West of Here (38 page)

And what happened?

He flew into LaGuardia and totally wussed out on taking a bus to the subway, like he’d promised himself. He took a cab straight to the front door of the hostel on 103rd and Amsterdam, where he checked into a room with six farting Dutchmen. He was too intimidated by it all. He felt vulnerable. Once he finally quit procrastinating with his toiletries and ventured out into the Manhattan night, he didn’t make it far. He almost walked into Oscar and Tony’s, around the corner, and almost ordered a beer. But peering in the window, he paused, got indecisive, made a false start toward the door, made another, but stopped himself. When he felt he was being watched through the window, he felt like a total pussy and fled to the corner store, where he bought three Foster’s oil cans and a pint-sized plastic Statue of Liberty coffee cup to drink them out of.

Where did he go with his coffee cup and his beers? To the pulsing variegated madness of Times Square? Did he stroll along the edge of Central Park? Did he sit on a bench and watch the rich pageantry of the Big Apple as it passed him by?

Not quite. He went straight back to the hostel, where he spent the
evening playing bumper pool by himself, listening to Sinatra on the old phonograph. He hated Sinatra. What a cheese-dick.

The next day, he ventured as far as Sal’s Pizza, twice. He returned to the corner store to stock up on oil cans for his Statue of Liberty cup. He got pretty proficient at bumper pool. Even old blue eyes started growing on him. Gotham was never the same after Krig’s barnstorming birthday weekend. They’re still talking about him in Times Square.

He never went back to New York. He never went anywhere. After that, he stayed right in Port Bonita, where he was once a double letter in hoops and wrestling. Port Bonita, where he could curl up in the familiar security of his one-syllable name. Yeah, okay, maybe people do change. Maybe they get more afraid the fewer choices they make.

“I’m sorry,” said Rita. “God, I’m a wet blanket. Let’s play darts.”

They played 301 and two games of cricket. Krig tried to let her win every time, but she sucked too bad. They talked about movies, and Krig resisted the urge to bring up
Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.
They talked about music, and Krig was willing to forgive her for hating Jethro Tull, even willing to forgive her for saying she hated “him” instead of “them.” They talked about some of the crazy shit they did in their youth. Krig told her about wrestling weaner pigs, about locker-room shenanigans — neglecting to mention that he was invariably on the ass-end of these shenanigans. Of course, he avoided his adventures in New York.

As the evening progressed, Rita made up a whole new youth for herself, one without the creepy stepdad and the couch surfing. She painted the rez of her youth as the person she wanted to be might have experienced it. She painted an adolescence that might have been Marcia Brady’s. She even invented siblings. A brother Joe and a sister Gail. A household of rank-and-file orderliness. A silver tiara on prom night. And each fiction was more thrilling and liberating than the last.

Rita was giggling in the passenger seat as Krig pulled off of Marine and into the back lot of High Tide. Her laughter ended abruptly
when she noticed a shadowy figure sitting on the hood of the Monte Carlo.

“Oh shit.”

“What?”

“Turn around — no, it’s too late, just let me out here.”

“What is it?”

“Randy.”

“So what’s the big deal?” said Krig, pulling up next to the Monte Carlo. But hardly had he uttered the words, before the big deal became perfectly clear. In a flash, Randy was wrenching Krig out of the driver’s seat, even as Rita tried desperately to pull him back into the idling car. But Randy won the tug-of-war, and Krig soon found himself facedown in the gravel lot, breathless, the right side of his torso burning like fire and ice.

Rita leapt out of the car and tried to pull Randy off, but she was no match, never was.

“Shouldn’t have crossed the line, douchehammer!” Randy observed, delivering a crisp right foot to the kidney. “How does it feel now, fuckstick?”

Krig would remember thinking if he could only get to his feet, he could take this shrimp. And he could have. He could have rolled to the left and popped up — Christ, shouldn’t that have been his fucking instinct? Once he got on his feet, he could have had his way with the little ferret. He had the size, the reach, the superior strength. He could’ve rolled, popped, and bing-bang, he’d have been on his feet. Done a quick duck under, and got him low. Pretty soon he’d have had all that weight on top of him. If he rushed Krig, Krig could’ve got him in a body lock and shook him around like a rag doll. Better yet, got him in a head shuck, and start twisting that skinny little neck. Either way, he could’ve had him. But where was Mr. Double Letter? Mr. Double Letter was flat on his beer belly, wincing at each blow, saying to himself, Just get this over with.

