Fiction | Short Story

North to the Future

If you’re having a good time it usually means you’re having a bad time, I think. So the opposite has got to be true also.

AJ Riley could have one new Buick, the poor man’s Caddy, but instead drives a series of bad decisions around town and calls them Cadillacs.

He’s going for a quantity-over-quality kind of thing with a whole fleet of Eldorados and Devilles, each one more rusted than the next, each car somehow more whaleish in size and sound. The rust comes off these beaters like glitter off a stripper, so you had better watch out when AJ drives by or you could get a fleck of hood in your eye.

As a kid, I could never get enough of AJ and his daughter Janene. She was always the excuse, this girl who happened to be my age and attended my parents’ church. I couldn’t just page AJ and tell him over the phone that I wanted to hang. That wouldn’t have been appropriate as a girl then or as a woman, which I suppose is what I am now.

I’d go over to their place and sit in the shag carpet and watch AJ play an unplugged Telecaster along to cassette tapes of cover bands he used to be in. Janene and I would eat macaroni and cheese and watch AJ play that guitar for hours, jamming blues and California country riffs from songs my parents never would have allowed in our house. I remember Janene always asking if I wanted to go outside. I had outside at home, but I didn’t have this.

Janene’s mother was somewhere in Mexico with her real family so it was just the two of them in a small house in the back of the valley. Their place was small because it was small and not because it was loaded with eight brothers and sisters and a stay-at-home-mom. It felt tiny because of AJ’s guitar cases and Elvis memorabilia and all his old unframed show posters rolling around on the floor.

When he played his pompadour came undone and he would build the thing back up between songs only to have it fall again the next time he chased a solo around the recording on one of the tapes. It embarrassed Janene but it did something real to me. Sometimes, while he retuned his guitar or picked up a slide, I would change the tape for him and we would dig deeper into the ’60s until it was dark and I had to go home.

He still plays. Every other week, AJ and some old-timers from around town hammer out a set at The Civil War Bar. The fifty-something-year-old regulars dance and get drunk and complain about their jobs and kids. They act worse than I’ve ever thought about acting but it feels decent having a few Budweisers and watching people my parents’ age drink so they can feel horny and angry again. I think I feel just like they do most of the time. Sometimes I guess I’m done and this town and these people have done it.

After a set the other night AJ locks his guitar in the case and then we hang by the bar. He buys me beers and I try not to flirt with him too much when he talks about the country boys out of Bakersfield or draws his hand through that big, stupid hair of his. He’s got a voice for radio and hair for the stage, his hair still Bible black with a perfect streak of white dividing one-third of his head from the rest. He can say anything he wants to. I’m just standing there.

He’s just been up to Oregon to see Janene and her new baby and he says how she’d love to see me, to catch up. She and her husband have so much space. It’s quite a life.

When we were growing up, AJ was always talking about Oregon, where he would retire, though he’ll never retire because I don’t think he’s worked exactly. He’d say how in Bend he could buy a bigger place with a two or three or even four-car garage, where he could wrench on his Cadillacs, all of them parked in a driveway instead of how they are here in Pacifica, scattered in the corners of parking lots rusting beneath bleached-out tarps.

AJ is nothing but plans. Aside from Oregon and the cars, there was a trip to Europe always in the works. I’d never heard my parents say a goddamn thing about Europe or anywhere else when I was a kid, so I said, Oh, hey, is Europe pretty nice? He told me that it was and that I wouldn’t believe how different everything was but how also it’s all pretty much the same. You are where you are is what I think he was trying to tell me.

I know his daughter’s story, but AJ tells it like I don’t. He tells me all about her great, new husband and I say we should take a shot of whiskey but he keeps rolling. After hearing about Oregon for so long Janene decided to move there for school and never come back. I get that part—the leaving—but the rest, I’m not sure. I guess I thought in time I’d be on track like her and know what’s next the way she has despite not having a mother in the mix. She was a Beaver at Oregon State, a barista in Portland, and now Janene is a wife and a mother in a two-story house with some man I’ve never met and a kid I can’t picture.

Cheers, I say.

