Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #15

I wanted to sleep. I was suddenly quite weary of being on the train. I should have returned to sit next to my brother in a more comfortable seat, but experience told me that my desire to sleep would be over-ruled by my inability to do just that. "It's insomnia," a doctor had once told me when I'd complained about so many nights of sleeplessness. "It won't hurt you."

The train had stopped for nearly half an hour, and now it was barely moving, as if it felt the same anxiety about getting to Helper as I did. Earlier, a group of teenagers had giggled their way through the observation car, and I envied their ability to be so openly foolish. They had lingered for awhile before passing through to the next car and leaving silence to claim the space they left behind. I still clutched the Rhodia and my sister's pen, but I had not yet written anything despite all good intentions. As the train stopped again, I opened the notebook again, leafed past more of Ophelia's writings, and found something long, something to occupy me.

Words Like Love

After six hours of what started out to be aimless driving, I ended up in Bridgeport in front of a combination café and bar called Little Clancey’s, though I was probably headed there the moment I left home. The “Little” on the hand-painted sign had faded, but “Clancey’s” in red letters was bright in a sunrise diffused by thin clouds. I’d traveled through California’s dry central valley, then turned east through Yosemite and finally north on Highway 395, just like we sometimes do when we visit our daughter Becky and her husband Ron in Carson City. By the time I reached Mono Lake, the eastern sky was crimson and I knew that Bridgeport was just north and would be the place to stop.

All four windows of the Impala were open when I rolled onto the gravel in front of Clancy’s, and a cool breeze brushed gently against my bare arms. I used to drink a lot, and when I did every window in the house or car would be shut tightly. The voices, the ceaseless wind, the smells—everything used to bother me. Now, though, working my way through sobriety, I welcome the fresh air and keep at least one window open wherever I happen to be.

“You’ll catch cold,” Nora, my wife of twenty-five years, will say when I keep both bedroom windows open all night even in winter.

“Viruses cause colds,” I tell her as she pulls the heavy quilt closer to her wide chin, “not open windows or even getting your feet wet.” But after awhile she’ll get up and shut the windows, caught up in one of my old habits.

I sat in the Impala and thought that Nora would be wondering where I had gone. She’d given up actually worrying years earlier, when I was drunk most of the time and hardly found my way home anyway.

“You could call me if you’re not coming home,” she would plead. “A little respect is all I ask. Just the smallest bit of consideration. Is that too much?”

It was too much, as far as I was concerned at that point in my life, in our marriage. “I’m an adult,” I’d tell her. “I don’t have to check in with you.”

We went on like that until one day Nora quit asking questions. But she would always wonder, even when I left the house last night with her yelling at me. We’d been watching television and a beer commercial came on. I told her that a beer would taste good, a nice cold beer in chilled mug, just like on television.

“A what?” Nora said very quietly. “God damn you, Brian. You go this long without a drink and after all that’s happened and you can still say it so easily, as if it meant nothing to either one of us?”

“I didn’t say I wanted one,” I said loudly. “I just said it would taste good.” I looked down at the worn carpeting in front of the couch, where our feet spend so much time.

And then she yelled about how my father had been drunk for so long that nearly his whole liver was eaten away by the time he died. About how close my drinking had come to killing both her and me, that if she hadn’t been in the car on my last birthday I surely would have died. She stopped yelling when she ran out of breath. Her chest was heaving beneath her lightweight pink blouse. Nora’s eyes were dark with disappointment like they were after Sam Tinker threw me the surprise birthday party, when she came to see me at the hospital. It was two days after I’d lost control of the Ford wagon we owned and Nora and I went bouncing into a large stand of aspens.

“Jesus Christ,” Nora had said after pulling me from the car and cradling my face in her hands. She got only a few scratches across her chin, but I caught the steering wheel with my sternum and then the dashboard with my forehead. For months afterward it hurt even to breathe.

Lying on the grass, I’d looked up at her, feeling her kiss my mouth time after time. Everything was confused, but I didn’t know if it was because of the accident or the pitcher of martinis I’d helped Sam drink earlier that night. It was raining, and drops of cool water were falling from Nora’s hair onto my face. Then everything turned a dark purple and I shut my eyes as Nora’s voice disappeared.

After Nora finally got her breath back last night, she stood from the couch and started in on me again, using words like responsibility and trust and love. So I took my keys from their hook beneath the phone in the kitchen, and I walked out the front door, letting her yell from the front porch as I started the car and left. At the Shell station I filled the Impala and got a cup of coffee, then drove away.

When I stepped into Clancey’s, Maureen was doing the beer orders for the week; I was the only one in the place. I’d met her years earlier, one of the times I’d driven alone to see Becky. Nora travels on her job selling pharmaceuticals to hospitals, so sometimes when she is away I wander. This morning I asked Maureen if she remembered me, but when she said she wasn’t sure, I told her that it made no difference.

Maureen had dark, curly hair and the smooth facial features—thick cheekbones and a mouth burned down at the edges—that I’d found myself falling love with for as long as I could remember. She reminded me of a waitress, a good dancer, that I’d known when I was in the Navy. But then, it seems every woman I’ve either had or desired has reminded me of someone else or the lover before.

“Why’d you come back?” Maureen asked when she filled our mugs with coffee. One coffee pot had DECAFFEINATED stenciled on it in bright orange letters. Some of the letters were partially scratched away, as if the pot had been in use for a long time.

“Restlessness,” I said, wondering if I should say that maybe it was because of her that I’d stopped there.

“How does your wife feel about that?” She gestured with her mug toward my ring finger.

“She understands.” I looked at the ring and tried to think of the last time I’d taken it off.

“You mean, she puts up with it.” She looked at me as if she’d heard lies from men for a long time.

I left the bar after two mugs of coffee, after Maureen got busy with other customers. Wandering around town until lunchtime, I finally stopped at Cleo’s Drive-In, where I ate a chicken-breast sandwich at one of the redwood picnic tables. I watched Maureen come out of the bar across the street, walking toward Cleo’s. She smiled when she noticed me.

“Still restless?” She said after ordering at the walk-up window. Her hair was neat and her legs thin, and I knew that she was the type of woman who took care of herself.

“Yeah,” I said. The Sawtooth Ridge was visible over her shoulder.

“At least you’re eating,” Maureen said. “I haven’t had a customer so early on a Saturday for quite some time.”

“I like coffee after a long drive,” I told her.

She took a bag from the girl at the window just as I finished my sandwich. “You feel better, now that you’ve eaten?”

“I feel good,” I said. “I feel almost....” I paused and looked up at the gray, ragged Sawtooth, trying to think of the right word, the right feeling.

“Almost what?”

“Almost human,” is what I told her. It was the most fitting word I could think of.

She nodded slowly, then followed my gaze up to the Sawtooth. “It’s going to rain. Come over later and I’ll buy you a beer.”

“Thanks,” I said, again thinking that a beer would taste good.

Maureen smiled as she turned and walked back to Clancey’s. I sat at the table and stared at the mountains. The ridge was high, nearly eleven-thousand feet, and I had spent a lot of time hiking in the area when I was younger. Below the ridge itself was Matterhorn Canyon, where a combination of ignorance and exhaustion almost killed me and Sam Tinker both. Just as after the car wreck, it was an experience that left me changed, though it changed me into someone who drank heavily. Though I never figured out why, it was after that when I started believing that nothing I did in life mattered. Most people would have reacted differently, but I just stopped caring about a lot of things.

After Maureen left, I decided to drive to Carson City after all. Becky always appreciates it when her mom and I visit, since she’s so far away from us. She and Ron have a small hardware store, and more than once I’ve helped them stock conduit or boxes and bins of nails.

“Oh, Daddy,” Becky said when I called her from a payphone at Cleo’s. “We’re just on our way out. We need some stuff from a warehouse in Reno, so we’re making a long weekend of it.”

“That’s fine, Becky,” I said, and it really was. “Enjoy the weekend. Maybe Mom and I will drive up next month.” If I had told her how far I had driven that morning, she might have changed her mind.

“Give her my love,” Becky said, and I told her I would.

I hung up the phone and looked at clouds covering the Sawtooth and thought back to when Sam and I got caught in the autumn snowstorm and nearly didn’t make it out. We were carrying neither a tent nor warm clothing, and for a full day we huddled around a small fire and waited for the storm to pass. We never told anyone about it, either, because we knew we’d been fools for being so unprepared. But several times in the years that followed, when Nora and I weren’t even talking to each other, I thought that the mountains might have been the place to die when I had the chance.

The wind had grown colder, and the clouds had dropped over Bridgeport. I smelled rain as I pulled my windbreaker from the Impala’s trunk. When I got back to Clancey’s for the last mug of coffee, Maureen wasn’t surprised when I said I was leaving.

