by Lily Tuck
How many times already had she walked down the highway and met Mike at the roadhouse, drunk a few beers, then gone back with him to make love? Mike was younger than she was, Mike had never had children, and what Mike said for him had started as no big deal—Penny’s cute ass on top of Thunderbolt was what he said he had noticed first—was different now, and the funny part, Mike also said, was that he really loved Penny and he did not want her to leave. In the distance, beyond the highway, Penny could hear dogs barking but Mike said they sounded more like coyotes to him; Mike had his arm around her and he squeezed Penny tighter to him.
At the Nevada state line, the inspection station official made Mike stop the truck. He made Mike and Penny step out of the truck on to the highway while he looked inside. He asked Mike if he was carrying any fruit, any plants.
“The bastard,” Mike said when he drove on again.
“What were they really looking for? Drugs?” Although the day was warm, Penny shivered. Who would explain if she was killed in a car crash with Mike? What would, for instance, Inge tell Mason?
A little over one hundred years ago, Penny began, to change the subject, the eighty-nine people who were to make up the Donner Party left Springfield, Illinois, for California, and Penny said she could almost see the twenty covered wagons drawn by oxen filled with provisions—beans, potatoes, squash, eggs packed in cornmeal, rice, tea, coffee—and the milk cows—funny too what had stayed in her head: to make butter, all the women needed to do was put the cream in the churn and let the jolting wagons do the rest.
“Are you listening?” Penny interrupted herself.
“Yeah, butter. Go on.” Mike put one hand inside Penny’s leg.
“No, not now,” Penny said.
Crossing the plains, Penny continued, the men were able to fish, shoot game. After killing a buffalo, often they would just slit the animal’s throat and extract the tongue, leaving the rest of the buffalo meat. At night, after supper, they played games, danced, sang; occasionally there was an accident—Penny was warming up to her story—the time a pony fell and crushed a young boy’s leg and they nearly had to amputate. Another time, a knife fight broke out between two men and resulted in the death of one of them. There was the danger of Indian attacks—luckily, the Paiute Indians had a reputation for being lazy. Another potential danger, Penny said, was bears; but the bears were about to go into hibernation which meant that they were full and sleepy. Everyone knew that the worst time to meet a bear was in the—
“Hell, you are making all this up,” Mike said.
“No, no, it’s true. I read it somewhere.”
“You read it where? Not everything you read in books is true, you know.”
“Well, I might be wrong about the bears hibernating, but the rest of it is true. I know,” Penny said.
“I nearly ran into a bear once,” Mike said. “Come to think of it, it was in November, and this bear cannot have been sleepy, but he sure must have been full.”
“Where?” Penny said.
“In Wyoming. I was out looking for some calves that were missing. I found them all right,” Mike continued. “A bear had gotten two of them—you should have seen them, it was like he had split them right down the middle and it couldn’t have been more than an hour or two since he had done it either, their innards were lying exposed on the ground, all torn up, half-eaten. It was pitiful. I couldn’t get my horse closer than fifty yards of them. The smell of bear was too fresh, I guess. Too strong.”
“Oh,” Penny said.
Due to unforeseen difficulties crossing the Humboldt Sink, after a pause Penny had resumed, the Donner Party did not reach the Sierra Nevadas until mid-October. Already, there was snow on the ground. Food was getting scarce, the oxen could not get enough grass to eat and were getting weak. Twice the Donner Party tried to cross the pass, twice the deep snow drove them back. By November, Penny told Mike, the Donner Party’s food had run out completely—they had eaten everything including their pet dogs.
At Truckee, Mike and Penny turned off the highway; the site where the Donner Party had spent their horrific winter was off route 40; across the way, there was a convenience store. Mike said he wanted to go and buy a few beers. He also wanted to buy some cold cuts, he said, some bread, some cheese. He and Penny could have a picnic.
“Did you know that nearly half of the Donner Party died?” Penny said when Mike caught up with her. She was standing in front of a big rock with a plaque on it. The plaque listed all the names of the members of the Donner Party. “Only forty-seven out of the eighty-nine people survived.”
