Given World Page 7

  I drove out of the murk into a sharp light that nearly blinded me. It felt even colder than it had in the fog, and the air coming through the gap above my windshield blew across my face and practically froze a section solid, from the bridge of my nose to the middle of my forehead. I had the heater blasting, which did not do much but keep my feet, in pac boots and wool socks, from turning into little blocks of ice.

  My eyes finally adjusted to the light at Bonner, where the Champion mill on my left was spewing smoke and sawdust straight into the air, and it seemed to stay, motionless, caught in time or an invisible element that defied gravity or dispersion. I drove as far as Rock Creek, circling down off the highway to the north side of the river, and along the frontage road to where it dead-ended at a woods of scrappy pine and brush.

  I pulled a tiny roach out of my pocket, smoked it and listened to the radio: an oldies station coming in clear as a bell from Rock Springs, Wyoming. They played songs I’d heard from behind my brother’s bedroom door as a child, and sometimes, if he didn’t have a girl in there, he’d let me in, take me by the hands and dance with me, spin me around the room to “Rave On,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Shout,” until I was so dizzy and laughing so hard I thought I was going to pass out. Then he’d let me down easy to sit on the floor, and he’d sit down there next to me, and we’d read or draw or talk about stuff until Mom called us downstairs for dinner.

  After he dropped out of college and enlisted, before he went away, he boxed up all his things, taped and labeled the boxes. He wrote his name on them with a fat felt marker, and on some my name or an alias in smaller letters below. I didn’t open them when he went missing, because there was no way I could convince myself he wouldn’t be coming home. Not in a box. Not in a coffee can. Not a bunch of bones tied together like kindling. Not coming back. Not ever.

  His records were in some of those boxes, books in others. He left me his model cars and the dinosaurs and the rock collection. Afternoons during his last few weeks at home, he’d go to one bar or another in town, and get drunk with his buddies who were going to Vietnam with him and a few who had deferments and were staying home. He’d come back an hour or so before dinner and sit out on the porch, not doing anything, just trying to get straight enough to come in and eat with us. He said he was sobering up the sunset, and he’d calculate the number of hours since the sun had risen over the South China Sea. I’d sit at his feet, repeating those words: South, China, Sea. He’d laugh while I did it, and all the while I was willing him back home. Asking God, I suppose. It wasn’t until much later I realized I should have been more specific about what condition he’d be in when he came back. Just in case.

  • • •

  I drove out of the woods and went to the Stage Station for a beer. I was very stoned and a little shaky, so in order to avoid looking at anyone I got a newspaper off the bar and sat at a table in the one corner still in a patch of daylight. It was earlyish, about four, but you could feel night coming on already, and the lights over the pool table outshone the late-winter sun, struggling, seemed like, just to stay lit.

  On the front page of the paper was a story about a guy who’d gone off the road down south of Drummond, and a picture of his car lying on its top by the creek running through there, the old railroad tracks with weeds growing up through the ties, cattails undisturbed in uneven rows along the water. It was too easy for me to imagine how it must have felt as his car left the pavement, all four wheels suddenly in midair, no sound but the wind roaring by, or maybe no sound at all. I looked again, to be sure it really was that guy, and read the rest of the story. It said they didn’t know yet how he wound up down there, but he was still alive, in critical condition at St. Pat’s in Missoula. They’d reached a brother in Kentucky who said he’d done two tours in the Air Force, spent them mostly in the central highlands at Pleiku, and come home with no medals but did have a little shrapnel lodged in his head.

  When I started feeling less wasted, I went up to get another beer and took the paper with me; I showed the picture to the bartender. Told him I’d seen that guy around some, driving a car that sort of matched mine.

  “Doesn’t look good,” is what the bartender said.

  “Nope.”

  He read the story, nodded, scratched above his ear. “A lot of those guys came back a little crazy. Think maybe he just drove off the road on purpose or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he could have.” I looked out the window at the parking lot, the dusky woods beyond, and tried to imagine what animals might be wandering through, just out of sight. “My brother went over there, and he didn’t come back crazy.”

