Diane Simmons

Suitcase

Some people were yelling that it was bourgeois to care if the kitchen floor pulled at your socks. Yeah, and what was wrong with shit on the side of the toilet? Shit’s natural.

But other people were yelling just as loud that it was false consciousness—whatever that was—to equate filth with opposition to the status quo.

Marie, who had only been in the house a couple of days, tried to stay out of it by hiding in the curtained-off bay window where they’d said she could sleep. But a big girl in braids and overalls named Sheila came over and yanked the curtain back. This was a collective, she said, and everybody had to participate. It even seemed that Marie’s vote was needed to break the tie over whether or not there should be household chores. Some people said she shouldn’t be forced to vote, that that was bourgeois and, as things went on, they urged her to refuse to vote. The other group agreed that, no, she shouldn’t be forced to vote, but that she should want to vote and she’d better.

It was 1972, and probably too late to be showing up in San Francisco, but Marie didn’t know that. Even if she had known, she would have probably gone anyhow. She had to go somewhere and San Francisco was in the news, still, as someplace.

Now everyone turned to look at her.

“Well,” Marie said. “I mean.”

“Oh yeah, she better talk,” said Chick, a burly, older guy—thirty maybe—with an immense, graying pony tail and thick glasses. Because he’d made money on a crab boat in Alaska, he had a big upstairs room to himself and a newish Volkswagen van parked in back. At night on the porch he talked about his plan to drive down to Guatemala and join the Indians in their fight against their repressive government.

Chick had beers that he kept locked in a little fridge up in his room. Every night he went up and got one for him and one for Marie.

“She better talk,” Chick said now. “’Cause this is a dictatorship. Want me to get the thumb screws, Sheila?”

“Yeah, Sheila, dig it,” said a skinny kid who was called Spider.

“What, she needs big strong men to defend her?” yelled Sheila’s friend, Rose, another big girl in overalls. “She needs some big phony bullshit supposed-to-be revolutionary and some little, some little . . . ”

Rose couldn’t think of anything bad enough to call Spider, but already Sheila and a couple of other girls had picked up a familiar thread, yelling that the men in the house were every bit as sexist as their lawyer fathers, their banker and oligarch fathers who, at least, weren’t hypocrites. Marie didn’t know what an oligarch was. She was impressed, though, if their fathers were really bankers and lawyers.

Now everyone started yelling, “Fuck you!” Some of the girls were crying and some of the guys were laughing and saying how predictable, how too, too predictable.

* * *

The next day Marie moved upstairs with Chick and within a week they were driving south on I-5 in Chick’s van. They drove out of the wet soft air and low, purple sky of the north, and into the clear day of Southern California, heading toward Nogales where they would cross into Mexico and then drive south to Guatemala.

They didn’t have to stop at motels because Chick had spent about a year getting the van rigged up to live in. They slept in sleeping bags on a foam pad that was cut to fit the van’s floor; when the pad wasn’t in use it fit neatly along one wall. Dishes and cooking gear were stowed in a special wooden box that could open out into a work space.

Chick taught Marie how to use the various pieces of gear—the folding grill, the Dutch oven, the reflector oven—to cook over a fire at the camp sites where they stopped. Once you got the hang it, it wasn’t that hard. Marie had done all the cooking at home since she was nine and could probably cook upside down if it came to that.

* * *

Chick had grown up half-blind in a waterlogged little town on the Oregon coast with a teenage mother and a series of fathers, some better than others. He’d started turning gray at twelve. Once he’d gotten old enough to be on his own, he was determined to rely only on himself for everything. That was why he’d fixed up the van with everything you would need, and why he would not think of staying in a smoke-stinking motel or of eating the un-nutritious food found in restaurants. He would rather stop and walk off into a field than use the foul bathrooms of a service station.

Another result of Chick’s childhood was that he felt really sorry for people. That was probably what got Marie on board, at least in part. His poor, barely-seeing eyes behind their magnifying lenses filled with tears to think of her growing up on a dry little Nebraska Sand Hills farm, the lonely child of a wordless, endlessly working father and a mother who had lost track of everything but the time and even that she had to check three or four times a minute on a man’s big watch.

