I Don't Like Where This Is Going (19 page)

We followed our farewell meal with farewell drinks at the Bucket of Blood Saloon. We toasted our friendship, long may it wave. We said our goodbyes.

Sometimes when I drink too . . . make that
whenever
I drink too much . . . no . . . whenever I drink sufficiently, but not uncontrollably, I become relatively euphoric and somehow tranquil at the same time, if that's even possible. When that happens, I imprudently disarm the filters of caution and good sense, which I normally rely upon as impediments to complete honesty. Whatever cheerful thoughts float across my buoyant mind, I express. And so as we descended the mountains toward Reno, a city 220 miles from the sea and somehow west of Los Angeles at the same time, and as I admired the delightful and sexy Patience asleep beside me in the passenger seat, I thought about wedding chapels and quickie marriages and the ensuing bliss forever after, and I shook Patience's arm, and when she opened her eyes and smiled, I said, “Do you want to get married?”

And she said, “To you?” Which I thought was a peculiar and disheartening answer. And when I didn't respond, she said, “We can talk about this when we're sober.”

And I thought, No, we won't. And I hit the accelerator a little harder. And the little engine skipped a beat.

11

I
HAVE A
better chance of understanding the origin of the universe, the laws of quantum physics, and the motivation of the sly pheromonal agents responsible for the carnal misalliance of James Carville and Mary Matalin than I have of understanding my own bewildering and miscreant self. This is not something a therapist should be proud to admit. And, trust me, I'm not. Why do I sometimes behave reprehensibly and against my own best interests? Every answer I come up with—stubborn, depressed, confused, distracted, hurt, blah, blah, and blah—seems brazenly false and insolently banal. I watch myself act boorishly, nastily, obnoxiously, and I tell myself to stop, but then go right ahead and do it anyway.

So there I was in Valmy, Nevada, in my cramped little Mirage, in the parking lot of the Golden Motel, on an unseasonably cold morning in early June, waiting for my sweetheart Patience, who had seemed to be ready to leave ten minutes ago, but was now delayed for whatever reason, and I sat in the idling car, fuming for no acceptable reason. We were five days into our desert odyssey, and I was finding myself increasingly anxious and irritated. It had been my bright idea to roam the Silver State without an itinerary,
to trust in serendipity—the journey
is
the destination and all that. So we followed our whim at every fork in the road, put our faith in chance to lead us on, and I arrived at the realization that where I really wanted to be was at home. In Melancholy, Florida. In my own house with my cat and my stuff and my work, helping my anguished clients to shape coherent stories from the chaos of their bewildering lives, doing so because, I believe, a simple narrative, and the awareness that is its consequence, are the only control we may have over our lives, and sometimes, for a while at least, that is enough to get us by. And in helping to give shape to their lives, I give meaning to my own. But out here, wandering in the desert, I felt expendable, false, and useless, like some malingering vagabond.

UNION BIOLOGICAL TRANSPORT
was the company name stenciled to the driver's door of the box truck that forced me off the two-lane mountain road. I woke from this—last night's final dream—before I sailed off into the uncompassed void. And now I realized the truck's cargo had been human—undocumented women from the tomato fields of Florida—a reminder to my unconscious self that Blythe and Layla were dead, Charlotte was in hiding, and Audrey/Ruby Tuesday was indentured, most likely, to the Affiliation, as Gene called it. If I'd been a better dreamer, I would have rolled down the tinted window of the cab and seen who was driving the rig.

When Patience finally backed out of Room 12, she tapped her pockets, cut the lights, and shut the door. When she turned, lowered her head, and held the collar of her jacket closed at the neck, I didn't recognize who she was or understand what I was doing with her, and for that moment I was a stranger to myself. I recall the scene now in high-contrast, badly focused black-and-white, like a jumpy, eight-millimeter home movie, and I'm watching myself
watching Patience walk toward the car, and when I cut to her, she lifts her brow, smiles into the camera, casts her eyes up and to the right like a child who's been caught being naughty.

