The Alvord
by Hillary Behrman
Sandra Dal Poggetto, Relict No. 10, 2016-17, oil, soft pastel on canvas, 12 x 12 inches. Collection of Ray and Juni Clark.
The voices know when the dinner rush is over and Vivian starts the clean-up. They wait for the lull, swooping in to spew insults. They wait for Roy Howard, the last of the regulars, to finish his third cup of decaf and ease himself out of the brown vinyl booth closest to the door, nodding first toward Vivian as she wipes down the counter and then raising a hand to Dale as he scrapes a day’s worth of gristle and fat off the grill. By the time Vivian has the ketchup bottles wiped, refilled, and lined up in three neat rows, looking like a full box of red Crayola Crayons, they come clamoring down. Zinging out of electrical sockets and buzzing around the fluorescent light fixtures bolted to the ceiling of the small cafe. Separating and reforming as they extricate themselves from the backup generator, industrial freezer, and hydraulic lift in the adjacent garage. They debate, revisit grudges, never know when to shut up.
If Viv moves fast, she will be in her car before she has the chance to hear what they’re going on about. She will be long gone before she starts talking back.
She never tells Dale about the voices, at least not in so many words. But he accepts her urgency and never asks her to stay late and help close up. Each night he makes the same offer.
“Go on Viv, I’ll lock up tonight.”
As if each time the idea has just come to him.
Dale is not a big man, but Viv thinks he isn’t exactly small, either. He carries most of his weight in his barrel chest and his thick upper arms. He works as hard as Viv does, and he has a daughter somewhere near Boise, who he’d like to see more of. Viv has tried not to listen when he calls the girl from the phone that hangs on a narrow strip of exposed drywall between the industrial freezer and the square metal sinks in the cafe’s cramped kitchen. More often than not, his daughter doesn’t answer and he leaves a message.
Tonight Viv makes it to her car just as the outside lights click on, flooding the gravel around the gas pumps, making bits of mica sparkle like the night sky crushed underfoot. She is almost too late. A tight band of pressure wraps around her chest and meets in two hot fists in the middle of her back. Once she’s in the car her hands are shaking so hard she can’t manage to jam the key into the ignition and drops it to the floor. She doesn’t pick it up. Reaching instead for the door lock and slamming her right hand down hard on the button. The protective bulb of plastic is missing and she stabs her palm on the raw metal post. The pain focuses her. Her breath steadies and she carefully reaches from door to door and pushes down the rest of the locks before she retrieves her keys from the floor and starts the car. She pulls away from The Fields Station—Café-Gas-Garage-Motel, all-in-one. The place constitutes most of the entire town of Fields, Oregon. She floats her foot on the peddle, resists the urge to gun it.
The car is baked from sitting in the sun all day behind the cabins, but she can’t unroll the windows to let in the night air, not yet. Not until she is free and clear of Fields and the half dozen electrical and telephone poles that populate the place.
The voices have done it before, jumping from the wires into the transmission of her car. She doesn’t want to take the chance. Her slick nylon work blouse, a fake 1950’s bowling shirt with a cursive “V” above her right boob, is sweat soaked and her rope-thick braid of black and grey hair sticks to the wet at the base of her neck.
During the day Vivian has ways of managing their buzz, but at night only the desert will do. The Alvord, not really a desert at all, is eighty-four square miles of hard baked mud. It stretches out from under the basalt ruffles of the eastern slope of Steens Mountain. Not another soul in sight. No telephone poles, transmission towers, nothing.
Twenty minutes down the road, the pavement takes a sharp turn east then corrects and heads north again along the dry shore of the Alvord. The road skirts the scalloped base of the mountain, crossing dry drainage after dry drainage. Ghost waterfalls funnel straight down from the frozen summit before petering out to almost nothing. She mutters to herself, “Wild Horse Creek, Hot Springs, Indian Creek.” The pressure across her chest eases as she ticks off each landmark. She leaves the road just before Pike Creek, nothing more than a bone-dry wash filled with bunchgrass and knotweed, and cuts cross-country toward the playa. The track is almost flat and she knows it well. Her Chevy Nova avoids most of the ditches and lumps, rarely bottoms out.
Then she is off the track onto the dried lakebed, burnished plumb over the centuries. It is so quiet here. Even the car engine muffles itself as if subdued by the safety of the place. Vivian unrolls her window, then leans over to the passenger seat and cracks that window too. The temperature is dropping. She knows she should try and keep some of the warmth in the car till she falls asleep, but she can’t help from gulping in the night. She drives slowly a few more miles out into the center of the playa, shifts into neutral, cuts the engine, and coasts the last half mile. As the car slows and stops she leans forward and rests her forehead on the steering wheel, almost drifts off right there, just like that, her head blessedly empty, clear of chatter. But she knows enough to rouse herself and make use of their reprieve. She unlocks the door and lands first one then the other boot firmly onto the dry mud. The lakebed is crackle-patterned clear to the horizon. She is careful to place each foot inside the smooth unmarred space between the cracks, each cordoned off section of earth a comfortable pace apart. The voices are barely audible in the desert, more mosquitoes than words.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, step on a crack.
Viv’s hand, steady now, unlocks the trunk. She rummages about in her duffle for a clean T-shirt and the loose-fitting pants she likes to sleep in. Doesn’t bother to undo her blouse more than a few buttons, just peels it off, dropping it into the corner of the trunk. Bent at the waist she unhooks her bra and lets it fall into the pile. Shirtless, her skin is bluish in the fading light, sweat drenched. Before she left Fields, she washed her hands and face. Now she wets a clean bandanna with water from the plastic milk jug she keeps stowed in the trunk and runs the cloth over her neck, under her arms and up around her breasts. She drops her jeans and underwear and swipes the rag between her legs. She unlaces her boots and stands on the crushed leather, balancing on one foot and the other as she strips her pants off the rest of the way. For a moment she straightens up, stands still, naked, and listens. She pulls on the clean shirt, a stretched out long-john top, and the flowered harem pants she found left behind by some hippie chick at the hot springs last summer. Over all of this she slouches into a heavy canvas work coat and pulls on a black wool cap. She leaves her hair braided. She lets the lid of the trunk fall shut listening for the click of the latch as it catches. She walks straight out into the night. Due north. Her pace so measured, so regular, she doesn’t even need to look at her feet to avoid the cracks. There is no moon, but the bulk of the massive uplift that forms Steens Mountain stands stark to the west and Mickey Butte rises to the north.
She could walk all night, all the way to the far shore. But she won’t. She imagines that distant dry shore as a different world, another country, the edge of some ancient map that tips under on itself and drops the traveler off into nothing. She can go only so far. She squats down to pee and makes her way back to the car.
Viv stopped telling anybody about what she had when she was in her twenties. No one calls anyone a Schizophrenic anymore. Everyone is suffering from mental health issues and has behavioral problems. But what Viv has is no issue, and she damn well knows how to behave. It is full out possession, and she keeps it under wraps.
If folks thought her strange as she zigzagged down a city street she shrugged it off, cloaking herself in an off-kilter vibe that passed for almost normal. When she moved out to Fields and started work at the diner, she told Dale nothing. Let him Google the meds he’d been picking up for her in Burns each week and come to his own damn conclusions.
When Dale realized Viv was living in her car, he offered up one of the motel units for free. They are never all booked at the same time. Each room is its own freestanding cabin lined up behind the gas pumps. Each has a queen bed with a mustard-colored paisley spread, a mildewed bathroom, a small fridge and a microwave. Viv is grateful but only sometimes showers in a vacant bathroom. She never sleeps there.
