My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (18 page)

I leapt out of the car and saw a trucker in jeans and a T-shirt heading our way from the rig, swinging a flashlight. He called out, “You hit it?”

“Just missed it,” I said.

He reached me and Sarah, who’d climbed outside and was rubbing her eyes. “Well, you guys’re lucky,” the trucker said. He was perhaps in his late forties, rail thin with an enormous shaggy beard. He waved his flashlight down the road. “I hope they ain’t hurt too bad. Let’s go see.”

I trotted after him, pulse throbbing in my neck, Sarah just behind us. “What was it?” she peeped. “The animal.”

“Elk,” said the trucker.

The Chevy had apparently smashed into the thing dead on—its windshield was splintered into a thousand shards, and behind the wheel an old Native American man sat picking bits of glass from his face, blood spotted here and there, while in the passenger seat, a boy no older than twelve stared out at us in a daze. “I didn’t even see it happen,” he told us as we unclipped his seat belt and helped him out his side door. “I was sleeping. It was just, you know,
boom
.” His eyes were wide with amazement. He ducked his head around and said something I couldn’t understand to the old man in the driver’s seat and the old man glanced at him and nodded and said a few words back. “My grandpa’s okay,” the boy said. “He’s just upset about the car. He doesn’t have insurance.”

The trucker said to Sarah, “You got a phone? Stay here with these guys and call nine-one-one. They need a wrecker for sure, and maybe an ambulance.” Then he pointed his flashlight down the slope toward the dead elk and said to me, “Come on, we need to get that thing out of the road.”

We started down the shoulder, and in the moonlight I could make out the elk’s giant black carcass as we closed to thirty yards. A pair of headlights rose into sight a half mile back, and the trucker pulled back. “This is a bad place to be,” he said. “Wait a second.” He started frantically waving his flashlight at the oncoming car, but they kept hurtling toward us, only gaining speed, it seemed. At the last second, before crashing into the elk, they banked right, just clipping the thing, and roared directly toward us along the shoulder. I dashed down into the ditch while the trucker held his ground, swinging his light. The car whipped back into the right lane of the highway and went screaming past, nearly sideswiping the Chevy where Sarah stood talking into her phone, before shifting back to the left lane and disappearing out of sight up around a bend.

“Hey, get your ass back up here!” the trucker hollered to me.

“I don’t want to get hit, dude,” I called up.

“There’s rattlers down there,” he said. “For fuck’s sake!” His voice was ragged with urgency; easily convinced, I galloped back up beside him.

Another pair of headlights was drawing near. Again, the trucker waved his light wildly, but this time it was a big white van, not easily maneuverable, and they broadsided the elk without even slowing down. There was a deafening crunch and a boom as the van lifted half a foot into the air and came slamming back to the pavement. For a moment, the van skidded toward me and the trucker sideways. Then it struck the Chevy’s mangled, detached bumper, sending up a geyser of sparks, and spun off the far shoulder, coming to rest in the median.

People die all the time because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and standing on the side of the road while full-sized Dodge vans and Pontiac Chargers whirled this way and that was about as fucked up a place to be as I could imagine. I was scared shitless, my heart jangling in my chest like a dinner bell, but the trucker said with absolute calm, “Come on, no cars, let’s roll,” and in that moment I would’ve followed him through a firefight in Mogadishu rather than reveal myself to him as the coward I actually was.

We hurried down the middle of the highway and reached the huge, twisted hunk of metal that had been torn from the old man’s Chevy. The trucker grabbed one side and I grabbed the other and we lugged it to the shoulder and heaved it far into the rocky ditch, where it crashed like a cymbal and clattered on down the hillside, presumably waking hundreds of rattlesnakes. We continued down the road, and as we got close to the animal itself, the air was filled with an overpowering barnyard stench.

