by Kim Barnes
Between Washington’s eastern border and the ocean lie miles of scrubland, desert dry, blown with sage. The mountains that surround the river drainages—the Blues, the Cascades—seemed impossibly distant. We pulled the trip between dusk and dawn, and my sense of that land has less to do with terrain and sky than it does with the few feet of highway our headlights illuminated.
The moon rose like white heat, the rock fired in silver. Coyotes became foolish then, separating themselves from shadow, feeding on the small animals flushed out of hiding by the false sun. I could look across the cab and see David’s face, see his one hand on the wheel, cigarette in the other. I felt giddy, as though I had been given flight.
I discovered the night world of long-haul truckers wired on coffee, NoDoz, amphetamines—whatever it took to pull through hundreds of miles of darkness. Some spent their hours on the CB, radioing other truckers ahead or behind, calling up the locals whose towns they passed through. Others tuned in to preachers broadcasting their message of salvation, praying along as the mile markers flew by and the sun coming up seemed another kept promise.
That first night, when we pulled into one of the twenty-four-hour cafés that anchored the freeway, I lowered my eyes beneath the appraising looks of men at the counter. I found their gaze sinister and embarrassing, but David saw in their stares a validation of his judgment.
It is hard to remember myself there, in the white-yellow light of glass and fluorescence; not hard but painful, because what I see is a girl dressed in a dancer’s leotard, tight jeans, and high heels, balanced on a bar stool between men who hunch around her. They’ve got their elbows alongside their plates, their boots planted on the linoleum. Their hands are rough, their faces lined from the efforts of smoking and squinting through hours of fog, sunlight, hail. As David nudges me in front of him, tells me to straighten my back and lick my lips, I’m thinking that this is all a game, that David will protect me because it is he who has made up the rules.
“They’re wishing they had what I have,” he said later, patting my bottom as we walked from the brightly lit diner, and because some part of me responded to both his desire and his insistence on theirs, I let myself believe that I might please him this way. I did not let myself think of those other drivers as men like my father, men with wives and daughters and sons, men who whispered not of my desirability but of my misfortune. Perhaps they even worried over me, seeing I was young and obviously ignorant. Many of them knew David, had seen him over the years in the same cafés, the same truck stops and rest areas, had seen his way with women and the kind of women he chose to share his bed.
Back in the truck, he told me I’d done fine. Next time I should wear something more revealing, something that would show them my tits. He lit a cigarette, smiled and winked.
There was nothing outside my window then but the charcoal silhouette of black trees against black sky. We were speeding toward Seattle, toward the ocean, toward people I’d never seen, land I’d never touched, water I’d never tasted. I meant to do that, taste the bay’s water and see if the salt were a true thing.
I cracked the window an inch. The wind came in full of forest smells as we climbed Snoqualmie Pass, and I had a sudden, nauseating ache for my family, for my child’s life spent cloistered in the woods, but that life was no longer mine.
Then who was I? The logger’s daughter come down from the mountains who hated her own ignorance of the world. A skinny, stubborn, strong-willed girl who needed to be broken, needed to learn. I didn’t know which side my bread was buttered on, didn’t know that if I wanted to dance, I’d have to pay the fiddler.
And that was the name—the truck driver’s handle—that David gave me so that I might be known on the waves of the air. “Tiny Dancer,” he whispered when I pleased him. “Dance.”
In the months to come, I would learn the complex shifting of gears, throwing my weight to the clutch, feeling the engine shudder and grind beneath me. I would learn the parlance of shortwave, the rhythms and code of numbers and names. Sometimes, listening to the voices floating in from the trucks and houses miles away, I felt as though I were a foreigner, the language not my own. The land was unfamiliar, my sense of time reversed, nocturnal. My family had no idea where I was, and I could not have said I knew the man who sat beside me. I would soon forget that I had ever been anyone else, that I had kissed with passion born of love, that I had once been touched by a lover whose hands held comfort.
Seattle, to me, will always be that city I first came to know not by its proximity to water nor its rain, but by First Street, the lineup of sex stores where David took me soon after our arrival. Seattle is a cramped booth with a machine that takes quarters for five minutes of flesh, filmed or sometimes live. Seattle is row after row of sex toys and magazines glistening with skin that has been pierced, tattooed, injected, impaled. Seattle is a cheap motel where truckers pay by the hour for a bed and curtains to draw against the light. It is a topless bar where women cup their breasts and lower themselves onto the laps of customers, women who, when they saw him, welcomed David not as a john but as a lover, as someone whose attention meant more to them than money.
This was the life he offered me, and even as he whispered with the women and I saw them take me in, something between jealousy and amusement in their eyes, I never thought to run.
From that first trip to Seattle on, during the nighttime hauls, during the days meant for sleep but fueled into wakefulness by speed, during all those times when his desire for me became a ritual of domination, I would do what David asked; I would become for him the woman I believed I must be.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?”
“It’s not what I want you to do. It’s what you want to do.”
