After an hour and fifteen minutes of searching, the C’mon Inn out on Expo Parkway looks like Xanadu with its tropical courtyard. The night clerk is wearing a blazer. He eyes us doubtfully one by one as we filter into the lobby through the double-glass doors. Indeed, we are a ragtag cabal. Without hesitation, I produce my wallet and attempt to book a two-room suite with on-demand cable and complimentary breakfast, fairly confident my card will not be declined. I paid the minimum two days before we left, which should leave $480—give or take—after the cash advance for the bond (the bulk of the money that was supposed to finance my end of the trip). But I’m only reckoning to pass the time, financial trifles cannot touch me tonight, nothing can disrupt the smooth surface of my stability.
“You okay?” Trev inquires as the clerk runs my card. “You look a little sweaty.”
“Must be the tropical air in here.”
“Your current address is at 1599 Madison, sir?” says the clerk.
“That’s the one.”
He punches keys like an automaton. “Sir, do you have a current driver’s license?”
“Of course.”
“One I could see?”
“Ah.” I fish my wallet out again, and surrender my license.
He glances at the license, punches another flurry of keys. Then another. I breathe deeply of the tropical air, admire the sturdy construction of the cedar mezzanine, cross my fingers in my pants pocket. The clerk punches and punches to the content of his bloodless little heart.
“You sure you’re okay?” says Trev.
“Tip-top.”
“You wanna sit down?”
“I’m great.”
The clerk stops punching, looks momentarily puzzled, then starts punching again.
“How’s the ribs?” says Trev.
“I can hardly feel them.”
“Sure you don’t wanna go to the doctor?”
“Oh no.”
Punch-punch-punch-punch-punch-punch-punch goes the clerk.
“Is there a problem?” I say.
“Mm,” he says.
“Mm?”
“Mm.”
Abruptly, he stops punching. He shakes his head solemnly and right clicks his mouse. Spinning slowly on his heels, he gingerly removes a sheet from the printer, holding it at some distance from his body, before surrendering it over the counter.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re all set. Elevator’s down the hall to the right.”
The accommodations are a considerable step up from Old Willard’s motor court. The master suite smells of fresh linens and window cleaner. The coat hangers, if not wood, are passable replicas of wood. The art on the cream-colored walls does not offend: resplendent fruit bowls and women with parasols. The dramatic center of the master suite is neither the quilted king mattress nor the dramatic floor-to-ceiling view of the rear parking lot but a pair of brown faux-leather La-Z-Boy recliners situated like rooks facing the flat-screen TV.
Dot steps around me, trailing the fruity scent of perfume, and immediately plops her bag down in the center of the floor and flops into one of the recliners. Trev buzzes straight for the remote on the nightstand.
“Hey, the lamps aren’t bolted down,” he says.
Peaches isn’t exactly sure how to proceed. She lingers in the doorway, holding one of her gigantic suitcases.
“There’s two queens in the other room,” I say. “Dot, you take the other one. Trev, you’re good with sharing, right?”
“That’s cool.”
“I can sleep on the floor,” Peaches says. “I don’t mind.”
I swing open the door to the adjoining room. “Nope. You and Little Elton are in here.”
Peaches waddles through, one hand clutching her belly and the other dragging her klunky suitcase. Poor kid. She must be exhausted.
“Do you want your sweatshirt back?” she says.
“You can give it back when we get to your mom’s.”
“You don’t mind if I go to sleep, do you? It’s just been such a . . . and I’m so . . .”
“Of course not.”
She’s still clutching the suitcase like she’s afraid to let go of it. I’m surprised she’s not carrying Elton’s, too.
I step in and pry the bag from her clutches, swinging it up onto the dresser.
“You get some sleep,” I say. “I’ll tell ’em to keep the television down.”
“I can sleep through anything,” she says.
“Of course, you can.”
“Good night,” she says, sweetly. “Happy birthday.”
“Good night,” I say, closing the door behind me.
the calm
With Peaches sound asleep, and Trev and Dot hypnotized by the big screen, I don my Speedo in the bathroom, snatch a towel off the rack, fish my cell phone out of my pants pocket, and retire alone to the chlorinated air of the atrium. The Jacuzzi is empty, as is the adjoining exercise room. Sinking neck deep into the warm effervescence, a calm envelops me. I should know better than to trust it. My ribs should be reminder enough, if not my current financial and legal status, or the fact that I’m harboring a teenage runaway, a very pregnant unwed mother, and a kid whose heart could give out any minute. I know I’ve lost my mind. But I’m not concerned, because it’s the first thing I’ve lost in a long time that actually feels good.
