By Lillian Pontius-Goldblatt

She was watching a science fiction TV show with her grandmother in the house on the very steep hill. The night before she’d lain on her back on top of the sheets on her bed listening to the saddest song on a very sad album over and over. She’d cried some, but not very much or for very long (though the music was up loud enough, no one would have heard; she made sure of that). This was the first time her grandma had come over; they had only moved into the small house on the very steep hill a week before.

She was learning to read tarot cards. She had read her grandmother’s cards and the Death card had shown. She had assured the older woman that the position of the card, along with its ambiguous connotations, points towards change and adversity rather than what its namesake suggests. Her sense of death, its reality, was much like that card’s. To her the difference between death and leaving was a narrow gulch. She was 12.

“Con? Do you smell anything?”

She, Connie, sniffed the air without looking away from the science fiction show. She shook her head no. The space ship’s doors opened with a hiss and a shapely woman with a fish bowl on her head stepped out a long, red leg, her foot meeting the pebbly surface of the alien planet with a crunch.

“I smell gas.”

Connie shrugged and her grandmother leaned forward on the couch.

“Can we wait until the show is over gramma? Ten more minutes.”

“Con, honey, I’m going to go make a phone call.”

Connie’s grandmother called 911 and told the operator she smelled gas. They told her to leave the house immediately, as they are wont to do.

“No, Con, it’s dangerous. We have to leave.”

“Fine!” Connie ran upstairs.

“Conchetta! Where are you going?” Her grandmother’s heart began to flutter. As a young person, an early career woman and late mother, she’d frequently known the anxiety that made her feel as if her chest was a vacuum sucking the lint from her head. She felt this again now with her granddaughter running upstairs into a house slowly filling with toxic fumes. “Conchetta!”

As the old woman pressed down the panic, Connie came clomping down the stairs, looking into a black box the size of a loaf of bread.

It was a battery powered TV on which she continued to watch the science fiction show.

**

Connie’s father came home at 11:30. His mother had not called him about the gas leak, so as he pulled up to the small house on the very steep hill, he was surprised to find his mother and daughter huddled on the stoop, their faces flickering in the light of the tail end of a nightly news program broadcasting from the bread sized TV.

A gas man had come. It was something having to do with the pilot light. The man had fixed it, but the girl’s grandmother, his mother, had not felt safe bringing her back into the house, still smelling the way it did.

This moment, seeing his mother and beautiful daughter on the three and a half step stoop on the steep hill, wrapped in the rainbow afghan Connie had won in a Christmas raffle, is what made the decision obvious.

**

Since Greg and Fleur had separated, Connie had missed quite a few days of school. Her teachers had been notified of the situation and alternatives were proposed. Connie was loath to do the work they sent home and most of the teachers made allowances for that also. Most.

She’d missed so many days, on her own accord and her parents’, that when Greg announced that they’d be driving to Memphis on Monday and he wasn’t sure exactly when they’d be back, she barely flinched. Academically, the year was already a wash.

“We’ll go on vacation, just a little one, a couple of days, a week maybe, we just need a little vacation.”

“What’s in Memphis, dad?”

“History’s in Memphis, Conchetta! Elvis!”

**

The first thing Greg had done after he moving out of the house in which he lived with Fleur and their daughter was trade in the car. The only way he could get a comparable quality vehicle (efficient, foreign, with modern amenities) was to switch from automatic to manual. Though he had learned to drive on a manual transmission pick-up truck in the early mall parking lots of his youth, he hadn’t driven one in years, and had forgotten the difficulties living on a very steep hill can present to one unaccustomed to driving in that fashion.

Connie was still too young to be thinking about her driving but he worried that he was making a bad impression, always dinking the neighbor’s bumpers.

“Why did you buy a new car, dad? The old one was nicer.”

“No, honey, this one is nicer. It’s a manual transmission.”

“What does that mean? Why is that nicer?”

“As a driver you have more control, you can really feel yourself driving the car.”

Connie rolled her eyes.

**

“I packed for four days for you. We can always do laundry if we need to.”

“You packed for me? What did you pack?” Connie unzipped the suitcase and began pulling out t-shirts and underpants. “Dad, I hate all this stuff. Why did you pack for me? I’m not a little kid.”

