From Winslow to Holbrook she watched the horizon, imagining how it would feel when she first sighted a massive head and the following rise of the immense body and the city-block length of tail, one of Tommy Rodriguez’s dinosaurs.
“Every time I drive that stretch, I get the feeling that some sort of prehistoric animal is going to start coming at me from over the horizon,” he told her. “You know what I mean?”
Looking at the flat land all around her, she knew exactly what he meant.
After Holbrook and into Gallup were the advertising reminders that this was the Wild West. A few stores painted bright orange and yellow beckoned tourists to leave the freeway. One, cut into the side of a rusty butte, offered the passing cars a wooden fort and teepees.
Signs alongside the freeway promised cheap cigarettes and moccasins and the last and best of all sales from Real Indians. The signs were landmarks. Their sales had been the last and best for decades. Each one made her smile.
By Gallup, her back was stiff. She spent the ten miles before the town with her left leg pulled up on the seat. She had no need to move her feet on the pedals, only the gas. Truckers would pass and glance back to see if she was worth a few blinks of their taillights and a few static-cut CB words to fellow truckers.
Sometimes, when she would flick her highbeams to show them where she was as they moved in front of her, they would blink those taillights slowly, seductively, like the knowing wink of a big-hipped woman.
The Navajos would pass her in their white and dark blue pickups, the women tight to their men, the children at the side window and an old woman blanket-bundled in the open back.
The fast-food hamburger in Gallup was dry and tasteless, the bathroom clean. She was in and out of that straight-road town in twenty minutes. Now the anxiety began and the excitement, waiting for Grants, waiting for it and passing it.
Wasn’t it Grants where the train derailed and because of it she had to tell Ronnie McBain they couldn’t have their first dinner together?
Didn’t she do a story on some small college in Grants or was that further south? And, where was the turn-off for the mountain scratched with the graffiti of three hundred years of travelers? The conquistadors carved their words on it, followed by the settlers who added their names before heading on and, before any of them, the Indians made their drawings.
The mountain was there, somewhere between Grants and Albuquerque or perhaps it was before Grants. She could never remember.
The lava land, the choppy badlands, that was out there too. She remembered the freezing day when she and photographer Pete Romero spent twelve hours doing three stories somewhere between Grants and Albuquerque. Pete turned the film, all of it, purple when he ran the processor. Three stories, twelve hours of driving and marching over the shoe-slashing lava rocks and freezing, all purple.
“Geez, Ellen, I am so sorry. I don’t know how it happened.”
“That’s okay,” she told him. It was his film as well.
“All purple?” she had to ask.
“Well, I guess a foot or two is okay,” he said and started to laugh. She joined him, laughing together until they were almost hysterical.
Acoma was out there as well. Acoma, the sky city, the place of adobe brown walls high on the butte. She thought of it as a cold mud city offering little reason to drive up the narrow road. She found the village’s adobe church as bleak and cheerless as the handful of worshipers.
The first hill before Albuquerque always promised that the city came next. The second hill, the third, all stretched equally long and high but once atop, the lie was seen. The city was not there, only the hint of the Sandias, the watermelon mountains, before the car went down again.
The air was different now, the sky different as well. Puffs of white clouds punctuated the blue. She inhaled deeply.
Finally, at the top of that one last hill, the city appeared like a jewel framed by the mountains that had begun their late afternoon change to deep pink. At that moment, she turned on the radio, loud, and hit the city singing.
27
Kim Palmeri’s blond head poked around the partition of Ellen’s cubicle.
“I’ve got you on that new factory tomorrow, on the west side,” she told her.
Ellen looked up in frustration. Two hours until the six o’clock and she didn’t have her stories written.
“Fine.”
“You gotta be out of here by eight.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
Kim leaned close. “What’s going on with Debbie?”
Ellen looked over at Debbie who was flipping through her notebook.
“There is something wrong,” Kim decided. “I caught her crying in the ladies’ room.”
Ellen shrugged. She had been back a few days and hadn’t had a chance to talk with Debbie. She tried calling her but got no answer. And, Debbie hadn’t called her.
She watched as Kim stopped at Debbie’s cubicle, speaking softly to her. Debbie looked up with a smile. A few minutes later, Ellen watched as Harold Lewis stopped at the cubicle and gave Debbie a little pinch on her arm.
“Hey, hey, cutie,” he sang.
When he passed Ellen’s desk, he gave her a short nod.
She felt a strange twinge of anger and something else she couldn’t identify. She glanced over at Debbie who was putting paper in her typewriter.
Others in the newsroom made it a point to stop by Debbie’s cubicle or they watched her when they had the chance. Something had changed. The excitement and the joy that had been so much a part of her seemed to have disappeared overnight. They didn’t see any anger or frustration. That they could understand. They all had that. No, this was different, and they felt the danger of it.
They watched and waited. Eventually they would know what
