I Heart Oklahoma!

by Roy Scranton

  “Mind if I sit down?” he asked, maybe the second time, she wasn’t sure. He had on those black steel-toed sneakers security guards wore.

  A glance at the extensive selection of empty tables, communicating what, indulgence? Or briefly, why? He had nice eyes, at least, and seemed friendly, despite the oddness of approaching a stranger at the Chuck Wagon Buffet at seven o’clock in the A.M., so she shrugged slightly more than not at all.

  He sat down with his tray and took off his ball cap, revealing a smooth brown helmet of hat hair lengthening to a tidy mullet at the back. Five o’clock shadow and wry blue eyes. She didn’t say anything.

  “Not from here, are you?” he said, grinning.

  “Weak opening,” she said flatly, resuming wrapping sausages in total practiced nonchalance.

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to hassle you. I just saw you over here on your own and thought a pretty girl like you might like company.”

  “You do a lot of cruising at the Chuck Wagon? That what passes for Tinder out here?”

  He laughed, the sound of dusty boots in open air, a laugh that seemed to need a knee slap to complete it. “I work the night shift at the prison,” he said, “so I come by here a lot for dinner. Or breakfast. I don’t usually pick up women, but I saw your Cattle Decapitation T-shirt and figured, hey, any lady who’s into eco-radical deathgrind must at least be interesting to talk to . . .”

  “Don’t imagine they play out here much,” she said, sliding the wrapped sausages off the table and into her bag. He work at a prison? For real? Be careful not to seem any warmer than suspicious, or the fucker might get ideas. Frankly, the whole trip had been a freak show from the beginning, from the first Pennsylvania pit stop with one-eyed “Chiyanne” behind the counter all the way to last night’s Survivor: Extreme Weather film crew at the Best Western, and what kind of name is Chiyanne anyway, printed all caps on a white sticky label? Is it, like, phonetic? And why here, why Extreme Weather? Did they know something she didn’t? Not mentioning the StormWatch convoy that passed her outside Elkhart, a different kind of climate change: four up-armored Humvees with turret-mounted machine guns and Indiana Civil Defense tags, one with a #qanon bumper sticker.

  “I saw ’em when they came through Fargo a few years back, for the Karma.Bloody.Karma tour,” he said. “There’s a lot of metal fans out here, you’d be surprised.” Still smiling, digging into his eggs and gravy now. He reminded her vaguely of this pimpled jock she’d macked on in high school who, when she pulled his dick out of his pants in the back of his car, had exclaimed: “Whoa, I thought you were a dyke.”

  “Not so much.”

  He shook his head. “Naw, really, there’s lots of metalheads out here. Fewer vegetarians, it’s true,” he said wistfully, picking up a forkful of gravy-coated eggs.

  “That”—time to go—“I don’t doubt, but rather my surprise. Look, Mr.—?”

  “Mike. Call me Mike.”

  “Look, Mr. Mike, I got miles to go before I sleep. The Fergus Falls Chuck Wagon is peachy keen, but I must needs hit the road. Hope you don’t think I’m rude.”

  “Well, uh, I don’t even know your name, ah, I mean, where you goin’ in such a hurry?”

  She stood with her bag and leaned over the table—“Tell ’em Suzie sent ya”—then rapped a knuckle twice on the grease-flecked laminate and spun in her low-cut Cons, sweeping past the buffet and out the door, not looking behind, not looking anywhere but out to the car in the lot waiting against the low green of west Minnesota, the massed clouds looking suspiciously like tornado weather, and her Jack Russell Abelard standing against the driver’s side window with his snout dug into the crack and snapping ceaselessly, his pink tongue curling like a tentacle, just like he’d been when she left him. He was a dependable little shitface.

  Leaving had not been a hard decision, as such decisions go. Ever since getting back in fact from that bullshit clusterfuck road movie and collecting Steve the Cat from Cathy, a niggling itch grew by night, plains invading her dreams, space and air calling Suzie, and day by day she struggled and failed to remember why the hell she loved New York, what she wanted, how it all worked. The UberATs will stop for you, that’s the way it is, it’s not something wrong with them when they edge and push and seem about to ever so slowly run you over simply by not stopping, no, they’ll stop, there are rules here, but what the fuck, why bother? It didn’t help that Remy had turned spastic, calling at weird hours, carrying some sort of guilt for what had happened. She told him take your baggage to JFK, honeylamb, ’cause there ain’t no room for it here.

