American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [78]
“There, children, there,” said Mother, pointing to the peak. “Your grandparents are down the road now, just up ahead.” She drew out a tube of lipstick and slicked her mouth.
We passed Walcott Junction: a combination of filling station, general store, and “café lounge.” A sign flew over it all, perched so high that it summoned a clientele for miles. MOJO GAS, it said. A solitary word pulsed in a window—Pabst.
So much was familiar. So much was not. The earth, the bareness of it, could have been Pachamama. But there was a different life to it, something else there I couldn’t make out. It wasn’t the prairie that was drawing my eye. In Peru, ground was all I had looked at: the mountains, the deserts, the rocky shore. My orientation had always been down.
In this place I found myself looking up, scanning sky. A canvas arched over Wyoming, a vast brilliant dome that made my head rise, drew my eyes up. If Pachamama were alive in that dust, you would hardly have noticed her. There were hardly trees anymore in this part of America, no branches for spirits to wave from. Not one gurgling stream to satisfy a ghost. No vines. Were the pishtacos that stalked Peru not here in these flatlands at all?
Fifteen miles past Walcott, a ganglion of metal loomed out of the plain. As we drew nearer, we saw the full immensity of the thing, a steel-pipe cathedral against a darkening sky. SINCLAIR OIL, the billboard said. And then a boulevard of houses trailed past, under a brume of smoke. Gringo machines. If their maquinaria were here, so were their pishtacos.
I started from my seat, convinced this was our destination, but Papi looked over at me and shook his head. The factory and the hacienda were a mirage. A familiar door in an unfamiliar world.
When the bus lurched into Rawlins, we might as well have lurched onto the moon. The town was unlike anything I had ever seen. Gray buildings, massive and squat, sprawled against a hillside. Trucks lined the streets. There were offices, shops, hotels, but no one came and went from them. A stillness reigned. I could see lights winking in windows and doors, illuminating the signs: BOOTS, LIVE MUSIC, WESTERN BAR, RIFLES, BAIT, SHERIFF, FEED, MEATS, SPIRITS, THE FERRIS HOTEL, and then, down the road with a well-lit driveway in front, WYOMING STATE PENITENTIARY. On the other side of a bright white train station, a profusion of little houses—clapboard, metal, brick—spilled over the hill and down to a two-lane highway. Tidy patches of green lay in front. The bus made its way to Main Street, lumbered around corners, screeched and then rumbled forward again, until it pulled to a stop.
The driver barked out the destination—“Rawwwlins!”—yanked back the door, and a night wind sliced in. I pulled my alpaca sweater around me, ran in front of the rest, and hopped two steps down to the pavement in front of the Come On In! lounge. In its window, a row of dust-caked bottles lined the sill, and through the glass pane, over the bar, I could see a giant moose face. The head was outlandish under the antlers, its dull eyes dazed, as if the animal had needed a drink and walked through the wall to get it.
“Hullo there!” a voice said, and I spun around to see a tall, broad-shouldered man coming toward us in the twilight. He was wearing a bone-white hat: guttered on top, dipped at the brim. Around his neck hung a string tie with a quartz stone as blue and translucent as the