This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

  As if Norby could forget. Seattle, a year ago next month. A concert at the Neptune, the sweet scent of alcohol seeping from their pores as they moved in rhythm under the houselights. They’d spent the preceding day roaming the University of Washington campus, with Norby basking in sweet envy at his lover’s fortune in having matriculated there. Before the show, Derek had found the shirt—disco purple with silver cross-threading and mother-of-pearl snaps down the middle—at a vintage shop on Brooklyn Avenue, and it hung perfectly on him. Such fun those buttons had been to pop open hours later, back at the hotel, in their drunken rambunctiousness. Derek’s skin, hot to the touch. The scent of him on Norby as they slept, entwined. Yeah, Norby knew the shirt. If he closed his eyes and thought of Derek, something he tried to avoid, the shirt was part of the image. When he’d found it after Derek cleared out, he cast it to the back of the closet, not wanting to lay eyes upon it—and holding the furtive hope that he could keep it somehow.

  Sorry. Not there.

  Where u?

  Montana.

  The words lingered unanswered for a bit.

  Oh.

  Yeah.

  When u back?

  A few days. A tremor went through Norby’s hands. Sudden anger at the imposition, and the inquisition. It came on sideways, at odd angles, with no percolation.

  Can someone else let me in?

  No.

  Chill. Just asking.

  The world doesn’t turn on you and your fucking shirt.

  Whoa. What’s with u?

  “You goddamn well know what’s with me,” Norby said aloud. He bolted into a sitting position, turned off the TV, and jabbed his finger at the phone’s touch screen, tapping out a reply. The night of the breakup, he’d gone back to the house alone. Derek stayed in a room at the Hotel De Anza, having already packed a bag and cleared out before they met for dinner. That had been tough enough, but it was no match for the scattershot visits over the next week—sometimes when Norby was at work, sometimes when he was there—when Derek would swoop in and haul off some more belongings. Finally, Norby had set some boundaries: one more trip, get everything, leave the key, stay permanently gone. That had been eleven days earlier, and the agreement had held until tonight. The bile rose in Norby’s throat faster than he could swallow it back down.

  Nothing’s with me. You can get it when I’m back.

  K. Jeez.

  You’re so manipulative. Norby rapped it out before he had time to reconsider. If he could still wound Derek, that comment would get him. Their worst fights, and Derek’s most extended bouts of pouting, had come in the wake of Norby calling him on his fouls. Norby braced for the reply. If he drew blood, as he expected, he could count on Derek to overplay the offense.

  Whatever. U R mean. This is why I couldn’t love u. Norby stared at the screen, absorbing it even as his mind screamed at him to just let it roll off him. He blinked, then blinked again. How wonderful it would be if he just couldn’t feel anymore.

  He pressed the power button and turned off the phone.

  PATRICIA

  She lay on her side in the darkened bedroom, feigning sleep after hearing Sam come in the front door. His unwinding brought forth the melody she knew well—the slap of his tossed keys on the kitchen counter, the concussive beat of his slipped-off boots hitting the floor beside the sliding-glass door, the insistent beep of the refrigerator as he pawed too long through the drawers looking for something to ease his sweet tooth, the padded footfalls through the living room as he headed toward her.

  She opened an eye and found the glowing display of the alarm clock: 9:21 p.m. A late arrival for Sam, even by eve-of-Jamboree standards. She knew better than to have expected him for dinner. Once the pies were out of the oven and cooled, she’d wrapped them in aluminum foil and set them high on her grandmother’s buffet in the dining room, well out of the reach of the grabby grandchildren she expected to see in about twenty hours. After that, she drove the twelve miles to Sidney and ate a double cheeseburger from Dairy Queen in the privacy of her car, euphoric at every bite. She knew what such a luxury demanded. She would be back in Sidney the next morning, in league with her CrossFit group, ready to keep that greasy delight off her thighs.

  A crack of light fell on her from the opening of the bathroom door as Sam brushed his teeth before bed. Praise be for that, she thought. He often didn’t take such care, and on those occasions when he went in for a good-night kiss, she would quietly endure the detritus of whatever he’d consumed for lunch at Pete’s.