Mike held out a bag of groceries, a blanket he had taken from the back of his truck.
“We can sit on this,” he said.
“Hard to imagine, isn’t it? But you never know to what lengths people will go if they are starving to death, do you?” Penny said.
Mike said, “That’s right. I got bread, salami, two kinds of cheese. They were out of Coors so I got a six-pack of Millers.”
Penny said, “I can’t imagine—where would you even begin? With an arm? A leg?”
Mike said, “I left the truck in the parking lot. There is nothing in it to steal—nothing but the truck itself, I guess.”
Penny laughed. “Who would want to steal your old truck?” Then she said, “That reminds me of a story my husband, Mason—no, I mean my ex-husband, Mason—told me about this farmer in France.”
Mike said, “France? I’ve been to Canada.”
“The story is about this French farmer during the war and each week the French farmer rides his bicycle past the same German officer and the farmer is carrying this big sack. And every week, the German officer stops the farmer and makes him get off his bicycle while he inspects the sack. The sack is filled with potatoes, turnips, cabbages—whatever—and of course the German officer is convinced that the French farmer is smuggling something. Each week, the German officer does the same thing: he makes the French farmer get off the bicycle and he goes through the sack to make sure. This goes on during the entire war, and no matter how hard he looks, the German officer never finds anything in the French farmer’s sack.”
“I bet I’ve heard this story before,” Mike said, handing Penny a beer he had opened.
“Wait. Let me finish.” Penny took a sip of the beer. “The war ends and just before the German officer goes back to Germany, he sees the French farmer one more time and he says to him: Listen, this business with you every week with that big sack is not going to let me sleep nights. Now that the war is over and it no longer matters, do me a favor and tell me what it was you were smuggling. And you know what the French farmer answers?” Penny asks Mike.
“Bicycles.”
Sitting with his long legs crossed on the blanket next to the rock with the plaque on it, Mike was cutting up the salami. He handed Penny a slice on the point of his pocketknife and Penny shook her head. She said she was not that hungry and anyway, she had decided all of a sudden to become a vegetarian. Mike laughed and said that Penny had to eat to keep up her strength, and Mike also said he was not kidding around as he waved the slice of salami on the point of his knife closer to Penny’s mouth. Again Penny shook her head, she made the neighing sound of a horse balking at crossing a bridge or balking at something and Mike took both her arms in his free hand and held them together so hard that Penny had to open her mouth and let Mike force-feed her the salami slice. When he let go of her arms, she was planning to spit the salami out, but Mike had second-guessed her. Still holding on to Penny’s arms, he said to her: First, chew it down good.
In the motel that night, Penny said she had a headache. The room had two beds in it and Penny and Mike each slept in one of them. Penny pulled up the covers over her head while Mike watched television. She could hear the voices on a talk show, and she could see the glow of the set through the synthetic material of the bedspread. Also, she could hear the sound of the trucks on the highway. The motel was situated at the bottom of a hill and all the trucks changed into a low
er gear right outside the window.
The snow at Donner Lake had reached twenty-two feet. Penny had seen the marker. She had also overheard someone there say that twenty-two feet was nothing compared to the winter of ’52. Then it had snowed sixty-nine feet and the pass was closed for twenty-eight days. Four hundred people were trapped inside a train, food had to be brought to them on snowshoes; also a doctor.
When Penny got back to the Donner Trail Ranch, she told Inge that the night in the motel was the first time since she had been in Verdi that the divorce seemed real to her, the first time too—even if Mike was snoring away in the bed next to hers, although Penny did not tell Inge this—that she had felt alone. Really alone. And being alone, Penny went on to tell Inge, was not necessarily such a bad thing either, it was different that’s all. Inge told Penny yes, and to just please take a look at her. Inge was wearing the green lizard cowboy boots. Penny was not going to believe this but for the first time since she had been in Verdi, Inge had been lucky and won a lot of money at chemin de fer.