“I had a feeling you would be,” she said. Her hands were wet from washing glasses in the small sink behind the bar. “I could still buy you a beer.”

“I have a long drive,” I told her. “But I might be back, if you want to save it for me.”

She smiled, showing teeth that were white and straight. “You’ll be back,” she said, though I wasn’t sure how she meant it. I stared at her, but she turned away before I could tell her that she probably was right.

I got home late that night after driving slowly through rain most of the way. The weather didn’t break until I stopped at a mini-mart to buy cherry Lifesavers. Outside the store I saw stars winking through small gaps between clouds sliding across the sky.

As I parked the Chevy in the driveway, I slipped a Lifesaver beneath my tongue. Candy had once been a way to hide the smell of what I’d been drinking, but now it just tasted good. When I stepped quietly into the house, I let the last sliver of a Lifesaver drop down my throat. Nora was watching television, and I smelled her lilac perfume, my favorite, as soon as I shut the door behind me.

“You came home.” She didn’t look up. Her feet were propped up on the large footstool we’d bought just a week earlier.

“Yeah. I had some things to work out.” I took off my shoes and wiggled my toes on the carpet.

“We were supposed to go to dinner,” she said, and I noticed then how she was dressed up, still expecting to go out. That was why she was wearing perfume. “We were supposed to eat at someplace nice, and that’s all I’ve been waiting for. I thought you’d be home, so I never cancelled the reservation.”

I didn’t remember anything about dinner, but I didn’t doubt her. “Tomorrow,” I told her. “I forgot. I’m sorry. We’ll do it tomorrow and make it special.”

“Have you been drinking? You’re eating candy.” It was the first time she looked at me since I’d come into the house, and her stare was cold.

“I’ve been driving,” I said, fingering the single remaining Lifesaver in my pocket, wondering how she had noticed the candy from twelve feet away. I thought that even after twenty-five years of marriage it would be nice to have at least one secret, to have something that Nora did not know.

“Nice way for you to show your love for me,” she said plainly. “Skipping dinner for getting drunk. You could have called and then at least I could have eaten here. I could have fixed something instead of sitting here and waiting.”

“I do love you,” I told her. “And I’m not drunk.” But she’d been drinking—a half-full bottle of gin and a glass with ice were on the floor beside the couch. I wondered about the Sawthooth, about whether the ridge was now covered with snow. And I wondered about Maureen and her beer orders, even about what she’d bought for lunch at Cleo’s.

Nora had tried to hide the gin, and I wanted to say that it didn’t matter to me what she did or whether she believed that I was sober. I didn’t care if she was drunk then or drunk for the rest of her life.

“You do love me?” she asked. “You do?” She wasn’t convinced. But she was drunk and nothing would matter by morning. Her perfume was strong, and I wanted it to be stronger yet, to envelope me and the house and all that I knew in its silky embrace.

“I do,” I said, “I really do. You’re a princess.” I thought then that one day soon I would tell her about nearly being frozen in the mountains, about what that experience had done to me.

“Yeah?” She came over to me and took my hand, holding it to the side of her face.

“Yeah,” I said, and I sat down beside her to watch television.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #14

I wasn't sure if I had expected to write something in the Rhodia after my sister left the observation car, but I believed I planned to. This, though, wasn't atypical. Before we were even married, Peggy told me that the gap between my expectations and my plans was as wide as she had ever seen in anyone. I told her I thought that was a compliment.

So, rather than put pen to paper, I leafed through the notebook's pages yet again and found another of Ophelia's short entries. This one, titled "St. Peter's Gate," was illustrated with small clouds.

St. Peter's Gate

First, I have to say that I do not believe in angels. At least not the winged type that float beneath halos. If there angels, they are among us and embodied in living beings: the man who reaches out to stop you from stepping into San Francisco's traffic, the woman who hugs you after your first visit to the oncologist. At the train station in Chicago, though, I believe I did see an angel--a small, compact man who seemed to move through the crowds both unnoticed and accommodated at the same time as people changed their paths ever so slightly. He walked with such grace from the ticket counter toward the trains that I could not help but watch. And he watched me, too. He watched as I searched for my ringing cell phone and then let it ring unfound when I knew there was no reason to answer. Then, when he was gone, everything seemed fine. The anxiety of leaving Chicago and being without direction was gone. The commotion in the train station seemed suddenly comforting. I wanted to follow him.

I wondered about Ophelia's angel. On my trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, not long after Peggy and I had separated, I wandered out of Waverly Station and hoped the climate would soothe my literal and figurative hangovers. My brother Steven had recommended an inexpensive bed and breakfast, the directions to which I had written on a small piece of paper that was barely readable. "Head toward Holyroodhouse," Steven said. "It's a palace. The Queen sleeps there when she's in town." So, I carried my worn knapsack out of the station and turned where Steven's instructions said I should turn. When I found the palace, I stopped to look and thought of the idea of royalty. "Excuse me," a woman said as I began walking again. I turned around to see a tall, thin woman who smiled like no woman I have ever seen. Everything about her seemed perfect--her clothing, the tilt of her head, how she held herself against what had become a cold breeze.

"Hello," I said.

She held out her camera. "Will you take a picture?"

I could not place her accent, but I guessed French. "I will," I told her. She stood so the palace was behind her, and I took her picture. "You should look at it," I said as I returned the camera. "See if the photograph is okay."

She looked at the digital image now inside the camera. "It is good," she said. "The palace smiled nicely." The palace smiled nicely. Such a perfect phrase. "Thank you," she said as she put the camera into the pocket of her denim jacket. I watched her walk away, her hands clasped behind her back as she headed away from the palace and toward what appeared to be a castle at the top of a hill.

Later, as I lay in an uncomfortable bed that barely fit in a small room, I thought about her, how I could have loved her forever. Angelic, is what I thought.

Not Even in the Dark

The first girl I should've kissed but didn't was named Alice. This was a long time ago, probably the last day of seventh grade when we walked from our rural school to a more rural working farm Val's family owned, Val being the girl who accompanied me one summer (maybe that same summer) to the McHenry County fair that occurred each August. I remember being on one of the fair's rides, I think it was the Scrambler, and doing all I could to keep from sliding across the seat and pushing up against Val. It was symptomatic of the shyness and social awkwardness that I've never truly overcome. I should have let inertia drive me into her shoulders! I knew a lot of farmers then, or at least I knew their kids who lived in the bucolic regions outside my small Midwestern town and always had to get home after school to do their chores.

Alice and I had a little history in seventh grade, a brush with the evils of youthful criminality. Well, not just the two of us; there were several of us. For one reason or another, we thought it would be fun to light small smoke bombs while out at recess (or whatever recess is called in junior high). Being young and fairly stupid probably contributed to our not thinking things through: It's not easy, or even possible, to light smoke bombs without someone noticing. Soon enough, Alice and I and our fellow delinquents were sequestered near the scene of the crime, a teacher or two watching over us. What made me more nervous than anything was that I had worn no socks to school that day, a clear and deliberate violation of District 200's rules of behavior. I sat in the grass and covered my bare ankles with my hands and hoped no teachers would notice. Soon enough, we were in the principal's office being lectured and admonished by Mr. Pace, a stern and stern-faced man who, like most adults I'd encountered as a boy, had little patience with what I thought were harmful indiscretions. Years earlier, my friend Tony and I found amusement in covering a green Post Office drop-off box in mud freshly formed by heavy rain. One or another authority figure, someone who was associated with the Postal Service, I believe, was less amused, and that same evening whoever that person was joined my parents and me in our living room. My parents, I'm sure, were humiliated. I lost a shoe in the mud that same night, something I thought was a more serious problem.

One by one, those of us in Mr. Pace's small office were interrogated. Alice, to her credit, owned up to being the one who had supplied the smoke bombs. She was close to the principal's desk as she was questioned, the rest of us a few paces to the rear. While she spoke, I stepped forward to stand beside her, and I said that Alice was not the only one to be blamed, that we had asked her to bring the smoke bombs. Mr. Pace, even less amused than before, told me I had enough to worry about and that I should save my energy to defend myself. I think I stopped trying to be brave for awhile after that admonishment. I do not recall the punishment that befell me. Alice, though, was banned from the school bus for a week or so, which I'm sure caused her parents no small amount of trouble.

