Joy Williams: Honored Guest

They took to the road that night and didn’t stop driving until daylight disclosed that the landscape had changed considerably. There was a great deal of broken glass and huge cactus everywhere. Organ-pipe, saguaro, barrel cactus and prickly pear. Strange and stern shapes, far stiller than trees, less friendly and willing to serve. They seemed to be waiting for further transition, another awesome shift of the earth’s plates, an enormous occurrence. The sun bathed each spine, it sharpened the smashed bottles and threw itself through the large delicate ears of car-crushed jackrabbits. They saw few people and no animals except dead ones. The land was vast and still and there seemed to be considerable resentment toward the nonhuman creatures who struggled to inhabit it. Dead coyotes and hawks were nailed to fence posts and the road was hammered with the remains of lizards and snakes. Miriam was glad that the lamp was covered and did not have to suffer these sights.

The first night they stopped at a motel, with a Chinese restaurant and lounge adjoining. Miriam ordered moo goo gai pan for dinner, something she had not had since she was a child, and an orange soda. Carl fed Jack some select tidbits from an appetizer platter with a pair of chopsticks. After they ate Miriam wandered into the lounge, but there was only a cat vigorously cleaning itself who stared at her with its legs splayed over its head. She picked up a couple of worn paperback books from the exchange table in the office and went back to her room. Through the walls she could hear Carl singing to Jack as he ran the bathwater. He would shampoo Jack’s hair, scrub his nails and talk about the future … Miriam turned on the lamp and examined one of the books. It concerned desert plants but many of the pages were missing and someone had spilled wine on the pictures. She did learn, however, that cactus are descended from roses. They were late arrivals, adaptors, part of a new climate. She felt like that, felt very much a late arrival, it was her personality. She had adapted readily to being in love, and then adapted to not being in love anymore. And the new climate was, well, this situation. She put the book about cactus down.

The other book was about hunting zebras in Africa. I shot him right up his big fat fanny , the writer wrote. She had read this before she knew what she was doing and felt terrible about it, but the lamp held steady until she finally turned it off and got into bed.

The next day they drove. They stopped at hot springs and ghost towns. They stopped on an Indian reservation and Carl bought Jack colored sand in a bottle. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and Miriam drove while Carl spooned blueberry blizzard into Jack’s mouth. They admired the desert, the peculiar growths, the odd pale colors. They passed through a canyon of large, solitary boulders. There was a sign threatening fine and imprisonment for defacing the rocks but the boulders were covered with paint, spelling out people’s names, mostly. The shapes of the rocks resembled nothing but the words made them look like toilet doors in a truck stop. On the other side of the canyon was a small town with two museums, a brick hotel, a gas station and a large bar called the Horny Toad. Miriam had the feeling that the truck’s engine had stopped running.

“Truck’s stopped,” Carl said.

They coasted to the side of the road and Carl fiddled with the ignition.

“Alternator’s shot, I bet,” he said. He took Jack’s sunglasses off, wiped them with a handkerchief and carefully hooked them back over Jack’s ears. He was thinking, Miriam thought. Underneath her elbow, the metal of the door was heating up.

“You check into the motel,” Carl directed her. “Jack and I will walk down to the garage. He likes garages.”

Carl helped Miriam get their luggage from the back and carried it into the hotel’s lobby. She arranged for two unadjoining rooms. They were the last rooms left, even though the hotel and town appeared deserted. The museums were closed and everyone was at the bar, the manager told her. One of the museums displayed only a petrified wedding cake, a petrified cat, some rocks and old clothes. It was typical and not worth going into, the manager confided. But people came from far and wide to see the other museum and speak to the taxidermist on duty. He was surprised that they had come here without having the museum as their destination. The taxidermist was a genius. He couldn’t make an animal look dead if he wanted to.

“He can even do reptiles and combine them in artistic and instructive groups,” the manager said.

“This museum is full of dead animals?” Miriam said.

“Sure,” the manager said. “It’s a wildlife museum.”

Miriam’s room was in the back of the hotel over the kitchen and smelled like the inside of a lunch box, but it wasn’t unpleasant. She rearranged the furniture, plugged in the lamp and gazed out the single window at the bar, a long, dark structure that seemed, the longer she stared at it, to be almost heaving with the muffled sound of voices. This was the Horny Toad. She decided to go there.

Miriam had always felt that she was the kind of person who somehow quenched in the least exacting stranger any desire for conversation with her. This, however, was not the case at the Toad. People turned to her immediately and began to speak. They had bright, restless faces, seemed starved for affection and were in full conversational mode. There were a number of children present. Everyone was wildly stimulated.

A young woman with lank, thinning hair touched Miriam with a small dry hand. “I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic,” she said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Yes,” Miriam said, startled. People were waving, smiling.

“I used to be so afraid of losing control,” Priscilla said. “I was afraid of going insane, embarrassing myself. I was afraid of getting sick or doing something frightening or dying. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

She went off to the bar, saying she would return with gimlets. Miriam was immediately joined by an elderly couple wearing jeans, satin shirts and large, identical concha belts. Their names were Vern and Irene. They had spent all day at the museum and were happy and tired.

“My favorite is the javelina family,” Irene said. “Those babies were adorable.”

“Ugly animals,” Vern said. “Bizarre. But they’ve always been Irene’s favorite.”

“Not last year,” Irene said. “Last year it was the bears, I think. Vern says that Life is just one thing but it takes different forms to amuse itself.”

“That’s what I say, but I don’t believe it,” Vern said, winking broadly at Miriam.

“Vern likes the ground squirrels.”

Vern agreed. “Isn’t much of a display, but I like what I hear about them. That state-of-torpor thing. When the going gets rough, boom, right into a state of torpor. They don’t need anything. A single breath every three minutes.”

Irene didn’t seem as fascinated as her husband by the state of torpor. “Have you gone yet, dear?” she asked Miriam. “Have you asked the taxidermist your question?”

“No, I haven’t,” Miriam said. She accepted a glass from Priscilla, who had returned with a tray of drinks. “I’m Priscilla Dickman,” she said to the old couple, “and I’m an ex-agoraphobic.”

“He doesn’t answer everybody,” Vern said.

“He answers the children sometimes, but they don’t know what they’re saying,” Irene said fretfully. “I think children should be allowed only in the petting zoo.”

A gaunt, grave boy named Alec arrived and identified himself as a tree-hugger. He was with a girl named Argon.

“When I got old enough to know sort of what I wanted?” Argon said, “I decided I wanted either a tree-hugger or a car guy. I’d narrowed it down to that. At my first demonstration, I lay in the road with some other people in a park where they were going to bulldoze two-hundred-year-old trees for a picnic area. We had attracted quite a crowd of onlooking picnickers. When the cops came and carried me off, a little girl said, ‘Why are they taking away the pretty one, Mommy?’ and I was hooked. I just loved demonstrating after that, always hoping to overhear those words again. But I never did.”