The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  Cheyenne heard a sound that turned her lungs to ice. A growl hit her ears and vibrated through her body and she didn’t need to look to see what it was; it was genetic. She froze. There was a second growl and adrenaline surged. She bolted forward into the desert in a full run until she heard the woman laughing.

  “He’s just saying hi.”

  Cheyenne turned. She hadn’t seen the cage. Inside, two full-grown tigers paced. One brushed against the bars, scratching its face; it chuffed and made a whirring sound, which was a kind of purr that died with each breath.

  “What is this place?”

  “Originally it was a whorehouse. There was an air base nearby. Then carnies bought it, which is where the tigers came from. The cats were an experiment of ours that got out of hand. We’re sort of a stop-off for illegals. Hey, you’re not FBI, are you?”

  “God no, I—”

  “Just joshing,” said the woman.

  A man came out of one of the rooms. “Whose car is out there?”

  “It overheated.”

  “Better get it off the road before some teenage cholo hits it.”

  “This is Pedro,” said the woman.

  Pedro helped her roll the Toyota into the compound and filled the radiator with a hose. Cheyenne turned it over but nothing happened. Pedro lifted the hood and had her try it again.

  He phoned a friend, speaking in Spanish.

  “Beer?” said the woman. “It looks like you had a rough night.”

  Cheyenne glanced down. In addition to coffee stains and engine grease there was still blood on her shirt at the hem. She went to wash up. When she emerged a few minutes later, three men had gathered around the Toyota. They were drinking vodka and talking about the car in Spanish. No one touched the engine, just passed the bottle. Cheyenne recognized a few words—water, crazy, heat, asshole. An old man held up his hand and everyone shut up. He started to whistle and circle the car then reached into the engine, unscrewed a part, and tossed it into the yard where a startled cat hissed at it.

  He looked at Cheyenne. “It’s fine now.”

  The others clapped him on the back but the old man brushed them away.

  Cheyenne looked dubious.

  “Really,” said Pedro. “He’s always right.”

  She got in and the car started.

  * * *

  —

  The sun went down behind her and cool night air whipped through the windows. Coming into El Paso she took an exit for a filling station close to the freeway off-ramp on a frontage road with few working streetlamps. She pulled up to a pump before realizing the station was closed. She pulled out but the car stalled. When she turned the key in the ignition, it clicked. She was going nowhere. Reclining her seat, the emotional damage of the past twenty-four hours that had made her mind race finally overloaded and tripped a shut-off valve. She was a blank.

  An hour later she was thrown sideways as the Toyota was hit by a car doing a fast three-point turnaround in the lot. The driver hadn’t seen her until he backed into the front of her car. The impact knocked her both over and sideways so that the stick shift nearly cracked the back of her ribcage. A second later there was a tire screech as the car squealed off and everything was quiet again.

  Cheyenne got out and looked at the tire marks. Her heart gave a little. There was a large dent between the midline and the driver’s side headlight of Kirsten’s car. The rubber part of the fender had been torn away and was hanging detached. She got back in and laid down again.

  Someone knocked on the roof of the car and she jumped up. A young Latino man in eyeliner with an ankh around his neck leaned into her window and motioned for her to roll it down.

  “Lady, you can’t be here. It’s four in the morning. We’re closed.”

  She rolled the window down. “My car doesn’t work.”

  “Your problems are yours, not mine.”

  “The starter clicks. I had someone look at it today but I think it was more of a healing than a repair.”

  The man drummed his fingers on his collarbone; he had black fingernail polish with little flower decals. She pointed at them to say something nice but he shook his head.

  “Call someone to come get you,” he said. “Call your insurance company.”

  “I don’t have insurance. Can’t I just sleep here?”

  “Absolutely not. I’m meeting someone. It’s business. I can’t have you around.”

  A car came down the frontage road. The young man’s eyes tracked it as it passed.

