Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights

by Mary Ellen Courtney

  “Fuck,” he said as he slid to the ground rubbing his head with the relatively grease-free back of his hand.

  “Sorry.” I looked for spurting blood. Sometimes a little fantasy is better than nothing.

  “What are you sorry about?” he asked.

  “You hit your head,” I said.

  “You didn’t hit it.” He gave me the barest squint, but I hid my tiny riff of glee. He looked over my shoulder to Sparky. “That must be your car.”

  “Yes, it keeps lurching. It barely stops.”

  “There isn’t anywhere around here that knows how to work on that. You need a dealer.”

  “Okay thanks.” I headed back to my car. I looked back at him; he was watching me with a smirk. I don’t know why I cared, but I wished I still had my old VW GTI instead of the wimp car. I grabbed my phone and searched for Toyota dealers. Shit. I really was in the middle of nowhere. I called triple A before I realized I didn’t know where I was. The trucker was putting away tools so I yelled over to him.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Can you tell me where the fuck I am?”

  “Grub ‘n Scrub. They’ll know.” He was smiling.

  Triple A said at least an hour. I called my mother. I thought maybe they’d rescue me, or at least come and get Grandma’s stuff. She talked it over with Bettina.

  “We can’t, Hannie. Bettina wants to stop by the rest home for the blanket, so Judith is driving me home and they have dinner plans.”

  “Mom, I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere. You’re just going to leave me out here over that stupid blanket?”

  “Oh, Hannah, don’t be so dramatic. You’re a big girl. You’ll be able to find a place to stay while they fix the car.”

  “What if they can’t fix it? Tomorrow’s Sunday, I could get stuck here. I have plans. I have a job.”

  “Oh well, if you get stuck, rent a car and come stay with me.”

  I hung up and headed into the diner for god knows what to eat. A waitress in a brown-and-orange uniform led me to a booth right by the kitchen. They had a Thanksgiving dinner special, aka Ptomaine Special. I ordered split pea soup and coffee. She did an eyeball half-roll when I asked about espressos. I took in the room.

  The cook looked like he had pancake batter glued to his beard with bacon grease. He wore a grimy apron and one of those little captain hats with the small brim. He glanced up, smiled, and winked as he ticked the brim in salute. He’d done it before; there were greasy tick marks all along the edge. He had a nice smile through the globs.

  I took out my phone to fire up a solitaire game. My screen image was an old picture of the family camping under the wing of our plane in the Idaho backwoods before it filled up with suspicious survivalists. It was taken a still happy month before my father died. We sure hadn’t seen that one coming, except I guess I sorta had.

  Before my grandmother’s dress and bird, the only other time I’d cleared out someone’s things was for my father a month after he died. My mother said it was just too painful, so I did it.

  I’d had a clear premonition of my father’s death exactly one week before it happened. I was watching a sunset out my sister’s bedroom window. My mind’s eye didn’t see the plane crash into a mountain of snow; it simply saw the end. So even while we waited for the call about his missing plane, I knew he was gone. It was a strangely calm place to sit and wait. Nobody in the family appreciated me saying that he was dead. The premonition, what felt like a psychic connection, made me wonder which one of us made the decision that I should stay behind that day; I always went with him.

  I can barely remember the month between the phone call about the crash and clearing out his things. Except for a few film clips, it’s all kaleidoscopic shards with what felt like cotton-stuffed ears. I’ve bored friends and lovers, and even the occasional therapist, to tears, recounting how disconnected it all felt. The only one who didn’t mind my endless word circles was my ex-husband. I thought it meant he cared. It turned out they overlapped with his endless circles like the Olympic rings of a bad marriage.

  I don’t remember what my brother and sister were doing during that month; they are close in age, so maybe they were consoling each other. My mother went into full retreat. I don’t know how she spent her time. It wasn’t with me. Aunt Judith, who never had children, offered nothing but tight lips and arched eyebrows at what women wore when they came to visit the family. The men in the family talked a lot about money. They were worried, with good reason.

