Driftless

based on a true story

(trigger warning this story contains reference to sexual assault. I love you, take care of yourself).

July in Colorado was biblical. Pine sap tangled in my long hair. My lips cracked open from dryness until they bled when I smiled. Dust coated everything—my clothes, my cigarettes, my eyelids, the inside of my nose. The altitude made me think I was dying.

At first it was subtle, just a strange hollowness in my breathing, as if the air itself had been thinned like glass. I kept inhaling but never arrived anywhere satisfying. My heartbeat turned loud and urgent, knocking from inside my ribs. Especially inside the yurt.

Chloe lived in a round green yurt with what she called the ‘dark hippies’, her roommates who carried the smell of smoke, sweat, wet wool, and dirty feet everywhere they went. Their names were nouns, Sparkplug, Juniper, Sweet-Dick and Crow. The odor inside the yurt thickened the heat inside the canvas walls until breathing felt communal and used-up.

There was no running water except for a spigot jutting improbably from the ground outside. At night we peed into a giant coffee can to avoid running into wildlife. During the day we climbed into the trees for privacy.

After a few days, once I could finally breathe again, I slipped back into Chloe’s life the easy way I always had. We drank into oblivion every night, smoked endless cigarettes, sang songs “I got a brand new pair of roller skates, you’ve got a brand new key” and linked arms walking dirt roads under impossible skies.

Outside the yurt Mount Sopris rose into the distance so beautifully it embarrassed me. It looked fake somehow. Too cinematic to belong to ordinary people. When we ran out of beer Chloe announced she knew where a secret hot spring was.

“It’ll heal you,” she said.

“From what?”

“Everything.”

I had been following Chloe around since we were 17, long enough to believe her.

We started walking down the logging road toward the highway that curled around the mountain. The sun felt close enough to touch. My scalp burned. My eyes felt dragged through sand. Somewhere below us the valley shimmered in waves of heat and Chloe walked ahead of me barefoot again, like the earth itself could never really hurt her. She stuck out her thumb at passing cars. Dust blew into our faces. RVs and trucks and station wagons rolled past without slowing. I watched the backs of them disappear around the switchbacks.

I’d lived in Colorado with my mother once when I was little. We lived on a mountain not much different from this one and something about the smell of pine made me think of her. I hadn’t spoken to her in years. Still, standing there in the heat, I missed her suddenly. Not the real version. The version I kept making up. A girl wanting her mama.

I looked up at the sky and felt like the whole afternoon was vibrating. We heard the car before we saw it. Its muffler was doing a terrible impression of a muffler. Chloe and I both turned as the thing came rattling around the bend too fast, shuddering like it might come apart before it reached us. We looked at each other and stuck out our thumbs with the same mental shrug.

Why not.

The car looked held together by duct tape and optimism. No hubcaps. Dragging tailpipe. The stereo was loud enough to vibrate the doors.

You let me violate you
You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you
You let me complicate you

The car veered onto the shoulder. We grabbed our bags and ran toward it like stranded people seeing a boat. The driver’s window rolled down and a face appeared beneath a nest of dark hair. He looked maybe twenty-five, but mountain years seemed to work differently. Everybody out there looked both twenty and fifty. His skin had that cooked, weathered look of somebody who lived outdoors too long, and when he smiled I noticed one of his front teeth had gone brown—the color of an apple slice left out too long.

“Where you girls headed?” he yelled over the music.

“Hot springs,” Chloe said immediately.

He laughed.

“That’s not a place.”

“Sure it is.”

“Nah.” He smiled. “That’s a category.”

I laughed because Chloe was laughing and because when you’re young and hitchhiking you spend a lot of time pretending the universe likes you. The inside of the car looked worse than the outside. Fast-food wrappers. Beer cans rolling around the floorboards. A sleeping bag crammed into the backseat beneath clothes and things I couldn’t identify. For a second I thought of my mother.Not my actual mother. The imaginary one good kids seemed to have—the kind who would’ve grabbed my arm and said absolutely the fuck not. Chloe had already climbed in.

