West of Here

  As the evening progressed, Rita made up a whole new youth for herself, one without the creepy stepdad and the couch surfing. She painted the rez of her youth as the person she wanted to be might have experienced it. She painted an adolescence that might have been Marcia Brady’s. She even invented siblings. A brother Joe and a sister Gail. A household of rank-and-file orderliness. A silver tiara on prom night. And each fiction was more thrilling and liberating than the last.

  Rita was giggling in the passenger seat as Krig pulled off of Marine and into the back lot of High Tide. Her laughter ended abruptly when she noticed a shadowy figure sitting on the hood of the Monte Carlo.

  “Oh shit.”

  “What?”

  “Turn around — no, it’s too late, just let me out here.”

  “What is it?”

  “Randy.”

  “So what’s the big deal?” said Krig, pulling up next to the Monte Carlo. But hardly had he uttered the words, before the big deal became perfectly clear. In a flash, Randy was wrenching Krig out of the driver’s seat, even as Rita tried desperately to pull him back into the idling car. But Randy won the tug-of-war, and Krig soon found himself facedown in the gravel lot, breathless, the right side of his torso burning like fire and ice.

  Rita leapt out of the car and tried to pull Randy off, but she was no match, never was.

  “Shouldn’t have crossed the line, douchehammer!” Randy observed, delivering a crisp right foot to the kidney. “How does it feel now, fuckstick?”

  Krig would remember thinking if he could only get to his feet, he could take this shrimp. And he could have. He could have rolled to the left and popped up — Christ, shouldn’t that have been his fucking instinct? Once he got on his feet, he could have had his way with the little ferret. He had the size, the reach, the superior strength. He could’ve rolled, popped, and bing-bang, he’d have been on his feet. Done a quick duck under, and got him low. Pretty soon he’d have had all that weight on top of him. If he rushed Krig, Krig could’ve got him in a body lock and shook him around like a rag doll. Better yet, got him in a head shuck, and start twisting that skinny little neck. Either way, he could’ve had him. But where was Mr. Double Letter? Mr. Double Letter was flat on his beer belly, wincing at each blow, saying to himself, Just get this over with.

  Krig watched dazedly as Randy forced Rita into the Monte Carlo through the driver’s side, kicking and screaming — at least she was putting up a fight.

  With one arm on the wheel and the other fighting her off, Randy whipped the car in reverse, swung a 180, and immediately stalled.

  Krig had a window there. A chance to turn the tides. A chance to revise his history. All he had to do was get his fat ass off the ground and rush the car as Randy turned it over — once, twice, three times, with no success. Krig could have ripped that little weasel right out of driver’s seat and pummeled him.

  But he didn’t, did he? Worse, he distinctly remembered thinking — after Randy’s third failed attempt at turning the car over — C’mon, start, start, damn it! He remembered thinking, Don’t flood it, you idiot, you’re gonna drain the battery.

  And even more vividly than Krig remembered the shame and humiliation, he remembered the relief that washed over him when the engine caught on the fifth try, and Randy and Rita tore out of the gravel lot.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, Rita collided with the edge of the bathroom door but only after Randy called her a whore and struck her with a backhand across the face that sent her careening across the hallway into said bathroom door. After much shouting, and more shoving, Randy cried like a baby for forty-five minutes, apologizing profusely for his very existence. I can’t help it, he whimpered over and over. I just love you so much. And before she even realized it, her eye had swollen half shut, and Rita found herself comforting an inconsolable Randy on the bed until two in the morning, eventually succumbing to his sexual advances. For ten minutes, he fucked her even harder than usual and, having spent himself inside of her, rolled over and fell quickly to sleep.

  Rita lay awake half the night, worrying. Why did she have to get poor Krig involved? What if he was badly injured — what if he was dying in that parking lot right now? She had his cell number, what was she waiting for? After two six-packs and all the excitement, Randy was out cold. When Rita couldn’t stand it anymore, she stole out from under the covers and across the darkened room. The floor was still strewn with Curtis’s laundry. She tiptoed out into the creaky hallway and quietly closed the bedroom door behind her.

