Roadside Bodhisattva (20 page)

“What’s their story?”

“You just met the new long-term lodgers at Deer Park. They’re migrant workers who come up here early in the growing season to work on the farms. Lettuce, potatoes, apple orchards. They do all the grunt work. Most of ’em live in pretty shabby conditions, in shacks and trailers provided by the farm owners. They’re trying to save up everything they earn to send back home. Even so, they end up spending a lot. The owners charge through the nose for everything. Anyhow, I found a dozen guys who were the worst off of them all. They were sleeping under bushes and cooking over open fires. Just no room at the inn for ’em. So I told them about the cottages here, quoted them a rate that seemed fair to them, which even included breakfast. Two to a cottage was all I’d allow, although they wanted to cram in more when they heard how reasonable the rent was. Got the farm owners to provide transportation on the cheap every morning and night. Now, Ann is guaranteed one-hundred-percent occupancy for about six months of every year. Her income’s gonna double or triple on those units. No more fly-by-night Peyton Place stuff that leaves half the cabins empty half the time. She’s set for at least six months of the year. In the winter, the lovebirds can take over again. Along with the extra dough the increased trade at the Diner is bringing in, Ann shouldn’t have any money worries anymore.”

“Pretty smart. I guess those beaners are good for something then.”

Sid lowered his coffee cup like it was a bottle of nitroglycerin. “What did you call those men?”

“I, uh—it’s just a word kids used to use at school—”

Sid’s face looked like a rigid mask of one of those angry Tibetan deities my folks used have posters of. He leaned forward until this scary wooden mask was about three inches away from me.

“Don’t ever let me catch that lousy slur coming out of your mouth one more time, even by accident, Kid. These men are not ‘beaners’ or ‘wetbacks’ or ‘burros,’ understand? They’re people like you or me, caught in some tough circumstances, doing the best they can. I think you’ve got a good heart and a good head on your shoulders. In fact, I know it. And I know you didn’t mean any harm by that dumbass remark. But some words are hard to retract, once they’re loose. And the last thing we need at Deer Park is tension among all the folks who have to live here. You got me?”

“Uh, sure, Sid. I didn’t mean—well, I’m sorry, that’s all.”

Sid pulled back from me with an honest and instant smile. That’s how he was, like the weather or a cat or the ocean. One minute one way, the next minute totally changed, with no signs to show things had ever been different.

“Kid, so long as you can learn and apologize, you are okay in my book.”

Yasmine seemed down pretty much all the time lately, and for some reason her sadness got to me. Out of all the people at Deer Park, she was the one I would have said meant the least to me. Oh, sure, she had been a little more pleasant, a little more open, since she had had that sloppy breakdown in front of me. And she had scored some major points with me by standing up to suv guy and making him look like even more of a wuss than he was. But I never felt I had ever really gotten too deep past the tough front she put up for everyone. And every now and then, I’d still get digs about my “wasteful” habits, or have to listen to these boring speeches about how the whole world could be improved if everyone would just do what Yasmine did. So when you factor everything together, there was really no reason why I should have let Yasmine’s gloomy silence about her mother’s troubles bother me. But it did.

Oh, sure, maybe her being a hot chick had
something
to do with my interest. Sue wasn’t falling all over herself to enlist me as her new boyfriend, even though she had apparently dumped Jayzee, and for all I knew she was getting it on with this guy Bruno. So it was easy enough for my mind to wander toward an actual babe I worked side by side with. But Yasmine was close enough to almost twice my age, I figured, that me hooking up with her was about as likely as Sid stocking the juke box with decent music. So I could rule that angle out pretty honestly. No, what really got to me was the picture of Yasmine hanging out hour after hour at the hospital with her sick mother, then going home alone to eat cold tofu or some other horrible good-for-you California gunk.

So one afternoon, as Yasmine was handing me my share of her tips, I said, “Uh, Yasmine, you going to visit your mom now?”

Yasmine’s face scrunched up. “Yeah.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Not so good.”

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t, so I said, “Want some company?”

She reacted like I’d slugged her. “Company? At the hospital? Who? You?”

