Postcard Stories

Chattanooga, Tennessee

I saw a dead body once. We were on a family vacation, heading south.

My brother and I sat in the back of the van, watching cartoons on a travel TV that was secured in place, between the front seats, by bungee cables.

We’d taken our shirts off in the heat, and were perspiring, loud, and rude. We fought. We insulted. We slapped, and pinched and punched. We jammed saliva covered fingers into one another’s ears and gave out Indian rug burns. We made flatulent noises by tucking our hands under our sweaty armpits and flapping our arms. We wrote curse words on a notepad - ones we were too afraid to say in front of our parents - and threatened to beat each other “into pulp.” My brother was older than me, and bigger then, but I tried to overcompensate with the sting of my words.

Dad rolled down the window. We heard patrol sirens whining, distant chops of an idling helicopter. Something was wrong. You could just feel it, like nausea or hot sun on your arm.

Nobody seemed to know or care why we’d stopped. Some people left their cars, danced to radios, or chased each other in circles. Others darted off into the woods to urinate. One long haired man hopped out of his van holding a lawn chair. I watched him run ahead a hundred yards or so, plop down, crack a beer, and wait for his ride to catch up.

We inched ahead.

Eventually, we reached the accident. Shards of metal and glass were scattered everywhere. A sheen of oils and hose-water glistened on the blacktop, reminding me of the time my brother busted the fish tank in Ms. Carl’s second grade classroom.

At some point, traffic began to slow. Cars were lined up, bumpers kissing bumpers, as far, and straight, as any of us could see. The first car was completely smashed in. The hood was bent upward, and the windows all blown out; a crumpled, glossy, magazine picture of a car. A crew of paramedics and firemen circled around it.

The other car was off in the woods that bordered the highway, barely visible, wrapped around a tree.

My brother was the first to see the body. We rolled by it slowly, stuck in the tedious pull of traffic. He pointed at the white sheet lain delicately on the road.

“Don’t look, boys don’t look,” said my Dad, in a tone I don’t think I’d ever heard before. “Close your eyes.”

There was nowhere else to look.

I didn’t recognize what it was at first. All I felt at the time was confusion. Why was this person resting on the blacktop? My god, how hot they must have been! How sweaty and uncomfortable it must be under there. I was concerned. Did anybody realize they were there? Someone was going to run them over! Why wasn’t anyone doing anything?

I fished through the bottom of our Igloo cooler and grabbed a bottle of water.

“You should give this to that person,” I said, passing it up to my Mom. “What person?” she asked. “There’s somebody under that sheet.” Mom took the drink, but didn’t respond.

“You moron,” said my brother as he flicked the back of my ear. He seemed almost delighted. “That person under there is dead. They’re cooking like a steak on a skillet and –”

“Christopher!” said my Mom. I could see the bottle trembling in her hands.

I looked back and saw a hand reaching outward, from underneath the sheet. It had five fingers and unpainted nails – a man, I assumed – just like mine, just like my hand.

Dad remained silent, staring forward into the rear-window of the car ahead of us. Two oblivious children, bowl-cut, in matching overalls, pulled their mouths back with their fingers, making faces, waving.

None of us said much after that. We cleared through the traffic and resumed our usual speed on the highway. We returned to our thoughts, our TV.

At a picnic table in Chattanooga, a few hours later, my Dad pointed up at a mountain off in the distance. “Let’s go up there,” he said, nodding with his chin, while dipping a tear of grilled cheese into a styrofoam cup of soup. “Let’s see what it’s like at the top.”

Mom nodded, chewing, looking out and away.

We parked at the base of the mountain, and a cable car took us up the side. It was steep and felt like a roller coaster, ratcheting up to that first drop. I felt a stab inside my stomach. I imagined us reaching the top and sliding all the way down the other side, flipping and rolling – I thought suddenly of the car in the woods along the highway – into Chattanooga, uprooting plants and trees, crushing pedestrians, tearing through the windows of buildings, out through their back walls like an exit wound. I felt guilty and weird for thinking this way. I wanted to go back home.

We reached the top of the mountain. We could see forever, it seemed.

“Seven states,” said Dad, flipping through his annotated guide book. “It says you can see seven different states from here, on a clear day.”

I tried to imagine that I could see them, all seven, but it was cloudy and everything looked the same from this height. I couldn’t distinguish one state from the other. The sameness was overwhelming. All I could see were the same trees, rooftops, baseball diamonds, cars, fields of green, and the little moving specks that I assumed were people.

I could also see the network of roads, like the gray spidery veins that ran down my mother’s bare legs, which scared me to the point of closing my eyes. For I knew that if I opened them, I could trace the roads back to the scene of the crash.

