There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4, Page 2

  Once they got the incredible news that Charlie had been chosen to join the faculty at Spaulding University, things had to happen as quickly as the ceremony for a Catholic girl who needs to get married. A city-beat reporter for the local daily newspaper, Maye had highlighted the number of days she had remaining covering meth-lab busts, informed her editor that she’d be leaving by the summer’s end, and jumped into action like a superhero. They had two months to sell their house, pack their belongings, and find a new home before the fall term began, which wasn’t much time to move an entire life, especially one with a wife whose eBay feedback score was in excess of 550. Both Maye and Charlie had grown up in Phoenix, and they were excited to begin to build a new life in a charming college town in the mountains of Washington. They couldn’t wait to enjoy tall pines, cool breezes, and nice people away from the traffic, the heat, the crime, the pollution, and even, Maye now realized, their little house with the burglar alarm and wrought-iron bars over every window and door. They were tired of the grind of a hot, crowded city, and when, during their first trip to Spaulding, they passed a vivacious vegetable garden and smelled an onion that caught the breeze, there wasn’t a doubt in their minds. You would never smell an onion in Phoenix under any circumstances unless it was on someone’s breath and he was asking for a spare dollar. During that trip, they hadn’t heard one gunshot, they’d forgotten to lock the rental-car door on one occasion and nothing was stolen; and home invasions simply meant a neighbor drunk on microbrew had outstayed his welcome at a barbecue in the delightful little hamlet. They rushed back home, told their friends and families, and Maye began prowling the Dumpsters with her lucky stick. She had been so immersed in the details of relocating—including flying to Spaulding every other weekend to find a new home—that some things kind of slipped her attention.

  Like the fact that she was not just going to Spaulding, but that she was leaving Phoenix.

  By the time she got to Kate’s, she was sweating more than a chubby man in a backyard cage fight testing out his moves from a $19.98 Fast ’N Furious Head Bustin’ Street Smarts DVD recently purchased from Wal-Mart and she wanted nothing more than to have a little face time with a glacier. She knocked on the door and heard Kate yell from the back of the apartment. “Come on in, I’m just opening the wine!”

  “You are crazy,” Maye replied as she opened the door and stepped into the living room. “How do you know I’m not one of the fourteen sex offenders that live within a six-block radius of here?”

  “Because your husband just told me it was you,” Kate said, laughing.

  “What?” she asked, turning the corner into the kitchen.

  And there, in fact, was Charlie, smiling. And Kate.

  And Sara. And Brian. And Patrick. And Sandra, Curtis, Laura. Chrissy, Krysti, Nikki, Kim, Adrienne, Susan. Mark, Steven, Jeff.

  Everybody.

  Everybody was there. All of her friends. The friends who had let her crash on their couches when it wasn’t wise to drive home in more reckless times, friends who had loaned her money when the electricity was about to be shut off in leaner days, friends who had been there when she broke up with boyfriends, friends who had been her bridesmaids. Friends who had gasped in horror the first time she brought them to the little bungalow she’d just mortgaged, then helped scrape off layers of linoleum on the kitchen floor to get to the honey-colored fir buried below. Friends who had listened to her, friends she had listened to. Friends that she needed. Friends she had spent her life making.

  Maye was stunned.

  She had never been so glad to see all of them in her life. She gasped with happiness, and although she was grotesquely sweaty and had the legs of a lazy drag queen, she was incredibly happy. And she was also suddenly and horribly ashamed of herself. These were her friends. So what if she wasn’t at home, packing? These were her friends. How could she even think that it was more important to fill a couple of boxes? This was worth it, she decided—so worth it, even if she had to pack Charlie’s books topless in front of the movers. Hands down.

  All of these people, she thought as she smiled—they know me. Charlie poured wine into a glass and gave it to her, and she lifted it up with everyone else as Kate made a toast.

  “To Maye and Charlie,” she said. “May you be happy, prosper, and sweat less in Washington—but you’ll never find friends as good as us!”

