and tried piecing together my own prayer, unable to remember anything beyond “Thy kingdom come.” Disaster close to home had not given the words new meaning, so I left supper to burn on the stove, called home.
I work her every way I can from my Idaho kitchen to hers, our voices ones and zeroes pinged through space satellites. I tell her we’ll load the horses, haul them across the canyons and mountains, and put them in the backyard. Bring your chickens. Just brick and wood, I say of the three-bedroom home she’s scraped for, the patched-up house whose mortgage will probably outlive her. I hear her switch the phone to the other ear, bang a door shut. I brag on the depth of our town’s reservoir and the snow at the tip of the mountains you can see in August. A preacher buzzes radio noise in the background. I’ve never even heard of a tornado in Idaho, I say. You can carry your gun on your hip in the grocery store! She sits there, jaw set in silence I can see. Then—You know the story of Job, she says. What if God picked the wrong person for the job?
NPR finally runs a story, a color piece on Bonita’s Riders for Christ—a group that takes its message almost as seriously as its method of delivery. Before all of this, they opened rodeos performing cowgirl tricks against the backdrop of fireworks and “God Bless the U.S.A.” Now sword-packing Riders sit sentry at each of the cardinal directions outside of town, certain the Four Horsemen will gallop down from the heavens any day in need of spangled escort. Steve Inskeep says a few have liberal enough interpretations to pack rifles, which has created something of a rift, and those Riders man only the southern outpost, where the group’s leadership think the Horsemen least likely to appear. Steve outlines stories for tomorrow’s program in the event the rapture doesn’t occur overnight. Then he cues Blondie. I pick up the phone to make sure Mother hasn’t found herself a sword.
Every day before she died, my grandmother bowed her head and prayed for Mother’s gambling and carousing to stop. She prayed for Mother to humble herself before the Lord and care about what good Christian people thought. She prayed for Mother to get out of that mess she was in, as she referred to Mother’s second—and then third—marriage. Both adultery in my grandmother’s eyes, though my only memories of Mother’s first (and God-recognized) husband are the blue welts he made of her eye, the way the bruises bloomed purple, then yellow on her chest and back, the way he swung the red suitcase as he walked down the hallway of our apartment building, as I followed, crying for him to stay. Grandmother prayed for God’s love to rain like fire from the heavens. I wonder if this is what she had in mind.
There will always be those ready to don a cowboy hat and ride the bomb down with a yippee-kye-yay, those who sell hats and work the levers. While the Bible church holds twenty-four-hour prayer meetings, sinners filter to the casino and the VFW, filling up the dark places, no need to conserve, no need to conceal pent-up desires. Faithful to no end the time is nigh.
Mother refuses to step into a church, but she’s taken to covering her head, wearing long dresses. I find myself in the unexpected position of suggesting she go to the casino to keep some semblance of normalcy. She won’t hear of it. Mysterious are the ways.
I get an all-networks-busy recording and punch end and send until I get a crackly ring and she picks up. I don’t tell her I’m half-believer. I insist that, while surely some kind of geo-seismic shift has occurred beneath her very feet, this does not necessarily mean that the Christian God of Fire and Fury has returned. I tell her it probably has to do with all the oil Texans sucked up. Arrogant Texans messed up the tilt of the earth, perhaps. Somehow altered weather patterns, I say. I was never good at science, and she reminds me of this. I duck, jab. Ask if she’s taken up embroidery or churning butter, ask if Laura Ingalls is the First Saint of the New Apocalypse. She sets her jaw. Okay, the end of the world maybe, I say, but show me this God.
What do I love the way I used to love the mystery of my mother, her strength in suffering?
Today I ask if she wishes she’d left before it got so hard, come to live with me and my husband in the high desert where we could listen to the end of the world over the airwaves and cook frittatas still. This is what we do when there is nothing new to report and the line goes quiet. This is how we push back at the distance and the catastrophe. Do you wish you’d stayed, she says. I am afraid she’s getting religious.
