Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Really? I never read it.”

  “You should. You might learn something.”

  I punched her playfully on the shoulder. “Oh, getting feisty on me now, are we?”

  “I’m no dummy.”

  As we drove on, through a kind of prosaic, postcard-perfect beauty, I discovered the miles went much faster when I kept up a patter with my mother. If I just stayed up in my head and white-knuckled the road the journey was going to seem like eternity.

  “Do you have a girlfriend now?” my mother asked, as we dropped down into the high plains city of Gillette, Wyoming, a former boom town, thanks to oil, that had surrendered to one of the worst methamphetamine epidemics in the country.

  “No, not really,” I answered.

  “What’s with all this sex, sex, sex?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked, taken aback.

  “All these women,” she drawled in her singsongy voice. “What does it mean? Does it bring you happiness?”

  “Why are you asking me all these questions, Mom?”

  She nodded inwardly, as if gathering her answer before spitting it out. “Well,” she began, trailing off. “I don’t really know you all that well, and you’re my son”–tears hobbled her speech, but I was getting used to that, so I didn’t admonish her to stop–“and when you drop me off at my sister’s I’ll probably never see you again.”

  “I’ll come out and visit,” I said automatically, but she could no doubt hear a certain disingenuousness in my tone.

  “No, you won’t,” she said. “No one’ll come to visit me in Sheboygan. Hank is afraid of flying, and Doug hates me, and you’re too wrapped up in your high-falutin’ Hollywood world.” Her tears had subsided to sniffles. “And I won’t be able to travel by myself.” She paused. “You’ll come visit when I die,” she finished. For someone whose entire right hemisphere was nothing but dead cells, she was surprisingly knowing; along with a reptile’s parietal eye, she’d developed a sixth sense. She could have been an oracle foretelling what was to come. Or not.

  From Gillette we crossed into South Dakota on the western slopes of the Black Hills. The interstate gradually climbed in elevation and the landscape turned increasingly wooded. I lowered the AC and cracked open the windows. The air was wonderfully cool, the landscape continuing to spectacularly unfold, almost growing monotonous in its pulchritude.

  We’d been quiet awhile, dipping in and out of conversation, when I inquired, “How’re you doing, Mom?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do you have to go?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll stop for lunch, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, in her new imperturbability.

  We coasted down out of the Black Hills, bent off the interstate and pulled into the small town of Rapid City. I parked on a quaint downtown street whose sidewalk corners featured nearly life-sized bronze likenesses of past U.S. presidents.

  We ate lunch at the ancient Hotel Alex Johnson–a single glass of Chardonnay for my mom, mineral water for me.

  After lunch I wheeled my mother to the bathroom. It was becoming routine. She must have been really holding her bladder because it took seemingly forever to empty it.

  With a little more difficulty, I managed to get her back into the passenger seat. I was bone tired and still a bit edgy when I climbed back behind the wheel for the second half of the leg to Sioux Falls.

  Threading through downtown Rapid City and looping back onto I-90 I noticed an armada of billowy clouds had materialized out of the hot blue sky, bred by the rising humidity and bracing heat of the mid-afternoon.

  Between Rapid City and Sioux Falls the passing terrain is monochromatically flat. Vast stretches of treeless prairie, broken up here and there by cornfields, flowed endlessly to the horizon lines, unpolluted sky as far as the eye could see. Once this area had been composed of a lot of small farms, but multinational agribusiness had long since wrested control of the land and the old farmhouses with their barns and silos were in a vivid state of dilapidation.

  Beyond the small town of Chamberlain, an afternoon thunderstorm developed. The swift-moving clouds mushroomed and grew coal-shaded as they amassed. As in a partial eclipse, the landscape suddenly darkened. Far in the distance lightning flashed. A few seconds later thunder followed it out of the foreboding sky.

  “It’s getting closer,” my mother said, growing excited. She motored down her window and half flung her head out. “Oh, I love the thunderstorms,” she effused. “I missed them so much.”

