Misconception

by Ryan Boudinot

  "That's one hell of a tow job you got there," the logger says.

  I suppose so, George says. The saplings snap, and with a great crashing rumble our rented vehicle of recreation tumbles side over side through the trees, flinging our belongings from the windows and flapping doors, finally coming to rest upside down some fifty feet below.

  The logger takes off his hat and wipes his brow. "Not exactly a tow job anymore," he says.

  Of course our vacation is now ruined, with George and my mother not speaking, and me sitting between them in the logger's expansive front seat as he drives us to the next big town, where we'll rent a car. The plan is to return to the scene, pick through the wreckage for our things, and wait for a towing crew. While George fills out the paperwork for the car, my mom and I find ourselves alone in a gas station restroom. She gives me a look, an oh shit, what did weget into? I return it, and we both laugh, a little at first, then bent over double, holding onto the sink for support. Suddenly this is the best vacation I can remember. In the rented Toyota on our way back to the scene, George sucks air through his teeth and mutters about insurance premi ums. My mother and I communicate via a language of raised and lowered eyebrows. The game is to make the other laugh, but as soon as one of us does, George bellows that there's nothing damn funny about this, that we're going to have a hell of a time gathering our stuff, and that the Coopers are not going to be pleased about what happened to their vacation transportation and winter home.

  At the ravine, we scramble down the embankment, picking up items of clothing and scattered toiletries. I find my mother's hair diver, smashed to pieces on a rock. Inside the RV there is a mess of food, bedding, utensils, and cleaning products. George crawls over the rocks and weeds holding objects aloft and asking whether they belong to us or the Coopers. He wants to put them in two distinct piles. He becomes upset that he's lost his silver grooming set, which includes a toenail clipper, nail file, tweezers, and an engraved toothpick.

  "I can't lose my kit," George says. "My dad gave it to me when I graduated from high school. Are these socks yours?"

  The mountains around us soon threaten to hide us in twilight and George and my mom loudly debate whether to drive home in the rental car. The tow truck George called is nowhere to be seen. I find the grooming kit under a road atlas inside the upside-down RV and pocket it without telling George. He sits on a fallen log numbly eating graham crackers squirted with fake cheese from a can, occasionally making pronouncements about substandard highway construction.

  We try to bargain with the daylight, hold out for as long as we can before admitting it is night, then resign ourselves to the fact that we'll be spending the night here. My mom probes the inside of the RV with a flashlight, arranging cushions and blow-up mattresses on what used to be the ceiling. I crawl inside a sleeping bag and nest in a corner in the back, a table suspended above my head. George and mom settle into a place next to the bathroom. When they start snoring I escape by crawling through the window, dragging the sleeping bag behind me. When I get to the rental car, I throw George's grooming set as far as I can into the deep woods.

  Albany again.

  "Cool," I said. "You said cool when you looked at my slide in the microscope."

  Kat snored in the chair. I still had a handful of pages to go. I skimmed ahead. Kat developed a crush on me, after a series of other boyfriends. Dry humping in Paul's garage, holding hands at the mall, the microscope, menstruation, the trading of slides. And this: It ribbons out of the tiny portal at the tip, a white slo-mo stream like windblown hair in a commercial for shampoo, hanging for a moment, propelled upward untilgravity lies it on the back of my hand in a pattern suggesting a treble clef. I read the passage a second time, unable to recall the experience. I thought I'd experienced my first orgasm with a girl two years later: Paige Phillips, the eyeliner addict. This was some part about Kat making me come with a combo blow/hand job in George's van, parked in the driveway.

  "Finished?" Kat said, waking into a stretch.

  "I don't remember this thing with, uh, you and me in the van."

  "It might not have happened exactly like that. It felt right, structurally."

  "I thought this was a memoir."

  "Maybe it happened with another boy, but I thought it would be good to include."

  "You said cool when you looked into the microscope, not sick. It wasn't Mrs. Holmstead who had the freaky thing about fire drills, it was Mrs. Holland."

