Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (8 page)

The old man scratched his shoulder. Where his neck met his clavicle, Tad noticed one of those flesh-colored nicotine patches that always made him a little sick to his stomach. “Sure we can,” the mechanic said. And then to the other man: “Go in my office and grab that other fan.”

After hesitating to look at the bouquet once more, Tad left.

He bought a six-pack of beer and walked back to the trailer as the sun set. The horizon was violently radiant and the wind sung with borrowed nostalgia. It was growing colder. He passed the immense copper pit, a fenced-off canyon of wrecked earth at least a half-mile across, staircased and very still. Tad peered through the fence. The damage looked cataclysmic up close, but seen from space it was nothing. Seen from space it didn't amount to a pinprick. This struck him as a nice, comprehensive thing to realize. He wanted to realize more things like it, but it was getting too cold to concentrate. On the road again, he decided that if anybody asked what he was doing, he'd say, very casually, “Just passing through.” But no one did.

In grade school, he used to pretend to chew gum in class. When the teacher asked him to spit it out, he would pretend to swallow it. This was what he remembered while he looked at the bouquet. The old man reminded him of the teacher, something about how he lazily regulated the conversation.

In the trailer, Amy sat on the edge of the bed, her head pitched forward slightly on her long neck, as it did when she was unsure of something. He came closer and she said, “Tad.” The word released a smell like sweet dough. “We aren't moving, are we? It feels like we're being pulled behind a truck.”

He told her about the snake and waited while his disappointment became their disappointment. “That's so awful,” she said. Tad's impulse was to make her feel better, and why not? There were a hundred ways to make her feel better, a hundred possibilities. But as he stared at the white underside of the comforter, scorched with an iron mark, he was dim with hesitation.

She said, “I was remembering when I was little, how I'd lie naked in bed after a shower. I'd feel this amazing . . .
thing
happening inside me. This event. Like my body was just the thinnest husk to hide what was going on inside. I'd try to imagine what my husband would be like, what he was doing at that very moment.”

“Probably thinking about girls like you, naked in their beds.”

“I hope not. I was nine.”

“Maybe I was riding my bike. Was it summer?”

“I imagined him traveling a great distance, suffering setbacks.”

“A hero, earning his way to you.”

She closed her eyes and smiled. Her face looked slightly misshapen. Was something happening inside her? He waited for her face to show signs of relief. He was distracted by the sound of a coyote.
Ah-oooooo
. So faint and wavering, it sounded like a coyote practicing to be a coyote.

If there was only one way to make Amy feel better, instead of a hundred, he would not have hesitated.

In a few minutes she was asleep, gripping the pillow like a flotation device, a castaway at rest at sea. The sight of her sleeping always made him a little envious, the way conversations in other languages did. He was ignored, left behind. It seemed unfair that she could close her eyes and make him, sitting right next to her, invisible. As he left the trailer, he made a lot of noise, trying unsuccessfully to wake her.

He carried the beer into the cemetery that neighbored the trailer park. The hundred-year-old tombstones were crooked, like tombstones in a Halloween play.
KILLED BY INDIANS
, some of them said. The ground was loamy and uneven, and he suspected he was stepping on unmarked graves, so he found a bench and, sipping the beer, watched a distant quiver of spotlights spread out and revolve and reconverge in precise increments, brusquely sweeping the sky.

When he was a child, his mother took him to an Indian mound. He was excited for days beforehand but it was just a big green lump scattered with railroad ties. The sort of place you visited without leaving your car. In protest, Tad began running up the mound and down, up and down. A man in a blue uniform stopped him and said, “You're running on the bones of my people.”

The man's lips held a toothpick. He clenched his jaw, a sheriff ready to pull his gun. He smiled. “Just kidding,” he said. “About my people, I mean, not the bones.”

Tad thought of a few things he would've said to the man now. His thoughts were a junkyard. He hounded the edges, distracted by any oddity or shiny trinket.

The spotlights danced in the sky as he finished the beer and began constructing a list of demands for himself and Amy. It went: We must take care of each other. We must be the best versions of ourselves. We must inoculate each other from unhappiness.