  In the darkness, she located her purse on the kitchen counter, fished out her cigarettes, her cell phone, and a lighter. In only a nightshirt, she snuck out the back door and down the steps. The night was considerably colder than she had imagined, clear and moonless. The stars were spattered brightly in a wide brushstroke across the sky. Rita padded in bare feet through a dew that was turning to frost, around the back corner of the house to a single lawn chair on a buckled slab of concrete overgrown with long grass. She pulled her knees up under her nightshirt for warmth and lit a Merit. Clutching her cell phone, she looked briefly up at the sky and shivered. How was it possible that the stars burned cold? How was it possible that they burned at all? The sight of them caused Rita to shiver once more. She pulled her legs in tighter under her nightshirt and smoked her Merit down to the filter and snubbed it out on the concrete. She lit another before dialing.

  “Krig?” she said, just above a whisper.

  “What up?” he said groggily. “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, Rita.”

  Krig sat up in bed in the glow of the television. “Hey.”

  “Are you … are you okay?” she said.

  Locating the remote on the pillow beside him, Krig turned off the TV and settled into the darkness. “Yeah. A little sore, I guess. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rita, exhaling. “Late. Or really early.”

  “What about you?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Everything is fine. I just … I’m sorry that I …”

  “No worries. I needed my ass kicked, I think.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “I can handle myself,” she said. “But thanks.”

  They lapsed into silence. Krig could hear Rita smoking.

  “Krig, I … all that … tonight, when I was … look, I … I better go.”

  “Say it.”

  Silence again. The sound of Rita smoking.

  “All that stuff I told you tonight, that stuff about me growing up — none of it was true. I don’t know why, I just … I guess I just wanted to step outside of my life, you know? I was having fun.”

  “I think I get it,” he said. “I’ve made up stuff before.”

  “I wasn’t lying to you because I … I don’t want you to think …”

  “Really,” said Krig. “It’s okay. I don’t think anything. I think your boyfriend is a dick, but other than that …”

  “Thanks. I mean for, you know, defending me, I guess.”

  “Defending you? That’s a laugh. I didn’t even defend myself. Jesus, I may as well have been a piñata.”

  Rita stopped her giggle short when a light snapped on in the trailer. “Shit.”

  “What is it? You okay?”

  Rita snubbed out her cigarette. “I gotta go,” she said.

  the specialist

  AUGUST 2006

  Doubtful, that’s the vibe Rita got from the specialist. She saw it in the first cursory blue-eyed glance he bestowed upon her when they met in the corridor. He didn’t inquire about the black eye; in fact, he hardly seemed to notice it. Still, Rita could feel the force of his doubt as he leafed through his clipboard distractedly, his golden brows scrunched upon his tanned forehead: doubtful of her qualifications as a mother, as a woman, as a human being. Rita could tell that he blamed her for Curtis.

  “We think he understands us,” the specialist s
aid, not looking at Rita’s black eye. “And we know for certain he can hear us. The tests show he can hear us.” Here he heaved a sigh and shook his head doubtfully. “Frankly, I’m at a loss; we’re all at a loss. There’s no edema, no clotting — nothing to suggest trauma. Nothing in the EEG points to neurodegeneration. In short, we’re finding nothing to account for the deficits. The tests have told us all they can tell us, I think. I’d like to send him to a specialist.”

  “I thought you were the specialist.”

  “A different specialist,” said the specialist. “Someone nontraditional.” For the first time, he looked at Rita’s black eye, and Rita looked back at him defiantly, but the specialist did not shrink from her gaze; he merely shook his head doubtfully and made a notation on his clipboard.

