Jessica Z

by Shawn Klomparens

  So my job, while Josh drives, is to check maps and control the iPod hooked up to the stereo. Josh is mostly easy to please, music-wise, and only rarely suggests that I skip over any songs. I don’t think he’s really listening, anyway. He always seems to be off somewhere, thinking about something else.

  It’s hot in the pickup, but Josh won’t turn the air-conditioning on because it slows us down too much on the climbs. So both windows are open and the vents are up full blast, filling the car with an airy roar. My hair keeps whipping into my face, and I remind myself to check in my backpack—now resting on half a ton of limestone in the back of the truck—for a ponytail holder the next time we stop.

  I grab my Nalgene bottle from down by my feet and take a long drink of tepid water.

  “You want some?” I shout over the wind and the music, wagging the bottle over the shift lever. “Josh?” He’s driving one-handed, looking off up the road, with his other arm resting in the open window. “Josh?”

  “What?” He blinks and glances over at me. “Oh. Sure. Thank you.” He takes a sip, then another, and with water dripping from his chin he hands the bottle back to me.

  I want to call Katie, here, on the road in the rolling middle of nowhere, but Josh had badgered me into not bringing my cell. His argument was that we needed to get capital-A Away, but one apparently cannot get Away when everyone you know comes With in the form of a stored contacts list.

  Maybe he has a point. I’d still like to talk to my sister, though, if for nothing more than to fill my ear with something other than the sound of rushing air.

  We bottom out on a descent and begin another long climb on the highway, and I can feel the way the weight of the trailer slows us down. I lean forward to look at it in the side mirror, but what I see makes me let out a little yelp: there’s a dark car with flashing lights right behind us.

  “Josh! Josh! There’s a—” My chest is tight and I’m pointing at the mirror like an idiot. “Josh!”

  He just looks at me. “Huh?”

  “There’s a…it’s the police!”

  Now he leans forward and looks into his own mirror. “Oh yeah,” he says. Then he holds his arm out of the window and makes a lazy waving motion, and keeps driving.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. I’m simultaneously feeling frantic about the no insurance thing and hating that this reaction is inherited completely from my mother.

  “We’ll stop at the top,” Josh says, and the two minutes it takes us to get to the next crest feel like a year. Josh coasts to a halt on the wide shoulder and pulls the parking brake, then he turns down the stereo and grabs his battered leather day planner from the storage console between our seats.

  “See if there’s any registration or anything in the glove box,” Josh says to me as he unzips the planner. He’s taking out his passport and a folded-up piece of paper just as the trooper comes up to his window. The cop is younger, and cute, but he has his hand resting on the black pistol at his hip, which makes me nervous and kills any impression of cuteness.

  “Afternoon,” he says, leaning down to peer in at me before straightening up to speak with Josh. “Sir, are you aware you were going eighty-eight miles an hour back there?”

  “You’re kidding,” Josh says as he hands over the passport and paper. “This truck goes that fast?” The cop laughs as he unfolds the paper and looks at it.

  “What is this?”

  “That’s my U.K. driver’s permit,” Josh says. Complete calm. “I live in England.”

  The cop cocks his head and looks at it for a moment. “Can I see your registration, Mr.”—he squints as he looks at the paper again—“Hadden? Proof of insurance?”

  “She’s looking,” Josh says, gesturing toward me with his chin. All I can seem to find in the mess of papers in the glove compartment are service receipts and fast food napkins and junk mail addressed to a Mr. Huai Liu Wang. “This isn’t actually our truck.”

  “This isn’t your vehicle?”

  “I borrowed it from a colleague.”

  There’s a long pause, and the cop looks at Josh’s passport.

  “You know I was behind you there for a while,” he says.

  “Yeah, I couldn’t stop on the uphill, we’d never get going again.” Josh looks over his shoulder. “Heavy. Heavy load.”

  “What have you got in there?”

  “Limestone,” Josh says. “I’m an artist.” As if that explains everything. “You want to take a look?”

