West of You

by Christina Metcalf

  But as M reminded me on my birthday this year, you only need one to work. That last day I had talked to her--not that I knew it was our last, of course--I had begged her to tell me who the right one was. I was fairly certain it wasn’t Mike. But who did that leave? The Player to Be Named Later (my latest interest) or Walsey as his friends called him? How would I know?

  Love often feels like that song by Kenny Rogers. You know the one about knowing when to walk away and knowing when to run? In my rule book, you run when you no longer trust the guy or he no longer trusts you and you pack your stuff in the middle of the night when he no longer respects you because that is a fast train to all sorts of bad stuff.

  When I came back to my car stop, a man had replaced the crow. I might’ve thought the crow became the man but this guy was much more of a bear than a crow. Nothing crowish about him. He was big and fuzzy. If a crow became a man, that guy would be small, dark, and pointy. These are things that anyone paying attention should know.

  “Can I bum one?” he asked gazing over at my pack like it was a honeycomb.

  “They’re Virginia Slims. Probly stale.” I said as if he couldn’t possibly smoke girl’s stale cigarettes that were half his age.

  “Okay by me.”

  I looked around as if someone would turn me in for giving him girl’s smokes and then handed him one. He muttered “thanks” but he had a lazy way of talking where his words joined each other in unusual ways and ended abruptly in the middle of others. I stood not sure if I should sit or get back in the car and try to make it to Centralia before I changed my mind. But there seemed to be something very unsocial about handing someone a smoke and then taking off so I sat back in my spot this time squatting onto my heels and rocking back. It was a little more graceful than the pelican flop I had done the first time. Maybe I could learn new things.

  “Are you coming or going?” he asked before taking a drag. For such thick fingers, he held the cigarette in a very dainty way.

  “Don’t know. Do any of us really know?” This conversation felt very deep for so early in the afternoon.

  “Nah, I meant the store. You coming or going?”

  I nodded and took a long drag like I expected to find the answer in the soothing smoke entering my lungs. I still didn’t know, even a simple question like that so I shrugged.

  “I hate that place.” he pointed at the store with the long, thin cigarette sandwiched between his sausage fingers. But I noticed it wasn’t just the store he was pointing at but the mural of a man who looked a lot like Grizzly Adams, which in turn kinda resembled this guy who I realized was now more of a man cub than a bear.

  “That’s my dad.”

  “Ahhh.” I had nothing else to say so I took a long drag of the cigarette and hoped he’d disappear. Not that I wanted anything to happen to him. Quite the opposite. I wanted nothing to happen to him. I wanted us all to just go away.

  My phone buzzed. It was 1:05. Right on time

  “Luke. Hi.”

  The bear cub looked at me as if I was talking to him. When he saw that I wasn’t, he picked up my pack of smokes and helped himself to another. I didn’t care. They were terrible and stale as hell.

  “Did I ever tell you she belonged to a subscription panties service?” Luke asked like it was a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation to start off on.

  “No, can’t say you did.”

  “Well, they came in the mail today again.”

  “You should cancel that.” I suggested.

  I hated that her sister gave him my number but I guess if he had access to M’s phone, he would’ve found it eventually anyway.

  “Kinda proves my theory.” he said again.

  “What theory?” I held the phone away so he couldn’t hear me smoking. Not that he would care but she would’ve and not that he could tell her now but old habits die hard. For a smoker herself, she sure got mad at me when I did it.

  “The theory about the accident.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Or a set up. I can’t decide. You know she dated that guy…”

  “Jeff.”

  “Yeah, Jeff. Before me. He had a wife, ya know.”

  “But they weren’t together at the time.”

  “Still. She might’ve gotten angry. Taken her revenge.”

  “Why? He went back to her. And that was 4 years ago.”

  “But maybe she never got over him being with another girl. Get rid of the girl and he’s never been with anyone else.”

  “He’s a firefighter. He’s been with a lot of other people, I’m sure.”

  The bear cub nodded and pointed his cigarette at me like he was putting the point on an exclamation point. He muttered “Truth.”

  “Still. She wouldn’t order panties and go get groceries if she planned on killing herself.”

  “But she did, Luke.”

  Luke was endearing in a dull kid in the back of the class who struggled with basic math kinda way. His age difference showed often. I’ll never forgive M for making him a semi-permanent part of my life. I inherited him like a great aunt’s yippy dog that you feel guilty taking to the pound and so you’re stuck with it until it hopefully wanders off. But for now I was stuck with him while he was “processing” and going through theories of how it happened and how it was anything other than her killing herself.

  I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs that this isn’t Hollywood. The package isn’t tied up with a bow. There’s no reason for her death other than God is a raging alcoholic. For some reason, I hold my finger up at the bear cub sitting next to me in the universal sign for wait. He nods.

  “Luke. I’m in the middle of something.”

  “What?”

  “Grocery shopping.”

  The bear cub laughs and I notice his face is much younger than his burly beard would suggest. What is it with guys now-a-days? They’re almost effeminate in the way they dress and yet they sport these giant, hairy soup catchers that look like something from a Dead show.

  “Oh.”

