American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  But Mona knows. She knows too well.

  Mona’s last name wasn’t always Bright. Once, only a few years ago—though it feels like a lifetime now—when she was on her fourth year with the Houston PD, she happened to meet a state trooper named Dale Loudon, a brick wall of a man who had large, sad eyes and a soft, slow way of speaking that charmed Mona’s hardened (or so she thought) heart. Dale liked old movies, mowing his grass, and making fly-fishing lures, though he was a terrible fly-fisherman himself. He was kind, he was attentive, he was, more or less, thoughtful; in other words, he was everything Mona had missed out on so far in her life. And the fact that he had a dick like a plantain certainly didn’t hurt his case.

  They got married when Mona was thirty-two, and she was, to her suspicious disbelief, quite happy. The quiet, dull domesticity Dale offered appealed to her, resonated with her. She had never known you could live like that, so relaxed, just simply there. There was something perfect about the Sunday mornings when they would lie in bed lazing away the day. It was like some kind of wonderful exotic drug—but then, it would be, because never in her life had Mona ever had a home like that. A real home.

  She was pregnant four months into the marriage. It was not something either of them had intended, yet she couldn’t ever call it an accident. Because Mona was, despite all logic, quite thrilled at the news, which was not something one would expect. Honestly, no one could ever hear the question “Would you like for your body to play host to a whole person, and, upon painful extraction of that person, would you allow every waking and even unwaking moment of the next years or decades of your life to bend at the whims of a tiny, tyrannical, larval human, to the complete devastation of your financial and social life?” and respond in the positive. Let alone Mona Bright, she of the fierce right hook, cold grimace (which she picked up from her father), and deadeye shot (for Mona had been far and away the best shot in her graduating class—something else she had learned from her father).

  But Mona did. When she saw the tiny pink plus sign on the white stick, something inside her opened up, unfolded its limbs, and stretched its palms toward sunlight. She could not articulate it, but it felt like she now had a chance to make things right, even though she was never entirely sure what had been wrong. (Besides, a tiny voice always reminded her, absolutely everything.)

  She soon found herself buying all sorts of ridiculous shit for the nursery: carpets and drapes and a crib and bedding (all vetted by the most scrupulous baby magazines, which suddenly seemed terribly wise) and onesies and hats that would only ever be worn about twice before the little thing’s head grew too big. Most of these items were a gender-neutral yellow, because Mona could never get her head around this binary blue/pink bullshit. She also refused to learn the baby’s gender, because that would just ruin all the damn fun, wouldn’t it?

  Dale bought her similarly ridiculous maternity shit. Slippers. Body pillows. A foot massager for her swollen ankles. He even bought her a pink maternity dress. A pink one, because, bless his heart, Dale could never get his own head around Mona’s problems with the blue/pink situation. But the thing was, Mona had worn it. Even though it made her look like a deflating balloon or a piece of goddamn chewing gum, she’d worn it. And she hadn’t cared. The second she saw the tiny dancing shrimp-person displayed on the screens at the ob-gyn, none of that niggling stuff could ever bother her again.

  If anything bothered her, it was the whole family process—and there was a process. She began to think about the phrase start a family more and more: it was like start a car, suggesting that there was a preassembled apparatus and you could just hop in and hit a switch and off you would go. Or as if there were a cheap-suited huckster who, once you had a ring on your finger and a mortgage sucking off dollars from your bank account, could fix you up with the right kind of family and you could drive it off the lot today. It was a creeping feeling she had when reading the magazines, as if they were saying, “This is how one births and rears a child,” and they’d brook no other suggestion. You had to look exactly like the picture in the magazine, otherwise you were doing it wrong.

  And none of that seemed right to her. She didn’t want this to be a product, a commodity, something that had to look like what was advertised on the fucking box. This was her one chance to give love she’d never gotten herself, and she didn’t want it to be turned into something she was being fucking sold, just buying the Motherhood Experience, one internet purchase at a time.

  Her life and her child were the only things she’d ever really had. And she made herself promise never to forget that.