Patience settled into the front seat and leaned over to kiss me, and when our lips touched in the cold, dry air, we were zapped with the sting and click of static electricity. Patience made a joke about my high-voltage smooch, and I pulled my head away. I drove toward Battle Mountain. Patience apologized for the lumpy bed and asked me if my back still ached. She had chosen the motel for the sign out front: T
HE
G
OLDEN
M
OTEL
/B
EAUTYREST
. For years, she told me, she'd been letting signs guide her life. If you need something, open your eyes, and you will find it. Sometimes the signs were the written kind, like the one we'd seen at the New Wine Church of Jesus Christ in Tonopah, announcing Sunday's sermon: S
URELY
, I
COME
Q
UICKLY
. R
EV. 22:20.
This Bible verse had become our bawdy mantra on the trip. Other signs might be zodiacal. I was an Aquarius, a wonderful match for her Libra, she assured me. Air meets air. It was all or nothing for the two of us.

I looked out at the lightening sky and the scrubby landscape, so vacant it could blunt the senses. I felt the car jerk and hesitate, or thought I did, like it had been doing for the last five days. Patience said she didn't notice it. Maybe it had something to do with the altitude or the cold engine. I tried to relax.

She said, “What's the matter?”

“Nothing's the matter.”

But she was right, of course. I felt distressed, uncomfortable, tense, annoyed. I was still preoccupied by Layla's murder, exasperated by the infuriating and inexplicable cover-up, and shaken by my own absurd but slightly terrifying brush with the law. I saw a restaurant in Battle Mountain, pulled to the curb, and parked in front of the green pleated-aluminum façade of the Coffee Shop.

Patience took my arm and walked us to the door. “When you're agitated, you set your jaw and flare your nostrils.”

We took a booth beside the depleted breakfast bar. A hand-printed sign taped to the sneeze guard reminded the customers that it's “all you can eat,” not “all you can heap on your plate.” We ordered coffee. The man sitting alone at the adjacent table wore wide red suspenders crisscrossed over his chest. He seemed to be reasoning with his pliable waffle and losing the argument.

Everything about the Coffee Shop was bothering me, the brown Formica table with its cigarette burns, the plastic cruets of powdered nondairy creamer, the red and yellow squirt bottles of catsup and mustard, the bamboo basket of saltine twin-packs, the sugar and sweetener packets stacked on their plastic caddy, the peel-back cups of ersatz jam jumbled in a cracked wooden salad bowl. The coffee arrived in a coppery plastic thermal decanter. Patience poured coffee in my cup. When she poured her own, she moved her eyes from the cup to the menu, and for some reason her hand followed her eyes, and she poured the coffee on the table. She quick got a rag from our waitress and sopped up the mess. I tasted the coffee and said, No harm done. Weak and stale.

Tennille, our waitress, took forever to get back to us. When she did, Patience said she'd stick with the coffee. We passed on the uninviting breakfast buffet. I ordered bacon and eggs sunny-side up. I said, “Do you have any butter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Real butter?”

Tennille didn't understand the question. She dipped into her apron pocket and took out a small sealed tub of what turned out to be something called Country Morning Blend. I said, “No toast, thanks.”

Patience took her journal out of her backpack, flipped it open,
and read me her last entry, something she'd overheard in the Shop n Go in Lovelock:
Bottle caps don't break down, why should you?
The man in the red suspenders at the next table barked and rubbed his hands together. He had spread typewritten pages across his table. He touched his eye with a finger, touched his forehead, his chin, each of the pages in turn. He barked again.

Tennille arrived with my breakfast. I didn't remind her I didn't want the toast. Patience asked the waitress about the barking man.

“That's Eric. He's not all there, if you know what I mean. But he's sweet as honey, just the same.”

Patience took a slice of bacon. My ex, Georgia, used to pilfer my food all the time. Drove me crazy. I said, “Should I order you bacon?”

“It smells so good.”

Eric was suddenly standing by our table contorting his face, flicking his fingers until he got our attention. He looked at me and forced a crooked smile. “We're all impressed with your strength of character and sense of self-worth.” And with that assessment, he saluted, turned, and marched back to his table.