She sleeps in the back seat of her car, one long leg folded up against her chest and the other half bent, foot wedged tight against the car door. She tried sleeping outside on the ground for a while, even had a tent. Silent as it is out there, if her ear is close to the ground she can still hear the earth murmur. Nothing like the harangue of voices that come through the wires in town but still a distraction. So the car it is. She uses her twelve-hour shift at the cafe each day to undo the kinks, stretch out to her full height, an inch shy of six feet. Her legs are longer than her torso, not much hips to speak of, a straight up and down sort of a body. Men barely noticed her when clothed, but the few she has stripped bare for were always appreciative.
She sleeps well that night and the next. The longer days of April bring relief, a few more travelers and the cafe is busy, a constant hum of human activity and need, drowning out everything else. The late setting sun provides cover, breathing space. She can wash up, do some laundry, eat a real meal before she heads back out onto the desert.
Some nights, she stops briefly at the hot springs and slips into the soapy, rotten-egg warmth as the last of the day trippers are pulling on their flowered skirts and Patagonia pants. Tonight, she eases down into the hotter of the two concrete pools to feel the intense heat and avoid the bikers in the other pool, three men and a woman, their sizable tattooed bodies glowing and shifting like moon jellies under the steaming green water. Each nods at her, and she nods back, then closes her eyes and leans her head onto the splintered wood decking, her braid a coiled cushion protecting her neck. Eyes closed, she listens for the bikers’ departure, silently counts to one hundred after their engines rev and tires send gravel scattering. Only then does she open her eyes to the gloaming and pull herself up and out, bracing her arms on the planking.
She has never felt this strong. She has tapered so far off her meds that she might as well not be taking them. Her hands wield the steel knife, steadier each day, as she helps chop peppers and ham for Dale’s omelets, only a ghost of Lithium in her veins. Her thoughts are clearer than they have been in years. She still hears the static buzz of voices, but is able to concentrate enough not to listen. She stays away from everyone but Dale and even keeps him at a safe distance.
Tonight she lets herself use the outdoor shower behind a propped up enclosure of corrugated metal just beyond the concrete pools. Someone has left behind a bottle of Dr. Bronners. She picks it up and squeezes the last of the peppermint-sweet liquid soap into her hand. She raises her arm to the sky and soaps up. She moves her hand under her arm, palm down, around and under the overhang of her breast, the back of her hand lifting the slight weight as she soaps underneath. Her fingertips register the bit of gristle before her mind does, moving back and forth over the pebbly lump, rolling it beneath her own flesh. It isn’t clear what it is until the automatic lights kick on over the pools and their prattle comes buzzing back out of the small generator.
Idiot girl, tit girl, gonna die—tit girl.
“Shut up.” She usually knows better than to talk back.
As she scuttles back to her car and locks her naked, dripping self inside, they become an angry crowd. She struggles to get her shirt back on, doesn’t bother with pants. Back out onto the road, she gives them the slip, one swerve-and-skid mile on the pavement and she’s back out onto the flat bare earth. Later, standing by the trunk of her car, she worries the spot, poking and prodding her whole chest in a grid over every muscle, tendon, and suspect bit of fat. She doesn’t find another lump, but the first one doesn’t go away either. Once she is curled up in the back seat with all the doors locked, windows sealed tight with strips of gummy duct tape, she continues the incessant fondling. Finally, she falls asleep with her arms crossed over her chest, her right hand gripping tight to her left breast, her other gripping the right. When she wakes up the next morning both hands are still there, clamped on hard. Ringing each breast are five purplish bruises the same size and color as her nipples.
•
She makes no move. Does nothing for more than two weeks. She gets through each day head down, chin tucked so low her neck aches with the strain of keeping it there. Each night, sleep in the car, then at dawn the drive to Fields to work her shift, then drive to the desert, and repeat. She doesn’t count her tips, doesn’t do laundry, doesn’t stop at the hot springs or take walks out across the china-crackled earth. Just car to work to car to work and back.
Until the night she sits sealed in her car looking out over the desert and thinks about hopscotch. Thousands of children could play it all over the dried lake bed, no chalk needed. She doesn’t get out of the car to test the idea. She is in the passenger seat, her feet in socks up on the dash, her arms crossed over her chest staring out at nothing. She should have seen what was going on out on the flats but doesn’t. She is deep in her own blessedly quiet head.
