“You know what he said to me on my first day? ‘If you disappeared into one of those mine shafts, nobody would do a thing about it. Nobody would even notice. Think about that before you start making plans to sneak off in the middle of the night.’ ”
“He’s not lying,” Gina said. “He has cops in his pocket all over the state. But I’d notice.” What she didn’t say was that she had her own theory about how Michael had ended up in that bar.
Gina was eighteen and had never left Montana or even her hometown. She had a room full of designer clothes and jewelry and expensive shoes, and she hated it all. Her father would let her spend thousands of dollars on a horse she never bothered riding, but he wouldn’t let her go to Billings with her friends for the weekend. He would pay a driver to take her around town, but he would not buy her a car, or even let her buy one herself. She had a job at the convenience store in town that she kept only so she could spend twenty hours a week somewhere she knew he wouldn’t bother her, and the money from her paycheck just piled up waiting for some use she hadn’t yet figured out.
Her older sisters, June and Laura, weren’t smart enough to get away with anything, so they had solved their problems by marrying young and packing their new husbands off to Missoula. Once they were gone, it was harder for Gina to avoid her father’s scrutiny. On nights she wasn’t working and couldn’t sneak away, she would lock herself in her room and lie in bed with the radio on, plotting her escape. She began to picture the man who would get her out of Montana. Not someone boring, like June and Laura’s husbands. Not a husband at all. Someone exciting. Someone who hated Montana as much as she did.
When her father was drunk and in a lecturing mood, he loved to say, “If you really want something, you have to imagine every step of how you’re going to get it, and then you take it without mercy.” It was how he operated with everyone, and it was why half the people in town hated him, but Gina had to admit that maybe there was something to the philosophy, given that he owned everything in sight. So she imagined—the way the man who would be her escape would walk, and sound, and smile. The way he would drink a pop and zip his jeans. The kind of shoes he would wear and how he would smell in the heat of summer. She imagined him until she got to the point where every time she turned a street corner in town she expected to bump right into him.
* * *
—
The night Gina met Michael was one of her sisters’ rare visits home; when their father headed out to the bar, Gina and Laura and June got into Laura’s car and drove down to the lake. Laura and June were drunk on a shared six-pack and cackling with laughter. At the lakeside they left their dresses spread out like empty shells along the pebbled shore, slipped into the cool water, and made their way swiftly to the middle of the lake. They were all strong swimmers, and they spent an hour dipping between the dark water and the clear, sweet light of the moon.
When they swam back to the beach, they slicked the water off their bodies with their fingers, and Laura and June put on their dresses. Gina found her sandals but not her clothes; she walked across the beach, searching, but the night was windless, and until she heard a rustle in the bushes, followed by a quick burst of laughter, she couldn’t imagine what could have happened to the dress. She walked toward the underbrush cursing, eyes boring into the darkness, and crashed through the branches to find a group of men blinking up at her, beer bottles littering the ground around them, and Michael waving her dress above his head like a trophy.
Gina didn’t say anything, and she didn’t try to cover herself. She stared into a dozen-odd pairs of glittering eyes and recognized, one by one, faces she sometimes saw coming out of the mine at closing time. The same realization came over the men, so that they dropped their gazes and shuffled backward into the shadows, muttering apologies. All except Michael, who stayed leaning against a pine tree, lazily grinning up at her while she stared at him. Eventually one of the other miners crawled up to him and whispered in his ear, and then the grin disappeared. Michael turned his face away, held the dress out to her, and, when she took it, got to his feet and ran. But already she wanted to run after him, to bring him back, to tell him she knew why he was there, even if he didn’t.
After that, she noticed him everywhere: coming out of the movie theater; sprawled in the shade of the big oak trees in the park; sitting at the counter at the doughnut shop, licking powdered sugar off his fingers. He hunched over when he ate his breakfast, just like she had imagined he would. He had a tattoo snaking around his left biceps, the way he was supposed to. Every time she saw him she looked at him long and hard before she went back to what she was doing, and he blushed heavily and dropped his eyes.
When she found him sitting alone at Piper’s Grill, two months after the night at the lake, she decided enough was enough. As always, he turned away from her, but she walked over to his booth and sat down across from him, taking half his grilled cheese sandwich from his plate.
“Do you work at my daddy’s mine?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
He took a gulp of his drink and she watched him, biting the crisp corners off his sandwich and enjoying his discomfort.
“There are other places I’d rather be,” he said finally.
“Damn right,” she said. “Like anywhere.”
He laughed, and so did she, but he didn’t say anything else and looked down at his plate again.
“You’ve already seen me naked,” Gina said. “Which most of the boys in this town would give their right eye for, by the way, so I don’t see the point in getting shy at this late date.”
“Could you keep your voice down? Your father would kill me.”
“He’d kill both of us,” she said, “and we haven’t even done anything yet.”