  It was Steve running away—she almost said “escaped”—that clinched it. Fine, she thought, now the one human being I can depend on in the world is gone and he was a cat, so fuck it, I’ll apply somewhere out there, some fucking Buckeye Podunk State College, Flyover U, anything away for a new start, a real new start, start over for real. With her New York grit and crabby glare she’d be unique, a character, instant personality, and it would give her time to adjust to whatever song she’d find playing when the record flipped.

  So she applied to MFAs across the land, playing nice in class to get her recommendations, trying to work what happened with Jim and Remy into something worthwhile and failing, some road movie novel, then writing other stuff, some other things, the last one she’s working now in scraps and bits, The True Life Story of the Highway Killers, or Charlie and Me, or maybe Caril Ann’s Last Stand, driving it across the country in a stained green Mead notebook, working up the fake to take the edge off the real, trying not to remember so hard all the people she was leaving behind, trying to bundle and sink old memories of, for instance, Nate the sk8r boi, with the pale chin scar and orange-spotted brown eyes always wide open like he was gonna jump, such a sweet guy and when he showed up bleeding knees and elbows asking “You gotta Band-Aid?” she knew he’d be hard to unhook. Packing/throwing away her life to fit the remains into her new used car, she’d found boxes and boxes of gauze and tape and tubes of Neosporin, and it was all she wanted in the world to punch his number into her cell and hear his lopey fragments, Sup, yeah, hey bro, but no, she just smiled, and now, crossing Fargo in the butter-gold light of a Great Plains morning, America bang-flat before her sea to sea, driving into the coming storm, she let herself linger on his really quite enormous nose and crooked cock, his lean waist and huge feet, his shyness, tenderness, and sulky humors. She remembers he dumped her by text message.

  How many fresh starts you get? Like a deck of inky-blue cards, little pictures, draw and play—she had a feeling she was getting near the bottom, though, like whatever’s next better stick.

  “What you think, Abelard?” she asked the curled white tube on the passenger seat snoring softly. His ear twitched in post-sausage stupor.

  At this point she could only imagine the blue Rockies in the distance, because from here it was still miles of miles, Fargo left behind and Valley City, Jamestown, and Bismarck yet to break, rolling and humming and thick air whistling in the window, oldies, classic rock, country, Today’s Urban Beats, All Polka All the Time, Live from Here. These northly, arid plains were different from the OK scrub she knew in her blood, yet gave the world the same sense of infinity, the far-curved horizon, endless sky, immensities of brown and blue and gray making you see yourself a spot dribbled onto eternity, a little nothing that happened once and was gone the next fall. The exact obverse of New York, where the world is a hum happening only for you. And not just the flat but the lack, the emptiness of it, the absence of human growth—not that there’s no formation, Costcos and Sinclairs, for example, the highway, but here the structure seemed temporary against eons of earth and wind, while in NYC the present is all there is, built up on a granite spar you don’t even think about.

  It was the sense of inevitability she remembered from the plains that troubled her most, a sense that came from how easy it was to cast lives adrift on the flats, how shallow roots dug here.
If it wasn’t flooding or tornadoes, then it was a freak storm smashing trees into houses or drought or a late frost choking the first shoots of spring or a hailstorm crippling the harvest, not that she ever lived on a farm but that was how it was in her imagination, fed on Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather and The Wizard of Oz, the texture of being out here, or maybe just her mind, a recurring melody that sang “vanitas, vanitas,” backed by the whipsaw rhythms of the Dust God’s steel pedal guitar. Tomorrow would come because the storm clouds would always build on the horizon and sweep the day down, tomorrow would come because killing winter would always freeze, tomorrow would come because the brutal son would always rise, tomorrow would come down onto the plains like death because that was what it did, but you might not be there to meet it. You were trash to be swept up in a crosswind, twisted into space, and tossed away, again and again, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  How it all started was like this.

  It started out Charlie and me fell in love.

  Start over.

  What happened was we were driving out across Wyoming.