First one, then another thin tendril of smoke climbs up out of the cracks. No, maybe it isn’t smoke but made of more solid stuff, the branches of some kind of plant, a fast-growing vine. She figures she’ll let herself continue to think it is a trick of the light but then they emerge from the cracks right next to the Nova, creeping up onto the windshield. Some of them break off and wriggle up into the night sky, forming a roiling dark cloud that stretches from the desert all the way to the base of the mountain. Sometimes she wishes her illness wasn’t so trite: angry apostles inside wires, smoky plants snaking out of the ground. She would have thought her biochemistry could come up with something more original given her wasted years in school, something elegant and scientific. Her father once said he expected more from her DNA. But then, sometimes it is comforting to know that there are others like her, another family of sorts spread across the globe, linked by a shared lexicon of hallucinations.
During the day, the bustle of the cafe has worked. At night, the silent isolation enhanced and buffeted by blankets, duct tape, miles of desert usually does the trick. There is no tin foil but there might as well be. Strange how she knows that all of this is butchered genes, yet at the same time, the blankets work. None of the snake-vines get into the car. In the city it had always been crows, pigeons, starlings on wires—trash birds. Now she sees clearly. It has never been about the birds. They are mere mouthpieces for parasitical manifestations of pure energy. And this time it is bubbling directly out of the earth.
She watches as the desert shatters all over again. Chunks of dry mud buckle up. Invisible force fields crumble a millennium of compacted soil destroying acres of the uncountable brittle bones of ancient sea creatures. What is the point if she is just going to die out here from a pebble in her chest? What is a fucking pebble compared to the heaving ground? It has been years since she burned, cut and drugged herself into near oblivion. The scars are barely visible. If something is going to kill her then it better be her own damn self, not some clump of rogue cells, some electrical grid of prophets, a shattered lake with no fucking water. She scrambles over the gear shift and rifles in the glove compartment for the keys. She feels the vine-snakes under her tires like giant worms, meaty and firm. She crushes them as she drives away.
She tells Dale about the lump the next day.
“You sure it isn’t just a figment of your overactive imagination, no offense.”
“None taken.”
“You got some people somewhere?”
“None I care to see.”
“Seems you gotta go then.”
She just shakes her head.
“Seems wrong to let some little deaf dumb bit of fat, flesh, lump—whatever you want to call it—get you.”
Still nothing.
“You know, when you just got a handle on your other troubles.”
He has a point, to be sure.
He offers to get her there, to the city for tests, treatment if she needs it. She doesn’t think getting there will be the problem.
Dale’s cousin Margo in Seattle is a nurse. She helps make all the arrangements, and even gets Viv a place to stay at the YWCA after the surgery, for the full six months of chemo and radiation, for as long as she needs. Dale closes the cafe for a week, the first time in fifteen years. Stan, the owner of the cafe, is pissed but not enough to bring his fat ass down from Burns to keep the place open. So Dale locks up, puts a sign on the door and drives the more than 500 miles northwest with only three stops. They aren’t in the same car. That would be too much togetherness for Viv. They go caravan style; Viv’s light blue Chevy follows along behind Dale’s white Ford pickup.
The man is a goddamn saint. He stays on at his cousin’s for five whole days to see her through the operation and settled into her own room at the Y’s shelter before he drives off. He’s lost a week’s worth of business, more than two hundred dollars in gas for both their cars, and still leaves her with fifty dollars in cash and a promise that her job will be waiting for her. Really, a goddamn saint in saggy-ass Wranglers and a too-tight snap front shirt.
