Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  Get me, he thought again, the hell out of here.

  The girl with the pizza-slice hat came and slid their pizza onto the table, departing without a word.

  “She is not happy here,” Cassie noted, watching as the girl walked away.

  “I love it,” Brian said. “She’ll destroy us all.”

  “So,” his mother said, picking up a thread from some earlier point in the conversation he’d drifted from, “you’ll love this. It’s part of a ‘clothing-optional personal recreation facility,’ apparently. That’s what they’re calling it.”

  A tendril of cheese hung gelatinous and steaming from Brooke’s plate to the pizza tin. She leaned forward, twirled it around her finger, slurped it up. “What does that even mean? That doesn’t sound like anything. That’s like a bunch of different words grabbed out of a hat.”

  “Oh, it’s all tax related,” Cassie said. She pulled a slice onto her plate, considered it for a moment and picked up her wine glass again. “It’s all a big tax write-off for the whole sad-ass lot of them.” She paused. “The fuckers.” Brook and Brian shared a quick side-eyed look, there and gone. This was a new thing with their mom, the swearing.

  “Asshole,” Brooke said.

  “You got that right,” said their mother. Brian ate his pizza.

  The divorce had opened new, untold avenues of hurt inside their mom. That much was obvious. Granted, their dad had left in a spectacularly shitty fashion, but in spite of the Houdini-like speed with which he had essentially vanished from their lives, it was still a slow pull of a Band-Aid when it came to discovering how much it hurt. They were all still feeling it, still exploring its boundaries. Brian still found himself vacillating between relief and resentment at the man’s absence.

  The previous fall, their father had left with Traci, a twenty-four-year-old nutritional supplement saleswoman who worked at his gym. This was immediately after Cassie had found a message window open on his computer that spelled out the long-running affair between the two, complete with a bevy of graphic sexual requests via his father and lots of emojis and some pretty smart puns, if Brooke was to be believed, about both Tantric sex and nutritional health from Traci. Brian had no interest in reading the offending message thread; he got his information from his sister and mother. Though as far as he knew, his mother still carried a folded, worn printout of the exchange in her purse, stapled in the corner like the world’s crappiest school assignment.

  Once he’d been called out on the affair, his dad hadn’t denied it. Instead, he’d quickly and secretly cashed in a bunch of his stocks and his 401k and then absconded with Traci to live in what amounted to a high-end nudist colony outside Scottsdale, Arizona. His mother, working her sixty hours a week at a catering business she co-owned, suddenly found herself bereft of a husband, unable to make house payments on her own, her life pretty much upended. She hired a PI to look into the nudist colony. She and his father promptly began savaging each other in the court system. From what Brian could discern, his father’s new digs sounded somewhat like Sunny Meadows, except with gates and a guard and clearance lanyards and—this is the part that hollowed his mom out, he could see it—a “clothing-free” option. Not to mention the twenty-four-year-old nutritionist.

  There were rumors in nearby taverns, the PI had reported in his weekly summary, that wife-swapping abounded in the complex, that there was some kind of weird polyamory thing going on. Brooke—since she could stomach the details of their parent’s marriage unraveling in a way that he couldn’t—had seen the photos the PI had sent. Traci was, by all accounts, the youngest member in the complex by at least few decades.

  “They do yoga in the morning,” Brooke once told him. “Like, the whole compound, or facility, or whatever it is. Thirty or forty people doing the downward dog on the tennis courts. Naked. Their little yoga mats. Teats hanging all pendulous.”

  “Oh my God, Brooke. Stop.”

  “That private investigator has pictures.”

  “Gross.”

  “Red knees. Knobby elbows. Big old lady-bush gone all gray and wiry.”

  He said, “You are so full of shit.”

  “Traci’s had a boob job, Brian. I can tell. She’s got a tattoo on her lower back.”

  “Like a tramp stamp? The private investigator took pictures of Traci’s tramp stamp? Isn’t that illegal?”