  “Some didn’t.” The way the words came out sounded like what I’d said proved some opinion he already had on the subject. He was an old guy. He wouldn’t have gone.

  I stayed to drink my beer, me and the bartender talking about what little we knew about the world. How much water was in it. What kinds of things and people we imagined were on the other side of the ocean. Turns out we didn’t really know very much.

  When I got back home, Leo was at our bar playing the poker machine. Without looking at me he said, “Where have you been?” He discarded a two of clubs and a queen of diamonds, aiming for an inside straight. “I was starting to get worried.”

  “I was out at Rock Creek.”

  He glanced over. “You look strange.”

  I reckoned I did. I felt strange. “You’re never gonna hit that straight,” I said.

  But I wasn’t thinking about the cards. I was trying to figure out how anything could be so big it could be more than one thing: the Pacific on one side and the South China Sea on the other. I could not properly imagine the immensity of it, the possibility of all that water and what it could hold. I thought about that guy in the hospital and wondered if he was still alive, if they’d managed to get his car up out of that draw. Decided to go see some things for myself.

  I told Leo I’d be leaving in the summer, after I’d saved some money. Together we put a new clutch in my car, a new distributor, brakes all around. We fixed the antenna for real. Laid down some actual carpet in the back.

  I went to the hospital and talked them into letting me into the ICU to see my friend. He was in a coma. “Don’t expect much,” they said. As if.

  I sat on a chair next to his bed and watched his eyes move under his eyelids. I whispered, “Hey,” and then again, a little louder, “Hey, buddy,” but he just stayed in there, in that other world. I couldn’t know a thing about it.

  It was almost September by the time I’d got all ready to go, and Leo followed me in his truck as far as the Idaho border, to make sure I at least got to the top of the pass okay. Maybe he thought if something happened I could just coast from there, as clearly it would be all downhill from the top of that pass to the ocean. We pulled over among all the semis—cooling off from the climb and checking their brakes for the descent—to say good-bye. Leo kissed my forehead and told me he still didn’t think I was crazy. He gave me a new toolbox and a socket set for a going-away present, got in his truck and drove back the way we’d come. Halfway down the mountain I felt something snap inside me, like a shredded fan belt when it finally lets go. It felt strange but didn’t hurt like you might think it would.

  I sailed across the panhandle and turned left at Coeur d’Alene, figuring I’d drive all night and be in Nevada in the morning. I’d never seen a real desert. I started a list of things I’d never seen. A tornado. Mountain lion up close. The Southern Cross. Saturn, that I knew of. Penguins. Palm trees. My list got longer as I drove, though I figured soon I’d be able to simultaneously put something on it—an iguana, for example, or a tide pool—and take it right back off again.

  I practiced, on that road, keeping the people lost to me at bay. Aside from Mick, a tiny baby conceived just in time, maybe, to live, and named after a barn cat; and his father, who tried to hold me steady, though he couldn’t, as he had no way of knowing how. Even if he had, I didn’t know how
to let him. On that road I was practicing something I would never perfect but knew I was going to need. Maybe not forever. Certainly for a while.

  I headed south through Idaho and west through Nevada, collecting images of jackrabbits, casinos, tumbleweeds and dust spiraling across empty fields. I saw a black horse with a white mane. A five-gallon oil can on the side of the road with a bald eagle dead on top of it. A claw-foot bathtub with no feet. An army boot. A coonskin cap hanging on the branch of an old apple tree, rotten apples piled deep around it. California was just ahead of me when it started to get dark again. I drove through the mountains with the top down, even though it was almost Montana cold up there. I needed something like cold to keep me awake.

