by Rae Meadows
“Don’t worry. He’s practically married,” I say.
“Not if he’s coming here to see you,” he says.
I shrug, because I have nothing else to say.
“If things get rough up here, you know you can come down to me. You’ll always have a place in the trailer,” Ford says.
“Thanks.”
“And Jane?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t follow her too closely.”
I want him to clarify, but I have enough of a sense of what he means and it looks too painful for him to continue.
“I love you, kid,” I say.
“I love you too,” he says.
I kiss his cold, chapped lips and hang on, longer than I should, until he gently pulls free. I walk him to his truck, already loaded up with what little he brought to Salt Lake, and I touch the window before my sweet-souled fairhaired friend drives away.
“Hey Roxanne!” Kendra calls from the door of the office. “Want to go see Cully?”
I’ve sent girls to Cully before. He has a strong East Texas twang and he likes to get peed on.
“What the hell,” I say.
*
I’ve never peed on anyone before. On what part of him do I pee? Do I do it in the bathtub? In the bed?
Cully actually says “Howdy” when he opens the door. He’s tall and beanpole skinny, with the expected mustache, and he’s clad in a white T-shirt and tight Wranglers. Although he seems easygoing, he shows up on some of the girls’ “will not see” lists on account of his golden shower proclivity as well as for a propensity for getting aggressive. Tonight I feel like I can handle whatever he throws my way because all I want to do is forget everything else.
“Hello,” I say, “I’m Roxanne.”
“Rox-anne,” he sings in his best Sting imitation. “Welcome. Make yourself at home.”
We’re at the Crystal Inn downtown, on the twentyfifth floor overlooking Temple Square. The room, in shades of sea foam and mauve, has an early-eighties, smooth-cornered feel to it. Cully clicks off the hockey game and dives onto the bed.
“Money’s on the TV there,” he says.
After I call in, Cully says he’s going to take a shower and that I should relax. I step out of my shoes and coat and curl up on the bed in my jeans. He sings Garth Brooks in the shower and I switch on the TV and turn to a cooking show on PBS.
I imagine Ford in his truck, just past Provo around Spanish Fork, with Johnny Cash on the tape deck, thinking about the last month. I wonder how he will remember it, how he will give it shape and meaning, how Ember will become understandable in memory in a way she wasn’t in person. I feel his absence and I feel relief. With Ford gone, I don’t have to explain what I’m doing. I don’t have to have a good reason.
“Hey, Roxy baby,” Cully sings, dancing out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. His hair is slicked back, and water drips from his mustache. A puckered diagonal scar on his abdomen, I assume from an appendectomy, and a blurry blue tattoo on his bicep are his distinguishing marks.
“Hey there, Cully,” I say, crossing my legs Indian-style.
“Want to dance, lovely lady?” he asks, swinging his narrow hips from side to side.
I have to laugh. He takes me by the hands with surprising force and pulls me across the bed. When I’m on my feet in front of him, he unzips my sweatshirt in one quick pull and puts his hands around my waist, swaying to nonexistent music.
“Slow down there,” I say, losing my balance.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” he says. He slides off my sweatshirt and slips his hands under my shirt. “Want a pick-me-up? A kick of speed might loosen you up.”
“No, thanks,” I say, “but some music would be nice.”
He rolls his eyes but lets me go turn on the radio, which is playing the end of an old Pearl Jam song. When I turn back, he’s let the towel drop and his hand is on his semi-erect penis.
“Come back here, you,” he says. “Let’s have ourselves some fun.”
I walk toward him and he reaches out and yanks me to him by my belt loops.
“Off with these,” he says, going right for my zipper.
I coyly push him away and get out of my jeans on my own, and before he asks, I take off my shirt.
“Whoo!” he cheers, dancing to Britney Spears. “Come on, Roxanne, don’t you want just a taste? One little bump?”
And then I think, why not? Why not shut off my mind for a little while.
