Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon

by Cameron Pierce

“Where will they be? Clearly you two dummies need to think this through.”

  “Haha, please. Jesse and I have dogged many a small town like this. We’ll call in a bomb threat at the local high school. That’ll keep the whole task force occupied for at least a couple hours.”

  Myrtle throws up her hands, giving in. “Sounds like you thought it all through. I guess we’re doing it then. We’re robbing a bank.” And suddenly there’s a newfound excitement in her voice. “Oh my god, I’ve never robbed a bank before.”

  ***

  They pull up in front of the only bank in town. Andrew backs into a parking space that will allow them time to prepare inconspicuously but also permit a quick getaway. Andrew calls in a bomb threat to the high school on his car phone. Then they open the coffin, empty their suitcases, and load the suitcases full of snakes. What the snakes have done to the catfish makes Myrtle vomit. She sits at the wheel while Andrew and Jesse enter the bank, underwear fashioned into masks over their heads, armed with guns and carrying suitcases full of snakes. They dump the snakes on the floor, scattering them as much as possible.

  Andrew, like a carnival barker, announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a bank robbery. Please get down on the ground.”

  People scream as they fall to the floor.

  “Except for you,” Andrew says, pointing to the lone teller. “And do not trigger the silent alarm. Is anyone else back there with you?”

  The teller shakes her head no.

  “Anyone who moves or disobeys our orders in any way will get shot in the fuckin’ face.”

  “Or bit by a fuckin’ snake,” Jesse adds.

  Andrew turns to Jesse. “Is that it? Did I cover all the bases?”

  Jesse shouts, “And give us all your fucking money! Or at least a thousand bucks.”

  “You want a thousand dollars?” the teller asks.

  “Or two-thousand. It doesn’t matter.”

  “A thousand is fine,” Andrew says. “We’re not greedy.”

  “We only have ones,” the teller says.

  Andrew looks at her. “A bank with only one dollar bills?”

  “We only do small bill transactions on Saturday. The rest is locked in the vault, and I don’t have the key.”

  “Well we’re not prejudiced, sweetheart. Just make it snappy.”

  The teller feeds dollar bills into the bill counter while Andrew and Jesse monitor the crowd. The snakes are slithering amongst the people, doing everything they are supposed to do.

  Jesse’s not so sure, though. He nudges Andrew. “You sure these are medicinal snakes? They look like regular old diamondbacks to me.”

  “Medicinal as a can of whoop-ass if you don’t shut your trap,” Andrew warns.

  An old man on the floor speaks up: “Sirs, please get this snake off me. I have a fear of them.”

  Jesse steps toward the man. “You have a fear, do ya?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well let me help you with that.”

  Jesse puts a bullet in the old man’s calf.

  The man flails in agony, causing the snake on him to grow agitated and strike out, biting him.

  “Now which hurt worse, the bullet or the snake?” Jesse turns to address the crowd. “If anyone else has a fear of snakes, guns, or anything else on God’s green earth, please let me know.”

  Nobody has a fear of anything.

  Andrew leans over the counter, asks the teller what the hell’s taking so long.

  The teller panics. She tells Andrew that the bill counter has jammed up.

  “Then fuck the counter and put it all in a bag.”

  The teller stuffs several stacks of bills into a bag and places it on the counter. Andrew snatches it up, says to her, “Now come around here and lie down with the rest.”

  The teller starts to weep, but she comes around the counter and lies down on the floor, as far from any snakes as possible, which is not very far away, because they’re everywhere.

  Andrew bows to the crowd. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your cooperation. Please count to five-hundred before moving from your current position. If we come back to check on you and a single one’a you has moved so much as a finger, I swear to god we’ll kill you all.”

  “Come on!” Jesse urges.

  Andrew and Jesse flee the bank, run to where the ice cream truck is parked. They hop in and take the underwear masks off their heads.

  “Did you get the cash?” Myrtle asks, on the verge of panic herself.

  “We got the cash!” Jesse says.

  Myrtle sits there, hand on the key but not quite turning it.

  “Somethin’s missing,” she says.

