Copyright Deviant Art
I met him on the road to the California coast (SR 46) at the crossroad where James Dean died. There’s a fudge and sandwich shop there now, highlighted by a huge cutout of young James Dean dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and a black leather jacket, dead but still around to tip his head to you as you pass by the spot he never got past. It’s part of a long boring stretch of highway that rolls out of Bakersfield past oil rigs and olive orchards and through towns so flat and featureless that it hurts your heart to drive through them. There is no way there's any kind of life worth living in these concrete hamlets. I shot past dusty acreage, fast food restaurants, and small houses where itinerant workers who meet and get pregnant before graduating from high school bunk up with their immediate families because no one makes enough money or has enough education or imagination to move away. It's the heartland of California farming. Fruit stalls manned by fat girls hunch in between stands of tall eucalyptus trees and signs that bitch about California withholding water from its big farming conglomerates in a drought decade. It’s also Hee Haw country, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard territory, land of the honky-tonk, rock and roll bands. Songs about cowboys, arrogant dusky figures racing on horseback across empty landscapes towards nothing are born in this part of the state. I drive the route every February and have done so since my first husband and made this trip from L.A. with the dogs to celebrate our anniversary at a hotel set on a cliff just down the road from San Simeon.
Some of the trips were deeply sad. My husband was depressed and angry on our last trip together and I was just lost and didn’t know how to save a marriage that wouldn’t last, but we liked the drive. The landscape is especially pretty once you pass the cities and head into the winding roads that skirt the ranches, vineyards, and the Pacific coast.
This lonesome trip was just for me and my dog, a middle-aged Staffordshire named Aran. Once again, I was running from grief and wondering who the hell I was. The shop underneath the James Dean display that sells fudge, sandwiches, peanut brittle, and bags of nuts, and peanut brittle, is a flat white warehouse. No color or fancy displays, just rows and rows of bagged nuts, dried fruit, and handmade candy. If you make it all the way to the back, there’s a candy counter where you can pick out chocolates and custom order sandwiches. I usually don’t stop there because there’s nothing there I need by the time I get to this famous corner where someone clipped the sports car and ended the life of a Hollywood legend, but I stopped tonight. It’s a long dark stretch of road that links Bakersfield, Paso Robles and the coast. And once you hit the seaside you are still an hour from the hotel that encourages pet owners to bring their dogs.
I usually take a deep breath once I hit the Bakersfield stretch and play the kind of music neither of my last two husbands could stand. I drive past the rows of trees and sandy grey expanses, past the prison, crossing the distance as quickly and carefully as I can aware that other drivers are being as careless as I am as I buzz along dark often misty paths and take sharpish turns too fast while listening to songs I've been hearing since I was a teenager. I was a melodramatic kid, and I haven't changed much as I've aged; only now I can see death coming for me for real.
I’d stopped at the store tonight because I was suddenly unbearably lonely and wanted to stand in the light and talk to someone. A conversation with the clerk while I bought a bag of almonds and dried apricots would help.
I had parked in a dark spot, diagonally across several parking spots, as if I was in a hurry or as if I’d been chased into the light, so I didn’t see him properly until I’d stepped away from the store lights. He was leaning against the passenger door of my Xterra and watching me, appearing as he had in the seventies at the height of the band’s prominence. They had just scored with the release of a new album that moved them into forever status. Miles Campbell the band’s front man, long haired, young, energized, and comfortable in his skin, the way you get when you are sure of who you are. Of course, he couldn’t have been who he appeared to be because Miles was dead. Hought Schmitt, Mile’s good friend and the band’s co-founder made the announcement. Miles had died a week after my sister, a fact I wouldn’t have known about either, except a friend had decided I should know despite my parent’s objections.
I was driving down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles when I heard about his death on the radio. He’d been ill for a long time. I hadn’t thought about the band for a while, although I’d owned all of their albums over the years.
