todd of tacoma

I was farming, not much else thanks to farmers’ hours. Farmers’ hours are minimum twelve a day in the summertime, maybe more like fourteen or fifteen, six days a week. Add an hour roundtrip commute and I don’t know how I found time to drink all the time. I had to feel it out on Sundays, kind of, listen to my body, do what it told me to do, no questions. Rest on the Sabbath, keep it holy. A few drinks in the afternoon, sometimes none at all after that.

Unless C called.

Until C called.

On the days that C called.

Almost every Sunday.

Standard disclaimer about anonymity. All letters appearing in this blog are fictitious. Any resemblance to real letters, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Sometimes I forget to use letters.

Drip

Benefit of working for farmers is they’re almost all religious. Benefit of working for a religious farmer is you get Sundays off. You have that, at least. Maybe you crank a mainline closed in the morning but that’s about it. After that, you get your downtime. Downtime is when you’re beat to shit and drunk all the other days and hours of the week and you finally have time to be down.

I had taken Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores to a wine bar downtown my ex-girlfriend’s friend worked at. She was opening, the friend, and had told me the night before to stop by. She was being polite but I decided to stop by anyway. To my surprise I didn’t want wine so early today so I ordered a coffee. Listening to my body.

We don’t have drip ready yet. Do you want just a press?

I had no idea, I had no idea what a press was, so I nodded sure thing and she said French press to fix my dumb face, as if that’s the piece I was missing and I would go aha, but if you know me, you know it takes more than a proper adjective to fix my dumb face when I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Whatever time later, like minutes or hours, she brought back my French press. A cylindrical carafe of dark water with a plunger sticking up. I’d seen them before, certainly, at other tables or at friends’ houses, but had never before found myself needing one, and had never before observed how a coffee drinker using one used one. It looked unfinished.

Just give it a couple minutes, she said and, having not yet learned her lesson, looked at my dumb face for confirmation. Her eyes, cold and healthy as a mountain lake, told me this was the simplest goddamn thing in the world. Wait a couple minutes, press the stopper, pour. So simple she didn’t need to say it.

C coming by?

Not today.

The casual way I was always asked about C’s whereabouts would suggest C was or might be or once was my girlfriend. But C was not my girlfriend. My girlfriend was my ex-girlfriend, and we were about six minutes fresh off a breakup. Always about six minutes fresh off a breakup. By now I think I believed that’s what made a good relationship.

I saw C after every one of my breakups but hadn’t seen her since the latest one. She could always sniff it out, probably the smell of desperation, and I think with me she was hoping one day the desperation sex she offered would be good enough or memorable enough to end things with my girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, whatever, once and for all.

We fucked in secret, C and I did, not a damn person knew what we were doing all the time. In fact, everyone in our respective friend circles and the friend circles closing in on those circles all would say to us, why don’t you two fuck and get it over with?

We did, and never got it over with.

It wasn’t something we tried to keep secret, but over time, once it became obvious to us that it was kind of a secret, we naturally leaned even harder into it. The fucking and the secret. Especially the secret. Boyfriends and girlfriends came and went, but that delicious secret remained. Taking a wide angle look at our history you could make an argument we dated other people merely to keep the secret necessary.

I didn’t want to meet C here and she didn’t want to meet me here because we suspected that might ruin everything, might be that tug on the thread that would uncover us finally.

We were drinking buddies, mind you, not fuck buddies.

Seemed like a couple minutes passed, but by my phone it was about fifteen. I’d got caught up in one of Marquez’s descriptions of a sweaty teenage body. I was about to plunge my coffee but then I remembered I had no idea how long to let the whole operation steep, so I set my thin little book on top of the flat plunger knob and went two doors down to get cigarettes from the tobacconist. In the display window of the record store between the bar and the smokes was a poster for the last show at the Zebra Above. My best friend was playing there, as well as SloMo Joe and the No Shows, Bipolar Ben and The Touchers, Slippers, Donnie Evil. I’ll tell you more about these bands in another blog.