When it seems that nothing can touch me, that nothing can disturb the imperturbable calm, twin headlights slice through the atrium. Through the window I see the Skylark swinging a wide arc in the parking lot. And just like that, the putrid stink of crossed wires smolders deep in my sinuses, and the electrical fire is raging in my skull again. I’m out of the water before I even know it. I’m dashing barefoot through the atrium, clutching my cell phone like a grenade. Bursting out the side door with a metallic clatter, I charge madly across the parking lot in my Speedo with murder in my heart. I’ve got an insatiable hunger for flesh. I’ll devour this guy. I’ll chew him up and spit him out in Janet’s face. This time I don’t charge straight at him, but cut a tight angle along the side of the building to head him off at the exit, sprinting right past the lobby. I jump a small hedge, nearly slip on the grassy divider, break stride with an awkward lurch, but manage to keep my feet long enough for something to pop near the base of my neck. I careen forward, go briefly airborne, hit the sidewalk, and skid to a stop on my knees and palms, just as the Skylark swings onto the thoroughfare.
Peeling myself from the pavement, I stagger to my feet, fighting for breath. My palms are hamburger, embedded with gravel. My knees are bleeding. I can hardly move my neck. Standing at the curb beneath the glare of the streetlight, my naked body steams in the night air, as the Skylark’s taillights recede.
I fall to my knees. Sobbing, I dial Janet.
She answers on the second ring.
“Call him off, please,” I say. “It’s over. You win.”
“What are you talking about? Who?”
“Please, Janet. I give up. I can’t take it anymore.”
“What happened? You sound like a crazy person. Are you crying?”
I try to pinch off the grief in my throat, but I can’t, and it only makes me angry. “Goddamnit, none of this is my fault, Janet!”
“Ben, I’m hanging up.”
“Where were you that day at the duck pond, Janet? Where were you for the bumps and bruises?”
The air goes out of her like a ruptured balloon, and there follows a stunned silence. I huddle on the curb and grab my knees for warmth, teeth clacking, as I press the phone to my ear in the terrible silence and wish that my heart would stop beating. Faintly, I can hear Janet whimpering on the other end. They are the whimpers of a dying animal, slow and agonizing, the whimpers of something begging to be put out of its misery.
Cars hurtle by on Expo Parkway, a blur of lights and a steady thrum. I don’t know what day it is. I clench my eyes and stare at the back of the lids; the hum of the traffic washes over me, and I hope that when I open my eyes I will be somewhere el
se. Someone honks as they speed past.
“Pervert!” they holler.
confusion
The last time I took the kids to see the ducks at Battle Point, Janet wasn’t with us. It was late in spring, and the clinic was busy as usual. For the third week in a row, Janet didn’t take her long lunch that Friday. She had a one o’clock with a rich lady’s terrier. Or a tabby with a tapeworm. Or maybe it was a mixup in billing.
The treetops are swaying in a stiff breeze. The sky is mottled, as low clouds hurry east. Jodi is asleep in his car seat on the lawn beside me as Piper wades in the reedy shallows to the top of her red rubber boots. Before I can scold her for standing in the water (she knows the rules), she backpedals onto the shore.
“Something’s wrong,” she proclaims, pointing across the water, where she’s intent on a lone duck drifting along the far bank. The hen is brown and gray but for a brilliant blue blaze on each wing. One of her wings is disfigured, bowed unnaturally above the radius. She flops the appendage uselessly, batting the water, as she drifts toward the rest of the clutch, grouped like an armada on north edge of the pond.
“Can we help him, Daddy?” she says.
“It’s a her.”
“Can we bring her to Mommy to fix?”
“Mommy only works on pets, honey.”
“What if we keep her as a pet?”
“It’s not that simple, sweetie.”
“Why not?”
But before I can address the complexities further, a riot of furious squawking erupts from the far bank. Suddenly, a swarm of four or five drakes rise from the clutch in a blur, descending upon the injured hen. They begin nagging and pecking at her.
