My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I blundered left right left right back to where my car was parked in the front yard—this was the custom in that neighborhood—and intended to coast the small distance to the bar, as it was just around the corner, and Steph came howling out of the house as I turned the engine over, and she jumped on the hood of my car, spread eagle on the windshield.

  I yelled out my window, “Are you fucking serious?”

  “I won’t let you!”

  “Seriously, get the fuck off my car. It’s just down the street and I don’t feel like walking.”

  She would not remove herself from my hood.

  We were at an impasse.

  “Fine. I’ll walk,” I said. I turned off the car and emerged from the driver’s side, and when I put my keys back in my pocket, I found my missing credit card.

  “That turned out all right,” I said the next day, and Steph pointed out some deep bruises she had acquired from flinging herself onto the hood of my car, to keep me from killing children and dog walkers between the dilapidated house and the shabby bar, and I thought, Well, shit, this isn’t Texas. I’d never thought of that before. You wouldn’t have people walking in Texas, let alone walking their dogs. Anyway, in Texas, neighborhoods have sidewalks, and you’re expected to have a few DUIs. It drives the economy. Mind the pun.

  I didn’t think I was drinking too much, or more than necessary. I thought, more than anything, that I drank like a British person. Or an Australian, when I’d really take it too far. Maybe I was just living in the wrong hemisphere.

  Steph felt my drinking was entirely out of control.

  I, well, didn’t. I drank like labor. I drank like a working man, five days a week. Maybe six. Three of them acutely. I drank like a lord. I had every analogy available to put it into a context; she was the outlier.

  She couldn’t drink steadily; you put her in front of booze, and she drank it all, right at once. Then she had a seizure or a “life event” and wouldn’t drink again for years.

  “Who’s the dangerous drunk, when you compare the two patterns?” I asked her.

  So one morning, I was up pretty early, a bit sleep deprived—I’d been writing a lot lately—and Steph was in the shower, getting ready for her day at work. I knocked on the mildewed door to the bathroom with the mildewed shower stall and the undignified toilet where you had to pull up your knees to your chin to take a proper poo, and I said, “Hey, Steph! I got your coffee going, and I’ve walked Cleo,” and I could hear her crying, in the shower.

  “Steph, are you ... ” I asked through the door. I’m a bit lightheaded, sure, but I could swear I heard her crying.

  “Darling, are you crying?”

  The shower cut off with a squeak, and then a rumble. The listing vinyl platform we called a floor groaned as she stepped out and grabbed a thin, nasty towel off the floor, because the towel racks didn’t hold into the linoleum, so we had the two swinging towel rack sides, but no bar joining them. Even the towels in that house were substandard, made of a tired, resistant fiber that moved the water around your body rather than soaked it up.

  “Darling?”

  And she opened the door, bright as a shiny day.

  “I’m great!” she said. “I’m just fine! I don’t know what you heard.”

  “Hunh,” I said, “Because I could swear I heard you crying.”

  “No, no,” she said. “Not at all.”

  “It’s funny because I can still see tears on your face. But all right, well, I have your coffee going. I’m going back to the bar to finish writing this fantastic story about my grandmother and these ocelots—”

  And I turned around here and she punched me, bare, sharp, white girl knuckly, right in the eyeball—BAM!

  “You fucking bastard!” she yelled. “You goddamn lazy Mexican drunk motherfucker! You don’t fuck me for weeks and all you do is drink and pretend to write and you’re surprised that I’m crying!”

  I took a step back as soon as I was hit.

  She was standing there, so thin and wet and well, pale, with a towel wrapped around her torso, her eyes crazy and her shoulders bare and glistening with that toxic water from the mildewed shower, and she glowered at me with all the righteous indignation of a mother with a baby walker waiting in a crosswalk in Seattle.

  My head was humming, and not from her blow.

  It hadn’t been much, but it had been received as terms.

  We were done.

  She had hit me, and my physiological response had been to hit right back, that very second.

