Texas Sun

ShuggaShugga ShuggaShugga

And the plaintiff wail let loose, the mournful cry of the train’s howl, crossing yet another dirt track leading nowhere. Leading her back.

ShuggaShugga ShuggaShugga ShuggaShugga…

WoooooooWwwwooooooom

Wwwhhhhhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmm.

Another crossing. Another back road of her memory.

WoooooooWwwwooooooom

Wwwhhhhhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmm. All the while an incessant Clank, Clank, Clank from the train’s bells; the whistle and massive moaning horn in accompaniment. 

As the young woman sitting in coach looked out the flat West Texas landscape, she fought back the tears. But they came regardless of her efforts. For the bulk of her journey, she had managed to keep her eyes dry. The journey, made unnecessarily long by the frequent stops of the passenger rail ceding precedence to the freight lines who owned the lines, but as she neared her stop she could feel it all coming back.

“Miss… Miss… Sorry to wake you. It looks like this is your stop.” She had dozed off.

The officious man in the blue shirt and creased polyester pants and black patent loafers stammered, “S-strictly the best for us,” he struggled out, noticing her appraisal, and made his way further along his beat. Looking back on it, she felt guilty of her judgment, barely conscious of it as she was, her Catholic Guilt ever present. But she told herself that it was her job now, what she has trained to do, and forgave herself briefly.

The train pulled into a town of low stucco buildings and wide swaths of sun bleached asphalt and concrete, a sea of beiges and browns and grays. The slowing locomotive drew to its berth adjacent yet another large slab of concrete, a ratio tower parked beside, perhaps a stately holdover from earlier telegraph operations. The station some four hours east of El Paso and the “Upstairs-Downstairs” slums of Juarez across the Rio Grande. The stark difference never clearer between the Haves and the Have-nots, she always hated that stop. It was like a coin tossed in her favor to end up on this side of that razor wire.

The rail line crept in the back alleys and vacant lots of this everytown. As if sneaking into a newborn’s room to check for breath and a pulse. And upon finding a peaceful, resting baby, letting loose a fierce bellow.

Wwwwhhhhhuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmm!

SHUGGAShuggashuggahsugggsuggg, SSSHSHSHSHSHSSSSH SSSSSSSSHSSSSSH!

She gathered her crocheted bag; water bottle and book, dried fruit and nuts among its contents. Looking up she saw a young man, fresh faced and broken with the scars of acne, trying to help her. Slim in stature and underweight. In his skintight Wranglers and points of snakeskin jutting out from the cuff, he was struggling to pull her luggage out of the overhead bin. The bright magenta hue of her rolling Samsonite making doubly sure there was no mistaken recognition. The jarring color of her bag easing transfer from Baggage Claim at LAX to the gridlocked mass of exhaust, cries of joy and lament, and the horns just outside it’s wall of sliding doors. Also easing escape from a train onto the platform of Alpine, Texas.

The chivalrous cowboy’s burden made the fraught trip from it’s overhead storage to its resting place on the ground with a thud, stabilizing itself on its four wheels despite the threat to structural integrity and risk of bodily harm. The aluminum substructure of the train car rang hollowly under the weight of the case. The pressure molded case and hardened resin rollers withstanding the plunge, as well as the sudden stop at the end.

She felt a mess, her breath reeked of the garlic from last night’s dinner and mingled with the cups of terrible coffee. With the bags under her eyes and her frazzled, seat-tousled hair, the overnight journey from Los Angeles’ Union Station did her determined countenance no favors. “Red-eye indeed!”, she had noticed. All the romantic hopes of a train trip across the Southwest dashed by 20 hours of the restless lurch. “You get used to it though, or at least your legs do,” Maria mused.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, quickly scrambling to collect her belongings and begging to be free from the awkward interaction. The cowboy nodded and returned the beige, wide-brimmed hat to his head.

“Ma’am,” devastated by her lack of interest. She rescued her bag and made her way quickly past the would-be-suitor with a mumbled “Thank you.” She knew to be wary of cowboys approaching with a helping hand and large plastic smile.

She exited into the late afternoon warmth, stepping onto the hard unmoving surface of the platform. The large stable mass of aggregate cement suddenly countered her unsteady limbs. Almost immediately her train-legs gave way, causing a momentary stumble, garnering a concerned look but no movement from a station attendant. The oversized structure of her rolling luggage caught her only long enough to avoid damage by landing on the firm surface. The rolling wheels gave way and she haltingly fell to a ungainly seat on the dusty slab. Looking up she could see the scrawny cowboy laughing at her plight from the high window of the San Antonio bound train. His thin lips, split by two rows of oversized gleaming incisors, twisted into a cruel, spiteful grin.

“Good ol’ Alpine,” she muttered mostly to herself, looking up at the tan stucco one-story building that made up the station; the antenna now towering even higher next to it and subsequently her. The small college town “Way Out West“ always felt to her to be inconceivably small, but from this vantage point it positively loomed.

