Catch & Release (12 page)

I pay for the gas. I have my sweatshirt tied around my waist to disguise my lumpy crotch. I've replaced the sock with paper towels: Absorbent? Check. Comfortable? So not.

Odd is leaning against the bumper scratching his cheeks. Whiskers itch, I guess. My problem is bigger than his.

“I need to go to real store, Odd. Like a grocery store or drugstore.”

“We could use some real food,” says Odd.

“That's right, food and stuff,” I say.

“Alrighty then,” says Odd.

 

Odd is pushing a shopping cart. I think we could have made do with a little plastic basket, but he's pushing a shopping cart. If I were on my own with a basket, I could just turn away and hide if another customer comes our direction. I could be stealthy and this shopping trip could be over so fast. But I'm with Odd, and he's steering a cart down the narrow aisles making squealing-tire noises when he turns a corner. I wish we could just go our separate ways, but I'm the one who's paying. He picks up a watermelon and starts thumping his knuckles against it. What's he thinking?

“No watermelon, Odd. We can't eat a watermelon in the car. You can have bananas or oranges . . . no juggling the food . . . we could get stuff for sandwiches . . . that's a lot of pop . . . I don't think we need that much . . . you shouldn't eat Lucky Charms every day . . . I need something . . . here, you just wait here . . .” But he doesn't wait. He trails along behind me with the cart right to the feminine hygiene products.

“Alrighty then. That explains the bearanoia,” says Odd. He picks up a bale of super-extra-long-overnightpads-with-wings.

“Put that down,” I say.

“It's OK, Polly. I go to the store for my mom all the time,” he says and flips it into the cart.

“That's not what I use.”

“What
do
you use?”

“Just shut up for a minute and let me find it.”

“Hey,” Odd yells at a butcher putting packages of steaks out in the meat cooler, “We need some help . . .” The butcher turns around and comes over. “She needs . . . What is it you need, Polly?”

“Look, I'm sorry we bothered you. Everything is under control.” I toss a box into the cart. It isn't my brand. Tough shit. Will it kill me? Maybe not. But the humiliation is a sure thing.

At the checkout while I'm sliding my card through to pay, Odd says to the cashier and the bag boy, “She gets really cranky when she's on her period . . .”

I want to tell him he can't have his Lucky Charms, but I've already paid for them. The bag boy is putting them in the sack.

 

“Why do you have to act like that, Odd?”

“What?” He's feigning clueless.

“Like that, in the store, like a jerk.”

“I was trying to be helpful. And friendly. You're not friendly, Polly. You never smile at anybody.”

 

“Ever been to Elkhorn, Polly? Ever visited a ghost town?”

“I've been to Virginia City.”

“Pfft. That's Disneyfied. Nobody sells ice cream in a real ghost town. Ever visit a real ghost town? Ghost town cemeteries are the best. You gotta see a real ghost town cemetery. And I'm gonna fix you up.”

“Is it far?”

“Naw. It's just on the way,” says Odd. He doesn't say on the way to what. I don't ask.

 

There are fish in Hebgen Lake, but they are safe from us, even the gulpers that will rise for almost anything. We are driving by on our way to a ghost town without ice cream.

“. . . suspected pirate mothership near the Seychelles. There have been seven hundred twenty-six incidents of piracy since January 1, a marked increase in activity despite active multinational suppression efforts,” says the radio.

“Hey, Polly, we could be pirates! Think about it. Like old-school pirates. We got the qualifications,” he says, and then reaches down and knocks on his robot leg. He's got a point. We might have to get a parrot, and I'd have to start wearing my eye-patch, even though it is uncomfortable, since that is part of the uniform. And I'm skinny enough to be a pirate, at least the ones that show up lately on the TV news.

Pirates makes as much sense as rock stars. Maybe more.

“We'd need a boat,” says Odd, “But hey! We can just steal one! That's what pirates do, they steal boats.”

A truck passes us towing a green drift boat. It's got smiling, up-turned curves—the better to scoop me up and deliver me to the river of happiness. It would be fine to fish from a boat like that. A boat like that could make a person turn pirate.

“. . . released by the Russians after seizing a Russian oil tanker are presumed dead. The pirates' small vessel had been stripped of all weaponry and navigational equipment before they were set adrift,” says the radio.

“Alrighty then, not pirates,” says Odd.

“We could fish anywhere along here,” I say.

“We're going to Elkhorn,” says Odd.

“Can we fish there?”

“Like you just said, we can fish anywhere,” says Odd, and he just keeps driving past the channels of the Madison River. People come from halfway around the world to fish here, but us? We can fish anywhere, so we just blow right by.

 

I send my dad a message, “Madison now its all good.”

I delete thirty-seven messages from my mom.

 

“So Odd is a family name, huh? I heard you say Grandpa Odd last night. Is it short for something? Because, you know, it's a bit odd,” I say.

“Har-dee-fucking-har,” says Odd, “Is your name short for Polyester? Polyhedron, maybe?”

“It's just Polly,” I'm a little ashamed of myself. Odd's probably been putting up with crap about his name his whole life. It made me cry when the other kids called me Pollywog on the playground, but Odd has to be a lot worse.

“Odd is a real common name in Norway,” says Odd.

He doesn't say another thing to me until we stop for gas, then all he does is ask for the toilet key so he can use it while I pay for the fill-up. The key is attached to a long chunk of broom handle with the words “PEE KEY” written on it. I hand it off to him like a baton in a relay race. When we get back onto the interstate, he rolls down his window and reaches down by his feet. He's still got the pee key. He chucks it out the window.

I just shut my eye and shut my mouth. There is no point in asking him why he needs to be such a jerk. He probably didn't even use that pee key. He probably just wants the whole world to start peeing all over stuff like pack rats. I don't say anything. And he doesn't say anything, right back.

 

When he finally does talk, it comes out of nowhere.

“Gramma Dot, I lived with her when I was little. My mom tried to kill herself back then. She would have done it, too, but she didn't want to make a mess so she was fiddling around getting everything ready. Gramma Dot just dropped by unexpected and tumbled to the situation. They put my mom in treatment, and after that, Gramma Dot, she took care of me. It was better for everybody.”

I don't know how to talk back to that. We don't do crazy in my family. Not like that. Odd comes from crazy people. I look at him. There's nothing to see. But now I know his head is full of snakes, all crowded in there and biting each other. It's been going on so long they are immune to poison. Not to pain.