Shirley Sullivan

What Do You Have to Say to Jesus Now?

They were headed south, down from the mountains, speeding through a snow-brushed country flat as playing fields. Since leaving the ski resort they had been driving for two hours, the only sound the hum of tires on the road, and Kate, preoccupied with the people she needed to call about the wedding when she got home, hadn’t noticed the warning light. They were directly across from the entrance to the White Sands National Monument when Martin’s black sedan stalled and rolled slowly to a stop and no amount of cursing or ignition-key coaxing could get it going. The hum of the heater ceased and the green dash lights went out, leaving Kate and Ellen in the middle of a highway miles from anywhere. It would be dark soon and the surrounding wilderness would disappear as the world sank into shadows. Forcing herself to take a deep breath, Kate looked out past rows of gnarled mesquite, imagining what might lay hidden in the canyons.

“Weren’t you supposed to check the car?” Ellen asked, her voice smooth with certainty. “Didn’t you promise Martin you’d check his car before we left?”

Kate, barely able to see Ellen in the dusk, tried to get her head around the fix they were in when she sensed more than saw a movement along the fence by the side of the road. “Look at that.” As Ellen squinted past her, she pointed toward an animal with long spear-like horns and black markings on his head and legs, standing knee-deep in winter grass. Behind him, the rest of the herd waited soundlessly with their heads lowered.

“Look at the size of them. What are they?” Ellen asked.

“Oryx.” Kate said. The wind rose a little, scuffing the grass and rattling the car. Low clouds unspooled on the horizon. “They’re waiting for us to get out and load our .30-06’s,” Kate said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve been brought here to be hunted. All the way from the Kalahari Desert. Isn’t that great? It takes a serious gun to bring them down.”

“How do you know this?”

“Martin. He knows everything.”

Both women sat perfectly still, watching the animals as they watched them. Kate imagined them downed, eyes bulging in recognition of the end, mouths open in a final outrage.

After several minutes, Ellen said, “Don’t we need to do something? Like get the car off the road?” She tried to wipe the fogged-up windshield with her hand but her sweat made it worse. “Someone could slam into the back of us.”

“You’re right. Help me push.”

“I would, but I twisted my knee on that last run.”

Kate, wondering what her friend would look like with a split lip, hauled her heavy fur coat from the backseat and opened the car door. At the unlatching the antelope bolted backwards, then flashed off through the brush. Slipping on the icy pavement, Kate pressed her body into the back of the car as she struggled to establish a foothold, then pushed. Gradually the Lincoln moved forward, tires sinking into the field.

“You scared them off,” Ellen called.

“Could you maybe get on your cell?” Kate called back. “We need a tow-truck from Alamogordo. Otherwise we’ll be here all night.” Kate braced herself against the cold steel of the car as she made her way back to the driver’s door, the frigid air like glass in her throat.

A tow-truck sped past them, braked and moved in reverse with a mashing of gears, its blinking roof lights and giant tires dwarfing their car. It was a quite a show as Kate and Ellen watched the driver position his truck in front of their bumper, then swing down and stroll toward them. He was grinning.

Kate rolled down the window. He had a blue crescent moon tattooed on his hand and one gold earring. The wind had rearranged his hair.

“I wouldn’t have taken you girls for a Lincoln sedan,” he said. “A 911 Porsche, maybe.”

Kate smiled up at him, a silly, lopsided smile. “Oh, this isn’t…”

“Want to roll up the window?” Ellen said. “Before we catch pneumonia.”

They rode in the front seat of the truck on the way back to Alamogordo, the driver humming something that sounded familiar to Kate. A rosary of blue glass beads swung from the rearview and glistened in the green lights of the dashboard. A miniature Jesus on the cross was attached to one end. Kate resisted reaching out to touch them. It was fifteen miles before anyone spoke.

Both women sat perfectly still, watching the animals as they watched them. Kate imagined them downed, eyes bulging in recognition of the end, mouths open in a final outrage.

“Been skiing, right? Sierra Blanca?” the driver finally asked, steering with one hand on the wheel. “I saw the rack on your car.” When no one answered, he rolled the window down and spat.