Chick felt so sorry for little Marie, alone on that silent farm, that he wanted to do everything for her. Before leaving San Francisco, he had taken her to get birth control pills and wept when they first had sex. With his glasses off he looked at her with his nearly blind eyes and said that he wanted to take care of her forever. Marie didn’t know about forever. But it was nice to be taken care of.

When they made it to Nogales they paid a daily rate in a trailer park so they could use the laundry room and have a place to spread out and organize the supplies they were loading up for the trip down to Guatemala. They went to a hippie food co-op for the health food supplies Chick used, packages of soy nut cereals, and cans of food yeast to supply the B vitamins most people didn’t get. At a regular grocery store they loaded up on dried milk and peanut butter, which Chick had heard was an expensive delicacy in Mexico. They got a half gallon of Clorox and eye droppers that they would use to purify water.

Marie got Chick to stop at a paperback exchange where she bought a bunch of ragged mysteries, even though Chick didn’t approve of the crap they made up for books. But he was happy, at least at first, when she found a book that taught you to speak Spanish; they started to study from it so they could talk to the Indians they were going to be fighting alongside. For a few nights they tried to piece together some phrases, like, “We are here to obey you.” But after a couple of nights Chick remembered that Spanish was the language of the oppressor as much as English. They should learn, he said, Mayan, or whatever the people in Guatemala really spoke. So that was it for Spanish.

* * *

The real Mexico didn’t look much like the pictures of senoritas and bull fighters in the Learn Spanish book. At first, there was nothing but the road, cratered and surfaceless and traveled only by a few ancient trucks with their high drooping loads, meandering along in the middle of the road at fifteen miles an hour. For the first time in her life, Marie considered the beauty of the shining black American interstate, of the new and speeding cars, and the great, screaming tractor trailers.

But Chick was teary-eyed with joy when, on their second night, they found their way off the road and onto the dead-fish stinking beach at Topolobampo. He wept because they had escaped the criminal materialism, the mind-fucking lies and the unnatural stink of America, a stink that was, he taught, a lot worse than the natural and wholesome smell of decomposing flesh.

* * *

They drove south and south, avoiding cities and large towns where Chick was afraid they would see the putrid American influence. As they drove, Chick talked about why they had to go fight in Guatemala. He pounded the steering wheel about United Fruit and the CIA who had brought down a government that was trying to help the poor people. The massacres, Chick cried. The death squads. The illiteracy. The more-or-less slavery. All these crimes at America’s more-or-less door.

Marie learned never to smile when he was talking. Once she must have because he yelled, “It’s no joke, baby!”

Outside the van, the world swam by, hot and green now, restfully pointless and if she had thought about it she would have said that she didn’t believe they were going to fight for the Indians any more than she had believed her mother ever knew what time it was.

Here there were more people or maybe people were just out more than they were in the dead, dry North. Men in broad hats, stooping in the wavering green fields, always straightened to stare as the van went past. Old women and little girls walked along the roads with bundles of sticks on their backs. Chick, who looked more and more like a great white bear every day as compared to the small, dark Mexicans, tried to offer the old women rides, but they sank terrified back into bushes.

* * *

The roads didn’t improve but you grew accustomed to them as the idea of speed faded. Marie didn’t know what had become of the toilets with their litter of used tissue paper that had so disgusted her at first; she didn’t look for them anymore, just plunged into the brush as Chick did. He was as proud when she came out, stepping high, and watchful of snakes, as if she had just spoken her first word.

They slept in the van, sometimes with the double doors open to get the breeze that ruffled the mosquito net curtain Chick had rigged. Once, as they slept, hands reached in over Chick’s feet. Marie felt a grip on her ankle and screamed. Chick jumped out, naked and roaring so that Marie laughed.

Chick didn’t blame the thieves; they naturally mistook him for a rich American. He only hoped he would have the nerve to rob Americans if he were in their place. In the next town, Chick meekly replaced the tire pump somebody had apparently stolen before reaching into the van.

When they couldn’t find a camping place, they grudgingly parked on the zócalo of a small town, closing the double van doors and pulling the green canvas curtains Chick had installed for this eventuality. Then they lay in the hot dark—Marie reading by flashlight, Chick with his hands meditatively behind his head—until the town kids stopped pounding on the van and shouting “heepie!” and went home to bed.