CNN runs a segment on the Mayan calendar. A reporter runs around interviewing people in front of the Mall of America, asking for views on the Texas apocalypse and the End of Time. I wonder what the Mayans had in mind as they toiled, fashioning stone chink by chink: a twenty-four-hour news cycle, complete with a running Twitter ticker of the apocalypse?
An African American woman claiming Mayan and celestial ancestry speaks during the second half of the segment. She wears a purple tunic with strange lettering. Says this whole Mayan hysteria is a big misunderstanding. The Mayans didn’t create a calendar, and 2012 isn’t the end of time. They were measuring divine light, outside of time. One the back of a Chinese take-out menu, I try to doodle light and circles of time. In the end it all looks like lightning bolts and cyclones.
The anchor seems relieved until the Mayan lady places a hand upon her polyester arm and explains that just because the Ancients weren’t concerned about our modern world, doesn’t mean the events in North Texas aren’t indicative of what’s to come. We must practice seeing with our eye-eyes, she sighs, before we can see with our mind-eyes. And then: North Texas is now. When she smiles into the camera, she seems sad for us. I hear my husband’s key in the door, home from giving a final, and I turn off the television, fold the menu into a tiny square and cram it into my back pocket.
My husband is a skeptic. He thought the grasshoppers were a nuisance last August, nothing more. Of the heat, he said, it’s Texas in August, what did you expect. When I speak to Mother, he opens the computer, goes quiet. As soon as I hang up, he closes the laptop, and his sigh misplaces the rest of the air in the room. I don’t think he does this for my benefit. I think he does not appreciate what he cannot tie down with reason. I think this is why he loved me in the first place: I am a good challenge.
At first nobody danced at the wedding, or Mother’s Event, as I began calling the night. The Legion Hall filled with Bonitans and relatives of Mother’s third husband, the one who died in a freak accident when his pony horse spooked into the crowd at the track, crashing into the pane glass window of the V.I.P. suite, crushing fancy hats and knocking my stepfather stone cold dead. Few friends made the trip to Texas, and when I bemoaned the fact, Mother knocked back her white zin and said, Yes, it’s too bad you have a family that loves you.
As ladies in tight jeans and men in broad-brimmed straw hats streamed in, they brushed one another’s backs, checking for grasshoppers, made quick for cold Dos Equis and napkins to dob sweat. The swan-carved melon soon sat empty, save the black seeds. People fanned themselves. Mother cocked her brow toward the empty dance floor, so I gave up on Rebirth Brass Band and put on the AC/DC that she had insisted I load onto the playlist. As soon as the bells began to ring out and the guitars snarled to life, cowboys began setting down drinks, clasping hands with their women, marching bowlegged toward the rented speakers. I took a hard pull off my beer. She knows her crowd, my husband said.
I told you, Mother said, and led us onto the sawdusted floor, “Hells Bells” echoing off the walls. My husband shrugged his shoulders, pushed up his glasses, and proceeded to get down, banging his head and bouncing his ass off Mother’s as I clapped them on. In those sweaty three minutes, Mother was right—everything was, somehow, just right. But soon I’d had two beers too many, and barefooted and half-cocked, I was out Bonita-ing the Bonitans. I woke up the next day as ready as ever to leave and never come back.
I get the all-networks-busy signal for two days before I decide I have to go. My husband calls the plan hopeless and vague. He says we need to save our resources. He quietly reminds me of my job search. When he asks me what my goal is and I shrug, he walks away, comes back to say she is a grown woman who can take care of herself and never has been inclined to listen to reason. That’s easy to say, I blab, when it’s not your mother living on the brunt end of the beginning of the end of the world, which is mean because his mom died years ago.
Being the man he is, he agrees to go to Texas if I wait for him to enter final grades and agrees to use his credit card to pay for the gas that has skyrocketed. Despite rationing, you can still travel freely if you have the money and don’t live at the end of the world. He tells me I am about to put an end to that freedom on both accounts. Then he squeezes my hand hard and begins to pack.