The front door squealed open, and I saw a man walk in whom I didn't know, but who looked vaguely familiar. Plaid shirt, dusty jeans, work boots, sunglasses over eyeglasses, and green ball cap. He looked like he was trying to grow himself a chin with his scraggly beard. I sensed that he was annoying, whoever he was. And then I remembered that he was the guy pumping gas while I was filling the car last night at the Shell station in Valmy. I noticed him then because while he was fueling his pickup, he was talking on his cell phone and smoking, two risky behaviors that the sign on the gas pumps warned against. The
S
on the enormous neon gas station sign above our heads had burned out, announcing to any
poor soul approaching this benighted town out of the pitch-black desert that they had arrived in
HELL
.

I asked Patience where she'd like to drive to today, hoping we'd head in the general direction of Vegas. She unfolded her state map on the table. We decided to drive 305 to Austin, eighty-eight miles of unpeopled open range. I figured the car's little jerkiness wouldn't be a problem. Gas up and buy water before we leave town. Tennille brought our check. Patience paid her. Eric brought another check and laid it facedown on the table. Patience read what he had printed:
This happens rather than that. And that's the way things like this come about—you and me in the same place. A miracle.

I SET THE CRUISE CONTROL
to eighty, adjusted my seat, stretched my legs, and watched Patience glue Eric's message into her journal. She said, “In ten years, all I'll need to do is look at this check, and I'll remember everything—the red suspenders, the threads of white saliva at the corners of Eric's lips, Tennille's brown mascara, these salt flats. It'll all come rushing back to me.”

I felt the car flinch and balk, and so did Patience. I said, “We're forty miles from anywhere.” And then the car ran well for ten or so miles before it jerked a few more times, knocking the car out of cruise control. Patience suggested stopping to let the car rest, but I was afraid if I turned it off, it wouldn't restart. I figured we were now twenty-eight miles from Austin. It took all of my concentration to keep the car running. All I could think of was this damn sputtering car and the salesman who had sold it to Bay and me at Rick Ferguson Auto Sales in Vegas, Danny Mascola, “Dan the Can-Do Man,” white shoes, white belt, carbon black toupee, and yellow aviator shades, Danny Mascola, whom I wanted to throttle
right then. She sound like a creampuff to you now, Danny? Patience told me to breathe.

Carl, at the Last Chance Chevron in Austin, told me the problem was vapor lock. I stared at the engine and wondered if I was being fucked with. Vapor's a gas. How can it lock? And if it did, how would you know? Carl said, “What that means is your engine's running so damn hot that the gasoline begins to boil, and that creates vapors that your fuel pump can't handle. When the car cools down, the vapors condense to liquid, and the car runs fine—for a while.” Carl said what he would do with this little Asian car was he would install a new thermostat to keep her running cool. “Suit yourself, of course.” Carl wiped his hands with an orange shop rag, tucked the rag in his back pocket. He pointed to the Mirage. “Myself, I could never buy a Jap car like this. You don't know how cruel those people were. You heard of the Bataan Death March?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It was yesterday.”

“We're allies now.”

“You think so?”

Carl figured two and a half hours to fix her up, given as to how he was backed up and all—his mechanic Grady Hall didn't show up for work this morning. Had his girlfriend-du-jour call to say Grady's gone fossil hunting with the Ramos brothers down to the Toiyabe Range, if you can believe that.

Patience and I walked to the Lucky Boy Saloon, sat in the dark and empty room, and ordered drinks. The bartender said he was sorry, but he didn't know what a Vulcan Mind Bender was. When Patience explained it to him, he said sorry, but they didn't carry ouzo at the Boy.

Someone—the Chamber of Commerce, maybe—had built a large letter
A
out of whitewashed boulders on the hill across the
street.
A
for
arid. A
for
abject.
The bartender brought our vodka and tonics and a bowl of Wheat Chex and pretzels.

Patience asked him if he was a Virgo.

He blushed. “Hell, no!”

“Not that,” she said. “Your birth sign, I mean. What's your birthday?”

“First of September.”

“This should be a good day for you, then. Welcome the intrusion of a healthier perspective.”

“I sure will, ma'am. Will that be all for you all?”