8

MITZI OZBURT’S MOTHER had got wind of what was going on in California and she was headed that way in a Lincoln Continental Town Car with her boyfriend, DeLesseps Johnston, to stop it.

Mitzi never did find out how her mother knew, but she blamed the Dominicans, since who else would have told except Nora Jane and she didn’t, and, besides, never would.

“It’s happened before,” Carla Ozburt was saying. She and DeLesseps had spent the night near the Petrified Forest in Arizona, but Carla barely glanced at the scenery when they passed it right after dawn. “When she was sixteen she fell in love with a priest at St. Mark’s and I had to change churches and go to the cathedral for a year. I had her in Sacred Heart for a year, but she wouldn’t kneel in the gravel by the statue and she wouldn’t learn anything she wasn’t interested in, so then we put her in a school out in Metairie where they mostly teach art, but she didn’t like that either. Then she started staying at her daddy’s half the time and I totally lost control. A hairdresser. I can’t believe I clawed and fought my way out of Boutte to end up with a hairdresser atheist as a child.”

“Mitzi’s not an atheist, Carla. How would she meet a priest if she were an atheist? You are exaggerating this, and she wasn’t just a hair-dresser. She worked at the John Jay Salon. My mother goes to John Jay. She’d miss my funeral not to break an appointment with that man.”

“You can’t know. You don’t have any children.”

“That’s a mean thing to say. I’d like to go back by that Petrified Forest. I wish we’d had time to look at that.” DeLesseps was a small, pretty man who had been spoiled rotten by his mother and his aunts. He worked halfheartedly in the mayor’s office in New Orleans, a job one of his uncles had arranged for him. Before that he had been in the admissions office at UNO but got fired for not showing up. He was forty-eight years old and had not really found himself until he met Carla and signed on to be her slave and driver and sometime lover. “I carry the bags,” he told his friends. “I like to watch her operate. She’s a piece of work.”

“We need to find a place to stay in some good part of San Francisco and go there and change and then just go find her. There’s no reason to call her anymore. She’s not going to return the calls.”

“We don’t even know for sure she’s in San Francisco. They may have run off somewhere.”

“No. He’s still at his church. I checked on that.”

“I think we should have flown. This is going to take another day and part of one after that. We can’t make it tonight, Carla. It’s too far. We could stop in Las Vegas. Look on that map. It couldn’t be that much out of the way.”

“When I get my hands on her, I promise you this time it is going to be real. If she does this she is out of the will.”

DeLesseps kept his thoughts to himself. There was no point in talking to Carla when she was on the crazies over Mitzi. The worst thing was that they were exactly alike. They looked alike, they dressed alike, they were the same size. Mitzi was softer and sweeter and more reasonable, but she was more determined also. DeLesseps had known her since she was eighteen and just out of high school. He had never known Carla to win a battle with Mitzi yet.

They were in a desert now. After about fifteen miles DeLesseps had to speak. Carla had been on the phone with her travel agent in New Orleans, finding a hotel in Sacramento for the night and one in Berkeley for the following week. He waited until she settled down from that and then he made his pitch. “Maybe this guy wasn’t really cut out to be a priest and he was going to leave the church anyway and Mitzi was just in the right place at the right time. You don’t know what’s going on, Carla. Reserve part of your judgment until we get there. Remember when you thought she was into drugs and it was just some loose face powder you found? You could have had a heart attack while we waited for those tests.”

“He is an ordained priest in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. He is a servant of God and my daughter has played his Abishag.”

“His who?”

“King David’s whore. In the Old Testament. Don’t Episcopalians read the Bible? I thought you all read the Bible.”

“No, that’s Methodists, I think. Listen, Carla, is this heat gauge always like this? I don’t remember this being way over here.”

“Let me see.” Carla leaned over him to look at the instrument panel. She didn’t know anything about machines but she always pretended that she did. DeLesseps certainly didn’t know anything. He could hardly change a lightbulb from being the great-grandson of a famous Louisiana politician and spoiled rotten from being the only male in his branch, not to mention being raised in a house with two older sisters and more servants than there were family members and then having the family lose all the money and being thrown out to try to make it in a real world, where people worked and had to fix things that were broken.

So there was no one in the car who understood what was happening as the motor heated up and the power-steering hose began to split. Carla hadn’t had the car serviced for forty thousand miles, because she was too involved in the Race for the Cure luncheon she was cochairman of that year.