  “It says ‘No Regerts,’ Brian. Misspelled. In cursive.”

  “You are so lying.”

  “Dad’s old gray balls, swinging in the breeze. You can see his bald spot, too.”

  “You’re telling me you’ve seen a picture of Dad’s balls. While he does yoga. Naked.”

  “Hell yes, I have. It made me sick.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, whether or not you believe it doesn’t change the fact that it’s seared into my retinas for the rest of my life. It doesn’t change the fact that he can go to hell.”

  So now, over pizza, Cassie regaled them with updates. It could be distilled down to this, really: court, court, more court. Their father flew back and forth when necessary, Scottsdale to Portland and back. But mostly it was lawyers lobbing legalities at each other. Their father was resolute in his arrogance, his belief in a lack of wrongdoing—this in and of itself was not that much of a surprise to anyone. It was his defining quality. That and his distance. He’d always been a workaholic, and ultimately kind of a shithead when forced into proximity of his family for long stretches. Like they were his kryptonite; the longer he was near them, the more irritable he got. It was his second marriage; his first wife lived in Maryland somewhere. They’d only been married a year, when Dad had been in college. Still, this affair, and the savagery of his contempt for their mother, had surprised them all.

  After dinner, the three of them walked back to Sunny Meadows. Soon even this stretch of land would be one vast metropolis. The weedy hills beyond the apartment complex would also be leveled and filled with more boxes of people. It felt inevitable, given the velocity of the world now. They walked, and he watched his sister slip her hand into his mother’s hand. In that moment he felt both apart from and feverishly touched with love for them.

  Back at Cassie’s apartment, they watched television. Their father had taken little more than a change of clothes with him to the nudist colony, as weird as that was, and the flatscreen was just too big for the new living room. The edge of it actually jutted out into the hallway that led to the rest of the apartment; you had to be careful not to knock into it. Brooke laid on the couch with her feet in their mother’s lap; Brian sprawled out across his father’s recliner. He unpacked his own pickle jar from a box in the kitchen, and he and his mom tackled the second bottle of wine together.

  They got stuck on some old show that Brian vaguely remembered from high school, long canceled and relegated to the darkest corners of random odd-channel syndication. What was it called again? The star of the show was an anthropomorphic plate of outrageously flirtatious lasagna living among a human family, each of whom endlessly struggled with their love lives. That was, like, the whole premise: this horny plate of lasagna trying to bang this family that tried to bang everyone else. So weird. The teenaged children, a brother and sister, one in college, the other in high school, plowed through romantic partners like they were visiting a buffet table; the mother was continually exhausted from the father’s brutish, joke-heavy, ceaseless advances. All the while the lasagna, moored to the kitchen table and seemingly desperate to copulate with a human of any gender or orientation, oozed lascivious remarks and sexual innuendo. It was never explained why or how lasagna-human relations were desired or, really, possible. Or even why they perpetually left that particular plate of lasagna on the table, or how it had gained sentience. The show had aired for only a season or two and had been canceled years ago. The lasagna itself was essentially a hand puppet slathered in cheese and meat, flaps of calcified pasta
jittering as it spoke in a cynical, cigarette-ravaged rasp.

  “This is fucking weird,” Brooke said from the couch.

  “Brian used to love this show,” Cassie said.

  “I did not.”

  Brooke snorted. “This seems like something Brian would like. You could relate, right?”

  “You did, honey. When you were in high school,” Cassie said. “It was always on when you were in high school.” She was getting a little buzzed.

  “Well, can we change it now? I can assure you the allure is lost on me these days.”

