by Lynn Kostoff
FIVE
Evelyn Coates parks in the employee lot behind the Mesa branch of Frontier Cleaners. She’s already forty-five minutes late for her stint on the afternoon shift. She drops her hand to the ignition key, but her fingers hesitate then move to her cell phone, where they punch in the number for the store, and she tells the manager, who’s probably standing only a couple hundred feet away, that she’s having car trouble and won’t be in this afternoon.
She sits for a moment, revving the engine, then pulls back out of the lot, heading west on Baseline toward Phoenix until she hooks up with Route 87 and then cuts south, skimming the western boundary of Gilbert and straight-shooting it through Chandler.
Evelyn’s tempted for a moment to get off on Warner or Ray Road and take either to where they intersect with McClintock and drive by the house where she was raised, but any impulse toward nostalgia feels false-bottomed, the Chandler she grew up in transformed beyond recognition now after Motorola, Intel, and Avent set up shop there and development went into overdrive, subdivision after subdivision filling the immense fields of cotton and soybeans that during her childhood had lain only a few blocks from her home. The chamber of commerce still touts the city’s small-town charm, but for Evelyn it carries the metallic aftertaste of artificial sweetner.
Near Riggs Road, on the outskirts of town, she whips into the lot of a convenience store that’s dressed up as a hacienda. She leaves the Mustang running and strides inside. A thin film of perspiration rides her hairline and neck, and she feels it lift from her skin in the arctic blast of air conditioning. She’s the only customer in the store.
On impulse, imagining her husband’s frown, Evelyn buys a single tallboy beer and then a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.
Back outside, she unsnaps and folds down the ragtop on the Mustang and gets behind the wheel again. She listens to the engine idling, feels its vibrations through the floorboard. She slips her hand beneath her skirt, catches the hem of her panties, and peels them down her legs and off, wadding and stuffing them in her purse before backing up and pulling out on 87 again.
Farther south the landscape begins to flatten and open up, mile upon mile of desert hardpan broken only by mesquite, creosote, and brittlebush, elephant trees, crucifixion thorn, and ironwood, lingering pockets of fading wildflowers, and scattered cacti standing like stranded chess pieces or misplaced coat racks.
Evelyn opens the tallboy and takes a long swallow. The wind rips through her hair, and the air streaming through the vents lifts and fills her skirt. She sets the beer between her legs. The inside of her thighs ripple in a long shudder when the can touches them.
She punches through the radio until she finds KZON. She wants something loud, harsh, and hormonal, songs stripped and raw, full of the blunt crazed grace of those too young to understand anything beyond what they feel.
She takes another swallow of beer. Rimming the far western horizon, the South Mountains and a couple of bumps beyond them, the Estrella Mountains, slowly recede every time she presses the gas, space begetting space, endlessly filling itself.
To the east a small dust storm churns and rises in the flat afternoon light.
The wind screams. She turns up the radio. She tries to remember the last time she heard her husband laugh.
He’s a good man. He is. And she loves him. Evelyn just wishes she could remember something that had made him laugh, but she can’t.
She pushes the Mustang through the flat, hard light. The condensation on the beer can trickles down the inside of her thighs.
Making a bet with herself, she drives with her eyes closed until the count of seven. Then on impulse counts out three more.
When she opens her eyes, she sees a jackrabbit flash through the underbrush.
She passes a stretch of blackened ground, the charred stumps of saguaro cacti that have become inadvertent lightning rods from the late spring storms.
She closes her eyes, counts again.
She’s spent her life surrounded by good, decent men. Her father had been one. Everyone said so. He’d been a high school math teacher, and while her father may have found what he needed to negotiate his life in the truths governing quadratic equations and logarithms, he was totally helpless in the face of the everyday workings of the world. Her mother left when Evelyn turned twelve, and Evelyn stepped in and managed the household, doing all the cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, the shopping and writing out of the monthly bills. She stayed at home, taking care of things, through high school and her first two years at Arizona State.
