3:AM Magazine

By Jami Attenberg.

I drove all day on 80, straight through to Cheyenne. The driving was rough in the snow and I was careful and slow. I thought about nothing but staying straight and not driving off the road. My truck had snow tires, but still I was terrified. I skidded every few minutes. I blamed everyone I had written letters to for putting me in this situation. These unfortunate circumstances. I skidded some more. It felt like I could crash at any moment. I did this for eight hours. Eight hours of feeling like something bad was going to happen. Something worse than all of the bad stuff that had already happened.

I found a motel a few exits after downtown Cheyenne. It was cheap and family-owned. Family-owned would have been of comfort in my own town, but on the road it was questionable. I didn’t know this family, after all. What were they like? I could not drive any further though. There were some trailers parked out front. Everyone was taking comfort from the storm. And there was a restaurant with a small bar next to the hotel and the girl who checked me in reminded me of my sister, how she could be so excited and sullen at the same time, like she was just ready to burst. They were all ripe cherries, these girls. I felt like I would be safe for the night. I filled out some paperwork and the girl asked me for my credit card.

“I want to pay in cash,” I said. I knew enough not to leave a credit card trail behind me. Every cop show I had ever watched since I was a kid had taught me that.

“You won’t get charged,” she said. “It’s just for incidentals.”

Incidental, I liked that word. It was like an accident, but with purpose.

“What kind of incidentals?” I said.

“Well we’ve got microwave popcorn if you get the snackers after the bar is closed, and there’s dirty movies on channel 18 if you’re into that.” She sneered a little bit.

“Good to know,” I said. I would not be cowed by a child.

In the room I took a shower for the first time in a week. The hot water ran out quickly. The radiator near the window banged and moaned. The windows steamed up. The comforter on the bed was brown and there were tiny cartoon trains all over it. It itched my skin when I slid underneath it. I put my head down and slept for an hour. When I woke my hair was dry and clean and straight. I felt rested. I had the same feeling as when I was driving, that something was going to happen, but now it could go either way. I remembered playing hide-n-seek with my sister, me in the closet, her about to open the door. I never knew what I was going to do. I could pounce or I could scream or I could jump in the air and laugh. But something had to happen next.

I left the room and locked the door behind me. The door next to mine cracked open, and I saw a woman watching me. I thought maybe she was like me for a second, a single woman traveling, hiding in one way, but still running toward something. But then the door swung open and a little boy came running out. He was a toddler, wearing just diapers on his bottom half and a sweater on top. The woman plucked him up and clutched him to her chest. I could not decide how old she was. Everything about her looked the same as me, except for her forehead. There were lines carved into it like rivers in the earth. I wondered what it would feel like, to rub my hands along those lines. This is how we are different, I thought. I am still smooth, and you are lined. I wondered if she hated having them, or even if she noticed them at all. I wondered if that little boy was why she had those lines, if the love she felt for him was so strong and deep that her face had changed forever. She smiled at me, and then the baby started crying, and she closed the door.

I went to the bar. It was full of men, a few guys younger than me, but most of them were in their forties or older. In the back I saw a couple of women with their husbands, and there was a little girl who had sparkly barrettes crooked in her hair running around. I was sure that everyone knew everyone else. Most people were smoking. In certain parts of the bar the air was so thick with it you couldn’t see people’s faces clearly.

I sat at the bar. The stool had a tear in it. The men to the right of me were laughing and seemed friendly enough. They weren’t any different than the men who came into the diner at home, men who had known me since I was a kid. My father didn’t take me into bars, but he wasn’t the kind to go out and socialize. He wasn’t a snob, though, and he didn’t raise one either. I sat down and ordered a Southern Comfort and Diet Coke from the bartender, a short woman with breasts so big it was like she didn’t have any stomach left. They just took over everything. Her lipstick stained the skin around her mouth where age was fading her. She had the same eyes as the girl who had checked me in at the motel. She could be complaining one minute, she could make you laugh the next. You just didn’t know what you would get from her. Except for a SoCo and Diet Coke.

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.

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. 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 didn’t mind talking to him. I had spent so many years with Thomas, so weepy and sensitive at times, that it was nice to talk to men who didn’t look like they had ever cried. They seemed fearless, riding their Harleys through a snowstorm, while I knew Thomas was curled up in a cozy living room with some woman from two towns over.

Arnold and Pete took turns buying me SoCo and Diet Cokes. The drinks tasted like syrup to me, and I took big gulps of them like medicine. Arnold told me about how his ex-wife had up and left him and Pete years ago, when Pete was but 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 farm house 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. But eventually the isolation began to drive her nuts. She begged Arnold to move but he wouldn’t listen. He liked it out there in the quiet, dark woods, coming home to his wife and kids in his cozy cabin. It felt safe and nice to him. He didn’t listen to a thing she said. Trinie let her dark hair grow long and it fell below her waist. She started to stage small acts of defiance: she cooked meat only halfway through for dinner sometimes, at least the meat she served to her husband, and she taught her child new and unusual curses to say to his father, as if he were the parrot of a salty old fisherman.