Greg held up a pair of jeans splattered with orange paint.

“I thought you liked these.”

“Ugh, I haven’t worn those for years.”

“Fine, you pack. We’re leaving in the morning.”

**

Greg meant to leave very early. He had called up to Connie several times after hearing her alarm go off and brought his bags out to the car, along with a bag of the fruit and crackers and beef jerky he’d bought the night before.

“You dressed?” He rapped his knuckles on her door. “Connie?” He opened the door. At the foot of the bed was the bag he’d packed for her while she was at her mother’s the day before. Half of its contents were strewn across the floor; some new items had been tossed into the suitcase. Connie was asleep under a mound of blankets, the morning radio personalities yammering on at an obscene volume.

“Conchetta! You need to get up now! We should be on the road by now.”

He tore the blanket from her head and began shoving the clothes on the floor into the suitcase.

“You are so inconsiderate!” he yelled as she pulled the blanket back over her head, “so irresponsible!” He tore the cover from her hands. “Rude, Connie this is rude. I just want to do something nice!”

Conchetta climbed out of bed and pushed past him, entering the bathroom across the hall and slamming the door behind her.

“Ten minutes, Connie, ten minutes then we’re leaving, whether you’re ready or not.”

**

The highway heading west out of the city was bumper-to-bumper traffic. There is an inelegance to being stuck in traffic next to someone with whom you have been recently fighting: a forced intimacy, combined with a common and immense enemy. Connie turned up the radio. Greg honked at people that hadn’t done anything wrong.

As they crested a small hill they could see the bottleneck.

“I knew it had to be an accident. It’s not rush hour. Can you see?”

“It looks like a tractor trailer. It’s something big.”

They inched closer to the accident. Everyone had stopped honking at one another; there was a universal craning of necks.

“Yeah, it’s a truck,” Connie said, reaching up and slowly opening the moonroof. She undid her seat belt and hoisted herself up through the window in the top of the car.

“Careful, Connie.” Greg put is hand on her side. After a moment, she dropped back into her seat. There was a look of surprise and mirth on her face.

“A truck tipped over and spilled trampolines all over the road.”

“Trampolines?”

“The small ones, for kids, a million of them.”

As they squeezed past in the one open lane, the truck driver sat with his head in his hands on the back of an ambulance talking with a middle-aged police officer. Behind him a young officer bounced on one of the lost trampolines, directing traffic with a flickering road flare.

Father and daughter were both bullheaded, and refused to laugh aloud.

**

“I’m hungry and I have to go to the bathroom.”

“We’ve only been on the road for an hour.”

“You didn’t let me have any breakfast.”

“You should have woken up earlier.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Have an apple.” Greg reached behind his seat and pulled out the bag of snacks.

“I don’t want an apple, I want lunch.”

“Have an apple now. I know a place we can stop in half an hour.”

**

The place Greg knew was a diner twenty minutes from the highway in a small town called Symphony.

“You might have been too young to remember,” he said, “but I worked in this town for a little while.”

It was the parking lot that Connie remembered. Several houses before, there was a photograph that had hung in the foyer of the three of them in that parking lot. In the picture Connie was four or five, her mother on the left and her father on the right, each held one of her thin ankles. She hung upside down between them, laughing riotously, her small pink shirt drooping down exposing a round child’s belly. Behind them was the row of strange, bulbous lampposts that skirted the restaurant’s entrance.

**

By midday they were in the heart of the mountains, and still a long way from Memphis. Even in the full light of day the atmosphere was that of restless ghosts.

After the meal, the tension dissipated between father and daughter.

‘This was a good idea,’ Greg thought to himself. He imagined the clot that had been building in his heart was beginning to dissolve. Connie had drifted off to sleep, lulled by the rocking of the car. Before closing her eyes, though, she too felt the noiseless, ephemeral threat of badness and pain begin to drift away.

It was a long time before she woke up. Greg worried for a while, about taking time off from work, about Connie. He thought of Fleur. They had driven through the mountains once. She was from a small town further south. He’d met her family, that’s why they’d driven through the mountains. Turning a sharp corner Greg abruptly pulled off the road and onto the rocky shoulder.

