The Taste of Penny (3 page)

The driver stands at the front of the bus. “Any more crazy terrorists here?” he says. No one says anything. “I sure hope not. Next stop is Novgorod. Unfortunately, I'm sorry to say, that the bathroom on the bus is still out of order.”

I KNEW WE WERE IN FOR TROUBLE THE MOMENT the locals, who call resort workers “spank tourists,” showed. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a crowd of Carhartt flannels. We couldn't figure who invited them. It was me and Patsy and a few others who have jobs like vacuuming moose heads in the main lodge.

I tried to make them feel welcome. Patsy was the only woman and loving it. I offered them some detergent. We did bumps in the bathroom in case management descended. We got off-kilter and imprecise, and the detergent flew, dusting the floor and toilet seat.

Then I taught them all how to dryer-ride. I programmed thirty-second spins in the Vapor Electro-Heat Roller Dryer, which beat them up good. I gave instruction and advice: Roll at precisely nine o'clock. Land frog push-ups.

All the while I kept my arm locked around Patsy's, knowing how she gets with men like this around. At one point
she broke away, saying that she had to go to toilet. She always says this:
go to toilet
. I don't know where the
the
goes.

About then the locals suggested that it was my turn in the dryer, that I should show them how it's done. I said, “Nah, fellas. I get into this all the time. It's you all's moment.” Brick, the biggest one, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Really, I would like to see what you can do.”

You do not go this far, all of the locals dizzy and warm to the touch, without taking your fair shake. I glanced around and noted that all the moose head vacuumers had left already. It was just me, Patsy, and the Carhartt flannels. I climbed in and at that moment Patsy returned from the bathroom. She wore the feather roach clip in her hair. She switched on the boom box and I heard muffled new wave country reverberating through the dryer drum. I remembered her telling me at the start of the trip, “One thing you've got to realize, Scoma, I am the type of girl who eats her pudding with a fork.” She was skeptical about how a winter spent washing rich people's come out of sheets was going to fix us.

Brick hooked his arm around her elbow and spun her into the open floor. One of the other locals tapped on the dryer control pad, and I could tell from the three beeps he didn't program me the same thirty-second joyride I programmed them.

I had a perfect view of Brick and Patsy out of the dryer glass, and I simply employed my technique, turned at nine o'clock, landed frog push-ups. Simple. Just like I told them it'd be. They applauded for me. Patsy gyrated on Brick's leg. Brick spun his arm above his head like a lasso. It's nothing I hadn't seen before, used to recline with a BLT while she wiggled it on some creampuff's haunch.

I dryer-ride these days better than I skate vert. But when I saw the whole group of them through the glass, her and
the locals heading out of what we might call the public area of the facility and into the back, I mistimed and came down hard. The metal drum knobs slamboed me. I got caught in the revolutions and couldn't get out. I could feel the blood racing to the contours of every future bruise.

Patsy danced her way out of what we might call the public area of the facility, finger-tip-feeling the underside of Brick's chin, not her slinky stripper dance but kind of Indiana, slithering ledges. She walked them right out there with those ledges, one of which Brick tried to tame. She fired it at him.

They didn't take her. She left with them.

Everyone told me. “Damn, Scoma,” they said, “that girl lives in a necklace.” I thought that if I could get her away from the place where she shed her clothes while folks mowed the breakfast buffet, we'd be all right.

When the dryer cycle stopped, I pushed the door open and flopped out. I lay on the floor and the wooden trusses cutting across the middle of the ceiling spun like helicopter blades for a long time. When they finally slowed, I stumbled to the back. The locals were all passed out in the dirty sheets, our neglected responsibility. Wrapped together tightly in sheets, Brick and Patsy.

I toppled one of the laundry carts for commotion.

Brick's eyes popped open. He tried to roll away from Patsy but he was tangled in the sheets. I punched his face a few times before he got up. Patsy didn't wake. She lay there nude, curled on her side like a letter S. And he was facing me, fists up.

Now, I took some boxing. I threw a few jabs, missed. He ducked, bobbed. His dick and balls smacked around, distracting me. He didn't even try to cover himself. I remembered hearing somewhere that naked men don't fight good.