  But I hadn’t.

  I took that step back, made an instant assessment of the situation, and, while my eye was watering, I turned right around, grabbed my keys, and within a few hours was signing rental documents on an oversize studio on the same block I lived on when I met Steph, the only thought pumping through my head telling me to pick up where I left off, before I met her, try to pick up again where I was two years ago.

  That was the end for me.

  You don’t hit people you love.

  You do not hit people you love.

  CHAPTER 19 Every Exit an Entrance, Someplace Else

  About a month later, and against any sort of good judgment, we attempted an assuagement to the end of the relationship instead of a clean, cauterizing break. We were both sentimental like that and arrested in our adolescent dating phase.

  The closest I can now explain it from the safety of this distance and this keyboard is that we both pitied one another as a bad fit for this world: What we saw and understood of the other made us sad for both the other person and ourselves, and if we could make it better for the other, well, it might be better for me, for us.

  At least, that’s what I thought: If she could make the adjustment and function, then so could I. I mean, Jesus—she was way more fucked up than I was, right? Sympathy and compassion are not love, though. There needs to be someone there, at the end of the compassion and sympathy, that you respect.

  So I would help bring her to shore, help her feel better about our separation.

  But Dear Lord: Get me hence, after.

  And so it started when I bought her that camping book, the one with the best hikes in Washington State, for dogs. And their owners, of course.

  Her boss had kindly presented Steph with a book on her birthday some time before for the best alpine hikes in Washington, and that was a lovely gift, except that Steph took her dog, Cleo, with her everywhere, especially when she hiked, and dogs are not allowed in most state-sanctioned parks because of their “ecological footprint” on those heavily trodden and sterile experiences, where you meet one hundred other weekend hikers in their North Face polar fleece headed back down the same gravel path you’ve just trudged, smiling politely after going quiet when they notice you so their conversation doesn’t intrude into your “wildlife experience.”

  It would generate a tremendous amount of anxiety between us that she’d bring the dog and then allow Cleo off-leash on these hikes, when we’d take them. Never mind the “ecological footprint” business, an off-leash dog creates a variety of potentially volatile situations with other humans and canines outside the designated off-leash parks. And I had a profound dislike for people who didn’t take care of their dogs, or their children, in public.

  Which is why I bought Steph a book with the best dog-friendly hikes for her birthday, published by the “Mountaineers,” who, as near as I could figure, were part of some shifty college of weekend/weekday warriors who kept their technology jobs in Seattle but really tested their polar fleece mettle on the fiercest hikes in the Cascades, on Saturdays. Maybe a slow Wednesday here and there. But definitely on those Saturdays: Saturdays are macho, for people who think in html and Java.

  Steph accepted the gift in the manner it was presented, sort of a shot across the forgiveness bow, as we had broken up the month previous. It had been ugly, and it had affected our health, both mental and physical, and it hadn’t settled well on me that we were separating like that, in that degree of ugliness after
the level of affection shared between us. Back then, I wasn’t smart enough to know that these dark feelings ebb just as quickly and as easily as the light ones, when they’re not stoked.

  So, the book, then.

  Steph found something in that book, out in the Cascades, outside an isolated town called Twisp, and asked if I’d be willing to come out with her and Cleo; it was late October, sure, but we could pack for the cold, right? Harvest moons and all that. There was enough polar fleece to spare.

  What can it hurt? I thought. Play the good guy, have some fun carrying a backpack, take the dog out for a spin, stretch the legs on the dead relationship, and have some good old Lewis and Clark type of adventure, once again, because I’m nothing if not optimistic. It’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Why I moved west? Why we all, in fact, moved west? Trees and shit. Mountains and waterfalls and the like. With bears. Lots of fucking bears. Why the hell not?

