“Yep,” Bert says. “We’re in the real world. Time for a haircut and a beard trim.”
He’s eating a Little Debbie apple pie, and Mom digs the wad of Kleenex from her pocket, cleans his beard of jelly. Since I was last home his wild beard has gone gray.
“I can’t be trusted anymore,” she says. “You should have seen the latest hack job I gave him. He won’t let anyone but me cut it. Except you, maybe.”
“Only you,” he says to her, tucking his hand into the back pocket of her jeans.
“People will think we’re gypsies,” she says.
* * *
Bert does all the driving. I didn’t get my learner’s permit because he liked to drive me so much. He’s been with Mom for ten years, and spent a lot of that time taking me to town and back in his truck. It was the only time he would really talk. I’d get him going on the easy stuff, like the planets and their moons, or Nostradamus, or the reptilian elite. Then he’d say something about Mom, how he’d been trying to cook something that would make her want to eat. How he didn’t know what to do to cheer her up. Bert trying to cheer up Mom usually involves him walking into her bedroom and flashing her his stomach, fast, like a toddler. And all I’d say would be “I know.” And then I’d say one of my worries about Mom and all he’d say would be “I know.” Back and forth like that.
The motel room smells like feet and chemicals. Bert puts on the coffee. I arrange the soaps into the shape of a fan inside their wicker basket. Mom lays sheets of newspaper over the carpet. Outside, rain darkens the parking lot. Bert switches the TV channel to a show on female bodybuilders. He cranks up the volume, drowning out the gurgling coffee machine and the huffing heater installed between the beds. Mom takes his head in her hands.
“You see what I live with?” she says to me. “Just the two of us? It’s inescapable.”
“Maybe what you guys need is a foster child,” I say.
She snips at his long hair and beard, the fine gray-blond clippings falling at her feet. Her big toe is bruised under the nail. She starts to cry, soundlessly.
“Well, that hurt,” Mom says softly to Bert. There is a round of rowdy applause from the studio audience.
“Yep,” Bert says.
“I never thought of that one. Just adopt a new child. Easy.”
It sounds different coming out of her mouth.
“I’m right here,” I say. “I only meant because you’re good parents.”
“I know what you meant,” she says, stepping back to eye Bert. He flexes, running a hand through his hair, which sticks out around his ears. I can see the scissor marks. His beard is shorter on one side than the other. They move close, crunching the newspaper.
“You look like you’ve escaped the nut house,” she says.
Mom has been paying for this trip with Bert’s birthday gift, one hundred Sacagawea coins, double the years of her life. She keeps the coins in a purple satchel, and takes her time doling them out, dropping them one by one into the palm of the drive-thru cashier, or the red-faced woman who pumps our gas. When we leave our Motel 6 room covered in hair and newspaper, Bert’s sweet-smelling tobacco ground into the rug, Mom tips the maid with the last of her gold. She lingers by the nightstand, touching the coin like a magpie with a shiny wrapper.
We go off route. Bert hands me the map, but I can’t get oriented. He speeds over hills, our stomachs cresting and plummeting. We take the blue highways through West Virginia and Kentucky, waiting for willow trees and cicadas and a warm breeze. The towns we pass look like home — trailers with scabby patches of yellow grass, kids’ plastic trikes, and broken trampolines. People glare from their porches, white breath hanging in the air from cigarettes or cold. We crack the windows and shiver.
Mom holds the air horn in front of her like a weapon, ready to blare at offending cars. Bert fiddles with the radio dial as he drives and lands on the news — talk of swine flu and next summer’s storms. Hurricane Wilma is mentioned and after that he won’t stop bellowing “Willlllllllmaaaaa!” like Fred Flintstone.
“If the flu hits, God help me you are coming home,” Mom says. I laugh.
“You think I’m kidding? We’ve already stocked up on canned goods. Nothing funny about a pandemic.”
“And I’ll shoot anyone with the crossbow who tries to break in and eat our food,” Bert says, working a red Swedish Fish around in his mouth.
She twists to face me, and grips my knee.
“I don’t think you understand,” she says, her lips barely moving. “I’m talking about the black plague here. I’m talking about sores all over your body, and the young dying first, in a matter of days. Projectile vomit. Please, if you let me do one thing for you, let me fear your death.” She leans back in her seat and takes a sip of water, which spills as we round a bend.
“Wet T-shirt contest,” Bert says.
The light lasts longer. “It’s warm enough that there’s color,” Mom says. We drive until we find a field, anyone’s field, and pull the car over to sleep. The field is dusky hay, wild around the car but stretching off into trampled-looking furrows. I curl up in the way back and Bert and Mom recline their seats. Bert gives me his winter coat for extra warmth. I pop the collar. The coat holds his smell — brushfires and pot smoke and pine.
“Compared to Motel 6, this Volvo is like the Ritz,” he says. They can see the stars through the sunroof. He knows the names of the constellations, and he lists them for us as we fall asleep. Capricornus, the sea goat. Mom laughs. Equuleus, the foal. Circinus, the compass. Andromeda, the chained lady.
“Goodnight, beautiful women,” says Bert.
Hours later I wake up to what sounds like someone volleying a tennis ball back and forth before I realize it’s just Bert’s nose clicking as he snores. The sky is green through the back window. Mom is not in the car. She stands in the field, looking toward me, her figure blurred by the fogged glass.
I wonder if she is sleepwalking. I climb over the seat to roll down the car window. “What’s wrong?” I whisper. She presses a many-ringed finger to her lips, gestures for me to join her. I wrap a blanket around my shoulders, quietly lift the latch. I’m barefoot, and the long grass is sharp and wet. I’m afraid I might step on a slug. She puts her arm around me. I’m shivering. A black cricket springs onto my foot and I shake it gone.
“I think I have to leave Bert,” she says.
My mouth floods with spit. I hold my hand over my mouth, swallowing.
“I can’t explain it,” she says. Her voice is taut. I keep swallowing. “It’s just the only thing I can do.” She pulls her turtleneck up over her chin. “You have no idea how hard it is to live with someone who only reads the horoscope. Who says ‘queechee’ when he’s ordering quiche. Who spends all his time thinking about these conspiracies. I’m waiting for the day I find him wearing a tin foil hat. That stuff is all he talks about. When he even talks to me. He doesn’t, mostly. He talks to you.” She takes my hand. “It feels like life or death.”
Bert has known me since I was six. I remember the first time I saw him he was doing dishes. I stood on a stepstool next to him and put my hands in the hot dishwater. Later that day he taught me how to tie my shoes. Bert wears shoes that fasten with Velcro. When I come home on vacation he makes me beef stroganoff and molasses cookies. I am the only one who compliments his cooking, and he likes to joke with Mom that if they ever separated, I would go with him.
She hugs me, rocking us back and forth.
Before Mom met Bert he was drinking a fifth of Coffee Brandy a night and she was gearing up to get rune symbols tattooed around her waist like a belt. He met her at a party where she was flirting with everyone but him. He was lying on the couch, too drunk to stand, but by dawn he’d slept it off and was the only man fit to walk her home. He quit drinking the next day, and spent two winters building us a cabin.