The Great Offshore Grounds Read online

  Cheyenne shook her head. “It wasn’t. It was beautiful. I just fucked it up.”

  Livy squinted at the clock over the steering wheel. It was 4:30 a.m.

  Cheyenne leaned between the seats. “You know, I was thinking,” she said, “as long as we’re driving this far we should take a more scenic route, slow down a little.”

  “It’s going to take me months of overtime to recoup these five days.”

  Cheyenne pulled two crumpled twenties out of her back pocket. “This is all I have left after what I gave you for the trip. Take it.” She slapped it onto the dash. “I don’t say I’m broke. Last week I had nothing and I still took you to dinner.”

  “On the fifty dollars you borrowed from me.”

  “That makes me twice as generous.”

  Livy became a dot in a sea of rage. Then an idea came. “If we take an extra day,” she said slowly, “you find another place to live as soon as we’re back. No excuses. And you pay me back from your first check.”

  “Deal,” said Cheyenne.

  Noticing a faint line of rose blue on the horizon, Livy pointed. Within seconds, the line turned into a pale orange plane of light that radiated over the low tawny scrub brush now gilt with frost and dew.

  “You’ll be able to hitchhike in a few minutes,” said Livy.

  Cheyenne grabbed Livy’s fisherman’s cap and pulled it down over her ears, waiting.

  “Should I feel bad that Essex can’t drive a cab anymore?” she asked.

  “No, he was a terrible cabbie.”

  Cheyenne took the twenties off the dashboard and got out. Two hours later she returned with a trucker and a five-gallon plastic can of gas. By midmorning they were well into Montana.

  * * *

  —

  A few hours past Missoula the land changed again, flattening and turning brown, scoured by wind. They crossed the Yellowstone River, then followed it as it ran, north by northeast, fed by the Yellowstone Lake. It had poured over the falls and through the Black Canyon before they ever knew it. Past Billings the Yellowstone joined the Bighorn, which carried with it the Little Bighorn and the Tongue. As they drove they saw signs for reenactments. Custer. Stand with or against! Your choice. And they heard talk in the rest area of a magnificent new state-of-the-art jail created from nothing but investor money and high-interest loans.

  Then they came to the great Powder River, which was fed by the Little Powder, as well as oil from pipeline breaks, Red Cloud’s War, and benzene as it joined the Yellowstone. The Yellowstone, which already had inherited so much, the Bighorn and the Wind and the Tongue, as it flowed toward the Missouri River, which had no choice but to inherit the watershed as it drained toward the Mississippi, that unstoppable force. And maybe there just is no way out of history. No matter how much you want to come from a different story, you can’t.

  They traveled from high elevations and scrubland to prairie to chain stores, and settled into the doldrums of flat grass, sunburnt and feral, another unwelcome thing upon the land. After Miles City, they dropped south through the hunting grounds of the Crow people. In the periphery, Livy saw a new future, free again. Cheyenne saw a woman with a changing face. Now this. Now that. The mother narcotic. Maybe a different past would mean a different future. Maybe there was another history to claim. Passing through the Black Hills, north of Mount Rushmore and Pine Ridge, south of the Bakken Formation and Standing Rock, they drove the Badlands.

  East of the coal beds, west of the Black Hills, they passed a rash of square and Sputnik-era buildings, each half as tall as the flagpoles in front of them. An elementary school, a middle school, a high school. Decorated with signs leading to bomb shelters, furnished with government-issue desks made of moon shots, school bells cocked like a gun for lunch periods and air raids, they passed white chalky pits of bentonite clay terraformed by bulldozers missing only the great hand of a giant three-year-old descending from the heavens. There were ripples in the land; the sun was a patina on the highway. Tangled spaghetti creeks glinted and irrigated farms lined one beside another like jade mah-jongg tiles. Livy looked through the windshield as she drove at the grassland steppe on either side of the road.

