(no subject)
In Kansas and Nebraska, her resolution to see more and pay attention to the small towns again runs headlong into the fact that both states contain large quantities of nothing at all. When she does hit a town half-hidden in the fallow cornfields, she's enthusiastic enough to be there, but there's a lot of bone-cold downtime between them. No one ever told Rose about the morale-sapping power of a constant chill, but she figures it out for herself.
The skydiving helps, but it's when she reaches Texas and the temperatures start to climb that she really finally climbs out of the hole Arkansas put her in. When she hits Austin, the day before her birthday, it's seventy degrees and the sky is a faded kind of blue that's comfortingly familiar.
She had to push to reach Austin in time; later she'll work backwards, picking her way from town to town on the two lane blacktop spiderweb that runs between the Interstates. (Here in East Texas, she's finding, it resembles one of those webs the spiders make when you give them caffeine, but it's still doable. Further west the big nothing starts up again.) But it's her birthday and she wants to feel pretty and dance with a pretty girl in a place where no one will look at her funny, and in Texas that pretty much means Austin.
(She's already done the research on Yelp--the Rainbow Cattle Company has gay-friendly line-dancing, which seems kind of epic, but she's thinking more seriously about Sister's Edge II or Rain. She can't figure out if the former lets in under-21s, though.)
She weighs the cost of taxis against the cost of a hotel downtown, and ends up in a Holiday Inn out on the perimeter, located in a strikingly depressing jumble of concrete; highways weaving and interlocking at all angles. She makes it downtown to do her shopping without much trouble (downtown Austin is cute, if not what she thinks of as a city; the Day-of-the-Dead murals are cool and there's a building that looks like an owl from the right angle) but then, with her hotel actually in sight, she takes the wrong exit and the concrete vortex swallows her.
After a couple of inspired bad turns, she decides to get off the highway, stop somewhere, and pull up Google Maps on her Blackberry. When she realizes she's on a strip of four lane road called Slaughter (!), she has second thoughts, but she sees a grocery store up ahead and decides to make the best of it. She forgot to get shaving cream anyway.
She couldn't tell you, and it doesn't occur to her to wonder, why she stops just there. She's always tended to think in bright flashes of emotion and intuition rather than words, and her time on the road has only strengthened it; it's pure instinct that steers her into the HEB rather than the Walgreens across the street.
She doesn't wonder--but once she stops, she notices. A weird kind of feeling, as if the entire day has conspired to bring her here. Maybe more than just one day. She's not (unfound) lost in a strange city. She's exactly where she's supposed to be.
It's not a new feeling, this instinctive drive. But it's the first time, maybe, she's been this close to being conscious of it. She follows her feet across the parking lot. Past the trailer set up out front, that in more clement weather will sell snow cones. Through the right-most doors, past the deli and the floral section, into the aisle of cereals (aisle 6). The rows of boxes are perfectly straight and mostly untouched--it doesn't occur to her, as it rarely occurs to anyone, that it's someone's job to create that odd tunnel effect that comes when everything is perfectly aligned. She follows the lines up to a point--and stops, brought up short by a box of cereal with the ominously vague name of Product 19.
(hard times befallen the soul survivors)
Her focus shifts, and instead of the box of cereal she's looking at a product display hanging from a strip on the shelf. It's a plastic bag containing what look like bingo cards displaying images instead of numbers, and a deck of picture-cards. She has a weird sense then--a kind of doubling, as if she's standing exactly where someone else stood, a few hours before or after, looking at exactly what they saw.
She picks it up.
(Hang on to this feeling, she whispers in her own ear; the voice of Rosie Real. This is what it means to stand dead center in the path of ka. It's the way she felt when she picked up the envelope on her vanity, with the faux-cheery note on the front and the acceptance letter inside.)
But the harder she tries to hold on to it, the more it slips through her fingers. She stares at the package. The top card has a picture of a rooster on it, and she can see others on the bingo placards; a woman, a man in a suit, a devil, a woman in a boat, a flag, a crossed pair of arrows.
What am I doing?
"Excuse me--miss? Do you work here?"
Rose doesn't startle visibly, but she's startled all right--she didn't even notice this woman come up on her. She's a small dark-haired woman, and every detail Rose picks up as she glances at her (working hard to make up for the oversight--con your vantage!!) screams someone's mom. Especially the Cheerio stuck her her sleeve.
