Gertrude Press Prize Winner

There’s no easy way to get out of Nevada. Either you scratch through the badlands or climb over the mountains. My way was mountains. There was snow in the pass. Highway Patrol wouldn’t let me by without chains or four-wheel drive. On the shoulder, three coveralled men were ready to rent me chains for fifty plus a deposit. As I slowed, they went at my wagon like a NASCAR crew. The cute one with the wind-burned face and sun-bleached soul patch, tapped at my window. I rolled down. He said: “Cash or Visa only, doll.”

I gave him cash. His fingers were brown from rust. I heard the chains knuckling at my wheelwell. Someone said, “Jesus shit!”

Soul patch said, “You need a receipt?”

“For my deposit,” I reminded him.

He nodded and almost smiled, still counting ones. My tip jar take.

Snow fell like confetti, the sky the color of stainless steel.

My mother had said on the phone: He just kneeled down, Rainy. Like he was about to pray.

They’d been working the line, grading oranges, she said, and Dad’s collapse was nothing more than that: a sudden kneel. She worked across from him. Everybody thought this romantic. Until a few months ago he’d been a foreman in the groves. After his third faint, they put him on the line. It pissed me off, how he and Mom let it go on without checking.

Soul-patch handed me a damp slip of paper. Rusted fingerprints. He smiled. I wanted to lick his chapped lips.

“You do this all day?” I asked.

He renewed his smile: “You gonna tell me to quit?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

I thought of my live-in, Kai. He wanted me to quit gigging: Nobody does the road like that anymore, Rain. It’s cliché. I’d wanted him to say: You’re too good babe, you deserve more. The cliché was how we related. Whenever I needed him to be better than me, I could predict every wrong thing he’d say.

Soul-patch said, “Think about it. I’m saving lives, you know.”

I thought I heard him say, you don’t have to drive through snow.

So I said, “I don’t?”

He raised his snowy eyebrows at me.

Then I heard at last what he’d said and I felt my face grow hot.

I was twelve when we visited Donner Pass on our way to a week in Reno. The Donner family ate everything they could—harnesses, shoes, tree bark--before they started eating each other. As I lay by the motel pool that week while my parents played the slots and my brother watched cable, I thought of the Donners, and asked myself: Would you have done any better?

Soul-patch cleared his throat. I’d been staring.

“Sorry,” I said.

He seemed to shrug without shrugging.

Then I raised the window. Someone thumped my trunk. I got a final chain-fit, then rolled away, clanking. Glancing in my rearview, I saw nobody waving.

“He’s sleeping,” Mom said. “Don’t make a sound.”

She pecked me on the forehead. The screen door creaked as I edged past. Her porch was crowded with plants, plastic tacked over the screens. I wanted to explain why I was parked on the front lawn. She smelled of cinnamon and something else. Maybe beer.

“I’m not asleep,” Dad called.

He was lying in his recliner, the TV murmuring a few feet away.

I said, “You scared me, Dad.”

“Serves you right.”

He was smiling—or trying to. The left side of his face was frozen.

“Don’t get up,” I said.

“I’m not.”

I tried to kiss his cheek but he squirmed and I got his ear instead. He was wearing white wool socks, corduroy pants that were worn at the knees, and a gray sweatshirt that said in pink script, Get it now while it’s hot!

“You must be exhausted,” Mom said to me. “How long’d it take?”

“Not that long,” I lied.

“I saw there was snow in the pass.” Dad gestured to the TV. He was watching the weather channel.

“It’s February, Dad.”

“Smarty pants.” He tried another smile.

I realized I might not get used to the way his face looked. It was like staring at a cracked mirror.

“I’m about to make some pork chops,” Mom announced. “You want one or two?”

I turned to see if she was joking. I’d been a vegetarian for three years.

Mom was looking at me—enthused and hopeful--like I was her younger sister. Two years ago this would have infuriated me. “Sweetheart, she wants a salad.”

“We’ve got salad in a bag,” she offered. “And five kinds of dressing.”

“Thanks.” I sat on the battered ottoman next to Dad’s recliner. “So, what’s the latest?”

He turned down the TV with the remote. “Your mom’s learning to cook.”

Dad did all the cooking when we were growing up. Mom washed the dishes. He cleaned the bathroom. She did the laundry. That was their deal. “I’m not supposed to move,” he added.

Mom leaned away from the stove to show herself in the kitchen doorway. “He moves plenty.”

I heard the sizzling of meat. A moment later I smelled it.

Dad said, “You were gigging in Winnemucca?”

That’s Indian for ‘Where the fuck are we?’ Nancy, the bandleader, had joked.

“You need to give us your latest CD,” Mom said. Smoke poured from her pan.

“It’s just a club band,” I said.

“You don’t have a CD?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you play every night?” Dad asked.

“Shit.”

“Then quit,” he said.

“I did.”

“Really?” He looked startled. “I was only joking.”

Squinting through the smoke, Mom stabbed at the meat with a long fork. “Are you going to change jobs?”

“Drumming’s a hard business,” Dad said solemnly.

“Every job is hard business,” I said.

“You can always drum on the side.”

I looked at them, back and forth, as if to say, How many times have we been through this?

Then the smoke alarm went off.



“You quit your gig and go home and this is the first I hear?” Kai was complaining.

I was in my parents’ front yard, my cell to my ear. It was nine or ten and getting cold. Inside, Dad was sleeping on his recliner, the TV still on. Mom was sitting on the couch nearby, afraid to wake him. Or watching to see that he was breathing.

“I didn’t know I had to check with you every move I made,” I said.

In my head I heard Sting singing that old hit, I’ll be watching you. . . .

“I’m not allowed to worry?” Kai asked.

“I haven’t heard from you in a week!”

“Well, I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Fucking every babe who’d have me.”

“What?”

“Delivering phone books.”

“What?”

“Picking weeds in a chain gang.”

I slapped my phone shut. I hated it when Kai got that way.

In the distance I heard the turbines start up. They’d churn the air all night to keep the freeze off the oranges. In the old days, hands had to go into the fields to light the smudge pots. When small, I used to sing those words to myself: smudge pots smudge pots smudge pots smudge pots! My cell chirped. I was the only musician I knew who didn’t have a download on her phone.

“I’m an asshole,” Kai announced. “I don’t know why you still live with me.”

I heard him sigh. Behind him the TV blared. I recognized the music to Star-Maker! One of those reality shows. Kai and I called it Star Fucker. “Yes, you’re an asshole,” I said. “You know my Dad nearly died?”

“Nobody called me!” he croaked. Then: “Shit, Rain. How is he?”

“Half his face is frozen. It’s weird.”

“How long you gonna stay?”

“I don’t know.”

“You got money?”

“Do you?”

Kai was ABD in library science. He was always reading books, especially old ones. Sometimes he’d just open one and stick his nose in it and inhale deeply. His program director had given him a six-month extension to finish his dissertation, which was a year overdue. Lately I’d come to realize that it’d bug me if he didn’t finish. This made me secretly hate myself.

I told him I had enough to hold me a month or two.

“So you getting out of the music biz?” He could have been asking, So, it’s raining there?

“You got suggestions?”

“I would never.”

“Smart man.”

Then we were silent. Phone to my ear, I walked to the middle of the street. Exeter has the widest streets of any small town I’ve seen. There’s no explanation for it.

Kai said: “You know I’m fucked up when you’re not here.”

I listened to the TV behind him and the props motoring above the orchards. “Then you must be fucked up a lot.”

“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

This was the best he could do. Why did I want more?

“I’ll call you,” he promised.

“I know you will,” I said.

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