The last day of school was always fun, for we did nothing. That year, we played softball and ate pre-made sandwiches all afternoon. Alice and I were both pretty good baseball players then. The baseball field, in fact, was the only place I felt comfortable for much of a my youth; it was a place where I didn't have to worry about conversation or trying to figure out the ever-changing dynamics of various social circles. All I needed on the baseball field were a decent bat and a reliable glove. At the end of the day, our entire seventh grade class walked--yep, walked--the several miles from the school to Val's farm. Most of us had been together since kindergarten, and we shared a high level of comfort together. We must have eaten something at Val's house, and we must have played hide-and-seek. Not too oddly, every now and then one or two people would disappear to where they could hide and not be found. Eventually, around dusk, Alice and I found ourselves together near one of the large silos. I'm sure we talked about many things, and I am positive I knew that I was supposed to kiss her. Alice was a very smart girl and now teaches law at a very nice university--so she must have remained smart.

She also probably knew when enough was enough, and she said something like this: "I think I see your mom's car." She didn't. I knew she didn't. It was simply code for "Kiss me now or won't get another chance." We never did kiss, of course; that would've been too easy. Even in the dark I could not be resolute. We just sort of drifted away from the silo and into the lights coming from the farmhouse, and eventually my mother did appear. If I had known that night that about six months later my family would move to California, I might have been more courageous.

Many years later, Alice and her husband would visit my wife, son, and me in California, and the visit was pleasant. Alice was a reporter then, an occupation I greatly admire. I doubt that Alice remembers that night at Val's farm, and there is no reason she should. I would bet, though, that she remembers the smoke bombs, the bright clouds of blue and red and green that rose into the trees, spread across the grass, and eventually found a way Mr. Pace's stern eyes.

The Man and the Duck

One good thing about growing (or being) old is that I've seen many things and met many of people. At an age now where I can make comparisons easily, I've got a knapsack-full of "she's just like what's her name," "he's a replica of someone named so-and-so," and "that's the other thing but in a different shape." The comparisons come so easily and readily now, I often wonder if I'll ever again meet anyone who is truly unique. Oddly, or perhaps not, this phenomenon means that I am seldom disappointed in or surprised by people, though there have been notable exceptions. These exceptions are more gossipy than not, however, so we'll just agree to let that topic drop. A couple of good friends have disappeared over the last few years, which I find more disappointing than surprising since those disappearances were neither announced nor anticipated. Paths converge and then separate, don't they?

My recent lament that I've been stuck between 2 mountain ranges for a long time still rings true, but this is nobody's fault but mine. So, seeing any new places has been on hold for awhile. A couple of half-hearted attempts to get out of Dodge have failed because of a variety of reasons, but with just over a month left of summer, I think that same heart is growing a bit stronger. My friend Tom recently sent me a photograph from a mountain peak, an image that arrived by email about 2 days after I'd spent time thinking I'd like to go climb a mountain (and I now have one in mind). Shawn has been writing and fishing; Kominski's on his way to the Midwest for a week of enjoyment. Good for the 3 of them--the bastards.

But, to end things here, let me tell you about the man and the duck.

A few weeks ago while my car and I were stuck in traffic, I watched a man standing on the sidewalk, his cardboard sign saying he was homeless, had a family, and needed money. The sign also said "god bless you," which I appreciated. As he paced, he was soon accompanied by a duck, a shapely brown duck. The duck was cute. The bird walked toward the man, stared up, wiggled its tail feathers, and seemed to be waiting for something. The man looked down, walked a few steps and turned the sign toward the string of cars. The duck looked down, waddled a few steps, then looked up at the man again. The man said something, and the duck wiggled its feathers. I could not tell if the duck and the man were connected somehow; I had seen one man or another there before, but I had never seen the duck. When the light ahead turned green, I wished that it would quickly change to red again so I could sit in my car and watch. There is a drainage canal near where the 2 of them were strolling, and I wondered if the duck lived in the water there.

I was happy about that short episode. I don't often interact with people on street corners or with ducks, and this was something new and different.

I Went to the Doctor and the Doctor Said

"Your blood pressure's up," the doctor says as he reads my chart.

"I thought it might be," I tell him as I wonder what he's scribbling. "I can feel it."

"Not much, but a little," he says.

I think that a little can be enough, but I don't say this.

"Any idea why?" he asks.

"A few ideas," I say, and I drag a couple off the top of the list and hand them over. I always wonder if he really wants to hear these things, or if he's simply like a disinterested spouse who asks just to be polite.

Neither of us is overly concerned, so he moves on to other things. He does some stuff that I don't particularly enjoy but have come to tolerate, and he tells me to make an appointment for a couple months in the future. The woman at the counter takes my money--check or cash, no credit cards or debit cards--and asks me when I want to come back. We negotiate a date, and she uses a pen to write my name in the appointment book. I tell her that using a pen instead of a pencil is a sign of confidence that I'll come back, and moments later I'm on the road back to the office.

That night I never do find a cool spot on either side of the pillow. I toss and turn as quietly as I can and wonder what gets the blame for tonight's insomnia: caffeine, the heat, the things I told the doctor about.

After a few hours of marginal sleep, the alarm sounds and 15 minutes later I'm out the door and on the road to the office again--wash, rinse, repeat. Somewhere in the middle of the day I remember being on a ship down near Guam. I was standing on the catwalk outside the compartment I worked in, gathering fresh air after being cooped up inside with radio receivers and cryptographic equipment and the heat all that gear generated. Other than the sounds of the ship's bow sliding through water and the radar rotating on the mast, there was no sound as I leaned against the guardrail and counted stars. The quietest darkness I've experienced was on a road between Sandy, Utah, and Ely, Nevada. The only thing I could hear when I got out of my car and stood on the pavement was the clicking of the Ford's engine.

Returning mentally from the Pacific Ocean to my landlocked cubicle and the computer screen in front of me, I think of the movie Requiem for a Dream, the scenes in which the television seems to come to life. It's strange to go from being at sea to reviewing last weekend's movie. Maybe it's because as my blood pressure is going up my vision is going down from staring into a computer monitor so long every day, and perhaps the monitor has a life of its own and is plotting something just like the television does in the movie. I jump off the third horse in this daydream trifecta, and I imagine getting into my car and taking a little road trip across the country or at least into the middle of Utah. Just a little jaunt I think right as my email program reminds me I have a meeting in 5 minutes. My monitor seems to flicker a wink at me as I lock my computer. I grab a notebook, find a pen, walk into the conference room, sit myself down, and get my mind back to work.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #13

I had joked to my parents more than once that the only time I put pen to paper was when I was signing for my belongings after posting bail or, more likely, having it posted for me. They had never come to see the humor in this even after I assured them it had happened only twice. Plus, the second time didn't really count because no charges were ever filed. "Some things parents never find funny," my mother had said. She was right, I suppose, and I know it must have been more of a burden for her and my father than it had been for me. I could always leave town and start someplace new, but they'd lived in the same house for 45 years and had to live and work among people who knew more about me than even I probably did.

Only half a dozen or so people were in the observation car with me after Margie left. The train would stop next in Helper, and something about passing through that town made me nervous. The Rhodia felt slick in my hands, and I realized the more I thought about Helper, the more sweaty my hands got. I watched a man who looked a few years younger than me come up the steps in the middle of the car. He was carrying a can of beer in each hand, and I thought a beer would taste good then. Behind the counter downstairs a short, wide woman stood counting money. "Can I get a beer?" I asked.

"What kind?" she asked.

"What are my options?"

She pointed to cans of beer lined up on a shelf behind her. I wondered how they stayed there when the ride got rough.

"Coors," I said, picking it only because I suddenly remembered Matt, an actual grave digger I'd known in Pensacola, Florida. This was before Coors was sold everywhere, and Matt had driven from Florida to Kansas and back one weekend just because he wanted to buy a case of Coors. Matt and I would come close to some bad trouble one night, but when he returned with the Coors he was generous enough to share as we sat on the beach and watched lights from ships and boats reflect off the Gulf of Mexico.

There were fewer people upstairs when I returned to where I'd been sitting. I set my feet on the small ledge beneath the window, but seeing my full reflection in the window now made me even more nervous, so I found a chair that would swivel and keep my reflection to myself. Several pages in the middle of the Rhodia were blank, and I picked a page right next to one of Ophelia's entries. I braced the notebook against my knee, test the pen on my hand, and knew after only a few minutes what I would write.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #12

After finishing "The Map-Reader," I got as comfortable as I could in the observation car. I watched telephone poles pass by and imagined that they were moving but the train was not. When I was seven or eight my was taking me to see a counselor because "he doesn't seem to want to talk to anyone." My parents might have thought I was suicidal, but at seven or eight I'm sure I hadn't reached that stage yet. During the ride to the counselor, I watched the broken lines in front of the car and asked my father how we knew the car was moving, not the road and lines. He didn't say a thing. He just tapped on the break pedal so I could feel the car slow down. Later I wanted to say that the lines had slowed down, too, but I knew his point was for me to feel something.