He stood on the passenger side of the car, facing me, leaning against it, and thumbing a beat nervously on the top of my car as if we had already agreed that I’d let him in.
“Hey,” he said, smiling as if he’d been waiting for me because we were old traveling buddies. “Open up.”
“I’m not giving you a ride,” I said, knowing I would. I’d stopped walking because I could feel the tug of free will being siphoned away in his presence. Standing still was me trying to pull back from the powerful tug of a dead man’s will.
He tapped the top of the car with his fingertips, a little drum roll. “Don’t waste our time; open up.”
He looked up at the sky as if he was checking the time. “We gotta roll.”
I unlocked the car. He was already strapping on his seatbelt before I had settled in myself. He put a hand back and petted Aran, who settled down after she was satisfied that he wasn’t a threat. I moved slowly because my mind was being blown, and even all the easy tasks, like sitting down, closing the door, turning the key, etc., seemed like complex lessons I’d yet to master. The music started up instantly. I’d moved onto Prince’s Greatest Hits by this point in my drive. Miles didn’t seem to mind.
“Great guitar,” he said, tapping the dash because I’d frozen in place and just stared at him. “You okay to drive?” he asked, “Because it doesn’t matter to me if we crash.” And he grinned. I looked up at the James Dean cutout to my left and didn’t think the joke was funny, but it got me moving. I started to toss the food into the back seat, but he stopped me and opened the bags while I turned the car around and executed a left back onto the highway that would soon be cutting into wine country and lightless roads. A low ground fog had settled in, so I put on the brights and my driving spectacles.
He started talking, and for a while, I just listened. I remembered that he’d come from Detroit and had a reputation as a chatty guy. He spoke about his past as if we were friends and he was just running through old stories about people we’d known, people I’d only learned about by reading the rock and roll gossip magazines and watching MTV.
“Me and Hought were sitting at the bar, and she walked in with a crowd, and they took over a table, and before we could beat each other over there, it was clear she was taken. Man, was that a sad moment. That girl was gorgeous, but she also became a good friend, so…” he shrugged and stopped as the album finished. He took it out and replaced it with Tom Petty.
“You’re dead,” I finally blurted out.
He shrugged. “Yeah, couldn’t be helped.”
“So, what do you want from me?” It was a damn weird moment, but he wasn’t there to hurt me, and I had the feeling he wouldn’t be with me long. I also realized that I needed the company. He seemed to need to tell me his stories, and he went on and on. Eventually, I joined the conversation. We talked about old friends, the past, music, about life and death, and about how hard it was to be sick. He’d been battling some chronic bullshit and had died because the medication he’d been taking to combat the pain had eventually killed him.
"Shitty trade off," I said.
He nodded. “But without the medication, I couldn't play. I couldn't perform, and that was not happening. And you know, I thought it would never come to that. You battle your way to success, and it's such a fucking hard road that when you finally win, you think it means you can beat anything."
"I rock climb," I said. "I have friends who have fallen on routes they've climbed a bunch of times because even though you're not dumb, once you climb a route successfully more than once, you imagine that the rules of gravity don't apply as they once did because you've beaten it so many times. You begin to believe that the rules of falling have changed for you."
"And you get careless," he said.
I nodded.
"I don't know," he said. "We all knew I was ill, but I don't think anyone was ready for how fast it went from bad to terrible. I died before most of my friends even knew I'd been hospitalized."
"I read that they put you into a coma to try to save you."
"Yeah," he paused. Lights from an oncoming car washed over us just before the driver flicked his high beams to low and buzzed by. "I have things I still need to say and people who need to hear them," he said. "I wasn't always an easy guy. I had a temper, and I knew the very wrong thing to say that could really sting. The people who knew and loved me knew that, but there's things that stick with me now, and I need to take them back before it's really all over."
