Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon (19 page)

The Boring murder-suicide story breaks during the midnight news. Once again, a third accomplice is never mentioned. Jesse and Myrtle are painted as psychotic redneck lovers.

Is it a miracle?

No.

It’s life.

***

In the morning, the news just replays all of last night’s stories, along with a weather report and something about a dog show happening in Portland that day.

Andrew goes to a dark sports bar across the street and orders a burger and a beer. On the television, an ESPN retrospective on Walter Payton is playing. There are plenty of pictures of Payton’s family, but Harold the truck driver is in none of them. Andrew wonders what Harold will think when he sees Jesse and Myrtle on the news. What will he think of that sweet young couple? Will he call the police and inform them of the other man accompanying them? Will Harold Payton be Andrew’s downfall? Andrew doesn’t know and presently doesn’t care. He’s feeling good, godlike.

But when Andrew returns to his motel room, he turns on the television to tune in to the evening news—and there, in the opening news previews, is a police witness sketch of Andrew. He about shits himself as commercials play and the news takes its time getting to the story. Finally, it does. Police are now looking for an unidentified male suspect connected to the crime spree in Texas and yesterday’s tragedy at Dodge Park. The man is believed to still be at large in the greater Portland area.

Andrew racks his brain. Where can he go? Canada? Out of the question. Out to sea? Also no. He’s still got ten bucks left, so he does what he does best. He waits until one in the morning, then goes out to the seediest bar he can find within a couple blocks of his motel. He buys a drink for the drunkest, loneliest woman in the bar. He talks her up and it doesn’t take much effort to convince her to take him home. So they go back to her shitty apartment where she lives alone and they drink some more and then as they’re stripping down, getting ready to do the thing, she passes out cold. Andrew waits a couple minutes to make sure she’s really out, then he tucks her into bed and erases all sign of his presence in her home. He finds her car keys (he’d asked at the bar what kind of car she drove then acted impressed when she named something shitty, and he said something like, “The kind of car a woman drives says a lot about her. I can tell you’re a classy lady,” even though she wasn’t).

He takes the whiskey bottle they were drinking from along with twenty dollars from her wallet and a package of hot dogs from the refrigerator.

He finds her car in the parking lot of the shitty apartment complex and he drives north on the I-5.

Somewhere in these green mountains, he will find a place where a man can disappear.

***

A decade has passed since all of that went down.

Andrew’s still on the lam, but he’s settled down, at least to the degree that he can. He works on a farm for people who don’t mind too much if he’s got a past about him. They don’t ask questions. There’s a woman he goes out dancing with every other Friday night, when her kids are at their father’s. Her name is Isabella.

Last year he took a drive back to Boring. He visited Dodge Park, and he nearly stepped on a baby rattler. Rattlesnakes weren’t native to this part of Oregon. He’d considered the ones he released good as dead, once the cold came. But the snakes held on. They began breeding up a storm, and ten years later, they’re still here. The snakes of Boring are real, although they’re not medicinal. The snakes of Boring are only full of poison.

Jesse was a good friend to chase this dream all the way up to Oregon, Andrew thinks, and Myrtle was a good woman. Andrew will never have a friend like Jesse again. It’ll just never happen. Maybe there’s justice in that. He probably doesn’t deserve one, but on nights and days when he’s feeling especially lonesome, he says aloud to himself, “I wish I had a friend like Jesse in my life.”

Then again, he’s not complaining.

You are born in August at Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California. Your mother is a third grade teacher. Your father works for a beer distributor. Just a few months before your eighth birthday, they will file for divorce and you’ll be asked to make the biggest decision of your life. The choice is yours. Don’t worry. This isn’t about choosing a favorite. It’s about you. It was always about you.

Your mother keeps the house in Bakersfield. Your father moves north and buys a small riverside cabin in Oregon. Do you want to remain in Bakersfield, where you have your friends and the comfort of a familiar backdrop, or do you pack it in and rebuild with your father in Oregon? A single mother household or that eternal father-son fishing trip you always wanted. In a room full of strangers, you will be asked to decide.

If you choose to remain with your mother, go to BAKERSFIELD.

If you choose to move with your father, go to OREGON.

BAKERSFIELD: Two years later, your mom remarries. You move into a big new house in a nicer, newer part of town with your stepfather. He’s a businessman. The license plate on his Hummer: BSNSMAN. You’re not even in middle school yet, but suddenly you have a college savings account full of money for when you go off to college. Your mother no longer spends her nights at the kitchen table, weeping over a stack of overdue bills. You have nice new clothes. Those Air Jordans you always coveted? They’re yours now. And the swimming pool in the backyard is sure to attract a whole bunch of brand new friends. Life is shiny. Life is good. You’ve seen your real father once since the divorce, but maybe that’s for the best. You’re practically a different person now.

OREGON: You and your dad live in a one room cabin that backs up to a scenic river full of trout. It is cold and it is damp and it is lonesome out in the wilderness, but you love almost every second of it. You wake early in the morning to fish before school and afterward you fly down those backwoods roads on your ten-speed, anxious to wet your line. One autumn, in the year your muscles have started to develop, your father takes you out and teaches you to shoot a gun. You bag your first deer that season. You hang its antlers in the corner, above your little sweat-stained cot.

