“Catch anything?” says Odd when he sees me coming.
“Nope.” There are all kinds of lies told about fishing. This is one of them. I caught three fish, each one prettier and bigger than the last. And I set them all free. But Odd doesn’t need to hear that.
“Me neither, but I got my picture took with three Japanese girls. We all made peace signs. They were hot.”
“Good thing I wasn’t with you then, ’cause I would have scared them off.”
“I dunno about that. You might not a had the power. They thought I was real photogenic.”
“They said that?”
“I think so. It was all in Japanese, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they said.” Then he reaches around behind him and picks up a box of cereal and shakes it, “Dinner? We got Lucky Charms and Oreos and stuff to make s’mores. . . . And hey, thanks for loaning me those flies. I lost that Bead Head Prince, though. Sorry for that.”
I put my hand into the Lucky Charms box and pull out—mostly crumbs. And a yellow-and-orange marshmallow hourglass. This piece of sugar can stop time . . . or speed it up . . . or reverse it. I just don’t know how to make it work. And I don’t know what I would want it to do, either. What if I reverse time, but nothing changes and I just have to live through everything again? Who would want that? The hourglass makes a little squeak when I crush it between my teeth. I can feel it dissolving on my tongue. Lucky me. I have no milk for my cereal.
I reach for the red aluminum flask and take a deep draw of water. Only, it isn’t water; it stings. It stings all the way down and spurs the tears out of my eye.
“Welcome to flavor country, Polly.”
All I say is “Water?”
“Didn’t take you for a hard-liquor prohibitionist.”
I don’t say that I like a sloe gin fizz while I play threehanded pinochle with my parents or that Bridger’s mom let us have mojitos on the Fourth of July.
“But, if you want water, you got a river. I only brought vodka,” says Odd.
“We can’t drink the river. What if it isn’t clean? We’ll get giardia. We’re more susceptible to infections. . . .”
“Hey, if we need to pull over ’cause you get the runs, OK. But you aren’t going to get that sick, Polly. Death had a shot at you and passed you right up. He took a nibble out of each of us and spit us back out. Until he gets hungry enough to eat leftovers, nothing we do matters. We could drink pure piss and battery acid if we wanted.”
I take another sip from the bottle. I am expecting it this time. It isn’t so bad. It might be pure piss and battery acid, but I’m ready for it now.
We pass the flask and the cereal box back and forth in silence for a while. Then the cereal box is empty. Odd takes the plastic bag out and scrounges the last bits that have been hiding under there. He hands me a pink marshmallow heart.
Odd lifts the red flask and says, “To Gramma Dot and Meriwether Lewis.” Then he passes the bottle to me. I raise it and say, “To Odd’s Grandma Dot? And Meriwether Lewis?”
I feel like I need to join in the toast, but I don’t know the particulars.
“You know what, Polly? They are going to sell all her shit. They are gonna sell it all. They are going to sell her furniture and books and even her lawnmower.”
I’m ready to say how sorry I am . . . and your grandma wouldn’t want you to feel sad . . . and maybe they will let you choose something to remember her by . . .
“So they take her on a fuckin’ two-week cruise of the fjords of Norway, like she can be homesick for a place she never been, and then they’re just going to take her to the new place afterward and hope she’s forgot all about her own home.”
“What?”
“Gramma Dot, she’s got the Alzheimer’s. They say she does. Look, can’t a person forget they were making a grilled cheese sandwich? Burnt toast don’t mean Alzheimer’s. Shit happens. I figure you make enough sandwiches, some are going to catch fire. They could cut a person some slack.”
“All she did was burn a sandwich?”
“The curtains caught on fire a little bit, no biggie. My mom didn’t even like those curtains. Now they’re all, ‘It’s for her own safety,’ and ‘It’s a nice place,’ but you know what? That’s crap. They just don’t want the responsibility.”
I don’t have anything to say about this. And, considering everything I heard so far, I don’t even want ask what Meriwether Lewis has to do with it.
