Given World Read online

  3. Girl, Three Speeds, Pretty Good Brakes

  So that was me, going on eighteen. Not too tall, no tits to speak of, brown hair to my ass, parted in the middle and brushed intermittently, worn just far enough out of my eyes so I could see, but my peripheral vision was not what it could have been. I’d graduated from high school, and left my family and our home in the rearview mirror of a Greyhound bus. Moved to the city—or what, in Montana, passes for one—and stayed awhile. I left a few things behind, but no one came looking to return them to me or to fetch me back. I didn’t expect them to. They had enough to deal with.

  What I did take along was a whole lot of questions for the world—oh yeah—beginning with “Why why why why why?” I often said it out loud, I guess because I was lonely enough to talk to myself. Bewildered too, but I knew enough to go. When I wasn’t asking why, I was giving myself orders: Just keep moving. Hit it, Riley. Get the lead out. So there was me, keeping myself company, and after I got my job in Missoula, there was my Mustang—my parachute, my escape. I took up driving like some people take up smoking or poker, and set about prowling the roads of a different part of the state—a different planet, almost—than the one I’d come from, a hundred miles north and two fifty east. The one where I’d left my mother and father, their grandson, and their own mess of memories and regrets. I didn’t know if they were still reaching, like I was, into empty space, looking to grab onto something no longer there, but it was likely enough.

  One of my half-assed dreams, when I was still young, had been to become a diesel mechanic, work on huge things—equipment that could move mountains. It was not something girls normally wanted, but I was not a normal girl, and I had plans for that equipment. I guessed that given the right machinery, my little corner of the world—including all of Montana, parts of western North Dakota and southern Alberta, maybe just a small corner of Wyoming—could be arranged a little more to my liking. I even thought about joining the army. I knew they had some big machines, and I knew if you joined, they took you away. Maybe to somewhere warm, maybe near an actual ocean, where if it was the right time of year, there would be whales. As it was, I was already imagining them in the endless wheat fields, their big humped backs rising up out of all those amber waves of grain. I had a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses that nearly took care of the color discrepancy. Hits of mescaline or the occasional tab of acid took care of the rest.

  Sometimes I’d lie out there on my back, and the world would turn over on itself, so all that big sky—all that inexhaustible sky I knew for some people who weren’t me was full of possibilities—instead became a big milk-glass bowl containing my life and all the reasons for me even having one. It would fill slowly with water, and I could feel fish swimming through me, through all my arteries and veins. And then I would start to drown in it, because it was all wrong and it was too big, and I would close my eyes and grab onto the dirt or the grass or the rocks or whatever was there and make the world go back the way it had been, and then sometimes I’d feel myself drowning in that too.

  Despite all that, I was a picture, even if it was only in my mind, in my uniform. There was, however, the problem of being too much of a fuckup for even the army to want me. That, and I had not yet figured out a way to forgive them for losing my brother and taking my boyfriend. Or either of them, for letting it happen.

  My parents, I knew, saw me orbiting a little too close to the sun, but they didn’t try to talk me down, probably because they knew they couldn’t, or were afraid of pushing me even further away. I learned how to drive at fourteen and spent a lot of time in my dad’s pickup. On the back roads, on the straight stretches, some voice in my head would tell me to floor it. I noticed the same voice never told me to stop if the road ended or turn if it turned. I wondered a few times about the significance of that, and it took a special effort on my part to stay out of the wheat fields.

  • • •

  In Missoula I found a job at a gas station where the mechanic, Leo, offered to teach me how to work on cars. I worked on other people’s, and found my own—bought it off a guy who came by on his way to the train station, needing the fare for San Diego, as he allowed that he did not intend to spend one more goddamn winter in goddamn Montana freezing his fucking ass off. It was September. The car needed the kind of work I could do. I gave him a hundred thirty dollars, two weeks’ pay.