  “Sure,” the cop says, moving his hand back to the holster. “Why don’t you step out.”

  Josh opens his door and gets out of the truck, taking his open planner with him, and he and the cop walk to the back of the truck, leaving me with only the steady ding-ding-ding of the door-open chime. There’s a thump as the topper hatch is opened, and I glance back to see Josh gesturing as they talk. The chime is driving me crazy, but I can’t quite reach across to the driver’s side door, so I pull the key from the ignition and hope the sudden quiet doesn’t somehow disrupt whatever Josh is doing back there to talk his way out of the trouble we’re in. I hear the murmur of their voices, manly and low, punctuated by occasional laughter and the rush of a passing semi.

  After ten minutes of distracting myself by reading the owner’s manual and looking at more of Mr. Wang’s mail—sometimes he’s addressed as Harry Wang—the hatch to the topper bangs closed, and Josh wordlessly climbs back up into the driver’s seat and pulls the door shut behind him. He leans forward and looks in the side mirror as he starts the engine, and waves as our trooper pulls past us in his dark patrol car. I see the cop raise his hand to us as he speeds off down the hill.

  I’m almost holding my breath. “How bad is it?” I ask.

  “What?” Josh puts the truck in gear and we slowly creep forward before the hill grabs us and starts to pull us along.

  “Ticket? Citation?”

  “No ticket. I took care of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I took care of it.”

  “How?”

  “How about, there was a transaction conducted.”

  I think I know what he means, but I can’t believe it. “Explain?”

  “I paid him off.”

  “Are you kidding me?” My mouth is hanging open; the ease with which he’s accomplished this is like a weird magnetic force. I’m pulled and repelled at the same time.

  “No,” he says, and he glances over to the mirror again as a big truck passes us. “You’ve never paid off the police before?”

  “You’re serious. You just bribed that cop.”

  Josh looks at me and laughs. “You’re just like my sister.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re just—” There’s a pause.

  “What?”

  “Naïve isn’t the right word,” he says.

  “I’m not naïve.” Unless “naïve” means being unfamiliar with paying off people of authority. I can’t believe this.

  “I didn’t say you were.” Josh downshifts as we start up the next hill. “That’s just, you know, that’s how the world works, Jessica.”

  “Through bribes?”

  “Pretty much. Goods and services. We both had something the other wanted. Monetary exchange. Bribery is like the perfect form of capitalism. The most refined. That’s why the Republicans love it so much.”

  I think this is going to lead into one of Josh’s big political diatribes, but he doesn’t say anything else, and the only sound left in the absence of his voice is the whine of the truck’s engine as we struggle up the hill with cars blowing past us.

  “Well, how much was it?” I ask. “What did you give him?”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “Josh!”

  “Easier to swallow than being arrested for driving a car that isn’t mine with no insurance,” he says, and he looks at me and lifts his shoulders into a little shrug. “And who would have driven you home?”

  I shake my head.
“You’re nothing like my sister,” I say.

  We stop for the night at the same forest service campground we used on the way out. The perfect campsite we had the first time has been taken by some survivalist type and his dog, so we drive a little farther on the seriously washed-out dirt road to another vacant fire pit and Josh gets busy setting up the trailer. We’re in the shadow of a big pine-covered hill, and I sit on a splintered picnic table with my fleece jacket pulled down over my knees as I watch him work. He pulls levers and turns cranks and adjusts jacks, and soon the wings of our tiny borrowed home fold open and that’s that.

  I hop up the pull-out step and climb inside to start putting the kitchen together while Josh pulls our stuff out of the back of the truck. Maybe Dad is onto something with this whole RV lifestyle. In spite of the dank old canvas smell, I’ve found myself starting to like this thing. My eyes adapt to the dusk, and I just stand in the darkness with my arms folded and listen to the rush of the stream running next to our campsite.

