HALFWAY HOME TO SOMEWHERE ELSE
The baby had been bawling since the West Virginia border, so I figured we could use a break. We were driving by a series of hot dog joints in a town called King’s Crossroad. I don’t think any king had ever visited there, but the pilgrims that built this land had a zeal for history. I took a right turn by a shack selling flags and T-shirts, Confederate and tie-dye mostly. It was hippie hillbilly country.
“This not our exit,” my wife said in her broken English, turning down the radio with her cigarette hand. The other was holding the baby to her open-air boob.
“I thought we could use a little break.”
“Your trip,” she said. She took a drag and blew it carefully out the open window and away from the baby’s face.
It was one of those muggy days where the sun licked you all over like a stray dog. The kind of day that wore on you. All you wanted was some lemonade, but the little boys and girls were inside with the TV and AC, and the paper cups were being chewed apart by angry rats.
I did like driving with the windows down though.
“There’s an old swimming hole around here I used to go to,” I said. “We can cool ourselves down.”
“My swimsuit in bottom of bag,” my wife said. “And what the hell is swimming hole?”
A bearded trucker leaned out of his window as he drove past. My wife flicked him off and tucked her breast back into her cutoff shirt.
“You can change at the hole,” I said. “It’s an old stone quarry. Some digging machine went too deep and hit an underground spring, and now you can swim there. We used to go all the time in school. The machine is still under there, near the south side. One time, a kid at the rival high school did a swan dive too far down and ripped open his belly on the rusted metal. It was in all the newspapers.”
Clouds of gnats bounced off our windshield.
“That’s horrible,” my wife said. “That’s another horrible thing you tell me.”
Maybe here I should say that Natasha was my mail-order bride. At least that’s what she liked to say. I brought her over to work at my restaurant, a waitress exchange program with one of those splintered-off Soviet countries I used to confuse. We served Southern food with an haute cuisine twist. Mango salsa rub on the fried chicken, wasabi-coated French fries, that kind of spineless bastardization. Natasha wasn’t the best waitress, but she had fierce, sad eyes and whispered nasty jokes about the customers into my ear. Her fingers were pale, thin bones with limp ash perpetually growing between them. She didn’t even seem to mind when I grunted my sorrows between her legs on the wiped-down bar after closing. She just smoked her black Russian cigarettes and scratched my neck, saying, “It is okay.”
When her work visa expired, what were we supposed to do? Natasha didn’t want to go back to her “rotten land filled with crooks and assholes,” and I, while still young, was old enough to know the scarcity of steady sex, and anyway Natasha was now my floor manager, and business was booming.
I only got lost once looking for the old quarry. I took us down an unmarked gravel road that kicked up so much dust we had to roll up the windows.
“You make me waste smoke,” Natasha said.
At the end of the road we found an old farmhouse, maybe from the plantation days. The paint still looked white, but dried vines reached up the walls. The dust cloud collapsed on our windshield. I had to use three squirts to wipe it off. Looking around, we saw the yard was filled with scrap-iron unicorns. They were belly deep in crabgrass. There was at least a half dozen of these welded beasts: the sculptures of either a bored heiress or a schizophrenic squatter.
“This what I love about this country,” Natasha said without elaboration. She took a snapshot out the window, and we backed away.
“Must be the other way,” I said.
“Must,” my wife said.
The baby said nothing but reached out to me as a dribble of spit spilled down her puckered lips. I stuck a finger in her hand, and she squeezed it and laughed as I drove.
Natasha and I had gotten in another ten months before an Asian Tex-Mex fusion joint opened up across the street, and my customers scampered away. Their tempura tacos had been rated best in the South by Gourmet. All we had left were a few drunkards plucking bits of dried fruit out of their mashed potatoes.
Then the baby sneaked her way out of some broken condom. We named her Emily. I loved her and blew kissy farts on her stomach, although there was some part of me that found it hard to think of her as anything but an animated ball of dough.
What fool had told me at a dinner party that my art school dropout kitchen concoctions were good enough to pay twenty a plate for? If I saw him again, I’d pop his eye out with a wine key.
So now I was driving to Asheville for a sous chef interview at a place called Impossible Possum Bistro, with an impossibly beautiful wife and a baby in whose lumpy white face I didn’t recognize a single feature of my own.
The quarry was marked with a large quartz tossed into the ditch on the far side of the road. Someone had sprayed “Dingus Crossroad” on the rock in pink spray paint.
“I told you,” I said, pointing toward the rock. “See?”
I parked the car on a path that had been beaten into the woods by countless horny teenagers. Just far enough inside to hide from passing cop cars. When we pulled up, there was a blue jeep parked ahead on the path. Crumpled beer cans decorated the dirt around the tires. I turned around and looked at the baby strapped into her seat.
“I think she’s ready for a nap. Let’s put her under some blankets in the back.”
“We aren’t leaving baby in damn car.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “It was a joke.”
My wife handed me the baby and stood behind the car door. She dropped her shorts and panties to pull on a blue bikini. The sight of her pale bottom made me begin to swell, even in this heat. They were the kind of high, white cheeks that made everything in the world click into place for a brief second.
“Where is your suit?” she said.
“I’ll swim in these,” I said, “like the old days.”
“Swim in jeans? Dumb old days.”
I put some diapers and blankets in a yellow camping pack I had in the trunk. “I think it’s back this way,” I said.
I found a good-sized stick on the ground and waved it in front of me to knock any spiderwebs out of the way. It whizzed through the air. I felt as if I was the protector of my wife and infant child.
We walked through the pine trees and then out into the open field. The sky was almost painfully blue. About fifty yards off, the field was interrupted by a circle of rocks and evergreens that guarded the swimming hole. It was like an oasis that you’d see in a comic strip desert.
We placed some blankets and the baby down on a flat rock. I scratched the bottoms of her feet, and my wife popped a pacifier between her lips. We walked to the edge of the quarry, arms around each other’s waists, and I slipped my thumb below her waistband to rub across the slope of her behind. Natasha lit a cigarette and stared into the quarry. It was a good thirty-foot drop.
“I not jumping in that.”
“You can scamper down the side there to a ten-foot ledge.”
A hot cloud of smoke blew into my face.
“Fine,” I said, pulling off my shirt.
Across the gap there were a few teenagers, two guys and a girl. The boys were doing flips into the water while the girl cheered them on while looking at her phone.
“Eight point five for Aiden.” I could just make out the girl shouting.
“That was a goddamn ten!”
I looked back at Natasha rubbing sunscreen on Emily’s pink cheeks. I took off my shoes and stepped up to the ledge. The heat was pulling the sweat out of my skin. I tried to remember the technique for jumping thirty feet into water. I knew I had to keep my arms straight up, but I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to knife my toes into the water or break the surface tension with my soles. It felt as if I was standing there for a long time, staring down into the bright blue water. The walls of the cliff still contained rectangular cuts on the otherwise smooth surface. The water below was making me thirsty.