Authors: Chris Crutcher
We cruise along the Salmon River outside Riggins, Idaho, a little past noon, watching river rafters looking like cool-dude astronauts in their thick life jackets and sunglasses, bucking the light rapids. By late afternoon we’re just south of Boise, and finally I’ve jerked awake enough times that I’m getting whiplash, so I pull over to let her drive.
We’ve not talked a lot—Sarah doesn’t have that need to fill the lapses in conversation, and I’m wondering what we’re heading into. The closer we get to Reno, the more remote she seems. We hit the Nevada border in the dark, me blinking in and out of sleep, Sarah with her eyes glued to the road. My glasses are on the dashboard and she is completely beautiful to me, her blurred features smooth in the dim dash lights. I see what would have been, but for a fit of rage. I wonder how much of her personality has been shaped by people’s reactions, by not looking into that store window for fear of seeing herself, or wondering if those people crossing the street a half block up are crossing because they really have something to do over there or because they don’t want to walk past her.
How does a man do that to a child? What is there
in being human that allows that? Can you imagine pressing a three-year-old girl against a hot wood stove? I get it that he was drunk, but he still had to
do
it. He picked her up and walked to that stove. I’ve consumed enough alcohol in a sitting to put me over the limit and under the table; hugged the commode like it was the last lifeboat on the
Titanic.
And I’ve been pissed. I’ve said things to people I would’ve taken back in a
second,
were I given the opportunity. I’ve punched guys for calling my parents names, and I’ve punched guys for calling me fat or embarrassing me in front of people. I suppose you could say that’s on the continuum to doing the kind of damage he did, but on a scale of one to ten, mine is a 0.0003 and his is a sixty. Plus, if I’d ever done anything close to that, I’d kill myself. How do you live with the shame of burning a little girl?
And how in
hell
do you live with the shame of leaving that girl with the guy who burned her? How do you live with yourself after you tricked a terrified little kid into running to her room to get her stuff while you made a clean getaway? Offer her a glimpse of a chance to escape the desperation with you, only to leave her crying at the window. I fucking
know
her mother looked back up at that window. I know it. If I were Sarah, I wouldn’t know who to hate either. Man,
I’ve eaten some shit in my life, but compared to what Sarah has tasted, my shit tasted like angel food cake.
“How much for two rooms?”
“Two-twenty a night,” the woman behind the front desk at Harrah’s says.
“Do we get free movies and a private masseuse with that?” I ask her.
“Are you being smart with me?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am. Sorry. Do you mind if we huddle?”
I’m eighteen and so is Sarah. Consenting adults.
We sit on a couch amid the din of bells and buzzers announcing jackpots of unimagined size, people moving through the place in a herd, curses. “Look,” I tell her, “it’s been awhile since you were here. If she doesn’t work at the same place, we might have a tough time finding her. We need to conserve our funds. Why don’t we get a room with two beds?”
She hesitates a second, says, “Okay.”
That was easier than I thought. “We might have to tell them we’re married. I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.”
“This is Reno, remember?” Sarah says. “What happens in Reno, stays in Reno? You could bring your
favorite sheep in here and they wouldn’t stop you unless she shits on the floor.”
“We decided we want one room,” I tell the nice woman behind the desk. “Two double beds.”
“What happens in Reno, stays in Reno,” she says, looking from me to Sarah and back, thinking, I’m sure, what could possibly happen in Reno between a 270-pound man-child and a crispy child-woman.
“All right then,” I say. “Process us in.” I peel off six twenties from my roll and hand them over, hoping there’ll be a day when I can do that without the pit of my stomach falling out.
“She said two double beds.” I stare at the king-sized Sleep Number bed covering about three-quarters of the floor space. I know it’s a Sleep Number because there’s a sign on the bed that says so, encouraging us to order one off sleepnumber.com if we like it
or,
for just a little less, we could buy a condo. “I’ll call down and see if they can put us in a different room.”
I pick up the phone as Sarah sits on the bed. She bounces it a couple of times while I wait. “Hang up,” she says.
“They haven’t answered.”
