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

This was what he’d said around Tonopah, and all the way west Arnie let himself be teased by the idea of the steelhead. When at last they saw the great beasts standing in the salt marsh, Arnie pictured the fish swimming in between their feet. Tickling, which was why the elk every so often twitched.

“How many’d you catch?” Arnie had asked then.

“Catch what?” Jay’s eyes were barely slits. They’d been driving more than twenty hours straight.

“You know. The steelhead.”

Arnie’s scalp prickled, his hair still mussed from Jay’s having rubbed it. Now Jay rubbed his own hair, which was black and thick and hung in ringlets on his neck.

“I never caught any,” he admitted. “I never even been here. You’re seeing it for the first time same as me.”

At this point the salt marsh grew blurry, from tears that Arnie tried to keep the new guy from seeing. He should have guessed that nothing swam down there between the elks’ legs. The fish were just a gimmick to get him to come along quietly.

“Aww, Little Man, don’t wig out on me,” the new guy said, when he twisted around and saw Arnie crouched behind the seat. “Don’t worry, everything’ll be great, you’ll see.”

“If you’ve never been here, how would you know?”

“I know. I got a cousin who lives out this-away.”

IN THE MOTEL, as the margin of light grew larger around the drapes, his mother groaned and knitted herself into the new guy’s arms and legs. Eventually she hoisted herself under the sheet to reach for a Styrofoam cup that she’d left on the nightstand.

“Ugh,” she said, after taking a swallow. “Hello, Washington. I thought your coffee was supposed to be so great.”

“You bought that last night in Oregon,” the new guy reminded her, as he took the cup and tossed it into the wastebasket. The cup sailed across the room without spilling a drop, though it left a stain on the wall where it ricocheted before it fell.

She sat up then with the sheet bound across her chest and looked at Arnie.

“How you like it here so far?”

“Okay, I guess.”

She was doodling her hand in the curls at the nape of the new guy’s neck. Then her voice changed, as if an idea had just occurred to her.

“Hey, Arnie, I bet a smart kid like you could find me a decent cup of coffee in this town.” She fished out a five-dollar bill from her purse that was on the floor beside the bed and made him come around to get it.

“You know how I want it?”

“Lots of cream, lots of sugar,” Arnie recited — after all these years, of course he knew.

Their motel room was on the second floor, with a little balcony out one side. On the other side was the door that led to the outside stairs and the parking lot. Now that he was seeing it with a wider angle than the car windows allowed, Arnie realized that the end of the earth was just a spit of sand paved over to keep the wind from blasting it away. Earlier this morning, when they’d passed the salt marsh full of elk, the sun had glimmered just above the mountains, a bright smudge in the gray. But now the clouds were thicker, letting loose a kind of rain that hovered, weightless. He remembered that his coat was still locked in the car, and his sweatshirt grew heavy as it sopped up moisture from the air.

The road had ended in this bare place, where the sand scuffed beneath his sneakers and mostly the dozen motels and tacky seashell shops were not yet open for the season. Across from their motel Arnie found the marina, where rocks had been piled into a jetty that protected a pocket of water from the surf. Some of the boats had giant spools on which their nets were neatly rolled, the sight of which brought Arnie some relief. There were also charter boats with signs that trumpeted the daily rates. Where the land met the dock he found an open bait shop, where he asked for coffee and watched the man pour it from a pot that was sitting on a hot plate.

“Be careful, this’ll put hair on your chest,” the man said as he popped a lid on the cup.

“It’s for my mom.”

“Well, it’ll put hair on her chest too. Unless she already has some.”

Arnie thought then of his mother’s chest, sweaty and smooth where the sheet pinched back her breasts. Her auburn hair was peppery at the roots.

“You visiting?”

Arnie shook his head. “We’re supposed to be staying here for good.” From a rack on the counter, he picked up a handful of packets of sugar and creamer, along with two cherry pies in paper wraps — one for the new guy, one for him. His mother’s stomach didn’t usually kick in until four o’clock.

“Comes to three forty-seven,” the man said. “Let me give you a bag for that.” While the man put the coffee and pies in a sack, Arnie noticed the stack of tide tables by the register. A buck fifty apiece. On the front cover it said, “The bigger the dot the better the fishing.” He flipped through the pages and saw that today was supposed to be a big-dot day.

“And one of these,” he said.

The man nodded. “If you’re gonna live on the coast you gotta know when low tide is, right?” Suddenly Arnie realized that they hadn’t just come to the end of the earth but another planet where he didn’t even know the basic rules of life.

“How come?”

“Weh-yell. . so you can drive your car on the beach, for one,” the man said, handing him his three pennies and the bag.

“Our car’s a junker. We barely made it out here.”

When he heard it coming out his mouth, Arnie realized that this information was too intimate to be giving to a stranger. But the man just said that having an old car was good. “Then you won’t care so much if you lose it when you get stuck and the tide comes up and washes it out to sea.”

Arnie felt his jaw drop a little while he considered the possibility. The man behind the counter laughed.

“Don’t worry. That only happens to the tourists. You got to start thinking like a local now, since you’re here for the duration. Pay attention to the ocean. You got to build up your tolerance for rain.”

“It wasn’t my idea to come,” Arnie said, bunching up the neck of the bag in his fist.

“S’okay,” the man assured him. “There’s plenty of worse places you could be.”

WHEN ARNIE GOT BACK to the motel, the door was locked. He banged and waited, then finally Jay opened the door in his flannel shirt and skivvies. “Hey, whassup,” he said. His mother was inside the bathroom, filling the tub. Her voice sounded as if it were coming from a tunnel when she called, “Arnie, you find everything okay?”

Of course he had, so he ignored her. Sometimes she acted like he was an idiot.

To Jay he said, “The man at the store said the steelhead were running.” Running : the word made Arnie think they had to hurry or else it’d be too late. He considered telling Jay about today having a big dot, to see if Jay would know what he was talking about. It would be a kind of test.

“See? What’d I tell you?”

“So when are we going?”

“Real soon,” Jay said, studying the bathroom door. “First your mother and I got to get ourselves cleaned up.” He grabbed a towel that was folded on a little shelf above the coat rack.

“I got you a pie for breakfast,” Arnie said, pulling the coffee out of the bag.

“Great. I love pie.” But Jay set both the coffee and the pie down on top of the motel TV, which was old enough to be a box, and picked up an ashtray instead. “Better warm up your casting arm, Little Man,” was the last thing he said before he disappeared inside the bathroom. When he opened the door, for a second Arnie could see the white slope of his mother’s back, crouched over the water tap.