They’d been happy a good, short while now, Jack and Mira, cruising I-90 West in a ragged-out nineties Jeep Cherokee. Blue tarp over the busted back windshield smacking and rippling incredibly so they had to keep the stereo blasting. Deep Purple’s “Highway Star.” Soaring past eternal prairie. Nearing middle age and never seen such distances.

Old, hand-painted billboards shuffled past, offering pretty lavish promises: dinosaur gardens, ghost towns, gemstones, the world’s largest bison, the world’s largest everything. Another one suggested they choose life. But that’s just what they were doing.

They’d gotten clean together and wanted to see the country. Lighted out of Tellico Plains, Tennessee, towards something flatter, plain and enormous.

 

“It’s cute,” Mira said. “Lot of guys? They’d at least like pretend and watch. Kurt? God. Football kind of made him crazy.”

She took a long drag, exhaled a blue stream through the cold cracked window.

“Took it too far,” she told him. “Like, fucked me up a couple times.”

“Guys in there yelling,” Jack said. “But the ladies just sat around talking about this very, very real stuff, you know, like all this mental illness all over the family, all over the place, just a lot of craziness. Really got my brain turned on.”

“Explains why you watch all that gory shit. Monster movies,” she said. “I don’t see how you stand it. Look at the road. Listen.”

Jack barely looked at the road, barely looked at Mira.

“He, like, for real whipped my ass one time,” Mira told him. “Just because his goddamn team lost.”

Jack jerked his head about wildly at all that lost-looking country, this country without any trees. Then he spoke again in a high register, hurled down fully into his history, and farther away from her.

He told her all about the ladies sitting around the kitchen table at his boyhood home in Cleveland, Tennessee, spinning tales on Great Aunt Francis, the craziest of the crazies. Queen Crazy. He recalled his mom talking about electroshock therapy. Jack’s imagination went berserk: he envisioned men wearing long white coats cupping her head with chrome earmuffs hooked to snarls of curled black wire. Some man hauling a lever, streaming blue electricity into her face, after which she’d ignited. The doctor unbound her, peeled the mummy-suit away, and dressed her in a white gown dragging like a waterfall, hair shocked back in a long beehive with Bride of Frankenstein lightning stripes.

“I think you’re just one of them,” Mira said. “You watch Frankenstein like fifty goddamn times because you are Frankenstein. That’s your boy.”

“Everything got real intense,” Jack said. “It’s like Mom gave me mushrooms, but without the mushrooms. Let me get a drag off that.”

“You think you’re a special boy, don’t you?”

“When Dad brought the bowl of Buffalo wings to the table,” he said, and took the drag, “I heard this orchestral blast—trumpets, gongs, you know. After we’d filled our plates up, Dad went back into the living room with my brothers and everybody and just jumped up and down and screamed, literally screamed, at whatever game was on the TV.

“I stuck with the ladies, man. Tell me more about electroshock therapy. Not while we’re eating. That was Aunt Paula. But you could hear my dad the whole goddamn time, screaming: No! No! Oh, God! God damn it! Get him! Get him! Get him!”

“I was just playing, you know,” Mira told him. “I do think you’re special. Give me that hand.”

 

But she’d heard this all before. She hoped, really, that Jack might finally tell her something new, maybe even reveal some forthcoming thing, like a portent. A vision as terrifyingly clear as the western sun. But neither of them possessed a knack for seeing the future.

Maybe they wouldn’t go back to Tennessee, is what Jack told her. A true clean break. They could be homesteaders. This is what Jack said. But Mira doubted he’d done his research. Quit drinking, too. Smoking. Eat right. Their teeth would whiten. Their teeth would whiten so much they’d glow in the dark.

Early evening. A massive copper sun cocked westward like they might just drive straight into it. Something lavender colored the air. A scent of lavender.

Mira leaned her head against the warm window, searching the passing country for signs.

 

“Here it is,” Jack said, cranking the window down. Badlands. Cathedral spires of painted rock. Miles of it. Certainly more magnificent than the Atlanta skyline, or pictures of New York City.

They paid a fee—got into the park just before closing time—and switch-backed down a furrowed gorge threaded with crimson strata.

“How about this here?” Mira said.

A sign read Sage Creek Campground, 8 MI.