Also: about to start crying. "No, I don't," Rose says, snapping fully into the present. With barely a flicker of hesitation: "But can I help you?"
The woman bites her lip, and Rose knows what she's going to say before she says. "I was only gone for a minute, and he was buckled into the carriage, but he's at that age and--"
"We'll find him," Rose says, shoving the pack of la loteria cards into her pocket unthinkingly, the weird moment receding. "Don't worry."
"He's four," the mother says. "Just four. He's wearing blue shoelaces."
"Blue shoelaces?" Rose says, because... just that?
"Overalls," the woman says. "Blue overalls. What am I saying?"
"We'll find him," Rose repeats. With help from employees, they start searching the store; the coolers, the baler (God please no), the back rooms and odd corners you never know are there in a store until you start digging. Mom keeps up a running, anxious monologue.
"...and he knows better than to go with a stranger. But sometimes he gets excited. Last week at the zoo he almost climbed into the tiger cage..."
Rose's mind flickers back to the woman's carriage, abandoned back in aisle six. Kitty litter "He likes cats? I saw a paper plate in the parking lot, I think it had cat food on it."
Is she sure? She checks her visual memory--thank you, Helen--and yes, she's sure. They buttonhole a cashier. She admits they feed the stray that lives in the parking lot.
"Where does it go? If someone chased it or something?" It's a thin thread, but it feels right; she's getting excited.
"Some of the baggers do that," the cashier admits slowly. (She's wearing a red polo shirt with HEB U on it, and Rose supposes it looks a little like her own red top. A little.) "It always runs under the snow cone place."
The trailer has a plastic fifty gallon trash drum on the top, with a beach ball set in it to approximate a snowcone; it's up on cinder blocks, about seven inches off the ground. Rose kneels in the sandy verge between the parking lot and the store front, where firewood is being replaced by potted plants as the weekly special, and peers under. "Luke?"
She sees sulky green cat eyes staring out at her... and hears a whimper, the sound of someone who has given up on crying.
"You stuck, kiddo?" There's a quiet, affirmative sob, and an answering squeak from Mom.
Rose eyes the gap. Not on her best day. In the end they have to get a powerjack from the store out here.
Despite his protests, Luke does not get to take the kitty home with him. Rose gets her shaving cream, and when the cashier calls her attention to it hanging out of her pocket, buys the cards as well. She has to rush when she gets back to the hotel, showering and shaving and doing her hair and nails and primping--she wears tight dark jeans, always in style, and a strapless gauzy yellow top, bell-shaped and waist-skimming, gladiator-sandal-type heels--but while she waits for her cab she has time to examine them again. She wonders if they're important.
Or was it about finding Luke? Is he going to be somebody important down the road? Am I going to see him again?
On the other hand, she thinks, he's already pretty important to Mrs. Riviera. And maybe not everything is about her.
Later, at Rain, despite wearing the dorky plastic bracelet that identifies her as under 21, she meets Carmen. She's 22, a student teacher; she's wearing a short skirt and Converse All-Stars with blue laces. Rose asks her if she knows the song being sampled in the track currently rattling their teeth.
(It's "The Weight," as it turns out. The Aretha Franklin version.)
Carmen has a school holiday Monday, and she insists that Rose needs a real Texas native to show her the Alamo. They leave Sunday morning in a misty rain, Carmen hanging tight on the back of the Honda.
There's lots to see in San Antonio; the Alamo itself, and a very weird tribute to Davey Crockett that looks like he's been frozen like Han Solo in carbonite, and the riverwalk and cool little basement stores, crammed with tight with junk--luchador masks and stuffed bull's heads and Day of the Dead statues and almost-certainly-fake katanas. Rose buys a Bowie knife--not one of the fake silver-plated ones for tourists, but something you could go to war with.
She splurges on a hotel just off the riverwalk, which turns out to be gorgeous by moonlight. Strands of twinkling lights dangle over the river, just outside their window; Rose has a weird dream about those, featuring ghosts from the Alamo, but sometimes a weird dream is just a weird dream. They part ways on Monday night, back in Austin. They friend each other on Facebook, and start but don't finish awkward sentences, along the lines of, 'well, if you're ever in the neighborhood...'
