“Where do you want to go?” Elise says.
“I want to go where you want to go,” he says dully.
“Choose!” Elise says, panicking.
He stares up. “Wyoming?”
It leaves in five minutes. They buy tickets and rush to the gate on the lower level, where twenty buses all lean and cough, ready to be boarded, and they climb up the steps to theirs, find seats together, and collapse.
They pull out of the netherworld, and the bus careens into the Lincoln Tunnel, burping and hissing.
Jamey looks at Elise’s reflection in the window, as she watches the vanishing city.
“Shit, they were gonna electrocute you,” she says without turning to him.
En route to Baltimore first. They pull into a gas station.
“What do you need?” he asks her, already sharper than when they left, although his eyes are still half-lidded.
“Mountain Dew?”
As the bus rolls out, he massages her back as she leans forward and sips her soda.
“You’re knotted up,” he says.
Now she cries, the stress caressed out, tears dropping off her cheeks.
She sleeps with her head on his shoulder. Late afternoon, she wakes, bleary.
Her eyes consume everything they pass—amazed and skeptical.
“What!” she’ll say suddenly, pointing out something ordinary like cows gathered under one big tree. “Is that cows?”
They stop and start through the ruins of Detroit.
“My ass hurts,” she says.
She sleeps for much of the night, snoring, head on his shoulder.
And he barely sleeps. He doesn’t want to miss anything.
This morning, he studies a carnival that isn’t running, a field of spinach. Vultures spiraling.
Everything he sees is significant. There’s little time left, and everything matters.
A biker in the next lane doesn’t glance up to the bus window—blond, a craggy face, denim vest, her arms browned in the sun. Jamey looks at the humid sun blinking off the motorcycle, at the scrappy woods beyond, at the dead possum whose mouth opens to ruby entrails, a sign for Honey Creek, the telephone wires rushing by while the sky is stationary. Someone is holding his jaw—Don’t look away, Jamey. He squints his tired eyes open. He’s committed.
And he suddenly understands that he’s waiting to see a signal to leave.
Not today, or tomorrow. But soon.
Grand Rapids.
The passenger is tall and maybe a hundred pounds, hair soaked in oil and combed—his face narrowed like a ferret by the speed he’s been doing for so long. His body re-formed by addiction, curved into endless need, refusal, humiliation, and perseverance.
He perches on their armrest with a brown unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. Hey kids! Daddy’s collecting money for the next rest stop, where I’ll grab us all snacks to share. No? Well, need some gum? I got Doublemint at a dollar a stick? Shoe shine, fifty cents?
When they stop talking to him, his mega-smile drops and he stares with hunger, moving to the next row, puts on his mega-smile. It’s a terrifying performance—perfect, stellar.
It’s a population of misfits, changing at each stop as they discharge riders and take on new ones. An ex-con with a ginger-blond mustache whose last meal was behind bars. A woman with a beehive hairdo carrying a parcel of dried meat. A pretty child in a watermelon-print sundress who keeps asking questions but whose mother never answers, paging through a magazine with empty eyes. And the obese man, taking up the last row by the bathroom, with three chins and deep creases in his flesh, aromatic in an ancient way, stinking ethereal, more beautiful than hell.
They doze on each other’s shoulder, conscious of hands moving under the seats, reaching for a wallet in a backpack. They stamp at the ghostly fingers the way you scare roaches.
Sunrise behind them, and they’re passing another town in Iowa. This place, a blink of fellowship, people and buildings and animals—folks meandering around this fine morning, sunlight caught in their hair like dewdrops, all believing that where they are is where life begins and ends, even if they know better. The gravity of any location pulls citizens to its heart, organizing people by abstractly spiritual geography.
The speed of the bus isn’t grand but it has the effect of slowing down any activity it passes, so a farmwoman lifts a crate into her truck sluggishly, and the man trudges the field at a funereal pace, even the dust kicked up by his boots billowing in languorous, illuminated clouds.
They drive into the falling sun.
