Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

The yellow-haired cashier rang open the drawer. “It was so nice at the river, Dee,” she said, not even looking as she counted out the fifty dollars to B. “Why couldn’t it be like that all the time? How d’you know it wouldn’t?”

The bills were ragged, torn fives and tens, soft and old. B. forced herself not to pull her hand back.

“It never stays like at the river, honey.”

B. was out in the blinding sun with the fistful of bills.

The cashier’s horrible hair quivered in her mind, the other’s black triangles, and the carsickness rose into her throat. None of the calm of the banks. She braced against the door of the Mustang. She wanted to lay her spinning head on the roof but the metal was blistering. The cool expansive feeling must come. She waited. A woman wheeled out a heaping cart with a red-mouthed toddler in the front kicking and screaming over the bar. The woman spoke to him in a robotically soothing voice. Her hair looked limp and dull in the sun, her face drawn.

All the women in the valley looked tired, B. thought.

The carsickness surged. The cool expansive feeling did not come.

The toddler’s stained mouth shrieked. The woman tossed the bags into the back of the station wagon, still speaking as if by rote. B. held her stomach and steadied herself against the Mustang. Without thinking, she walked toward the woman as the last bag went in, the toddler shrieking almost in her ear. The woman ignored B. standing there. She slammed the rear door and pulled the child out of the cart, onto her hip. “I have some extra money,” B. blurted out. The woman gave no signal that she had heard B. She put the boy in the front seat and slammed the door, walked stone-faced back to the driver’s side. The boy’s attention turned to B. and his wailing stopped, as if a television had been switched on. The woman sat still in the driver’s seat for a moment. “I have a husband,” she said through the window. “I ain’t no charity case, so whatever born-again Jehovah’s Witness racket this is, go fuck yourself.” Then she started the engine, the toddler still fixed on B. as if she’d exploded or dropped off a cliff in a cartoon. They peeled out of the parking lot and B. stood in the exhaust.

This time she did not feel any urge to cry. Like an automaton she got into the car. She drove with the dirty grocery store bills in her right hand. Daughtry was in her thoughts somewhere, chiding. Her skull spun; she felt the whiteness on the inside of her jaw from clenching.

On the road back to the freeway, she passed a group of Chinese men huddled in a vacant lot in the thin shade of a pepper tree, smoking on their haunches. She stopped the Mustang. She walked over to them and threw down the crumpled grocery store bills. The men kept smoking, staring without speaking. Back in the car, she realized that she would rather at that moment be any one of them, with their strange eyes and stained teeth and dirty undershirts.

When she was back on the freeway, she lifted her hands off the wheel and closed her eyes. Eventually she opened them again. She lowered her hands back down but did not let her foot up off the gas.

The plum trees were endless dark masses blotting the pale blue sky. She followed the gray trunks. She focused on getting to the end of each field, each orchard. One to the next, forward motion.

The girl from Sambo’s was not even standing when she came upon her, but sitting on her knapsack, her bare brown legs in the cutoffs splayed in front of her. She wore the same white peasant blouse, now with a brown suede vest over, her feet shoeless. When B. stopped the car, the girl did not look surprised or grateful, just stood up and bent into the open window.

“You going to Reno?”

B. shook her head.

“Me either.”

The girl climbed in without another word or a second look at B., settling her knapsack on the floor. She unbuttoned the suede vest and stuffed it inside, rummaged for her cigarettes and lit one.

B. could see the girl’s breasts clearly through the peasant blouse. She pulled the car back on the road. The girl smoked and stared out the window, as if there was nothing inside the car to hold her attention.

“I’m going to San Francisco,” she finally said on one of her exhales. “But not yet. My old man is there. But I don’t need that scene right now.” A half dozen silver bracelets clinked at her wrist as she raised and lowered the cigarette.

“I used to live there,” B. said. “I don’t think I’m going back.”

The girl did not seem to hear her. They passed an empty fruit stand, the bright red-lettered sign for corn & apricots today giving the impression that someone might show up any minute. Hot grainy air blew around the car, whipping the girl’s long hair.

The girl held the cigarette between her lips and knotted the hair behind her. “We were camping for a while at the beach. My parents never took us to the ocean. Just pools. Chlorine and water wings and all that noise. Anyway, I told him he could leave for San Fran if he wanted, I was staying. He left.”

B. could not make sense of any part of this statement. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Fontana. Wasteland of America.” General images of the southern half of the state rolled through B.’s mind, orange groves and salmon-colored houses and women in white sunglasses. B. saw in her peripheral vision the glint of blonde hair all over the girl’s legs. Her fingernails were grimed black. They drove through an alfalfa field (she knew from the scattering butterflies), and past a small house with two date palms in front and a dead olive tree in back. B. wondered whether she’d already driven down this road.

“It’s a drag because he’ll miss me.” The girl drew a finger back and forth across her chapped lips. “Yeah, it’ll be a real downer for him. But like I said, I have my own scene — see things, do things.”

The nausea thrummed through B. She tried to concentrate on what was happening inside the Mustang, on how the girl had come to be beside her, but she was having trouble processing all of it, the hair, the breasts, the dirt.

“What have you seen?” she said carefully through the thrumming.

“Lots of stuff. I saw my first real Indian the other day. I mean I’ve seen them hustling at concerts, but this one was real. He drove a bus and wore a funky necklace of feathers and beads with his uniform, and his hair was down his back. His nose was big. He looked angry.

“And I saw the governor’s mansion. Jed and those groupies would think it’s too straight. But if people visit, it’s for a reason.”

B. tried and failed to picture the girl shuffling behind a velvet rope next to families and silver-haired retirees. It was at this moment she realized the girl had no recollection of her.

“What have you seen?” the girl asked indifferently.

B. flushed. “I saw the Sutter Buttes. They’re mountains in the middle of the valley, not connected to anything, you see. It makes them interesting.”

The girl tilted her head back against the seat, eyes on the window.

“I’ve never been picked up by a woman before.”

“I don’t mind,” was all B. could think of to say.

“You should go to the governor’s mansion,” the girl said without enthusiasm.

They drove past another alfalfa field. A slinky metal irrigation machine wheeled through it but there was no one to see; a machine somewhere to make it run. B. understood this about the valley now.

The girl had already fallen asleep, snoring lightly. B. kneaded her temple. The thrum was across the backside of her eyes, down the base of her neck. A be-in type in her car now, a “crazy,” a “stinko,” the secretaries called them, and yet she seemed to B. only like a dirty, pitiable child. B. told herself that she must make a plan. To get back to the banks, yes, but then for after. This was what she must do. Because even if she got back to the banks, she had the hazy understanding that they would only be available to her for a limited time. B. recalled on the wrist of the first pretty teller a charm bracelet with gold miniatures of the Eiffel Tower and the London Bridge (and a four-leaf clover and a heart with an arrow through it and a diamond chip). Well B. could go abroad too, couldn’t she? She could go to Paris and Rome.