The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes the side of the highway is not your friend. There’s a bad wind flinging dust at you, highway cones, no shoulder, everyone’s speeding anyway. The drivers frown apologetically.

  Can’t stop. Can’t stop. Can’t stop.

  Bob and I have been standing on the road with our thumbs out for hours. I’m having menstrual cramps and we take turns slouching against the guardrail, letting our eyes go soft. Our cardboard sign says North Carolina. This morning we were dropped here by a smiling man in a cluttered pickup.

  “Used to go down to North Carolina,” he said. “Unloaded lots of bud down there. Pounds and pounds.”

  When you hitchhike, people tell you their secrets. You exist in a liminal space between what is real and what is not, a sort of leaf come unstuck from an eddy. The driver feels as though talking to you, the hitchhiker, is like stuffing a note into a bottle and tossing it into the sea.

  Bob and I play the only hitchhiking game we know—we guess how many cars will pass before one stops and offers us a ride. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, everyone loses and then your heart is broken. We decide that a car is a capsule of energy, hurtling down the road, and that maybe it’s better to be where we are, in the fresh air, where feelings are free to come and go with the wind.

  Morning melts into afternoon. We are going to die on this highway shoulder. Morale dries up and blows away, leaving just our barren souls behind. Bad posture, aching backs, tired thumbs. Hunger.

  Suddenly there is a car there, stopped in the road.

  There are rules and rhythms that govern hitchhiking, just like every other thing. For example, sometimes no one will stop. Other times, a car will stop within minutes. In the first instance, sometimes there’s a reason people will not stop, a reason of which you, the hitchhiker, are unaware. A blind corner, maybe, or the shoulder seems sketchy. In this situation, if you have the patience to wait long enough, a second rule applies—someone truly wild will stop.

  Andrew drives a sleek silver SUV. He opens the back for us and we stuff our packs inside as cars rush by all around us. Once we’re inside the car, he wrenches the steering wheel and we tear back into traffic. He shakes a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros and lights it. He’s a Marine, he says, on leave in Indiana. Now he’s headed back to North Carolina. Or maybe he’s stationed on a base in Indiana, and he’s going to North Carolina to see his family. I can’t catch all the words, mumbled around the cigarette. He’s got a fresh crew cut and a hard, smooth face. He’s speeding. A pink scar runs through his eyebrow, breaking it into two slightly uneven pieces. “They sewed me together crooked,” he says, pointing to it. He opens a Monster energy drink and pounds it.

  “How old are you guys?” asks Andrew, turning back to look at me, swerving toward the median.

  “Twenty-four” and “Twenty-five,” we say.

  I’m only nineteen,” he says. “Be twenty in November!” He tosses the empty can from his energy drink into the backseat. We ask him if he’s been deployed yet. “No. But I want to be! I might go to Afghanistan in a year.” He pokes at the stereo, but it won’t turn on. The glass face is cracked. “I forgot,” he says, glancing at it.

  “I have a brother who’s considering the Marines,” says Bob. “Would you recommend it?”

  Andrew shakes his head. “No, especially if you’re like me. I go on leave, I find someone to be with, then I gotta go back. Shit!” He clutches the pocket of his polo shirt, swerving into the right-hand lane. “Where’s that pink piece of paper? I need that pink piece of paper!” He lifts a stack of CDs and finds it underneath. A small pink slip, bright against the gray dash. Andrew smooths the paper clumsily and stuffs it into the visor above his seat. “I need that slip of paper. That’s her phone number, address, everything.”

  Andrew swivels his whole body to look at me in the backseat.

  “So, what do you guys like to do?”

  Bob says he likes to garden. I say I like trees.

  “I like to hunt,” says Andrew, facing the road again. “But not just deer. I like to hunt coyotes.”

  “Oh,” I say. “My brother likes to hunt coyotes too. In Colorado. It sounds pretty hard. How do you hunt them?”

  Andrew shrugs. “I bait ’em. With meat. Then I wait. It’s easy!”

  “You bait them?”

  “And I wait for them to start a feeding frenzy. And then I just blow them to pieces. It’s not the hunt I like,” he says, watching my face in the rearview mirror, grinning. “It’s the slaughter. I’ve got an anger problem,” he adds, squinting at the road.