“We were, actually,” Kate said, “it was a last time holiday get-together thing before my….” She hesitated, one hand at her throat, unable to get the word out.

The thought of Martin, waiting at home for her return, in that big house he’d lived in for what seemed like centuries, waiting for her to explain why she hadn’t checked the car, made her all the more aware of this man next to her.

“Before your what? Divorce? Surgery?”

“Could you maybe turn the heat up?” Ellen asked.

Another silence. “I’d like to try skiing one of these days,” the driver continued. “Not much snow in Kuwait.”

“You’ve been in Kuwait?” Kate asked.

“Yes ma’am, I have.”

“Wow.” Kate finally recognized the song he’d been humming. Joe Cocker. You are so beautiful, to me. Don’t you see. Suddenly hot in her coat, she redirected the heater vents toward Ellen. And then the lights of Alamogordo came into view.

It was as if the town expected them back. Motel bars beckoned with blinking neon and street lamps flashed on as they passed. The windows of a mobile-home village glowed like everyone was home. Big rigs revved down on their way into town. A mile on, they reached the repair garage, located on the main drag between the bus station and a twenty-four-hour diner. The driver set the brake and began the process of unhooking the car while Ellen walked briskly inside, followed, a few lengths behind, by Kate. They found the mechanic leaning into the Coke machine, one hand in his back pocket, absorbed with reading the labels on the cans.

“Hello? Hello!” When he looked up Ellen explained they had a car, that one, right over there, that had stopped running, and could he maybe take a look. Sure, he could do that. He extracted his soda, popped it open and took a swig. All three walked to the car, peering in as he lifted the hood.

“So, what do you think? Can you fix it?” Ellen asked him after he’d had a chance to assess the damage.

“Sure thing,” he said, straightening up. “I’ll do what I can but you got yourself a busted alternator.” He checked his watch. “Right now it’s about closing time. I can’t have this fixed ‘til tomorrow.” He took another swig of Coke. “You ladies come back in the morning.”

The silly, lopsided smile was back on Kate’s face.

Ellen guided Kate to a nearby bench inside the garage. After brushing it off with a tissue from her purse, they sat down. Ellen leaned forward and cleared her throat. “We have to spend the night?”

“Is that so bad?” Kate said.

“What? You want to get a room? Have a party? In this dumpy town?”

The tow-truck driver, finished with his paper work, strolled over and handed Kate the bill for the haul in. She handed him her credit card; Martin’s really but it had her name on it. “Sit there long enough, your asses will freeze,” he said. “I know a place where we can get a drink.”

“Thanks all the same,” Ellen said.

“Sure.” Kate allowed her coat to fall away from her shoulders, revealing a sweater snug over low-slung breasts.

Ellen stood up and walked off. Kate hurried after her and the two stopped beside a car with the tires removed; it rested on blocks. “We can’t go off with him,” Ellen said when they were out of earshot.

It was as if the town expected them back. Motel bars beckoned with blinking neon and street lamps flashed on as they passed. The windows of a mobile-home village glowed like everyone was home.

“Why not?” The floor was littered with oil cans and greasy rags, the smell reminding Kate of all the years she’d played in the shed where her grandfather had stored his tractor.

“You’ve always thought you were entitled to whatever guys you wanted.” Ellen looked quickly around. “And what do we know about this man? He could have brought anything home from the war. A transmittable disease. A pet monkey with a transmittable disease. God knows what he has on his mind. Well, that’s not true.”

“You’ll know best.” Kate studied her friend, her small determined features, remembering how, growing up, Ellen resented it when Kate knew something first. Like how it felt being asked out. What sex was like. “You’re not up for a threesome?”

“Maybe not this time.”

“Want to watch?”

“Knock it off.”

“Okay,” Kate said, “but I like him.”

“Oh, well then, if you like him. Do you know what happens to women who go off with men they don’t know?”

“No, I don’t. Tell me.”

“Their bodies are found in a ditch.”

