Turn at Albuquerque

Humans have trouble telling the difference between real and make-believe because they learn from fables. If you really want to understand how people see the world, you’ve got to study their folklore. I’d watched all of humanity’s most important myths—Loony Tunes, Jurassic Bark, Friends, Lord of the Rings, Thelma and Louise—and tried my best to decode the messages hidden inside. 

Action movies were exciting, but barking at all those loud noises distracted me from the lesson. Romance was okay, but I couldn’t stand to watch someone else getting so much attention when I was sitting right there. Westerns were my favorite. The fancy neckerchiefs and spurs jingling like dog tags when they walked reminded me of myself. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the horses, but what I loved most about westerns were the love stories.

My favorite western was called Breaking Bad. It was about a man who loved his family, but still made time to start a new business with his buddy. They made math, which was a bad medicine that people took for a thrill. The show followed them on lots of business trips together into the desert, where they taught each other wholesome life lessons about hard work, loyalty, and responsibility, just like Mom and I did. 

One of the best characters in Breaking Bad is Albuquerque. It looks just like the city nextdoor, yet is surrounded by intrigue and a desert so empty that anything could happen there without anyone noticing. Maybe all that emptiness and not-noticing is why Mom pointed the Wagon toward Albuquerque when Sedona let us down. With the boogeyvirus traveling through chains of people, a city protected by a moat of desert was just the hideout we needed. Or perhaps she just wanted to feel famous.

“Look, Oscar! A sleazy lawyer ad at a bus stop, just like on TV!” Mom bubbled. Usually Mom hates driving in cities, but she was too starstruck by Albuquerque to be annoyed. “Do you think they did that on purpose?” A moment later she gushed, “Look! A seedy hooker hotel, just like in the show!” She’d seen plenty of math heads in the City, of course, but everything looks more glamorous when it’s from TV. 

“Mom! Mom! There’s a hot dog shop in Albuquerque, remember?” The hot dog shop was where Jesse went to meet men with face tattoos and trade business secrets. “It has outdoor seating and everything! Can we go there for dinner?”

“Sure. If it’s a real place.” 

“Oh boy!” I wagged. “I hope I make a Friend with a face tattoo.”

“Oscar, what do you think Breaking Bad is about?”

“It’s about a successful business man who cares very much about his family, just like me,” I explained. “It’s supposed to teach you about work-life balance. Why, what did you get out of the story?”

“That we really should have affordable healthcare,” Mom sighed. After a moment, she asked the Witch’s advice on finding the seediest hotdog stand in Albuquerque. 

The first place the Witch brought us was dark behind its barred windows and there was nobody with or without face tattoos at the picnic tables. The Wagon and I waited impatiently as we watched Mom walk to the front window and make a visor of her paws to peer inside. She must have seen someone there, because she waved her arms in sign language for, Look at me. 

When the door didn’t open, Mom held the Witch to her face and talked to her instead, all the while staring at her own reflection in the window. She came back to the Wagon empty-handed.

“What happened?” I crowded in closer to sniff for hints of boiled meat. 

“They were closed,” Mom said in a one-star-review voice. “There was someone inside, but she wouldn’t let me in, or even open the door to talk to me. She made me call her just so she could tell me they closed early. They’re not even bothering to open tomorrow. She told me all that through the phone while making eye contact through the window. Can you believe that?”

“Rude!” I agreed. 

“It’s like science fiction or something,” her voice said, but her puzzled face seemed more like a scene from a mystery.

“Don’t they need someone to eat the leftover hot dogs they’re not serving for dinner?”

“How are the staff gonna pay their rent if they can’t work?” Mom missed the point, as usual. “Remind me to tip generously from now on.” 

The Witch led us on a tour of all the locked doors in Albuquerque before Mom finally spotted a sign in an empty car kennel pointing the way to takeout. She came back a million years later with a tub the size of a popcorn bucket and the smell of cheese on her breath. 

“They only had a couple of things on the menu, so I got us mac & cheese,” she said, scooping a few spoonfuls of mac into my bowl. “I’m sorry, they didn’t have any bacon in the kitchen.” 

I gave the mac a sniff, but Mom had ordered it the way she likes it: hold the hot dogs. “But I don’t want mac & cheese!” I decided, eating it anyway.

“Me neither.” Mom glumly poked at the cheese with her spoon. “I’d give anything for a big salad, but I don’t think we can count on any fresh food for a while. We should plan to live off of the water and canned food in the van from now on. Lucky for you, there are hot dogs that come in cans. I’ve been saving Vienna Sausages for a special occasion.”

“I knew you wouldn’t let me down!” I wagged. 

“Come on. Let’s just find somewhere to sleep first so you have plenty of time to lick the bowl when you’re done.” 

Since Walt and Jesse never had trouble finding a secluded place outside of town to do criminal things like cooking or sleeping, I thought I’d be munching on canned sausage in no time. As it turns out, all those convenient car-trails in Albuquerque are pure Hollywood.

The Wagon drove into the sunset and kept driving under a fading sky. It was full-dark by the time we escaped the street lights, and still we drove on into the blackness. The first roadside car kennel the Witch found was so deep into the darkness that Albuquerque was a twinkling Milky Way in the distance. Mom had just reached her paw into the bag where the wiener cans lived when the whoosh-crackle of a car pulling off the road distracted her. 