I pack with one hand, work the phone in the other. Sending, ending. Sending. I fill my backpack with Ziplocs and wool socks. I check the tent for stakes. My husband packs a few shirts and underwear and fills his bags with books on Greek philosophers whose names I can’t pronounce. When I come in with the orange cat-hole trowel, he takes it gently from my hand and puts it back in the garage. I don’t know how to pack for the end of the world, so I imagine a backpacking trip.
Mother picks up as we’re driving through the red rocks of Moab listening to a classic rock station. It’s Don Henley’s birthday, and every station seems to be in on the awful celebration. When I hear her voice, I punch off the radio and sit up. Everything is fine, she says. A trembler, not too big. She tells us to turn around and go home. Or head west—everyone should see the Grand Canyon, she says. She sounds tired.
Why don’t we all go see it together, I say. You know, she says, it’s just a few miles from one rim across to the other. Imagine all that sky, she says and fades off before adding, People die all the time trying to get across.
We’re coming, Mama, I say and snap the phone shut. I lean my head back and close my eyes. All I see are burned-out buildings and twisted metal. My husband touches the side of my face and pushes the car faster.
A fierce wind greets us when we pull to the top of the hill outside of town. A line of delivery trucks waiting to move into Bonita has us backed up alongside the roadside park. From the looks of it, the park was recently a happening place, but news teams have mostly abandoned makeshift camps. My husband points out that Texans favor a liberal definition of the term park—it’s just a couple of cement slabs with picnic tables and a trashcan off the highway, usually devoid of much else besides prickly pear or bluebonnets in springtime.
I point to the farthest table, tell him this is where Mother and I came to watch the sun set when I was a girl. I absorbed as much at that time as I could, that time after work and school before she reapplied her lipstick and walked through a cloud of perfume and out our front door where she’d spend the night dancing the sun back up as I slept.
Now tarps pop and snap in the wind, strain at the lines holding them to earth. One guy in a dingy brown suit huddles on a bench squinting into his phone. We roll down the windows despite the wind. A brown beer bottle rolls across the cement slab. Plastic bags flutter against the table legs, trapped just east of the freedom stretching ahead on the endless Texas prairie.
Toward town, things appear just about normal, aside from a gas well that billows orange flames and hazy, electric smoke. My husband is taken aback by the sight, but I tell him this happens from time to time in oil country, even when there isn’t an apocalypse going on.
Mother, speaking on good authority I assumed, had always told me nothing good happened after midnight. I have a feeling that’s when I was conceived. I know it was sometime the summer before her ninth-grade year, not long after she started to sneak bell-bottoms to school where she changed out of her holy-roller dress and put on eyeliner she stole from the drugstore. I can imagine her scrubbing her eyes red to get the makeup off, rolling the jeans into a neat ball and putting them in the bottom of her locker, walking back home at the end of the day defiant but looking like the holiness girl she was supposed to be.
Mother told me plenty, wanting to make certain I didn’t follow in her footsteps. I listened close, until late one night my junior year when I let a stout little running back named Bunzy sweet-talk me into going to see a well fire that had erupted when drillers hit a gas pocket. We left a party around eleven, me peering out the back window every few minutes, sure that every set of headlights belonged to Mother. After parking his truck in a ditch, we followed the orange glow through pastures, carrying a bottle and blanket over tree-lined fences until we got to the flame.
I snuck into the house close to sunrise and tiptoed past my stepfather’s snores, and only after I was tucked deep into my bed did I smile to myself, excited at the new life that awaited me outside Mother’s hypocritical rules. The next morning, I discovered a hickey the running back had left, like a badge. He told everyone except his girlfriend that he got further than he did.
You could say I got the last laugh—he turned into a meth-head, still in and out of jail. Mother always swore it was him who broke into the house and stole the change bucket. I was long gone by then, of course. Cause and effect, my husband says, and inches the car forward.
Two rangers lean against their Mustangs at the front of the line. Just beyond them sit two women atop paint horses holding purple flags emblazoned with a golden cross and sword. The horses shift and stomp. Flags pop in the wind. Would you look at that, my husband says. They wear cowboy boots and white tunics gathered at the waist. Wide leather belts and giant gem-encrusted cross buckles hold their swords in leather scabbards. I hope they’ve got Gold Bond in Bonita, my husband says, but he doesn’t laugh. I raise my hand toward them, but they don’t seem to see. Over the wind you can hear the thrust of the gas-driven flames from the well fire. The women stare beyond us out toward the western horizon in certainty. One dismounts and kneels in prayer, her voice lost to the wind and flames.