I looked at him. He seemed very real and, again, very young. He was younger than me and had to have been at least twenty years older when he died. We were in the Tehachapi Mountains by then; views of the sky and the hilly expanses were whittled down by passages winding through low rounded hillsides. When we hit dark spots in the road, he seemed to dimly glow around the edges, and I felt slightly nauseous the way you do when you’re standing at the edge of a high drop, and something in you says, “Jump.” Even though you never would. He wasn’t there to hurt me, but he didn’t belong on planet earth anymore.
As if he could hear my thoughts, he made a "c'est la vie" gesture with his hand. "Don't I know it," he replied to my unspoken ideas. I thought of my sister then. The idea came to me as if he had placed it into my head.
"How'd she die?" he asked.
"Overdosed a month ago," I said.
"Were you close?"
"No." The car automatically shifted gears as we headed uphill. I pressed down on the accelerator to keep our speed up, and as the car fishtailed slightly, I was reminded that the road was wet. Aran stirred in the back seat. A dead rock star in the front seat wasn't bothering her any. She raised her head, checked us out, sighed, and went back to sleep. "My sister and I grew up together, had the same parents, and shared some things, but no. Except for my grandfather there’s always been a semi-permeable wall between me and my family. I hadn't heard from her for twenty years until she got sober and sent an email, “I’m sorry. I was an addict. Blah, blah, blah.”
“What’d you say back?”
“I said it didn’t matter anymore and wished her well. I didn’t need an apology. Neither of us are...were easy people, but I didn’t want to get re-enmeshed in all the old family bullshit.”
We were driving through an oak grove now. I was grateful for the company of the trees that grounded me somehow because this was just some weird shit.
“Sometimes the relationship is just dead no matter what,” he replied. A stream of moonlight crossed his face as we crested a hill. He looked normal. I wondered if I’d seen that glowing shit for real or was just tired. Petty was singing about Mulholland Drive and the San Fernando Valley, provoking memories that made me suddenly incredibly sad. As if he knew that, my famous passenger started talking again. He was an accomplished storyteller. He’d have been a hit with the ladies when he was alive.
The drive between the James Dean intersection and Paso Robles where you turn onto the 101 is about two hours long. The ride seemed both longer and shorter that night. In that time, we shared whole lifetimes before I finally saw the twinkle of streetlights as we closed in on the highway overpass that would tip us into the city.
He tapped me on the shoulder. “Pull over,” he ordered.
I obeyed and turned into an auto parts store parking lot.
“Write this down,” he said.
I pulled a pen from the center console and a pad from the back seat. He dictated the information I needed to deliver and the names, phone numbers, and addresses of people I needed to contact. He spoke quickly and urgently and kept looking behind us as if something was after him. He wasn’t frightened as much as he was hurried, as if time was up. I wrote it all down in the dark and prayed that I would be able to read my handwriting.
“That’s it,” he finally said to me and relaxed back into the seat. “Just get,” he pointed at the pad, “that stuff done.”
Then a car of twenty-somethings came into view. It pulled into the lot next to us, its headlights washing through my Xterra. I looked over at the rock star and saw his skeleton through his skin. He smiled a grisly grin and vanished. The kids in the other car quickly checked a map and pulled out again. Then I broke into tears and cried for about 45 minutes. After that, I remembered the dog in the back seat and made her crawl up front so that I could hug her. We sat together for a while. I was not sure if I could be trusted to drive. We were still a couple hours out and wouldn’t get to the coast until 3 or 4 in the morning. I felt dizzy and weighted by the things the ghost wanted me to tell strangers. Time had moved ahead suddenly, very quickly. It was only had a few hours until sunrise.
I had an urgent need to call the first number on my list. I looked at the paper on which I’d written the numbers, found my phone and looked at the clock. It was fifteen minutes after one. Another car with its high beams on sped past me. I watched it crest the top of the hill and disappear. Then, I took a breath and dialed. The phone seemed to ring forever. I almost hung up after each bell. Then, just as I felt relieved of the responsibility because I’d done all I could, a woman answered.