The next time Penny went riding on Thunderbolt, Ron—not Mike—took her and the others out. Penny only got to see Mike later when she returned from the ride. Mike was outside the barn shoeing a big bay horse. The horse was the horse Mike usually rode. The horse’s two front legs were hobbled, and Mike, with his back up against the horse’s rear, had one of the horse’s back legs firmly wedged in between his own legs. Mike was cleaning around the horse’s frog with a hoof pick, and the big bay horse was nervously whisking his black tail back and forth in Mike’s face. Without looking up from what he was doing, Mike was telling the horse to, damnit, quit that. Penny stood with her hands on her hips watching Mike.
“You know the story you told me?” Mike said, straightening up and putting the bay horse’s hoof down and not looking at Penny. “I heard the exact same story before, only instead of a French guy it was a Mexican, an old Mexican with a sack crossing the border into Texas, and the punch line, too, was different. It was horses.”
In the end, Penny had spat out the salami. She had chewed and chewed and chewed but still she could not make the meat go down. Her throat had closed to it, she had gagged. Also, she knew how she must look—her jaws working away uselessly, her eyes filling up with tears. Okay, you don’t have to eat it, was what Mike had finally said to her.
Fortitude
The naked woman in the floor show at the nightclub on Pat Pong Road is blowing smoke rings from down there—perfect round smoke rings. Each time she puts the cigarette to her lips, the guys in the audience start to whistle and catcall and stamp their feet. The noise they make is so loud, so deafening, I can’t hear myself speak—not that I want to speak particularly.
Just think of it, my husband says to me when the show is over and the lights have come back on and he has ordered us two more beers. Think of the muscles she must have down there.
Poor woman, I say. In spite of myself I light up a cigarette. Look. I show him. I can’t even blow an ordinary smoke ring. And I’ve smoked for how long? Since I was fifteen? Jesus, I also say, shaking my head.
Yeah, which reminds me, my husband says, drinking his beer. In a club in Vientiane, I saw a woman put a ping-pong ball inside her. She made the ping-pong ball bounce up and down on the floor and all the guys watching her tried to grab the ping-pong ball as a souvenir. My husband puts his hand in his pants pocket then takes it out again, his hand closed, holding something. See, he says to me, opening his hand quickly.
Don’t, I say.
Yesterday, when I arrived from the States at Don Muang Airport, I did not right away recognize my husband. From where I was standing waiting to go through customs, I mistook him for another man. I waved and smiled excitedly to this other man. Fortunately my husband was standing not far from this other man and he waved and smiled back at me and I did not have to explain that after the eighteen-hour flight I was tired probably and not seeing things right. Also, my husband has lost weight. His blond hair, too, is cropped short, and when I first put my hand through it, his hair felt prickly and strange.
The other thing I noticed about the woman in the floor show is that she has shaved off her pubic hair. But then again, orientals, I’ve heard, don’t have much body hair. This goes for the men as well. Most oriental men don’t bother to shave. They pluck the hair out with tweezers or else they leave a little tuft of the hair growing—like those long hairs that grow out of a mole—for good luck or good karma.
I don’t know, my husband continues, oriental women don’t really do it for me. They’re too little or something. He leans over and squeezes my knee with one hand.
Lucky for me, I say, moving my leg away.
The woman who was in the floor show is sitting at the bar now. She is drinking a diet Coke and she is dressed again in a flower-print dress. I watch as a fellow, a fellow in uniform, goes up to her and offers her a cigarette. A Marlboro cigarette. The woman shakes her head.
I nudge my husband and point my chin toward the woman. You know what? I tell him. She doesn’t smoke.
