Miss Wyoming Miss Wyoming Miss Wyoming

by Douglas Coupland

  And then one day, somewhere in Colorado, it all stopped. Her head cleared, and it was as if the months of hell had been merely a fevered patch. Though she had lost her husband, her house, almost all of her possessions, she felt—free.

  She took a room by the week over by the Cheyenne air force base, where weekly rentals were common. She changed her name to Fawn because she saw a fawn behind her rental unit one morning, and Heatherington because that was the fake I.D. name they gave her in the back room of Don’s old sports bar haunt as she exchanged her Piaget wristwatch for a new identity.

  Good old Duran had been spot on about Marilyn’s needing a skill not tethered to beauty to help her through her life. She resumed including him in her prayers, when she prayed, which wasn’t too often. He’d been dead for maybe fifteen years. In 1983 she’d read that he’d whacked his car into the side of a dairy van. She said, “Hey Durrie, at least I sound like a lady on TV announcing the news. Sleep tight, honey.”

  Marilyn’s clerical and organizational skills, acquired so many years back, landed her a job at a company called Calumet Systems, which, as far as she could tell, built UFOs for the government. Nobody there recognized “Fawn” as Marilyn, despite her recently televised reunion. She’d morphed into somebody utterly new. She was now a cropped brunette with pitted skin who bought her Dacron frocks off the rack that in a previous life she wouldn’t have deigned to use to wipe crud off the snow tires in the garage. She was cool and serene and proud to help her government manufacture UFOs at Calumet.

  This went on for a year. She assembled bits and pieces of daily necessities from thrift shops, and she went out once a month to see a movie with two of the girls from Calumet, who ribbed her about her BMW, which she said her brother gave to her. She watched TV. She was happy because she figured she could live this unassuming life until she died and she wouldn’t ever again have to put so damnable much energy into being a complicated person with tangled relationships that only seemed to wear her out in the end.

  She typed like a woodpecker, even with long fingernails. She was so good at it that a man from a company outside Calumet was brought in to witness her skills for himself, to identify her “metrics.” He praised Marilyn for her low error rate and he noted her biggest weakness, her frequent inability to capitalize sentences that began with the letter T. The man had smiled at her just before he left, and it was then that Marilyn intuited that he knew she might not be Fawn Heatherington. He’d asked her if she’d ever worked anywhere else before, and she’d said she hadn’t. This had to seem like a bald-faced lie, but it actually wasn’t. Her job with Mr. Jordan, the Spam Man, had been in another era altogether, and her only other typing-based work was time spent in a satellite office of the Trojan nuclear plant, raising money for Susan’s gowns.

  That same night the fire in her body came back again, and it was worse than before, possibly because its reemergence seemed like such a sick joke and she’d worked so hard to erase Marilyn Colgate, the Burning Woman. The loneliness that she thought she had so effectively thwarted began to rip apart her insides. She phoned in sick to Calumet. She screamed and wept in her car, and drove to California with a plan to beg for Susan’s forgiveness, though she knew this was only dreaming.

  She drove past the Cape Cod house on Prestwick and parked in front of a house down the street. It was garbage night. Nobody saw her. She picked up Susan’s small zinc garbage can and threw it into her car’s back seat. She drove to a Pay-Less lot past the Beverly Center and dissected the contents of the can: two nonfat yogurt tubs, an unread paper, three Q-Tips and a phone bill with thirty-eight long-distance calls to the same number in the San Fernando Valley, plus a receipt for a jungle gym delivered to a Valley address. Bingo.

  She went to a pay phone and dialed the Valley number, and a man’s voice answered, “Hello?”

  Marilyn said she was from the company that had delivered the jungle gym and wanted to see if they were satisfied customers.

  “Eugene adores it—lives on it, practically. And it really does help pull together the whole back yard.”

  “That’s good, then,” Marilyn said. “Would Eugene be needing anything else for the back yard?”

  “Oh you relentless sales folks. Not now, but he’s getting a real thing going for airplanes, so don’t be surprised if we order the Junior Sopwith Camel in a half year or so.”

  “We’ll look forward to it.”