We have our shots and it’s the good kind of bad. The whiskey at Wars tastes like it’s been distilled with a bucket of old coins, but you get used to it.

You really should head there for a visit, AJ says. You might love the way of life like she does. Plus, I left a bolo tie. Leave room in your bag to pack it on back with you.

I laugh and say, okay, fine. I don’t need to be around for another Fog Festival. I don’t really have a place in my life for organic candles or the sea of pastel paintings of Linda Mar Beach on sale during the two-day excuse for my sisters and their friends to trade products from their passion projects.

I buy my Amtrak ticket to Oregon the next day. Maybe it’s the hangover or maybe it’s how happy AJ was at the prospect of Janene and I reconnecting. When it comes down to it, maybe things are as easy as just doing them.

*

California moves past the train car and all I can do is look out and listen to Buck Owens on my headphones and drink this terrible train coffee. The morning sunlight pulls through the redwoods and occasional pine and I stare at it. I just sit in my seat and it comes to me, the world does, the trees and sky and this awesome sort of absence. All you have to do is wait for the ocean to come into view again. Sometimes when you’re by yourself nothing is real. Sometimes nothing is wrong.

You have to eat at least one meal on an American train before you die. It’s the same sodium-soaked bullshit as on a plane but everyone is sat together and talks and it’s something I would normally hate but for some reason kind of like.

I go to the first available seat at a table with a lot of these five-o’clock-and-it’s-dinnertime folks and it’s my first meal of the day. I wait for a few of the others at the table to order and then ask for a Sam Adams and some chicken strips. The waiter IDs me and everyone laughs when one of the old guys at the table cracks the What-about-IDing-me? joke when he orders his Pinot noir or whatever. He could probably be my grandfather. It is pretty funny, what he says, and I think I hope he doesn’t choke on one of those pigs in a blanket. His plate is teeming with the little guys.

The sunlight shifts to perfect and the coast comes back to us as I finish my last chicken strip and I still have beer left. Gale is telling everyone at the table about the Grand Canyon. Her husband chimes in from time to time, saying how yes, it is pretty grand. I sip my beer. It’s grander than I thought it’d be, the husband says again minutes later. Gale has moved on to describing their sleeper car. I look around the table but get caught in the folds of this old woman’s face and pull back out to see she’s just fine sitting here timing out her life on a train with a man who used to be her lover. In most ways, it looks like Gale was born for this. Born to share her life this way. The sleeper is roomier than she thought it would be. You could live there if you wanted to, she says.

It’s not long until it comes to me and I have no story so I say I’m headed to Alaska to find myself. I’m signed up for one of those fishing excursions. I just really need a change, you know? After I started and sold my company, an internet thing, I need some “me time.” They seem impressed and we go like this for a while until, I’m not sure how, but they ask about my family and I start telling the truth.

Eight siblings, how fantastic, Gale says. Never a dull moment.

Oh, Gale. It doesn’t get any more Gale than that does it?

Nine altogether? Dear Lord, one of the old guys says.
 You got a whole ball team right there.

You like baseball? Pinot noir says. I bet you do.

Of course I do, I say. Who doesn’t?

The youngest, huh? The old baby of the family.

And that’s kind of what you are when you’re the youngest of nine. I want to get this siblings thing out of the way so we can get back to Gale or the weather, something nice, so I tell them what it was like. That it was a lot of hand-me-downs and it wasn’t. Sometimes I got something new when no one else did and that was worse of course because of the trouble it caused. There was no one to pass it down to. This new jacket is all mine.

Youngest means everyone has done everything before. Everyone is better and worse. You come stock with pre-sins, the missteps you’re going to make based on the history of the sisters and brothers before you. Everything gets Biblical pretty quickly in my family, I tell the group.

Sometimes I think that with the nine of us our parents’ legacy is only a numbers game. Right now, for example, there’s little to no return on this particular investment, but my sisters are doing great, they’re happy with kids.

I say to the table how the older siblings end up raising you because Mom is so tired. She loves you and dad and all, but sometimes she makes it seem like she’s lifting something heavy when it would be great if she made it look light. And Mom is looking at her options. School. Pilates. Anything outside the house.