  “Well, you’ll get to see plenty to make up for that now,” I consoled her.

  “I know,” she said. She turned to me. “Let’s pull over, shall we?”

  A thick rain had begun to pelt the windshield and the sky had grown so ominously black cars were switching their headlights on. “Mom, it’s raining, there’s lightning.”

  “I know,” she said. “I want to be out in it.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, don’t be a stick-in-the-mud, pull over,” she said, gesticulating to an approaching off-ramp with her one good arm.

  I peeled off the interstate onto the off-ramp and pulled into a rest area. Motorists were huddled in their cars or scurrying back and forth to the bathrooms with articles of clothing and bits of car-trip flotsam held over their heads for protection from the cloudburst.

  “Take me out into the rain,” my mother said.

  “What?”

  She looked at me. “Take me out into the rain, Miles. Please.”

  “You’re crazy, Mom.”

  “I know,” she said, “I’m crazy!”

  “You’ll get soaked to the bone.”

  “I don’t care. This might be my last thunderstorm.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll take you out, but just don’t get all melodramatic about it, okay?”

  We both laughed. I killed the engine, pushed open my door, and was soaked to the skin by the time I got to her side.

  The transfer wasn’t any harder owing to the pummeling rain, and soon I was pushing her out into it. The air was thick and humid and infused with a palpable electrostatic charge that goose-pimpled our arms. The lightning was closing in, marching both closer and lower, its jagged detonations burning afterimages on our retinas, the thunder trailing the flashes by shorter and shorter intervals. The boiling storm clouds unleashed a hammering downpour.

  “Let’s go back, Mom!” I shouted over the rain and lightning and thunder.

  “No! Take me up to that hill!” She crooked a finger at a gentle rise off in the blurry distance.

  “What?”

  “Take me up to that hill!” she insisted, undaunted by the crackling fulgurations.

  Why did I want to argue? We had passed that point; now it seemed we were one. I pushed us to the top of a small, grass-covered overlook. The lightning grew closer, hurling itself to the ground in indiscriminate patterns. The storm seemed to swarm us all at once. The ear-splitting claps of thunder were deafening in sound and ferocity. The sky was brutish in all God’s sublime fury.

  “Mom, in that metal chair you’re a lightning rod!”

  “I don’t give a damn!” she shouted. Her voice was carefree, giddy. As a lightning bolt rent the sky in two, she clenched her fist and raised it to the heavens. “Take me, God. Take me to Rusty.”

  Before I knew it, I was laughing. Her gesture, what she’d just shouted, was daft and at the same time weirdly profound. “He probably will, Mom.”

  “Oh, I love the rain,” she cried out, tossing her head back and letting it drench her hair and face. “I love the rain.” In her face I could see the teenager from pictures I had found when I had cleared out her condo.

  And, like adolescent sex, the squallish storm was over almost as soon as it had begun. It swept away over the cornfields, its looming black epicenter casting a massive traveling shadow on the green flora.

  We were both utterly bedraggled, but strangely exhilarated.

  “You want to go back now, Mom?”


  “No, not yet,” she said. “We have to wait for the rainbow.”

  “How do you know there’ll be one?” I asked, clutching my biceps, shivering.

  “There always is,” she said confidently. “Let’s stay.”

  “Okay,” I hooked an arm around her shoulders and gave her a tentative hug.

  Within a minute the clouds were breaking apart, sunlight raying through and turning sections of the cornfield iridescent. The countryside, once the storm had spent itself, glistened. My mother’s expression suggested that she was almost supernaturally one with the land’s revivification.

  Suddenly, she stretched out her good arm and pointed. “Oh, look,” she exclaimed. “There it is.”

  I stared off in the direction she was motioning, looking for whatever she was trying to point out with that shaking finger. A great arcing rainbow had materialized in the clearing sky, framed by a backdrop of the retreating clouds, soaring majestically over us, at the very least making my mother a clairvoyant. I wondered for a moment whether the devastating stroke had vouchsafed her special access to the divine.