C used to work at this record store. She was fired quietly for taking money from the till. She was fired for the same thing at the wine bar, actually. Fired from the tobacconist’s, too. There was a broken display case one morning after her shift. Security footage found her face down on the case, one arm draped over it, one out of sight, her back pulsing and rocking like a snake taking on a fat rabbit. Then, in one big, ultimate jerk she bucked up and you could see her eyes all demonic and she plopped back down again and it wasn’t her head on the glass that did it, it was her stretched out hand that she reached forward like she was clutching a bedsheet, and she pounded a couple times and shatter lines spread from her palm. She shot back up and squeezed her legs together and wriggled on the stool.

She had fallen asleep, she said, and woke up sharply from a nightmare.

They fired her for stealing from the till.

I thought you’d left. I was about to clear this, my ex’s friend said when I came back with my smokes.

With the book on top like that? I sounded like a dick, so I winked.

Did you want a new coffee?

I wanted to know what I should have done with this one. But to spare myself the humiliation of not knowing I pretended this is how I liked it.

I’m good.

You sure? It’s nothing.

I’m sure.

I sat back down and waited till she was occupied elsewhere and I plunged once and plunged again, and again and again, watching bubbles rise and black whirlpools drill down. She walked by finally to check on me when I was most mesmerized and she smiled me alert and I stopped. You could tell she was holding back a teaching moment, but she walked away, having learned her lesson. I was proud of her, showing so much restraint. We were all of us growing up since graduating less than a year ago.

But she did not look grown up. The bar made their female wait staff dress like sexy interns and student teachers and students. White blouses so tight they looked like frilly little throw pillows around the bust. Black skirts with white nylon leggings. Come autumn most of them would be wearing plaid skirts. Back to school. By Halloween some of them would have backpacks and would deliver your bill in a Trapper Keeper.

I feigned offense and outrage about it, about the objectification, but my eyes could not help lapping it up, soaking it in, whatever, from the pigtails down to the shiny clogs and the pigeon-toed way they sometimes stood in them, every time I came in, no matter who was working, regardless what I was drinking. Did the bar know better what was in my heart, my deep deep heart, better than I myself knew?

The coffee was colder than room temperature somehow, and bitter, with an oil slick on its surface. When I was finished with my first cup, I plunged the French press several more times hoping to clear it up, like I was priming a pump, and poured a second cup. Colder still, and more bitter.

I picked up my book.

An old man wanted to sleep with a virgin before he dies.

The Mint Condition

We were meeting in Belgrade at a bar called The Mint. A steakhouse, actually, and it was just open at three o’clock when we went in for whiskeys and Rolling Rocks. The Mint hadn’t called C yet about her application, she told me, but maybe if she showed her face they’d remember they forgot.

Did you call them?

No, fuck that.

They never called me, I said, so they must not have read all the way to your references.

She tried instantly to get the bartender’s attention and then hit me on the arm, as if she’d just remembered in that order that she intended to hit me. One of her most endearing jokes despite the fact she had a good arm and a strong windup and it kind of hurt.

I don’t get paid until next Wednesday, I hinted.

That’s OK, I won’t drink too much.

What kind of Scotch do you have, she asked the bartender.

Scotch?

The bartender was on the other side of the room.

It’s a Scotch day.

We’re more of a bourbon kind of place, he said. Wanna see our selection?

Wild Turkey, she said.

At least it’s something I can afford, I said.

Lighten up.

I’ll have the same.

Two Turkeys!

Rolling Rocks, too, please.

You work in the industry?

Yes!

She couldn’t help herself. And, so I wouldn’t advertently or inadvertently fuck up our industry discount, she pinched me on the leg. She had to weasel a discount even if she wasn’t buying and was about to remember to hit me again when the bartender popped up with our Rolling Rocks saying cheers.

Is the festival at the Ellen?

What festival, he asked.

PowderFest. She indicated her question was prompted by his t-shirt.

You’re going to that, I asked.

You’re skiers?

C nodded.

We weren’t skiers.

Hell yeah, he said. Tough winter, right?

So tough.

I felt like I was staring at a French press again.

