The Desert Sky Before Us Read online

  What?

  Just do it.

  Rhiannon shifts into the right lane and pulls onto the shoulder, the highway’s rumble strips vibrating beneath the Mustang. She brings the car to a stop but keeps the engine running, her foot on the brake pedal.

  Jesus, Billie. What?

  I need to tell you something.

  Rhiannon looks straight ahead and Billie sees her jaw working inside her mouth, her teeth tightening against one another.

  Mom brought me something, Billie says. For the trip.

  Brought what? When did she bring you something?

  Mom brought me a journal.

  Rhiannon looks at her. What the fuck are you talking about?

  A journal of map coordinates.

  For what?

  She brought me this journal and GPS specifically for this trip.

  When? When did this happen?

  Four months ago. She came to see me.

  What, and you’re just telling me this now?

  I know you want the quickest route. But, Rhee, this is mapping us to St. Louis.

  That’s south. Rhiannon shifts the car into park, the engine idling. We’re heading west, she says. Straight across the top of Missouri.

  There’s a whole journal, Billie says. A journal of coordinates. Places she wants us to visit along the way. At least that’s what she told me.

  Rhiannon pulls the journal from Billie’s hands. Opens it to the first page and runs her fingers over their mother’s handwriting. The same penmanship that once scrawled their names across brown lunch bags, that marked birthday cards mailed to Billie’s college dorm room and to Jacksonville and to the screened postal facility in Decatur every single year. Billie studies Rhiannon’s face, the tremble of her lip, a brief flinch before she begins turning the pages.

  Don’t look ahead, Billie shouts.

  What do you mean, don’t look ahead? Where the fuck are we going?

  She made me promise not to look ahead. That we’d take each page one at a time.

  One at a time? How many are there?

  I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.

  Jesus, Billie. That could take weeks.

  She knew we’d have to get back within two weeks.

  Rhiannon glances down at the journal’s first open page. But there’s no location, she says. Only coordinates and a drawing.

  I know. Billie looks at her hands. I think she wanted us to have some fun. As much as we can on a trip like this.

  Rhiannon closes the journal and throws it against Billie’s lap.

  Why didn’t you say anything? Is this some kind of fucking joke?

  Rhiannon presses her fists against her closed eyes, like she’s trying hard not to break herself open.

  We don’t have to do it, Billie hears herself say.

  Rhiannon pushes herself back against the driver’s seat and blinks up at the car’s ceiling.

  Of course we have to do it, she whispers.

  Billie touches the back of her sister’s hand and Rhiannon pulls away.

  You should have fucking told me.

  I know. I just didn’t want you to say no.

  I mean earlier. Four months ago. You should have told me then.

  When, Rhee? It’s not like you came by. You haven’t visited in nearly three months.

  You should have told me, Rhiannon repeats.

  Cars whip by on the highway. They sit in silence. NPR blares on low, the last radio signal Billie knows Rhiannon has hoped to catch before they travel beyond range. Storms developing late. Continued flight investigation across the weekend in Arizona until a black box is found. Airports continuing to shut down. O’Hare. Lambert. General Wayne Downing in Peoria. The sound of a radio a revelation, something Billie took for granted and then forgot. Their news at the Correctional Center always television, always screened to prevent surprise and the possibility of inmate conflict. Billie breathes inside the car and hears the rise and fall of her sister’s lungs in the driver’s seat beside her.

  We take 55 south from Springfield, Rhiannon finally says.

  So you’ll do it?

  We take 55 south to get to St. Louis, is all Rhiannon says.

  Billie closes her eyes. Rests her hands on the journal. Feels nothing but relief. Keeps her eyes closed long after she feels Rhiannon shift the car into drive and the rumble strips shake as the Mustang pulls back onto the road.

  THE RIVER IS a ribbon of dulled light beneath a matte-gray sky. Billie remembers coming into St. Louis as a kid and rounding the hilled bend of Interstate 55 and seeing the Mississippi River sudden and wide, as big as an ocean from the landlocked plains of Illinois. The Arch a halo on the riverfront, what her mother surely saw being built from her hometown of Godfrey across the river along the bluffs. Where Rhiannon and Billie visited their grandparents as children, picking white peaches in summer and spotting bald eagles in winter.

  Rhiannon turns off the radio. What does the coordinate say?

