Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  “I guess you’re right,” Kevin said, though he wasn’t at all sure that he agreed. Some people, maybe most, were more practical, measured, when it came to love. He had observed in his friends’ affairs an almost clinical tidiness, which he found far more repulsive and destructive than their own fiery breakup. Ann would probably pronounce him naive if he made this point to her — she was fond of claiming that he found what he was looking for, and never went looking without a quarry firmly in mind. He kept his mouth shut, tried to think of ways to change the subject, but instead he changed lanes, speeding up and drifting over to the left lane after the bus was visible in his rearview mirror.

  “I liked watching those kids,” Ann said. “Anything’s better than the signs advertising all these hokey tourist traps.”

  Kevin preferred the billboards for Tweetsie Railroad and Land of Oz theme parks to the leering kids, whose attention made him feel awkward and ancient, but because he was being accommodating he accelerated until they were once again alongside the bus, which seemed to be filled with a football team and cheerleaders headed to a game. He tried not to look, but when Ann said, Those girls think you’re hot, Kevin glanced past her to see a couple of bored cheerleaders sharing a laugh over something he was sure he did not care to know.

  Kevin was desperate for a segue to take him out of this silence and thought of saying, “And you? Do you think I’m hot?” But he was scared she’d say something ambivalent like, “I’m here, aren’t I?” and he would have to agree with her being there beside him in the car, a fact so surprising to him still that he was not sure he wanted to examine it. There was another reason why the question was dangerous: she had had a lover for eleven months of the year they were apart. Only three weeks earlier she had gotten rid of him, and though he knew he should have waited to be with her until she was over her lover—she had waited only a week before taking up with this man after she left him—he felt that waiting (even if he could have managed it) would in this case be putting her lover’s feelings before his own, and he wanted badly for her lover to stay up all night for weeks with a tumbler of iceless bourbon and a rekindled cigarette habit, listening as he had to scratchy record albums over which he had grieved the loss of girls back in high school.

  As they began the climb into the Appalachians, Kevin plugged cassettes into the tape player and sang along brightly with songs they had shared while together. But he worried: about how to kill the daylit hours, for it was too early yet to find a motel and check in and he certainly did not want to appear too eager for that part of the two of them he had missed the most.

  Kevin knew the area moderately well and several options occurred to him — a couple of antiques stores, a stretch of a river clogged so tightly with huge boulders that you could rock-hop a half mile either way. But he dismissed these ideas quickly, as he would never be able to focus on antiques and was sure his boredom would show, and as for the river, how could he expect to keep his hands off Ann in such awesome seclusion? They used to camp when they were together and what they liked most about nature was the erotic opportunities it provided. No, he needed something genuinely and newly distracting, something he would never have done when they were first together to keep at bay his eagerness and his anxiety.

  Not three miles past the point where the highway crossed the Eastern Continental Divide, in the first of several tacky hamlets vying for tourists, Kevin found his solution. Along a two-mile stretch of otherwise scenic highway, a half-dozen gem mines competed for the leaf-season traffic. He seemed to remember his parents taking him and his sister to one of these places when they were in grade school, though the particulars were long lost to him. He knew that Ann would object because she did not care to throw darts at balloons when they visited carnivals, or enter sweepstakes or buy lottery tickets or any other of the ways in which he squandered money taking chances. Ann took chances of a more dangerous sort, and he had it in mind that aside from killing time he might also attempt some unspoken but obvious moral instruction about the types of chances one could take with impunity. He would be careful not to use this word for he was overly fond of it and had overused it in the past nine months and Ann had let him know more than once that impunity to her was a less than noble goal, if even an attainable one. We all get hurt and punish ourselves and find ways to punish those we care for the most, she’d said to him once. Though Kevin acknowledged the obvious truth in this statement, he nonetheless questioned her need to allow for such obligatory crime and punishment. This was back when he used to argue with her, before he found ways to love the person she had become.

  Kevin swung suddenly into the dusty gravel lot of a gem mine. He chose one with a fruit stand attached to one end, so that Ann might assume he had stopped for apples, which were gloriously in season.

  “Do they have cider?” she asked, and he said he was sure they did and he would buy some after they were through.

  “Through what?”

  “We’re going gem mining.”

  She asked if he was kidding but without conviction, as if he expected such a response.

  “Dead serious,” said Kevin, and Ann resigned herself to it with a sigh, easing out of the shoulder harness so willingly that it occurred to him that she, too, might be going out of her way to keep things light and easy between them. Perhaps she had learned what he had learned in their time apart. For some reason this idea made him tremble, and he hesitated with the car door swung open until Ann said his name and nodded at the door and he saw that he was blocking a space for a van trying to pull in next to him.

  “Counting your money?” said a heavy red-faced man climbing out of the passenger’s side of the van. Before Kevin could answer, the man said, “You best take more than you planning on. I’ll tell you, they’ll lighten your wallet in these places.”

  The man’s companion had hauled herself out of the driver’s side and was alongside saying, “Don’t listen to him, he’ll spend all day out here, going broke for a four-dollar ruby.”