“Sure, why not?”

Yasmine studied me like I had just landed from Mars. “All right. But you know this won’t be pretty.”

I shrugged. “If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.”

“Okay. Get in the car, Kid.”

I didn’t even stop to tell Sid I wouldn’t be helping him with afternoon chores. It felt like Yasmine was only barely accepting my offer, and maybe if I stepped away for even a minute she’d drive off without me.

I didn’t have to say much on the ride to the hospital in her putt-putting junker. Yasmine talked more than ever before, about her mother, about growing up in California, about how she hated the East Coast. She talked about California the same way my folks talked about various Buddhist paradises, like the Pure Land.

Just as we were pulling into the hospital parking lot, Yasmine said, “Kid, you know about my mom’s past, don’t you? How she got sick?”

There was no point in lying, but I discovered I couldn’t actually come right out and say the whole truth. “Your mother, she was, um, an actress—”

“She was a porn star, Kid, a very minor one. And she picked up aids before the latest drugs came out. So by the time treatments got sophisticated, she had already suffered a lot of damage. Still, thanks to a really good doctor here, she’s had some decent years since then. That’s one good thing I’ll give you about the East Coast. Plenty of medical experts. But now she’s on the way out.” “That’s rough.”

“On her? She’s got a good attitude, no regrets—”

“No, I meant on you.”

Yasmine didn’t say anything to that.

I had never really been in a hospital before. It smelled weird, and the lights were too sharp, and either people were waiting motionless like they’d be there forever, or they were rushing around like they had a dozen important places to be at once. Some of the doctors and nurses seemed real serious, others were joking like they were working in an office. It wasn’t much like any hospital tv shows I had seen.

We went up to the fifth floor. Yasmine and I had to put on face masks to go into her mother’s room.

Yasmine’s mother seemed about half the size of her daughter. Under her blankets, eyes closed, hooked up to tubes and machines, she was pretty wasted looking. Her face showed some resemblance to her daughter, but kinda like the way you’d say somebody’s grandmother reminded you of the newborn granddaughter. Still, my imagination let me see that Yasmine’s mom must’ve been as sexy as her daughter way back when. She still had one good feature, and that was long dark hair arranged across her pillow.

Yasmine said, “Mom, I’m here,” and her mother opened her eyes. Her voice was croaky. “Yasmine. You brought a friend.”

“This is Kid A, Mom. Kid, this is my mother, Heather O’Hara.”

“Please to meet you, Mrs. O’Hara.”

“Call me Heather, Kid. And grab a seat.”

I sat down. Yasmine got a hairbrush out of drawer and began gently brushing her mother’s hair.

“So, Kid, how do you know Yasmine?”

I explained about Deer Park. Heather closed her eyes while I talked. Eventually I ran out of stuff to say, and after a few seconds of silence, Heather opened her eyes and said, “Sounds like a nice setup. Food, friends, laughs, music, a roof over your head. What more do you need?”

I was gonna say I still wanted some of the exciting adventures I had dreamed of when I ran away from my own mother all those weeks ago, but then I decided not to contradict the sick woman.

Yasmine didn’t talk a lot with her mother. It seemed like everything between them had already been said. So the three of us just sat quiet for a while, Yasmine holding her mother’s hand. After about an hour Heather seemed asleep and we scraped our chairs back to leave. But Heather spoke.

“Yasmine, get that picture out of the drawer, please. I want your friend to have it.”

“Mom, really—”

“Yes, really.”

Yasmine dug in the bedstand’s drawer, came up with a framed color photo and handed it to me.

Heather O’Hara had been knock-out, drop-dead gorgeous. She was posed on some stage, wearing just her underwear and stockings and high heels, her boobs half spilling out of her top, and holding some kind of trophy. The photo was signed “Pookie Arizona” in bright red ink.

“That’s me getting my AVN Award in nineteen-ninety-eight, my last year in the biz. ‘Best Solo Sex Scene.’ The film was called—what was it called? I’m not sure anymore. But maybe you could even find a tape somewhere—”

“Mom!”

