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.
the misfit west 