Then she rolled over and went to sleep with her face on an iron bed slat.
She woke in the early morning to a scratching sound, like rat claws on metal. She waited to see if it would stop. When it didn’t, she got up and slipped quietly into the passenger seat. The sound was gone. Then it started again. Outside it was getting light. She peered around the parking lot then saw a face. A skinny white man with fuzzy blond hair and big freckles, bug-eyed and hollow-cheeked, was sawing at the ropes with what looked like a car key. She slipped into the back where Essex was, picked up one of the detached rollers from the bed, then slammed it against the inside of the van where the man was sawing. Essex bolted upright, terrified.
Cheyenne checked the damage outside. One rope was sawed halfway through.
“Jesus. We’re going to have to tie it up all over again.”
Essex looked at the greenway of bushes and thin trees behind the rest-area bathrooms.
“What was his plan?” he asked. “Drag it into the woods?”
“He was trying to cut five strands of one-inch rope with a key. He didn’t have a plan.”
But that wasn’t true because she could see the plan too—a gleaming cage with a slatless frame. A sodden mattress on the forest floor, grass blades growing through the rails. King of the Brass Bed, he stands. In his hand, a goblet of acetone, his keys, a scourge, his scepter, a road flare, a ring of rock salt and Sudafed encircling the marriage bed over which he lords.
“We’re a magnet for bad ideas,” she said.
They relashed the ropes and the day heated as they drove the upper Midwest. They stopped for frozen burritos at a gas station and took turns watching the van. Cheyenne bought blue Gatorade but was too freaked by the color to drink it and poured it out.
* * *
—
Moving west, their meth-head problems got worse. In a gas station on the outskirts of Chicago they made the mistake of running to use the restroom at the same time and came out and found screws all over the ground from where someone had tried to detach a rail and slide it down under the ropes.
They crossed the Mississippi around dinner and pulled into a family restaurant. They parked the van right in front and asked to be seated by a window. They never took their eyes off it for more than a second, but when they went to check the ropes they found saw marks on one of the legs.
The next day, sun-dried and crack-lipped, they drove until noon without saying or hearing a word of human speech. The first person to talk to them was a short dirty man with metal teeth who offered them $100 for the bed while they were putting gas in the tank. They didn’t say anything to the man and just got back out onto the interstate.
“Those were homemade teeth,” said Cheyenne after a few minutes.
“They don’t usually come in that shape.”
Cheyenne dug out her phone to check for messages.
“Have you talked to Livy? Does she know I’m coming home?”
“She’s in Alaska. Fishing. I’m not supposed to get into details.”
“What do you mean?”
“Try her yourself.”
“I have.” Cheyenne shifted onto her other hip.
“Are you still mad?” he asked.
“No, I deserved it. But I do consider all debts resolved.”
“What are you going to do when you get back?”
“I’m going to spend a week in bed and touch everything that’s mine and doesn’t belong to some guy and figure it out after.”
Essex drummed on the steering wheel with his thumb. “Livy sold your bed,” he said.
Cheyenne shrugged. “It was just a futon. I got it from the Buy Nothing people.”
Essex looked pained. “She sold the rest of your records and books too. I tried to keep a few of your favorites, but she found them. Everything’s gone.”
She stared at him like he was a talking lobster.
They hit the channeled scablands. Their final night they took turns staying on watch. The rest area was filled with eighteen-wheelers, running motors and torn mud flaps, amber running lights. Both Cheyenne and Essex were restless in the cold desert wind that whistled through the van. In the morning when she was checking the ropes, Cheyenne saw that the two big brass bed knobs on the headboard were gone. They had been unscrewed in the night. She kicked the side of the van. Essex came out to see what was happening.
“No one is ever going to want this bed. It’s massively damaged and missing things and will never be what it was.”
“Hold on, it’s not that bad.”
“It’s not worth anything to those fucking people if it’s not perfect. I know them. They’re like that. You have to be perfect. God. We’re doing this for nothing. Jackson gave me his family’s bed and I can’t even keep it in one piece.” She slammed her forearm onto the side of the van. “Fuck!” she screamed.
“Stop doing that, it’s stupid.”
“There’s not going to be a fresh start, not even a small one.”
He reached for a lock of her hair. She grabbed his wrist to push it away but he shook her off.
“You have cheese in your hair and I’m trying to get it out.”
She dropped her hands.
“I think it may be gum. But you don’t chew gum, do you?”
He got the cheese out of her hair, which turned out to be peanut butter.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
Her bones turned to lead. “Please don’t tell me anything,” she said. “There’s nothing I need to know that I don’t know already.”
“We’ve always been close. You know me like no one else.”
“Don’t. Just leave it.”
She slipped sideways, buying space between them.
“You know how you love people,” he said, “and feel responsible for them but how loyalty isn’t always good? Like how I’m loyal to you and it isn’t always good. But it’s because we understand each other. We’re special.”
She closed her eyes to brace for what she knew was coming.
“I joined the marines,” he said.
She let out a breath and laughed. “You’re too old. There’s no way they would take you.”
