Jesse Nee-Vogelman
Tree'd
Another time we were driving through the Nevada desert. It was twilight in alien country. All day we’d passed signs for extraterrestrial jerky. The sun peeked red over distant mountains and onto the dirt and scrub. No cars passed. A billboard bragged that we drove the Loneliest Road in America.
I couldn’t see. The light was soft and flat. We had no service. My girlfriend asked if I had a spare. I didn’t know, I told her.
They sell it to you with a spare, she said.
I don’t know, I said. I don’t know, and I didn’t ask.
I was driving fast. We didn’t know where we were going, but we wanted to get there. The radio was static and Jesus and Elvis. There was cocaine in the glove box and amphetamine diet pills and two tabs of gel acid we were afraid to take with each other.
Under the bed, she said. That’s where they keep it.
I don’t have the tools, I told her. Even with the tire, I don’t have the tools.
Lights appeared in my rearview mirror. Three cars moving fast. The dust from their wake plumed and caught the light. I remembered what they said about objects and mirrors and closeness. The cars were two-seaters, loud and quick. They lined up behind me like goslings behind a gander. Then one passed me without signaling. It had Washington plates. I checked the mirror. They all had Washington plates. Matching decals decorated their windows, a geometric tangle of loops and lines, like the cross section of a brain. Then they all turned off their lights. It was not yet dark, but almost dark, the desert pale with lavender and gray, and the cars lavender and gray against the rock. They began to trade places. They pulled in front of me or darted into the oncoming lane and moved from back to front to back again like children playing red rover. I waited for one of them to slam on the brakes and force us off the road. My girlfriend gripped my leg. She had just painted her nails bright red. I began to sweat or realized suddenly that I had been sweating for hours. I slowed down to let the cars pass me and they slowed down. I sped up to pass them, and they sped up. We were four cars doing a hundred through the desert at night with only one set of lights between us.
A jolt of adrenaline shot through my veins. My eyes dilated, and my breathing slowed. Dark cars surrounded us on a near invisible road, and suddenly I remembered a night, only a few months before, when we’d gone hiking in the Bitterroots. When we’d left, it was night and the roads were icy and black when an elk had stepped into the road. My girlfriend shouted and held up her hands. Elk were killers in that country. But I didn’t even slow. I crossed lanes and curved around the bull like a figure skater preparing a Lutz. It was enormous. A trophy buck. The kind a certain type of man waits his whole life to kill. Eight point monarch with a crown of bone, built by God for ripping car doors off hinges. But we swung by with grace, kissing our nose to the elk’s stubby tail and roared off and into the night. My girlfriend cracked a beer and handed it to me and we laughed all the way home like maniacs who had just been freed. It was then as it was now. I was a man driving a truck with a beautiful girl. Whatever would happen, I would handle.
Then, without warning, the cars sped off. We were doing triple digits, and they left us in the dust. I slowed down and caught my breath.
What the fuck was that, said my girlfriend.
Drug run, maybe, I said, though I didn’t know what drugs were coming down from Washington.
Aliens, she said.
Then we hit something.
The glove box slammed open. I pulled over. Pills and baggies scattered across the floor.
Are you all right? I asked.
She held up her hands.
I did it, she said. The flat. I talked it into happening.
She looked at her hands, eyes wide with fear of her own power, like a boxer who had just killed a man in the ring.
Fuck, she said, looking at the pills on the floor. All uppers, when what we really need is downers.
I stepped outside and circled the car. The tires were full. I turned to my girlfriend who stared into the desert.
Jesus Christ, she said and pointed.
Lying on the shoulder was a seven-foot wooden oar. It was ancient and thick. Less for rowing than for parting seas. My girlfriend picked up the oar and held it to the taillights, where exhaust condensed like the heavy breath of an injured animal. The oar was solid, barely marked, though its paddle was cracked, and the handle was scratched in rows, as if gnawed by some lost desert dog. I looked around for a sign of anything that made sense. I don’t know what I expected. A lost oasis. A boat broken and capsized in the desert. Finally, I looked up at the stars.
What the fuck, I said.
My girlfriend ran her hand slowly along the oar.
What the fuck, she said.
We threw the oar into the truck bed.
A trophy, she said.
But the truck was lame. I started the engine, and it shook like an addict going dry. It whimpered and coughed and drifted to the shoulder, as if it couldn’t bear to leave. I stopped the truck, but I didn’t cut the motor.
We have to move, I said. There’s no one out here.
My girlfriend nodded.
That’s what I’m hoping for, she said.
We limped forward along the Loneliest Road in America and watched the sun set behind the mountains. We thought about the cars and the desert and the oar and tried to connect them but couldn’t. About seven miles outside a town we’d never heard of, I curved around a rock pass, and the truck gave up. There was a jolt and a thud and a smash, like a heavy ceramic plate shattering to pieces. We pulled over. We put on the hazards and walked back up the highway, lighting the road with our phones. A couple hundred feet back we found a steaming chunk of metal still slick with oil, cut smooth in half.
