Laura Farnsworth
Carlsbad
That girl near Roswell, that short little thing in red jeans balancing on one foot atop a stump and taking long pulls from a Big Gulp while flipping him off as he passed. Slowed down to almost a loiter, he circled the gas station to see if the clerk had a sight line to the farthest pumps, if there were security cameras, if there were guys with badges chewing the shit out front the diner next door. Fill up, speed away, he could. A cocktail of headache, hunger, and heat made Ms. Red Jeans look for the thinnest hangnail of a second like Janel, Janel gazelle, Janel my wedding belle, and he had almost, almost cried.
It wasn’t worth it: the gas pumps’ slumped shoulders, the licorice whip of the girl’s hair in the wind, what sweet junk she might be selling from her handbag with the white fringe. He had half a tank. There would be another gas station in Artesia.
And he was doing things differently now.
On the road he tallies: three gravel haulers, a Greyhound coach with a serious exhaust problem. Two sheriffs, driving slow, one of them drinking a Coors. He nods at them, smoothes himself on by. A farm truck leaning left with its overburden of hay.
A clot of motorcyclists, kicked back on long seats, cleave and growl alongside and then ahead of him until they are smaller than the flecks of carnage on his windshield. He wonders if their arms fall asleep, empty of blood, knuckles locked around—what are they called—gorilla something? Can’t think, his brain full of sand and tacks and cheese. It will hurt, the clinic brochure said, the coming down, the cleaning up, it will hurt, but then you know that already. Yes, he knows. Three times, sliding down the drains of detox. Forms on the judge’s desk, I can take it all away from you, son, just need a pen. Last of the last of the last chances. He punches at the steering wheel, chapping his blood awake.
Ape hangers. That’s what they are.
If the gas station in Artesia has a pay phone, he will call her. Janel. Janel please don’t yell, he’ll press the numbers that jangle the bell inside the old green rotary in her grandparents’ house in Santa Fe, the one just a few steps too far from the television for them to reach before Janel, stepping over the baby’s plastic animals, catching the trunk of the elephant with her naked arch and swearing at a timbre undetected by the black-suited preacher bellowing through the Zenith’s cracked glass about the many ways to burn eternal.
Hello, she will say, and then there will be silence when she knows it’s him, the kind of quiet where she champs her lips in behind her teeth and she looks like the old lady at the McDonalds who waits on them when they take the baby to play in the ball pit. She will close her eyes and hold her breath and that will be just enough time for him to say I have gotten this far and I am not giving up. And when she opens them, there will be newsprint commas beneath her eyes where her eyelashes stuck.
I will call you when I get there, get to the clinic. Carlsbad.
He is almost there. He can tell you about almost, the slag of someone else’s hit inside a mossy syringe, squeezing his own spit inside, sucking it back out, almost a minute’s relief until he can find another discard. Almost high, almost in a squad car’s cage. Almost a man, almost nothing. Worse than losing something is almost having it.
Kiss the boy. For me, Janel. Kiss Joey.
And then she’ll hang up, announce wrong number a little too loudly, and make the baby a grilled cheese, and burn it but not mean to.
Janel, Janel farmer in the dell. The farmer takes a wife. He had a wife but couldn’t keep her.
Twenty miles, says a sign, and then seven, and then next exit, and there he is, in Artesia, pulling into a gas station. Two pumps, an empty Coke machine, somebody’s fat dog tied to a dead mesquite. And the bikers he’d seen before, shiny leather cockroaches, leaning into the shade of a blistered awning, propped by the stucco wall.
A girl cockroach peels off her chaps and spreads herself flat on a beach towel just outside the shadow of a giant plywood arrow naming the establishment Home of Willie’s blazing chili, and hand- painted driftwood sculptures, and pinto bean fudge. The girl (the hue of peanut butter, even her hair) fans herself with a road map and nests a Dr. Pepper upright in her cleavage. He can see her underwear, thin elastic like eyebrows cresting over her cutoffs, her thumbs spreading the neck of her tank top past her shoulders (she has the kind with the little knobby bones on top, the beginnings of antlers on a fawn). He has to push his hands into his front pockets, inch the front of his jeans away from the disturbance happening there—why do women have to be so pink and brown and silky and mean? He just wants to give the clerk a twenty, his last one, buy enough gas to get where he has to be instead of stealing it, maybe get a Snickers, no, an Almond Joy, so he can eat one part now and another later, fill up his empty water jug from the spigot by the bathroom. And find a phone. And hit the road.
Carlsbad, by six o’clock p.m. Court order, if you want visitation. If you want to have a family. If you want. Do you want? After five now, five-fifteen. Must be. He wants, yes, he does.