She lets them cut off most of her left breast—there were three other tumors her fingers hadn’t been able to search out. The surgery and the treatment went better than expected. The shelter isn’t so bad either. It isn’t until she is finished with most of the treatments that things start to get so screwed up. Her cancer Doc connects her with a psychiatric nurse who ups her anti-psychotics and adds some downer that leaves her numb and buzzed enough not to give a shit about the flocks of men perched on the electric bus cables and hanging like bats from the hospital’s florescent light tubes. And then they start giving her some drug that sucks out every ounce of hormones she ever had. It isn’t the hot flashes so much as a wicked burning itch that makes her want to flay herself. She tries to cut and peel back a piece of skin on her thigh. What a damn mess. She really screws it up. So she barely leaves her room and can’t conceive of making the trip back to Fields. She’s stuck. Her chest is all healed up and six months are gone in a blur. Her hair already partly grown back into something that looks like a 1970s shag.
The shelter is on top of a hill at the corner of 9th and Terry, three stories of clinker bricks forged in the city’s Great Fire, where Viv can hear ghost babies crying in the caulking and others more alive just below her room. The first two floors are filled with families, four or five to a studio apartment with bunk beds. The third floor is reserved for single women, each in their own room with a shared bathroom down the hall. Each room has a bed, a sink, a small table and one straight-backed metal chair. It is how she imagines nuns live. White walls, white painted floorboards, white sheets, and the simple wooden table she can lean on and look out the window. She keeps an eye on her parked car. One tire is flat.
As long as she stays in the room she can manage. It takes her a day or two to recover from any trip outside, to the doctor or the 7-Eleven to pick up groceries. The neighborhood is a dense cluster of hospitals and apartment buildings smothered in a web of powerlines and electric bus cables. On good days the overhead grid of wires and cables are lined with big black crows. On bad days the crows are an army of stunted dark-coated men arguing with each other, hurling down orders and insults. She might as well be nineteen again, she is that disordered.
Still Viv sees with a clear eye how the transformer towers look like giants in skirts with tricorn hats, and their warning spheres drip down like the side curls of orthodox rabbis. Even at her worst, she knows they are just transformer towers. But sometimes these connections delight her; seeing under the obvious holds joy as well as terror. She had a childhood peopled with real fairies, not some pastel Victorian pansies with wings. No, she had watched dragon babies birthed out of the stalks of skunk cabbages, reeking of sulfur. No one was ever fully dead, her grandmother a regular visitor and confidant for years after her passing. A childhood friend dead to leukemia, a teenage boyfriend killed in a climbing accident, none of them were ever truly gone, all of them available to chat. There is some luck in this, but no one speaks of it.
Most of the shelter staff think she has chemo brain or a drug problem. She talks to almost no one, only an occasional nod and hello to the baby dyke janitor who vacuums the halls at night and scrubs the communal bathroom. Vivian sometimes watches the girl late at night through her window, three stories down chugging cup after cup of coffee from a big green thermos. She sits on the tailgate of her dirty grey pickup, halfway through her shift, between 3 and 4 a.m. Sometimes she waves a hand up at Viv, or tilts her mug in Viv’s direction in a silent toast.
Viv ignores her, stares straight ahead. This has been going on since Viv first got to the shelter when she still had all her hair, the down-to-her-butt braid. The girl, Dayleen, took up calling her Rapunzel when they passed in the hall, calling it up to her window. She kept it up even when Viv hadn’t a hair left. Until one day, just before dawn, Viv opens her door to the sound of the vacuum and gives just a little, pointing to the index card taped to her door with “VIVIAN” clear as day in black magic marker.
The girl’s grin cracks her face wide open. “Call me Day, that’s what family does.”
The nights are warm again and Viv takes to watching Day like she is some distant foothill, the base of the mountain in the desert. When Day walks by, Viv is sure she can smell the dry desert air, ozone and burnt grass. The girl is a counterweight to buzzing wires, and the zapping neon this city loves so much.
One moon-clear night Day raises her mug and calls up. “Wanna cup?”
At first Viv can’t move. She is habituated to her own stillness. But there is something about that girl that reminds Viv’s body of its functions. Her mouth waters. Her calves quiver with the need to stretch. God knows how long it takes, but Viv makes it down the three flights of stairs and pushes the horizontal bar on the heavy exit door to the parking lot just in time to watch the girl shove the thermos back into her knapsack. She is too late. Viv is a twitching idiot clutching her plastic travel mug. Day pulls the thermos back out and fills both their cups. They don’t sit down. They drink the coffee. Day watches her. Viv watches back.