“Just want a motel room,” Jack said. “But imagine getting high out here. Almighty god.”

“We’re doing this,” she said, “to stay alive. Remember that”

She flung her arm out the window. Sunlight clung to her face but dissolved in soft, dark purple places around her eyes. She lifted an index finger, as though she might tell Jack what’s what about something or another, but then she dipped the finger into silvering temple hair and rode it along her nape, rattling a shark’s tooth earring.

 

“Don’t start looking at me like that,” he said.

“What’s going to happen,” she said, “when we get back home?”

“If we go back,” he said. “We’ll take some of this here with us.”

“Cute,” she said. “That’s a cute thing to say.”

Just beyond the rock towers and buttes, the horizon absorbed the sun. Absorbed its light and power. A thin line of blazing amber ignited the space between land and sky. The road rapidly darkened.

Jack and Mira rounded a hairpin curve, and a thunderous RV roared past and blasted its horn.

“Mr. Death Wish,” Mira said. “Look at the goddamn road.”

“I don’t want to die,” Jack said.

He needed to show her that, too. He pulled over, undid her belt buckle, and walked his fingers into her blue jeans.

“Now,” she said. “Yes. Now.”

She closed her eyes. Jack closed his. Reached and turned the stereo up as loud as he could get it. Keith Richards sang, “I’m waiting on a call from you.” Charlie Watts banged the tom drum once, and it echoed across the Badlands. Jack opened his eyes. A bison crossed the road. He’d never seen one. He’d never see one like it again.

They left the park and drove into the Black Hills and stopped in Deadwood.

 

“Fucking tourist trap,” Mira said.

“Don’t ruin this.”

The sky went full dark and motorcycles parked along the main drag changed colors beneath the neons.

“This is something,” he said.

“All these little casinos give me the creeps.”

“You just need to sleep.”

“I need to get drunk.”

“Never gambled?”

“Told you, gives me the creeps. Look here. Gemstone Museum.”

“And you’re the one complaining about money. They’ll charge twenty dollars apiece to get in there. Come out better here. These are kiddie casinos. Bet against some old-ass computer that looks like a little Ms. Pac-Man.”

“Want to do your own thing, works for me.”

“Thought you wanted to get drunk,” he said. “That’s something we could both get down with.”

“Then park the car already.”

 

They discovered a bar called Rattlesnake Knights.

The place was ablaze with tourists, miserable-looking elderly lushes in worthless patriotic garb, crushed-faced locals, and road-weary couples just like them. Not talking. Just drinking. Dark eyes and faces lit blue by cell phone screens.

But there were other people, too, holding each other, fully alive. Dancing to some ZZ Top.

Jack and Mira sat by this kid at the bar. He looked to be about sixteen, seventeen, but the bartender didn’t care. He wore a long black coat, a feather-banded Bailey hat, pale face painted with cracked foundation, the circles around his eyes deep set and violet-dark.

“What’s the costume about, little man?” Jack said.

“I’m just trying to live,” the kid said. “Fuck-stain.”

“Did you run off from someplace?” Mira said.

“Bad time for talking,” the kid said, and ordered straight warm vodka.

He continued cursing under his breath. The vileness of his phrasing soared while his voice dipped into a whisper.

“If there’s something we can help you with,” Jack said, “just tell us. Right, babe?”

“You got a Mom and Dad someplace?” Mira said.

“It’s all people like you,” he said. “It’s you.”

What he’d meant by that, Jack couldn’t tell. But it became an awful chant. It’s you. It’s you. This chant rose up to the ceiling amid the rafters and smoke.

A man wearing a phony leisure suit and handlebar mustache careened behind the bar and cried out, “No, no, damn it. Wesley, you idiot.”

Wesley was the bartender.

“This town’s like Disneyland,” Mira said, “but for even sorrier people.”

 

“That’s him.” The owner pointed at the kid. “Out of here, now.” He told Wesley, “Great. You’re fired. Bye-bye.”

The kid in the long black coat shot his last vodka and fled. Jack couldn’t figure out whether or not the whole thing was staged.

“This is what I came here to see,” Mira said.

“Pleasure at the expense of others,” Jack said.

“I can’t stand it,” she said.

“I thought you just said you liked it. Fuck it. Go do your goddamn gemstone museum. Did you know I’m a diamond?”

