‘Did you see that?’ Vida said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
This has been happening ever since I was eleven,’ she said.
Fresno, Then 3½ Minutes to Salinas
The stewardesses on this flight were fantastically shallow and had been born from half a woman into a world that possessed absolutely no character except chrome smiles. All of them were of course beautiful.
One of them was pushing a little cart down the aisle, trying to sell us cocktails. She had a singsong inhuman voice that I’m positive was pre-recorded by a computer.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.’
While pushing her little cart down the sky.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.’
There were no lights below.
Shine on, O talisman!
I pushed my face against the window and looked very hard and saw a star and I made a wish but I won’t tell. Why should I? Purchase a cocktail from pretty Miss Zero and find your own star. There’s one for everyone in the evening sky.
There were two women behind us talking about nail polish for the thirty-nine-minute way to San Francisco. One of them thought that fingernails without polish should be put under rocks.
Vida had no polish on her fingernails but she didn’t care and gave the women’s conversation no attention.
From time to time the aeroplane was bucked by an invisible horse in the sky but it didn’t bother me because I was falling in love with the 727 jet, my sky home, my air love.
The pilot or some male voice told us that if we looked out the window, we could see the lights of Fresno and were 3½ minutes away from the lights of Salinas.
I was already looking for Salinas, but something happened on the plane. One of the women spilt her fingernail polish on a cat ten years ago and I looked away for a moment to wonder about that and missed Salinas, so I pretended my talisman was Salinas.
The Saint of Abortion
We were about to land at San Francisco when the women behind us finished their conversation about fingernail polish.
‘I wouldn’t be caught dead without fingernail polish,’ one of them said.
‘You’re right,’ the other one said.
We were only three miles away from landing and I couldn’t see the wing that led like a black highway to my talisman. It seemed as if we were going to land without a wing, only a talisman.
Ah, the wing appeared magically just as we touched the ground.
There were soldiers everywhere in the terminal. It was as if an army were encamped there. They flipped when they saw Vida. She was increasing the United States Army sperm count by about three tons as we walked through the place, heading towards the van in the parking lot.
Vida also affected the civilian population by causing a man who looked like a banker to walk directly into an Oriental woman, knocking the woman down. She was rather surprised because she had just flown in from Saigon and didn’t expect this to happen on her first visit to America.
Alas, another victim of Vida’s thing.
‘Do you think you can take it?’ Vida said.
‘We ought to bottle what you’ve got,’ I said.
‘Vida Pop,’ Vida said.
‘How do you feel?’ I said with my arm around her.
‘Glad to be home,’ she said.
Even though the San Francisco International Airport acted like a Playboy cybernetic palace wanting to do things for us that we were not quite ready to have done, at that moment I felt that the International Airport was our first home back from Tijuana.
I was also anxious to get back to the library and see Foster.
The Bufano statue waited for us with a peace that we couldn’t understand with its strange people fastened projectile-like upon a huge bullet.
As we got into the van, I thought there should be a statue for the Saint of Abortion, whoever that was, somewhere in the parking lot for the thousands of women who had made the same trip Vida and I had just finished, flying into the Kingdom of Fire and Water, the waiting and counting hands of Dr Garcia and his associates in Mexico.
Thank God, the van had an intimate, relaxed human feeling to it. The van reflected Foster in its smells and ways of life. It felt very good to be in the van after having travelled the story of California.
I put my hand on Vida’s lap and that’s where it stayed following the red lights of cars in front of us shining back like roses in San Francisco.
A New Life
When we arrived back at the library the first thing we saw was Foster sitting out on the steps in his traditional T-shirt, even though it was now dark and cold.
The lights were on in the library and I wondered what Foster was doing sitting outside on the steps. That didn’t seem to be the correct way to run a library.
Foster stood up and waved that big friendly wave of his.
‘Hello, there, strangers,’ he said. ‘How did it go?’
‘Fine,’ I said, getting out of the van. ‘What are you doing out here?’
‘How’s my baby?’ said Foster to Vida.
‘Great,’ she said.
‘Why aren’t you inside?’ I said.
‘Tired, honey?’ Foster said to Vida. He put his arm gently around her.
‘A little,’ she said.
‘Well, that’s the way it should be, but it won’t last long.’
‘The library?’ I said.
‘Good girl,’ Foster said to Vida. ‘Am I glad to see you! You look like a million dollars in small change. What a sight!’ giving her a kiss on the cheek.
‘The library?’ I said.
Foster turned towards me. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said, then turning to Vida, ‘Oh, what a girl!’
‘You’re sorry about what?’ I said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Foster said. ‘It’s for the best. You need a rest, a change of scene. You’ll be a lot happier now.’
‘Happier, what? What’s going on?’
‘Well,’ Foster said. He had his arm around Vida and she was looking up at him as he tried to explain what was going on.
There was a slight smile on her face that grew large and larger as Foster continued, ‘Well, it happened this way. I was sitting there minding your asylum when this lady came in with a book and she—’
I looked away from Foster towards the library where its friendly light was shining out and I looked inside the glass door and I could see a woman sitting behind the desk.
I couldn’t see her face but I could see that it was a woman and her form looked quite at home. My heart and my stomach started doing funny things in my body.
‘You mean?’ I said, unable to find the words.
‘That’s right,’ Foster said. ‘She said the way that I was handling the library was a disgrace and I was a slob and she would take it over now: thank you.
‘I told her that you’d been here for years and that you were great with the library and I was just watching it during an emergency. She said that didn’t make any difference, that if you had turned the library over to me, even for a day, you didn’t deserve to be in charge of the library any more.
‘I told her that I worked at the caves and she said that I didn’t work there any more, that her brother would take care of it from now on, that I should think of doing something else like getting a job.
‘Then she asked me where the living quarters were and I pointed out the way and she went in and packed all your stuff. When she found Vida’s things there, she said, “I got here just in time!” Then she had me take it all out here and I’ve been sitting here ever since.’