  “You drivin’ is what’s missin’. Now go, before the pigs come.”

  “The snakes!” Myrtle shrieks.

  Andrew and Jesse look dumbfounded.

  “You idiots forgot the snakes in the bank.”

  “Aw, fuck.”

  “Horseshit.”

  “Those snakes are the only reason we’re doing all this,” Myrtle says. “Don’t throw away our riches, Jesse.”

  Andrew slides open the back door of the truck and hops out. “Come on, both of you. They should still be counting in there. Let’s collect the snakes and get the fuck away from this bumfuck no-good stinkin’ town.”

  Myrtle’s still in the sea-foam green dress, filthy now, and Jesse’s in his gray Sears suit.

  Inside the bank, the folks on the floor have just counted off two-hundred.

  Andrew screams at them, “You’re counting too fast. Go back to zero.”

  The people start counting over as the three of them gather up snakes, which is a difficult task, considering they’ve got to stuff them all in suitcases and not get bitten or allow others to get out, but they manage pretty well and they’ve almost collected all the snakes when—

  Myrtle, dropping a suitcase full of snakes with a clatter, cries out, “Ow! The sumbitch bit me!”

  At her feet, a rattlesnake coils for another strike.

  “Myrtle!” It’s Jesse.

  The snake strikes out, bites her again. She falls down as Jesse gets to her, stomping the snake’s head into pulp.

  Around them, the people on the floor continue counting.

  “Stop counting!” Jesse says.

  Andrew, realizing the situation is unraveling, clasps Myrtle’s fallen suitcase as well as his own and makes for the door. “Grab her, man, and let’s go,” he says.

  Jesse scoops Myrtle into his arms, whispering words of comfort to her. Andrew holds the door for them, then he tells the people to resume their counting. “Okay, you can start your counting again. Remember to go slow. It isn’t a footrace. And if we realize we left any snakes behind, we’ll be back, so don’t you fucking dare move. Have a nice day, folks.”

  ***

  The ice cream truck whips out of the bank parking lot, driven by Andrew. Jesse’s in the back of the truck, sucking poison out of Myrtle. Andrew turns on the ice cream truck music, thinking it’ll make them seem less conspicuous, just a regular old ice cream truck passing through town. He’s sweating and the sweat stings his eyes but then they’re on the highway again and they’re flying.

  Thirty miles down the road—

  “Myrtle, stay with me honey,” Jesse says. Then to Andrew he says, “She’s not doing so good.”

  Andrew keeps his eyes on the road. “What do you want us to do? We can’t take her to a hospital.”

  “I don’t know, man. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

  “Shit, nothing’s ever supposed to happen, Jesse. Nothing ever happens unless you make it happen. Sometimes it just happens to go wrong.”

  “Don’t philosophize me. This is your fault.”

  “Fuckin’ whatever. I invited you to join me in something special. This is how you choose to repay me because your fiancée can’t bag a goddamn snake?”

  “Stop the truck,” Jesse says.

  “What?”

  “Stop the truck. We’re done.”


  “Who’s done what?”

  “Myrtle and I are done with this. With you. We want out.”

  Andrew says quietly, “If you want out, you can jump.”

  Jesse sucker punches him in the side of the head, causing Andrew to jerk hard on the wheel. The truck swerves, hits a pothole in the road at a bad angle, destroying a tire. Andrew regains control but the tire is fucked and the wheel too.

  “Pull over!”

  “I can’t! The cops will be out looking for us. If we try walking along the highway, we’ll be sitting ducks.”

  So they drive minus a tire, waiting for the whole thing to give out and the truck to wreck, killing them all, but it doesn’t, and they manage to pull over at the next rest stop and park safely.

  At the rest stop, they situate their possessions—snakes and cash and catfish. The snakes stay locked up. The cash goes into Andrew’s duffel bag. The catfish find a new home in the dumpster. Andrew and Jesse take turns in the bathroom washing the blood and fish guts off them and changing clothes. When they are each wearing a clean Sears suit, they begin approaching truckers for a ride. Myrtle remains in the back of the ice cream truck, only semiconscious, but even without her presence, it isn’t long before a kind trucker sympathizes with their story of this poor man’s pretty young fiancée, bitten by a rattlesnake on a camping trip gone awry.

