The Influence(2)

Lita was silent for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “You’re off the hook. For now. But the offer’s open. When your unemployment runs out, come on over and take a break from the rat race. We’ve got plenty of space, and we’d love to have you. And I’m serious. Think about renting out rather than selling. This is just a temporary setback. You don’t want to lose everything you’ve worked for just because of a little bad luck.”

He was touched. As much by the reconnection as by her genuine kindness and generosity, especially in comparison with the rest of his family. “Thank you,” he said simply.

“I have an idea,” she suggested. “Why don’t you come down for a visit? A weekend. We haven’t seen each other in ages. It would be good to catch up.”

He immediately thought of twenty reasons not to go—starting with the price of gas—but to his surprise, he said yes. He wanted to see Lita again. And get to know her husband, whom he’d only met once. And maybe he would take a sabbatical from real life, drop out of society and live off the grid for a couple of weeks. It would give him a chance to think about the future, to make plans without a gun to his head.

“All right!” Lita said, and she said it the same way she had when she was a little girl. He found himself smiling into the phone. “Got a piece of paper?” she asked. “Let me give you directions…”



****



Magdalena was a small town in southeastern Arizona, only a desert mountain range away from Mexico and closer to the New Mexico border than to Tucson. Getting to it was far more difficult than it should have been in this MapQuest world, but then again the information superhighway had been paid much more attention to in the last few decades than had real highways, so perhaps it should not have come as a surprise. Past Benson, past Willcox, Interstate 10 was clear all the way to New Mexico, according to the road signs. But, following his cousin’s directions, Ross pulled off on the anonymously marked “Exit 96” and took the bleached two-lane blacktop south.

Ten miles in, he passed an abandoned gas station, and twenty miles further on, he saw a small hill atop which someone had erected a giant white cross, although there was no other trace of human habitation.

Somewhere along the line, the pavement seemed to have faded away, and Ross was not sure if he was now travelling down a dirt road or over asphalt that had been retaken by the desert after battling the sandstorms that hit disproportionately this section of the state.

There were no signs indicating that any town lay ahead, nothing even telling him how many miles to the Mexican border. He’d been off the highway for an hour and was about to take out his cell phone and try calling Lita to make sure he was on the right track (that is, if he could get a signal out here), when ahead, at the base of one of the low rocky mountains that blocked the edge of the horizon, he saw a flash of reflected sunlight. It disappeared as the road dipped, then reappeared as his car topped a small rise. There was more than one glinting object, and he realized that they were probably the metal roofs or water towers of a town.

He was still many miles away, but as he drew closer, he saw darker objects between the bright flashes, buildings, and, eventually, a white “M” on the sloping brush-covered side of the chimney-peaked mountain directly behind the town.

Magdalena.

Lita and her husband really had dropped out of the rat race. This was about as remote a location as she could have found anywhere. And while there was something admirable about that, and while the rugged desert was undeniably beautiful, Ross felt an odd twinge of discomfort. He was a city boy, Phoenix born and raised. To him, the wilderness was somewhere you visited on vacation, not the place where you lived. Still, though he might not want to reside here permanently, it might be a fun spot for some R & R while he sorted out his options.

He slowed the car. Referring to Magdalena as a “small town” was giving it the benefit of the doubt. More of a village or hamlet, it appeared to have one main street, the road he was on, which dead-ended past what looked like an old adobe church and seemed to turn into a hiking trail that wound up the side of the mountain. What he supposed was the downtown consisted of a handful of small businesses and houses, in addition to a slightly larger market with an independent gas station in its parking lot.

Ross glanced down at the directions on the seat next to him. Lita had said her home was down the second dirt road on the right. He turned on the road, passed a shabby beauty salon, three or four ramshackle houses, then was back in open country, where, three miles past a cattleguard, just where she’d said it would be, he saw an old-style metal mailbox with the number 11 stenciled in black on the side. Following her instructions, he turned left at the mailbox and drove down a rutted dirt driveway to a surprisingly new ranch house that seemed completely at odds with the surrounding community. To the left of the house was a corral and, beyond that, a long low building that resembled a barn. Lita and her husband, apparently, were ranchers.