The trickle of blood from his nose got me
overconfident, and I threw a knockout, a real Popeye. I missed again, over extended, still dizzy. I have this habit of sticking my tongue out during physical activity. He got underneath me with the uppercut, a nice one.

What I remember last is the tip of my tongue sailing away from me.

 

 

When I come to, there's a tarantula in my mouth. My knee is wedged under the emergency brake. A ziplock baggie on Patsy's feather roach clip dangles from the rearview mirror. Inside the baggie is some kind of salted slug.

There are no operative mirrors in the Civvie. Ditches snapped off the side-views. At first I think I might have been in a wreck. Then it all comes roaring back to me. Not a tarantula, the swollen nub—what's left of my tongue. That would make the salted slug the unfortunate tip. The rearview mirror is stuck in that mode where headlights don't shine in your eyes and all you can see is a transparent reflection of yourself.

I un-wedge my knee from the emergency brake. I squeeze the tip of my tongue in the ziplock baggie. Me and Patsy drove to Big Sky Resort from Florida just a few weeks ago to spend our winter working laundry. Right about now, on an ordinary morning, we would have already laundered the very sheets her and Brick are probably still twisted up in. We'd be pushing them in carts up to the resort. We'd have folded tight and flat. We'd have tucked in corners to boomerang them at maids and run.

I don't go back inside the laundry room to get her or ask how it was I am put into the Civvie. I drive away. I drive until I see a Taco Bell and utilize the facilities. I wad up a ball of toilet paper and press it to the swollen nub of my tongue.
Flecks of toilet paper stick to it. I self-serve a cup of ice, pushing the tip of my tongue—ziplock baggie, roach clip, and all—down in there. The boy at the checkout eyes my blood-smeared face and hand. He doesn't say anything. Then I drive away from Montana. I'm all giddy, delirious, lightheaded. I am going ninety, minus some percentage of tongue.

The road in front of me is blank, interrupted every couple miles with dead deer. I start to count out loud like Patsy and I always did, and that brings on the tears. I punch the steering wheel. Sixteen, seventeen, seventeen and a half, eighteen—how much for torso? Leg? A furry stain? How do you count that? Me and Patsy tried. We counted carcasses in high fractions, her always looking way over the ditch, singing, “Four and two-twenty-eights. Where's the hell the rest of the thing go?”

 

Right before the state border, there's a line of trucks parked on the shoulder. I slow to a crawl and roll down the window. A bumper sticker on a Chevy reads, “Gut Deer?” There's a huddle of folks with knives and Igloo coolers in the ditch. They're knelt around a moose carcass in the snow.

A pear-shaped guy with ice in his beard waves at me. He is holding a lime-green paring knife. When he comes toward me I see the moose's side is split open. I've never seen a dead thing so big. Maybe a thousand pounds. There's a chain between the Gut Deer? truck's hitch and the moose's leg. A trail marks where the chain dragged the moose from the road. Another guy buries the guts in the snow a few feet away. Steam rises when he shovels snow over the guts.

“You signed up?” the guy says. A Ford Pinto honks and screams around me. I make my face into a question. “Buzzard Workshop,” the guy says. “Roadkill 101. You signed up?” His
tone is recruity. I figure, it's a curious scene. I figure, I'll check it out. I pull the car over.

“You got a blade?” he asks. I point to my mouth and shake my head. “It's okay,” he says. “We have some spares.”

He opens the door to the Gut Deer? truck and hands me a hunting knife with a compass in the butt of the handle, the flea market kind I used to covet as a kid. Then we walk to the moose carcass and the old lady and a woman with a green bandana tied around her head scoot aside to make room for me. I kneel next to the moose's shoulder.

There's a girl about my age wearing a Skoal T-shirt that matches the guy shoveling guts into the snow and a woman sitting in a lawn chair behind the moose reading a copy of
Better Homes & Gardens
. The bearded guy stands at the moose's head. The smell is warm and sour.

The bearded guy hands out oversized freezer bags, then props his boot on one of its antlers and begins to lecture: “Now as I was saying, roadkill is a right and a privilege…” He says some things I don't understand about anatomy and about the unjust laws we are in violation of by taking apart this already-murdered creature in the ditch. I want to clarify. It does not seem right that something like this would be illegal. But I can't speak. My tongue swells, filling my mouth.