  Cassie flipped through the channels. Golf. News. Golf news. A woman shoving a plug of hamburger into an apparatus that pushed it out the other end in pink strings. Tanks rolling down some dusty, rubble-strewn road, impossible to tell if it was a film or a newsreel. The viral video of that dog leaping from the tree, the cat safely in its jaws. And there, wonder of wonders, was the film adaptation of The Long Way Home. They watched as a young Brad Pitt abruptly hitchhiked away from his small Seattle apartment, away from his dissolute marriage, his failed academic career. (Lolled across the recliner, Brian felt a flush of embarrassment rise to his cheeks at what seemed the brazen similarities to his own life.) The film eventually cut to some lonely stretch of wooded road, some interminable point beyond the city. Brad looked, honestly, pretty fucking Hollywood-handsome compared to some of the mutants that Brian knew and had gone to school with, himself included. Even in his dumb canvas jacket and worn cardigan, his five o’clock shadow, the guy seemed just too pretty to pull off being the frazzled, broken academic-on-a-soul-search type.

  Yet the Schutts were enrapt, and Brian thought again of saying something about his interview with Mark Sandoval that day, but it was still too big of a jigsaw puzzle to unpack. In the film, Pitt smoked a joint with a trucker and got dropped off at a diner. He poured syrup on his hash browns with mournful eyes. Sparks flew between him and the waitress—again, Jennifer Garner looked like a million bucks considering she was snared in the graveyard shift at a diner in the ass-end of nowhere—before he paid his bill and wandered away into the night, only to step off into the brush a short while later, reasonably high, to take a piss. And then came the cone of light, the paralysis, the terror. The abduction, the paralyzed limbs. The probe that snaked its way through a tear duct, and the gossamer-thin ones that entered beneath his fingernails, the one writhing down his throat. The off-camera implication that the asshole, the urethra were also invaded. Pitt screaming and bucking beneath the white light. No aliens around at all, just that halo, those invasive threads. It was, Brian remembered, pretty close to what Sandoval had written in the book. It had landed Pitt an Oscar nomination.

  “Ooooh, my Brad,” their mother cooed, “not down the wiener, Brad, I’m so sorry,” and Brooke let out a bright peal of laughter like a little kid. Even Brian did. A pure and unplanned moment, an oddly sweet one given the wretchedness of the scene before them, and for a moment that odd collection of rooms warmed toward a home; the place became more than an odd repository of their mother’s ghosts. He felt for a moment like they were people forming scar tissue together, healing together.

  By the end of the movie Cassie was asleep, her chin tucked down, pickle jar nestled in her lap. Brooke walked her into her bedroom and tucked her in and they left. “Goodnight, babies,” he heard her say from her bedroom as they stepped out into a night grown cool and rich with the sound of crickets. The wine had left him with another headache.

  Brooke jammed on the heater of her little compact Hyundai. She pulled out of the complex and the first thing she said was, “I think we should disown the fucker.”

  “Who? Dad?”

  “No, Rodney Dangerfield. Yes, Dad.”

  “I don’t think it works like that.”

  “I’m just saying. It’s kicking Mom’s ass. She can’t even afford that PI. I’m helping pay for him.”

  He was surprised. “You are?”

  She nodded grimly. “What else does she have going on for her? I hope she takes him for every dime. I hope Traci loses her frigging saline bags in the settlement.”

  “I don’t think Traci will have to actually give up anything, will she?”

  She scowled at him, incredulous. “You do get that Mom’s just putting on a good show for us, right?”

  “I don’t know. It’s Mom.”

  “It’s Mom?”

  “Brooke, she just seemed happy to have us there. We got to have dinner, watch a movie. We got to hang out with her. She seemed fine to me. She seemed like Mom, you know?”

  “Your whole life ripped out like that after someone’s dumb enough to leave a chat box open.” She bit her lower lip, changed lanes. “Just no fucking loyalty, you know? Dad can take his downward dog and stick it up his ass.”

  She dropped him off in front of his house. The night was cool, idyllic. He stepped out and leaned down at the open car door. “Thanks for the ride.”

  She gazed out the windshield with her hands wrapped around the wheel. “Listen. Just try thinking of some people besides yourself, Brian. Just try it out, see how it feels.”