  We was drivin out acrost. Acrossed. Acrosst. Across’t? Cross. We was drivin cross Wyomin. What happened. Happind. What happind wuz we wuz drivin cross. Start over.

  She lit a Parliament and cracked the window, somewhere out there, later, while tornado-storm rain turned the road to white water, her destination the other side of the veil. She’d applied to various programs, got into a few, and had eventually decided on Seattle. She had looked, looked, and looked, peering into photos on websites for answers to her questions: who were these people, what would it be like, what did the future hold. She was baffled by the notion that she recognized almost none of the names anywhere, yet all the bios claimed novels written, poetry published, awards won, articles and stories in the New Yorker and Tin House.

  She said writing was the important thing, of course, that was the party line, but really? For fuck’s sake. Everyone talked like it was religion, like you were touched by the Holy Spirit because you liked to tell stories or thought words were cool. Artaud was closer to the truth when he said all writing is shit and all writers pigs. Inspiration? Craft? Try ego. Try delusion. Try pettiness and ressentiment. All these twisted perverts taking out bent passions on a blank page, making shit up, inventing lies, a bunch of fuckups spending their nights muttering to themselves over their laptops.

  She stopped writing and looked up at Abelard and Abelard looked up at her. I stopped writing, she wrote, I wrote she stopped writing. Go back and read it again. She turned where she sat with her back to the window, the dog on the bed, the dark screen, she turned her head to face the uncurtained window pounded by the storm’s rain, the weird storm glow casting her in fuzzed-out silhouette, gray on gray, and she saw herself reflected in the screen and Abelard’s gaze, remembering someone writing about how the miraculous quality in Rembrandt was in the way he caught figures just as they turned toward the light.

  It was the collection of Day-Glo silicon yard gnomes at the New Museum, standing Gulliverian among the rotund mini orgiasts bent in pink and yellow erotic convolutions, this one holding her breasts up around her beard, this one spreading its ass to the sky, this one sticking all its fingers from both hands in its mouth, boy-girls, girl-boys, bearded women and lady-men in pairs, triads, and garden-gnome daisy chains, neon blue and green and orange, fucking and sucking one another’s beards and cocks and cunts and tits and assholes, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, dig dig dig the utopian art-commodity dullness of it all, feeling as she flâneured through disgraced and bored and gazing out the gallery windows at the light descending through the sky over the city like the fall of heaven, smears of molten cloud and a plane crossing, a gently arcing black star, remembering when Bowie died and that P J Harvey song about a rooftop in Brooklyn and seeing Melt-Banana play the Williamsburg Music Hall and watching Lou Reed fall asleep at a Richard Foreman show at St. Marks and CBGB closing down and the Dunkin’ Donuts going in at the corner of Bedford and Seventh that had finally put the last piece in the deterritorialization puzzle that had for weeks been quietly assembling itself within her, the message now as obvious as Kara Walker at the Domino Sugar Factory. That was after Steve fled and before she got Abelard, around the same time her mother got cancer. Now, quiet in a hotel somewhere in America, she writes I am sitting in a room writing about thinking about remembering, my dog’s looking at me, the rain’s washing out the highway, we’re taking the Oregon Trail out West, what dusty life, dysentery and Indians, I was trapped in a Koons now I’m trapped in a Hopper, still the same soulless gape, alone in a room with a screen.

  And a dog.

  And Charlie.

  Start over.

  And how it all started was me and Charlie fell in love. How it all started was a movie. How it all started was Jim called and Charlie was.

  Start over.

  It started out Charlie and me—start over.

  What happened was we was driving out across Wyomin.

  She counts light poles by the roadside. She pounces on the page. There’s an emptiness across the land, across her mind, a blank scrawl, cataract sky, inhospitable fallowness, dead mammals, reflections in glass wiped flat by time. Extinction time, end time, first time. She crosses the country and lives happily ever after, gets her MFA, teaches creative writing. She writes a road movie, she writes the true story of Caril Ann Fugate, she writes a hundred books about dead and made-up people.

  Return, tab, type.

  Start over.

  What happind wuz.