The rangers let us pass after we explain our purpose, sign a dossier, and complete a few forms. They assure my husband that the fire will burn itself out and that there’s no reason to call 911. Don Henley’s been running through my head since Moab, and as the Ranger waves us past, I sing, You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. Not funny, my husband says, and accelerates past the snaking flames that dance high into the sky welcoming me home.
On the stretch into town a hand-painted sign warns, Welcome to Pretty. Slow down—rough going. My husband says the road could be buckled from the heat, but I think earthquake. You can see where the earth bucked and bowed, picking up the two-lane road and setting it several feet off to the side, leaving the double yellow stripe misaligned. Infinity broken. What was a major geo-seismic event is now simply a few bumps that our steel-belted radials take with ease, nothing to it.
While we were busy packing tent stakes and books, it never occurred to us to bring more than road food. The stupidity strikes us at the same time when we see the beat-up grocery store in the middle of town, which is really just the middle of a highway. There never was much to Bonita, especially before the casino. A few gas stations. The VFW and Legion Hall. Two drugstores. One or two grocery stores, depending on the year. Plenty of churches and a rodeo arena. After the heathens voted the town wet, there was never a shortage of liquor stores, and the sign for one is half lit just down the road. That will be the next stop.
The gas station across the street is nothing but charred rubble and bits of metal that skitter in the wind. Gas lines ruptured in the last earthquake, and dust coats the cars in the grocery store lot. A boy who can’t be more than ten stands in the back of a pickup holding a shotgun. His little brother is yanking on a kid goat’s ear. Not that unusual, I say to my husband who’s gone quiet. When I open the car door, my husband stays put. She’s not going to leave, he says. I nod at the boy with the gun, but he just shifts feet and stares at me. I can’t believe we didn’t bring bacon, I say.
The checkout lady recognizes me, though to me she is only a face. She tells us that a few other places have reopened but they’ll rob you blind if you don’t watch. Tell your mother we miss her at the V, she says. No sense moping around waiting on the big one. She smiles, and her teeth are stained from coffee or cigarettes, both likely. Her eyes are lined in dark blue, and you can see where the powder has settled into the wrinkles crisscrossing her face. She doesn’t smooth her rouge, just leaves the circles be, like setting suns.
When we pull up to Mother’s, the place looks empty without her usual array of petunias and marigolds. A blue tarp still covers the roof on the east end. It’s buttoned down tight with bungees in all directions, looks professional. Her horses run up to the fence and nicker, toss their heads at us. They’re skinny. Mother’s told me grain’s hard to get and she’s down to her last few round bales, but it’s still hard to see them looking like the horses kept by people who aren’t horse people—people who stake a horse to a lead in the backyard and cram three kids on the bony animal to ride through the streets unshod during parades. I wonder what those horses look like now. I wonder what those kids look like.
Mother walks out and stops, as if we are a vision she can’t trust. Standing there on her cracked concrete porch with sagging steps, arms crossed, she seems small. The bonnet covers her eyes. Then she bounds down the steps and grabs me up and feels again as whole and big as the world. My husband stands back watching us. When we don’t let go or stop our crying, he begins to unload camping gear. Bless you babies, Mother says, stroking my hair, Bless my sweet babies. Those are my grandmother’s words, not Mother’s. I pretend not to notice and hold on tight.
I don’t know my father, but I have my mother’s hands. Our left lateral incisors each stick out just a hair. When I’ve drunk too much, my husband reminds me that I have more than her hands and mouth.
The wind knocks out the electricity at night. The tarps covering the unrepaired portion of the roof rumble across the ceiling with each gust. Mother’s heeler burrows beneath a pile of quilts stacked in the corner. Mother doesn’t seem fazed even though it’s her night on the grid. She goes around muttering prayers and lighting candles. When she’s not squeezing my hands and stroking my hair, it’s almost like she’s not even here. My husband fills the lantern I brought. I ask him if he’d like to play Frisbee with his laptop.
