The streetlamps above the parking lot and the light pouring from the glass windows were so bright, and the surrounding woods and road so dark, that the McDonald’s felt like some oasis in a desert of night. You could imagine wild beasts roaming the edges of the forest, held back by a fear of the torchlike M.
Foster walked inside and went straight for the bathroom. He pissed for thirty seconds and washed his hands with a squirt of pink liquid. He had to hit the faucet button three times.
Even at this hour, there were people ahead of him in line: a couple holding each other around their waists and two teenagers talking loudly about the shapes of their boyfriends’ privates.
Foster was a man of routine, part of the reason this drive was proving something about himself to himself, so he already knew his order. The cashier looked half-asleep as she punched in the different orders with fingernails that had been painted the yellow and red of the chain’s logo.
Foster calculated the miles he had left to go. It seemed to him he was living a version of the American dream, staking out a new life for himself in a land miles from home. Sure, he was probably less likely to die of dysentery than travelers on the Oregon Trail, but the principle was the same.
He had two hundred dollars in his wallet and a few more in the bank.
It was his turn, and he stepped up and glanced again at the various options. He already knew what he was getting, but it was some kind of reflex. Perhaps he just didn’t like looking random cashiers in the eye.
“I’ll take the number six combo,” he said. “With a regular Coke and large fries.”
“Didn’t you hear what I was saying?” the cashier said.
“What?” Foster said. Now he glanced at her. She was thin and sickly looking. Her uniform visor was turned stylishly off-center. She gave an annoyed sigh and gestured at the teenagers, who were squirting ketchup from a hooked tube.
“No more burgers,” she said. “They got the last meat!”
6.
I want to expand on something I said earlier about not knowing exactly why my brother left. Sometimes I say this to people, especially women who are strapping their bras back on, and they think it means my brother and I don’t get along, or that family isn’t important to me. We get along quite well. When we get together, we talk about new movies or old books, but we don’t pry open our rib cages and poke at what’s inside. I visit him and my parents a few times a year. The big holidays mostly.
You can lose touch with people pretty quickly this way. I remember my first girlfriend, at least the first one I’d count as real, meaning we had sex and saw each other more often than a monthly dance. Her name was Vanessa Chance, and we’d first kissed below the bleachers of a homecoming game. When the school year ended, Vanessa went away to summer camp in another state. She sent me a letter that said, “You’re so far away, it’s hard to believe you still exist.” By that time her face was already starting to turn fuzzy in my memory. We broke up two weeks before the start of tenth grade.
7.
Foster passed the man in the chicken suit every time he drove to town. Foster didn’t have a job exactly. He’d worked long hours on the fly rail of a local theater to save up for his temporary escape. He was now living in an apartment he had secured on Craigslist before he drove west. His plan was to photograph all the dusty, crumbling old mines. If the photos turned out well, he would try to get a gallery to display the series alongside an artist’s statement about loss, forgetfulness, and the decline of American industry. Mostly, like everyone I knew, he just wanted to pretend he was doing something with his life.
The man in the chicken suit was the first thing Foster saw every morning before getting his coffee. The man made a real impression on him. Perhaps he simply seemed so bright and absurd in the middle of this forgotten town of half-empty buildings and abandoned mines.
I wish I could say that Foster caught the man urinating behind a tree on the side of the road or with his foam head resting on a bench as he rolled strikes at a local bowling alley, but it never happened. The man just danced sluggishly on the strip of gravel on the side of the road.
Perhaps it was a woman in there or a different man each day. You couldn’t tell.
8.
The town in Colorado was called Victor. I remember looking it up on Wikipedia before flying out there, and the town’s population was under five hundred in the last census. I can’t remember if it was named after a man named Victor or merely the concept of triumph.
9.
I was pretending to be a writer at the time, bumming around New York on meager savings, attending literary parties for free cheese cubes and sour wine. Not that things have changed on that account, beyond the cheese getting softer and the wine more delicately poured. The point is that it wasn’t hard for me to make the time to visit him. I told myself it counted as research for a novel I’d been outlining over and over without ever starting.
I booked an aisle seat, so I could go to the bathroom without stumbling over some sleeping stranger. When the plane took off, the man next to me, who had the exact same haircut as my father, asked me if I wouldn’t mind holding his hand until we leveled off.
“What?”
“It’s just something I always do,” he said. “Makes me feel calm. Normally my wife does it, but she couldn’t make this trip.” I didn’t respond, and he started to tear up. “She has cancer,” he added.
The man was balding and had a large gray mustache draped over his lip. I held his hand, which was surprisingly smooth and warm, as it would have made me feel petty and embarrassed to deny him. But I looked angrily away and imagined the nasty things I should have said to him instead.
10.
“Look,” Foster said. “Right there!”
He swung the tan Camry onto the main road. The car’s floor was littered with trash. I even found a petrified taco clunking around its cardboard box. It annoyed me, because the car had been my car. It was my college graduation present for my pointless degree, and I’d left it at home when I moved to the city. It wasn’t worth the hassle up there. In my absence, my brother had moved in with his fast-food wrappers and Talking Heads CDs and made it his.
“Just like you said.”
I turned my head in time to see the yellow blur of the man in his chicken costume. He seemed to be looking into the car at us, and I gave him a wave.
“Isn’t that kind of crazy?” Foster said. “He can’t be happy doing that, can he?”
11.
There wasn’t a lot to do in town, and I was glad my flight was in only two days. Most of the shops sold knickknacks of the town’s glory days, although how glorious those days ever were seemed up for debate.
The main things in town were the old gold mines. They were these huge jagged holes appearing suddenly off the road, like deep wounds in the land. Foster took me to three of his favorites. Each had rickety and abandoned buildings hanging over the edge of the pits. One was red, another sky blue, and the third may have once been white but now was sullied into a dusty brown. I suppose these were the buildings where the pounds of rocks had been crushed to rubble and the shiny bits separated from the dirt.
“These are really something. Can we go down in them?” We were standing over the pit by the blue building.
“Probably not a good idea,” my brother said. “But we could sneak up there, maybe.”