My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays

by Davy Rothbart

  The moon rose low in the sky, casting gray light over the flat, cracked rock sea that stretched from both sides of the highway as far as I could see to the horizon. Out here, in the country’s emptiest corner, sometimes ten minutes went by without seeing another car heading in either direction. The overall effect was of driving on the moon itself.

  I glanced over at Sarah. An eerie green glow from the dashboard dials spilled across her face. Her chin was tucked to her shoulder, turned slightly toward me, her mouth slack. She breathed slowly and easily, one hand on her knee, the other slipped down between her legs, pressed against the zipper of her jeans. A part of me wondered if maybe I could just suck it up and spend eight days with her, try to have a good time, see how things went. Who was to say how I’d feel once we had a little more time together? The strangeness of being on such an intimate journey with someone who felt so foreign might subside. But I knew I wasn’t attracted to her, and our whole chemistry seemed off. The idea of having to fake it for another week filled me with a discomfort so deep it edged into terror. Then again, ending the trip early—and having to find a way to explain it to Sarah—felt too horrible to really contemplate. I banged once, hard, on the steering wheel, marveling at the trap I’d set for myself, and filled with painful exasperation. With no clear path at hand, all I could do was to simply keep driving.

  Another few miles down the road, a small maroon sign flashed off the shoulder: Now Leaving Arizona, Come Back Soon! Two hundred yards farther down, a wide billboard loomed from the median dirt: Welcome to NEW MEXICO, The Land of Enchantment. We whooshed past, and I felt the border sweep over us like an invisible membrane as we entered my magic land. I thought of Shade, and longed desperately for her to be in the passenger seat of my car instead of this impostor.

  I needed a cover story, it seemed to me, a way to end our trip that didn’t feel personal. And the truth was, it wasn’t personal, not exactly. It wasn’t her fault that I’d built her up as some kind of idealized soulmate. What I craved and had been chasing, again and again, for the past eleven years, I began to realize, was the exquisite misery I’d felt when I’d first seen Shade on the screen. That wrenching longing was its own perfect drug, and as long as a girl kept me at arm’s length and maintained a distance, some veil of mystery—as Maggie and Bonnie and all of the others had, even when we’d come together—then my excruciating and exhilarating ache could be preserved. But when a girl threw open the gates and let me in, as Sarah had, no matter how charming, smart, and pretty they might be, the intensity would drain from me and I wouldn’t be able to gas it out of there quickly enough and start my search for the next girl to call Shade.

  Past tiny Steins, New Mexico, I began to see signs for motels and truck stops in Lordsburg and Deming. I knew I couldn’t go as far as Deming, not with Sarah. But I didn’t want to pull off the highway and turn around until I had a plan in place. Slowly, I pieced together what I would tell her. It hurt my heart to think about how she might respond—with anger, with grief, with shock? Sarah’s face, dipped in moonlight, was so placid, her sleep so peaceful, I couldn’t help but think of my mom’s grandfather on the train to New York and his waiting bride. I hated myself for what I was about to do.

  I resolved to get off I-10 at Lordsburg, but at the first exit I faltered at the last second and stayed headed east, and a mile later, at the next exit, I was boxed out by an enormous tractor trailer hauling a single ninety-foot windmill turbine blade that looked like a dragonfly wing made of metal. I braked hard but couldn’t get over in time, and the pint of Dewar’s shot out from beneath Sarah’s seat and wedged itself against her left foot. There was no third exit, just an amber dusting of streetlights from Lordsburg’s central square disappearing in the rearview mirror, and magnificent, sad, sacred Deming puffing heat from twenty miles ahead. I thought of my last visit to the Desert Sky Café, my promise to myself to return only with Shade. How many times since then had I dreamed of what that moment would be like? It was agonizing to be so close and yet so far away.

  I wasn’t even sure if there’d be another exit before Deming. I dropped my speed to sixty-five and started looking for a gravel turnaround with access to the westbound lanes. The Dewar’s bottle at Sarah’s feet made a sloshing sound as we coasted over breaks in the road, and I slipped off my seat belt and stretched my right hand toward it. If I was going to turn the car around and wake Sarah up and lay some bad news on her, I needed some scotch in me first.