I follow him into the bathroom, where he cuts clumped white powder on the back of the toilet. With a pocketknife, he takes a small pile up each nostril. He hands me the knife and I do the same, the chemical drip in my throat promising an altered state I long for. I feel it almost immediately in my heart and I reach up and kiss Cully on the cheek.
“Thanks, darlin’,” he says.
He starts to lead me by the hand but then picks me up, as if carrying me over the threshold, with one arm hooked under my knees and one around my back, and sets me on the bed. The drugs have shrouded me in a layer of remove. I close my eyes and feel his body on mine, his lips on my neck, his hands seeking out mine. He smells like Speed Stick and tobacco. I like the breathless feeling of all his weight on me. I have nothing to do but be here as a body. Cully gets his hands underneath my butt and flips me over on top of him. When I open my eyes, I’m dizzy. I feel his erect penis against my stomach.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, come on. Give it to me.”
His hands are pressed on my thighs as I kneel above him. For a moment, I feel totally lost. No memory, no fear, no awareness. An empty vessel. He groans as he masturbates and the sound of his voice snaps me back.
I have pee fright and I have to think of waterfalls to get it going as he begs me to do it now, do it now.
“I want to feel it on me,” he says.
I close my eyes and feel the odd freedom of letting go right here. My aim is not great but I adjust so the urine stream hits right on his frantic hand, and he ejaculates as if on command.
“Shit, yeah,” he says, flopping into a spread eagle position and closing his eyes.
I move off the wet bed and reach for my jeans.
“Roxanne, come here baby,” he says. He slaps my butt hard. “Yeah. Real nice. Go in the front pocket of my pants over there. There’s a little something for you.”
It’s a hundred dollars.
“Thanks,” I say.
I haven’t been called out yet, but the date is all over.
“Drive safe,” Cully says, lighting a cigarette and turning the hockey game back on.
When the door shuts, I hear him yelling at the TV. I stand in the hall and listen as Cully claps and hoots. It makes me smile that he was pleased with my performance. My heart jumps about and I feel warm and riled up from the drugs and from the afterglow of having had a momentary, crystalline sense of purpose.
I jog to the elevator.
chapter 16
With Ford gone, Ember moves from the makeshift living room sleeping area into my room, right into my bed. She comes in early the next morning—she’s been out all night—and snuggles against me in her clothes. I feel sleepy happiness with her beside me. In a sense I’ve gotten what I’ve been after for weeks, though I know it’s a fleeting arrangement. We sleep until eleven, content to laze about until noon, getting sweaty under the covers.
“My breath could kill someone,” she says, rolling over.
Ember knows that I know she wasn’t with Ford and she wasn’t here, but I don’t ask her where she’s been.
“I had to pee on someone last night,” I say.
“No way! I haven’t even done that yet. Oh remind me, I have some money for you.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.” Her contributions to the household are spotty but I take what I can get.
“Did you see Ford before he left?” she asks.
“Yeah. He came by the office.”
“Do you think I’m a bad person for not going with him?”
“As if I’m in any position to judge anyone,” I say.
“It’s not the right thing for me to follow him down there. It would make me resent him eventually,” she says. “He’s way too good to be subjected to that.”
“Well, if it matters, I’m glad you stayed,” I say. I want to sink down into right here forever.
Ember hooks her fingers into mine.
“Of course it matters,” she says.
“So what now?” I ask, half-hoping she’ll decide everything for me, take away the uncertainty and fear of what I’m supposed to do next.
Ember shrugs and hooks her leg onto mine.
“Jane?”
“Yeah?”
“Has there been anyone since McCallister?”
“Nah.”
“Don’t you miss it?”
I think about sex and the first things that come to mind are peeing and hockey.
“Not really,” I say. “In an abstract way, I guess. The longer it’s been, the more remote it seems. I miss the first skin-to-skin contact under the covers. Getting hugged from behind. Having a neck to kiss. Mostly, I think I miss being part of something everyone else isn’t in on.”
“That makes me sad,” Ember says. “When I’m alone I miss sex almost immediately. The leading-up-to-it part and the sex itself. That’s when I’m okay. But the minute it’s over and he pulls away, the clock starts ticking and it won’t be long until I start feeling lost, like I might float away.”
