Drive

I like to drive, fly clean and low with the windows down and the radio going. You haunt particular roads, hovering in the bushes or steaming up pavement as I roll by. Sometimes I feel you breathing in the backseat of my car, grinning your sly smile, trying to trick me into turning around and finding you vanished. I resist. I know all sorts of things now. I would never pay you a quarter for a Chinese rag or play poker for chunks of bottle glass while my nickels disappeared inside your pockets. I’m not a little sister anymore. I’m as much of a bandit as you, only lasting. Darkness curls in me like an animal coming to life. My eyes strike yellow in the scattering light.

At first, it was easy to think of you as dead. The violence made it less remote. At first, it was a thing, your dying, a possession. When Aunt Lime told me I didn’t even cry. Instead, I decided to go to Peru, hike high up in the Andes and breathe the same air you chose to be your last. I dragged my backpack out of the closet and loaded it for the journey. If I had left right then, I would have made it. That much I know. But it wasn’t that easy. There were too many people around, all red-eyed and swollen with a sadness not even you could have owned. Everyone told me to wait. They said Peru wasn’t going anywhere and Faith would need me around for comfort. I should have left before the talking started, questions hanging like a web between those of us who loved you. I was awkward there. Faith and Aunt Lime were shocked into listlessness, swollen with an inertia I knew would break and flood at some point and, frankly, I did not want to lie around when the rupture came. Right after finding out, I was active as a hummingbird tending to tasks I normally don’t even notice, straightening clutter from rooms, making coffee, washing towels for guests who came from out of town for your funeral. Then, before I knew it, it was too late for me to leave. I lost my agility. I became muddled, vague.

For a while, I used you as an excuse. I stopped going to school and I stopped going to work. I had a dozen reasons to change my plans but you were a genuine drama. You cut all the edges off. You watered a mountain with pieces of your skull. You did what can’t be ignored or forgotten.

Your funeral was a carnival. Nobody knew what to wear, what to talk about, how to act. Dave was there with Buddy and Colleen. I was surprised Buddy made it. He’s still pissed off at you for stealing his car and never telling him why. You would have laughed at Colleen. A few years back she went mainstream. She got a job making $12.00 an hour for riding around in helicopters taking notes for businessmen. Still, they stay together. Quite a pair with Colleen in narrow skirts, high heels and silk blouses and Dave poised for some other lifetime with his ponytail and ancient leather jacket.

Janie was there with her clown husband, Craig. That summer he got a job working the rigs, one week on, one week off, was pulling in crazy money, a thousand a week plus bennies. You haven’t missed a thing not meeting him. He’s one of those men who are too big for houses. I danced with him at the wedding and his hand was like a claw around my waist, his fingers sticking in my spine while his thumb came nearly to my navel. He’s got a royal blue pick-up truck with fat tires and a bumper sticker that says: “Don’t tell my mama I work offshore. She thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” A couple times I tried having a conversation with him but it’s truly futile. He whoops like a madman if he likes what’s been said or when Janie walks into the room looking just so. You can tell by the way she avoids his eyes she knows she could have done better. Remember when Janie was the angel baby, the one who would never do wrong? Well, she’s married to a redneck now, a fool who believes he is her hero. Anyhow, he’s good with the kid. Whenever she talks about him, that’s the thing she comes back to. I suppose it takes some brains to marry moderately successful, moderately stupid men. Too bad Faith never learned that lesson, like how to survive without always running.

When we were little, I dreamed Faith changed. I never told you because I thought you would laugh, but I dreamed big dreams back then, that everything was different from what it was. I dreamed Faith had a regular job and that there was some cushion between her skeleton and her skin, that she didn’t get bruised at the slightest collision. Mostly, I dreamed we were normal, not always running from some boyfriend she’d lied to or stolen from or who knows what?

Now, I can’t picture her any way except the way she has always been, loony as a bedspring with a knack for digging up trouble. I think how it had been for her, 15 years old and running off with your Mexican daddy, giving birth in the back room of a migrant town market while her cashier friends pumped her with aspirin and threatened to call for help. Faith said you slid from her like a fish, that the pain was practically nothing. I used to believe I had something on you because I was so much trouble getting born. She says she wasn’t sick a day when she was pregnant with you, but with me she stopped getting out of bed. She would lie there all day long listening to the radio, smoking cigarettes and chewing on those lemon rinds she was always craving. Then, thirty-six hours in labor with pain like she couldn’t describe. When we were kids, I was proud of being the one who had hurt her.