  When I finally found the ocean I couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything beyond the edge of the cliff where I parked my car, on account of the fog. I had not expected fog. But I could hear the water, and smell it. I could feel it. I could barely stand not being able to look at it, but figured I’d already waited so long, and the sky had to clear eventually. I moved over to the passenger seat, put my feet up on the dashboard, and fell asleep.

  When I woke up, the fog had backed off to the horizon and I saw the ocean, as big and blue as anything.

  I got out and sat on the hood of my car to watch how this unlikely element moved; watched the tide come in and the waves break, until I had memorized the patterns of each one. I let in some of what I’d seen along the miles of road between me and home, and what I was seeing now, in shades of something other than gray I knew I could use later on to remember my life. I sat there the whole day. I didn’t have any idea which way I’d go when it got dark, but it wasn’t a terrible worry. Something would tell me.

  I watched the sun get set to drop into the water and couldn’t take my eyes off it. The lower it fell, the bigger it got, until finally it was a huge orange ball balancing on its edge, millions of miles from me and my car there on the cliff, but it looked so close—close enough I figured I could throw stuff at it. I got my brother’s records out of a box in the trunk, sorted through them. He got into my head easily, despite my best efforts; enough that I could hear him holler in some fake pathetic voice, No, not that one! while I tossed some of those records—the ones I never liked; sappy ones he played for girls and the “Stay out” order (for me) was not negotiable. I flung them off the cliff, laughing, Ha ha ha ha.

  For all I knew, there was no bottom and no end to the ocean, and some of those records sailed a long time before they fell into it. They caught the sun and threw it back at me until it wasn’t there anymore, until the last little curve of it flattened out and disappeared, slipping into all that water like the bald head of God reflecting its own image, painted on the twilight sky.

  4. Slim

  A young woman. Okay, maybe not so young. Maybe forty-two and already a grandmother. Believe me: no one finds this harder to believe than she does. Her name is Rose and she is a little ashamed, on this particular errand, to admit (to herself? to her small passenger?) that she has only ever skirted this reservation. It lies adjacent to a road she has driven many times—the shortest cut between Great Falls and home—but there has never been any reason to actually go in, to stop, until now. That, or she has always sensed she would be unwelcome, or guilty of trespassing, or simply did not belong.

  In any event, it is late spring now, and wildflowers—mostly purple lupine, but some red Paintbrush, some dirty-white Queen Anne’s lace—flourish in yards and in the many vacant lots, making the otherwise dust-colored neighborhood a little brighter, almost radiant. She takes that as a good sign. From whom? God does not have a place in all this. That would be the kind of wishful thinking she cannot afford.

  She carries a red and black wool blanket, wrapped around some small, obviously alive, thing. It is not a puppy or a newborn calf. It is a baby. Her grandson. She has come to offer him to someone she has never met. Not the boy’s father. His father is in Vietnam, if he has not had the good sense to go AWOL and head for another country; one simultaneously very close and very far away.

  She can’t speak for anyone else but imagines they all thought about that passage when the lottery numbers were picked, matched to birthdays, fired like flaming fucking arrows into the hearts of mothers everywhere. But she is not thinking about that now. This is someone else’s child (her daughter’s, but still), and she doesn’t even know if the father—this child’s father, who is possibly already a dust cloud floating on the breeze over the South China Sea—even had a mother. Anything, at this point, seems possible. Maybe because there is this baby, who, created a few months later, might now have been . . . nothing. A memory. Carried regret. When the decision came down from the court, they didn’t talk about it. It was too late. And this boy’s mother was mostly beyond talking by then anyway.

  Rose knows a family name and approximate location because of letters sent to her daughter when she still lived with them, and a handful after she left. Early postmarks said Oklahoma, later ones Texas, but the last one came from Montana.

  A man answers the door. He is tall and dark and reminds her of the young man she has met only the one time. She says hello, and folds the blanket away from the baby’s face. “I believe,” she says, holding the boy out awkwardly so the man can see him better, “this is your grandson.”