Whatever that is, I said. My guess is you want it on the truck.
We’d passed into service about a mile back. Thank god, I wanted to say, but it felt strange given the circumstances. We got my insurance on the phone and paced the road for landmarks to guide the tow truck, describing the shadows of peaks and valleys we could barely see. The operator told us we couldn’t ride in the tow cab and told us to get a ride share or call a taxi. We told her we didn’t think she exactly understood the situation.
We’re in the middle of nowhere, I said.
There aren’t taxis in the daytime, I said.
My girlfriend had a tattoo kit in the back. While we waited, she sterilized the needles with a lighter and stabbed a box into my wrist. One big box and a smaller rectangle attached to its spine. It could have been a book, but also a television or a sandwich bag. Or just a box.
By now, we were coming down. I was jittery and wired and exhausted and scared. I knew if I didn’t sleep immediately, I’d never sleep again. I got out and went to the truck bed to pop a soda. That week I’d bought six cases of Mexican mineral water because it was cheaper close to the border.
The tow truck arrived, and he let us squeeze into the cab though it was against the rules. He was a nice boy, full of energy and Red Bull, and he gave us a tour of the town, pointing out the mine and the state prison. When he finished, he dropped us at the White Pine Motel, where a man with half a thumb cut us a deal. In the morning, we asked about car shops. The clerk and two maids argued about the mechanics in town. They all agreed one was a drunk, but they couldn’t agree which one.
In the end, I chose the first guy who answered.
Look, he told me, I can’t tell you what’s wrong, but I can tell you this. Last guy come in here wants an oil change. Engine’s completely shot. But he doesn’t listen. Tells me he just wants it quick and cheap and to hell with the engine. All right, I say. Your life. Next day, he gets fifteen miles out into the desert. Boom. Car explodes.
I looked out, past the dog groomer and the gas station, into the endless dry heat.
Well, I said. I wouldn’t want that.
We stayed in town five days. Tough to get parts in that corner of the world. Plus the mechanic’s son got married that weekend. He was just glad the new wife had made bail. We angled for an invitation, but he didn’t take the hint. As we turned to leave, a man with the name Rocky stenciled onto his shirt walked in smoking a cigarette and was dismayed to learn the wedding was at three in the afternoon.
You expect me to stay sober until then? he asked.
No, said the mechanic. I just expect you to look it.
Outside, I grabbed a box of mineral water for the hotel and smashed half the bottles on the garage floor, which fizzed the cement clean.
We spent the next week doing coke in the mornings and drinking mineral water in the afternoons before we wandered around the desert. We went to the cemetery to shop for baby names. Alonzo ‘Two Hat’ Yuley and Christ Orphan. We stopped at his grave. Another day’s work done, it said. Then we went to the White Pine museum and saw fossils of the giant short-faced bear, which was twelve feet tall and weighed eleven hundred pounds. We went to a church where the preacher sang songs and played bass drum with his feet, and his wife couldn’t pronounce the name Zachariah. We were edgy from the coke and the church basement coffee, but we stuck around for the father’s day barbecue and told everyone my girlfriend was pregnant so we could get bags of homemade beef jerky. The salads all had mayo. The ribs were plentiful and free.
When we told the locals about the oar, they weren’t surprised.
Used to be a lake around here, they told us, as if that explained anything at all.
On our last day, we went to an old fashioned pharmacy and soda fountain. You could get marshmallow syrup added to any drink. The girl behind the counter was sixteen but had gotten her GED that summer and was now attending college online.
We’re expecting, we said with a smile, and patted my girlfriend’s belly.
You’re lucky, the girl told us when we described getting stuck outside town. These hills got lions.
She showed us a picture of a dead cougar draped across her shoulders.
We wait for the snow, she said, and go quadding through the hills for prints. Then the dogs track ’em and tree ’em. But that doesn’t make it easy. Nothings scarier than a lion’s been tree’d.
Tree’d, I thought, sadly. But we’d been oar’d.
I tasted my soda, which was sticky and sweet and more delicious than I’d ever imagined. That doesn’t seem very fair, my girlfriend told the girl. Shooting a helpless thing in a tree.
She flipped through the pictures on her phone and showed us a picture of a dead dog, its throat ripped out and its stomach open.
Lions don’t kill cause it’s fair, she said. Lions kill cause they’re lions.
Then I asked her if she ever saw aliens out this way.
I’m no dummy, she said. No reason for them to bother us all the way out here.
I thanked her, added marshmallow to my soda, and left a five dollar tip.
Jesse Nee-Vogelman is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Montana's MFA Program in Creative Writing. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Tampa Review, the New Haven Review, Reckoning (Pushcart Prize nominee), Cirque, and the Harvard Advocate (Louis Begley Prize). Previously, Jesse served as the Artist-in-Residence at the Signet Society of Arts and Letters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lives and works in Missoula, Montana.