The car really began to heat up about ten miles out of Weggins, Arizona, a small town near Death Valley National Park. By the time they limped into Weggins, the Lincoln was going to need a major overhaul before anyone was going to drive it to San Francisco. There was no one in Weggins to fix it, and the truck to haul it to Bishop couldn’t get there until afternoon, so Carla and DeLesseps paid the service-station owner to drive them to a motel and got a room with a hot tub that didn’t work and a television with fifty channels and settled down to wait it out.

DeLesseps had his laptop computer and Carla had her cell phone and that was going to be about that until late the next day.

“We just have to make the best of things,” DeLesseps volunteered.

“We could make love. We haven’t done it in a long time.”

“Are you kidding? My only child is on her way to eternal damnation and you expect me to want to fornicate. I hope you aren’t serious, DeLesseps. I hope you didn’t mean that.”

“Then could we find somewhere to eat? I’m starving, to tell the truth.”

“Okay.” They left their bags unpacked and went to the dining room and looked at the wilted lettuce in the salad bar and decided to see what else was available.

“There’s the Four Steers Steakhouse two blocks down the road,” the man at the desk told them. “It’s nice. I eat there myself.”

“Just down the highway?”

“Yes. Just keep on the side so you don’t get run over.” The man put down his newspaper and handed them a card with the name of the restaurant on it. “Tell them Will Maynes sent you. It will help me out.”

They left the motel and began to walk along the highway past a junkyard and some small businesses and an optometrist’s office. Carla wasn’t talking. She had put on her tennis shoes and she was feeling her age for the first time since the last time she was stupid enough to leave New Orleans and go wandering around the world. She was in such a bad mood that she had forgotten why she was in Arizona on the first day of March, two thousand and four, only five days past her sixty-fourth birthday and what seemed like a million days since the last time she was comfortable or happy.

“I give up,” she said in a quiet voice, just loud enough for DeLesseps to hear but not loud enough so he had to hear it unless he wanted to.

“Don’t do that. I can see the sign. It’s right up there. We’ll have lunch and then call and see if there’s an Enterprise rental that will bring us a car.”

At the Morning Glory Motel the man who was living off of the Mexican girl who cleaned the rooms had taken her keys and was in the room Carla and DeLesseps had rented. Going through the bags, he found the case with Carla’s jewelry and opened it and thought maybe he would cry with joy. He took the case and the laptop and the leather holder for the cellular phone and three of DeLesseps’s shirts and a suit and sweater from Rubenstein Brothers and a pair of running shoes from Fleet Feet of Boston and stuffed it all into a laundry bag and got into his truck and took off for Mexico. He was leaving Maria Elena behind without a word of farewell. He didn’t even have the courtesy to stop off and give her back the keys he had taken while she was napping in their room.

He threw the keys away in the desert near the Arizona border. He traded in the car in Nogales and crossed the border into Sonora, where the spoils of his evil would make him a wealthy man for many months before his karma caught up with him.

Carla dug into her steak and baked potato, forgetting her low-fat, low-carb life and concentrating on saving room for apple pie and ice cream.

DeLesseps was almost as indulgent. At least it was a break from sitting at a desk at the mayor’s office being a flak-catcher for every out-of-work voter in the parish. “My great-grandfather was the governor of Louisiana,” he reminded Carla. “And I have to work for that asshole and he didn’t even give me a raise this year. I think I’ll stay out here in California and start over again.”

“What? What are you talking about?” She looked across the expanse of the tabletop, with its cheap paper place mats and dirty salt and pepper containers, and past the tables to the dusty windows with the plastic curtains and tried not to think of what would happen if she caught giardia as she had one time in Colorado.

“Never mind. Just go on thinking about yourself. I’m going outside to smoke. Order me some dessert. Just pick out anything.” He got up and left the table. He almost never got mad at Carla, but this trip and this day were too much. He walked outside and lit a cigarette and watched as the pickup truck carrying his laptop computer and half his clothes sailed by on the dusty four-lane highway.

After they finished lunch Carla called New Orleans and had her travel agent search the area for a car rental place that would deliver. In fifteen minutes the agent called back to say there was a place in Reno, Nevada, that could have them a car by ten that night. Five hundred dollars’ delivery and fifty a day. “We’ll take it,” Carla said. “Charge it to my card.”

Carla called the service station to check on the Lincoln. The attendant said the tow truck still hadn’t come to take it to the dealer-ship in Bishop. She gave him her cell phone number and told him she would pay him to call her when it came.

“Would you take fifty dollars to drive me back to the motel?” she asked the cashier at the restaurant.

“Sure,” he said. “But you have to wait until the lunch crowd clears out.”