“I leave for boot camp in two days.”
Her eyes locked on him but her expression was predatory.
“The good news is I can help you out once I start getting paid,” he said.
She started to shake. “What have you done?” Her voice scraped the words, the iron in her blood shivered, she laughed again. “Nothing? You have nothing to say.”
She began to circle him. His shoulder blades knit together.
“What the hell do you think you’re joining? You won’t get a bank account because you think the interest goes to the NSA.” Her voice rose. “You don’t even think we should have agriculture! I’ve been in more fights than you have. If someone shot at you, you’d apologize to them.”
He showed his palms and stepped back. “Isn’t it better to have someone like me there than some psycho?” he said.
“You think this is a joke. That’s what you think? A joke.”
“That’s not what I was saying.”
“The president’s own. Do you know what that means? They kill you first. Call them,” she said.
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Say you made a mistake and you can’t come. Tell them you’re useless because it’s true. Tell them you took a sheet of acid and thought you were in a movie where you actually gave a fuck about international politics!” Her voice was turning into something he’d never heard come out of a human; it soared, half growl, half whistle; she shouted, “You can’t even bring yourself to hunt!”
She stopped and looked around. Seeing a trash can a few feet away she walked over and knocked off the metal lid. She saw a nest of beer bottles at th
e bottom. She grabbed one and walked over to Essex and smashed it at his feet.
“What are you doing?” he said.
She went back to the can and grabbed a second bottle. Essex, who had come out without his shoes on, pressed himself against the van. She threw the bottle at his feet. A trucker rolled down his window and threatened to call the cops.
“You’re going to get us arrested,” said Essex.
She found and smashed a third bottle.
“Why are you doing this?” she hissed. She stepped in at arm’s length to him. “What the fuck are you thinking?”
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t look at her. “I’ve got nothing going on. I want to know what I’ve got in myself. I can’t tell. I could be anybody.”
“And you can’t think of any other way to figure that out? You can’t think of anything? Like martial arts. Like hiking the Appalachian Trail. Spend a year alone in a cabin without water. Track a fucking bear!”
He raised his head and dropped his shoulders. His resistance gone, he looked at her.
“All those things are great, Cheyenne. But this only takes a signature.”
She stepped in until she was six inches from his face. Her skin was the color of roses and her eyes were bronze. Every bottle she broke was a universe ending.
24 One Good Reason
KIRSTEN HEARD THAT CHEYENNE was back in Seattle from Essex, not from Cheyenne. She texted to say Cheyenne should come over for dinner once she got settled. Cheyenne’s reply was polite and noncommittal. Kirsten sent back a large red heart, but only because there wasn’t an emoji for mythic ambivalence.
Before Essex had left to get Cheyenne, Kirsten made him promise to stop by before boot camp even though she’d already said goodbye to him three times. She was hoping for a stroke of genius, some indestructible argument to keep him from going, but every reason she offered was met with a shrug. It was like he was twelve again. Saying nothing, changing nothing, shuffling around. The image of him at that time was still vivid; Essex, already big, sitting on the couch, shoulders caved, feet on the ground, eyes on the coffee table, knees up to his face—when had he turned into such a fucking follower?
“What happens if you change your mind?” she’d asked him. “Things don’t always feel how you think they’re going to feel.”
“I don’t think the marines care much about how I feel,” he’d answered and then given her a little smile. “I also don’t care much about how I feel right now. I’m going in circles.” And she could see that he was.
She was too. At night, she was sure something was very wrong with her and she would start to sweat lightly as a kind of panic set in. The feeling was more akin to guilt than fear, as if she had done something very wrong and everyone was about to find out. In the daytime, it was gone. If something were truly wrong with her, she’d know it. It wouldn’t be a mystery and she didn’t need the medical-industrial complex to prove it.
She opened the door after Essex had left to let the breeze in. It was hot for summer in the Pacific Northwest and the blackberries on the bush by the parking lot were fully ripe. Livy said the berries in Alaska were sweeter and bigger. She couldn’t imagine that being true. She wondered if Livy had talked to Cheyenne.
A week from now her health-care coverage would kick in and she would have her first doctor’s appointment. She had promised Margaret that she would get all the tests her high premiums, slim paycheck, and $10,000 deductible would allow. By then Essex would be covered in mud and getting screamed at; Cheyenne would be wandering around avoiding her; Livy would be out in the Bering Sea chasing security, surrounded by salmon, covered in salt.
25 Egypt, Again
CHEYENNE STOOD in the front yard of Neighborsbane, waiting. Jackson’s bed was fully assembled on the lawn. She’d advertised as an estate sale to draw more buyers. The scrap-metal guys were already circling. One, a man with white Brillo hair in thrashed overalls, pulled over in a tiny red truck piled high with refrigerators and offered her fifty bucks. The guy across the street had a brother looking for a bed who would probably give her $300 he said, but she was holding out for the antiques freaks.
