Jessie, Shawnee, and I walked past the park and along the road that runs beside the highway until we got to Jessie’s house, where music was blaring and a party was going on.
“It’s a party to celebrate nothing and everything,” I said. “It’s a party to celebrate my new fowl, this bird.”
“We were already here,” Jessie said. “We just went outside to give you the fowl. Be careful with it, though. Someone brought it here to my house. My own fowl’s so big now I can’t even carry it around like I used to. It scratches my skin. Claws at my mouth. I’ve heard it will knock out teeth if I’m not careful, so I have to keep my eye on it.”
“I have to watch it for him,” Shawnee said. “I’m the one who keeps it tame.”
“Mine won’t be that cruel,” I said. “I won’t feed it so much. I’ll let it nibble at my finger and peck on me as it grows, but I won’t let it get out of control. Not this fowl.”
“That’s what everyone says,” Shawnee told me. “That’s why I never took a fowl. Jessie offers one to me, but I haven’t ever taken it. Just look at Jessie’s fowl. The thing is so big it lives out back in a coop and shrieks in the morning and at night. It wakes him up shrieking. You have to feed it or it’ll attack you. I googled that shit once. Those fowls become aggressive and will charge you, and if you walk away or turn your back, it’ll attack. Fucking all around Albuquerque.”
Jessie was chewing on a straw. “You have to raise your arms and flap them so that it thinks you’re a bigger creature than it, and you gotta hope it goes passive.”
“My fowl won’t attack me,” I told them.
“Be careful with it. If you’re not careful with the fowl, it will want to be fed all the time and become angry.”
I took the fowl out and looked at it. Its beak was tiny, and it seemed to almost smile at me. What kind of fowl smiles? But mine did—or at least that was the way I saw it.
“Come inside,” Jessie said, but I declined. I wanted to enjoy the fowl myself, not share it with others. Others inside the party would want to see my fowl.
“No way am I going inside,” I said, and laughed a little. “I’m taking this fowl home.”
“Good luck,” they both said.
I unlocked my bicycle from his porch and rode it back home, where I would have to hide the fowl from Rae. She wouldn’t like the fowl, never. I steered my bike with one hand so I could check on the fowl in my jacket pocket. Its eyes were glowing in the dark as it looked up at me, smiling. I had a happy fowl, and it made me happy. It was fine right there in my pocket, with me protecting it, already grooming it. The fowl wasn’t trying to hurt me or make any noise at all. The fowl was so nice.
When I got back to the house, I hid the fowl in the bedroom in my dresser drawer so Rae wouldn’t find it. I told it good night and looked at it. The fowl had no odor whatsoever. It never made a sound, just breathed its chest in and out, breathing heavily for a tiny thing.
That night I wasn’t able to sleep because I kept thinking about the fowl. I took it out of the dresser drawer while Rae slept and stayed up all night in the living room with it, looking at it and touching it and letting it nibble and peck in my hand. I had no appetite and the thought of food made me feel sick to my stomach.
The most fun thing about the fowl was feeding it, and like most things, it grew quickly and became bigger, but it began to smell bad and shit and vomit in the house. The fowl was too big to hide from Rae, so I had to carry it with me to the park and leave it there. It tried to follow me, and when I picked it up and threw it, I must’ve injured it, because then I saw the fowl drag itself across the ground toward me. I ran away from it that night. I kept hiding from the fowl anytime I saw it in the park, but it always saw me and ended up back at my house, which frightened Rae and caused us to fight.
The only way I could get rid of the fowl was to ignore it. Eventually it went away, but never for good. Sometimes it returned, and whenever I saw it, I felt a pull at my heart to want to pick it up and hold it. I could never fully rid myself of the fowl, and there was something I loved about it, no matter how disgusting or how elated it made me feel.
WHEN I GOT HOME, Rae was still gone. I called her cell but got her voice mail. “It’s me,” I said. “Where are you?” I hung up. I couldn’t figure out if I was mad or sad. I didn’t know whether to be angry at myself or at Rae for ignoring my call. In the kitchen I drank the last of the wine. I looked through drawers for a pack of cigarettes but couldn’t find anything. Then I went into our bedroom, packed a duffel bag, and left.