"Angie?" I said, feeling like an interloper.
"Yes, who is this? This is a private number."
"Don't hang up. A friend of yours (no way I was going to say his name) gave me this number and told me to tell you this. Then I repeated what I was to say to her to keep her on the line and to make her hand the phone to her husband, another famous rock star who would have hung up on me as well except for the things I then said to him.
"Who are you?" he asked without much feeling.
"Mr.," I said. "I don't believe in God, and I don't believe in ghosts. Do you?"
"I, uh." He sighed. "I don't know," he said something to his wife, then answered my question. "I'm guessing there is a God, but I don't believe in ghosts."
“Then let me say what I’ve been told to say to you because I don’t believe in ghosts either. You should get a pen and paper too because some of this includes instructions for places you need to look for stuff and you need to tell people some things as well.”
“Who the hell is this?”
“Um, he said to say it really is me, Mr. Moses. Stop farting around and pay the man.” And then there was silence. “Man,” I said, feeling stupid and crazy. “You…it doesn’t matter…Kate. I’m Kate,” I said. “I teach at the community college in Bishop. Every year I take this drive out to the coast. I was born in Los Angeles and I miss the ocean, so every year I drive out during mid-semester break, and I bring my dog. We hang out at a hotel on the coast just past Cambria. I write, read, walk the dog, sit by the fire pit at night, and listen to the waves that remind me of when I was a kid and my grandparents would take us to the beach on weekends. I met a friend of yours tonight who I could not have possibly met. It’s not possible, but he drove with me for a while even though he died a month ago. He looked like he did in the seventies with that long hair and the sideburns.”
I had to stop because I was afraid I would cry again.
“Then he told me these things. He made me write them down and told me to tell you, and then he disappeared.”
The man didn’t hang up. In fact, he took my dictation, and as instructed, I told him who needed to hear what and what apologies and heartfelt explanations needed to be delivered to whom. Then I told him about a cache of documents, half written songs, I think, that were hidden in an old studio he and his friend once owned together. His wife broke into the conversation to tell him that she had found the lost necklace where I’d said it would be, where the dead rock star had told me it was hidden. I had everybody’s attention after that. Then I heard him tell her to go to some party without him.
It took a while, but when I was finally done, I felt as if I’d been emptied of all of my secrets. I was also freezing. I’d been sitting in the dark and the cold and had turned off the car, which was also why the dog was still in my lap. I automatically reached for the cup of coffee in my coffee holder that smelled like cigarette butts and was grossly cold.
“I really don’t believe in ghosts,” the man said. “But I think you think you’re telling me the truth.”
“It’ll cost you nothing to check it out. Your friend says it is stashed away for your eyes only,” I said.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
I looked at the road that still lay ahead. There were no lights in this part of the highway. The road stretched ahead into total darkness. “I’ll keep driving,” I said. “Me and the dog want to get to the hotel and see the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean and hear the waves roll up the beach the way they always have as long as I’ve been alive.”
“What hotel?” he asked.
“A Best Western in between Cambria and Hearst Castle. They like dogs.”
“Take care,” he said. “You sound wasted. Drive carefully.”
“You have my number now,” I said.
“I am on a landline,” he replied. “Let me write it down.”
"I think you might call back," I said. "But I promise that I won't call you. You should also know that she can be very snippy if you irritate her. She didn't suffer fools lightly."
"Who?"
"I'd rather not say in case I'm just fucking nuts. But I have a crazy idea about what happened tonight. Someone I should have known better died recently. If I'm right, you'll call me back. The reception is shitty out here, but I'll answer if you ring through. Good night Mr. Hought."
"Goodnight, Kate," he said. "Drive very carefully. Get there in one piece."
He didn't have to say that. I had another idea that I didn't share.
I suddenly was assailed by all kinds of superstitions. Maybe dead people can talk to people who are about to die. Maybe I'd been chosen because my time was up, and all I could do was complete one final crazy task before I died in a car crash. I also thought about Aran and I didn't want to take her out if this was the case, but, as I would not abandon her, I'd take our chances.
