CHAPTER 14

© 2010 GREG DUNAJ 

14.

                                    

          

    Utopia could wait. Though it was really too far to walk back to the ranch, she started off anyway. It was a glorious afternoon. Blue sky stretched to the horizons, interrupted only by a few puffy, disinterested clouds. No, today was too beautiful to hurry along and race back to the ranch. It was just too beautiful a day to barrel through it.  Anyway, she could afford to walk, at least for a little while. Forcing a smile onto her face, she started off, passing idyllic fields sparkling with wildflowers of yellows, reds and blues.         

              Usually the van was there at the highway waiting for them when the Greyhound from San Antonio dropped them off. Some had jobs, while others would go into town to shoplift or collect unemployment checks or to send telegrams to estranged families to request money. The bus ride was about 60 miles. The van took them the final 10 miles to the ranch they called Utopia.

              She was actually surprised the van was not there waiting for them. They were usually very precise, but today the van was delayed for whatever reason. After kicking at the ground for just a few minutes, she stood and started walking. Without a word she set off along the road towards the ranch. The three men and two other women who were her fellow riders today stared blankly after her but said nothing.

              A few long-horned steers grazed in the field of a ranch. Others huddled in the shade of a lone cottonwood. This particular ranch was called Deer Valley and its ornate entry gate bristled appropriately with deer racks. Other ranches in the area boasted similar bursts of individuality and expression at their gates. One featured black metal cut-out silhouettes of typical farm scenes like windmills and barns. Another had tacked on each of its posts withered cowboy boots of varying colors and shapes, giving a whimsical charm to the otherwise empty expanse. Chalk white stone exposed where the cattle trampled it peeked out from beneath the fields of the Deer Valley Ranch. A languid pool of water from a dammed creek sat beneath a cliff of white rock that looked more pastoral than forbidding. A long white egret stood poised in the water, its slender bill held nobly skyward.

              As the heat of the day and the exercise of walking began to make her sweat, she pondered what had spurred her to be so rash as to begin such a long endeavor. She truly wanted it to be the blue sky and the beautiful views, but she knew it was the sadness she felt in her heart. At this moment there was an overwhelming desire in her to be alone for awhile, if only for a short time. Instead of being a part of the ranch and its members, right now she wanted to linger like this, away from everybody.

              The ranch had been a good choice for them. It was a good place for them to live, if only because it was warmer here than in Cleveland. Eventually she’d return to the ranch and her son who was waiting for her, but right now she wanted to be alone and walk.

               “Going to go where my heart can breathe,” she sang to herself, though not too loudly. She was unsure of her voice though she was quite alone as she walked. “Climb that mountain and swim that stream...”

              She smiled wanly at this Texas Hill Country where she and her son Robert had come to live. It was beautiful here. It was the best place they had lived at in years and yet she was consumed with a great sadness. They were part of a family at the ranch, of sorts, but she felt as if she and Robert did not belong there. She felt as though the other members of the ranch were merely tolerating them and soon they would lose their patience for them.

              A few miles into her trek the road crossed a narrow river. The bridge was really no more than a spillway over the cool, clear waters. Rain would swell the river quickly and overwhelm the bridge. The structure was designed to allow the torrents to follow its own course without trying to stand bravely in its path. There was a sign near the bridge that warned of the dangers of trying to cross the bridge during such times of flooding. Locals didn’t need to read the sign; they knew they had to wait out the storm. The waters would eventually recede.

              Today, there was no rain and the water was not angry and in a hurry. She paused to skip a few stones in the meandering current. She then took off her shoes and waded in the water. It was cold, refreshing. Utopia could wait, but she had walked enough; here she would wait for the van that would take her back to the ranch.

               Utopia the town was nestled in the Ugalde Valley along the Sabinal River and was a few miles further along the road from where the Utopia ranch was situated. People in town rarely mixed with those from the ranch. Townsfolk felt those people up at the ranch were to be avoided. Some feared it was another cult like Waco brewing in the hills just beyond their quiet, little town. There were dangerous deranged squatters, zealots and idlers living up there, townspeople said. Even if they were not a cult, there was certainly something strange going on at the “ranch”. There certainly was an uncommon devotion to a single person and that was suspicious enough.