But the telephone poles. I watched them long enough to sense there was a pattern there, and I removed the BIC pen from the Rhodia's spiral binding. My sister had given me the pen when she'd stopped to check on my brother and me an hour or so earlier. "You still have that notebook?" she asked. I showed it to her. "Then you might need this," she said and handed me the pen before walking away. She had been encouraging me to do things since I was a kid, and this was no different.

I first noticed that some poles had a plate with a number on it, which I guessed was a mile marker. Then, 10 poles later was one that had a single reflective strip wrapped around it. Pole 20 had two strips, pole 30 had three, and pole 40 had four as well as a plate with a number one less than the first pole: 40 poles per mile, I assumed. I used the stopwatch on my Timex to see how long the train took to pass from one numbered plate to the next, then used Margie's pen on the palm of my hand to write the calculation that showed our speed. I felt like the boy in "The Map-Reader" learning something new about navigation.

Margie found me not long later, after I had watched hundreds of telephone poles. She sat down in the adjacent seat and pointed to my hand. "You've got a notebook full of paper. Why did you write on your hand?"

I looked at my palm, at how much of the ink had smeared into the narrow lines and folds of skin. "I guess I was saving the paper for something important," I said.

"You going to write something?" She took the Rhodia and leafed through some of the pages. She handled the paper carefully, with a delicacy that must have suited her profession.

"I don't have a lot to write about," I said.

"Sure, you do. Write about how crazy it is to be riding on this train with a couple of dead relatives."

"You write it," I said.

She shook her head. "Not me. This isn't my story. I'm just along for the ride."

"That doesn't make much sense, Margie."

"Probably not." She stared out the window. It was getting dark outside the train, and our faint reflections looked back at us. "Remember when we were kids?" she asked. "When Mom and Dad would go out to dinner or something an leave the three of us alone? How we'd turn off all the lights until someone finally got scared enough to turn them back on?"

I laughed. "You never did give in."

"I used to cheat. I'd keep a tiny flashlight under my pajama shirt so that only I could see it. Then I'd wait for you or Steven to break down."

"You did that?"

"I did."

I shouldn't have been surprised. Margie had always been very smart, but she also had a certain sneaky streak that probably continued to serve her well.

Margie stood up. "I'm going to see if I can call Mom. You staying in here for awhile?"

"Might as well," I said.

She moved away, heading for the next car. "Write something."

The Heat of Things

I don't remember when I did not dislike July in Northern California. High-pressure systems press in, the air goes still, and even the dust stops moving. I'd hoped to be somewhere cooler this weekend, but poor communication and ongoing work-related tasks dictated otherwise. Having been to neither mountains nor ocean for over six months is creating its own high-pressure system as I get squeezed tighter between two ranges of mountains that roughly run parallel the Sacramento Valley. Chicago and Portland for a couple of days each were nice respites, but those trips seems too long ago to make sense. Perhaps a scheduled quick jaunt to Portland next week for a wedding will draw a bit of steam out of the kettle.

Nobody, though, has made the various beds I lie in; responsibility for mattress and bedding is my own and there is little reason for complaint. And a recent lunch with a writer friend and an email from a different writer friend that same day helped me re-evaluate a bed I would choose over the others. Sleeping in it full-time is neither possible nor practical, but like in a Motel 6 someone has left the light on there.

Yes, that is a couple paragraphs of poor writing; I can admit that. If I want to blame anything, though, I'll blame the heat.

Blackberries

With various deadlines gnawing at my little brain and a fledgling summer cold pressing against the remainder of my body, I do the wise thing after a long day at work and go for a 24-mile bike ride. I'd left the office with good intentions--take work home with me and make some progress, then brew some peppermint tea and tackle preparations for the course I start teaching this week. Having loaded my bike onto my car 10 hours earlier, however, was akin to loading obligation into my life, so I promised myself a short ride at an easy pace. Short turned into average once I got going, though, and easy switched to less easy when someone passed me and pressed my not-yet-extinguished enjoyment of competition.

Concentrating on catching the rider ahead of me (which I never did) was at least good for forcing the weight of deadlines into a small mental compartment; how my cold will respond is still in question. But, at the end of the ride, I wandered to the small patch of wild blackberry bushes I have visited several times this summer, each visit finding a few more ripe berries that, for some reason, the birds and other people seem to have overlooked. Happy to sacrifice pieces of skin to the brambles, I experimented with small berries and large: which are the sweetest?

It is, perhaps, a silly quest to find that one perfect berry, and each time I found what I thought was a good one, I continued picking and hoping to find a piece of fruit that was even better. Always searching for something better might be the sign of general unhappiness with what is, but rather than dwell on that, I'll dwell on remembering the taste of those berries that were just right--warmed by the afternoon sun, purple and sweet, within easy reach.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #11

Finding Pete


My brother barely moved when I stepped over his legs and walked to the observation car. I had been dozing and watching Utah through the window, reading pieces in the Rhodia. In the middle of the notebook was "The Map-Reader," printed neatly in red ink, and to read it I needed more light than the bulb above my seat could provide.

The Map-Reader

Fold by fold, the father spread the map across the width of the redwood picnic table. He anchored each corner with stones the son had gathered near the lake after they left the blue Taurus to cool in the shaded parking lot. The car did fine on the flats, but the engine overheated on extended lines of uphill grades.

“Keep your soda away from the paper, okay?”

“Okay.” The boy set the can of generic cola on a flat rock near his feet.

“You didn’t have to move it off the table, Pete. Just away from the map.”

“I know, Dad. It’s good now.”

“Here’s where we are.” The father set his little finger alongside a blue oval. “Woods Lake. Here’s the road we took down from the highway—see?” He used a different finger to trace the thin, solid black line that ran toward the bottom of the map, away from a red line that was the highway.

“How long will we have to stay here?”

The father looked at the Taurus. “I don’t know. The air’s cool, so I should be able to check the radiator soon.” He looked down at the map, spread his fingers along a stretch of red line, compared the distance between his fingers to the scale at the top of the map, and repeated the measurement several times. “Just eyeballing it, looks like we’ve covered a couple hundred miles since this morning. You hungry?”

“A little.”

“Be specific. Are you hungry, or not?”

“Isn’t ‘a little’ specific, Dad?”

“No, it isn’t. It’s general, like you’re afraid to commit one way or another.”

“Then I’m hungry.”

The father sighed. “Look, Pete. I know it has been a long day, and I know you’re tired of being in the car. I’m tired, too.”

“You make it sound like I’m trying to start something, or I’m trying to be snippy. I’m not. If I wasn’t hungry, then I’d say so.”

He looked at the boy. “Fair enough. You sandwich hungry, or carrots and celery hungry?”

The boy smiled. “Cookie hungry.”

“How about half a sandwich, then cookies?”

“If I wait a few minutes, maybe I’ll be more hungry.”

“That’s fine—we’ll wait. I think we need some more stones.” The breeze had picked up.

“I’ll get some,” Pete said, and he found a handful of stones beneath the table. As he spaced them equally around the map’s edges, his father reached into a worn leather rucksack and pulled out several large, neatly folded squares of paper.

“More maps?” Pete asked. Over the years, he had learned to assume that nearly every scrap of paper his father possessed was a map of some type.

“A different kind—not a road map.” He flipped through them and unfolded the paper, spreading it beside the road map. “This is a Forest Service map—a topographic map, or just topo,” he said. “Each map is a quadrant, and we’re on the Caples Lake quadrant. Look: here’s Woods Lake—see how it looks different here, on this map?”

“It’s the same shape. It looks the same as on the road map.”

“The same basic shape, yes. But more detailed. And all the green area? That’s the forest.” He gestured to the conifers that seemed to gyrate from the top town when the breeze was strong. “The white areas are rock—granite, from the looks of things around here. The blue lines are creeks and streams. And these brown lines that curve all over the place? Those are contour lines.”

“Contour?”

The father nodded. “They show you things like slopes, how steep the ground is.”

The boy squinted. “What are the broken lines all by themselves?” He drew his thumb along one of those lines, which started near their lake and headed into the green section of the map.

“Those are trails, for hiking. Two broken lines next to each other are jeep trails and gravel roads.”

“Some of these brown lines—the contour lines—have numbers. That’s the elevation?”

“Yep! Good work. The light-brown lines show a rise or fall of forty feet; there are two-hundred feet up or down between the dark-brown lines. We’re at about eight-thousand feet. So, if you follow this line,” he traced a dark-brown line around the map, “you’ll always be at eight-thousand feet. And when the lines are close together, that means the ground is steep.”

