Julia and the Art of Practical Travel Read online

Ohhhhhhh, wailed Aunt Constance. The poor dear. I feel simply terrible. Hopefully the ranch cook can make something from him, perhaps a pork pâté or a tasty terrine.

  Li Yong dragged the javelina back to our hiding spot. It was awful to see the animal squashed and dead like that. Just then several more javelina trotted down the cliff to the stream. They sniffed the ground so hard I thought that they’d cut up their snouts on those rocks. Li Yong seemed very surprised.

  You must have hunting magic, he told Aunt Constance. So many javelina. Usually only one or two come down here in a day.

  Now four or five more of the pigs appeared over the cliff and came down to the stream—and then three more. They all sniffed the air and the ground like they were looking for something that they wanted to find very badly. Then they started to march toward us.

  This is not good, said Li Yong. When javelina are by themselves, they are easy to shoot. But when they are in a big pack, they can be dangerous. Get behind me.

  What can they be looking for? wondered Aunt Constance. Five more javelina came over the cliff to join the herd.

  What if they smell that chicken foot from Madame Flavie Batilde? I asked. Is it in your basket?

  Aunt Constance went white.

  That must be it, she said, and then at that moment the pigs began to thunder toward us.

  Li Yong picked up a gun and shot in their direction. One of the javelina fell but the rest kept coming.

  Run! Li Yong hollered, and all three of us started to scramble back toward the house as fast as we could. The pigs ran after us, kicking up a big dust cloud as they went.

  Give them the chicken foot, I yelled to Aunt Constance, but she gripped her basket purse closer to her chest. Her straw hat flew off her head and got ripped to shreds under the hooves of the running pigs.

  As the ranch came into sight, the Honorable Winston Cantor-Battle ran out onto the porch with a big gun and he began shooting at the javelina. A few more of them fell, and the bullets that didn’t hit the pigs made explosions in the dusty ground all around us. We finally clattered up the back stairs of the house; Aunt Constance ran straight through the ranch house, into our room, and slammed the door. She lay gasping for breath on her bed, still hugging the purse to her chest, and for a while we didn’t say anything to each other.

  But when she caught her breath and could talk again, she turned to me and said:

  I may not be the most worldly person, Julia, but even I know better than to throw a gift from a voodoo queen to a gaggle of wild pigs.

  This, of course, made all the sense in the world, and for the first time since we left Windy Ridge, I realized that Aunt Constance was very brave in her own way.

  That night a full moon rose over the plains, and the light made everything in Texas look ghostly and blue. Li Yong and some of the other ranch hands had fetched the dead javelina—including the one that got squashed by the rock Aunt Constance shot off the cliff—and brought the animals to the ranch cook, who made a fine big steaming barbecue out of them, smoking the meat in a fire pit dug into the ground. It was a hot night, so we ate the barbecue out on the back porch and listened to the cows lowing out on the plains.

  One of the cowboys brought a Chinese instrument with lots of strings up onto the porch and began to play a quiet song that made me feel strange, but the Honorable Winston Cantor-Battle seemed to be enjoying it so much that he practically melted into the porch.

  I love this country, he told Aunt Constance and me. He took a big puff on his pipe and went on:

  Here we are, in the Lone Star State, with the big moon above and all of the space and air in the world. You can be whoever you want out here.

  I’m telling you, ladies, he added, when you find the place where you belong, a place that makes you feel like the best version of yourself, you stay put. Never, ever let it go. Never leave it. Because once you’re away from it, you’re not your whole self anymore.

  I know exactly what you mean, said Aunt Constance. She looked sadly at the horizon, and I knew that she must be thinking of Windy Ridge, where Lancasters had felt the most like themselves for hundreds of years before it got sold to Tipsy Lipps.

  One of the cowboys came up to the porch out of the blue night and whispered something to the Honorable Winston Cantor-Battle, who smiled around his pipe. Smoke swirled around his face as he turned to Aunt Constance and me.