“Drop the phone.”
I do.
“I’ll bet they don’t have these beds in every room. Sit here and check this out.”
I walk over and push on it with my hands.
She says, “Sit.”
I sit. Whoa! The Sleep Number bed has my number. I fall back and stretch my arms out, like Jesus on that last bad day, minus His discomfort. “Amazing.”
“We might not get one if we change rooms,” she says.
“There’s only one bed.”
With her finger she draws a line down the middle and says, “Cross that line and die.”
“Right,” I say, “and besides, we probably don’t have the same sleep number.”
“Let’s unpack.”
I’m sleeping with a
girl
tonight.
My parents brought me to Reno about eight years ago, but it was a whole different experience. They were walking down the sidewalk four abreast, holding hands with me trailing as far back as possible. The sidewalks on the Strip are wide, but you haven’t seen wide until you’ve seen my biological parents. People were walking over the tops of cars to get around them. I spent the
night shrugging. People would gawk at them, then back at me, and I’d just shrug, like, who the hell are they?
My parents told me in the old days how dangerous it was to come out of the closet, how often they’d been threatened or belittled. They were so happy to be here in Reno where no one knew them, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Well, even though prejudice against gays and lesbians has been on the decrease since Ellen DeGeneres smiled sweetly and told the world to kiss her ass, it ain’t
all
gone, and I still take my share of hits for having parents so far to the left on the bell-shaped sexual curve. So I just tried to stay below the radar that night.
But now it’s Sarah and me walking down the strip and she’s burned and I’m fat and it’s possible I’m feeling a little of the release my parents felt here. I grab her hand.
She doesn’t punch me in the gut.
“Think we should look for her tonight?”
Sarah bumps me with her shoulder, a little aggressively. “Let’s do it tomorrow. Last time Ms. Lemry and I caught her on the morning shift in a restaurant in the Sands. Let’s take a time out for now.”
“You’re not sure you’re going to do this, are you?” I ask. “The deal is still on, you know. Say the word, and we’re burning rubber outta here.”
“I need to sleep on it. I’ll know in the morning.”
We crawl into bed in our sweats. The lights are off but for the dim glow of the TV. Sarah draws the line down the middle of the bed again, though she’s laughing. Her side. My side. Never the twain…all that. It reminds me of those stories I used to read about the Puritans or some other way too uptight folks “bundling” before marriage. The groom- and bride-to-be would put a board down the middle of the bed, get in with their clothes on, and rack out. It was supposed to be a test; see if they could reign in their horns and prove they believed sex was for procreation only. The way I’m thinking now, I’d have been feeling along that board for the knothole.
Sleeping in one’s sweats is not the order of the day for a man of Bethunian girth. I carry my own down covers under my skin and if I bundle, I sweat. We’re not talking minor seepage. We’re talking rain.
When I think she’s asleep, I slip off my sweatshirt ever so carefully, then my sweatpants. Monster boxers I can handle. I crowd the edge of the bed, a good foot from Neverland.
The twain meet. Sometime in the middle of the night, her foot touches my calf. Innocent enough; she’s facing the other way. I push my calf into the pressure. Her toe runs up to the back of my knee.
I cannot recount the sequence of events, I don’t care to remember the details, lest I discover some
way
crazy indiscretion I committed, like maybe she was asleep except for her foot, and I took advantage. But somehow her sweats end up in a monster wad at the bottom of the bed with mine. I don’t know how to proceed, and she doesn’t either, but evolution takes over.
I won’t speak a word of it. Our secret dies here. I don’t know if it was good sex or bad sex, because those terms are relative so you have to do it at least twice to get a measuring stick…I mean,
standard.
I only know that when it’s over, everything I thought about her, and most of what I thought about myself, is changed. Not like some huge revelation where I want to go to Mexico and build houses for the poor, or take a job as a male stripper. But it is like there was this one new possibility. There is the possibility that somebody could want me.
That’s all you get in terms of graphic details, because intimacy is, well, just that.
I reach over and touch her hair. It’s wet. I trace the trail of moisture with my finger, right to the corner of her eye.