He stroked Connie’s arm to wake her and nodded for her to get out of the car with him.

Their feet crunching the gravel was the only sound as they walked to the edge of the cliff, and when they stopped to look out at the curving body of the land, it was silent.
It was early spring and the white, green leaves were soft and small, rippling like cilia, feeling and smelling and understanding the world with tiny, ticklish fingers.

Greg felt the clot again in his chest. His shoulders shook, quivered under the wisps of cloud. He was not thinking of his daughter at all, though, until she took his hand and they stood together.

The drop was mighty, the rock below them ribbed with dynamite tracks where the hill had been blown apart to make room for the highway. Fear rose in Greg and he gave Connie’s hand a tug away from the ledge. The small, quick movement knocked them both into their bodies on the side of the road.

“Dad, are we going to make it to Memphis tonight?”

Greg dropped his daughter’s hand and scratched the small beard he had been cultivating in the last months.

“I’m not sure, kiddo.” They climbed back into the car and drove again, quietly.

**

Connie was telling her father about a boy at school who wore an eye patch and how the other kids made fun of him, how they called him a pirate and said “Aar” when he walked past. She also told him about a girl who was very pretty but wasn’t popular, and she couldn’t tell why.

“Are you popular, Con?”

She shrugged. “No, not really, well a little, more than other people.”

Since Greg and Fleur separated and Connie had begun missing school, she had become more outspoken. While it was not something she could easily tap while with her father (particularly in the recent past), Connie had a sharp wit, a rarity among girls her age. It was this wit, and its sudden, pervasive vocalization, that had brought about her new popularity. She said hurtful things to fellow students, to teachers, but they were funny things also so they were excused, for the most part.

“She’s going through a hard time now,” they would say in the teachers’ lounge. “She won’t be like this forever. You remember how the youngest Carmine boy was when her dad ran off.”

As her luck would have it, girls her age see meanness as an attribute of the upper class. This trait of hers had brought her to the attention of the small circle of students who spent their free time at the mall, talking on their cell phones.

Connie talked about her teachers, Mr. Stein the slave-driver, Mr. Colfax the senile, Mrs. Raddler the benevolent.

“There is a project we have to do by the end of the year. A research paper on whatever we want.”

“What are you going to do yours on?”

“Oh, I don’t know, divorce, maybe.”

The clot in Greg’s chest, which Connie’s talking had massaged almost entirely away, suddenly turned into a stone.

“Connie, I…”

“No, dad, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m doing my project on ghosts, anyway. The divorce thing was just a thought. I already started it.”

“Ghosts?”

“The ghosts of our town.”

“There are ghosts in our town?”

“There are ghosts everywhere. People haunt places where bad things happen and bad things happen everywhere.”

“You’ll have to let me read it when you’re done.”

Greg was breathing heavily in an effort to move the rock from where it rested behind his breastplate. He had lowered his voice half an octave, in an attempt to keep it from breaking apart.

The sunlight was reddening. It was not going down yet, but stuck in the place in the sky where the shadows it creates are long.

“I need to get a coffee, let’s stop and stretch our legs.”

**

In the bathroom of the coffee shop chain they found just off the highway, Greg stared at his reflection for a long time. He closed his eyes and reconstructed his daughter’s face as she said the word ‘divorce.’ How entirely without strength she must feel, he thought, how entirely without control, without love. He opened his eyes and felt sick. You cannot make this not hurt her. He rubbed his eyes, rubbed his eyes, rubbed his eyes and when he saw himself again in the mirror he looked a little more like he’d imagined, round-faced, like Connie, in fact a lot like Connie.

**

Connie sat in the car looking at the map.

“We’re close!” She seemed excited, tracing her finger along the snaking highway, reading the names of the small towns and jumping through the junctions. “Will we be there by dinner? We could get Bar-B-Q!”

Greg looked at the map. “I don’t know, hun. We’ll get there tonight, but probably not for dinner.”

Greg had not been paying close attention to how far they had come. Once, on the highway, you stayed there and drove, straight, for a long time. He thought perhaps his racing mind had somehow sped up their progress. The truth was, when he looked at the map, they were only a couple of hours past Knoxville.