  The call ended. Marilyn went into the Pay-Less and bought a foam 747 made in Taiwan. She drove out to Randy’s house, parked down the street and slept there overnight. In the morning she carried the plane around to the edge of the house and there saw the most beautiful child she’d ever laid eyes on—a child of almost celestial beauty. He looked so much the way Susan had as a child, and like someone else—a face she couldn’t quite place. Suddenly she knew something about where Susan had spent her year of amnesia.

  Marilyn wanted desperately to hug this child. She held up the 747 and made it loop up and down with her arm until Eugene Junior noticed her. He skipped delightedly her way. Two minutes later, with Marilyn in tears, they drove away from the jungle gym in her BMW.

  Randy had been folding laundry in the living room, and though it had been less than five minutes since he’d last checked on the child, his radar blipped. Something was wrong. He looked in the back yard and his spine froze. Then he saw the car pull out of the driveway. He phoned Susan, just back from her walk with John Johnson. Before he could speak, she burst out, “Randy! I just got a ride home from the cops—and I met this guy—”

  Randy interrupted and told her what had happened.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  The police dropped Susan off at home. She made a pot of coffee and phoned an old TV contact, Ruiz, now at the Directors’ Guild. She had asked for John Johnson’s home number, but Ruiz was hesitant. Susan reminded him that she was the one who arranged for his sister’s nose job in ’92, and so he gave her the number. The pen Susan was using had dried out. She was repeating John’s number over and over, searching for something to write with, when the phone rang. It was Randy with news of the kidnapping.

  After she hung up, she stood amid her cheerful anonymous kitchen and her skin no longer felt the room’s air-conditioned chill. Her ears roared with so much blood that she went deaf. The sink and the potted fern in front of her seemed unconnected, like a convenience store’s surveillance camera image. Only her sense of taste seemed to still work, albeit the wrong way, as tingling coppery bolts shot forward from her tonsils. She’d been waiting for a moment like this since she severed connections with her mother in the Culver City legal office amid the shards of Gregory Peck’s ashtray. She’d always felt that nobody ever gets off an emotional hook as easily as she had.

  The agitated chemical soup in her bloodstream thinned slightly. Her senses returned to her and she ran to the hallway, grabbed her purse and fished through it quickly: keys, wallet, ID, cell phone, photos and mints—that’s all she’d need. She dashed out the door and into her car parked in the driveway, leaving the house unlocked and the coffeemaker still brewing. The sun had set and rush hour was almost over, but the Hollywood Freeway was packed five cars abreast, as tightly as a movie audience, all flowing at sixty-two miles an hour. She phoned Randy, and both of them screamed into their receivers, Randy demanding to call the police, Susan ordering him not to. They entered a cell hole and the line cut out. Susan called back, but her budget cell phone’s drained battery began beeping. She told Randy she’d call again once she had recharged it in the cigarette lighter, which would take about three hours, by which time she would be near the California–Nevada border.

  “Randy, it’s not your fault. She’d have gotten into Fort Knox if she’d wanted to.”

  “But Susan, why are you—”

  Vzzzt zzzst . . .

  “She’ll be back in Wyoming, Randy. She wants this on her turf. It’s how she—”

  Dzzzzzt . . . vvvvdt . . .

  The phone died, and Susan was
alone with her thoughts in the car, driving east, seeing only a few stars and a few jet lights in the sky.

  She was furious with her mother, but she was also furious with herself for having been so vengeful and stupid in Cheyenne. She’d been so full of pride, twisting the financial knife, and most stupidly of all, mentioning grandchildren. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Something in her voice and eyes had given Marilyn the clue. Dammit. She slapped the steering wheel and felt nauseous with worry. She turned on the radio, but it made her head buzz to hear the outrageous opinions and meaningless chitchat that drenched the sky. She turned it off.

  She looked at the road signs. She was nearing Nevada. Randy said Marilyn had a one-hour lead, and Susan knew her mother was a speed demon, so she was likely a fair distance down the Interstate.

  Susan looked back over the past year for other clues as to why this craziness was happening. The biggest hint was that after Susan’s return to Los Angeles from Erie, not once had she seen Marilyn in the news—either on TV or in print, aside from the endlessly replayed hugging scene on the front steps of Marilyn’s house. Susan knew Marilyn’s media embargo was her way of communicating by not communicating—of letting Susan know she was up for a challenge. Susan mentally tried to imagine the amount of money Marilyn lost by being silent and had a grudging admiration for her strength. Why couldn’t her mother use her strength to clip newspaper articles and knit baby booties like everybody else’s mother?