Where she met, fell in love with, and married Richard Coates.
Another good, decent man. Albeit a different one from her father.
Richard was passionate, at home in the world, full of plans. That’s what had initially drawn her to him—his unwavering belief and confidence, lacking even a shred of arrogance, that he could accomplish whatever he set out to do. He knew how things worked. He was optimistic without being naive, principled and ambitious, fair in his treatment of others.
Evelyn dropped out of ASU at the close of her junior year. She’d been an art history major with secondhand plans that she’d borrowed from her best friend, Carol Findley, of working in one of the better art galleries in Scottsdale and maybe one day running one of her own.
At the time, though, Richard had gone into business with Charlie Wells and was scrambling to make it work. Money was tight and Evelyn wanted to help, so when the opening at Southwestern Airlines came up, she signed on as a flight attendant.
Richard went on to turn a haphazardly managed, barely break-even grounds maintenance service into a flourishing, lucrative operation. On the basis of his reputation for solid work and through long hours of canvassing, Richard had put the company in line for a number of long-term contracts with some of the larger resorts and retirement communities in Phoenix. Things were looking up. They bought a house in Encanto Park and eventually traded up to Scottsdale.
The house had a leviathan-sized mortgage that dwarfed the number of hours and whatever desire she had left for her degree, and Evelyn stayed on with Southwestern Airlines. With each takeoff, landing, and layover, the worlds of Rembrandt and Monet, Degas and Gauguin, shrunk and became convenient icebreakers for conversations at social gatherings and parties.
Then Richard discovered his partner had gone behind his back and set up a series of price-fixing schemes and rigged bids with their competitors. He’d also, without Richard’s knowledge, begun hiring illegal aliens for some of the ground crew work. Charlie Wells refused to back down or change either of these practices when Richard confronted him, and Richard refused to work with anyone who condoned either one. They ended up dissolving the partnership. With the working capital he managed to salvage, Richard turned around and started Frontier Cleaners. Money again was tight, his hours long, and Evelyn this time left Southwest for United and a better salary and benefits package.
It didn’t seem too much to ask. After all, Richard’s plans were never just his plans; his plans were for them, the life they were building, the future they were building together.
The very future she now finds herself in but doesn’t recognize. Or maybe recognizes all too clearly.
A life that has now come to feel like one of the morning paper crossword puzzles her husband likes to solve.
Something governed by definitions and whose fit and form only allow you to move in one of two directions.
Evelyn tears south, passing a white-on-green mileage sign for Coolidge. The sun’s off to her right, a blazing yellow-white hole in the sky.
Under the right circumstances, decency, she thinks, becomes a burden.
Under the right circumstances, your plans, she thinks, begin to plan you.
Until one day, you find yourself sitting across from your husband and he says, It’s not too late. Thirty-nine’s not too old. Lots of couples wait. You take care of yourself. You’d be a good mother.
Your husband reaches across the table and takes you
r hand. A new life, he says.
What you feel, though, is the weight and shape of your own, how you’ve spent your entire life attending to the needs of others—your father’s, your husband’s, those of thousands of strangers on hundreds of flights—and you can’t make your husband understand how the very idea of a child frightens you right now, a new life, a thumbnail of flesh that is pure unadulterated need, feeding on and growing inside you, a relentless presence you carry with you everywhere until it’s ready to drop into your life wailing and grasping, all mouth and fingers, and you become the center of another cycle of need.
A family, a child, your husband says, they make sense of things.
But you don’t want to make a child or sense right now.
You want to take off your panties and drive as fast as you can through the desert.
You want the flat, hard light, the wind, a landscape that promises nothing beyond itself.
Right now, you want the sun to burn you clean of everything, even decency.
But what you want more than anything else is simply this: to hear your husband laugh again.
SIX
Debt has a way of settling you in your skin.
So does the threat of death.
