by Megan Kruse
Now, when he slept at Eric’s on these precious Sunday nights, he curled himself into a ball, the sheets thick and slippery over his face. Tonight, though, he didn’t sleep. He’d been thinking about Silver – about this idea of moving on – since he showed up.
Eric kept two thousand dollars in cash in a tin box on one of the polished wood tables. The box had a picture on the front in Technicolor – a row of peach trees, bright green leaves, blush cheeks of fruit. It was a test, Jackson knew. Eric knew that Jackson knew it was there, and if he were to take it the illusion would be broken; they would become the strangers they were. For now they could exist like this – in this world they’d made, where Jackson materialized once a week and then faded back to nowhere again. If the money was gone, it would all disappear.
He’d only taken one thing from Eric in the last two months, a necktie from a row of them that were looped over the closet rod. It was maroon and navy, striped diagonally. He put it in his pocket just to be able to take something from that world and carry it back to the other.
He must not have slept. He was awake when the alarm went off. The room was still dark because Eric had the kind of heavy, expensive curtains that could blot out the sun. Eric was in the shower, and Jackson opened the box so easily. In five minutes, or ten, Eric would step out of the shower, lie on the bed damp and flushed. There were hours still before Eric’s afternoon meeting, and they would fuck and then eat breakfast in bed, chichi pastries that Eric had bought the day before and strong coffee.
Jackson slipped the twenty hundred-dollar bills into his boot. He knew what it meant – he couldn’t see Eric again. He had an idea about his life, a way it was supposed to be. He imagined that somewhere else, if he was truly living in another life Eric and this part of himself might die off easily. The peaches like globes of perfect sunshine, smooth and covered in sun. Even the wood of the box felt warm. His mother had loved to drink peach nectar. She would buy a little carton of it and drink the whole thing alone. It saddened him, but he couldn’t say just why.
The shower shut off, and Jackson could hear Eric humming to himself. “Turn on the espresso machine, would you, Jack?” he called. “I’ll be right there.”
“Sure.” Eric’s money was a hard wedge in his boot. Jackson walked to the kitchen and flipped on the shiny chrome espresso machine. He went down the hall quickly and quietly, let himself out the front door and was gone.
OF THE GREYHOUND ride he would remember the wet rock corridor of the Gorge, a long stretch of farmland, and a truck stop in Pasco, where a man was kicked off for buying a tall boy of dishwater beer. The camel color of Spokane and the slow climb toward Silver. Rocky hills, the stands of pines more regal than the ones he’d known, less stunted by washed-out roots. Lake Coeur d’Alene glittering, hiding something dark and sour. He thought of what he’d heard about the white supremacists out here, the queer bashers. Some kid at Marysville-Pilchuck had a butch sister who had gone to school out here and then dropped out after the windows of her car were smashed and her nose broken by a faceless group in the middle of the night.
The bus drove him fifty or sixty miles into the rocky panhandle. Signs for little towns, broke down saloons, a dirty rim of snow spitting up from the road. The bus let him off in a town called St. Regis, where he waited for several hours at the Travel Stop for his ride. He’d overshot Idaho, but that was what he’d been told to do. St. Regis was built around the Greyhound stop; there was a bar he wished he could drink in and a store full of Western novelties, antler coat racks, and cowboy bathroom fixtures. He spent most of the evening sitting on a wooden bench outside, smoking Camels. All evening, men wandered across the street from somewhere in the vague woods, where he guessed the houses were, headed for the bar. ATVs rolled up and down the road. At ten or eleven, a truck rattled up and stopped, and a man got out. He was broad-shouldered, wearing work boots, dusty jeans, and one of those canvas jackets made for the Rockies. He looked up and down the wooden walk that stretched around the Travel Stop. “You Jack?” he asked, looking Jackson over and lighting a cigarette.
“That’s me.” Jackson knew he must be a disappointment. He was a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, pale, his girlish hands.
“Mike Leary,” he said, pushing back the sleeves on his sweatshirt.
“Listen,” Leary said. “I’m beat. And nothing’s open in Silver right now, so I can’t get you set up. What do you say we just stay here tonight and then head over in the morning?” He gestured toward a dark motel across the street. One letter – T – flickered on and off, but mostly off.