Rose heads for Dallas, by way of Killeen and Waco and a lot of little towns in between; and the cards, stashed in hurriedly in her luggage, end up forgotten entirely for a while.
The skydiving helps, but it's when she reaches Texas and the temperatures start to climb that she really finally climbs out of the hole Arkansas put her in. When she hits Austin, the day before her birthday, it's seventy degrees and the sky is a faded kind of blue that's comfortingly familiar.
She had to push to reach Austin in time; later she'll work backwards, picking her way from town to town on the two lane blacktop spiderweb that runs between the Interstates. (Here in East Texas, she's finding, it resembles one of those webs the spiders make when you give them caffeine, but it's still doable. Further west the big nothing starts up again.) But it's her birthday and she wants to feel pretty and dance with a pretty girl in a place where no one will look at her funny, and in Texas that pretty much means Austin.
(She's already done the research on Yelp--the Rainbow Cattle Company has gay-friendly line-dancing, which seems kind of epic, but she's thinking more seriously about Sister's Edge II or Rain. She can't figure out if the former lets in under-21s, though.)
She weighs the cost of taxis against the cost of a hotel downtown, and ends up in a Holiday Inn out on the perimeter, located in a strikingly depressing jumble of concrete; highways weaving and interlocking at all angles. She makes it downtown to do her shopping without much trouble (downtown Austin is cute, if not what she thinks of as a city; the Day-of-the-Dead murals are cool and there's a building that looks like an owl from the right angle) but then, with her hotel actually in sight, she takes the wrong exit and the concrete vortex swallows her.
After a couple of inspired bad turns, she decides to get off the highway, stop somewhere, and pull up Google Maps on her Blackberry. When she realizes she's on a strip of four lane road called Slaughter (!), she has second thoughts, but she sees a grocery store up ahead and decides to make the best of it. She forgot to get shaving cream anyway.
She couldn't tell you, and it doesn't occur to her to wonder, why she stops just there. She's always tended to think in bright flashes of emotion and intuition rather than words, and her time on the road has only strengthened it; it's pure instinct that steers her into the HEB rather than the Walgreens across the street.
She doesn't wonder--but once she stops, she notices. A weird kind of feeling, as if the entire day has conspired to bring her here. Maybe more than just one day. She's not (unfound) lost in a strange city. She's exactly where she's supposed to be.
It's not a new feeling, this instinctive drive. But it's the first time, maybe, she's been this close to being conscious of it. She follows her feet across the parking lot. Past the trailer set up out front, that in more clement weather will sell snow cones. Through the right-most doors, past the deli and the floral section, into the aisle of cereals (aisle 6). The rows of boxes are perfectly straight and mostly untouched--it doesn't occur to her, as it rarely occurs to anyone, that it's someone's job to create that odd tunnel effect that comes when everything is perfectly aligned. She follows the lines up to a point--and stops, brought up short by a box of cereal with the ominously vague name of Product 19.
(hard times befallen the soul survivors)
Her focus shifts, and instead of the box of cereal she's looking at a product display hanging from a strip on the shelf. It's a plastic bag containing what look like bingo cards displaying images instead of numbers, and a deck of picture-cards. She has a weird sense then--a kind of doubling, as if she's standing exactly where someone else stood, a few hours before or after, looking at exactly what they saw.
She picks it up.
(Hang on to this feeling, she whispers in her own ear; the voice of Rosie Real. This is what it means to stand dead center in the path of ka. It's the way she felt when she picked up the envelope on her vanity, with the faux-cheery note on the front and the acceptance letter inside.)
But the harder she tries to hold on to it, the more it slips through her fingers. She stares at the package. The top card has a picture of a rooster on it, and she can see others on the bingo placards; a woman, a man in a suit, a devil, a woman in a boat, a flag, a crossed pair of arrows.
What am I doing?
"Excuse me--miss? Do you work here?"
Rose doesn't startle visibly, but she's startled all right--she didn't even notice this woman come up on her. She's a small dark-haired woman, and every detail Rose picks up as she glances at her (working hard to make up for the oversight--con your vantage!!) screams someone's mom. Especially the Cheerio stuck her her sleeve.
Also: about to start crying. "No, I don't," Rose says, snapping fully into the present. With barely a flicker of hesitation: "But can I help you?"