  The trucker’s name is Harold Payton. He claims to be Walter Payton’s uncle. He says he owns a whole fleet of trucks and isn’t required to go out and drive himself, but sometimes he gets an itch to travel, so he takes on a route.

  They finally escape the Lone Star State. Harold mostly talks while they listen. Myrtle starts recovering at some point along the drive and she asks about his wife, but he says he never married and never had children of his own. He moved to California when he was young to evade an unmentioned bad situation. If he could do anything different, he says, he’d become a youth guidance counselor, that in Sacramento he sees a lot of troubled young people who are into drugs and whatnot and just falling apart, and he feels he could offer them a certain perspective, be someone who would care and see that they implement change into their lives. “But alas, I run a trucking business. It’s a good living. I just wish I had someone to share it with. I ain’t religious so it’s not like I donate part of my living to a church.”

  “Maybe you could donate to a charity,” Myrtle suggests.

  Harold dismisses this idea. “They’re all crooks. I donated to what’s that sponsor a baby in Africa program. I donated to them for years. Then I found out rich white people pocket most of the money and almost none of it goes over to Africa.”

  “I’m sure there’s an honest organization out there somewhere,” Myrtle says.

  “I’m sure there is too,” Harold says. “I just haven’t found it yet.”

  And then, while Jesse and Andrew crash in Harold’s sleeping quarters, Myrtle sits up front in the passenger seat and has a long conversation with Harold. She opens up about her vision for the future, the home she and Jesse will own, their future family full of babies, the clothes that she will wear and the clothes that she will dress her children in. She can smell the green lawn and the chocolate chip cookies and the leather seats of the good car in the driveway. Myrtle has a dream of safety and cleanliness, where nightmares are merely a thing you wake up from in your comfortable bed next to a husband who will comfort you.

  “Do you believe in immortality?” Harold asks her.

  Myrtle isn’t religious either, but she thinks about it, and she nods her head. She says, “Yeah, I think I do.”

  When they stop in the darkness at a twenty-four hour roadside diner, Myrtle orders blueberry pancakes.

  Andrew orders a whole steak and eggs breakfast with a side of bacon and when his food comes, he takes it with him into the bathroom along with both snake-filled suitcases. “Don’t wanna keep us any longer than I have to, so I’m just gonna eat while I freshen up,” he says, and he makes a beeline toward the bathroom, where he locks the door and sets the suitcases on the floor, and he breathes deeply to ease the heavy beating of his heart.

  At the table, Jesse smiles like Andrew’s so amusing. “Some people like to eat in privacy, I guess. Haha.”

  Harold focuses on his biscuits and gravy, shoveling food into his mouth in a slow, deliberate fashion. He looks up from his food, wipes his mouth with his napkin, and says, “Who am I to say what’s right?” Then he lowers his head again.

  In the bathroom, Andrew scrapes steak and eggs into the two suitcases, sparing only the hash browns for himself.

  The snakes are dying. Some have already passed and the ones that are still alive look limp. None even act pissed off that they’ve been cooped up in a suitcase. The snakes will not make it all the way to Boring.

  ***

  They arrive in Sacramento.

  Harold says to Andrew and Jesse, “You two are nice boys. If you plan on settling down in Sacramento and need work, let me know. Trucking ain’t easy, and it’s lonely for a lot of people, but you can provide a decent living for your family. I offer full benefits too. Medical, dental, you name it.”

  They thank him but politely decline.

  “Well, if you ever change your mind, or find yourself back in Sac-Town with no place to go, you call Harold Payton.” He hands each of them a card.

  After parting ways with Harold, they spend eight-hundred dollars on a beater car. They spend twenty bucks on mice and a water dish at a pet store. They buy a drill and they drill some holes into the car’s trunk.

  Andrew has the two of them go find a store for some food and beer so he can handle the snakes himself, because at this rate, they’re likely all dead.