  I think Luke could tell I was lying to him plus I knew he always called at 1:05 every Tuesday. For the past two months, I’d blocked my schedule for him and he knows it. The first two weeks after her death, he would just call and sob on the phone for about 20 minutes. But now and for the twenty-something texts I receive every week in between calls, he’s moved into the “why” stage of grief and all sorts of conjectures. But most of them stay this side of her doing it to herself. He sounds like a conspiracy theorist, minus the tin foil hat.

  It’s not that I’m not sad too but he is sad enough for both of us. He is just so damn needy. For me to be sad around him would feel like I was stealing his role.

  “Well...I’ll let you go then...I guess.”

  I could tell he wanted me to reconsider or tell him it was okay we could talk longer. But if I was going to get on the road I couldn’t listen to his panty theories.

  “Bye Luke. Talk to you next Tuesday.” It sounded like a world away. I wanted to tell him I’d probably be at his place by this time next week but I wanted to avoid the countdown to my arrival. I didn’t want him checking in with me, and what if I changed my mind? It wasn’t like East Jabip, or whatever that podunk town was called, Texas was on the way to Washington state.

  If I had any sense, I wouldn’t go. I’d cut straight across the country way farther north than would make it logical to visit him. But something told me I needed to see where she lived. Five years there and I never visited. I needed to see him. I owed him (and her) that. Maybe there was something to figure out. People don’t just off themselves because they like the taste of pills or gun barrels. God, now he had me believing there could be a reason aside from hopelessness.

  Luke hung up without saying good-bye.

  The man cub looked up at me. Now that I got a clearer view of his face I could tell he was as high as a Friday night at Burning Man. I had the sudden urge to rescue this wounded cub from his overbearing father. Okay, so his mural didn’t r
eally make him look overbearing. He looked really friendly and happy.

  I asked him to get up and I took the hand that didn’t have a cigarette in it. I opened my back door and slid across the seat, motioning him to follow.

  “Let’s give your dad something to see.”

  And so I cry sometimes when I'm Trying to Remember the Words to Songs I Used to know

  There’s not much to see in Centralia, Pennsylvania. It gets a lot of hype on the Interwebs. There’s this massive fire burning underground. The whole town was supposed to evacuate years ago but some people refused to move and so they sat there in the place they had always lived. Poisonous gasses filled their lungs and killed canaries. Cracks formed in the pavement where it buckled from the heat underneath and smoke hot enough to scorch skin rose from the ground with no warning. A “hell on earth” is how people on the road-tripping travel sites described it. But just like everything else in life it was a disappointment.

  Out of four years in college, M and I went on spring break once. Correction. She went every year. I went once at her insistence. M had been taking Italian and got a wild hair that we needed to speak it to natives. Only problem was I never took Italian and couldn’t afford the trip. She convinced her parents that she was less likely to get killed or pillaged if she brought me. As if I was any protection. But she sold it that I was some street smart kid from Gloucester, Mass and I could hold my own in Italy. Her parents agreed and they phoned my dad.

  The only reason I’m telling you this is because out of nearly two weeks in Italy, I learned two things. The people in Venice are unnaturally beautiful and I don’t mean like fake beautiful. I mean like God put all of his “Davids” in Venice. The city is full of a freakish number of genetically perfect people.

  The second thing I learned is that Pompeii is NOT perfectly preserved. The buildings might be, if you like caveman porn, but the people look like mummies. NOT perfectly preserved. If you blew on them, they’d blow away. Don’t let yourself be disappointed the way I was.

  So Centralia is like that but the volcano is underground. Except it’s not a volcano just a fire that will take billions of years to burn itself out.

  And it all started because the town council decided they didn’t want a smelly garbage pit stinking up the July 4th celebration. So they got rid of it in the “quickest” way they could. Instead of burying it in a landfill like the brilliant people do in Florida to create rolling hills in their otherwise flat landscape, the Centralians set their trash heap ablaze. Sounds safe enough, a giant fire pit, right?

  Only problem is that Centralia is located in coal heaven and what happens when you set coal deposits ablaze? Let’s just say the coal didn’t pay attention to the fact that the townspeople only wanted to burn the trash.

  But anyway, I don’t want you to be disappointed too so I’m going to describe it in lurid boring detail much like I should’ve done with the man cub at the nostalgia place but I’m not quite ready to share that. It’s something I would’ve shared with my bestie but alas part of her got a front row seat to the action and I mean that quite literally. I’m so glad the cap was on my Mountain Dew she would’ve died if it spilled on her.

  Or I would’ve.

  But he’s a story for another time.

  We were on our way to Centralia. I mean, I was. I left him in Connecticut.

  The coolest part of Centralia, there’s a joke in there about the underground fire and all but I can’t quite find it, is the drive in. You can’t just drive there of course because the government has declared it a disaster zone or some such. You have to take Route 61 out of Ashland and the travel sites tell you that you’ll come to a sharp curve and diagonal yellow lines that cross the parallel dividing lane lines and then you park on the shoulder. You shouldn’t have any problem finding it because it’s a popular stop off these days thanks to the Interwebs.