  “Okay, come on, you’re going to have to wait in the store,” he said. The man opened the car door and waited.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  “Let’s just get inside.”

  “I also would love a glass of water.”

  “There’s water inside.”

  She grabbed her backpack and followed him to the convenience store, which was adjacent to a garage festooned with razor wire and lit solely by glowing beer fridges.

  “I’m going to lock you in for a little bit and then we can figure this all out.”

  Cheyenne was about to remind him that she had to go to the bathroom when the car came back. The man shooed her into the corner by the milk cooler and pointed to a chair.

  “Don’t go anywhere until I come get you,” he said, and left without locking her in.

  She saw the car roll by and a white guy get out with a duffel bag. She heard them talking outside about border crossings and shift changes. Cheyenne was cold and wanted to get a sweatshirt from her car. She slipped out but as she came around the side of the building, a spear sailed by within inches of her head and sank two feet into the door of the men’s bathroom.

  “Holy shit!” said the white guy who threw it.

  “Was that meant for me?” said the guy with the eyeliner. “Are you trying to kill me with a fucking spear?”

  “I’m just trying to prove it’s real Aztec!”

  Cheyenne turned and walked back into the convenience store. She was finally sick of caring about shit that didn’t matter.

  She watched the sun rise through the store windows. There had to be meaning in this. Why else would it be so stupid?

  The young man came back in and made her coffee. “We have hazelnut cream.”

  “I need a starter,” she said.

  Half an hour later one was in her car.

  “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. We almost killed you with a spear.”

  She started to back the Toyota out.

  “Wait.” He leaned in through the window. “Don’t forget, you’re in Texas. Don’t stop or get out if you don’t have to. They’ll fine you hard for driving without insurance. That dent looks like a hit-and-run and with the out-of-state plates, you’re cop bait.”

  “Don’t worry.” She smiled. “I can’t go to jail.” She pulled out the ashtray so he could see the half-dollar. “I’m riding with a Kennedy.”

  He started to laugh.

  “What?” she said.

  “You might want to rethink that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Lady. You’re in Texas.”

  41 Census

  THE NAVIDAD RIVER cuts through the black prairie lands before emptying into a lake damned and full of catfish. On both sides of the river, stands of live oak twist and shelter, and small painted churches dedicate themselves to the patron saints of Slavs.

  In the 1840s, Czech immigrants, driven by failed European revolutions and poverty, trickled then poured in. They arrived at the port at Galveston, a scourge of liars, putting false names and false homelands on their documents, a contagion of temporary workers, no longer Slavs but Germans, no longer peasants but blacksmiths and butchers, they pooled in south Texas, the unassimilated papists, Moravians pretending to be Bohemians
, liars.

  On the edge of the Civil War in the freefall of Bleeding Kansas, a group of Moravians wandered north. They hadn’t gone far when it started to rain. They took cover under an ancient oak just as the water crashed down. Looking out through the branches, they saw no reason to leave. Settling there, they built the town of Dubina, Texas. Dubina, “oak grove” in the mother tongue, the oak, sacred to the Slavic god of thunder. Today Dubina is a specter, having been razed by fire. Its history, however, has been preserved in the University of Texas archives and uploaded into the decentralized databases of modern ancestry websites. You can see their names in census taker’s neat cursive. A woman of either twenty-two or twenty-seven, born in Bohemia or Moravia or Austria, claiming ten or twelve children, half of whom are dead. For the record, the census taker says, tell me where you lost them? Did you eat them? Olga, Elisabeth, Frank, Anna, Catherine, Joseph, Walter—where are they? No, she says, I did not lose them. I did not eat them. They are under the black prairie. They are in the mud of the Brazos tangled in cottonmouths.

  * * *

  —

  Crossing Texas, Cheyenne slipped into a dream state where her body drove but her mind, her mind…Over the last four years every idea she’d had about who she might turn out to be spiraled to the ground. Justine, it seemed, might have gone through something similar.