  “Want some whiskey too?” Jesse asks.

  “Naw,” Andrew says. “California is a bunch of tight-asses about drinking and driving. Just grab us some beer.”

  Andrew dumps the snakes out of the suitcases into the trunk. He watches them writhe. They have made a recovery. He drops the mice into the trunk and slams it shut.

  He thinks maybe someday he’ll write a book on caring for snakes.

  He’ll call it Snakes and Bacon.

  ***

  The drive from Sacramento, California to Boring, Oregon takes nine hours. It’s a long time to pass in a car, but you can cover that distance in a single stretch, wasting only part of a day.

  “Look at all the trees,” Myrtle says. “I have never seen so many trees in my life.”

  “Yeah, that’s a lot of fuckin’ firewood,” Jesse says in agreement.

  They’re passing through the redwoods in Northern California.

  “Once, Texas had this many trees, but they cut them all down,” Andrew says.

  “Did it?” Jesse says.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Seems like probably it did.”

  “Doesn’t Bigfoot live up here?” Myrtle asks.

  Jesse, who’s got a beer raised to his lips, pauses. He looks at his fiancée, smiles. “What do you know about Bigfoot?”

  “I know he’s big and hairy, kind of like a human ape, that he kidnaps women and turns out blurry in photographs. And I know he lives in these here woods.”

  “Girl sure knows a lot about Bigfoot,” Andrew says.

  “It’s that college education of hers,” Jesse says, jokingly, but Myrtle doesn’t take it that way.

  “Maybe if you two watched more of the Discovery Channel, you would know more about the world around you,” she says.

  “I know about these parts,” Andrew says. “I know a lot about them.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Naw, you see, my dad always wanted to fish up here. He used to talk about the salmon runs of the great Pacific Northwest like they was fairy tales. The Columbia, the Willamette, the Snake, the Rogue, the Deschutes, the Nestucca, the Skagit, the Snohomish, all the great rivers of Oregon and Washington. You name it, my father read about it. In fact, once we hit Oregon, I bet you I can name every river we pass.”

  “Maybe with ro
ad signs,” Jesse says.

  “Or a map stapled to your ass,” Myrtle says.

  Andrew just smiles to himself, and nostalgia for something he’s never experienced passes through his chest like heartburn. He’s entering the paradise his father always dreamed of but never experienced himself. Now Andrew will finally experience it, settle the demands of a restless ghost, if only he can navigate through the situation at hand.

  “Once, in the time of the Indians and dinosaurs,” he says, “so many salmon filled the rivers they didn’t even need bridges. You could cross any river walking on the backs of salmon. When they were hungry, they just set a basket at the water’s edge and soon enough, a salmon would jump into the basket. The forests were full of tasty mushrooms like we’ve never seen. Berry bushes grew like weeds. And bald eagles were everywhere, man. Everywhere. Bald eagles were like their friends. And the bears. So many bears and wolves and deer. Hardly any snakes anywhere. Nothing that could poison you at all, really. And it never got too hot and it never got too cold. Perfect weather all the time. The salmon had some magic in them that made it all happen. An old Indian chief said so. He said that as long as the people loved the salmon and treated them with respect, the salmon would fill the rivers.”

  “So what happened?” Myrtle says.

  “Lewis and Clark happened.”

  “Did Lewis and Clark kill Bigfoot’s family too?”

  “Probably, knowing those sumbitches.”

  The three of them nod knowingly, as if this is the way things are and must always be.

  “Imagine being the last of your kind,” Myrtle says.

  “It’d be lonely, for sure,” Jesse says.

  “I’m not so sure. I think it might be kind of freeing,” Andrew says. “Like real freedom.”

  “I don’t think it’d be lonely or freeing,” Myrtle says. “I think it’d be something else entirely.”

  “Like what, baby?” Jesse says.

  Before Myrtle can answer, they cross the Oregon border and throw up a little cheer.

  “We’re in the home stretch now,” Jesse says. “So you sure everything’s still squared away for the drop-off?”