  “It sounds like it would be fun,” I say, “to bait them and then when they show up to eat, to just watch them. I bet it would be fun, to watch coyotes eat.”

  Andrew holds up his forearm, where a scar snakes from elbow to wrist.

  “I tried that once. And then this happened.” He shakes his head. “I almost bled to death. Called my dad before I passed out. Would have died.”

  Right.

  “Where did you grow up?” asks Bob.

  “On a military base,” says Andrew. “Both my parents were Marines.”

  “Do you have siblings?” I ask.

  “Yep, younger ones. I was born with a briefcase in my hand. Never got to have a childhood. Both my parents went to prison when I was a kid, so I had to take care of my siblings. Started my own business when I was fifteen. Graduated high school the next year. Made fifty thousand dollars a year, with my business. Then, because I’m an idiot, I sold my business and joined the Marines.” He shrugs. “When I get out in a couple years, I’m going straight to Fort Bragg. I want to train to be in the CIA.”

  Andrew changes lanes aggressively, throwing me against the wall of the SUV. “What I really want to do, I want to start a family. And I finally found someone, too. Just when I find someone, I have to go back.”

  “You better make it back from Afghanistan,” I say. “If you want to start a family.”

  Andrew frowns, and then he smiles.

  “She’s not even old enough yet,” he says. “She’s only seventeen!”

  “Old enough for what?” I ask. “To have sex? Or to have kids?”

  Andrew laughs. “To get married! My fiancée! We want to get married! And the funny part is, her family, they want her to marry me too.”

  We stop for gas, and then drive on. Andrew, it turns out, is headed straight through Greensboro. We’ll make it at last.

  Andrew asks us if we’re hungry.

  “I’ve got some MREs you could eat.” He reaches under the passenger seat and hands us the prepackaged military dinners. I tear one open. Hamburger patty meal. It isn’t half bad. I eat the “western beans.” There is a tiny bottle of Tabasco hot sauce.

  “Cute!” I say. “Look at the little Tabasco!”

  “That comes in handy,” says Andrew. “Sometimes you gotta drive thirty-six-hour convoys, and you need to stay awake.”

  So you put it on your dick, I think.

  “So you put it on your dick,” says Andrew. “That shit burns, but it keeps you awake.”

  After eating, I crack the window, drowning all sound in the rush of air. I space out, leaning against the glass, until Andrew drops us on the curb in Greensboro. As he pulls away, relief floods over me. Evening has come, and with it, a sort of misting rain. Bob relays a story that Andrew told him while I was spacing out. The story started with “I don’t believe in hitting women, but…” and ended in the broken car stereo.

  2000

  “I feel so good. I can’t believe how good I feel.” I’m lying on the carpeted floor of Nicole’s guest bedroom, where I’ve been staying since moving out of Kyle’s apartment. Kyle wanted to get married. He bought me a gold bracelet in a white box. He wanted to take me back to Newark, New Jersey, to meet his family. He had a kind smile and smelled of
rancid fryer grease and took me to my senior prom, but I didn’t love him, and so I had to go. Now I have my blankets and pillows on Nicole’s guest bed and my fiber-optic lamp on the nightstand and the lamp makes a small whirring noise as it turns blue, then purple, then blue again.

  “Mmm-hmm,” says Nicole. She has her head on my shoulder and my arm is around her waist and I am breathing her in. I had my first orgasm a month ago, alone in my car in a dark parking lot, with a vibrator I bought from a tacky sex shop, and this feels kind of like that, only longer.

  “Did we buy Gatorade?” I say. “I feel so thirsty. What flavors did we get?”

  The walk to the kitchen is a surreal parade of tactile wonders: the cool wall under my fingertips, the soft carpet beneath my bare feet. The rooms of Nicole’s house radiate safety. The lighting is soothing and low. The Gatorade—red flavor—tastes like the wettest, sweetest, most refreshing drink that has ever been consumed in the history of all beings, anywhere. I pull Nicole close to me in the kitchen and we kiss, and her lips are the most alive thing my lips have ever touched. I can’t believe how long I’ve wanted this, to kiss her. It doesn’t seem strange; doesn’t everyone feel this way about their best friend?