              The citizens of Utopia had many theories and offered many predictions about the people who literally “squatted” on the Dedalus’ homestead and formed the Utopia ranch.  When members of the ranch trekked into town to purchase supplies or to use the phone they were watched closely and townsfolk filtered their comments though fingertips. Everyone in Utopia town expected one day to have their serene little corner of Texas Hill Country explode with news reports and government helicopters. The two little groups of people kept largely to themselves, the words passing between them rare and perfunctory.

              But the people who lived on the ranch did not even consider themselves a large, extended family. Yes, before they came here they were disjointed and adrift. The music of Dedalus first drew them all here. They felt a common connection to him and his words, and living at the ranch gave them a sense of serenity and a strong bond of companionship between the members developed over time, but, these people squatting on the ranch were not some evil empire scheming and festering in the hills above Utopia. There was no ideology to foment. There was no trouble. They came here first as fans, but when they set up their homestead on the very edge of his 540 acre ranch, they became more complete than ever before in their lives

              Their whole purpose of alighting here was to ‘Escape’.

              It is difficult to be a single mother, but raising Robert alone was nearly impossible. He was a bright, loving child, but nonetheless he was challenging, confrontational and stubborn. He ran her ragged. He was constantly getting into fights, skinning his knee and refusing to do his chores around the ranch and yet at day’s end with her tongue hanging out a mile, the boy would hug her tightly and tell her how much he loved her. This was not enough solace for her though and once a week she would take the bus into town and walk the streets of San Antonio, just to get away from Robert.

              Being at the Utopia ranch these past six months had saved her sanity. Had she not been able to foist her strenuous and difficult child onto the other members of the ranch for a much needed reprieve, she might have gone insane. At the ranch she was no longer just a single mom trying to raise a fiercely independent child on her own and now had some help.

               She made herself believe Robert thrived at the ranch as well, though she was sure the patience of the other members would soon wear thin. Robert fought them at every turn and daily she heard new horror tales about how he refused to meditate or study or complete his chores. Every time she returned to the ranch she expected to see her son Robert in shackles or strapped to a tree upside down, but each time she returned in the van he was there smiling broadly at the gate, unharmed. He would leap into her arms and hug her tightly, his smile stretching to the horizons like the blue of this day.

              It was only later, when they were alone, that the tears would brim in his eyes and lamentations creaked from quavering lips about returning home.

              But, there was no other home. This was it.

              They lived with Fred for a while, after her husband died two years ago in that liquor store robbery in Shaker Heights. Fred had been a godsend she met at the Wal-Mart where she had gone to buy the motor oil that her rusted Taurus threw up like a drunken sailor. Fred was good for her and he even talked pleasantly with Robert on occasion. Most importantly, he provided a roof over their heads and paid the bills. She would have stayed with Fred, but Fred did not stay with her. One day he left. He came home from work one day with a six-pack under his arm. He propped his feet up on the kitchen table, after first kicking away some breakfast debris, and smoked a cigarette. He drank one beer in silence and then without a word, he left. He left his clothes and his toothbrush and the rest of his six-pack of beer and got in his car and drove away.

              She wasn’t able to carry the rent and they lost the apartment.

              “Fly, fly away...” she sang softly, her toes wiggling in the cool water of the stream. The clear blue sky overhead offered a soothing balm. At least it was warmer here than in Cleveland she murmured. She wiped a tear away, but sang no more of the song she first heard on the radio six months ago. It had been a comforting paean to her own rebirth, but it offered no solace for her now. A grove of cottonwoods across the stream formed a cool glade, but the sun was warm and she turned her already bronzed face toward it like a flower and allowed its strength to dry her tears.