When they saw a stream they clambered down to bathe, though with their clothes on so as not to offend the women who were usually there if the bank was halfway accessible. While they talked their mile-a-minute Spanish, they slapped clothes on the rocks and hung them on bushes. Though Chick and Marie tried so hard to be polite and respectful, the women still didn’t want them there, made shooing gestures and shouted phrases that Chick and Marie couldn’t understand but that raised a shout of laughter from the others. Chick smiled and made bowing motions toward them. Later, driving away he would wipe tears from under his thick glasses.

He was crying a lot now, Marie noticed.

Sometimes Marie tried to wash their clothes in the river, wrestling with the leaden, water-logged jeans that were as heavy and unwilling as a drowned body. She rubbed in bar soap like the women did, then, uncertain as to why, smacked the pants legs on the rocks. Meanwhile a crowd of squatting children watched, commenting softly to one another.

At outdoor markets, where they were followed by crowds of kids, they augmented their supplies with tomatoes and oranges, tasteless white farmer’s cheese, eggs, rum, and any other foods cheap enough that common people could afford them too.

Every meal was cooked over a fire, usually before a silent audience of local children and a few adults who stood in a half-circle, their faces shining in the firelight, staring as if at a fascinating performance. At first Chick had tried to share, had offered to divide the whole pan of food among them, but nobody ventured near the portions he set out in pans and cups.

Chick understood. He understood how they saw him; a rich gringo oppressor. He aligned himself with their distrust of what he represented. He would wait humbly until they could understand and love him as a comrade.

Still he suffered. He would sit with his great white head in his hands, drinking cup after cup of rum and grieving that he could not find a way to show the people how much he loved them, show how much he hated who they thought he was. Who he maybe was even.

* * *

At first, it seemed that everybody else who’d come to Mexico had done it for the dope. Every market seemed to have a bunch of hippies straggling through, giggling and trailing that particular dirty-clothes-and-pot smell. In some towns every little kid wanted to sell you grass and older guys eyed you appraisingly. Once as they crossed the zócalo in Culiacán, a band of little boys swarmed around them chirping, “You want money? Big money? Boss says drink beer.”

They gestured to a café table on the shady side of the square where a man in a big cowboy hat and sunglasses watched.

Chick was so humiliated that all Americans were expected to treat impoverished Mexico as some kind of opium den that the next day he carried his modest stash of weed out into a field. He took a dump and then buried the dope in the hole with his shit.

* * *

But farther south the type of gringo on the road seemed to change. Now the people they met were often on some kind of mission themselves. As they pulled up to camp by a stream not far from Puebla, they met evangelists, a married couple in their thirties, both tall and blond and bony. Both came hurrying out when Marie and Chick drove into the clearing, both talking at once, her talking into Marie’s window and him talking into Chick’s. Marie made out that they had just opened a canned chicken they had packed back home in Gallup for some special occasion. Tonight wasn’t any special occasion; they’d just gotten to obsessing about that canned chicken. They knew they ought to have waited for a real occasion but she—her name seemed to be Honey—had said the Lord would send an occasion and her husband—they never got to his name—had trusted in that and thought it was right that they trust in it, and that they shouldn’t be so prideful as to think they could make all the decisions their own small selves. And now here they were—Marie and Chick—so that proved it. It was a special occasion. And Chick and Marie had to just come and sit right down, they had the chicken all ready, cooked in a stew; they had Bisquick dumplings just coming done on top and they even had gone into the canned pickled beets. And now that Chick and Marie were so miraculously here, Honey was just going to root up her own homemade fruitcake she had hidden away.

“Come on,” Honey said, reaching inside the window and grabbing Marie’s arm, “Oh, praise the Lord for sending me a girl to talk to, and you’re nice, I see you’re nice, my Lord, you look so clean, and I feel like a mess. Goodness, I never knew it would take this much just to get there; oh well, let’s just talk about stuff.”

He, meanwhile, the guy, was trying to tell Chick about the industrial size sewing machine they had in the back of their blue panel truck, how they were heading down to an evangelical mission near Guatemala City to set up a little shop, maybe you could call it a little factory, where the people could sew clothes for themselves, and maybe export things and the people could be brought to Christ that way because of course the Catholics had gone in there to mix their mumbo-jumbo in with Indian stuff, and, frankly, once you learned what was going on down there, the Lord just wouldn’t let you off the hook.

