Con trails
by Beth Stiller
[ fiction - may 04 ]
Crisscrossing the country wove a nomad community. Rules written in diffused con trails, jet exhaust. Mouths babbled since silence is weaker. Without history, nomad conversation is much like lyrics, up for interpretation. Thoughts, rehearsed in the shower, spat messy, out of loneliness. The drawer beside the hotel bed held books of religious and corporate doctrine, rulebooks unopened. Lean-tos propped up against the elements. Words absorbed like sloughed ovum into the uterine wall, so warm.
The Great Plains - once home to the Lakota Nation, survivors oblivious of quantum physics or the triangle offense. They ate bison. Jacqueline and Dan ate venison in a lovely brown sauce accented with a medium-bodied red. A wood fire burned. Outside was bitter cold. Blue Northerns ripped south from Saskatchewan to the Gulf of Mexico. Musicians from the local Philharmonic gathered after hours to play a little jazz. Bowties loosened. Blood flowed. Dan slightly tipsy, swayed to the music, noticing native American art on the walls. He imagined pitching Jacqueline a teepee, buffalo pelt on a tidy dirt floor. Jacqueline gave in to the music and his charm. Not much had changed on the North American Continent except that the Lakota rarely lived to mid-life. That was their problem - Jacqueline and Dan's.
"Have you done this before?" she whispered through half closed eyes, hand on temple rocking her head, imagining being in his bed. She adored the way he told a story, like a child reliving the moment. Jacqueline felt she too could slip into his imagination.
"This?" his posture improved. Cleavage drew attention. "Yes," He wanted to confess. "No," He wanted to free himself of every detail. "Yes," he wanted to validate feelings pooled beneath the skin, TB test - waiting to redden. He wanted to say it all, right there, right now but the near recent past had been filed into a dream like place. An act unnamed, doesn't exist. "When a tree falls..."
"Yes?" she tracked his eyes through the candlelight. They were exquisitely glazed, a dribble of hollandaise across steamed asparagus.
"Yes, I did eat venison in Idaho once, friend's father hunted, had a freezer full. This dish is mild not gamy, the sauce has a hint of sweetness. Do you like it?"
Jacqueline tossed her hair behind a bare shoulder and reached for the wine glass. "Mmm." What color are his eyes? The piano player lead on, saxophone and clarinet followed, an eye for an eye... Was this anything special? Was he? Were they walking up some ancient trail, not as old as The Lakota; whose people never lived long enough to tread this far.
One bank of elevators led down to the street the other up to temporary shelter. Dan lit floor fourteen. Knowing that as high as it goes, as low as it can fall. Jacqueline stared at the unlit 'B' basement-button, afraid to look up, "blue eyes or perhaps green", driven to build community under all circumstances, totally human.
"Anything for a constant change," Dan blurted, "you started it," expecting a... 'No-you.' Instead got a...
"Started it, alright, okay, fine, me." She flippantly suggested that it didn't matter who started 'it'. 'It' has been started. Whatever.
"So why seek me out?" He imagined her traveling the world meeting interesting people and sleeping with them.
"I thought you were... kind of cute."
"Cute," he repeated mischievously. He watched the light reflect off her hair. He pictured it tumbling over bare skin. "It's the situation."
"The situation, this year's... situation, Dan."
He unlocked room 1444. She gazed at the early pottery barn 'artwork' on the corporate hotel walls, Great Plains Indian village. "It's deeper then that." The squaws scraped buffalo skins with sharpened stone. Doing a little clean up.
"Really." He drew her to him, whispering too softly for Jacqueline to hear, "do you have six months?" Thursday's airline ticket crinkled between them in his breast pocket until he neatly folded his coat over the chair and slipped hers off.
Dan told her. He spilled his history all over the sushi bar. He knew if he did, his dreams would run clear. He had cleansed himself of Becky by telling Claire, and Claire by telling Angela, and Angela by Gina.
Jacqueline listened. They had just rounded forty, Dan and Jacqueline. Their work had them roaming the country nine days out of ten. Jacqueline managed in-flight training for the airline. She'd been to Kashmir, and the Gobi Desert. She'd wiggled her toes in the red sands of Madagascar. Dan worked for a pharmaceutical firm. They were in and out of airports, hotels, restaurants and rental cars. Their food was expensed. There were no family dinners.
Dan told Jacqueline about Gina out on the coast. He told it all. "Jackie, I've been on the road so long..."
