by Maryl Jo Fox
Frank was just going to have a drink or two and then try to find Scotty. Scotty’s one slippery guy these days, always going off somewhere, having a meeting, looking exhausted, avoiding his old friend, it seems. You need an appointment book to see Scotty. It’s all very mysterious.
But the woman at the bar is alone and has just signaled the bartender for a second Cosmo. She’s dressed too nicely for Desert Dan’s—beige linen suit, white silk blouse, nails manicured in a neutral shade, plus Frank knows an expensive haircut when he sees it—blunt cut, layered in some way he knows is current. He absorbs her beautiful sad blue eyes and trim figure. What makes him approach her is the proverbial deer in the headlights look she gives the bartender when she orders the second drink.
He knows then she probably needs the alcohol for some sad, urgent reason. So Frank, Mr. Fix-it Man in Levi’s and a T-shirt, goes over and sits next to her on the bar stool and orders a whiskey straight up. At first neither speaks. She stirs her drink with the little swizzle stick. He reaches for the bowl of peanuts, swings it over toward her.
“Care for some?” he asks softly.
“No, thanks,” she says. She says “thanks” like “tanks,” the ending ks hitting hard. This interests him. She wasn’t born here. She has a thin, hard air about her, hunched over her drink, trying to relax, drinking the second Cosmo faster than if she were already relaxed. She starts to take off her jacket. Their eyes meet. He holds the jacket as she takes it off. His hand brushes against the soft pale skin of her arms. A shiver runs up his spine. “Tanks,” she says again in that interesting way. She lays the jacket across her lap. They are quiet. Then she says, “Please don’t ask where I’m from. Yes, I have an accent, and yes, I’m from Germany”—she says “Chermany”—“and yes, I’m leaving tomorrow. Just passing through.” She clams up. He looks at her in the mirror. She looks defiantly back at him.
He lowers his gaze, finishes his whiskey, orders another, and finally says, “I’m not here for long either.” They sit in silence. It’s comfortable sitting here with this enigmatic woman, as alluring to him as an endangered butterfly. “So, what’s your name, beautiful woman?”
Her face softening, she looks back at him in the mirror, and he knows he’s in. Her eyes flicker; her blue eyes are luminous. “Gretchen.” She looks away.
“Frank,” he says a beat later.
He leans back on the bar stool, his pulse rising. He smiles at her, dimples creasing his cheeks. Her smile is reluctant. She has small, even, very white teeth. Her blouse is short-sleeved. He wants to touch her arm again, so he moves his arm over a little, reaching for the peanuts, and feels the electric charge of early contact. She looks a little startled but doesn’t move her arm away. He’s moving into his second whiskey, and she’s ready for her third Cosmo.
“So, Mr. American Man, Mr. Frank, how do you spend your days?”
He takes his time answering. “I’ve done lots of things, been lots of places. I’m with Union Pacific at the moment.” He watches her. “Good way to see the country, meet interesting people. Like now.” He lets the compliment sink in.
Her face changes subtly. She smiles. “That’s why I left Chermany. To see the States. The world. Go all over. Not call any place home.” She stops, swallows hard. The corners of her mouth quiver.
They sit in silence. Something is really bothering her. He moves his hand closer to hers. She doesn’t move it away. He takes her hand. Their hands are warm together. After a moment that somehow contains solace, she says she has to drive to Boise in the morning, that she’s tired. He gives her a questioning look; she nods.
They leave the bar together. Everything now has an air of inevitability. Up in her room, she’s done considerable laying-in of booze. Johnny Walker Black, Jack Daniels on the dresser. He gets the ice bucket filled. She pours them both whiskeys, hers with ice. They sit on the small couch, arms touching, talking about nothing, the weather, different parts of the country, traveling. Behind it all is rising tension. He puts his arm around her, feels her relax.