Marie, by this time, knew—or should have known anyhow—all about the Christian evangelists in Guatemala. How they were welcomed by the killer right-wing government, how they were a symptom of American anti-communist hysteria. and how they were as key to the oppression of the people as the thugs with guns.

So she should not have been too surprised when Chick slammed into reverse even though these two were still standing there talking, their arms half inside the van. Tears were streaming down from inside Chick’s glasses as he drove away.

Marie felt like crying too, she’d wanted that chicken dinner so bad.

* * *

On another stream, stumbling down the bank with a pan full of dirty dishes, Marie saw a man standing in thigh-high water. He was a gringo, obviously, tall and beautiful, bathing naked, his head afluff in shampoo suds.

Afterward he sat on a rock and combed his long blonde hair. He told Marie¸ who went ahead and squatted by the water with her dishes, that he was on his way to Colombia to do cocaine for a year or two. Then, he said, shrugging sweetly, knowing, of course, how beautiful he was, he would see. Maybe he would go to New York and become a model. Up above Chick was watching, looking more white-bear-like than ever.

“Have tea with me,” the man said. His name was Laurence; anyway that was what he had stenciled in purple lower case letters on the side of his camper. The doors were open so that you could see the floor and walls had been covered with leopard skin carpeting.

“I have lemon, ginger, and Red Zinger,” he said.

Chick of course said no.

* * *

And then, camping on a vacant lot on the outskirts of Miniatitlán, another rig pulled up beside them. In it was a gray-haired German man, maybe forty-five or even fifty, driving a new, fitted-out VW van with the pop up top and the little red leather benches and built-in table. Once he’d gotten settled with his top popped, he came over and invited them in his bad English to come and listen to his short-wave radio. He would make coffee. He had canned milk, he said, for the coffee.

Chick said no. When the guy had gone, Chick explained that a German that age was sure to have been a Nazi. He’d probably driven up from South America where it was well-known they were still hiding.

“Where in South America?” Marie asked.

Chick said it didn’t matter.

“Like Bolivia?”

“It doesn’t matter. What does it matter if he’s a Nazi?”

Later, when Chick went off into the bushes to do some business or other, Marie went over to the German’s van. She sat at his little table and took one of his china cups, feeling its creamy smoothness in her hand. She put a lot of the canned milk in her coffee.

The German tuned in his radio to an English station and they listened to a report about a cricket game that was being rained out. This made the German laugh. While they were listening, Chick came pounding on the side of the van, making the German jump and crash his head on the lantern that hung over the table.

* * *

After the thing with the German, Chick pretty much stopped talking and they trundled along in silence. Marie avoided looking at the tears that leaked from under his glasses. At night he got stoned on the grass that he’d apparently re-supplied himself with; once he was good and stoned he would lie down in the van and start drinking rum.

What about the Indians? Marie wondered.

* * *

One late afternoon they pulled into a clearing outside the ruins of a Mayan temple, Palenque. A couple of weeks earlier Chick would not have dreamed of stopping in a place like this. The clearing was filled with hippie rigs. Everybody was stoned. Everybody was filthy. Everybody was sick with the runs and the jungle behind the campsite was slick with shit.

Marie thought maybe Chick was trying to get even with her, showing her what happened when you didn’t care if people were Nazis or not. She hoped it was that, kind of, and not that Chick was losing it.

Everybody camped in the clearing was talking about how some girl had died a few days ago; the Mexican police came and took her body and her boyfriend. Nobody knew where. Now there was another girl who was sick, more than just the runs. This one was traveling with a guy in a big black Cadillac; they had taken the back seat out and replaced it with a mattress. Everybody knew she was sick but nobody did anything. Everybody was too scared of the cops coming back.

In the day it was hot and quiet, a few cars passing on the dry, white road to the ruins. At night they were all alone in the clearing, the jungle buzzing, loud and crazy.

The second or third night, a boy and a girl came by the van. The double doors were open; inside Chick snored behind the mosquito net curtain, already stoned and drunk. Marie was sitting in the cab with a candle, trying to read.

“What luxury,” the girl said, looking inside.