Krig watched dazedly as Randy forced Rita into the Monte Carlo through the driver’s side, kicking and screaming — at least
she
was putting up a fight.

With one arm on the wheel and the other fighting her off, Randy whipped the car in reverse, swung a 180, and immediately stalled.

Krig had a window there. A chance to turn the tides. A chance to revise his history. All he had to do was get his fat ass off the ground and rush the car as Randy turned it over — once, twice,
three times,
with no success. Krig could have ripped that little weasel right out of driver’s seat and pummeled him.

But he didn’t, did he? Worse, he distinctly remembered thinking — after Randy’s third failed attempt at turning the car over —
C’mon, start, start, damn it!
He remembered thinking,
Don’t flood it, you idiot, you’re gonna drain the battery.

And even more vividly than Krig remembered the shame and humiliation, he remembered the relief that washed over him when the engine caught on the fifth try, and Randy and Rita tore out of the gravel lot.

AN HOUR LATER
, Rita collided with the edge of the bathroom door but only after Randy called her a whore and struck her with a backhand across the face that sent her careening across the hallway into said bathroom door. After much shouting, and more shoving, Randy cried like a baby for forty-five minutes, apologizing profusely for his very existence.
I can’t help it,
he whimpered over and over.
I just love you so much.
And before she even realized it, her eye had swollen half shut, and Rita found herself comforting an inconsolable Randy on the bed until two in the morning, eventually succumbing to his sexual advances. For ten minutes, he fucked her even harder than usual and, having spent himself inside of her, rolled over and fell quickly to sleep.

Rita lay awake half the night, worrying. Why did she have to get poor Krig involved? What if he was badly injured — what if he was dying in that parking lot right now? She had his cell number, what was she waiting for? After two six-packs and all the excitement, Randy was out cold. When Rita couldn’t stand it anymore, she stole out from under the covers and across the darkened room. The floor was still
strewn with Curtis’s laundry. She tiptoed out into the creaky hallway and quietly closed the bedroom door behind her.

In the darkness, she located her purse on the kitchen counter, fished out her cigarettes, her cell phone, and a lighter. In only a nightshirt, she snuck out the back door and down the steps. The night was considerably colder than she had imagined, clear and moonless. The stars were spattered brightly in a wide brushstroke across the sky. Rita padded in bare feet through a dew that was turning to frost, around the back corner of the house to a single lawn chair on a buckled slab of concrete overgrown with long grass. She pulled her knees up under her nightshirt for warmth and lit a Merit. Clutching her cell phone, she looked briefly up at the sky and shivered. How was it possible that the stars burned cold? How was it possible that they burned at all? The sight of them caused Rita to shiver once more. She pulled her legs in tighter under her nightshirt and smoked her Merit down to the filter and snubbed it out on the concrete. She lit another before dialing.

“Krig?” she said, just above a whisper.

“What up?” he said groggily. “Who is this?”

“It’s me, Rita.”

Krig sat up in bed in the glow of the television. “Hey.”

“Are you … are you okay?” she said.

Locating the remote on the pillow beside him, Krig turned off the TV and settled into the darkness. “Yeah. A little sore, I guess. What time is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Rita, exhaling. “Late. Or really early.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Everything is fine. I just … I’m sorry that I …”

“No worries. I needed my ass kicked, I think.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“It’s
you
I’m worried about.”

“I can handle myself,” she said. “But thanks.”

They lapsed into silence. Krig could hear Rita smoking.

“Krig, I … all that … tonight, when I was … look, I … I better go.”

“Say it.”

Silence again. The sound of Rita smoking.

“All that stuff I told you tonight, that stuff about me growing up — none of it was true. I don’t know why, I just … I guess I just wanted to step outside of my life, you know? I was having fun.”

“I think I get it,” he said. “I’ve made up stuff before.”