The van’s direct hit had sheared off the elk’s back half and spewed pulverized pieces across fifty feet of pavement like lava from a volcano. Slippery innards were splashed everywhere and the road was black with blood—the smell stung my eyes and I was careful not to breathe in through my nose. The trucker booted what looked like a hoof out of his way and raced over to the elk’s front half, and I came up fast behind him. Without hesitation, he took hold of one of the front legs; with sickened chills, but also a degree of morbid fascination, I took hold of the other. The animal was remarkably undamaged, at least its head and front legs and shoulders, and its leg felt like what I imagined an elk’s leg might feel like if the thing were alive—muscly, with a layer of coarse, fuzzy fur over an oily hide. Its eyes were open, its face stupid and blank. Me and the trucker both tugged as hard as we could, but the beast was heavy as a coffin filled with ice and only budged an inch. Then, from the darkness, two big guys materialized at our side, a father and son perhaps, who’d climbed from the destroyed white van. All four of us hauled together and the elk slowly moved with us across the asphalt, leaking guts and ribs from the seam in its belly. We kept straining backwards until we’d dragged the thing clear of the road and most of the way off the shoulder. “That’s good,” said the trucker. When we all let go of the legs, they kept their upward angle, which gave the elk the posed, oddly comical look of a man bowing to the floor and praising God.

The trucker laughed. “What a waste,” he said. “If I had my pickup, I’d take that meat home.” He looked at the father and son. “I feel bad, fellas. Another minute or two, we coulda had that thing outta your way. How’s your vehicle?”

“Done for,” said the burly dad, with matter-of-fact remorse.

“Damn.” The trucker rubbed his head with his forearm. “Well, let’s get the rest of it, too.”

For the next couple of minutes, the four of us roamed the empty lanes, hurling chunks of elk off the road. I picked up a bloody, knotted leg, roped with veins and tendons, and foul, squishy organs, including one so nasty-smelling that I gagged and almost threw up. It was easily the grisliest task I’d ever been a part of, but in a weird way I was grateful to be picking up elk parts, instead of the grislier task of talking things out with Sarah. Finally, a couple of semis lit into existence at the bottom of the hill, and the trucker said, “That’s probably good,” and the four of us stood off to the side as they howled through. It was strange that all the sharp danger had drained from the scene so quickly, and left only a few unremarkable patches of roadkill blood.

The trucker and the father ambled along the median and got on the ground with flashlights to look at the underside of the totaled van, while the beefy son pulled out a gallon jug of water, splashed it over my hands, and passed me an old raggedy towel to dry them. I asked if they needed a ride or any more help, but they said they were cool, they’d call a friend with a tow truck in Deming, so I headed up the road toward Sarah and the wrecked Chevy. As I got closer, I could see the moonlit silhouettes of her and the little boy and dimly make out their voices, talking and laughing, and I felt a sudden gaping sadness open up inside of me.

“What’s your boyfriend’s name?” the boy was saying to her.

From the darkness, Sarah replied with reverential softness, “His name is Davy.”

*

Ten minutes later, we were back in our car, ready to drive on. I’d pulled off my shirt covered in elk blood, tossed it to the rattlers, and thrown on a fresh one, but my hands and elbows were still smeared with blood and instantly the new shirt had streaks of its own. My shoes, bloody on the soles, smelled like pig slop; luckily, as I took a few sips of Dewar’s, its sweet pungency helped cancel out the odor.

I started the Ford, peered east toward Deming, and then, with a wave of guilty upset, pulled onto the road and swung a wide left, bumping across the sandy median and back onto the highway, pointed west. Sarah was too abuzz with all that had just happened to recognize that we were heading the wrong way. Her unsuspecting ease reminded me of a ladybug I’d lured into a pot as a kid before frying it with a magnifying glass. She filled me in on the Native American boy’s story—he’d been living with his mom on an Air Force base in Twentynine Palms, California, but his mom had just been cycled into service in the Middle East, so his grandfather had picked him up the day before and was bringing him out to live in New Mexico. “I bet he’ll always remember this night,” she said. “God, that poor kid. I mean, his grandpa seemed nice enough, but a change like that’s always hard.”

We passed Lordsburg again. Sarah started laughing. “You really stink, you know. It’s the elk. That is the weirdest smell. But, I don’t know, there’s something kind of manly about such, you know, hands-on work. I like that you’re not afraid to get dirty. You’re like one of the whalers in
Moby-Dick
.” The dashboard clock read midnight.

Our headlights danced across a small roadside sign:
SAN SIMON, AZ 22; TUCSON 168
. I saw Sarah take notice of it and sit up a little, and my stomach swished in slow, cramped circles, like an eel in a goldfish bowl. “Wait a second,” she said, “I think that sign said Tucson. Are we going the right way?”