“Is that true?” I ask.
“Well, not really float away, but yeah.”
“Even with Ford?”
“Especially with Ford because he thinks it’s all something it’s not. And I’m reminded of that every time.”
Ember picks at lint on the comforter. “But you’re doing it again. You always masterfully deflect my prying. So why are you here anyway?”
“Here?”
“Here. Utah. This bed.”
My face burns.
“There’s no shame in hiding out, if that’s it. That’s pretty much my game. Flee from one haven to the next, as long as it protects or distracts me. Survive the time. Don’t think that I’m too far gone to notice the pattern.” She nudges me with her shoulder. “What are you hiding from?”
I put a pillow over my face but Ember pulls it away and pokes me in the arm.
“I don’t think of it as hiding,” I say. “More like removing myself so I can do things differently. Not starting over but consciously choosing something for a change. Not just going along with circumstance.”
“That sounds good but I have a feeling that this is about McCallister,” she says.
“Now you sound like him. No. That’s over.” “When is anything with a man ever over?” “I want it to be.”
“Okay, okay. Then what about Ford?”
“What about him?”
“Oh come on. You two are both a little in love with each other.”
She interrupts my sputtering protest with a laugh.
“I think it’s sweet,” she says.
I sit up.
“That’s not it. Really,” I say.
“Just think of me now and again when you’re growing old together.”
The phone rings until the machine clicks on.
“Um, Shena, it’s noon and you’re on call. Hello? Are you there?”
“Shit,” Ember says, oozing out of bed.
She cuts two lines of cocaine on the bedside table. The dreamy morning evaporates while Kendra rattles on.
“Okay already,” Ember says, snorting up one and then the other with a well-used straw. She keeps on her outfit from the night before, still reeking of smoke, pulls her hair into a lopsided ponytail and quickly sniffs her armpits. Gargling a mouthful of mouthwash, she grabs her keys and she’s out the door, leaving it open behind her.
*
Nikyla and Jezebel are on the couch, flipping through a Delia’s catalog.
“This is a good look for you, Rox,” Nikyla says holding up the catalog.
“That skirt’s so short,” I say. “Maybe if I were ten years younger.”
“You always say that but we’re all just girls here. Age doesn’t mean anything,” Jezebel says. She lies down on Nikyla’s lap and hangs her legs over the side of the couch with Albee asleep on her stomach.
“Have you talked to that guy you were dating?” I ask.
Jezebel shakes her head “no.”
“Listen,” Nikyla says. “He’s not worth your time. The right one will love you no matter what.”
Jezebel shrugs, unconvinced, and points to some skater pants.
“Yeah, those are cute,” Nikyla says. “You can get some like it at the store. Use my discount.”
“Hey, Roxanne. Did you hear what happened to Miranda last night?” Jezebel asks, readjusting the puppy.
“She was almost raped,” Nikyla says.
“What?” I’m stunned by the revelation and by their prioritizing it behind cute pants.
“She ran out with only her purse. Her arms and legs had all these bruises,” Jezebel says. “The dickhead even called out after her that she forgot her clothes.”
Her nonchalance is forced. I know this reminder of what could happen brings our vulnerability into stark relief.
“Is she okay?” I ask.
Nikyla looks up from the catalog at the blinds-shaded window.
“She called in a couple hours after she got home but no one’s seen her since. She hasn’t come in,” Jezebel says, trying hard to play down the incident so she’ll be able to face another date.
“I talked to her,” Nikyla says. “She said she’s leaving. Going to Idaho to her parents’. She doesn’t sound that good.”
“Was he arrested?”
“Yeah, right,” Jezebel says, sitting up.
“Come on, Rox, even you’re not that naïve,” Nikyla says with uncharacteristic edge. “It’s not like she didn’t take the money.”
“What does Mohammed say?”
Both girls just look at me. I feel queasy.
