Lucia Perillo - Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain - Stories

This was where they were headed now, with Dang Kim Tiffany wedged between them in the truck. Hers was a snap decision, she said, brought about by the catalyst of Sam: once she’d danced for him, she felt compelled to see the ceremony’s end. And she’d never been to the mountains, despite having lived in the Northwest since she was six, her own father being afraid of them because he said they were the home of ghosts. The storms were ghosts wagging their beards at the children who’d forgotten them too soon. And the gullies were where they reached over the mountains and scratched with their long fingernails. Her voice reminded Tim of a little bell being rung by an impatient woman.

“Every weekend he made us dig for butter clams. That’s the story of my life: clams and more clams.” She and her mother built driftwood fires and cooked lunch right on the beach. Dang Kim Tiffany was wearing Ivan’s cloak because the boss had taken her pack, which contained her clothes, hostage. “No leaving with customers,” he barked from behind the bar where he dispensed the soda pop. “Plus you got three more hours until you’re off.”

He’d seized one shoulder strap of the pack while she pulled on the other, and — after they’d stood for a while at a standoff — she let go and sent him crashing into the glasses stacked in plastic racks.

“Who needs it?” she said as she crossed the parking lot in her purple underwear, in her silver high-heeled sandals that were now heaped on the floor of the truck like a pile of chicken bones.

Ivan asked, “So do we still have to call you Tiffany?”

Her earrings jingled when she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Library Man. When I finish med school everyone will have to call me Dr. Dang.”

They made the rest of the trip in silence, passing the reservoirs that stretched so ominously black between the foothills and the Pacific Crest. Dang Kim Tiffany fell asleep and snored quietly while drooling onto Tim’s jean jacket, which he was surprised to find had more of an erotic effect on him than her dancing; it had been a long time since he’d found himself on the receiving end of a female slump. She breathed through her mouth, which smelled like hay, her nostrils small, her hair perfumed by smoke. When they finally stopped, he could hardly bring himself to wake her. Groggily, she sat up and said, “This is not what I expected of the wilderness.”

They’d pulled off at a roadside clearing littered with paper diapers balled up in the brush. Their trailer was gone, and the concrete pad that it had sat on was now cracked and spiked with thistles. The tall firs that ringed the camp had been logged off, their stumps overrun with blackberry vines.

But the trail was where they remembered it, angling uphill from the back edge of the clearing. Ivan beat back the brambles with his cane, while Tim took the rear and shone a flashlight at their feet. Dang Kim Tiffany refused their elbows and instead waded through the dark as if she were crossing a river, going by feel, her bare feet seeking out the bare ground where the deer had trotted on their errands. Ivan’s cloak made her look like a dark shrub with a tiny human head. Whenever she stepped on something sharp, she’d flinch but not permit herself to say a word.

This was the same trail they’d taken Sam up when he’d visited six years back, though now, with the trailers gone, the undergrowth had reclaimed it. With Sam, they’d hiked slowly, and now they hiked slower still, Ivan humming “Cat Scratch Fever” and dragging his bad leg while a nearly naked woman walked behind him. So there was beauty, Tim thought, and also decay, and the years were just a factory for changing one into the other.

But the Patriarch was something that did not change — at least not perceptibly, to Tim’s relief. A good six feet in diameter, big enough that each side of the tree had a climate of its own. Mossy on the uphill side, with roots that sat atop the soil like hands, the other side bare, the roots disappearing in the duff. Six years ago, when he finally reached the base of it, his father had tipped his head back and emitted one long whistle.

“Well, son, you got me,” he said. “When it comes to trees, I’d call this one right here chapter and verse.” But then immediately he’d turned and started walking back.

“Okay, I seen it,” he called over his shoulder. “Now I guess we can head on home.” And when Tim opened the box and shook it gently to let the ashes scatter, they did not. Instead, the wad of them thudded to the ground and rolled into some prickly underbrush.

“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you bozos call a decent burial?”

No way, José, over her dead bod: she said Tim would have to fish Sam out and break him into pieces small enough for the wind to carry. Maybe they’d have to dry the ash to make it light enough: she dispatched Ivan to gather firewood.

“No green sticks,” she called as he shambled off. “Do you even know the difference, Library Man?”

Ivan’s voice came from the other side of the night’s black wall when he said, “You may not believe this, but we were rangers once.” And though Tim knew his father’s send-off was getting way too complicated for this time of night, he also knew he had no choice but to follow the woman’s orders. The first step meant finding Sam, and to do that he had to get down on his knees.

1. ICE

Don’t ask Aurora where she has been. Seventeen nights in seventeen different states, seventeen transmitters on seventeen different mountains. Clear across the country, only she was going backward: Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Maine, where somebody recognized her from the TV. TV is how we know what we know about Aurora, like that they found her in a town called Bath. Aurora living and not a dead girl. Seventeen nights, seventeen motels, seventeen Bibles in the nightstand. Seventeen buckets from the ice machine. It must have seemed like a vacation, no school and after all he was her father, though we did not know this when he stepped into Mr. Lentini’s class, so quiet that we barely noticed him. We were doing the water cycle, Mr. Lentini showing three of us who did not know the trick how to make a cloud look like it had three dimensions. You had to draw some curves in the middle, not in an organized pattern, which looks fake. And Mr. Lentini asked, May I help you? very polite before it clicked a second later about the shiny thing at the end of the man’s arm being a gun. Then Mr. Lentini, who normally did not touch us though sometimes the girls wished that he would, scooping us under his arms, where there was a powdery b.o. smell. And saying, Everyone under the desks , soft enough that at first nobody moved until they saw Mr. Lentini pressing the three of us against him, which was how come everybody was jealous of us later on the most after Aurora. Who let the word Dad! escape from her like an animal breaking free from a trap. He had his arms in their camo-jacket sleeves wrapped all the way around her, the gun pointing out from the base of her neck. He was dancing her backward out the door, hugging her so tight the nubs of her breasts must have hurt, oh yeah he was touching her for sure but then again he was her father.

2. WATER FROM THE DITCH

Seventeen days in seventeen motels: meanwhile we were supposed to keep drawing clouds and rain and rivers as if nothing had changed, with arrows to connect them because Mr. Lentini said these were all versions of one thing. We put the mountains in the background, an arrow to show the snow melting down, another to show the vapor rising. Wiggly lines for the arrows’ shafts. What the parents did was tie yellow ribbons around the trees out front because of some old song, never mind how stupid it sounded, to think that some old song could save her. Also there was Jake Dumfrey, the nighttime security guard from the mall, who stood by the flagpole wearing his fake foot from Vietnam. When we collected water from the ditch by the road both he and Mr. Lentini walked there with us, Mr. Lentini up front and Jake Dumfrey hobbling behind even though the ditch was just a few yards away, a trickle buzzed by flies. But under the microscope you could see that the water was not so simple as it looked: in the smudge of it there were creatures like the cyclops and the paramecium, the machinery visible inside them, beating. All day long people in cars passed by the ditch and didn’t know about the creatures. But they knew about Aurora from the TV, from the newspaper and posters tacked on all the telephone poles in town. And from the yellow ribbons that made the cars honk when they saw us out there. Like they thought our soccer team had just won the tournament.