Anyway, like she is about most things, Janie was pragmatic about your dying. She said: “What the fuck Jules? It’s probably the only thing he ever did that he really wanted to do.” After the funeral I spent a lot of time with Janie when Craig was offshore. We’d stay up until morning, inventing blender drinks and talking like we were fifty years old remembering good times. It’s a disease. You probably knew that too, the poison in trying to believe things don’t change. Everything is always changing, time flattening the clutter and making everything, eventually, a lie.

Joel and Tracy couldn’t come for the funeral. They moved out of state just after you disappeared, bought some property in Montana right next to the border. They started having babies as soon as they got there. They have three now, each of them with snow white hair and skin as pink as island snappers.

Aunt Lime is now a full-fledged alcoholic. She went on a diet, lost thirty pounds, and filed for divorce. Then she moved into a trailer with a fifty-year-old speed dealer from the Valley. They watch football games on TV and drink until they laugh at nothing. She’s happier now than I ever knew her to be. Her lover is a grampa named Bill who wears his hair in a long grey braid and drives a new compact car. He’s got a Willie Nelson complex, sits on the porch strumming country songs on an old guitar. One thing, every time she goes anywhere he kisses her smack on the lips. I wish you could see how it makes her smile.

It’s one thing to fill you in on what’s happened after you died. It another to tell you things you could have known while you were living. Now that you’re dead, nobody talks about the years in between, when you up and disappeared and we’d all sit around speculating about where you might be. Nobody thought you would actually die. Kinda stupid, huh? You disappear without a trace and nobody mentions that you might have had a secret accident or sucked up too much of some witch-doctor cure you claimed transformed you. No matter how long you stayed gone we expected you to show up one day with a wild story, needing money and a place to stay.

Disappearing was the one thing I admired you for, getting in your car and driving south like a criminal. I have always understood that. I tried to explain to the tender-hearted. I said: “Maybe he looked around one time too many. Maybe waking up indoors everyday made it so he just couldn’t care.”

What I didn’t say was how much crooked hope your vanishing act gave me. In my bones I felt you had won, escaping from whatever haunted you. That was my dream and dreams never happen just the way you dream them, always something left out and usually the thing you wanted more than any other. For a long time, I imagined you in Mexico, coconuts falling on the ground around you while you played with the señoritas. Later, after your letter from Peru, I was angry. You betrayed my daydreams, my hope for eventual reprieve. The letter didn’t say much, just how you spent most of your time trekking and could speak Spanish like a native, how you dreamed in a foreign tongue. I tried imagining you exotic but it was impossible. Hard to picture people truly changed if you knew them while they were growing. Afterwards, of course, I realized, when you wrote that letter you had already decided to die. I can see you traipsing around a mountain selecting the perfect spot, your hair long and shaggy, energy crackling cold in your joints as you moved. Did you plan it all like you planned that final letter home? After the letter, everybody here figured you were demented or otherwise you would want to live. I’m still trying to explain that one. Still, I wonder. Mostly I wonder if, before you actually did it, you felt free. I imagine that, when all the deciding had been done and the fear was over, you felt something like the wind, no longer stuck inside your skin, no longer hungry. Afterwards, I cut out pictures of the Andes from National Geo’s and hung them on my wall. Some mornings before I opened my eyes I imagined you there on some mountainside, jagged peaks surrounding you, tall grass the color of wheat wavering in the wind and a cold so pure you could catch an occasional transient whiff in the valleys below. Lying safe in my bed, I pretended I could smell those colors. I reached my fingers up diagonally from my head and imagined I could feel your skin, how cool and red your face turned while you hiked in the thinning air.

It was November here when you died, January before I got started. I took a road trip in your honor. I cut my hair school-boy short and punched holes in my diaphragm with a threaded needle. I went out Route 10 to Quartsite and Phoenix. It was cold though the colors there are always the same regardless of the seasons, the bleached reds and hills pale as old bone. Every place I went it seemed I had been before. It was that stretch from Tucson to New Mexico when I started asking you questions, chattering like a crazy woman singing songs to the dead. Mostly, I wanted to check on details about growing up. You were the only one who could verify my stories and now I will probably never know if what I remember was real, how people had once seemed so tall and the sky at night, black as a river.

I planned on turning south through El Paso. Instead I went north, spent some time in Santa Fe before heading into Denver. I met an Aussie there named Chris and we got married. I loved listening to him talk, like nothing in this world is dramatic. I married him so he could work in this country. We had known each other three weeks, went camping in the mountains north of Spokane to celebrate. When we met I was pregnant and he stayed with me the entire time, driving me to the clinic, holding my hand in the operating room and whispering to me while I tried not to scream. It seemed the perfect favor to marry him. Not just like I owed him, but also that I had something to give.

