by Marie Sexton
“So this is it?” Nate asked. “This is all anyone does?”
“This, or get high.”
“You get high?”
“No. But lots of them do. Especially those of you in the Grove with money to spare.”
Nate had always been a good kid at home. Sure, he’d snuck a few beers through the years, but he wasn’t into drugs. He took his own pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and looked at it. The truth was, he’d only started smoking two weeks before, and he’d only done it to piss of his dad.
“Class of ’87,” Cody said. “You’ll be a senior this year?”
Nate wondered how he knew, then realized Cody was looking at his class ring. “Yeah.”
“Me too.”
Nate straightened the ring on his finger, remembering how excited he’d been as he chose the designs back in tenth grade. Of course, he hadn’t known then that they’d be moving before graduation. Now he’d have to serve out his senior year in Warren, Wyoming. Only one year in this joke of a town, and he’d be able to leave. That’s what he held on to. “You play any sports?”
Cody laughed. “Yeah, man. I’m the captain of the football team. Whatta you think?”
It had been a stupid question. If he’d thought about it for half a second, he would have known that.
“What about you?” Cody asked.
“Tennis. And I was on the swim team.”
“Only swimming pool here is the outdoor one. It’s open about three months outta the year.”
“Yeah, I saw it.” It was nothing more than a square, cement hole in the ground, full of squealing kids. It wasn’t even close to Olympic size, even if there had been lanes. Next to it was the tennis court—singular, not plural—the cement cracked and overgrown with weeds and grass. Nate had counted five empty beer bottles but not one tennis ball.
He swallowed hard against the sudden lump in his throat. He fought to turn his frustration into anger. It’d serve him better that way.
“I guess I don’t do anything anymore.” But he didn’t sound nearly as casual as he’d hoped. He knew his bitterness came through.
For the first time, there was no resentment or disdain in Cody’s eyes. It looked more like pity.
“You’re in hell, Nate,” he said without a hint of humor. “This place will eat your soul.”
Nate offered to drive Cody home, but Cody said dropping him back at the gas station where they’d met would be close enough.
“Want to hang out tomorrow?” Nate asked. “I can meet you at the wagon after lunch.”
It took Cody a second, like he hadn’t quite understood the question, or couldn’t believe he’d actually heard it, but then he smiled. Not the cynical smile Nate had seen earlier, or the one that told him Cody thought he was a preppy fool. This was different. It made him look younger than he really was. It was sweet, like a secret smile Nate suspected few had ever seen.
“Cool,” Cody said. Nothing more. But Nate had a feeling he was looking forward to it.
He drove up the hill to Orange Grove with a familiar feeling of dread in his gut. His dad was the newest officer with the Warren PD. The oil boom had brought lots of people to the state in the seventies and the first part of the eighties, but now, the boom was over, and people were fleeing Wyoming in droves. Towns were shrinking, and unemployment was higher than it had ever been. Fully a third of the houses in Orange Grove were empty, dented For Sale signs standing in the front lawns, bowing before the wind. Unfortunately, higher unemployment and a hard-hitting recession meant an elevation in crime. Nate’s dad had managed to get a job with the police department because he had years of experience on his résumé, but Nate had never understood why they had to leave Austin at all, and moving to a town that had already peaked and was now declining into ruin was the last thing he’d wanted to do.
He found his dad at the dining room table with open folders full of paper spread out all around him. “Where’ve you been?” he asked. Not accusing. Not worried. Just genuinely curious about Nate’s day.
“Out.”
Nate saw the pain in his dad’s eyes at his elusiveness. He and his dad had always been pals. But that had been before.
Before the affair. Before the divorce.
“Did you meet some kids?”
“One. We hung out.”
“That’s good. I’m glad you’re making friends. Boy or girl?”
“A boy. He’ll be a senior, like me.”
“That’s great. What’s his name?”
“Cody.”
“What’s his last name?”
Nate knew he was only asking because he wanted to know if it was a name he’d find on the lists of habitual offenders. Nate was happy to be able to honestly say, “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, his dad fiddling with his pen, Nate staring at his toes. He wanted to say more. He wanted to say, Cody took me to a field where we smoked half a pack of cigarettes because there’s nothing else to do in this goddamn town. He wanted to say, He told me everybody from this part of town gets high. He wanted to say, You’ve brought me to the shittiest place on earth. Cody says it will eat my soul, and I think he’s right.
What he actually said was, “What’s for dinner?”
“I was thinking Chinese?” It sounded more like a question than a statement. “I noticed a place on Main Street.”
“They don’t have a Pizza Hut or a McDonald’s, but they have a Chinese restaurant?”
“There’s actually a pretty rich Asian history in this area. A lot of Chinese helped build the railroads. I was in the library today, and they had a book on—”
Nate cut him off before he rambled on for ages. “Chinese is fine.”
The diner was like a trip back in time, with little individual jukeboxes at each table. A dial on top flipped the pages, like some kind of storybook, showing them the available tunes. They pumped in a few dimes, just for fun. There wasn’t much pop, but Nate picked “It’s Raining Again” and “One Thing Leads to Another.” His dad hunted for Bob Seger, but the only one they had was “Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You,” and it seemed that one hit a bit too close to home, so he played “Down Under” and “Jack & Diane,” and for a few minutes, it was almost fun.