Pete looked back at the road map. “How much of this one do we have to drive today?”

“Most of it. If we can drive until dark, we can start another map.”

The boy looked past his father and to the lake, at a blue surface that anticipated the wind, and he wondered if there were fish there. There were poles and reels in the car’s trunk, but they had not been used in a long time.

“I’m going to check the car,” the father said. “Stay here and make sure the maps don’t blow away.”

Pete watched his father limp toward the parking lot. He turned his eyes back to the two maps and adjusted the spacing between the stones so that his thumb and forefinger spread a few inches apart each touched a stone. A few pine needles had dropped onto the paper, and he flicked them to the ground; he had learned many trips ago that not only must the maps be creased neatly and correctly, they must be kept clean. He had come to be comfortable with how things were ordered; in his bedroom in the apartment where he lived with his mother, nothing was out of place. “You’re too neat for a boy your age,” his mother had told him once.

“The car’s cooling down,” his father said when he came back and sat across from Pete. “I brought a sandwich—eat the whole thing, you get three cookies. Eat half, you get one cookie.”

Pete laughed. “What kind of deal is that? Sounds like bad math, if you ask me.”

“I was hoping you’d eat only half a sandwich so I could eat all the cookies.”

“Mom said I shouldn’t trust you, you know.”

The man considered whether the boy was kidding—and whether his ex-wife had been kidding. “She’s probably right, but for reasons other than cookies.”

Pete unwrapped the sandwich: a layer of plastic wrap surrounded by aluminum foil. His father said that this technique kept the moisture in and the heat out.

“What do you see, Pete?”

“See?”

The man pointed to the topo map. “There. What do you see.”

Pete shrugged. “Green and white, mostly. And the contour lines and streams.”

“Do you see them?”

He didn’t know how to answer. “I see the map, what you told me to see.”

“But look. You can see more than you think you can. You know about the contour lines now, how they indicate elevation. If you know this, you can train yourself to see how everything is not flat--the hills and the canyons. And you can see how steep a trail is. Not imagine, but see.”

“I understand what’s there,” Pete said, chewing as he spoke. “I can’t see what you do, though.”

“Some day, you will. It takes practice. I’ve been looking at maps for a long time. You finished with the sandwich?”

Pete had eaten half. “Yeah.”

“I’ll eat the other half.”

“Can I have the cookie now, Dad?”

“You can have all three.”

“Really?”

“Yep. I ate two on the way back from the car.”

“Maybe Mom’s wrong about you.” When the cookies were gone, Pete left the table for the edge of the lake where he shuffled across a small beach. The tall mountain on the far side of the lake seemed to be surrounded by a halo. The boy did not see any fish.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Pete said when returned to the table.

His father pointed toward a small building near the car. “Outhouse is over there.”

Coming out of the outhouse, Pete walked part way up the hill that rose in front of him. He looked to the picnic table and watched as his father folded the maps and slid them into his rucksack. The man always seemed thinner whenever Pete saw him, and now that thinness leaned toward sickly. His limp had gotten worse, too, though he never complained about his leg hurting.

“Dad?” Pete said when he neared the table.

“What is it, Pete?”

“Can I see that map, the topo?”

“We need to get going.”

“Just for a minute.”

The man reached down and retrieved the map, unfolding it across the table.

“We’re here, right?” Pete pointed to the lake.

“That’s the spot.”

“I think this is the outhouse, right here.” He placed his small index finger at a bare spot. “See—I think this is it.”

His father squinted. “You could be right.” He rotated the map. “If we look at it this way, we can get a better idea of where this picnic table is. Here’s the campground that’s near the parking lot, so you’re right.”

Pete pointed toward the outhouse. “And see this line? Maybe that’s the hill outside the outhouse door. Across the lake there’s a mountain,” he pointed to a small circle of contour lines. “I saw it from the beach.”

His father eyed the lake, tilted his head so he could see what Pete was pointing to, and he nodded. “You learn fast.”


The Taurus had cooled, and they drove to the highway then turned east. “Where are we going now, Dad?”

“Not far.”

“Be specific, Dad. Not distance—destination.”

“You’re getting to smart for me, Kiddo! I think we’ll stop in Reno, get a hotel room for the night. We’ll find a place with a swimming pool. We won’t change maps tonight.”

“Okay.” Pete looked out the window, at the mountain he had seen while standing at the beach. “Are you supposed to leave California?”

His father clicked his tongue against his teeth. “No.”

The terrain changed from granite and trees to something more barren. Pete blinked one eye at a time to make the landscape shift.

“You know why I show you these things, right, Pete?”

“The maps? Mom says it’s because you’re obsessed.”

His father laughed. “Yes, I suppose she’s right. But that’s not why I do it, not really. If you can read a map, you can do anything. If you walk around an airport, you know how to follow the signs—the pictures and the words—that’s like reading a map. Everyone has to be able to find their way around, to figure things out. To see things that others can’t see. If you go on a trip by yourself someday, you’ll be able to look at a road map for a few minutes and know exactly where you’re going.”

Pete sensed that his father had relaxed now that they were out of the mountains. The car should be okay now. “Dad?”

“Yeah,” his father said.

“How long will you be gone this time?”

His father glanced across the seat. “Why do you ask that?”

“Mom said you won’t tell her, but I want to know.”

“Your mom wants to know because she’s trying to decide if she should give up on me forever.”

“She already divorced you, Dad. That’s pretty much giving up, isn’t it?”

“That’s giving up on being married to me, and I don’t blame her for doing that. Giving up on me is something else.”

“Mom doesn’t give up easily.”

“No, she doesn’t.” He ran his finger across dust on the dashboard. “It might be three years, Pete,” he finally said. “Maybe fewer.”

“Three years. When will you know?”

“I’ve got to call my lawyer tomorrow. He’ll tell me when I’ll find out.”

“But you were innocent of everything, right?”

“Yes, mostly I was innocent. Not of everything, because nobody is completely innocent.”

“That’s not very specific, is it.”

The man hesitated. “No, it isn’t. When you get older, I’ll give you the specifics.”

“I can ask Mom.”

“I told her not to tell you.”

“That doesn’t seem fair. People ask me where you are, and I never have a good answer.”

“Who asks?”

Pete shrugged. “Friends.”

“What do you say to them?”

“I usually just say that my parents are divorced and you moved away.”

“I’m sorry about that. I should work harder at not going away.”

“If you’re gone for three years, I could have my driver’s license by the time you get home.”

“You’ll be a good driver. And you’ll know how to read a map, too.”

“I’ll take you for a drive when you come home, okay? You can navigate.”

“I’d like that, Pete.”

Pete reached into the back of the car to retrieve his father’s rucksack. “Can I?”

“Yes. You always can. I want you to take care of those maps while I’m gone. You should start your own collection, too. You need your own set of maps.”

Pete pulled several road maps from the rucksack’s pocket. “You can’t take these with you?”

“No. But I’ll be able to look at others sometimes. If the library is good, that is. Usually there’s at least an atlas or two.”

“Which map are we on now?”

“We’re still on the one on top.”

Pete opened the map and found the highway and Woods Lake. He watched out the side window until they passed a road sign that showed the mileage to Reno. “Fifty-three miles.” He drew his finger along the red line that was the highway.

“You find where we are?”

“It’s pretty easy.”

“Well, keep watching, because I’ve never been this way. We’ll have to turn north at some point.”

“I think I see where—not too far away.” He looked up at the sky. “Before dark.”

“’Before dark.’” I like the sound of that. “You think you can figure it out?”

“I think so, Dad. But I was hoping to change maps tonight. You know, drive onto another one.”

The father adjusted the rearview mirror to deflect sunlight from his face. “I’m not sure this is the day for that, Pete. Sometimes it’s good to leave them folded so you have something to look forward to.”

“We could keep driving, Dad. You’ve got a bunch of maps left here.”

The father didn’t reply, just kept his eyes on the road and on the front of the Taurus, watching for steam.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #10

Margie's brain

Margie said that the first time she opened a human skull, she half expected to see some evidence of the person's soul. What she found instead, she also said, was mushy tissue. "It was like opening a musk melon, maybe a pumpkin." Not long afterward, she once told me, was when she became convinced that there was no god—and certainly no God.

"How can you determine that from looking at a brain?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Science won me over," she said. "I thought about what I'd seen, what I felt in the texture of grooves on the brain. I'd always been ambivalent about religion, so ambivalent I couldn't even convince myself to become an agnostic. There was a time I was sure that God existed, and then a time when I simply hoped so. At some point I saw that bugs and fish and skunks and people all die the same way, for the most part—things just break down and stop working. Humans are nothing special, just as accidental as any other form of life. A bunch of chemicals get thrown into a pot, and something develops."