  I remember swimming unseen through the sea of adults milling around our dining room table at the reception after the funeral. It was subdued. My father had been the life of the party. He had always moved fast. I overheard one friend say that if you were talking to him and you blinked, he might disappear. I knew about that. I had blinked and he had disappeared on me too. I was good at changing frequencies and spotting other planes. I’ll always wonder about spotting that mountain; I might have saved his life. Not all of life’s wonders are wonderful.

  I loved flying lingo like “no joy” and “roger that.” My father’s name was Roger. He always smiled when I said, “Roger that Roger.” After the tenth time I would have strangled me. I sometimes imagine that I would have still been saying it as a rebellious teenager and that he wouldn’t have smiled. It’s all in the delivery. I could imagine him saying, “Don’t Roger me that, little girl,” or whatever he would’ve called me. I wonder what he would have called me when I wasn’t a little girl anymore. As it turned out, I was never a rebellious teenager; my mother just wasn’t up to the challenge.

  It’s funny what we remember. People kept dropping off food. It was nice of them, but the strange tastes from other homes just added to the dissonance. I remember being sent to stash casseroles in neighbors’ freezers when ours got full, and then going back to get them when we needed more food. It was strange to drop in and out of households where nothing had changed. People were already looking at me from a distance that I didn’t understand. Life was already upside down without my father there.

  I remember feeling tiny standing by his heavy mahogany casket in the huge church. I remember turning a corner at the funeral home and running into my uncle who looked so much like my father with his blue eyes, it scared me. I remember touching my father’s dead hand.

  My sister and brother were angst-filled teenagers more prone to my mother’s melancholia than to my father’s buoyancy. I was my father’s child. My mother said he had picked me up the day I was born and had never put me down. In many ways I had stepped into his shoes after he died. I became the child my mother refers to as GG Spring. Good Girl Spring. I packed his things for the last time. I learned how to fix toasters. Before long I learned how to throw a blanket over my mother when she passed out on the floor. I was twelve years old.

  Now I’m thirty-two and Grandma had made it to ninety-eight so clearing out her few possessions was a simple thing to do.

  I tried not to breathe when I packed for my father. I tried not to breathe the smell of him. His citrus and bay rum aftershave drifted around his suits and rose up out of his drawers. It was still fresh and alive and having a good time with the smell of leather and with his hair in sweaty baseball caps. If our lives run like seasons, he had died in his summer.

  Grandma had died in her winter, in her three hundred and ninety-second season. The season when things turn grey and odors are faint. When life feels more still, the resting season. Her smell had faded away to dust and old breath, and an unidentifiable perfume with only the bass notes still alive. But it wouldn’t give up. The dusky smell clung to my skin under the veil of Manzanita smoke. There were tenacious pockets hidden up my nose that burst like bubbles in unpleasant moments.

  Her last dress smelled like that. I’d packed it in the trunk. It was tissue-thin cotton in a faded pattern of summery flowers. I could almost remember her in the dress, sitting in the old wicker chair by her bed, her substantial ankles crossed. She always had glasses and dentures in place. She was big on appearances. I
t was always a surprise when she rolled her dentures around. They made her lip stretch out like a Ubangi woman with a lip plate. They clacked. She used to slide them back and forth sideways like she was scratching her gums, then send them back to home base. Dentures must be annoying as hell. Mom and I had already argued about burying her with her dentures. I’d blown through a Black Friday sale to buy a pale lavender chiffon scarf; her daughters wanted it swirled around her neck like a cloud.

  Once Grandma hit ninety it seemed like she’d live forever. Now I felt lonely for the years I’d missed talking to her while I was married. I couldn’t believe I’d thrown her over to do time in a shitty apartment and bad marriage. Deep down, not even deep really, I didn’t want to marry him in the first place, but I’d been living pretty wild and he was a man full of rules that I mistook for a grown-up. Once I married him I was determined to live up to my obligation. I knew the decision to end the marriage was right the day he moved out and took the teakettle he never used. He knew I loved it.

  Grandma had no teakettle or anything else in the end. She’d been bed-bound the last five years. On the day she died she asked to get up and sit in the chair. I guess she’d enjoyed the view from her perch for about fifteen minutes, then got back into bed, went to sleep, and never woke up. It was Thanksgiving Day.

  “Here ya go. You need cream?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  Thank god my lunch had arrived! I was really working myself over with ruminations. Recrimination was about to enter stage left and start mud wrestling with my so-called buoyancy.

  Surprise! The soup was made from scratch. It wasn’t the safe slime from a can that I was expecting. Chunks of carrot, potato, celery and ham had been simmered with peas you could actually see were peas and then dressed with chopped parsley. I bet the ham was local; I was just south of Corona, a pig-raising capital. My nursing home nostrils were washed clean by the aroma of real food, warm spices, and a generous pig.

  “This is delicious,” I said to the cook.

  “Thanks, it’s my mother’s recipe. I think the nutmeg makes it.”

  I could smell his mom’s nutmeg. At some point everyone has a mother. That’s easy to forget. I set my phone on the table and went back and forth between fragrant bites and solitaire moves, which makes for a Prius-paced game.

  I was startled when the trucker slid into the booth with me. I didn’t recognize him at first. His bandana was gone and his hair was black and wet from a shower. He was in jeans, a blue shirt, and a broken in leather jacket. I knew he wasn’t particularly tall, and now I could see that he wasn’t particularly handsome either, but he had a look about him, like maybe he knew more than the difference between may and can.

  “We got off on the wrong foot,” he said.

  “It’s fine. Help is on the way.”

  “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. I didn’t expect you.”

  “Expect me?” “Expect me?”

  “A little car.”

  “I didn’t expect a cranky grammar lesson, so we’re even. How’s your head doing?”

  “You enjoyed that,” he smiled.

  “A little,” I nodded. “Do you do that with everyone? It must wow the girls.”

  “Yeah, that was bad. I was doing battle with a stuck spark plug.”

  The waitress appeared and glared at the trucker. “You sitting here?” He looked at me. I hate eating alone. He looked like about a hundred film crew guys I knew. How dangerous could it get?

  She looked at me, “You don’t have to let him sit here.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Well, don’t buy his bullshit.” She walked away.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “She’s my sister.”

  “Ah, yeah, I have one of those.”

  He went into the kitchen, helped himself to a bowl of soup and sat back down. “The cook’s her husband. They bought the place from his folks.”

  We ate in silence. My phone rang. Steve. I’d completely forgotten to call him back.

  “Sorry,” I said to my tablemate.

  I answered while I got up and headed outside to talk. “Sorry I didn’t call you back.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I was tied up anyway. What’s the situation?”

  “It’ll be a few hours at least. I’m waiting in a diner for the tow truck.”

  I promised to call him as soon as I knew what was happening. We were supposed to have dinner the next night with Margaret, a production designer with whom I’d done five projects. Margaret should have been my mother. She and her husband Ed had been filling in as parents for years.

  I went back inside. My soup was cold. My companion took it in the kitchen and came back with a fresh bowl.

  “My name’s Hannah.”

  “Stroud.” We shook. He’d cleaned his fingernails. His faintly citrus smell was getting all tangled up with the earthy soup. It was a whole new world.

  “How’d you end up here?” he asked.

  I told him the story.

  We were done with lunch and just paying our bills when the tow truck showed up. He walked out with me and talked to the guy while the car got hooked up. I assumed I’d ride with the beard and one-earring truck driver and his two overwrought Yorkies. They were yapping and bouncing off windows covered with nose smudge. I dreaded the small dog smell. He wasn’t insured for passengers. He gave me a card for a local taxi company. The dealership was in Escondido, not too bad, maybe twenty miles. I watched as my car whipped left on the end of a hook and headed back the way it came.