              Yes, it was that song that drew her here to the Hill Country of Texas in the first place. She had family, a great aunt and a second cousin, in Texarkana and thought to move down there with the hope they would take her and Robert into their home. Her money got them as far as Kansas City by train and she started hitching rides with the boy. She turned tricks with truckers to get some “pin money”, as her mother used to call it. Robert did not help matters though and his patience would quickly wear as he wandered through the truck stops. If he wasn’t plied with enough quarters for the arcade, Robert would throw pebbles at the cab’s windows until her john and their ride would get angry and toss them out.

              They got a good long ride with Fat Al in Tulsa. He was making a run of paper products and car batteries from Tennessee to San Antonio and he really did not want anything from her or Robert but their company. Fat Al’s daughter, his only child, had just eloped with some greaser from the next town and she had sworn to never speak with him again. His wife had just died a month ago. He said she was lucky to have her son. “They grow up quick,” Fat Al said with a laugh that had no mirth.

              Fat Al gave Robert a fistful of quarters and also a couple of bucks to raid the Slurpee machine and the trucker cried on her shoulder for the whole time they were together. She cried too, the first time she allowed herself to cry since her husband died, but, she took Fat Al’s money just the same. She also accepted his offer to travel all the way down to San Antonio with him on his delivery. He wanted to be a family again, at least for a little while longer. Her family in Texarkana did not know she and Robert were even coming down, so she agreed. Robert liked Fat Al’s generosity and at truck stops the big man would get the skinny boy to punch him in the stomach. It quivered appropriately and Big Al would laugh and grab Robert and hug him with his meaty fingers.

              She had never heard of Dedalus before. He was a pop star before her time. When his song ‘Escape’ came on the radio just as they crossed the border into Texas it struck a nerve in her. The simplicity of the melody, the poignancy of the lyrics, the pain of the singer’s roughly textured voice all took her by surprise, though she did not have the intelligence to put such thoughts and nuances into words. She “liked it,” she said to Fat Al. Over her son’s admonishments, she turned up the radio and drummed her fingers against the dashboard. The big trucker laughed and nodded his head approvingly.

              In Tyler she begged him to stop at a mall and she got him to buy her a cd of Dedalus music. The gap-toothed clerk at the shop had never heard of him. Fat Al got out of his rig to help look, but he did not know Dedalus either and was no help. She finally found one Dedalus song on a compilation of songs from the ‘70's. Nestled warmly between ‘Band On The Run’ by Wings and ‘We’re An American Band’ by Grand Funk Railroad was ‘Escape’ by Dedalus. Fat Al gladly bought her the music, but she was not satisfied with that and she begged him to drive all over Tyler looking for other stores. Fat Al was happy to oblige for awhile, but after an hour his patience finally thinned and he said they had to give up her search. As he began to steer his rig towards the highway, she spotted a book and record exchange shop. The rig squealed to a halt, meaty fingers drummed the steering wheel, the motor strained against the brakes, but Fat Al agreed to let her out, and he even agreed to wait for her. She left Robert in the cab and slid down to the ground and caromed into the store. Immediately she pounded out the door again and clamored up to the driver’s side of the rig and begged Fat Al for $10. The smile on his face looked like a nervous lizard ready to leap away to safety in the bushes. His eyes narrowed to slits, but she leaned through the window and kissed him on his lizard smile and promised to repay him and Fat Al opened his wallet again.

              There, past listing shelves of dog-eared tales of romance and unrequited love and classic novels of strife and war and temperance and solitude, and over piles of Italian and French fashion magazines and self help guides to combat every single conceivable difficult approach to living and gardening and mechanics and bricklaying that sat upon the floor like towers of Babel, and wedged between an especially tattered collection of science fiction novels and a pile of dusty philosophy tomes and western adventure serials was a tray of used cds. The letters for the alphabet were scrawled on swatches of cardboard. She approached the “D’s” slowly, her hand outstretched, her breath held firm in her chest, a latter day Arthur nearing his Excalibur.

              It was the oddest thing she would later tell the gathering at the ranch. The Dedalus cd was right there, in the front, as if it were waiting for her to pluck it from its ignoble, forlorn place.