Kate turned her back on Ellen’s words and found herself staring at a wall plastered with pictures of naked women. From somewhere toward the rear of the building came the sound of impolite laughter.

“Do you honestly think you can get away with this? We’re not in high school anymore. I can’t keep covering for you.” She took another Kleenex from her purse and blew her nose. “Is this your reaction to last minute cold feet? What is it, that Martin is older? That he carries an

umbrella even when it isn’t raining?”

Kate turned back around. “I can’t live in that big drafty house with Martin and all those dogs.” She looked down at her boots. Bear children within those walls. Something about the light in Martin’s house, it marked generations of living and dying there. A house for grownups, everyone well-educated and conservative, where triviality didn’t exist, and the foundations and perimeters were all firmly in place. No room for impulse or improvisation. She couldn’t live among the heavy drapes at every window. His mother’s curling smile and profusion of tiresome stories. Accompanied by the ticking of the grandfather clock. Then there was the issue of the dress. The one she had worn and insisted Kate wear for her wedding. It was hard to refuse Martin’s mother. Kate had been unable to refuse the fur coat she now wore.

“Why did you let it go so far?”

“Stop your worrying about him. He’ll find someone else. There’re plenty like me floating around out there.”

“People who need to grow up?”

The two women stared at one another, unblinking.

“Thank you, little moralist. Your marriage lasted two years.”

The expression on Ellen’s face stopped Kate short. She’d been too mean, since Ellen’s husband left her for a man he’d known only briefly, someone he met on a business trip to Miami.

“I’ll be next door at the diner,” Ellen said. “I’ll have a nice fried chicken dinner with a buttered roll and a glass of beer.”

“Wish you’d come.” Kate watched her friend walk off in the direction of the restaurant. “Really,” she called. There was no answer. “Okay, then.” She watched until Ellen was out of sight, only then did she turn toward the driver.

His name was Eddie Rodriguez. He unlocked the door to a cheerless apartment and pushed in ahead of Kate, switching on a lamp that sat on a table next to the wall. Awkwardly, they stood side-by-side in a room with a ceiling fan, a sofa bed, pulled out and unmade, and a small television. Even in her coat, she felt cold.

She followed him into the kitchen area, and while he slipped out of his jacket, she opened the refrigerator door, staring hard at a jar of mayonnaise. “You hungry?” he asked. “I can rustle up something to eat.”

While she was thinking of the next thing to say, he took hold of her, found her mouth, and slid his tongue down her throat. “I’m Sonya,” she told him, catching her breath.

“Sonya, huh?”

“Is that funny?”

“You call yourself anything you want. Girls like making up names for themselves. Listen, you like music?” Eddie fiddled around with a small stereo on the kitchen counter until they heard someone singing.

“How ‘bout a drink?” There was a bottle of tequila next to the stereo. “Or. I’ve got other stuff.” He rubbed his nose. “Better stuff.” He opened a drawer and removed two plastic bags. “What do you think?” He tried to remove her coat, but she resisted. “So, what? This your first time?”

“Why?”

“You look like you’re on tilt.”

While Eddie removed a small white rock from one of the sacks, Kate glanced toward a smallish window, hoping for a glimpse of snowy mist or clusters of light, a tiny beacon of reassurance. Nothing. She imagined Martin, arms crossed over his chest, head inclined to one side, looking at her with that special silence.

Eddie, repeating the name Sonya over and over, had placed the rock in a cylinder pipe and was heating it with a cigarette lighter. “Don’t you worry,” he winked at her, “you’re in good hands.”

Something about the light in Martin’s house, it marked generations of living and dying there. A house for grownups, everyone well-educated and conservative, where triviality didn’t exist, and the foundations and perimeters were all firmly in place.

She listened to the concoction sputter and pop, feeling like it was a child’s game and when it was over she’d go home to mother. He told her she could go first.

“Eddie.” There were sounds inside the room, like drowning insects. Like Indian chants.

“It’s okay. I’m right here.”

