The Melting Season

by Jami Attenberg

  The man introduced himself. His name was Arnold. He and I talked about the roads for a little while. He and his son, Pete, had just come back from Denver, visiting Arnold’s ex-wife and Pete’s mother. They rode their motorcycles, and things had been rough with the snow. He told me to just keep heading west, to take 80 through Salt Lake City and head down to Vegas. If I kept the pedal to the metal, I could make it there in a day. Pete came over and introduced himself to me. He was tall and his face had not been ruined by drink yet. His hair was tied back in a ponytail and he had long sideburns. He was rough-looking, for sure, but I did not mind talking to him. I had spent so many years with Thomas, who could be so weepy and sensitive, that it was nice to talk to men who did not look like they had ever cried.

  Arnold and Pete took turns buying me SoCo and Diet Cokes. The drinks tasted like syrup, and I took big gulps of them like medicine. They treated me like I was really interesting, but in fact they were doing most of the talking. There was nothing I could tell them about anyway without getting myself in trouble.

  Arnold started in on this story about how his ex-wife had left him and Pete years ago, when Pete was still a baby, but how they were all still close. Arnold was part Arapaho, and when he and his wife, Trinie, were married they moved onto a reservation nearby. Trinie had been a dance student in Colorado and had dreamed of moving to New York, but had gotten pregnant with Pete almost immediately after she met Arnold. Neither one of them could afford much. Trinie’s parents had kicked her out of the house when they found out she was pregnant with some half-breed’s kid, and all Arnold’s folks could do was find them a small farmhouse deep in the woods of the reservation that they could rent for cheap. It was three miles to the main road, and Arnold rode his Harley into work as a day laborer and left Trinie there alone to take care of little Pete. Once every few weeks Arnold’s mother would drive Trinie into town to buy groceries in her pickup truck, but mostly Trinie was alone all day long, just her and the baby.

  At first she liked it: she had a vegetable garden, and she learned to chop wood. “She was becoming one with the earth,” said Arnold. She used to put on little dance performances in the trees for Arnold and baby Pete. But eventually the isolation began to drive her nuts.

  I thought about me and Thomas out on our farm, with no one to talk to but each other, even with all those construction workers hammering in the background. They were building us our brand-new dream farmhouse, even though I was just fine with the way it was. He said it was necessary. He said we deserved it. He said he wanted to treat me right. So I let Thomas run the show, and I stayed away from all the renovation business. And once he started fixing things up, he could not stop. Soon enough he was making changes to himself, but by then it was too late for me to stop him. I let him be in charge, until I could not stand it anymore.

  “I bet she went crazy out there,” I said.

  “Crazy’s a word I’d use,” he said.

  She begged Arnold to move but he would not listen. He liked the quiet, dark woods, and coming home to his wife and child in his cozy cabin. It felt safe and nice to him. He was not hearing a thing she said. Trinie let her dark hair grow long and it fell below her waist. She started to stage small acts of defiance. She cooked meat only halfway through for dinner sometimes, at least the meat she served to her husband, and she taught her child new and unusual curses to say to his father, as if he were the parrot of a salty old fisherman.

  Arnold shook his head and laughed when he told me that last part, and there was a forgiving glint in his eye. It probably took her forever to get him going, I thought. He would have let her keep torturing him till the end. Pete got up to get me another drink. I was getting good and drunk. I realized I had forgotten to eat but I was not hungry anymore. Arnold said something to me about how his house was nicer than any old hotel, and if I wanted I could come out and stay with the two of them. Off in the corner there was another crack of one head against another, and then somebody started yelling. Pete came back and handed me a drink, then put his hand around my neck and rubbed the muscles there until they were warm. It had been a while since someone had touched me like that and I was enjoying it a little bit. Arnold watched Pete rubbing me for a minute. His face did not change at all. Then he motioned for me to move in closer to him, and I did, and Pete’s hand dropped away.

