My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (19 page)

She guided me through her ghost-town neighborhood back to her mom’s house, and when we reached her street she said, “Just pull over here.” I cut the engine and killed the lights. “Look at that,” Sarah said. She pointed all the way down to the end of the block, where her mom’s boyfriend, Ray, sat on their front porch, twitching a bit under the white chute of a single streetlamp, like a man on the stage of an empty auditorium.

“That’s weird,” I said.

She sighed. “That’s just Ray.” Then, a second later, she’d squeezed onto my lap and we were kissing fiercely. Her lips moved to my chin, down my neck, and after a minute she pulled up my shirt and starting kissing my chest. With one hand, she traced along the insides of my thighs, slowly up, and I felt myself getting hard. The possibility seemed to teeter before us to have sex right there in the car. I was in such a daze, and so lost and warped from the past twelve hours and our queer round-trip, I might have simply gone for it. But from nowhere, a fat gray cat dropped onto the hood of the car with a loud, clanging thud and crouched at the base of the windshield, tossing its tail back and forth and sizzling us with a freaky death stare. Sarah laughed a sad, shy laugh. I reached for the keys from the ignition. “Let me get your stuff out of the trunk,” I said.

“Do you want to sleep here tonight?” Sarah said. “We’ve got a sofa I can give you.”

“I think I’m just going to cruise around, find a café.”

“God,” she said, “I don’t know how I’m going to tell my mom about this. I’ve been talking about you nonstop for the past six weeks. I feel totally lame.”

“Me, too. The same.”

We bailed outside and I opened the trunk and handed over her pink backpack. We held each other for a bit and kissed again. I felt connected to her in a way I’d never quite felt connected to any of the Shade girls I’d been involved with over the years, like she’d seen me at my ugliest and basest and most plain but still thought I was an okay guy. Her forgiveness and compassion struck me as incredibly generous and nothing but genuine. “I am so happy that I know you and that you came into my life,” I told her, trying to keep grateful tears from sprouting up. “I’m sorry I fucked this all up so bad, but I hope you know how much you mean to me, and that I really do love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, taking a sharp breath. “Call me when you need me.” She spun and walked toward her house without looking back.

I climbed into the car and watched her go. When she reached her front porch, she said hi to Ray, and slipped through the front door. I sat there for another few minutes, looking at Ray, looking at the gray cat on the hood, and flipping for no reason through the sports pages of a
USA Today
I’d picked up on the plane, like I was on a stakeout. Finally, Ray stretched and stood and went inside, and I started up the car, swung it through a clumsy four-point turn in the street, and headed once more for Deming.

*

Before I got back on I-10, I had one stop to make—the Subway off Speedway Avenue. By now it was almost three in the morning and the lot was dark. In front of the liquor store next door, a man was passed out next to a slew of empty bottles, draped in a chopped square of old carpet.

I ripped a sheet of paper from a notebook and began a note to the Mexican girl who’d been working behind the counter earlier in the night. I knew I was crazy—at the peak of my dementedness, really, my hands spotted with dried elk blood—but I also longed for the girl desperately, and it seemed to me that if this whole sad affair with Sarah had led me, ultimately, to my sweet Subway angel, and things worked out for us, then the universe might still have a logic to it and not simply be a place of chaos and meaninglessness, as I was beginning to fear.

When I was done with the note, I read it through, amazed that I could author something so bizarre and creepy that was at the same time so hopeful and honest:

To the girl with green eyes who was working tonight (you also had silver-hoop earrings)—my name is Davy, I came into Subway around 8:00 tonight with my friend Sarah. (I had a brown hat and a black T-shirt that said WCBN. Sarah was the one who asked you which bread was the freshest and gave you a hard time because she didn’t think the bread you gave her was fresh enough.) Anyway, I thought you were beautiful and I wish there was a chance we could get to know each other. I don’t even live in Tucson, I live in Michigan, but if you ever feel like talking on the phone sometime or even want to write me an e-mail or send letters back and forth, I would really love it. I’m not a weirdo or anything, just someone who trusts deeply in intuition. I hope to hear from you sometime! All my info is below. Love and Respect—Davy

I climbed from the Ford and walked over to the door of the Subway, looking for the best place to tuck the note and trying to decide if I should actually leave it. I could imagine the endless ribbing the girl might get for it from her coworkers. And the chances of her actually responding seemed remote. Then again, the chances of her calling or writing to me if I didn’t leave the note were even less, so really I had nothing to lose. Still, as badly as I ached for her, I wasn’t so crazy as to miss the irony of the situation and my own manic tilt—I’d ditched one Shade candidate and inside ten minutes was trying to break through to the next. A lonely feeling wobbled me, and I stood there rereading the note again, sacked by a sudden hopelessness.