“I thought I saw a monkey run under the bed.” She hesitated, pulling her coat together, before she stepped forward to inhale the vapors through the pipe. Then, as soon as she exhaled, the rush hit.

She sank heavily to the floor. Splayed out, her hands loosely curved, she felt the soft wool of her sweater against her skin. “The air’s not like real air in this room,” she said to no one in particular. She thought she heard a phone ring in another room, but there was no other room.

Eddie went next. Then he was beside her, opening her coat. “I’m supposed to go back, you know. I’m just driving this truck for my uncle for a couple of weeks, then I’m being deployed back to Kuwait.”

As he talked, Kate dangled from a tree outside the window, alongside the icicles, contentedly unborn, the pulse of drugs in her veins. Eddie’s voice traveled to her from another universe. “I’m a time voyager,” she offered. Their bodies would be discovered in a week or so, under the bed alongside the monkey, who would have nested in her hair. “I’m a gypsy. With sequin eyes.” A woman of palms and rivers, of sailboats in the harbor, carrying unfamiliar cargo to the edge of the world.

“You going to take off that coat?” Eddie asked after a while. “What is that anyway? Mink or something?”

“It’s fox.”

He buried his face in the fur, then slipped his hand between her legs, forcing them apart. “This is a first, a girl in a fur coat.” He kept on talking from light years away. He was twenty-eight. She thought he was older. He looked older, the depthless light in his eyes, like the pull of a dark star, the disappearing beauty. He didn’t want to go back. Couldn’t go back. His luck had run out, just like a well run dry, he felt it. He’d tried to convince them he was unfit for duty, that they needed to cut him loose, but no one heard. He felt the edges of his life closing in.

He went to the kitchen and took another hit. When he returned to the floor, she felt her ski pants being removed. “I saw the rosary in the truck. Is that for real?”

“I carried it with me the whole time I was in Kuwait, and, the thing of it is, I was spared. A lot of my unit never came home.”

She kissed the edge of his smile. She kissed his cheek. We may never trap the stars, or find Mecca, she told him, but come and stay with me. Spend some time. Time is white. Sometimes it’s blue and sometimes yellow. Depends on the time of year. We can cross into Mexico, visit the markets, dance in the bars, drink tequila with those little worms. If we’re lucky we won’t be murdered. And if we are, since it’s almost Christmas, we can be carried through the streets with the Posadas, wrapped in shawls. Perhaps we’ll be taken in. Otherwise, you can meet the family, be the honored guest. Someone will tell us what to do. Martin, he’ll know.

His breath was sweet with the drugs and in the dark, his face was blue. “It’s all one big magic trick.” He fumbled his pants off, and with her holding on to him with both hands, they began to move in rhythm to the music on the radio.

Eddie took something to fall asleep. Kate, still in her coat and unable to sleep in spite of her fatigue, went into the bathroom and ran hot water over her hands. Standing at the window in the frigid dark, so close to the glass she felt the iciness on her cheeks, the engagement ring on her finger like a beacon for help, she looked out at an alley and beyond that, streets that were vacant, the ghostly sky burning with a shimmery luminance. The white drug set things loose inside her body, things like glacial streams. She thought of her own bed, piled over with blankets. Cathedral bells and yellow honey cakes. Bowls of mangoes and sweet William growing next to the house. Can’t you see, she hummed, you’re everything I hoped for. She began to sob.

Back on the floor next to Eddie, his breathing was thin and uneven as compared to hers, which was noisy. “Eddie?” she said, then nodded off to rolling fields of dream. Next she knew it was dawn and all she could think of was coffee. In the kitchen, she clicked off the music, found the grounds, and washed the carafe. The place was cold and her head throbbed. She stood at the sink, wishing the drone of the refrigerator would stop, and drank a glass of water. With the coffee pot burbling she wiped the Formica counter with a damp paper towel even though it didn’t need it. She wiped the stove. The front of the cabinets.

She poured coffee and waited for Eddie.

She poured a second cup and carried it in to him.

