Marian Palaia - Given World

After he dropped out of college and enlisted, before he went away, he boxed up all his things, taped and labeled the boxes. He wrote his name on them with a fat felt marker, and on some my name or an alias in smaller letters below. I didn’t open them when he went missing, because there was no way I could convince myself he wouldn’t be coming home. Not in a box. Not in a coffee can. Not a bunch of bones tied together like kindling. Not coming back. Not ever.

His records were in some of those boxes, books in others. He left me his model cars and the dinosaurs and the rock collection. Afternoons during his last few weeks at home, he’d go to one bar or another in town, and get drunk with his buddies who were going to Vietnam with him and a few who had deferments and were staying home. He’d come back an hour or so before dinner and sit out on the porch, not doing anything, just trying to get straight enough to come in and eat with us. He said he was sobering up the sunset, and he’d calculate the number of hours since the sun had risen over the South China Sea. I’d sit at his feet, repeating those words: South, China, Sea . He’d laugh while I did it, and all the while I was willing him back home. Asking God, I suppose. It wasn’t until much later I realized I should have been more specific about what condition he’d be in when he came back. Just in case.

• • •

I drove out of the woods and went to the Stage Station for a beer. I was very stoned and a little shaky, so in order to avoid looking at anyone I got a newspaper off the bar and sat at a table in the one corner still in a patch of daylight. It was earlyish, about four, but you could feel night coming on already, and the lights over the pool table outshone the late-winter sun, struggling, seemed like, just to stay lit.

On the front page of the paper was a story about a guy who’d gone off the road down south of Drummond, and a picture of his car lying on its top by the creek running through there, the old railroad tracks with weeds growing up through the ties, cattails undisturbed in uneven rows along the water. It was too easy for me to imagine how it must have felt as his car left the pavement, all four wheels suddenly in midair, no sound but the wind roaring by, or maybe no sound at all. I looked again, to be sure it really was that guy, and read the rest of the story. It said they didn’t know yet how he wound up down there, but he was still alive, in critical condition at St. Pat’s in Missoula. They’d reached a brother in Kentucky who said he’d done two tours in the Air Force, spent them mostly in the central highlands at Pleiku, and come home with no medals but did have a little shrapnel lodged in his head.

When I started feeling less wasted, I went up to get another beer and took the paper with me; I showed the picture to the bartender. Told him I’d seen that guy around some, driving a car that sort of matched mine.

“Doesn’t look good,” is what the bartender said.

“Nope.”

He read the story, nodded, scratched above his ear. “A lot of those guys came back a little crazy. Think maybe he just drove off the road on purpose or something?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he could have.” I looked out the window at the parking lot, the dusky woods beyond, and tried to imagine what animals might be wandering through, just out of sight. “My brother went over there, and he didn’t come back crazy.”

“Some didn’t.” The way the words came out sounded like what I’d said proved some opinion he already had on the subject. He was an old guy. He wouldn’t have gone.

I stayed to drink my beer, me and the bartender talking about what little we knew about the world. How much water was in it. What kinds of things and people we imagined were on the other side of the ocean. Turns out we didn’t really know very much.

When I got back home, Leo was at our bar playing the poker machine. Without looking at me he said, “Where have you been?” He discarded a two of clubs and a queen of diamonds, aiming for an inside straight. “I was starting to get worried.”

“I was out at Rock Creek.”

He glanced over. “You look strange.”

I reckoned I did. I felt strange. “You’re never gonna hit that straight,” I said.

But I wasn’t thinking about the cards. I was trying to figure out how anything could be so big it could be more than one thing: the Pacific on one side and the South China Sea on the other. I could not properly imagine the immensity of it, the possibility of all that water and what it could hold. I thought about that guy in the hospital and wondered if he was still alive, if they’d managed to get his car up out of that draw. Decided to go see some things for myself.

I told Leo I’d be leaving in the summer, after I’d saved some money. Together we put a new clutch in my car, a new distributor, brakes all around. We fixed the antenna for real. Laid down some actual carpet in the back.

I went to the hospital and talked them into letting me into the ICU to see my friend. He was in a coma. “Don’t expect much,” they said. As if.

I sat on a chair next to his bed and watched his eyes move under his eyelids. I whispered, “Hey,” and then again, a little louder, “Hey, buddy,” but he just stayed in there, in that other world. I couldn’t know a thing about it.

It was almost September by the time I’d got all ready to go, and Leo followed me in his truck as far as the Idaho border, to make sure I at least got to the top of the pass okay. Maybe he thought if something happened I could just coast from there, as clearly it would be all downhill from the top of that pass to the ocean. We pulled over among all the semis — cooling off from the climb and checking their brakes for the descent — to say good-bye. Leo kissed my forehead and told me he still didn’t think I was crazy. He gave me a new toolbox and a socket set for a going-away present, got in his truck and drove back the way we’d come. Halfway down the mountain I felt something snap inside me, like a shredded fan belt when it finally lets go. It felt strange but didn’t hurt like you might think it would.

I sailed across the panhandle and turned left at Coeur d’Alene, figuring I’d drive all night and be in Nevada in the morning. I’d never seen a real desert. I started a list of things I’d never seen. A tornado. Mountain lion up close. The Southern Cross. Saturn, that I knew of. Penguins. Palm trees. My list got longer as I drove, though I figured soon I’d be able to simultaneously put something on it — an iguana, for example, or a tide pool — and take it right back off again.

I practiced, on that road, keeping the people lost to me at bay. Aside from Mick, a tiny baby conceived just in time, maybe, to live, and named after a barn cat; and his father, who tried to hold me steady, though he couldn’t, as he had no way of knowing how. Even if he had, I didn’t know how to let him. On that road I was practicing something I would never perfect but knew I was going to need. Maybe not forever. Certainly for a while.

I headed south through Idaho and west through Nevada, collecting images of jackrabbits, casinos, tumbleweeds and dust spiraling across empty fields. I saw a black horse with a white mane. A five-gallon oil can on the side of the road with a bald eagle dead on top of it. A claw-foot bathtub with no feet. An army boot. A coonskin cap hanging on the branch of an old apple tree, rotten apples piled deep around it. California was just ahead of me when it started to get dark again. I drove through the mountains with the top down, even though it was almost Montana cold up there. I needed something like cold to keep me awake.

When I finally found the ocean I couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything beyond the edge of the cliff where I parked my car, on account of the fog. I had not expected fog. But I could hear the water, and smell it. I could feel it. I could barely stand not being able to look at it, but figured I’d already waited so long, and the sky had to clear eventually. I moved over to the passenger seat, put my feet up on the dashboard, and fell asleep.