  They could hear the subsonic songs of red rock and scrub bush. In an unsparing white flash of midday light, they drove through miles of the cash crop ethanol, a pentimento of buffalo skins behind it, untanned and rotting in piles on the prairie; they, too, were shadows. Drive to the sea here; drive to the sea there. Raise a great army. Nantucket to the Arctic to Panama—growing in all directions like a deep breath.

  They drove across the Great American Desert. An empty and lifeless wasteland, it stretched from the Midwest to the Rockies and served as an initiation for pioneers and speculators seeking the spoils of the west. Only the desert was not lifeless and not empty. It was not the Kalahari or the Gobi but a prairie overrun with life, a prairie covering a great aquifer, from which grain, future dust bowls, and the Monroe Doctrine would be drawn. Wagons brought whale oil to new towns. Oil for light and lubrication. Bones for corsets and collar stays. Ivory for the keys of Midwest parlor pianos. Girls stretched their hands wide over the white keys. Dreaming of marriage, future typists, future salaried masses, secretaries. Tapping out notes, imagining, still, a world made of whale teeth and ribcages, brown fat and ambergris.

  Was this where it had all gone wrong? Livy saw a man alone in the arid expanse. Flickering in and out of existence, preening in an Elizabethan ruff with a fistful of charters, bent down to check the soil for tobacco. Finding it too dry to plant, he strode forth, oscillating over the steppe, to the gold and salt and light rumored to be in the hills to the west. She watched him vanish into a pinprick in the rearview mirror, a small white star degenerating toward collapse.

  9 Draft Horse

  ESSEX MET JARED FOR LUNCH. Thirty minutes at the diner and their table was a carnage of torn sugar packets and empty cream decanters. The waitress had stopped refilling their coffees. Jared pulled apart the second half of his grilled cheese sandwich and dipped it in ketchup. He began to eat, his bony face exposing his state-funded teeth chinked with mercury amalgam.

  “Is an army of cabbies after you now?” Jared asked, swabbing the last of his crust.

  “No, I just can’t ever drive again.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Probably landscape. Stand by the freeway and get day-labor gigs.”

  “You ever done that?” asked Jared.

  “Yeah, it sucks. Either you get picked up because you’re white so they can bro down with you on guns and immigrants or you don’t get picked up because you’re white and they’re afraid you won’t work hard enough for shitty pay.”

  “You should make a sign that says ‘It’s okay to fuck me over.’ ”

  Essex laughed. “I thought that’s what the look on my face said.”

  Jared squinted. “No, it says ‘I’m starring in day-labor porn.’ ”

  Essex tossed an orange skin onto Jared’s plate.

  “Enlist,” said Jared. “You have no money. Soon you’ll have nowhere to live and you’re obviously out of ideas.”

  “Cheyenne will pay me back,” said Essex.

  “Cheyenne never pays anyone back. Especially not you.”

  “She would if I needed it.” He smiled. “Maybe.”

  Jared laughed. Essex leaned back in his chair.

  “There really should be day-labor porn,” said Essex. “Truck boy! By the yard-waste bags, yes, you! Find me my fluffer!”

  Jared stared at his cleaned plate. “Come with me to the recruiter,” he said. “You don’t have shit going on. Tell me you don’t want something to change. Tell me you don’t want to be different.”

  Over Jared’s shoulder by the entrance was a glass box with the silver claw. A seven-year-old was trying to navigate the metal arm over the stuffed animals and getting frustra
ted. Even from where he sat, Essex could see stains on the napless fabric of the animal the boy wanted. The boy lowered the claw and snagged a small tiger by the neck, which dangled and dropped. Essex felt an overwhelming urge to go over, break the glass box, and get the tiger. Strike a blow against the machine. Everybody gets a stuffed animal. The boy gets two for his anguish. Physical strength should be good for something. But then what would happen? He would be in jail or entangled in the mental health system bound to some poor caseworker who didn’t need him any more than Essex needed a caseworker. That’s the problem with critical thinking. It always ends in a big nowhere.

  “So you sign up and you’re gone,” said Essex. “When? The next day? A week?”