I got to the hotel just after sunrise. It used to be cowboy, or caballero country out here. Now most of the herds are gone but vast plots of land are still fenced off. During the day, horses and cattle scatter about and forage. In the early mornings and evenings, you can see silhouettes of riders traversing the low ridges, lone riders escaping the modern world in their own way. My mother and my paternal grandfather had been raised on ranches. Thus, both my sister and I had been required to learn how to ride, shovel hay and horseshit, and brush down horses. I like the smell of horseshit. It reminds me of my grandfather and all his kindnesses.
I checked in at the front desk, in a room decorated with paintings where the horses blended in with the trees. Before I left reception, out of habit, I poured another cup of stale coffee and plucked a glazed Danish from a tray. Then the dog and I sat on a bench outside by the smoldering coals of a warm fire pit until I'd finished breakfast. I fell asleep on top of the sheets. Sun on my face, heat, and the sound of Aran barking at passers-by woke me. Out of pity for others, I walked her and made her wait in the bathroom while I showered.
Afterward, I sat out on the patio and started to write. The night had left me in despair, as if time was running out. I felt if I didn't write down every word that had been spoken to me last night, I would stay crazy forever. I needed a purge. I wore out around dinnertime, ordered a sandwich and fries, and had them delivered to me at the hotel’s cliffside fire pits just above the beaches. The pits were built on a broad open space with woods on either side where horse trails lead through the trees to the beaches below. Since it was the middle of the week, I was able to find a fire I didn’t have to share. I brought a pillow for Aran and the four legal pads I'd filled out thus far. When the sandwich came, I couldn't eat. I stared into the fire instead, feeling like I was falling down a hole with no bottom. I spent the next day in the same way. Writing, walking, and ignoring my meals.
At the end of the second day, all the words suddenly went away. Exhausted, I was dozing in front of my fire when Hought arrived and handed me a large cup of coffee.
“Your sister said if you hadn’t changed, you took it strong, black, and without sugar and that you could never have enough.” He selected a folding chair, tossed a package to the ground, and popped the top off a beer bottle before he took his seat. Aran lay between us, with her butt close to the fire. Pit bulls love the heat. She lifted her head, decided our visitor was not a threat, and went back to sleep. The man put his hand down, like you do, without thinking if you like dogs, and scratched her head. Hought wasn’t old, but aging and age suited him well; the grey strands and the lines across his face made him look friendlier than he looked on the album covers.
"How is my dead sister?" I asked.
Shannon. Two years younger than me, sharp, bright, funny, stylish, and my enemy for most of my life. A memory of her clean lines, lean features, a slouching, striped cardigan, and stressed blue jeans exploded forth. The last time I saw her, she'd bleached her hair white and cropped it.
He took a big swig. "She's a pistol."
I laughed and remembered the scar on her chin when on a dare, she rode her bike off a home-made ramp and fell.
"She scared the fuck out of me,” he said. “I was sorting through the songs that I found in the bench at an old recording studio we'd used before anyone cared about who we were." He stopped speaking for several minutes, then he shook away his thoughts. "I heard her stir behind me and turned to see her sitting at my drum set. Goddamn." He shook his head.
"Did you cry afterward?" I asked, jumping to the end of his part of the story.
"She disappeared when the cleaning staff showed up. I cried like a baby for just under an hour.”
He shook his head again.
"Don't know how to explain it. I was horrified and heartbroken. Then I sat down and wrote for hours.”
He fell silent again.
I suspected he wasn't naturally effusive, and here we were, invading one another's privacy. We were too far from the cliff's edge, to see the waves, but we could hear them roil. The sound reminded me of scooping spawning grunion off wet sand with my sister and grandparents when she and I were very little.
Hought realized that he'd started to peel the label off his beer and stopped.
