The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  “Because we’re Chernobyl wolves.”

  “We eat radiation grass. We’re special.”

  She crossed her arms for warmth. “I do love you and I will miss you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  “Wait,” she said, “what song is that? I know that song.”

  He picked up the phone and listened. “I don’t.”

  “Turn it up.”

  An electric piano played simple chords under high male voices overlapping. Sometimes, sometimes, they sang through the phone’s small speaker. The song was only half a song, though, and never really got going.

  The host returned.

  “That was for our beloved friend Kirsten, who passed yesterday at her home. I see the phones are lighting up. We have a listener on the phone from— Really? From all the way down in Cougar, Washington. Hello, caller, you are on the air.”

  Cheyenne grabbed the phone and shut off the stream. “I don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say about her.”

  “It might help.”

  “I just want this moment to be ours. Why does it have to be so public?”

  Essex shrugged. “She wanted people to know how she saw the world.”

  “Anybody she ever talked to would have known that.”

  Her eyes were full of tears again. She looked up and they ran down into her ears. It tickled so she wiped them away and looked back at him.

  “I don’t even know who we are to each other without her,” she said. “Are you even my brother without her?”

  Cheyenne watched him settle back into a slouch. The curve of his shoulders was so familiar in so many ways through so many lenses.

  “You would tell me,” he said, “if there was something I could say to make you marry me. You would tell me. You wouldn’t make me guess.”

  She threw her arms wide and shouted, “Say: ‘I can’t live without you!’ ”

  A startled bird flew off a bench.

  Essex whispered into her ear, “I can’t live without you.”

  “God, I was joking. Nobody should ever say that. It’s super creepy.’ ”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not like anyone even knows how they’re going to feel a year from now.”

  “That’s why they should say it. They know how they feel now.”

  She put her hand up.

  “No,” he said, “hear me out. People want credit for being honest but they’re lying about the one thing they truly feel in that moment. They’re cowards. They’re afraid of their own emotions. I’m not.”

  He spun her toward him and she started laughing.

  “I can’t live without you,” he said.

  Now she was laughing hard and couldn’t stop.

  “Try it. It’ll be great. I won’t hold you to it. Promise,” he said.

  “I can’t live without— No!” She pushed him back. “It’s too stupid to even say. I get hit by a bus or leave you for a student I met at a bar and you do live without me.”

  “Exactly. That’s what I mean. You lose nothing.”

  “Because it’s lying!”

  “Okay,” he said. “How about I can’t live the same without you.”

  She weighed it. “But you can say that about anyone you love.”

  “Yeah exactly. And some people more than others.”

  Cheyenne was too close to his body, in the realm of its heat. She moved back and started crawling around the blanket, throwing things back in their bags. She picked up the little brass Kali statue and threw it into her own bag.

  “That’s supposed to go to Livy,” said Essex.

  “She can find me and ask for it back.”

  She also threw Livy’s I Ching coins into her bag and reached for the Ain’t No Lovin’ T-shirt but Essex stopped her.

  “That’s mine. You’re not taking it. I’m serious.”

  She sat back hard on her heels. “Fine, I don’t care.”

  Her lips were pale and there were pale blue streaks under her eyes. There was sand in her eyelashes at the corners and the edges of her nostrils were red.

  “What are you going to do after I leave?” he asked. “I won’t be able to help much longer. Is there anyone you can go to?”

  “I’m an heiress. I’ll be fine.”

  He put his hand on her head, fingers pointed down. “Your invisible tiara.”

  “Thank you.”

  “At least you have a car now.”

  “Which I can live in if I need to.” She kicked out her legs and pedaled them to warm up. “I’ll probably squat in the apartment till they kick me out. Get a job. Try and figure out if there’s something I can do that’s of use to anyone that doesn’t make me want to shoot myself.”

  She smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “It might go badly for me,” he said.

  “They’re not going to kill you. You don’t mean enough to anyone and neither does Jared.”

  “I could be in jail for a long time.”

  “Let’s see what happens,” she said.

  He got to his knees and waited for the blood to flow back into his legs. “We have to go.”

  “Let’s wait for dawn,” she said.

  “It’s the Pacific Northwest. Dawn never comes.”

  She laughed. “The gray lightens.”

  “Not for another hour.”

  She didn’t move and wouldn’t look at him.

  “Cheyenne, I don’t have another hour.”

  75 The Fears

  THEY LOST A SAILOR three days before crossing the equator. The weather wasn’t rough. Still he went over. Livy saw the whole thing. He slipped in the headrig as the ship lurched in a sudden wave, the Irish sailor, lost forever to the fears.

  It was the sailor’s death that convinced Livy that Marne was right. They did need a ritual for crossing the equatorial line. Initially she’d balked, and yet when the Irish sailor went over what had they done? They wore ship and made a show of looking. And if that ritual had meaning then why not all others? But there were no shellbacks among them, no one who had been where they were. They were, each of them, new, crossing the line together.

  “Keep it short and don’t kill anybody. We still need to sail,” said Livy.