The man wrapped in carpet coughed and groaned in his sleep, and in my moment of self-pity it seemed that very little separated the two of us. It was easy to envision that one day soon I’d be rolled up in a carpet of my own. At last, I went ahead and slid my note through the Subway door, jumped back into the Ford, and hit the highway, pointed east.

Quickly, the lights of Tucson faded and the mountains swallowed me up. A piece of downtrodden jazz came through the radio, a fluttering signal from a station in Bisbee. Two hundred miles in front of me, the Desert Sky Café sang its siren song. All of my senses felt heightened, and I welled up with crisscrossing currents of emotion, relieved to be on my own again, inside the familiar soreness of my longing for Shade and away from the messy scramble of actual interaction with a girl. My aloneness felt holy and pure, proper for a pilgrimage. The moon settled behind a bank of low clouds and a million or so stars tumbled into sight.

Through the darkest part of the night, the same small desert towns I’d passed twice already scrolled past a third time. It felt like I’d spent lifetimes driving this same stretch of road. There were no other cars for miles at a time. Odd, mournful memories scudded in like fist-sized meteorites—standing at the end of the North Avenue Pier at midnight, overlooking downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan, a hot wind in my face; a man with a hook for a hand I’d picked up hitchhiking in Lafayette, Louisiana, and delivered to his estranged daughter’s house in Lake Charles; the old Scottish woman who’d tried to comfort me as I cried on the bus from Edinburgh back to London the night Maggie Jones broke up with me. Soon a great weariness began to blanket me. All I wanted was to pull into Deming, coast over to Shade’s house, climb into bed beside her, and kiss her hair and the back of her neck as she slept, then hold her through the night.

Past Exit 1, I pulled over to the left-hand shoulder to take a leak, and found myself looking up at the giant
Welcome to NEW MEXICO
sign and a packed zoo of constellations beyond, stepping from the sky. I entered a kind of waking dream, high off the majesty of the stars, and floated there in the desert cool for what might have been five minutes or an hour, soaking up the glorious night. Gentle cyclones stirred through, carrying the taste of sage and piñon pine. Animals in the far, far distance cawed, hooted, and mewled.

Finally, I lashed back into the Ford and pressed on into New Mexico. I cycled through a hot triptych of feelings—joyous, sad, and lonesome. I felt Shade’s presence so near, it was strange to consider that I’d flown down from Michigan to travel with Sarah, not with Shade. Past Lordsburg, I dully registered the wash of my brights on the dead elk’s carcass at the side of the road, and the Jackson Pollock–like tangle of brown blood and entrails across both lanes, already faded.

One at a time, the stars snuffed themselves out, and the sky ahead pooled from black to deep blue with the first hint of dawn. Tiny houses and ramshackle trailers dotted each desert crest, marking the outskirts of Deming. Five minutes later, I bent right off I-10 onto the service drive, and after coasting through a few sets of lights the truck stop rose into view, a couple of rigs arranged side by side in the lot, the Desert Sky Café glowing in the middle under a pair of streetlamps, one pink and one orange.

Before I went in, I sat in the car for a bit, misty-eyed, heart ablaze. A low, sustained foghorn hum buzzed through my whole body, like I was still in motion. I’d sworn not to return to this spot without Shade, but here I was, without Shade. Without Shade, I was completely hollowed out and done for. Without Shade, I felt I might crumble to dust. But fuck it, first I’d get breakfast.

*

Forty minutes later, I finished telling my story to the waitress and she was disappointingly—almost comically—unmoved. She’d never seen or heard of
Gas, Food, Lodging
, didn’t have a daughter named Shade, and was nearing the end of a double shift. She peeled some Wet-Naps from a shelf under the register and passed them over. “There’s a john through the kitchen,” she said. “Go on and wash up. But if you don’t mind, let me cash you out first.”