The girl is young, half Viv’s age, twenty or so, her hair cropped short and thick, the sides shaved, the bangs long and floppy over her eyes. She wears a white men’s undershirt tucked into snug Levis cinched tight with a wide leather belt. She looks like she could be Dale’s daughter or son. Viv touches her own hair. God only knows what I look like. Her body has gone soft. She is cut up and hairless. She runs her fingers over her temple. She has no eyebrows.
“Nice eyes, can see ‘em now all that hair of yours is gone, Rapunzel.”
The girl talks as if she is straight out of some pulpy romance novel. But it is sweet, and when she talks the bird men are struck dumb. Mostly she talks about herself, the distant high open place she’s come from, her fancy college-educated girlfriend, her dead brother. She asks Viv easy answerable questions: Where you from? What happened to your hair? Your chest? The cancer gone?
Then one night, “Why you still here?”
Viv says nothing but glances over at her car. Day follows her gaze.
“Flat tire? No gas money?”
Two nights later, Viv drifts off to the sound of Day’s vacuum in the hallway and wakes hours later to clanking metal. She gets up and leans over the wooden desk and looks out the window. The pickup’s headlights throw a spotlight on Day, squatting by Viv’s car, jacking it up. The next night she returns with the tire patched up, the night after with a gas can. Viv watches and marvels at the sheer industry of the girl. She scratches at her face and arms, raking her nails deep into layers of skin. All this kindness is a debt owed in action, and Viv can only act on herself.
Each morning, week after week, just after a breakfast of instant oatmeal and instant Folgers consumed from the same plastic mug, coffee first, oatmeal second, Viv goes down to the front desk and picks up the required exit forms. She takes the forms up to her room until she has a stack of paper.
Today is different. The car is fixed. There is nothing holding her back. She fills out the form, folds it again and again into a small thick square and shoves it in her back pocket.
The parking lot is ringed with trees, their leaves still fetal, florescent green. Some are blossomed out in pink and white, nothing subtle, so different from the way the desert navigates the seasons, a barely noticeable shift from brown to gold.
She walks across the lot to her car. It is parked directly under a heavily-blossomed pear tree that smells like semen. She scrapes the wet white blossoms with the edge of her hand, then shakes her wrist back and forth to flick the stray petals into the air. Their rancid odor clings to her like some memory of a long-ago hand job. She climbs in and retrieves her key from under the seat and starts the car, backing out of the parking spot, turning around, driving slowly down the slight incline that leads to 9th Avenue. She comes to an abrupt stop right at the edge of the sidewalk. The car’s nose is poking out so that a woman pushing a funny-looking too-big kid in a fold-up stroller swerves to avoid her bumper. That is as far as she gets. On the next day an over eager Jesuit volunteer named Maeve tries to get in the car with her for encouragement, but Viv holds tight to the passenger door handle until the little fanatic is close to tears and finally leaves her alone.
Even with the windows rolled up and the roof reinforced with blankets and crusted duct tape she can hear them grumbling, debating as they run back and forth along the cables. If she isn’t crazy she wonders why she has voluntarily locked herself in her very own rolling padded room. Sometimes the electrical currents heighten her senses, allowing her to feel their power coursing through the rubber-coated bundles of wires, gaining strength as they travel from the dams at Grand Collee and Newhalem, making her skin taut and itchy. She feels them surge in her from transformer tower to transformer tower until they divide and splinter to form the net of wires above her head. Today, the voices break through the protective rubber coatings, a chorus of ill-mannered whisperers, all threats and mandates. They speak over each other, cut each other off.
Cut it off, cut off your dick, you got no dick, no dick.