  Lights out, she waited for his touch as he slid into his side of the bed. A serpentine arm slithered over her hips and across her belly, drawing her into him.

  “You awake?” he said.

  “Barely.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She patted his arm. “It’s OK. How’d it go?”

  She closed her eyes and let him speak his piece. Conceit moved to the forefront on this particular occasion, where Grandview and Jamboree became the revolving planets and Sam became the sun. Patricia supplied all the proper cues—the “uh-huhs” and the gentle, reassuring rub of his arm—that kept Sam’s story rolling forth. She deviated into true interest only when he mentioned the visitor from back East.

  “The New York Times? Here?”

  Sam sat up a bit and pressed his whiskered face against her bare shoulder. She liked that. “Yeah. You should have seen Swarthbeck. He was sweating like a hog after the fair. I guess she kind of got under his skin with her questions.”

  Swarthbeck. Patricia’s face twisted into a sour-milk frown. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for him; indeed, it went much deeper than garden-variety disregard. But the mayor was a useful idiot, she often reminded herself, a hedge against even greater ambition from her well-meaning husband. This Jamboree thing essentially came with the marriage, a duty passed down the family line that she knew was going to fall on Sam eventually. And she couldn’t very well begrudge the position on the school board, because what kind of troll opposes the education of kids? But as long as Swarthbeck was mayor—and indications were that he’d sooner die than give it up—Sam couldn’t be. As for the other aspirations, the county commission or maybe a seat in the statehouse, she’d exercised her nuclear option long ago: Sam could do that or be married to her, but he couldn’t do both. She wanted a husband, not a public figure.

  “What’s her interest?” Patricia asked.

  He kissed her ear. She rolled her shoulder to cover it up.

  “Oil,” he said. “Same old story, just a different way of going at it. She wants to know what the future looks like for a place like this.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her we’re in a lot of trouble.”

  She rolled toward him, face-to-face. “John isn’t going to like that.”

  “It’s true, though,” Sam said. “I get it. Everything’s hunky-dory to Swarthbeck. Money’s rolling in, times are good, we can replace the town pool, whatever. I’m looking at the bigger picture.”

  She touched his face. Good old earnest Samuel Einar Kelvig. Thirty-two years had a way of putting distance into their marriage, and in some significant ways even discontent. Other times, though, she remembered why she’d loved him in the first place, and why she’d stood by him, even when he was flat wrong or just entrenched and pigheaded. Because his heart was right.

  And about pigheaded . . . Her thoughts turned to their son and his impending arrival.

  “Kids’ll be here tomorrow,” she said.

  Sam propped himself on an elbow. “Samuel, too?”

  “He called me from the airport this morning.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Bismarck. I told him to drive the rest of the way tomorrow.”

  “And you know he’s there?”

  Patricia clucked her tongue, trying to chase her husband off the territory he w
as claiming. This had been Sam’s go-to on matters of their son ever since that disaster of a first visit with Samuel’s friend, and Samuel and Derek’s subsequent turnaround in the Minneapolis airport after she and Sam had bought them tickets and asked them, pretty please, to come back at Christmastime for another try. To Sam, that had been an unforgivable snub and a demonstration of the immaturity that still hung heavy from their son. Patricia had found a softer spot in her heart. The boys had gotten spooked, and she and her husband had done the spooking.

  “He said he’ll be here,” she said.

  “OK. Good. Glad to hear it. He bringing anybody?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well, we’ll roll with it, I guess.”

  Patricia exhaled. She couldn’t say this was promising, but among all the reactions Sam might have conjured, it was on the safe side. “Denise and Randy and the kids will be here in time for supper in the park,” she said. “Randy’s got a dentist appointment in the morning.”

  “OK.”

  Sam rolled away from her, prepping his pillow for the coming slumber. She reached for his shoulder.

  “Sam.”

  “Yeah?”

