How Best to Avoid Dying

by Owen Egerton

  “Just happy to be alive, Miss Gobbler.”

  I pass the next few hours planning. It’s the best day at work I’ve had in months.

  At nine in the evening I lock the door. Miss Gobbler is putting the finishing touches on a plastic pot of gold and nibbling on heart-shaped Sweet Tarts she’s bought herself.

  “Miss Gobbler, would like to go get a smoothie with me?”

  She’s blushing, her face looking like it’s wrapped in red cellophane.

  “Well, alright,” she says. “But just one.” She closes up the box of Sweet Tarts. “Sugar makes me a booger.”

  She’s yapping away as we drive, describing her favorite forms of entertainment. By the time we pass the Smoothie Shack, she’s explained the entire last season of 7th Heaven. As we cross the city limits, she’s trying to remember something funny said on the KLTE Morning Zoo Show. Half an hour later she asks, “Where are we going?” I don’t answer. A few minutes later she asks me again. Again, I don’t answer. We’re way past the city lights when she next speaks. “I’m not frightened.” I look at her, but say nothing. “Good things happen to good people.” I speed up into the desert. “Answer cruelty with kindness, that’s what I say.” I turn off the highway onto something a little less than a road. The moon is rising. “Today’s sorrow is the seeds of tomorrow.” Her voice cracks a little on “tomorrow.” After a mile or so I stop the car, get out and open the trunk. Amongst the junk I have a shovel and a bottle of water. No flashlight, but the moon is enough.

  I start digging. She watches me from the car, her breath making small fog circles on the window, which recede, refill, recede. I keep my mind on the digging.

  When the hole is deep enough I collect her from the car. She doesn’t run, doesn’t struggle at all. She just keeps mumbling scrambled scraps from Chicken Soup stories.

  “And that boy grew up to be Dwight D. Eisenhower…”

  I lead her to the hole and have her sit down. Again, she doesn’t struggle, just more gibbering. “The kind man is the wise man, love conquers all, hold on Friday’s a coming.” When the first shovel full of sandy dirt lands on her lap she lets out a yelp. Then she goes quiet. More quiet than I’ve ever known her to be. The dirt rises. At one point she tries to stand, but I shove her back down. Once the dirt is up to her chest, standing is no longer possible. She only starts screaming when the dirt reaches her neck. A harsh, cutting scream, but I keep to my work.

  Pat down the dirt so that just her head is sticking out, just her head and nothing else. The ground around her slopes in, like a four-foot-wide shallow bowl. She stops screaming now. The moon is right above us. Huge, unclean, white.

  I down half the bottle of water and lay back on the pile of unused dirt just to rest for a minute.

  I sleep past sunrise, past the morning cool and into the heat. When I wake, Miss Gobbler is staring at me. Oversized, wet eyes.

  The scene is different in the light. Grotesque. Just a head in a bowl. And I find myself asking, who did this thing?

  “Thank you for staying,” she whispers. I grab the shovel and throw it in the car. I’m not leaving, not yet. Sit down behind her, relax. I don’t know what time it is. Morning? Maybe. Don’t know. No clock. Not sure if she has a watch, but if she does it’s under. It’s still. It’s quiet. No buzz, no hum. A little wind, nothing more.

  “I’m thirsty,” she says.

  “That’d be the heat,” I say.

  I watch. She calls out every hour or so, but I don’t say anything. I just watch, watch her head get kind of twitchy, watch her nod when she falls asleep. Watch the sky and the stony horizon.

  “Bug!” she screams. “Big bug. Big bug!”

  It is a big one. In front of her face, and her spread apart eyes are going crossed trying to watch it. I stand and squash it. She looks up at me and I’ve never seen a face so grateful. Real pale, but real grateful, and with those eye, she looks like a Precious Moments greeting card.

  “You saved my life,” she says.

  “I buried you in a hole.”

  “I forgive you,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I forgive you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I did, earlier today. I forgave you,” she gives me a sickly little smile. “It’s like it never happened.”

  “But it did happen. It’s happening.”

  “Not in the eyes of God.”

  I bend down, lean in close, and flick her on the nose. “You’re still in a hole.”