She’s trying to relate to you when you’re sixteen—asking you how to be young again and wanting to know what you know about everything new in the world. And while nurture had raised the rest, let’s see what happens when nature gets a hold of one of them, my parents seemed to say. So I am wild and free and bored.

I say, but try to qualify, how being raised as the youngest is like seeing a band at the end of a long tour. They get through the songs but don’t enjoy them anymore. The drummer’s tired and trying not to drink too much. Everyone wants to change places, the band with the crowd and the crowd with the band and the sound guy hasn’t not done blow since Albuquerque and everything only sounds loud now.

And don’t get me started on all the weddings. I’ve been a bridesmaid six times. I’m better at standing next to wives-to-be than I know what to do with.

So this sleeper car, I finally say to Gale and her husband. You really think you could live in there?

*

Canadians are just like us without all the worry and I love them immediately. There are two pretty ones and a strong-looking one in a baggage car I find wandering the train. Two boys and one girl and I can’t tell who goes with who. They’re from Toronto but live in San Francisco and are headed to Portland (like me) and then to Seattle and then from there riding bicycles from Seattle to Mexico for some charity. You should do it! the girl says. I know, I say. It sounds pretty great.

I tell them I’m on the way to Portland to track down my biological father and also a boy I went to college with—it’s a two-birds-one-stone kind of trip. They say how great and that we have to keep in touch so they can hear how things turn out. I’ve never had to keep in touch with anyone but I give the girl my real information and they pass around a bottle of Crown Royal and even they know Canadian whiskey is a joke and that’s the joke.

After a few rounds with the bottle one of the guys starts doing push-ups and there’s nothing to do but join him. It’s dark outside and we’re inside some dimly lit baggage car exercising and getting drunk, going in both directions at once but not feeling pulled even the slightest. I think maybe I should go with them instead of whatever it is I’m doing.

*

Janene is standing in the front doorway holding her baby. I pay the cab and he leaves me in front the beaming house. I walk up the driveway past a lawn as crisp as a clean sheet of green construction paper, the sprinklers dribbling the last of the morning cycle.

Here I am, I say.


Would you look at you? she says.

The sun reflects off the all-white house. I visor my eyes with my hands and find her in the black of the doorway. The baby in her arms is as beautiful as anything but Janene may as well have been holding a loaf of sourdough. I decide to try to feel something later. I need to set my bag down, get a little bit comfortable, and then I can manage a couple of questions about the birth weight and the baby’s sleep regimen.

I can’t believe it’s you. I didn’t think you’d ever make it.

Well, here I am, I say again.


Wow, you here and this weather.

It’s perfect, I say.

I’ve got one foot on the second step and adjust my bag to shift some of the weight off my back. She leans against the doorframe, tilts her head, and looks at me. I feel like I am trying to sell her something or it’s the other way around.

Well, what do you think?

You look great, she says. It’s just so surreal. Dakota Jensen is at my house. I’m a mom. Welcome to my home, Dakota May Jensen.

I’m still at the bottom of the steps looking at all of it and she’s telling me to come on up and I’m so blinded by the sun that when I finally follow her through the front door I can’t see anything.

It’s after the baby is down for a nap and I’m getting a tour of the house, with Janene showing me all these new doors her husband has just hung, that I know I have to leave.

Pretty great, huh? she says and strokes her bedroom door. We weren’t sure, she says, but the walnut was worth the wait. You wouldn’t know it, but doors, really good ones at least, can be a real thing, you know? Very spendy, but an investment like everything else.

Her husband had purchased the doors at a Home Depot and they all look the same but we’re having a good long look at each individual one. She points to a head-high knot that’s been sanded and stained like the rest. I try to remember which door my bag is behind.

Looks just like an eyeball doesn’t it? she says and laughs. I love this little guy, she says and pretends to polish the knot. We walk down the hallway to the next door.

This is, well, will eventually become my home office when I go back to work, she says and opens the door to nothing. Just new carpet smell and a plastic-wrapped leather office chair.