Oh, fuck, the Turkeys! Be right back.

Wyatt wants to go, C said to me.

That’s right, he’s from California.

You’re turning into one of those assholes, by the way.

A skier?

Fuck you, a local. Complaining about Californians buying up all the land, skiers and stoners, Ted Turner and his buffaloes.

I love buffaloes.

Then prove it! Go to Yellowstone or something.

Did you know they face snowstorms instead of turn their backs to them?

Is that true?

Not sure. It’s something I learned.

She was picking at a smudge on her skirt and she said, fuck, because she just noticed it. It occurred to me if the wine bar I was just at really wanted their wait staff to look like schoolgirls they should add more touches like this. Stains and maybe wrinkles and tears. They should hire C back as a consultant.

It’s at the Rialto, I think, not the Ellen.

How do you even know?

You asked, so I decided to know.

The bartender hadn’t put on music yet. In the silence after C laughed you could hear our Rolling Rocks as we played with them on the bartop.

Are you and Wyatt a thing now?

Depends who wants to know.

You are!

Not if you ask anybody else.

Is he a secret? Like me?

Just like that I had destroyed it. Near the top of the list of rules for secrets is you must not call them secrets. It’s their nature, it’s how you find secrets in the wild and keep them wild. You utter one fucking thing about them, even just name them, and they wither and die.

You and your ex hook up more often than Wyatt and I do, she said.

We’re not hooking up now.

Because you’re hanging out with me.

Our Wild Turkeys came. Our bartender’d had to hunt down a new bottle. He then had to acknowledge it was quiet in here and had to admit not knowing how to operate The Mint’s new sound system.

I’ll just leave you the bottle, he said. I gotta change a bunch of kegs.

You’ll what, C asked.

Honor system, he winked.

Thanks, barkeep. Go check the horses, Todd, we’re gonna be a while.

He beamed, like he had stock in the joke, like he’d set her up and she delivered just as he’d wished. In his glow I understood how C survived without jobs whole months at a time.

They ran out of a bunch of beers on tap last night. I’m not the only one who knows how to change the kegs!

Fucking barbacks, C said.

Amen! Hey, don’t clean me out.

He walked off.

Are you going to introduce me to your new friend?

She poured a couple more shots and said, to drinking free, and we shot them and she poured a couple more. You know how it goes from here. First drink, you feel lucky to have escaped the sober part of your day. Second drink, the best drink of the day. Third drink, the only drink you don’t think about drinking, and you’re off to the races. Everything after the second drink is your third drink. There is no fourth.

You and Wyatt are the only ones that matter, I decided to say. Fuck what everybody else says.

I don’t know, I don’t know if I want to know him.

Like, biblically? Haven’t you already?

Know him in the we’re a thing way. If we’re a thing I won’t know him like I know him now.

You don’t want to be in love.

You were in love, right? You and she who will remain nameless?

I nodded, which is that tragic way of saying, yeah. Like, yeah, with ellipses.

Well, that’s your answer.

What’s amazing is I don’t think I realized or she realized, my ex that is, I don’t think we realized we were in love for about three months, and it wasn’t anything special. Three months? That seems right for most people, I know, but for me it’s usually about a week, shit, once or twice a week when I’m single. My ex and I, we were driving back from Chico Hot Springs, up by Pray, and it was spring and the earth was a patchwork of dead grass, new growth clawing through dead grass, snowbanks melting, and full rivers that would drown you if you looked at them funny. You feel like our planet has seventeen suns in a Montana spring, every ripple in every river and creek like a bounce card, and every glistening snowmound, too. The air tastes like ice water. You don’t drive with the windows up in this weather. You blast the heat and stick your head in the wind like a dog. My ex and I, we were driving along the Yellowstone River in just such a Montana spring when we decided, silently, that we were in love, quite in love. We didn’t even look at each other. We didn’t say a word. We didn’t sigh or indicate in any way that we were in love, but we were in love. I think I was playing Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye.

Let’s not talk about her the whole time, C said.