We were together almost a year. When our money ran out we settled in Seattle. I got a job waiting tables and he was hired by some company to work their shipping yard. He went to work at 3:00 a.m. every week-day morning. He bought himself a motorcycle and I’d wake up just enough to hear him speeding away, the feathery sounds of drizzle at the window. Every single morning I expected him to die. A million times I pictured him skidding on a wet corner, the flash of him there, then so easily gone. Every weekday morning I’d half sleep, half wait for that heartbreak call. It was a cruelty, all that waiting. And after awhile I couldn’t stand to carry the cruelty alone. I’d get up right after he left to avoid those dreamlike startles. I got so tense, I suspected he was causing part of it. We had a couple of huge blow-outs and then we split. It was the saddest day I’d had since I got your letter, though I knew what I had to do. I packed up my car and drove to Morro Bay. I truly believe it is better that way, going from one kind of living directly to the next without any half-way marks or the nonsense of hanging around waiting in between.

One thing I really miss, I could tell him stories, hundreds of them, how you and I travelled constantly, back and forth from L.A. to Tallahassee and how nothing seemed weird to me until I turned nine and started noticing the rest of the world. Everyone else seemed flat to me then, living in the same place year after year. I could tell him about Faith, all the trouble she had remembering things and how scared we got when she’d demand details about things she should have known. I told him about the questions: “Where did we stay last night? Where are we going?” Faith, we would tell her, we stayed in a little motel outside Abilene. All night long we heard trucks passing on the highway, their engines grinding steady until we hardly noticed them anymore. Sometimes she would nod, recollecting. Other times she’d scream and accuse us of lying, of trying to get something by her, treating her like she were stupid or insane. I told him how we would get punished. Sweet Jesus how we would be bruised and bitten, would run for our lives and hide until her storm had blown through. I told him all those things and sometimes I started crying at, I don’t know what, just crying most of all at the way he stroked my hair when I was sad and we were together.

Anyway, that’s how I got here, this beautiful country, all the pine trees the Redwoods and wild coastline and this town just a little gritty, not yet obliterated by the touristy gloss. I felt safe as soon as I arrived. I got a job on a 26 ft. crab boat, driving. The captain is a rich kid named Pete whose Daddy bought him the boat for his 29th birthday to keep him from being an absolute bum. We set traps offshore and check them every other day. Most days the swell throws us around so by late afternoon I’ve forgotten everything I once knew of solid ground. I drive the boat. I have to concentrate on wind and speed, pull it up starboard right beside the painted buoys, careful not to catch the line in my prop. I’m good at what I do. It’s like I can predict those sudden gusts coming.

It’s a hell of a long way from the Andes. It’s a hell of a long way from everything I used to know. It’s a cowboy way of living, except salt covers your skin instead of dust. The best part is, after listening to water and wind all day, just stepping on shore is quieter than I ever remember it to be.

The only trouble is there’s a lot of killing in this work. Not just crustaceans, but eels, rockfish and sharks. The sharks are the worst. We kill them for bait when they swim into the traps. Two out of three are pregnant. I never do the cutting but I watch. Pete holds them by their tails, mostly pin-backs and puffers, then slits the length of their bellies with a filet knife. Embryos slide out on the deck and Pete washes them overboard through the scuppers. Those mamas make excellent bait. Whenever we check those traps they are always brimming.

I think you might have liked this way of living. There’s crooked beauty in it. At night, coming back to port, or in the morning before leaving, I watch the big boats unload. Mostly, its halibut, albacore, salmon or snapper. Though occasionally, someone goes further South and catches a swordfish. They are the prize, the silvery skin wet from ice, shimmering pearly white and blue. One thing I’ve learned, I’d much rather swim than fly. I guess you were the opposite. You wanted to be weightless, with nothing, not even water pressing in. None of it works very long. Some things can’t be forced, like that other way of living, without death breathing down your neck and where there are places you really belong.

Fete’s been hinting around that we should get together on our off days. When I first met him I didn’t like him a whole lot. He’s a sea dog. He doesn’t have much to say. Though on the ocean things that once meant a lot stop meaning very much, things like words. Sometimes Pete and I look at each other and understand more than we could explain in an hour. The thing is, after living this way, I can’t imagine going back to how it was before: living on land, driving a car on the freeway to get to work, dressing up for strangers, huddling indoors all day long. It would be the end of hoping for anything better. I have been working traps for only a year now, but it’s like I have always known this way of speaking, when each sound is secondary to wind in your ears and water slapping at the hull. Nothing exists then except what is right in front of you: the salt bite of cold ocean air, how skin feels and food tastes, the endless black sea slashed by wind chop, white caps curling the edges of swells, the everyday surging of ocean water.