  She caressed him, dribbling her fingers down the length of his arm.

  “What, Pat?”

  “It’s important to me.”

  “What?”

  “Samuel’s visit.”

  “I know.”

  She paused, the words caught in her throat. She swallowed, straightening them out.

  “No, listen.”

  Sam rolled back to face her. “What?”

  She swallowed again. Lord, how many times had she rehearsed this in her own head? How many ways had she looked at this breach with the child she loved and yet didn’t understand? All she really knew is that she felt incomplete. It had happened as Samuel pulled away from them by degrees out there in Missoula and then extended the distance when he moved to California. Three years ago, the rupture came, and she’d spent the intervening months and years trying to mend the broken ground. She needed help, and only Sam could give it to her.

  “Make time for him this visit,” she said. “He’ll be here by noon, he said. Come home for lunch. Will you do that?”

  Sam thrashed in the bed to sit up and to face her again. “Good lord, Patricia, I’ve got a to-do list longer than the Missouri River. Send him to me. I’ll put him to work, and we’ll talk then. I could use the help. It’s gonna be hell for me and Omar to get it done alone.”

  “Sam, I need you to be gentle with him.”

  “Gentle!” The word leapt from him, ready to thrash away at her. She leaned back, aghast, and listened to him strangle on the others trying to get out.

  Finally he spoke, softly, as if to compensate for the things he had nearly said.

  “He’s not a delicate flower, Patricia, he’s our son. I love him, but I am not going to pretend that I understand him, and I’m not going to let him disrespect us just because he’s . . .” He fumbled about for the closing, and Patricia silently filled in the blank he’d left in a dozen uncharitable ways.

  “I’m done,” he said. “I’m wiped out. Let’s talk in the morning.”

  He flopped over again, for good, and found the groove into sleep faster than he had any right to. Patricia lay on her back, listening to the rise and fall and blinking into the darkness, her mind scattered to the wind. This funny life, she thought. Sometimes it shows you everything you love and everything you’d leave all in the same moment.

  THE MAYOR

  Nowhere else did John Swarthbeck feel at home the way he did in the inner room of his Main Street office, a shame because only a few of the six hundred or so people in town had ever visited the temperature-controlled sanctum. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme—on vinyl, the very copy Swarthbeck’s own father had given him back in ’65—made the rounds as he tallied the cases. One hundred four prime bottles of River City Select, his one-of-a-kind, homemade hooch, sat waiting for delivery this weekend into waiting hands. And Swarthbeck would, of course, hold back five bottles for his own use, to bestow upon those friends, old and new, who tickled his fancy over the next couple of days.

  Tonight, though, he fondled his usual glass of port as he wound down his business. He lifted it in a toast to the framed-and-mounted centerfold of Jenny McCarthy from the June 1994 Playboy, which hung over the desk. He’d paid 125 clams for that at a brothel in Nevada, and so on price alone it was deserving of a place of honor. It stood, too, as a symbol of class, as Swarthbeck was inclined to define it. These kids today can see any number of vulgarities with a quickie Internet search. Miss McCarthy represented a better era and a more respectful time. It pained him to say that honor and respect were mighty hard to come by these days, and getting harder all the time.

  Take that mouthy dame from the newspaper. She’d come sniffing back around, seeking him out after the trip up Telegraph Hill with Sam Kelvig. She said she wanted to let the mayor know that she’d just been messing with him, asking those questions about the bear cub and the moonshine.

  “Like I didn’t know that,” he told Jenny. He bit the end of his pen, then got back to his figures. He’d been bottling the stuff all year to meet the demand of Jamboree, with its private parties and inevitable drunken trysts. Even now, the still pushed forth his product. Thanksgiving and December were never too far away, bringing another spike in demand and more cash to feather Swarthbeck’s bed.

  “God bless Sammy Kelvig,” he said as he toasted Miss McCarthy again. The punctilious peckerwood could grate on a guy, but he’d made this Jamboree business a boon by turning it into a foot-tapping, body-swaying, beer-guzzling, rock-band-intensive tribute to town history. Sam Kelvig had a vision and he implemented it, and John Swarthbeck would by God make his annual nut on this event alone. Not bad for a guy with little more than some sugar-beet byproduct, yeast, water straight from city services, and a length of copper tubing.

