admitted-conscious of symbols of wealth and status.
'I only mention that as an explanation for the stupid things I did when I was younger,' Julieta said.
'More stupid than the things everybody does when they're young?'
'Probably.'
Julieta explained: When she was fifteen, she began trying out for modeling jobs. She had always been told she was gorgeous, and ever since she was thirteen, seeing herself mirrored in the eyes of men, she could almost believe it. From modeling, it was a short step to beauty contests. Her parents were as suckered as she was by the incentives the pageants offered: prizes, scholarships, a chance to meet the rich and famous, a line in your resume that would help nail lucrative modeling work. At first it was easy. She won some of the local pageants, did modeling for more prestigious agencies, and then felt confident enough to compete for the title of Miss New Mexico in 1982. She spent all the money she'd saved on the tailored evening gown and bathing suit and the deportment coaching everybody said she'd need. Preparing for the contest took almost a year, during which every hour outside of school was occupied with exercising, fitting clothes, going to the orthodontist, practicing her smile and posture, pursuing the community service that would perk up her citizenship score. When at last the competition began, it was a whirlwind that completely carried her away. She entered the last stages utterly self-brainwashed into believing that this was her destiny, the absolute best and only course for her life. That winning really, really mattered. That win it she certainly would.
She made it only to third runner-up.
She tried to smile for the cameras while her heart crash-landed and the tears exploded behind her eyes. The spotlight lingered on her briefly, impatiently, and for the last time, before it moved on to the more beautiful, talented young women.
'Barely twenty years old,' Julieta said. 'I felt like the ugly duckling. The instant my name was announced, I had this epiphany that I'd completely wasted five years of my life, posing with a fake smile and sticking my chest out. By that time I had no friends. I'd never had time for friends, and anyway the kids at high school and UNM all thought I was hopelessly stuck-up. And I realized suddenly just how completely I'd learned to quantify every aspect of myself I didn't even know what I really liked to do or was good at! My only reason for doing anything had always been, 'Gee, I'd better take up ballet or.. or chess so I'm more competitive in the talent judging.''
Maybe that painful epiphany would have driven her to redirect her life, but the pageant of 1982 had yet one more damaging and lasting effect. At some point, she'd been introduced to Garrett McCarty, one of several corporate bigwigs who'd helped sponsor the proceedings. He was CEO and sole owner of McCarty Energy, a big thing in western New Mexico, coal and uranium mining. And Garrett, forty-nine-year-old millionaire, famously eligible twice-divorced bachelor, took an interest in one of the good-looking pieces of prime stock at the pageant: a dark-haired, blue-eyed Hispanic-Irish girl from suburban Santa Fe.
'Long and short of it, he bowled me over. I was bruised and demoralized after the contest, but when he contacted me I was handed an instant remedy. He courted me for six months and it was heady-power, money, important people, nice clothes, expensive cars, good food. I thought, 'Hell, maybe I won the damned thing after all!' When he proposed to me, my father and mother were ecstatic. Garrett had gotten chummy with Dad, talked about buying tons of equipment from his firm. Marrying him would mean a guaranteed living for me, grandkids for them, and best of all a way to meet the real people, to hobnob with the movers and shakers. Which would prove we were taking our rightful place in the world. And all I had to do was look nice, keep the smile in place!' Julieta made a face as if she wanted to spit. 'I hate talking about it. It's a tawdry, pathetic soap opera.'
'But did you love him? Were you attracted to him? Apart from his money, I mean.'
'I don't know. I couldn't tell him apart from his money-hell, I couldn't tell him apart from his Corvette! He was very handsome, didn't look his age at all. I think I told myself I was in love with him. But it's a long time ago now. The girl who married Garrett McCarty was a different person. I could just as easily recite the facts of the life of Helen Keller or… Mary, Queen of Scots, and it would feel neither more nor less 'me'!' Julieta looked over at Cree as if checking her response. 'I know I should be able to toss off a wry grin and chuckle at it, but I can't.'
'Would it help if I told you about my own youthful follies? I've got plenty-we could probably manage a yuck or two about 'em. My mother says if you haven't got regrets you haven't lived right.'