  “I wish it was like that. There’s a bunch of stuff they make you do first.”

  Essex picked up a fork then set it down. “I’ll go,” he said.

  Jared laughed. “You’re kidding.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t think you’d say yes.”

  “I’d join about anything right now.”

  The waitress dropped the ticket. She’d kissed the back, leaving a lipstick print, and drawn a little heart next to the total. Essex flipped the ticket between his fingers with a snap so Jared could see the lip print.

  “Here’s somebody who should enlist,” he said.

  They started to get up and realized they were blocked in by an old woman struggling with her walker. The woman inched forward in such incremental motions it seemed for a second Essex was observing a problem of scale and not speed. She’d been to the beauty parlor but slept since and the back of her hair was pressed flat, curls awry on one side of her head, her white powdered skin with its lacelike neural net of fine lines, intersections, all down along her arms, age spots, hematomas, suns and galaxies. Essex realized she was nearly blind. When she was a few feet away she halted, slowly turning her head. Her filmy cataract eyes, glazed and blue, fixed on Essex.

  “Honey, I thought you were dead,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re not.”

  She came toward him, a tanker drifting into port, but then saw that he was someone else and began to shake. Because she was not a tanker. She was a dry leaf weathering a gentle breeze as if it were a harsh wind, holding with everything fast to the tree.

  10 Wolf Spider

  THE MORNING after the girls left for Boston, Kirsten stalked the living room in her cornflower slip, her hair pinned into a knot by a chopstick. Finally she sat back down at the kitchen table.

  Kirsten looked at the envelope addressed to Ann on the counter. The second letter. The demonic chrysalis. The wolf spider. It wasn’t worth writing again. She had expected Ann to be angry at Cyril for violating their agreement, but she wasn’t. Instead her responses were flippant. The girls’ karma is their own. If they’re meant to find me they will. That was it. If they’re meant to find me they will? For the first time ever Kirsten had come down hard against karma. Fuck karma, Ann. We had a deal. She’d heard nothing more.

  What did she know about Ann anyway? Even if she’d wanted to tell them. She knew Ann was still a Buddhist but not what kind. She knew Ann traveled extensively but not how. Perhaps she had married well or come into money. It was also possible that cut away from children and the need to shell out money for a two-bedroom apartment for twenty years, Ann had floated upward into the realm of homeownership and 401(k)s, health care and cars with airbags.

  Kirsten looked back at her laptop where several windows were open. All health-care plans, none of them worth a shit, but she was tired of getting bounced on and off of Medicaid every time assholes in the legislature decided to redefine poor. Normally she could weather the tides of eligibility, but not this time. Something was wrong and she didn’t know what. Her stomach hurt. Her appetite flagged. She’d gone for her annual at the women’s clinic and everything seemed fine. But she knew her body well enough to feel a change. She went to the tarot cards and did a few readings. She got the Lovers and the Star and the Universe—who doesn’t want that in their life? She clicked through the benefits on each plan. Any preexisting conditions? Oh I don’t know, how about capitalism?

  So here she was. Wide awake in the blazing daytime, having scrolled through online postings, and now sitting with Nickel ads flayed to the classifieds, looking for a job.

  You can’t just call anymore. That’s a flag. You can’t ask a reasonable question like what shift or how much an hour. That’s a flag. You can’t even walk in and fill out an application. Everyone wants a résumé. Whore out your personal charm just to wash dishes.

  “A flexible team player with experience and a positive attitude wanting to move ahead.”

  She annotated in her mind.

  Flexible. No boundaries, no kids.

  Experienced. Needs no training.

  Positive attitude. Obsequious yet entertaining.

  Wants to move ahead. In responsibility but not pay.

  For years Kirsten had made her own deal with the government. I fill out paperwork, you give me money to live on. It was an honest paycheck in her opinion, a reallocation of federal funds to support the work they should be doing and weren’t. How many nights had she spent on the suicide hotline talking someone off the ledge? The number of times she’d opened for the early shift at the domestic violence center. Every night she showed up reliably alive. Not dulled by meaningless jobs, she met the messed-up world intact and offered it an all-hours humanity. The government had gotten more than its money’s worth. They’re fucking lucky I only charge them food stamps and $850 a month.

