the misfit west

Author: Jen

  • as for me and my house

    The Oriental Trading catalog comes in the mail with Dad’s stack of Wall Street Journals and by the next morning it’s on the back of the toilet, pages curling from the shower. Temu before Temu. Everything in it comes in bulk. Twenty-four plastic leis for five ninety-nine, a gross of rubber frogs, grass table skirts by the dozen, sticker sheets in quantities nobody on this earth could use, printed for people who have that many people.

    The good issues I take back to my room and go through at night with a ballpoint. Tiki torches. Coconut cups with the bendy straws. Paper lanterns strung on wire. A piñata shaped like a parrot. The order form in the back has twelve blank lines for item number, color, quantity, and I fill in all twelve and never tear it out.

    The party is at dusk on our deck with the torches going down both sides and the parrot hanging off the gutter and the coconuts getting refilled and nobody going home. It never rains on it. Nothing tips over. I have this party in the bathroom, in my bed, out in the dry crusty field behind the house where I’m sure a rattlesnake is waiting for my ankle, and it is a daydream, a wish, a want, a prayer.

    The real deck is where Dad comes out after a twelve hour shift, boots off, and throws Frisbees for the dogs before he’s had dinner. The wind comes across the yard with nothing to slow it down and a tiki torch out there would last about as long as a match. Mom and Dad don’t have people over.

    In my room the sock drawer is the washer and the drawer under it is the dryer, and I draw burners on gray paper with a red marker so I can brown ground beef the way I watch her do it, and I cook for the dolls, and I set the table, and everybody eats.

    The one night anybody comes is Dad’s reunion, and while they’re all inside I back the Comanche into his friend’s car and put the taillight across the gravel in red plastic pieces. I pull forward, kick what I can find under the tire, and go sit at the kitchen table and wait for it. When the two of them come out with their beers they stand there looking at the bumper a long time, and then they start laughing, both of them, and Dad puts his hand flat on his friend’s shoulder and leaves it there. Nobody comes in to get me. I sit on the back step in the dark way past when I should be in bed listening to a sound I can’t place at first because I haven’t heard it much.

    The rest of the summer the phone hangs on the kitchen wall and Mom waits for it. Oil on her legs at the counter while she waits, smelling like Jovan musk. When the call comes we load up and drive out to the park at Foothills and she walks the loop with the other mothers, three times, four times around, while we’re all turned loose. Bible school in June with the paper crowns. Wednesday nights with the verses. The Christian bookstore with the cassettes and the devotionals and a wall of figurines with their big wet eyes. Mountain Dew runs to the Kum and Go, fountain and bottle both, and if we’d done something wrong that day we went for free. The calendar on the refrigerator is filled in through August in her small handwriting, and for two people who don’t have any friends, my parents are forever keeping track of what’s popular.

    The knocker on our door says AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD. Over the stove there’s GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD in cross-stitch with the glass gone soft from the grease. There’s a fish on the back of the van. I learn the verses cold, I could say them in my sleep, and I do sometimes.

    At youth group I say out loud that we don’t seem very on fire for God, and the pastor waits until after and walks me down to the hallway by the coat hooks and talks to me quiet enough that not one person turns around. That night the catalog is right where I left it, swollen from the steam, and I open it to the luau pages and start circling.

    I have a dining table now. Before this I had a room at the Lariat with a mini fridge and a dog, so I want to be clear about what a table is. There are platters in the top cabinet I’ve never taken down, a folding table still in its plastic in the garage, a box of string lights, a case of mason jars I bought for a reason I could explain to you if you asked me to.

    The catalog still comes. Not to that house, that house sold, but here, with my name on it and a customer number I never gave anybody. Same parrot piñata. Same grass skirts by the dozen. They’ve added a cotton candy machine that does forty and a whole separate edition called Fun & Faith.

    Berkshire Hathaway bought the company in 2012. Dad read the Wall Street Journal every day of his life, stacks of them in the spare room, cups and handles and W’s, hours in the green chair working out where the money was going, and he never made a dime. The one thing Buffett wanted was sitting on the back of our toilet the entire time.

    I want to open a Pilates studio. I have never said that out loud to anybody who could do anything about it, but I can see it better than the room I’m sitting in. Morning light, mirrors on the long wall, rubber floor. Reformers down both sides with the springs color coded, red and blue and yellow, and the sound of a room full of them is the best sound I know: the click of a spring going on, the carriage running out and coming back, forty pounds of somebody’s body moving on a track and not making much noise about it. Water bottles sweating on the sill. Everybody’s shoes in a pile by the door because nobody wears shoes in there. Reformers run four thousand apiece and the company that sells them mails a catalog too.

    Ten reformers. That’s what fits.

    The roster is on a clipboard by the door with the date at the top and ten lines under it, first name and last, and there’s a pen on a string so nobody walks off with it.

    I start at the top.

  • dogs stay free

    Folks don’t check the emergency contact line. A name and a number go in the box and the box goes in a file and everyone involved agrees that this means somebody comes.

    The man on mine does not know my middle name. He does not know what month I was born. If I died in a parking lot in some town I was only passing through, a nurse would call a man who would have to guess at the date they wanted for the form, and I have thought about that guess more than is good for a person.

    My father spent his working life under Gillette in a swamp that stopped being a swamp about sixty million years ago. It was pressed flat and stayed, seam after seam, one of them a hundred and ten feet thick. Men take it out and it goes east on trains and gets burned so that buildings can be lit.

    He wore the same pocket shirt and the same Wranglers every day of my childhood, different color, same shirt. In fall he’d bake his boots in the oven to waterproof them and I’d smell it from my room and come up the stairs thinking he was making something.