"Drove by that James Dean intersection on the way here,” he said. “I expected to see him dressed like Jett Rink.”
“Say what?”
“Jett is the last role he played. A cowboy who struck it rich on the oil fields in Texas and lost the girl and any sense of pride he had in himself.”
“I read that he was that messed up in real life,” I said remembering Dean’s last great scene in the film, staggering about an empty auditorium, a broken dreamer.
Hought jumped to another topic. “Miles and I had a difficult relationship, he said. “But it was a seminal one. We didn't spend a lot of time together in those last years, except for reunion tours, but I miss knowing he is alive somewhere in the world. We were a pair, one of us from a dusty bend in the road in Texas and another from Detroit. We met in California. He made fun of me because I hate horses and horseback riding and had never roped a cow."
“I never talk about my sister Shannon, and I haven’t cried like I did after Miles vanished for years,” I said. “The last time Shannon and I spoke, I said unprintable things. Things I couldn’t take back, and I missed the memorial. They spread her ashes on my grandfather’s ranch. We spent a lot of time there as kids. Mom and my paternal grandfather grew up on ranches. They shared more interests than I think either shared with their spouses, and Mom would take us out there as often as possible.”
“You don’t think of California as the wild west, generally,” Hought said.
“I am the child and grandchild of cowboys. The bar stools in our house have my grandfather’s brand burned into the seats. Tack, cowboy boots, and the smell of horse manure are my childhood memories. I loved my grandfather, and he loved having a kid who loved him. My dad hated his father, so a kid that loved him was a treat,” I said, anticipating the question. I remembered my grandfather standing slightly behind me, teaching me to fire a shotgun, skin a bird, gut a fish, and how to sit silently in a hide on cold, wet mornings. I remembered the smell of silence and how the ground rustled and crackled when we waded through the brush.
I tossed a log from the pile by the fire into the pit. “He also taught my sister and me to ride. I remembered being shown how to walk around a horse so as not to startle it and to feed it apples open handed, so you don’t lose fingers.”
As we talked, a girl riding a palomino crossed into the woods, melding into the darkness like a sprite, and I had a feeling I was the only one to see her.
Hought tipped his beer to me. “I’m still grappling with the idea of ghosts. But I do believe in a plan.” He spoke in a low settled tone that reminded me of my grandfather.
“God’s plan?”
He considered his answer. “Not everything works out, but events line up to make successes and failures, and you can backtrack and learn from history.”
Then as if he had just remembered, he reached for a pack of papers by his chair.
“I have stuff for you,” he said, handing it to me. “No messages for anyone else, but things she needed to explain, I guess.”
“Can it wait?” It had been an educated guess that a spiritual exchange of favors had been made between one old friend and an estranged sister. Fueled by exhaustion. My mind-bending experience with weirdness in the dark had fostered a narrative in my mind. I was happy and sorry that I’d been right when I’d guessed about her. “I’m tired and suddenly very hungry. Let’s eat.”
“We could do that. Also, you still have to tell me how you knew she would visit me.”
He dropped the package in the ground between us when I wouldn’t accept it.
“Are you staying here for long?” I asked, gesturing at the hotel behind us. The wind was picking up, and I could smell a storm coming. It would rain furiously for a few hours tonight, but the ground would be dry by morning.
“Staying for the night anyways,” he said. “It’s not a long drive from L.A., but I could sit and stare at the sea for a bit.”
“In answer to your question, I’ve read a million Tales from the Crypt comic books and horror novels which gives me a background in creepy logic,” I said. “But I think I know why a man I’d never known would come to me instead of his friend to say his final goodbyes. I think it has to do with highways,” I said. “Real and metaphorical, and I think there’s always an exchange in the universe. And I bet we can’t control our paths any better after death than we do while we are alive.”
“Yin and Yang?”
“Something like that. One soul on a track headed one way meeting another that was going somewhere else. They can’t change where they are headed, but they can exchange information. Pass notes as they head out.”