  Three new calves were born into our herd tonight, he told us. That’s the most in a long time. So it appears that you are not two travelers, but three: Constance Lancaster, Julia Lancaster, and Lady Luck.

  We all walked out onto the moonlit field to see the baby cows. Even though they were less than an hour old, they already stood up on their own, wobbling and glistening out there in the middle of all of the World’s End nothingness that made the Honorable Winston Cantor-Battle feel so much like himself, that nothingness that was filled with dust and heat and sad music brought along from the other side of the world.

  Here are some of the big things that happened after we left World’s End:

  1. I found a big passel of Indian beads near the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona that I made into a necklace so long that it almost reached my toes:

  2. Aunt Constance and I had a picnic on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and a big wooden box of our Lancaster silverware fell over the side and bounced hundreds of feet down the canyon walls into the Colorado River, which was emerald green that day.

  3. We stayed overnight in Las Vegas and had dinner at a fancy casino. Afterward Aunt Constance decided to play a hand of bridge at one of the gambling card tables and lost a lot of money. Then she cried and said that we’d have to sell off even more of our Windy Ridge things to pay for the money she lost to the casino, but someone told her to try again, which she did, and this time she won the bridge game and also got back a little bit more money than she lost, so we came out ahead. I said that the Madame Batilde chicken foot was giving us good luck, which was a good sign that it was going to help us find my mother when we got to San Francisco. Aunt Constance said that Las Vegas was more crooked than any of those voodoo salons in New Orleans’s French Quarter, and we drove out of town in a hurry. In fact, we skittered out of Las Vegas so fast that Aunt Constance forgot to fill up the gas can for the car. And when you’re driving out there in the middle of nowhere, you need three things:

  1. Food;

  2. Water;

  3. Gas for the car—so you don’t get stranded in the desert with all of that tumbleweed.

  Which is exactly what happened to us. The needle on the dashboard pointed at the E for empty, and soon the car started going slower and slower even when Aunt Constance pushed down hard with her foot on the gas pedal, and then it stopped altogether.

  What are we going to do? I asked her.

  We’ll have to wait for someone to drive down the highway and then ask them for a ride to the next gas station, Aunt Constance told me unhappily, and added: I’m sorry that I was so careless, Julia.

  So we got out of the car and sat on the front bumper. An hour went by, and nobody came down the highway. Then another hour went by, and the sun got so hot that it started to make us dizzy. So we dragged two of our trunks out of the car, stood them on their sides, and put an Oriental carpet over them to make a little sun tent.

  And we sat inside the hutch and ate some cookies and played gin rummy to kill time, and even though Aunt Constance was very upset about being stranded in the hot desert, she still had enough of her wits about her to beat me at almost every hand.

  We Lancaster women have been shrewd card players for at least six generations—even when under duress, she told me.

  Late that afternoon, I saw a flicker of movement way down the road, and we both scrambled out of the hutch and stood with our hands shielding our eyes from the sun’s glare, and soon the flicker turned out to be a rusty Ford pickup truck that had probably once been red and now was almost no color at all. The driver stopped the truck next to our trunk-and-carpet hutch. He wor
e a cowboy hat and a star badge on his vest.

  Hop in and I’ll take you to the next town for gas, he told us.

  How far is the next town? fussed Aunt Constance. She was worried about leaving all of our Windy Ridge things alone in the car for too long.

  It’s only thirty miles north of here, said the man. It’s called Gold Point, Nevada.

  Aunt Constance peered down at our map. Where is it? she asked. I don’t see a Gold Point anywhere on the map.

  That’s because it doesn’t exist, the man told her.

  Aunt Constance looked bewildered.

  What on earth do you mean? she asked him.

  Well, it existed once upon a time, the man in the cowboy hat explained. It was a mining town about a hundred years ago, when there was still gold in the hills. But now the gold is gone, and so are most of the people. Gold Point’s considered a ghost town and so the state took it off all the maps.