“We’ll wait.” Carla went back to the table where the remains of their lunch had not been cleared away. The pie plate was covered with flies. She sat down at a clean table and DeLesseps joined her and they sat like that for a long time, talking about times they had been in California with different people they had been married to or sleeping with. By the time the cashier came and found them and said he could drive them back, they had become friends again, full of each other’s stories and jealous of everyone each of them had ever known.

The cashier’s name was Frank Donald. He was twenty-six years old, had been an Orkin field man for a while in Los Angeles and returned to Weggins to decide what to do next. He was a stepson to Will Maynes, the clerk at their motel. Frank said he wanted to go to the motel anyway to borrow a shovel for digging up a broken sewer line in his mother’s yard.

“So that’s about it for my story up to now,” he said, turning into the parking lot at the motel. “What room are you guys in?”

“Three one three,” DeLesseps answered. “You can just let us out.” “I’ll be up at the office if you want to go anywhere else.” Frank took the fifty-dollar bill Carla gave him and looked embarrassed. “This is way too much money. I’ll take you someplace else if you like. We have a movie house in town, where you rent movies for the VCR on your TV You may have some time to kill. Or I could just drive you around and show you the town and where folks live. We have a Hopi ruin about ten miles from here where some professors from the uni-versity are digging. You can see part of the main kiva, that’s where they did their religious ceremonies. It’s pretty cool really. We used to hang out there after dances when I was in school. I know all about it. You have to walk to get there. You got any good boots with you?”

He was still talking while DeLesseps was opening the door and still there when DeLesseps discovered what had happened. “We’ve been robbed,” DeLesseps said. “Goddamn it all to hell. What next? Is there anything else that can go wrong this week?”

“What?” Carla said. “What, what, what?”

Thirty minutes later both of the policemen in Weggins were there and ten minutes after that the sheriff and the sheriff’s deputies. Carla and DeLesseps were ordered to stay out of the room while the deputies dusted it for fingerprints.

Carla called her insurance agent in New Orleans, then called her lawyer, then called her travel agent, then tried to call Mitzi for the fifteenth time that week. Then the rented car arrived from Las Vegas with a second car following to take the driver back to Las Vegas. It was a Dodge Intrepid. It was not the Mercedes Carla had ordered, but she took it nonetheless. Frank suggested they go into town to the sports bar to get a drink while they waited for the fingerprint experts to arrive from Holcomb and do their work. Carla stormed into the motel room and demanded her cosmetic kit and when they refused she screamed until they took the things she wanted out of the kit and put them in a paper bag and handed them to her. Holding the bag, she stalked back to the Dodge Intrepid and got in behind the wheel. DeLesseps got in the passenger seat and Frank got in the back.

“We’re going to Willy B’s to have a drink,” Frank told the sheriff. “These visitors have had enough for one day.”

“Go on,” the sheriff said. “Get them out of here.”

* * *

Carla Ozburt and DeLesseps Johnston and their new best friend, Frank Donald, were settled down in a booth at Willy B’s, a sports bar on the main street that was the meeting place for everyone who was anyone in Weggins. Willy B’s had been the local drugstore when Frank’s father was a boy, then a restaurant, and, finally, when a man who had been in the Korean War and played football for his regiment there came home to stay, had turned into a bar with three large television sets, “no smoking” signs everywhere, and a bartender who kept the place as clean as a barracks and allowed no bad behavior. There were always flowers on the tables because the bartender’s girlfriend owned and ran the local flower shop.

“What time is it?” Carla asked. “I feel like I don’t know where I am anymore.”

“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon,” DeLesseps said. “We ought to call the service station again and see what’s happened with the Lincoln.”

He took Carla’s cell phone and called and the owner said the tow truck had just pulled in. The tow truck driver got on the phone and assured DeLesseps that the Lincoln would be at the dealership in Bishop before it closed at six.

“We’re moving across the desert leaving things behind like the early settlers did,” DeLesseps said. “I’m starting to feel light.”

“There’s no point in hoping you’re going to get that stuff back from the motel,” Frank put in. “If I was you I’d just get a night’s sleep and then drive that Intrepid on wherever you are going. You said you’d called the insurance people and it all was covered, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Carla sipped her Diet Coke. She had stopped drinking twenty-six years ago when she was pregnant with Mitzi and had never started again. She didn’t go to bars. Willy B’s was the first bar she had agreed to enter in years. “I’m sorry about your clothes, DeLesseps. I know how much you liked that jacket.”

“It’s okay.” He was sipping a light beer and feeling better. He had expected Carla to go into one of her moods, but she was acting nice. You never could tell with Carla what she might decide to do.

“So where are you folks heading?” Frank asked.