At a diner in Nebraska, they break and grab a quick breakfast: sliced ham and scrambled eggs. She tries to get Jamey to eat, but he plays with his food like a girl who thinks she’s overweight. She pushes a forkful of fried apricot pie to his mouth, and he almost retches.
Back on the bus.
They drive past white crosses.
Past an Indian reservation.
Past floodlights at night shining on giant tractors, working through late hours.
They drive along barren highway and then a town begins: a gas station first, then raggedy houses, a grocer, then a liquor store, a stationery, a diner, a gun store, culminating in a church at the midpoint, then de-escalating with a ladies-wear store, a barber, raggedy houses, the other gas station…
Wyoming!
They make it to the Wagon Wheel Motel, its name written in neon script above the office. The Wagon Wheel offers a daily newspaper delivered to their door, a hot breakfast every morning. A bar with wagon wheels for lamps, and a motor court with picnic tables.
They register as Buck and Esther London, names they came up with on the bus while looking out filthy windows onto clean land. They take number 186 from this single-story horseshoe of rooms.
Home sweet home.
The room has faux-wood walls, and an Aztec-patterned comforter, 1950s bedside tables. Ashtray with the Wagon Wheel logo. They brush their teeth and fall onto the bed, and wonder if they are in fact different people than when they left New York three days ago.
Jamey looks around the room from his horizontal position and can taste the smoke of thousands of cigarettes. He can feel a lady in a nylon peignoir cutting corns off her feet, right there. A man watching game shows in pinstriped boxers as he flosses. Salesmen must have looked in this mirror. Rodeo contenders would have prayed. The old lady held the shower walls as water pummeled her frail body, then set out in an apple-green Pontiac Catalina for a last Thanksgiving at her son’s house.
“What are we doing?” Jamey asks.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought maybe you had a plan.”
“My plan was to get away.”
They lie in silence.
They meet the old cowboy who lurks around the motel. His name is Don, and he runs his hand through white hair under his hat then replaces the hat. He wears dark glasses too. He has a peg leg, and gets violently drunk every night, and does motel chores all day. He shoots a couple rotgut whiskeys, runs to the loo, vomits, comes back for more, patting his mouth with a gingham hankie.
“Lost my leg in ’Nam,” he tells them one morning in the parking lot, and runs a hand through his white hair.
Later they overhear him at the bar telling a Canadian couple it was a mountain lion tore off his foot.
The air! The air is so different. She breathes it, and the novelty doesn’t fade. This world brushes her arms, touches her face, like something getting to know her. She can’t help but smile at the clouds ringing the knees of snowcapped mountains, or at the constellations at night. She hadn’t known that stars do twinkle, that squirrels eat mushrooms, that birds fill a dusk with song. This place is a surprise, pulled out of the big American road map like a Cracker Jack prize.
Thickets of grass and wildflowers bend with the wind.
Jamey looks at ravens weighing down the branches of a tree so heavily it seems they’re in the wrong tree, since everything here is calibrated.
The breeze moves different trees differently�
��aspen leaves wink and tilt like sequins—the cottonwood flutters. The young aspens don’t have white bark yet. The rose hips look like red marbles.
He can’t imagine the moment he and Elise will say goodbye to each other.
He didn’t know he could have this volume of feeling, this intensity—sadness lights every cell like adrenaline. Stabs of it run through his loins, bolts of grief up his arms.
Just watching her now, spreading peanut butter on bread at the motel-room table, the way she looks at what she’s doing, licks the blade, her shoulders rising as she cuts the sandwich in two—who dreamed he could love someone this much?
“You could do fine without me,” he tells her.
“Shut up,” she says without looking away from the TV.
She hates seeing him like this: skinny, ghostly, his tooth cracked.
He still has the basic face he brought to every occasion—the mask that can outlast anyone’s prying except hers. She could tell, from the day they met, that he hadn’t given up. His act was to pretend to care, but to pretend so badly it looked like he didn’t care, protecting the dear and tender truth that he did care. He wanted to love somebody.