“I wasn’t lying to you because I … I don’t want you to think …”

“Really,” said Krig. “It’s okay. I don’t think anything. I think your boyfriend is a dick, but other than that …”

“Thanks. I mean for, you know, defending me, I guess.”

“Defending you? That’s a laugh. I didn’t even defend
myself.
Jesus, I may as well have been a piñata.”

Rita stopped her giggle short when a light snapped on in the trailer. “Shit.”

“What is it? You okay?”

Rita snubbed out her cigarette. “I gotta go,” she said.

AUGUST
2006

Doubtful, that’s the vibe Rita got from the specialist. She saw it in the first cursory blue-eyed glance he bestowed upon her when they met in the corridor. He didn’t inquire about the black eye; in fact, he hardly seemed to notice it. Still, Rita could feel the force of his doubt as he leafed through his clipboard distractedly, his golden brows scrunched upon his tanned forehead: doubtful of her qualifications as a mother, as a woman, as a human being. Rita could tell that he blamed her for Curtis.

“We think he understands us,” the specialist said, not looking at Rita’s black eye. “And we know for certain he can hear us. The tests show he can hear us.” Here he heaved a sigh and shook his head doubtfully. “Frankly, I’m at a loss; we’re all at a loss. There’s no edema, no clotting — nothing to suggest trauma. Nothing in the EEG points to neurodegeneration. In short, we’re finding nothing to account for the deficits. The tests have told us all they can tell us, I think. I’d like to send him to a specialist.”

“I thought you were the specialist.”

“A different specialist,” said the specialist. “Someone nontraditional.” For the first time, he looked at Rita’s black eye, and Rita looked back at him defiantly, but the specialist did not shrink from her gaze; he merely shook his head doubtfully and made a notation on his clipboard.

It was raining pitchforks when Rita emerged from the clinic. She sat in the driver’s seat of the Monte Carlo in a desolate stupor, listening to the rain assault the roof with a clattering both sharp and dull. She had no notion of where to go from there. Mechanically, she fired up the Monte Carlo and found herself heading in the direction of home.

Rita tried to remember a time when home was not at the very least an ambiguous proposition. She had to go all the way back to the summer of her eleventh year, when her parents were experiencing “difficulties,” and Rita lived with her grandparents two miles off of the rez, near town. Only then, in the absence of her mother’s bitter silence, relieved of the eggshell uneasiness inspired by her stepfather, did Rita come to know something other than cold comfort. Only by subtraction had she ever experienced the ease and succor of domesticity. With her grandmother, Rita spent her days making lavender cakes, and mending clothing, and folding laundry with one eye on the television set, while her grandfather was at work canning. In the afternoons, Rita and her grandmother would drive to town on errands, with Rita’s grandmother sitting rigidly in the driver’s seat of the old red truck, all five feet of her, clutching the wheel fiercely. She looked like a potato doll, though she couldn’t have been fifty. That was 1979. Poco was all over the charts. Chic, Anita Ward, the Little River Band. Every afternoon in the truck, on the drive to Swains, or the grocery, or Coast to Coast, Rita hummed along with the radio. Her grandmother chimed in with smiling eyes for Eddie Rabbitt and Shalamar. Sometimes they drove as far as Jamestown, past the spit, beyond Happy Valley, around Sequim Bay, to the tribal center. Rita loved these drives. The world felt big and full of possibilities.

Her grandfather never came home tired; he arrived smiling, an hour before sunset. Over dinner he talked of his day — whether or not it was full of adventure — and always, in his playful manner, he asked Rita about her day.

“How many marriage proposals did my girl get today in town?” he’d say.

“Only four,” Rita would say.

“Four? Is that all?”

“Okay, maybe five.”

Her grandfather grinned at her, spearing a steamed carrot off his plate. “When am I going to meet these young men?”

“I said no.”

“All four times?”

“Five.”

“Good girl.”

Every evening, while her grandmother tended to the dishes and made her grandfather’s lunch for the following day, Rita retired with her grandfather to the den, where they sat side by side on the green sofa and watched one television show together. Rita always got to pick the show — it didn’t matter to her grandfather what they watched. All of it seemed to amuse him.