This was something he hadn’t bargained for. Was there anything worse than a long evening in close company with a stranger? Jackson looked around quickly. Was there booze? Anything? A restaurant? No, conversation over food was worse than the television. In a motel room you could pretend to be tired. Jackson followed Leary through the gravel parking lot and toward the saddest motel. The door of each room was cracked plywood. The tiny windows had their plastic curtains pulled tight. It was April but still like winter. Jackson’s bag was cutting into his shoulder.
Mike Leary was a generous man, it seemed. He paid for two rooms, side by side, shook Jackson’s hand, and wished him goodnight. Jackson closed the door and sat down on the bed. Just another terrible motel – cigarette burns in the bedspread, a picture of a sailboat above the bed. He slid the drawer to the bedside table open and there was the Bible. Poor witness, he thought. Poor thing. He closed the drawer.
And so here he was. Idaho. Well, Montana, and then Idaho tomorrow. In the bottom of his duffel bag he’d shoved a pint of shitty whiskey and he brought it out. What else was there to do? He sat on the bed. Turned the television on, turned it off again.
His life looked more and more like a stranger’s. They’d never said that at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, that it was possible to have a life you’d never imagined. One you’d never wanted. A quick prayer for Lydia to any God that might be listening – let her be happy, let her be at a slumber party, let her have friends – then he pushed the thought of her away before he felt sick and drank off of the whiskey instead.
He could hear the shower in Leary’s room. He thought of Leary naked. It wasn’t a bad thought. He was fifty-five or sixty, heavy around the middle but not fat. He looked like a guy who had a lot of friends. In any other world, Jackson would have been both terrified and aroused by Mike Leary. Correction, he thought, in this world he was both terrified and aroused by Mike Leary. Leary didn’t seem at all put off by the fact that Jackson obviously looked like he hadn’t held a hammer in his entire life. Jackson knew that Leary must know something about him; how much, he couldn’t say. He’d landed here because of Ida, Leary’s daughter, and this idea she’d had for him.
Ida was a street outreach worker, one of the young people with yellow badges who’d waited in the parks at night, giving out food, clean needles, and advice. She was the only one who didn’t annoy him. She was no different than the rest – young, mousy, with curly hair that she kept pinned up, a T-shirt that said Street Team on it. She didn’t seem overly eager to make him talk about his life, but she remembered small things he’d asked for, and she was always where she said she’d be on certain nights. They’d sat one night in the wet grass and talked about country music. She liked all of the people you’d expect: Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, the Dixie Chicks, and he told her about Robert Earl Keen and Randy Travis and George Strait. She would go home and listen to something and the next time he saw her she would be ready to talk about it. Jackson imagined her at home in some little apartment, boiling pasta on the stove and listening to those songs.
And that was why he was here, really – he’d done it for Ida. Her wet eyes, blinking fast. She didn’t have to tell him about the job – hell, she might have lost her own job if anyone knew that she was extending personal favors. She had no real reason to believe in him. And Jackson did it for her because it seemed like there wasn’t anyone left who wanted something from him, and th
at seemed rare and good. He’d disappointed everyone else, but he could do this one small thing.
The day that he went into her office. He could see already that he’d done something important, and it made him proud, in a silly way: Delinquent Pleases Social Worker! Woman Takes Leap, Does Not Regret It!
“I was wondering if your dad still needs help.” He picked up a paperweight on her desk, put it back down. The wad of Eric’s money in the bottom of his shoe – one more bridge he’d burned, and no telling yet whether that was a mistake.
“Nice to see you, too.” Ida’s cheeks were flushed. She was pretty, Jackson thought. He really did imagine her happy someday, with some nice, slightly faggy husband who would live in her shabby apartment with her and listen to her when she came home from work.
He smiled at her. “Sorry.”
“So what’s been going on?” she asked. She must have seen he was skinnier. He felt it even when he walked.
“I think I want to get out of here,” he said. “I’m tired of this.”
