98 Cent Tacos
Salvation Mountain, a brightly colored painted hill with a cross and messages about love and God.
By. Hannah Bradford
Looking out the car window at the mountains of Mexico in the far distance, I try to forget about the two crockpots full of soup buckled in the back seat like passengers. I try to figure out if it’s my mother in the seat beside me who’s making me uncomfortable, or if it’s the thought of soon seeing the Slabbers, the name many of the homeless call themselves at Slab City.
Slab City is a place you only visit to see Leonard Knight's Salvation Mountain—which, despite its name, smells more like the waste tank to a porta potty than it does a dedication to God and a gift to the world. As we near it, I see the people, ranging from sixteen to fifty, all walking on the side of the road with their thumbs out, looking for a ride to the same destination. In the distance, looms the colorfully painted hill of Salvation Mountain.
“Remember not to touch them, and don’t go anywhere alone,” my mother tells me again. Her gray hair escapes her hair-tie like a spider web that’s been dismantled. Her hair is the longest I’ve ever known it to be, touching her waist, a visible horizon at the point where she stopped coloring it after so many years. Even with several multi-colored hair ties leading down the ponytail, it still looks untamed.
I think back on the way she looked a year ago, before I left for college. Her diet of Del Taco most certainly took its toll. She appeared puffy, yet too thin, at the same time. Her face a sickly tomato red. Her worn out baggy clothes and sagging skin hiding the skeleton you only noticed when you were forced to hug her. Her eyes dark sunken into her skull. Her blue and green eye shadow doing little to hide the corpse she had become.
I look back out at the Slabbers. The desert sand baked onto their red sunburned bodies. Their matted hair. Most of the people I see are like this. Some with shoes, some without. Some carrying large back packs, others taking a casual stroll away from their camp.
As a child, Mother would pull me in close and tell me not to make eye contact with the homeless and beggars outside of the markets. I was taught to tense up my body and pretend to be invisible. Little did she realize then that that would be her one day. For two years she lived out of her car in the Kohl’s parking lot underneath one of the hundreds of trees that lined the lot. She would use the bathroom of Kohl’s to wash herself with a rag and brush her teeth. In the hundred-degree sun, she would bake in the tin can of her car.
When my family and I drove by Kohl’s I would look to see if she was there. Sometimes she would be, and my father would snicker and say, “It looks like your mom is home.” We’d laugh, because there was really nothing else you could do. “I’m sorry,” Dad said, “I probably shouldn’t joke about that.”
During those two years, I hated spending time with her. Mother’s red jeep would pull up to the house and I’d be suffocated with guilt and discomfort as I sat in passenger seat. Her car, the place I knew she slept. As a high school student, it was hard to explain my mom to my friends. It was hard to explain why I hated this woman who’d given life to me. I felt the need to punish her.
She often took my sister and me to Del Taco on Taco Thursday. Out of spite, I’d order an item more expensive than the 98 cent tacos. I knew she couldn’t afford it, and I knew she couldn’t deny me it.
I was cruel to her.
My senior year, while driving alone with my mother’s boyfriend, a generous spirit, he tells me, “Your mom will never be homeless again. I am leaving her my house in my will.” I wonder if he thinks my dad kicked her out. I wonder if he knows that she chose to walk out on us.
Nearing Leonard Knight's Salvation Mountain, my mother pulls off the main road and onto a dirt road. We stop behind the church truck. As I get out of the car, I look around at the desert-worn people amassed around the truck offering canned goods, clothing, hot food, and God. My chest tightens. I tell myself that that it’s my mother speaking inside my head. But I’m not so sure. I stand behind the loaves of bread and give two slices for each person who approaches. Some ask for more than two.
Though my mother forbids it, I indulge them.
Hannah is pictured with a close mouthed smile, shoulder length hair, and wearing a red swearer with black and white ostriches pictured on it.
Hannah Bradford is a writer and credentialed teacher. She is a graduate of Marshall University with a double major in Creative Writing and English Literature, and a graduate of the University of Redlands with a Masters in the Art of Learning and Teaching.