  The flimsy camper door clatters behind me and I look to see Josh stepping in with a sleeping bag in each hand and a backpack slung from his slender shoulders. I take one of the bags from him and raise my hand and click on the camper’s little overhead lamp, but Josh reaches up and turns it right back off and we stand, facing each other, close in the dark. I hear the gurgling noise of the stream and my pulse in my neck and a mosquito keening around somewhere close to our heads, then his arms are around me and mine around him and we fall together in a controlled descent to the slide-out bed closest to the truck.

  Josh’s stubble from three days of travel burns my chin as we kiss, and I’m cold as he pulls up my jacket and tee shirt. His hands are on my chest, and I’m sure he can feel me shivering.

  “Sleeping bag?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, and I undress in the chilly night air while he works at pulling the bag from its nylon storage sack. He throws the unzipped bag over me and climbs under too, and I help him play catch-up with the removal of his clothes.

  Sex with Josh is not like anything I’ve experienced with any other man. Not better, really, or worse; just very, very different. Well, maybe it is a little bit on the “better” end of the scale. Physically, anyway. Sometimes there’s a startling aggression to his movement; not meanness, really, but a frenzied spasm that usually leaves me hunting for a headboard or wall to push against for support. Emotionally, though, there’s always a sort of detachment that intrigues me and infuriates me; there are no hints to what he’s thinking or feeling in the grunting breaths in my ear or the scratch of his beard on my neck and cheek. But by wrapping myself around him in every sense—legs, arms, and everything else—I’ve learned to give myself the advantage in this embrace. Josh can only push away from me so much before giving up and pushing back in again.

  And again, until, with a gasp, it’s over.

  “Did you?” he asks, with his face pressed into my right shoulder.

  I shake my head, and he kisses my neck and jockeys his weight to begin his dutiful downward journey. I wrap my arm around him, though, and don’t let him go; his weight and warmth on my body is perfect right now.

  “Don’t,” I say. “I don’t always need to.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s nice to be right here. Just lie with me here.”

  Did you? They’ve become my two favorite words. This anticipated, postcoital question is the window, the one moment of insecurity I ever get to see in Josh. Hearing his vulnerability in this nightly, breathy query is climax enough. A real one will never happen—not like that, anyway—and if it did, I wouldn’t tell him.

  If I lost that little window, what would be the point?

  Besides, I’ll take care of that later, myself, when Josh is asleep. For now, though, we’ve got the stream, the intermittent whine of a mosquito, and the plastic crumple of the sleeping bag as it lifts and falls with our breathing. Josh is three hundred miles west, thinking about his rock and paper and ink, and I’m here, with my own thoughts.

  It’s hard not to make comparisons. I think of Jason, my boyfriend from school. Maybe he fell a little lower on the scale. He didn’t have much experience, I guess, and maybe, maybe he seemed to care too much? Lots of pausing, lots of staring in the eyes; many, many are-you-okays and is-that-alrights. Like every night was prom night. But he was sweet, and funny, and smart, and I guess he did love me for more than the fact that I liked him too. So we did it, and did it, and he got better (though I never had the heart to tell him that in the end, a few times, when I wasn’t doing it with him, I was doing it with someone else). Until the night when, after days of subtle suggestion on my part, he finally made a determined attempt at being “rough” and “adventurous” and the ohh-babys and you-like-that-huh-do-yas became a little too much to bear.

  It probably did hurt him a little bit when I started to laugh. Jason, I’m truly sorry for that.

  And then there was Patrick.

  Oh, Patrick.

  I shouldn’t think about him right now. I really shouldn’t. And I won’t, because Josh is sliding himself out from under the spread-open sleeping bag and pulling on his pants.

  “You ready for something to eat?” Josh asks.

  “Yes,” I say, sitting up and feeling around by my feet to try to make sense of the clothes tangled up down there. “Will you have some wine?”

  “You’re corrupting me.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re fogging my mind.”

  “Ha.”