In bed in the hotel, I cannot sleep. Despite the ceiling fan which makes the noise of a jet plane taking off, the room is too hot. Also, my time, it is only ten o’clock in the morning yesterday; and I drank too much beer. Each time I shut my eyes everything in the hotel room spins and I start feeling sick to my stomach. Jim, my husband, is snoring lightly. Occasionally, he jerks an arm up in the air and mutters something. I think of the other man at the airport I mistook him for. Once I got closer, I saw that the other man had bad acne scars and did not look a bit like my husband. The thought that I could make such a mistake embarrasses me. More than embarrassment, I feel ashamed. So much so that, earlier, while we were making love, I had half hoped that my husband, in the heat of his passion, would call out a name. Not my name, an oriental woman’s name. The oriental woman’s name which inexplicably comes to my mind is Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Early the next morning on the way to the beach, Jim and I sit in the backseat of a jeep. The man who is driving the jeep is called Maynard, the man sitting next to him wears glasses and is called Evan. Maynard and Evan are in the same company as my husband, Alpha Company; all three men are on R&R in Thailand for a week. The traffic getting out of the city is heavy. We stop, start, honk, start again.
With a groan, Jim puts his head on my shoulder. I’ve a helluva hangover, he says.
Evan turns in his seat and asks me, So how do you like Bangkok? Have you been out here before?
I shake my head no. We went to Wat Prah Keo, yesterday, I offer. Pretty amazing. All that gold.
Yeah? I’ve never been. Evan turns back. He says something to Maynard that I cannot hear and that makes Maynard laugh.
Wise ass, my husband calls out to them.
Bitch, Maynard swears at a samlor driver who cuts in front of the jeep. Fuckingcuntbitch. Then remembering me, he says, Pardon—pardon with a French accent.
I’ve never been to the Far East before. The farthest east I have ever been—only to me, then, it was west—was Hawaii last year on our honeymoon. Also, I have not seen my husband in eight months and since he has been sent overseas.
My husband’s arm is around my shoulder, with his other hand he is picking at and feeling the material of my blouse.
Nice. New? he asks.
I bought it at that dress shop next to the gourmet deli on—I start to tell him when, with the same hand, he starts fondling my breast. Stop, I also tell him, gesturing toward the two men sitting in the front of the jeep.
My husband shrugs. He puts his head on my shoulder again and shuts his eyes. He sleeps or feigns sleep.
The road to Pattaya is paved but narrow and full of potholes which Maynard tries to avoid. To do this, Maynard sometimes drives the jeep on the wrong side of the road; sometimes, too, he only gets back on the right side of the road at the last possible moment when another car or truck is bearing down on us from the other direction. I make myself look away, or I look out the side window at the paddy
fields. The paddy fields are so green they nearly look yellow; an occasional palm tree marks the blurry horizon. Along the road, children are selling sugarcane. To try to stop us, the children wave the sugarcane at the jeep. Once, when a sugarcane stalk raps against the side of the jeep, instinctively, I draw back.
In the front seat, Evan is flipping through a guidebook. He is practicing his Thai out loud.
Nung, sorng, sarm, see, har, hok, jeht.
Can you quit that? Maynard tells him.
Then, all of a sudden, without warning it begins to rain. First one big drop of rain at a time falling on the windshield, then faster and faster the rain comes pelting down. We pass a woman on a bicycle and I see her swerve on the bicycle, but on account of the rain I don’t see whether or not she falls off the bicycle. I can no longer make out the road or the rice paddies out the window.
Damn, Maynard says. I can’t see a damn thing.
Christ, Jim says, sitting up. The noise of the rain has woken him up. What the hell was that?
Rain, I say.
Jim looks at me for a minute as if he doesn’t know who I am. What? he asks, frowning.
It’s raining, I say again.
His face clears. Shit. I guess I was dreaming, he answers.
Sip, sip-eht, sip-sorng, sip-sarm, sip-see, Evan continues.
Evan, I can’t drive if you don’t shut the fuck up! Maynard shouts at him.
Pattaya is not how I imagined it—I imagined a long stretch of deserted white sand with lush palm fronds and red and purple bougainvillea branches lining the shore. Instead, the shore front is filled with ugly cement buildings, restaurants, fast food stands. Everywhere misspelled signs in English advertise clubs, massage parlors, boats for hire. In our small and sparsely furnished one-room bungalow, Jim is lying on his back on the bed, his hands are clasped behind his head. A slight sea breeze stirs the curtains in the window. Next door a radio is playing, a man sings like Chubby Checker: Lock to the light, lock to the left. Jim is watching me unpack, then he watches me undress.