My brother stepped up behind me and I flinched, waiting for another flick against the ear, or a tennis shoe to the back of my thigh, but he said nothing, did nothing. He looked out with the rest of us and remained silent.

It was getting near dusk when we returned to the van – which was cooler now – and drove off into the night.

We stopped at a roadside motel, later, to sleep. I couldn’t, however.

And while I tossed and turned – pacing, at times, around the darkened room – the rest of my family slept well. So well, that they remained asleep in the glow of a muted news program, which replayed footage from the crash site over and over – as if their nightmares were projecting outward from their minds, across their foreheads, faces.

I don’t think I dreamed of the crash though, once I finally fell asleep. In fact, I don’t even remember what I dreamed of that night.

Postcard: Found at Antiques of Old Wilmington in Wilmington, North Carolina in January 2012.

Lamesa, Texas

We were driving along somewhere in the Abe Lincoln hat of Texas. The open road looked like those drawings you make in your notebook when you’re in grade-school; you know the ones, where you draw the horizon line, then draw a scalene triangle below it to simulate depth of field, and then maybe add some isosceles’ into the mix for mountains, before you fill that fucker in with colored pencils. But there were no mountains here. There was nothing really in any direction except empty fields of grass and dust. Occasionally you’d see a ranch and, if you squinted, you might spot a blemish of cattle moving as one across the plain. It was hot as hell in the backseat and I sat completely still because I didn’t want to move and feel that sweaty peeling sensation of a back that’s been against a hot seat for too long.

“Wow, this place is great,” I said to Kevin and Mom from the seatbelt-less backseat of the Astro. It was a lie.

“What did I tell you, champ? I knew you’d love it,” Kevin said as he and Mom bounced in their seats to radio country. He was always saying “champ” because he’d been an assistant football coach at some point in his life – before Mom and I were in the picture – and apparently the habit of saying “champ” was “too deeply rooted” for him to “stop anytime soon.” Mom held a comically large map of the state of Texas between her outstretched arms, providing an anecdote for every town we passed. She’d grown up somewhat close to where we were.

I fell into a lucid half-dream state, sedated by the heat. At one point I remember passing by an elderly man on a Rascal scooter moving steadily along the side of the highway, but I wasn’t sure if I’d actually seen it.

That night we stopped at the small roadside Motel. We laid around for a bit, before I was assigned the extremely important job of fetching the ice. I was sure it was just so Kevin and Mom could get a moment alone to bang. They were practically all over each other by the time the door closed behind me.

I left the room with the ice bucket in hand, the blacktop still warm from that afternoon’s heat. The Motel was set up in a single story horse-shoe shape around the parking lot. I was halfway across the lot when I noticed a flicked cigarette arc out from behind a humming beige Toyota. She rounded the hood, and I flinched.

“Goddamn, you startled me,” she said. She looked a little older, tallish and twenty-something, with long legs that jutted out under her denim cut-offs. She seemed like she should be wearing a cowboy hat over her straight dark hair. In the light I noticed her rough cheeks, pockmarked and rosy. I asked her for a cigarette, and we leaned against her warm truck, blowing smoke up into the air. A DJ who referred to himself as “Wildman,” began speaking in excited tones over the start of some blues-rock music coming out through the rolled down windows of the truck.

Ava invited me back to her hotel room where some friends were hanging out. I told her about my ice-gathering assignment, but decided to go when I thought of what disgusting business might be going down in our room right then.

There were several people hanging out inside their room, which was air-conditioned and sparsely lit, listening to the exact same song as we’d been listening to against the truck. Two of them were identical twins in cowboy hats, and both introduced themselves as George with straight faces. Though, I’m sure it was a joke. The TV was on, but muted.

“Babe, who’s that?” he said, without standing up. I looked over, and realized I was being watched intently by a tough looking guy seated in the corner of the room. He wore a muscle shirt and a long wallet chain ran along the side of his jeans.

“This is James,” Ava said, twisting her hair as she nodded over at him.

He spit out a lip of tobacco into a Dixie cup, smiled, and leaned forward. He shook my hand. “Twain,” he said and leaned over and pulled a beer out of a cooler by his feet. I noticed a duffel bag resting next to it as well.

“You’re twenty-one, right?” was all he said, as he handed me the beer. I felt uneasy, nodded – even though I’m still in high school – considered leaving, but then took a seat in front of the TV.

Everyone sat quiet, watching TV. Something didn’t feel quite right. I kept shooting quick glances over to Twain in the corner, but he never broke his TV gaze. I also noticed Ava making eyes with me from her seat on the corner of the bed. I would smile, and look away because, even though I was really attracted to her, I really did not want to start anything.