  I can assure you, though, he added, that the town is still very much around. I’m the sheriff, after all. My name is Sheriff Stone.

  So, with that, Aunt Constance and I climbed up into his truck to take a ride to nowhere.

  How did you become sheriff of a town that doesn’t exist? I asked him.

  No one else wanted the job, said Sheriff Stone. So I held an election and—what do you know?—I won hands down. There were three voters in total: me, myself, and I.

  You also happen to be looking at the town’s mayor, fire chief, and reverend, he added.

  That sounds like a lot of responsibility, Aunt Constance said.

  Well, I thought it was my duty, Sheriff Stone told us, and then he pointed up at the hills.

  There’s Gold Point now, he told us.

  Aunt Constance and I leaned forward and squinted, but we couldn’t make out a thing. If there was a town up there, it sure blended into the hills, like a chameleon blends into a tree branch. Sheriff Stone turned his truck off the road; we drove straight into the desert and ran over a lot of dry plants and we got bumped around a lot as he plowed up into the hills.

  And soon the buildings of Gold Point came out of the background like magic.

  This is Main Street, Sheriff Stone told us.

  I can tell you right now that Gold Point’s Main Street looked nothing like any other Main Street I’d ever seen. It made Paw Paw’s Main Street look fancy. First of all, there were no grocery stores, no gas stations, no ice cream parlors. What there was instead: maybe ten old buildings cobbled together from wood planks, and at least half of them were falling down or looked like they were sinking deep into the dusty ground.

  Tumbleweed did cartwheels across the street in the wind. A rusted-out car languished in an empty lot, its front doors covered in bullet holes.

  That’s where I do my target practice, explained Sheriff Stone, and he stopped the car. Hop out, ladies. I’ll run back to my garage and get you-all a canister of gasoline.

  He ambled over to a falling-down shack and disappeared inside.

  Aunt Constance wrapped her arms around herself and peered around.

  I’ve never seen such a lonely place before, she told me. It’s the loneliest place in the world. I can’t wait to get back into our car and drive away as fast as we can—

  And the next thing I knew, she was lying on the ground. Aunt Constance had accidentally stepped in a hole in the ground and sprained her ankle.

  We got stuck at Gold Point—the loneliest place in the world—for a whole week.

  Sheriff Stone was not only Gold Point’s policeman, mayor, fire chief, and reverend; his house was also the town restaurant and he was its chef. He made breakfast each day for all of us, and it was usually a hill of bacon the size of a haystack that he cooked over a fire out in the backyard. There was no running water out there, and Sheriff Stone got all of his water from barrels that collected rainwater:

  I fill the others up with tap water when I drive down to Las Vegas every few weeks, he told me. That’s where I was coming from when I picked up you-all.

  Aunt Constance and I slept in Sheriff Stone’s house, which also served as Gold Point’s jail. Years ago, lots of drunken gold miners had gotten locked up in those jail cells, Sheriff Stone told us. But now Aunt Constance and I had taken up residence in them instead, sleeping on cell cots. I thought it was all very exciting and pretended that I was in a Wild West movie. Aunt Constance, on the other hand, said it was the most demoralizing experience of her life and that Grandmother Lancaster was going to hurl a lightning bolt down at us from heaven, and then she even said, “Curse you, Rosemary,” because my mother was the reason we were stuck here in the first place.

  Anyway, on our first morning there, after we’d eaten the breakfast bacon, Sheriff Stone said that we should probably go get our car off the highway.

  How can we do that? asked Aunt Constance crabbily. I can’t drive with my foot like this. She sat on her cell cot with her bound ankle propped up on a pillow.

  Julia and I will drive down and get it, he said. And she’ll have to drive it back. It’s too far for me to walk out there and drive it back myself.

  Really? I yelled, jumping up out of my chair. Can I really drive?

  Julia is a child, cried Aunt Constance. She can’t drive a car. That’s ridiculous.

  Oh, anyone with eyes, arms, and legs can drive a car, Sheriff Stone told her. And as far as I can tell, Julia has all of these things.