  I meditated on charnel grounds and got sick of my own daydreams. I want to be a blank. I want who I am to have nothing to do with anyone else.

  She had stayed in the desert for several months…I look around in every place I go and see the same people—Ponytail Guy and Dr. Massage and That Chick Who Can’t Stop Blubbering. They say there are two kinds of truth—relative and absolute. The world being full of stupid people is absolute…and eventually went into silent retreat.

  Cheyenne had never seen anything as wide and flat as West Texas. Once she reached the plains, the sky touched the ground everywhere. She passed decommissioned oil rigs, machinery rusted into place. Coming into Odessa there were functioning wells, hundreds. Rigs pounded the earth methodically, a horrifying sight. They looked like dying black cattle yanked by their heads to the ground. She started, held her breath as she passed as if it were a graveyard.

  In Abilene, she heard about the storm with hurricane-force winds sitting on top of Fort Worth. According to the cashier at a Mexican restaurant that let her use the bathroom, roads were flooding. It would go on for the next twenty-four hours. She thought about waiting it out but also considered what the man at the gas station had said about not stopping any longer than necessary and turned south toward San Antonio and east again.

  Outside of San Antonio she saw a state trooper. She decided to turn off and see if she could find a parallel route. The land began to roll in hillocks, green again. She could feel the pressure dropping. Cumulus clouds formed in gray, pink, bronze—the colors of sunset. There were only ranches and farms around now. She looked for a place to pull over. She saw a stand of oaks off the road by a tractor turnaround. Water from a drainage ditch fed the underbrush, which buzzed with insects and whistled with birds darting in the tall grass. It was going to rain; the air was an electrical field; she was not separate from it. Rain. Rain hard. Make me eight years old again. Lightning shock my heart; make me cry for real. She saw drops fall on the road and smelled wet concrete. She thought she might choke from relief. What was it? This feeling.

  She parked and got out. She wanted to feel the air and electricity on her skin. Then the rain really came. She grabbed the peanut butter and bread and ran for the oak trees. Under one, she found a spot to watch the clouds move. Branches touched the ground around her. She felt something sharp. It was a metal plaque embedded at the root: Heritage Tree. A thousand years old. Not ceremonial, a surveyor’s mark. Do not cut. Do not sever. But the tree had grown around the plaque; it has folded it into its roots and buried it in soil.

  The rain bounced off the road. Glorious. Don’t stop. May singing atoms crown us all. The sky turned to jade and the clouds merged into a giant wall coming toward her. There was a roar of hail. The Toyota was getting pummeled. She saw the wall of clouds descend in fangs biting the earth. Lightning struck and flashed in a cloud. She began to count. At three, thunder boomed. A second later a barrage of hail drowned all sounds.

  She could try to outrun the storm but she didn’t think she could see enough to drive. Another sideways strike lit the road white. The cloud lifted leaving only filaments. The winds died. The storm slowed coming across the fields. The hail turned into a hard rain. She stepped out from the protection of the grove but something else was happening. The cloud began to turn.

  There was a gap between what she saw and what it meant. Then it clicked: tornado. The word changed shape as she watched the cloud, not a box but a cage, not a cage but a net, not a net, something ephemeral and utterly incapable of containing the experience.

  The wide trunk of the ancient oak strained—this tree has been here for a thousand years, this tree was here when Vikings came, this tree lived at the time of the Toltec, this tree, this tree—and there was a new sound. In the field across the road a twister touched down and spun earth into clouds; it tore a trench through the adjacent field; it hit a herd of cattle and one fell, broken, to the ground a few feet away from where she hid. She saw another come down not far from the first and threw up into the dirt. The ancient tree seemed to lift. She could feel the great roots loosening. The tornado jumped across the road and came toward the oak grove. Everything got dark then light and flickered like a silent film. She saw the tornado pass in front of her. It picked up the Toyota and spun it into the air. The debris cloud was everywhere then. In the jet-engine sound, her mind went blank. She let go of the roots and closed her eyes and covered her head with her arms. There was a massive crack as a bolt of lightning struck the field behind the trees. She was now under the storm. A boom of thunder, then hard rain. It came in sheets through the oak branches, beating her back as she crouched with her knees tucked, hands over her head. Then there was only the sound of the rain, deafening.