  That girl had some nerve, Swarthbeck thought, ping-ponging back to Wanda Perkins. Somebody in town had done some gum-flapping, or the reporter was sourced up better than he was inclined to give her credit for. The thing was, he knew that no paperwork could come running back to his door. The forest service guys had been content to take the cub back—impressed, even, that the mayor had done such a good job of fattening him up, and for Swarthbeck it had been a relief, as he wasn’t quite sure what he’d do when the cub became a full-on bear, with appetites beyond his ability to sate. The cub had ended up in the sanctuary in Rapid City, disingenuously if accurately billed as an orphan, and Swarthbeck had even made a couple of pilgrimages out to see him. Now where was the harm in that? he wondered. As for the hooch, the feds had made the boundaries—and the considerable running room between them—perfectly clear: don’t embarrass us by selling the stuff out in the open, and we won’t come back to town and bust your still, embarrass you in front of your people, and throw your ass in the pen. Swarthbeck had found those terms agreeable indeed.

  The reporter had said Watford City was her next stop; she was going to dig into the way oil money had changed downtown and transformed a town built on agriculture. A “renaissance,” she called it. Five-dollar words aside, Swarthbeck had to think it didn’t amount to more than slapping fancy siding on a rattrap of a house. Watford, he sniffed. You couldn’t pay me enough. “Well,” he’d told her, “be sure to come on back for Jamboree. We’ll show you a good time.” And she’d said she wouldn’t miss it, that she’d be back Saturday with Larry Grubbs. Swarthbeck figured he could get on her good side yet.

  The mayor checked his figures one last time. Finding them satisfactory, he capped his pen, gave Jenny McCarthy a little squeeze where it counted, silenced John Coltrane for the night, and wheeled the dolly holding cases of spirits toward the door and into his office proper, where they would wait for placement with their rightful owners.

  Swarthbeck drove into the sul
len blue of night, up Telegraph Hill and toward his place. The old farm lay three miles due southwest of town, set off the road a piece and given shelter by a cottonwood windbreak. He ciphered out some quick math in his head to put recent events in perspective. Martha had run off thirty-one months ago now, chugging hard toward three years, and the mayor found himself caught between amazement that he’d survived the breach and consternation that he still didn’t understand exactly what had happened. She’d never been afraid of him, which made her something of an anomaly in town. She said she was going, and she promptly did so, leaving precious little time for Swarthbeck to say anything of value. Her point had been that she didn’t want this anymore, and didn’t want him for sure. That she was now living in Grand Forks and going to college, at her well-curated age, was proof enough of both contentions. His point had been that he could fix anything. He was wrong about that, he often reminded himself now. You can’t fix that which insists it isn’t broken.

  Since she’d been gone, he’d taken to sleeping in the office more than he did at home, catching his showers and his breakfast at the truck stop. He didn’t see much reason to do it any other way. He’d let the fields go fallow, and he didn’t have any livestock unless you counted the barn cats, which seemed to be doing just fine, multiplying and replenishing without his involvement in their greater well-being.

  Tonight, though, he yearned for a proper bed and a proper sleep. Come Friday evening, from the supper on through the weekend, he had hands to shake and babies to kiss and deals to close.

  At the turnoff, he crossed the small bridge over the creek and made his way toward the darkened house.

  The New York Times, Saturday, August 1, 2015

  The physical manifestations of oil’s influence in the region are clear. On the 12-mile stretch of highway between Sidney, the seat of Richland County in Montana, and Grandview one can see upward of a dozen clusters of single-wide mobile homes and fifth-wheel trailers, the shelter for oil-field workers who can’t find more traditional housing in town. And while there is a surfeit of work available in the region, it is work that requires some initial qualification, a message that doesn’t necessarily get passed on before desperate people make their way to the area.