  He pulled back a little. “Wait, what?”

  “I’m just saying. Mom’s going through a lot.”

  “Brooke. We’re all going through a lot. We’ve all got stuff going on. This constant hard-ass thing you have going on, it’s tiring.”

  “She’s our mom. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I know that. And I’m saying I don’t need a guilt trip, okay? I fail to see what horrible thing I did tonight.”

  “Mom needs us to stick up for her.”

  “I did stick up for her!”

  “Not enough.”

  “Why? Because I didn’t call Dad an asshole with you guys? I didn’t join in the group assassination? Seriously, Brooke. Because I ate pizza instead of talking endless shit about Dad?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  He shut the passenger door, probably too hard, and Brooke drove off in a flare of red taillights. And just like that, that good feeling that he’d felt in his mom’s apartment, like they were all coming together into something unbroken, that was gone. He stood in front of his house feeling like he’d stumbled further back than when he’d started.

  2

  So he turned around. Walked away from the house. Strode down those ever-familiar streets, his head blurred with anger. Maybe Mom just wants to be listened to, Brooke. Maybe she doesn’t need you to roll in and be her avenging white knight. What did she want him to do, build an effigy of their father and light it up in the Piece A’ Pizza parking lot? Loose some daddy-hurt howl and kick it in its flaming balls? Christ.

  Walking, walking, he stepped over a Rorschach of vomit in front of a shuttered boutique where headless mannequins stood draped wraithlike in the window. He stepped over a smeared slice of pizza with a boot print in it. A man in front of the Saturn Hotel was talking to himself, waving his hand at his head as if besieged by gnats. He saw ECHO LUVS B in big looping letters on a wall, the ghost of old piss snarling in the air around him. A jukebox throbbed through the open doorway of a bar when someone stepped outside to smoke, and the laughter from inside sounded like it came from a different world.

  He turned south, hooked around the corner, and the block went from bright to dark just like that. Streetlights stood moored at the corners, but there was nothing in between but an expanse of neon-scattered dark, traffic at his back and up ahead of him.

  And there was a car stopped in the middle of the street, with the dark shapes of men clustered around it.

  He heard someone titter and dread coiled fast in his guts; someone slapped the car’s hood, and as if in response, the headlights flared to life, illuminating the street. Brian saw four guys standing around a white four-door Toyota with a sagging bumper. One of them slapped the hood again, his face ghoulish and underc
ut by the headlights, and Brian heard someone say, very clearly, “Knock him back to Coonbekistan,” everyone loosing a chorus of laughter. Sour spit flooded Brian’s mouth as he slowed his walk, heart seized in a panic.

  He was soft, man. He’d always been soft. Soft-muscled, soft-boned. Ran a thirteen-minute mile in high school, dicking around, afraid to try. Saw himself as a sausage-casing of a man swaddled in academia and ironic T-shirts that seemed forever bunched too tight around his gut. Saw himself in pants that cut continually into his waist as he ran to catch busses that inevitably pulled away from him, exhaust clouding at his knees. Knife-thin lips and a double chin he tried unsuccessfully to hide behind a wan beard. Beleaguered with constant headaches that no washcloth or painkiller or darkened room could fix. Afraid of women and conflict both. Afraid, simultaneously, of succeeding and failing. Afraid all around! Of everything! Fathered by a distant, litigious, beleaguered nudist. Sibling to the fiercest person he knew, who managed to talk to him simultaneously with pity and utter contempt. That was who he was. That’d always been him. It was fine. It was his world.

  But what it meant was that he was soft, he was a body-pillow of a man, and yet here he was and there were four of these guys. One of him, four of them. They’d said what they’d said, and he was soft, but that thing at the bus stop when he was sixteen, that guy at the bus stop: it was something that still kept him up nights sometimes, still had the ability to galvanize him with shame all these years later.