We lay on David’s bed, in the breeze coming in from the patio door, open to the cool air of midnight. I took the joint that he offered, pinched it between my fingers. I pretended to take the smoke into my lungs, pretended to hold my breath. In the dark, he couldn’t see that the motions were false, that the smoke drifted free of my mouth. I didn’t want escape, disorientation. I wanted this moment with David, just the two of us, the wind smelling of the river, the muddy shallows. I wanted us to talk of other things—I wanted to hear the stories of his youth, of Vietnam. I wanted to know how his father had left and why. I wanted him to tell me what lay deepest in his mind, what wonders held him just before sleep, what answers came before waking.
I listened as David’s voice softened. I liked him high because it was the only time he seemed able to rest, the only time the rigidity left him, and I could reach out and touch him with tenderness. There had been so little lingering of lips at the throat’s pulse, so few caresses; I do not remember his kiss at all. Each movement had its purpose, as if part of a well-rehearsed play, intentional and detached. He shied away from my eyes held too long on his; he turned his back when what I wanted was only to hold him.
This was not what David wanted—not the arm-linking, not the lush kiss or the spooning sleep of lovers. What he wanted, he said—more, even, than my voyeur’s eye and ear—was to have me lie with other men, men he would designate and direct. Our conversations had come down to this one thing: when would I be ready?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.”
“Quit thinking about it,” he said. “Just do it. The first time is the hardest. After that it’s easy.”
There was the encouragement of his smile, the sureness in his words that meant he believed I would do the right thing—and that right thing would be to step out of my old skin and into the new, free myself from the old parables of temptation and punishment. I needed to test my wings, he said. I needed to fly.
I felt a certain curiosity, but I cannot say I felt a true sexual urge toward such an encounter. My interest lay not in other men but in David. Yet how could I separate the two? Everything I knew about men and women revolved around this one truth: to keep a man happy, a woman must meld her will to his, become for him
the extension and fulfillment of his need.
“Is that what you really want?” I spoke into the darkness of the room, smelling the sweet smoke, feeling as though I’d been unleashed from my mooring, floating toward deeper waters.
He tucked me against him, ran the length of his palm across my face. He held me for a long time, nothing more.
And then, after a time, he rose, pulled me gently after him. Already there was someone waiting in the next room, someone who had been there all along. I had not known this. I had believed us alone, believed myself free to contemplate and consider without consequence. I’d forgotten how well he knew this road, how he was always there ahead of me, preparing the way that I should go.
“COME HERE,” he would say, and I would. Then he would tell me what he wanted. Sometimes he wanted me to do nothing more than undress for him. On the dance floor, he instructed me to move my hips, arch my back, tilt my shoulders. He scolded me for sunbathing in my swimsuit: the unattractive tan lines marred my skin. Sometimes, when another man asked me to dance, I would look up and see David where he sat at our table, encircled by friends, watching me, smiling, nodding his approval, pleased with his creation.
A kind of Bacchus, reduced to bone, running on whiskey and speed, he brought us together cheerfully, as though what we were about was a communal celebration. The ones left at the night’s end were the most or least hardened, the reduction of time and sobriety. These were the men I would come to fear most: those who knew what they were capable of, and those who, as of yet, did not.
It is this story that I sometimes believe I cannot speak, the darkest moments of my passage. Even now I cloak the truth of it in vagaries. What is it I mean to tell? How can I define what it is that I longed for, what emotion directed me?
If I tear through the curtain of words, I see love, so easily, rend first, then need, curiosity, desire, lust. The story is about all these things and none of them—it is about what these words become when they are no longer words but currency on the tongue.
It is not simply the sex that shamed me. I understand how the wondrous exploration of sensual delight can be twisted into something disgraceful, so that even a chaste woman in her marriage bed will cringe in mortification at her body’s sanctified quickening. All the warnings, the broadcast of admonitions concerning carnal pleasure, the insistence on separation of body and soul, the inherent weakness of the clay vessel forever compromising the ethereal spirit—even now I struggle to free myself of the spectral jury, sitting in judgment of my pleasure.
But this is not about sex. It is about confusion bred into fear; it is about the tyranny built on that fear—controlling the body, the mind, the soul of another. It is about being raised to believe that women want to be, must be, dominated. It is about rejecting those beliefs and still being unable to escape them—so wide a river, so many currents to swim through.
I thought I was near the surface when I met David Jenkins. No more father, no more church, no more concerns about what others might think. David was my guide into the new world; by the time I realized I was lost, the last swell of land had fallen away from beneath my feet.
What I mean to say is this: there are rooms in which a girl with hair the color of caramel licks the thighs of her lover’s lover. Rooms full of people who will bind one another and bite small moons into flesh, and they will do this not out of love or lust but out of a need to reduce by half the pain they themselves are feeling, and to override by half the pain the other is feeling, and it will never be enough. There is a room with a bed on which two people will make a simple love and the one will go home and gag and purge himself with emetics and thrash himself and spend in the lovely rage of his guilt.
And that other: she may sleep and dream; she may wake up charmed. She may crawl thirst-stricken from that bed to the bed of another, believing, even then, that she will not survive the desert of her journey.
