Authors: Anne Argula
It came down to the years, though, didn’t it, the years that put her at one away from thirty and me only one shy of fifty. I had to believe that those years were to my advantage, because I had spent them all with Connors. That had to count for something.
Esther defined niceness. All of her conscious thoughts were directed to helping others in some way, preferrably small but noticeable. She saw me and acted incredibly blessed for the experience, as though now at last her day was made. It made me want to puke. All I saw was an operator smart enough to flatter the wife of the man she’d like to steal. Maybe I was too sensitive. Conners always said I was. I was the love of his life, he continually reassured me. Even when he had a dirty dream, I was the girl in the dream. He would rather have me, the way it was, than anyone else, no matter how good it could be. That’s what he said. Which went a long way toward finding some kind of acceptance of our situation. Still, it could not calm my fear that given the opportunity, he would jump it, so to speak. And why shouldn’t he? How could I be so entirely uninterested in sex and at the same time so jealous he might enjoy it with someone else? Because that’s the way I am. That’s the way we all are.
I smiled at Esther the way you do at a scooter going by, and caught Connors’ eye. He came out and met me at the end of the counter. I explained the last-minute detail.
“That’s the shits,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“The end of your watch, and they want you to
….
And then turn around and come home and go to work the next day?”
“The green weenie,” I agreed.
“Can’t you get out of it?”
“Not without being an old lady about it.”
Nobody wants to be an old lady. Connors understood that.
“Then let Odd do most of the driving.”
“Okay.”
“You ride in the back seat and try to get some sleep. You need your sleep.”
“I will. I do.”
“Why don’t you just quit? The hell with it. We don’t need the money.”
“Twenty-two months, and I’m outta there. Listen, angel, I don’t have anything at home for your dinner.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of myself.”
He was a good husband and I had no complaints. I was the best wife I could be and he didn’t complain either, though the silences were getting longer.
“See you in about…let’s say, fifteen hours,” I said.
He came out from behind the counter for a hug and a kiss.
All my life I have been aware, more than most people, of the possibility of sweeping changes during unexpected moments, and yet, like everyone else, I go on assuming things will occur more or less as they were supposed to occur. See you tomorrow, plumber on Tuesday, eight and a half percent interest, cloudy and mild, Woodlife the deck in August, early retirement in twenty-two more months…. What fools we are, ain’t?
3.
My old man had to take a yearly vacation. It was forced on him by my mother, who would not go along but believed it important for him to get away from the store once a year, for at least a week, though if he were to be gone for a week, the drive had better be three and a half days each way, because he never lasted longer than the drive itself. When I reached the age of sixteen and got my driver’s license, I went with him.
He would sit next to me with a sixer of Bud, tune in the baseball game, and let me drive him all the way to Toronto or Atlanta or Rapid City, South Dakota. He had no love for those particular cities, no sights he wanted to see. Their only appeal was that they seemed far enough away to constitute a vacation, far enough away from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where we lived. The old man and I would reach Toronto or Atlanta or Rapid City, and we would stay the night in some eight-dollar motel. He would caution me not to walk around the room in my bare feet, because we did not know who occupied the room before us. We would have dinner, supper we called it, in some restaurant recommended by the desk clerk. Early the next morning, often before daybreak, we would start the long drive back to Pennsylvania, having seen nothing but the road, the motels, the restaurants.The old man could claim a vacation and my mother would leave him alone about it.
On the road, this is the story I told Odd, about me and my old man and our road trips. He got half a kick out of it, cracked half a smile.
“Were you a tomboy back then?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Relax. It’s just the way I picture it.”
“It was my transistion period. A year or two before, I played shortstop on the boys’ team. I played center in vacant lot football, and it was only years later it dawned on me that I won that position so the guy playing quarterback could cop feels. I did some street fighting too, and held my own.”
“Your father still alive?”
“No, they’re both gone.”
“You had a good childhood, though, sounds like.”
“Yeah, there was usually a lot of yelling but no one ever got hit. I was the only child, but nobody doted on me. Just the opposite. They made sure I was tough.”
“There was never any yelling in my house,” said Odd. “There was hardly any talking. I wasn’t real sure I even belonged there.”
“I had the same feeling! Felt out of place. In the family, in the town, da frick. Maybe it’s that way with all kids.”
“Could be. Like Spokane, I kept wondering why in the hell we had to live here, but nobody else seemed to think about it.”
“How come you didn’t just leave, when you came of age?”
“Good question. It’s not like I never thought about it.”
“Still not too late. You’d qualify in most any other department.”
“Yeah, but you’d miss me too much.”
He was being sarcastic, but I
would
miss him if he left.
We burned the rest of the daylight getting to Ritzville. Once we stopped for gas and Odd offered to take over, but I wasn’t feeling at all tired. Anyway, it was easier for me to drive than just to sit. We used the facilities at the gas station and he crawled into the back and fell right to sleep, to one of his “Driving-in-the-lonely-night” tapes.
He snored, softly at first, a comforting sound to me, really. It reminded me of Connors, when we used to sleep in the same bed, and of Nelson, when he lived at home and I would check on him. But as Odd’s sleep deepened his snores became unsettled, harsh, jagged. A leg kicked out. Both of his arms shot out and folded over his head like a protective cowl, and then his breathing just stopped. I youkst the rearview mirror for a better look. Hell, he wasn’t breathing. He was thirty-two, -three, how could he just stop breathing? I was about to pull to the side of the road and administer CPR, when his lips puffed out with spent air and he started breathing again. “You never knew,” he said in his sleep, as though talking over fences to someone two backyards away. “It’s time.”
I killed the music and drove on, keeping one eye on the road, one eye on him. He slept like that, repeating the pattern. I began to count slowly whenever he stopped breathing…one, two, three…nine, ten…fifteen, sixteen…and then a violent puff of air.
He went on like that ‘til we made Moses Lake, where they interned the Japanese-Americans during World War Two.
“Odd? Odd? Odd?”
I kept calling his name, softly, until he awoke.
“Odd, do you know you do stuff in your sleep?”
“I do?”
“Big time. You kick out your legs and throw back your arms. Worst of all, you hold your breath. Woi Yesus, how does anybody sleep with you?”
As good-looking as he was, the question was rhetorical.
“I don’t sleep too well.”
“That’s an understatement, if I just got a sample.”
“Everybody’s got something,” he said.
“Ain’t you tired during the day?”
“Sometimes. But my judgment’s clear.”
“No one said it wasn’t. Don’t get all defensive.”
“I’m just saying I can do my job.”
“I know that. But you could do with a medical check-up on the sleeping thing. You could pay for it yourself, so there’s no insurance record.”
“I’m fine, don’t worry about me.”
“Okay, deal. You don’t worry about me neither.”
“Why would I worry about you?”
“Just don’t.”
We hit a hatch of boonda bugs, which smeared the windshield opaque. The window washer couldn’t keep up with it, so I pulled to the side and waited them out. To clean the windshield I had to sacrifice half a bottle of my Calistoga Springs water. I always have a bottle of water at my side because I need continual irrigation or I will spontaneously combust. I drank the other half, and we went to opposite sides of the road and watered the weeds.
No way was I going to turn over the wheel. By now I was tired, but at least I was awake. We got back into the car and motored on.
“You didn’t have any ‘Taking-a-piss-by-the-side-of-the-road-music’?” I said.
“I’ll look for some.”
We passed the long misery that lay between Moses Lake and Ellensburg in silence. I went into the right side of my brain, or is it the left? I’m never sure. Anyway, that side where whatever happens has no reason. I had some imaginary glimpses of Nelson aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, standing inspection on the flight deck in his dress blues.
“This Houser guy, did he have a record?” Odd said, breaking the silence and my reverie.
“No. Just a victim of love, or something.”
“Do you think he knew he was doing something wrong? I mean, do you think it bothered him?”
I thought he was legally sane, that was enough for me. Not for Odd.
“Wouldn’t he know that in the end it would hurt them both, that it would end in pain and sorrowful stuff?”
A stiff prick has no conscience, I reminded him.
Rather than laugh, as most guys would, he only seemed to think more about it.
“It must be easy to fall in love with an underage girl, they’re so sweet, but it must be very hard to find a safe way to express that love.”
“Bullshit. You don’t see grown women falling in love with underage boys.”
“There was that teacher in Seattle.”
“Looney tunes.”
“Why couldn’t I have had a teacher like that? Talk about learning something useful.”
“That was strange in the extreme. And she’s in prison for it, don’t forget.”
“Still, it happened. I think it happens a lot, but a real adult knows how to deal with it. A real adult knows how to sit and watch his impulses, watch them until they pass away, knows he don’t have to be controlled by them. Like Houser was.”
If I thought about it at all, I might agree, but on the subject of Charles T. Houser and Stacey all I could think about was they were the reason I was on this boring road instead of home in my own bed.
Maybe it was the night and the lonely road. I’d never heard Odd talk so much. I was already hoping it wouldn’t carry over to the long return trip during which he might try to get into the prisoner’s head, and I would have to say that we shouldn’t talk to him without a lawyer in the car.
“What’s Houser, thirty-two, thirty-three?” asked Odd.
Around that, as I recalled. Like Odd himself.
“A fourteen-year-old girl is impressed by the attentions of a man that age.” He waited for me to confirm, and when I didn’t, he said, “Isn’t she?”