  Off to the left you can barely see the old road. I walked it a ways and was disappointed by the number of people I saw. I wanted one of those post apocalyptic moments that you see on the Walking Dead. I did get to see the steam vents. I didn’t get too close because there were so many people that I figured there was a good chance the road would give way, like what happened on that bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia with the Mothman.

  But back to Centralia. There’s really nothing of the town left. Buildings have been demolished. I wondered who knocked them down since the government was saying how terrible the area was. Did they give people hazzard pay to bulldoze buildings or did the people dismantle them in protest? The town is just a field with some cracked up road leading to it. If there weren’t so many hipsters walking around I would’ve thought the town had been taken by alien lifeforms. The whole thing just wiped away. Instead, it looked a lot like a hipster commune.

  The most disturbing thing about Centralia besides bearded hipsters trying to shove each other into scorching steam billowing out from the road was the story I read about how the whole tragedy could’ve been prevented. But don’t get me started about the government and how they do working people wrong all the time. I could tell tales of that for the whole road trip but I know my bestie wouldn’t want to hear about that.

  She still believes that people are good and everyone deserves a second chance. At least she did. She believed that about everyone but herself.

  ✽✽✽

  #275. She’ll never get angry at someone cutting her off in traffic

  #276. She’ll never have to watch hipsters with big bushy beards in magenta skinny jeans with large disks in the ears you could throw a football through.

  All you’ve got is this moment But it's different than my dream

  I sat in the McDonald’s parking lot trying to decide if I should visit her brother Palmer or not. I didn’t think he’d support me taking his sister all the way to the Pacific Northwest. After all, her people got right off the boat, contacted their buddy William Penn and asked him for some prime real estate. He made them a deal they couldn’t refuse and the men of the family had been educated Ivy League and the women debbing every fall since then.

  She told me how they all dressed in white, the debs not the men, and had to scrape the ground in a curtsy as low as they could go. It seemed dumb and fascinating all at the same time. I wasn’t bowing on the ground unless it involved a scrub brush and my dad’s angry voice and I sure wasn’t dressed in white. White was for people who owned multiple items of clothing.

  My uniform blouse was white but I could hide that under the sweater vest the nuns made us wear so that the boys didn’t get any funny ideas staring at our bras under our white shirts all day. They also made us look like boxes, even if you had a chest, which I certainly didn’t until I had Maddie.

  Going to Palmer’s house intimidated me, if I’m being honest with you and why shouldn’t I be? At least mostly honest. He was the kind of guy who judged people on their ability to recognize which fork they were supposed to use. I, on the other hand, was raised in a family where sometimes you had a choice between the plastic one or the metal one. After my mom left, there wasn’t usually a choice at all. What can I say? My dad was more of a plastic “aficionado” than a silversmith. At least, that’s what M used to call him. Everything had to be disposable because then he didn’t have to clean it. If it wasn’t, he just left the wrapper on like our tray tables.

  I always wondered what he was protecting them from? Use? Did he want them to remain perfect just in case she came home? Would he rip the plastic off of them in a triumphant declaration that the “prodigal” wife had returned? She likely would’ve knocked them over and sent them crashing. She hated tray tables but then my mom hated a lot of things. Her family most of all.

  When I went to college I tried studying women’s studies for a while thinking if I knew more about women, maybe I could understand why she left. She claimed to be a feminist and always told me Glouchester was no place for one of those. But I never thought she’d leave. That was something only the dads did in my neighborhood.
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  I grabbed my old flowered backpack, the one that looked like it could’ve been Laura Ashley if Laura Ashley made ten dollar backpacks and sold them at Walmart. I hadn’t used it in a few years. It was the type of bag you’d carry when you had kids so you could fit all sorts of tissues, wipes, diapers, crayons, juice boxes, Kindles, cars, barbies, a bouncy ball, and a baggie with what were once goldfish crackers and now looked more like cheese powder or some new designer drug aimed at preschoolers.

  I pulled out her diary and stretched my mouth wide for my Big Mac.

  Wednesday

  I don’t want to go tonight. I feel guilty even writing that. L is such a beautiful soul. I worry about disappointing him. I just don’t belong around here. I don’t know how to muck stalls or drive a tractor. He says he doesn’t care that he just wants me beside him. But while I am...I think of the Hamptons. Everyone’s there this time of year.

  And all we have is oppressive heat, dust, and wild pigs.

  He swears it will pay off. Making something of this land. I don’t know why we can’t just use his grandpa’s money. No shame in that.

  I shouldn’t write these things, it would break his heart.

  I wondered if Luke had read it and if it had.

  The next page was a cartoon drawing of a fat man that resembled Boss Hog from Duke’s of Hazzard. I wondered if that’s what she felt like down there in Texas, out in the middle of nowhere.

  I finished my Big Mac and double wiped to make sure I didn’t have any awesome sauce on my face.

  I pulled out my list of nevers again. Hell, what number was I on?

  ✽✽✽

  200 something, whatever.

  She’ll never eat a Big Mac. Not one.

  ✽✽✽

  There were certain things M never allowed herself to do. Eating “food for the masses” was one of those things. She gave up french fries on her 40th birthday. And not just for her birthday but forever.