Given World (8 page)

I’d quit the mescaline when I found out I was pregnant, and after the baby was born it no longer seemed like such a brilliant idea or grand escape. He came six weeks early, and even after they let me take him home I could hide him inside my jacket like a little trick rabbit, and no one would even know he was there. He stayed behind when I left. I couldn’t take him because I was too afraid of what I might do, like lose him; set him down somewhere and forget. I was not so out of it as to believe I was even remotely steady enough to take care of a baby. Both my parents, by some miracle I was sure I’d never fully comprehend, seemed to understand.

When I got stoned I would think about my childhood, which always came back to me in black and white and a barely distinguishable range of gray. We had dogs, and farm animals of the regular kind: chickens, cows, once in a while a few goats. I had a big brother who tried against some pretty ferocious odds to teach me about the world and what was in it. A mother who, against similar odds, kept me steady as long as she could, kept me from becoming a human rocket-propelled grenade and launching myself into the atmosphere, where I’d explode into tiny pieces and rain down on the house and the yard while she watched from behind the screen door: another one gone—the last one, except . . .

And my dad, who, no matter what, seemed always on the verge of smiling, like he was telling himself jokes, and if you were lucky—if you asked with the right words—he’d tell them to you too.

Our days: Getting up before the sun every morning and going to bed halfway through
Bonanza
at night. 4-H. The bus to school, the bus back. A long way between us and everyone else. A lot of alone time. And a war on TV, brought to you by Nabisco.

I didn’t know—because I never thought it through—that American boys had not been fighting in Vietnam since the beginning of time, or that no one had ever watched a war on TV before. I would watch and look for a face I recognized among the living, but then came the ones they were loading onto the helicopters: the ones that didn’t move no matter how long the camera stayed on them; the ones I maybe should have known better than to think about as hard as I did. But I didn’t know not to do that. You could tell under the tarps and the blankets that some of them had been blown clear apart.

Boys my age were too young for the war, but older brothers had been going and coming back in shifts, quietly over the years, and no one said very much about it. When they came home, they went back out to work the ranches, and I’d see them on the street or at the feed store and try to match their faces to the ones I’d seen on television. There was a sameness to those faces—something I was too young to identify, but it was etched there, and no one else had it.

I was thirteen when they let us know they couldn’t find Mick. When the letter came in the mail, my mother wandered around the house for weeks carrying it and talking to herself, saying pretty much the same thing over and over. For a long time, among all the other voices, hers was the one I heard most distinctly, at the most random times, saying, “I thought they were supposed to come and tell you in person.”

It was as if our house were a birdcage someone had thrown a sheet over and forgotten, in the morning—every morning—to take off. I don’t remember any talking, let alone laughing, or making anyone feel better about anything, though I know there must have been trying. The quiet was blinding and deafening. Even the barn cats stopped freaking out when anyone came close. They perched in the windows at the top of the barn and watched us come and go, as though they knew those were our final days, and anytime now we’d pack up and leave. But I was the only one who did.

I made it through school, barely, knowing that once it was over, I’d be gone. I left my parents in a parking lot in Havre: my mom waving, some hidden force pulling her away from the bus steps; Dad awkward and incongruous with the baby’s carriage, in the background, where he liked to stay. I wanted to put my bag down and go back for another hug, tell him not to worry, I’d figure it out. Like he said. Mom had that distant look, as if she were the one leaving. And the baby, well. I couldn’t see him. Dad could have had a mess of those boney cats in that carriage. With their eyes closed, meowing and growling like they do. Bye kittens. Good night moon.

In Missoula, I got my job and rented a little apartment over the Laundromat, where when winter came the steam would rise into my room, and the sweet smell of the soap would cover over the stink of the pulp mill down the road. Still, there was nothing to be done about the smoke from its stacks, which would combine with the smoke from people’s woodstoves and the fog that was a natural consequence of the inversion layer in that valley, and sometimes we wouldn’t see the sun for weeks at a time. I’d drive out of town then, in any direction.

For a while that one winter I had company: another car I came up on one hazy day outside of Frenchtown, and it looked a lot like mine. There had been approximately no other traffic on the road in either direction since I’d gone by the Flathead cutoff, aside from a few log trucks and one kamikaze U-Haul pilot who was having a tough time staying off the median. I got around him as fast as I could, swerving at the last second while he played
What’s My Lane?
, and my imagination previewed for me what might happen if I didn’t swerve—if I hit him and lost control; or cut the wheel and cut back too sharply and spun out. I saw the marks my tires would leave in a spiral as me and my car left the road.

The other Mustang might have been doctored up at the same body shop as mine. It had a similar paint job, holes in the top, duct tape. It wasn’t an exact match, but close enough I thought I ought to get up alongside for a look. The guy driving had long, straight brown hair in a ponytail; a mustache; and aviator shades he was wearing even at dusk, with yellow lenses.

The first time we drove together for a while, west on the interstate, north and south of the river, crossing it every now and again like you do on that stretch. On the straightaways we were doing ninety, ninety-five. After a bit, though, I slowed up to let him get ahead, feeling silly out there in the fast lane, not passing anything. I had my radio tuned to static from Missoula, breaking every once in a while to let through snatches of country music—about love, about broken hearts. I’d always figured if I could hear a whole song all at once it might make sense, but the antenna on my car was broken at the base, splinted with Popsicle sticks and electrical tape, and I had not gotten around to replacing it yet. So I filled in the blanks myself, with words I could understand, about cars, motors, carburetors, timing chains.

At Tarkio I turned around, using my signal to say,
See you later,
before I got off the highway. He flashed his brake lights and then he was gone, leaving me and my car, in some unbidden, imaginary outcome, to bump down the embankment, over the riprap and into the river, to float all the way to Lake Pend Oreille and the Columbia or sink and give the fish a place to hide. Or to drive straight up the slope on the other side, to a point too vertical, where the weight of the engine would pull us backward, and we’d tumble end over end to the bottom—possibly across the road and into the river anyway. I let my mind have its fun and its carnage, but I was seeing that other black car too, flying along toward the coast in the darkness, with a radio that probably worked. I kept my car on the highway. I headed toward home and bed and tumbling dryers; the smothering smell of other people’s sheets and towels and shirts and jeans.

I stopped at the bar where I knew Leo would be nursing a beer and playing the poker machine, in a vapor mist of cigarette smoke and deep-fried chicken. I ordered my own beer and sat on a bar stool next to him, watching him draw electric cards, always keeping jacks, eights, and aces when they came up. We sat quiet except for the beeping of the machine: the excited noises it made whether he chose right or didn’t, whether the hand turned out a full house or a pair of deuces, or all but the last card of a straight flush. After a while I said good night to him and the bartender, walked down the street and up to my room, where I took off my clothes and curled around myself in the exact center of the bed, my head under the covers, and slept in one position all night. In the morning, for a few long waking seconds, I had no idea where I was.

I saw that other car fairly often the next few months: up the Bitterroot, in the Mission Valley, west of Beavertail. We were all over the place. I’d come up on him, or he’d appear in my rearview mirror and get up beside me, wave, give me a slightly lopsided smile, and I’d drift back and follow until my internal compass swung me around and guided me home.

Mornings I was generally up at five, at the station by six, in my uniform: dark blue pants and pale blue shirt with my name embroidered in orange over the pocket—that over a layer of long johns, my brother’s old horse-blanket-lined jean jacket on top of it all. Leo would already be there, with the propane stove in the garage fired up to take the edge off the chill. The edge was about all it ever took off, and I’d wonder what it might be like to be warm more than four months a year. I’d conjure up a palm tree. A beach. Add the ocean: a body of water without any discernible other side, deep and full of all kinds of slippery things, and whales. It appeared in my mind like a child’s drawing: the waves a series of inverted
V 
’s across the middle of the page; the whales just below and ready to breach; the sun a yellow ball in the top left-hand corner; two distinct white clouds to break up all that monotonously blue sky.