  “There’s our rainbow,” my mother said, starting to cry, personalizing the atmospheric phenomenon as if it was of her own making, as if all the suffering she had endured the past few years had magically conjured this for her out of nature’s elements.

  I slung my arm around her wet shoulders and hugged her again, this time less awkwardly. “There’s your rainbow,” I echoed her.

  “You see,” she said, “He was listening.”

  Thunder reverberated in the distance, not nearly as loud as before, as the storm retreated over the prairie to wreak havoc on the next town in its path.

  “He’s calling,” my mother said cryptically. “He’s calling.”

  “Who’s calling, Mom?”

  She seemed confused by my question, as if I should be able to read her thoughts, as if we had grown so close during this journey that we were now inextricably of like mind. “Rusty,” she said.

  “Dad’s calling?”

  She nodded as if that were as certain as the sun setting. She raised her index finger and waggled it at the clearing heavens, as if to scold him. “Oh, yes,” she said. “They’re all up there.”

  I let it go unquestioned, let her have her private sacramental moment in some imagined place where the walls between the living and the dead are transparent. As the sky brightened, the rainbow’s colors grew more vivid. I couldn’t remember when I had last seen a rainbow. Certainly never one like this magnificent creature, the sky’s own elaborately beautiful sand castle if ever there was one, soon to dissolve in the bluing and revived heat of the afternoon.

  When the rainbow had begun to fade, dimming against a brightening sky, I wheeled my bedraggled mother down to the restroom.

  Back in the van, I rummaged around for a towel I had cadged from one of the hotels and dried us both off. As if she were my infant child, I undressed her and got her into dry, clean clothes. I gave her a brush and she worked her sodden hair back off her glistening wet face. Finally, with some effort, I transferred her back up to the front passenger seat. While she waited I went into the restroom and changed myself.

  Back on the road, we were both reflective. I could tell she was thinking about returning home, after so many years away, to Sheboygan. Our imminent arrival made it all too real and seemed to rekindle her fears about how it would work out rooming with her sister.

  Near dusk, we got off the freeway and wended our way through Sioux Falls. The GPS guided us to the six-story Sheraton, the most expensive hotel in South Dakota’s most populous city, just as the Midwest summer sky was purpling.

  I pushed my mother into the lobby. The hotel was designed with the rooms arranged in a rectangular fashion, the lobby forming a huge atrium, rising all the way up, giving the place a spacious feel. It had been a long drive and we were both spent.

  As soon as we were settled in another handicapped-friendly room I fell onto the bed. I just wanted to sleep, but my mother was hungry. Room service produced mac and cheese for her, along with the requisite glass of Chardonnay, and an overcooked burger for me. I kept to my regimen of abstinence, one more leg to Sheboygan weighing–a little less heavily now–on my mind.

  “You should have a glass of wine,” my mother suggested insidiously. “You earned one.”

  “That was a lot of driving,” I chortled. “No, if I have one glass, I’ll end up down in the bar and you’ll never make it to Sheboygan.”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  I was about to answer, but realized I had nothing to say.

  After she had eaten, I dosed her with her meds, sans the diuretic, and prepared her for bed.

  Once she was under the covers, her meek voice cooed against my back. “Could you give me a kiss good-night?”

  I massaged her shoulder for a second. “You know we don’t do that, Mom.”

  “I know. But there’s still time to change.”

  I don’t know why, but I couldn’t overcome the awkwardness of something so commonplace, giving my mother a goodnight kiss on the cheek. I demurred, peeled off my clothes and slipped into bed. Employing the remote, I channel-surfed until I found a baseball game that held no interest. I dissolved a whole Xanax under my tongue and prayed for a restful night, one in which my mother wouldn’t wake me to assist her in relieving herself, one in which I didn’t shudder and sweat and squander the precious sleep I needed for the next day’s drive.

  chapter 18

  My iPhone alarm woke me at 7:00 a.m. I felt a little woolly-headed from the Xanax, but otherwise amazingly restored. My mother lay supine on the bed next to mine, snoring peacefully. I had no recall of having toileted her during the night. Finding no towels between me and the sheet I assumed that the worst of my detox’s St. Vitus’s Dance was over. Something built up in me that, like the previous day’s thunderstorm, had broken. I found myself on the other side, sober for the first time in months.