Jimmy dry-palms four aspirin and circles his room at the Mesa View Inn. It doesn’t take long, the place a box with a narrow bathroom attached, a weekly rate stand-in for the idea of a home, cluttered with a lumpy bed, a couple of chairs, wallpaper whose fading design resembles underwear stains, a dresser with mismatched drawers, a portable black-and-white that picks up two stations, and a hot plate.
Traction, Jimmy thinks.
That’s what he needs. A little traction.
After what happened between Richard and him, Jimmy moved to the next branch of the family tree and tried a long-distance call to Mom. She’d been divorced from the old man going on four years now, the marriage having sputtered along until Mom suddenly became a big fan of Jerusalem Slim, Mom cashing in her chips for a seat on the Hallelujah Express and three months after the divorce was finalized, landing a second husband in the same beat, a guy named Jerry Snapp, another born-again citizen, who owned two seafood restaurants in Tampa.
Mom was a regular sister of mercy now, big on religious homilies and quoting scripture passages, but decidedly tight with the maternal purse strings, so when Jimmy asked for the loan, he kept it simple, shaving away all references to Ray Harp and his collection practices and sticking to a tune he figured Mom might come in for the chorus on—the new-man, fresh-start melody—but she shut him down completely when it came to the cash, telling him how happy she was to hear he’d changed and how she’d always known he had the capacity to be more than he’d settled for and how it was important at this particular juncture in his life to trust in God to provide, and capping things off by saying that she and Jerry were praying for him.
The next thing, a dial tone. Jimmy had debated calling back and saying he appreciated all the prayers but maybe Mom and Jerry there, if they really wanted to do him some good, they could throw in another one, like Ray Harp maybe getting amnesia or eating it in a car wreck.
Traction.
One week.
He’s even marked the date on the calendar, one of those complimentary jobs from his brother’s business, Frontier Cleaners, Richard standing in front of the original store in Scottsdale, the addresses and phone numbers for the others listed below, then a bold-faced slogan: We Clean What You Can’t. Jimmy had one of them hanging in his cell at Perryville, too.
Jimmy sits down on the edge of the bed. His hands are shaking, and he can feel the pulse in his neck take off.
He’s been in jams before, but this thing with Ray Harp, it’s got him worried.
He’s wondering if maybe he’s losing the touch. He’s seen it happen. Plenty of other guys, their luck goes light and then just one day disappears. They keep doing what they’ve always been doing, but it just doesn’t work anymore.
The Mesa View Inn, for example.
Jimmy’s hit bottom a couple times, but he’s never had to take up residence there.
Ditto with Perryville Correctional Facility.
One thing leading to another, that’s the way Jimmy’s used to playing it, and that’s the way it’s always worked ever since he washed out of his first semester at ASU for a little recreational pot-dealing among friends. That led to some new friends, and those friends had friends, and pretty soon Jimmy had lots of pals with interesting alternatives to regular employment.
Jimmy had the touch then, and though he told himself he’d know when to quit and take a French leave, it never quite happened. The world was full of sweet, easy deals, and he was going to live forever.
But then one day you blink and you’re thirty-five, and one thing is not leading to another anymore. They’re sprouting detours instead, none of which takes you where you want to go.
Jimmy gets up off the bed, circles the room, then ducks into the bathroom and splashes handful after handful of cold water on his face.
When he gets out, nothing’s changed. He’s still in the Mesa View Inn, and it’s still the middle of the afternoon, and it still feels as if everything in the place is pointing a finger at him.
He bolts for the lot and points the pickup in the direction of the Chute.
On the way there, Jimmy works at striking a match on an idea to undo what his brother had done to him with the paperwork on the Dobbins parcel.
Nothing catches though. There’s smoke but no spark.
Richard, though, had it all wrong about the grave and Jimmy not visiting it. He’d ducked going because he didn’t want to have to stand at the foot of the plot and look at the marker and read his old man’s name and the dates engraved on it, because that had a way of finalizing everything and Jimmy doesn’t want to think of the old man that way, not yet. That’s what he hates about cemeteries, the way they go about laying them out, everything designed and maintained to make one point: it’s over.
