HISTORAMA

By Diza Sauers

Diza Sauer's debut novel, "HISTORAMA," is a brilliant thrill ride, bringing the forces of legend and the fury of nature to bear on one messed-up family's future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outpost19
• Release date: Sep 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781937402174

Book preview

HISTORAMA

by Diza Sauers

copyright 2011 by Diza Sauers

All rights reserved

published by

Outpost19 | San Francisco

ISBN: 978-1-937402-17-4

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For My Best Beloveds. 

You all know who you are, 

and you were right. 

HISTORAMA 

This time it didn't take nearly so long to run out of gas.

Rumor had it...

They did it in Number 12.

Clarke saw tattoos wherever she went.

Riva's key fit every single lock.

The land sold quickly.

Riva had worked in the kitchen long enough.

The rains still had not come.

There was a bird for her hand, one for her heart.

Clarke couldn't believe she was standing there.

Or she could have been a road.

Even though Riva knew better, she stood with Walter.

You can read this in the earth itself. Plant forms from previous worlds are beginning to spring up as seeds... The same kinds of seeds are being planted in the sky as stars. The same kinds of seeds are being planted in our hearts. All these are the same, depending on how you look at them.

- Frank Waters

O

This time it didn't take nearly so long to run out of gas. An hour out of town the road cleared a hill, swept to one side then disappeared into a wall of rain. The knocking noise up under the hood grew to a roar, and then everything cut out. Riva watched rain pelt the windshield. The wipers straggled as best they could, jerking back and forth. She refused to look over at her mother stomping on the dead gas pedal or swiping at the windshield as if that would give them gas. At times like this it was best not to even look at her mother. Experience had taught her to stare straight ahead and try out her tricks. She had any number of them. She could turn the night into day. Even with her eyes open. Especially with her eyes open. It was a trick she remembered from being just a girl, making things what they were not. If they had ham and grapes for lunch, she could make it apricots and cheese. If it was night, she could make it day. She worked on nudging that red needle back up off E so that they weren't doing this: hurtling toward her mother's idea of a vacation, racing to see the Great American Sights on empty, in the dark.

Her mother let the car coast down the hill. They picked up speed and flew around a bend. A huddle of lights appeared beneath them.

See you always find what you're looking for, Mallory crowed. This is it. Isn't this just it? You know, it's going to all turn out. I just have this feeling we're on our way. And when I get that feeling, I just know. She sighed and unsnapped her top pants button. It's a gift, my instinct.

With her mother it was always instinct. Just the word put Riva's teeth on edge. The last time Mallory talked about her gift, she took off to Seattle for a year to improve herself. She was always improving herself, and it was a real job. She'd been doing it as long as Riva could remember. They'd been through Buddhism and had a brush with Mormonism. They'd done sweat lodges, the Course of Miracles, and some kind of Mud Woman Shamanism that Riva never fully understood. Now, her mother wanted to understand her, and there they were, out of gas.

Flashes of sheet lightning threw open a shocked expanse around them, then slammed them back into their small shell of night. The car listed to one side as it picked up speed. A huge billboard cut out in an enormous shape of a rearing horse loomed up at them. The rider waved and his cowboy hat flapped in the wind. The hat said:

DON'T MISS OUR

HIST-O-RAMA!

Riva tried to think about something else. Mallory whooped, jammed on the high beams and yelped for another beer. The car had picked up some speed coasting down and around the bend. It was a short matter of time before it would slow and drift to a stop.

Riva fixed the beer the way her mother liked them, cloudy with lime. She had no desire to be a part of her mother's vacation. If they wanted to see the sights, all they had to do was look out a window. It didn't matter that she had been born and lived her entire life out west, what mattered was that Mallory had never recovered from the fact that she was from Ohio. Every so often Mallory raced around trying to take in all that she could of places where she'd never belong. Riva just wanted to stay home and be normal, maybe make some money baby sitting or learn sign language or CPR, something useful. She dreaded the Great American Sights. She had been on that trip before.

Oh, her mother bit her lower lip, how about the Grand Canyon? Should we do the Grand Canyon first? Oh, I just love it there.

We went to the Grand Canyon, mom.

When?

The tarantulas were migrating. They crossed the street in front of us in a herd. We stayed in that little cement teepee and watched MTV. The canyon was big. I felt small. End of story.

Mallory pushed herself back in the seat and adjusted a bracelet, Well, I don't remember that. She licked her lips and squirmed, Do you remember, darling, don't you remember that summer we traveled and traveled and took in the sights? Don't you remember? This could be like that. Again.

Riva certainly did remember. When she was eight, maybe nine, they drove and drove across entire reservations, state parks, the eight northern pueblos, the Rio Grande, Acoma the sky city, west to the Painted Desert, Arches, all the way to Zion. They saw it all, the great southwest, and they saw it along with everyone else, right through the car window. Of course next came the part that always happened: the vacation suddenly cut short because they ran out of money. Mallory ended up coasting down as many hills as she could, over-extending gas cards just to get them back home.

And here they were again, coasting in the dark. They swept toward a blinking traffic light. Mallory kicked the engine over and fluttered the gas pedal. The road snaked off, vanished in the dark. Several low buildings huddled around the some gas pumps. A broken down car with a cracked window had a runny spray painted sign on the windshield that said BEWARE OF DOG. A German Shepherd sat alert in the front seat. A closed sign sat in the store front window.

Oh, they just don't make them like this anymore. Mallory coasted by the gas pumps and pulled into a big empty lot out back.

Between buffeting waves of water Riva tried to make out where they were. A branch hit the car, then blew on. A can bounced across the hood.

Oh, this is so romantic, her mother said. This is just what I would be doing if I were your age, out in the night, traveling places. Adventures. She drained her beer, Let's sleep right here. Her eyes had that glazed, hopeful look.

We can't. We'll get a ticket, Riva spoke as grimly as she could.

Oh, we will not. Besides, we're out of gas. They’re closed. We’ll tank up in the morning.

Water dripped on Riva's foot where a leak dripped through the glove compartment. Come on, let's go. I don't want to stay.

Mallory propped her foot up on the dash and leaned back. Make yourself comfortable.

The windshield started to fog over and Riva tried not to smell her mother. A row of scraggly trees hemmed in the lot, lashed back and forth against the sky. Riva crawled into the back seat, balled a towel up under her head for a pillow and decided that she was going to remember this moment. She pressed her fingers into the backs of her eyes, pushing it all into her: Mallory marveling at a parking lot, the bedraggled trees, the lights of town barely faded behind them, a stupid horse sign in the middle of nowhere. Only her mother would pack everything up, drive an hour down the road, run out of gas, then call it a vacation.

In the distance, the mountains blazed up once, twice, erupting at the top into a pattern of clenched gold teeth.

I don't believe this. Mallory used her wondering voice, the voice that Riva knew to not listen to, the one that warned her to think about something else quickly because she wouldn't want to hear what was going to come next.

I slept here once, a hundred years ago, Mallory talked to the windshield.

Riva kept one eye shut so Mallory would think she was asleep.

I know it's hard to believe but I was here once with your father. Oh my God! I don't believe this. She leaned closer to the blurred over windshield. Even with her eyes shut, Riva knew the windshield was steamed over, that it was impossible to see. She heard her mother give a frantic little swipe with her hand, the squeak of flesh on glass then the push back in her seat as if she just received some kind of shock.

It was right here. We were right here. In this very lot... Her voice fell into a sharp little slurp of beer. Riva twisted herself into a more comfortable position.

We did. Riva, we…well, we slept here. She pointed her bottle at the row of struggling cottonwood trees. Twice.

Riva gave a feeble little snore in the back of her throat.

We did. And stop that. I know you're awake. You need to hear this. He was something, your father.

Mallory never went back any further than that. She always started right in just as he was leaving. He left them a hundred different ways. That was all Riva had of him, the man her mother built over and over again, always leaving them behind in different places, sometimes vanishing in a taxi, a bus station, once at a booth in a busy restaurant during a lunch rush. Riva had very little left of any of it, other than the vague sense of her father who was perfectly featureless, a blank where his face should have been. The storm rumbled further off into the distance. Random drops pelted the roof; water gurgled all around them, soaking back into the ground with a quiet hiss.

I don't remember much else, but I remember we slept out on the hood when we were done, just stretched right out, belly up to the sky. And in the morning we got up and ate a huge breakfast. A fantastic breakfast. Lord, that man could eat. There was a table piled high with food, tortillas and beans and biscuits and gravy and fresh fruit and coffee, eggs and chile. And ham.

Then came the food, always the food. Her father had been a man with a gargantuan appetite. Riva might not know what her father looked like but she knew ridiculous details about his appetite, how he ate ribs, starting in on one end and not letting up until he teased the last sweet piece of flesh from the bone, grease running right off his face. During a long road trip, he could roast a chicken to a turn, nestling it down in the engine of his car, wrapped in a little tin foil, some shallots, a splash of red wine. He crimped pies shut with just his knuckle and forefinger, making pie crust so flaky and golden, it shattered beneath the fork.

Mallory cracked her window and let in the rumble of distant thunder and the pissy smell of greasewood. Oh, he was a handsome one, I can tell you. With the biggest hands, he'd place one of those hands on top of me and I felt like I was just being swallowed up. Swallowed alive. I remember now, Riva, I do. That trip we drove all through here. We only needed an iron skillet, a knife and some matches. We ate what he found. Honestly, he could catch a fish, smack it on the head with a rock, gut it and then cook it over a fire with just a green stick. He called it Fish On A Twig...

That was it. If it was going to be the fish story again Riva had had it. They always pulled the same goddamn fish out of the river and bashed it over the head with a rock, cooked it on a stick then ate it with just their hands and their mouths. She'd heard it before, all her life, the man made out of words just beyond them in the wet night, cooking a fish on a twig.

Riva did what she always did at these moments: she erased herself slowly and worked on building a newer, more improved version of herself. She started with the one breast that had sprouted out bigger than the other. Silently, with just her mind, she worked on pushing it back in. She willed the little hairline scar by her lip to flame a little more red. She broke herself down piece by piece, and rose right above her mother, above even the fish with its crispy fins, done to a delicate crunch.

Eyes. Riva closed her eyes and concentrated on giving them a little more mystery, so they weren't such squinty hazel slits. Nothing could be done about her blotchy skin or mousy hair. It would always hang in a straight little line just below her jaw. And she couldn't change the fact that she was rail-thin and hadn't grown in over a year, not since she turned fourteen.

But her arms were easy. She let them shoot right out, white and slender, reaching all the way out up into the sky. Her legs could run her back up those mountains and home. She pressed her face further into the damp pillow and tried not to listen while her father ate the whole peeled onion like an apple with every meal. Her mother never slept there, not with her father, not with anyone, not there. None of it was true, not running out of gas or being on vacation stranded in a parking lot, a leak dripping on one foot. She let herself drift out into the rain, beyond where water disappeared into the sand with a little hiss. She floated up into the night sky with a high hard storm passing through, unfolding herself piece by piece, returning herself to where she belonged.

Even though the sun beat into the back of her head, Riva didn't move. She kept studying the place where her mother's car was supposed to be, gassed up and ready to go, but there was no car, only a glossy black puddle, a melted wad of chewing gum, and the gas pumps lined up, all their hoses in place. Riva stared hard; the pumps stared back. She turned in a slow circle, trying to put things back into place, the ice machine, the store, a sun bleached sign for bread. Everything was where it belonged, even the rubber hose that snaked right over to her feet waiting to shrill out, alerting the man inside that there was someone out there to pump gas. But no one was there, not her mother or their car, just the highway, stretching out empty in both directions.

It made her sick to think about the highway scrolling off, vanishing in dips and then bending out of sight, heading straight out into the desert where her mother sat at the wheel holding an early morning beer peering at what was coming up next, whistling softly through her teeth, not looking in the back seat where she assumed Riva was curled up, catching up on her sleep.

A red armchair leaned onto the soda machine, and Riva knew just what to do. She walked in a straight line, careful not to step on the hose, and sat in the chair like she was waiting for a bus, leaning back in an early morning shadow as if enjoying the morning. She ran her finger over the small brass tacks, counting them.

Earlier, she had counted her mother's deep, sucking sighs that went on forever until Mallory snorted and jerked awake. She quietly opened a beer. Riva sank deeper into her pillow in the back seat and pretended to be asleep. She didn't even make the fake groan when her mother softly called her name. Riva kept a jacket up over her face, and stayed down while her mother pumped a tank of gas and went in to pay for it.