  After about a month at the station, Leo caught me talking to myself and I realized I wasn’t always aware I was doing it. I told him I felt a little crazy. I didn’t tell him about my brother or Darrell or the kid, because at the time a connection had not occurred to me, but I told him about the drugs, as blaming those seemed logical—and probably, at least partially, was.

  Leo started watching me around the office and in the service bays where we worked and out at the pumps. He squinted at me. “I don’t see anything the matter with you.”

  “It doesn’t show,” I said. “It’s up here.” I thumped myself on the side of the head with the heel of my hand, hard; so hard my head rocked.

  He took a step back. “Man, did that hurt?”

  “Yeah.” And it did, a little. “But pain doesn’t bother me. It’s weird.”

  “You’re weird,” he said.

  “I told you.”

  My car was seven years old and looked like it had been through a war. It was about five different shades of black, and there was a hole in the floor behind the driver’s seat big enough to put both feet through. The top didn’t meet the windshield tight by about an inch, so whatever weather they were having on the outside, I was pretty much having on the inside too.

  The interior smelled like a pile of wet leaves, and sometimes as if those leaves were covering a tiny decomposing animal. The canvas had a couple of cuts in it that I patched up with duct tape, and the wheel wells had been widened and Bondo’d, it looked like, by a four-year-old with some spare Play-Doh. Leo and I bolted a piece of sheet metal over the hole in the backseat and then one day, to surprise me, he installed some Astroturf on the floor back there, in place of real carpeting.

  It was a 289, eight-cylinder, three-speed. The first thing Leo taught me to do was tune it up. Back in those days, you could actually get inside the engine of a car and see what you were doing. I could reach every spark plug without the extension on the ratchet, and get enough torque on it to pull them out without any help and without banging my knuckles up more than just a Band-Aid’s worth. I was proud of my bruised knuckles, the pattern of tiny black cuts on my fingers, the grease I could never quite get out from under my nails. I was practically addicted to the hand cleaner, scooped out of the can in great gobs, like shortening, and rubbed around until it was turned by body heat to something almost fluid, but not quite. I loved all the liquid stuff, the smell of the gas and how woozy it made me, the pink transmission fluid, the honey color of new oil. I learned how to gap spark plugs, calibrate brakes, set timing, change tires, aim headlights, adjust carburetors. I learned how to listen to a motor. I knew how to get enough miles out of a worn-out clutch to get you home. I carried screwdrivers and a rag in my back pockets, a tire gauge in the pocket of my uniform shirt, a pencil behind my ear. I learned how to find the slow leak in a tire, dunking it in a galvanized tub of water, watching for the telltale bubbles. I’d circle the spot with chalk, patch it, fill the tire with air and roll it across the lot, casual but steady, so it wouldn’t fall over.

  Sometimes I’d take the tow truck out to charge dead batteries or change flats. I got used to getting to a place and having some rancher come out of the house and look at me and ask what I was doing there, as if me and my tow truck had perhaps taken a wrong turn at his driveway. If he was particularly difficult, I would offer to send someone else out—a guy—in a day or two. They would usually let me get my tools out then, but I could see they didn’t like it a bit—what the world was coming to. They thought we were all on drugs, all the kids. I wasn’t, really, except every once in a while when Leo and I would smoke a joint of Mexican pot, a
nd then, if it was slow, he’d watch me while I got out the rubbing compound and tried to get down to a layer of something on my car that might actually be mistaken for factory paint.

  I’d quit the mescaline when I found out I was pregnant, and after the baby was born it no longer seemed like such a brilliant idea or grand escape. He came six weeks early, and even after they let me take him home I could hide him inside my jacket like a little trick rabbit, and no one would even know he was there. He stayed behind when I left. I couldn’t take him because I was too afraid of what I might do, like lose him; set him down somewhere and forget. I was not so out of it as to believe I was even remotely steady enough to take care of a baby. Both my parents, by some miracle I was sure I’d never fully comprehend, seemed to understand.