And that’s the one thing Jimmy doesn’t want to think about when it comes to the old man.
Anything but over.
The old man had never missed visiting hours at Perryville Correctional. Not once. Jimmy knew he was a disappointment,
but the thing was, the old man wasn’t the type to point the finger. It just wasn’t in him. It was a big world out there, and the old man knew the things it could do to you.
His whole life the old man had played it straight, never complaining, right up to the day his heart exploded on the way home from the insurance agency he ran, the old man having just made the entrance ramp to Route 10 when it happened, and he ended up plowing his car into the side of an eighteen-wheeler on the westbound.
Jimmy misses him, Jesus, he does.
Try explaining that to a tombstone though.
When he gets to the Chute, the place is quiet, the afternoon regulars just starting to show up. There are seven or eight scattered among the tables and a few more perched like dash ornaments at the bar.
Leon’s tending, a sheet of newspaper spread flat in front of him with a fuselage of a model airplane in its center. Leon’s got a long, crumpled tube of epoxy in one hand and a wing in the other when Jimmy sits down.
“A Zero,” Leon says, nodding at the model. “Fast and to the point. The Nips knew aircraft.”
Jimmy orders a draft and watches in dismay as Leon levers the handle.
Leon’s a decorated air force vet with twenty missions over North Vietnam, but despite the legendary accuracy Leon has accorded himself in his war stories when it came to anything that passed between his crosshairs, Jimmy has never seen him draw a draft without leaving at least four inches of foam broiling below the lip of the glass.
Jimmy leans forward and squints at the shelf behind Leon. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Found it asleep in the jukebox,” Leon says. “No telling how long it was there.”
A couple of feet down from the cash register is a cracked aquarium patched wit
h masking tape and topped by a piece of fine meshed screen held in place with a rock. In it is a fat sidewinder, its back alternately marked in brown and white dots the size of chocolate chips. Even in the bar light, the pattern of scales on its sides is as regularly defined as the tread on a new tire.
Leon flips a thick gray ponytail over his shoulder, then leans down and taps the glass with his index finger.
When the snake shifts its blunt wedge-shaped head and lifts its tail, Jimmy counts six rattles.
“That’s some kinda mean,” he says. “A real venom machine.”
“Pass me the glue, will you, Jimmy?” Leon says before stepping over and tossing a small white mouse into the aquarium tank.
At around a foot and a half, the sidewinder takes up most of the floor of the tank. The mouse is on its hind legs, sniffing the air, its world shrunk to four square inches of loose dirt.
When the fangs hit, the mouse is flipped into the air. It flops around in the tank for a while. The snake, watching, slowly lowers its head, its jaws already starting to loosen and unhinge.
Jimmy hands Leon the glue. Leon starts to attach a miniature set of machine guns to the wing.
“Hey, don’t talk to me about artificial intelligence,” someone booms from the other end of the bar. “How do you feel about artificial beer? Same working principle. Artificial’s artificial. It doesn’t matter which way you try to slice the ham, Bill Gates ain’t Solomon. No way.”
Leon glances up, sighs, and shakes his head. “Tell you something, Jimmy. There’s nothing more tiresome in this world as a drunk philosophy professor.”
“Hey, Howie’s all right,” Jimmy says.
“Howard Modine is not all right,” Leon says, setting down the wing. “The guy never shuts up. You think he’s okay because he buys you drinks.”
Modine walks over to where Jimmy’s sitting and claps him on the back. He takes in the action in the cracked aquarium, the mouse half gone now, the closed eyes of the snake, the steady rhythm of jaws and throat.
“We must all suffer History,” Modine says. His voice is deep and gravelly and always a couple of decibels louder than it needs to be, as if Howard works under the assumption that most of the people in the world have gone deaf.