He’s getting excited, knows to calm himself. She smells of something floral and expensive. Their kisses are a little shaky, intense. In due time they move to the bed. Talking brokenly now and crying, she buries her face in his neck. She had fallen for her boss, a partner in the San Francisco law firm where she worked. Married. Not willing to divorce. The guy had just dumped her a few days ago as the office closed for the day. “I really loved him,” she says, near to sobbing. He tries to soothe her. “Don’t worry. You’ll find someone much better, someone who will treat you right.”
She looks at him. They are ready. And it’s good. Very good. But afterward, he feels the familiar emptiness. He looks over at her. She has the same sad face he saw at the bar. He’ll never see her again, but it upsets him to see her looking sad like that. He looks away. They grip each other’s hands.
For years he’s been this wanderer, this sex machine. He had to have sex every day or he couldn’t sleep. Got irritable, jumpy. It was an itch, an addiction. To get it, he was skilled, calculating, sensitive. Underneath, he felt a certain anger, impatience, or worse, a sadness that bubbled up just as he finished with the Woman of the Day.
He doesn’t know what’s happening to him. For the last few years, he’s felt empty and depressed most of the time. The sex wasn’t helping as much. Even more confusing is when—like now—he sees the same sad look on the woman’s face. They’re looking for the same thing he is. It’s all a muddle and a mystery.
When he was a kid, maybe eight, he heard low music coming from the living room late one night. He crept outside his room, down the hall, to see. His parents were dancing to music from the portable phonograph. They were kissing, their mouths moving together as if they were chewing on something. It scared him a little, they were so intent. Later, they crept outside to sit in the lawn swing and smoke their cigarettes, punctuating their quiet talk with the hands holding the cigarettes. His parents’ moving hands, outlined by flame, made a magic circle. The child watched and felt with a stab of his heart that he would never be allowed inside that magic circle with them. And it was true.
He had felt that exclusion his whole life. While his father still lived, Frank watched his parents every day as they made little jokes he didn’t understand, as they touched each other’s hair or hands or face to emphasize something they were talking about, as they whispered to each other or quietly laughed. It jars him to remember this now, in his forties. Gretchen is looking for her own magic circle. Until she finds it, she’s just another passing soul, sad like him.
She has already passed out. In despair and relief, he turns over and falls asleep. A little before three, he wakes up, dresses, and lets himself out the door.
He wakes in his own bed when it’s already hot. Clara is out somewhere; the wasps are nowhere in sight. Cranky and tired, he turns on the fan and fixes himself a mug of strong black coffee and puts a couple of Entenmann’s donuts on a plate. At the table he’s cursing himself. He didn’t come to Jackpot to service a bunch of sad women. Been there, done that. What did he come here for then? Scotty? Himself? Pause. Someone else?
Later that morning, he sees Gretchen get into a black Mercedes and head north, screeching her tires for effect.
chapter 6
After Frank got stung and stormed out, Clara sat unmoving at the kitchen table, trying to put her thoughts in order.
She had just refused her son’s desire to talk about something important. But she came to this god-forsaken place to talk about important things with him before she dies.
She needs the wasps around her, but they are driving her son away.
She shouldn’t have let the wasps out, but they can’t stay in the jars forever.
She won’t abandon the wasps to the howling winds, but she didn’t plan what to do with them once she got to Jackpot.
Why did they have to sting him? He wasn’t doing anything! She’s got to do something about them—she’s got to see her son!
What’s happening to her orderly life? She didn’t come to Jackpot to have her life fall apart. Is this what the desert does to a person?
Groaning, she lies down on her bed.
Each thing Clara experiences builds its own little room in her brain and wires itself to memory, the central screening room. Some rooms are more walled off than others. A few are fortresses. The day of Samantha’s death, for instance, is so upsetting that she can’t fully revisit it. It’s locked up tight, and that’s her problem. It’s getting moldy and infected.
Brain Rooms contain the whole of her life. Sometimes these rooms have thin walls that flap and break and spill into the room next door. Then these adjacent memories get all jumbled up, sending out their incendiary contents to jam up transmission lines between other Brain Rooms. Sometimes these flapping walls feel like herds of wild broncos tearing up the shrubbery. She’s got headaches nearly all the time now. Isn’t sleeping. Has to take little naps just to get through the day.