  “My grandson,” the man says, as if trying to decide if the word could have more than one meaning. “And he came to you by way of—”

  “My daughter.”

  He raises one eyebrow. “I see.”

  Rose nods. The words are not a challenge but an acknowledgment. That, at least, is how she hears them. “Yes.”

  “And your daughter?”

  “Is in Missoula, I think. She left him with us. To find a family for him.”

  “Leonard can not be this baby’s father.”

  “Leonard? I don’t know who that is. The boy I know is called Darrell.”

  The man nods. He does not look surprised or wary, as she had thought he might. “Darrell is my nephew.”

  “Oh,” Rose says, knowing she still has to say what she came for, even if she doesn’t know how to say it, especially now. The man waits, not impatiently, and she steels herself, slowly blowing out a bellyful of air before she speaks again. “Do you think— Can you take him? I mean, would you? My husband and I, we can’t keep him. I’m afraid—” She wants to explain, about her missing son, her already lost daughter, her inability to function some days, to keep track of days at all, let alone keep track of this tiny person. But she can’t explain. It would be too much.

  The man laughs softly. To Rose, the laugh sounds sad, or resigned, or both, but she doesn’t trust herself to judge what anyone else is feeling. Since she doesn’t even know what she is feeling, it would hardly be fair.

  “Yes,” the man says. “I can take him. I can take care of him.”

  Is it the answer she wants? God—him again—knows. Simple enough, she thinks. Simple as that. Done.

  She looks at the baby, and back at the man. The resemblance is more than dark skin and eyes and hair. “I know this is a terrible thing to ask,” she says. “But do you want him? Or do you—”

  “Not so terrible,” he says. “I understand why you would ask.” He looks past her, across the road, up into the seemingly empty hills. “I would like to have him here with me. My boy died two years ago. He was seventeen. And now my nephew is gone too. This house is pretty damn empty.” He looks down at the baby in Rose’s arms. “Seems right,” he says. “I think I know myself well enough by now to trust that.”

  Rose finds she is jealous but doesn’t say.

  “Don’t worry.” He touches her shoulder. “He’ll be okay. Tell your daughter. He’ll be fine here.”

  “I’ll tell her.” It does make sense. As much as anything else does. She hands him the blanket, the baby. The boy looks at him, out of pale eyes that don’t really go with the rest of him. He looks quite serious, like a little old man; aside from the eyes, almost like a miniature
of the man holding him.

  “His name?”

  Rose says they call him Slim.

  The man smiles as he repeats it. “How old is he?”

  “Sixteen weeks.”

  “Small.”

  “Yes. He was premature, but the doctor says he’s healthy now.” She reaches out a hand and the boy wraps his tiny fingers around one of hers. She waits for him to let go, and begins to turn away.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee,” the man asks, “before you leave?”

  She realizes her legs feel like they might not hold her up much longer. “I’d like that,” she says. “Thank you. I’d like that very much.” She sits on the front step. He crouches to give the baby back to her.

  “While I make coffee,” he says.

  “Of course.” She looks into Slim’s eyes. She sees they are changing color. She thinks they may be turning green. Or maybe it is a reflection, a trick of the light. He holds a tiny hand up for her hair. She leans her head down so he can reach it. So he can hold on.

  5. Not-So-Secret Life

  I truly believed I was flying under the radar—figured I was inconspicuous or at least camouflaged—but Primo told me that was ridiculous: I was impossible to miss. It was the car, he said, beat up in its massively original way. He said he dug the duct-taped slashes in the rag top, the dope Bondo work around the wheel wells, and what was probably the most fucked-up paint job he had ever seen on a vehicle a person could actually drive. He said it looked like something some Mission cholo might be commandeering. A Mission cholo like him.

  “Yeah, okay, so what.” His response when I pointed that small detail out, later, when I knew what the word meant. Even so, he said, even he would not have thought that many different shades of black were possible.

  “I knew it ran though,” he said, “because you kept moving it.”