  She looked back over the day. She sighed and tried to hook her arm over the back seat to snag a bottle of orange juice in the back. The car swerved, another car honked and she pulled over to the shoulder and breathed deeply.

  She’d met John Johnson only that afternoon, what seemed like forever ago. It was the first real connection she’d made in so long. He was as colorful as guys got, with a cordiality and freshness she doubted he was even aware he possessed. And he’d seen her face in a vision! It was so sweet. Normally she’d have thought this was just a manufactured come-on line, but with him it wasn’t. And Susan was moved that she could represent an image of . . . cleanliness to somebody else, somebody with whom she seemed to share such a unique set of experiences. And with John she’d also had that sexy charge-right-into-conversation feeling. And what fun it would be again to have a man’s razor and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet.

  The next time John would hear of her it’d be in some tawdry, cheesy tabloid slugfest she’d always dreaded, with Eugene Junior used as a pawn. Randy was right. She ought to have brought the child into society more quickly. What were the rules on these things? If she told about Eugene, would she be tried as some sort of arsonist? If she had DNA tests done, proving the child was definitively hers, would people suspect Eugene Junior was the child of rape? The scenarios spun out of control in her head. Could she be deemed unfit to parent? Could the child be taken away from her?

  Randy. The phone was charged. She called; he was in the Valley house bathroom vomiting with fear, guilt and worry beside Dreama on the cordless phone. They wanted to come meet Susan, but Susan said, no, to stay there in case Marilyn called the house. Dreama was doing what she could to calm Randy.

  Susan drove through the night. By dawn her eyes were bloodshot and stung in the sunlight. Somewhere in central Utah she bought apple juice and a ham sandwich at a gas station. She ate, realized she was going to collapse if she continued right away, and took a tranquilizer from her purse, garnering a fitful spate of sleep in the parking lot. The cell phone jolted her awake. It was Dreama and Randy calling for news.

  She sped off again. Her map told her there were 1,200 miles between Los Angeles and Cheyenne. She spent hours dividing miles-per-hour into 1,200. It always seemed to come out to around a fifteen-hour haul. When she factored in the nap, she calculated she’d arrive in Cheyenne around 7 A.M. local time. In Utah her engine died. She lost more than half a day there. She arrived in Cheyenne at sunup, ragged and starving. She showed up at Marilyn’s old house, rang the doorbell, ready for war, and the new tenants answered, a pleasant young couple, the Elliots, getting ready for work.

  “Your mother moved out a year ago,” said Mrs. Elliot, Loreena. “We get people knocking here maybe once a week still, looking for either her or you. We certainly never thought we’d see . . . you here.” Loreena didn’t mean any disrespect. Susan could only imagine how bad it looked, arriving in the morning not even knowing where her mother lived.

  They offered Susan breakfast, and she ate in the kitchen, which was eerily the same as it had been the morning of the reunion. Loreena offered a bath, but Susan declined, far too frazzled to lather and rinse her hair. Loreena offered her a clean outfit, which Susan did accept. While changing in the upstairs bathroom, she could hear a muffled conversation downstairs. Susan was paranoid about the police being brought into the matter. When she returned to the kitchen, she confessed that she and her mother had stopped speaking, but now she needed to connect with her. The husband, Norm, said the situation reminded him of his sister and his mother, and Loreena nodded.

  Susan and Loreena combed the phone books for all possible variations of Marilyn’s surnames, maiden names, middle names and pet names, but their work yielded nothing. Susan then methodically scoured every street in the city—it was just small enough to do so—looking for a maroon BMW. After the sun had set, she conceded defeat.

  She phoned Randy, who was clomping about the Valley house packing things up, anticipating Susan’s request for him to drive to Wyoming with Dreama.

  Susan assembled a degree of composure and thanked the Elliots, then spent the next twenty-odd hours in her car driving around Cheyenne. She phoned Randy’s cell and told him she’d drive to Laramie, to the west, and meet them there.