  "Mrs. Holland. That's right. I'll change that." Kat stretched out of the chair. "Look, Cedar, it's not like I'm consulting an almanac to write this thing. All I need from you is to tell me if there's anything in there you want me to cut so that I don't find myself in court."

  "You want me to just read your memoir, half of it written from my point of view, and rubber stamp it? That's why we're here?"

  Kat pinched the bridge of her nose. "It's just legal shit my editor gave me."

  "Can we set aside the legal shit? I'm not going to sue you. I'll keep reading. I promise I won't nitpick. You're right. Who cares about the name of our teacher? Let me see the rest."

  "I have to go print it. And I did say sick, not cool."

  Kat left. I settled into the chair she had occupied, into the warmth of her body retained by the upholstery, and stared at the leatherette booklet containing the motel's phone numbers and amenities. The Weather Channel played the storm. I considered going to Kat's room and asking for the entire manuscript, but cautioned myself. She was doling it out a section at a time as if through a series of safety valves.

  What it boiled down to was this: as long as I didn't fuck Kat, I still had a chance to patch it together with L. One fuck in an office with a twenty-two-year-old intern was a mistake, two fucks was a habit. I was going to have to not fuck Kat.

  I Googled Kat Daniels, pulling up 347 results, the first few of which were about a porn star. I clicked a couple links and determined this wasn't the same Kat Daniels. I flipped to the title page of Kat's memoir. Katherine Daniels. I found her book, Nymphonomicon, on Amazon and read the review:

  Katherine Daniels's short stories, collected in Nympho- nomicon, introduce the radical aesthetics of early nineties riot-grrrl feminism to the otherworldliness of postwar European fiction in the vein of Danilo Kis or Bohumil Hrabal. She appears to have digested Angela Carter's oeuvre and Bataille's Story of the Eye, using their perverse energies to limn the dirty secrets of her generation. In "Oranges," a woman keeps her boyfriend in a lunch box, while the title story is a woman's sexual history told in the form of entries in the yellow pages. "The Weight of Blood" employs an unnamed city's S-M subculture as a strangely affecting milieu in which to expose a man's childhood traumas involving a pinewood derby. At turns affectionate and bitingly perverse, Daniels pulls the reader through the more convoluted recesses of the human psyche while rendering physical, human contact electrically real on the page.

  -Ryan Boudinot

  Whatever that means. The handful of customer reviews were split between five stars and one. The cover image, a reproduction of some grainy vintage erotica with the title and author name placed strategically over the nipples and pubic area looked intriguing enough. I signed in and ordered it.

  Kat returned with the next batch of pages.

  "I ordered your book," I said.

  "I would've given you one for free. I have a few copies with me."

  "I Googled you. You're a porn star."

  "Different Kat Daniels. She's got way bigger tits than me."

  "My first cadaver dissection was a woman with implants. Have you ever seen a cadaver?"

  "I can't say I have."

  "They're fascinating," I said. "Out of everything in med school, cadaver lab was my favorite."

  "I guess that shouldn't surprise me."

  "You get to see parts of bodies that the bodies themselves never saw."

  "Like a memoir. You get to see parts of lives that those living them never saw."

  I glanced at the clock and thought
I should get on with the next chapter, but I was enjoying Kat's company. It was like the college experience of having a girlfriend, staying up in waves of mock profound logorrhea, suggesting a twoin-the-morning recon to a mini-mart for unhealthy food, smoking bad hash from a crunched soda can. That period, when I would have most enjoyed getting to know Kat, when both of us were most interesting and consumed with unrealistic plans, was a comatose pause between us. Our initial, pubescent compatibility had degraded. Now we were old, with histories tied up in other people. This flavor of strangeness, this witnessing of the momentum of another person's ripening and the onslaught of decay, was precisely the reason why I wanted desperately, suddenly, to put my cock in any place she offered. Just to see what it was like, to extract eroticism from sheer weirdness. Instead, I continued to read her book.

  Cedar recounting some

  events from back

  in the day.

  One afternoon that summer Kat called sounding panicked and asked me to meet her at Burger King. I rode my bike across town and found her in a booth drinking a shake, using a spork to move piles of salt around on a placemat.