  She gazes around. This argument seems to stump her.

  I sit down. More hours go by. It’s a beautiful spot, really. So large and quiet. I’m just sitting watching the occasional cloud. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so relaxed.

  Sometime in the late afternoon she speaks. “I’m thirsty,” she says. “I miss Yoo-hoos.”

  I chuckle. “Yeah. I kind of miss Slim Jims.”

  “Oh my, Slim Jims,” she says and tries to giggle, but the thirst and weight of sand against her chest slows and grizzles the giggle into a lower laugh. It’s nice.

  “I miss Cheetos,” she says.

  “And yogurt.”

  “And Ding Dongs.”

  “We could have lived for a year with all the shit in that place.”

  “It was a garden.”

  Then she’s quiet and so am I.

  The sun sets. Like SunnyD and Robitussin spilling on the sky. The air changes, smells larger, as if the colors are sending their own air and there’s no AC unit to protect me. This happens every day?

  “Check out that sky,” I say. Miss Gobbler lets out a little gasp, but nothing more.

  Blue, darker than Eckerd’s blue, soaks from the east.

  I lay down on my back, my head beside hers and we watch each star pop into view, like Christmas lights a million miles away. More and more until the sky is nearly full. And what was quiet in the day is now a deeper, wider silence. Before there was sky, but now there’s all of space.

  “Do you know any of their names?” I whisper.

  “No,” she whispers back.

  “So beautiful.”

  “Beautiful,” she says.

  “I think that red one is Mars,” I say.

  Her mouth opens and a high wavering voice escapes. “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise the kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell.”

  I join in. “And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.”

  We sing every song on that 90-minute tape, starting with “Rocket Man” and finishing off with Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven on Earth”. Then we lay still, my forehead just touching her cheek. The moon rises slowly, that same dirty white.

  “Thirsty,” she says.

  I grab the bottle of water and kneel next to her.

  “Yoo-hoo?” she asks.

  “Yes. Yoo-hoo.” She laps it up, making little snarling noises, till the bottle is empty.

  “Better?” I ask. She doesn’t say anything. Just breathes.

  I lay back, watch the moon. Every so often she moans a little. Once she laughs, a weird laugh, as if she just got a joke someone told her years ago. I stroke her hair and it soothes her. She’s quiet. Everything is.

  My mind is floating and the sky is moving. Blue clouds glowing, hiding the stars. It feels good to be alone with her, away from everything. There’s no one else in the world, just her and me. It’s nice. No lie. This is true. Even these raindrops feel good, water falling on my face, water wetting her hair, water trickling in the sand between us.

  OF ALL PLACES

  California

  Sun, hiding behind those mountains like some shy child. Holy. It’ll make you sing. And in my rearview mirror I can see the leftover slice of moon. Three hours since dawn. Forty hours till Texas.

  Sunlight in the morning is like liquid. It fills up the car with that orange-yellow morning glow till you think you can swallow it.

  Yesterday I was in Santa Cruz with my brother, drinking a bottomless cup of coffee and all hopped up on the so
ngs rolling from the speakers. My brother was telling me about a job he had for me selling barrels.

  “People need barrels,” he said. “It pays well.”

  I roll down the car window just to get more sun in and feel the temperature change—mile by mile and minute by minute. All that change in one day.

  “You can stay on the couch.”

  I put down my coffee, leaned back and looked up. On the ceiling of the coffee shop people had stapled dollar bills, each with a message: I LOVE MARCI, CLASS OF ’03, NO WAR. And right above my head a dollar bill told me, YOU’VE GOT TO GO TO TEXAS. I looked back at my brother who was drawing a barrel on a napkin. “I’ve got to go to Texas, want to come?”

  Maybe he’s selling barrels right now. First barrel of the day. But I’m driving.

  Nevada

  My stereo is a soundtrack for the landscape and I’m thinking, were these girls seeing this drive when they played this song, when they put all that sad in their sound, when their voices spun around each other like lovemaking? They must have been here. Must have smelled that hot sun thawing out the pines.

  Top of the ridge, twisting along. Look. You can see for years from here.