She nodded approvingly, but not in a bad way, not the guidance counselor way. Just like, I know. He saw how he was making her day, and instead of that old impulse – the part of his father he could sense in himself sometimes, which he hated and feared – to ruin it, to make her feel bad for thinking she knew him, it made him happy. “Do you think your dad still has work?” he asked again. “I’m free.” He shrugged his shoulders in that dirty coat. Of course he was free. A regular bird. He shrugged again. Four hours later he was gone, tunneling through the Gorge in the rattletrap Greyhound. “Riding the Dog,” a man next to him had said sorrowfully. “All my life I be riding the Dog.”
HE’D HAD JUST enough of the whiskey to make him good and drunk. It was a good feeling. It was snowing outside, and the heating unit was making a noise like it might give up, gravel in a tin can. He lay across the bed of the hotel room and put his feet against it. It burned when he touched it with his toes, but when he pulled them back it was cold again. He accidentally kicked the wall and then thought of Leary and tried to be quiet.
My new life, he thought. This is where I will be. Here. Thirty miles from here. Even the ceiling above him was stained. It floated on and off of its plane. The room turned ever so slightly and that comforted him.
He was cold all night. Did he sleep? He kept thinking of one day when he was younger, five, maybe. His mother took him shooting out on the back forty. The day was full of magic to him – he hadn’t known she could shoot or even that she owned a gun. She wore a dress and boots. Earplugs. He must have had earplugs, too, but he didn’t remember them. She was beautiful. She was pregnant with Lydia, buoyantly pregnant, the .38 steady in her slim hands, her dress, her bare brown knees above the tops of her scuffed brown boots. If there were problems between his parents then, he didn’t know it. The house – the double-wide mobile with an addition built on – still seemed big enough; the woods outside were the dark green rim of his only world; he did not want or know yet what there was to want. Fragile egg of his naïve contentment. His mother, the gun, her hand on his tiny shoulder. That was all of it – his whole wide world.
Lydia
Interstate 84 East, 2010
WE DROVE AT NIGHT, AND THEN, WHEN WE WERE FAR from home, we drove into the day that grew brighter and brighter as we left the mountains behind. In Idaho, the only colors were the dark of the woods and the white of snow. On the highway I counted sixteen onions, spilled from the open beds of trucks. The snow was deep between the trees and I remembered a snowman I built once. I pushed rocks into his snow mouth and the snow closed back up. I pushed a stick right through him.
We kept driving south until the snow was just bright dust on the red rock hills, like snow on Mars, and the air was so cold it burned. All this time I’d thought that everywhere was as dark as where we came from, that the trees went on and on. The things we had were behind us in plastic sacks that rattled and snapped as we drove. I made lists of what I’d left behind. A closet of clothes. The toys I was too old for and my little bed. My big yellow tomcat, half wild. If I had known it was the last I would see of him, I would have been better. He clawed up my new jacket and I was mad all winter long.
I didn’t speak my brother’s name that whole long drive. My throat was a hard, hard stone. The things I said to my mother came out choked and thin. I thought again and again, I don’t hate her. There was a fist in my stomach. In my chest.
In Utah, we stopped at a motel. In the parking lot two boys were smoking cigarettes, tapping the ash into empty cans. When she thought I was sleeping, I felt her sit beside me on the bed. She touched my hair. Her hand was light on my face. “You are my home,” she whispered, “and I am yours.” Her voice stretched and lapped around me. When I woke up, my mother was in the chair and her tea had spilled in her lap. Her sweater was damp. Outside a bird sang in the gray snow of the parking lot.
We went to dinner that night in a restaurant across from the motel in the best clothes we had. There were thick plastic menus and the waitresses looked tired.
“It’s nice to go out, isn’t it?” my mother asked, and I said yes.
If my mother and father were going out, if we were left at home, Jackson would post me at the door like a soldier. I’d wait to see if the car raced up the drive, if my mother got out quickly and ran toward the back of the house or if the car idled in the driveway, if they kissed in the front seat. I remember it was always raining but I never felt a thing.