Maybe I always hated Janene, I’m remembering. And now she’s in a book club with other moms and I only pretend I read a lot because people expect that when you spend so much time at a coffee shop and you have half an English degree you’re always reading something or other. It’s unreal what people want from you. Everyone’s always asking me what’s next or how about Flaubert? I can blame bad translations and they usually back down. But what’re you going to do, Dakota? What do you want? I am always wanting to finish learning French. That part is true.

She’s spinning the office chair and going on and on about the importance of painting accent walls in all the rooms. For contrast, she says.

One of AJ’s cars is out back in the deepest part of the yard. I saw it during the outside portion of the grand tour when Janene told me how they plan to put up a zip line when the kid is older, and I believe that they will. They’re a follow-through couple and the yard’s perfect for it. She didn’t say a thing about her father’s car but I bet it was one of the Eldorados. “The-The Gold One” is that translation. I’ve always loved that kind of double-up. We don’t care if it’s the-the. We’ll combine anything with anything and make sure it’s big enough to impress no matter how little sense it makes. Janene and her husband have the Eldorado tarped and tied off as if the car will take flight without something holding it down. I imagine it’s the one that sat for so long in the church parking lot. The aqua Eldorado with the passenger side window a girl could slide down with her hands from the outside while the others sat through Sunday School. AJ must have driven up and flown back. I wonder if he’ll do that until they’re all here and then he’ll stay too.

Now she’s telling me about a desk her husband has promised to craft her by hand. She loves that he loves that kind of stuff. She loves the smell of cut wood. That guy, she says. He’ll be home from work any time now and we can have some wine by the pool and hear all about what you’ve been up to.

I have to run out for a second, I say.

What do you mean? Run where? she says.

I tell her it’s a surprise and I meant to pick something up for the baby. I go for my bag and she asks why I’m taking it, and I say, I don’t know, Janene, because I fucking want to.

I head for the train station even though I have no idea where I am. I light a cigarette and smoke some and just hold on and walk and the rest of it comes up and around me and I like it if for no other reason than it smells like me. I look for a bar. It’s one in the afternoon, someone’s got to be around. But maybe not. This neighborhood so far as I can tell is all tract housing and electric cars you can never hear coming your way. It’s drinking Pinot Grigio responsibly next to self-cleaning salt-water pools. It’s listening for your kid to wake up. It’s the deal my brothers and sisters have pinned down.

I circle the block and stand a few houses back from Janene’s and watch the afternoon sprinklers cycle until they drop down into the sod. It sounds to me like she got all these things all at once, the house and husband and kid and all, a kind of package deal. I know that’s how my parents did it too. The idea here is that you have to want this so you can get that, so you can find someone or be found by someone.

I walk until I can’t feel my backpack anymore, until it’s settled into the kind of heavy I can handle. I go to where I think the station should be and somehow find my way and head in to change my ticket.

The man in the booth has long dark hair and big, stark teeth and says darling too much. He stares at me through the ticket window as we talk about the ride this time of day. The sun will set just as you pass Mount Shasta and that should be beautiful, he says. The best train rides are always beating the dark. The ocean will come into view by morning and I can be home by the afternoon, we determine in our too-long conversation. I finally hand him my credit card and return ticket and he slides me a receipt and ticket for an hour from now. I sign my name. He eyes the receipt and says what a pretty name, for a girl, and I say thanks and, No, I’ve never been to either of the Dakotas, and is it? I’ve always kind of hated my name.

I drift down the platform to an empty bench along the California-bound tracks. A few kids are hustling up and down, staging quarters on the rails. I look in my purse but don’t have any change and come out with a Parliament instead. If you’re having a good time it usually means you’re having a bad time, I think. So the opposite has got to be true also. I tell myself how I’ll know when I know and light my cigarette. I’ll say, I love you, now let me make you miserable.