“We are going to San Francisco to see about my daughter, Mitzi,” Carla said. “She is in love with a priest. You can see why I’m in a hurry.”

“So how does that play out?” Frank asked. “I was raised a Methodist. I don’t know what Catholics do. We have problems with our preachers sometimes, that way, you know.” He put his hands around his beer bottle and tried to get the feel of the problem.

“It doesn’t play out,” Carla said. “I’m going there to talk her out of it or bring her home to Louisiana.”

“What does she say about it?”

“She won’t talk to me. I have called her sixteen times and left her messages and she doesn’t return my calls.”

“Far out. How old is she?”

“Twenty-six years old. She’s my only child.”

“Well, I guess you better drive on up there and see about it. Just drive the rental car and come back through Bishop and pick up your Lincoln on your way home.”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” DeLesseps put in. “That’s our only option, don’t you think?”

“There’s another hour of sunlight,” Frank suggested. “We could go out and see the Hopi ruin. It’s not far from here. I think you’d be glad you saw it. It’s about the most interesting thing around Weggins.”

“Let’s go.” Carla pushed her Diet Coke to the middle of the table and the men left their beers and followed her to the Intrepid and she handed Frank the keys. “Take us to this Indian place.”

“It’s on a mesa,” Frank told them as he drove down the two-lane highway going east. “The land flattens out at Weggins, but there are still mesas out here. This kiva is the last one. They told us in school it was the last one ever found this far west of the Painted Desert. They don’t know much about those Hopis. They died out, but when they were here they must have been real smart because they built these cliff dwellings just like the way the earth throws up mesas. And some of them have lasted so long now. They had a real civilization and they were peaceful people too. We had a family of Hopis in Weggins when I was a kid but they moved away one summer. They were nice people. There was a boy a year younger than me who was a good athlete. We hated to see him go. Look out there, you can see the land starting to go up. See the mesa.”

Ten minutes later they had parked the car by the side of the road and were walking across flat, scrub-covered, hard-packed red soil toward a hill with structures that looked like they had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Around the base of the mesa were sawhorses and bright orange tape held down by steel spikes. A pickup truck was parked beside a pile of stones. A young woman wearing khaki pants and a pale blue jacket was sitting on one of the stones, writing on a legal pad.

“Nellie Anding,” she said, getting up and holding out a hand. “I’m a geologist from the University of Nevada. We’re excavating here, as you can see.”

“Frank Donald,” the driver said. “I live in Weggins. I’ve been coming out here since I could drive. You don’t mind if I show my visitors the kiva, do you? I mean, you aren’t keeping people out, are you?”

“No. I hope you won’t move any of our markers, of course, but I won’t be territorial. We have a permit to dig, of course, but not to tell anyone they can’t be here. Would you like me to give you a tour? Everyone else is gone. I’m just cleaning up some paperwork.” She smiled and put her notebook and pen down on the ground beside a backpack.

She was about five-seven, wiry and athletic, with dark hair pulled back into ponytails. She was wearing a large man’s watch with a compass. In her ears were long silver earrings, very shiny and simple against her small, pretty face. “It gets lonely out here in the afternoons. It’s a holy place and you feel it when the sun starts going down. I’m glad to have company.”

“Where are your headquarters?” Frank asked, moving in. “Where are you guys staying?”

“We were camping for a couple of weeks, but now we’re at the Best Western in Weggins,” she said. “You live there? We’re trying to hire some local people to help with the sorting. You might put me on to someone. It’s not hard work, just tedious.”

“I might do it,” he said. “What can you pay?”

“Ten dollars an hour, as of yesterday. We just got our funds renewed by the university. We’re celebrating that.” She smiled again, the same beautiful, wide, intelligent smile that had greeted them when they came walking up. Then she turned her attention to Carla and DeLesseps. “I don’t know how much you know about Hopi culture,” she began. “Come on, walk this way. You’re lucky to see the kiva in this light. It gets really spooky when the sun starts moving down those mountains over there. That little range.” She pointed due west.

“I don’t know much,” Carla said. “But I had a book of photographs by Edward Curtis with Hopis in it. The best photograph in the book was a group of Hopi women. I copied it, I traced it and drew it and colored it. I used to paint when I was younger.”

“These ruins might make you paint again,” Nellie said. “Follow me.”

They climbed the mesa to a set of small steps that led up to the flat-topped ruin. Very carefully, one at a time, they climbed to the top and then went down into the kiva and stood there with the red and purple and orange light of the setting sun lighting up the stone- and mud-daubed walls, and it was very, very holy. It was a long time before Carla remembered what she was doing there and thought to say a prayer for Mitzi. “Guide her to the right way,” Carla prayed. “Take over, God, because I’m about to give up.”