**

The first hotel Greg tried was full.

“It’s the convention,” said the man at the front desk. “All week we’re booked.”

“Shit.”

The second hotel was booked too.

“We have the conventioneers sharing rooms, even.” The night clerk gave Greg a list, though, of Memphis area hotels and their customer ratings and price ranges.

**

The only room in the city, it seemed, was in a hotel called the Archeress several miles from downtown. Connie had long been asleep in the car—it was after midnight by the time they found the small, old hotel—and Greg carried her, draped over his shoulder, through the lobby and into the rickety elevator. Greg laid Connie on the wide, well-fluffed bed and sat down beside her, taking off her shoes.

“Pumpkin, I’m going to go downstairs for a little bit, get a cot. I’ll be back later.”

She made a small noise and twisted away from him.

**

Greg saw little difference between the night clerk behind the desk of this hotel and those behind the desks of every other hotel where he had ever spent the night. He was small and older, probably someone’s brother or cousin who needed a job because a shoelace factory or freight shipping company had closed down.

“Do you have a cot?” Greg asked.

The man looked up from a paperback he was reading under the desk and pointed to a small room just beyond the counter.

“In there.”

“Actually, could I pick it up later? Is there a place around here to get a drink?”

The man nodded and pointed at the door. There were long pauses between his gestures and their explanations.

“Out there, if you make a right down this street.” He stood up, came around from behind the counter and went to the large glass door. “There, you can see it, Pilgrim’s, on the corner. People go there.”

**

The bar was small and crowded, but not crowded the way bars are crowded in the busier parts of bigger cities. It was mostly men milling around the tables, standing and talking, patting each other, laughing over the low music from the jukebox. They smoked around a pool table, but no one played. The last bar Greg had been to, on the night of the gas leak, with a woman named Marina from work, had been full of young people with plastic cups. It had been a narrow bar like this one, but had had several floors, each with a live band, and each with a hundred people talking loudly, rubbing against one another.

The women in the bar were of two ages. There were girls with half-closed eyes, young and foul mouthed, in ill-fitting denim. They could have been in high school, some of them. There were also women a few years shy of the young ones’ mothers. These were working women. They spoke erratically and had wide rear ends. Greg sat by an older woman who was talking with a younger woman at the bar. He did not wish to begin a conversation, but would not have been averse to a conversation were one to blossom organically.

That was why he had come out for a drink, correct? Why else? Why was she, Connie, not enough? He loved her more then he had ever loved Fleur.

He looked at the woman next to him. She was speaking with the younger women softly, her mouth barely moving as if the weariness in her broad, strong body permeated even the muscles of her face. She had round, blue eyes and wispy hair dotted with light and dark notes from myriad home hair coloring kits.

Greg looked down at the dense hair of his forearms and his rotund thighs as they pressed down into the vinyl of the barstool.

The man next to him was alone too, wearing a white, plastic nametag dangling from a fold of his sweater. Doug. Doug was petite. Greg was not a tall man but Doug was nearly a head shorter. His body curled in, shoulders and rib cage like a clenched fist. His hair was dark and thick, but closely cropped with only a severe cowlick behind his right ear revealing it’s true nature, its wildness. The sleeves of the sweater were pushed up to his elbows and the pleats on the front of his pants were neatly pressed. There was something Greg liked about him.

The women’s talking slowed and he could sense a subtle looking over. ‘Who are these men?’ he felt them asking each other, ‘with their clean shoes and out of town faces.’ Doug turned and looked past Greg at the women, his eyes dark. He smiled. The younger whispered something to the elder and slipped from the chair, out into the dim light of the bar. The older woman smiled back at them, looking them each in the face. She turned back to the bar. Doug leaned forward on his seat, opened his mouth, closed it, leaned back, straightened his posture, began to spin himself around on the stool, stopped, and slouched back down over the bar, peering into his short glass. He looked at the woman sideways, then at Greg, pursing his lips into a small frown.

The young woman rejoined her friend but did not sit down.

“Come on, Doll, let’s go.” She said it loudly. The air was pregnant but Greg didn’t quite understand what was happening. The women left. Greg felt that he and this man next to him were now teammates alone on the empty field where a great game had once been played, but not for a very long time.