Then the moose's carcass vibrates, and I realize everyone is cutting into it. The bearded guy appears behind me. He takes my hand, which is holding the hunting knife, and guides me through the muscle of the shoulder. It's thick, tougher than I ever imagined. Once the knife is in, he releases me and traces the line in front of the knife with his finger as I work it—the meat pushing against the blade before opening a seam. I manage around what you might call a hock.

“That'a boy,” he says and pats my shoulder. An old lady crouched over the moose holds up something red and stringy in her veined hands.

“Can you eat this?” she shouts to the bearded guy.

“Leave something for the real buzzards,” he says. They laugh.

He moves on to the woman in the bandana whose knife is stuck in some dense material around the back leg. I'm wearing thin black gloves and my hands start to go numb from the cold. I split my hock into two freezer bags. When I look up, the woman in the bandana is smiling and cradling the detached leg. She says that she used to butcher moose she found on the road with a chainsaw. She is thankful for this clean cut. She is thankful for the bearded guy sharing his expertise with us like this. “Being able to take an entire leg off,” the old woman says, “to know how to work the knife and find the joints.”

She is taking both back legs, for living-room lamps, she says. She stands them up against an Igloo cooler. The other two are rationed out for soup bone and marrow. The girl in the Skoal T-shirt slices off the tail, about the size of a yam, and slips it into her coat pocket.

The bearded guy pries open the moose's mouth, revealing its tongue, which is like a giant purple snail. “Who wants to pickle this beauty?” he asks, sawing at the back of the tongue with the thin paring knife. It ekes out like a monstrous conch. He holds it in his gloved hand and it seems to pulse. I bolt to the Civvie, abandoning the freezer bags and my hock. “Hey,” the bearded guy yells. I drive away and only realize that I stole his knife when I look down and see it bloodying my passenger seat.
I tear into Wyoming on a little route. And when a prairie dog farm with a little store is the first thing that appears, I make it my first Wyoming thing.

A sign says
Dawg Food Here
and the bells on the door rattle me. I see aquariums imprisoning wimpy rattlesnakes, and underneath the aquariums are bags of peanuts costing one dollar, prairie dog food. But
I'm
hungry for nuts, and go for one. When I take it, a shriveled rattler strikes the glass.

I say, “mirror” to the old man behind the counter but it comes out “
mewe
” and a spot of blood on his collar. He points toward the back of the store, where there's a bathroom and another sign,
If you find this bathroom a mess PLEASE tell us
. The bathroom is stunningly clean—the mirror, though old, recently Windexed.

I stick out the nub of my tongue. I rinse with water, then pop a peanut and the salt wakes up whatever's dying in there. I rub at the red stains around my lips. The stains fade but don't come off.

On my way out, stringy old dude asks, “Is the bathroom clean enough?” I thumbs-up and leave. Then I am outside on a corralled field. A hanging wooden sign reads,
Little D Guest Ranch
. The dogs pop out. I sprinkle some peanuts in the snow at my feet. They mob, chittering like a flock of pigeons.

There's a yellow Kelty tent—a nice one—over in the corner and someone pops out in the same way the dogs just did. He is bound in skintight Gore-Tex head to toe, arctic gear, the kind that the rich resort people wear to look like ninjas while they ski. He walks toward me, all knees, and puts his hands on his hips.

Suddenly I'm overcome by tired. I try some signing: point at his tent, then put my palms together like prayer and
tilt my head onto them.

“Temp arrangement,” he says. “I'm here on business. The old man doesn't mind. He's senile on clean. And sure it's abnatural domestication but you won't gain anything by setting them free. They've got a good thing here, to them. And what the fuck do they know? We're the ones who are supposed to know things.”

I empty the last of the nuts in the snow and the dogs feeding frenzy. I pull out my chest and the Marlboro tent. I've been going around with the chest since I was ten. I keep it in the trunk of the Civvie at all times for precisely a chain of circumstances like this: my escape from an already cold and treacherous environs populated with wealthy skiing ninjas to one colder and more treacherous and populated with small rodents.