The girl was wearing a white Mayan dress that came to her knees and motorcycle boots. The boy was barefoot in a crusty pair of jeans and a t-shirt that had lost most of its back. They squatted down and told a complicated story of how they’d bought an expensive five-pound Dutch cheese at the duty free port of Chetumal. They had planned to live on it for a long time. But some people picked them up hitch hiking and the people’s dog ate their whole cheese.

Then, when they got mad about their cheese, the people drove off with all their stuff, what was left of their money and even their shoes. So they’d had to steal the boots off a guy sleeping on his motorcycle and they took turns wearing them. They were sorry—especially since it was a black guy—but he had wheels so it was kind of fair.

They had a little sack of beans some Mexicans had given them, but nothing to cook them in and no matches. Marie gave them a dozen matches and one of Chick’s pots; she told them they would have to build their fire somewhere else though.

* * *

“Let’s get out of here,” Marie said to Chick after a couple of days. “Everybody’s sick. We’ll catch something.”

Chick was lying down in back stoned.

“I can’t find the keys,” he said.

* * *

Walking out into the jungle, going far to find a clean place to pee, Marie came across what looked like a pile of garbage. It wasn’t the usual Mexican garbage of a few rotting fruit rinds, but expensive, American-type garbage, papers and books and bottles of things that came from a drug store. There was a new-looking American Tourister suitcase tossed to the side, and Marie realized that somebody had probably stolen the suitcase, gone through it for money or jewelry, and dumped it.

The thieves hadn’t wanted clothes, even though there were nice ones, girl clothes, just a little gooey now with spilled shampoo. Marie combed out of the mess two good, clean pair of underpants. There was a silky, copper colored shirt, and a good pair of jeans.

There was a pair of baby doll pajamas dotted with little roses.

Marie held them up, amazed. What kind of a girl would still have baby doll pajamas?

Standing on the bare jungle floor with the trees arching high above, Marie shucked off her own grimy, smoke-and-dope-and-weeks-of-sweat smelling pants. She stripped out of her shirt and underwear and left them on the ground; maybe they would be found by someone who might know how to get them clean. She pulled on the new underpants, the copper shirt, and the jeans, which fit perfectly.

She kicked around some more, saw a book and picked it up. It was thick but only a dictionary of some sort; as she tossed it away, a pale blue envelope flew out. Marie put the envelope in her back pocket, then picked the book up and shook it; a green American passport dropped to the ground.

Marie picked it up and studied the picture of a round-faced girl in round dark-rimmed glasses. She had a brown pony tail and bangs. Gillian, her name was.

Marie looked around for the glasses and there they were, lying in the dirt a few feet away, not broken at all.

She put the passport in her back pocket along with the letter. She put on the glasses and looked into the distance. It seemed like she could see better.

For the first time she thought to look around but nobody was watching. She started back to the bus, before remembering and turning back to find a bush and pee. Only then, did she see the girl. Probably. If it was her. If it was, it was too late. So Marie turned and ran.

* * *

She didn’t tell Chick about the girl or the things she’d found; he didn’t come to enough notice the new clothes or the glasses.

That night, as Chick slept, she climbed up to the cab, sticking a knobby Mexican candle on the dashboard. She leaned against the door, her pillow behind her back. Carefully she unfolded the letter. It was from Gillian’s mother.

They all missed her a lot, the mother wrote, especially Jack, who had started jumping up and barking like crazy every time someone came to the door. They missed her too, but they were fine. Sue was busy with swim team and Dad was usually able to leave work a little early so he could get home in time to go to the meets. Afterwards Sue was always famished but it seemed too late to cook so they just went to the Italian place in town. Once, at another table, they saw a girl in a pony tail and round-rimmed glasses who, for a second, they all three thought was Gillian.

“We miss you, love,” the mother wrote. “But we know you are having fine adventures and learning loads at the language institute. How much you’ll have to tell us when we see you in September! We’ll curl up on the porch swing and talk all night.”

Marie folded up the letter and put it in her pocket with the passport, blew out the candle and sat for a long time with her back to the door, her feet stretched out under the steering wheel. Outside the van the jungle buzzed so loud it seemed the world was on fire.

 

Return to Volume 4.2

 

 

 

 
 

 

All files © 2005-2012 Blood Orange Review