Don mentions they need a dishwasher at Dragon City, a random Chinese joint down the highway; their regular guy shot his sister in the hand last night and is in jail.
“Maybe I’ll go down there?” Jamey says.
“Make an extra dollar, why not, I say,” Don says.
“Why do you need to work today?” Elise asks.
“Got to make as much money as possible.”
“Why?”
“To live on.”
She knows he means for her to live on with the baby once he’s gone.
He’s the only white boy in the house. All the cooks are Chinese guys with thick elbows and a way of bantering and laughing as they sizzle food and sink steamers into pots like all kitchen crews everywhere and just like this one kitchen, here. Universal and also a subset. Jamey can’t understand but smiles along, and no one cares. They assume he’s a junkie, a strung-out loser with twine to hold up his pants, a broken tooth.
With their muscular jowls or jaundiced eyes, balding heads or prison tattoos, they seem far away from anyone Jamey knows. The heat in the kitchen makes everyone pink, as if there’s some excitement, but when they break between lunch and dinner to eat, he sees normalcy in everyone’s eyes. It doesn’t matter that they’re Chinamen in Wyoming. Nothing can ever stay strange for long.
He smells fetid at the end of every shift. It’s odd because all the food smells good, but combined it’s too many ingredients, accelerating some kind of decomposition. He comes home rotten.
He arrives at the motel with little confetti strips from egg-drop soup in his hair, and grease on his hands so deep and indelible it’s healing. He showers but Dragon City stays like golden plugs in his nostrils.
When he walks home, hands in pockets, he can’t help looking back at his life.
Odd moments surface—sailing a Beetle Cat alone, eating a tomato-mayonnaise sandwich, the wind’s power moving the hull…sleeping in Martine’s king bed, the loft filled with never-ending light…clamming as a kid in a cold bay, feet working in the mud, hair blown into a salty twirl…a red rose blooming in a stranger’s yard, in the September streets of New Haven…
They walk the hallway of the motel to get breakfast. Sometimes a door opens, and the moment is spiked with cheap shave cream and halitosis.
These foreign smells make her think—again—how impossible it will be to wake up in a bed without him. What’s the point of anything? Why did we make it this far, she thinks, through hours in our own lives before we met, even after we met, when we were sure we were worthless, but we somehow got to the other side of those times, holding it together, ashamed to be hopeful but being hopeful, when we had no protection and no direction but we kept going anyway, and then we got rewarded, and now it’s being ripped out of my hands? I didn’t give up and I didn’t complain, she thinks, furious. Why can’t I have what I want, what I earned, what I deserve?
He plans to learn to hunt. He talks to Don about it at the Wagon Wheel bar, the sound of pool balls clicking behind them.
“It ain’t the season,” Don says.
“Yeah, but I could brush up my target shooting and be ready.”
“Well, what you need, a shotgun?”
“Yeah, a twelve-gauge?” Jamey asks casually.
“How much you want to spend on this here shotgun? I can get you something that works but it’s not very pretty, fer about one-fifty.”
“Perfect.”
Everyone thinks he’s on drugs, which is ironic since now he’s lucid, but he’s wasting away. His jaw bone, brow bones, hollow eyes—and a mouth that’s still plush. He ties his pants with string.
They cook on a hot plate. She hates cleaning his dish afterward, which is full since he just pushes food around. She scrapes it into the garbage. She does it in slow motion, trying to keep her face together. She takes the plate to the sink.
A stubborn, poisonous feeling is creeping into her, and she recognizes it.
She loved block parties as a kid, the hot dogs, the cake, playing tag through all the adults, who cursed and laughed and smoked reefer—everyone happy, all night they’d dance, grandparents, kids, the bad boys, the dirty girls, everyone was invited, no one stayed away. And then that feeling, as the crowd shrank, they were folding up the long metal tables—See yez—G’night, now—stumbling and giggling, fighting, sealing Tupperware, stubbing out smokes, finishing bottles, someone throwing up behind a car. She’d feel rage, a disappointment so vicious she couldn’t be consoled, touched, even approached. I hate you! she said to anyone nearby. C’mon, shug, her mother would say, firmly gripping her little arm. Party’s over.