A couple of the cockroaches stand up tall as he comes closer. One of them steps into brightness, staring through eyeholes cut in a folded red bandana, takes a precision spit into the dirt. His buddy does the same, arms folded over a cement-mixer gut. Red Bandana spits again, an asteroid. Cement Mixer sends a missile. And another, then still more, until the path to the gas station is pimpled and damp. The cockroaches chuckle to each other.
He walks through the insult. It will be on his shoes, his mind, the floor mats of that shitty old Pontiac. Until he gets to Carlsbad and they take everything away.
You like lookin’, son? You like my lady? Like what you see?
Yes, quite obviously he does. But why? Why did he look? Every time he does, there is hardship. Why are there women, anyway? Earlobes and freckles and toenails and nothing but suffering. Janel. For you my soul I’d sell, and he does, and all it takes are two words, spoken: Fuck you.
By the time the cockroaches catch up to him, five steps, maybe six, he’s already fallen into the wallow in his head where he keeps every thought he’s ever had about her, a snake pit, a bomb shelter, an aquifer, a tomb. He’s down in there, writhing and swimming, and trying to breathe, suck some air where there is only dust and snot and a slab of his cheek. When his ankles go skyward (the cockroach is a strong sonofabitch), his pockets vomit Chapstick, peppermints, sweaty coins, loosened by shaking, shaking, and all he sees are boots, a pair of roast beef calves swelling at the seams of filthy Levi’s, and though it’s a gamble (low-grade heroin takes a toll on the gums) he sends his teeth into the meat of the nearest leg.
They shimmy, his incisors, cheap garden pickets in an earthquake, and three of them (his best guess without actually feeling around) come undone.
He’s a motherfucking piñata, yells Red Bandana.
Shake him harder, somebody dares, and they do, get the asshole’s wallet, does he have any weed, and the joke is on the roaches because he, of the suspended license and enthusiastic new parole officer, has neither.
Roast Beef whips him around, making spin art with the blood and drool from his crumpled mouth.
Inverted. Empty. Dripping. And in motion, it seems, toward the open door of what he hopes is the men’s room (bladder swearing with rage) but is actually a utility closet: rotting string mops and vats of urine-yellow disinfectant and a battered water heater holding its bile. When the door slams shut behind him, cockroaches hooting and palm smacking, the quiet is a sweetness.
He unbuckles his jeans and dribbles piss into the container of disinfectant, producing foam that he hopes isn’t toxic.
Chemistry was never his thing.
A couple of flies inspect the ruin. His jeans are missing one knee, and two of his belt loops point skyward, like antennae attached to his waist. The shape of Australia is scraped across his ribs, and the bones of his neck feel too far apart. He blows his nose and expels a pebble. Right outside the door, a chaos of scraping and groaning, then the departing croon of motorcycles.
He laments the damage to his Bon Jovi shirt, the one from the Have a Nice Day tour; an illogical hang-up, considering the missing teeth, runaway pocket change, and vagabond (he assumes) twenty bucks. He’d rolled it up tight, like a cigarette, and slipped it into the hem of the shirt through a tiny hole in the fabric, the one Janel eroded with her thumb and finger while they watched a marathon of old 24 episodes, soothing herself like a child with a blanket when the action got too wild, whispering that he looked, when sober, a lot like a younger Kiefer Sutherland. That part of him has been torn.
Until now, everything good in his life has happened while he’s worn this damn shirt. When the baby came, two weeks too soon in the back row of a movie theater (dollar matinee, something with Vin Diesel), he’d taken the shirt off to swaddle his boy until help arrived, wiping away the ocean goo of a warm, safe hiding place, feeling a chilly jumble of shame and pride in his own sudden nudity, like he himself had just been born.
His mouth is still bleeding. He bites down on a roll of toilet paper from the supply shelf, wetting some in the water heater’s drip pan to wipe his face and neck. There isn’t a mirror, so he keeps at it until the wads are mostly clean. No clock, either, no idea how long he was the roaches’ toy, but it must be five-thirty, or later, thirty-seven miles to go, his last chance to do something right, anything right, and he is caged.
The closet door opens outward, or it should, and he puts all of his weight to work, wedging one foot against the opposite wall and pressing his better shoulder into an ass-crack of daylight. Nothing. Something’s blocking him in. He’s only got a couple of feet to back up and give momentum a shot, which he does, collarbone as pry bar, kneecap as collateral. The door startles (Janel’s eye he remembers, opening, barely, when he whispers I’ve brought you ice cream, rocky road, before it closes again, before she groans and leans over, throws up on the floor, first trimester, her endless lunar sleeps) and then shuts.