  It was eight months into the pregnancy when it happened. Eight months of nausea, of swollen feet and fingers, of nosebleeds and blurred vision and exhaustion; eight months of little wiggles and shimmers down in her belly, the poke and prod of tiny limbs; eight months of black-and-white photos of the slumbering stowaway growing inside her; eight months of mounds and mounds of impossibly tiny clothing. And then when she was on her way back from the grocery store she passed through an intersection with the blessing of two green lights, and yet just as she trundled through she caught a blur of red in the corner of her vision—just the tiniest blur, like the flit of a hummingbird’s wing. Then she felt her head snap back and her arms go limp, and in that moment her world shattered.

  The entire earth seemed to buckle up and throw her car several feet to the right. She blacked out briefly. When she came to, with screams and tinkling glass and the hiss of machinery in her ears, she looked through what was left of her driver’s-side window and saw the crumpled front of a red Ford F-150, its windshield sporting a frost-rimmed, gaping hole on the right side, created when the driver—unbuckled, drunken—had been ejected through the windshield like a man shot out of a cannon, his face pushed back through his brain as he dove through the glass.

  And all she could think was—Where did that come from? Where did that come from?

  Then the ambulance and the parade of lights, some red and blue, some cold white. So many white flashing lights, light after light after light, and pokes all along her side as they put pins in the bones of her left arm… and then there was Dale, seated beside her bed with his big hands clasped before him, his face the color of a currant and his eyes dripping tears, and he said, honey, honey, she didn’t make it.

  And Mona said, Who? Who didn’t make it?

  And Dale said, Our little girl. She died. He killed our little girl.

  And as Mona understood who this she was and realization dawned in her sputtering, bruised brain, some little shelf under her heart collapsed and she caved inward, crumbling to pieces and falling down the big, dark mine shaft that occupied the space where her daughter had once peacefully slept.

  Dale kept talking, but it didn’t matter. Mona was walking through the hallways of her mind, turning off lights, shutting off switches, locking doors, shutting everything down, down, down, until all that was left was the barest fundamentals.

  Shut down. Turn it all off.

  Make yourself empty, and drift.

  After the funeral Dale held her hand and said she’d be all right. He said they’d get through this. He was wrong on both counts.

  She wished so badly to have known her at least a little before she lost her. Much in the same way, Mona knows, that she wished to have known her mother before she excused herself from this world.

  Why is it, she thought, that people always leave us just before we know them?

  After her marriage fell apart, her old lieutenant came by to pay her his respects and offer her her old position. But Mona turned it down. The person who had worked that job was gone, just as the happy creature of lazy Sunday mornings was gone. Now she could tolerate nothing but endless highways and miles of ugly country and the constant shuffle of motels, a beery, dreary life of mundane odd jobs and faceless, wordless lovers. And somewhere in the midst of all that miserable wandering she looked at herself in the mirror and saw a glimpse of the trembling, mad woman who had once told her to stay in the y
ard until the ambulances were gone, just before she lay down in the bathtub and stuck her chin on the barrel of a twelve-gauge.

  Mona considered doing the same. Perhaps, she thought, it was a kind of family duty, carrying on in her mother’s footsteps.

  Yet almost as the thought crossed her mind she got a letter notifying her that her father, Earl Bright III, had sloughed off his mortal coil to transcend this earth and touch the heavens, and so on and so forth, and waiting in the bleary wreckage of his life was a confusing invitation to come visit this little slice of paradise in the shadow of Mesa Abertura.

  Now Mona is here, sifting through the remains of another person’s life, yet this life was over long before she died. How and why this happened, why some germ of madness infected her mother’s brain, remains a mystery to Mona. And though she hates herself for it, she feels nothing but anger at the woman projected on the wall. She hates that Laura Alvarez and the rest of this town has a joy that has always eluded her. She hates that this place is perfect forever, whereas she has only a dream of something that now feels as if it might never have happened, a dream of two people, mother and child, who never truly were.