  But none of it looked real on paper. She closed the Nickel ads. If you were over twenty-five and looking for a job, everyone expected a pageant of humiliation and a good story. Are you a recovering addict? Are you married to a bride hoarder? Are you a homemaker new to the market with an autistic son or a husband with cancer? Tell me. No, tell me. What exactly is your excuse for being fifty-two and broke?

  It’s not like she didn’t know how to weather the opinions of others. A mom of two toddlers at twenty, living off food stamps, she was used to the scouring glance. In the DSHS office while the girls crawled on the floor then ran wild over the seats, then squirmed, and fought, and yanked hanks of hair out of each other’s heads. If she ignored it, she got told off for not disciplining them. If she yelled at them, she got told she was abusive. And both girls were hard in their own way. Cheyenne was a danger to herself in public. Livy was a danger to herself in private. She was unreadable when you most needed to read her, whereas Cheyenne would tell you point-blank every shitty thought she had about you. But Cheyenne had a deep sense of wonder. She could see herself in the stories Kirsten told. She was mythic by nature. Or had been. Kirsten couldn’t seem to get anything out of her that way anymore. And there weren’t any federal aid programs for that. Hello, ma’am, yes. Can you tell me which form I should fill out for a failure of faith in the universe? It would be pages for sure. How long has it been since you last had faith in the Universe? Have you tried in the past week?

  * * *

  —

  The parking garage that hired Kirsten charged her $35 for the shirt they gave her and told her they’d dock her if she didn’t wear it. It would come out of her first paycheck, which would come after her third week of work. But none of the uniform shirts they had fit Kirsten—men in Indonesia not having breasts—so she had to settle for one that came down to her thighs. They suggested she buy two.

  On her first day she put it on in the bathroom. It was plastic and creased like a Halloween costume. When she came back to the office, her supervisor showed her how to fill out the time card and gave her a no-solicitation policy to sign. He rented her a flashlight and handed her a patch.

  “Make sure you sew it on right here,” he said, patting the meat of his upper arm. “Otherwise it looks fake.”

  Fake like we’re not really cops? Fake like yo
ur grievance process? She flipped through the employee manual. It would take three months to clear the probationary period and get health-care coverage. Then most of her check would go to covering the premium, but it was better than bouncing on and off of Medicaid every time the qualifications changed. And down the line—her new employer assured her—it was a career. She wondered if they believed that.

  Leaving the office, Kirsten thought of her daughters.

  You don’t like your myth? Well I don’t like the one I’m in either.

  Her stomach started to hurt. The bowl of oatmeal she’d made for breakfast was still full. She scraped it into the trash. It would take three months to get on the company’s health plan, but once she was on, she would get all the tests. Between now and then, it was best not to have a record of stomach complaints. Not until she was off probation.

  11 The Locust

  THE STORM came up from Nebraska. When the high winds began, they had to stop to wait it out. Tornados touched down and lifted. Mad ballerinas, storm goddesses, they danced across flatlands and floodplains. When the winds died, they drove again, racing power outages and wild skies. They turned north and talked less. Neither sister had seen the rust belt but it was apparent that a giant metal locust had crawled across this part of the country, leaving behind its discarded shells in the form of smelters, bridges, ironworks. They drove along the Great Lakes where tall ships were reenacting a famous battle, their sails flying, circled by helicopters from cable channels. They, too, were after a different history.

  “I want something hot to eat,” said Cheyenne. “There’s got to be some restaurant bar around here with cheap food.”

  Cheyenne saw a motel with a medieval turret and a sign that read HAPPY HOUR.

  “There,” she said, “turn there.”

  The bar was red leather and the faces were pink. A TV was on and video poker games were talking to themselves. Bread bowls of clam chowder were the special of the day. Livy ordered one to split. To go.