    He died outside, on a concrete pad, in December, alone. The paper on the front page said he plunged. My family says he fell. I had a friend go clean the pad before we got back from the hospital and she did her best but the cat found it anyway under the tarp. I poured bleach water over that concrete bucket after bucket while the cat kept coming back.

    One spring I rented a U-Haul because a moving truck was cheaper than a car and my dog and I rattled all the way down south. Vinyl bench, no cruise, one station out of Cheyenne that came and went with the terrain. Behind my head an empty cargo box caught every seam in the road and handed it back doubled so the whole rig rang like a dropped pan for six hours at a stretch.

    Angel had her chin on my leg the entire way and would not take it off. I could feel her jaw tighten at every joint in the pavement. I was driving myself from Gillette down to Fort Collins in an attempt to get a handle of the substances that had stained my country soul yellow.

    Laramie is not on that road. Laramie is a turn you make, west on eighty, up over the hill and past the rocks with the wind coming across at you the whole way, and I made it, because that was as close as I could get to somebody I knew.

    The Motel 6 there is on East Plaza Lane, close enough to the interstate that eighty never really quits, and the freight comes through on top of that all night, not coal, just everything else the country is moving while you’re trying to sleep.

    Rooms were under seventy dollars. Dogs stay free, which I knew, which is exactly why I picked it. Behind the building there’s a pool with no water in it and a chain link fence around the pool, and the wind moves grit across the bottom of it, which up here it does constantly.

    I called him from the lot and asked him to put a room on his card. He told me the charge would post with the name of the motel and the name of the town sitting right there on the statement, and his wife would see the line.

    There’s a reason I could call him though. Just because he didn’t know my birthday didn’t equate to unfamiliarity. His father beat him. He caught a felony for meth. His best friend died in front of him in a car wreck.

    He got out of all of it and did the same work I do now, sits with people coming off the same things we came off. He understood my situation completely. Better than anyone else in my phone. He knew exactly what was going to happen to me that night and he was not confused about the stakes for one second.

    He owns four houses. I used to say that like an accusation. What I think now is that a man who came up the way he came up builds walls, and he builds a lot of them. My name in his records is a door in one of those walls, and he could not open it. Not for me. Not for seventy dollars. Not because he didn’t want to. So we established the terms. Cash and food, yes. Name on paper, no.

    My sister had been telling me for years that men are not friends with women, that he only wanted to sleep with me, that there is no such thing. I never believed her. Sitting in that lot at seven thousand feet with the heater off to save gas and the dog breathing on my leg, running the math on the last person I had, I started to.

    The Ranger is two miles north on Third, a liquor store bolted onto the side of a bar, open till two, pool table, shuffleboard, and I have never in my life been so glad to see a lit sign. There was a kid in there, and I mean a kid, twenty-two maybe, with a face that told me he had weather of his own coming. He listened to about ninety seconds of my story and paid for a room. He did not know my middle name either. There was no form anywhere on this earth with this guarantee and he did it anyway.

    Down in Fort Collins my buddy met me at a barbecue place off the highway, bought me nachos, and put a hundred dollars in my hand. He’d gone and gotten it in cash so it wouldn’t have a name on it either. I want to be honest about what I did with it, which is that I spent every dollar on a man at a bar that same night, or on the idea of him, and got pulled over trying to drive him home.

    I slept in the back of the U-Haul behind an expensive hotel, because a moving truck behind an expensive hotel looks like somebody moving and nobody calls anybody, and behind a gas station it reads as a problem. I backed into the dark end of the lot where the lights don’t reach and pulled the door down and Angel got the blanket.

    Through the glass I could see the lobby lit up the way they keep them all night, a hundred beds in there, made up, empty, waiting on nobody, and every bulb in it burning something a man like my father took out of the ground.

    That spring I was sitting at my mother’s house waiting to get into my own, and I had told her something true about my brother, and he came down the stairs and said, you are dead to me. He got the whole sentence out clean. He’d been holding onto it.

    My mother killed herself that fall. She was in the house about a day before anybody knew. My brother found her.

    My sister called and I knew before she had it all the way out of her mouth and what came out of me was goddamnit, Mom.

    I cried until I could smell the tears in my own sinuses and the air went sanitized, the way it smells inside a building with a pool, and that is what her death smells like to me and I stopped trying to explain that to people a long time ago.

    All three of us believe it was our fault. It is the only thing this family has ever agreed on and not one of us has ever had the courage to talk about it.

    Two of them now, both alone, both unsaid. We are a family that does not come, and we are a family that does not say so, and I was raised in that family and then I needed somebody to come.

    In May my buddy’s heart stopped and he lived. Nobody called me. There was no reason anybody would, I am not on a single form of his. He told me himself, after, long enough after that it had turned into a story he was tired of telling. I don’t know whether his wife knows my last name. He goes to a great deal of trouble to keep me out of the record. He is also the best I have got.

    A friend came and stayed one night. She hugged me at the door and I found out what I had turned into. Feral. But I loved, love, these two people. This friend a felon, too, somehow in all that won’t say lies all the love and courage and care that a form can’t capture in a box.

    I live in Laramie now, about a mile from a lot where I couldn’t get a room for seventy dollars. The pool is still empty. The sign out front is still out. Sixty million years ago there was standing water where my family is from. Things grew in it and died in it and got pressed down under everything that came after until they became something people could burn to keep warm.

    My father spent thirty years bringing it back to the surface so strangers would have light and heat, and I don’t think he ever imagined his daughter would one day be sitting in a motel parking lot, trying to figure out who would show up for her.

    I only learned recently that the emergency contact line has no force. It isn’t a medical power of attorney. It doesn’t give anyone authority to make decisions or sign forms. It’s just the state’s best guess about who might come. The form asks who to notify. The real question is who comes.