  When I got stoned I would think about my childhood, which always came back to me in black and white and a barely distinguishable range of gray. We had dogs, and farm animals of the regular kind: chickens, cows, once in a while a few goats. I had a big brother who tried against some pretty ferocious odds to teach me about the world and what was in it. A mother who, against similar odds, kept me steady as long as she could, kept me from becoming a human rocket-propelled grenade and launching myself into the atmosphere, where I’d explode into tiny pieces and rain down on the house and the yard while she watched from behind the screen door: another one gone—the last one, except . . .

  And my dad, who, no matter what, seemed always on the verge of smiling, like he was telling himself jokes, and if you were lucky—if you asked with the right words—he’d tell them to you too.

  Our days: Getting up before the sun every morning and going to bed halfway through Bonanza at night. 4-H. The bus to school, the bus back. A long way between us and everyone else. A lot of alone time. And a war on TV, brought to you by Nabisco.

  I didn’t know—because I never thought it through—that American boys had not been fighting in Vietnam since the beginning of time, or that no one had ever watched a war on TV before. I would watch and look for a face I recognized among the living, but then came the ones they were loading onto the helicopters: the ones that didn’t move no matter how long the camera stayed on them; the ones I maybe should have known better than to think about as hard as I did. But I didn’t know not to do that. You could tell under the tarps and the blankets that some of them had been blown clear apart.

  Boys my age were too young for the war, but older brothers had been going and coming back in shifts, quietly over the years, and no one said very much about it. When they came home, they went back out to work the ranches, and I’d see them on the street or at the feed store and try to match their faces to the ones I’d seen on television. There was a sameness to those faces—something I was too young to identify, but it was etched there, and no one else had it.

  I was thirteen when they let us know they couldn’t find Mick. When the letter came in the mail, my mother wandered around the house for weeks carrying it and talking to herself, saying pretty much the same thing over and over. For a long time, among all the other voices, hers was the one I heard most distinctly, at the most random times, saying, “I thought they were supposed to come and tell you in person.”

  It was as if our house were a birdcage someone had thrown a sheet over and forgotten, in the morning—every morning—to take off. I don’t remember any talking, let alone laughing, or making anyone feel better about anything, though I know there must have been trying. The quiet was blinding and deafening. Even the barn cats stopped freaking out when anyone came close. They perched in the windows at the top of the barn and watched us come and go, as though they knew those were our final days, and anytime now we’d pack up and leave. But I was the only one who did.

  I made it through school, barely, knowing that once it was over, I’d be gone. I left my parents in a parking lot in Havre: my mom waving, some hidden force pulling her away from the bus steps; Dad awkward and incongruous with the baby’s carriage, in the background, where he liked to stay. I wanted to put my bag down and go back for another hug, tell him not to worry, I’d figure it out. Like he said. Mom had that distant look, as if she were the one leaving. And the baby, well. I couldn’t see him. Dad could have had a mess of those boney cats in that carriage. With their eyes closed, meowing and growling like they do. Bye kittens. Good night moon.

  In Missoula, I got my job and rented a little apartment over the Laundromat, where when winter came the steam would rise into my room, and the sweet smell of the soap would cover over the stink of the pulp mill down the road. Still, there was nothing to be done about the smoke from its stacks, which would combine with the smoke from people’s woodstoves and the fog that was a natural consequence of the inversion layer in that valley, and sometimes we wouldn’t see the sun for weeks at a time. I’d drive out of town then, in any direction.

  For a while that one winter I had company: another car I came up on one hazy day outside of Frenchtown, and it looked a lot like mine. There had been approximately no other traffic on the road in either direction since I’d gone by the Flathead cutoff, aside from a few log trucks and one kamikaze U-Haul pilot who was having a tough time staying off the median. I got around him as fast as I could, swerving at the last second while he played What’s My Lane?, and my imagination previewed for me what might happen if I didn’t swerve—if I hit him and lost control; or cut the wheel and cut back too sharply and spun out. I saw the marks my tires would leave in a spiral as me and my car left the road.