I drove my shitty low-slung Oldsmobile to the El Cortez Motel. It was the motel where Rae and I used to stay sometimes, pretending we were somewhere far away. I wanted to call her on the motel phone and try to get her to come stay with me. The motel’s VACANCY sign flashed pink out front. Inside, I was certain the motel clerk recognized me. He chewed on a toothpick and wore a patch over one eye. His hands looked like my dad’s, dry and cracked with stubby fingers. Behind the front desk, the sign on the door read: MAN GER. All the motel doors opened to the empty parking lot. Nearby, a desolate highway stretched west through the plains.
“The door says manger,” I said. “Away in a manger.”
The clerk handed me the key to room 121 but never looked at me.
I walked down the row of doors until I got to my room, opened, and went inside. It smelled of old cigarette smoke and cleaner. I immediately went to the phone, which was the old rotary kind. I called Rae’s cell, and she answered.
“I’m at the El Cortez Motel,” I said.
“Why? Go back home.”
“Drive over here,” I said. “I’m sorry I smoked. It was because my mom called you. Drive over here.”
She was silent a moment. “No, you need to go home. You lied again. I told you I was leaving if you kept smoking that shit.”
“Please come to the motel.”
“My God, Edgar, I can’t even talk to you right now. I’m staying at Jessica’s tonight.”
She hung up, and I immediately called back. It went to her voice mail. I called again, and the same thing. I was a little high. I’d brought along a small duffel bag containing a bottle of a few oxycodone pills, aspirin, a tape recorder, a few cans of beer, and Rae’s broken sunglasses I had doctored with black tape. These were all the things I needed for the night. I took the sunglasses out and squeezed the tape on the handle to make sure it hadn’t loosened. I put them on a moment, then took them off and set them on the desk beside the bed.
I wanted to talk to someone. A roadside motel like the El Cortez was not a good place to feel lonely. The room was a mirror image of all the other rooms, the center of nothingness, dim and warm despite the air conditioner blowing. It felt like an isolated presence, welcoming me. But I liked the room dark—no light entered from the drawn curtains, which were green. The lamp threw a jagged and intimidating shadow across the pale wall, and the carpet, partially stained, was avocado.
In the room I sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at the ceiling. Something in my head was expanding, I felt, trying to force its way out. My skull felt heavy when I kept my head tilted back, looking up. This was how things went—first the head, then the stomach. When I saw my reflection in the mirror across the room, I wondered whether people saw me differently. I’d lost some weight.
In the bathroom I took an oxycodone and drank a cup of water. The only thing I had in my pocket other than my wallet was my turquoise snakeskin lighter, which was a gift from Rae. I imagined her here with me. I thought of her watching me play chess in the park against one of the druggies, daring me to lose. She kept me on edge, a dominant and unpredictable force. I started to feel sick to my stomach.
I turned on the TV. A movie was on, showing a man walking through the desert. I stared into the TV. The man was walking and walking, going nowhere. Where was he going? I wondered. A drifter, a wanderer, in search of something important. This must be real life, I thought. Searching for something, trying to move forward. Looking for
meaning or happiness. The commercials were all in Spanish.
When a commercial came on, I peeked out the peephole and saw the parking lot outside. I could see desert dust blowing around in the wind. I looked back up at the ceiling and felt a sense of transparency and isolation, a sense of longing, a dampening of the soul. The room smelled like all the other motel rooms. Above the bed hung a framed watercolor of a farmhouse painted in browns and reds. A field surrounding the farmhouse was dull green, with nothing else around, only empty pasture. The farmhouse looked vacant, too, with a broken-down pickup truck beside it. No sign of life anywhere. I wondered who lived there and then who painted it, and for what purpose. On a different wall, the only other picture in the room, was another watercolor, a painting of an old wooden fence with barbed wire. A dreary sky in the background. A barbed-wire fence. I wondered why a fence, such a lifeless and dull thing, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A fence, used to enclose territory. It was as if the motel was emphasizing its loneliness.