They spend the day with Don as he checks fences on the Rhoner ranch, riding the truck through fields, tagging wires that need mending.
Don has the twelve-gauge and takes them shooting near Clover Lake, taking aim at a dead tree.
Jamey knows how to load shells from hunting with his uncles. It’s been a while since he fired a gun, and he winces at the kickback.
“You’re a damn good shot!” Don says, surprised. “Want to give it a little try, Elise?”
She shakes her head.
Lying in bed later, Jamey can feel it all coming to an end. They both can.
The gun is the new sun in the room. It’s a star. They revolve around it.
He’s in pain; he throws up anything he eats.
She hands him a Saltine, and he pushes it away, gently.
“Let’s go to the hospital,” she says.
“No, Elise,” he says. “Not going anywhere like that.”
That morning, at dawn, he stands at the doorway to the room. A doe is in the brush, but she’s not scared away by him, which is unusual. She looks up then back to a movement in the grass. It’s a damp fawn, just born, with brittle tiny sticks for legs, barely walking. And mama won’t leave its side. This is what he’s been waiting to see, and he’s breathless.
The motel room itself is a puzzle. It reminds Jamey of himitsu-bako, these Japanese puzzle boxes they had at Sotheby’s. Exquisite parquetry, a mosaic of black walnut, yellow mulberry wood, and blue cucumber tree. Only one unique series of moves could open a box, those moves built into the box itself. His favorite box had 66 moves, but it was more complex and difficult than the box with 115 moves. He liked that fact.
He makes his proposal, laying out the options.
“The bottom line is that I have to, you know, leave,” he says with difficulty.
“Jamey,” she pleads with him.
“I can go alone.”
“What the fuck are you saying?”
“But”—he seems uncomfortable—“from where I stand, I do know there’s—somewhere to go.”
They look at each other for a while.
“I’m not staying here without you,” she says.
He stands at the window, and looks at the sky f
or a while.
“You been planning this!” she accuses him finally.
“Did you really think I wanted to go hunting?” he asks gently.
She comes to look out the window too. “Why is this happening?”
They get ready to do it without talking, Jamey seating himself in the middle of the room. Elise kneeling at his feet, muzzle to his chest.
It’s her mom she sees in her mind right now. Her mom’s colossal face, the metallic eye shadow, a worried grin, a cheap cigarette lit between her teeth. And then she sees the baby in her belly, a shadow of promise, a rosebud mouth and virgin eyes.
Yet believing in the next world is an act of love.
Her mother, then her baby. Then the act of love. Mother, baby, act of love.
This wheel turns in her mind.
“Don’t you love me, Elise?” says Jamey.
And then suddenly her eyes close and a huge red ledge tilts in her, an avalanche of logic, crumbling, disappearing. There are no words but ribbons come untied, knots loosening by themselves. Form is unlocked, and the fall is a bird’s dive from high in the air, and the finger is on the safety and it clicks the catch forward and the gun is a form too and soon the walls and structure of flesh and history can dissolve, sugar in hot water, a new thing glistening and abruptly liquid, the sugar bubbling as it goes—she’s been coming this way her whole life, now she’s letting go, on to the next place, to destiny, pale finger and violet rhinestone nail on the cold metal trigger—
He sees it coming, a blue rush in her gray eyes before she closes them, the soul of Elise welled up in her long bony hands, and she’s gonna do it, and he actually smiles, grins like a fool, and there goes the safety catch, and there’s her finger on the trigger—
He pushes the muzzle at the last millisecond and the shot hits the wall, a focused spray of powder, one almost-deadly thunk in the fake wood—the deafening shot—kickback to her shoulder—she’s now staring at him—unfocused like she just woke up—gun tilted crazily at the ceiling—and he takes the weapon, opens it to pop the smoky shell from the top barrel onto the orange carpet. He pulls the live shell too.
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