It turned its blinding eyebeams to stare directly at us. A moment later, another set of eyes joined. Behind the growling engines, there was an even deeper rumble that shook the very earth and made my hackles stand on end. Mom froze with her finger on the key to the can and waited to see what would happen. 

“Hey! We’re trying to eat over here!” I barked. 

“Hush, Oscar.” Mom patted my head with short, shushing strokes that were supposed to be comforting, but I could tell she just wanted to have a hand nearby to use as a muzzle.

Finally, the glaring eyes looked away and the low growl turned into the racket of a lot of people talking too loud all at once. I heard the snick-pop of someone pulling the key on a can. 

“It’s safe, Mom,” I whispered. “You can open my wienie can now.”

“Ugh, these drunk college kids could be here all night!” Mom threw the can back into the shadows where the Ho Foods bag was and climbed into the driving chair. 

“Where are you going? What about dinner?” I sniffed my bowl just in case I’d missed something in the darkness, but it was as empty as I’d feared. 

“There’s a campground at the trailhead.” Mom turned the key and the Wagon purred to life. “It’s only about 30 minutes away. Let’s just sleep there.”

We drove for what felt like the rest of the night as Mom searched the darkness beside the road for another place to stop. By the time we reached a lone streetlight in the darkness, she was antsy from too much raspberry water. 

“You have arri—” the Witch started.

“Oh good, there’s a bathroom!” Mom interrupted. She left without telling me she’d be right back and waddled across the car kennel with the jerky, fast-forward steps of a character in a silent movie. A moment after she disappeared into the shadows behind the potty, the blurry edge of the Witch’s spotlight peeked around the corner.

Mom stomped back out of the shadows a moment later and pulled the Wagon door open.

“You might as well come, too. There’s a sign that says the bathrooms and trash pickup have been canceled until further notice.” She said until further notice in the deep voice she uses to repeat something very stupid. “That makes no sense.” 

“It’s because the boogeyvirus is indoors and people-potties always have doors,” I said. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“You’re supposed to be alone in the bathroom,” she said impatiently. “The only thing that locking the bathrooms and trash cans does is encourage people to litter and make a mess of the parking lot. I’m not picking up my crap in a bag.” 

“Don’t worry. I’ll show you how it’s done.” 

“Going to the bathroom is a biological imperative. Locking the restrooms doesn’t make people stop needing one, it just makes them go in less sanitary ways.” The Witch’s spotlight found the edge of the car kennel and Mom followed it into the bushes. “You’re supposed to wash your hands and not touch your face, right? If they really wanted to keep people from spreading germs, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just keep the hand sanitizer stocked.” She said it like her not-understanding made someone else look stupid. 

Mom found a private-ish place behind the potty building while I sniffed for my own spot. It was hard to smell anything over the stink coming from the potty house. An idea followed the smell up my nose and barged into my brain. “If people leave smells behind in bathrooms, maybe they leave germs, too,” I suggested.

“It’s well ventilated, can’t you tell? Even I can smell it. Most people hold their breath in there anyway, so maybe it’s the safest indoor public place there is. Did you think of that?”

“But what about the flush?” I asked. The Witch had been trying to scare Mom with gross stories about how people potties could blow boogeyvirus into the air when they flushed. 

“It doesn’t flush, dummy. That’s why it stinks.” 

When I finished my business, Mom unraveled a poop bag before remembering about the trash being locked. She put the bag in her pocket and went back to her rant. She wasn’t talking to me anymore, but I tried to keep up anyway. There were so many things I didn’t understand lately, and without Mom’s rants I might never make sense of it all.

“And what’s the point of taping over the fee slot?” Mom scolded. “You don’t have to choose between staying open and staying safe. It’s a false dichotomy.”

“What’s a false de-comommy?” I asked. 

“It means you think you have to pick one thing or the other, when you can really have both. Like thinking that you can’t spread money without spreading disease. The economy is like electricity; if you break the circuit in one spot, the lights go out everywhere. Money does no good sitting in the bank just like dog food is no good if you never open the can.” So she hadn’t forgotten about my hot dogs after all. 

“Do you mean to say that the ecomommy relies on other people to open the wiener can for him?” I asked, hoping she’d take the hint. “It sounds like doing good deeds for hungry dogs is pretty important, don’t you think?”

“In the past, carrying on through a crisis like this brought nations together and made people proud of their resilience. How do you think most of these trails got here?” She chopped her arm toward the blackness beyond the street light. 

“Magic?” 

“The New Deal!” she said, like I should have known it all along. “In the depression people needed work, so the government made up odd jobs out of nowhere to put money into their pockets. Those jobs built most of the trails and parks around the country.” 

“But Mom, the boogeyvirus,” I said, because that explained everything lately.

“Every crisis is an opportunity to make things better. But you can’t look for opportunity if you shut everything down.”

“Isn’t it nice that the world gets a vacation, though?” I was pretty sure that vacation was the right answer, because vacation was what we were doing, and Mom’s always right. 

“A crisis is no time for a vacation!” Her paws balled up and her back got a little taller. “The virus is gonna blow over in a few months, and then what?”

“A few months? Who can wait that long?” I howled. “This isn’t America anymore!” I was starting to enjoy my new catchphrase. 

Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.

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