  I was already dressed and ready to go when my mother’s eyes fluttered open. “Miles?”

  “Yes, Mom, I’m here.”

  “Oh. I had the most vivid dream,” she said drawing out vivid in her singsong manner.

  “What was that?”

  “Oh. We were all in heaven and everyone was happy.”

  “Who all’s we?” I said.

  “The family.” She stared off into space, into the abyss of her memory. “Now, I don’t remember the rest of it.”

  “Do you mind if we skip your bath this morning, Mom? You had a pretty nice shower yesterday afternoon.”

  “Oh, yes. That was the best thunderstorm.” She turned to me and said, “You don’t have to bathe me. I’m fine. How’d you sleep?”

  “Pretty well,” I said. “Yesterday was rough. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. But today we’ve got less than 500 miles.”

  We took our breakfast in the room and checked out. I transferred her up into the front passenger seat so she could be next to me on the last leg into Sheboygan, the last leg of any trip she was likely to take, a tacit understanding that evoked a filial-maternal current between us.

  The drive to Sheboygan featured flat farmland, much of it blackened where the ubiquitous cornfields had been harvested. The nitrogen-based fertilizers dumped on year after year, without crop rotation, having left the land looking scorched, it was as if we were traveling through a post-apocalyptic world imagined by Cormac McCarthy.

  As we grew closer to Sheboygan, my mother grew more deeply introspective; her usual patter all but ceased. The fears and insecurities that had plagued her and given her the urge to go to the bathroom more than she really needed had abated. She seemed to drift in her thoughts to the huge body of water that was Lake Michigan, coming into view and disappearing off to our right, realizing she had come full circle to her childhood and, in completing that journey, glimpsed the arc of her life. Dusk gradually eclipsed the lake’s expanse of cold blue and turned it into a black hole.

  As we
neared Sheboygan, I turned to my mother. “Would you rather get a hotel? Just this first night, I mean.”

  She shook her head.

  “You seem sad, Mom.”

  “The trip’s over,” she lamented. “I didn’t want it to ever end.”

  Her words struck an emotional chord and I felt sad for her–not me!–suddenly. “Well, we made it,” I replied lamely.

  “Oh, yes. We made it.”

  It had been a long day and she was tired. From the worry etched in her face, I felt queasy all of a sudden, at last grasping that the trip, and getting out of Las Villas, had been the real motivating fantasy, not the reality of moving in with her elderly sister.

  Following the signs and the trusty GPS, I turned off at the I-43 for Sheboygan and drove a short distance to North 11th St. where her sister lived. It was near the point where the Sheboygan River, after snaking through the small city, found its way to the lake. In its heyday, Sheboygan had boasted a bustling port and shipyards. Later it became a bedroom community housing the hundreds working at the Kohler plumbing fixtures factory, a scant few miles to the east. Kohler was still there, but Sheboygan, once very working class, was thriving again, now as a tourist destination with its lakefront B&Bs and renowned golf courses. But harsh winters obligated the tiny city to shutter itself half the year, and the tourists to move to warmer climes.

  My Aunt Alice lived in a small, rectangular wood-framed house outfitted with aluminum siding, on a block whose every house would by the light of day reveal itself to be nearly identical to the one next to it. I transferred my mother from the van into her wheelchair and pushed her up a narrow concrete path. Two steps leading up to the front door didn’t concern me, now that I was adept at dollying my mother backward down longer flights, but it did concern me for her sister. The porch was so miniscule that I had to leave my mother on the concrete path while I rang the doorbell.

  Alice answered the door. I hadn’t seen her in years. She was tall, thin, with short-cropped gray hair and a countenance fissured by a half-century’s tobacco abuse.