  I got my fingers around the bottle and plopped back into my seat, but just as I began to unscrew the cap, a dead horselike beast, big as a Clydesdale, flashed suddenly into sight thirty feet in front of us, stretched on its side across both lanes. “Holy shit!” I cried, pounding the brakes and yanking the wheel hard to the left. We rocketed onto the left shoulder and into the hard dirt beyond, then fishtailed wildly and shot back onto the road. The bottle of Dewar’s had jumped from my hands and landed down by the pedals.

  As I reached again for the bottle, Sarah bolted upright and shouted, “Watch out!” Ahead of us, in the same lane, was a car’s entire steel fender and grille, massive as a canoe. I swerved hard to the right, almost lost control again, and finally came to a stop in the middle of the road. “Oh my God, what just happened?” Sarah said, frightened and full of alarm. “Are you okay? Wait, are you drunk?”

  Adrenaline firing through me, I eased the Ford up a long, curving incline, past an old Chevy Cavalier parked on the shoulder with its hazards blinking and its windshield and front end completely demolished. I pulled in behind the rig with the gigantic turbine blade, which had stopped on the same shoulder a hundred yards in front of the Chevy. “I think someone hit a fucking unicorn!” I shouted. “Come on, let’s make sure they’re okay.”

  I leapt out of the car and saw a trucker in jeans and a T-shirt heading our way from the rig, swinging a flashlight. He called out, “You hit it?”

  “Just missed it,” I said.

  He reached me and Sarah, who’d climbed outside and was rubbing her eyes. “Well, you guys’re lucky,” the trucker said. He was perhaps in his late forties, rail thin with an enormous shaggy beard. He waved his flashlight down the road. “I hope they ain’t hurt too bad. Let’s go see.”

  I trotted after him, pulse throbbing in my neck, Sarah just behind us. “What was it?” she peeped. “The animal.”

  “Elk,” said the trucker.

  The Chevy had apparently smashed into the thing dead on—its windshield was splintered into a thousand shards, and behind the wheel an old Native American man sat picking bits of glass from his face, blood spotted here and there, while in the passenger seat, a boy no older than twelve stared out at us in a daze. “I didn’t even see it happen,” he told us as we unclipped his seat belt and helped him out his side door. “I was sleeping. It was just, you know, boom.” His eyes were wide with amazement. He ducked his head around and said something I couldn’t understand to the old man in the driver’s seat and the old man glanced at him and nodded and said a few words back. “My grandpa’s okay,” the boy said. “He’s just upset about the car. He doesn’t have insurance.”

  The trucker said to Sarah, “You got a phone? Stay here with these guys and call nine-one-one. They need a wrecker for sure, and maybe an ambulance.” Then he pointed his flashlight down the slope toward the dead elk and said to me, “Come on, we need to get that thing out of the road.”

  We started down the shoulder, and in the moonlight I could make out the elk’s giant black carcass as we closed to thirty yards. A pair of headlights rose into sight a half mile back, and the trucker pulled back. “This is a bad place to be,” he said. “Wait a second.” He started frantically waving his flashlight at the oncoming car, but they kept hurtling toward us, only gaining speed, it seemed. At the last second, before crashing into the elk, they banked right, just clipping the thing, and roared directly toward us along the shoulder. I dashed down into the ditch while the trucker held his ground, swinging his light. The car whipped back into the ri
ght lane of the highway and went screaming past, nearly sideswiping the Chevy where Sarah stood talking into her phone, before shifting back to the left lane and disappearing out of sight up around a bend.

  “Hey, get your ass back up here!” the trucker hollered to me.

  “I don’t want to get hit, dude,” I called up.

  “There’s rattlers down there,” he said. “For fuck’s sake!” His voice was ragged with urgency; easily convinced, I galloped back up beside him.

