Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

She decided that the checks were for her like the sand for the boy, and she did not let her mind go beyond this thought.

The radio announced a heat wave for the valley. B. could not imagine it any hotter. The back of the ivory sheath had sweat through and her limbs felt swollen; her hair had half slipped out of its pins. She stopped at a restaurant on an exit. She brought her large makeup case into the bathroom and powdered and fixed her hair and unzipped her dress to spray perfume underneath.

She ordered an iced tea from the waiter. The young man stared at her so intensely she wondered for a moment if she knew him from somewhere. She asked if he lived nearby, and he nodded without speaking. She remarked on the heat and he continued to stare until finally he said, “Ma’am, your zipper’s undone.”

She reached her hand to her back; her dress was flared open. “Oh. Thank you.” She flushed to her neck. Her bra strap had fallen down her shoulder and she smelled her own odor still pungent under the perfume. She gripped the zipper awkwardly and pulled it up as far as she could. “Thank you,” she mumbled. After he left, she pretended to study the menu with great absorption.

A woman with three small children was the only other customer in the place. She sat two tables over but kept staring at B. and the sky-blue makeup case. The woman looked old and childlike at the same time, small-boned, a high forehead with deep lines. She was wearing a sundress with a stain at the breast. In one arm she held a baby, while two young children ran back and forth from the window to the table, eating half a French fry and dropping it on the floor, sucking the juice off a pickle and putting it back. The woman sat like a statue in the midst of it.

“Do you live around here?” B. asked.

The woman’s expression signaled the ridiculousness of the question. The baby squirmed. She hitched it higher and tighter on her lap without once glancing at it.

“I was just wondering if there was anything of interest to visit. For someone passing through.”

The woman looked at B. as if she had asked for directions to China. A strand of thin hair fell across the lined forehead.

“There’s Old Town, I guess,” the woman said finally. “If you like the gold rush stuff. They have a railroad museum there, I think.” One of the children ran by and shoved the baby. The baby smiled wildly as if it was a game and not an aggression.

“Oh, I won’t be going to Sacramento, actually.”

The woman seemed to accept this as understandable. “There’s the buttes,” she went on. “On the way to Chico. Those are sort of strange. Just strange to look at, out there all alone. But they don’t let you drive in them. It’s private land, I guess.” She paused. “There’s not much to see before Tahoe really.”

“They sound lovely. Thank you.”

B. absently fingered the handle of the makeup case.

“I’m from the city,” B. added.

The mother nodded curtly as if to put a stop to this need to state the obvious. The baby was kicking its legs and whining. It tried again to scootch off her lap but the woman’s grip seemed an insensate vice. The baby gave up and sank back into watching the children, trapped, mesmerized.

“You travelin’ alone?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“You lost or something?”

“No. Just driving. Just taking in the sights.”

The mother picked up a French fry and swirled it in ketchup without eating it. “Well, I’d go directly on to Reno if I was you. There’s nothing to see before Reno. A lot of driving gets me irritated.”

The baby finally let out its wail then, sharp and steady. The mother hauled it to her shoulder and slapped it on the cheek, which only made the baby cry louder. Just then an adolescent boy opened the door of the restaurant and yelled, “We’re parked in the back, he’s waiting, come on!” The woman scooped up her purse and the baby and barked at the children to follow.

“Well, good luck with your trip,” she said over the baby’s shrieks. “The buttes, I guess, but I don’t know if they’re worth it.” And in a burst of chaos and sun, she was gone.

The waiter finally brought her iced tea and B. twirled the straw, letting the ice circle. She looked out the window at the Mustang in the parking lot. The blue metallic sheen was already filmed with dirt. She tried to imagine the buttes. In her mind they were snub-nosed, western, angular, removed. She left her tea and went back to the bathroom. Her eyeliner was still intact but her pores large again and her lipstick gone. She reapplied the powder and twisted up the lipstick and told herself once more that she was just taking in the sights, making an anthropological tour of the valley. A survey, she considered vaguely in the mirror. She drew on the pale pink until her lips were bloodless.

“It’s nothing you have to worry about. It’s nothing that touches you. I just want it off my chest. I don’t want to bring that shit into this.”

That was how the checks began: Daughtry had used them on a trip to Carmel. He’d driven her down the coast to a restaurant with white tablecloths and a view of the ocean, where the chicken was mealy and the carrots oversweet and elevator music piped out through invisible speakers. He had insisted she taste his abalone although she nearly gagged and could not reconcile the notion that the runny meat had nestled inside the jeweled interiors of shell. He ordered champagne and blathered on about the drive.

“Those mansions on all those cliffs, dammit! Those rich people knew exactly where we would want to sightsee and now we get their walls and garages. ‘Scenic drive’ bullshit. Fucking criminals. Imagine taking your whiskey there every night, the ocean and those crazy pine trees and just watching the sun set. . You wouldn’t have a care in the world. Who would?”

His nervous chatter was what helped her. About a lousy baseball pitcher or the shape of her face or the city degraded by the “hippie trash.” So she did not have to think or deflect anything from her mind while he spoke. She could concentrate on his deeply felt conviction in each phrase, wrap her mind around the banal images and observations, and before she knew it an hour had passed. And when his head canted and the hangdog, self-defeating look came over him at some gaffe he’d made — an expletive, an ignorance of some kind — she might even reach out and stroke his cheek.

But on the way out of the city that day Daughtry had been unusually quiet. His palm damp as he cupped her shoulder, the car door not closed all the way when he ran into the bank, so it blew rhythmically as cars barreled by on California Street.

“What’s wrong?” she’d asked. But he did not speak until they got past Daly City and then he only talked about getting out of the “rat-race city.”

It was not until after the white-tableclothed restaurant, when they had gone back to a motel on the main drag in Carmel, that Daughtry, drunk, had confessed about the checks.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, it’s not that I want to do these things, but it’s always the money thing, you know. Who isn’t behind the eight ball every once in a while? You can get canned pretty easily when you’re not union, and the union scene with the dues and the fucking meetings. . It’s just been a way to tide over. You, you don’t have to worry about stuff like that. You make their offices look good.”

She’d met Daughtry in the building where she worked. He came to their floor to fix dead lightbulbs, unclog toilets. (She once saw him huddled against a window because one of the girls lost her earring behind a heating vent.) His smile was large, his voice raspy. He was not very tall. His hair was black and thick and combed with oil and he had light green eyes. “I like your hair up that way,” he told her one day as she ate a sandwich at her desk and read her book. He had on his coveralls and was carrying a hammer; she did not know his first name. “Most men want it down all the time,” he said, “but it gives you class.” Her hair was thick and in between the wash-and-sets she pinned it up in a French twist. She thanked him and burrowed into her page, trying to ignore him as he stood there.