It turns out the end of the world has been subsidized. We must, however, convince Mother to accept the food FEMA ships in. God will provide, she says. It’s for us sinners, we say, and she gets a worried look, grows quiet.
When we pull up to the Tuesday pickup, my husband says in a big, booming voice, BEHOLD GOD FEMA. Great, I say, on the seventh day God created formaldehyde trailers. He says the end of the world is making us dumb and walks away to grab a box. I’m happy he’s making jokes, and when he comes back I’m grinning. Hey look, two-by-two, I say, dropping cans of tuna and chicken into the box.
Why would a fish need an ark, he says. What good is an ark to a fish?
Time moves slowly at the end of the world. Each day Mother cooks a breakfast to end all, but won’t eat. She’s in there cracking store-bought eggs before we wake up. When we shuffle into the kitchen, she shakes her head at the pale yolks in apology. The hens have stopped laying her prized multicolored eggs with the hard shells and yolks like setting suns. With a set jaw, she flips the sizzling sausage that we splurged on when there was no bacon, plates the biscuits and the FEMA milk gravy, and sets it out on the counter. When we finally sit down to eat, my husband and I exchange looks as Mother blesses the food and the day and gives thanks for everything from the table and chairs to the hairs on our heads. She only smiles standing over us while we eat. We do our best to keep eating.
Mother spends the rest of the day in her room. When I’m not recovering from breakfast, I drive my husband crazy with my encyclopedic store of Don Henley songs. I don’t know how I know so many or how to stop singing. He retreats to the garage to read. Or stares at the blue roof, his face smashed in concentration, muttering numbers and supply lists. I can see he feels bad that he’s not a son-in-law who can swoop in with a hammer and make things right again. Sometimes I see him standing next to the barbed-wire fence trying to work up the courage to climb over and pet the horses.
I go to the bedroom to lie down beside Mother while she reads the Bible. Sometimes I stand on the bed and sing all she wants to do is dance. I remind her of her disco days and toss my hair like a stripper. I find her box of sequins and play dress-up. She doesn’t get angry. She smiles and reaches out to pull my hand to her mouth where she breathes it warm and kisses it. We have to be ready, she says.
On Day Four, my husband comes into the kitchen and plops down a grocery sack of toilet paper, pulls out a packet of powdered eggs. Fresh out of the real ones, he says. He starts to say something, then trails off, smoothing the edge of the fake eggs as if what he wants to say can be found there and coaxed out.
People were talking about cattle dying, he says finally. The guy hauled them to a sale because he didn’t have any grass or water left on his property. When he let them out, they trampled each other trying to get to the water. Within minutes, they all collapsed. Water intoxication. And if that isn’t bad enough, he says, the bag boy says there’s a sex room at the VFW.
I squeeze the toilet paper to my chest like an idiot and sing: We’ve been poisoned by these fairytales. It works because he hops onto the counter, and sighs, All right, which song? I shrug my shoulders and dance a little more. Then he surprises me and says that maybe we should just go to the V and have a drink.
Eyes Wide Shut II: Apocalyptic Cowboys and Hellbent Barmaids? No thanks, I say. Do you remember the lady at the grocery store? Do you really want to see her naked? He rubs his eyes, says things may be getting to him, says I need to think about what I want to do. Then he picks up a leftover biscuit and walks into the garage. The weather has been calm for two days, the skies blue. It’s making us all a little crazy.
Before all of this, my husband loved that Mother wasn’t like his first mother-in-law, following him around tallying up his shortcomings, holding secret court with her daughter over the telephone. While he feared what harsh truth might come out of Mother’s mouth, especially when she was onto her second red eye, he loved that she was a let-it-loose kind of lady who wore too much eye shadow and did her lipstick every hour on the hour. Sometimes he walks back to her bedroom and stands in the doorway awhile before he turns and walks back out. I think he’s starting to worry about that with which he cannot reason.