  "Last night my dad called," she said. "He wants to meet me across the street at Kentucky Fried Chicken in half an hour. I don't want to see him by myself."

  "Does your mom know he's here?"

  Kat shook her head. "I wouldn't be seeing him if she did."

  We spotted Kat's father's van-a white beaten-up Ford with the name of his employer, Apex Septic, stenciled crappily on the side-across the street in the KEG parking lot. A man appeared to be sleeping inside. The tailgate bore an ideology in the form of a bumper sticker: Bosses are like diapers. Full of shit and always on your ass!!! We crossed the street. Kat went to the driver's side and stood looking at him awhile. He must have realized he was being watched and, startled, he jerked his head, smiled, and adjusted his baseball cap.

  "Katie Lady! I'm so happy to see you!" the man said, hugging his daughter in the parking lot. "You hungry? Who's your friend?"

  "I'm Cedar."

  "As in the tree? Cool name, dude. I'm Jerry. You guys in the mood for some extra crispy?"

  As we went inside, Kat whispered to me to stand in line with Jerry while she went to the restroom.

  "You Kat's boyfriend?" he said.

  "Yeah, I guess so."

  "Cool. I always wondered when she'd start seeing boys. You going out for any sports?"

  "I'll probably do tennis next year."

  "No football? You look like you could be a wide receiver. What's wrong witchoo man? Don't worry, I'm shitting you. You got a favorite flavor? I'm kind of partial to original style."

  "I like barbecue."

  "Yeah, barbecue's great. And we'll have to get biscuits and gravy, too. Coleslaw. Whatever you want, man, let me know. My treat."

  We ordered and found a booth. "You a big movie fan?" Jerry said.

  "Sure."

  "Ever see War Games?"

  "Yeah."

  "Want. To. Play. A. Game? Ha. Yeah, all that crazy shit. I was an extra in that motherfucker. I'm not shitting you. Shot those military base scenes up in the mountains in an old mining camp. Put me in a soldier uniform and had me chase after a truck waving a fake M-16 all day. Those Hollywood fuckers do boatloads of coke. Sound guy invited me into his trailer and let me do a few lines. But I don't do that kind of shit anymore. I'm completely straight, have been for some time now, a year and three months. Back then, though, that was a different story. One of the makeup chicks, man, we got to talking and before you know it I was asking her if I could see her with her knees behind her ears, you know what I'm talking about. Here comes Katie. Sweetheart!"

  Kat slid into the booth beside me as our order arrived.

  Jerry said, "I got apples in my truck for you, just picked yesterday. I've been doing some extra work at an orchard. I have this arrangement with the bossman there to fix equipment. They let me take home all the apples I want. Nice ones, too, the ones they send to Japan. All the crummy apples they turn into cider. You guys have jobs this summer?"

  "I babysit sometimes," Kat said.

  "I mow lawns."

  "Good, good," Jerry said. "What are you guys holding back for, dig in! There's way more chicken here than I'll ever eat. So you're going to be in high school next year?" Kat nodded.

  "You promise to study hard?"

  "Yeah."

  "That's one of my biggest regrets, you know," Jerry said, screwing his hat tighter onto his head by the bill. "If I would of taken it a little more serious at the time, that's all I'm saying. But you're smart, way smarter than I ever was. You'll do good in high school."

  "Why did you want to meet me here?" Kat said.

  "I thought you liked fried chicken."

  "I mean why did you want to meet me at all."

  Jerry took off his hat, bent the bill, and put it back on again. "Hey. Okay, I see where you're coming from. I got you. I know it's weird, me calling you up out of the blue and all that. I was going to be in the area anyway, and I just thought it would be good to see you. To catch up on things."

  "I haven't seen you in like years or something."

  Jerry turned to me, laughed nervously. "See, man, she's mad at me. And you know what? She has every reason in the world to be."

  Beneath the table Kat locked her fingers around mine. "I'm not mad at you," she said, "I just don't understand why you wanted to meet now."

