“Car Hike” by Ellen Graham
The last time I was in Bozeman there were mountains and I was cold and Cynthia and I ate peyote and experienced Death. We ate malted milk balls but they tasted like pizza. She had a little room with a trunk and wiry-haired dog and played music by Heartsfield and Poco. Her boyfriend—she always picked ones that were dumb—“if he drives a cement truck, well that’s about my speed”—but she was smart, she was a nurse. He worked in a slaughterhouse and once mailed her a bull’s dick and she laughed and laughed. Cynthia could do that. She seemed to walk above life. We grew up together and she taught me about car hikes. She would smoke pot and drive all through the silent stretches of Montana from Bozeman to Butte to Helena to Missoula. She would pull over and watch moose or a meteor shower or the light of the lake. I tried to be like her. I would try to drive through Utah to get as far as Provo—once, even, Wendover—but I turned around. Cynthia is my girlfriend, a “gal” as my dad would say. Not that I love her love her. Those kinds of things scare me. They talk about our love, our world, and they tell me try it, try it once. But that is not this.
Cynthia picks me up at the airport in her VW bus. The snowy road shows through the floorboards. I know this doctor, says Cynthia, he’s OK. It won’t be hard. I mean it’s not as hard as you think. You spread your legs and it hurts and then it’s over and you eat some cookies and drink some juice. Then, she says, then you and I will go drink peppermint schnapps at the Frontier Lounge and watch the cowboys dance. Is this guy paying half?
Oh yes oh yes. He’d be here if he could, too. But he can’t be.
This of course is a lie. He doesn’t know I’m pregnant. He is ten years younger than me and I wooed him for what seemed like forever. I would watch him play pool. He moved around the pool table like a cat. Everything he wore was tight. We’d go dancing, he and his friends and me. He would do mannerly little dances and I would do my wild lady dances. He asked me if I had heard the latest Drake and I asked if he played with a boy band and his friends laughed. Maybe I shouldn’t be lurching around young men.
We drove to the graveyard later that night. I took off my shirt in my car and drove topless. He looked over from his car and smiled and looked away. We sat on headstones and talked. All I wanted was one real kiss. I had to ask him to kiss me and he did but it was like a grandma kiss and he made a sound like mwaa! I went home and lay in my bed and thought of kissing him—just that—and that put me to sleep like a valium.
Later I gave him coke and advice, because I’m older, and we did it, just once. Weird and wonderful, the way a first time is. I thought we were a good fit, lying next to each other. I haven’t seen him since.
Cynthia wipes her car window where it keeps fogging. Hey, she says, after we leave the Frontier Lounge we will go home and dance to Hugga Hugga Burnin’ Love and I will make my lemon cake and we’ll eat it. I love this old timber road. Boy there is nothing like a few peyote buttons and a car hike to make me feel better. Don’t you think?
I nod but I really don’t feel so good. I am cold through and through and when I look out the car window at the snow I see trees move when they do not. I am experiencing Death all around me and I cannot move.
You know sometimes I eat these buttons and I think: I see I see I see—so what?
Cynthia laughs then I do and soon we laugh so hard we have to pull over and we laugh in her car on the side of the road in the snow until it is silent.
I did try to go to him once. There was a party at his house but he wasn’t there. I waited politely in the kitchen and sliced cheese but he never came.
Look pal, says Cynthia, sometimes it just sucks the grand wazoo being a woman. Sometimes it just does, she says and I nod although I have never really felt so.
At her house I wake up in the night crying and Cynthia climbs out of bed and onto my sleeping bag on the floor. She puts her strong arms around me. I am not like you, I want to say. I get scared and sometimes like this I am scared for everything in the world. I cannot throw my face back to the sky and forget. I cannot let go to the road. I cannot stand still by myself and watch things.
But I do not say anything and Cynthia holds me and lets me cry and I see nothing in the blackness outside.
In the morning when we go to the clinic I try to be brave. Cynthia says I am. She holds my hand and presses down on my stomach and then she leaves the room. After he’s done the doctor tells me it would have been a girl. I don’t know why he tells me this. But it fills me with such a big emptiness I think it will upend me.
Ellen Graham is a freelance theater director in the state of Washington. Her writing focuses on the West, and stories of open spaces, both on the land and in the heart. A prize-winner in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers, she has also been published in Narrative, High Desert Journal, Everyday Fiction, Concrete Desert Review and On The Run. She is at work on a series of stories about growing up in Salt Lake City.