  “The last straw—for Trinie, not for me, I would have let her stay forever no matter what she did to me, I mean she’s my wife and the mother of my son, come on—was the blizzard of ... was it ’83? Could it have been that long?” Arnold paused and scratched his chin, and did some thinking. In the corner a man lost another game of pool and threw his cue on the table. I realized everyone around me was drunk, too. It was getting late. The families had packed up their kids and left by then, and the only other woman left was the bartender.

  “I think it was ’83,” said Pete. He slipped his hand around my waist. “You sure you want to stay in that hotel tonight?” he said in my ear. I did not answer him.

  The blizzard came and it was a whiteout for days. There was no work to be found so Arnold and Trinie were trapped in the house with little Pete. It was cold and they were running out of wood so they used it sparingly. No one wanted to go outside in that weather and chop. And that one extra person around all the time made the house feel even smaller to Trinie. Plus Arnold was bored. He went through a few fifths of whiskey a day. They started yelling and fighting and no one could hear her scream. “She kept screaming,” said Arnold. “Hoping someone would come and save her or pull her out of there, and the more she screamed the more she realized she was in the middle of nowhere. Then she got it in her head that if no one could hear her scream, no one would hear me scream. She decided to test that little theory of hers out.”

  Next to me Pete nodded twice, and left his head down.

  Trinie went after Arnold with an ax one morning. He woke up just as she lowered it and he rolled off to the side and onto the floor. The ax went through the bed. Pete saw the whole thing.

  “I don’t remember much but I remember that,” said Pete.

  “After that we sent her back to Colorado to stay with her parents. They were ready to have her back, as long as I stayed away.” Arnold started laughing. “And believe me, at the time I thought: you can keep her.”

  A fight started in the corner by the pool table. Men tumbled over each other like children and then they were both shoved outside and the whole bar emptied to watch them. We all carried our drinks with us. I slipped a little bit on a patch of ice and Pete caught me. The snow was falling lighter and the sky was finally dark. There were grunts and punches and people casually stared. No one wanted it to get too crazy, but no one wanted it to stop either. It was a snowstorm, there wasn’t much else to do but drink and fight. There was blood on the snow and one man finally passed out. We all shuffled back in the bar.

  “I saw that she was right, of course, but by then it was too late,” said Arnold.

  “We got a new house down the road from here,” said Pete. “Right in the middle of it all.”

  “I have to go home,” I said.

  “We’ll walk you back to your room,” said Arnold.

  “It is okay,” I said. “I am fine.”

  “We can’t have you slipping and falling in the snow,” said Arnold. “Come on, Pete, give her a hand.” Pete put his hand under my elbow. We made our way back toward my room. My eyes were closing down on my face. Arnold was saying something to me; I could hear him through my eyes.

  “You sure you have to leave tomorrow?” he said. “It’d be nice to see your face around longer.”

  “You sure are pretty,” said Pete.

  I did not want to hurt their feelings. They had been so nice to me. And they had spent all that money on my drinks. I felt bad for them, too, that Trinie had left them alone in the woods. Arnold put his hand around my other elbow. They were both treating me like I could not walk at all, but I knew that I could.

  “I can walk,” I said. I
tried to shrug them off but they would not let me go. “I am fine,” I said. We were almost to my door and I just wanted to get under the covers and go to sleep by myself.

  “We’re just trying to help you out,” said Arnold.

  “I think you might be a little drunk there, sweetheart,” said Pete.

  “I am not,” I mumbled, though I knew I was.

  Pete and Arnold rested me against the door. They both moved in closer toward me.

  “I just don’t know,” said Pete. “You look like you need a hand to me. Don’t you think, Dad?”

  “Where’s your key?” said Arnold. “We’ll get you into bed.”

  “I am fine,” I said.

  “Just give us the key,” said Arnold.

  “I am fine,” I said louder.

  “There ain’t no need to yell,” said Arnold. “There’s people sleeping.”