"So have I. I'm tired of excuses. Tired of red-faced guilt while complaining of exhaustion. Jet engines devour the air of our grandchildren's breath. We squeeze the last drop of dinosaur bone to accomplish. Then sex a high out of it all. Using today what should be saved for tomorrow, and right, for no good reason, to raise profitability, to ward off the fear of personal failure, or to run so fast thought goes quiet. Break it, right here, right now. The Berlin Wall is a souvenir store. It can be done."
He came closer. He ran his fingers across her back relieved he had freed himself of Gina. At least Jacqueline doesn't talk about perfume.
"We can build a new community. The Tuaregs, the Aborigines, the Lakota never made it to mid-life. It's not 'us and them'. It's us and more us, overpopulating the planet. If we are going to make the place swollen with humanity, let's do it with love - emotional communism. Gina is welcome."
The waiter stood between them. "Will it be just you two?"
"We are ready," Dan noted.
Jacqueline looked up, "The white tuna sushi. I prefer the white."
"Two white tuna sushi," Dan echoed, "a Japanese beer, and two glasses." The chief bowed and obliged. Dan stayed the course. He slipped the wooden chopsticks out of their paper sleeve and snapped them apart. Had she said, 'swollen with humanity, Gina too?' He lifted the sushi with two dry sticks and rolled it around in his mouth. It did have a new flavor - white tuna. "Something new? I've done it all twice and again." Tuareg, isn't that some SUV? He recalled a crossword puzzle, Sacramento Bee, fifteen across, nomadic blue men of the Sahara Desert: Tuareg. "Jacqueline, it's like I leave home every six months, a new woman. Or what, lay lethargic in the opiate of domesticity?"
Jacqueline leaned closer, "I like that perfume, Opium."
He cringed.
"Dan, I need art. I can't stand it anymore, living with graphic muzak - these hotels are driving me crazy. Nature can't answer the call. No, I don't want to be out in the Midwestern cold, but alleluia, I need art, real art! Sexing ourselves silly isn't making it."
He perked up a bit, would she, again? He recalled her nude silhouette, street neon flashing warm through curtains swaying in dry heat. He took her hand and began to paint a game plan. Angela to Gina to Jacqueline he traced a triangle on her palm and looked up. He longed to be known. Have his 'plan' foiled, be deconstructed put together again with passion. He feared he had little left just an ache to dive head first from ten thousand feet. Throttle up beyond fifth gear, burn a line forever into his skin a war wound averted by too much comfort, bleeding still with a need to touch bullets, tattoo artist or just breasts once again. "I'm thinking of buying a motorcycle."
She rambled, "not that I want to be remembered for eternity... it's just these relationships are ...not deep enough. Don't go far enough. I'm not tough enough to be the matriarch of emotional communism, to build the nomadic home of the twenty first century. I want to curl myself around a domestic dog, clinch my legs to a stallion, dig my head under a blasting iPod, and anyway who would raise the children?"
He figured he would get lucky, so what's new. His stomach tightened. Dan wasn't sure he was ready to stay home, really stay home, 'Nice ass,' he righted himself. Home, a temporary shelter built to last six months, one woman-city at a time. He never bought art, a throw rug now and again, a swatch of wallpaper; a full set of glasses, both white wine, red and champagne but not art.
"Well, who would raise the children?" she repeated.
"I'm, I, am not, well had the operation, can't make children Jacqueline."
"Oh."
He looked naked blinking his blue eyes.
"Not that I wanted to, Dan not that I was suggesting, us. Just in general you see... the new nomads have no dinner table." She felt nauseous.
He expensed the meal.
She spun the wasabi around in her soy sauce dish with one chopstick. The lights dimmed in the sushi bar. They were the last customers.
A bus boy lowered metal shutters with crash. Jacqueline gasped. The elevator cable snapped. Her stomach was in her throat.
"Call it a night?" Dan doodled on the receipt.
"Over?" Jacqueline wondered if she might want to visit Tasmania, ride a scramjet, one of those supersonic combustion ramjets. "Dan have you heard this Lakota tale?"
"Tail?" his eyes were half closed imagining her behind glistening in starlight.
"A Lakota woman went to the sky to marry a star."
Marriage? He doodled a waterfall, which turned into a wedding veil.
"She then fell to her death through a hole in the constellation. As she died her child was born, 'Falling Star'. He became the hero of Lakota myths."
Jacqueline looked Dan in the eye, "Shall we call him, 'Aero Thrust'?" She caught her fall.
"Going?" He tucked the receipt into his wallet.