  Another pair of headlights was drawing near. Again, the trucker waved his light wildly, but this time it was a big white van, not easily maneuverable, and they broadsided the elk without even slowing down. There was a deafening crunch and a boom as the van lifted half a foot into the air and came slamming back to the pavement. For a moment, the van skidded toward me and the trucker sideways. Then it struck the Chevy’s mangled, detached bumper, sending up a geyser of sparks, and spun off the far shoulder, coming to rest in the median.

  People die all the time because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and standing on the side of the road while full-sized Dodge vans and Pontiac Chargers whirled this way and that was about as fucked up a place to be as I could imagine. I was scared shitless, my heart jangling in my chest like a dinner bell, but the trucker said with absolute calm, “Come on, no cars, let’s roll,” and in that moment I would’ve followed him through a firefight in Mogadishu rather than reveal myself to him as the coward I actually was.

  We hurried down the middle of the highway and reached the huge, twisted hunk of metal that had been torn from the old man’s Chevy. The trucker grabbed one side and I grabbed the other and we lugged it to the shoulder and heaved it far into the rocky ditch, where it crashed like a cymbal and clattered on down the hillside, presumably waking hundreds of rattlesnakes. We continued down the road, and as we got close to the animal itself, the air was filled with an overpowering barnyard stench.

  The van’s direct hit had sheared off the elk’s back half and spewed pulverized pieces across fifty feet of pavement like lava from a volcano. Slippery innards were splashed everywhere and the road was black with blood—the smell stung my eyes and I was careful not to breathe in through my nose. The trucker booted what looked like a hoof out of his way and raced over to the elk’s front half, and I came up fast behind him. Without hesitation, he took hold of one of the front legs; with sickened chills, but also a degree of morbid fascination, I took hold of the other. The animal was remarkably undamaged, at least its head and front legs and shoulders, and its leg felt like what I imagined an elk’s leg might feel like if the thing were alive—muscly, with a layer of coarse, fuzzy fur over an oily hide. Its eyes were open, its face stupid and blank. Me and the trucker both tugged as hard as we could, but the beast was heavy as a coffin filled with ice and only budged an inch. Then, from the darkness, two big guys materialized at our side, a father and son perhaps, who’d climbed from the destroyed white van. All four of us hauled together and the elk slowly moved with us across the asphalt, leaking guts and ribs from the seam in its belly. We kept straining backwards until we’d dragged the thing clear of the road and most of the way off the shoulder. “That’s good,” said the trucker. When we all let go of the legs, they kept their upward angle, which gave the elk the posed, oddly comical look of a man bowing to the floor and praising God.

  The trucker laughed. “What a waste,” he said. “If I had my pickup, I’d take that meat home.” He looked at the father and son. “I feel bad, fellas. Another minute or two, we coulda had that thing outta your way. How’s your vehicle?”

  “Done for,” said the burly dad, with matter-of-fact remorse.

  “Damn.” The trucker rubbed his head with his forearm. “Well, let’s get the rest of it, too.”

  For the next couple of minutes, the four of us roamed the empty lanes, hurling chunks of elk off the road. I picked up a bloody, knotted leg, roped with veins and tendons, and foul, squishy organs, including one so nasty-smelling that I gagged and almost threw up. It was easily the grisliest task I’d ever been a part of, but in a weird way I was grateful to be picking up elk parts, instead of the grislier task of talking things out with Sarah. Finally, a couple of semis lit into existence at the bottom of the hill, and the trucker said, “That’s probably good,” and the four of us stood off to the side as they howled through. It was strange that all the sharp danger had drained from the scene so quickly, and left only a few unremarkable patches of roadkill blood.

  The trucker and the father ambled along the median and got on the ground with flashlights to look at the underside of the totaled van, while the beefy son pulled out a gallon jug of water, splashed it over my hands, and passed me an old raggedy towel to dry them. I asked if they needed a ride or any more help, but they said they were cool, they’d call a friend with a tow truck in Deming, so I headed up the road toward Sarah and the wrecked Chevy. As I got closer, I could see the moonlit silhouettes of her and the little boy and dimly make out their voices, talking and laughing, and I felt a sudden gaping sadness open up inside of me.

  “What’s your boyfriend’s name?” the boy was saying to her.