  “I am fine,” I yelled.

  Pete lifted his hand, and it seemed like he was going to clamp it across my mouth. But he just scratched his head with it instead. Next door a light went on. We all turned. A hand pulled the curtain to the side, and two sets of eyes peered at us. Pete and Arnold took a step back.

  “Everything’s fine,” said Arnold.

  I pulled out my key and it dropped to the ground and Pete leaned forward to help but Arnold put a hand on him and pulled him back. I picked it up off the snow. My hand burned with the chill of it. I let myself into my room, and when I looked back, Arnold and Pete were just standing there. Arnold’s hand was still on Pete, holding him back.

  “You sure you’re okay?” said Pete. It was a desperate whine, like a stray dog looking for food or the touch of a hand.

  “I am fine,” I said, and I closed the door. I locked it. I did not take my clothes off or anything. Tomorrow I will be a new me, I thought. I need to figure out how to be a new me. I got under the covers, and when my heart stopped racing through my chest, then, at last, I could sleep.

  2.

  My cell phone woke me up early, not even 6 A.M. I was miserable, my head swollen with alcohol, the spot behind my eyes tender and on fire. I checked the phone. It was a video from my sister, Jenny. She was standing sideways in front of a mirror, her stomach puffed out, completely pregnant. My heart stopped right there in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Then she pulled out a pillow, showing me the little bump left behind, and started laughing.

  Hilarious, I texted her. She should take that act on the road. She would make millions.

  She texted back: When are you coming home?

  I did not reply because I did not have an answer. If I was coming home at all. My phone buzzed again. Jenny had sent me a picture of our garbage can, a mountain of empty beer cans sprouting out of the top of it. Oh Lord, I thought. Our mother’s been drinking more than ever. Still it was not enough for me to turn around home. I could not say one way or the other what I was going to do next, except keep on driving.

  Outside the roads were still silent, and the sun rimmed the curtains of the motel room shyly. For a minute I could have been back on the farm, waiting for the rooster to let us know it was time to get up and shake off the night. Some mornings, I would rise before the rooster. But I would let him go first into the day. I did not want to hurt his feelings. There was no one around in the mornings, except me and my husband and the rooster and all his chicken wives. All of us kept close together on that farm. We were not going anywhere.

  Then I remembered: my husband had cast me out. No crow to cradle me now. There was a roof over my head, but still I was homeless. The last nine months I had lived in that house it had been a construction zone. Thomas could not wait to spend his daddy’s money on renovations once he died. It was the first thing he did after we moved in, call up his high school buddies and put them to work. Work, if you want to call it that. They were sucking Thomas dry just like they sucked those cans of Budweiser all day long, making noises every hour or so like they were lifting something heavy. Tall, strong men strutting and braying like that cock in the morning, Thomas letting them because they were big men now. They had always been bigger than Thomas. It was not hard.

  But it was the place I called home. My marital home. And every bed I had slept in since I would wake up in the night and feel like I was sliding off. I held on to the bed in the motel room in Cheyenne. I grabbed the sheets and pinched the end of the mattress. I was homeless and loveless and all alone in the world.

  I allowed myself one more minute of feeling sorry for myself, and then I snapped up out of bed. I had to get rolling. There was nothing for me in Cheyenne except a place to hide.

  I showered off the smoke from last night; I could smell it rising in the steam around me. Then I threw away the clothes I had worn. I could not imagine packing them next to my other clothes. The smoke would infect everything. I almost threw up, thinking about the smoke and Pete and Arnold, the crack of heads together, the fall of the ax, the blood on the snow. I felt a clenching deep inside me. If that woman had not looked through the window just then, those two could have been thrashing around on top of me soon enough. Heavy and mean. Father and son taking turns. It was just plain wrong how pushy they had been at the end there. It was all rushing through my brain.