Now, you could hear electronic slot machines waking up. There’s one at least in every room in Belgrade. We squirmed like you squirm when you’re drinking to no music.

Would you two get back together if she knew about us?

We’re not getting back together.

Because she knows you cheated?

She doesn’t know. Nobody knows.

Everybody knows.

No, they don’t.

They know everything they need to. Like you know about buffalo.

She walked about six fingers up my legs and said, I could never work here. It’s too fucking hot and quiet.

My car doesn’t have AC, I hinted.

Are we going for a ride?

I don’t think your buddy is going to figure out the music.

Can I stick my arm out your window and pretend like we’re in love?

Fuck off.

She held up the Wild Turkey bottle to determine how much we owed.

I only have a card.

That’s fine.

She dropped a twenty on the bartop as if that covered us and took another swill as if she was owed one for using cash.

Where did that come from?

Maybe we can go bridge jumping.

I don’t have any river clothes.

Then don’t wear any.

What if there are other people?

Job Interview

Her arm was out the window when we got sprayed by a Big Gun sprinkler that wasn’t set or its stopper was broken and the mist alone was enough to soak a neighboring field’s alfalfa winrow. That’s a waste, C said. I wasn’t sure what she meant, so I said, second cutting, to kind of agree with her. I can’t imagine they’re gonna be too happy. But smell that, you smell it? Alfalfa in the heat smells sort of like chocolate to me. For as long as I’ve said this, though, I have never heard anyone agree. It smells good, she said. Third cutting’s crap, so whatever if it doesn’t dry great, but this. What, actually, do you do at work? Mostly irrigate. Fake rain. Is that what you do on the motorcycle you talk all the time about? I’m back and forth on a dirt bike all day. What’s that look, I said, because she had a look, like she had a question. You lay on the country boy pretty thick with girls around here, why not with me? Maybe there’s only certain things I can fool you about. You’re kind of fooling me now. She twirled her thumb in the wind. When you do that it feels like a dog is nosing your palm, try it. I grew up eleven minutes from farm country, she said, and I know nothing about it. There’s not so much to know. How many people do you work with? It’s a whole family, two whole families, well, one, you get what I mean, some brothers and some kids. And you, she said. Then at harvest there’s more. They hire a bunch of truck drivers to haul seed from the fields. And just as many women to sort it from the rocks and dirt clods. When’s harvest? Month and a half or so. Could I be one of the women? You wanna work harvest? Can you vouch for me, she asked. If you show up on time and don’t steal any potatoes. Why did you have to say that? She unbuckled my seatbelt, ding, ding, and unhooked my belt and popped my jean button with one hand. Ding, ding, ding, ding. That’s obnoxious, I said. She said nothing, stopped moving, froze but for her breathing. Breath as hot as the afternoon. Then spray from a wheel line slapped my windshield and she startled and then moved again. Like an idiot I turned on the windshield wipers, smearing all the summer’s dead bugs in an arc. Ding. I unzipped my pants and grabbed her hand because she kept pretending to grab the steering wheel with it and I couldn’t tell if she was being funny. Closest bridge is Axtell, I said. Ding, ding, ding.

River Rocks

When we pulled in riverside about six teenagers in an Accord pulled out. They had left the little parking area empty except for an eighteen pack of Coors Light packed with empties.

All to ourselves.

Probably not for long.

Put me on the ground.

She pointed to a nasty little copse with a makeshift firepit and a few mud puddles.

Why not in the back seat or standing?

I’ll let you come inside me but you have to fuck me on the ground.

Why is the ground important?

She played with a tassel on her blouse, one of those near the collarbone that doesn’t actually tie anything off, but the way she played with it you’d think she was about to rip a tear in spacetime and wiggle her finger inside.

As if I could see into the future, I looked up and down the gravel road to determine if we’d be interrupted on the ground for the next ten minutes or less.

When I started to come she felt it happen and she tightened the grip of her legs around me and squeezed, then she kicked me off her once I’d pulsed my last pulse so she could take over where I left off. I stayed back. If I’d try to touch her now she’d lose everything she was working for and wouldn’t talk to me for a week. A lot of effort goes into a whiskey orgasm.

