My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (16 page)

The tension in that rental car exploded into an actual argument about an hour from our destination, when I played a song by Evan Dando, which was actually a song about, well, negotiating the hairpin turns in a relationship, and she lost her temper, from the passenger seat.

“What does that mean? That I'm abusive?”

“It's just a song! I just like it! It's not a message to you from him or me! What the hell, Steph?? Are we supposed to listen to your granola shit for an eight-hour drive and I can't play what I like? I thought you'd like this, since he's from your part of the world. Jesus fuck.”

Pause. Quiet in the car for three minutes.

“You know I have a job interview for something I've worked really hard to get in roughly an hour, right? And this is not going to help me interview?”

Quiet, for ten more minutes. Then we were unexpectedly closer to the destination than we had anticipated, and I was at the strip mall offices of the “media company,” and I had to switch into interview mode with this tension hanging over me.

They were in the parking lot, awaiting my arrival. Before I could change into more presentable clothing, I was put in front of both families, the four investors who owned the company, in my traveling clothes (shorts, nondescript T, and sandals). Behind me, Steph peeled out in the rental, making the introductions a bit awkward. I began my presentation, trying to block out the weirdness of the drive from Seattle with Steph and attempting to ignore the worry as to whether she'd already decided to drive back home in a huff.

My presentation was spectacular. I was genuine, relaxed, and competent and showed everyone present how I could raise the image of their company with a few changes and uniformity and standardization of logos, branding, and, well, literacy, and with all this, I could get them in front of the big players, instead of the mom-and-pop bullshit they were currently stuck with. Then I pulled out reworkings I had done on their “newspaper” and brochures, whatever I could find online, materials I had rebuilt to standard.

It went over like gangbusters.

It helped that they reminded me entirely of the families and businesspeople of South Texas, spoke identically in that lilting bifurcation of Spanish and English of educated second-generation Mexican Americans, and yet, I felt very much that we were not cut from the same cloth. I was way too punk, and they were way too drunk on the blood of Christ, and not just the wine cooler/low-alcohol content of the Catholic Church, mind you. These were the sort of Christians who burned the Harry Potter books, I could tell right away. Still, their money spent.

I was invited to lunch, and I demurred because I was tired from the performance and wanted to leave things on an “up” note, wasn't certain in what mood I'd find Steph or whether I would encounter her again that afternoon. So I made some excuses and wondered if I was stuck in Kennewick for the weekend, when I was finally able to reach Steph on her phone, and she said she'd be right over.

She was a different person than the one who had peeled off two hours before.

She was bright and gushy and came around the vehicle and was introduced to the owners, who made an awkward, very un-white insistence on “welcoming everyone like family,” and I was nervous at what Steph's reaction was going to be. And instead of embarrassing me, she was entirely likeable and receptive, though a bit too anthropological. But I could forgive her for that, because God knows if the situation had been reversed, I'd have broken out my pad and pencil and started sketching her Yankee family and their habitat as well, but it still left me feeling unsettled and uncertain.

What really set me on edge, as we headed back to Seattle, was that Steph insisted on playing only my playlist, and had memorized every song that had upset her before, and sang them without hesitation at full volume in a chirpy, optimistic enthusiasm that gave me the creeps for the full drive home.

“Those people were nice,” she said.

“Yeah, they totally remind me of the Mexican Americans of South Texas. Like my sisters used to be, which is weird,” I said.

“Yes, them, too. But the people I met at the mall, they were nice as well,” she said.

“You mingled at the mall? How very small-town of you. Whatever inspired you to do that?” This didn't seem like her, for some reason.

“Oh, they came up to the car to check up on me,” she said.

“Hunh,” I said. Tingle, tingle. “Was there, did something happen?”

“I just had my head against the window and they came up and knocked to see if I was all right,” she said, and then continued singing.

Holy shit
, I thought.
This doesn't feel right
.

What was she not saying?

As I learned more about her, and upon reflection, it's clear now that she was on the verge of some kind of episode in the hour leading up to the destination in Kennewick. Her anger and hostility at imagined slights was an indication of her traumatic brain injury, which very likely led to an epileptic fit, in the parking lot of the mall, when she was alone, and she wouldn't tell me it happened, couldn't allow herself to be considered “damaged goods,” so she hid it, tried to keep it under control.

I was offered the job a week later, and Steph wanted to camp as a celebration. I can't imagine why I would have agreed to this; I must have been thinking about something else and trying to assuage her when I said yes. It had to have been, because before I knew it, we were driving her Jeep to her favorite camping destination, a place called Bacon Creek that you could only find on those geosurvey maps. But I tried to get into the spirit, even went to a general store in a dodgy part of Seattle and bought “his and hers” machetes for thirty dollars.

She'd been there before, she told me, many times, and it was perfectly safe. Just a few hours northeast of Seattle.

“That's fine,” I probably said, when I meant, “Absolutely not, I hate camping.”

Camping, as someone I trust implicitly once told me, is at its best definition an agreement to be uncomfortable.