Arnold shook his head and laughed when he told me that last part, and there was a forgiving glint in his eye. It probably took her forever to get him going, I thought. He would have let her keep torturing him till the end. Pete got up to get me another drink. I was getting good and drunk. I realized I had forgotten to eat but I wasn’t hungry anymore. Arnold said something to me about how his house was nicer than any old hotel, and if I wanted I could come out and stay with the two of them. Off in the corner there was another crack of one head against another, and then somebody started yelling. Pete came back and handed me a drink, then put his hand around my neck and rubbed the muscles there until they were warm. It had been a while since someone had touched me like that and I was enjoying it a little bit. Arnold watched Pete rubbing me for a minute. His face didn’t change at all. Then he motioned for me to move in closer to him, and I did, and Pete’s hand dropped away.

“The last straw – for Trinie, not for me, I would have let her stay forever no matter what she did to me, I mean she’s my wife and the mother of my son, come on – was the blizzard of was it, ‘83? Could it have been that long?” Arnold paused and scratched his chin, and did some thinking. In the corner a man lost another game of pool and threw his cue on the table. I realized everyone around me was drunk, too. It was getting late. The families had packed up their kids and left by then, and the only other woman was the bartender.

“I think it was ’83,” said Pete. He slipped his hand around my waist. “You sure you want to stay in that hotel tonight?” he said in my ear. I didn’t answer him.

The blizzard came and it was a white out for days. There wasn’t any work to be found so Arnold and Trinie were trapped in the house with little Pete. It was cold and they were running out of wood so they used it sparingly. No one wanted to go outside in that weather and chop. And that one extra person around all the time made the house feel even smaller to Trinie. Plus Arnold was bored. He went through nearly a bottle of whiskey a day. They started yelling and fighting and no one could hear her scream. “She kept screaming,” said Arnold. “Hoping someone would come and save her or pull her out of there and the more she screamed the more she realized she was in the middle of nowhere. Then she got it in her head that if no one could hear her scream, no one would hear me scream. She decided to test that little theory of hers out.”

Next to me Pete nodded once, and left his head down.

Trinie went after Arnold with an ax one morning. He woke up just as she lowered it and he rolled off to the side and onto the floor. The ax went through the bed. Pete saw the whole thing.

“I don’t remember much but I remember that,” said Pete.

“After that we sent her back to Colorado to stay with her parents. They were ready to have her back, as long as I stayed away.” Arnold started laughing. “And believe me at the time I thought: you can keep her.”

A fight started in the corner by the pool table. Men tumbled over each other like children and then they were both shoved outside and the whole bar emptied to watch them. We all carried our drinks with us. I slipped a little bit on a patch of ice and Pete caught me. The snow was falling lighter and the sky was finally dark. There were grunts and punches and people casually stared. No one wanted it to get too crazy, but no one wanted it to stop either. It was a snowstorm, there wasn’t much else to do but drink and fight out there. There was blood on the snow and one man finally passed out. We all shuffled back in the bar.

“I saw that she was right, of course, but by then it was too late,” said Arnold.

“We got a new house down the road from here,” says Pete. “Right in the middle of it all.”

“I have to go home,” I said.

“We’ll walk you back to your room,” said Arnold.

“It’s ok,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“We can’t have you slipping and falling in the snow,” said Arnold. “Come on Pete, give her a hand.” Pete put his hand under my elbow. We made our way back toward my room. My eyes were closing down on my face. Arnold was saying something to me, I could hear him through my eyes.

“You sure you have to leave tomorrow?” he said. “It’d be nice to see your face around longer.”

“You sure are pretty,” said Pete.

I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. They had been so nice to me. And they had spent all that money on me. I felt bad for them, too, that Trinie had left them alone in the woods. Arnold put his hand around my other elbow. They were both treating me like I couldn’t walk at all, but I knew that I could.

“I can walk,” I said. I tried to shrug them off but they wouldn’t let me go. “I’m fine,” I said. We were almost to my door and I just wanted to get under the covers and go to sleep by myself.

“We’re just trying to help you out,” said Arnold.

“You’re really wasted,” said Pete.

“I’m not,” I mumbled, though I knew I was.

Pete and Arnold rested me against the door. They both moved in closer toward me.

“I just don’t know,” said Pete. “You look like you needs a hand to me. Don’t you think, Dad?”

“Where’s your key,” said Arnold. “We’ll get you into bed.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Just give us the key,” said Arnold.

“I’m fine,” I said louder.

“There ain’t no need to yell,” said Arnold. “There’s people sleeping.”

“I’m fine,” I yelled.

Pete lifted his hand, and it seemed like he was going to clamp it across my mouth. But he just scratched his head with it instead. Next door a light went on. We all turned. A hand pulled the curtain back, and two sets of eyes peered back at us. Pete and Arnold took a step back.

“Everything’s fine,” said Arnold.

I pulled out my key and it dropped to the ground and Pete leaned forward to help but Arnold put a hand on him and pulled him back. I picked it up off the snow. My hand burned with the chill of it. I let myself in to my room, and when I looked back, Arnold and Pete were just standing there. Arnold’s hand was still on Pete, holding him back.

“You sure you’re ok?” said Pete. It was a desperate whine, like a stray dog howling for food or the touch of a hand.

“I’m fine,” I said, and I closed the door. I locked it. I didn’t take my clothes off or anything. I just got under the covers, and when my heart stopped racing through my chest, then at last I could sleep.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jami Attenberg is the author of the story collection Instant Love. Her novel, The Kept Man, will be published by Riverhead Books in January 2008.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, July 17th, 2007.