"What does that do to faith?" I asked.

"Not a thing," Margie said. "I'm not saying that faith is bad, or that belief in a god is bad. I just don't think either is necessary. I remember the first time I had to tell a patient's family that someone had died. A couple of them responded with something like, 'At least he's in a better place now.' I just didn't get that. I thought, If God gave us life and wanted us to live here, live as humans, why would we want to go to a better place? I began to see both God and heaven as human constructs and nothing more."

"Maybe belief gives us freedom," I said. "Or hope. I'd like to think that we do have a purpose, that we're not just a collection of accidents."

"I found some liberation when I stopped believing in god," she said. "And I found myself thinking that if I concentrated on doing as much good as I can while I'm alive, then that's enough—I don't have to hope for some 'better place.' I'm comfortable with being alive now, with being happy now."

I had admired my sister's abilities and intelligence for as long as I could remember, but no matter what she said, I wanted to believe that even those of us who had not accomplished or contributed much to society had some type of purpose, that there was hope of redemption. But, maybe that went to what Margie was saying....

Now, on the train, Margie was sitting with my father, and I thought I really should give her the Rhodia; perhaps she could gleen—or add—something I could not. Instead, I ran my hands across the smooth cover. And with my eyes closed, I reached my fingers into the middle of the notebook and felt how the pressure from someone's pen had created indents in the paper—small, grooves of thoughts and ideas left for me to feel.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #9

My admiration for my brother was strong, but as his snoring got louder, I stuffed Kleenex into my ears and leaned away from him. Settling against the window, I remembered another train ride that ended up interrupted for a couple of months. I was drinking a bit more then and had reached a precarious balance between complete obliviousness and mistaken confidence. That's not always an unpleasant place to be, but it's often difficult to leave behind.

I was headed west to east on that trip, but lost over the years is where I was actually going. I know I was alone. Where I ended up, was Helper, Utah, a main street of a town in which there are few violent crimes but many thefts and burglaries. The Amtrak train stopped in Helper about seven in the morning, not long after sunrise, and I stepped outside for fresh air. For some reason I also started walking, and then the train continued on without me. I returned to the station for an hour, probably thinking the train would return for me. I felt glad that I still had my wallet and a few hundred dollars, but my duffel bag was still on the train. I've started over again at several points in my life, but that was the first time without a change of clothing.

When I walked back into town, I found the Golden Rule Mission where I got a free breakfast and directions to the Phillips 66 gas station where the owner gave me more directions, this time to a 3-room strip of a motel. There I paid for a week's worth of lodging and met Susan, who managed the Gateway Lanes bowling alley. When my week was over Susan took me in and said that if she earned the money, I had to cook and clean and walk her home from the lanes late at night.

"Three years," Susan said one night when I asked her how long she had been there.

"Three years?" I pictured Helper and wondered who could live there for that long.

"Legend is that the town keeps people," Susan said.

"Keeps people? What does that mean?"

"Like you'd find in the Twilight Zone keeping," she said. "The town draws people in. Look at you--you didn't show up on purpose, did you?"

"I just missed my train," I said.

"Nobody just misses a train in Helper," she said.

"How did you get here?"

"Bad transmission in a Chevy Nova," she said. "On my way to someplace other than Utah, and this is as far as I got."

But one day she was gone. I had walked to the bowling alley to walk her home, and Nate, the bartender-cook-security guard said that Susan had met someone a couple nights earlier, then had left with him just a couple hours earlier. That was enough for me, so a few days later I boarded the Amtrak train and never looked back.

The train with my family--including my dead aunt and uncle--was headed toward Helper again. Steven was still sleeping and the train had grown a bit too quiet for so early in the evening. I switched on the overhead light and opened the Rhodia. Leafing through the pages, I found paragraph of small text toward the end of the notebook. Above the paragraph was the note, "I have started writing a novel called The Golfer's Wife. Here is the first paragraph."

I knew the nature of my marriage had changed when I walked into the house and found that my wife had packed her clothes, killed the cat, and moved out of my life. "Angie?" I called tentatively as I walked from room to room, my voice bouncing off the sheetrock of what no longer seemed to be the cozy home I had left nine hours earlier.

I closed the Rhodia and thought about that paragraph, about how everything in it seemed so plausible.

How We Let Go

My youngest son turned 18 today, an age of mythical privileges and responsibilities. When I was young but old enough to pay attention to things, turning 18 meant eligibility for the draft during the Vietnam War. And, in some places, it was the age at which a person could legally buy and consume alcohol. Later, and largely because it seemed important to those who could (and were) sent away to die, it was the age at which a person could vote. All 4 of my sons are now registered for the draft, one of those just-in-case formalities that runs counter to my belief pacifism that grows stronger the older I become.

So it goes, Vonnegut said, and indeed it does, though any more I'm not sure where it goes. I look at my son now and try to judge how ready he is for leaving home for college in just a few months. He admits no nervousness now, but perhaps he senses precursors to that churn in the belly that accompanies our greatest changes. Not long after high school graduation I was away to boot camp, and in my self-centered way I think that I was somehow more prepared for leaving home. Is he prepared? I wonder. Have I been good a good enough father that he has managed to learn what he needs to work through problems he will face on his own?

Then again, maybe these problems I anticipate are mine—he is prepared, but I am not. As we enjoyed birthday cake this evening, I wondered if my concern for him is born from the realization that I am losing control of him. For, in many ways, parenting seems to be partly based on control: "Don't eat that, but do eat this"; "Don't talk to me like that"; "Is your homework done?" The urge to control our children seems so strong, so necessary—yes, we must teach our children to be safe, to be "good" in all that word's definitions, to be prepared for the world they must face. But—and this is so difficult—we must also trust them and their ability to know the difference between the wise people and the foolish. Any "wisdom" I have has been acquired through an ever-growing highlight reel of mistakes, misplaced faith, false prophets, and poor decisions, but in the end I am better off for all that has gone wrong.

Is it easy to let go? Never. More sentimental than I can articulate or even acknowledge, I am in a constant battle of reassurance—that the kids are all right, and that I will be, too.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #8

Steven (mostly)


The youngest of us, Steven was probably the most accomplished even if he wasn't the surgeon Margie was. He had moved smoothly through college and various corporate environments in New York, Chicago, and London. Three years my junior, he had learned well from my mistakes and had developed into a well-balanced and respectable man. Though he must have known--and I must have told him--that for much of my youth I would have been happy if he had not joined our family, he seemed to never hold my sometimes outward dislike of against me. In some ways there are few things worse, more humiliating, than being forgiven by those we hate. He told me once that he had always admired me, but that he had also learned not to emulate me.

Now, he slept in the chair beside me. He was not snoring so much as purring. I looked out the window and wished I had his ability to sleep no matter the time or circumstance. When we had shared a room as boys, I would rise to visible jealous anger that he could sleep through the night when I battled insomnia. I probably would have been a better older brother if I had been able to sleep. His brown paper bag and can of beer were tilted loosely between his hands, and I pulled them gently from his fingers. The can was empty.

Years before, not long after he had returned from London, we were sitting in my parents' kitchen. I have forgotten if were were gathered for a holiday, but it might have been his first Thanksgiving home in awhile. I remember we had spent time looking through my mother's photo albums, and Steven lingered over pictures of the two of us hiking and fishing at Barney Lake in the eastern Sierra.

"Tell me," I said at some point, "what exactly do you do for a living?"

Steven laughed. "I sometimes ask myself the same question. But, I get paid for developing software. Actually, that's not true. These days I get paid for managing other people who develop software. For banks, sometimes for governments. We find ways to transfer money from one place to another."

"That's legal?" I asked.

"As far as I know. It's not even real money, though. It's all electronic--funds transfers, that kind of thing. Billions of dollars going from one place to another in less than a second."

I kept looking out the window at Colorado and wondered how I had missed so many steps along the way. I had started college and dropped out; I had been married twice but was now single; I had had good jobs but was now without one. Steven and Margie both seemed to have missed no steps, and their lives consisted of even and controlled movement forward. Years ago I was jealous of those two lives, and I often felt I was chasing my sister and being pursued by my brother. Steven had never said a thing, though, had never let on if my brushes with both law and early mortality had ever bothered him. "You don't have to be me," he had once said, and I was stricken with how this should've been something he heard from me and not the other way around. I knew it was his way of saying that he accepted me for whatever and whoever I was. We had at different times bemoaned our birth order: the overachieving oldest child pressured to lead the way; the often-lost middle child pressured from both sides; the carefree yet desirous-to-please youngest child.

