She knows he means for her to live on with the baby once he’s gone.
He’s the only white boy in the house. All the cooks are Chinese guys with thick elbows and a way of bantering and laughing as they sizzle food and sink steamers into pots like all kitchen crews everywhere and just like this one kitchen, here. Universal and also a subset. Jamey can’t understand but smiles along, and no one cares. They assume he’s a junkie, a strung-out loser with twine to hold up his pants, a broken tooth.
With their muscular jowls or jaundiced eyes, balding heads or prison tattoos, they seem far away from anyone Jamey knows. The heat in the kitchen makes everyone pink, as if there’s some excitement, but when they break between lunch and dinner to eat, he sees normalcy in everyone’s eyes. It doesn’t matter that they’re Chinamen in Wyoming. Nothing can ever stay strange for long.
He smells fetid at the end of every shift. It’s odd because all the food smells good, but combined it’s too many ingredients, accelerating some kind of decomposition. He comes home rotten.
He arrives at the motel with little confetti strips from egg-drop soup in his hair, and grease on his hands so deep and indelible it’s healing. He showers but Dragon City stays like golden plugs in his nostrils.
When he walks home, hands in pockets, he can’t help looking back at his life.
Odd moments surface—sailing a Beetle Cat alone, eating a tomato-mayonnaise sandwich, the wind’s power moving the hull…sleeping in Martine’s king bed, the loft filled with never-ending light…clamming as a kid in a cold bay, feet working in the mud, hair blown into a salty twirl…a red rose blooming in a stranger’s yard, in the September streets of New Haven…
They walk the hallway of the motel to get breakfast. Sometimes a door opens, and the moment is spiked with cheap shave cream and halitosis.
These foreign smells make her think—again—how impossible it will be to wake up in a bed without him. What’s the point of anything? Why did we make it this far, she thinks, through hours in our own lives before we met, even after we met, when we were sure we were worthless, but we somehow got to the other side of those times, holding it together, ashamed to be hopeful but being hopeful, when we had no protection and no direction but we kept going anyway, and then we got rewarded, and now it’s being ripped out of my hands? I didn’t give up and I didn’t complain, she thinks, furious. Why can’t I have what I want, what I earned, what I deserve?
He plans to learn to hunt. He talks to Don about it at the Wagon Wheel bar, the sound of pool balls clicking behind them.
“It ain’t the season,” Don says.
“Yeah, but I could brush up my target shooting and be ready.”
“Well, what you need, a shotgun?”
“Yeah, a twelve-gauge?” Jamey asks casually.
“How much you want to spend on this here shotgun? I can get you something that works but it’s not very pretty, fer about one-fifty.”
“Perfect.”
Everyone thinks he’s on drugs, which is ironic since now he’s lucid, but he’s wasting away. His jaw bone, brow bones, hollow eyes—and a mouth that’s still plush. He ties his pants with string.
They cook on a hot plate. She hates cleaning his dish afterward, which is full since he just pushes food around. She scrapes it into the garbage. She does it in slow motion, trying to keep her face together. She takes the plate to the sink.
A stubborn, poisonous feeling is creeping into her, and she recognizes it.
She loved block parties as a kid, the hot dogs, the cake, playing tag through all the adults, who cursed and laughed and smoked reefer—everyone happy, all night they’d dance, grandparents, kids, the bad boys, the dirty girls, everyone was invited, no one stayed away. And then that feeling, as the crowd shrank, they were folding up the long metal tables—See yez—G’night, now—stumbling and giggling, fighting, sealing Tupperware, stubbing out smokes, finishing bottles, someone throwing up behind a car. She’d feel rage, a disappointment so vicious she couldn’t be consoled, touched, even approached. I hate you! she said to anyone nearby. C’mon, shug, her mother would say, firmly gripping her little arm. Party’s over.
They spend the day with Don as he checks fences on the Rhoner ranch, riding the truck through fields, tagging wires that need mending.
Don has the twelve-gauge and takes them shooting near Clover Lake, taking aim at a dead tree.
Jamey knows how to load shells from hunting with his uncles. It’s been a while since he fired a gun, and he winces at the kickback.
“You’re a damn good shot!” Don says, surprised. “Want to give it a little try, Elise?”
She shakes her head.
Lying in bed later, Jamey can feel it all coming to an end. They both can.
The gun is the new sun in the room. It’s a star. They revolve around it.
He’s in pain; he throws up anything he eats.
She hands him a Saltine, and he pushes it away, gently.
“Let’s go to the hospital,” she says.
“No, Elise,” he says. “Not going anywhere like that.”
That morning, at dawn, he stands at the doorway to the room. A doe is in the brush, but she’s not scared away by him, which is unusual. She looks up then back to a movement in the grass. It’s a damp fawn, just born, with brittle tiny sticks for legs, barely walking. And mama won’t leave its side. This is what he’s been waiting to see, and he’s breathless.
The motel room itself is a puzzle. It reminds Jamey of himitsu-bako, these Japanese puzzle boxes they had at Sotheby’s. Exquisite parquetry, a mosaic of black walnut, yellow mulberry wood, and blue cucumber tree. Only one unique series of moves could open a box, those moves built into the box itself. His favorite box had 66 moves, but it was more complex and difficult than the box with 115 moves. He liked that fact.
He makes his proposal, laying out the options.
“The bottom line is that I have to, you know, leave,” he says with difficulty.
“Jamey,” she pleads with him.
“I can go alone.”
“What the fuck are you saying?”
“But”—he seems uncomfortable—“from where I stand, I do know there’s—somewhere to go.”
They look at each other for a while.
“I’m not staying here without you,” she says.
He stands at the window, and looks at the sky for a while.
“You been planning this!” she accuses him finally.
“Did you really think I wanted to go hunting?” he asks gently.
She comes to look out the window too. “Why is this happening?”
They get ready to do it without talking, Jamey seating himself in the middle of the room. Elise kneeling at his feet, muzzle to his chest.
It’s her mom she sees in her mind right now. Her mom’s colossal face, the metallic eye shadow, a worried grin, a cheap cigarette lit between her teeth. And then she sees the baby in her belly, a shadow of promise, a rosebud mouth and virgin eyes.