In the faint light she hardly recognized him, his eyes, like pools of black water, revealed nothing. A line of dark hair extended down from his navel. When she saw his chest wasn’t moving, she knelt and pressed a finger against an artery in his neck. “Hold me, Eddie.” She sat on the floor, her legs straight out in front of her like she did as a little girl when she watched TV, too close to the screen, as her mother always said. Ice pelleted the roof with a hissing sound.

She thought of her own bed, piled over with blankets. Cathedral bells and yellow honey cakes. Bowls of mangoes and sweet William growing next to the house. Can’t you see, she hummed, you’re everything I hoped for.

The minutes ticked by. The silence in the house deepened. Elongated. Coiled around her. If she kissed him, her mouth would fill with blood. Dizzily, she rose. Looking down on him, his prayers fallow between his legs, her name written on his eyelids, she decided he must be chilled. She slipped out of her coat and laid it across him, the gray fur soft around his face. She pulled on her sweater and jeans, found his keys, her purse, and left. The world outside, bundled in silence, breathed in its sleep.

His truck was parked outside at the end of a gravel drive. Behind the wheel, she checked her face in the rear view. Same familiar face, how could that be? She drove to the main highway before she remembered to turn on the headlights. She drove to the all-night diner. Ellen was seated at a table with her head on her arms. Kate sounded her horn and Ellen’s head jerked up.

She watched Ellen stumble as she rose, grope for her purse, put money on the table. The waitress, reading a newspaper, didn’t look up. Kate blinked the lights of the truck off and on, guiding Ellen out of the diner and toward her.

Kate got out of the truck as she approached and moved into the full glare from the headlights, just as it began to snow, big fat flakes catching in her hair and eyelashes.

“What’s wrong?”

“He’s dead,” Kate said.

“He’s dead?”

“I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do,” Kate said.

Ellen stepped forward, taking Kate by the shoulders. “Okay. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. Get in.” Behind them, early morning traffic passed in both directions.

Untouched by the morning chill, Kate pulled herself back into Eddie’s truck, released the brake and, edging toward panic and confused about which way to drive, began to sob into her hands. As Ellen snapped her seatbelt, Kate shoved the gear into drive and skidded onto the hardtop. She headed into the first flurries of snow and soon it was streaming into the headlights, exploding on the glass.

“Are we stealing his truck?” Ellen asked.

“Did you see that sign? What did it say?”

“Tularosa.”

“We’ll go that way,” Kate said.

“Okay, but that’s the wrong way.”

They sailed along darkened, half-deserted roads, headed north, toward Bent, the land between towns falling away from the road, the trees heavy with ice. They passed a fruit stand closed for the winter, a motel with a group of cabins and a sign that announced “ ACANCY”. They drove through the Mescalero Reservation, turned around, drove back, tires singing on the blacktop. They drove highway 82 to Cloudcroft, through High Rolls and Mayhill, towns where no one went. Stopped in La Luz at a gas station, filled the tank. They drove all the way to the entrance of White Sands National Monument and parked on the side of the road.

It was no longer snowing and the sky had cleared. “What happened?” Ellen asked. Kate seemed to sink into the seat. “It was like the last night before a big war, and you’d cover the lamp shades with dishtowels and dance together without moving your feet.”

“What?”

“Only the bombs hit before you’re ready.”

Ellen reached for her friend and the two women fell against one another as if their spines had collapsed.

“Do you know what happened to your coat?”

A minivan blew by. Ellen was speaking, but Kate had stopped listening to her friend. She rolled down the window and listened to the stillness between the cars, to the sound of thrush wings fluttering in the brush only a few yards away. The antelope had gone and though nothing moved nearby, she could still hear them. She could feel the air move, imagining them galloping toward the hills. Eluding the hunters.

“There’s still time to go back for your coat.” Ellen looked pensive, her hands clutching the purse in her lap. “Martin’s mother will never forgive you.”

“Eddie and I did a trade.” Kate reached for the blue glass beads hanging from the rearview. They felt warm in her hand, like summer, with sandy beaches and turquoise water. Like ice when the sun strikes it. Liquid as the bay of deliverance, where the currents travel all the way to the Sea of Cortez.