“Or up.”
“Hopefully,” I said. “But I also think that we never leave this world and that the dead and the living continue to live side by side without being available to each other.”
“Two shadow worlds living alongside each other,” he said, settling back into his chair and stretching his legs. The sunset was done and gone. We were sitting in the dark again. “I came because I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this who wouldn’t think I was nuts, and, I have this envelope your sister wanted hand delivered.”
I picked it up. There was no reason to think this would be good news. I almost tossed it into the fire.
As if he had read my mind, Hought touched my arm.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “Let’s not piss them off after all the trouble all four of us have been through.”
“I think I know what it is.”
“Open it up then. Miles's gift to me made a difference.”
It was unsealed. I stuck my hand inside and pulled out several documents, including a letter from an attorney whose services Shannon had paid for upfront. I sorted through letters, a photograph of my grandad on his ranch, a birth certificate, and an index card with the attorney's number.
"She says she was sorry," Hought said. "She says she's always known, and she kept quiet because she was jealous, because she was angry and didn't want to be cheated out of any inheritance, and out of loyalty to your parents.
“Loyalty to them and not me.” An anger that shaped most of my personality flared up, and I remembered how much I hated my family. "I'll be back in 20," I said. "I need to make a call."
"What's the food like here? I'll order while you’re gone."
"Room service is basic, but okay. My room is just up there," I nodded at a patio 100 yards back with an open sliding door. "When the sun drops, it gets icy. We can eat in my room. And you said that you sat down and wrote some stuff. I did too. I want to see what you wrote."
He nodded. "What do you want to eat?"
"Grilled cheese with onions and tomatoes, fries, a slice of chocolate cake, and a pot of coffee I said." Another memory sliced through me so powerfully that I felt like I was there. Shannon and I, riding our ponies into the hills with packed lunch pouches filled with bologna sandwiches, apples, cookies, and skim milk, on a day that ended with another of our fabulous fights. The papers in my hand explained some of that rage between sisters.
"See you then," Hought said, breaking me free of the dream as he punched numbers into his phone.
It took me 30 minutes to settle things with the attorney. I met the delivery guy as he was leaving. An immense tray was set up on the dining table. Hought was removing his plate from the array.
"Gonna tell me what was in the envelop?"
"Tell a total stranger?"
"We're in a weird place tonight." He cut into a piece of salmon.
"One of the papers was a birth certificate. The one I have says something different than the one you just gave me. It changes some things. It changes everything."
"Not who you thought you were?"
"I'm who I always thought I was. I just didn't know some of the particulars."
"Better to know," he said.
"I agree, but if I hated my family before now, I hate them freshly. This feels like Shannon making herself feel better more than it feels like her setting things right. I’m more lost than I ever was. Did Miles change anything for you with his big reveal?"
"There was some guilt after he died." Lightening flickering over the sea sent a beautiful tendril skyward. I wanted to cry again, and I realized how empty I felt.
Hought had to struggle to say his piece out loud. "He was ill for a while, and after a long while, even if it's someone you love, you can get callous when you should be compassionate…Jesus." He was staring outside.
It was still early enough in the year for the grass to be green and lush. It wouldn't last long in this place, but the way the grass bending in the wind was what I fixated on first when I looked out the window before I saw the others emerging from the woods where the girl and the horse had disappeared. It was a parade from the past; it was a parade of cowboys led by a big man who walked his horse out into the open. Thunder and lightning rumbled, flashed, and crashed outside as energy spilled free from a seam in the sky.
"A photograph came with the papers," I said, reaching for the envelope I'd set on a bedside stand. Without looking, I felt for it, pulled it out, and handed it to Hought. "I don't know why you're here," I said, "but I think I know why I am."
