Photo © PALI RAO
Halva in the
Glove Box
“I walked clean across Delaware in one day,” said the Cactus Man, and one glance at his feet told her he spoke the truth. As for her, last Thursday night she’d left her underwear behind in Biloxi. She wanted to confess this to the Cactus Man but was scared he’d think she was a tramp. Perhaps she was a tramp, leaving her underwear in Biloxi, outside the Quick Fill Food Mart and Gas. But that black cotton thong was as old as the ends of her hair, and just as fine, the elastic worn to a single thread that cut into her haunches as she walked. She’d slipped it off in the Quick Fill ladies’ room, meaning to wash it out and let it dry on the passenger seat as she drove through the night, but before the thong hit the basin, she knew she could never bear to tug this scrap of fabric back on her body again. She dropped the underwear in a plastic bag with a banana skin and an empty Gatorade bottle, tied a knot the size of a walnut in the top, and tossed it in the trashcan outside.
Ten minutes down the highway she started to worry that someone would find her discarded thong—a cleaner in blue overalls, or a homeless person rooting for half-smoked cigarettes, an uneaten bud of banana nestled in its skin. The Cactus Man would probably know about these things. She was sure he’d riffled through more than one sack of trash in his lifetime, and he looked like he was clothed in his spoils.
She’d picked him up outside Tucson, his arms held out angular, so he looked like one of the cacti she’d been driving past all day. At first she hadn’t realized he was thumbing a ride, but when she did, she pulled over on the dusty hard shoulder, checking she had no new underwear drying on the seat beside her. He dropped his cactus arm and ambled to the car, no rush, his feet roots to the earth, and stuck his head through the open window. His face was prickly and his skin dry, like he hadn’t taken water for years, but his eyes told her he knew how to live on not a lot, one sapphire of water would last him a week. She unlocked the door and he climbed in.
She realized she hadn’t asked him his name yet, and he hadn’t told her, but it didn’t seem to matter because he hadn’t asked her name either, and the Cactus Man suited him, although she only said it in her head, not to his face. He sat still as she drove, the stillest person she’d ever known. Even when he reached forward to turn the radio up, or press the cigarette lighter in, or take the cigarette lighter out once it had popped, holding the cherry tip to the tobacco of his roll up, he didn’t seem to move. His long coat that could have been brown and could have been green hung from his collar down to his ankles, almost as if there were no body beneath it, except those cactus arms that crooked out of his shoulders and hooked out at the elbows, and the prickle of his hair and the rough leather skin of his face.
He said he’d go wherever she was going, but not in that way men do when they want you to sleep with them. Not in a maple syrup and butter voice, just in a way that suggested it didn’t make much difference where he arrived. Exactly as if you had offered him a choice of steak or dry oatmeal and he’d said, “Yep, either is good,” so you would give him dry oatmeal to test him. Laura wasn’t immune to provocation so she told him she was going to Tuba City, and he said okay, tapping his ash out the window, still without moving, and Laura glared through her black plastic sunglasses. She’d meant to be heading for L.A.
She was still deciding whether to take the turn to Tuba City, or the road across the desert, through the Mojave, that she’d heard of but never seen, that made her think of Arabs and the scent of rosemary. The Mojave.
She whispered the name in her head, “Mo-haaaa-veeee,” hearing the vowels breathe out like a breeze, warming her from the inside out. Laura had wondered about changing her name to Mojave. If she was called Mojave she could wear long floating skirts of orange muslin. She could burn incense in her car. She could remove the light bulbs in her bedroom and live by candles, always in twilight, but she thought before she changed her name to Mojave she should at least see the place. Stay a few days, sleep in the car, watch the moon silver the sand dunes, drive around in circles over the dirt roads and not worry about which direction she was heading. She had chocolate halva in the glove box, unwrapped, so she could eat it as she drove, biting down on the grainy sweetness, feeling the layers fall apart on her tongue, licking her fingers clean of the halva’s creamy flesh. She knew it was right. But now the Cactus Man was making her drive to Tuba City, and all she knew about Tuba City is that it didn’t have anything to do with tubas and that it wasn’t a place to eat halva.