I was no longer willing to make that agreement, with anyone or anything, and yet, somehow, I found myself driving north and then east with Steph and her dog, Cleo, on a four-hour trip into the Cascade Mountains. Perhaps in my youth I'd have been much more engaged in this trip, in this destination of raw, untamed wilderness off switchbacks and logging roads, last traveled by men with huge fuckoff moustaches and sore bottoms, their knee-high leather boots squeaking from moisture. But I wasn't that guy anymore, no longer into Indiana Jones–style adventures and risk taking. I wanted gravel paths and stepped ascenders and at least the insinuation of a fence between me and a plummet: I wanted assurances and rough-hewn guarantees, placards telling me about the pioneers and conservationists responsible for this lovely meadow view onto Puget Sound. But watch your step, in case of soil erosion.

Lovely. Now, when's drinks?
I'd ask, in my best P. G. Wodehouse.
Shall we repair to someplace warm? Capital
.

That was my renewed idea of camping; at worst, it was a motel room rented from a redneck.

But for Steph, it was the unrefined, untamed wildness of the Northwest land that drew her, brought her closer to communion, called to her wild rumpus, fed her Max in
Where the Wild Things Are
.

It was a Friday night, after we'd finished work, and her truck was loaded with the camping kit. We'd made it out through I-5 and the North Cascades Highway when Steph turned off after a bridge she knew well and started driving through these rustic, nearly reassumed logging roads. The battered old Jeep's headlights were hardly better than a pair of weak flashlights, illuminating very close to nothing. She navigated this behemoth through some frightening isolated spots for an hour, drawing us deeper and deeper into the natural brush, and my anxieties and primal sense of de-escalation of the predatory ladder grew with each slipping minute.

I really wanted a handgun, or at least a large-caliber rifle.

Instead, I had Cleo, who was going apeshit with all the smells of deer and bear when she put her nose through the back window of the Jeep. I can only imagine what she was experiencing and what frightened her. What she knew.

Steph arrived at the road's terminus, and a path continued, so in the dark we shouldered our gear a half mile farther into the woods and found a clearing, made a fire, and set up a camp in the near pitch dark. I lay awake all night, wondering if a bear would be so kind as to eat the damned dog first, to give me time to persuade Steph to make it to the Jeep, and fell asleep about the time the sun was breaking over the mountains. When I awoke, it was to one of the most magnificent landscapes I'd ever seen, like a raised level cliffside surrounded by evergreens, protected on one side by a steeper cliff, with paths leading off in two directions, one to a raw, wildly dangerous waterfall gushing with primal ferocity from the thawing mountain snow, and the other to a wadi of a sort, with huge uprooted trees and pristine volcanic boulders worn smooth from all the winters and springs they'd seen, so that they were like buildings laid down on this riverbed on their sides, at the bottom of the waterfall.

It was precarious and sublime. I'd never seen anything like it, in all my years of living in the Northwest, never taken a journey like this into the breathtaking wilderness.

Still, I was starting a new job in a day, so I was kind of put off, I realized. If we stuck to this plan, I'd return to Seattle late Sunday night and begin my new job Monday morning, after traveling four more hours back to the western part of the state.

I started unpacking our breakfasts and such, tied a bottle of warm chardonnay with a rope and immersed it in the runoff at the bottom of the waterfall, which was still icy and frigid from the melting snow from higher elevations, and then went back to tending the fire as Steph wandered off with the dog.

A bit later, we took a hike through an adjacent logging trail and wound up bewilderingly lost in the most unrefined, oldest-growth forest, which I imagined was really Lewis and Clark–type shit, real monkey brain forest growth, for the planet, where we felt like large, ripe organic treats to either mammal or insect. Seriously, it was like a badger would have found us within its dinner purview. Or a beaver. Hell, never mind a bear, black or brown (I had no idea what neighborhood we were in, or if throwing gang signs would have helped).

Sometime after noon, after we'd been trapped in another riverbed and had been hunted by the grandmother of all wasps, bigger than any I'd ever seen, we finally found a parallel logging road and were able to make our way back to camp. I broached the subject of leaving that night, when we made it back to camp, because, you see, I was kind of a passive dope and hadn't realized that Steph intended on spending both nights out there, and I needed to rest before the big start of the new job.

“So is that all right? Steph?” I asked.

She didn't let on what she was thinking as we reentered camp, and the dog was running this way and that, her nose in overload with information.

I fetched the chardonnay from the waterfall and opened it, taking a swig directly from the bottle with our lunch as I built up the fire. Steph walked out of the tent, accepted the offered bottle, and took a heavy swipe from it, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and then took another, handing it back to me.

I was impressed. Half of the wine was gone. I tried chugging from it but couldn't compete. Hesitated. Bit into my cheese and summer sausage, then took another draught. Handed it back. Steph ate some of her lunch, then knocked back the rest of the bottle in two big, open-throated gulps and announced, “I'm going swimming.”

“I'll stay and mind the camp,” I said, unsure of her declaration.

Bugs were everywhere, I began to realize. Little zippy black fuckers, getting all over. Sunlight, bright and crisp—different from the density and saturation value of the South Texas sun that I'm accustomed to—was hanging about, making things smell. I smelled the green, and the wet, and the bugs. Everything was completely still and quiet. I sat on a log, my ass bones aching. Was this camping? I built a bigger fire, tried to kill time by splitting logs with my blunted axe.