Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

The woman said, «Eric, put that thing down and pass me the bag of groceries. Jeanie, get the blanket from behind my seat.» Jeanie, a teenage girl, was videotaping John. «My name is Beth,» the woman said. «Here …» She placed an Arapaho blanket around his shoulders and then opened a cardboard carton of orange juice. «Here, drink this up. You're dehydrated.»

John guzzled the juice and collapsed on his knees. His teeth chattered. Beth retrieved his bundled clothing. He saw the man in a truck. «Eric, goddammit, help this guy out. Get out here.» Eric put down the gun and reluctantly helped Beth lift John onto the truck bed. She spoke to John over the bed's rim. «What's your name, hon?»

He said, «John.»

«John, you lie down and we'll have you home in a few minutes, okay?»

John said, «Okay,» then lay back and watched the blinking red light of Jeanie's camcorder taping him. Then he tilted his head back and looked at the stars, and he began to cry because it had all been a waste and because the voice of Susan was only a sound buried under a laugh track he'd heard by accident in a stale white room.

Even the most anal of the 4A .M. bread-baking monks would be unable to compete with Eugene Lindsay's compulsion for getting his postal fraud mail-outs into the local postbox before morning pickup. Susan was drafted into this work pronto, and even when she was half a year pregnant, Eugene still had her lugging box loads of heavy documents and paper up and down the basement stairs. Susan could have cared less. For the first time in her life she felt as if there were no tightly coiled springs waiting to lurch out from beneath her skin. She felt as if she were on holiday. Added bonus: wild sex, up until the baby got too big.

«Yooj, I feel like a Cambodian peasant or something, freighting these — what are they?» — she looked down at the envelopes in the box she was holding — «mail-outs to the Greater Tampa, Florida, postal region. I could drop Junior into the rice paddy and be back on threshing duty the next afternoon.»

Eugene attended his Xerox 5380 console copier like a surgeon with a patient, bathed in strobes of Frankenstein green light. «Hey, sunshine, God bless Florida. All those seniors with nothing but free time and too many radio stations. They hand in their mailing addresses like they were spare change. Now let's get them up to the front door. Mush!»

When winter came, the air in the house became drier, but the daily schedule went on unchanged. In December, when Susan had realized she was pregnant, Eugene forbid her to go near the microwave oven or to drink alcohol.

Spring and summer came and went. She liked her job. She opened the daily mail, which Eugene picked up at a post-office box a few streets over. Inside the envelopes came crumpled money, sent in by superstitious radio enthusiasts whose names Eugene purchased from an old college pal who'd become a telemarketing whiz — suckers ! Most often it consisted of two twenties and a ten, but sometimes Susan collected wads of ones and fives in dirty little clumps, likely scrounged from under the front seat of a teenager's car. What did these people want? What kind of cosmic roulette wheel did they hope to spin by responding to Eugene's fraudulent thrusts?

Susan's stomach felt as if it contained a great big ski boot that rolled around inside her. The Seneca plane crash seemed like a lifetime ago, her precrash life, a miraculous story of outrageous behavior relayed to her the morning after a drinking binge blackout. The only real reminders she had of her former days were the passing glimpses of herself on TV-reruns of old shows — as well as the image of Marilyn, now dressed like a Fifth Avenue stick insect, hair chignoned regardless of time of day or season, scrapping it out in court with the airline.

The crux of Marilyn's case was that Susan's physical remains were never found despite indisputable evidence she was on the flight (a GTE Airfone call and the testimony of four ground staffers) and that, unlike other family members of crash victims, Marilyn was alone in not having so much as a fingernail with which to memorialize her daughter.

Susan saw Marilyn royally milking the situation for all it was worth. With public sympathy on her side she was likely to win her case. Eugene would egg Susan on. «You're going to just sit and let her rake in millions on this and do nothing?» But the topic was one that made Susan turn remote, and so he stopped forcing it. To Susan, the sight of her mother on camera was too distant, too unreal to enter into.

Life in Indiana went on. Eugene ventured out to do his mailings and make minor shopping runs. Susan occasionally went along, but she was much happier cosseted away with her lifelong sexual paragon, helping with the family business. It wasn't even until her third month there that she realized she hadn't once had the urge to make a phone call.

In early September, Susan was heavily pregnant and began to grow bored and cranky. «Hormones, Eugene. I get them hot and spicy like my mother.» She told him she wanted to take the car out for a spin.

Eugene, testy after disassembling an overtaxed air conditioner in the basement, unsure if he might be able to reassemble it afterward, had no interest in joining her. A heat wave had made the basement the only cool area in the house. The floor was covered in wires and screws, one of which Susan stepped on, sharpening her own mood until it broke.

«I want to drive to the Drug Mart and get some alcohol to cool my boobs. And it'll be fun to do some makeup, slap on a wig.»

«What if you — »

«Go into labor?»

«Well, yeah. »

«I'll bring the cell phone.»

«Let me gas up the car then.»

«Gas up the car?»

He went around the corner from where he was rewiring the air conditioner and opened up some sliding doors to reveal several 55-gallon drums Susan hadn't seen before They'd been loaded through what appeared to be locked hatches in the ceiling above.

«What the hell are these, Eugene?»

«Gas. I panicked during the Gulf War. I stocked up.»

«Are you nuts? Keeping these in the basement?»

«Cool yer jets, sister. It's nearly all gone. You should have been here in 1991. It was like a refinery down here.»

«This stuff's been down here the whole time?»

«I only drive maybe three miles a month. So, yeah.»

«That's not the point, Eugene.»

«Go get your wig. The weather's making us both nutty. I'll gas the car.»

Susan went upstairs to disguise herself. That day she was Lee Grant in the movie Shampoo, complete with frosted wedge-cut wig, and a beige pantsuit of Renata's modified to fit her smaller yet pregnant body. She also chose one of Renata's many purses, filled it with a small pile of clutter, makeup and baubles — her «pursey stuff» — and looked at herself in the mirror — sporty! Feeling a tiny bit better, she went into the carport, and called down to Eugene. «I'm going, Yooj.»

«Can you pick me up some gum?»

«Gum?»

«Cinnamon Dentyne.»

«Yes, my lord.»

«Ouch!»

«What's that?»

«This goddamm wire just sparked in my hand.»

«Careful now. See you in a half hour.»

She got in the car, still slightly annoyed. The sun was almost down, but none of the day's heat had dissipated. And soon the alcohol would be an extra cooling treat. She parked at the strip mall and bought a few things at the drugstore. Her mind wandered. She thought about how soon it'd be before she'd be going there regularly for Pampers and breast pads. On impulse she bought a bottle of bourbon at the Liquor Barn next door, and then got back in the car. Sirens were flaring down the street and she heard a boom a few blocks away.