001969

My grandfather stamps the gas pedal, sending a rooster’s golden plume to settle over the green haze of Iowa corn.

In the backseat of this Ford Galaxie, his daughter winces as I kick her swollen belly.

We are speeding toward Chicago, my father intubated in the Great Lakes Naval Hospital’s ICU.

“Cripes, Myrtle! What was he doing traipsing around with a 16-year-old girl?”

Grandmother reaches to touch his hand, and he stills.

In the rearview mirror, my mother’s eyes close against vying contractions.

001975

Father veers onto the gravel shouldering this lonesome stretch of CR 18; the car shudders to a stop beneath ribbons of afternoon heat.

“Out—now.”

Scott thrusts the heavy door open with both shoes, rubber soles squeaking against the panel.

Outside, dragonflies patrol the ditch for mosquitoes; barbed wire loops from the weeds between bone-tired fence posts.

“What am I going to do with you?” my father wonders, sounding oddly bemused.

His son’s face is sculpted clay. He buries both hands deep into his pockets.

The Seville’s engine ticks away long minutes. I will him to allow Scott back in. I grasp for the words my father needs to hear—words I might force past my brother’s clenched jaw, if only to share this seat again, hold his protecting hand.

Instead, he shrinks into the distance, refusing to be broken.

001981

We drive into Wyoming well after dark. The heater rattles under the dash as ornaments of frost paint the glass.

The high plateaus of Johnson County surrender to the mountain range my mother has painted in her rapt illustrations of our new start. It stands to the west, its stark shadows of rock looming out of the night.

I tussle my little brother’s hair, but he doesn’t wake. He’s been sleeping since we saw the antelope outside of Spearfish. One bow of his thick-rimmed spectacles rides awkwardly above an ear.

I take them from his face and hold them loosely in the dark.

The lights of Buffalo wink into view.

“We’re almost home,” my mother whispers, adjusting the Nova’s temperamental defrost.

Minnesota lies 800 miles behind us—a distance farther than we’ve traveled since yesterday.

001987

Mitch and Troy spent the day at Lake DeSmet, constructing a growing pyramid of shot-gunned Coors cans.

Walt and I meet up with them in the high school parking lot as the sun slips behind the Bighorns; a cerulean sky bleeds evening aubergine.

Mitch rolls down the window of his F-150. “Get in or get gone—choice is yours.” He’s dangerous tonight: eyelids hooded, tongue thick with alcohol.

Troy stares out the other window, and it’s apparent they’ve been fighting. What lit this slow-burning fuse? A girl? Some drug debt owed? An AC/DC front man dispute?

Walt and I stay neutral. We climb into the bed and crouch directly across from one another on the inner fender wells of the Lariat.

The truck builds speed as it leaves town. We’re taking an arid ranch road out to Ucross, where it is rumored we can buy beer without a driver’s license.

“So much for seatbelts!” Walt calls, his voice thin as a stretched balloon.

“How fast do you think we’re going?” I shout into the rushing air.

He scoots forward and cups his face to the back window. “Fuck me! 80!”

We will be ejected from the truck, necks snapping as we cartwheel through the fragrant sage; laid before our mothers, our eyes swollen black.

But then we’re in Ucross, population 25, and I’m on my knees retching into the dust.

There is no liquor store, and Troy sticks his middle finger up when we refuse a ride back to town.

My stepfather introduced me to distance running a year ago, but the most I’ve ever managed to gut out is five agonizing miles.

Tonight, eighteen seem so possible.

001992

She hasn’t meant to get us stuck, of course. We’re lost, searching for our first shared apartment. And I asked her to make the u-turn—I asked her.

“I’ll push; you steer,” I say, stepping from her car annoyed, terse.

Five minutes later, my breath labors—lungs ragged, crackling. We’ve managed maybe ten feet, but her Ford Escort remains mired in a soupy trench, and my pants are stiff with dirty ice.

I rest one forearm on the hood; the other on my shaking knee. “You live in Minnesota, Sue. You’re supposed to be prepared for this type of shit. Why don’t you have cat litter in your trunk?”

“Because I don’t have a cat,” she says.

I reach beneath the mudguard, my fingers seizing gray slush. I throw it in her face.

She flinches; her lips part in disbelief.

I try to laugh it off, but it’s too late—she’s seen the violence in my eyes. I know I’ve never looked more like my father than I do in this moment.

001997

“She’s all yours,” the discharge nurse declares.

Sue rests in a wheelchair, holding Maddie to her chest. I’ve brought her Prism from the overnight lot, and scramble around to open the back door.

We secure our newborn into a car seat I’m suddenly sure will be recalled.

“Do you want to drive?” I ask, offering my wife the keys.

“I think I’ve done enough for one day,” she jokes. “You’ll be fine.”

We live ten blocks from the hospital. I brake at every intersection, though all stop signs
direct cross traffic to do so. A girl pedals past on a glittering bike with training wheels—we are traveling in the same direction.

Later, as Sue naps, I tiptoe to the nursery and peer into the crib. My daughter’s lips twitch in her sleep, searching for a mother’s milk.

I marvel at our creation, wondering how much of me she’s inherited—vowing to mend whatever I’ve broken.

002004

I shift the duffel bag onto the floor, wedging it up against the seat.

The Emerson border agent is interrogating a Suburban full of goose hunters heading into Manitoba, but his deft eyes note my movements. He finishes checking their permits and waves them through.