  He sighed. "Because I wanted to apologize. You know how things work with AA. I've been going for the last few years, like, you know, I should of always done. And one of the big deals for AA is apologizing to people you hurt in the past. I don't expect you to like me or anything, I know I did some fucked up stuff-"

  "You broke my arm," Kat said.

  "It was an accident, Katty. I ... Yeah, like okay, breaking your arm. Which I didn't mean to do at all. But what a shit thing to do, yeah. I know a bunch of words from an ex-drunk are worth nothing, I know that. And I know there'll always be part of you which hates me. I accept your hate as part of my punishment. There's all this talk of higher powers and stuff in AA. I've been thinking a lot about repentance, like what it's supposed to be about. My folks never were big into church, and I never saw much use in it. Until recently, anyway. Few weeks ago I went to this wetback Catholic church, right? Because it was close to my house and I saw on TV how they have these booths you can sit in and confess shit to the priest. So I went there and went into one of the booths, but there was no priest on the other side, so I figured you had to stay in there until the priest came. I got scared that if I left I'd fuck up my chance to repent. So, yeah, I wasn't really thinking straight. I ended up hanging out in that booth overnight, falling asleep in there. Later I realized they had hours of confession posted outside, but they were in Spanish, so same difference. The priest found me the next morning and asked if I wished to confess. I said yeah, and he said he didn't take confession until after he had his morning coffee. So we went back to his little office where they keep the supplies, the community wafers and wine and stuff, and I ended up telling him everything there that I would have told him in the booth anyway. Old Mexican dude, named Father Jimenez. Studied in a seminary in Colombia, turns out. The sad part to me came when I realized I couldn't even remember some of the bad shit I'd done, probably couldn't remember the worst shit, and the worst shit I ever done was the shit I did to you. So I'm there with Father Jimenez crying my guts out, telling him all this stuff and I like start to become more aware of what it is I'm actually doing. Like I see myself from outside of my own body. And the fucked-up thing I think is that this confession stuff, it doesn't erase the original deed. And in a way, it's like you can fuck up all you want, and then you wipe the slate clean with a confession. Those Catholics, man, they have it figured out. Go ahead and fuck up, just make sure to confess.

  "Which, to me, seems really fucked up, wouldn't you say? So I leave the church after about a box and a half of Kleenex, and I go out to my truck and sit there for about an
hour. Listen to a rock station playing wall-to-wall Meat Loaf with no commercial interruptions. And I fucking hate Meat Loaf, but I made myself listen to that shit sort of as punishment. I start thinking about how to confess and have it actually mean something. What I came up with was this: when you do something wrong, and realize what you did was wrong, a true confession is a way to understand the wrongness of your action the deepest way you can. It's not going to fix whatever it is you did, the damage is done, but it's a way to tell yourself not to fuck up again. Because all you can really accomplish is to become a little better so you don't fuck up so bad next time."

  Jerry pulled his straw in and out of its lid, making a sound like an out-of-tune violin. He trembled a moment, trying to cough out some words. "That's why Fin here, to confess to you that I hurt you and was mean to you and that I live with my own self hatred for it. And this apology is my way to tell you that I want to understand what it must have felt like for you. I know I'll never reach the same level of hurt you felt, but I'll never stop trying to put myself in your shoes and will never forgive myself for it. Even if you forgive me totally, I won't let go of this anger at myself. I know I can't offer you guys much. I'm just a fucking septic-tank pumper who lives in Bumfuck, Egypt, with a van and a three-room shack and a shop. But I want you to know that I would drop anything if you need me, that I will go after anyone who hurts you. I just want to say that I love you, Katie."

  We were suspended in a coldness.

  "Are you finished?" Kat said.

  "I ..."

  "I've heard enough of what you have to say. Let's go, Cedar."

  What Jerry did next was slump, though the word implies this was merely a physical gesture. He had expected this response and knew he didn't deserve any better. Yet still he had hoped. His sorrow pulled his eyes down toward his hands, folded over a piece of greasy chicken growing cold. Pathetically, he took a pencil from his shirt pocket and slowly filled in a three-letter word on a crossword puzzle printed on his placemat. Shaking, I followed Kat out. She crossed the street to Burger King and went behind the building.