They sat silently drinking for a long time. Doug scratched his face, pressed fingers into his eyes and signed something indistinguishable but irrefutably profane. Greg shifted away from Doug, uncertain of him, but did not move seats. He felt committed and somehow tied to this man.

Doug motioned to the barman.

“Yes, sir,” the barman said.

“I’ll have another.” He lifted his glass as he said it, and shook it just a little too violently. The ice cubes and a half-inch of backwash whiskey swilled from the glass, landing squarely, wetly in Greg’s lap.

“Shit.” Doug snatched at a small stack of napkins lying on the bar mat. “Here, here, take these. A drink for this man.” He pointed to Greg and shooed the barman off. “Shit, I’m sorry. I’m flummoxed. I’m not myself.” He put the glass back on the bar and turned from Greg, back towards the bottles lined so evenly. Drinks were laid before them but they were silent. Again, the air was pregnant. Greg couldn’t take it.

“What is the convention?” Greg asked, indicating the nametag.

“Shit.” The man ripped at the badge, its claws popping a thread in his shirt, a small hole blooming where it had been. “Double shit.” He fingered the hole. “Don’t mess with it, Doug. You’ll just make it worse, Doug,” he whined in a sing song cadence with his lips curled up. “That’s what my wife would say. I just bought this stupid sweater. The Annual Conference of Geotechnical and Earth Movement Professionals.” He paused. “You asked about the convention,” he explained. A momentary look of accusation, distrust fell across the man’s face, and then quickly lifted to reveal resignation to the fundamental sadness and futility of consciousness so closely linked with drinking alone.

Greg nodded. “Sounds like a laugh riot.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“No offense meant, buddy.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m not myself.” He smacked his hand on the bar. “Doug.” He held out his other hand. “You can’t possibly be from around here, either.”

“No,” Greg shook his hand. “Greg. My daughter and I drove in today.”

“Graceland?”

“Graceland.” Greg nodded. “Of course, Graceland.”

“They asked me to come.” Doug waved to the bartender. “On me, another one of those for him and me.” He turned back to Greg. “They asked me to come, personally! You see, I do alternative energy: battery cars, solar panels. So they want me to do geothermal. They asked me.”

Doug fell silent, brooding. His hand was still splayed on the bar, a pale, dead fish. After a moment his muscles loosened.

“What is your daughter’s name?”

“Conchetta, Connie.”

“That’s a nice name. Let me guess, fourteen?”

“Twelve.”

“You left her in the hotel?”

“She was asleep. She’ll be fine.”

“Mom’s gone?”

“We’re separated.”

There was a pause.

“I gotta take a piss,” Doug said, “watch my seat.”

“My wife and I are separated.” Greg said it to himself. He had not been forced to say it aloud until just then. Somehow everyone he worked with had known without him having to say a word. His friends had known for a long time, before him even, maybe.

“My first wife,” he whispered, but shook his head. “My ex-wife.”

**

They had several more drinks before Fleur came up again.

“My ex-wife, my second,” Greg said. “We didn’t even have to get a divorce. That bitch was still married to someone else. We didn’t even have to get that shit annulled, ‘void under the law.’”

“She was married to the two of you at once?”

“She’d separated from him but they’d never gotten a divorce.” Greg shrugged. “It was other things that ended our marriage but that made it a little easier, legally. We haven’t said for sure we’re going to get a divorce yet.”

“It’s that new, eh?”

Greg nodded. “A few months. I just moved out.”

“Fuck it, man.”

“I’ll have an ex-wife.”

“I said ‘fuck it.’ One day you’ll say it the way you say ‘Mrs. McMurry, my third grade science teacher.’”

“I’ll love a woman who I cannot be married to anymore.”

A man walked past, wearing another of the white, plastic nametags.

“You know,” said Doug. “I stayed this far out so I wouldn’t have to see those assholes more than I had to.”

“Were you a speaker? A presenter?”