Contented, feeling as if something serious had been achieved with very little effort, he walked back to the trailer. A pair of tombstones were pitched against each other in an interesting way, and Tad scrutinized them like something he might sketch. He felt expansive, blameless, a bit drunk. “Just passing through,” he said to the tombstones. He said it how Gar Floyd would. He made it sound dusty.

All night a harsh wind shook the trailer on its moorings and he brought the sound into sleep with him, dreaming that they were being pulled down the highway. Into the unknown, into the unknown. In the morning he was awoken by the ticking of the trailer's metal ceiling in the sun.

They ate breakfast in a diner with framed articles on the wall about paranormal phenomena. They took a tour of the copper mine, which was cold and long and garishly informative. Amy sat with the disposable camera in her lap waiting for something photogenic to occur. Their guide, who'd worked in the mine before it closed, said everyone on the train had to ask one question before the tour ended. “Any advice for me and my new wife?” Tad asked him.

The guide thought about it for a second, then said, “Never don't say good night.”

Afterward they went into antique stores and picked things up and set them down. Amy bought a piece of petrified wood that said
OFFICIAL ARIZONA SOUVENIR
and a dream catcher for Gar Floyd's rearview mirror. This cheered them for a while. A trifle distresses, a trifle consoles, wasn't that how it went? They looked around for consoling trifles. They returned to the trailer and listened to the radio shows.

A man keeps seeing someone who looks exactly like him. A woman begins speaking another language, one that no one, including her, understands. The shows were really about aloneness, Tad decided. He helped Amy pull off her tank top and then licked a line straight down her back. He licked dots along each side of the line, like a surgical scar. He studied her back and tried to decide what else to do.

What else was there to do?

T
he Volvo had been moved to the front of the service station, one fan blowing into the driver's-side door, another into the passenger's side. Beneath the wiper blade was a piece of paper, which Tad freed.
THE HAPPY HAWKER
, it said.
WE PAY TOP DOLLARS FOR IMPORTS
. There was a drawing of a car with dollar signs for headlights.

He leaned in. The odor, though not as harsh, was still there. Still insistent. The remains of the remains outlived the remains, Tad thought. And the wildflower bouquet remained on the dashboard. It looked happy there.

Inside the station, the old mechanic sat eating a sandwich half wrapped in wax paper. He listened to a portable radio and chewed in rhythm, as if eating the song.

“Still stinks,” Tad said. “Any more fans?”

The mechanic swallowed thoughtfully before speaking. “People used to put dead fish inside hubcaps, as a joke. Maybe someone's playing a joke on you.”

“I told you, it's not my car. It's Gar Floyd's.”

“Maybe someone's playing a joke on Gar Floyd.”

“Maybe. And maybe we're all clowns in a giant circus.”

“Maybe.”

The other mechanic came in from the garage and whispered something to the old man, who said, “Christ,” and stood up with his sandwich. They walked outside. Tad followed them behind the station, where, in a packed-dirt clearing, Jeff was stooped over the picked carcass of what looked like a turkey. When he saw the three men, his front shoulders went rigid and he took the carcass's spine in his mouth, waiting, it appeared, for a reason to run away with it.

“He acts like we don't feed him,” the younger mechanic said.

The old man breathed through his nose. “He's not acting like anything, Lon. It's instinct. He's made to think every meal's his last. It's how he survives.”

“I bet he'd bite me if I tried to snatch it from him.”

“What would you do if someone tried to take away your last meal?”

Tad had the feeling that this exchange had occurred before, perhaps hundreds of times. After a while, Jeff relaxed and began gnawing at the carcass, crunching the bones ostentatiously.

“Stranded in Bisbee,” the old man said finally, continuing to admire his dog and eat his sandwich. “That could be a hit song. It'd be sad, but not too sad.”

“Something's wrong with this place,” Tad said. It was one of those things that he didn't know he was going to say until he said it. “We were happy till we got here.”