He rears back; he batters the door. Again. Again. Another inch, he can see dirt, and one more, a couple of sunburned kids, staring over oozing popsicles. Another inch, then one more, then two, the kids’ mother pulling them back and away and gone. Hey, he yells, I need some help here, hey, wait, hey. Hey! Fuck.
He can snake his arm through the opening now, up to the elbow. The air out there is cooler, smells of rain, of rivers on oily asphalt, of campfires drowned. Don’t, his veins say, the oozy one right above the yellow inside skin of his elbow, stop it, the one turned to tar just above that, but he does it anyway: pushes and pushes up to the stringy shoulder meat so he can feel around out there, find what is keeping him stuck. The Coke machine. Metal that leaves rust on his fingers. The square, deep, mouth that swallows bottle caps, the umbilicus of an electrical cord, the fangs of a plug. How many cockroaches did it take to move it in front of the door? Is there an equation for that?
He never understood physics. Or algebra. Or love. He was born, he had the right to it, or so he thought, the duty to give it, to accept it from wherever it came, to find someone and make them feel something. Janel. There’s your heart, under there, she teased, reaching up into his shirt, the heart, the blood, the valentine of the body, the harm.
He understands harm.
The water heater begins to churn. A gag of rusty wetness travels across the floor toward him. He tries to dam it with his shoe. He could die in here, scalded, on top of every other misery, die before he makes it to Carlsbad and back to his boy who will not ever know him as anything but a scumbag in a Sears family portrait that Janel will hide behind the mirror in the spare bedroom of her grandparents’ house. He presses his face to the crack in the door. Yelling for help brings an orange dizziness to the lining of his mind, and he sinks into the damp.
When there’s a knocking from outside, he says hello, an invalid who has a visitor. Hello? He hides the wads of bloody toilet paper behind the water heater and passes through a door that now opens halfway, framing the gas station clerk, Willie embroidered on his enormous bowling shirt, a coppery slag of chili arching down the front. One Willie is enough to move a Coke machine three feet.
What time is it, he has to know, and are his car keys still in the dirt, and will you buy these Nikes for five bucks, pretty new, size eleven, please, I need gas money, and, by the way, thank you. And I’m sorry.
You aren’t supposed to drive barefoot, says his liberator.
But I’m not. I still have socks.
Willie has the Pontiac keys in his pocket, which serves as the lost-and-found. Willie has the time: ‘Bout twenty of six. Willie has this wisdom: You look like a fuckin’ pile of shit, boy.
Four dollars for gas, a dollar in change, rolled thin, like a joint, and tucked into a shred of the hem of his shirt, for luck, for nothing, for old time’s sake, for Kiefer. Willie puts on the Nikes and hands him a paper sack.
The road to Carlsbad: a Mountain Dew jammed in his crotch, the salt of pretzels stinging the empty places in his mouth, a turd of Willie’s fudge melting in the ashtray, termites looking for riches in the hallways of his nerves, pickaxes, dynamite, thirty-seven miles, fifteen minutes to get there, not even an aspirin in your system when you report to the lab, radio yawning to find a pretty signal, the sky going a peachy shade of lipstick, a rush hour of cows lowing home, thirteen miles to go, and then seven, and then exit next right, and a long, crunching driveway.
The needle touches E at 6:06, and it’s 6:08 before he finds a parking spot and runs, tossing the last of the soda, spitting out salt, collecting thorns in his socks, peeling them away, handing over himself and everything he hasn’t already lost to a woman at the admissions desk who never even looks up at the broken goddamn clock. She snaps a bracelet around his wrist, which used to be thicker (he was a wrestler; isn’t he still?), and holds the paper still so he can sign with twitching fingers, and pages the orderly to take him back.
When he opens his ass cheeks for the nurse, when he zips himself into the blue jumpsuit, widens his potholed mouth and lifts his tongue, steps onto the scale, when he zings zero-proof pee into a clear plastic lab bottle, when he is in a therapy circle with other men who hold up their stigmas like bingo cards. When he’s done scoring the poor fuckers around him on a scale from daddy’s-wine-cellar-mama’s-oxycontin-suburban-newbie to set-your-single-wide-on-moonshine-meth-fire-old-timer.
When he is asked to state what pain he has caused those who love and care for him, how many miles he has put between himself and those wrongs, fuck, he didn’t call her, he was going to, proof, or the closest possible thing, here I am, Janel. I made it. Carlsbad.
When he is told to choose one last waking thought for this day of personal revolution, which is to be repeated in a whisper over and over, Janel, Joey, until sleep arrives. When the meditation gong signals the end of therapy, the collapse of an afternoon’s sufferings.
When he has dialed Janel’s grandparents’ phone number into the resolute mattress beneath him. Seventy-five times. Seventy- six. Eighty-two.
Then can the asphalt in his mind unroll.