“They are idiots.” The man shook his head. “I am a wind man. Wind energy, that’s what I do. I mean I could tell you about it all, I’ve researched it all, but I’m a wind man. And they bring me into do geothermal, fucking fire.” Doug laughed, tilted his head and looked at Greg with such confusion in his eyes. “Fire! I don’t do fire, and they throw a fit when I bring up wind.”

“It didn’t go over well? Nobody ever asked me to make any kind of speech to anybody.” More drinks were set before them.

“Oh, it went over fine, they just don’t understand. We poke holes in the earth and suck out its fire and we are still taking without replenishing. We are still leeches.” He made a slobbering, slurping noise, puckering his hands into claws and sucking at the air. “But wind! Everybody feels the wind blow, don’t you see?” the man asked. “We are all windmills. We use wind and it uses us, man. Don’t you see?”

Greg did not understand and suddenly realized that he was very drunk. The man had been buying a steady stream of drinks for the both of them. Greg had even smoked a few of the cigarettes the man had been offering. He coughed.

“I have to go back to the hotel. I left my daughter. I have to get a cot.”

“One more drink, man. I gotta go home tomorrow. I don’t want to do that.”

“No, my daughter. She is alone. I left her alone. It was good to meet you.”

**

The night had grown cold and a light frost had settled over the windshields of the cars lining the street. A neon illustration of a lady archer firing a golden arrow across the front of the hotel lit the street with seedy, nightmarish warmth. Greg was worried. He was thinking of the night clerk and his shifty night clerk eyes, his long pauses. He must have a skeleton key, a skeleton key in his bony fingers.

He was walking fast and his large feet were heavy. He looked at his watch; it was so late. His toe caught on the curb and he fell, his chin bouncing on the concrete. He felt the sandy crunch of a chipped tooth on his tongue. He scrambled there for a moment, his hands slipping on the thin ice, his legs wobbling with fear.

“Connie,” he muttered, “Connie.” He heard a car in the street; crouching on the sidewalk, he ran a hand through his hair.

“Buddy, you alright?” It was a young man’s voice, a teenager. Greg lifted a hand and waved the car away. “You sure, Buddy? You hurt?”

Greg raised himself to his knees then slowly stood, one foot at a time. He covered his face and waved again to the boy.

“Don’t worry, son, just a bit too much to drink.”

The boy laughed a little. He was with friends, a young girl, a few other boys.

“You be careful, buddy.” The car drove off. For a moment, Greg thought that the girl in the car was Connie. Then for a moment it was Fleur and the young driver was himself and he was someone else, some old man in the street who had fallen.

The boy drove away slowly, murmurs floating from the car. Greg’s elbows burned. He looked down at them; his palms were stippled with red beads. He brushed the gravel from his skin; the larger pieces left divots and pangs shot up his arms as he pried out the stones.

**

The night clerk was not behind the desk when Greg came into the lobby of the Archeress. Panic flew into Greg’s chest. He slammed his hand on the counter.

“Hello!”

Greg’s scraped up palm jabbed with a quick pain. A foot popped up on the other side and then swung down and Greg saw the thinning top of the night clerk’s head.

“Sorry.” He hoisted himself into the chair. “It’s my back. I lay on the floor.”

“Can I get my cot now?” Greg swayed.

The man stood, his hands pressing his lower back. The night clerk’s eyes ran a circuit around Greg’s face. He then shuffled into the small room he had indicated before. He rolled out a cot, folded in two.

“You drop this latch,” the night clerk explained, “then the other one and it should pop open. I’d do it for you, but my back.” He shuffled back to his post on the floor behind the desk, lowering himself point by point, then sliding a small, tubular pillow underneath the base of his spine.

“You know you’re bleeding?” he asked Greg from the floor.

Greg touched his mouth; a slim trickle of blood fell over his fingers.

**

Approaching the room, Greg was filled with fear again. He fumbled with the keycard and dropped it several times before he was able to get the door open.

“Connie,” he blurted as his eyes adjusted to the dark of the room.

There she was, still on top of the covers, one sock kicked off. She mumbled something in her sleep, shaking her head and swiping her wrist across her forehead to clear the lock of hair that had fallen over her eyes.

Photo by Janna Washington

Tags: fiction short story Lillian Pontius-Goldblatt
January 19, 2009 at 7:19pm ∞