  Mona isn’t really paying attention to the movie anymore; she’s just staring through the morass of flickering blue faces as she imagines her own failings. Yet then her anger goes cold and something in her brain, the tiny cop part that still scrutinizes everything she sees, speaks up and says—Did I just see…?

  She sits up, watching the film. The cameraman is following her mother through a dense thicket of people, all of whom are waving to the camera. Mona waits, but she doesn’t see it again, so she has to go through the laborious task of rewinding the film.

  She starts it again and sits before the glowing wall, waiting, watching. The cameraman turns a corner and begins wading through the throng, Mona’s mother sometimes stopping to wave him forward. People keep turning to look at the camera and its blinding light as it passes, and then one huge, pale face comes swooping out of the crowd like a wayward moon…

  “What the fuck?” breathes Mona.

  She rewinds it again, and watches it once more. The empty room seems even bigger than before, and she shivers a bit, feeling cold and vulnerable. For projected on her wall, just very briefly, was the smiling face of none other than Mrs. Benjamin, the very woman who not more than a few days ago claimed she did not remember Mona’s mother at all. She’s standing in the crowd to the side, listening to conversation with a polite smile, and as the camera passes by, her eyes flick over, irritated—Who brought that damn thing?—before her polite smile returns and the camera moves on.

  “She lied,” says Mona aloud. “Why did she lie?”

  But even more concerning, Mrs. Benjamin does not appear thirty years younger in the film. She looks the exact same age as she did the other day, around seventy. Yet this film has to have been taken more than thirty years ago. Right?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  There is only so much nothing a man can take, Norris learns, before he has to do something. It’s only been three weeks since Bolan sent them to do that job on the mountain, yet it feels like an eternity, each hour stretched to a day by Norris’s screaming paranoia. But so far nothing has happened, and Norris has made sure to do nothing as well. This, of course, is part of Bolan’s orders: don’t do a damn thing, he told him. Buy groceries. Watch television. Read, cook, whatever. Just don’t talk to me or anyone else, and don’t step a single fucking toe out of line, you hear?

  Norris is only too happy to oblige. He’s one of the few Roadhouse employees to actually live in Wink. This is not, of course, coincidence—Bolan decided (or was told) a year ago that he’d need people actually in Wink, rather than on the periphery like the Roadhouse. Zimmerman and Norris got stuck with the job, which only occasionally seems like a bad one—Wink is a terribly nice place to live—though the job does come with a lot of rules. Some of which make it a little difficult on a man like Norris.

  He tries to be good during this cautious period. He buys groceries, and cooks, and watches television. He cleans his house and mows his yard and just tries to be a generally agreeable neighbor. And everyone just smiles and waves to him, as if there’s nothing wrong.

  And there isn’t, Norris says to himself. Nothing is wrong at all. They certainly didn’t kill the town’s eldest, most respected resident up on the mesa nearly a month ago. Why, it’s just insane to consider. No, it’s just old Norris here, going about his normal, respectable business.

  But then it happens: he’s at Mr. Macey’s checking out (his bag contains only tuna, bread, and mustard, for though he attempted cooking as Bolan said, it was an unmitigated disaster) when his eye scans the magazines at the counter. Most of them are the usual forgettable fare (but the magazines in Wink, though all slightly bland, are ones Norris has never seen elsewhere, like Southern Housekeeper and Gardener, Our Day Today, and Southwestern Steppes Outdoorsman). Yet one, a fitness magazine Norris has never seen before, features a cover that leaps to his eye: a young man in a white T-shirt and acid-washed jeans leans against the hood of a Corvette, staring into the sunset. He is thin and bronzed and his oiled hair features a wandering forelock, an enticing thread of hair that curls across his smooth brow. And there is something about him—the way his hips are thrust forward, maybe, proffered to the viewer, or the way he seems both aware of the beauty of the sunset and totally indifferent to it—that puts a cold fire dancing down Norris’s bones.

  He freezes up. Bolan said to be good, after all. And the urge that has charged every molecule in Norris’s body is most certainly not good. Yet Norris cannot help himself. He swallows, picks up the magazine with trembling hands, and places it in his bag as he checks out.