After about ten minutes Odd says, “D’Elegance, that’s Gramma Dot’s. It was the last car her and Granpa Odd bought before he died. She calls it Granpa’s car. Everything on it is original.”
When it is finally too dark to see, Odd says, “She thought I was Granpa Odd once. She grabbed my ass. That was weird.”
When I wake up to pee, there is a unmistakable wetness, a sticky heat. I hardly need to touch myself with my fingers to know it’s happened. I’ve got my period. Last time I this happened, I had two eyes. It’s been months. Why now? Did my body just suddenly remember it wasn’t a child? Is this the first time I have blood to spare? Maybe it’s just some biochemical reaction to Odd’s monkey-house armpits. Whatever. It’s a mess. And I’ve forgotten the number-one rule of the Vagina American: be prepared. I really doubt Odd or Odd’s Gramma Dot has stashed a supply of tampons in the Cadillac for this possibility, so I reach down and pull off one of my socks and sacrifice it. Come morning I can replace it with a wad of paper towels. That’ll be fun, sitting on a wad of that mess until we hit a pocket of civilization and I can do better.
Suddenly, for the first time I can remember, I’m afraid of bears. I imagine I smell hot and bloody as an elk roast. My tent doesn’t feel safe anymore. It just makes me blind. It makes me listen so hard my cheeks start to ache.
I give up, unzip the tent, and crawl out. The stars are bright enough to make me dizzy, but starlight doesn’t open up the shadows. I drag out my sleeping bag and head for the Cadillac. I want a barrier a little more substantial than ripstop nylon. D’Elegance will protect me. When I pull the door shut, all the world has to stay outside. She is my protective quarantine. The backseat is too small to feel comfortable, but I fold my legs up and cuddle my cheek against the velvety cushion. My sleeping bag is warm. It’s quieter inside the car. I can’t hear the constant motion of water and air. All I can hear is the stuff inside my head. I hear the song.
Come away, human child
To the water, and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand.
I hear the song, but it’s not in my voice. It’s in others’ voices, the voices I heard when my mom played the CD over and over again while I was in the coma.
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances.
She found it in my room on my desk and decided it must be special to me. It wasn’t. It was just part of a multimedia thesis on Yeats for English. It was all the versions I could find of people singing and reciting the same poem.
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star.
I know my mom was sitting there, watching me sleep, because her whisper is all tangled up in the song, “It’s OK, Babykid. It’s OK. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here.”
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams.
They don’t have what I need at the gas station. They have tampons, but I need pads, with wings. I’m not being picky, it’s a matter of life and death according to Mom. If I use a tampon, I’ll die from toxic shock. My body is a compromised system. A two-inch wad of cotton and string can kill me. Everything can kill me.
I pay for the gas. I have my sweatshirt tied around my waist to disguise my lumpy crotch. I’ve replaced the sock with paper towels: Absorbent? Check. Comfortable? So not.
Odd is leaning against the bumper scratching his cheeks. Whiskers itch, I guess
. My problem is bigger than his.
“I need to go to real store, Odd. Like a grocery store or drugstore.”
“We could use some real food,” says Odd.
“That’s right, food and stuff,” I say.
“Alrighty then,” says Odd.
Odd is pushing a shopping cart. I think we could have made do with a little plastic basket, but he’s pushing a shopping cart. If I were on my own with a basket, I could just turn away and hide if another customer comes our direction. I could be stealthy and this shopping trip could be over so fast. But I’m with Odd, and he’s steering a cart down the narrow aisles making squealing-tire noises when he turns a corner. I wish we could just go our separate ways, but I’m the one who’s paying. He picks up a watermelon and starts thumping his knuckles against it. What’s he thinking?
