A lizard with no tail skittered in front of her. A series of small signs appeared along the traiclass="underline" “Ten thousand men crowded the bank here in search of a dream. But the dream was elusive.” The signs went on about claims and sluice boxes and the few who struck any gold and the multitudes who left destitute. The women were cooks and madams. B. remembered reading that somewhere.
She came to a stack of pans by the river, apparently for trying your own hand at panning. She picked one up and removed the bone-colored heels and climbed slowly into the freezing water. The cold woke her up out of the dream-gel substance, made her sharp and lucid inside the spinning. She moved into the water. The edges of the cut on her foot gilled. She bent down and shoveled up the dirt and shook it around the pan. Nothing. She dumped and tried again, shimmying the rocks and sand and coming up empty again, her hands turning blue in the icy water. She tried once more, the sharp buzzing in her head and throat. It would be easy to keep trying it all day, she saw, to go on hoping and waiting for something to appear. In frustration she tossed the pan into the water and watched it float away. She walked out of the river to one of the oaks and sat. From her spot she saw the girl get out of the car, climb onto a picnic table, light a cigarette and lie back in the sun. B. shivered. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse reflexively for a check, forgetting they were in the glove compartment. Instead she came up with the knife from the buttes.
She examined it for a long moment. Its sleekness was comforting to hold. She angled the blade so the sun glinted off and it gave her a feeling of sudden reassurance, as if she could reach into her purse and find whatever she needed. She leaned against the oak tree and let the comfort of the knife wash over her.
When she got back to the Mustang, the girl was in her seat with the door open, feet on the concrete, painting her nails with B.’s nail polish.
“You hit the motherlode?” The girl did not look up from her strokes. Her long hair was out of the bun now and back in her face. The bubblegum pink did not obscure the dirt in her nails. B. walked to the driver’s side without responding.
“We should do it now,” the girl said then. “Strike while the iron’s hot.” She was brushing out a last line of her big toe, swabbing the remnants with her fingernails.
B. was still at the oak tree, on a calm plane above the girl. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she answered.
“I didn’t ask whether it was a good idea,” the girl snapped. “If you don’t let me, I’ll turn you in.”
The absurdity of the conversation, the threat, did not touch B. She started the engine and backed out before the girl could move. “Shit, let me close the door!” The girl scrambled to get her feet in. After that, the girl remained silent for a while, having sensed the shift in mood. They drove down a two-lane road from the park and at the first gas station, B. turned in.
“You can change in the bathroom,” B. said.
“I need you to help me,” the girl said.
In the single restroom with its urinal and green flickering light, B. pulled the powder-blue dress out of the travel bag and thrust it at the girl. She got out her makeup case and haphazardly brushed eye shadow and mascara and blush onto the tan face.
“You can’t wear my heels anymore.”
“Why not?”
B. ignored her. “We’ll go to the nearest town with a store and a bank and get you your own shoes.”
“I’m not paying.”
B. yanked the girl’s hair back into a chignon as best she could. The girl said nothing, just stared at her face in the green-lit mirror, in the warm smell of urine and mothballs.
In the car, the girl began talking nervously again.
“It’s just that I don’t have those housewife hang-ups, you know. He’s free, I’m free. But if I come back with the bread, well, the groupies can’t give him that.” She absentmindedly smoothed the wrinkled lap of the dress as she spoke.
The next town they reached was two short blocks, a Mexican restaurant and an insurance shop on one side, a fabrics and sewing supply store on the other. Next to that a clothing store. B. parked in front. She noticed as she got out that the girl was still wearing an anklet, a strip of dark leather with hanging white shells. The girl should have taken off the anklet. “Wait here, I don’t want them to see you,” B. said. In the clothing store, there were outfits for everyone and everything — overalls, wedding dresses, toddlers’ rompers. A crescent-shaped display of shoes for all occasions. B. chose a pair of white pumps in her own size.
The saleswoman boxed up the shoes, offering tips for the stains on B.’s dress (“Little bit of selzer, little bit of baking soda, that’ll come right off.”), but B. was fixated on the anklet. It spoiled the calm from the gold rush park. The confusion of dark leather and shells and the powder-blue dress, the incongruity everywhere.
“You need to take that off,” she said slowly in the car. “Take it off if you’re going to do it right.”
The girl slipped on the heels and turned them this way and that on the dashboard admiring, the shells clicking. “Got that from the Indian lady too. It’s good luck.”
All at once B. remembered the antler bone on the motel room floor. Gone, no luck anywhere.
“You can’t wear that with the heels,” she told the girl.
“Relax,” the girl said. “Don’t worry so much. They’ll never see.”
The bank was at the end of a two-block street. The girl had already retrieved the checkbook from the glove compartment, ripped one out and written on it with her bubbled writing. She stepped out of the car without a word. B. watched the long solid back of the powder-blue dress, set off by the girl’s tan, the white pumps and the anklet. They disappeared through the glass doors.
On the road she had thought again of a house. With the girl. This time far up at the northern edge of the valley, where she’d never been, hundreds of miles away from the realtors and beauty salons and university men. The afternoon light in the windows as clear to her as if she’d seen it in person. A grove of eucalyptus and orange trees in back. A porch. And the girl in the afternoon light. “Come with me to a house,” B. had imagined saying in this fantasy. “Come with me and we can sort things out.”
When the girl sat back in the car, B. had the knife ready. She stuck the point at the girl’s ribs.
“Take the money and move on.”
The girl sat momentarily stunned. Then she tried to turn. B. pressed the knife further in.
“Fuck you and your twisted Donna Reed show,” the girl finally whispered. She grabbed the knapsack and got out of the car and kicked off the white pumps and threw them at the door.
“You crazy old cunt!”
B. did not look back. She imagined the girl barefoot in the anklet and powder-blue dress, receding.
The road seemed a series of waves moving her forward. She drove past billboards for casinos and ski resorts (like a practical joke in the heat) and knew she was heading into the mountains. She wondered for a moment if the girl might report her but decided she would not risk being shipped back to Fontana. B. thought of the girl’s mother — intent over the porcelain, dusting the petticoats, waiting for the girl to return. B. laid on the gas. The car sloped up and up, she could see the pines ahead. Surrounding her on all sides the spots of oak, gentle and lulling, drawing her on. She would tell the girl’s mother how she had tried to visit the bridge, to sit in the mission chapel, to take in the hummingbirds and crocuses. But that only the banks had worked. The carsickness was a violent and spinning nausea as she drove. B. imagined the girl’s mother would understand. Who had worn the kid gloves and sat for the wash-and-sets. Who had lost the daughter with the long loose hair and bare feet. What have you learned from this experience? The vault clocks ticked through B.’s mind. She saw she could just continue on, higher into the mountains, until she was through. Until she was out.