I sipped on the beer for a few minutes and then sat up and told Ava I was going to go. It was Twain who rose from his chair.

“I want to show you something kid,” he said.

He reached into a gym bag at his feet. He removed an un-marked videotape.

“I really need to go.”

“Just stay for a second and watch this.”

“My parents are probably wondering –”

“– sit, and watch this tape.”

I sat back down, a jolt of unease in my stomach. I put my lips around the bottle-top and took a long drink. Twain walked up and leaned over the television. He put the tape in.

Ava turned toward me, her fingernails drumming against the bed.

“Twain found this at a garage sale the other day,” she said.

I nodded and looked on as the static cleared and a home video camera bobbed along what looked like snow covered ground. I could make out boots shuffling along and then the camera righted itself. A woman on the video, bundled tightly in a large coat, slid across the snow. She moved with ease, magically gliding. Finally, she looked up at the camera and waved.

“Come on, try it again!” a man’s voice called out from behind the camera.

The woman shook her head playfully, and took off across the snow. I realized that she was on an icy pond somewhere, skating. She looped around, then leaped up into the air, twisted, and smacked ass first onto the ice. The camera shook, as the man behind it laughed.

The woman stood up again, gathered herself, looped, gained momentum, leaped and fell to another round of laughter from behind the camera.

I looked across the room. Twain and the twins were laughing and pointing like it was the funniest shit they’d ever seen, and I pretended to enjoy it, when I didn’t get it all. And I felt more confused and creepy the longer I watched. Who were these people on the video? Where did this come from? The skating woman got up a dozen more times and, each time she twirled into the air, she fell. I kept waiting for the ice to break, for something awful to happen. It was surreal, and unsettling. A thought began to scare me; was some sort of weird snuff film?

But then the static returned. Twain stood and switched it off.

“Funny shit, huh,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Twain laid down onto the bed, kicking his shoes off one by one onto the ground. The George’s said goodbye, and left.

I sat cross-legged, a few feet from Ava on the floor as Twain began to snore above us. His socked feet sticking out right near my head. We didn’t say much, just sort of looked at each other for a while.

At one point, Ava glanced up toward Twain on the bed. He was still snoring. She looked back over at me and placed her hand on my kneecap, rubbing it gently. I leaned over and brushed Ava’s cheek with my hand.

I began to kiss her. She put her tongue inside my mouth. Her hair smelled clean and nice, and her breath was minty from the gum she’d been chewing all night. As she kissed me, her eyes remained alert and fixed on Twain lying face first on the bed and she sat back and lightly pushed me away.

“That was nice,” she whispered and then told me that I should go. We both stood, I tried to hide my erection by leaning forward, as if into the wind, but I think she noticed. She said nothing about it.

The motel door closed behind as we stepped out into the warm night. We made out for another few minutes.

“I want to see you again,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s not going to happen,” she said.

I asked why not and she looked me over. “That sleeping guy in there, Twain, he’s my boyfriend. I’m not just gonna leave him.”

She turned back around toward her room.

“Come with me then,” I said, although I don’t know what would’ve happened if she’d said yes.

She didn’t respond and then kissed her fingers, placed them on my lips, and opened the door, to a shirtless Twain standing in the doorframe, looking mad as hell. He had tattoos all over his chest.

“You think it’s okay to fucking kiss my girlfriend like that?”

He moved toward me, looking wild.

“Settle down man, it’s not what you think,” I said, trying so hard to keep my cool. I was scared as hell.

“Stop it, Twain!” she said.

He lunged right at me. I jumped back, but he knocked me flat with a heavy downward blow to the jaw. My face pressed on the warm black top and my lower lip felt twice as big.

I heard their door slam shut behind me, followed by yelling from inside the room.

And I staggered up, disoriented in the quiet night and stumbled back across the parking lot alone.

I keyed into the dark quiet of our room and tried to tip-toe over to the bathroom as the nightstand lamp flicked on and Kevin rose and looked at me, glossy eyed, mostly asleep.

“Where you been, champ?” he said.

Mom snored at his side, her arm draped over his stomach like a cummerbund. I just looked blankly, thinking of what to say, hoping he might turn back over and fall asleep and forget all about this. A long moment passed, and I could see a growing look of concern on his face as his eyes looked me over. And then, without knowing what to do, I slapped my palm against my forehead.

“Shit!”

“What’s wrong?” he said, alarmed, now sitting upright against the headboard.

“I forgot to get the ice.”

Postcard: Found at Best of Times in Burbank, CA in September 2011.