by Anne Valente
Two minutes of speed and wind and light.
She shifts the transmission into manual and lets her foot fall from the brake and the Mustang rolls onto the crunch of the flats, Billie receding behind her in the rearview mirror. No helmet. No gloves. No racing suit. She wants to feel empty. This entire trip for Billie, as if Rhiannon could stomach and stand the short months of their mother’s decline. As if her grieving ended in Illinois. As if a blank page could speak in the absence of directions. Go west, daughter. As if any number of funerals was enough to lose the memory of a heart monitor flattening, her mother whispering her last words hours earlier before she lost the ability to speak. You girls are so loved. Rhiannon steers the Mustang across the pocked flats and the tires crackle, salt splintering beneath them like the fissures of a frozen lake. She faces the car west toward the vanishing point of the surrounding mountains. The sun sinking. Pulses the engine. Checks the tachometer’s revolutions per minute. Glances out the driver’s-side window one last time, Billie barely visible across a field of sun-spiked salt.
She shifts the car into first gear and lifts her foot from the brake.
The Mustang is a rocket, a shuttle launch spiraling out across salt. The tachometer spikes, the speedometer rising as Rhiannon shifts into second and third gear. Sixty miles per hour. Seventy. She keeps her hands locked on the wheel. Muscle memory. Her body an archive. A record of tendon and bone. A record of grief. Eighty miles per hour. Ninety. Rhiannon shifts gears again and the car bullets across the flats.
Two hundred and fourteen passengers. Unfathomable.
The world a well of loss.
The world a lack of any preparation for goodbye.
Twenty seconds until the Mustang reaches maximum velocity, twenty seconds everything, enough time to break the world apart: the time it took for a heart to flatline and for a plane to shuttle to the earth and for Billie to light a match and for Rhiannon to feel the heavy weight of so many goodbyes rattle through her body behind the wheel.
The scent of burned rubber. The salt-damp of sweat, a racing suit clinging to her limbs inside the stock car’s cockpit. Crowds filling stands and spilling from the infield, tailgates and shuffleboards and bean bag tosses. Her foot harder on the gas pedal, ninety-five miles per hour, ninety-eight, one hundred. Goodbye to the welcome silence of the highway and the wheat-dusted hills and the prairie dog mounds of Nebraska and the sunflower-strewn fields exploding across Kansas and her father shuttling her across so many states and Wendell Scott and a portrait pasted to her bedroom wall. Every barrier she never broke. One hundred ten miles per hour. Fifteen. Salt spraying up from the Mustang’s tires. Goodbye to Billie: orange prison jumpsuit. Billie led away by the elbow in the courtroom, hands cuffed behind her back. One hundred twenty-five. A house in Jacksonville that Rhiannon and her parents cleaned out. A red-tailed hawk. Two jesses her mother must have kept in her pocket.
Her mother.
Goodbye to what it was to be alive.
Goodbye to a stock car spinning out and a helmet hung just to gather dust and an art opening and a first kiss fluttering against her mouth and her mother’s hand on hers when she first said the words out loud: Rhee, I’m sick. Goodbye to the slowing beat of a heart monitor and the shoveling of earth in a cemetery that nauseated Rhiannon, the Mustang shotgunning across the flatlands of a once-sea. Goodbye to a backyard garden and her mother’s watering cans and the sun filtering down through a green canopy of summer oaks and the gasoline scent of a garage and the cool shade of sliding beneath her father’s car on a wheeled dolly and the damp Midwestern humidity billowing in from their driveway’s scorched blacktop that was the same wafting heat of every raceway ahead and the bright blue dream of breaking records scrolled out before her.
One hundred sixty-four. Maximum velocity.
The Mustang shakes. Weightless. Floats across a surface of salt. Rhiannon leans back in the driver’s seat, the sun gone. Solstice. The longest day. The sky a marble of lavender and coral. She closes her eyes and feels nothing but the engine’s pulse, the same as her own heartbeat. She could drive forever if she knew the Mustang could endure it but feels the car sputter and can still see the dim outline of Billie waiting for her in the parking lot. She lets the car run until it slows completely to a halt, her breath the only sound. The mountains a silhouette. Her hands still gripping the steering wheel.
