Marian Palaia - Given World

She looked down at their feet, almost touching in the dust, raised herself up on her toes, spun, and walked away.

“Hey, Ginger,” he said, and she stopped. Her back was to him, and she held her arms up in front of her, elbows bent, like she was waiting for someone to put the handcuffs on. He stood behind her and wrapped his hands around her wrists. He had to tuck his fingers into his palms to get a grip. When she tugged, he loosened up and she slipped away. Just like that.

He left in late September. They’d found what was left of Leonard’s body washed up under a pile of deadfall on the riverbank — some bones gnawed or missing — and buried him a few days before Darrell took the bus to the induction center in Butte and then on to basic training in Oklahoma.

He sent her letters, but she wrote back only once. She said, Someday I will learn to not get attached. Maybe that’s what this was all about. Don’t think you can come back here and marry me or anything, because I won’t be here. I am not going to wait for you too. There was a long space; he could picture her thinking, pen poised over the page, biting her lip. Then she wrote, But I am glad I found you. Or you found me. That’s the way it went, isn’t it? God I was high that day. Another space. I don’t know if I would have been more mad if you didn’t go. I can’t get to the place in me that knows that. Another space and Don’t get killed please. She signed off, finally, at the very bottom of the page: Love, whatever that means, Riley, whoever that is.

Even though she never wrote again, he kept writing to her, mostly about what they were trying to teach him: how to shine his boots, make his bed, shoot and clean an M16, throw hand grenades, eat C rations, perform first aid. He was introduced to the practices of land navigation, or how to read a map and operate a compass. (“No celestial navigation,” he said. “The army, she doesn’t trust the stars.”) He learned the rules of war (“Slightly more complicated, but basically the same as checkers”) and the proper way to salute, stand at attention, and march, in ranks inspection, parade, and graduation. They dressed him in camouflage, but the pony requisition never came through.

After basic, they sent him to medic school in San Antonio for a few months, one night near the end of which he beat a redheaded white boy at pool and earned a mauling for it. It was in a honky-tonk he’d been to before, a few miles from the base, and usually he just kept to himself in a dark corner or at the end of the bar. But this night he was feeling good, like maybe he’d finally notched a chink in the armor of the pale world. He’d passed all the tests; everyone had started calling him Doc.

The first blow came from behind him, a pool cue at the knees, swung low like a cricket bat. He grabbed the edge of the table on the way down, came back up with the nine ball in his hand, turned to see who’d hit him. Four guys were standing there, three of them holding cues by the skinny ends, the fourth with a quarter-full vodka bottle he commissioned to smash in one of Darrell’s cheekbones.

Someone said, “How does that feel, you fuckin’ Cherokee?”

He slid to the floor, one leg tucked under him and the other stretched to the side in some ill-conceived Twister position. He felt but didn’t really see until it was walking away the boot that came down on his shin and his ankle, three times, maybe four. He heard it, though — the cracking. On the jukebox, Tammy Wynette was singing “Stand by Your Man.”

Darrell laughed, closed his eyes, and in the darkness conjured up an image of that dancing girl, the one he’d heard had left for Missoula. The big city. He’d never gotten a new address, and letters he sent to her parents’ house had started coming back. Still, he hoped she’d find what she was looking for; that someday he might see her again and could tell her about the ocean. He figured he’d let her know, somehow, if it was anything like Montana at all.

So that was me, going on eighteen. Not too tall, no tits to speak of, brown hair to my ass, parted in the middle and brushed intermittently, worn just far enough out of my eyes so I could see, but my peripheral vision was not what it could have been. I’d graduated from high school, and left my family and our home in the rearview mirror of a Greyhound bus. Moved to the city — or what, in Montana, passes for one — and stayed awhile. I left a few things behind, but no one came looking to return them to me or to fetch me back. I didn’t expect them to. They had enough to deal with.

What I did take along was a whole lot of questions for the world — oh yeah — beginning with “ Why why why why why? ” I often said it out loud, I guess because I was lonely enough to talk to myself. Bewildered too, but I knew enough to go. When I wasn’t asking why, I was giving myself orders: Just keep moving. Hit it, Riley. Get the lead out . So there was me, keeping myself company, and after I got my job in Missoula, there was my Mustang — my parachute, my escape. I took up driving like some people take up smoking or poker, and set about prowling the roads of a different part of the state — a different planet, almost — than the one I’d come from, a hundred miles north and two fifty east. The one where I’d left my mother and father, their grandson, and their own mess of memories and regrets. I didn’t know if they were still reaching, like I was, into empty space, looking to grab onto something no longer there, but it was likely enough.

One of my half-assed dreams, when I was still young, had been to become a diesel mechanic, work on huge things — equipment that could move mountains. It was not something girls normally wanted, but I was not a normal girl, and I had plans for that equipment. I guessed that given the right machinery, my little corner of the world — including all of Montana, parts of western North Dakota and southern Alberta, maybe just a small corner of Wyoming — could be arranged a little more to my liking. I even thought about joining the army. I knew they had some big machines, and I knew if you joined, they took you away. Maybe to somewhere warm, maybe near an actual ocean, where if it was the right time of year, there would be whales. As it was, I was already imagining them in the endless wheat fields, their big humped backs rising up out of all those amber waves of grain. I had a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses that nearly took care of the color discrepancy. Hits of mescaline or the occasional tab of acid took care of the rest.

Sometimes I’d lie out there on my back, and the world would turn over on itself, so all that big sky — all that inexhaustible sky I knew for some people who weren’t me was full of possibilities — instead became a big milk-glass bowl containing my life and all the reasons for me even having one. It would fill slowly with water, and I could feel fish swimming through me, through all my arteries and veins. And then I would start to drown in it, because it was all wrong and it was too big, and I would close my eyes and grab onto the dirt or the grass or the rocks or whatever was there and make the world go back the way it had been, and then sometimes I’d feel myself drowning in that too.

Despite all that, I was a picture, even if it was only in my mind, in my uniform. There was, however, the problem of being too much of a fuckup for even the army to want me. That, and I had not yet figured out a way to forgive them for losing my brother and taking my boyfriend. Or either of them, for letting it happen.

My parents, I knew, saw me orbiting a little too close to the sun, but they didn’t try to talk me down, probably because they knew they couldn’t, or were afraid of pushing me even further away. I learned how to drive at fourteen and spent a lot of time in my dad’s pickup. On the back roads, on the straight stretches, some voice in my head would tell me to floor it. I noticed the same voice never told me to stop if the road ended or turn if it turned. I wondered a few times about the significance of that, and it took a special effort on my part to stay out of the wheat fields.