BAKERSFIELD: You meet a girl named Sarah. She has blonde hair and wears Abercrombie & Fitch. You go out to movies on the weekends and some nights her parents invite you over for dinner. Other nights she has dinner at your house, where you eat your favorite takeout. You share your first kiss together and maybe a little something more. Sarah is your first true love.

OREGON: You meet a girl named Sarah. She has blonde hair and climbs trees better than any boy. You explore the woods together and some nights her parents invite you over for dinner. Other nights she has dinner at your house, where you eat the fish that you have caught and the deer that you have hunted. You share your first kiss together and maybe a little something more. Sarah is your first true love.

BAKERSFIELD: You’ve just passed your driving test. Never mind that your stepfather is cheating on your mother and screams at her almost every night. He’s handing you the keys to a brand new BMW. You drop by Sarah’s place unexpectedly to take her out for a drive, and that’s when you receive the call.

OREGON: You’ve just passed your driving test. Never mind that you’ve been driving your father’s truck since you were thirteen, or that you drove yourself unaccompanied to the DMV to take the test. You’re legal now. You drop by Sarah’s place because the two of you are heading to Crater Lake for a weekend camping trip alone. You and her have taken drives in your father’s truck many times before, so that part is nothing new. What’s got your belly tingling is the prospect, the feeling, that maybe this weekend you two will go all the way. You don’t own a cellphone, but if you did, you’d be receiving that call about now.

BAKERSFIELD: Your father killed himself. You’d seen him what, three times since he moved to Oregon. He never remarried but he always sent you a birthday card with some recent pictures of fish he’d caught and a small check that your mother reminded you was a lot of money to him. They ship his body back to Bakersfield, where he’s buried in the same graveyard as his father, who died in Vietnam, who you never met.

OREGON: Your father killed himself. Apparently he wandered out onto the old country highway and put a bullet in his head, right there in the middle of the road. The gun was still warm when a farmer found him, but it was too late. You and Sarah have nearly left town when Sheriff Don pulls you over. You smirk because you’re legal now, but your palms are sweaty. You’ve never been pulled over. Sheriff Don asks you to follow him back to the station. You throw your hands up in protest and flash your license and that’s when he lays it on the line. “You’re father’s dead, son.”

BAKERSFIELD: Your mother asks if you’d like to take a trip up to Oregon to collect your father’s possessions, to experience the place he called home in his final years, but you decline.

OREGON: You’re still a minor, so they ship you a thousand miles away from Sarah, back to California, where you’re to live with your mother and a stepfather you’ve never met. They live in a million-dollar home. They are members of a country club. They tell you about the college savings fund they set up for you way back when. All these years they’ve been thinking of you, putting money away. They never once visited. Now they’ve torn you away from it all.

BAKERSFIELD: You’re not sure whether it’s the BMW or your estranged father’s death, but Sarah finally throws away notions of waiting until marriage. The way people talk to you, you know you’re expected to feel sad and hurt. In secret, you’re just stoked about driving and getting laid. You feel nothing for your father. You milk the sympathy, though. You learn that the grieving are granted certain privileges.

OREGON: You write letters to Sarah every day. You promise that you’ll return just as soon as you get yourself emancipated. Failing that, you’ll wait the two years until you turn eighteen and then you’ll move back to Oregon and marry her. She says she’d love nothing more than to marry you and have your children. You dream of your future life as a married couple, putting the pieces together in letter after letter. Your first child will be named Dean, after your father, if it’s a boy. Charlotte if it’s a girl. These letters from Sarah are the only thing that matter. They keep you going despite the isolation and the devastating weight of your father’s death, which squeezes your heart like a vise. You find it hard to breathe on the days when no new letter arrives. A few months later, the letters start to trickle off. First they drop in number, then they get shorter, then they come so infrequently that most days you don’t even bother checking the mail. You write to Sarah just as often, and twice as desperately. Then, after a hellish month of silence, the fateful letter arrives. The one you dreaded most. She hasn’t died. No, it’s worse than that. She’s started seeing someone else. She doesn’t say who, but she says you know him, that you’d approve, which of course you never would.

BAKERSFIELD: Life presents a myriad of choices. Driving drunk is one of them. That’s how your BMW ends up totaled. That’s how Sarah ends up leaving you.

OREGON: You take a swing at your stepfather for yelling at your mother. This is the final straw, they tell you. So the next day, you’re being shipped off to a school that’s more like a prison. And you thought the suburbs were bad.

BAKERSFIELD: They release you from jail after four days because you’re a privileged white kid who still has a bright future ahead. Your parents buy you a ten-year-old Lexus. “We hope you’ve learned your lesson,” they say.

OREGON: The only thing worse than military school is failing a suicide attempt at military school.

BAKERSFIELD: You’re out drinking by the river with some friends when one of them asks if you loved Sarah. You say you did, and what you’ve done finally hits you, and you break down in tears. You still love her. You will always love her. Your love for her is only surpassed by the hate you feel for yourself.