Jezebel says in a mocking Arabic accent, “Just put him on the 86ed list and don’t send anyone to see him. It’s over. No one gets hurt.”
Kendra is murmuring in her best phone sex voice back at the desk.
“Jezebel,” Kendra says, “Don Steele at the Marriott.”
“Score,” Jezebel says. “That means presents.”
I feel like shaking them until they break and their fear tumbles out.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Josh got the promotion. He’s manager now,” Nikyla says, examining her face in a compact.
“You know what that means,” Jezebel says. Nikyla makes a rocking cradle with her arms. “Really?” I ask.
“As soon as possible,” Nikyla says.
I force a smile. But I feel the need to flee.
*
It’s four o’clock as I drive west out of town toward Wendover. The news of the assault and of Nikyla’s impending pregnancy has left me feeling raw. All I can stomach is driving. A trip through the expansive, moonlike Bonneville Salt Flats seems the only palatable option. The sun is already orange and sinking ahead. To my right, the Morton Salt factory perched on the edge of the lake is idle and vacant.
I never would have admitted it at the time but I thought McCallister and I were going to get married. It was not something I actively hoped for. I had just assumed. We were different than other people. We were weird. We were a team. I couldn’t imagine anyone else understanding me the way I thought he did. I thought that as long as McCallister needed me enough, I’d win by default.
When we had been together only two months—still feeling blithe and unstoppable—I got pregnant. McCallister was coolheaded about it while I was terrified. He said all the right things: the timing is wrong, we’re not ready, it’s a practical decision, we’ll have plenty of time, we’ll get through this. He said all those abstract niceties that made me feel better on the surface, but he shied away from the messy undertow
. I let him.
He went with me to the clinic, he paid for it, he held my hair when I threw up into a paper bag in the cab on the way home, he took care of me afterward and brought me chocolate and movies and maxi pads for the endless flow of blood. He asked me how I was but I knew he didn’t want to hear that I hurt, that I was seized by cramps, that I resented him, that I felt a lack.
“I’m fine,” I said again and again, and seeing as we didn’t know each other well and that he was trying his best, I let it go at that. And so did he. In the days, weeks, months that followed, I stowed the memory, and every scrap that clung to it, in a crevice of my head, forcing my mind to imagine a blank page whenever I would think of it, congratulating myself when the stretches between remembrances grew further apart.
We never talked about it. Sometimes I wonder if he’s forgotten. Or maybe it’s something he could never quite get over. At least with Maria he has a clean slate.
The salt flats are eerily white and sere, tinged pink by the setting sun. Smooth planes of water surround the craggy rock formations to the north, and the resulting reflections make them look like floating meteors. The thought passes through my head that if I stay on I-80, I’d end up in San Francisco, which has a certain appeal. But I have to pee and I haven’t eaten all day and I’m not that deluded as to try running away again.
So I exit. Wendover is half in Utah, half in Nevada, and the Utah side is a meager strip of trailers, a bodega, a gas station, a Mormon church, and little else. The state taxes are higher, so there’s no incentive to live on this side of the line except to uphold some moral obligation to the church.
The Nevada Wendover is a small gambling oasis taunting and tempting Utahns to come over for a spell, a brightly lit miniature Oz emerging from the desert overlook. Giant Wendover Will, a neon, pointing cowboy with a cigarette in his mouth, marks the Stateline Casino, and a “This Is the Place” sign mocks its counterpoint back in Salt Lake.
The rodeo is in town and it looks as if I’ve wandered onto a western movie set. Every man I see has a cowboy hat on, and every woman has a chambray shirt tucked into tight jeans. I slip into the clanging sea of the casino, where I go unnoticed against a backdrop of blinking lights, slot machine bells, and the sound of coins falling into metal trays. No clocks, no visible exits, no windows, just the smell of stale smoke, the metallic tang of money, and the itch to win. I find a five-dollar blackjack table and an empty stool next to a young guy with a florid face and a black Stetson. The knuckles of his hand tapping the table for a hit are scabbed and cracked. He nods when I sit and turns his attention back to the dealer.