The food turned out to be better than Nate anticipated, too. They had sweet and sour pork, and ham-fried rice, which they both agreed was way better than regular old “pork-fried” rice. Nate’d grown used to awkward meals with his dad. This one wasn’t as bad as some, but it still felt wrong. His dad attempted to make small talk, as if nothing had changed. As if Nate’s mom wasn’t missing from the picture. As if they weren’t sitting in a ridiculously tiny Chinese diner in the middle of Wyoming, with the wind blowing outside like it couldn’t wait to get the hell into some greener state.
And who could blame it if it did?
“I saw a truck for sale today,” his dad said. “A Ford. A little rusty, but those things’ll run forever. I think it would be a good investment.”
“I’m keeping my Mustang.”
“Once winter comes—”
“I know.”
They lapsed into another uncomfortable silence. They seemed to have those more often than not lately.
“I know you don’t want to be here,” his dad said quietly. “But there weren’t that many jobs to choose from.”
“I don’t see why we had to leave Austin at all. You had a job there.”
“Your mom wanted the house, and I didn’t want to fight her for it.”
“You didn’t fight for anything.”
“I wanted you,” his dad said, his voice quiet. “I fought for you.”
Nate slumped, having no good way to tell his father he shouldn’t have bothered. Besides, he’d heard it all before. “Whatever.”
“I couldn’t stay in Austin after the divorce. I just couldn’t. I needed some distance—”
“Well, you got that, didn’t you?”
His dad rubbed his forehea
d. “I know you think I should have tried harder to make things work with your mom, but—”
“You didn’t try at all.”
“That’s not true,” his dad said with seemingly infinite patience. “You have no idea how wrong you are about that.”
“If you’d really tried, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be at home in Austin. With Mom.”
His dad sighed. He sat there in silence for a moment, and then he dug in his pocket, and pushed a dime across the Formica. “How about another song?”
Cody walked home from the gas station feeling uncharacteristically cheery. Yes, he’d only have a few weeks before school started and the normal social politics of high school took Nate away, but until then, it seemed he had friend. He hadn’t really had one of those in a while.
The three trailers near his seemed more oppressive than usual. One housed Ted, an unemployed alcoholic in his forties who lived alone. Vera from the gas station lived in another, with her invalid mother. And the third belonged to Kathy Johansen and Pete Jessup, who might have made a living selling drugs if they hadn’t used more than they sold. They were arguing like they always did, their shouts easily overheard through the thin walls. Cody heard a crash inside their trailer as he walked past. The only thing louder than Kathy and Pete’s frequent arguments were the trains that came through every other day, shaking Cody’s entire trailer as they passed.
Nate had offered to drop Cody off at his house. He had no idea they’d been right there, practically at Cody’s front door, but there was no way Cody wanted a rich kid from Orange Grove to see where he lived. Nate’d find out more than Cody wanted him to know soon enough.
He was surprised to see his mom’s car parked out front. She was sitting on the couch when he walked in, a cigarette smoldering between her fingers and two empty beer cans on the coffee table in front of her. She should have been at work.
“They were slow today,” she said, answering his unasked question. “Ralph sent me home.”
His mom worked as a waitress at a truck stop on I-80. It was a forty-minute drive each way, and the pay was shit. She spent more than half of what she earned on the gas it took to get there and back each week, but there weren’t any jobs to be had in Warren. Besides, they’d gone through plenty of stretches with no income at all. This was better, albeit not by very damn much.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked. Occasionally she’d bring home a leftover hot beef sandwich for him, but there was no takeout container on the countertop today.
She shrugged and ashed her cigarette into the dead plant on the end table. “Whatever you can find.”
He opened the cabinet and stared at the contents as if he hadn’t seen them before. Ramen noodles, the generic equivalent of SpaghettiOs, and a mostly empty jar of peanut butter.
“Do we have any bread?”
She didn’t answer. That meant no.
From the kitchen, he could only see the back of her head as she watched Wheel of Fortune. It came in a bit staticky because the tinfoil-wrapped rabbit ears on top of the set were crap, but he could still see it was the end of the round, when the winner looked through the showcase and used their prize money to buy things.
“I’ll take the ceramic dog for $317,” today’s winner said. “And the color TV for $625.”
Cody wondered as he always did what it would be like to spend money like that. Those people had no idea how lucky they were. Yes, Pat, I’ll take the spaghetti sauce for $3. Not the generic kind with the black-and-white label, but the Prego, if you please. And a loaf of Wonder Bread for $2.50.
Nate probably had bread at his house. Cody wondered if Nate’s mother sat on the couch, drinking her dinner while chain-smoking her way through her second pack of the day.
“The check didn’t come,” his mom said.
Cody stared at the back of her head as her words sank in. Whatever giddiness he’d felt after his time with Nate died a quick and painful death. “He’s months behind. He promised he’d send it.”
“You think I don’t know that, Cody?”
“School starts in less than a month.”
She sighed. She still didn’t look away from the TV.