  “Here, here!” they all agreed as they burst out laughing.

  “Look at you, skipping town when you still owe me twenty bucks from your bar tab the night you fought tequila and tequila won,” Nikki said. “I will continue to hold as collateral the ashtrays you pried out of the back of the cab with a butter knife you pocketed from IHOP when you insisted on having breakfast at four A.M. after the bar closed.”

  “Oh, Maye, you owe me so much more than that for making me wear burgundy taffeta in public at your wedding,” Sara interjected. “And for never sending that picture of you peeing in the woods to that newspaper you worked for. Or…the tape.”

  Maye laughed. “Why did I think we could get through one night without mentioning the tape? Yeah, well, I learned on that road trip that it’s never a good idea to get bombed with someone who is more than willing to let a video camera roll for forty minutes on a twenty-four-year-old drunk girl in a tent delivering an impromptu soliloquy on why any man would be lucky to get her,” she said.

  “My favorite part was the ten minutes you spent proving your case that you had a better rack than any slut with implants,” Sara dutifully reminded her. “Complete with a multifaceted demonstration and the pronouncement that you could easily sell your pair to a flat-chested blond girl and pay off your credit card debt.”

  “Don’t forget what she said about her ass,” Nikki reminded them.

  “No!” Maye protested as she laughed and covered her face with her hands. “Please don’t!”

  “‘With these pearly globes and a thousand more Marlboro miles, I could get me a triple-wide!’” Kate, Sara, and Nikki recited en chorus.

  “I’m filing divorce papers tomorrow,” Charlie interjected, smiling.

  “That video alone is enough to dissuade anyone from stealing my identity,” Maye added as she shuddered and turned a molten shade of red. “A copy of it should be attached to my credit report. Not even a meth addict would want to take on that variety of humiliation to simply assault the credit limit on my Master-Card. No weight-training set is worth that level of cringe, and the fact that you didn’t perform a mercy killing that night to spare me from a decade’s worth of third-degree embarrassment thus far just speaks to your own selfishness, you revolting hags. The cringe alone was potent enough to kill most ordinary humans.”

  “Not Super Boob Globe Girl, apparently,” Sara added blithely. “She lives on. And on. Even if she is deserting us.”

  You can move your furniture, you can move your books, you can move your underwear, but you can’t move your whole life, Maye really understood as they all laughed at old stories, the humiliating ones, the funny ones, and the ones only one another knew.

  Some things, even things that took a lifetime to make, have to stay behind.

  2

  Decorative Weaponry

  Spaulding, Washington, was indeed a charming place.

  Nestled at the base of the North Cascade mountain range, the façade and landscape of the town hadn’t changed much in almost a century, since Malcolm Spaulding, visionary and ambassador of indoor plumbing, decided to find the prettiest spot in the country to call his home and build himself a sewer-pipe factory.

  He found his utopia in a rainforest of towering pines, feathery, sweeping ferns, and, as he would repeatedly remark, a soil so rich you could grow love in it. An insufferable romantic despite the fact that his livelihood was shit, Malcolm Spaulding swore that from the base of the mountains, he had a view that stretched almost all the way to the Pacific Ocean on a brilliant day. In the summer it was sunny and warm enough to keep tomatoes ripening until fall; in the winter, a misty rai
n would swirl in and replenish the forest with the most essential ingredient it required to remain enchanted.

  Everything in Spaulding grew, particularly the sewer-pipe factory. Spaulding, Washington, was not only a beautiful place, but its sole export was one of the main reasons that people didn’t need to keep poop buckets under their beds anymore. The town spread its beauty every time a toilet gurgled and flushed.

  Spaulding had a definite sense of pride in having introduced civilization to the entire, thankful nation.