  Thirty-eight degrees north, ninety degrees west, Billie says. Approximately.

  Where in St. Louis? Tell me where to go.

  Billie lets the GPS map them straight into the heart of St. Louis, the highway winding past Busch Stadium where they saw St. Louis Cardinals games as kids.

  Get off here, Billie says when the GPS beeps. Rhiannon pulls the Mustang off the highway and straight into Forest Park.

  Are you serious? Rhiannon says. We’ve been here a million times.

  The park a staple of their childhood, larger than Central Park in New York. Weekend day trips down to St. Louis for the park’s free institutions. The Art Museum. The History Museum. The St. Louis Zoo. They pass the zoo’s entrance and Billie remembers feeding the giraffes with Rhiannon and their grandparents, rough purple tongues pulling in stalks of leaves. Washington University sits at the park’s western edge, where their mother earned her doctoral degree and where she met their father, working then at the Gateway International Raceway just across the river in Madison. The raceway Billie imagines was their mother’s version of cutting loose through graduate school, where she went sometimes with friends to forget the halls of academia. Where Billie guesses her mother’s friends warned her away, even then, from starting a life with a man wedded to transience. Billie guides Rhiannon through the park until the Mustang is idling in a lot near the outdoor ice skating rink. She glances out the window at a group of people playing sand volleyball, what the rink has become in summer months despite the Midwest’s rain.

  Why are we here? Rhiannon says. What the fuck are we supposed to find?

  Come on, Billie says. Let’s get out and walk.

  They follow a paved path that circles a pond populated with clusters of mallards. Two men stand at the pond’s edge casting fishing lines. Three teenagers sit on a blanket beside the water taking advantage of a day without drizzle. To stroll along a path: unthinkable from the boxed-in walls of Billie’s bunk in Decatur. Everywhere people outside, a small miracle. Billie scans the tree line for hawks, an instinct. Rhiannon walks ahead, her gait impatient. She slows when the path begins to ascend a steep hill.

  Are you sure this is right? Rhiannon says.

  Positive. This is where Mom went to school. Where she met Dad. We spent half of our childhood in this park. Surely there’s something here she wanted us to see.

  Rhiannon brushes her hair from her face. A road bike buzzes past them in the opposite direction. Rhiannon keeps walking and Billie follows until her sister stops short and Billie nearly runs into her.

  Rhiannon steps onto the damp grass, her face tilted up. Billie follows her gaze. What they’ve seen before as kids. The St. Louis Science Center. Home to the city’s planetarium, to penny funnels, to a chick hatchery and gas-filled beakers and rising balloons that demonstrate the magic of helium. Home also to dinosaurs. Reconstructed skeletons. Indoor replicas of pterodactyls in motion. And an outdoor park filled with resin dinosaurs that she and Rhiannon climbed on as children.

  Except one: only one dinosaur too tal
l for them to scale. A tail that as kids they crawled across until it sloped upward, too steep to climb. Rhiannon stands at its base, squinting up. Their mother’s drawing. The Tyrannosaurus rex.

  JOHNSON, BRIAN. PHD. “WENDELL SCOTT: NASCAR’S FIRST BLACK RACER.” AN UNEQUAL PLAYING FIELD: AFRICAN AMERICAN ATHLETES IN THE 20TH CENTURY. ED. DEBRA HILL. UPPER SADDLE RIVER, NJ: PRENTICE HALL, 2010. 121–129. PRINT.

  CALL NUMBER: GV692 .S4 2010

  WENDELL SCOTT: INITIAL BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

  Born on August 29, 1921, in Danville, Virginia, Wendell Scott became the first African American NASCAR driver and the first African American winner of the Grand National Series. He learned the mechanics of cars through his father, who was a driver for two white families in Virginia, and eventually began running his own auto body shop after WWII. He began attending stock car races, though he was at first barred from participating due to assumptions that only white racers were allowed on the track.

  Because black drivers were sometimes recruited in Danville’s Dixie Circuit to race white drivers, Scott eventually began racing in his hometown. After he brought his car to Winston-Salem to compete in a NASCAR race, however, the organization would not let him enter. He raced in non-NASCAR competitions and speedways until 1954, when his reputation for speed and skill brought him onto the national stage of NASCAR competitions.

