When the cars slid into their places in the starting circle, the drivers climbed out the driver-side windows (the doors were welded shut) and raised their arms for applause. The drivers were mostly men; they spent the entire year souping up their engines, reinforcing the doors with bars, and replacing the windows with metal grates. A great deal of pride and money went into the competition, and in Salmon, pride and money are in short supply.
The derby ran in ten long heats, including the Motorcycle Heat, the Powder Puff Heat (for lady drivers), and the Herby Derby.
As the cars revved their engines to begin, one of the drivers leaned out and flipped the crowd off. We went wild.
ONCE THE FIRST heat was ready, Judge Snyder bullhorned, “Get ready and start your engines!” The engines roared, and the drivers careened toward the middle of the course, bouncing off each other in the frenzy.
As Judge Snyder hooted at the drivers, Jeannie leaned over and shouted in my ear, “Do you remember traffic court?”
I laughed and turned to tell the story to Caleb. We had been fourteen—observing traffic court for our driver’s education class—and I was surprised to hear Judge Snyder offer three pleas to defendants: guilty, not guilty, and guilty with an excuse. When a sobbing woman pleaded “guilty with an excuse” to a DUI charge, Judge Snyder nodded.
“Very well,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
“Well,” the woman said, “I was almost to my house. I had made it all the way to the turn before the cop pulled me over. I normally wouldn’t have been out drinking, but my husband had just divorced me . . .” She started sniffling a little bit more and looked down, wiping her nose on her sleeve. When she looked back up, she said, “I just didn’t know what to do.”
Judge Snyder said, “It looks like you had a good excuse. I’ll drop the charges this time, but don’t do it again.”
Bud interrupted my story. “Well, at least her husband didn’t leave her to move to Missoula and munch box.”
We fell silent. I looked down at the action below, just in time to see the front end of a car crumpled back into its windshield.
When we didn’t respond, he spoke again, louder. “You give your whole life to someone, and then they leave you to become a box muncher.”
Our silence was uncomfortable, so Caleb nodded and smiled at Bud out of politeness, but when he looked at me, his face registered horror.
When Bud looked away, I mouthed to Caleb: I warned you.
THE FIRST HEAT was in full swing now, and the audience was energized. Each driver still hoped for victory. In the first heat, everyone felt like a winner.
The drivers’ strategies became obvious fairly quickly. The driver of car 16, sponsored by a windshield-repair place, drove into the middle of the ring and began aggressively ramming any car that came within ten feet. His bumper got hooked on the bumper of car 7, sponsored by Langer Distributing, with the words “I Love U, Barb” spray-painted over a graphic of a Pepsi can.
Both cars’ tires spun uselessly as they tried to separate, engines squealing, steam bubbling out from underneath the hoods. Soon the other drivers saw 16’s vulnerability, and he became a target. Five cars took turns exacting their vengeance, slamming into him with painful crunches. There was only one rule in the derby. One car couldn’t slam into another’s driver-side door. Beyond that, it was a free-for-all.
Together, the cars slammed 16 free from 7’s bumper, and then 7 took his turn slamming 16. Soon, smoke was pouring out from underneath 16’s hood. A siren went off, and the other cars pulled away. They drove to the edges of the ring, idling, while the driver clambered out his window. The fire department sprayed the car as the driver stood by, shoulders slumped, watching. When they finished putting out the fire, he climbed back in the window, reached his arm out, and pulled down his red flag.
When the siren sounded again, the other cars raced back into the ring and spun in circles. One driver tried to play it safe. He circled the action, avoiding the other cars. At one point, he idled quietly in a corner, clearly hoping the other drivers wouldn’t notice him, but hiding wasn’t a good strategy. They backed him into the corner. It only took three good hits, metal upon metal, before he reached out and pulled down his flag.
Jeannie leaned over and tapped my knee. “Seventeen is Ginny,” she said. “She skipped the Powder Puff. That takes guts. The derby is a good ol’ boys club.”
