Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

But she saw quaint woven straw chairs and mansard roofs and sensed that this kind of plan was too similar to what she’d already done, coming west.

The thrumming went on.

All at once the heat returned to her again, the air flattening. A suffocation that mixed with the girl and the non-plan and the thrumming. There was no breathing. She pulled over. She got out and began walking blindly into a field. It was not until she saw a flash of red and smelled the sharp stickiness of the vines that she realized she was back in one of the tomato fields. Going on and on, helter-skelter, shadeless. But she had to move. The bone-colored heels caught in the crumbled dirt. Her face felt swollen. She wondered suddenly what she looked like to the girl. She reached into the purse for her compact. In the sunlight, her skin was pink and glazed, her throat beginning to sag, the skin draping slightly at her chin. Blackheads were visible in her pores, broken capillaries around her nose. She had, until recently, applied a facial mask every week to slough off old skin and expose new, as her mother had taught her.

She should try to find a facial mask in the valley.

The sound of splattering turned her around. The girl was squatted beside the Mustang, peeing in the dirt.

“I could have driven you somewhere,” B. said confusedly, stumbling back toward the car. “We could have stopped for you to. . urinate.”

“I didn’t want to urinate on your seat.” The girl stood up and buttoned her cutoffs and made no move to get back in the car. “You wanna get high?” She took a small cigarette from behind her ear. B. shook her head. “Suit yourself, it’s good. Jamaican.” The girl walked past her into the field, her skin brown and firm in the sun. She took long drags on the joint and pulled tomatoes from the ground, tossing them as far as she could.

Now B. could not stand the tomato fields one minute longer. “We should get going,” she called.

The girl had picked a yellow tomato and was trying to look through it. “Going where?” she asked.

B.’s head throbbed, her scalp burned. “Well, I just stopped for a second. I’d rather keep moving.”

The girl shrugged. “I’m hungry,” she said.

“You’ll have to put on some shoes if we stop.”

“I have shoes.”

Each square of land they passed was bleached in the heat and smog and against the washed-out sky. B. felt as if she’d always been in the valley. Daughtry’s voice came into her head. Throw the checks out. They’ll be looking for you. She shook it off. She concentrated on the bleached squares while the girl stared out the window. Finally they came on a sign for a roadside bar and restaurant. open all day.

The front and back doors of the bar-restaurant were open, a sunlit tunnel into darkness. Fans on the ceiling spun but did not create any breeze. B. was relieved there were no other customers. She did not want to be seen with the girl. A man stacking glasses behind the counter took their orders and they sat down.

The girl ate her hamburger with a meticulousness that surprised B., French fries first, then the hamburger patty, then the pickle, placing the other trimmings inside the bun and closing it firmly. B. picked at her spaghetti. It had seemed the safest choice for the throbbing and spinning and heat but the noodles coagulated in a thick cloying sauce.

“What do you think you’ll do, in San Francisco?” she asked the girl.

The girl had been spearing the hamburger bun with her fork. “I don’t know. Hang out.”

“You don’t really have a plan.”

The girl looked up from her stabbing and B. thought she might jab the fork at her but her face was expressionless. “Are we going soon?” she said. She got up and walked toward the jukebox.

B. stroked the ostrich-skin purse. The girl, she knew, would not offer any money. B. felt unwilling again to part with the bank bills. In the deep of her mind, Daughtry was warning her in his low bitter voice.

“It’s so silly of me,” she said to the man behind the bar. “I forgot my cash in my other purse. Do you take checks?”

The man ran his eyes over her. “You from Sacramento?” he asked.

“I’m on a trip with my daughter, to Reno.” She paused and softened her voice. “We’re going to meet my husband. He’s on business there. He won’t be surprised to hear I brought the wrong purse.” She handed him the check. “There’s extra for the tip, of course.”

The man looked at her. “I don’t know this bank, ma’am.”

“Oh, it’s in the city. I can endorse it in front of you here.” She opened the purse, fumbled inside. “Well, I thought I had. . Do you have a pen?” She smoothed her hair back, realizing she could not remember the last time she’d brushed it.

He reached next to the register and handed her a pen.

“I’ll just take down your driver’s license number,” he said.

“Yes, of course.” She rummaged the open purse again and dropped her shoulders, pretending exasperation. “Well, of all things. My license is in my other purse as well. Harold will think I’m hilarious.”

“I need some kind of identification, ma’am.”

“You could use my license plate.”

She was reading a script in her mind, without examining any of the lines. Behind the bar, a black-and-white pinup photo from the 1940s was glossy and signed. A girl in a one-piece, curls on top of her head, long legs in seamed-stockings and platform heels, peeping over her shoulder. B. could not quite make out the inscription. be light! me tonight! (take flight?) On the check she wrote out an amount larger than the bill.

“Ma’am?”

“I can write the license number down for you,” B. heard herself saying next. She clutched the pen, beginning to write.

“No, I’ll get it myself. That’s yours over there?” The man gestured through the open door to the Mustang.

He stepped outside with his pad. B. stood in the doorway. The girl was busy examining the jukebox as if it were a riddle from a distant time. B. watched the man walk around the car, tilting his head. He went around the back and wrote on his pad. He came back inside and slipped the check into the register and counted out, minus the commission and tip, her change.

He looked B. in the eye. “I sure hope you’re not scamming me. I’d hate to send two pretty ladies to jail.”

Be light! Take flight!

“I don’t know what you mean.”

In the bathroom before they left, she tried to stick her finger down her throat. She only gagged. She knew not to expect the cool expansive feeling. But the throbbing seemed worse now. A new feeling of dread came over her, a feeling that she was heading the wrong way, that she should have turned or stopped somewhere earlier. Her body felt suddenly exhausted. The girl had gone outside, kicking at the dust of the parking lot, the loose thin leather that barely held together her sandals and her feet covered in dirt.

“I can’t drive any more today,” B. said in the car. “I think we should stop at a motel.”

The girl looked straight at B. for the first time. “I don’t do anything like that, okay?” The girl’s eyes were brown and tired.

“No. I meant. . it’s too hot. I just want to rest. I’d rather drive in the morning.”

The eyes took this in. “If you’re paying.”

B. stopped at the next roadside motel and got them a room with two double beds. Dark blue bedspreads with giant purple and red flowers. The girl went into the bathroom. B. heard the shower turn on. While she could she went back to the car and hid the checkbook in the glove compartment and the money under the seat. Then she lay back on one of the beds. The rough texture of the nylon threads scratched her legs but she did not move or turn down the comforter. There seemed to be glitter in the ceiling. She stared at the glitter and went through in her mind all the actions she could take right at that moment: get up, rip up the checks, change clothes, get into the car, go back to the city. She lay there, immobile. The dizziness held steady. The shower ran for a while and she realized she herself had not bathed in days. After the girl finished, she would shower. They would sleep. She would have coffee and a real breakfast in the morning and be able to drive for hours. Drive farther away. Perhaps she could find other quiet places, not like the supermarket or the bar. Department stores, maybe. But she would have to go into cities for that. She sat up and saw herself in the mirror across from the bed. She was sunburned, thin. Her dark roots were showing. Her cuticles dirty and her knuckle with a large cut, she could not remember how. She could start there: bathe, clean her fingernails. And yet she did not want to move, did not have the energy to scrub anything. Maybe it was better to let all these thoughts go. Maybe a plan would come to her that way, descend from somewhere. She held the vague recognition that someone might be after her now. The police. The people to whom the checks belonged. Daughtry. But the considerations were shadowy, faint, like a bell tolling in the distance.