  Someone laughed. It was nerves. They already felt the absence of the Irish sailor, when they’d had to brace the main yard after the search, when they had to dig and hold without him.

  Just south of what Livy guessed was the equator, they gathered on deck between the fore and mainmast waiting for the show. The ritual was a hodgepodge of Naval Academy hearsay, nautical-themed sports hazing, and community theater gags. The Lord of Misrule strutting as Diva Mermaid, demanding service, stripping dignity. There was one part of the ceremony that worked on Livy. Toward the very end, after the mad laughter of personal shame, Marne reappeared as Queen Davy Jones standing on the jack lines above the deck; she warned of the sea, of its chest below, and of the deep fall bodies take to its floor, floating, she said, down, slow, like summer leaves to the ground. A chill ran through each of them, the lost sailor everywhere.

  Livy makes an entry in the ship’s log. Star date: somewhere in time. Location: orbiting planet earth on a large body of water.

  The wind that pushed the swell that took the sailor turned out to be the last breeze felt for many days. They moved forward for a time, but it was only inertia and proof of a frictionless sea. Doldrums stretched in all directions. With enough diesel for the backup generator but not enough to drive the ship, they began to float, torn sails and missing parts, peeling paint bubbled and flaking in patches to reveal the bright yellow stripe beneath, a toy adrift in a giant tub.

  Late at night when the ship was silent, Livy charted. But she could only review past positions in the log and guess. Looking out a
cross the ocean, she saw vast galaxies reflected. The horizon seam of sea and sky vanished. A starlit lighting bowl, the ship no longer traveled on the outside surface of the sphere but upside down and backward on the inside. Even if she had run the engine, even if she had spent the last of the diesel to move, they would still be nothing but a tiny tractor inching across hundreds of miles of space.

  Raleigh came up beside her. He shot the stars with his sextant, also lost.

  On the eighth day of doldrums when the sun was highest the crew sheltered under the tarp, ankles swollen and red, itching, bored, and international, they taught each other to curse in different languages, each sailor now a nation, they held terror at bay. Off the portside bow, Livy thought she saw a ripple, a whale perhaps, deep under, but said nothing. In these waters, even the flutter-kick of a frog’s leg would break the glass-like sea.

  Ship’s log: These doldrums have no end.

  Livy looks up into the equatorial sky. She sees a Japanese Zero. Its small-plane engine stutters. She blinks as it crosses the path of the sun. Running out of gas, the Zero circles down painting ensōs in carbons and hydrocarbons until it crashes into the sea, a twist of black smoke on the water. Looking to the south she sees the Galápagos yet lit by the fire of turtles burning in their shells.

  Ship’s log: Nothing is meant to be.

  * * *

  —

  After sunset, Livy climbed over the anchor, rode up onto the fife rail that ran around the foremast. Sarah came over and Livy stepped aside to make room for her on the post. We are lost, she wanted to say. We are charting by history and hearsay. I know how far we’ve come but not how close we are. Leaning against Sarah’s body, goldene medina, also a new world.

  The next day Sarah wandered the deck in a long-sleeved white gauze shirt. Running her hand along the pins that belayed lines slackening in the hot dry air. She stopped to kick a neatly ballantined halyard coil into a pile of spaghetti. Glancing up she saw a loose line shiver.

  “Wind!” she yelled.

  Everyone ran to see.

  “We should set the royals,” said Marne.

  Set the royals!

  Set the royals!

  Marne and a Dutch sailor laid aloft, scrambling up the shrouds to the crosstrees, dots at a hundred and twenty-five feet above. Sailors on deck secured and sent the royal yard, hoisting it with difficulty, their feet sliding when they tried to dig and hold. Once set, the royals puffed with air. Soon the breeze moved down and filled the topsails. They began to move again.

  Calculating wind speed and adjusting for current, tracing angles, Livy charted the best she could. Farther south, they caught the trade winds and the ship came to life, lines snapping, bowsprit harpooning waves. A whale was sighted two points off the starboard beam. It wasn’t close but when it sounded the water it displaced sent a swell that raised the ship, letting it smack back down onto the surface of the sea as the sailors cheered.

  But it was not a toothed whale but a lost baleen whale, swimming without location.

  * * *

  —

  After a week they sighted the oil well three points off the portside bow, a small black poke on the horizon. There was shouting and howling as if they were saved, as if they’d forgotten what they came to do. All afternoon the oil rig appeared and disappeared as the Neva sank in the troughs and rose on the crests. Sailors debated the merits of persuasion or hostage-taking. We have musket! We have cannon! Everyone laughed. Because they were not assailants. They were refugees arriving unasked on an island, which was not land but a symbol of it, stuttering in and out of time.

  76 Testament

  IN THE PARKING LOT, they dumped the trash. They got rid of the paper bags, which were damp now and on the verge of breaking, and Cheyenne wrapped hers and Livy’s things in the hippie scarf with the silver thread, knotted it, and put it in her backpack. They stood there between the cars, looking at each other. She could see him at eleven and at fourteen, all the things that change, all the things that don’t; he was sixteen passing for older, lost like a teenager, then twenty-two at her wedding and twenty-seven, driving Jackson’s brass bed across the country. He kicked her foot. She put the instep of her shoe against the instep of his.