I smiled at the mud flying from Ginny’s wheels as her car ripped around a corner. Ginny and I had been in school together. We had a brief friendship in grade school—even going so far as to prick our fingers with a needle and rub the fleshy tips together while waiting for the school bus. Blood sisters, we called it—our blood forever merged. By high school, our lives were different, and I hadn’t spoken to her in years.
While Jeannie and I talked, Caleb was forced to visit with Jay and Bud. Having grown up in Appalachia, Caleb was no stranger to men like Bud, but Caleb also knew that those kinds of men made me uncomfortable. I looked back and smiled to reassure Caleb that I was okay—I was used to Bud. He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. I patted his hand, comforted by his tenderness. Jeannie leaned over and tapped my knee. “Let’s go get a cheeseburger,” she said.
I nodded and stood up. I turned back to Caleb. “We’re going to get a cheeseburger,” I said. “Do you want anything?” Caleb nodded and said a beer would be great.
Jay laughed and punched Caleb in the arm. “Aah, you guys are newlyweds,” he said. “She still does things like get you cheeseburgers. That won’t last.”
Jeannie shrugged when I looked back at Caleb; his face was puzzled. “I think she’ll always buy me cheeseburgers,” he said, slowly.
“Sure I will,” I said. I was confused. My parents still did things for each other after thirty-five years of marriage. “Why should that change?” I asked Jay.
Jeannie and Jay were the experts on all things marriage. They seemed so meant for each other that when I was with them, I could believe that marriage was sweet and earnest—that it wasn’t hard. Before Jay had the chance to answer, Jeannie grabbed my arm and pulled me away. “At least she’s not in Missoula . . . ,” Bud said.
I bristled, ready to tell him off. Still, when I looked at him, I stopped. He was staring at the cars demolishing each other down below, his face wooden, his eyes sparkling in the sunlight as he fought back tears. He was obviously in pain. For all of his puffing, I could tell that he missed his wife. I turned around, acting like I hadn’t heard him.
I hurried to catch up to Jeannie, who was standing at the bottom of the bleachers talking to a high school buddy, a woman who’d been impregnated at nineteen by the star point guard on the basketball team.
I waited silently while Jeannie finished talking to her friend. As we were walking off, I brought the conversation back to Jay.
“What was that all about with Jay?”
Jeannie looked away and then looked back. “You guys are newbies,” she said. “You don’t get it yet. In the beginning, you do all of these things for each other, because you’re so in love, and you want to. But after a while, you don’t want to do things for each other anymore. I mean, why should you?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t get that.”
She sighed. “You spend your whole life trying to figure out who does more, who works more, who takes care of the kids more, and who does more in bed. I mean, look at me,” she said. She stood back and held out her arms. She had become frail. Her body, already small, was now tiny. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before.
“I’ve lost forty pounds,” she said. “I’m a size zero now. Sometimes I have to buy my clothing in the children’s section. I lost all of this weight, because I thought it was what he wanted, but he still doesn’t want me. If there is nothing I can do to make him happy, why should I try?”
I stood there, stunned. I didn’t know what to say.
When we reached the counter of the brew-pub kiosk, Jeannie ordered a cheeseburger and a
beer. I ordered two beers. She patted my shoulder. “Hey, lighten up,” she said. “I don’t want you to think we’re having problems or anything. We’re fine. It just happens to all couples. You get used to it.”
“Okay,” I said. I was afraid of what might come next and changed the subject. “How many more times do you think Judge Snyder will say ‘Git ’er done’?”
Jeannie laughed and squirted some ketchup on her burger. “I don’t know,” she said, then took a bite. “Maybe we should turn that into the Judge Snyder Meets Larry the Cable Guy drinking game.”
When we reached our seats, Bud and Jay were talking quietly. Caleb looked left out. We had more room on our bench, so I patted the seat next to me, and he squeezed in beside me. I handed him his beer, and he popped the top and smiled at me. “You missed the last heat,” he said.
I shrugged and smiled. “They go on a little long anyway.”