I approach Mother with half a plan. She is lying on her bed with her hands clasped, Bible open beside her. The wind has picked up. You can hear it whistling through the small spaces and moaning through everything else. Out the window I see a dust devil moving across the pasture. The horses are running. A large limb cracks in the tree that stands bare in the front yard. I watch, waiting for it to fall. When it doesn’t, I sit on the bed. Let’s take a drive, I begin. I tell her we need to fill up the car. The corrugate gate is banging against a fence post, ringing out again and again. God wouldn’t want you in here hiding behind prayer, I say, pushing.
The birds are all gone, she says. I tried feeding them, but the little things blew off. Tumbled away one after another when they gathered for the seed. I guess I shouldn’t have. The ones didn’t catch on the fence rolled right across the pasture. Haven’t seen a bird in two months or more.
I look out the window for a sign of something okay, something not terrifying. A yellow grasshopper thunks onto the screen. Mother begins to massage the top of one thumb with the other. What if you’re right, I tell her. What if God’s decided, Well, so much for Earth and all those little people down there. And you know, I think I’ll stretch it out, make them suffer good. If this is all we’ve got, then what? I want to hear you laugh. I want to hear you say, throw dirt on it, and give the finger to anybody who doesn’t like it. I need you to fight. I need you.
She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes fill with water. I pull her hands apart, wrap them in mine. I raise her hand to my mouth, take her index finger, and run it over my sticking-out tooth. Then I run my finger along hers, feeling the bump of imperfection. Remember when you used to come into my room when I was dead asleep and do this, I ask, leaning my forehead against hers. Looking into her eyes is looking into my own. You’d open the door, say Are you asleep, before barging in to lay down and tell me about your night.
You needed your rest, Mother says. I start to say something but she cuts me off, says, He’ll come like a thief in the night. She picks up her Bible. Well, I say, if he’s a thief, he’s not a very good one making all this noise.
When I poke my head into Mother’s room to tell her we are going to leave for a bit, she is sitting on the edge of her bed. Her purse is at her feet, and her head is covered in a silk scarf tied beneath her chin. She looks tiny there, and older than I’ve ever imagined she could be. I wonder if she’s been hiding these old lady purses and scarves beneath her bed for years, just waiting for the right moment to become this person I see before me. She smiles thinly and hugs her purse tight against her chest. The uncertainty I see in her eyes tells me it’s not faith keeping her in her bedroom.
The wind has let up some, I say. It’ll just be a short drive. Honey, she says, it’s not the wind I’m scared of.
The sun’s close to setting, and as we pull out of the drive, the wind blows us onto the gravel shoulder before my husband yanks it steady. I’ve left him up front alone so I can sit in the back with Mother, like the new moms I see on the road, unable to let their baby rest buckled behind their backs for a second. When she didn’t fight the seat belt like she always has, my husband gave me a look that said We’ve got to get out of here as plainly as if he’d written a note. I make soft cooing sounds and hear myself saying, There, there. We’ll be just fine.
Remember our sunsets, I say. Remember how we’d pack an ice-chest with baby beers and Dr. Pepper and go up to the hill and watch the sun go down? How it’d stretch for miles, lighting up the sky blood orange and blue and everything in between? Mother looks out the window, and I imagine that she smiles.
My husband fiddles with the radio up front. He passes a fuzzy news station long enough to hear that a tornado has ripped through downtown Oklahoma City. A big one. They’re interviewing the police chief who sounds confused. His voice catches. It’s just gone, he says. I lean forward and punch it off. There’s no sound for a while except the sound of the tires on the road and the wind. Always the wind.
Finally my husband speaks up. I know Oklahoma’s close, and I feel for them, he says. But isn’t this good news, in a sense? It’s weather, just horrible weather. Science.
Mother is praying to herself. Her whispers grow louder. I find his eyes in the rearview and give him the please-shut-up look. He jerks his head over his shoulder toward Mother, says, We need to talk.