In a dirty sink in back, I rubbed the last dried traces of blood from my hands and forearms. I decided not to stay in Deming to try and find my soulmate, who was a character from a movie, but instead to head on to Albuquerque—if I made good time, I’d be there by noon, and could crash out on my friend’s sofa while he was at work.

Outside, in the bright morning sun, I popped the Ford’s trunk, tried to douse the dead elk’s persistent stench with a fresh swath of deodorant, and started to change my shirt once more, when a state trooper’s black SUV crawled into the lot and came to a stop right behind me, pinning me in. An older man, Hispanic, tall and broad-shouldered, in a brown uniform and black boots, stepped out and walked cautiously over, surveying me closely. “Good morning,” he said, hand at his hip.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Getting cleaned up?”

“Yeah.”

He moved closer. “What you got on that shirt?”

“Blood. I was clearing some roadkill off the interstate.”

“That’s what you told Carol, huh?” He nodded toward the diner. Apparently, the waitress had put in a call. My drawn-out story must have sounded insane to her—how was she to know the difference between elk blood and human blood? Also, I supposed asking her to break a hundred-dollar bill might not have been the best idea. Spattered in blood, flashing C-notes, it must have seemed like I’d robbed a stagecoach. “Can I see some ID?” the trooper asked. I handed over my driver’s license, and he said, “You mind sitting in my vehicle while I run this?”

“I guess not.” He gave me a quick check for any weapons, led me to the back of his SUV, and I climbed inside. Somehow the pain I’d inflicted on Sarah earlier in the night felt linked to this police action, which muffled any resistance I might otherwise have had. The cop shut the door, walked around to the driver’s seat, protected by a thick pane of wire and Plexiglas, and called my info in over his radio. Now that I was safely in his custody, he seemed to relax a bit, and introduced himself as Officer Maez. He asked me to repeat the story I’d told the waitress, and I found myself recounting the whole weird journey my long night had become, explaining the reasons I’d come through town in the first place—Sarah, Shade, the whole enchilada. He listened with thoughtful care, raising his eyebrows, shaking his head, and occasionally chuckling at appropriate moments. He told me he knew
Gas, Food, Lodging
inside and out; he’d even been an extra in a scene filmed inside the diner. After the complete disinterest of the waitress at the Desert Sky, it was nice to open myself to someone as curious and attentive as Officer Maez.

His radio came to life and he exchanged a few words with someone at HQ. Then he told me, “Sorry, this could take a few more minutes. We run everything twice—Border Patrol has its own database. Got to run the plates, too.”

We kept talking. Maez turned out to be kind of a sweetheart—he owned a bean farm with his wife, he told me, and wrote poetry sometimes in a little notebook when work was slow. At last, he eyed me in the rearview mirror. “I understand about Shade,” he said. “I get it. I used to be like you. Chasing phantoms.” He laughed and rubbed at his graying temples.

“So what’d you do?”

“I married my best friend. Rhonda.” He pulled out his wallet and dug through for a photo, then pushed it against the glass, upside down. “That’s Rhonda.”

“She’s pretty.”

“Yeah, she can be mean when she wants to be, but she’s a good one. I got lucky.” His radio crackled to life, and after a minute he said, “Okay, looks like we’re all set here. Thanks for your patience.” He stepped out and opened my door. Then, once he’d passed my license back, he looked me over and rubbed at his chin. “You know, come to think of it,” he said, “there was a girl named Shade who used to live right here in town.”

This sideswiped me. “
What?
Where is she?”

Maez explained the story. When Rhonda’s youngest daughter was in high school, she’d had a friend named Evangeline, and after
Gas, Food, Lodging
was filmed in Deming and the movie landed in theaters, Rhonda’s daughter and the rest of their friends had started calling Evangeline “Shade” because she looked so much like her and had so many similar interests and just seemed to share her very essence. She’d even washed dishes at the café for a couple of years in high school.

Naturally, my heart was on fire. “What’s her last name?” I asked Maez. “Where can I find her?”

“Well,” he said cryptically, “I’ll show you something.” He marched me back into the Desert Sky Café, and deep in the rear corner, between a pay phone and a dusty pinball machine, he pointed out a small plaque on the wall, with a picture of a beautiful, dark-haired girl at the top and an inscribed gold plate below: