Stories 3

Nonfiction

GROWING GILLS

by Caroline Taylor

It's 1955, and I have turned twelve. My father and I are on our way from El Paso to Houston. It's his birthday present for me—only me. Not my older or my younger sister. Me. I’m feeling pretty special.

Once we leave the moonscape of the Davis Mountains, the terrain becomes flat and desolate, dotted here and there with cactus, sagebrush, and the occasional giant, metal-clad black grasshoppers, pumping oil from the ground. The highway heads straight ahead toward the horizon where a shimmering puddle of water forever straddles the blacktop ahead of us.

“How far can we see?” I ask him.

“Maybe twenty miles?”

Toward late afternoon, we begin to count the low ridges that interrupt the highway’s flatness at seemingly regular intervals. Fourteen ridges later, we arrive in Fort Stockton and find a white stucco motel with a flat roof, red metal chairs lined up outside the doors, and a swimming pool where my father teaches me how to float on my back.

We eat dinner at a truck stop across the highway. Country music blares from the jukebox, reminding customers that love don’t last and drinkin’ and fightin’ only land you in a heap of trouble. The truckers around us look tired and tough and not very friendly, but the food tastes nearly as good as home. The buxom, red-haired waitress calls me “hon” and lavishes other endearments on the truckers. To my father, she says “yessir” and “nossir” and “have a nice trip.”

We leave Fort Stockton at dawn and head into the glare of a brilliant sunrise.

“You’ll like the Richies,” he says. “Their daughter Rita is the same age as you.”

I figure I'll like anybody rich, since we're nearly the opposite. (It's only later that he spells their name: Rische.) “Will we be staying with them?”

“You’ll sleep in Rita’s room.”

I try wrapping my mind around the idea of having your very own room without nosy, pesky sisters knowing everything you do from the minute you get up till the Sandman carries you off to the Land of Nod. It would be heavenly. On the other hand, Rita will probably hate having to share with me, even for a night or two.

“They have a swimming pool in their back yard.”

So that’s why he’s teaching me how to float.

The next day, we're pelted by a huge thunderstorm. It rains so hard, we have to pull to the side of the road as lightning streaks across a purple sky. Finally, the sun comes out, clothing the sagebrush in sparkly beads of water. By the time darkness falls and the desert air begins to cool, we can’t seem to find a decent motel, so Daddy decides to drive all night. There are so many stars in the sky, I make him stop so we can look straight up and as far as the eye can see in every direction. I count six falling stars, wishing each time that the trip—me and my father, just us two—will go on forever.

The chill air finally drives us back into the car and the company of late-night radio stations, fading in and out with dance music “from the Fountain Room at the Roosevelt Hotel” and preachers threatening hell and damnation to blasphemers.

At Sonora, we find a motel with a red tiled roof and, again, white stucco walls. This one has both green and red metal chairs resting outside the doors. While Daddy registers, I examine a rack of postcards with scenes of cactus and yucca and sand dunes. The one I like best shows a black stallion, nostrils flaring and tail streaming in the wind, standing on his hind legs against the backdrop of a lurid turquoise sky streaked with orange and yellow. Most postcard horses are white like the Lone Ranger’s Silver or Palomino like Roy Rogers’ Trigger. Black stallions are wild and free and don’t belong to anybody.

Somewhere around New Braunfels, the desert terrain changes into rolling, grass-covered hills. Scrub cedar and stunted pines take over from the sagebrush, and here and there a twisted live oak clings to the side of a hill. Crops are planted in the valleys, and the towns are closer together.

It's gradually becoming more humid. By the time we arrive in Houston, I can hardly breathe, the air is so heavy with moisture.

“If you want to survive here,” Daddy teases, “you’ll have to grow gills.”

I sit there, trying to picture my ears giving way to two large, scaly flaps, designed to suck oxygen out of the water so I can breathe. I can float pretty good, but I still don't know how to swim. Can fish hear?