  We bought the ecstasy in Denver, from a friend of a friend. The drug makes me feel exactly how it sounds, and I am overjoyed by this simple, literal truth as I lie on this deep carpet that Nicole vacuums regularly, in this spotless house that looks as though it has just been built. I have the urge to go upstairs to Nicole’s room and open her dresser drawers, touch all the clothing there. To open the curio boxes on her shelves and handle their contents. The walls of the house are hung with Nicole’s black-and-white pencil drawings, framed: Her mother, in profile. Her older sister, and the daughter her sister had at sixteen, a toddler now.

  Later, we are wearing just our underwear; at some point it became unbearably hot. The night has aged considerably. We are in that indeterminate time now that I know from working graveyard shifts at Denny’s, when, for just a moment, the whole world is still. I trace my fingers across Nicole’s hips, wishing this strange long night would last forever. The room is full, absolutely full, with the whirring of the fiber-optic lamp.

  I wake the next day; did I sleep, though? Sitting up, I discover that my blood, brains, and all the soft tissues of my body have been replaced with dry, coarse sand. The world is harsh, the sunlight angry and too bright. I take a shower, repulsed by the acid smell of my own body, and sit in the tub, watching the water swirl around me. The sound of the water is like faraway, mumbling voices. I try to recall the flood of feeling last night, the goodness of embodiment. I can’t. Did I eat yesterday? The thought of food brings a wave of nausea. I stare at my belly, legs, and feet. How is it possible for a physical form to contain so much ugliness?

  “We should make out sometime…when we’re not on drugs,” I say. It’s four a.m., and Nicole and I are in her parked Subaru in front of the donut shop, pulling still-warm glazed twists from a waxed paper bag. This is one of our special dates, getting up early and buying donuts—they’re forty cents each—from the donut shop the minute they open. Nicole turns to face the window, avoiding my eyes. We’ve been taking ecstasy every weekend. I work at Applebee’s now, where I average ten dollars an hour after tips, and that feels like more money than I can possibly find ways to spend. Once, when we had a thousand dollars between us, we drove to Denver on the icy highway over the Rocky Mountains and spent it all on ecstasy, which is cheaper to buy in bulk. We use the drugs to have parties at Nicole’s house, with all of the “friends” we suddenly have—snowboarder bros who work as lift operators in Vail and promise to pay us for the drugs but rarely do.

  “Seriously, though,” I say. “Don’t you want to? Make out, I mean?” Nicole frowns and starts the car.

  “Are you done with your donut?” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  —

  I am eighteen when I fall in love with Chris. There is the love I have for Nicole; my longing to touch the broad plain of her stomach, my obsession with her hair, her brown eyes, the angles of her elbows, her melancholy frowning, her shy laugh, my need to comfort her, the way I ache when she is sad. I dream that she tells me all her secrets, that I get to sleep holding her in her perfectly made bed.

  And there is the love I have for Chris. This love is different, because Chris loves me back.

  I’ve been living in a rented room in a house with a couple of nice twenty-something dudes who work as line cooks and spend their evenings drinking Mountain Dew and playing Dungeons & Dragons. The carpet is dirty; the shades are always drawn; the furnishings are one loveseat and five cardboard cutouts of Star Wars characters. None of us knows how to cook. Besides my shift meal at Applebee’s, I eat mostly peanut butter sandwiches. Chris was a friend of these gentle nerds, and one day he showed up after his shift at the Home Depot carrying a case of Budweiser and a fistful of pop-punk CDs. He was wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and work boots, and his eyes were the color of ice. His ears stuck out and the words Stay Gold were tattooed on his right arm. His Honda Acura with its stick-on racing stripes and loud muffler was parked at the curb. Before long I knew the sound of that muffler by heart.

  Chris is kind and eccentric and has just a bit of a country way of talking. He says “I seen” instead of “I saw,” as in “I seen a coyote crossing the road on the way to work this morning.” He listens to Bad Religion and Anti-Flag and rides a dirt bike in the desert, flying fast over hills, flinging red dust. Now and then he crashes the bike and dislocates a shoulder or bloodies his face. Sometimes he wears a cowboy hat, and eventually he’ll trade his Acura for a shining white pickup truck.