THERE WERE THOSE WHO WOULD TRY to save me. John came for me once, walked through the door of David’s apartment, took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the revelers and their beery questions. I was in David’s bed, drunk and sick on tequila, perhaps sedated by the Quaaludes he’d threatened to slip into my drinks. I’d curled myself tight beneath the sheets, the loud music and laughter reaching me in waves as I drifted in and out of sleep.
I recognized John’s touch, the clean smell of him. He was stroking my hair, calling my name. “I’m getting you out of here,” he said, and he pulled the sheet from the bed, wrapping it around me and lifting me to his chest. I felt like I was floating, tethered to his arms by thin bits of cloth as we descended the stairs into the heat and noise, the sweet smoke, the charged air.
The laughter quieted; only the music, the drum and shrill guitar, John’s voice, then David’s. I remember wondering if David would let me go, if he would let John take me. Everyone in that room was afraid of John, his size and the fierceness with which he stared them down, dared them to stand in his way. But something in me welled up then, some impulse to fight my own fight, hold my own ground. I tried to say it strongly, but it came out as a whisper: “Take me back upstairs, John. Please don’t do this to me.”
What is it like to hold a woman in your arms, the whole of her, to move with her easily from one place to the next, while the room of people watches to see you relinquish your possession? Because John did, he did what I begged him to do. He turned and moved back up the stairs slowly, and David followed, waiting as John laid me gently down and covered me again.
What words then passed between them I don’t remember. Sleep was there, and I let its current take me, away from the final sadness on John’s face, away from his lips on mine.
THERE IS ANOTHER BOY, whose lover I was for an hour, no more. He is the one whose face I will remember, whose eyes will bring me back into myself for a single, excruciating moment, while the party roars on and David waits patiently in the next room. He is the one who has been chosen and sent to me, whom I must receive. He comes to where I sit on the cedar bench of the sauna, hesitates when the door behind him closes. He kneels before me, then rests his head in the cleft of my hands, the fingered lap I have made for him.
Long, blond hair falls across his bare shoulders. His eyes are a delicate blue. He is fair, fine-boned, so fragile as I hold him and wait. He trembles and I lift his chin. I see how it is with him. He is crying. He thinks he must love me.
He is afraid for me. Or of me. How can I soothe him? He is older than I, perhaps twenty-three. I touch his forehead, let my hands slide beneath his arms, pull him toward me. He comes to me easily, he is a child, and I take him and hold him and rock him there, the two of us alone in the mist of the rocks that shush and whisper.
This will be our secret, this moment of nothing. It is our secret and David must not know, for this is an intimacy he cannot give or receive and is a betrayal I must not risk. This is injury, infidelity, treason. Yet, in this other one’s eyes, I have seen myself, the pity and fear, the tender regard, the power I possess and contain.
I hold to him until the heat is too little or too much, until we must rise together and go from that room and say to the man who waits, “We are done.”
A WARM AFTERNOON IN SEATTLE, JUST outside Pike Place Market, where David and I had gone for a lunch of smoked salmon. We might have been any other couple walking the wharf that day, smiling in the coastal sun, feeding the seagulls our scraps. This was the part of Seattle I loved, the city I’d romanticized as a girl while watching Here Come the Brides on my grandmother’s TV, singing along with the theme song: “The bluest skies you’ve ever seen in Seattle.…” I hummed the words as David and I stopped at the import shops, where I bought bamboo baskets and sandalwood incense, willing myself to forget that we had just come from First Avenue and its sex shops, whose wares David preferred over the cheap knickknacks I adored.
On our way back to the parking lot, in an open, concrete stairway, we came upon a large man beating a hooker; the bitch, he shouted to the gawking crowd, owed him m
oney.
We stood and watched with everyone else as the pimp raised his fists again and again, as the girl slumped against the metal banister, slid down the concrete wall, blood on her face, blood in her hands. I started toward them, thinking I could stop the man from hitting, thinking I could somehow save her.
“Don’t,” David said, and grabbed my arm.
“Why doesn’t someone do something?” I pulled away, saw the pimp wipe his fist in the handkerchief he’d taken from his pocket. People turned their heads, witness to nothing.
“That’s none of our business,” David said. He began walking. I looked at the woman, who lay crying on the landing between stairs. People stepped carefully around her.
“The main thing you’ve got to remember,” David said as we drove back toward the motel, “is that she was a whore. She wasn’t worth it.”
I stared out the window as we passed the King Dome, the Space Needle, the museum with its long lines—thousands waiting to see the sarcophagus of King Tut. It was late, and we needed to pick up our load and head toward home. I was sick with what I had witnessed—both the violence and David’s unwillingness to intervene. I was beginning to understand how carefully David weighed his risks—a skill he’d honed in the jungles of Vietnam. He had survived, come back alive after two tours of duty, the first one because he’d been drafted and forced to go, the second because he had lived through the first and was now good at this game of war. What home offered him was minimum wage and laws he would rather not keep. In ’Nam he had all the drugs he could eat, and the women there did not know the word for love.