  This wouldn’t be a rough, raw open trail place like Bacon Creek, which had grown tiresome and spent, and, if I’m perfectly honest, quite frightening, since it was an antediluvian hunting camp and felt a bit too “Live Free or Die,” by either tobacco-spitting hunters or bears, after that last visit. This was a state park we had found, in that book, and it seemed a bit more guarded, kept up, a bit less ... Donner Party, or Windigo.

  We loaded up her Jeep with our preparations, our favorite pillows, and even visited a “foam store” in the U-District and bought a high-density foam that we cut to the shape of the back of the Jeep to make a safe, off-the-ground sleeping spot: Fancy!

  This was actually my idea; I had a fear of apex predators, like grizzlies and yeti and hedge fund managers. I felt sleeping in the Jeep would keep us safe. If I had to sleep outside, my other plan was to sacrifice the dog first: If it was a bear, then break one of the dog’s legs to buy us a couple of minutes; if it was a banker, sign her up for a predatory mortgage to cover our trail. That’s what dogs are for. (Sorry, Cleo: You should have developed your neocortex and hired an accountant.)

  It was late one Friday in a colder-than-usual and dwindling October afternoon when we headed north on I-5 for the North Cascades Highway and then exited eastward, rising ever steadily up, up, and up into these odd, insulated enclosures of towns and hamlets.

  I was driving her Jeep this night, its headlights weak and more jaundiced than illuminating, and it was when I turned off I-5 on Highway 20 headed east, in Burlington—a proper train depot sort of town, on the Skagit River—that things began to descend into a clear Jungian exploration of self, for the both of us.

  Even now, years later, I’m not entirely sure which one of us triggered this sequence of metaphor, this ascent into hyperreality—a declension of mysticism and trauma, lined with markers and signals and omen, from which neither of us would come out the same, or unbroken.

  The mountains became a gateway, began our shared walkabout, as I drove that Jeep with both of us as willing participants, together. It was like we were both stuck and aggravated in our shared experience and wanted to kick the transformation into action: Let’s get a move on.

  Let’s change the reality. Let’s do what we both know we’re capable of doing.

  Wine into blood, bread into body. Transfiguration.

  Let’s bring on the tragedy; I can take it if you can take it.

  To understand this better, an appreciation of the geography is needed here.

  The I-5 corridor runs nearly the entire length of Washington State into Canada, parallel to Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, nearly at sea level. When you turn right, or east, up around the northern bits, and drive for a few hours, you begin driving into the Cascade Mountain Range, and you start ascending into some deep, green, primordial country.

  Bigfoot country. And remember, the Jeep had terribly ineffective headlights.

  When I’d first moved to Seattle, my first experience with a karate school was under the tutelage of this older, spiritually minded mystic named Dennis, and he often said the reason he loved being in the Pacific Northwest was because the energy here was fresh from the polar ice caps—in the water, in the trees—and held a level of purity you couldn’t find anywhere else. There was magic in the primitive evergreen nature here because it was brand new, unrecycled, untreated. All your wishes came true here, he said, so you had to be really careful about what you were really wishing for, because the place would give you what you wanted, whether you knew you wanted it or not.

  And for Steph and me, it began right away.

  We were just outside of Concrete, Washington, when we hit a traffic snarl on a two-lane highway. We crawled slowly for roughly fifteen or twenty minutes in the fading light before we came upon the source of the traffic irritation: a classic 1950s Chevy convertible in a head-on collision with a 1950s classic Chevy pickup truck.

  Both vehicles were tremendously truncated at the fore, and both drivers stood by the side of the road speaking calmly to the state deputies, remarkably unharmed if a bit dazed and possibly discussing the cost of rehabilitation for either of the vehicles, with another seventeen-year-old deputy in a hazard vest trying his best to direct traffic around the accident.

  Steph and I were silent, attempting to figure out what had just happened. The violence of the collision was clearly evident, but the odds of two classic, refurbished vehicles in that velocity of impact, on a two-lane state highway, with no casualties ... it just wasn’t making sense.