  “Is that how this works?” Ann asked when the couple was out of earshot. “You spend forty bucks on a four-dollar stone?”

  That’s the way everything works, Kevin thought. Quickly he hooked his arm in Ann’s and drew her close as they scuffed through the gravel. “The Hope diamond was discovered here,” he said.

  “You don’t say?”

  “And the crown jewels of England.”

  “And the Rosetta stone?”

  “And Liberace. He came shining up out of the muck. Some preacher unearthed him. Hosed him off and taught him to play piano and made a killing off him.”

  He felt so good going into the mine that he ordered the largest bucket available, which was the size of a washtub and took two high school boys to carry. They followed the boys through the office out under the shed covering the long, bench-lined sluice. The water running over the shallow chute appeared clear and cold. Kevin looked forward to placing his hands in its iciness. It was not until the high school boys had set their bucket down and found him a trowel and filled two trays to brimming with lumpy dirt that he remembered Ann, who seemed to be enjoying the sight of him enjoying himself. She looked amused and skeptical behind her sunglasses, which weren’t necessary under the shadowed shed, and he wanted badly to kiss her and lead her right out of the shed into the rhododendron-clogged forest that rose steep-banked right alongside the gem mine. He imagined his fellow miners smiling as he and Ann gave themselves over to a passion that even children and crones would recognize as pure and deserving. He imagined applause as they returned to take their chances with trays of dirt.

  They watched their neighbors sift the trays in the rushing water, washing away the dirt and picking through the rocks remaining at the bottom of the tray. When they felt confident they knew what they were doing they lowered their own trays in the water.

  “We’ll never get through this tub of dirt,” Ann said.

  “Might take us a week, but it will be worth it if we find what we’re looking for.”
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br />   “And what are we looking for?”

  “Priceless jewels. Buried treasure. The mother lode.”

  “Right. So let’s say there is something here, and we found it. How do you think our lives would change?”

  Kevin shut his eyes tightly, as if doing so would make her take her question back. She got this way sometimes, querulous and analytical. Often Kevin worried that Ann was smarter than he was or, if not more intelligent, then more focused, less prone to distraction, delusion.

  “Do you mean what would we buy with the money we got from selling our booty?”

  Ann laughed. “No, that’s not what I mean and you know it. We’d spend the money.”

  “No, we’d put it away for our children’s college education.”

  Ann studied her tray. Kevin felt his stomach tighten, as it always did when she failed to acknowledge some reference to their future.

  “Why don’t we concentrate on unearthing our treasure first,” he said. “Plenty of time to consider what it might do to us.”

  But she was hard at work already, shaking her tray lightly, watching the water wash away the dirt. She had a rhythm going that he envied, for he was too aware himself of what was at stake here, too conscious of the fact that they weren’t really going to find anything but a few small bright stones they could buy, bagged, in the gift shop for far less than they’d paid for this bucket it seemed would take them a lifetime to work through.

  And what if there was nothing there at all? Kevin reminded himself of the purpose of this venture: to kill some time until sundown, when he would have her back in the way that he’d dreamed about for months. He lost himself in thoughts of the two of them rolling across a king-size vacation bed, finding things to do to each other that were at once familiar and brand-new. He wanted so much from this night; he wanted it to be the first time they’d touched, and he wanted their touch to convince Ann of what they had and had almost lost. He wanted her to regret leaving him, regret taking up with her lover, but he wanted these regrets to be tempered with impunity, for he would find the strength to forgive her for all her sins against him if she’d only stay put and trust her imagination this time.

  Down the line the large man they’d spoken to in the parking lot bellowed so ridiculously that both of them dropped their pans in the water.

  “Your friend seems to have hit the mother lode,” Ann said.

  The man was holding up a stone as big as a pecan. Kids had left their places on the bench to run down and gawk over his shoulder. It was a dull purplish — an amethyst, it looked like, crude but huge. The man’s wife looked unimpressed, and later, when they passed by on the way out, she winked at Kevin and Ann and nodded at her husband, who was too thrilled by his find to speak.

  “Gets what he pays for and it tickles him to death.” The woman lingered long enough to say that she and her husband had renewed their vows the night before in a ceremony and were retracing their romantic getaway of thirty years earlier. Her husband called to her to come on, they were going to get their picture taken with their find, and Kevin imagined buying a newspaper and coming across this couple grinning blindly into the flash, a cheesy headline highlighting their renewed vows.

  “That’s great,” Kevin said, after the woman had told them to have a blessed day and trundled off after her husband. “Isn’t that great? I think I’ll buy this place. We’ll move up here and make people happy.”

  “What about the ones who come up empty?”

  “They can buy another bucket. You can run the office and I’ll stay out back, planting the jewels in the dirt.”

  “Great. I’ll have to deal with the unhappy ones who want their money back.”

  “People know what the deal is. They know it and they want it anyway. It’s a risk, sure, but isn’t everything? You have to decide whether it’s worth it or not, and sometimes you don’t even have to decide. You just trust that it is.”

  Ann dropped her tray in the sluice. She stood up.

  “What?” he said to her, but she was pushing the hair out of her eyes and looking away from him, and it seemed to Kevin like a year passed before she turned to him.