Most days I’d be off work by two or three, and one freezing and particularly socked-in day in early March I went looking for sunshine. I knew I could find it on the other side of town, east where the inversion (depending on which way you were going) began or ended, like a wall of fog, like a magic trick of the gods, a wall you could drive through and disappear.

I drove out of the murk into a sharp light that nearly blinded me. It felt even colder than it had in the fog, and the air coming through the gap above my windshield blew across my face and practically froze a section solid, from the bridge of my nose to the middle of my forehead. I had the heater blasting, which did not do much but keep my feet, in pac boots and wool socks, from turning into little blocks of ice.

My eyes finally adjusted to the light at Bonner, where the Champion mill on my left was spewing smoke and sawdust straight into the air, and it seemed to stay, motionless, caught in time or an invisible element that defied gravity or dispersion. I drove as far as Rock Creek, circling down off the highway to the north side of the river, and along the frontage road to where it dead-ended at a woods of scrappy pine and brush.

I pulled a tiny roach out of my pocket, smoked it and listened to the radio: an oldies station coming in clear as a bell from Rock Springs, Wyoming. They played songs I’d heard from behind my brother’s bedroom door as a child, and sometimes, if he didn’t have a girl in there, he’d let me in, take me by the hands and dance with me, spin me around the room to “Rave On,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Shout,” until I was so dizzy and laughing so hard I thought I was going to pass out. Then he’d let me down easy to sit on the floor, and he’d sit down there next to me, and we’d read or draw or talk about stuff until Mom called us downstairs for dinner.

After he dropped out of college and enlisted, before he went away, he boxed up all his things, taped and labeled the boxes. He wrote his name on them with a fat felt marker, and on some my name or an alias in smaller letters below. I didn’t open them when he went missing, because there was no way I could convince myself he wouldn’t be coming home. Not in a box. Not in a coffee can. Not a bunch of bones tied together like kindling. Not coming back. Not ever.

His records were in some of those boxes, books in others. He left me his model cars and the dinosaurs and the rock collection. Afternoons during his last few weeks at home, he’d go to one bar or another in town, and get drunk with his buddies who were going to Vietnam with him and a few who had deferments and were staying home. He’d come back an hour or so before dinner and sit out on the porch, not doing anything, just trying to get straight enough to come in and eat with us. He said he was sobering up the sunset, and he’d calculate the number of hours since the sun had risen over the South China Sea. I’d sit at his feet, repeating those words:
South
,
China
,
Sea
. He’d laugh while I did it, and all the while I was willing him back home. Asking God, I suppose. It wasn’t until much later I realized I should have been more specific about what condition he’d be in when he came back. Just in case.

•  •  •

I drove out of the woods and went to the Stage Station for a beer. I was very stoned and a little shaky, so in order to avoid looking at anyone I got a newspaper off the bar and sat at a table in the one corner still in a patch of daylight. It was earlyish, about four, but you could feel night coming on already, and the lights over the pool table outshone the late-winter sun, struggling, seemed like, just to stay lit.

On the front page of the paper was a story about a guy who’d gone off the road down south of Drummond, and a picture of his car lying on its top by the creek running through there, the old railroad tracks with weeds growing up through the ties, cattails undisturbed in uneven rows along the water. It was too easy for me to imagine how it must have felt as his car left the pavement, all four wheels suddenly in midair, no sound but the wind roaring by, or maybe no sound at all. I looked again, to be sure it really was that guy, and read the rest of the story. It said they didn’t know yet how he wound up down there, but he was still alive, in critical condition at St. Pat’s in Missoula. They’d reached a brother in Kentucky who said he’d done two tours in the Air Force, spent them mostly in the central highlands at Pleiku, and come home with no medals but did have a little shrapnel lodged in his head.

When I started feeling less wasted, I went up to get another beer and took the paper with me; I showed the picture to the bartender. Told him I’d seen that guy around some, driving a car that sort of matched mine.