“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.
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.