So Jane dropped the card into the weathered red metal mailbox covered in bird poop. Then she thought about Zoe’s awful toothpaste all the way back to her house.
She also thought about secrets and memories.
Her mother was waiting with lavender tea, looking at Jane with questioning eyes, almost the way Zoe would have if she’d been around. Finding a boy with no past lying on the beach, well, Zoe wouldn’t have been surprised by that and would have expounded on karma sticking its gnarled little fingers into everything once again.
But Mama just stuck to the facts as she poured boiling water into their cups.
“Pretty impressive for a girl who taught herself everything there is to know about mollusks,” she said. “I’m really proud of you.”
Jane dunked her tea ball a few times and then passed it over for her mom to use.
“I was thinking maybe I have a future in marine biology after all. Maybe Martha isn’t the only one with a life somewhere else.”
Mama smiled a sad smile and said she thought it was a brilliant idea.
Jane thought about Conrad washing up on the beach. It fit with her mother’s unspoken theory that the rising and falling tide pretty much decided all of their fates. She had little to lose anymore by asking direct questions, so she pushed her luck one last time.
“So, we didn’t have the same father?”
“For someone who is practically a genius when it comes to bivalves, you certainly let Martha fill your head with strange ideas. Why on earth did you girls think that?”
“Because you and Zoe couldn’t stand each other. We thought it was a lifelong quarrel over…him. Whoever he was.”
“Jane, the woman talks to potato chips.”
“Well, now that you say it like that…”
They both laughed, but then Mama reached over and held Jane’s hands tightly in her own.
“Your father didn’t even know about you. I just didn’t think it was fair to make you think he might come looking.”
Jane had already figured this out, but she also wondered if it was her mother who wished he’d come looking. Why else would she insist on staying in this place when almost everyone else moved on? Mama did not believe in karma and her fingers were not gnarled, but they were warm, and holding them made Jane feel hopeful for both of them.
She thought again of a stranger named Conrad heading to a hospital all alone in an ambulance, with no idea who he was. At least he wasn’t in a coma, which was another symptom of amnesic shellfish poisoning.
Maybe this Ben person was someone who would come looking for Conrad, once he got the postcard.
All of this hope had emboldened her.
“Can I go visit Martha and Zoe in Colorado?”
Mama stared at her hard for a couple seconds. Jane squirmed, unable to read her expression.
Had Mama hoped Zoe was out of her life for good?
Her mother stood up and left the table.
Jane thought she might cry. She had known better than to press Mama like that.
In the next room she heard a dresser drawer open and then screech shut again. It was the heavy junk drawer, where she and Martha stashed anything interesting they found. She knew every broken shell in it, every odd-shaped rock, every piece of mottled beach glass. Their entire lives were there in the space of one sandy bureau drawer. Jane hadn’t opened it since Martha left. Mama knew she wouldn’t, not without her best friend to share it with.
It was a perfect hiding place.
A few seconds later she was back and sliding a bus ticket across the table toward Jane.
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” she said. “Of course you should go visit Martha.”
PARKING-LOT FLOWERS
Ben had picked up the hitchhiker on the edge of town before he’d realized how young she was. Maybe fifteen, probably a runaway, and he really didn’t need that. He so did not need that.
He’d finally gotten himself going, nudging his rusty Mustang out of town as if it were a reluctant horse by the same name. It was a feat that had required so much energy that picking up anyone could only be attributed to an exhausted lapse in judgment.
But how many times had he stood on the side of the road with his thumb out, in freezing rain, hoping against hope for a ride? It’s called “empathy,” he told himself. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Hers weren’t shoes; they were leather boots with back zips, and inside one of them, she’d slid a switchblade, nestled between her calf and a long woolen sock. He didn’t know she had it, and she didn’t know she wouldn’t need it with him, but that’s the beauty of strangers, all the things we cannot know.
He stereotyped her as a sullen, introverted runaway, mainly because of the greasy hair hanging out of her purple hoodie.
Beware of stereotypes, he reminded himself, thinking of how Conrad had been voted most eligible bachelor and how all the girls in town vied for his attention. It was so easy to make people believe what they wanted to believe. Until it wasn’t.
The hitchhiker had an expensive backpack with one of those Nalgene water bottles that hippies and climbers used, but if he had to guess, she was not a hippie or a climber. He leaned across her to get aspirin out of the glove box, and she flinched as if he might touch her.
Ben was a “nice guy,” to the point of being boring—he’d been told—and even though he was starting to regret picking her up, he was not used to being flinched around.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m just a moth attracted to the flame,” she said. Then she stared blankly out the window.
Was that sarcasm?
He wanted to tell her how much of a cliché that was, but then he remembered sitting around the campfire—just a year ago—with Conrad and his older sister, Lula, and her friends from college. Everyone had been feeling carefree. He and Conrad were about to graduate from high school. There had been something thrilling about being with Conrad’s sister and her friends, drinking beers and passing a joint, just a few miles from where he was driving now. He passed the turnoff to the the grate and cattle fence with the broken chain that all the kids in town knew was a ruse. Beyond it was the trail that led through thick pine and juniper trees and then opened out to nothing and everything at the same time. Their secret, beautiful place.