  We moved on, went on our way, and the evening settled around us on this Friday night, and we eventually began singing along with my iPod, plugged into her dreadful radio that we could hardly hear because we had to keep the windows open for ventilation. It was an old, battle-worn Jeep, but Steph loved it, and at times so did I, when she would keep it clean and didn’t have garbage spilling over in the front seat. Once, when I was driving, a water bottle rolled under the brake pedal, and as I was trying to negotiate a curve, the fucking brake wouldn’t work and I had a moment of panic, until I understood what was happening and had to stomp on the brakes and crush the plastic bottle so I could make the turn. I was incensed at her, that her bad housekeeping would almost kill me.

  But not this night. This night, we were getting along, talking loudly over the sound of the wind and feeling something very nearly comfortable, when out of nowhere I had to slam on the brakes again and bring the Jeep to something short of a complete stop and turn the wheel hard to the left.

  Black car, halfway in and halfway out of the road, hazard lights blinking.

  It was still the two-lane highway, approaching some small mountain village with working-poor sort of single-family houses on either side of the road, where Highway 20 made a T intersection up ahead with a blinking stoplight, and there were these three kids, standing by the side of road, the fourth one down on his knees, cradling a black dog and crying.

  I caught this in an instant, shaken. Shook.

  Steph had all her limbs extended out, braced for impact as I wrestled the Jeep under control.

  A Volkswagen Passat rested at an angle, and they all gazed up at us, snowboarding types, though it was early for snowboarding. We looked at them, and the one boy on the ground was holding the dog as the dog was convulsing, dying, in his arms, and this kid was visibly heartbroken, deeply affected, and crying, begging the dog’s forgiveness, it seemed. It was a big dog, about sixty or seventy pounds, a Lab mix, with its tongue dangling out the side of its mouth, and there was blood. It would die in minutes. Nothing anyone could do.

  The three kids stared at us, their faces silently asking if we knew what to do, helpless, and I slowly shook my head, saying, Sorry, man; sorry. This one, you guys have to do alone.

  And Steph and I drove on, quiet now, with Cleo alert over the console between us, alert, aware, and sycophantic, trying to make peace from the hum of death in the air.

  “That was horrible,” I said as we were driving in the dark, about an hour later. Neither of us could get the image of the dying black Labrador out of our minds, out of our conversa
tion.

  The mood became morose in the Jeep, tinged with the mystic. It was a four-hour drive from Seattle to Twisp. Had I known, I don’t think I would have agreed. Somehow, Seattle usually seems like it’s two hours from everywhere else in Washington. Maybe I’m spoiled because I grew up with Texan distances.

  Steph told me once again about the time Cleo was hit by a car, at the end of her leash, how they had turned one of those dark corners in the North Seattle neighborhoods she likes to walk with a sense of impunity. Once, she said, there was a couch on a street corner and she and Cleo stopped for a nap; that’s how safe she felt out there, and I bit my tongue and kept quiet. But this night, she said, this night was a rainy wint’ry night, and Cleo had extended the full length of the extension leash and entered into the road and was clipped badly by a Buick.

  “And I just flipped out,” she said.

  I knew Steph really well by this time, and Steph flipping out was not something pleasant. She could grow five times her size with histrionics.

  Cleo’s back leg was broken in a compound fracture, had been brought up into the back wheel well. She’d gone into shock and was looking at Steph like she was asking for permission to die.

  Steph denied her that privilege and brought the dog back, she said, by bullying the poor Persian fellow who happened to be driving across their path that night and having him take them both to the emergency pet clinic on Aurora.

  Steph can bully quite a bit out of most people is the lesson here.

  They’d gone out on a date after, Steph said, but he didn’t speak enough English to get along.

  “Besides,” she said, “from what I could make of it, he wanted a wife to stay at home and cook dinner for him and his mother.”

  “That’s . . . um,” I tried to respond, “I don’t think ... well, it’s good that he took you to the vet clinic, I guess.”