Day finds her there, in the parking lot, the engine still idling. She taps and taps on the window until Viv rolls it down. Day reaches across Viv’s chest and turns off the car. It has started to drizzle, and Day is wearing a tent-sized olive green army surplus poncho over her overalls. Her spikey hair peeks out at the edges of the hood and a new blood-specked tattoo of blackberry vines winds around her forearm, showing through the wet nylon that sticks to her skin.
“You going somewhere, lady?”
Viv shakes her head and starts the engine, wrestling the gear stick into reverse, clutch popping and slipping as she backs the car up the incline and into the still open parking space under the cum tree. A great green Totoro of a woman, Day waits for her by the fire exit, comforting and fierce.
“Go on up. I’ll bring you something to eat on my break.”
But when the girl knocks, Viv doesn’t open her door. She sits on her monastery bed, back flat against the white wall. Only the brick babies are quiet.
Idiot girl, girl, bits of tit, tit girl,
Under the bed, bed, dead girl . . .
Viv doesn’t leave the room for days except for a few quick trips to the bathroom. She eats her oatmeal dry, tries not to drink too much water. Night after night she sits at her monk’s desk and stares out the window. She watches Day take her breaks.
Tonight, the girl leaves the building right on schedule and crosses the lot to her truck which is parked right next to Viv’s Nova. It is raining and the foul-smelling pear tree is in the process of dropping its final load of blossoms all over Day. Instead of ducking, the girl closes her eyes, lifts her face and spreads her arms. She welcomes the onslaught. Viv turns away from this communion. And turns back, unable to help herself.
Day reaches into the front seat of the truck and gets out her knapsack. She takes out the thermos and fills two mugs. Places them on the tail gate, and doesn’t look up, just waits. This ritual has been going on for several nights. Day drinks one of the cups of coffee and then eventually the other, packs it all up and finishes her shift. She reminds Vivian of the old ranchers who came to the Fields Station every morning, always willing to wait, never in a hurry.
Viv was never curious about those ranchers but she is curious about the girl. Letting herself feel this sort of interest is a novelty. She doesn’t trust it. She has rarely had the mental bandwidth to even consider what might be going on inside someone else’s head. She can’t be sure the girl is even real anymore. It is a week into this game when Viv finally forces herself to break the spell. She leaves her room to join Day on the metal lip of the tailgate. When she gets to the parking lot, she is so jiggered up by her own movement through space, so distracted by the damp air on the hairs of her arm that her body goes rigid. She can’t move again until Day reaches out and lifts her hand from her side, prying open her clenched fist and wrapping her fingers around the metal mug. Day keeps her hand there on top of Viv’s letting the pressure of her fingers trigger Viv’s grip.
Day watches Viv take a sip of the coffee. She turns her gaze on Viv’s car and back on Viv, one eyebrow raised. Viv talks into her cup.
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
“Thought you loved that desert of yours. Thought you’d be long gone by now.”
But Viv has known all along that getting unstuck from this moldy, clear-cut of a city is doubtful.
Still they meet up night after night. Day pieces most of it together; Viv’s issues, something about energy circuits, above-ground transmission wires, and electric busses. Some nights they return to stories about Day’s girlfriend, Day’s family place out on the Palouse, and the fact she is no longer welcome there. They talk about Dale and the café near the desert. Day draws a sketch of a horse with her finger in the dust on the hood of Viv’s car. Viv licks her own finger and traces a jagged ridge of mountains behind the animal.
One night, Day retrieves a road map from her truck and shows Viv where she comes from, a town so far east in Washington it might as well be in Idaho. The ease of it, the map travel, shocks Viv. She feels the rare fissure of what is possible. She asks Day, “You working tomorrow?”
“Nope, I’m off.”
They make a plan to meet at the county building at 10 a.m.
Viv never makes it out of her room. She gums instant oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She is sure she will never sleep again or maybe she will never wake up; she can’t tell the difference. She’s been upping her meds again, but it doesn’t seem to help. Day and the county building are out of reach. Her hands shake like aspen, and men are crows, and crows are starlings, and starlings are snakes.