The train car was filled with the quietness typical of after-meal contemplation. If they could, I knew, old men would be enjoying their cigars and brandy. I turned on the light above my seat and opened the Rhodia. Leafing through the pages, I searched for something else from Ophelia, and I found several entries all in her fine script. With the tip of my forefinger I traced her signature and felt the depth of the pen stroke.

Steven had stopped purring. "You still here?" he muttered.

"I am," I said.

"Good," he said, and then he went back to sleep.

Ophelia's writing seemed to range from happy to quite sad. One entry toward the middle of the notebook entreated people to read James Joyce's story "The Dead." After several exclamation marks, she wrote: "This is only a small part of the story--out of context. Please read the entire story! This is one of Gabriel's passages..."

from "The Dead"

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasms, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.

I wondered about this--about its meanings, about who Ophelia was and what she was trying to say. I looked at Steven's sleeping face and wondered if he would know, if he could tell me who James Joyce was. I felt nothing but admiration for my brother then, and I asked myself if I would ever tell him so.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #7

Leaving Grand Junction


We were, with a slight lurch, moving forward, moving west. The train seemed to pause slightly just as the station was behind us, and there was a slight moan from the other end of the observation car. Moans aside, we were moving.

"Not a place I want to return to," Steven said.

"A good place to leave," Margie said.

"There are worse places," my father added, always optimistic.

The observation car was full of much activity--the comings and goings of people who had been on the train for hours but who now apparently felt the need to move.

"I'm hungry," Dad said.

"We've got a seating time in the dining car," Margie said. "I reserved a table for all of us in about half an hour."

"I'll give up my seat," I said. "I'm not hungry."

"You might be later," Margie said.

"Then I'll eat later," I said.

"Dumb kids," Steven said. "I saw Cousin Mark downstairs. I'll ask him if he wants to join us." Mark was Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet's oldest child. He and I were close in age, but he was the learned type and had found reasonable success as a college professor and a writer. I admired him for the writing, and I wondered if he would be interested in the notebook. Cathy, his sister, would be joining the train in Salt Lake City where she lived with her Mormon family.

"You'll be missing a nice dinner," Dad said to me when Steven was gone.

"Don't humor him, Dad," Margie said.

Half an hour later they were all gone, eating in the dining car while I left the noisy observation car for my seat toward the rear of the train. Leafing through Rhodia, I saw how some people had taken the writing assignment quite seriously, while others seemed to have leaned toward graffiti. One entry, "Nebraska," was written in the same hand as others, and all were signed with the letters "MK."

Nebraska

There is nothing there.
But you have to see it to believe it.

Zephyr rolls hard and fast determined to leave Nebraska at night. With passengers flopped half asleep in all contorted positions, like refugees fleeing the park land of fields, broken by grain silos hiding missiles aimed at evil empires, lit only by Pepsi and Coca Cola machines glowing red and white and sometimes blue against filling stations. Don't lose a minute--just keep humping until Nebraska is done--until we've checked McCook, Holdrege, Hastings, Lincoln, and Omaha off our list of grudging stops. Ride on through the Nebraska corn husking and soy gleaning night. Cross the Missouri and ride on.

I liked it--for the mood as much as the words. I have driven across Nebraska, and it's a drive that never seems to end. It's one of the seemingly endless bad filmstrips among the country's 50 states' worth of travelogues. And something in it made me think of Peggy again, how she and I were young enough to see glamour in so many bad motels when we took to the road. We both enjoyed getting on the road a couple of hours before dawn and letting the day open up to us. Then we'd find someplace to sleep in the afternoon, sometimes simply parking our car in Walmart parking lots along with the RVs, and try to be driving again as the day ended. "How is all of this going to end?" Peggy once asked me on a road trip not long before we decided to divorce. I never answered that question, and she never asked it again.

When my siblings and father found me, they were full of food and happiness. "I brought you the leftovers," Margie said. "Half of a hamburger. Slightly cold by now."

I took the food from her. "Such a nurturer," I said. "Thanks."

Steven sat beside me. He belched, slipped his feet out of his shoes, and tilted his seat back. "People are going to think you don't like them if you keep avoiding everyone," he said. Margie and our father sat in front of us; Cousin Mark entered the car a few minutes later and sat a few rows behind us. He was reading a book as he walked by, and I doubted he'd even noticed us.

"I like everyone just fine," I said. I shut the Rhodia and watched what was left of Colorado pass by. We rode on.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #6

Waiting--Grand Junction


Peggy wrote poetry. Nearly every day she would jot individual lines on scraps of paper and now and then assemble those scraps. "Is it any good?" I once asked her.

She said she didn't know. "I'm young," she said. "I write poetry like someone who is young." I didn't know what she meant. I still don't.

Steven and Margie sat beside me. They'd come in through the station's front door, and each carried, literally, a brown paper bag. Steven offered me his bag. "You want a drink?"

I shook my head. "Dad's been sharing his flask. It's a bit less white-trashy than brown paper bags." I didn't offer them the flask itself.

Margie laughed and pulled her bag down to expose a Diet Pepsi. "It's your brother who's the white trash," she said. Steven showed me a can of Miller Genuine Draft.

"Where have you been?" I asked.

"We went walking," Steven said. "Up and down the streets. Not much to see around here. Kind of flat and dusty. We found a couple of body shops and a 7-Eleven. Where's Dad?"

"Back on the train, I think."

"He should've gotten a sleeping compartment," Margie said.

"We all should've gotten a compartment," I said. While the Amtrak seats were comfortable enough for sitting, they were only adequate for sleeping.

"What's with the notebook?" Steven asked.

I leafed through the Rhodia's smooth pages. "Dad found it. It's got stuff from train passengers. A mobile journal." I gave it to Margie when she held her hand out.

"A mobile journal," Margie said. "I kind of like that idea. You find anything good?"

"Haven't read much," I said. But I had read some, though I'd mostly searched for entries that had photographs or drawings. One photograph was of a long highway, with what appeared to be a dust storm in the distance. The photograph took up the top two-thirds of a page, and after it was a story titled "The Map-Reader." I liked that one--the idea of driving across the desert alone for hours and hours. But it was ideas like this that got often got between Peggy and me, too. And as I stared at the photograph, I found myself missing Peggy. "You'll always remember me," Peggy said on the our last day together as husband and wife. And she was right, too. We always do remember certain people even when they're the ones we seemingly should forget.

"You could write down your most personal feelings," Steven said.

Margie laughed. "He doesn't have personal feelings, remember?" She thumbed a couple of pages. "There's some interesting stuff. Looks like some kids got their paws on it--someone drew houses and trees with crayons." She handed it back. "If you can't think of anything to write, give it back to me. I'll write about our family's weird tradition of hauling dead relatives half-way across the country."

"Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet were smart enough to get a sleeping compartment," Steven said.

"That's sick, Steven," Margie said.

We let the joke fade. I looked through the window to where the train was, where my father paced. He would appear on one side of the window, disappear on the other, and then reverse course. He finally stopped framed perfectly by the window, and he seemed to focus on several people who were boarding the train. It was the most movement I had seen in hours. "People are getting on the train," I said. My brother and sister didn't move, didn't even appear interested in leaving the station. "I'm going outside to see if something's happening," I said.

Outside, I asked my father if he'd heard any news. "No," he said, "but some of these people talked to a guy in a funny hat, and they talked to other people, and then the whole bunch of them got on the train."

"I'll go check inside," I said. "Maybe someone updated the chalkboard."

I had once spend an entire night in London's Victoria station. I'd missed my connection to Edinburgh, so I sat on a bench and dozed until dawn and the next train north. It was not the worst night I've spent alone, and I must have appeared sane and clean enough that nobody of authority bothered me. The timing turned out to be good, for if I had arrived in Scotland when I was scheduled to, I would not have met one of the few women I've known who could cause me to actually swoon.

The Grand Junction station was not one in which I wanted to spend even another minute, and I felt that luck had visited me because, according to the chalkboard, our departure time was just ten minutes away. I motioned to my sister and brother. "The train's leaving," I said, and they followed me outside.

"Where's Dad?" Margie asked.

Steven pointed upward. "On the train. The observation car."

Our father was sitting near a window and gesturing us to join him. "It's time to go," I said to nobody in particular.

"The engines are talking to one another," Dad said when we sat next to him.

"Family dynamics at their best," Steven said.

My father looked at me. "Where's my flask?"

Fictionus Interruptus

A year ago today I woke up in London and went to bed in Brussels. It was a wonderful day of adventure, of traveling to somewhere I had never been, of being mostly lost for a good amount of time. I had a different job then, one that had owned me for nearly a decade and provided me with ample vacation time for such adventures. Now, though, I have much less vacation available and must carefully allocate my days off throughout the year. The older I get, the more I would trade money for time off. With this in mind, it might be ironic that I traded both when I switched jobs....