“What rhymes with Bisbee?” the old man said.

“Frisbee,” the other mechanic said.

Tad waited for something else to happen. The old man bit so close to the wax paper that Tad was sure he was going to take a hunk out of it, but the old man knew, apparently he knew, what he was doing.

T
ad and Amy had dinner in town. He ordered a buffalo burger, because he thought it might make things more exciting, but it didn't. The way the waitress handed him the plate and said, “Here's your buffalo,” and then later, “How's your buffalo?” and then, “How
was
your buffalo?” depressed him. He felt like a baby with a toy. A man at a nearby table said to the young boy across from him, “Pretty soon you'll get to sleep in a bulldozer. How's that sound?”

The boy seemed suspicious but interested.

Amy smiled from time to time to let Tad know their mutual silence was okay. The smile was a token that stood for something to say. It reminded him of the edge of a curtain being lifted and let go.

A group of waiters came out of the kitchen singing “Happy Birthday.” One of them presented a single-candled cupcake to the boy, set a coffee filter atop his head, and told him to make a wish. The boy kept his eyes shut a very long time, then, all of a sudden, his face came alive again and he blew out the candle.

Tad said, “I keep thinking of that stupid commercial that goes, ‘If this hammerhead stops moving, he dies.' ” He tossed a napkin over his half-eaten burger. “It's probably not even true.”

Amy looked at him solemnly and said, “There is so much we don't know about the hammerhead.”

They laughed and then it was quiet again.

“For my birthday one year,” she said, “my dad gave me
The Odyssey
, the children's version
.
There's a part where Odysseus returns home disguised as a shepherd to claim his wife. His dog is old and blind, but he sniffs him and immediately recognizes him. I loved that part. That's what I always thought my husband would be like.”

“Like Odysseus,” Tad said.

“No,” Amy said. “Like his dog.”

They waited for the check. Tad took Amy's hand and kissed it, inhaling the brackish sea smell of zinc oxide. She brushed crumbs off his T-shirt. He had a premonition of her doing the same thing fifty years from now, so familiar to each other they'd be strangers. He thought: there is so much and so little we don't know about each other.

B
ack in the trailer, he was restless. More sex? They'd already had sex twice. Doing it again would be strictly remedial; it would diagnose their dissatisfaction. Instead he complained about the trailer, which was starting to seem like a decoration left out too long. The carpet was filthy. The trash can was filled with condom wrappers and used condoms. Tad threw away an uneaten orange to make the trash can look more domestic.

Then he had an idea. In his wallet was a Drive Way business card with the phone number of Gar Floyd's motel in Jacksonville. He found the card and dialed the number. After the clerk connected him to Gar Floyd's room, it rang five times before someone on the other end picked up, fumbled the receiver, and said hello.

Amy studied his expression. “Who is it?” she whispered.

“Gar Floyd?” Tad asked. Gar Floyd said
yes
tentatively, as if expecting bad news. He sounded nothing like Gar Floyd.

“You don't know me,” Tad said, “but I'm driving your car to Florida. I wanted to tell you that I, that we've, been wondering about you. You spend time in a person's car and you begin to wonder about him.”

“Abort,” Amy said, waving her hands. “Abort.”

Tad had forgotten why he originally wanted to call. Gar Floyd was clearing his throat, breathing roughly. What had he expected Gar Floyd to say? “Oh,” he said. “I thought you were calling from the hospital. My wife's getting treatment. She's sick.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Tad said.

“They prescribed these sleeping pills and, ever since, I keep dreaming I'm back in the Air Force. I'm doing something wrong but no one will tell me what. That's just what it was like.” He paused to catch his breath. “Listen, my wife's not doing so well. What time is it where you are?”

Tad looked at his watch and told him.

“Well,” Gar Floyd said after a while, “how's the car?”

“It's great,” Tad said. “It's a great car.”

“The transmission's been rebuilt. The tires are brand-new.”

“The tires,” Tad said, “are unbelievable.” He felt his stomach tighten. “We shouldn't have bothered you.”