I could see the sun was in her eyes, so I scooted over to the left a little to shade her and let her know without interrupting her that I was right there rooting for her and, bam, I bumped into a rock with my bony-ass hip, bumped it hard enough it was going to leave a bruise. Fuck! The rock was as big as a head and, because it was on the edge of a puddle and not stuck that far into the ground and because I had hit it so fucking hard, it came loose. I put my hands on it to roll it out of the way and forget about it and just rub my throbbing hip, but C saw me with it and liked something that she saw.

It is never more obvious than in the course of intercourse that you cannot see what others see.

Hit me with it.

What?

Fucking hit me with it. Hit me! Oh, fuck, hit me with it!

With the rock? I didn’t say this, I said nothing, actually, but the look on my dumb face said, with the rock?

Sit up, you pussy, lift it up and bash my skull in, pussy bastard!

She was picking up speed now.

Fucking coward!

It would kill you.

Just fucking try it. Try it!

I had a girlfriend once with a rape fetish, not my ex but a few exes back, had a rape fetish and I was too PG-13 for her scenes. I think I cost her a lot of orgasms, looking back, orgasms she deserved to have and I failed to deliver.

I wanted to deliver now, to be the kind of man who delivers now, but I didn’t think I had that killer face C needed to see. Instead of pretending I relished murder and torture and that my art was bashing cadavers and carving up women, I kept imagining gravel dust and police lights arriving on the scene. Detectives in unmarked cars, too, pulling up in the dusk light and stowing their flasks in their gloveboxes and thinking, I thought I’d seen it all. Me shivering half naked on log, spattered in blood and in a trance. She asked for it! I’d say on repeat. The teens in the Accord would be there for some reason, for questioning, crying for some reason. A couple of them would quit school and move back to California. One would go on to direct slasher films all set in Montana.

I imagined a jury, too, not of my peers but of harvest women downcast, eyeball-castrating me and lashing me with their leather faces. They’d bring down their verdict. You have transgressed your last! As I’m pleading from the stands, she was asking for it! She was really asking for it!

I’ll scream if you don’t raise that rock above your head right now!

The red between her tits was fading and it would leave her face soon, too, if I didn’t summon the killer in me. If I didn’t imagine bashing her face in, not just once, not twice, not three times nor thrice, but until I had satisfied my homicidal lust, until the devil had jumped out of my heart and my chest, until ten demons had clawed through my bloody fingertips and gasped freedom! and I had rolled over in the mud, breathing like a dying animal, the only one breathing now, breathing for two.

She saw me then, what she wanted to see anyway, way down deep in the well she saw me and saw that it was terrible.

My name is Legion.

She closed her eyes.

No, don’t! He’s going to kill me!

She laid there against the rock. I was feeling pretty weak from the long workweek, so I hadn’t thrown it very far. She had also crunched and convulsed her way closer to it as her legs were eating her hand and when she finally opened her eyes her forehead was right there against it, my murder weapon, now just a cold wet stone.

She spat out sand and hair.

Jesus Christ!

I wanted to argue that I hadn’t really thrown it that close to her, but I didn’t have much of an argument.

Happy now?

The gall to ask.

I’d ask you the same thing, I said.

We didn’t have to talk after that. It wasn’t really worth it or not worth it to talk, after what we’d done, after everything we’d ever done, then and before and after. We had done what was required.

I didn’t have my river clothes but fuck it. I lit a cigarette and climbed to the top of the bridge. The smoke stung my eyes but I let it. At the top I could smell a dead cow had exploded a few miles from here. When they die in the summer farmers drag their carcasses to the edge of a field to bloat. They gas themselves up till their legs are practically filled with air and then they explode, a blast radius of shit and cadaver for miles. Stronger and more foul than a skunk in a wheel well. C was dressing herself by the river’s edge where you couldn’t smell anything and she was beautiful. She was flagellating her back with her blouse tassels to beat off all the riverside sand and dirt and dry the mud. Sometimes she looked perfect, like now. Then I felt like jumping.