  And then he pointed out that the only other choice was to leave the car with all of our trunks and Windy Ridge practical-travel things out there in the desert alone until Aunt Constance’s ankle felt better, which might take a week or even longer.

  And, he added, who knows who or what might make its way into the car and help themselves to its contents.

  Aunt Constance looked stricken.

  I don’t see that we have a choice, then, she said. But, God in heaven, please go slowly.

  Slow as snails, promised Sheriff Stone, and I almost died right then and there of excitement.

  Sheriff Stone and I got into his truck and drove down that empty highway. I wondered if a single other person had driven down that road since we stalled there the day before.

  Happily, all of our practical-travel things were still in our car. I got into the driver’s seat and my heart pounded.

  There’s nothing to it, Sheriff Stone told me. He pointed to the floor: Here’s the brake; here’s the gas. Don’t mix them up, and you’ll be golden.

  We practiced for a while until I said I thought I had the hang of it, and he got back into his truck and told me to follow him. I wished that someone would take a picture of me for once, because Belfry would never, ever believe this in a million years.

  It was all going pretty well until I stepped too hard on the gas and the Windy Ridge car shot forward and hit the back of his truck. Not really hard, but just hard enough to make one of our travel trunks slide off the roof of my car and chunk down onto the road and break. Everything inside spilled out onto the pavement.

  Why are you traveling all over creation with this crazy stuff? asked Sheriff Stone as we picked up the scattered silver and old books and some velvet curtains off the ground and piled them up in the back of his truck.

  They are Windy Ridge necessities, I informed him. Our practical-travel things. Aunt Constance needs them to remind her that we are Lancasters, no matter where we are.

  And what are all of these? he asked, picking up some pictures that had spilled out of a cardboard box onto the road.

  That’s part of my photograph collection, I said.

  Can I look at them? asked Sheriff Stone.

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. I’d never really shown the pictures to anyone before, even Belfry. But Sheriff Stone seemed like a nice man, and he did, after all, teach me how to drive, so I told him okay, he could see the pictures.

  Where’re all the photos of your family? he asked, leafing through them. He held up one of a Windy Ridge china pitcher and one of a perfectly shaped acorn that fell in our bac
kyard last fall and one of a beetle that lived under my bed the summer before.

  I don’t have any family pictures, I told him.

  Why not? he asked. You have hundreds of pictures of things, but no people. There has to be a reason.

  I didn’t look at him. Instead I started stacking the pictures into a pile.

  I should mind my own beeswax, said Sheriff Stone, and he handed me back some photographs.

  It’s easier not to have them, I said finally.

  Have what?

  Pictures of people, I told him. Because then you get reminded of them. And it makes you sad.

  But isn’t it nice to be reminded of certain people, like family? Sheriff Stone asked.

  No, it’s not, I said. Because sometimes people who are supposed to stay with you forever just leave you behind instead. And so it’s better not to think about them too much. That’s why I like things. They don’t leave, unless you move them or lose them yourself. And they always stay the same.

  Sheriff Stone got a funny look on his face.

  Well, that sort of makes sense, I suppose, he said. But you can’t stop change from happening, you know. It comes whether you want it or not. Even with things.

  He picked up a Windy Ridge silver fork from the road.

  If you leave this out, it’ll get tarnished, won’t it?

  I suppose so, I said.

  And think about trees, he went on. They might live in the same place in your yard, and they’ll still be there long after we’re all gone, but every season and every day they look different, don’t they?

  That’s true, I told him.

  And just look at Gold Point, said Sheriff Stone. Once, hundreds of people came out here to make their fortunes. They found gold in the hills and silver too. Then one day the gold ran out, so those people all left and they took that particular American dream with them. And now that dream lives someplace else, and what’s left here is a big hole in the air where that dream was, and the crumbling skeleton of a town.

  So why don’t you leave too? I asked him. Don’t you get lonesome living in a ghost town by yourself?