“No watermelon, Odd. We can’t eat a watermelon in the car. You can have bananas or oranges . . . no juggling the food . . . we could get stuff for sandwiches . . . that’s a lot of pop . . . I don’t think we need that much . . . you shouldn’t eat Lucky Charms every day . . . I need something . . . here, you just wait here . . .” But he doesn’t wait. He trails along behind me with the cart right to the feminine hygiene products.
“Alrighty then. That explains the bearanoia,” says Odd. He picks up a bale of super-extra-long-overnightpads-with-wings.
“Put that down,” I say.
“It’s OK, Polly. I go to the store for my mom all the time,” he says and flips it into the cart.
“That’s not what I use.”
“What do you use?”
“Just shut up for a minute and let me find it.”
“Hey,” Odd yells at a butcher putting packages of steaks out in the meat cooler, “We need some help . . .” The butcher turns around and comes over. “She needs . . . What is it you need, Polly?”
“Look, I’m sorry we bothered you. Everything is under control.” I toss a box into the cart. It isn’t my brand. Tough shit. Will it kill me? Maybe not. But the humiliation is a sure thing.
At the checkout while I’m sliding my card through to pay, Odd says to the cashier and the bag boy, “She gets really cranky when she’s on her period . . .”
I want to tell him he can’t have his Lucky Charms, but I’ve already paid for them. The bag boy is putting them in the sack.
“Why do you have to act like that, Odd?”
“What?” He’s feigning clueless.
“Like that, in the store, like a jerk.”
“I was trying to be helpful. And friendly. You’re not friendly, Polly. You never smile at anybody.”
“Ever been to Elkhorn, Polly? Ever visited a ghost town?”
“I’ve been to Virginia City.”
“Pfft. That’s Disneyfied. Nobody sells ice cream in a real ghost town. Ever visit a real ghost town? Ghost town cemeteries are the best. You gotta see a real ghost town cemetery. And I’m gonna fix you up.”
“Is it far?”
“Naw. It’s just on the way,” says Odd. He doesn’t say on the way to what. I don’t ask.
There are fish in Hebgen Lake, but they are safe from us, even the gulpers that will rise for almost anything. We are driving by on our way to a ghost town without ice cream.
“. . . suspected pirate mothership near the Seychelles. There have been seven hundred twenty-six incidents of piracy since January 1, a marked increase in activity despite active multinational suppression efforts,” says the radio.
“Hey, Polly, we could be pirates! Think about it. Like old-school pirates. We got the qualifications,” he says, and then reaches down and knocks on his robot leg. He’s got a point. We might have to get a parrot, and I’d have to start wearing my eye-patch, even though it is uncomfortable, since that is part of the uniform. And I’m skinny enough to be a pirate, at least the ones that show up lately on the TV news.
Pirates makes as much sense as rock stars. Maybe more.
“We’d need a boat,” says Odd, “But hey! We can just steal one! That’s what pirates do, they steal boats.”
A truck passes us towing a green drift boat. It’s got smiling, up-turned curves—the better to scoop me up and deliver me to the river of happiness. It would be fine to fish from a boat like that. A boat like that could make a person turn pirate.
“. . . released by the Russians after seizing a Russian oil tanker are presumed dead. The pirates’ small vessel had been stripped of all weaponry and navigational equipment before they were set adrift,” says the radio.
“Alrighty then, not pirates,” says Odd.
“We could fish anywhere along here,” I say.
“We’re going to Elkhorn,” says Odd.
“Can we fish there?”
“Like you just said, we can fish anywhere,” says Odd, and he just keeps driving past the channels of the Madison River. People come from halfway around the world to fish here, but us? We can fish anywhere, so we just blow right by.
I send my dad a message, “Madison now its all good.”
I delete thirty-seven messages from my mom.
“So Odd is a family name, huh? I heard you say Grandpa Odd last night. Is it short for something? Because, you know, it’s a bit odd,” I say.
“Har-dee-fucking-har,” says Odd, “Is your name short for Polyester? Polyhedron, maybe?”