She climbed out of the kiva and sat down upon a stone outcrop and put her head into her hands and began to cry. DeLesseps followed her and sat beside her, patting her on the back. “I’m sorry about the jewelry,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Carla said. “I hate all that old heavy stuff anyway.”

Frank and Nellie stayed in the kiva being quiet, then they moved up the small stairs and walked around Carla and DeLesseps and began to climb down to where there was a smaller room on the far side of the mesa. “We think this is an apartment where people lived,” Nellie was saying. “We have excavated this for weeks and can’t find a thing but one comb that isn’t Hopi.”

Carla reached into her pocket for a small gold rosary she had brought along for emergencies. As she touched it her cellular phone started ringing. She glanced at the number and then answered it.

“I’m really sorry, Momma,” Mitzi started saying. “I know you’re mad at me for not calling you and you should be mad but something’s going on that I just had to… well, not talk about just yet. What do you know?”

“That you are living with an ordained priest and that’s what I expected to happen when you went to California.”

“Momma, listen. You don’t know the rest. If you’d let me explain you’d feel better.” There was static on the line. Carla stood up and walked down to a cleared place on the mesa and tried again.

“Can you hear me?” Mitzi said.

“Yes. I am in Arizona, Mitzi. I am on top of a mesa at a kiva of the Hopi Indian Nation. The air is very clear up here. I haven’t had to take an antihistamine all day. I am coming there.”

“Coming where?”

“To San Francisco or Berkeley or wherever it is that you have chosen to lose your mind in. I’ll be there tomorrow. The Lincoln broke down. I’m driving a Dodge.”

“Oh, Momma.”

“DeLesseps is with me. He has been very kind. We are with thoughtful people who are caring for us and tomorrow morning we will drive on to where you are. I don’t know how long it will take in the Intrepid.”

“Momma, I wish you weren’t doing this but I want to see you. I love you, Momma. I miss you very much and I love you.”

“You had better and you should. Tell me how to get there after we get into town.”

“It’s complicated. It depends on how you come. What road will you be on?”

“How would I know? You stay there at your house so I can call you.”

“I have to go to work. Do you have that number?”

“I supposed you’d quit since they said you hadn’t been there for a week.”

“Who told you this? How did you find out?”

“I won’t talk about that now. I’ll call you tomorrow. I have to hang up now. We are on a mesa as I told you. I love you, Mitzi. Do not do anything you will regret until I get there.”

Carla turned off the cell phone and put it in her pocket. She turned to DeLesseps. “Well, she called. That’s a beginning, I suppose.” She took his hand and they began to walk hand in hand down the mesa. At the steps he kept his hand on her sleeve as she descended the steep, narrow little stairs. To the west the sun was all the way down to the horizon. Only the brilliant red and purple and lavender and golden plumes were left to light the desert. “There will be splendid stars tonight,” Nellie told them, when they had come to where Nellie and Frank were waiting. “There are stars out here some nights that are all the philosophy a man or woman could ever need. Be sure and get out of town and look at them. You won’t see this in many places.”

They decided to eat dinner at a place Frank knew about that was nearby and then drive back to the kiva to see the stars. “Come with us,” Carla said to Nellie. “We’re stuck in transit. We’d like the company.”

“All right,” Nellie said. “I’ll go with you. If there’s a restaurant near here I should find out about it for my helpers.”

“It’s not a restaurant,” Frank added. “It just has hamburgers and shakes and sometimes a few other things. It’s part of a country store.” He paused. “They have pickled eggs and cheese and crackers.”

The store was not a disappointment. It sold turquoise and silver jewelry, and Carla couldn’t resist buying two bracelets and a belt buckle. All four of the travelers splurged on chocolate milk shakes with their burgers. “I guess I’ve only gained five pounds.” Carla laughed. “I don’t think I’ve gained ten.”

“You haven’t gained an ounce,” DeLesseps insisted. “You’re as thin as a rose.”

They went back to the mesa at dark. The stars were out in full battalions, millions upon millions of stars and galaxies and shooting stars, and around and behind the stars the blackness of eternity moving past infinity into concepts no human mind can grasp.

“Maybe there are reasons,” Carla said to DeLesseps. “Maybe he wasn’t really a priest. Maybe he was still thinking about whether to be ordained.”

“We’ll find out soon,” DeLesseps said. “Look up there where the Big Dipper is near those Seven Sisters. Look at that bunch of them down near the end of that. Good grief, Carla. How did we get here?”

“How does anyone get anywhere?” she answered.