“Come on.”

The guy leaned across and shoved the passenger door open.

“I’m Jesse.”

I climbed in. The car smelled like cigarettes and mildew and something sweet going rotten underneath it all. Chloe immediately put her bare feet on the dashboard like we’d known Jesse our whole lives.

“I’m Chloe.”

Jesse looked at me in the mirror.

“And you?”

I waited a second.

“Mae.”

Not my name.

He nodded slowly.

“Mae.”

Like he was trying it on.

The road curled down the mountain in long switchbacks. Trees blurred past in green smears. Every few minutes the valley opened beneath us, huge and sunlit and impossibly far away. Jesse drummed his fingers against the steering wheel.

“You girls from around here?”

“Nah,” I said.

“Nah where?”

I shrugged.

He watched me in the mirror for a second too long. Chloe had already found cigarettes somewhere on the floor.

“Can I steal one?”

“Take two.”

She lit one and passed it back.

“So what do you girls do?” Jesse asked.

“Nothing,” Chloe said.

He laughed.

“No seriously.”

“No seriously.”

“We’re professional drifters,” I said.

“Hell of a retirement plan.”

Then he looked at me again.

“You got a boyfriend, Mae?”

Something about the question landed sideways. I blew smoke out the window.

“No.”

“You do now,” Chloe said.

I kicked the back of her seat. Jesse laughed. Too hard. Outside the road narrowed. Jesse turned around to talk. Not glanced. Actually turned. The tires spat gravel. For a second nobody said anything. Then Chloe laughed.

“Dude.”

Jesse smiled.

“What? I got it.”

I looked out the window.

There wasn’t really a shoulder anymore. Just sky. A few miles later Jesse slapped the steering wheel.

“Shit.”

“What?” Chloe asked.

“I forgot something.”

He said it lightly, smiling a little. Too lightly.

“What thing?” I asked.

“My buddy’s place.” He scratched at his jaw. “I just gotta stop for a second. Dude owes me money.”

Chloe shrugged.

“Okay.”

Jesse turned onto a dirt road I hadn’t noticed before. Gravel crackled beneath the tires. Pinyon Pine trees crowded closer on both sides until they started swallowing the sky. I looked out the window. No houses. No mailboxes. No tire tracks. Nothing. Just trees.

“Your buddy lives out here?” I asked.

“Everybody lives out here.”

He smiled at me in the mirror.

“Relax.”

I hadn’t realized I’d stopped looking relaxed. Chloe leaned against the window smoking, absent-mindedly drawing smiley faces into the dust with her finger. The car dropped into a rut and my bag slid against my feet. Without thinking about it I pulled it into my lap. I told myself I was looking for cigarettes. Then I told myself I was looking for chapstick. Then I told myself I was just bored. Inside the bag I felt around blindly: notebook, lighter, socks, paperback with the cover falling off, half a granola bar hardened into something geological. Then my fingers found a metal fork I’d stolen from a diner somewhere in Arizona. I didn’t remember stealing it. I wrapped my hand around it anyway. The tines pressed into my palm. Outside the trees kept getting thicker. Jesse looked at me in the mirror again. I smiled back. A second late.

The trailer looked like every place I’d ever accidentally ended up—sun-bleached and leaning to one side, surrounded by piles of things that had once had purposes. Tires. Broken lawn chairs. Rusted bicycles disappearing into weeds. A skinny dog wandered beneath a truck and stared at us without enthusiasm.

“Told you,” Jesse said. “Two seconds.”

Before the car had fully stopped Chloe shoved the door open.

“I have to pee so bad.”

“Classy.”

She flipped me off over her shoulder and wandered toward the trees, cigarette hanging from her mouth. Jesse disappeared inside the trailer. I sat there with my bag in my lap. Still holding the fork. Outside I could hear birds and wind moving through the trees. I looked down at my hand and laughed quietly to myself. Jesus Christ. I was about to stab a guy with stolen diner silverware because I’d watched too many crime shows. I loosened my grip. Then I heard Chloe yell something. I couldn’t make out the words.

