Miss Wyoming (24 page)

The next day Marilyn went home to Cheyenne, and the day after that she got the call from a sparkle-voiced airline PR woman about Susan's return to the living. She hung up the phone and reached for half a Shitsicle Don had left beside the phone book. Susan would be home the next morning.

Back in Cheyenne's outskirts, Marilyn lurked inside her motel room with the drapes closed, the TV blaring. Vanessa and Ryan were standing behind the rental car keeping sentinel on her, while Ivan and John headed to the lobby.

Ivan called Cheyenne's airport about the jet's overnight parking and then rented rooms for the group in case they had to watch Marilyn into the evening. John was looking out the window covered in grit and credit card stickers, also scoping the door to Marilyn's room. The group reconvened at the car, where Ryan said, «I'm starved. We didn't eat lunch.»

«Me, too,» said Ivan. «I'm going to go make a burger run. There's an A&W a quarter mile back on the road.»

«Well, you can't use the car,» said John.

«What?» said Vanessa. «As if Marilyn's going to vamoose right
now
or something? We're all sugar crashing. It's a worthwhile risk to get ourselves properly nutrished. Get me a large fries — make sure they use vegetable oil, no lard — and an iced tea.»

John was too hungry to fight and he gave Ivan his order. As he left in the rental car, Vanessa walked up to the door of number 14, and knocked loudly. Even from a distance, the sound of blaring cartoons and commercials tumbled from the room, the windows rattling as if they possessed stereo woofers.

Vanessa's unexpected charge shattered John and Ryan's complacency, and they dive-bombed behind Marilyn's BMW.

«Hellooo …»
said Vanessa, and she knocked again, louder this time. «
Hellooo —
Mrs. Heatherington? Fawn Heatherington?» Vanessa rapped the windowpane and then a slit in the curtains, which were yellowed, nicotine-soaked and threadbare, fluttered open. The room's door opened a crack. «Yes?» Bugs Bunny shrieked from within.

«I'm Mona. My uncle runs this place. Did you leave a twenty-dollar bill lying on the counter by mistake?» She held up the bill.

The door opened a notch wider. «Why yes, I did — how thoughtful of you.»

«Think nothing of it, Mrs. Heatherington. Wyoming hospitality.»

Marilyn plinked the bill from Vanessa's fingertips and mumbled the words
«Wellthankyouverymuchgoodbye,»
to Vanessa, but Vanessa stuck her foot in the door so it couldn't close. «Excuse me?» said Marilyn in a forced huff.

«Sorry to disturb you even more, Mrs. Heatherington, but — »

«Fawn. Call me Fawn.»

«Sorry to disturb you even more, then, Fawn, it's just that …» Vanessa's eyes saw the aged curtains. «It's just that for the past year I've been trying to get my uncle to buy new curtains for the units. See how ratty these are?»

«Well, I suppose, yes.»

«Exactly. If you could just mention this when you check out, it would sure help me build a stronger case. He's kinda cheap.»

«Absolutely,» said Marilyn.

The door shut and Vanessa strode over to her room, number 7. She was followed by John and Ryan, who scrambled out from behind the BMW, then beneath Marilyn's window. They came into the room and Vanessa said, «She's not alone.»

«How can you tell?» asked John.

«I heard someone rattling about in the bathroom. Even through the cartoon noise.»

«Did you see anything else in there? Clothing? Books? Magazines?»

«No. It looks like an unoccupied room.»

Ryan asked if the room was the same configuration as the one they were in, and Vanessa suspected it was. «Then come back here with me,» Ryan said. «Let's see if there's some kind of escape route we should watch for.» They walked back to the bathroom and inspected the window beside the sink.

«I don't know if that window is crawl-out-of-able,» said John.

«I think it is,» said Ryan. «Watch me.» He hoisted himself up, his stomach resting on the dusty and blackened aluminum slide rail.

«Ryan,» said Vanessa. «Get down from there.»

«No. I just want to see if — » He was cut short by the sound of Marilyn's BMW charging out of the parking lot and left, westward, onto the highway.