Daughter, go west.
Goodbye to an empty page.
Her mother knowing her better than she thought: that it would enrage her. A parent knowing the depth of a daughter’s sorrow and how to bear down upon it. How to tap a well. How to activate control, the only reflex Rhiannon knows. How to begin again. Rhiannon watches the faded sun blur through the windshield’s glass and pulls her palms from the steering wheel and holds her face in her hands.
THE NIGHT SKY is a lacework of stars. Even brighter than Moab, a full moon bouncing light off the phantom white of the Salt Flats. The desert silent and dark. No trees. The faint rush of cars shuttling on the interstate, the black silhouette of mountains poking up in the distance. Rhiannon takes in Utah’s quiet as she walks back from squatting at the edge of deserted BLM land, no restrooms and no facilities, only the small glowing orb of their pitched tent for what feels like miles. Billie unfurling their sleeping bags inside by the spark of a single flashlight. The Mustang parked beside the tent, dim but visible in the sky’s wide moonlight. Its windows open, dome lights extinguished. The weak buzz of news radio billowing from the stereo’s speakers. No firewood, no grilled pits. No cooked hot dogs or cans of beans. As Rhiannon approaches the tent Billie emerges with her daypack and the last of their food.
How about trail mix and beers for dinner? she says.
Rhiannon nods. Camping is exactly what we packed them for.
Billie pulls a container of dried cherries and a canister of mixed nuts and a bag of barbecue potato chips from their groceries. She drags two bottled beers from the bag and cracks their caps, the carbonation lukewarm but welcome. Rhiannon takes the bottle Billie hands her and sits on the Mustang’s hood, the engine still warm through the metal.
Billie perches beside her. You doing okay?
The car’s heat pools against Rhiannon’s bare legs. The radio drones through the open windows. Two hundred and fourteen passengers and crew confirmed dead.
I don’t really know.
It was good to see you run speed again.
A passenger car isn’t really built for that kind of speed.
Billie glances at her. How did it make you feel?
Good.
Billie laughs. Good?
Rhiannon watches the patchwork of constellations above them. I haven’t felt that good in years.
Billie grabs a handful of chips, their crunch the only sound above the drone of the radio. A newscaster reports scattered debris nineteen miles west of Laramie. Knadler Lake. Just south of Wyoming’s Bamforth National Wildlife Refuge. Interstate 80 closed indefinitely for the work of investigation crews and cleanup. Detours scheduled. No black box yet recovered, only speculation of another weather-related crash. Speculation as to whether airports across the world will close again.
I can’t believe this, Billie says.
I know.
What now?
We can route south to I-70, back through southern Utah. On toward Denver and across Kansas.
I mean for you. Rhee. What now for you?
Rhiannon leans back against the car’s hood. She imagines trekking back across Colorado, across Kansas, on through Missouri and back to Illinois toward textbooks and a clapboard cubicle only to watch nine hours tick away every day. Nine hours to twenty hot seconds, the velocity of an engine rocketing across salt. Twenty seconds: enough time to know the impossibility of returning to a desk beyond the sweep of the western desert.
I don’t know, Rhiannon says. All I know is I can’t go back there. Not now.
To Illinois?
Rhiannon thinks of Beth. A talk that awaits her when she returns. Not Ill
inois, she says. Illinois is home. Billie, I can’t imagine leaving. But my job. Fuck.
Billie smiles through the dark. Leave that shit job, Rhee. Leave it now.
It’s not that easy. It’s good money.
What, you think I don’t know that? That I won’t be in a position to take any job at all that will pay me? I get it. I get the practicalities. But you can leave. You can leave that place and find something else.
I know.
Billie looks at her. Think you’ll race?
Billie, no. I’m too old.
You’re never too old.
Rhiannon pictures the race routes, capillaries of highways webbed across the entire country. Beth in Illinois. A home that was hers. A home she never let herself make.
I don’t think highway life is for me anymore.
What, you haven’t had fun out here on the road?