  She raised her head but she couldn’t see. At the bottom of her ribcage she felt a sharp pain and realized it was the vat of peanut butter. The tree was unharmed but for one large branch twisted off at the joint. As the rain stopped, she could see the debris scattered across the two-lane highway. Water flowed over the road, which was now a river shaped by branches and dead cows, torn siding and tin. The Toyota was nowhere.

  She couldn’t feel her legs. She needed to find the car. The wind blew in one direction now. It was still loud but different, like a chopper landing; it beat slowly on her eardrums. She walked along the center line of the road where it was highest. She kept her head tucked but felt the wind on her chest. She thought she’d seen the car go this way but really it had just gone up. She found it in the middle of a large field. Wading in, mud kept sucking off her shoes so she gave up and took them off. Sharp reeds cut her feet.

  The bumper of the Toyota was peeled off and all the glass was gone. The front of the car had been crushed to half its size. The front doors had popped off. She didn’t see the driver’s side door anywhere.

  She saw her backpack under the front seat on the passenger side. She climbed through a window socket but couldn’t reach the strap. She had to get on her belly and lie flat across the backseat to get to the strap but it still wasn’t coming loose. She squirmed down so that her face was against the carpet pressed into the glittering chips of safety glass. Working from there, she freed the backpack. Putting the strap in her teeth, she lifted herself back out of the car window until she could swing her one leg down and climb out.

  Going back to town made the most sense. But then she noticed a dot on the horizon half a mile away, miles closer than town.

  Cutting through fields she came to a long unpaved driveway that led to a farm and followed it, though it was mostly a creek now.

  The farm came into f
ull view. But it wasn’t a farm. It was a tiny castle.

  42 Metal Slovakia

  THE CASTLE WAS BORDERED by an honest-to-god moat. On the other side of it was a wall blocking her view of the lower half of the castle, clearly unfinished. There was Tyvek on the main tower and plywood had been used as a bridge over the moat, a trench filled with storm water and displaced snakes, and she saw one on the mud bank—a copperhead or a cottonmouth; she’d never seen anything but a garter snake.

  On the other side of the plywood bridge was a wooden gate. She tried to open it but she had the vat of peanut butter in one arm and the other gripped a bag of water-logged bread.

  “Hello,” she called, “is anybody here?”

  She thought she’d seen a car around back so she followed the wall, made of gray stone, carefully mortared, with built-in arrow slits at head height every ten feet. The moat ended and she saw the shell of an ancient blue Volvo in the grass; its hood leaned against the perimeter wall near a gap in the stone, through which she saw a trailer.

  “Hello,” she called, stepping into the castle yard. “Hello,” coming to the trailer.

  A light went on inside. A man near sixty opened the door. He seemed to have been sleeping. His hair was long and in a ponytail at the top of his head, salt and pepper cascading from his crown in all directions.

  “Wow, man. You are really out in this. That’s crazy.” He looked up at the sky and pushed the trailer door open. “Come in. She might come back. If she does we go to the castle.”

  He stepped aside so Cheyenne could enter.

  There was a love seat with a crocheted throw. A stained-glass bird dangled from fishing line by the window. A blue Formica table was bolted into the floor surrounded by an orange half-circle couch. The thin bang of the tin door closing behind her as he let it go woke her up. She couldn’t remember how she got there.

  He invited her to sit.

  “What shit is this? Fifteen years I am here. One tornado. Not this crazy end-of-the-world shit. Hold on. I look outside the wall and see where she is.”