  “Yes,” he says, and I can see in the dark how the whiteness of his tee shirt slides over his head and down his body. “I will have some wine. Are you ready for the light?”

  “Hold on,” I say, and I hold up a wad of sleeping bag to cover my eyes. “Okay, ready.”

  The switch snaps on, and I slowly pull away the sleeping bag and blink my eyes open. Josh crouches down to get something from the storage cabinet under the sink, and a moth flits in a crazy orbit around the light above his head.

  “Hey, Josh?”

  He doesn’t look up. “Yes?”

  “If you took a picture of that moth, like a long exposure, a really long exposure, what would it look like?”

  He stops banging around in the cabinet and turns his head to look at the moth. He looks at me and goes back to feeling under the sink. I can see him smiling.

  This smile, I think, means approval. And I think I’m pleased by it.

  He finally pulls a dented pot from the cabinet and begins filling it with water from the little hand-operated pump over the sink. Josh is, without question, the most unimaginative cook I’ve ever met. He’s completely fearless dining out—he’ll order anything, and always actually seems to enjoy it—but when it comes to making his own food, I’ve only ever seen him wrap something in a tortilla or boil something and cover it with sauce from a jar. We’ve had spaghetti the previous two nights, and I’m not going out on a limb when I predict we’ll be having it again. Out here, though, on our adventure, the pasta works and, with the addition of wine, it makes a nice, rustic, camping-trip-appropriate meal, I guess.

  I straighten the inside-out sleeve of my jacket and pull it on while Josh works at igniting the burner on the tiny green campstove, and I jump down from the camper and dare myself to take a step beyond the feeble ring of luminescence we’ve cast and out into the real night. It’s seriously dark out here, and cold, and my hands are clutched in a prayerful way up under my chin with my forearms tight to my chest as I shuffle toward the truck. I’m expecting a bear or mountain lion or guy who lives in his truck to pounce on me at any moment, but I make it to the back of the truck and get the topper hatch unlatched without being murdered. Crawling around inside, there’s a warm density to the limestone under me as I hunt for my backpack and the duffel bag with the last two bottles of wine; if it was a little softer I think I could curl up and go to sleep in here. Instead I transfer the bottles into my pack, and before I crawl all the way out of the bed of the truck I stop and sp
y on Josh for a moment through the mosquito screen and vinyl window haze of the camper. His arms are crossed and he’s holding a really long wooden spoon, but he’s only staring into the pot of not-yet boiling water.

  Back in the camper, it’s my turn to feel around in the cabinet under the sink until I find two plastic party cups with the words “OSWALD’S KAMPER KORNER” printed on them, and then I get one of the bottles from my backpack and unscrew the lid. I’ve become a screw-top convert, I think.

  “Does the ‘K’ make it more appealing?” I ask out loud. “Is it so outlandish to spell campground with a ‘K’ that a weary traveler would choose Oswald’s over the many other campgrounds nearby?”

  Josh continues to stare into the now-steaming pot of water.

  “It’s like that with used car lots too,” I go on.

  Finally, Josh speaks. “You write copy, what do you think?” he says, without looking at me. I believe this signals disapproval, but I reply anyway.

  “I think it’s absolutely stupid.” Pretty much like I’m feeling right now, so I nearly fill both cups and set one by Josh on the counter and take a substantial slug from the other as I slide myself into the tiny dinette bench seat.

  We don’t say much more as Josh cooks the pasta; he takes sporadic drinks from his cup, and I take more frequent ones. When I unscrew the bottle again for a refill, Josh turns to look and gives a half-smile.

  “Maybe I need to catch up,” he says. Does he feel bad about that copywriting remark?

  “Get working,” I say.

  “Dinner first. Dinner. I need something in my stomach if I’m going to keep up with you.”

  He brings two paper plates covered with noodles and smears of bright red sauce and sits down across from me. We eat, and talk, and drink, and he does indeed work on catching up—catching up so well that by the time we’re finished eating, I’m reaching for the second bottle.