Heather sighed dramatically. “Oh, Yasmine, at least let me remember when I had a body that everyone liked to look at.”

Yasmine bent and kissed her mother’s forehead through her surgical mask. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep good.”

Outside in the car, I looked at the photo, then held it out to Yasmine. “Here, I don’t want to cause any trouble between you and your mom. You can have this back.”

“No, no, she gave it to you. Keep it.”

“You sure?”

Some of Yasmine’s typical toughness returned to her voice. “Yes, I’m sure! That’s what she wanted. Just don’t go showing it around to everybody!”

“Oh, I won’t. I’ll put it in a safe place.”

Yasmine laughed. “Like under your mattress maybe? That’s where most photos of my mother ended up.”

“Well, uh—yeah, why not?”

Yasmine kept chuckling on and off all the way back to Deer Park.

Everything was going just swell at Deer Park. Everyone was happy, or, in Yasmine’s case, at least maintaining. Ann was rolling in dough. Sue was drawing tons more flash. Angie, I learned one day, had even gotten in touch with his brother, Ann’s ex, and talked for an hour on the phone. Sonny had become a regular sociable motor-mouth, always yakking about jazz. I swore he was even stuttering less. Yasmine kept making the same dumb joke to me, asking me how I was sleeping, if my mattress wasn’t too bumpy. The others were baffled why I always blushed like I was ten years old. Even the migrant workers seemed fat and sassy, like they didn’t have a care in the world, weren’t busting their humps under the hot sun every day for minimum wage. And Sid bopped back and forth among his various charity cases like he was Mother Teresa or something, keeping everything humming, nudging here, propping up there, giving advice, cautions, encouragement and words of insight, whatever his super-genius dictated at the moment.

I was the exception to the big warm fuzzy scene. None of my deepest desires had gotten satisfied. Nobody was really stroking me to insure I was all contented and stuff. No, I was practically invisible. Oh, I didn’t forget that everyone had stood up for me with the suv geezer. It still felt awesome to remember that moment. But day to day, no one worried about what I wanted or if I was feeling okay. All I did was work, practically from sunup to sundown, spend a little time with Sue, then go off to hide in the trailer like some old dog while Sid kept busy with Ann.

I tried to bring this up with Sid one day. But after I had managed to get across that I was feeling kinda slighted and ignored, all I got from him in return was a fable. I felt like I was back in the temple.

“Kid, did you ever hear about the lion and the hyena? Once there was a poor man who prayed to God for some guidance in turning his life around. So God said, ‘Go out in the wilderness and you will receive a sign.’ So the guy goes out in the jungle and the first scene he comes on is a lion tending to a wounded hyena. The lion is dragging carcasses to the hyena’s den so the hyena can feed on them and build his strength up. The lion is even licking the hyena’s wounds. ‘Excellent!’ the guy says. ‘All I have to do is show my fellow villagers how desperate I am, and they’ll shower me with charity.’ So he goes back to the village and lays down in the public square, trying to look as pitiful as he can. But the whole day goes by and nobody pays any attention to him. He just gets dustier and thirstier and hungrier. Finally, by nightfall, he’s mighty pissed, so he yells up to God, ‘God, I got your sign and did what you said, but no one responded to my plight. What’s up?’ And God thunders back, ‘You fool! I wanted you to copy the lion!’”

I felt my face get hot. “You’re saying I don’t really need any help, I should be helping others instead. Jesus, Sid, what else have I been doing since I got here? Can’t you cut me a little slack? What about
my
problems?”

“They’ll only disappear when you forget about them, Kid.” He went off then to tend his flowers.

I thought back after he’d gone to the few hours Sid and I had actually been on the road, moving forward toward the unknown, from the moment we woke up under that big tree to the time we first spotted Deer Park. It was only a tiny period out of the past several weeks, but it stuck up bigger than all the days since. It was the essence of what I wanted. Just me and Sid tramping down some highway without a name, heading toward adventure, taking in the sights, making our way by our wits, talking about a million things. But it seemed impossible it would ever happen.