  Even though he pays for the magazine honestly, he feels as if he’s stolen the damn thing. He tucks his bag under his arm and hunches over as he walks out. Yet as he leaves, he sees he is being watched: he looks up to see an old, lined face staring at him from the yellowed office windows near the exit. It is Mr. Macey, the shop’s owner, and though he is often genial and pleasant, now his face is fixed in a look of terrible fury.

  Norris runs out the door, and even hides behind a parked truck, watching the store’s door and waiting for Macey to follow. Yet he never comes. Norris slinks away, feeling guilty and jittery and nauseous.

  For the rest of the day he goes through his normal routine. He eats his tuna sandwiches and watches Howdy Doody on the TV. He plays darts on his porch and has to turn down an offer from his neighbor to join in. When night falls he returns inside.

  Sometimes Norris must remind himself that he is not on friendly territory. Somewhere in the woods there is a border, and what is on one side of the border is not the same as what is on the other. The Roadhouse, he knows, just barely rides that invisible line. Most people can cross the line, if they wish—but most don’t, fearing what would happen if they tried. Yet They can’t, at all. Norris knows that, and thanks God for it. But since Norris is in here with Them, on the inside of the border, he has to be mindful about himself.

  He turns on all the lights in the house, for to turn them off would look suspicious. He makes sure all his chores are done, all the dishes put away and the laundry neatly folded and sorted, and as he finishes up he picks up a stack of books very nonchalantly—Just carrying these books around, no problem here—and begins placing them on random shelves. About halfway through, he comes to the fitness magazine he bought at the store, and he grunts as if to say—How did this get here? And he absentmindedly leaves it on a shelf in the linen closet of the bathroom, making sure it appears as though he just set it down on whichever surface was available.

  Then he decides to go through the cleaning supplies under his sink. And again, he finds something that should not be there: a bottle of baby oil. He shakes his head, tsking and bemoaning his poor organizational skills, and again returns to the bathroom. Yet rather than putting the baby oil away, he enters the linen closet with it, and shuts the door behind him.


  In Wink, it is always smart to live your life as if you’re being watched. Because so frequently, you are.

  Norris blindly reaches out and picks up a waiting flashlight from one of the closet shelves. He turns it on, grabs the magazine, stoops, and crawls below the biggest shelf at the bottom of the closet. There, curled up in the fetal position, his breath trembling and his fingers quivering, he begins to page through the magazine, his eyes devouring every image.

  Wink has strict rules, and though one of its rules is never to discuss what the rules are, there are certain things that just don’t happen. No one gets divorced in Wink, for example. Premarital sex is deeply frowned upon, and pregnancy out of wedlock is beyond scandalous. Yet there are things even worse than these.

  Norris is not sure why, but he’s always found it easier to fall in love with men than women. He’s just more comfortable around them. And he knows it is wrong—it is wrong—yet he cannot stop himself. He cannot stop the bolt of energy that sometimes comes rushing out of his heart. He has never really acted on it: though sometimes he might desperately wish for physical contact (the brush of knuckles on the back of his hand, perhaps) he cannot allow it. His one moment of perfection, his guilty, trembling moment of joy, occurs once a month in the cramped dark of his linen closet, lit only by a flashlight and perfumed with the puerile aroma of baby oil. It is the only time he feels happy and whole, and each time it is followed by unspeakable self-hate. What a fool he is to follow such passions, and what a coward he is to do so in such a craven way.

  He is just about to unbuckle his pants when he hears a crash from his kitchen. He sits up so fast he knocks his head on the shelf above him. A single thought cracks through his mind like a caroming bullet:

  He’s been found out. They know what he is.

  He sits in the closet for a moment, listening, but he hears no other noise. Then, slowly, he emerges from the closet, making sure to leave the baby oil and the fitness magazine hidden below piles of bedsheets. He looks down his hallway but sees nothing there. He grabs the only weapon he can find—an old brass candlestick—and, feeling like a cartoon out of Clue, he stalks down the hall.