The first wave came. Their alabaster skin in black Victorian clothing, they stretched forth hands with Georgian rings to touch the bedposts and frame. Where are the bed knobs? Are those…saw marks? They clicked painted fingernails on the headboard and offered her $1,000 but she couldn’t stomach the thought of giving them her marriage bed. The price is fixed at $2,000, she said, and they floated away like driftwood.
She almost sold the bed twice but each time she could not imagine letting the buyer have it. By lunch the estate-sale folks were gone and the scrap-metal guys were back. Would she take $100? Cash right now.
Then a man in a brown vintage suit came up the street looking for the sale. Behind him several trucks laden with future scrap metal converged.
The man in the brown suit crossed the yard. “How much for the bed?” he asked.
The scrap-metal guy parked in the middle of the street and jumped out.
“Two thousand,” said Cheyenne. “It’s an heirloom. Totally irreplaceable.”
The man examined the frame. “Okay, I’ll go two thousand.”
“I’ll give you one-fifty cash,” yelled the guy with Brillo hair, huffing across the grass.
The man in the brown suit took out his checkbook. He was offering her a kind of freedom. Starter money, an edge on the coming hustle. A little bit of grace and dignity. But her mind strayed to magic. The magic of being all in. The magic of being unafraid. Looking at the check she counted up all the different freedoms he was making possible: the freedom to leave or stay, the freedom of food preferences—but Cheyenne didn’t care about freedom. What she wanted was liberation. She’d fucked up. She’d let everyone go in her life again. The man held out the check. Cheyenne reached past him and plucked three fifty-dollar bills from Brillo guy’s hand.
“Take it,” she said. “Melt it down.”
* * *
—
Cheyenne went back inside and up to Essex’s old room. It came with a stained mattress, purple and red walls with silver trim, a window that looked out on sewer work, and no sign that he had ever lived there.
There may have been a better way to persuade Essex to stay out of the marines than throwing bottles at him. There may have been a better way to apologize to Jackson for dragging him through her indecision than by having lots of sex then leaving again. There might have been a better way to reconnect with Livy than destabilizing her life by making her go on a road trip she couldn’t afford.
All that remained of Cheyenne’s personal things, which Essex had attempted to rescue, was a paperback edition of The Guinness Book of World Records. Livy had apparently used it as a doorstop to carry out the rest.
DOG WITH THE LONGEST TONGUE, LARGEST GATHERING OF NATURAL REDHEADS, MOST BEER MATS FLIPPED AND CAUGHT, MOST MOUSETRAPS RELEASED ON TONGUE, MOST ENTRIES IN A 2-PERSON PANTOMIME ANIMAL RACE
—though 37 seemed low…
GREATEST DISTANCE FLOWN IN A WING SUIT. FASTEST TIME FOR DUCT-TAPING A PERSON TO A WALL. LARGEST STRUCTURE BUILT BY A TERRESTRIAL MAMMAL
—setting aside the Boeing factory, the Target warehouse, and the Berlin hangar for giant airships because one thing is obvious; the world is full of people with ambition.
BEST EMPIRE
—Egypt, again.
She looked at a picture of the beautiful black drag queen sporting the World’s Longest Fingernails. Below was a footnote about the former champion who had held the record for decades but lost her nails in a tragic automobile accident. She had never been outgrown, but had reigned since the book’s inception, each curling nail fascinatingly grotesque. The editors’ reluctance to let her go touched Cheyenne. As if they could not bear to print an edition without her. She was no longer titled, but it was not her fault—and anywa
y if you blame yourself for every wreck that happens, even those you know you caused, you’ll go crazy.
Selling the bed for $150 was not a triumph. It was not a chariot. It was not Roman, like victory. It was Greek. Like fate. The Universe had not broken open and rewarded her for boldness over grace. From the second the scrap-metal man banged the brass bed apart to strap it onto his truck, Cheyenne knew she had made a mistake. Jackson had cut off her phone plan and she had no credit for another. She’d sold the phone but that just bought a bag of groceries and a bus pass. The temp agencies she had signed up with the first time she’d come back had marked her as unreliable, and all she’d been able to find was a part-time minimum-wage job as a hostess in a chain restaurant where everyone, including the manager, was younger than she was.
She renegotiated terms with her landlord-roommate, Lester Minus. She would pay him $2 for every hour she worked. She would supply the pay stubs as proof. In return he would let her stay, under certain conditions. He could rent her room out on a nightly basis to travelers while she slept on the couch. She would receive a 20% cut of the profits. However, since she was also, in effect, renting the couch, 5% would go toward that, which left her with 15% on the room.
All boats rise.
26 Physics
ESSEX HAD THIRTY-SIX HOURS. He wanted to see the Section 8 housing projects where he had grown up. Passing through the parts of town with playgrounds and grocery stores, it started to rain. He walked on the thin dirt footpath along an arterial road, between bushes and intermittent guardrails, every passing car spraying him with water. It went on like this for a mile. Not all miles are the same. The mile between you and digging a ditch is shorter than the one between you and the body of someone you love—and that mile is different from the one between you and the person who needs money as much as you do, that you can’t pay back. The mile he was walking felt like a combination of all three.
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 13