  I try to learn to skateboard to impress Chris. At the skate park I watch him do ollies with his shirt off, body flexing as he reaches the top of the ramp, jumps, spins the board under his feet, and drops back down. But I am too scared of the ramp, the board, the feeling of falling, of everything. I can skate on flat pavement and turn around; sometimes I can go down a bit of a slope. But that’s it. After the skate park, we always go through the McDonald’s drive-through. What we eat together consists almost entirely of fast food; I still have my eating disorder and so I obsessively count and recount every little thing that I eat, drink gallons of Diet Coke, am painfully hungry almost all of the time. At McDonald’s, I order one hamburger with the dusty hole on the bottom of the bun and the melting slice of cheese and eat it slowly. I’m tired a lot, never exercise, can barely walk uphill, and seem to be always fighting a cold. But I am thin. So, so thin. Chris thinks I am naturally this way. He thinks I’m perfect and that the way I look is the way all women should look. I love Chris. He loves me back, and it feels like starving myself is a sure way to guarantee a continuation of his love. The way my body doesn’t fill out my clothes makes me feel safe. Safe safe safe.

  Chris and I drive to Denver for punk shows, eat pizza, sleep in the back of his truck. We listen to the Bouncing Souls. I’m a hopeless romantic / You’re just hopeless. He takes me fishing and hiking in the bright, scrubby desert. We drive to Glenwood Springs and eat mushrooms in the hot springs—not at the developed resort, but at the place where the extra hot water is diverted into the Colorado River by way of a huge, busted concrete pipe. Hippies have built pools here using river rocks, and while we soak, the mushrooms work in me until the sky splits and the stars fall and the boulders in the river are singing me songs. I get bad tattoos to impress Chris, and I rip his entire music collection onto shiny blank compact discs. In the afternoons, I put on my apron and join the other servers at Applebee’s, the young mothers who chew gum and wear tiny silver cross earrings and unilaterally dislike me. I am in love and yet I am desperately unhappy, here in this desert town that time forgot, so much so that I feel like I might break.

  Chris tells me I am wild.

  “You’re wild, Jenni,” he says, putting his hands up like hooves and ne
ighing like a pony. “Wild Jenni. You’re gonna leave me someday.”

  After not seeing Jordan for months, I visit him at the apartment he’s moved into, which he shares with three friends. The lamps have no shades on them, and the only thing in the fridge is milk. Jordan’s handgun sits on the kitchen table, next to a crack pipe. His truck is parked outside.

  “The pipe is Dustin’s,” says Jordan. He smells like Old Spice and his hair is wet from the shower. I’ve brought Taco Bell, and I set the paper bag on the kitchen table. “I enlisted in the Marines,” Jordan says. “I leave for basic training in a week.”

  His words swirl in my head.

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay. Really?”

  On the drive home from Jordan’s apartment, I remember the way he would parade my Barbie dolls around when we were children, making them talk in funny voices. His freckled cheeks when he was little, the absurd length of his eyelashes. We both had such long eyelashes when we were kids. The thrill of depressing the hairspray nozzle while he held the lighter, the whoosh of flame that charred the living room carpet. The way he would stand up to Barbara, fight back when she went after him with the belt, the plastic rod from the window blinds, whatever she could find. Jordan holding my hand as we walked through snow flurries to the bakery thrift store, watching him climb up onto the dumpster and throw back the lid, rip open trash bags, the warm smell of bread. “You can always find food here.”

  In our dark apartment in Alaska, stomach pinched and empty, I would watch Jordan eyeing our mom as she paced, her words rapid-fire, nonsensical, syntax collapsing in on itself, her eyes far away. I’d watch Jordan watching her and tell myself, This is real, because Jordan sees it too. This is really our life. Walking the streets of Anchorage, my scarf wrapped seven times around my face against the bite of the wind, I’d look into the eyes of strangers and tingles of shame would run up my spine, down my arms to the tips of my fingers. Nobody knows. But Jordan knew. I rocked alone on the bathroom floor after one of Barbara’s violent rages, my mind full of static. Nobody knows.