The low roar of Day’s vacuum at 2 a.m. is fucking music to her ears. Less than an hour later Viv is standing in her sweat pants and oversized coat by the rear of the truck, drinking coffee and eating a chicken burrito from Taco Time. The rush of protein and fat make Viv feel strong like her old two-breasted self.
“Hold on. I got something for you.”
“You brought food, Day. Don’t need anything else—too damn beholden.”
“Shut up, Rapunzel. Give me a sec.”
Day goes around to the cab and takes out a long cardboard tube and a stack of paper from behind the seats and pulls her Maglite out of the glove box. She props the flashlight so it makes a puddle of yellow light across the metal grooves in the bed of the truck. She lays out sheet after sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch copy paper on the metal. She pieces them together like a puzzle, connecting all the crisscrossed lines and numbers, lining them up straight and true from sheet to sheet. She had waited for Viv for an hour and then went into the county building without her. She made copies of the city’s master transit map and Seattle City Light plans. She researched it all, quadrant by quadrant, placed every map, chart and drawing on the glass-topped Xerox machine. Now, neither woman speaks as the entire electrical grid of downtown Seattle materializes before their eyes.
Day uses bits of scotch tape to link the fragmented quadrants. She extracts a black sharpie from her back pocket and makes a careful X at the corner of 9th and Terry, labeling it with a big cursive “V” for Vivian. They study the papers. Viv smells Day’s sweet beany breath and listens to the distant rumble of the #3 bus heading down the hill under the freeway and past the jail, its hydraulic brakes making a hollow whooshing sound. Beads of sweat are shimmering above Day’s lip.
Day traces Viv’s escape route with her fingertip and then applies more scotch tape, reinforcing each connection, paper to paper. She rolls the whole mess into a long cylinder, sliding it into the cardboard tube and shoving it toward Viv.
But Viv’s arms are clamped across her chest and before she can reach for it, the tube falls to the ground and rolls under the truck. Day scrambles around on the pavement and is finally able to fish it out with a broken metal rod she grabs from the truck bed. The screech of the metal on metal and the clanging about on the ground is too much for Viv. She can feel the whole city block vibrate. She has read about the massive train-sized drill boring its way under the liquid mud and sand below Puget Sound. She is sure it has finally opened up some unclosable chasm. She slumps to the ground and presses her palms tight on either side of her head. She doesn’t want to listen to the words spewing from her own mouth.
Day crouches down close to her.
“Your hair’s so long.”
Day keeps on talking some nonsense, layer after layer of muffling sound, until Viv’s hands fall limp in her lap and Day is able to place the map in them. Day helps Viv stand up, and Viv clutches the cardboard tube against the flat of her chest.
The next time she leaves, it is a total cock-up. Despite the charted route, despite the way Mount Rainier rises straight up out of the pavement where 9th Avenue intersects with Yesler. It looks like she could gun the engine and drive straight up onto the glacier. But the car stalls out on the freeway ramp, and when rush hour starts, she is still there. Honking horns can’t drown them out.
Cock up, cock up, cock of the hill.
Downhill, hill down, cock, cunt, kill.
The bike cops circle the Nova. Viv can’t unlock the door, unroll the window, explain herself. She gets her head together enough to put the car in neutral and pop it into gear. The flock of black-clad cops perch upright on their mountain bikes following her around the block, uphill, to the shelter.
Later that night, Day’s voice is soft and clear through the door.
“You know it’s December, Viv.”
Viv nods silently, locked in her room like she understands, like Day’s words mean something she can make sense of. Her eyes are wide open in the small white room. All she can see is snow falling, filling up all the cracks in the Alvord, forming a safe crust she could walk on.
Hillary Behrman is a writer and social justice advocate living in Seattle, Washington. Her short story “Muskeg” was awarded the 2020 Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and published in The Madison Review. Her story “Rocks” was recognized in Glimmer Train’s 2018 Top 25 Very Short Fiction Contest and appears in the High Desert Journal. She is a 2021 graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program.