              “It looked so lonely,” she told the gaping faces. Her story got them a place to stay at the ranch.

              She listened to Dedalus’ ‘Escape From Chaos’, all the rest of the way to San Antonio, over and over. Robert slept as she opened the liner notes and read them as Fat Al steered his rig into the gathering darkness past dusty towns guarded by mangy dogs and teens on bicycles whose spokes glinted in the headlights of the semi. When she started listening to the cd a third time Fat Al said he didn’t want to hear it anymore and so she got Robert’s portable cd player out of his bag. She propped her knees against the door of the cab and listened to the cd twice more before they reached the city limits. As the sky darkened her reflection in the cab’s window became illuminated. Her face appeared, reflected in the window. The image before her was disturbing and she could not look at her reflection without a lump forming in her throat. With the Dedalus songs that spoke of self discovery and rebirth and escape floating through her, she slowly felt a pang of inadequacy grow in her gut. She tumbled over events in her life and came to believe she had squandered opportunity after opportunity. The guilt began to manifest itself in the drawn, limp expression on her face. As the semi pounded into the Texas countryside, she decided that his music and words were her words. The nerves he struck. He was giving a voice to her misgivings. She became convinced he was speaking for her, about her. Dedalus had tapped into her very self. She suddenly felt emptiness inside her and convinced herself it had always been there.

              With her frowning, glowering visage illuminated in the window of the semi’s cab, her reflection transformed into a glowing blob of some ethereal spirit looking back from the grave, the cab suddenly felt like a rolling tomb. The air was hot and stale. Her heart threatened to leap from her chest. Tears welled in her eyes and she could not breathe. She hid her face from Fat Al and thanked God her son was still asleep and she would have to explain her tears.

              She sobbed, her shoulders shook, her face tucked down away from Fat Al, hiding her grief. She was suddenly aware that her future was as nondescript as her past. Though this was the first she had ever thought about her place in the virtual sun, in this Garden of Eden, the emotions were too strong to dismiss. To mask her cries of anguish she opened the cab’s window and the heavy, warm air and the noise of the semi cleansed this rolling sarcophagus. Hanging her head out the window, her tears leapt from her cheeks and dashed themselves against the side of the truck.

              When the emotions spurred by the songs finally wrung her dry she felt limp and weak. She lolled her head on the window with her eyes closed and the warm air caressed her face.

              “You all right?” Fat Al asked finally after stealing concerned looks at her for a couple of miles.

              She pulled her head into the truck again, closed the window and wiped her eyes with the heel of one hand.  Fat Al saw she had been crying and slowed his rig. “Something wrong?”

              “Everything’s all right,” she said weakly. Her head seemed to sag into her shoulders as she slouched down on the chair.

              Fat Al glanced at her every few seconds. The road was straight. It was a straight run now to San Antonio.

              “It’s that music isn’t it?”

              “Oh, Al, it’s more than that. I’ve got so much shit going on in my life, and yet I got nothing.”

              Fat Al snorted and wagged his head a bit at the macadam before him. The great girth of his arms quivered and trembled with every nuance of the road.

              “That’s why I didn’t want to hear it no more,” said Fat Al. “I liked it, but it wasn’t making me feel good.  It made me think about things I wanted to forget for a while.”

              She rolled her head on the headrest and looked over at Fat Al.

              “Yeah,” she said, agreeing with the big man. “It’s better to forget sometimes than to remember.”

              “Yeah,” he Fat Al, his round face was a fallow yellow in the weak light of the dashboard. “Music can be like that sometimes. Make you sad when you really aren’t.”

              She smiled wanly and considered this last statement. Throughout her cry-fest she dismissed a hazy awareness that she was somehow manipulating the facts that her grief would only last through the length of the songs. Was there sadness in her heart, or were the tears she shed only in her eyes?

              “Yeah,” she said weakly, a single mom with a difficult child in tow, watching a complete stranger drive them deep into the Texas night with no destination in mind.