The Cactus Man’s knees grazed the door of the glove box as he sat, so she couldn’t reach the halva anyway. But now it was past four in the afternoon, and the sky had darkened to coal, clouds rushing up behind in her rear view mirror as if urging her on. She felt them sigh over her shoulder, and then the storm broke. The thunder crashed TUBA CITY and the lightning flashed MOJAVE and the two fought it out, rain slapping the windshield as hard as running feet, while Laura gripped the steering wheel and just kept driving straight ahead, waiting for the storm to decide.
The Cactus Man didn’t react. He sat, hands on knees, the bristles on his chin growing longer by the hour. He didn’t ask for a rest break and he didn’t lean forward to see the hovering black angel clouds, and he didn’t jump when a bolt of lighting found its way to earth in a wide, flat field to his right. The lightning wrote itself into the ground, not straight lightning, but crooked as a signature, and it was brighter than the drum of thunder was loud, so Laura decided that the lightning had the last word, and turned the steering wheel towards the Mojave again. She saw the red sun rolling along the horizon, bigger than a mountain, and she wanted to eat chocolate halva, but the chocolate had melted, rolled away by the red sun, and the halva was in the glove box anyway. The Cactus Man hunched in front of it, still as a mountain, his knees smashing into the glove box every time she stepped on the brake.
He didn’t complain or ask how to move his seat back, and he didn’t comment on the fact that Laura had turned west and was no longer heading for Tuba City.
They’d been driving for hours now, or Laura had been driving and the Cactus Man had been sitting there, growing into the passenger seat, green and brown, and she needed to stop, roll into a gas station and find coffee. She didn’t care if the coffee was burnt and charry. She needed to wash out her underwear and dry it on the seat. The Cactus Man was ruining her routine. She was hungry for doughnuts from the mini-mart, although she knew she should really eat green leaves, and she wondered how long he would travel with her. Till she reached Los Angeles? And would she have to drive straight through, never pausing across the Mojave, because she didn’t know what to do with the Cactus Man if she stopped? She didn’t know what to do with him now, at the gas station a mile ahead. Would he step out of the car, visit the men’s room, his great coat rustling to his ankles in the great heat? Would he just sit and wait in the car, staring prickles out of the window, waiting, clogging up her car, until she’d washed out her new cotton thong, $1.99 at Walgreen’s, and sipped her coffee to lukewarm?
She signalled right, slowed onto the ramp, pulled into the gas station. The gas pumps were red and yellow like the sun. The Cactus Man creaked his head round to face her, and smiled. His face crumbled open, like shifting sand in a soft wind.
“Do you want anything?” she found herself saying.
Inside it was all families and every family seemed to have a baby and every baby was crying. Laura bought two paper cups of coffee, the largest size, filled them to the brim, no cream or sugar in his, and pressed on the lids, knowing they would leak anyway. The Cactus Man unfolded his arm like a praying mantis to take the cup and sucked at the oval hole in the lid, even though the steam was still rising in a chimney through the hole. Laura climbed back into the driver’s seat and slipped off her sandals, waiting for her coffee to cool. They sat, looking straight ahead at the trash cans overflowing with Coke tins and cardboard. She hadn’t washed her underwear and she hoped she wouldn’t get into an accident and be taken to the hospital in dirty briefs, but then, she remembered, she hadn’t worried about that when she had none on at all because they were drying on the seat next to her. Perhaps she wouldn’t be able to wash her underwear all the way to L.A., thought Laura, not if she took him with her into the desert. Perhaps she needed to wear a new pair every day, discard the old in a plastic bag, a trail of thongs in gas stations across the nation. Was this how bad habits formed? The Cactus Man drained the last of his coffee, tipping the cup back till it was vertical.
“What’s your name?” His voice was dry and burnt as the coffee.
“Mojave,” she said.
Copyright © 2008 by Tania Casselle
"Halva in the Glove Box" originally appeared in South Dakota Review, Fall 2004 (Vol 42, Number 3)
