I turned around on my stool and faced the room. Most people nodded at me; a few smiled. I smiled back. I watched as a young guy with sloppy lips made his way around the room. Every few minutes, he would lean in too close to someone and yell, “Head butt.” Then he would do just that, slam his head against someone else’s. There would be this loud crack, and people would turn and stare, then go back to their talking. This was his thing, I guessed.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, he won’t do it to you,” said the man next to me. He had long feathery hair that was brittle on the edges. He wore a leather vest and his skin was pitted and rotting, but he had a nice light in his eyes. I liked looking at him. “He only does it to people he knows. Especially he’s not going to do it to a girl like you.” He blew smoke from his cigarette away from my face. “You just passing through or you’re staying awhile or . . .”
“I just came to get some food,” I said. “It’s been a long day of driving.”
“Oh yeah? Where you headed?”
“West,” I said. And then I added, “Los Angeles,” because it was as far west as I could think to go. It sounded like a place you moved to when you needed to start over. It was a lie, but there was no way I could tell the truth. And maybe it could become the truth. There were a lot of options. The world was wide open in front of me. I would have to trust myself to find the way.
The man introduced himself. His name was Arnold. He and I talked about the roads for a little while. He and his son, Pete, had just come back from Denver, visiting Arnold’s ex-wife and Pete’s mother. They rode their motorcycles, and things had been rough with the snow. He told me to just keep heading west, to take 80 through Salt Lake City and head down to Vegas. If I kept the pedal to the metal, I could make it there in a day. Pete came over and introduced himself to me. He was tall and his face had not been ruined by drink yet. His hair was tied back in a ponytail and he had long sideburns. He was rough-looking, for sure, but I did not mind talking to him. I had spent so many years with Thomas, who could be so weepy and sensitive, that it was nice to talk to men who did not look like they had ever cried.
Arnold and Pete took turns buying me SoCo and Diet Cokes. The drinks tasted like syrup, and I took big gulps of them like medicine. They treated me like I was really interesting, but in fact they were doing most of the talking. There was nothing I could tell them about anyway without getting myself in trouble.
Arnold started in on this story about how his ex-wife had left him and Pete years ago, when Pete was still a baby, but how they were all still close. Arnold was part Arapaho, and when he and his wife, Trinie, were married they moved onto a reservation nearby. Trinie had been a dance student in Colorado and had dreamed of moving to New York, but had gotten pregnant with Pete almost immediately after she met Arnold. Neither one of them could afford much. Trinie’s parents had kicked her out of the house when they found out she was pregnant with some half-breed’s kid, and all Arnold’s folks could do was find them a small farmhouse deep in the woods of the reservation that they could rent for cheap. It was three miles to the main road, and Arnold rode his Harley into work as a day laborer and left Trinie there alone to take care of little Pete. Once every few weeks Arnold’s mother would drive Trinie into town to buy groceries in her pickup truck, but mostly Trinie was alone all day long, just her and the baby.
At first she liked it: she had a vegetable garden, and she learned to chop wood. “She was becoming one with the earth,” said Arnold. She used to put on little dance performances in the trees for Arnold and baby Pete. But eventually the isolation began to drive her nuts.
I thought about me and Thomas out on our farm, with no one to talk to but each other, even with all those construction workers hammering in the background. They were building us our brand-new dream farmhouse, even though I was just fine with the way it was. He said it was necessary. He said we deserved it. He said he wanted to treat me right. So I let Thomas run the show, and I stayed away from all the renovation business. And once he started fixing things up, he could not stop. Soon enough he was making changes to himself, but by then it was too late for me to stop him. I let him be in charge, until I could not stand it anymore.
“I bet she went crazy out there,” I said.
“Crazy’s a word I’d use,” he said.