The woman bites her lip, and Rose knows what she's going to say before she says. "I was only gone for a minute, and he was buckled into the carriage, but he's at that age and--"
"We'll find him," Rose says, shoving the pack of la loteria cards into her pocket unthinkingly, the weird moment receding. "Don't worry."
"He's four," the mother says. "Just four. He's wearing blue shoelaces."
"Blue shoelaces?" Rose says, because... just that?
"Overalls," the woman says. "Blue overalls. What am I saying?"
"We'll find him," Rose repeats. With help from employees, they start searching the store; the coolers, the baler (God please no), the back rooms and odd corners you never know are there in a store until you start digging. Mom keeps up a running, anxious monologue.
"...and he knows better than to go with a stranger. But sometimes he gets excited. Last week at the zoo he almost climbed into the tiger cage..."
Rose's mind flickers back to the woman's carriage, abandoned back in aisle six. Kitty litter "He likes cats? I saw a paper plate in the parking lot, I think it had cat food on it."
Is she sure? She checks her visual memory--thank you, Helen--and yes, she's sure. They buttonhole a cashier. She admits they feed the stray that lives in the parking lot.
"Where does it go? If someone chased it or something?" It's a thin thread, but it feels right; she's getting excited.
"Some of the baggers do that," the cashier admits slowly. (She's wearing a red polo shirt with HEB U on it, and Rose supposes it looks a little like her own red top. A little.) "It always runs under the snow cone place."
The trailer has a plastic fifty gallon trash drum on the top, with a beach ball set in it to approximate a snowcone; it's up on cinder blocks, about seven inches off the ground. Rose kneels in the sandy verge between the parking lot and the store front, where firewood is being replaced by potted plants as the weekly special, and peers under. "Luke?"
She sees sulky green cat eyes staring out at her... and hears a whimper, the sound of someone who has given up on crying.
"You stuck, kiddo?" There's a quiet, affirmative sob, and an answering squeak from Mom.
Rose eyes the gap. Not on her best day. In the end they have to get a powerjack from the store out here.
Despite his protests, Luke does not get to take the kitty home with him. Rose gets her shaving cream, and when the cashier calls her attention to it hanging out of her pocket, buys the cards as well. She has to rush when she gets back to the hotel, showering and shaving and doing her hair and nails and primping--she wears tight dark jeans, always in style, and a strapless gauzy yellow top, bell-shaped and waist-skimming, gladiator-sandal-type heels--but while she waits for her cab she has time to examine them again. She wonders if they're important.
Or was it about finding Luke? Is he going to be somebody important down the road? Am I going to see him again?
On the other hand, she thinks, he's already pretty important to Mrs. Riviera. And maybe not everything is about her.
Later, at Rain, despite wearing the dorky plastic bracelet that identifies her as under 21, she meets Carmen. She's 22, a student teacher; she's wearing a short skirt and Converse All-Stars with blue laces. Rose asks her if she knows the song being sampled in the track currently rattling their teeth.
(It's "The Weight," as it turns out. The Aretha Franklin version.)
Carmen has a school holiday Monday, and she insists that Rose needs a real Texas native to show her the Alamo. They leave Sunday morning in a misty rain, Carmen hanging tight on the back of the Honda.
There's lots to see in San Antonio; the Alamo itself, and a very weird tribute to Davey Crockett that looks like he's been frozen like Han Solo in carbonite, and the riverwalk and cool little basement stores, crammed with tight with junk--luchador masks and stuffed bull's heads and Day of the Dead statues and almost-certainly-fake katanas. Rose buys a Bowie knife--not one of the fake silver-plated ones for tourists, but something you could go to war with.
She splurges on a hotel just off the riverwalk, which turns out to be gorgeous by moonlight. Strands of twinkling lights dangle over the river, just outside their window; Rose has a weird dream about those, featuring ghosts from the Alamo, but sometimes a weird dream is just a weird dream. They part ways on Monday night, back in Austin. They friend each other on Facebook, and start but don't finish awkward sentences, along the lines of, 'well, if you're ever in the neighborhood...'
Rose heads for Dallas, by way of Killeen and Waco and a lot of little towns in between; and the cards, stashed in hurriedly in her luggage, end up forgotten entirely for a while.