There was an immense-ness to the flat plateau studded with looming rocky outcroppings of mountains, the base of most starting at almost a mile, the air growing quite thin near the peaks. The only thing dwarfing the landscape and the past were the night skies in one of the last remaining dark places. Any attempt at civilization by the inhabitants of the land, and their trials and tribulations seemed trite in comparison to the gigantic expanse. 

Maria’s protective hackles were again raised upon exiting the station. From the curb there was a line of two or three taxis parked and waiting for the train. The excitement of the prospective fare garnered her all the attention she sought to avoid; all the familiar tension rose within her once more. Beyond the row of cabs, the parking lot filled with pickup trucks was all too familiar, not the same but identical in their presence. She knew to avoid most. She dreaded the recognition, and what would inevitably follow. Her luggage, her new hair and ripped jeans wouldn’t go over very well. “At least I can throw my flannel over the crop top,” she reassured herself thinly.

Down the boulevard to the west, the red-bricked and white trimmed courthouse and accompanying jail that “Tamed The West” all echoed harmoniously the same handsome brick and ivory of SRSU beckoning on the eastern horizon. The little campus tucked under the blue-gray Hancock Hill provided stellar stargazing from the desk at the top, some bygone fraternal prank turned ritual. The choice of staying home and going to Sul Ross State University was an option for her and her cohort of graduated Fightin’ Bucks, but she could think of no fresher hell than staying in Alpine and not striving for something better. She sighed heavily, knowing she had made the right choice of Cal State Film School; still, the pull of family made it hard. The freedom of college life countered her rigid upbringing and thrilled her to the core. In the end, the USC costume department had caught her and all of her intentions, as well.

With that thought, she stepped to the curb, flagged down one of the men waiting in line and jumped in the back of his white and red taxicab of a Dodge minivan. Giving the address to her childhood home, she proceeded to hide under her flannel armor and retreat into her headphones, mellow tunes soothing her train frayed nerves. A softly sung voice and steady rhythmic guitar always helped calm, even from infancy, when her father used to sing to her. She felt the tears welling again as the familiar streets drew near. Her mind flashed to the last time she had seen them, draped in the amber glow of the buzzing streetlight. The fear and panic now welling up again. She knew to breathe, but the paralysis of her lungs did nothing to help.

The driver crawled to a stop at the corner across from her destination and she settled her fare. Again a structure of small stature constructed with cheap pine lumber, cloaked in the rough plaster-like coating of stucco, this time painted a light rose red. Maria could see the tar shingles starting to peel back from the weathering roof; the gutter had a wild hairdo of oak leaves, acorns and twigs, poking from above the downspout, mounding up and out like an afro. By all appearances the yard man has been laid up. Not that it took much for him to skip over the abuelita’s little bungalow. The chain link fence had sustained a large impact by all appearances, with a long bowed section where formerly there was straight galvanized pipe. The gate hung open partway and there was a wad of dry weeds pinning it back, along with all the weight of an empty chip bag. The dust and trash blown by the same wind, swooping down out of the northwest with its dry high-desert air.

“Todo bien?” the taxi driver asked of her, after she made no initial move to get out of the van. Her feet were frozen, and she could not move for fear. The fear at the gate of her childhood, unlike that of the municipal parking lot, wasn't one of recognition but of not being recognized. Both fears perfectly valid for she HAD been gone for some months. “And at this age…” She hadn’t intended on being gone this long…

The streetlight’s gleam towering from the corner in the dusty twilight amplified the tungsten tones of the house and yard and sky. Again the bright magenta suitcase made it’s way to the ground, this time without a predatory smile, just the sad concerned eyes of a man who knew too well the turbulence of life. 

And with great trepidation, she activated the latch freeing her from her torment. The young woman and her bright bag made the way from to corner to corner and up to the gate. Escaping into the yard with the Emory oaks overhead and the dry grasses crackling in the evening breeze, she guided her bag down the cracked, uneven gray brick walk splitting the yard in two.

Before she could navigate even half of the path, the screendoor smashed open and a blur of dusty red sweatshirt and blue jeans, topped with a mop of black hair, cannonballed out towards her. With a surprising amount of force, borne out of anticipation of the reunion, a small boy barreled into her, almost knocking her on to her ass for the second time in an hour, the young boy screamed his hello. “Mama, Mama, Mama!”

The boy rocketed into her embrace, propelled by the fury of the gods and his impossibly short legs. A smaller, older woman came to the door behind him, backlit by the light of the kitchen, beaming a smile and cheeks stained with tears herself. Overtaken by the onslaught of welcome, her vision blurry, Maria could hear her mother calling to her to come inside and her son crying for her attention. She, for the first time in a million years, felt whole. 

Home again. For now.