“We’re almost there,” he says, as the cluster of skyscrapers that make up downtown Houston draw nearer. “This whole place is basically a swamp,” he adds.

I shudder, wondering how those huge structures keep from sinking into the muck that surrounds us, although that same goo does seem to nurture a stunning amount of plant life that includes brilliantly colored bougainvilla, magnolias, and towering oak trees, draped in Spanish moss.

Rita turns out to be really pretty, a brunette with rich chocolate-colored eyes, much taller than me. But she has to put up with three younger brothers who are smelly, noisy, and, as Mommy would say, “full of beans.”

The Risches treat us to a barbecue dinner on their large patio, overlooking a lawn so green that the only thing that has since called its emerald hues to mind is the scene in Giant when Rock Hudson goes back to Virginia to marry Elizabeth Taylor. The air is so hot and wet, I wish I did have gills.

I can't sleep in damp sheets that probably never ever get dry in this climate. Rita's snoring just a little bit. So I get up to use the bathroom.

I can hear them talking in the living room.

"… brought you back, didn't we?"

My father grunts. "Sure took you long enough. My wife was beside herself with worry."

"I wrote Ruth, kept her up to speed."

"So did I, only apparently none of my letters made it out of Guatemala. I sure hope you were sending her some cash."

There's the sound of ice tinkling in somebody's glass. "It got a little messy there, I'll admit. But you needn't have worried. We take care of our assets."

"Well, that's why I'm here, Ed. I could use a bit more than you paid me. After all, I stuck my neck way out getting you the inside scoop on Arbenz."

"And I appreciate it, Larry. Only I’m not the one holding the purse strings."

"Of course," Daddy says this with a sneer of disbelief. "So why don't you ask Washington?"

They continue to argue, their voices muted, as it dawns on me the "birthday" trip isn't such a special thing after all. Daddy was going to come here anyway. Worse, the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that he could have brought my older sister just as easily. The reason he didn't is obvious: Rita Rische is my age.

Back in my damp sheets, I toss and turn, wondering what sort of asset my father is to this man. I've heard about Arbenz, though. My father told us he was a Communist dictator who wouldn't let any Americans leave the country and that's why Daddy was stuck down in Guatemala for nearly six months. Now there's some other president named Armas, who is not a Communist.

The next day, Daddy and Rita's father announce they're headed downtown on some business. "Are you going to ask—?" I stop myself from saying Washington because then they'll know I've been spying. "—uh, what we're going to do?"

Daddy smiles. "I don't have to. It's hot as Hades out there."

Rita and I take turns locking ourselves in the bathroom while putting on our swimsuits. Her backyard swimming pool is nearly as big as the one at the motel in Fort Stockton, only this one is full of dirty water. Rita’s brothers have already taken their turn, splashing water out onto the grass, which is now a quagmire, and tracking mud into the pool. Maybe they were supposed to somehow clean it, although I have no idea how they could. I stand there in the suffocating heat, realizing I must be one of those people who prefer beaches to lakes—not that I've seen a beach lately. No way am I going to cross that muddy yard in my bare feet. But even if I go back for my sneakers, they will get coated with mud by the time I reach the pool. Trying to float in that cloudy, nearly gray, water makes the hairs on my arms stand up.

None of this seems to bother Rita, although she does tip-toe across the expanse of thick, black mud to reach the pool. Plunging in, she immediately sends clouds of fresh dark mud dispersing through the water.

I turn away in disgust, my eyes smarting as I realize I really don't want to grow gills. Exchanging the steamy slime and muck of Houston for the clean sand and dry purity of the desert around El Paso can’t happen soon enough. But I can't beg my father to take me home. Not until he gets what he came here for. Meanwhile, Rita's staring at me like I'm some kind of yellow-bellied coward.

“That’s what you get for wishing this trip would go on forever,” I tell myself, and for a minute there I swear I feel the skin at the sides of my head swell up as new, but necessary, organs try to emerge, covering the place where my ears once were.

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