  Wind drowning out my singing so I can sing all the louder, and I’m glad for the downhill, cause during the climb I was afraid the car would die out and I’d have to slide back down backward, maybe all the way back to the Pacific.

  If God is cruel then he can’t see me right now. I’ve escaped and I’m driving. If God is good then I might be the center of all things.

  Utah

  The car wants to stay in Utah. Ten miles from the state line, but it won’t move anymore. The ground is so dry my pee disappears as soon as it hits the dirt. Thirsty earth. I wish I had something for you. All that pee, just gone. Amazing. How much pee would it take to make a puddle?

  It’s frightening the way the cliffs have been carved. It’s like artifacts of a race of giant artists. All sculpted, a rock hard sand castle, brown-orange and lonely. The sky is high and far. The cliffs are old. In Utah everything stretches up, out, back, and I find me nowhere but now and alone. It’s a good lonely, still hurts, still hollow, but being lonely in a beautiful place is finer than being lonely on my brother’s couch. It’s kind of a scary lonely. I’m worried it might get me. Especially when the sun goes down. If you get lonely enough God will meet you there. I’m afraid to try.

  When the lonely gets this big and thick, I usually drive for a few hours, outrun the sad and find a different place, but the car wants to stay in Utah.

  I wonder if any human has ever pissed on this exact spot before.

  I try to sit and breathe. I love that sound. Breath. Teach me to breathe. Susan could breathe. Susan was incredible. Bleach blond dreadlocks and eyes like glacier ice. She had these tiny breasts. So tiny and round that it made me happy every time I saw them.

  Close your eyes. Keep them closed, she’d say. Keep them closed for so long that the light is different when you open them again. You sit still long enough, and you listen, but you don’t sleep, you listen. It’s hard to do. You want to open your eyes, or you get hungry and sleepy, like your body or your brain doesn’t want you to listen. So you fool your brain by making it concentrate on breathing. While your brain is busy with that the rest of you can listen.

  I hear wind, a lizard, a buzz, and nothing at all. So which one is God? Listen.

  Lizard, hawk, fly, pollen, and buzz. The lizard hides in the rocks as soon as I move my head, never letting me look and study and know it. The hawk is always above me, watching me, hunting me. Only its shadow touches me. The fly is in my ear, annoying me, tickling me, far too close. The pollen is silent. I only hear the wind that carries it, almost invisible, connecting everything, giving life where it lands. The buzz is in my head. No one else hears it. It might be mine and mine alone. It might drive me mad.

  I don’t know God’s name.

  Colorado

  Thank you for coffee, for truck stops, for Pete who drives without speaking more than three words, for rain, for the slow climb of mountains, the new air of Colorado, pancakes, paperbacks, and coffee again.

  Pete buys me a beer in a near-empty bar and tells me that if he could be anywhere in the world, he’d be young. I laugh. He buys me another beer and waves goodbye. He’s heading north, not to Texas. I sit till closing, because I don’t want to have to find a place to sleep. Concrete and diesel and cool wind. The beer wears off, leaves my brain sticky.

  Anywhere in the world, he’d be young.

  New Mexico

  A car picked me up at a gas station. Woman in her thirties, plump and pretty, she kept touching her hair and trying to giggle. She lit a cigarette and cracked the window, the wind squeezing in, sucking out, like the car’s a lung. She flicked the last little coal and it went a bouncing. Rolled up the window and asked me about my first time with a girl. Told me she’d never been with a man. I said that was no big deal and we were quiet for a long time. Then she stopped the car where there was no town and asked me to get out. “I want to be alone now,” she said and drove off.

  So now I’m walking. Long road, lights swipe by and snag the dark. Step away from the road to see more stars, to feel less steel. Walk. Catch that stride. Each step sending ripples that go on until there is no on to go on to. China hears my steps. Each step is changing the vibration, changing the world. Change the world. Walk. Like Shams walking out of the desert and finding Rumi. Like Miles walking through bee bop and finding cool. Like me getting high on coffee beans at 2 AM and walking the coast. But this is desert. Stone. Sand. All I want is this walk.