*

I’m stalling at the trailhead above Shamrock Ranch that loops three miles through the valley and returns on the other side of this service road gate where you get perfect view of the Pacific when it isn’t foggy. I haven’t started and I’m starting to see I won’t take the hike. I’m starting to think it’s better here, watching AJ thirty yards down in the back lot of this abandoned school where he’s got the driver’s side of an Eldorado open as he coasts it up nose-to-nose with a Deville I’ve never seen. Even from here it looks like rust is holding the cars together rather than breaking them down. He really does have these things everywhere—these inconvenient classics rotting in the fog. He’s never going anywhere. He can’t. He’s got too much shit in this town.

You can hear Merle in the Eldorado. AJ’s hair falls. He piles it back onto his head and looks young again. After the Mexican woman, Janene’s mom, he never really went back to dating. There’d be a woman here and there, but mostly it was his cars and the few guitars and his daughter. Now Merle Haggard is kind of breaking my heart down there and I wasn’t going to do the trail anyway so I start down the hill toward AJ and the cars and the song.

At the edge of the lot, he sees me.

It’s Kota, he calls. Hey there, chicken pickin’.

What’re you talking about?

Listen. That’s guitar playing right there, he says.

Someone in the band, Merle maybe, is soloing. The notes never crescendo, but they pop out of the guitar and fall out around the chords. A song like this never reaches all that high and you can almost thank God for that sort of thing.

Chicken pickin’ is that, he says and points at the beating speaker. I move closer to him in between the cars.

What you just heard there, he says, is what you want a guitar to do, huh? That’s a Telecaster, a Fender Telecaster. You know what that is, Kota J?

I hate when he calls me that. I’m always learning and unlearning things when I’m with AJ, and I hate that too.

Where did you come from? he asks.

The trailhead, but I didn’t get that far.

Okay, well, you can help, then. He tells me that when he yells go to hit the gas in the Eldorado and he’ll do the same in the Deville.

I hop over the jumper cables and fall into the driver’s seat and shit is the radio loud. I can’t hear him yell from the driver’s seat of his car but he gives me the thumbs up and I dig into the gas. The car jerks and flexes, the motor growls. I’ll smell like gasoline all day but who cares. I hit the pedal again and again and the Deville is firing too. I’m still flooring it and then let up but AJ is only smiling at me through his windshield, through mine, so we keep going, laying into it, our cars shaking and rattling like hell.

When we finally get out and are standing next to each other between the two idling cars he says he’s going to work on the carburetor in the Deville and probably pop it into the Eldorado. The Deville is just a parts car, he says, and I see now it’s missing its rear right wheel.

He turns to the Deville and bows his head under the hood and I sit on the bumper of the Eldorado and consider the rusted station wagon that washed up in Shelter Cove last year. It was a whole car but it wasn’t the whole car. The ocean had eaten most of it and turned the rest into a kind of sea creature covered with moss and mussels and seaweed. Some guy in the cove, one of those days I was around, laughed and said how neat and another person suggested turning the thing into a sculpture or something. I couldn’t imagine what that would be memorializing. Just thought of it was the kind of sad I don’t have any control over. It’s the kind of sad our town’s known for but doesn’t own, doesn’t even know it’s feeding with things like the Fog Fest and other rituals that don’t amount to anything other than the habits of people who happen to live next to the Pacific Ocean.

AJ eventually turns the Deville off and stands with one leg propped on my bumper.

That’s some house, huh?


I look up.

Janene and her guy’s, he says.

Yeah, it’s something.

He looks down at me and wipes his hands on a black handkerchief that was hanging in his back pocket. I don’t tell him I left Janene’s right away because he probably knows. And I don’t tell him about wanting to want what she has because he probably already knows about that too.

At least now you know, he says. Now you know where she lives.

True, I say and fiddle with one of the screwdrivers. I think I’m going to Alaska next, I say.

Aw, the last frontier. They’ll love you up there.

I’m not screwing around, I’m out of here. 


Then north to the future.

AJ, what the hell?


That’s their state motto, you should know that kind of shit if you’re going to live there.

I repeat it to myself and it sounds about right.

Pass me that flathead there, chicken pickin’. Let’s get this thing running.

You think we can? You think we can fix this? I ask and turn the tool between my hands and look around us at empty the lot and come back to AJ and hand him the screwdriver.

Yeah, he says, I think we are.