I ease my Dodge Dakota forward, my prepared answers already forgotten.

“Where you headed?” he asks, reaching for my driver’s license.

I tell him Winnipeg, and he asks me how long I’ll be staying, and whether my visit is personal or professional.

“I’m staying with a girlfriend for the weekend,” I offer, and immediately regret it.

“She have a name?”

Two, actually—though I only know her as Ms. Aurora, and I’m pretty sure he’s not interested in her BDSM handle.

Hesitation seals my fate.

“Pull into the bay, please. Leave all belongings in your vehicle and proceed to the waiting area.”

From this foyer, I am directed to a small room: its Spartan furnishings, a table with two chairs.

A bearded man enters, breathing heavily through his nose. There are tattoos on his forearms, but I cannot decipher them beneath the forest of kinky black hair.

In one hand he has a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew; in his other, he carries my duffle bag.

“We shall see what we shall see,” he intones, and it is clear he’s said this before.

He removes a pair of jeans, a heather t-shirt sporting the original Breakfast Club poster logo, my dopp kit.

Then he pauses, raising his eyebrows. His gaze creeps from the duffle, slides across the table, and climbs to my face.

My throat clicks like a stubborn pilot light.

He carefully lifts my wig from the bag. Next comes the sequin Hervé Léger bandage dress, and finally—inevitably—the pink leather collar. Its D-rings clink cheerily as he sets it down.

“I know they asked if your visit was business or pleasure. I’m going to go ahead and assume pleasure.”

There’s no use lying. The truth is spread on the table before us.

“I’m going to the Black and Blue Ball in Winnipeg. It’s, umm, sort of this fetish club I was—”

“Oh, sure! At the Village Inn there on Osborne Street.”

I forget to breathe. “Right. Osborne.”

“You know, a pretty girl like you should ask her Mistress to check out Northbound Leather in Toronto. They make a beautiful ladies neck corset.”

“I’ll make sure to mention that,” I squeak.

“But only if you behave yourself, right?” He chuckles, putting everything back in place.

Soon, I’m driving north on Lord Selkirk Highway. I should be excited about attending the ball, but in 48 hours I’ll be speaking to a U.S. Customs agent at the Pembina Port of Entry.

And it seems highly unlikely he’ll ever have booked a room at the Village Inn.

002008

“Just drive out there, grab your shit, and meet us back at the cabin,” my brother counsels. “Longer you’re in the house, the harder it’s going to be.”

“She didn’t even move it,” I say.

She is my soon-to-be ex-wife; it is my Ford Focus, squatting in the teachers’ parking lot behind Bemidji High School. It’s been parked between these same two yellow lines for the last month and a half.

I recall it was snowing the day they removed me from my classroom and drove me down to the in-patient psychiatric unit at Fairview Riverside in Minneapolis.

I was released at the end of April, and have been living with Scott and his wife in Maple Grove;
my therapist has cautioned me about certain “triggers” up north.

But I need my car. So my brother has given up his Saturday morning to bring me here. Mission accomplished, he circles out of the lot, and heads back to his Longville retreat.

I head west on Division, a familiar street awash with foreign irony. I arrive home, an alien.

Sue has taken the girls to her mother’s for the day. This was a concession arranged on my behalf—or, more likely, hers. I let myself in.

The divorce papers are in the kitchen. Yellow sticky notes indicate where I am to sign. The pen has rolled off the table, and rests beneath a chair.

I move downstairs. A stack of heavy boxes has been shoved into one corner of the living room.
My name, in her perfect script, is penned on each one.

She’s made sure there’s nothing left to lose.

002015

Parker Diana is my second daughter. Like mine, her mercurial eyes betray a pooled silence, and remain haunted even when she smiles.

She’s also my unabashed champion. At nine, on a family outing to Walmart, she noticed a couple gawking at me. Pointing at his wife, she informed the man, “I’d stare too if I had to look at her every day!”

So when she decrees I’m to give her driving lessons a summer before she turns 15, I acquiesce.

With the same faith that compels children to set up neighborhood lemonade stands, she sits behind the wheel of my CR-V, secures her seatbelt, and snaps her fingers. “Keys, please!”

We head east on a single lane dirt road near my house out in Wilton. Things are going well until we arrive at a hairpin turn in the road. A truck driven by a young man not much older than my daughter meets us coming the opposite direction. Parker panics and keeps going straight through the ditch and into the woods—my SUV stalling against a small tree.

I leap from the passenger’s seat and go to inspect the damage. The teen pulls his F-150 out of its fishtail, and tears away in a golden feather of dust; “Thunderstruck” fades into the distance.

Dragonflies tack above the susurrus of crickets.

I bend down and discover the tree is actually a graying fence post. Rusty barbed wire snakes back into the trees, marking a property boundary.

In the weeds beneath the car, I pick up an empty can of Diet Mountain Dew. There is also a fading No Trespassing sign, the property owner’s name scrawled across the bottom in Sharpie.

“Put it in reverse, and I’ll give us a push,” I say.

Five minutes later, we’re still stuck. She leans her head out of the window and says, “Shouldn’t you have some chains or a winch or something?”

We stare at each other through the windshield. Then I begin to laugh. And when she asks me why, I tell her because it’s just a car.

And, of course, because I know we could be so much farther from home.