  Still dark. Too late to know the time. Coming to a town, now. Homes on a golf course in the desert. Rich people sleeping with the lights on. Then, farther in, streets and a supermarket and a Baptist church with a parking garage. Buildings with no lights. Pass a man who smells like smoke and dirt. Looks like a father. Tells me I shouldn’t be out so late, it might rain. It’s these nights when it should be cooler because the sun went down, but it isn’t, and the sky is purple and low and feels like it might rain, but it won’t. I walk way too far on these nights. I think about the girl I didn’t make love to, I think about being lonely, I think about losing God in god giving and god sharing and I think about the homeless guy on the yellow bike, and the poet who used to get free coffee at Cups until he died and now you can’t find his books anywhere.

  Across the street, a huddle of girls just getting home. Stepping inside. Giggling. Pink flesh, tight and round and curves and all flavored. Who wants to be a monk and give up all this holy lust? My want changes the weather. Humidity goes up in the whole town just because I’m hungry for her, almost any her. Maybe I should call out, ask them if they know God’s name.

  I used to know. Someone told me what name to call him by, how to know him. A loving God. A hunting God. …And we, who with unveiled faces…new creation…love that surpasses knowledge…. A serious God.

  I fell in love with God and then I fell in love with a girl who taught kindergarten Sunday school at church and sometimes sang with the high school choir. One front tooth overlapped another. She split her radio listening between country and Christian stations. She collected beanie babies. She was perfect.

  The girl I never made love to. And she was lying in the hallway. We had been together for over a year, touching, kissing, searching, and then praying for forgiveness. Maybe it was a game, pushing the line. But sometimes God was in the room watching, or the husband I imagined she’d someday have, watching, and we would pull away, sick, feeling a guilt as strong as pleasure. All we didn’t do because we loved God. Loved God so much. And God wanted us pure.

  Her grandfather died, her mom’s dad. We drove five hours to the funeral. I held her hand while she cried. Huge sobs, like choking.

  A good man. A Christian. Ran the good race set before him.

  She was going to sing his favorite hymn, but couldn’t. She was crying too much. Gulping air through the tears.

  Her parents
stayed with her grandmother and she and I drove the five hours back. She slept. Stretching out across the bench seat of her parents’ Oldsmobile with her head on my leg. Soft hair, a little less than brown. So sad. Deep, slow breathing. I tried to match my breathing to hers.

  An hour from home, she woke up. We laughed and sang along to a tape. She said she wished she could have sung the hymn, but she knew he’d understand.

  It was late when we got to her neighborhood.

  “You should stay,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We were quiet for the last few miles, feeling the empty house waiting. Walking in. No one else near. Turn on a light. Have a soft drink.

  She took a shower. A long one. And I waited. She came out with a towel. There was steam coming off her skin. Baby powder smell and a different smell, a spicy smell. She loosened the towel. Smiled with one tooth overlapping another, laughed, then serious. Taking the towel off, more steam from parts I’d never seen, she stood and let me watch. Lying down in the hallway between her room and the shower room. My breathing was fast. Hers was slow. Looking at me. Adult eyes. Asking eyes. Not afraid, willing.

  I giggled. Turned my head. Stepped back. When I looked again I saw her eyes hurting, not understanding, me giggling in nerves. She covered herself. She didn’t move at first, but her body closed. I was ashamed. Her arms folded over her chest. No more steam. She stood. Wrapping her towel around her. She went into her room. She’s married now. She’s in Oregon. She has babies. She’s in the hallway. She’s asking. I’m giggling. Jesus, that was my worst moment. My worst, Jesus. When I remember too much I want to sleep, lose it all for a while. But I’ll walk instead.

  Texas

  Dawn. The sky is coming alive. Black to red to blue. Steps away from Texas. I can see the sign welcoming me, a picture of a flag frozen in wave. I can see the air and light is different across that line. Thanks for the air. Thanks for my legs feeling the road. Thanks that I’ll step into Texas, not roll. You have led. I have followed. And all I have found is that I have followed and love you more for it. I thought I’d be leaving sad, but I just found more. Collecting sad faces and carrying them into Texas.