  “You said I wanted you to be different than you are. I don’t.”

  “We’re all right.”

  Essex got in the rental and Cheyenne got in the Toyota. Turning it over, it wouldn’t start. She pumped the gas then tried again. Essex came over to her window. She tried to roll it down but it would only go partway.

  “Hang on.” She pressed against the pane and rolled simultaneously until she could get it down. “I need to grease the track.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I think it’s just the ignition switch not fully engaging,” she said. “Kore was like that.”

  “Kore?”

  “Mom’s red Subaru,” she said.

  She jiggled the steering wheel and tried to turn the key again.

  “What was the name of the one you lost in the tornado?”

  “It might have been something benign like Luna. She told me but I forgot. When we were little, she used to let us name the cars but then Livy and I would get in fights so she made us take turns. Livy named a car Shackleton.”

  Cheyenne turned the key and the Toyota rattled to life.

  * * *

  —

  On the side roads in the dark, she saw that one headlight shone straight, the other angled. The car pulled to the left and the brake pads were almost gone. Easy things to fix, especially with a manual. Her mother was a genius at knowing when a car was bound for the junkyard. She could tell five repairs away. They’d always take a bath on selling, though, because Kirsten felt compelled to tell every potential buyer all the things she thought might go wrong next.

  It was too much for Livy, even at ten years old.

  “Why do you have to say anything?” she said one night over dinner. “Just take the money and let them find out.”

  Kirsten’s eyes went wide and she snatched Livy’s dinner plate away and dumped her food in the trash. Livy started to cry.

  “Who do you think buys cars as shitty as ours?” Kirsten yelled. “People who don’t have a choice. Poor people like us.”

  Points for boldness and grace. Her mother, at least, knew when to cut her losses. Cheyenne either quit too early or too late. But Kirsten was like a samurai. One sword stroke with full confidence and she was out.

  * * *

  —

  Cheyenne’s mind began to wander. She drove by instinct, seeing the city that had once been there instead of the city that was. Beaten old diners and car washes with giant elephants. There had been a junkyard far out on the edge of town. She and Livy loved it because it was like a city made of cars. Broken-down or wrecked, stacked as high as tenement housing, dark alleys paved with shatterproof glass, it was where they went when a car was destined for scrap metal. Kirsten would pack sandwiches and they would limp the dying vehicle out there, stopping every few blocks. If the car didn’t drive, she’d get a friend to let her tie it to their back bumper with a slipknot around the hitch and they’d go slow on flat roads trying not to turn, with Kirsten steering and the two of them in the backseat howling like it was a ride.

  The glory would wear off on the long bus journey back. Livy looking over the driver’s shoulder after being told not to several times, Cheyenne switching seats and pestering strangers. Kirsten staring out the window like she wanted to run as fast and as far away as she could. She would get so distant that Cheyenne would get scared and sneak over to scratch her hand. Sometimes it took a second, but always, Kirsten would turn, looking first at Cheyenne as if she were a stranger, and she would smile and there was no distance between them.

  * * *

  —

  Cheyenne felt that way now. Like she wanted to drive a
nd never stop.

  She wondered what the real cost of getting the body back from the coroner was going to be. There might be storage fees at the county. There might also be fees around investigation if they thought the body was abandoned. Her gaze skated over the freeway. She blinked and saw iridescent pinpricks and halos. The cost-benefit analysis of body disposal? Weigh it against a feather.

  The airport was coming up. A few minutes later she exited, following the signs to rental return, and pulled into the stall next to Essex.

  He checked the backseat of the hybrid.

  “Are you going to come in?” he asked.

  “I’d rather just say goodbye here.” She pointed at the air traffic control tower. “See? The sky is lighter gray. We made it to dawn.”

  He kissed her forehead at her hairline.

  She squeezed his hand and he walked away. As he reached the edge of the parking lot, she saw him run his hand across the back of his neck and glance toward the control tower, then disappear. She leaned against the Toyota. Pulling her backpack off the floor of the car, she hunted for a leftover fritter inside, but there was none. She zipped up the pack and hugged it to her chest. She had a working car, a few weeks of dental, and, prior to eviction, a place for a month or two with dishes and clean clothes. More than she’d had of her own for a long time.

  Five moves from here? She didn’t know.

  Think of all the times you’ve been naked. You have a dollar. You have a magic rock. You have something someone said to you that you hold precious, a vague idea, a plan, nothing, you have nothing. Now think of all the times you’ve been wrong. You end up with a broken heart or chlamydia, a wristband and disposable slippers, you’re pregnant, you’re not.

  There’s no shame in freedom.

  Years of being embarrassed over nothing. Like everyone else could see. She shut the car door and began to walk before she even knew she’d made a decision. And her mother’s body? The coroner would search for next of kin. They would knock on electronic doors and find no one. You never give the Man what he wants. Eventually her mother’s body would be marked abandoned. They would burn her as an indigent, as a witch. But they would keep the receipt. And maybe it would find its way back to Cyril as a bill.