The room darkened as I sat in silence. This was how I liked to spend late afternoons, it occurred to me, sitting in a room as it darkened. Letting the darkness spill over me and the room. I opened a beer from my duffel bag and played the tape on my recorder, hearing my own voice. I heard myself say, “I looked for the Great Spirit today.” I heard myself laugh through my teeth, but I wanted to hear someone else’s voice, by circumstance, unfiltered and cautious.
I stopped the tape and called a random number. A woman answered. “Hello?” she kept saying. I hung up on her. The next number I called was a business. The guy who answered said, “Maintenance.”
“I want to talk, if it’s all right with you,” I said.
“What?”
“Where do you work? I just want to talk.”
He hung up.
I called a number that registered a busy signal. I found it strange and rhythmic, an alert of sorts. The sound put me at ease, helped me feel better. I became aware of my surroundings, of the dim motel room with the green curtains and pale walls. Maybe there were no colors in the room. In my mind I see black and white, something out of a French film. I liked watching the room dim on its own, listening to the hum of the air conditioner blowing.
I called my friend Jessie, but he didn’t answer. Then I called Byrd, an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in several months. He’d crashed his Harley on a highway just outside Tulsa and managed to survive with a concussion and stitches in his tongue. “I grew my hair out,” he told me. “Now everyone thinks I’m Neil Young. The guy at the diner keeps asking me what happened to Crazy Horse. What happened to the Stray Gators, he says. Sing ‘Yonder Stands the Sinner.’ Sing ‘Cinnamon Girl.’ Where are you?”
“New Mexico.”
“Come back to Oklahoma. You need somewhere to stay? You can stay with us, kid. I got an extra mattress in the basement. I got Rubber Soul on vinyl. I got Exile on Main Street.”
“My man Keith Richards.”
“Hey, Lucille’s sister’s in town with her kids, so I gotta go. Try to lay off the shit, brother.”
“I miss you, Byrd.”
He had already hung up. I found myself waiting for someone to pick back up, but the line went dead. I turned on the lamp and called Sonja, who was half asleep when she answered.
“Is everything okay?” she said. “Where are you?”
“Albuquerque.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Rae left me, and I just wanted to talk,” I said.
“Well, I’m sorry, but don’t use it as an excuse to use meth. Are you coming home for the bonfire?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Everyone wants to see you. I want to see you, and so do Mom and Papa. They keep asking me about it, and I tell them I don’t know.”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope you come home,” she said.
After I hung up, I didn’t feel like calling anyone else. I thought again of Rae, and how we could heal each other through language. We could say words and reach an understanding. We could touch each other’s face and say one organic word. Sometimes we never spoke. We once spent an entire afternoon embracing in the park.
Darkness spread around me. After a long while I got out of bed and took a beer with me into the bathroom, where I filled the tub with warm water. I removed all my clothes and stepped into the tub. I wanted time in isolation, quiet, but there was laughter coming from the next room, voices talking. My body felt warm and heavy in the water. The heaviness was an abstraction, I felt, a part of some equation convoluted by the presence of the room. Be aware of your surroundings, Rae used to say. Be aware, cautious, observant of time and place. I’d dealt with too many dealers who could hurt me. She didn’t want to see me beaten up over drugs. She was right.
I popped open a can of beer and reclined in the tub, thinking of the times she and I splashed around in the tub in a different motel bathroom, maybe at the Route 66 Motel or the Knights Inn, a mirror image of this room. A bathroom with the same tile full of squares, part of the equation to entrap me. Motel bathrooms all look the same, I told myself. I thought of Rae, of us splashing around one hot July afternoon during a dust storm that sanded over the windows. We listened to the Mexican radio station and drank Mexican beer. We paid the housekeeping to stay away, immersing ourselves in our own bodies, in each other, for six days.