“Yes, Pat,” the woman on the TV said, smiling her perfect smile. “I’ll take the gold money clip for $120.”
“Mom,” Cody said, doing his best to keep his voice level and rational rather than letting himself whine. “None of last year’s clothes fit anymore.”
“You can go to the Basement. I have a bit of tip money you can use.”
One of the churches in Warren ran a small used-clothing shop out of their basement. Secondhand shoes and secondhand styles. The worst part was, it was all donated by people who lived in town. “I hate shopping there.”
“It’s not that bad.”
She didn’t know what it was like, but he still remembered very clearly the humiliation he’d felt in junior high when some jock laughingly pointed out that Cody was wearing the shirt he’d tossed out the year before.
“I don’t want to buy my school clothes there.” Now he was whining. He knew it, but he couldn’t seem to help it.
“What the fuck do you think I can do about it, Cody?” She finally turned to look at him. The lines in her face seemed more pronounced than usual. She looked far older than she was. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
Christ, like he needed her to tell him that. If it did, he figured they’d have a damn loaf of bread. Then again, there weren’t all that many trees in southern Wyoming. Even if money did grow on them, it’d probably all be the same place it was now—up in goddamned Orange Grove.
Cody bit back his frustration. He wished, not for the first time, that he’d quit growing. His toes were jammed uncomfortably into the end of last year’s sneakers. He was wearing the one pair of jeans he owned that didn’t show most of his ankles. He’d mowed a few lawns over the summer, but the money he had left wouldn’t be nearly enough.
His mom turned back to her show. Back to the people who could spend $175 on a magazine bin that was imported from Italy and still ugly as sin.
“You’ll live,” she said.
Pat, I’d like a new fucking life for ten thousand dollars. Just take the money off the tree. The one up by Nate’s house.
He thought about the Sears catalog in his room. He’d spent weeks poring over it, circling things, making lists, adding and subtracting, figuring out how he could get the most useful assortment of clothes for the money his dad had promised to send. Winters in Wyoming sucked, and in the end, he’d decided to forgo fashion in lieu of warmth. Jeans, shoes, and a few shirts of course, but he’d planned to use a large chunk of the money for a new winter coat. Now, he’d have none of it.
He closed the cabinet door, his hunger suddenly gone. At least he still had most of a pack of cigarettes in his pocket.
“I’m going out.”
She didn’t answer.
He went back outside. The dull sounds of Kathy and Pete’s latest argument echoed around the lot, sounding desperate and pitiful. Cody sighed and plopped down on the steps. He had no idea where he was going. Back to the wagon in Jim’s cow field, or back to the gas station? He could go to the bowling alley and hang with the burnouts. Or out to the rock quarry, just so the cowboys could kick his ass. They hadn’t done that in a couple of years. Maybe this time they’d do it right and put him out of his misery.
It almost seemed like a good idea.
Jesus, Cody. Melodramatic much?
Yeah, he was laying it on thick, but it was either that or cry. The former seemed better than the latter.
He lit a cigarette and looked west, toward the highway. He imagined the distant interstate, full of people who were going somewhere. How many of them had money? How many had families in their car? How many never had to worry about whether or not their deadbeat dad sent the court-mandated payment or not?
At that moment, he would have traded places with any damn one of them in a heartbeat. No questions asked.
Nate had
told Cody he’d meet him after lunch, but he ended up going to the field right after he got out of bed. It was a bit after eleven when he arrived, and Cody was already there, a half-empty pack of cigarettes in his hand.
“Wind’s still blowing,” Nate said as he sat down.
“Welcome to Wyoming.”
He didn’t even glance Nate’s way. A brand-new day, and somehow Nate knew he was starting fresh with Cody. Whatever camaraderie they’d shared the day before had been wiped away in the night.
“I hear it’s really nice up in the northern part of the state,” he said, in an attempt to make conversation.
Cody sighed and tapped a cigarette into his hand. “I hear that too. I wouldn’t know.” He tucked the rest of the pack into the upper pocket of his jean jacket and pulled out a lighter. Nate waited while he turned away, cupping his hand against the wind to get it lit.
“How long have you lived here?”
Cody blew smoke, his other hand clenching around his lighter. “My whole fucking life.”
“Well, you graduate this year, right? Then you can leave. Maybe go to college—”
“Ha!” Cody shook his head, leaning forward to put his elbows on his knees. “Yeah, right. College.”
Nate wasn’t sure what that meant. Maybe his grades weren’t good enough, or—
“There’s no leaving this town. Didn’t I tell you it’s the black hole of modern civilization? I meant it, man. There’s no escape. You’re born here, you knock up some chick, then you die here. That’s how it goes.”
“Uh . . .” Nate had no idea how to tackle that happy thought. “You’re planning on knocking somebody up?”
Cody laughed without much humor and contemplated the smoldering cigarette between his fingers. “Pretty sure nobody actually plans that. Don’t change anything, though. Gotta have money to leave, and by the time you’ve got it, it’s too late.”
“I don’t care what you say. I’m leaving, as soon as I can. Packing up my car the night before graduation and leaving five minutes after they put that diploma in my hand.”