  The other Mustang might have been doctored up at the same body shop as mine. It had a similar paint job, holes in the top, duct tape. It wasn’t an exact match, but close enough I thought I ought to get up alongside for a look. The guy driving had long, straight brown hair in a ponytail; a mustache; and aviator shades he was wearing even at dusk, with yellow lenses.

  The first time we drove together for a while, west on the interstate, north and south of the river, crossing it every now and again like you do on that stretch. On the straightaways we were doing ninety, ninety-five. After a bit, though, I slowed up to let him get ahead, feeling silly out there in the fast lane, not passing anything. I had my radio tuned to static from Missoula, breaking every once in a while to let through snatches of country music—about love, about broken hearts. I’d always figured if I could hear a whole song all at once it might make sense, but the antenna on my car was broken at the base, splinted with Popsicle sticks and electrical tape, and I had not gotten around to replacing it yet. So I filled in the blanks myself, with words I could understand, about cars, motors, carburetors, timing chains.

  At Tarkio I turned around, using my signal to say, See you later, before I got off the highway. He flashed his brake lights and then he was gone, leaving me and my car, in some unbidden, imaginary outcome, to bump down the embankment, over the riprap and into the river, to float all the way to Lake Pend Oreille and the Columbia or sink and give the fish a place to hide. Or to drive straight up the slope on the other side, to a point too vertical, where the weight of the engine would pull us backward, and we’d tumble end over end to the bottom—possibly across the road and into the river anyway. I let my mind have its fun and its carnage, but I was seeing that other black car too, flying along toward the coast in the darkness, with a radio that probably worked. I kept my car on the highway. I headed toward home and bed and tumbling dryers; the smothering smell of other people’s sheets and towels and shirts and jeans.

  I stopped at the bar where I knew Leo would be nursing a beer and playing the poker machine, in a vapor mist of cigarette smoke and deep-fried chicken. I ordered my own beer and sat on a bar stool next to him, watching him draw electric cards, always keeping jacks, eights, and aces when they came up. We sat quiet except for the beeping of the machine: the excited noises it made whether he chose right or didn’t, whether the hand turned out a full house or a pair of deuces, or all but the last card of a straight flush. After a while I said good night to him and the bartender, walked down the street and up to my
room, where I took off my clothes and curled around myself in the exact center of the bed, my head under the covers, and slept in one position all night. In the morning, for a few long waking seconds, I had no idea where I was.

  I saw that other car fairly often the next few months: up the Bitterroot, in the Mission Valley, west of Beavertail. We were all over the place. I’d come up on him, or he’d appear in my rearview mirror and get up beside me, wave, give me a slightly lopsided smile, and I’d drift back and follow until my internal compass swung me around and guided me home.

  Mornings I was generally up at five, at the station by six, in my uniform: dark blue pants and pale blue shirt with my name embroidered in orange over the pocket—that over a layer of long johns, my brother’s old horse-blanket-lined jean jacket on top of it all. Leo would already be there, with the propane stove in the garage fired up to take the edge off the chill. The edge was about all it ever took off, and I’d wonder what it might be like to be warm more than four months a year. I’d conjure up a palm tree. A beach. Add the ocean: a body of water without any discernible other side, deep and full of all kinds of slippery things, and whales. It appeared in my mind like a child’s drawing: the waves a series of inverted V ’s across the middle of the page; the whales just below and ready to breach; the sun a yellow ball in the top left-hand corner; two distinct white clouds to break up all that monotonously blue sky.

  Most days I’d be off work by two or three, and one freezing and particularly socked-in day in early March I went looking for sunshine. I knew I could find it on the other side of town, east where the inversion (depending on which way you were going) began or ended, like a wall of fog, like a magic trick of the gods, a wall you could drive through and disappear.