Julieta brought her attention back to driving. 'I've got regrets,' she said. Ones you can laugh about later, Cree had meant to add. She bit her tongue.
They drove without talking for a while, a vertical crease deepening between Julieta's eyebrows. Ten minutes out of Gallup, she announced that she had another stop to make.
'I don't mean to take up your time with these errands,' she apologized. 'With drive times the way they are out here, the rule of thumb is to get several things done on any long trip. This one'll only take a minute.'
She turned onto a side road that ran through a spread-out scattering of tiny houses and mobile homes. No trees relieved the bare-dirt desert; the land stretched in every direction without any notable features. The laundry on the clotheslines, the satellite dishes on the parched yards, the pairs and trios of playing kids and their tagalong dogs: on one level, not so different from any neighborhood. But set in this arid moonscape, blasted by the westering sun, the little human outpost struck Cree as marvelously foreign.
Julieta drove slowly along the hard-packed dirt street. 'One of my maintenance staff had to have a hip replacement. Earl Craig. It's his second. He's been out for three weeks and he's had some complications. He'll need to miss another month or more, so I had to hire someone to cover. I know he's secretly worried about whether he'll be able to keep his job-employment is hard to come by out here. So whenever I pass by, I try to stop in to kind of reassure him.'
She pulled the truck into a short driveway to a tiny shoe box house. A thickset, midfifties Navajo man sat in a wheelchair not far from the front door, face tipped to the late-afternoon sun. When he heard the truck, he rotated his chair and a small dog jumped off his lap and began yapping. Julieta shut off the engine, rummaged behind the seat, and came out with a rumpled grocery bag full of something heavy.
'You should probably just wait here,' Julieta told Cree. 'I'll only be a minute.'
Earl's face relaxed into a smile as Julieta got out. The little dog sped toward Julieta and without pausing hurtled itself through the air at her. She clearly wasn't ready for the greeting, but she managed to stoop and catch the dog with one hand. She winced into a vigorous face licking, then slid the animal down onto one hip and awkwardly carried it back to its master.
Cree couldn't hear what they were saying, but Earl laughed and appeared to be apologizing for his pet. When Julieta set the bag at his feet, he bent to pull out several paperback books and exclaimed gratefully. Then they talked seriously for a moment, Earl shifting in his chair to point to parts of his hip and thigh, Julieta still holding the wriggling dog and nodding.
It was only two or three minutes until she handed back the dog, touched Earl's shoulder in farewell, and returned to the truck. Earl waved good-bye with his free hand and then bent to dig more books out of the bag.
When Julieta climbed back into the truck, she explained quietly to Cree, 'Mysteries, thrillers, that's all he'll read. I get them by the pound from a used paperback place in Albuquerque. Last time I slipped in Memoirs of a Geisha, but that didn't go over too well.' Remembering that mischief made her grin. 'Arthritis. He had a healing Way sung, too. The Hand Trembler-that's the medicine man who diagnoses illness-blamed it on Earl's walking on the grave of an ancestor. Earl sincerely and completely believes that, but it didn't stop him from getting high-tech molybdenum joints put in. And if you asked him whether it was the Way or the surgery that fixed him, he'd credit both. That's pretty typical.'
Looking back now, Cree saw Earl differently: to outward appearances, an ordinary middle-aged man in jeans and T-shirt; in fact, a person who lived in the knowledge he was poised on the brink of infinite mystery.
Another reminder that in coming here she was entering a different world, where nothing was quite what it seemed.
Julieta's expression of contentment remained as she backed the truck out of the driveway. Such a lovely woman, Cree thought. Such a lovely smile, all the more beautiful for its rarity. She covertly watched Julieta during the quarter-mile drive back to the highway. By the time they'd turned onto the asphalt again, the lines of worry had returned.
They drove on in silence. Still the land had not changed: As far as the eye could see were low hills of bone- dry brown earth, low-growing brush, scattered scrubby pinon trees. The only indication of human presence was an occasional trailer or prefab house at the end of a dirt driveway, a defunct pickup truck, maybe a corral occupied by a gaunt, drowsing horse.