  In 1961, Scott moved up to Grand National, NASCAR’s highest series, and became the first African American to win this series in 1963. He was not announced as the winner at the time despite finishing two laps in front of the second-place leader. The trophy went to the second driver, Buck Baker, and though Scott was named the official winner two hours after the race, his family received the trophy in 2010—forty-seven years after Scott’s win, and twenty years after he died.

  38.6311° N, 90.2703° W:

  St. Louis, MO

  Rhiannon wants to be thinking of her mother. Wants to stand beside a resin dinosaur she and her sister climbed across as kids, a sister she hasn’t stood beside in six years. Wants to not be hurt by her mother’s secret, that she gave the journal to Billie, that she kept all this hidden. Rhiannon wants to look at the T. rex and know what a pair of coordinates and a drawing mean but she stands with Billie inside the dinosaur’s shadow and thinks only of the Gateway International Raceway just across the Mississippi River.

  One of her first major races. Barely out of high school. A race in the NASCAR Nationwide Series, a minor-league circuit to prove her worth for the top-ranked Sprint Cup Series. Banked asphalt. Pooled mirages. The simmering heat of June. Billie still in high school and back in Champaign with their mother while their father stood nearby on the sidelines, the crew chief of her seven-man pit team. Two tire changers rolling out new wheels. A lone gas man adding race fuel, a catch-can man detaining the overflow. A jack man ratcheting the car and wiping the grille clean. Two tire carriers taking the changed tires away. Only seven team members allowed inside the pit-stop crew, her father calling orders from behind a regulation wall. A team that at the Gateway still had no faith in her driving, the only woman in all of NASCAR at the time. What Rhiannon hated most about racing and what she couldn’t have known as a girl in her father’s garage when she first fell in love with the speed of cars: NASCAR a minefield of every form of discrimination, the crowd unaccustomed to anyone behind the wheel who didn’t look like them. No drivers of color. No gay drivers, one of the first secrets Rhiannon ever learned to keep. And so few women. Janet Guthrie in the 1970s. Shawna Robinson in the 1980s, a driver no one talked about when Rhiannon was small. Sara Christian a competitor in NASCAR’s inaugural 1949 race, a man finishing the race for her. So few women, all of them white, and everyone else in every book she found: nothing but faces upon faces of white men except the one man who became her role model.

  A driver named Wendell Scott.

  The first black man to race in NASCAR. The first African American to win a major race. His family accepting the trophy posthumously, an award he didn’t even get to claim while living. What enraged Rhiannon to read in high school and what she read again so many years later while selling an order of textbooks on sports barriers in the twentieth century. For Rhiannon in the twenty-first: slurs of gender. The condescension of sweetheart. The hurl of cunt. The expectation that she was someone’s girlfriend and not a driver, surely so different from what Wendell Scott endured on the racetrack as the nation pushed toward the civil rights movement, but even if their fights were similar yet so very separate, she held him as her hero. The Wendell Scott Trailblazer Award now a NASCAR recognition, an award established for marginalized drivers making gains in the field and bestowed by nomination from other drivers, what her male peers never deigned to do for her. Her whiteness a privilege. Her sexuality concealed, at least on the track. And her gender only tolerated, even after her first major win at the Gateway International Raceway.

  Twenty cars huddled together around an oval track, a proximity that made Rhiannon forget how fast they were moving. One hundred seventy miles per hour. The interior of the car an oven, Rhiannon pressed behind the steering wheel into the bindings of a roll cage. Rhiannon drafted the leading two cars before maneuvering ahead on the race’s final lap and inching past the checkered line in first place. The sound of the crowds: a stunned silence before hesitant cheering. A woman climbing from the winner’s car, the briefest of pauses before grudging applause, what she guessed Wendell Scott also heard and worse when he won the Grand National in 1963.

  And the sound of her tires pulling off the circuit and into the crew pit: the same rumble of pulling over in Illinois and letting Billie tell her what the fuck was going on. In the feeble glint of the afternoon sun, the statue of the Tyrannosaurus rex looming above them, Rhiannon glances at her sister. At the ripples of scars cascading down her bare left arm.

  This is it, Billie says. The exact spot of Mom’s first coordinate.