«Shit,»
said John. He kicked a hole in the door of number 7.

«Don't be so melodramatic,» said Vanessa. «Ivan'll be back soon enough. Let's sit tight.»

«I bet she saw us behind her car,» said Ryan.

They waited outside for Ivan, and John was visibly falling apart. Vanessa asked him if he was going to be okay, and he wasn't sure if he would be. The sun was still above the foothills off to the west, but only just. Wind whistled by, and John recalled the wind, back when he'd been lost. He remembered how it never leaves the air.

Ryan tried to atone for his having distracted the trio away from Marilyn's exodus. He went up to the door of 14 and tried turning the knob. It did and the door opened. He inspected the room but found no clues.

«
Gosh,
Sheriff Perkins,» said Vanessa, «those darn crooks left a book of matches from the Stork Club.
Look —
there's even a phone number written on the inside: Klondike 5-blah-blah-blah-blah.»

«A bit more support, a bit less sarcasm, Vanny.»

Ivan pulled in and the trio rushed into the car like puppies. «That way,» said John. «She has a two-minute lead.»

The car skidded out in a lazy spray of gravel. They flew west down the Interstate, back toward Utah and California, amid the truckloads of lettuce and hay bales and lumber that John thought seemed to never leave the roads, as if they existed in some sort of perpetual caffeinated loop.

An Exxon station lay ahead like a beacon. Ryan scoped it out with the binoculars. «She's there,» he said. «Parked over by the tire pump.»

«Thank Christ,» said John. «Ivan, pull in, but not too far, because she might see us and bolt.»

Ivan veered into the station, then empty.

«Is she in the office buying gum or something?» asked John.

«If you're like me,» said Ryan, «whenever you're being pursued, your first impulse is to stop the chase and stock up on gum.»

«She's probably in the bathroom,» said Vanessa. «I'll go look.» She got out of the car and walked to the ladies' room entrance by the side. She knocked on the door and Marilyn's voice called out, «Yeah?» Vanessa faked a southern accent and said, «No hurry then, ma'am,» then gave the thumbs up to the men in the car, and walked back.

John got out and stood at the back of the car, absentmindedly eating a cheeseburger. «If we keep following her, we could be on the road for hours,» he said. «She could be driving anywhere.»

A black minivan drove by. Susan was at the wheel. She saw John and wrenched the van to a halt. Camper and Willy avalanched into the dashboard. She and John locked eyes, smiled. She recovered her wits.

«Shit, Susan,» Randy yelled, a drink spilled in his lap. «What the hell are you — ?»

Susan plunged the minivan into reverse gear and made a crazy donut, then looped around and pulled up beside John's car.

«Your mother is in there,» John said, pointing to the rest-room. «I found her for you. You were looking for her, weren't you?»

Susan climbed out of the van, lifted her arms up to her mouth, and started to rock back and forth slightly, like a stick in the wind. She said, «Oh,
John …
» but her voice vanished, and instinctively Randy and Dreama, now out of the van, stepped back in surprise, as though Susan were a highway smash-up during rush hour. She took geisha steps toward the rest room door.

Vanessa quickly pulled back from the door, allowing Susan to approach alone. The others in the group formed a semicircle around her. A truck zoomed by on the freeway. The sun was halfway behind a mountaintop and their shadows were black ribbons. The dogs romped and yelped in the grass scrub behind the station. Susan knocked on the door. Marilyn shouted out, «Jesus Christ, I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying. I'm changing a diaper in here, okay?»

«Mom?»

Everybody felt the silence from within the locked bathroom. The last glint of sun went behind a hill and their shadows vanished and the air became that much cooler.

The station's attendant rounded the corner to check out the crowd. Randy asked him, «Do you have an extra key to the ladies' room?»

«No sir, just the one.»

