“Adam,” I said, and didn’t get to say anymore.
“That little kid who you brought back to the ranch last time you were home?” She winced.
Adam had a glandular problem that made him look much younger than he was. They’d held him back twice as a sophomore, and he was actually now nineteen as a senior, but he still looked like a towheaded prepubescent.
“Yes, Adam.”
I looked up at the square of blue cloudless sky visible through the sunroof. “He said that if we watched the sky at night on mushrooms, it would let us see the UFOs that are supposedly invisible, going back and forth to Nellis Air Base on maneuvers. They cloak while doing recon,” I said, “but the shrooms give you the vision to make them visible via the magic of the opened third eye.”
I was ready to elaborate, tell her about our talk of Castaneda beneath the stars, but she jammed the brakes hard enough that I lurched in my seat, given a touch of whiplash as my forehead almost pressed the leather cushion of her headrest.
Cars passed the stationary Range Rover, honking boxes of steel rage, blurring metal monsters rushing left and right, causing the thing to feel as if it could tip over on its tenuous bearings and fall into the culvert at the side of the road; I’d heard these cars weren’t good in rollovers. I’d come close enough while driving drunk to test those physics firsthand.
She lay her head on the steering wheel, and her platinum’d hair uncoiled like a synthetic version of Medusa’s gorgon coif. When she next lifted her head to take another hit of the smoke, her mascara spilled from her eyes, running streams of black blood, the stigmata of a middle-aged Milf at wit’s end with her wayward wretch of a son.
“Michael, I don’t know what to do.”
I didn’t say “Send me to live with my father,” even though La Tuna FCI was only a state away and I might head to prison at some point anyway (though probably for something less white collar than my father’s embezzlement scheme, if I kept up the way I had been before going to Redrock).
I honestly didn’t know what I should do, except maybe get high.
I still had a half ounce of British Columbian purple weed wrapped in a Ziploc bag tucked in my black duffel, which meant I could get stoned enough for the short term to delay thinking about the question at hand, the one weighing on both of us.
I didn’t have a pipe on me, but back at Jim’s “Rustler’s Retreat” I had a couple ceramic pieces along with my bong molded to look like a wizard’s staff. I hid my pipes in strategic places throughout the ranch, a one-hitter in the tack shack near the agave patch, some rolling papers stashed on a shelf next to a can of WD-40 in the pool house, around which the pear cacti prickles made it unsafe to walk without flip-flops.
Suicide was also an option. As was running away.
But I wasn’t Huck Finn, and the river wasn’t what it once had been. Besides that Big Jim had connections on account of his stake in several grind joint casinos in Glitter Gulch and a piece of a slot vending concern with contracts stretching from Macau to Hamburg. That meant he had eyes and ears all over the planet and the best network of house and roving detectives in the world on his payroll. Wherever I went, I wouldn’t get far.
I’d be an adult in the legal sense in little more than couple years, anyway. All I had to do was wait it out, and I’d be free.
“Mom, I’m sorry,” I said.
I was.
She held up a hand, and I couldn’t tell if the gesture conveyed an apology accepted, caught like a dream in one those looms they sold in those roadside junk shops, or if she was telling me with her flick of the wrist to be quiet.
I shut up just in case, stared out the window, but since it was tinted and the sun was so bright, I saw more of my reflection than the landscape.
Debbie hadn’t just been messing with me. I had lost a ton of weight.
My face had always been round, moony, but all the hiking and the low-cal diet along with puberty had stripped me of the cherubic fat and made me look closer now to a man than a child.
I could see high cheekbones that seemed to grow overnight from nowhere. I had only a light smattering of pimples on my face, for which I was grateful, since I knew some guys afflicted with the things like they were like buboes on the face of a Medieval peasant.
Not being fat also let me see what features I’d gotten from my parents. I could see the ones I’d gotten from my mom. I had her sandy-brown hair, which she’d irreparably poisoned with dyes and treatments, and I’d also gotten her coppery tone that meant I didn’t burn but darkened to a deep olive more like an Italian or a Greek when the sun was really out and pounding the desert.
As for what I’d inherited from my father (aside from a taste for the needle), it would have been hard to say, since it had been a long time since I’d last seen him, and even then he had changed to be almost unrecognizable from the previous time we’d met.
Que sera, sera, as they said in Debbie’s adopted home of Paree.
Her crying had tapered off to sniffling, and she had finished her cigarette. She watched her side-view mirrors, saw nothing but desert and an unfurled ribbon of grey road behind her. She put the luxury auto into gear again and drove, this time in the other direction.
I sat up, on edge. “Where are we going, Mom?”
I hadn’t planned on calling her “Mom” again. It had just come out.
“Your uncle’s.” She reached into her alligator Coach bag on the passenger seat, snapped open the golden hasps and grabbed a Kleenex from the box. It wasn’t a surprise to see that she kept tissues there, and I imagined she did quite a lot of crying that had nothing to do with me.
As much of a little shit as I could be, I think I was also ultimately aware that I was the unhappy result of something rather than the source of that unhappiness itself. “Mom, I thought he was in a rest home.”
“He was.” She nodded, blew her nose into the Kleenex with her right hand while she worked the woodgrain steering wheel with the left. “He had some friends from the old days pitch in to get him out and set him up. He’s got a live-in nurse.”