In the tub I counted the tiles from ceiling to floor, around the room. It became a sort of game, counting vertically by row, then horizontally, eight, fifteen, then twenty, thirty-four. I kept losing track. The tiles over the sink were smaller and of a different color—pink rather than light blue. Pink, the color of skin and flesh, the color of body parts, tongue. By the time I finished my beer I had counted over a hundred square tiles, not counting the partial tiles that stopped at the edge of the tub. They were not half tiles, maybe a quarter of a tile. The numbers were confusing, and I couldn’t figure out the pattern, but I thought of it as a game. I had a strange and intense vision of being stuck in an elevator as a child, gripping my mother’s hand. A hard jolt from a cable or faulty electrical circuit. A woman crying out. A loud ringing alarm from somewhere. I felt the loss of air, no oxygen, the room shrinking. Closing my eyes, gripping my mother’s hand. My mother bringing me closer against her. The doors finally opening.
In the tub I let myself slide down into the water until my head was underwater and I was staring directly up at the trembling ceiling. I blinked underwater. I felt my eyes burning and saw only blurred whiteness above, everything shaking. I saw myself falling backward. I realized then I was drowning, being held under water by some force beneath me. The heaviness of my body made it difficult to sit up, but I managed to gain enough strength to lean forward and gasp as I came out of the water like some horrific beast, sputtering as I steadied myself in the tub. I leaned forward and pulled the plug to drain the water.
Slowly, I stepped out of the tub and watched the water drain as it made a loud sucking noise. I got dressed and went through my bag for a cigarette. The room felt much dimmer than before. I looked to the curtain and saw part of it trembling from the blowing air conditioner. On TV, an old movie showed a crippled boy taking his first steps. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched. The boy’s mother fell to her knees. A crowd of people surrounded the boy. There was no sound. I changed the channel with the remote and saw a movie with De Niro, the young, tough De Niro, sitting in a dingy apartment, writing in a notebook. De Niro, talking to himself, strapping a gun to his arm and ankle. Pointing a pistol at his reflection in the mirror.
I spoke into the tape recorder. I said, “Because I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” I said, “I’m sorry I got high.” I talked for a while about what I loved about Rae, pretending I was being interviewed by the brother I barely remembered. I said, “Ray-Ray and Rae.”
By sunrise I had spoken thousands of words into the recorder. At the window beside the door, I peeked out the curtains and looked up at the morning sky. I could see the open land past
the parking lot, dust swirling in the wind. I could see the motel sign, the pink VACANCY flashing. A hawk swooped down and landed on the sign. From my bag I took out the oxycodone pill bottle, tilting the last few pills into my hand, and swallowed them with a beer.
I put on Rae’s broken sunglasses and lay down in bed to try to sleep. A surge of pain went right to my head, and I saw myself projected forward into the darkness, an eccentric and intense sensation. Outside the window, I saw my ancestors walking and falling. Some were crawling. I saw the soft, yellow light on the horizon. I saw the rain lifting from earth to sky.
Sonja Echota
SEPTEMBER 1
Quah, Oklahoma
I SECRETLY WATCHED VIN HOFF for months before I ever met him. I’m not kidding. This was not love—let me be clear on that, though I had an immediate attraction to him. The attraction was really quite strong. There was also the fact that Vin was in his early twenties, and I was thirty-one. I have always liked younger men.
The public library downtown where I worked had a comfortable shaded area beside the south entrance where I parked my bicycle. After work, sometimes, I sat on the steps by the entrance and observed Vin playing with his son in their yard across the street. I’m aware how strange it looks for a woman to ride a bicycle to work, but I never liked to drive. I was, in fact, the only woman who parked a bicycle at the library. All the other bicycles belonged to kids.
Vin looked rough around the edges, drove both a car and a motorcycle, and was a single dad. I loved hearing the sound of his laughter. He was a musician who played guitar in a David Bowie tribute band downtown at the Branch, a local bar near the university in town. He was broad-shouldered, with the short, unkempt hair of a fashionable young man. He looked young in a sort of James Dean way, usually dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts.
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