  It was raining pitchforks when Rita emerged from the clinic. She sat in the driver’s seat of the Monte Carlo in a desolate stupor, listening to the rain assault the roof with a clattering both sharp and dull. She had no notion of where to go from there. Mechanically, she fired up the Monte Carlo and found herself heading in the direction of home.

  Rita tried to remember a time when home was not at the very least an ambiguous proposition. She had to go all the way back to the summer of her eleventh year, when her parents were experiencing “difficulties,” and Rita lived with her grandparents two miles off of the rez, near town. Only then, in the absence of her mother’s bitter silence, relieved of the eggshell uneasiness inspired by her stepfather, did Rita come to know something other than cold comfort. Only by subtraction had she ever experienced the ease and succor of domesticity. With her grandmother, Rita spent her days making lavender cakes, and mending clothing, and folding laundry with one eye on the television set, while her grandfather was at work canning. In the afternoons, Rita and her grandmother would drive to town on errands, with Rita’s grandmother sitting rigidly in the driver’s seat of the old red truck, all five feet of her, clutching the wheel fiercely. She looked like a potato doll, though she couldn’t have been fifty. That was 1979. Poco was all over the charts. Chic, Anita Ward, the Little River Band. Every afternoon in the truck, on the drive to Swains, or the grocery, or Coast to Coast, Rita hummed along with the radio. Her grandmother chimed in with smiling eyes for Eddie Rabbitt and Shalamar. Sometimes they drove as far as Jamestown, past the spit, beyond Happy Valley, around Sequim Bay, to the tribal center. Rita loved these drives. The world felt big and full of possibilities.

  Her grandfather never came home tired; he arrived smiling, an hour before sunset. Over dinner he talked of his day — whether or not it was full of adventure — and always, in his playful manner, he asked Rita about her day.

  “How many marriage proposals did my girl get today in town?” he’d say.

  “Only four,” Rita would say.

  “Four? Is that all?”

  “Okay, maybe five.”

  Her grandfather grinned at her, spearing a steamed carrot off his plate. “When am I going to meet these young men?”

  “I said no.”

  “All four times?”

  “Five.”

  “Good girl.”

  Every evening, while her grandmother tended to the dishes and made her grandfather’s lunch for the following day, Rita retired with her grandfather to the den, where they sat side by side on the green sofa and watched one television show together. Rita always got to pick the show — it didn’t matter to her grandfather what they watched. All of it seemed to amuse him.

  “You come down to Forks, sometime,” he’d say. “I’ll show you real dukes of Hazzard.” Or “Three is a crowd, and eight is more than enough, if you ask me. But … different strokes for different folks, I guess.”

  Other than those two and a half months with her grandparents, when had Rita ever known life to be reliable, predictable, comforting, something to sink into like a green sofa? The refrigerator was always deliciously full at her grandparents’ house. There existed in the lives of her grandparents a sense of the imperturbable, a sense that nothing could jeopardize the foundation on which their house was built — indeed, it had a foundation, it was a real house, not a metal box. Even the rain didn’t matter in the summer of ’79. The ten weeks went by in an instant, though Rita tried to preserve them for a lifetime. But the ruinous effects of time were stronger than nostalgia in the end.

  After that summer at her grandparents’, things only got worse at home. Rita’s presence made things tougher on everybody. Her mother seemed to resent her and did little to buffer her from her stepfather’s fury, which needed no impetus. There was no youth center on the rez in those days, no library, no bus to town, and soft-spoken Rita had few friends to offer her distraction. And like Curtis after her, she spent long hours in her tiny room, yearning for invisibility. Her stepfather could not be avoided, though, and as Rita approached womanhood, even her bedroom fell under his dominion. The doorknob was removed, so that Rita could not so much as dress without fear of intrusion. And as she blossomed into maturity, she took to wearing baggy sweatshirts and did not bother with cosmetic frivolities. Her voice had grown willowy soft. Some nights her stepfather would burst through the knobless door in his underwear and order Rita to make him a sandwich or fetch something from the carport, and always when she obeyed she could feel his eyes upon her.