* * *
—
It wasn’t hard to invent ways to cross paths in a town that small. At five-thirty, Gina would leave her house and walk to the Frosty Freeze, the only restaurant near the mine, and sit there drinking a pop with her bare feet up on the wooden rail of the porch until Michael walked by on his way home. Sometimes, if no one else was around, he would stop and exchange a few words with her, but other times he only blew gently against the soles of her feet as he passed. At night, he often came to the convenience store during her shift, just before closing, and spent long minutes browsing the magazine section until all the other customers were gone. As soon as the door closed behind the last patron, Gina would call out from the cash register, “Are you looking for the porno magazines, sir? Because we keep those behind the counter. I’d be happy to show you our selection.” She liked the way he laughed, shaking his head as if he were ashamed of her, walking toward her but still looking at the floor.
Only once did he ever allow her into the rented room where he lived, and then he pulled the curtains shut and turned the TV up loud before he sat next to her on the narrow bed, as though spies might be lurking in the hallway, ears pressed to the door. After a few minutes of nervous conversation she sent him across the street to get beer, and took the opportunity to quickly sift through his belongings. The room was crammed with odds and ends that he collected from the curb: facsimile paintings in fake gilt frames, ceramic lamps shaped like animals, furniture with six coats of paint. In his dresser, underneath his socks, was a plastic baggie of marijuana, which she had never seen him smoke, and a stack of letters bound with a rubber band, the same softly looped handwriting on each envelope in dark blue ink, the stamps set precisely into the corners. She would have opened them if she hadn’t heard the front door creak and Michael’s quick steps mounting the stairs, and she wondered about them for a long time afterward.
* * *
—
Unlike every other boy Gina knew, Michael was a source of constant frustration. His desire for secrecy she understood, and even enjoyed sometimes—it was satisfying to sit at dinner with her father
, eating her peas and listening to him gloat about how he had just taken some sucker from Fort Worth in a contract negotiation, with the back of her neck still tingling from where Michael had been kissing it not half an hour before. But it was less satisfying when dinner was over and she was alone in her bedroom, left to reflect that she had never managed to get much beyond kissing, that Michael always disentangled himself just when she thought she had finally seduced him. How it was possible that she had conjured a man all the way to Montana and couldn’t get him to go the extra few steps into her bedroom was beyond her.
“How did you grow up to be so pretty in a town like this?” he asked her one night as they sat whispering on a tree stump at the end of her driveway, twilight fading quickly around them, Gina tucking her hair back behind her ears.
“That’s brilliant, how many girls have you tried that one on?” she said.
“I mean it. This place is going to turn me into dust,” he said. He hooked one finger around the heavy jeweled cross that hung nestled between her breasts, a Christmas gift from her father. “What you need is a place to wear those diamonds,” he said. “Keep on living here and they might as well be glass.”
“He won’t let me leave any more than he will you.”
“You don’t need his permission. You’re an adult. You know what I think?” he said, bringing his mouth to her ear so that his hot breath feathered against her eardrum while he spoke. “I think that deep down, you like being Daddy’s girl. Having nice clothes and everyone in town under your thumb. I don’t think you really want to leave.”
Gina turned her head quickly, so that her lips slid against his and she was kissing him hard for a moment before he stood up and stepped away.
“I just can’t,” he said, “not here. You know he’d find out.”
“You’re a tease,” she said, pulling her knees up against her chest and wrapping her arms around them, turning away from him to look across the fields on the other side of the road. “Anyway, what if he did. I’m old enough to make my own mistakes.”
“It’s a little different for you. You’re his daughter, not some guy he’d beat senseless without a second thought.”
“How much do you owe him, anyway?”
“What does it matter?”
“How much?”
Michael was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Fifty thousand dollars.”
“Stupid. Who bets that much money?” He didn’t reply, but she could feel the anger in his silence, and looked up at him. “How long ’til you work it off?”
“It’s the interest that’s the problem. Years.”
“Years,” she said. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to wait that long.”
* * *
—
Gina’s daddy was sharp, and she didn’t kid herself about it. As much as she enjoyed sneaking around, she knew that she was never more than one step ahead of him, that if she wanted to lie, the lie had to be perfect, her face and voice and every detail of her story had to be perfect. But she also had a few trumps on him that he didn’t know about, and one of them was the Bomb Drop Money—two hundred grand in cash hidden in the fallout shelter below the basement, Saran-wrapped and ziplocked and stashed in a black gym bag behind four cases of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, right next to the gun rack. She and Laura had found it on a rainy Saturday during Laura’s senior year of high school, less than a year before Laura got married and left Gina to fend for herself. They had joked that only their daddy would save money for a day when money couldn’t possibly be worth anything, when everyone they knew would probably be dead and they’d be lucky if there was anything left to shoot with the guns, much less buy with the cash.
* * *
—
Now, standing in the cool interior of the shelter with a flashlight gripped in her armpit, Gina counted out stacks of twenties—fifty grand for Michael and twenty thousand more to live on, she wasn’t going to be greedy—and then ran her thumb along the edge of the bills, listening to the soft riffle of the paper, like a whispered promise.