I was lost for much of my time in Brussels, starting when I got on the correct local train after arriving by Eurostar but went in the wrong direction. When that local train stopped, everyone got off--I followed suit and found myself in a park dominated by a statue of Winston Churchill. Having no idea about where I was or where I should go, I simply loitered in the park until the sign sign on the same train changed to the name of the station I was looking for. I took that as a good omen, got back on the train, and 15 minutes later was at the stop near my hotel. Significant in this experience is a breakfast conversation I had with two women in London. They described a visit to Paris during which they were riding the metro when the train stopped at a station, the conductor announced something, and everyone got off the train. Speaking no French, the women decided that they should follow suit. They were not sure of where they were, but they eventually ended up where they were supposed to be. When I was on the right train in the wrong place in Brussels, I thought of their experience and simply did as they did.

I would return to England, given the chance. I would return today, in fact. I have brought this up in too many conversations with too many people, and the reaction I sometimes get is, "Why? You've been there twice--don't you want to see something new?" This is perfectly logical question, and perhaps it speaks to the truth that I perhaps I am not as adventurous as I'd like to believe. I suspect that my time in the navy plays a role in this: I traveled quite a bit, but drifted into assorted ports only every now and then, never staying longer than a few days. Age, too, has a role. With a good number of years on my back, new and completely different experiences are a bit harder to come by as I get softer and more settled in habit and responsibility. There is something very new about waking up in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar city and thinking, How do I get breakfast here? How do I get the shower to work? How do I get to Brussels?

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #5

Waiting--Grand Junction



My brother and sister were nowhere to be found. "If they're not here when the train leaves," my father said, "I'm stealing your brother's cigars."

We'd each bought a cup of coffee from the store, and we found a seat on one of the long, wooden benches inside the station, benches that seemed more like church pews. A middle-aged woman pecked away at a computer keyboard inside the ticketing office, outside of which was a small chalkboard with the train's departure time written neatly in blue chalk. That we were currently an hour beyond that time seemed to have been forgotten by whoever was in charge of the chalkboard. During what my parents had called my "wandering years" I had spent a bit of time in England, and even that long ago in dozens of train stations, I had never seen a chalkboard.

"You call Mom?" I asked.

My father shook his head. "Not yet. Later tonight, probably."

"You can call her more than once a day, you know. It wouldn't hurt anything."

"No, it probably wouldn't. But it'd surely make her think something's wrong. She was fearful that I'd be lonely without her, that I'd somehow get misplaced."

My parents had been married for forty-five years, a number that astounded me. They were both eighteen when they met, nineteen on their wedding day. My siblings and I arrived not long afterward. "Mom might be glad to hear that you're lonely," I said. "She'd appreciate being missed."

"I'm not a man of surprises," he said as he drank from his flask. A woman sitting across from us, her two toddlers splayed out on the floor at her feet, narrowed her eyes when she saw my father drink. He noticed, too, and just to make sure there was no confusion between them, he drank again.

"I'm going to get a Pepsi from the store, Dad. You want anything?"

"I'm fine. Potato chips, maybe." He reached for his wallet.

"Forget it, Dad. I can afford a bag of potato chips."

My dream about Peggy still lingered wherever it is that dreams rattle around, and I thought of her as I left my father on the bench. He and Peggy had been good friends, and I've always believed he was somewhat hurt when she was gone. My parents had endured an incredible amount of angst raising their children, and since I was the most troublesome, they were relieved when I got married and seemed to be changing things up a bit. Peggy and I had indeed struggled--including floating around Nevada for awhile--and hope was the last thing we gave up on. But we were both realists and knew when to end what needed to end. I always wanted to think that our life together made me more resilient, but in fact it made me little more than weary. "You don't know what weary is," Peggy once told me when I told her how I felt. She was probably right, too.

"They didn't have potato chips," I said when I again sat beside my father. "You want something else?"

"I want to get on the train and be moving," he said. "So, you write anything yet?" He pointed to the Rhodia notebook.

"Haven't opened it," I said.

"Your sister and brother walked through here on their way back to the train. I think I'll join them." He pointed to the chalkboard. "She updated the sign when you were gone. We're not going anywhere for awhile."

I was dismayed to see that our departure time was still an hour away. I wished that my father had left me the flask--some places are suited for drinking, and Grand Junction Amtrak station seemed to fit the bill. Slouching as much as I could without sliding off the bench, I leafed through the notebook. Some of the pages were completely full; others sported drawings or poems. Several poems seemed to have been written by the same hand, and though I've never read much poetry, they were short and easy to read. One, "Surprise," was centered perfectly on the page, with a sketch of a small, landlocked boat named San Antonio at the bottom of the page.

Surprise

Someone should have mentioned how dusk might
linger like this, how daylight and a diminished
horizon can refuse one another as easily as they refuse
the half-moon. Five-hundred feet below, a slack tide
barely pulses toward the line of seaweed strands,
distressed driftwood, diminished legs of crabs.
From this bluff, from this bed of clump grass, only
the single light on a schooner's mast has purpose--
an unnatural beacon any eye would find until finally
even it is directed away, perhaps into the surprise
of strong water, into what becomes of dusk.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #4

Waiting: Grand Junction


When I returned to the train, I found my father still sitting in the observation car. "You want anything from the store?" I asked.

"There's a store?"

"In the station. You want to get out and walk around?"

He didn't seem interested. "Any idea of how much longer we'll be sitting here?"

"From what I hear, could be awhile. Something about the engines not talking to each other."

"They must be related," he said. "You want a drink?" He handed me his silver flask, something I hadn't seen in years. He used to carry with him whenever we went on family vacations that involved extensive time in the car. He always swore that he never drank while driving, but in the middle of the night once somewhere between Chicago and Michigan I watched from the backseat as he glanced over at my sleeping mother and pressed the flask to his lips. He must have assumed that I was also asleep, but I was never sure if I shut my eyes before he looked into the rearview mirror to see if anyone was watching.

"Is it Scotch?" I asked.

"Yep. Where are your sister and brother?"

I sealed the flask and handed it back to him. "Probably still inside."

"They should've brought their spouses along for the ride."

I laughed. "You didn't bring yours."

"Your mother's been through this enough times." He reached over to the seat beside him. "Look what I found." He handed me a Rhodia notebook, its orange cover smudged with dirt and what looked like strawberry jam.

"Where's this come from?"

"Chicago, from what I can tell."

"You know what I mean. You find it just lying here?"

"A couple seats over. It was there all night, and when nobody picked it up this morning, I started looking through it. It's some kind of travel journal."

The notebook paper was smooth and bright, something a person might use a good pen on. Many of the pages were full, while others had only a short paragraph or even a long sentence. On the inside front cover was a note: "Started by Ophelia in Chicago as a random collection of random thoughts written by random people. Write something here, then pass it on or leave it in a place where someone other than the Amtrak people will find it and throw it away."

"I've been trying to think of something to write," my father said as I turned the pages. "I've been staring out this window trying to come up with an idea. If your mother were here, she'd have every page filled out by now. She loves this kind of thing."

Ophelia started like this:

Once again I have left home, though this time I actually bought a round-trip ticket. I also left a note for my parents telling them that I am fine, that I will call when I get a chance, and that they have nothing to worry about. I had planned to write something on every page here, but I thought it might be more interesting to have other people write things, too. If you have this in your hands, find a pen or pencil and write what you want to write. If all of the pages are filled, please mail the notebook to the Post Office box written below. I will be glad to reimburse you for postage if you tell me where to send the money.

Ophelia's handwriting was beautiful.

"I've read most of it," my father said. "There's some good stuff there, but there's a lot of crap, too. You should write something."

"I don't have a lot to say," I told him. "Maybe Margie."

"You could say that we're never going to get the hell out of Grand Junction, and that we ended up burying your aunt and uncle here." He sipped again from the flask. "You think that's her real name?"

"Who?" I asked.

"Ophelia. You ever know anyone by that name?"

"Nope," I said.

"Neither have I, and I've heard a lot of names. Maybe she liked Shakespeare, or maybe she was just crazy." He stared up at the ceiling for a few seconds, then looked at his hands. "' I hope all will be well. We must be patient: but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him in the cold ground. My brother shall know of it: and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.'"

"That's Shakespeare, right?"

"One of the few quotes I remember. From Hamlet. Ophelia."

I closed the notebook. "You want this back?"

"Not especially. Unless I think of something to write." He stood up. "Let's get off this train for a bit before we go crazy, too."