  Finally, Rita left home at fifteen, following three months of sexual humiliation that, though it never evolved past the touch of a calloused hand upon a thigh or beer-stinking breath upon the back of her neck, was all the more humiliating because it made her feel ultimately unworthy of such attention.

  The decision to flee that afternoon in 1983 — following a particularly humiliating episode involving a tampon — had proved to be neither for better nor for worse in hindsight. Rita could not help but wonder how things might have turned out had she sought the safe haven of her grandparents’ instead of the patchwork support system of marginal personalities she’d woven together while planning her escape. Sometimes she slept in Trish Groves’s garage. Sometimes at Mal’s, a forty-year-old woodworker she’d befriended at Traylor’s Diner, where she often whiled away the late-night hours drinking coffee in a booth farthest from the window. Mal never laid a hand on her, but Rita often felt the force of his gaze. His desire was palpable from the sofa across the room, and though she slept, she never slept easily at Mal’s. She should have never dropped out of school. That decision, perhaps more than anything else, sealed her isolation. It forced her underground. Throughout her fifteenth year, Rita’s invisibility, like her survival, became a matter of guile. She avoided the rez altogether. But even two long miles away, avoiding authority in its many guises proved to be an unrelenting challenge in a town the size of P.B. She kept odd hours, avoided downtown, she walked down the least trafficked streets. The worst part of it all, though, was the fact that she was frightened to leave Port Bonita. What held her there?

  Rita’s meditations on the past were rudely interrupted when on the edge of town, the Monte Carlo stalled in front of Murray Motors, where Jerry Rhinehalter was standing in the showroom window with a Styrofoam cup of coffee gazing wall-eyed at the rain. The car stubbornly resisted numerous attempts at restarting, but there was nothing unusual about that. The old heap always started back up eventually. After applying a little finesse — a butterfly fluttering of the gas pedal, a pat of encouragement on the dashboard, a breathless willing for ignition — invariably it coughed and sputtered back to life with a cloud of black exhaust. But not this time. This time the Monte Carlo wouldn’t start.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE WHERE?” SAID Krig into his cell, releasing his Kilt Lifter long enough to check his wristwatch.

  “In front of Murray Motors. Across from Beehive Odor Control.”

  “Yeah, okay, I know where you’re at. I’ll be there in five.”

  “Thank you sooo much, Dave. Seriously, you don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

  Dave? Dave? His ears rang. Had she really said it? That had to mean something. A bo
undary had been crossed there, no doubt. “Not a prob,” he said. “See you in a sec.”

  An hour later, after Krig had called AAA and the Monte Carlo was well on its way to Rita’s, after they’d sat in the Goat for a half hour waiting for the tow truck, with the heat on so high that the furry dashboard was warm to the touch, listening quietly to Steve Winwood’s first solo album as the rain rolled down the windshield in sheets, Krig and Rita sipped weak coffee at Traylor’s, of all places, in one of the back booths of Rita’s teenage exile, a fact that Rita did not mention.

  It was dark now. Out the window, Rita watched the rain falling diagonally, illuminated by the purplish wavering light of the parking lot.

  “I honestly don’t know why,” she said. “Why do I keep making the same mistakes over and over? It’s all right there in front of me — or behind me. I can see it. But still I keep rushing blindly at it. And I make every possible excuse for myself. Habit. Laziness. Fear. I’m never ready to own the consequences. Oh, I’m sorry, Dave.”

  She liked that Dave always listened. He didn’t pretend to have all the answers; he didn’t feel like he had to offer commentary on every single thing. He just listened like he was interested; listened to her wax on about a thousand small fears, and a few very big ones; listened silently to her litany of regrets, her inventory of woes. Now and again — if she gave him the chance — Dave would emerge from all that silent nodding and say something unexpectedly sage. Again, on this occasion, he did not disappoint.