“The motorcycle round is next,” he said. Unlike the derby, the motorcycle round had partners—a driver and a passenger. Each passenger had a balloon taped on a helmet and carried a Wiffle bat. The goal was to beat the balloons off the opposing teams’ helmets. The last team left with a balloon won a keg of beer.
We sat and sipped our beer while the motorcycles circled. The passenger had to grip the driver tightly so he wouldn’t fall off the bike. Everyone cheered when a balloon was popped. Finally only two bikes were left on the field. They drove in circles, the passengers stretching out to hit the balloons, then pulling back. Just when it seemed as though there would be no winner, the passengers jumped off the backs of the bikes. They ran into the middle of the ring and started beating at each other’s helmets wildly. Everyone cheered. I felt the violence acutely. If a balloon didn’t burst, if something didn’t break, I didn’t know what would happen.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, one man knocked the other man’s bat onto the ground. The first man stood poised, bat raised; the other man froze, his hands held up in surrender. I leaned forward, my hands gripping my knees. The man with the bat slowly lowered his weapon. He leaned down, picked up the other man’s bat, then tossed it to him with a smile. I jumped out of my seat and whooped, then quickly sat back down with an embarrassed smile.
The men chuckled before resuming the fight. Finally, one of them popped the other’s balloon. The winners hopped back on their bike and roared around the ring in a victory lap, swinging the Wiffle bat in a large arc in the air. Judge Snyder yelled, “Git ’er done!” Jeannie and I looked at each other and smiled. We clinked our cans and each took a drink of beer.
THE SUN WAS setting behind the mountains, red and purple splashed behind the peaks. Stars hung in a silvery veil over the valley, shrouded by the bright lights of the arena. The night air felt cool as we waited for the Herby Derby, my favorite heat. I leaned in close to Caleb for warmth, and he draped his arm around my shoulder. The cars roared into the ring, spitting mud into the air, flying wildly in circles, but this time they were compact cars like Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics. The engines were not as large, and everything felt smaller in scale.
I thought about the 1984 Toyota Camry that had driven me through my adolescent years. It had even driven Jeannie, Jay, and me down from a mountain hot spring when we were nineteen. Jay had been driving, and he took a corner too fast, skidding into a rock slide. When he stopped, Jeannie and I got out and started moving rocks together. A fat moon hung above us. My hair was still wet from the hot spring. “You’re so lucky,” I said. “You’ve met this wonderful person, and I’ve never even had a boyfriend.”
Jeannie smiled at me as we moved a boulder together, rolling it to the side of the road. “I know things,” she said. “And I know that you’re going to meet someone wonderful, and he is going to adore you.”
She had so much faith in her own prediction that I believed her. I hugged her, and years later, when Caleb and I went out with Jeannie and Jay for our first double date, Jeannie took me into the bathroom and said, “He is the one.”
WHEN THE WINNER’S heat began, Ginny was competing for the championship. When I ran into Ginny in town, she seemed happy. She never complained about her marriage, and she looked at her husband with so much love in her eyes. I craved this victory for her. I wanted things to work out for someone. For anyone.
I watched her slam into the hood of a car. She quickly backed up and purposefully hit the car on the front side, setting it into a spin. The other car’s tires spun as it tried to get away from her, but she continued to batter it. I admired her aggression, her confidence. The savagery was cathartic.
My hometown seemed to hold so much hidden anger, so many relationships strained by years of disillusion. I gripped Caleb’s hand, knowing that relationships come to an end, that nothing is certain, but not wanting to let go.
Jeannie and Jay sat away from each other, only occasionally speaking. Bud’s body was tight with anger, but I hadn’t forgotten his tears. I whispered “Go, go, go” to Ginny as she continued the fight. She didn’t back down. She edged the last car into a corner, but before she could hit it, the driver quickly reached out and pulled down his flag in surrender.
The crowd erupted into cheers as Ginny jumped out the window, holding her arms up in victory. I held my arms up, too, my hand still gripping Caleb’s. He looked at me, confused by my excitement. I smiled at him. “I know that woman.”