  The emptiness should be the page and not the language. The emptiness should be breath. I never wanted any of this, she thinks, I never wanted to come here and I never wanted to go, I just wanted something different. But what’s that even mean? What’s different? How is anything different from anything else? I just wanted a new start, start over. I didn’t want the thing but wanted not the thing that was, the unthing, another thing, a future unformed by the past. I wanted nothing. Where do they sell nothing?

  Return, tab, type.

  Me and Charlie.

  Disconnect, destroy, liberate, occupy, break free from this toil of endless days, summon the Wind Son, unleash the Anthropocene, a new glory, always fresh, but that’s not what happens, is it? In fact it’s scar tissue and bad reactions, sleepless nights, accumulation and wreckage.

  Return, tab, type.

  Start over.

  I wanted nothing. Nothing. How fucking hard is it to get a little nothing?

  The mountains show the next morning, a blue haze on the horizon that as she drives resolves into distant peaks, the world washed clean by rain. Curving into rise, not geology but geometry, the edge of the plane.

  “I see them there,” she says to Abelard, who looks up at her, head cocked, “and it’s the same as it was before, going the other way. I mean, the sense of leaving, being free, it’s in the plains maybe, I don’t know. I never felt free in New York. I felt hemmed in, beleaguered, bothered, rattrapped, and wasted time, always something doing, and then after a certain point that seemed normal, like what we were. I don’t know. It was a good tour, Toto. I wish I could have said goodbye to Steve.”

  She looked down at Abelard, who was munching on his crotch, and shook her head.

  She lit another Parliament and cracked the window. The smoke in her lungs came down with savory pain. But if you start by saying no, then what do you have left? Former model, former wage-slave office drone, clockwatcher, paper shuffler, former New Yorker of SoHo, the LES, and Flatbush-a.k.a.-Ridgewood, messy, smoking, no doubt cancerous, flabby but still thin enough, needs more and more product to manage her face, snappy, hip, prickly, uncongenial, doesn’t like people, likes animals but not enough to be a vegetarian, a hater who takes ambivalent pleasure in the end of human civilization, the fall of America, should have been a nun, like Teresa de Ávila, should have found her ecstasy in God but instead smeared it across a dec
ade of bad calls, questionable liaisons, and date-rapey sex. Can you retire at forty? Onward to the next lucky break, Abelard, some new thing to hate. They got whales out there, kid, sharks, too, even if they’re all suffering debilitating hormonal failure from the toxins leaching into the sea.

  When I was growing up, I wanted to live in a Jane’s Addiction video. Now? Dad sitting there in his favorite chair, wearing his dress blues with his medals all over his chest, flattop haircut and ruddy cheeks, and Mom lying in a hospital bed with chrome rails, hooked to an IV, her life leaking out in slow breaths. Green-bean tater-tot casserole on the counter, cream of mushroom soup and ground beef. The TV’s playing Fox News with the sound off, the only other light the dimmed sun seeping through the closed blinds shutting out the sliding glass door at the back. The hi-fi’s playing Roger Miller, “Lock, Stock and Teardrops,” with that creepazoid electro-voice backing him and the slow boom-chicka-boom, meanwhile the EKG beeps, the IV drips, dad lifts his arm and sips his bourbon. He’s got those cheap black shiny air-force dress shoes on, he’s looking into space, and over his shoulder in the weak gleam float constellations of transient dust, universes of mote life swirling.

  She saw the sign for the rest area and pulled off. She put Abelard’s leash on and got him up and out into the yellowing grass. The rest area was nearly empty, only one other car, towels hanging in the windows to keep the sun out, and nobody else around. Abelard pulled the extender out to the max, sniffing at something, then threw himself on his back in the fine brown dirt.

  The mountains were bigger now, weighty in the distance, massive and gray. She was finally feeling the end of the prairie, the earth was rising into solemn humps, and the mountains lent the drive a sense of narrative, some chaptered sequence, repetition and change.

  “Pee already,” she said, drinking water from her bottle. Then she noticed a round-eyed pale boy with a cowlick watching her from the window of the other car, maybe six or seven years old, staring with that blue intensity lonely children have, open and probing, making her feel as if she’d somehow exposed herself. Thankfully, Abelard was straining out a turd cluster, so she didn’t have to stand there being stared at long before they got back in the car and drove off.