The Stateline Virtues

by Megan W. Moore

The trip was almost too much for someone who had never seen the mountains — the desert, the insides of armadillos, the nothingness of cattle ranches and the white mile-high crosses that grow out of North Texas highways.

In New Mexico, where the mountains flatten into mesas, I thought about grace. About a grace that was something more than Jackie O. and something less than redemption. I thought about the city, and realized that I was only graceful when I concentrated too hard on even strides in expensive tall shoes that count blocks, and so devastatingly—I was not graceful at all. There was nothing graceful about freckles and chapped lips, about curly hair and sex on bathroom floors, about protest and guilt. Nothing graceful about ripped jeans and sunburn.

I looked to my hands for some last sign that I might be graceful, because I had long associated thin long fingers with grace—something about pianos and gloves. But seeing only dark yellow dust and chipped polish on small but masculine hands—unmoved—I quickly looked elsewhere. I looked to my best friend Kate as she drove, and adjusted the radio, trying with feigned commitment to find something without static. I focused on Kate and the way sweat gathered on her thin salmon-colored T-shirt as she leaned over the steering wheel, exhausted. It formed a line symmetrically over her spine. There was grace in that, and jealously I thought, Kate couldn’t be graceful—there is nothing graceful about one-syllable names or being too tall.

The 10 minutes of silence were harder with nothing to look at.

I said, “I am so fucking tired of country music and static.”

“Yeah, try to find that crazy Native American station.”

“You mean the Injun station?”

Kate laughed like she meant it, and just nodded.

I absent-mindedly tuned the radio in and out of static and settled on K130, a public access radio station that seemed like a song or two an hour in between huge blocks of chatter that was vaguely sad. As if the whole station was broadcast out of some guy’s tiny hut out in the sun somewhere, and he only kept it going because the people complained that there would be no local weather reports without him. Not that they couldn’t have figured out the weather themselves, which was always fucking hot. He was playing Elvis. It was that song “Don’t” and it was heartbreaking. Neither of us mock sang along, like we might have if it was any other Elvis song.

Kate checked the rearview mirror and said, “I wish this was ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”

“I wish it was ‘Big Hunk of Love,’ or some other song that he stole from some poor black band in the middle of Georgia.”

“I wish it was that crazy German one.”

“You mean, ‘Wooden Heart’?”

“Yeah, what the fuck? Is that about Pinocchio? Who was the target audience on that track?”

We both laughed and “Are You Lonesome Tonight” came on.

It was noon by now, and the Jeep was hot. We drove an ’82 Jeep Scrambler cross-country that summer. There was no A/C, and the floor wasn’t insulated, so all of the engine heat from 600 miles a day on hot highways flowed right into the hard top. Kate’s grandfather had given her the old Jeep when she told him she planned on leaving art school and taking up architecture. They had towed the Jeep to Mexico every spring, to their tiny family house near Yelapa. Kate and her grandfather would hunt for arrow heads in the morning and swim all afternoon. At night they ate fresh fish and handmade tortillas, soft rice and beans. Then she moved out East, and rarely made it back for their spring trips. By the time she was 15, the tiny Mexican neighborhood had gotten bad, a mangled grid of barbed wire and beaches, of gated streets and broken bottles in the sand, and the trips stopped altogether.

I could feel Kate thinking about the Scrambler, about what it meant to be driving it. But she more pertinently noted, “We definitely need gas soon.”

“Yesssss. Can we stop at a Casino slash gas station slash restaurant slash souvenir Mecca?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Ten miles later, we pulled off the highway, and in between two stands selling fireworks, we saw the bright red and blue towering compound. We filled up the Jeep and ate turkey sandwiches on white bread at the diner counter. I went to the bathroom as Kate leafed through some Welcome to New Mexico brochure. The bathroom was a dingy skim-milk blue, and the third sink in was only half connected to the wall—but it was cool. The fluorescent lights were so white-bright, different than the yellow-bright of the New Mexico sun against the red clay. I rubbed my eye, lazily shuffling my feet, and bumped hard into a tall tan woman with short blonde hair that fell into her eyes. She was handsome and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.

I mumbled, “Oh. Um. I’m sorry . . . sorry.”

I looked at my feet and glanced at the tall woman’s ripped jean shorts, at her lean but thick legs. They were long, and melted into their work boots. She answered with a voice that buzzed around her throat. “Don’t worry about it. You okay?”

I looked to her face. Green deep-set eyes that looked tired from squinting, with vague beautiful purple bags under her eyes, her aviator sunglasses rested on top of her messy hair. Her cheeks and nose were pink from the hot western sun. She spoke with a southern accent that was calming and deep. She had on a white T-shirt with the sleeves and collar cut off, loose-fitting and cool.

I managed to get out, “Yeah yeah, um. I’m fine, you?”

The tall woman laughed raspy, as if she smoked two cigarettes before bed every night, and said, “I’m fine honey. Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“Far from home, huh?”

“Yeah. Pretty far. We’re headed back East right now actually.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Where are you going?” I couldn’t believe I had asked her that so forthrightly. I sounded too eager—like I wanted to travel with her—right beside her—not cool and aloof like I might have asked the same question back in New York.