“You okay?”
She nods.
“Listen…”
“Shut up.”
“I…”
“Angus, shut up.”
Can’t say I haven’t heard that before. I wonder if she’s mad at me, but when I put my arms around her, she backs into me, so if she is, she has a funny way of showing it.
At about three, I pop awake.
I didn’t use a condom.
To a regular-sized guy, information like that causes debilitating panic. For a guy my size, it can turn cardio. What a jerk! I didn’t even ask! All those times I watched that squiggly swimmer reach the egg first in sex ed, it never occurred to me it could be
my
squiggly swimmer. And there is
no
chance Sarah Byrnes is on birth control.
I start to wake her, but I can’t. Unanticipated childbirth and matrimony aside, something in this feels so right, I refuse to mess it up. But either I don’t sleep the rest of the night, or I dream I’m awake. Either way, I start the day
beat.
Sarah jostles my shoulder. “Wake up.”
“I’m awake.”
“Let’s do it.”
I start to say we already did, but that’s a really bad guy joke, plus I know she’s talking about finding her mom.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Let’s get it done before I’m not.”
We both start to get out of bed, stop simultaneously when we realize there will be a plethora of nudity if we do. I’m at a way disadvantage. Sarah has a great body, all worked out and buff and everything. She worries about her
face.
I, on the other hand, look like fifty pounds of porridge in a twenty-five-pound bag. Man, I gotta get the swimming thing down.
“You first,” we say together.
“No,
you
first.” Two voices as one.
We dig around under the covers for our sweats. She giggles when she finds my underwear and tries them on. “Wow,” she says. “Boxers or briefs? Tarp.”
“She was at this breakfast place in the Sands,” Sarah says. “It won’t be easy if we find her; when she saw me last time she ran for it. God, I hated her that day. She was the only one who could save me, and she knew it. Shit! People thought my dad was so cool because he raised me alone. They had no idea what a beast he was.”
“But he’s in the slammer now,” I say. “You don’t
need her to do anything but talk. How could she at least not give you that?”
“Think what it would be like to face me if you were her. Forget what I want. How much would you hate yourself if you walked out and let your kid be raised by a monster? How could you look them in the eye?”
“I know. I couldn’t. But wouldn’t you want
some
shot at redemption?”
“You and I would, but you and I wouldn’t have done what she did.”
This conversation is
surreal.
I’m trying to imagine the unimaginable, which Sarah has lived. She’s such a hero to me. If this were
my
mom, I’d be down here with a baseball bat.
“It was awful last time. I let everything ride on it. I sat in that car with Ms. Lemry on the way here and envisioned everything but what happened. It was five minutes from the time we saw her in the restaurant till it was over. I survived the next week only because of Moby and Lemry. There’s no substitute for a family, but real friends can save you.” She stops in the middle of the sidewalk and turns to me. “When you’ve wandered in the desert all your life, you’d be surprised what one sip of water can do.”
I’ve been aware of people’s subtle glances all this
time we’ve been walking. Sarah’s scars aren’t in a league with Elephant Man or that kid in
Mask,
but they’re the first thing you notice. This is what it’s like for her on any street in any town, all her life. I would be tired.
“Sandy Byrnes? She worked here until about a month ago, but she left to go to California.”
“Dang.” I’m talking to Daytime Manager Bob Newman at the counter. As determined as Sarah is to go through with this, when we walked in she got short of breath and sat on the bench where others are waiting to be seated. “A month. Do you know where in California?”
“I believe it was Redding. Up north near Mount Shasta.”
“You don’t have an address or, like, a number? Maybe her cell?”
“I’m certain we have her numbers from when she was here, but I’m not at liberty to give them.”
“We’re relatives.” Then I do what I do almost as well as I played football; I lie my ass off. “We came down to surprise Aunt Sandy. She hasn’t seen us for almost ten years. We both graduated from high school this year and came down on vacation, you know, like, to surprise her.
She used to baby-sit for us.” I point to Sarah. “That’s my cousin. Her parents died in a car accident when she was little. She lived with us, but Sandy took care of us mostly.”