  I closed the door behind me and walked toward the lobby to drop off the key, my shoes crunching on the fresh snow left behind from last night’s storm. I was the only one up at the motel. I could see bloodstains mixed in with the snow in front of the bar. I pushed the key through a slot in the front door of the lobby. There was a tiny squeak and then it snapped shut.

  I need to be quieter and calmer, I thought. For years I was silent and hidden away on that farm, tending to Thomas’s needs, and now I could not shut myself up. There I was, getting into trouble with strangers, yelling in the middle of the night. What was I doing? I needed to be careful. There might be people looking for me. I began to feel uncomfortable and thick with guilt, even though I did not believe I had done anything wrong. I was worried I was still drunk, but I got in the truck anyway. I cursed myself, and then I started the engine.

  Route 80 was still pretty messed up from the weather. Great hills of snow were pushed to the sides like silent guards standing watch. I prayed for safe passage. The land started to change as I drove farther west. It was raining and the snow had melted some and I could see that the land was curvier, more luscious. Everything in my hometown was flat and remained the same, except for the corn, growing, growing, and then gone again. I had never considered the earth could be any other way. Why would I need to think about that? I was never leaving.

  The farthest I had ever been away was during my honeymoon, six years past already. We went to a resort town on a lake in Minnesota because that is where my parents went on their honeymoon, and they were paying the bills. They sat us down at the kitchen table the night of our engagement barbecue in the backyard. My dad handed the envelope with the tickets to my mother, who slid them across the kitchen table to us. “We had some magical nights there,” she said drily. “It’s good for swimming,” said my dad. He put his hand on my mother’s shoulder, and she turned her eyes at it and stared dully, until he pulled it back again.

  If it had been left up to me and Thomas we probably would have stayed home and snuggled up in bed for a week straight, watching TV, renting movies, me making popcorn and grilled cheese sandwiches. Easy stuff we could eat in bed. I was not even sure we needed a wedding. That seemed like extra to me. But you do not look a gift horse in the mouth, Thomas whispered in my ear later, after they handed us the envelope. And it would be our only chance to see a little of the world. Because Thomas had only ever promised to show me his love.

  The resort itself was like a pioneer village. Everyone had their own little log cabin, all of them circling a lake like we were settlers keeping each other company in the wilderness. We had the honeymoon suite so there were fuzzy slippers and bathrobes waiting for us and chocolate roses and a bottle of champagne in the kitchen.

  “Ooh la la,” said Thomas, and he popp
ed a rose in his mouth. He did a little dance over to me and said, “Come here and I’ll give you a chocolate kiss.” We put our arms around each other and I let him put his tongue deep into my mouth. It tasted like chocolate but also the peanuts we had been snacking on all day during the drive. I liked the saltiness but it was not what I was expecting. I guess he could tell. He pulled back from me. I could see how wounded he was. I decided not to say no to him for the rest of the seven days and six nights we were there.

  Later that night he pushed into me over and over again and I gasped out of love and he said, “Don’t lie,” and I said, “I’m not, it’s good to be next to you, it makes me feel good to have our bodies naked together,” and he pushed in harder, banged up against me. I knew I would be bruised in the morning. He did it like that sometimes when he was drunk. But I let it go, I let him go at it, because I wanted him to be happy.

  The next morning, Thomas and I walked down the waterfront to see how we were going to kill the next seven days. I saw a waterslide in the distance, and Thomas pointed out the kayaks on the lake. That was the first time I realized that it was a strange place for us to go on our honeymoon, if we were going somewhere at all. We grew up in a state that was practically dry. What did we care about the water? Sure I liked the community pool in the summertime, but that was all we could do at the resort, roll around in the hay at night, and play in the water during the day. And I think there were supposed to be some hiking trails but I was not much of a walker anymore. I had my truck by then. I just liked rattling along the cornfields. There were no cornfields here. There were thick green trees and the water and the air smelled nice, murky and earthy at the same time, but I did not know what to do with myself for even a second.