She laughed quickly and answered, “I drive trucks. I’m hauling a load of Mexican beer out to New Jersey.”

“Oh cool.” And because I could feel my legs crossing, and because I could barely handle her stare I said, “Um, I have to pee. Sorry.”

She laughed again. It was soft and I shook my head. I felt entirely embarrassed and looked to my feet. She opened the stall door with dexterous hands, and I grabbed it, hoping that she would come inside with me, and kiss me hard on the mouth. That the tall woman would press her body against mine—so that I could feel her strong arms around my waist, as if the harder she pressed against me, the tighter her white shirt would become against her nipples. As if something could pass between us just from pressing. But she didn’t come in after me. I closed the door gently and she said over the hum of the fan, “Hey, listen—my truck is outside, maybe I’ll see you when you’re done in there.”

I could hear the woman’s boots on the dirty tile, and put my head between my legs.

“Jesus Christ, what took you so long?” Kate asked, looking over her sunglasses.

“Oh, um. Nothing. Listen, let’s go.”

“Yeah let’s.”

I saw the tall woman outside, looking small beside her huge grey truck. She had two cases of beer in her hands, and nodded to me with impossible coolness.

“Do you know her?” Kate asked.

“Yeah kind of, come on.”

The tall woman handed me the beer and said, “Enjoy. Have a good trip.”

I smiled, and took the beer. I said thanks, as the tall woman climbed into her truck and started it. She waved goodbye, and I waved back.

“Sweet, so she just gave you that beer?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, I guess she did.”

“Nice, let’s get going.”

We still had four hours ahead of us until we reached camp for the night, a piece of a Native American reservation that a friend of Kate’s grandfather had hooked us up with. When we got there it was almost dusk and we pulled up to a tiny house surrounded by Yuccas and small barking dogs. We rang the bell outside of the gate, and out came an older man with jet-black hair, slicked back on his head with huge black frame glasses. He had dark, wrinkled skin and khaki slacks, and looked like an even more worn Elvis Costello.

“You must be Kate,” he said from the front porch, letting us into the yard.

“Hi, I’m Kate and this is Taylor. Thanks so much for having us.”

The man was a nature photographer, an old friend of Kate’s grandfather from college. He took us inside and poured us cold iced tea that came from a powder. He showed us around his studio. Pictures of him with Wonder Woman were hung next to gorgeous gelatin prints of New Mexico sunrises and 35-millimeter portraits of men in traditional Native American garb. He gave us a tiny silver key to the gate that separated his land from the others, and gave us directions to take the Jeep up on top of a tall butte about 15 miles away, to a plot of land his family has owned for decades.

He said, “Be safe girls. Don’t be ’fraid of mountain lions. They’re cowards anyway. Just hit your pots together and they’ll go runnin,’ I’m sure.”

And after he paused to look at the sunset: “And come back down here in the morning and we’ll have some breakfast.”

We drove up the butte, four-wheel drive for almost four miles until we reached the rusty gate the photographer had mentioned. We set up camp, our tiny tent and grill on a flat area of land overlooking the canyon. We made hamburgers, and drank the cold Mexican beers. We smoked a joint and didn’t have to wait long for the stars to come out. We kept drinking after dark fell. We sang like we wished we were cowboys. And after we sang and laughed Kate asked, “Hey Taylor, how did you meet that chick with the beer?”

“Oh, I sort of bumped into her in the bathroom actually. She was stunning, right? There was just something about her . . . ”

“Yeah I guess.”

“Well, the beer is good anyway.”

“Yeah.”

We fell asleep in our tent that night, both on our backs staring up at the huge sky, because there is no such thing as a rain fly in New Mexico. The stars blurred and focused as we looked up, drunk and quiet. I felt a small pressure in my chest that I attributed to being so far from the ocean. The tent would have been perfect for two lovers. But Kate and I weren’t lovers, not even close. The strong beer helped us to forget that our shoulders were touching, and so we fell asleep.

Kate was up first, stretching outside, and loading the truck bed of the Jeep. I stepped outside into the already bright sun, my heart pounding in my forehead, feeling hot and hungover. That morning the old photographer showed us albums of photos. His significantly younger wife was just returning from her shift at a casino, and offered to make us eggs as she tied back her thick black hair. He began to tell us about the folklore of the skinwalker, living out in the canyons. It was stealing children and women—shape-shifting into hybrid animals like some kind of Miltonian devil. I shuddered as he spoke, glad that he had decided to tell us this the morning after. Kate glanced out the window in an effort to stop paying attention to the story.

We left that morning, bellies full of strong coffee, minds still cloudy. And as we crossed into Northern Texas I thought about what it meant to shift shapes. I wondered about the truck driver, free and tall, floating somewhere between a woman and a goddess bearing gifts, confident, with her own brand of masculine grace. If I hadn’t met her in the middle of the day, I would have sworn she shifted shapes—her woman’s slinking hips and man’s rough hands. She could have stolen me if she wanted to.

Kate reached over to turn up the radio, and we kept on driving.