And those wasp stings on her forehead are still bothering her. The unhealed stings seem to be getting bigger. It feels like something is working on her, burrowing. This has to be her imagination.
After Frank stormed out, the Demon Death door in her brain flew open and stays open. Let it bang and carry on, she thinks, staring at the ceiling from her bed.
The day Samantha died, Clara found Frank in the hall full of swarming kids at the end of the school day. He was only nine. Her hands shook, her face was streaked with tears. His eyes got wide, seeing his mother like that.
“Samantha has been in an accident,” she said quietly. “I’m going to the hospital, and Abigail will come to pick you up. You must wait in the principal’s office until Abigail gets here.”
Staring at her, he whimpered, “But I want to go with youuu.”
“Not now, sweetheart,” she said firmly. “I’ll pick you up as soon as I can.”
He was so scared. His father had died just four months earlier. He could hardly comprehend that something terrible had happened to his sister too. But he obediently played Legos at Abigail’s until his mother came back, pale and distraught.
At the funeral, the dirt hole for the casket was covered with fake grass. Clara welcomed this subterfuge, but the fluorescent grass was scary to Frank. “What’s all that shiny plastic for the grass? Where’s the real grass? Why is the lid closed? Samantha can’t breathe in there.”
Numb, Clara looked at him. “It has to be closed. It’s better that way.” She couldn’t face the details of death with him, at least not then.
He started to cry. He let her put her arms around him just that once. Back home, he ran to his room and slammed the door.
Every night, Frank hid in his room and Clara sat like a statue in the living room. Some Demon that steals only those we love most had a special hankering for her family’s blood—that seemed clear. This idea was the only way Clara could endure her double loss, Samantha at eleven, Darrell at thirty-five. To fool the Demon, Clara had to mount a special disguise to keep Demon Death from taking Frank too. So she made his favorites: meat loaf, fried chicken, chocolate chip cookies. She kept a clean house and his clothes mended, helped him too much with homework, and later refused to let him try out for football. She wanted to corral him somehow, wrap him up in cellophane—keep him from the terrors of the living world.
But she never really talked to him, never explained what she was doing. Outwardly she was a caring Betty Crocker mom, but emotionally she was stiff as a fence post around him. She wouldn’t let herself kiss or hug him for fear Demon Death would see how much she loved him and take him away. She practiced all this restraint so the Demon would get bored and flee her cursed house!—go steal spouses and babies from other people who foolishly had their hearts throbbing right there on their sleeves where everyone could see. Everyone knows that too much public display of feeling invites the Evil Eye—better known as Demon Death Red Alert Attack Mode.
It was no use. She couldn’t keep the world away. Instead of cellophane, Frank chose raw contact. After the double deaths, he morphed from a quiet, industrious little kid into a wild boy. In fourth and fifth grades, he stole bikes and threw them in dumpsters, took a paint scraper to car exteriors, broke store windows and stole merchandise from the exposed window displays. The police talked to Frank and his mother, getting more stern each time. They knew he’d lost a dad and a sister, but the boy just had to buck up. They found stolen merchandise in the garage. His grades fell. There was some question of whether he would pass fifth grade.
Distraught, Clara went to his teacher, Mrs. Beaumont, a placid woman whose mouth receded into her several chins. “He’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Beaumont in a honeyed voice. “He’s just got to work it out.”
Clara swallowed hard, gunned her car home, and rocked all evening in her rocker. How could Mrs. Beaumont be so calm, like a Buddhist nun floating above the world? Did she have any children herself? Every night, Clara sat in the living room, needing to feel her beating heart as proof she was still alive instead of burning in a fiery pit.
Losing half her family made her mute, maybe nuts. She withdrew from Frank so much it was cruel. All those years. She didn’t realize. They couldn’t talk. How could she be so stupid? Frank didn’t know why she didn’t talk to him, why they never had any fun together.