“Daddy, what are they doing?”
“I can’t tell.”
“They’re hurting her!”
The green-headed mob drives the hen to the shallows, where they begin stomping her in concert with their webbed feet, forcing her head beneath the water time and again. In all my duck-watching days, I’ve never seen such a thing.
“Make then stop, Daddy! Daddy, make them stop!”
I jump into action. “Keep an eye on your brother,” I say. “Don’t you budge.”
I circle the area madly, looking for something to hurl, a rock, a stick, anything to run interference. And when I can’t find anything, I sprint down the asphalt walkway, around the bend toward the far bank.
“Watch your brother!” I shout over my shoulder. “Don’t move!”
My sudden arrival on the scene, chest heaving, arms waving madly, triggers a winged explosion, as the drakes scatter in the air all at once, disrupting the surface of the entire pond. Squishing my way through the swampy shallows toward the injured hen, I find that I’m too late. She floats in the shallows at the edge of the reeds, ringed by a garland of gray feathers, her lifeless body bobbing slightly on the choppy surface. Piper is knee deep in the water on the other side, slump-shouldered, head hanging. Behind her, swept up in the wind, I can hear Jodi wailing in his car seat.
On the drive home, Piper presses her face to the side window, gazing dully at the trees through tear-streaked eyes. I reckon aloud in an attempt to soothe her. I reckon that the hen must have been very old and very sick and very injured, which is no comfort at all. I reckon that her suffering is over, though I cannot justify the existence of the suffering in the first place. I reckon that there’s a logic to the brutality of the universe, but I can’t account for that, either. Nobody can. All I can do is buy Piper an ice-cream cone on the way home.
the daze
I’m only dimly aware of the desk clerk gaping at me from behind his computer terminal as dazedly I trudge across the tropical courtyard toward the elevator in my Speedo. But for an icy sting burning distantly in either palm, and the fact that I can’t move my neck, I am only marginally aware of my body. Mechanically, I summon the elevator, rocking slightly on my heels as I wait. Only one way to go from here. When the doors lurch open, the cleaning woman pushes a linen hamper out of the elevator, lowering her eyes as she passes me.
The elevator is restful in the way of a tomb. Gazing at the mirrored sidewall, a face looks back at me, slack, colorless, eyes open like a dead man. The inside of my head hums with the trilling of heat-dazed crickets. Arriving at the second floor, I step out into the foyer, ponder left or right, choose left, and plod down the carpeted corridor past rooms 214 and 212 to room 210. Clutching my cell phone, I am without card key and without towel, but when I knock on the door Dot opens it.
“Whoa, what happened to you?”
“I fell.”
She takes me by the wrist and coaxes me into the room, where she seats me on the edge of the bed.
“Dude,” says Trev, muting the TV. He buzzes toward me around the foot of the bed.
Dot promptly proceeds to the bathroom, returns momentarily with a wet washcloth, and begins dabbing my knees.
“There’s a first-aid kit in the big black bag,” instructs Trev. “Dude, what the hell? You’re a mess.”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, really. You’re a mess.”
Dot rummages around in the black bag. “What does it look like? I can’t find it.”
“Left side pocket,” I intone.
Awakened no doubt by my entrance, Peaches emerges from the adjoining room, sleepy-eyed, wrapped in a blanket.
“What’s wrong?”
“He fell,” Trev and Dot say in unison.
“Oh no. Poor thing.” Peaches lets her blanket drop to the floor and kneels at the foot of the bed in men’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt, both of which look too clean to have ever belonged to Elton. Prying my clenched hands open, she inspects my shredded palms.
Dot returns with the first-aid kit. “Ouch,” she says of my palms.
“Are there tweezers in there?” says Peaches.
Dot spreads the kit open on his lap and Trev begins clumsily picking through its contents for tweezers. When he locates them, he fishes them out on the third attempt and dangles them over his lap for Peaches, who begins cutting away the ravaged skin of my palms, blotting the scraped portions with hydrogen peroxide and a washcloth, wincing herself as though she can feel the sting. Then, mindfully, she applies ointment, dresses my palms in gauze, and wraps them with athletic tape.
Dot begins cleaning up my bloody knees, plucking out the gravel.