The bartender, Wesley, flung his apron at the owner, and ascended a rickety spiral staircase in back of the place.

Transfixed, Jack didn’t catch Mira slipping off, shouldering her way through the crowd, and bounding out the door and onto the street, where a massive pistol report cracked, hushing everybody in the bar.

Jack drained his whiskey, ate the ice, and walked out of there.

The kid in the long black coat lay face down upon a storm drain, where the neon lights shone. A pistol lay by his little hand. Moments ago, this kid had not been in Rattlesnake Knights with Jack and Mira, but rather existed inside some very particular moment right before you shoot your own face.

Jack and Mira, they’d only been shapes amid that thick, alluring darkness. Swimming along the margins. Just fuck-stains. Worth sneering at but not worth a damn.

Two policemen ran from across the street with guns drawn. Big men mounted motorcycles that sputtered and roared away. Jack watched them. Let me taste some of that thrill. Filled head to toe with a liquid envy igniting a quick rage somewhere at his center, at the source of feeling, but blooming now into something brighter, manic, and un-evil.

Amid the gathering crowd, Jack found Mira and gripped her shoulders and kissed her eyes and ears, and she said, “This isn’t what I’d wanted to see.”

Jack had wanted it though. He’d wanted something. This was the thing, now.

But he wanted to lean down and touch the boy, but couldn’t. Touch his cheek, search his eyes, maybe even steal his hat.

You couldn’t see his face. That was the horrible thing. You couldn’t discover the appropriate expression worn by the freshly self-murdered. Jack yanked a handkerchief out of his back pocket, hacked a wad of bile into it, and vanished into the crowd. Behind him, Mira shouldered her way through these roiling bodies, surrounded by their huge, rabid white eyes.

She caught Jack by the arm and he turned and she asked if he was all right and he said, “There’s something bad in that vodka.”

 

Years later, Mira recalled the story in alternative historical terms: the boy was kind to them, and thanked them for their concern.

“I’m an orphan,” he said. “Seems like you’d be real good folks but I think it’s too late for me, really.”

“Would you like to ride along with us, then?” Jack said. “We’ve been through hard times ourselves, Mira and me.”

“We save lives,” Mira said. “We practically make a living out of it.”

“Some little boy,” the kid said, “is going to be lucky.”

He touched Mira, touched her right where the hospitable womb might be.

This is exactly how Mira would recall it, years later.

Years and years.

 

In the motel room outside Rapid City, they couldn’t shake it. Jack felt guilty to be so thrilled. He’d never seen anything like it. He pulled out his phone and played some AC/DC. Mira’s face went bone-pale and she tucked it between her knees, sitting on the edge of the bed, and she said, “I’d seen a cat caught on fire by some neighborhood boys. Seen Mom get whipped to an inch of her life. But this is bad. We’re not coming back from this.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with us,” Jack said. “I mean us-us. They still let you smoke in motels here. I love that shit. The roads are empty. There’s no Wal-Mart, Target, or Mickey D’s. It’s like we’re back in some better time.”

“You can smoke in motels anywhere,” she said. “That other shit’s here too. Got your vacation goggles on.”

“Like I was saying. I think I’ve got that rotten gene.”

“You think?”

“I must’ve been dulling it out for years,” he said. “Which side of the family you think it comes from?”

“Let’s not,” Mira said. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, and a teal bikini top. “Let’s hit the pool.”

“That could do us some good. I bet it’s closed.”

“You wouldn’t sneak in with me? Or, what, we don’t do things like that anymore?”

She laughed, and Jack didn’t like the sound of it.

“It’s an indoor pool,” he said. “No fence to jump. Got to have a key.”

He poured her a Dixie cup of Seagram’s. He kissed her neck. He bit her ear.

He said, “I’m sorry. You’d asked me about it. I don’t care. You’re always wanting to know everything and I don’t even like talking about it. Nothing’s happened to me.”

“Except tonight,” she said.

“That didn’t happen to me.”

“It happened to us. But you don’t ask how I feel. Like, ever. Even when I bring up Kurt you just change the subject.”

“Kurt the football lover.”