If he closed his eyes he could almost smell the lingering pot and woodsmoke and that mysterious girl smell he could never quite understand. One of them even smelled weirdly like oranges.
Lula had brought three girlfriends home to Granville during their college break. All her friends had very white teeth and long hair that hung straight like curtains down along their ears. They talked about things he and Conrad never really thought about, mostly politics and how messed up the government was. They kept telling Ben and Conrad to start paying attention, to start getting involved, to think about protesting or they’d be sorry, man. They said man a lot; everything was Yeah, man and I know, man. And Can you believe it, man?
They couldn’t be serious. Protest where? In front of the Piggly Wiggly? These girls obviously had no clue about Granville. But that seemed silly. Two of them were sisters from a town just thirty miles up the canyon, Pigeon Creek, and it ticked all the same small-town boxes Granville did.
But Lula and her friends seemed to think that by going to college they had cracked some mysterious code that people from small towns could never crack. Granville did not qualify as being in “the real world.” Or maybe they just wanted to believe that.
When they laughed—even though nothing seemed all that funny—their white teeth stood out like miniature marshmallows lining dark caves inside their faces. He imagined pulling one out of the mouth of the girl closest to him, skewering it on the end of a sharpened willow, and roasting it in the fire until it turned black.
It had to be the pot
affecting him, because it was disturbing to think he could come up with that all on his own.
Conrad had slung a Coleman lantern up in a tree, and when Ben stood up he’d knocked his head on it. Everyone had laughed. He was always jostling and bumping into things, trying to navigate a world that was getting smaller and smaller around him, like Jack and the beanstalk, except that he was the beanstalk.
He was constantly teased about how long and lanky he was. Just getting up to take a piss and knocking the lantern might have caused a forest fire, which was not a joke. It was always fire season in the west, especially near Granville, which had been in a drought for the past decade.
He’d steadied the lantern and immediately noticed the moth. Somehow it had squeezed its furry wings inside the little glass doors, and it was licking the flames, either hungrily unaware of the danger or too much in love to care.
Whenever Ben smoked weed the world was slower, fuzzy around the edges, not unlike the moth’s wings. Its eyeballs, however, were inky, like humungous poppy seeds, hypnotized by the heat that bounced off the tiny glass doors of the lantern, which looked warm and inviting. Ben would have squeezed inside himself too, if he could have managed it.
While everyone else had babbled on about how the world was going to hell in a handbasket (what did that even mean?), he had watched the little creature die. He was helpless to do anything else. It could have been him inside that lantern, drawn to all that dangerous orange heat.
Now, as he drove, he thought about the smoky wings and the slow lapping flame against the moth’s body. If only he’d paid more attention.
He wondered if the moth had actually been a warning: Be wary of too much beauty and light.
He had kissed Conrad that same night, admitting that he’d wanted to for years. And Conrad had kissed him back. But now Conrad was gone, and Ben could not see the road because his eyes were getting blurry.
* * *
—
He swerved the Mustang onto a pullout near the river, where it curved dangerously around a bend and then dropped into a steep ravine.
“I need some air,” he said, slamming the door and leaving the girl staring openmouthed at him as he bolted, scattering scree down toward the river’s edge with his long legs.
He could feel her eyes on him as he squatted next to an eddy where the river formed a little bowl. He crouched near the small pool, but to reach it he still had to bend again, like folding a towel in thirds the way his mother did.
Over and over again he scooped the icy water into his cupped hands and then splashed it on his face.
Watching from the car, the girl shivered and fingered her knife, opening and closing it as if in a trance, running her hand lightly over the blade.
He was sitting on a rock when she finally got out and slowly walked toward him. He wasn’t sure if he was scared of her or if it was the other way around. He was watching a small animal with funny ears scurry across a fallen tree and cross over to a patch of something pink blooming on the opposite bank.
It stood up when she got close and wrinkled its nose in the air so its whiskers waggled. Its tiny paws were folded in front of it, as if in prayer, but as she got near, it let out an earsplitting shriek.
“Marmots are so cute,” she said, her hands over her ears, “but he’s loud, isn’t he?…Or she?”
She looked terrified, as if she hadn’t meant to say the word “cute.” Ben felt that familiar sensation he got, even around people he didn’t know. Always the pleaser, sensing everyone’s moods and needing to make people feel comfortable.
Trying too hard was how Conrad described it.
“That’s a pika,” he said, tapping a stick against his leg, “not a marmot.”
“Oh. What’s the difference?”
Seriously? They were going to pretend to care about pikas versus marmots?
“Um, well, pikas look more like little rabbits, but no tail, and they’re rounder and fuzzier.”
It was the longest sentence he’d uttered since he’d picked her up.