BUT WAIT. I missed something.
Months before the demolition derby, there was a different day. Caleb and I argued. I was in bed, and I turned my head to the wall. Squinted my eyes shut. Then I heard something guttural. Angry. “Don’t cry!” he screamed. He stood up and grabbed the computer desk chair, which was heavy and on wheels. He held it above his head, and I shrank back into the covers, shaking. He heaved the chair at the wall, cracking the plaster and narrowly missing me before it fell on to the mattress by my feet.
Not since Danny had chased me with his knife, not since that man had sat in his idling truck, not since that other man had held his hand over my mouth, had I known how it felt to shake from the inside. When I turned to look at him, Caleb’s eyes had never looked so cold.
That hole in the plaster formed a half-moon above our bed. At night, when my body curled into his, and we formed our own half-moon, the hole watched over me like a twisted sentry. It told me that I was not safe. Caleb never had to say a word.
9
That Hot, Dry Summer
THAT HOT, DRY summer was the summer that I spent digging in clear, cold mountain streams. The first scoop of dirt was always the easiest, the soil breaking away from the rocks, but as the holes got deeper, the soil was more packed. There were often large boulders in my way that I had to work around. I sat on that bucket, dug, and daydreamed about the things I couldn’t have. Caleb was beginning to feel like one of those boulders.
THAT HOT, DRY summer I worked with a twenty-two-year-old man named Ben. He had just graduated from college with an engineering degree, and his life seemed full of possibility. I was only six years older than he, but it felt more like twenty. My life, as a wife and a mother, had aged me. I liked Ben. We drove for hours each day to the streams, and inside our work truck we were rarely silent. Ben was puzzled that I was still an undergraduate, and I didn’t quite know how to explain it—that I had never fully committed to anything, that I had been uprooting myself constantly in search of something better, that for the first time in my life, I couldn’t uproot myself because I had a baby who depended on me and a husband who loved me.
ONE DAY I told Ben, “I think I’ll go to law school.” I was in the passenger seat, and he wound the truck around a corner on a steep mountain road near the Montana border. “I need to find a way to support my family. Caleb’s MFA isn’t going to do it.”
Ben said, “You should do that. You’re smart enough to be a lawyer.”
My early years of perfectionism, anxiety, and wanderlust hadn’t served my GPA well, but I was determined to change. I had gone back to school when Reed was six weeks old.
My breasts heavy with breast milk, I would come home to his hungry screams. Still, I maintained my 4.0. Mothering had given me a new sense of focus.
We would reach our stream for the day, get out of the truck, and pull on our thigh-high rubber waders. “Do you want to dig or sift?” Ben would ask. Sifting, which was done on the bank, was physically easier but required an attention to detail that I didn’t want to have.
“Dig,” I said. I liked the challenge of digging. I liked being able to lose myself in daydreams, and by then, I thought I knew how to work my way around the boulders.
THE LAST TIME that I had worked for the forest service, three years earlier, was as a wilderness river guard at a backcountry guard station, Indian Creek, in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. There I lived in a tiny, electricity-free wooden cabin only accessible by backcountry plane. At that time I had been reading a lot of Edward Abbey, and I’d gone into the wilderness to be reborn through solitude. I wanted to learn how to transform my loneliness into the ever-elusive solitude that Abbey wrote about so compellingly. I kept waiting for God to speak to me from the rocks. And sometimes, when I sat very still—the wind ruffling my hair—I heard the beginnings of a voice, but it was only my own. God was silent on all counts.
Before I left for Indian Creek, Megan called. Our parents still lived one block from each other, and we were both home visiting. When I walked into her house, her mother Mary was lying on the couch under an afghan, watching Law & Order. She raised her hand and smiled—a weak smile. “How’s the University of Montana?” she asked.
I smiled back, that kind of false smile that people use on the dying. “Oh, I’m not in Montana anymore.”
Megan had just walked in from the hall. “Mom, Kelly’s in Boise now,” she said.
Goodbye, Sweet Girl Page 9