Dead Echo

  *

  She’d lived with her grandmother until the age of sixteen. A hellion all the way, she now supposed in the dawning certainty of adulthood. God knows she’d been told enough. Her grandmother, all the while smoking away, haranguing her at every turn. Seeing her real mother infrequently until the woman had disappeared completely, gone one night into the snow, found frozen in a ditch, her blood full of amphetamines. She’d taken to pinching her grandmother’s car at night (the old lady always slept soundly), drinking with an older crowd she met at the arcade, petty theft. “Just like your goddamn mother!” Nelda used to say, coughing behind the endless cigarettes. “Just like your goddamn mother!” Right up until she got caught the first time, joy-riding with a trunk load of stolen TVs. Johnny had worked at a neat little electronics repair store, the door had been an easy jimmie with a crowbar, the burglar alarm non-existent. Nelda had left her to simmer for a week that first time, a month the second. And when she did come home it proved unbearable. The acid in the woman’s tone, the disgust with which she viewed her own life and all the ones who’d come to make it so put Patsy on the street again, only this time with nowhere to go. Her aunt, Pauline, had been doing a stint a state over for prostitution that spring and Patsy’s prospects were grim. But at least she’d been young and pretty. It hadn’t taken long to find an older guy to pin herself to. That had ended up taking her to Texas of all places, that stoking furnace of cowboys, money and oil, and by early winter, playing her cards right, she’d had a place of her own. Selling drugs just like her mother used to, yes, she realized that. Selling a little ass here and there, but it goddamn well beat the alternative. Besides, she’d always remained sure it was just another One Way. Doom in slow motion.

  Two years later she got a postcard (that had sure been funny, as peculiar as shoes on a monkey) addressed to her in Pauline’s ragged scrawl. Nelda was dead, hammered finally down into whatever hell she’d seen coming. Patsy had read the message through and walked over to the wastebasket and chunked it. Then she went out and got very drunk, and in the darkest deeps of the night sobbed for no reason she could readily imagine. The next morning she cleaned out her meager bank account, and left, tooling out of downtown Houston in the Civic she’d only had for a couple of months, driving aimlessly for the next three days.

  She ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska, that great mid-western Mecca, with two hundred and fifty eight dollars to her name and the Civic at a half-tank. A lot of the drive was lost even then (more so since) and when she finally parked the car and rented a room at a Motel 6 she had to fight hard to remember why she’d left Texas in the first place. Monte hadn’t been abusive nor even exceptionally demanding (he’d been impotent on more occasions than not) and he’d paid her a monthly allowance, almost like a kid, really. She wondered how he treated his own children on those odd days she chose to consider such things, and rarely left the vicinity of the memory when a series of violent tremors didn’t course along her spine. Perhaps that’s why she left, she tried to rationalize in the room that night. Perhaps it was just that because what the hell else did she have to hide behind? Christ. The death of a grandmother she’d neither loved nor cared about? Surely not that. She laid back and stared long into the ceiling as if looking for some sort of evasive answer hidden there in the swirls and nuggets of texture. But nothing had come. Except the morning. She’d walked out into the parking lot of that crappy motel, shading her hand as she scanned the bleak, flat horizon, and saw only desolation. It was at that moment she knew the truth of Stopping. Of simply discontinuing. Perhaps also, at the lowest point of despair, could one ever truly hope to overcome the worry and necessity of life.