  From the darkness, Sarah replied with reverential softness, “His name is Davy.”

  *

  Ten minutes later, we were back in our car, ready to drive on. I’d pulled off my shirt covered in elk blood, tossed it to the rattlers, and thrown on a fresh one, but my hands and elbows were still smeared with blood and instantly the new shirt had streaks of its own. My shoes, bloody on the soles, smelled like pig slop; luckily, as I took a few sips of Dewar’s, its sweet pungency helped cancel out the odor.

  I started the Ford, peered east toward Deming, and then, with a wave of guilty upset, pulled onto the road and swung a wide left, bumping across the sandy median and back onto the highway, pointed west. Sarah was too abuzz with all that had just happened to recognize that we were heading the wrong way. Her unsuspecting ease reminded me of a ladybug I’d lured into a pot as a kid before frying it with a magnifying glass. She filled me in on the Native American boy’s story—he’d been living with his mom on an Air Force base in Twentynine Palms, California, but his mom had just been cycled into service in the Middle East, so his grandfather had picked him up the day before and was bringing him out to live in New Mexico. “I bet he’ll always remember this night,” she said. “God, that poor kid. I mean, his grandpa seemed nice enough, but a change like that’s always hard.”

  We passed Lordsburg again. Sarah started laughing. “You really stink, you know. It’s the elk. That is the weirdest smell. But, I don’t know, there’s something kind of manly about such, you know, hands-on work. I like that you’re not afraid to get dirty. You’re like one of the whalers in Moby-Dick.” The dashboard clock read midnight.

  Our headlights danced across a small roadside sign: SAN SIMON, AZ 22; TUCSON 168. I saw Sarah take notice of it and sit up a little, and my stomach swished in slow, cramped circles, like an eel in a goldfish bowl. “Wait a second,” she said, “I think that sign said Tucson. Are we going the right way?”

  I gripped the wheel, suddenly choked up. My plan was all set to go, but its irreversibility was chilling. Once I launched into it, I’d have to see it all the way through. It wasn’t too late to change my mind—I could still act like I’d made a mistake and turn back around. But I pictured myself in an hour at the Desert Sky Café with Sarah and knew that would be far worse for both of us. The only thing less kind than what I was about to do would be to drag it out over the course of several days. Better to tear a bandage right off than to rip it off slow. I hardened myself, trying to work up the necessary coldness to do the deed.

  “Yeah, and there’s an I-10 West sign,” Sarah said. “I think we turned around twice or something?” She looked over at me, and our eyes caught, and in that tiny moment I think she understood what was happening. A quiet shock registered in her face, and somehow, once that first dart had pierced her, I felt free to follow with a hundred more.
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  “I’ve got something really terrible to tell you,” I said, my voice starting to break. “I am so, so sorry. I can’t believe I’m doing this to you.” And suddenly the long, complicated lie I’d dreamed up began to pour out of me. I told her I’d had a longtime girlfriend named Liz who I’d loved more than anything, but who’d struggled with drugs and mental problems until our relationship had dissolved. Just recently, I explained, in the past couple of weeks, Liz had come back into my life, and we’d decided to try to get back together. I should have said something before coming to Arizona, I told Sarah, but the reunion with Liz had happened so suddenly, I hadn’t known what to do. Now, though, I saw that I had to get home to her. I assured Sarah that my fondness for her was very real, but also that I knew this wasn’t our time and that I couldn’t in good conscience continue the trip. I could just as easily have tried a more honest approach, but I didn’t fully understand what I was feeling myself, and I was afraid Sarah would think that any missing spark was a sign of shortcomings on her end, instead of my own, and that the rejection would bear a more bitter sting. Besides, the heart of the story was true—there’d been a girl named Liz, the one from Plattsburgh, New York, and I’d been devastated when things with her fell apart. Had she wanted to get back together, I would’ve jumped at the chance. But I hadn’t heard from her in over two years. As I yammered on, I pretended to cry and then found myself really crying. Up ahead, a pair of signs coiled from the sand, thanking us for visiting New Mexico and welcoming us to Arizona.