  “That was shitty,” said Stroud. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “That’s okay, I can take a cab.”

  “No, you can’t. No one’s going to come out here. Especially not with the fire.”

  I looked at him trying to judge my chances of survival. Like I’m some kind of judge. “Are you a rapist or murderer?”

  “Not so far,” he said.

  “That’s not very reassuring.”

  He was smiling and shaking his head. I did sound pretty ungrateful, and he’d just gotten me a bowl of soup.

  “Let’s go.” He whistled for the dog and headed for a blue Volvo station wagon parked over by the motel. He opened the door and the dog jumped in the back.

  “That’s Rex.” The dog did a gentle survey of my neck and ear from the backseat.

  “I know, Rex,” I turned to the dog, “I smell like smoke.”

  Stroud glanced over at me and said, “He can smell a lot more than smoke.”

  Okay, call me insane, but that remark hit me like three cherries ping ping pinging in the slot machine two inches below my navel, maybe lower.

  “Is that what your sister means by ‘your bullshit’?”

  “No idea. I tuned her out years ago.”

  “I haven’t managed to tune out mine yet,” I said.

  We drove in quiet.

  “It’s like kindling out here,” I said. “It’s good they got the fire under control.”

  Despite the civilizing avocado groves, you can feel the grip of the dry desert’s fingers as it pulls itself up and over the eastern hills, dragging itself inch-by-inch closer to the ocean. Imported water slapped at the desert fingers trying to loosen their grip. Everyone was lulled to sleep by the chuck-chucking of sprinklers. My father had torn out the lawn and planted succulents and sage in a bed of gravel.

  “You smell like my father,” I said.

  Oh boy. I was reverting to strange small talk, one of my specialties, along with singing the wrong lyrics to songs.

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Good as far as I know. He died when I was twelve. Have you always been a truck driver?”

  “No. I taught high school biology until the budget cuts.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “I don’t miss teenagers. They’re a pain in the ass. Just the word biology sets them off.”

  “How do you get work?”

  “I have a contract
to haul bees during the almond growing season in the Central Valley. The rest of the year I take what comes my way, usually along the southern part of the country. It’s always different.”

  “What kind of name is Stroud?” I asked.

  “A nickname.”

  A couple of canary breeders in the Central Valley had asked him to take their birds to customers along his route. The birds really sang and guys could hear it over the CB radio. There was a lot of chirping, by men not birds, over the airwaves. Some guy in the Bay Area started calling him Stroud, after the Birdman of Alcatraz, the prisoner who got into birds. The name had stuck. I showed him the old box and told him about my grandmother’s canary in the coal mine who sang on his days off.

  “What’s your real name?” I asked.

  “Alan.”

  “Alan what?”

  “Watts.”

  “Seriously? Like the Zen guy?”

  “Just like. They named us depending on what they were into at the time. My sister is Joyce, after James Joyce.”

  “They sound interesting.”

  “They had their moments.”

  “My mother said they named me Hannah because it’s spelled the same way both directions, but my father always said it was because it means beauty and passion.”

  He glanced over at me, then back out the window.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say anything,” he said.

  “No, but you gave me a look.”

  “I was just thinking about what your father said.”

  There went those pinging cherries again; I could even hear them over my blabbering.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said. I might have been gulping for air at that point.

  “No?” he asked.

  “No what?” I asked.

  “Okay, here’s the dealership.” He turned in the driveway.

  My car was already in the service bay with guys standing around scratching their heads. They didn’t know what was wrong, which meant I could probably Google it and find out it was a chronic problem. The last time I had a car with a we-don’t-know-what’s-wrong problem it took a year of being stuck on the side of the road, untold aggravation, and the California Lemon Law to get them to fix it. They knew exactly what was wrong.