From inside the door came a child's crying. Instantly, Susan bolted toward the door and tried smashing it with her shoulder, unsuccessfully. She slammed into it again, then Marilyn opened the lock and Eugene Junior raced out. «He's okay,» said Marilyn, then Susan grabbed him and swept him over to a small wall beside the propane filling tanks where she held him close to her chest. Marilyn sat down on the toilet in haggard defeat.

«Mom,» said Susan, «it's okay.»

Marilyn didn't come out of the bathroom. Her body deflated and she took a breath. The group's eyes peered into the small, harshly lit room.

Susan slammed the door of the house in Cheyenne, and almost immediately Marilyn felt as if she were on fire. But the fire didn't go away. It burned within her, underground, flaring up hourly across the following months, and when she burned, she lost her head and said hateful, vengeful things, which finally drove Don away. She beetled about inside her clean, white petrified house with nobody to talk to and nobody to phone. She felt like her head was filled with larvae. Her doctor said it was «the change,» and Marilyn said, «Dammit, why can't you just call it menopause?» The doctor said, «We look at things differently these days. This isn't an end. It's a beginni — » Marilyn said, «Why don't you just shut the fuck up and prescribe me a suitcase full of pills and make this blasted
fire
go away.»

The fire didn't go away, and pills were useless in snuffing it out. She cried and then she felt elated, but mostly she was bewildered and burning. And then the bills came due and all of the money was gone. She'd been proud, and didn't want to give Susan the satisfaction of seeing her mother cash in on paid interviews, so she did no press after Susan had left for California. Yet at the same time she hoped that Susan would see her mother's refusal to pocket some money and then maybe, just maybe, Susan would forgive her. And if Susan forgave her, then maybe she'd one day allow Marilyn access to the brood of children she'd seemed suspiciously intent on mentioning.

In the end, Marilyn's pride and hope had left her vulnerably broke. She phoned the networks, but it was too late, the Susan Colgate story stale. Marilyn offered no new angle.

Marilyn pawned what she could, yard-saled some more, and then rented a cheap apartment. She developed a phobia about touching her lower stomach. She was afraid of her fallopian tubes and her uterus, sure they'd dried out like apricots or chanterelle mushrooms, and she didn't think she could cope at all were she to feel their lumpiness within her.

Fertility. Babies. Desirability. Love. These words were so fully joined together in her head, like pipes and wires and beams in a building. And now, suddenly she was barren. A houseplant.

As if on cue, parts of her face started to migrate and shift. Silicone injections from a decade ago became like rogue continents within her skin, and Marilyn ran out of supermarkets and convenience stores in the Cheyenne area because she had shrieked at the clerks in the stores for focusing even a blink too long on the inert sensationless bulges beneath her left eye, her right cheek or the bridge of her nose.

She lost her energy. She became unable to drag herself out of bed in the morning. And then the landlord's henchmen gave her a month to leave her apartment. So she threw what she could into the BMW (which she refused to surrender) and sold what remained to a guy from a local auction house. She went out onto the road, like so many people had done before her, discharged from a world that no longer gave a damn if she burned or mummified or vanished or was sucked up into the sky by a spaceship.

And then one day, somewhere in Colorado, it all stopped. Her head cleared, and it was as if the months of hell had been merely a fevered patch. Though she had lost her husband, her house, almost all of her possessions, she felt —
free.

She took a room by the week over by the Cheyenne air force base, where weekly rentals were common. She changed her name to Fawn because she saw a fawn behind her rental unit one morning, and Heatherington because that was the fake I.D. name they gave her in the back room of Don's old sports bar haunt as she exchanged her Piaget wristwatch for a new identity.

Good old Duran had been spot on about Marilyn's needing a skill not tethered to beauty to help her through her life. She resumed including him in her prayers, when she prayed, which wasn't too often. He'd been dead for maybe fifteen years. In 1983 she'd read that he'd whacked his car into the side of a dairy van. She said,
«Hey Durrie, at least I sound like a lady on TV announcing the news. Sleep tight, honey.»