She brought the money to the convenience store in her book bag, shifty with anticipation as she waited for Michael to arrive, but when he pushed through the glass door a cool smugness settled over her. She watched patiently as he moved through the store, waiting for the other two customers to leave. When he approached the counter, she scanned the bottle of Coke he handed her and said, “We’re running a special today. Buy a pop and get fifty thousand dollars.”
“Ha ha,” Michael said.
Gina grinned and raised her eyebrows, and nodded to the open book bag behind the counter. Michael leaned toward her and looked down at the bound stacks of bills that she had left at the top of the bag. He coughed once, hard, and stood back again.
“Are you nuts? Where did you get that?”
“Does it matter?” she said.
“Yes, it does matter. If I wanted to get thrown in jail, I could do that on my own.”
“It’s his, but he won’t know about it anytime soon. Anyway, you didn’t take it, I did. I could give it to you. Like a gift.” She crossed her arms and leaned on the counter, so that the front of her tank top gaped open.
Michael frowned. “What do you want?” he said.
“Take me with you. And we have to go tonight. He’ll be at the bar playing poker until close, and then he’ll come home drunk and go straight to sleep.” She nudged the bag around the side of the counter with her foot. “I could close this place down right now and meet you at the movie theater in an hour. Unless maybe you don’t really want to go.”
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?” said Michael, but he knelt down and quickly zipped the bag, slung it over one shoulder, and left the store.
* * *
—
Gina went home, slipped into a black dress, and packed a bag with some other clothes, a toothbrush and a hairbrush, and an old silver cigarette lighter that her sisters had claimed belonged to their long-dead mother. No nightclothes but lots of underwear and a pair of high heels. She locked the door to her bedroom and turned the radio on, climbed out the window and pulled it shut behind her, already picturing the scene that would take place the next morning. Her father yelling for her to turn down the goddamn music, to haul her lazy butt out of bed and get started on breakfast. Banging on the door and finally breaking it down to find nothing but the radio and a neatly made bed.
She sat on a bench outside the movie theater with her eyes closed, her bag in her lap, the shifting green-yellow-red of the stoplight bleeding through her eyelids as she listened to the street. Michael eased his car up to the curb and called to her softly, and she jumped up and ran around to the passenger side, slinging her bag in ahead of her.
He barely talked while they drove, and when he did his voice was low, as though he were afraid her father could still hear him. They kept on through the night, crossed the border into South Dakota a few hours before dawn. Gina rolled down the window and stuck her head out into the breeze and let out a whoop of excitement, because she had done it, finally, gone farther than her father’s influence could reach. A few miles down the road they came to a motel, a cluster of tiny A-frame cabins grouped around a chapel with a green neon cross, and stopped to get a room.
Gina clicked on the bedside lamp and walked around the room opening the drawers, hoping to find something interesting, but Michael sat hunched on the bed and didn’t even look at her.
“He’s going to find us,” he said.
“Hush,” Gina said. “No one knows where you are, except me.”
“Why did you do it?”
“He has enough to spare some. Did he even ask you where you got it?”
Michael nodded. “I told him I went down to the reservation for the weekend, won it at roulette.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘Some people
never learn.’ And then he laughed and told me to come back anytime.”
She stood in front of Michael, put her hands on either side of his face and tilted it up toward hers. “Stop worrying about him,” she said, and then she pulled down her shoulder straps and let her dress slip to the floor like a puddle of ink, just like she’d been studying to do. He drew her to him and pressed his face to her bare, hot stomach. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and he said it all night, but she could tell it was fear the whole time and not her; she had never realized that he was as scared of her father as he pretended to be.
* * *
—
In the next town they came to, they sold Michael’s car and bought a used pickup truck with a bed cover, put a mattress in the back and began working their way east as summer started to blaze. In cul-de-sacs and hotel parking lots and gravel pull-offs beside fields of soybeans like rippling green oceans, they made love and fell asleep twined together, the tailgate open to let the breeze play across their skin.
They avoided the interstate and stuck to county routes and two-lane state highways. They sold their phones at the first mall they got to, and Michael used the money to buy a cheap one that they quickly filled with pictures of Gina posing at roadside monuments—giant frying pans and concrete chickens and rhinestone-studded plaster Virgin Marys. Gina called her sisters a couple of times, but the conversations were always so awkward—June sounding confused, Laura angry and jealous, all three of them avoiding mentioning their father—that she gave it up and just sent a postcard now and then. Living out of the truck was uncomfortable, but it was fun in its own way. Sometimes Gina and Michael bathed in truck-stop showers, but more often they filled up buckets in gas-station bathrooms and made do with an empty stretch of country road, him tipping the water over her head while she shrieked and stamped with the cold, throwing her stippled arms around his waist and pulling him to her.
All the Names They Used for God Page 14