“It’s just Polly,” I’m a little ashamed of myself. Odd’s probably been putting up with crap about his name his whole life. It made me cry when the other kids called me Pollywog on the playground, but Odd has to be a lot worse.
“Odd is a real common name in Norway,” says Odd.
He doesn’t say another thing to me until we stop for gas, then all he does is ask for the toilet key so he can use it while I pay for the fill-up. The key is attached to a long chunk of broom handle with the words “PEE KEY” written on it. I hand it off to him like a baton in a relay race. When we get back onto the interstate, he rolls down his window and reaches down by his feet. He’s still got the pee key. He chucks it out the window.
I just shut my eye and shut my mouth. There is no point in asking him why he needs to be such a jerk. He probably didn’t even use that pee key. He probably just wants the whole world to start peeing all over stuff like pack rats. I don’t say anything. And he doesn’t say anything, right back.
When he finally does talk, it comes out of nowhere.
“Gramma Dot, I lived with her when I was little. My mom tried to kill herself back then. She would have done it, too, but she didn’t want to make a mess so she was fiddling around getting everything ready. Gramma Dot just dropped by unexpected and tumbled to the situation. They put my mom in treatment, and after that, Gramma Dot, she took care of me. It was better for everybody.”
I don’t know how to talk back to that. We don’t do crazy in my family. Not like that. Odd comes from crazy people. I look at him. There’s nothing to see. But now I know his head is full of snakes, all crowded in there and biting each other. It’s been going on so long they are immune to poison. Not to pain.
“I’d take care of her, Polly. If they’d let me.”
Elkhorn the ghost town is less dead than I expected. There are trucks and four-wheelers parked around. Someone has hung out laundry. A thin track of smoke rises from the stovepipe on another cabin.
“See that?” says Odd, and he points to a grey, weathered building with a balcony staring out over the town. No Juliet is up there waiting for Romeo. No paranoid lawman with a gun has a rifle waiting for the bad guys. It’s a ghost town. Romeo and Juliet are both dead. Lawman? Dead. Bad guys? Also dead.
“Right there, in that building, a guy shot another guy at a dance. They had a little disagreement about whether the band should play a polka or a waltz. That’s what my Gramma Dot told me. But come on, I want to show you the coolest thing.”
Really? There is something cooler than laundry, four-wheelers, and Gramma Dot’s tales of getting shot for waltzing?
The coolest thing is the graveyard. We are using
Odd’s definition of cool, which includes tombstones with little lambs kneeling on the top to make sure we know there are children buried in that dirt. One of the graves has a full-size tree growing right up through the middle of it. Some of them have fences around them. The dates on the ones I can read say 1889 mostly. Must have been an epidemic, or a school burned down, or some other screwed-up tragedy. Been there. Seen that, the latest version.
Odd is going from grave to grave like an optimistic dog that thinks there might still be a useful bone in one of them. Then he stops, unzips his fly and pees all over a grave.
“Odd! Stop that!” I yell, but it’s too late. He just shrugs and zips up his pants.
“This would be an interesting place to die,” says Odd.
I look around at the dark trees creeping up on the cemetery and the old graves smothered with purple-flowering knapweed. There’s not a cloud in the sky, but there is a jet trail. The wind has blown it into fragments that look like chromosomes. The wind will keep blowing and the trace of the jet will be nothing. The people on that plane are hundreds of miles away already, I figure. They are thinking about wherever the fuck they are going— Minneapolis or some military base, who knows? I look at the dirt again. At the graves and the sagebrush. This place isn’t that interesting right now, and I’m alive. I can’t imagine being dead would make it better. Odd and me, we disagree on the definition of interesting, too.
“We could be ghosts in a ghost town.”
Then Odd reaches into the messenger bag he has slung over his shoulder. I imagine he’s thirsty or needs to medicate himself, but instead of the aluminum flask or the prescription baggie, he pulls out a gun. The barrel has a dull shine, like a black snake. I can smell the gun oil. The only sound is a squirrel bitching.
Catch & Release Page 6