That’s different. We’re just out here for two weeks. I don’t know if I’m built for constant travel. I always thought I needed it. I don’t know if I do anymore.
You could do what Dad does. Coach. It seems to satisfy his need to race.
I have time to figure it out. But I can’t stay at that job anymore. I can’t.
Then don’t.
Billie is watching her and Rhiannon looks up at the network of bright stars peppering the dark cloak of Utah’s night sky. The faint band of the Milky Way beginning to shimmer. A wide-open dark so different from the thick gray of Illinois cloud cover, a clear expanse that across a week has allowed her to imagine other skies, other lives.
Birds navigate by constellation, Billie says. They follow the orientation of stars during seasonal migration. They know north and south by memorizing the patterns of constellations.
What are we looking at right now?
Billie pulls the laser pointer from her daypack. Circinus, she says. Those four stars. They’re faint. But out here with no light pollution, they’re clear enough to see.
Rhiannon points toward the far mountains. There’s the Big Dipper. No pointer needed. At least I know that one.
The radio wafts through the dark: airports deciding again whether to shut down. Rhiannon watches the laser’s light flicker across the points of constellations and feels a wash of sadness. As they travel east across Colorado the winds will pick up and wildfires will only continue to flare and in Missouri the horizon will flood with thunder and lightning and once they arrive back in Illinois the sky will fill with mist and clouds.
Mom knew, she hears herself whisper. She knew this would happen.
Billie shuts off the pointer, the sky lit with nothing but its own stars.
This whole trip, Rhiannon says. Driving instead of flying. Her work at the quarry. Uncovering the mystery of another climate that eradicated every living thing. She knew the earth was changing. She could have predicted that wildfire in Colorado. She could have anticipated these crashes. She made us drive. Rhiannon sighs, presses her knuckles against her eyes. She also knew I’d be so fucking angry that she left me a blank page. She timed it right. Salt Lake City. She probably knew I’d make my way out here.
Did you ever talk to her about the Salt Flats?
I think I did. And she knew about them anyway, being out here so often.
This trip is about both of us, Billie says. Equally.
What is she trying to tell us?
Isn’t it clear? To do what we want. To get back out there.
But what about the quarry? The mystery she and Angela were studying.
I don’t know. Maybe to take notice. To see it happening. Billie tilts her chin back and looks at the stars. To take stock of this planet before it disappears.
The radio statics across the Salt Flats. Two hundred and fourteen dead. On top of hundreds, the eighth crash, other families and other investigation sites radiating waves of heartache spiraling out across so many coordinates across the world. Coordinates her mother never mapped. Their current coordinates nothing, just one small pinpoint of grief on a worldwide map of devastation, the scale unimaginable. Rhiannon watches the winking light of every constellation, the moon spilling down across the bright-white specter of the Salt Flats. The visibility endless. The red rock of Utah receding in the rearview mirror when they wake in the morning. All the stars and mesas and bats and limestone, everything their mother has shown them on this trip. Drought and storm and fire. The chance that all of it could completely disappear.
I didn’t know it was possible, she whispers.
Didn’t know what? Billie whispers back through the dark.
I didn’t know a landscape could break your heart too.
In the thin light of the night’s stars, Rhiannon sees Billie’s eyes glisten wet.
I watched the same square of window from my dorm for six years, she says. I watched the hills beyond the prison yard change from green to brown every fall.
I bet it was still beautiful.
Billie smiles. It was. But not like this.
What about you?
What about me?
Rhiannon imagines the journal burrowed down in Billie’s daypack, so many pages of blank white paper beyond their last coordinate.
The hawk feather, Rhiannon says. The jesses. What are you going to do now?
Billie is silent and Rhiannon studies her face in the light of the moon, the anger that chiseled out her features in Liberty Park smoothed away.
Maybe I’ll go to Alabama. My bird’s namesake. I’ve never been there. Not once. But Rhee, I don’t want to do much. I’m tired of doing. I kind of just want to be. Billie hesitates for a moment. How long until we need to get back?
Five days. It should only take two or three to make it back to the Midwest.
Billie nods. There’s one more stop I want to make, if that’s okay.