I lean my head over onto Mother’s shoulder and think about a new apocalypse unconstrained by precedent or the absurdity of town borders. Words run through my head: Mother and plenty of water. Safe haven and plenty to eat. Understanding and safety for the man driving us, love. I can’t tell if I’m begging for these things or thanking something or someone or both. As if awoken from a dream, Mother looks down on me and says, It’s been forever since I’ve watched the sun go down from the hill.
When we pull up, the well fire still hasn’t burned out. My husband just shakes his head, giving up on understanding anything, I’m afraid. One of the Riders is leading her horse toward a trailer at the base of the hill. Her head hangs, stiff from sitting on top of a horse for God knows how many hours. The wait can’t be easy on the faithful either.
Two new Rangers man the exit out of town and past the roadside park. My husband stops, and one of them sticks his head in. Got everything you need, he asks. I lean forward and tell him we just want to catch the sunset. My husband doesn’t protest when I say we’ll be right back, but I know we’re going to have to make a move quick. I can let you go, the Ranger says, but they’re shutting down unofficial entries. The man does not put up with any kind of reasoning or logic, so my husband puts it in reverse and pulls perpendicular to the road. He puts the car in drive, leaves his hand on the gearshift. Ahead, a horse trailer pulls onto the road. The Rider raises a weary hand. Finally, my husband speaks, but I have to lean in to hear him—We could just go.
I turn to Mother. What do you think, I say. Want to grab some things? Somewhere things are better, somewhere things can still be okay. We’ll visit the library, go to a restaurant. We can swing wide and see the Grand Canyon. The animals need a new round bale, Mother says. And they’ll need another one after that. My husband slams the car in park, and when he sighs, I have to roll down the window to get some air.
Mother picks up her purse, opens the door, and steps out. You know we can’t stay here forever, my husband says. I love you, and I’ll help you tie her up and make her go, or I’ll hold you when we leave her, but I’ve had enough of whatever you want to call what’s happening here.
Do you even know what you’re asking me to do, I say. I hit the seatback with both hands and begin to cry. Mother is holding a crumpled tissue to her mouth, teetering across the cattle-guard, heading toward the well. I fling the door open and say, Do what you have to do. He’s still sitting there when I look back.
When I catch up to her, she’s standing at the base of the flame, close enough that when I take her hand it’s already warm. You can’t imagine heat, she says. You have to feel it for yourself.
Flames dance shadows across Mother’s face. Heat vapors make the world look unsteady, dreamlike. Please, I say, but this close to the flame, its roar swallows the word. The pressure comes and goes, whips in and out, a giant blowtorch below the earth’s surface beginning to run itself dry. An orange ball billows twenty feet or more into the sky before the flames shrink down and snake wispy in the wind. The fire makes its own wind, and I feel it moving through my clothes, pushing back stray hairs. My husband crosses the cattle-guard but stands back a ways watching us. He shrugs his shoulders and gives what smile he can. Mother offers him her hand, and he comes over and puts his arm around my waist, working to be the person I need him to be a while longer.
Above us, the new Riders keep watch on the hill, silhouetted by the setting sun. They step high in their stirrups and lean forward, bracing for something we can’t see. We stand there, staring into the flame until it begins to grow dark outside our circle. The wind picks up, whips the flame around, lighting up our faces. Mother pulls my hands close, turns them over, studies them like she used to when I was a girl. I’m not crazy, she says. I don’t think so anyway.
I know, I try to say, but she cuts me off. To tell you the truth, she says, I don’t know if it’s suicide or salvation. If I did, maybe I could go. But you, she says, you were always my perfect angel.
She wipes my face, leans her forehead against mine, and tells me, I’m glad you’re not like me in the ways that count. I hold her gaze, try my best to see past my own reflection, to see her as she is right now, as she must have been all those years ago, defiant but afraid. Space opens up, the sky goes soft, and I know she won’t be in the car when we drive away. I see what’s before us, I see what’s been, and I see out past the sun where stars explode and life starts anew. When I’ve seen more than I can take, I give in, close my eyes, feel the warmth of her skin. I imagine her as big and whole as the world, pretend her words were lost to the flame.