I gripped the wheel, suddenly choked up. My plan was all set to go, but its irreversibility was chilling. Once I launched into it, I’d have to see it all the way through. It wasn’t too late to change my mind—I could still act like I’d made a mistake and turn back around. But I pictured myself in an hour at the Desert Sky Café with Sarah and knew that would be far worse for both of us. The only thing less kind than what I was about to do would be to drag it out over the course of several days. Better to tear a bandage right off than to rip it off slow. I hardened myself, trying to work up the necessary coldness to do the deed.

“Yeah, and there’s an I-10 West sign,” Sarah said. “I think we turned around twice or something?” She looked over at me, and our eyes caught, and in that tiny moment I think she understood what was happening. A quiet shock registered in her face, and somehow, once that first dart had pierced her, I felt free to follow with a hundred more.

“I’ve got something really terrible to tell you,” I said, my voice starting to break. “I am so, so sorry. I can’t believe I’m doing this to you.” And suddenly the long, complicated lie I’d dreamed up began to pour out of me. I told her I’d had a longtime girlfriend named Liz who I’d loved more than anything, but who’d struggled with drugs and mental problems until our relationship had dissolved. Just recently, I explained, in the past couple of weeks, Liz had come back into my life, and we’d decided to try to get back together. I should have said something before coming to Arizona, I told Sarah, but the reunion with Liz had happened so suddenly, I hadn’t known what to do. Now, though, I saw that I had to get home to her. I assured Sarah that my fondness for her was very real, but also that I knew this wasn’t our time and that I couldn’t in good conscience continue the trip. I could just as easily have tried a more honest approach, but I didn’t fully understand what I was feeling myself, and I was afraid Sarah would think that any missing spark was a sign of shortcomings on her end, instead of my own, and that the rejection would bear a more bitter sting. Besides, the heart of the story was true—there’d been a girl named Liz, the one from Plattsburgh, New York, and I’d been devastated when things with her fell apart. Had she wanted to get back together, I would’ve jumped at the chance. But I hadn’t heard from her in over two years. As I yammered on, I pretended to cry and then found myself really crying. Up ahead, a pair of signs coiled from the sand, thanking us for visiting New Mexico and welcoming us to Arizona.

If Sarah had grown angry and started calling me names or had burst into dramatic sobs, it might have been easier. But she just cried very softly for a minute or two, covering her face with her hands, and then with her thumbs she rubbed the tears from her eyes and stared quietly ahead into the desert night. I kept apologizing and sniffling and sputtering until at last she said, “Stop saying you’re sorry. It’s my fault, too. I should’ve never believed that this kind of thing could happen.”

“No,” I protested. “You have to believe. These things do happen. Magic can happen.” But I knew I didn’t really have any right to be making that particular case to her. “Just not this time, or not right now.”

“Whatever.” Her face crumpled into a crying face but she wouldn’t seem to let herself cry.

Something about the way she was blaming herself and trying to bury her sadness broke me. I burned in hot self-hatred, wondering how I could ever forgive myself for so casually inflicting such pain, while at the same time selfishly worrying that I would always be this alone, unless I could track down the Mexican girl I’d seen at the Subway in Tucson. For the next hour, we didn’t say a word to each other. A couple of times, Sarah broke down in tears for a bit and then steadied herself. She leaned her face to her window for minutes at a time, looking into the endless dark, and then sat back, watching the hood gobble up each white, stubby dash painted along the center of the road. Time moved very slowly, and each mile seemed to last an hour or a week or a year. Only the towns whirling back past us—San Simon, Dragoon, Johnson—revealed that the car was actually moving.

In Benson, I stopped to fill up on gas, and when I went inside to pay, I ducked into the bathroom and tried again to scrub the elk blood from my hands, mostly in vain. I grabbed a Milky Way bar for Sarah, which she’d mentioned in one of our early conversations was her favorite. We got on the highway, headed west still, and strangely we began to chat about not much at all, amicably, as though nothing had happened. The breakup and tears had brought us somehow closer together or at least removed the weight of expectations I couldn’t fulfill, and the next forty-five minutes passed quickly as we reveled in each other’s easygoing company. Soon Tucson’s orange-y glow filled the night sky, and Sarah got quiet again and said, “Not this exit, but the one after this.”