Rhiannon doesn’t ask. If she’s dragged them west from Salt Lake City to the Bonneville Flats, Billie’s earned one unscheduled stop. She lies back on the warmth of the car’s hood, the constellations above them a blanket of light. Billie sits beside her. Rhiannon’s limbs swim with the lingering lull of the car’s movement, the same as sinking into every motel bed along a raceway route and still feeling a car’s pull. The radio drones from the Mustang’s interior. An earth spun beyond control. The same mass devastation her mother once studied. But out here: only silence. Only stars. Only the lit ghost of the Salt Flats. Only the pulse of her own skin, the hum of an engine beating back inside it.
HERRMANN, JEAN. BEAR RIVER MIGRATORY BIRD REFUGE. WASHINGTON, DC: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, 1999. PRINT.
CALL NUMBER: CHILDREN’S COLLECTION 598.008 HER
BEAR RIVER MIGRATORY BIRD REFUGE
The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a seventy-four-thousand-acre preserve on the northeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake, is home to over 250 species of migrating birds. A critical habitat for winged creatures on the Central and Pacific Flyways of North America, the refuge contains a variety of habitats including wetlands, grasslands, open water, and mudflats. Millions of birds pass through the refuge each year including trumpeter swans, bald eagles, pelicans, and snowy plovers.
The refuge is surrounded by desert lands, making it an important oasis for birds. Because the refuge is vulnerable to flood and drought, this land must be preserved for the continued survival of birds on their migration routes.
41.4462º N, 112.2622º W:
Corinne, UT
There is no need for a journal. No coordinates. Billie maps them on the GPS once they wake at dawn upon the Bonneville Flats, the sun a semicircle rising above the stark plains of cracked salt. Straight back across Utah from the near-border of Nevada, rounding up through Salt Lake City and on past Ogden. The peaks of the Wasatch lining the right side of the highway as they travel north, the alien coral blue of the Great Salt Lake spanning off past Rhiannon’s driver’s-side window. Beyond a Denny’s brunch off Interstate 80 in the middle of central Utah, a hollandaise omelet and a side stack of three pancakes and two cups of coffee, Billie leans back against the headrest
as Rhiannon veers around the northern edge of the lake. The radio off, news Billie knows they’ll listen to all the way home. Devastation Billie can’t comprehend. In her hands: the red-tailed hawk feather. Billie runs her fingers across it, a worry doll. Rhiannon at last pulls the car off the highway and steers them down a two-lane road toward brackish marsh and patches of salt grass.
Billie can already see them in the distance: shorebirds. A flock of black-necked stilts nesting in one of the mirrored ponds surrounding the road. The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. One of the country’s main flyways, a crucial stopover for so many birds in migration. What she read about in a dimly lit corner of the Decatur Correctional Center’s library, a children’s book on the Bear River Refuge. Dewey decimal number 598. The only book in the entire library on birds and their habitats, surely left behind by another inmate’s visiting child. Billie remembers the facts, what she scanned over and over for lack of any other reading material on birds. Seventy-four thousand acres established in 1928, surrounded by the Wasatch to the east and so many hunting clubs everywhere else. Strategically protected land along migration routes, information that seemed irrelevant from the walls of a prison library but out here, the eighth plane crash in less than four months, the fact takes on a somber note. Hunting clubs. Jet engines. Monuments in every state they’ve seen devoted to men who claimed discovery. Everywhere out here: evidence of human hands bending the earth to their will. Billie watches the black-necked stilts preen themselves, summer their breeding season. Building their numbers before the mass migration of heading south come fall, a clockwork Billie guesses will be altered despite what news pundits are already denying on the radio’s reports. Changes in so many climates. What Billie can only assume will become a norm. She cranes her neck up and looks out the window, the sky marine blue and cloudless, an endless span hiding its danger.
The Mustang rolls over gutted roads flecked with potholes until a parking lot appears. Only a few other cars, one couple wandering around with binoculars and a tripod. Bird-watchers. Billie recognizes their equipment, the feather still in her hands. Rhiannon pulls into a sand-dusted parking space and pulls a pair of sunglasses from the overhead visor, the full summer sun beating down upon the open water.