I leaned toward the window.

“What?”

Nothing. A second later the trailer door banged open. Jesse jogged back toward the car carrying absolutely nothing except his baggy pants. No money. No mystery package. Nothing. He slid into the driver’s seat. I looked around.

“Uh...Chloe?”

He turned the key.

“She’ll be a minute.”

Gravel popped beneath the tires. For one stupid second I thought maybe he was pulling forward to turn around. Then the trees started moving. Slowly. Then faster. I looked over at him.

“Jesse.”

He smiled without looking at me.

“Relax.”

The mountain dropped away outside my window.

“Jesse, what the fuck?”

He laughed softly. Not mean exactly. Almost embarrassed. Like I was overreacting to something harmless. Like we were sharing a joke and I was the only one who hadn’t heard the punchline.

The road narrowed until it barely felt like a road anymore. Pine branches scraped against the sides of the car with fingernail sounds. Jesse drove one-handed, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel while humming under his breath like we were on our way to buy groceries. I kept waiting for him to laugh. Kept waiting for this to become a misunderstanding.

After a while he said, “Mae.”

He said my fake name slowly.

Like he was trying to see if it fit.

“You travel around a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where’s home?”

I looked out the window. Trees. Sky between branches.

“No idea.”

He nodded like I’d given the right answer.

“I like that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know,” he said after a while, “I almost didn’t stop.”

I looked over at him.

“You girls looked wild.”

He smiled.I smiled back automatically. The way people smile at strangers in elevators. The way women smile at men. A reflex. I watched his hands on the steering wheel. Long fingers. Dirt under the nails. The brown tooth. I thought about opening the door. Then I thought about the speed we were going. Then I thought about mountains. Then I thought about nothing. Eventually he turned onto another road. Smaller. Dirt. No signs. No tire tracks. No anything.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Scenic route.”

My heartbeat started knocking again. Loud. Urgent. Like the altitude had found me all over again. After a while he pulled over. The engine kept running. Neither of us moved. I could hear it ticking underneath us. Wind moving through trees. Something screaming somewhere in the distance. Bird maybe. Cat maybe. Girl maybe. Jesse stared ahead for a long time. Then he looked at me.

The friendliness had gone out of his face so completely it felt like watching someone turn off a light. His expression emptied itself, his lips flatteened. Whatever softness had lived there a moment ago retreated behind his eyes, leaving something cool and unreadable in its place.

“Mae isn’t your name.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think I’m stupid?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled again.Only now it looked wrong. Like he’d put it on backwards. After that things stopped arriving in order. I remember scars crossing his chest and shoulders in pale ropes, old and new layered over each other. I remember not wanting to look directly at the knife. I remember thinking about the fork in my bag. I remember a bird screaming somewhere in the trees and thinking for a moment it was me. Mostly I remember leaving. Not physically. Just disappearing somewhere else for a while.

Later—minutes or hours, I couldn’t tell—we were driving again. The sun had shifted lower. Jesse had the window down and his arm hanging outside.Nine Inch Nails hummed quietly through the speakers. Or maybe it had never stopped. The mountain rolled by outside like nothing had happened. When we pulled back into the trailer yard Chloe was sitting on a rusted lawn chair smoking.She stood up.

“Jesus Christ,” she yelled. “Where the fuck did you guys go?”

I looked at her.

Jesse smiled.

“Took the scenic route.”

Just like that. Like earlier. Like nothing had happened. Chloe rolled her eyes and climbed back into the car.

“Asshole.”

Jesse laughed.

Then he drove us into town.

The whole way down he talked about stupid things—music, snowboarding, somebody named Travis who lived in a school bus. I kept waiting to look over and see something different. Blood under his fingernails. Horns. Foam at the mouth. Anything. But he just looked like Jesse.

When we got out he gave us a jaunty little wave before driving away. We stood there watching the dust settle back onto the road.

“What happened?” Chloe asked.

I looked down at my hand. The fork was still there. I’d forgotten I was holding it.

“Nothing,” I said.