5
Jo walked back up the path, more quickly this time, and didn’t escape the thorny corridor without a few sharp reminders of her passage. Seeing Jack in that cramped, dusty structure, made her feel as if she’d failed him somehow. She’d selfishly left him here, left him without her care and balancing energy, and he’d turned into exactly the lonely, narrow man he’d always feared becoming. She pulled a needle from her shawl. Then again, this impression itself was possibly just her pride confusing his wishes with her own—after all, he likely didn’t consider himself narrow; not in any bad way, at least—and this notion gave her some relief, despite its implication that he hadn’t been the man she thought he was to begin with.
As the path met the grounds of Border Run! it broadened, and the sand used to pave it became thin, exposing small stones and hard earth. When they’d met at a Love Family wedding in Venice Beach, Jack had exuded an easy, natural manner which, without his meaning too, had made the hippie ceremony around him seem theatrical and false. At the time she was young enough to be impressed by this, ever seeking new pathways beyond all the precious acrobatics of waking life, so she watched him from a distance, and smiled as he dodged small talk, keeping mostly to himself. It made her look differently at the party. When they happened to meet at the bowl of dandelion wine, he’d asked her to point out the couple getting “hitched,” and with this single word exploded Jo’s feelings for the event, not to mention most of the people there. Looking back on it, of course, she knew she’d been searching for an excuse to move on anyway. She’d already grown skeptical of the soft isolationism of drugs and free love, and in that context Jack’s project of simply finding a job had been easily mistaken for a more general ambition.
Jo looked again at Border Run! before climbing back in the car. The two watchtowers stood over the field as the sun relaxed its death-grip on the day, and she could hear the whir of electric motors as the grounds crew sought to reconstruct the obstacles damaged by the day’s two shows. In their year together in L.A., Jack had been sympathetic with her desire to change the world, and though his construction job prevented him from participating, he’d listen to her intently every night, and sometimes even call in sick to march with her, or to help her deliver aid to those areas altogether abandoned by governmental support.
When Jack’s father died, the original point of their trip out here had been to attend the funeral, take stock of the man’s land, and sell it. Jack knew that ImPass would pay top dollar—they’d actually been the ones to notify him of his father’s death. It was just a courtesy, their note insisted, for an offer to accompany the news. They’d used the phrase “silver lining.” Jo had gone along to see where Jack grew up, but also as an escape from the intensity of L.A., from the daily endangerment she had to face, and from the increasingly tense evenings as it became clear that Jack’s job of gentrification was at fundamental odds with the work she was trying to do. Some fresh air would help them, she’d thought. Away from their responsibilities, they could talk about themselves.
“Mrs. Lightning,” someone called.
She turned to see Angel emerge from the windowless utility building behind her. He held a large battery in one hand, and with the other took his hat off and waved it above his head.
Jo ran to meet him and, despite some awkwardness on his part, embraced Angel fully. She pulled back to look at him, and kissed his dirty cheek before seeing that he was still holding the battery. She let him put it down.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “How are you? How is Mateo?” Mateo was Angel’s partner of over 30 years. The last time Jo saw him he’d just had his heart replaced.
“Está bien,” said Angel. “He walks every morning; the doctor says he needs to stay in shape, and now he’s trying to get me to lose weight too.” He grinned and patted his extended gut. “I tell him food is like love: the more you have the better.”
“Yes,” Jo said, “but you must choose who you love wisely.”
“Ah, si, si. And also what you eat, you are saying, mi pequeño cacto.” Angel shook his head, clucking his approval, but Jo had fallen into a somber state, and gazed down at the black battery casting its small, powerless shadow across her feet.
“What is it?” asked Angel.
“I just saw Jack.”
“Oh, yes. Jack.”
There was a moment of silence, as though Angel were giving Jack room to express himself.
“How do you think he’s doing, Angel?”
“You know that man, Mrs. Lightning. The how isn’t always important, so long as the what is understood.” Angel wiped his forehead and put his hat back on. “All the same, I can say that he misses you very much.”
“He told you that?”
“Jack? Likely he does not even know it.”
Jo thought about this. Angel’s record for such things was good: he’d always known that Jack was upset before she did, and would advise her to get him talking. Once, after a Jeep had hit and injured a child during a Border Run! show, Angel told Jo that the victim’s grandparents had been old friends of Jack’s father. He told her to take special care of him, that he’d need some support. When Jo confronted him with this information, Jack confessed to having taken the accident badly, but claimed not to have even known about the familial connection. This kind of quasi-telepathic knowledge might seem strange anywhere else, but to Jo it was all part of the vague shimmer objects took on in the desert heat, the continual shifting and blurring of lines. It was a force that Angel seemed able to harness, or at least to observe.
She searched his face for some awareness that she was raising Jack’s child, that Alex was sick, or that she’d come here to protect him. She wished he could know without her having to tell him, for telling him was impossible.
“I’ve told you a million times, Angel,” Jo said. “I was never Mrs. Lightning before, and now that’s truer than ever.”
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