  Rhiannon nods. Finds it hard to speak. She pictures a library’s flames, what she imagined from her car’s cockpit on her first race after Billie’s sentencing. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway: the race that took her out of racing. The dead heat of August, Billie locked inside the Decatur Correctional Center less than two months. How Rhiannon had already set qualifying records at Daytona, how she’d placed in the season’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series at Talladega and Pocono and on to Kentucky and the Texas Motor Speedway through May and June, how the checkered flag was in sight.

  Billie squints at Rhiannon. What do you think this means?

  Her sister standing beside her, here and now. Her sister: the reason for the end of a career. How she’d only meant to clip the stock car beside her and her tire blew and catapulted her car against the racetrack’s walls. The car flipping, the tire exploding, her wheels spinning out. Her father on the sidelines. The asphalt’s heat so close to the fuel tank and the car spiraling across the raceway and she remembers wondering what flames would feel like catching the protective layer of her uniform if the car caught fire. If it would be a benediction. The same as Billie. A split second of spark, the car buckshot against the speedway’s wall. Then her father’s hands beneath her arms, pulling her out.

  She’d lost the race.

  After Billie left, she’d lost every single one.

  Rhiannon looks at Billie standing scarred in the shadow of the T. rex replica and for a moment feels the deep pit of resentment rise in her chest before she catches it in her throat and swallows it, her sister beside her a miracle despite everything.

  Rhiannon sighs. I don’t know, Billie. I don’t know what any of this means.

  Billie touches the T. rex’s leg, reptilian skin sloping down to four thick talons. She crouches and sits on the tail and glances up at the dinosaur’s frame.

  Can you believe how fucking small those claws are? she says.

  Rhiannon shields her eyes. Looks up. What she recalls her mother telling her of the T. rex, a Cretaceous dinosaur, the age following the Jurassic period of her mother’s work: the arm
s used for grasping a mate in copulation. What her mother knew by studying the mating habits of ancient reptiles. Her life’s work, a term that rattles in Rhiannon’s brain. Life’s work. St. Louis a city Rhiannon hasn’t visited since she stopped crossing the country on the racing circuit. St. Louis a city where her mother’s career began in graduate school and where Rhiannon’s flamed before fizzling out.

  THE BAR IS dark when they walk in. Neon signs. Damp hardwood floors. Two televisions behind the bar, one broadcasting an afternoon Cardinals game and the other on mute running CNN, headlines blaring the crashed plane and the continued closures of airports. Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. Tokyo’s Narita. New York’s JFK. Billie takes a seat at the bar and orders a Bud Light and Rhiannon pulls up a stool beside her.

  Come on, Rhiannon says. You can do better than a Bud Light.

  We’re in St. Louis. Home of the King of Beers.

  You’ve been away for six years. Order something better.

  Billie signals to the bartender and changes her order to a Schlafly pale ale. Rhiannon asks for an IPA and two orders of cheese fries, a late lunch. The bartender hands each of them a beer and Billie slides her pint against Rhiannon’s glass.

  Cheers, Billie says. To the road trip.

  To the road trip. And to your first beer in years.

  Billie looks at her. You think I haven’t had alcohol in six years?

  I’ve read Decatur’s policies. It’s not allowed.

  That doesn’t mean we didn’t have our ways.

  Despite herself, Rhiannon smiles. Your ways? Like what?

  Hidden contraband. Bootleg bullshit. One of the girls in my dorm worked in the kitchen and made her own moonshine out of cornmeal and sugar.

  Lucky you, Rhiannon says. The fries arrive and she grabs a bottle of ketchup.

  Moonshine aside, I haven’t had any beer in a long time. And I don’t think I’ve had a Schlafly since college.

  Rhiannon remembers Billie’s dorm room at the University of Illinois. A concrete tower of double rooms, nothing like the luxury high-rises skyrocketing around Champaign-Urbana now. Nothing like her own college experience, no dorm, only living with her father in Chicago between races and going part-time to the city’s University of Illinois campus. A degree in communications that she barely finished. Billie’s experience back home far more traditional, living in the dorms at their mother’s insistence. The full experience. Four years of college. Where Billie met Tim, a doctoral student in European history, before following him to his first job at Illinois College in Jacksonville. Rhiannon glances around the bar, an establishment at the edge of Forest Park and St. Louis’s Central West End. A neighborhood she knows her mother lived in for a period of time while studying at Washington University, the bar just old enough.