After spending most of his adult life in New Mexico, my father had tired of the cold winters and isolation of the high country and moved to Nevada, where his money would stretch even further than it had in the Southwest. In the desert sun of Nevada, his life savings bought him a condominium and some good times with a new girlfriend. The girlfriend (Shelly?) was a full ten years younger than him. That didn’t surprise me. My father had always been a very handsome man, and he had remained that way until the heart attack claimed him. Or so people in Nevada told me.
Sandy or Shelly had arranged for him to be buried in Nevada. There was no reason to take the body back to New Mexico. My mother wasn’t there; she was buried in Minnesota with her people. My brother, killed while serving in the army, had merited burial in a military cemetery with honors.
So my father was buried in a modern memorial garden on the outskirts of town, one of those where flowers too uniformly bright to be real decorate acres of sameness, and the grave markers, also alike, lie flush in the ground, hidden by green grass until you are nearly on top of them. As the nonsectarian chaplain said his few words under the canopy that shaded the coffin and mourners, I let my mind wander until one of my high heels pierced the overwatered turf and began to sink in, bringing me back to reality with a jolt.
One paper plate of food, forty-five minutes of small talk with my father’s friends and neighbors, and one long rental car drive later, and I was on my way back to Minneapolis again.
There wasn’t a spare seat in the coach section of the flight back. My fellow travelers seemed mostly to be retirees who’d been on gambling vacations, taking a break from Minnesota in January in the warmth of the West. As soon as we were in the air, the pilot got on the overhead and cautioned us, smooth-voiced, that the flights ahead of us were experiencing some “chop” from storms over the plains. The other pilots weren’t kidding. Fifteen minutes after his initial announcement, the pilot got back on the mike and told the two flight attendants to take their seats.
The plane bounced like a sled being pulled too fast over old snowpack that had turned to hard, uneven ice. The whole airframe made crunching, shuddering noises, bouncing hard enough to shake the wattle of the blue-haired old woman sleeping next to me.
I’m not afraid of flying, but that night I had a very odd feeling, one I’ve never had since. I felt completely adrift and out of control. I was surrounded by human beings, but they were strangers. I felt lost, as if up in this black stratum between clouds and stars not even God could know where I was. I looked hard out the window, hoping for city lights, anything that could give me a point of reference. There was none.
I hadn’t bought a real drink while I had the chance, and now I wanted one. For me it was always a physical craving that had two locations: I felt it under my tongue, and deep in my chest. I chewed the last cubes of ice from my Coke and felt a pang of regret when they ran out.
Had my mother lived, I was sure, we would have been close. She died when I was nine. My brother Buddy had been a bully, full of a sense of entitlement to whatever he wanted. Physical strength was the only thing he’d respected; at five years younger, I’d never had enough. My father, a long-distance truck driver, had slept in the main room of our trailer when he’d been at home, just so Buddy and I could have separate rooms. He never knew it, but he really needn’t have bothered.
It had been a great relief to me when Buddy, at 18, had joined the army and left home. My father saw it differently. He spent long stretches on the road, and felt that no 13-year-old girl could be ready to spend those days and nights alone, without the supervision of at least an older brother. He’d put me on a Greyhound for Minnesota, where my mother’s aunt still lived.
It was in Minnesota that I discovered basketball, or rather the coach discovered me, because at 14 I was head and shoulders above most of the girls in my class. I nearly lived at the gym after that, both in regularly scheduled team workouts and afterward, working to perfect free throws, striving for an absurd three-quarter-court shot. Just as a song can get stuck in your head, I sometimes heard a repeating loop of gym noise as I tried to fall asleep at night: the kinetic slamming of the ball against the hardwood floor, the shudder of the backboard, the squeaks of athletic shoes.
Everyone needs a place, and that was mine. Our team won a state championship in my senior year. There was a photo in our high-school yearbook from that night, one reprinted from one of the newspapers. It was taken just after the final buzzer, when in the midst of the celebration my co-captain, Garnet Pike, had literally picked me up in her arms, both of us laughing. Garnet was a little taller than me, and we’d all been hitting the gym hard that year. Even so, a second after the picture was snapped, we both fell, and I hit the court so hard the coach was afraid I might have fractured my tailbone. At the time I hadn’t felt a thing. Immortality ran in my veins that night; we were all untouchable.
UNLV came calling, and I went to play for them, but it was never the same. College didn’t suit me, and while I saw some action in games, it wasn’t much, not nearly enough to make me feel needed. I’d said nothing-to do otherwise would have looked like whining-but what ate at me was the feeling that I was at UNLV under false pretenses, that I wasn’t earning my place. Certainly my grades didn’t justify my presence on campus.
In the media guide for that season, I look unhappy, and you can see the ridiculous sheen I put in my hair as if to underscore the distance I felt from my clean-cut, ponytailed, or cornrowed teammates. The next year I let registration slide by without signing up for any classes, then wrote a letter to the coach, packed up, and went to find a series of dead-end jobs, my last, restless detour on the road to being a cop.
Buddy had died in a helicopter accident over Tennessee, the one that took the lives of thirteen servicemen. My father hadn’t believed me when I’d said I wasn’t leaving my police academy training to come home for the funeral. In his world, Buddy had been a noble hero; in his world, I’d loved and admired my brother as much as he did. He had continued to expect me until the very day of the service.
The night of Buddy’s funeral, I’d gotten home to find an eight-minute message on my answering machine. Outrage was my father’s main theme, some disappointment, some melancholy, but always returning to anger.
He had raised me single-handedly after my mother died, he said. He had never been drunk in front of me. And later, he’d never begrudged the checks he’d sent east for my support, while I’d never written him and rarely called. Finally, he’d segued into a paean to Buddy, the fallen hero, and that was when the tape ran out and cut him off.
It was too bad that the conversation was one-sided, because it was the last substantive one we’d ever had. I thought of picking up the phone and calling him. But I knew that he wouldn’t and couldn’t hear what I had to tell him about Buddy, the noble warrior. So in the end I hadn’t responded, and a long twilight had fallen on our relationship. Ultimately, if his girlfriend hadn’t gotten my address off an old Christmas card, I wouldn’t even have known about his death, nor been on a crowded bargain-carrier flight back from his funeral.
Landing at MSP, I felt relief at being on solid ground again, weariness from adrenaline letdown, and a desire for Seagram’s that had suddenly doubled. I had to take a cab home anyway, so there was no reason not to stop at the airport bar.
I was almost the only person in there. A bartender sliced up lemon wedges, her face faraway. A tall, lanky man with auburn hair nearly to his shoulders and two days’ growth of beard was drinking at the bar.