Marilyn's clerical and organizational skills, acquired so many years back, landed her a job at a company called Calumet Systems, which, as far as she could tell, built UFOs for the government. Nobody there recognized «Fawn» as Marilyn, despite her recently televised reunion. She'd morphed into somebody utterly new. She was now a cropped brunette with pitted skin who bought her Dacron frocks off the rack that in a previous life she wouldn't have deigned to use to wipe crud off the snow tires in the garage. She was cool and serene and proud to help her government manufacture UFOs at Calumet.

This went on for a year. She assembled bits and pieces of daily necessities from thrift shops, and she went out once a month to see a movie with two of the girls from Calumet, who ribbed her about her BMW, which she said her brother gave to her. She watched TV. She was happy because she figured she could live this unassuming life until she died and she wouldn't ever again have to put so damnable much energy into being a complicated person with tangled relationships that only seemed to wear her out in the end.

She typed like a woodpecker, even with long fingernails. She was so good at it that a man from a company outside Calumet was brought in to witness her skills for himself, to identify her «metrics.» He praised Marilyn for her low error rate and he noted her biggest weakness, her frequent inability to capitalize sentences that began with the letter
T.
The man had smiled at her just before he left, and it was then that Marilyn intuited that he knew she might not be Fawn Heatherington. He'd asked her if she'd ever worked anywhere else before, and she'd said she hadn't. This had to seem like a bald-faced lie, but it actually wasn't. Her job with Mr. Jordan, the Spam Man, had been in another era altogether, and her only other typing-based work was time spent in a satellite office of the Trojan nuclear plant, raising money for Susan's gowns.

That same night the fire in her body came back again, and it was worse than before, possibly because its reemergence seemed like such a sick joke and she'd worked so hard to erase Marilyn Colgate, the Burning Woman. The loneliness that she thought she had so effectively thwarted began to rip apart her insides. She phoned in sick to Calumet. She screamed and wept in her car, and drove to California with a plan to beg for Susan's forgiveness, though she knew this was only dreaming.

She drove past the Cape Cod house on Prestwick and parked in front of a house down the street. It was garbage night. Nobody saw her. She picked up Susan's small zinc garbage can and threw it into her car's back seat. She drove to a Pay-Less lot past the Beverly Center and dissected the contents of the can: two nonfat yogurt tubs, an unread paper, three Q-Tips and a phone bill with thirty-eight long-distance calls to the same number in the San Fernando Valley, plus a receipt for a jungle gym delivered to a Valley address. Bingo.

She went to a pay phone and dialed the Valley number, and a man's voice answered, «Hel
lo
?»

Marilyn said she was from the company that had delivered the jungle gym and wanted to see if they were satisfied customers.

«Eugene
adores
it —
lives
on it, practically. And it really does help pull together the whole back yard.»

«That's good, then,» Marilyn said. «Would Eugene be needing anything else for the back yard?»

«Oh you re
lent
less sales folks. Not now, but he's getting a real thing going for airplanes, so don't be surprised if we order the Junior Sopwith Camel in a half year or so.»

«We'll look forward to it.»

The call ended. Marilyn went into the Pay-Less and bought a foam 747 made in Taiwan. She drove out to Randy's house, parked down the street and slept there overnight. In the morning she carried the plane around to the edge of the house and there saw the most beautiful child she'd ever laid eyes on — a child of almost celestial beauty. He looked so much the way Susan had as a child, and like someone
else —
a face she couldn't quite place. Suddenly she knew something about where Susan had spent her year of amnesia.

Marilyn wanted desperately to hug this child. She held up the 747 and made it loop up and down with her arm until Eugene Junior noticed her. He skipped delightedly her way. Two minutes later, with Marilyn in tears, they drove away from the jungle gym in her BMW.

Randy had been folding laundry in the living room, and though it had been less than five minutes since he'd last checked on the child, his radar blipped. Something was wrong. He looked in the back yard and his spine froze. Then he saw the car pull out of the driveway. He phoned Susan, just back from her walk with John Johnson. Before he could speak, she burst out, «Randy! I just got a ride home from the cops — and I met this guy — »

Randy interrupted and told her what had happened.