I showed him the picture, and he looked at it and then at one of the figures outside that stood with the rest. Leading the pack was a dusty, tall, white-haired cowboy in full regalia with a Band-Aid across his chin. I had no spit in my mouth, The scene shifted. The wind hurled sand across a dusty flatland surrounded by woods on either side. Soil whirled about my grandfather in a furious collective of dust devils that blasted across the landscape. I had to say it more than once before I could say it loud enough to be heard. "He was hunting a cougar and fell. The Band-Aid covers where he cut his chin."
“And now I know that he loved me because I was his daughter, not his grandchild.”
The whistling winds propelled tumbleweeds and faint whispers of a kind of summoning toward us. I could also hear my heartbeat hammering away.
“Do you believe in ghosts now?” I asked.
Hought nodded. “Must be a tear in the world this week. That, or you and I are due for in-house medical assistance.” He touched me. “Come on,” he said and headed for the window.
“Did she really not say anything else to you when you saw her?” I asked.
He turned to me and I saw that he had much more to say. “There’s a thing that happens after someone has died,” he said. “I think she told me because I would know the value of what she had to say. When someone you know dies, you immediately start to calculate what their life was worth.”
I looked beyond him and saw a whole array of people waiting. Their figures shifting but staying whole while Hought and I had this weird conversation.
“My mother claimed that my grandfather visited her the week he died. He knew he would die soon and told her so. He was just very ill and knew it,” I said. “I’ve been feeling faded lately but I don’t want to leave the dog behind. No one’ll love her like I do.”
I looked back at her. She was up and she saw the cowboys too. She was staring at them the way dogs do when a cat is just in view but way out of reach. I looked at Hought.
“I’ve had a hole in me since I was a child. It’s part of the architecture of who I am. It’s a piece of information I’m missing that has always kept me from feeling useful, or necessary. This information doesn’t fix anything but I don’t think it makes anything worse.”
“Is that why you called the attorney straight off?”
“Well, they have to pay.”
“As long as it doesn’t matter.” Hought sighed. “Miles and I were friends but we were enemies too. We didn’t back off easily. When the band died we couldn’t be in the same room with each other because we didn’t know how to back down even when we should have. He had to fix that. I hope I’ve learned it.”
“It doesn’t matter to me that my family lied to me,” I said.
“It seems like it does,” Hougth replied.
“How can you tell?” I said.
“I’m afraid you’re going to start breaking things,” he replied.
“I can’t breathe.” I put a hand to my chest. “I can’t breathe. I feel like I can’t breathe.”
“You are breathing.”
“It’s the lie. It’s thousands of lies. They will make you do what they want, turn you into less than you are when they lie. They protect themselves from their guilt when they lie. I need the truth. I need a place where I feel like I fit, where the hole inside me heals up.”
I looked outside and whether I was dreaming or not, the figures outlined by the moon’s glow, were still winnowing in the breeze and I felt a powerful urge to join them. “I saw this movie once. It had a scene where the cowboy rode his horse off a cliff rather than face his truth. My grandfather had cowboy outfits made for my sister and I. Mine was a turquoise and black shirt, with pearl snaps, black pants, black cowboy boots, and a black and turquoise hat.”
The scene before us took more solid form turning into a warm brown sandscape with tumbleweeds spreading out and overtaking the cliff that had once led to the sea.
“If I go home tomorrow,” I said. “If I go home at all, it will be back to a fight I’m not interested in.” I cracked the door open and the dog leaped from the bed and raced through it.
“Aran,” I screamed into the winds. She raced to the first figure and he bent down to scratch her. Without realizing it I was stepping through the door after her. Hought put his hand on my arm once more and stopped me.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked, dropping his hand. He wasn’t going to stop me.
I don’t remember taking those last steps but suddenly I could hear the crunch of the ground as my boots crossed the distance. I could feel a warm wind that brought the smell of pine and campfire with it. I took my cowboy hat off and tied my hair into a knot and forced the hat down to keep it intact. Then I reached my grandfather and he took my hand and he, and the dog and I headed off together and the world we left behind vanished in the wind.
Comments