We left the restaurant in our good clothes, and in the car my mother took off her heels and put them on the backseat. She started the engine and drove us out of town. The highway pulled us forward like a long rope. When the sun spilled over I was always awake. I watched the gray fields and the shuttered towns. When we stopped I tried to look at no one, as if I had been made new, and if I were careful the regular world would not settle on me yet.
Those evenings, waiting for the car, I would become the same kind of nothing. “Listen for them,” Jackson would always say, and I was only the sound of the gravel turning, the wheels that would beat up the road, the night ahead, and all the things that would happen but hadn’t yet.
Jackson
Silver, Idaho, 2010
SILVER, IDAHO, FROM THE WINDOW OF MIKE LEARY’S truck, was about the ugliest place he’d ever seen. The buildings were squat and mildewing, roofs caved in. Storage containers, piles of junk. A dog picked over a pile of trash, his hide raw, no collar. There were shitty plastic toys in yards, in snowed-over dirt. Everything looked unarranged, things knocked from the shelves, bare foundations, the planks of new buildings.
Leary pulled up at a grocery store just inside of town. “Need some staples,” he said. “We’ll get you some things, too.” There was a crate of squash in a sodden cardboard corral. A bulletin board of handmade signs – HoneyDo Handyman. Wanted: Samoid Dog Hair for Spinning, Will Pay. A cart, abandoned with one busted wheel. Of all his mistakes, he thought, this one was the biggest. In Portland he’d had it good, and only days away from it he was hit with nostalgia, a long corridor he could look down, each door a different scene: Eric’s bed, the sheets with a thread count higher than he’d known existed; the Willamette dotted white with sailboats; the streets at night, wet with rain, when he was inexplicably happy to be alone, in the dark, just walking.
He didn’t have any money. He’d put most of Eric’s two thousand in his childhood savings account, but he didn’t have a bank-card or checks. He’d kept a hundred dollars in cash, but he’d used that for the bus ticket. Stupid, he thought. Was there even a bank in Silver? He thought about his options and settled on saying it: “I don’t have any money,” and Leary winked at him. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “You’ll be able to pay me back soon enough.”
Don’t bet on it, Jackson thought. He’d never done any labor in his life, really. He’d never had a real job; he’d stolen money if he’d needed it, picked pockets when he was brave enough, or stolen money from his father, who blamed it on his mother. On
ce, when he was sixteen, he’d stolen a ten from his mother, and he hated himself for it even now. He’d watched her fight his father for it – “There’s no food in this house, Gary,” she’d said, and his father had taken out his wallet and peeled off two tens, saying “I should go with you, bitch, and see how you spend it,” his eyes straight ahead on the television, a game, something just beyond that lit-up field. That same night, before she could spend it, Jackson had stolen half of it from her; he spent it on some pills the next day. His mother hadn’t said a word about it. Half of the time, Jackson wanted to kill his father. The other half he wanted to kill his mother – for fucking up, for staying while he and Lydia got sick and stupid.
He followed Leary into the Bread Basket Grocery. What there was of produce was piled up and turning. Little blonde children in shopping carts steered by their mothers.
Up and down the fluorescent aisles and Leary bought him a block of cheese, a loaf of bread, sliced ham sweating in a plastic package. A half-dozen eggs in Styrofoam, some bacon. Man Groceries. A six-pack of Budweiser, apples. Thirty-two dollars total.
Leary drove him east down a road past a cluster of trailers and work trucks. Across a stretch of rocky grass was the lake. “That’s all crew housing,” he said. “But since you’re late …” He grinned. “You get the special.” Beyond the little travelling circus of trailers was the lake. It was a steep drop from that pebbly grass to the water. “It’s still filling,” Leary said. “Everybody thinks a lake will fill overnight, but it takes a few months. Come summer, it’ll look better.”
The special, it seemed, was in the deep woods. They drove the rutted road around the edge of the lake, and the trees were all around them. About a mile in, Leary pulled the truck to the right, toward the water, and in a winter cul-de-sac of leaf mulch was the cab of an old semi truck without any freight. It looked abandoned. The trees beside it were scratching the windows, and the windshield was covered with leaf-fall, rotting and dark. Leary stopped the truck, and Jackson followed him out. Leary didn’t say anything, and Jackson was glad.