“They all watch football. I mean, this one time—I’ll tell you, okay?—I’d cheered when Kurt’s team lost, you know, just to fuck with him?  Bad idea. Crimson Tide, man. ‘Bama fans are all a bunch of fucking psychopaths. He’d been drinking all day. He just looked at me and said, ‘Here’s what happens. Here’s what happens.’ And, like, had me on the floor, quicker than that. ‘I used to have to pick a switch,’ he told me. Like his Mom made him get a switch off a tree so she could whip his ass? Whatever. Kurt just fucking hated me. It wasn’t the football. But yeah, he made me do that. He made me pick a switch off a tree. Well I think that was another time. But it’s all blurred together. Took me out there like you would a little kid. Pretty tree in the front yard. I loved that tree. Fucking god. Imagine being somebody’s neighbor and looking out the window, and this couple’s standing under a tree and she’s all pointing at it like, ‘How about this one? This one looks pretty good.’

“Just like I was his kid or something,” she said. “I hope people don’t do that shit to their kids anymore. Sometimes I’ve got to wonder, though, if I had kids. If I could. You don’t ever think you’d hit your kids. But at the same time, I don’t know what it’s like to have them.”

“You really let him do that?” Jack said.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “You really can’t. That’s how you respond? Wow.”

She cloaked herself in a tie-dyed beach towel, opened the door, and disappeared.

Alone now, Jack parted the curtain and peered at the sky. Stars so close and sparkling everywhere like he’d never seen before, and like he’d never see again, a billion little white fires.

 

He might read about the boy’s death in the next day’s local paper. Might feel famous, for he’d played a role in a young man’s last gasp at a place called Rattlesnake Knights.

He went outside, looked through the frosted indoor pool window and watched her blurred and colorful shape swim. Her cowboy boots stood atop the diving board. She swam the butterfly across electric blue water. She’d kicked in the pool house door. Torn the Master Lock bracket off some busted, splintered wood. Mira still possessed that fire. Jack now had lost it altogether.

He opened the door, and the chlorine burned his eyes before he even got in. Then he waded into this very warm, very blue water.

“Butterfly your way on over to me,” he told her, but she swam farther away. The deep end. She closed her eyes and let herself sink.

He called her name. Again and again. All over the dark, wood-paneled walls and ceiling the water’s light reflected little bright, rapidly wriggling turquoise snakes. He felt it again. Filled again with a hot liquid, fear mingled with mute rage, a wild writhing under suffocation. She’d been down there testing her lungs for, well, he didn’t know how long.

Mira bent her knees, lifted her arms, and propelled to the surface.

“You scared me to death.”

“You love being scared,” she said.

He swam over, reached for the diving board, and held onto its edge, resting there. Better now. He plucked its corner. It rattled and sprung and popped her cowboy boots.

“You get those wet,” she said. “I’ll kill you.”

He did it again. A boot dropped, but he caught it, tossed it, and it smacked the tile pool-house wall. He threw the other one.

“You can trust me,” he said.

“Kill you,” she said, and she moved into him and wrung his body and kissed him hard.

“If we fucked right now,” he said, “what difference would it make, like, in the long run?”

“It wouldn’t,” she said. “But it makes a difference now.”

This, here it is, the body of water, Mira shedding down to bare skin. For Jack, this confluence of joy, pain, release, and finally comfort beyond heaven, would be everything—a very brief everything that just wouldn’t be enough. He wanted his whole body to taste a needle.

 

They finished and sat at the edge of the pool until the windows changed to bright, dewy gray with morning light. They hadn’t stayed up all night like this, not since in the beginning. Those all-night conversations in the early days before you start wearing each other out. Mira fell asleep, finally, her feet still dipped in the bright blue water, and then suddenly Jack knew he’d been wrong about everything. He couldn’t see the future. It was so likely, he thought now, that amid their time, past and present, they’d regarded each other as mere absurdities, necessary for a while but inessential, and that this might be one of the great tragedies of their lives. Maybe he ought to just leave, cut ties and break clean. Or he could dive into the shallow end, grasping at some colossally human sensation. Three feet of water and bang. See if she’d wake up, dive in and pull him out, cradle his wounded head and whisper something: something about the road westward where some good change had occurred, words of truth rolling off her tongue like rubies he could pocket. But he would simply wait. Wait for Mira to awaken. Through the morning. Against the pain of fresh light streaming in. Early risers arriving for a swim. Parents and children.