“Marmots don’t have that high-pitched alarm call like pikas do,” he went on. “And they hibernate for almost seven months in their dens, all curled up with each other, their hearts beating once every hour or so….” He trailed off when his voice started to sound irritating in his own ears, too know-it-all.
“I wouldn’t mind sleeping for a few months,” she said.
The circles around her eyes gave the impression that she’d been asleep for decades. He’d seen zombies in movies that looked better than she did.
“Well, there’s a dark side in the marmot world,” he said, thinking of beauty and light, not wanting to sound too much like a pleaser. “If the teenage-girl marmots come back to the den pregnant, after doing whatever they do with the boy marmots, the mothers will punch them with their fists until they abort. They just don’t have room for extra bodies all winter.”
The girl looked at him with an unreadable expression.
“I’m sorry. That was blunt,” he said, taking her blank face for horror. “It’s not really about morality in the animal kingdom.”
He wondered if she was one of those animal-rights-type people as she turned her back on him.
She crumpled like a paper bag in the wind, and he thought maybe she was crying or perhaps even sick.
Ben looked away, giving her the only privacy he could, that of not watching. But after a few minutes he couldn’t stand it.
He went over and stood in the shallow pool next to her, shaking out a handkerchief and soaking it in the clear, cold stream. He wrung it out and handed it to her.
When she finally turned around he realized she was laughing. Maniacal, sleep-deprived laughter that looked painful. She took the handkerchief and buried her face in it, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably.
What the hell? He turned abruptly back to the car.
By the time she’d dragged herself up the bank, she was completely composed, once again the sullen introvert he’d picked up.
“How far are you going?” he asked.
She had pulled the hoodie strings so tight around her face she looked like a lumpy purple Mr. Potato Head, her lips pursed out like a fish.
“I’m going to hell. Straight to hell,” she whispered in a singsongy cadence. She was badly in need of ChapStick.
“How about I let you out in Baker?” he said.
“Fine. And don’t worry, I couldn’t care less about morality in the animal kingdom.”
Baker was forty miles away, which seemed like a long time to have to sit next to her.
The only radio station he could get was run out of the basement of mountain man Coyote Jones. It was definitely not FCC legal, but somehow Jones managed to stay on the air, fuzzy reception in and out of the local towns scattered all the way to the Wyoming and Nebraska borders.
Ben kept it on, because even static inside the Mustang was more comforting than being totally alone with a lunatic, although there were rumors about the sanity of Coyote Jones as well. There’s a difference between a familiar lunatic and one you know nothing about. As he’d often heard his mother say, “The people here are crazy, but they’re our kind of crazy.”
Ben was fairly certain that “our kind of crazy” did not include being gay. Not in 1995 in Granville, Colorado, anyway. Maybe in some far-off city like Los Angeles or New York, where there were enough people that you could slide between hundreds of bodies and be virtually unnoticed, but not here, in the middle of nowhere. There was no anonymity in a small town. Especially if you stood out at all.
No, he should never have kissed Conrad. And probably Conrad wished he had never kissed him back.
“Well, folks, we’ve got a hot spot burning just south of Granville. Looks like it’s picked up some traction on the western ridge, where all that fuel has been waiting to be kissed by some red-hot lov
e.”
Coyote Jones often used these kinds of analogies to describe the weather, and usually people thought it was funny. But just now, with a stranger in the car and him thinking about kissing Conrad, Ben didn’t find it humorous. He rolled down his window to get a little air.
At least the fire would be heading in the other direction if Coyote Jones had his information straight, which he almost always did.
“This one just looks like good old-fashioned arson—a dumpster fire that got a little out of control.”
The radio abruptly turned to static.
“He’ll be back around the next corner,” said Ben, as if she might be worried.
“That guy’s voice creeps me out anyway.” Her face looked even paler than before.
The stereo speakers hissed and crackled like a bowl of Rice Krispies.
“People trust him,” Ben said quietly. “Coyote Jones, I mean.”
“I have good instincts,” she said. “The guy sounds like a nutcase.”
“You aren’t from around here, are you?”
She wouldn’t be saying this if she were.
“Nope,” she said.
“So who were you visiting?”
“You wouldn’t know them.”
“Obviously you don’t know Granville. Everyone knows everyone.”
“Are you trying to make friends suddenly?” she asked, in the unfriendliest tone ever.
Definitely not, he thought, pressing a little harder on the gas.
Ben had tried to talk to Conrad at Mass the Sunday after the kiss, but Conrad wouldn’t even look at him. He was coming out of the room where they kept the chalices and where the altar boys prepared the wine and hosts for Communion. Conrad was the head acolyte, the one who trained the younger altar boys about everything from what to wear (black pants, dress shoes) to how to stand (hands together, fingers straight) and sit (hands on knees). Ben thought the whole thing was ridiculous, but it was also something he loved about Conrad—the way he said church made him feel connected to something outside himself. Ben understood that, but it was Conrad who made him feel that way, not God.
Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Page 5