  When they showed up, Susan collapsed into their arms in tears. She ditched her car in a gas station, and they drove in Randy’s minivan back to Cheyenne. Randy and Dreama tried to calmly assess the situation and tried to decide what to do next.

  What confused Susan amid this was news of John Johnson’s appearance at both Randy’s house and then at Dreama’s. This stopped her thinking dead, as if she’d been slapped.

  “He’s not a creep,” Susan said. “He just . . . isn’t.”

  “I never said he was, Susan,” Dreama said. “But he is a four-digit prime.”

  “Not numerology. Not now, Dreama.” Randy was cranky from the drive.

  “He was looking for me?” Susan said. “He doesn’t even know about Eugene Junior.” Susan mulled this over: John was looking for her. Once again her mind hit a wall. But now she had what felt like a new battery placed inside of her. Someone was looking for her—someone she herself had tried to locate. She looked out the window at the prairies. Suddenly they didn’t feel quite so large and terrifying. Suddenly they didn’t seem like a place in which she could be hopelessly lost.

  On the outskirts of Cheyenne, Susan took her turn at the steering wheel of the minivan.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Susan was holding Eugene Junior on the concrete ledge beside the propane tank. Her body felt deboned with relief, but the child showed no signs of anything other than simple pleasure.

  Randy had gone to calm the Exxon duty manager’s nerves, worried that this sudden burst of people might constitute a situation of some sort. Ivan’s cell phone rang; he answered it, began speaking Japanese, and withdrew inside the rental car. Dreama hovered by Susan, while John, Ryan and Vanessa crept up to the opened rest room door and stared in at the harshly lit, unkempt sprawl that was Marilyn, slouched on the toilet lid. Her eyes were wide and red.

  “Marilyn?” John said into the echoey tiled room. Marilyn didn’t respond. “Are you okay?”

  The back of Marilyn’s head rested against the wall. She turned toward John at the door.

  “Can I get you anything—Tylenol? Food? A blanket?”

  “No,” Marilyn said. “It’s okay. There’s nothing I want. Really. Truly. Nothing.” She looked at John and saw a resemblance to Susan’s child, which was, in a wa
y, a resemblance to Eugene Lindsay. “You’re the father?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “He’s a beautiful child,” she said.

  “Sure is.”

  “Susan was more beautiful, though. She was. She was like a Franklin Mint souvenir figurine. People would gasp.” Marilyn then glared at Vanessa. “You. How’d you catch me? I knew the jig was up when you talked about the curtains. You don’t look like the curtains type.”

  Vanessa gaped, unable for once to come up with a reply. Marilyn cut her thinking short. “To hell with it. I don’t want to know. It’d probably scare the shit out of me anyway. I knew I shouldn’t have stopped at Calumet for my bonus check.” She lit a cigarette. John thought she looked like a drag queen. “So what’s the deal—are you guys cops or something?”

  “No. We’re friends of Susan,” John said.

  Randy had just come back and told everyone that no police or state troopers would be forthcoming.

  “I ought to be in jail,” said Marilyn. She turned her head to look at the graffiti-free wall.

  “There’s not going to be any charges, Marilyn,” John said.

  The Interstate traffic punctuated the sky with its dull Doppler-shifted roars. John remembered back to less than a week before—when he was the schedule-obsessed robot watching the CNN six o’clock news—and he remembered Doris’s yelling at him to cough up the goods on his solo road trip. John put his arms out to Marilyn.

  Marilyn was disdainful. “Give me one good reason I should even come near you.”

  John thought a second and remembered Vanessa’s telling him about Marilyn’s polyandry. What was his name? He remembered and blurted out, “Duran Deschennes would have wanted you to be close to Susan.”

  Marilyn let out a thimbleful of air, and her face lost all harshness, briefly becoming young, and John could see the beauty she had obviously once been. She tottered over to him, as though walking on a wobbling dock. They went outside, where she and John sat down beside a transformer box and some scrub pines. “You know, I’ve been broke before, Marilyn,” he said. Marilyn nodded. “And I’ve been jobless before, too.” She nodded again. “But mostly I’ve had nobody to join for dinner at six-thirty every night,” he said. “That was the worst of it for me—sunset—six-thirty P.M. and nobody for dinner.”