  “I’ll be in the car.”

  “Come on, Annie,” he said. “All I’m saying is that there are worse ways to make fools of people.”

  “Give me the keys,” she said.

  Kevin handed them over. What else could he do? He knew there would be no talking to her until she had cooled off, that these arguments were not won or lost but merely forgotten. He knew a thing or two about time and forgetting and forgiving and waiting with an expectation that kept you engaged with every breath, almost like, by dreaming hard of what you wanted, you were walking through the world you expected to find.

  Kevin refilled his tray with more dirt and set to work washing mud from rocks of the sort he might have picked up in the parking lot, the kind crunching under Ann’s shoes as she made her way to the car. But as soon as his tray was empty he felt an emptiness himself, which lingered even when the tray was brimming again. He kept at it anyway, for even though he knew he should be getting impatient and even irritated by his lack of success, he realized he’d paid far too much for this tub of muddy gravel, and it seemed to him irresponsible to leave even the slightest chance of a payoff for someone else to find.

  The Golden Era of Heartbreak

  AFTER SHE LEFT, the town where we lived grew flat as an envelope. Sound carried: the song of a truck driver showering five miles east. Nothing could block his dirge. Long-distance misery leaking across the flats while he scrubbed away the road grime. He, too, had come home to a top drawer cleared of underwear. I could hear him night and day, asking her forgiveness, beg your pardon, baby, for the times that she’d arrived home to find him gone. I knew from the rising strings that she’d never come back, that he would never get clean. Those strings: sweet Nelson Riddle arrangements, country meringue from the fifties. Pinnacle of lovelorn lament. Fine time for misery.

  My house filled to the eaves with this song. Moths waved in the soaring orchestration. They dusted lampshades with it, painted the medicine-cabinet mirror. Up half the night trying not to listen, I reverted to an opinion I had given up forty years earlier, along about kindergarten: globes were wobbly lies. The earth was flat as the muted-by-miles-of-not-much-of-nothing notes of the trucker’s song. Nowhere to hide and no escape, just sleep for the lucky and, for me, punishing runs.

  After she left, I ran hundreds of miles along those low-shouldered roads. It got to where Mexican migrants would stop work to bring me a cucumber when I slashed past in the lethal early-afternoon heat. Then the hospital, where they gave me medicine that turned me into a loaf of bread. The cheerful foreign doc asked me what year it was and I told him pointedly — I mean to say that I got up in his face so close that his pocked scars from a wicked case of acne were craters on a magnified moon — that the major daily of our nation’s capital was contaminated because she had scoured its ads in want, want, want — I always got stuck on that word — I said to the doc, Her want spreads spores like anthrax. Say anthrax in one of those places. Is it an irony that registers on anyone but the inmate that you’re in there for behavior interpreted as less than rational, but when you say something crazy — which in that situation seems to me the norm — they shoot you full of more bread loaf? Though I confess I ate the ruffled paper cup that held my pills. I confess I’d have done anything to keep from returning to an earth leveled by her leaving.

  SHE’D BEEN GONE for a year and a half and I had not heard word one. I knew where she had alighted and with whom, but had no street address, no lover’s last name. Just major metropolitan area with this Rick she met at a conference. Work-related: how I hate having first scoured the want ads that brought us here to this town.

  “You could just as easily hate the conference where she met him,” said my sister when I complained about having helped Beth find the job. That was when I was still fool enough to commiserate with family members and worlds-at-large. Back be
fore, one by one, they all turned on me. Went from suggesting acupuncture to signing me up for some extended-stay hospital. People have no sympathy for the brokenhearted because it’s what they fear the most. They pretend it’s as minor and obligatory as having your wisdom teeth pulled, getting your heart ripped from your chest, having feral mutts tug-a-war the bloody organ in your kitchen while you lean white-veined against the rusty refrigerator, drowning in schmaltzy string arrangements.

  So I had no one — only the Mexican migrants who offered cucumbers and water from the boss man’s cooler and must have recognized in my desperate stride a fellow alien. The only person I got around to trading words with was the laconic, chain-smoking Deb — or so her name tag read — who worked at the market where I purchased my few provisions. It was a sticky-floored, dirty-ceilinged store that Beth had favored over the chain grocery because after the dogwoods bloomed Deb and her coworkers would take out the magazines in aisle 7 and stock it with chilis and tortillas and even Spanish videos for the migrants.

  One night I drove over to pick up my stock groceries: Band-Aids, ginger ale, saltines, bulk raisins, chicken broth, and white rice. I could live off this list for weeks at a time. And had been doing so, and the pounds sweated away in the eighteen-mile runs, and there weren’t that many to leave puddling the road in the first place and so many times in the days after she left I would not have been able to tell you the correct use for, never even mind the name of, a fork.

  “Give me one of those Pick Ten tickets,” I said when I had my groceries all lined up on the belt. Deb wasn’t there that night. In her place was a high school boy. His head was chubby and dripping with red-blond bangs. Used to be in a town like this you got beat up for wearing your hair long. Now the ones doing the beating are the only ones with their ears covered.