Frank’s wildness continued into high school. He always liked girls, had constant girlfriends. Girls were more important than grades. That upset her. But nothing upset her more than the affair he had with the pretty new chemistry teacher, Alice Martin, when he was three months shy of graduation in 1972. Frank! Her son! With a teacher! When Clara herself was a teacher! She heard it through the grapevine.
Frank got expelled, and Alice Martin got fired. This was her third teaching job, and here she was only twenty-six—that was the scuttlebutt. Alice’s specialty was sex with her students. Clara stayed home from school three days from the shock of it. Frank stayed with Scotty for two weeks after he saw Clara weeping in her rocker. The Big Silence returned when he came back home from Scotty’s. The principal wouldn’t let Frank be in graduation; he got his diploma in the mail. Among his friends, of course, he was deemed a master stud. Clara heard them laughing about it outside the house one day and she covered her ears. All these years, Frank and his mother never once spoke of this affair, like they didn’t speak of so many things. Love and fear made her tongue-tied. Frank just wanted to get away.
But she had a living son. He was still alive. No matter what, the need to fool Demon Death was always on her mind. Each day she had to make the Demon think her love for Frank was garden variety, not volcanic and total. Then the Demon would lose interest in Frank and she could keep one quarter of her family. Was that too much to ask?
The purple wasps thought she’d made a devil’s bargain with her silences. But Clara wouldn’t listen.
Frank, of course, didn’t understand the tangled subtleties of mother love. Missing something essential from his mother, something he couldn’t put into words, he always felt angry and disappointed around her but didn’t know why. The upshot was he left her through his wanderings, almost as surely as Darrell and Samantha left her through death.
He hitchhiked away from his mother’s sad home in 1972, knowing his high draft number would keep him out of Vietnam. His goal was Montana, because he’d never been there. A trucker’s tip landed him in Idaho instead, wrangling horses and branding sheep at a family-owned guest ranch in the Sawtooth Mountains. Whispers spread of the fringe benefits he offered female guests whose husbands were conveniently away on long pack trips in the Sawtooth wilderness. The wives settled for short pack trips and the Saturday night dance at the Stanley Rod and Gun Club. In the winter, he taught skiing at Sun Valley. After fourteen years of this, he got a job on Union Pacific and worked his way up to chief engineer. Like his restless mentor Alice Martin, he got to see the country.
Now in his forties, every route seemed the same—same cities, same meals, same restaurants, same
lines used on any number of women, their bodies the same shapely walls of flesh—scented, lightly furred, skilled, even athletic in the sex act, an exertion that never opened the door to the secret place he unknowingly sought for years.
He’s wasting his life. He wants to find something for himself that has nothing to do with a woman. With his aunt’s lucky inheritance, he fled to his old friend Scotty, who’s like a brother to him. But he sees now that Scotty’s just as lost as he is—and sick.
28 days left.
After Gretchen screeches up the highway, Frank drives the trailer cab down to Salmon Falls Creek, a little turnoff on the highway. It’s deserted, just as he thought it would be. Just the sound of water from an itty-bitty creek. He gets the gnarled burl from his glove compartment. He found it in the front yard the morning he and Clara set out for Jackpot. For years he’s made small sculptures from wood scraps he’d find at lumber yards—oak, cedar, walnut—hunks of wood a portable six or eight inches, a size suitable for his roving way of life. His women friends seemed to like what he made. Working with wood always helps him think.
He gets his leather case of carving tools from under the seat—chisel, carving knife, spoon gouger, wood veiner. Most days (or nights) since they got here, Frank sculpts things at Salmon Falls Creek. He sits in the passenger seat wearing his headlamp, the cutting board on his lap as he carves and chisels, trying to get a shape that interests him, but the burl remains an ugly lump. Frustrated, he slams out of the trailer cab and walks around the creek area, smoking a cigarette.
Things are at a standstill. He and his mother have been in Jackpot six days now, and he’s only spent two nights at her house. He’s bunking at Scotty’s because of the wasp stings, but Scotty’s never there. He wants to get Scotty to a doctor, but Scotty’s apparently in hiding. He wants to get Clara settled, but they just sit around in painful silence or talk about the weather.