“Stay still,” she says. “This may hurt.”
It doesn’t hurt. Not like I want it to. I wish it would. I deserve to hurt. But all I can do is sit on the edge of the bed, my damp Speedo soaking the duvet, gazing numbly at the big screen, where the Weather Channel plays silently. It’s sixty-one degrees in Albuquerque, fifty-seven in Lincoln. I make no move to answer my buzzing cell phone. After a moment, it goes silent. Almost immediately, Trev’s phone begins ringing. He arches his back and hoists his arm, then lowers his hand like a scoop into his side pouch. By the fourth ring, the device is in his clutches, and he raises it unsteadily to his ear.
“Oh hey, Mom,” he says, cautioning the girls to keep quiet with a finger to his lips. “Great . . . Yeah, Butte was great . . . No, we didn’t have time . . . ”
Trev wheels toward the bathroom and stops beneath the threshold, where he winks at me.
“Oh, he’s in the shower,” he says. “Yeah, uh huh . . . I did . . . Yeah, I’m about to . . . ”
I have to admit, he makes a pretty convincing liar. Calm. Collected. Cool as a ticket taker. His performance is almost enough to make me smile. But then I imagine Janet, slumping on the edge of a bed somewhere in Portland as she wonders whether she failed her children. And for once I hope Jim Sunderland is there beside her.
the long haul
Eight bucks buys a decent breakfast in Missoula. Twelve buys a thick foam cervical collar at the Missoula Rite-Aid.
“You want a helmet with that?” says the girl at the register.
“Very funny.”
“You look like the Michelin Man,” says Trev upon my return to the van.
&n
bsp; Just east of Missoula, the valley tapers abruptly like a funnel, and the mountains close in around us, broad-faced and sudden, just as the interstate begins its dogleg to the south through Bonner, then Turah, then Clinton. Now and again a slice of the Blackfoot River shimmers along the roadside, cut crosswise with a rusting train trestle. Here a fat kid in a skiff. Some guy in a broken down truck. A barking dog lashed to a tree. A waft of steel guitar in the air.
The weather continues to baffle. It is eighty-one degrees at 9:30 a.m. I’m driving with the window down, my neck sweating profusely beneath my neck brace. The itching is unbearable. My rib cage aches. My mangled hands and knees, freshly dressed by the girls before breakfast, are mummified in athletic tape, so that I’ve little choice but to grip the wheel cautiously, as though it’s hot. We have a gruesome day of travel in front of us if we intend to make West Yellowstone by evening.
Dot is cheerful between over-the-shoulder glances out the rear window. She has yet to utter a word about dropping her off in Butte. I wonder if Trev knows something I don’t. The Skylark, which picked us up not two blocks from the C’mon Inn and has abandoned all stealth and pretense, now pursues us boldly like a starving wolf. The driver is of little concern to me, whoever he is. I have nothing left to fear. Any harm the stranger may wish to visit upon me would be welcomed at this point.
We cleave our way through the mountains until the interstate dips into a wide basin brimming with blue sky, broken by dusty roads and rocky saddles strung out along the southern horizon. This is our first real glimpse of the famous big-sky country to come, and I couldn’t care less. For all its grandeur, the landscape does not move me. And why should it? The sky may be big, it may be blue and limitless and full of promise, but it’s also far away. Really, it’s just an illusion. I’ve been wasting my time. We’ve all been wasting our time. What good is all this grandeur if it’s impermanent, what good all of this promise if it’s only fleeting? Who wants to live in a world where suffering is the only thing that lasts, a place where every single thing that ever meant the world to you can be stripped away in an instant? And it will be stripped away, so don’t fool yourself. If you’re lucky, your life will erode slowly with the ruinous effects of time or recede like the glaciers that carved this land, and you will be left alone to sift through the detritus. If you are unlucky, your world will be snatched out from beneath you like a rug, and you’ll be left with nowhere to stand and nothing to stand on. Either way, you’re screwed. So why bother? Why grunt and sweat and weep your way through the myriad obstacles, why love, dream, care, when you’re only inviting disaster? I’m done answering the call of whippoorwills, the call of smiling faces and fireplaces and cozy rooms. You won’t find me building any more nests among the rose blooms. Too many thorns.