  The town had grown with Spaulding Sewer Pipe’s prosperity, and in addition to the general store and streets of little houses came a school. Enamored as he was with the transportation of human waste, Malcolm Spaulding knew a town couldn’t survive on that gold mine alone. When he saw just exactly how the school had improved the already lovely town—the spelling bees the whole town attended, the Christmas pageant, and the school dances—he simply couldn’t help himself and decided to build a good, solid but small college, which was named, naturally, Spaulding Polytechnic Institute of Sewer Pipe Husbandry.

  The residents of Spaulding liked the fact that their town was small enough that they could drive seven minutes to get anywhere and big enough that they could reach outside immediate family for romantic and reproductive purposes. The residents loved their town. To them, the world of Spaulding was perfect. Each street had two lanes, one for coming and one for going. The air stayed fresh and infused with the scent of rising bread dough from numerous bakeries and the hint of growing onions could be carried by a breeze on a warm, but not too hot, summer day.

  Spaulding’s residents were so enamored with their town and the factory that built it—which had quickly become the biggest sewer-pipe manufacturer in the country, having addressed the country’s flushing needs through two world wars and the first moon walk. (It was just a matter of time, Malcolm Spaulding predicted, before Spaulding Sewer Pipe would have the first sewer-pipe outpost in space and would be addressing the issue of sanitation minus gravity.) Every year an elaborate celebration was staged to rejoice in the factory’s success. The Spaulding Festival was the favorite and most anticipated event of the year. It was a joyous affair, and to the delight of his employees and their families, Malcolm Spaulding distributed generous prizes to the one who made it through the Sewer Pipe Maze first, the one who stayed afloat the longest in the pipe-rolling contest, and the baker of the best pie baked in a sewer-pipe cap. Children bobbed for apples in an upturned sewer pipe and could dunk their principal in another sewer pipe with a determined, well-planned throw of a ball. Everyone, year after year, had a glorious time.

  Nothing of much consequence had happened to change the Spaulding way of life and the speed at which it was lived. The factory went on making pipes; the pipe college went on producing graduates who went on to work at the factory. Things continued in Spaulding just like they always did, except for a brief period during the hot summer months when several buildings—including the sewer-pipe factory—caught fire and burned to the ground. A police investigation later revealed that sewer-pipe rivals had tried to edge in by destroying their main competitor.

  The people of Spaulding quietly and solemnly waited until the rubble stopped smoking, then they cleared away the remnants of what was lost and went immediately to the business of building it all right back, exactly as it was before.

  Spaulding was Spaulding, and no amount of fire could burn that away.

  But the truth was that Spaulding had changed. In the time that it took to rebuild, the Spaulding Sewer Pipe factory had lost its place as the largest of its kind. Competitors, particularly the one that was highly suspected of setting the fires, were more than eager to fill the orders the factory could not, and a majority of the business was lost.

  And that was how Spaulding, Washington, a sewer-pipe town, became Spaulding, Washington, a university town. The Spaulding Polytechnic Institute of Sewer Pipe Husbandry became Spaulding University, the rebuilt factory building was transformed into dormitories, and new businesses popped up all over town like pimples on the forehead of puberty. The football team won the Rain Bowl, the Fern Bowl, and the Sasquatch Bowl. It became the fastest-growing university in the state.

  Spaulding had bloomed again.

  And then the hippies came.

  In the time of war, the draft was instituted, and a portion of young men from all over the country who couldn’t secure a single deferment, let alone four or five, fled to Canada. When the war was over and it was safe to come back, they crossed the border again, drove eighty miles in their VW vans, and then just stopped, unloaded vast quantities of vegetable dyes, yogurt, incense, and bongs, and set up grow lights.

  They were friendly enough people, they tended masterful gardens, and although their customer-service skills were somewhat slow, they always had smiles on their faces. Over the years, the hippie folk grew their plants, beat their drums, spun their circles, and simply wove themselves into the community, evident as at least one house on each street became a canvas for a blue sky with clouds or a stretching rainbow. The schools filled up with children named Freedom, Tree, Solstice, and Merlin, with an overabundance of both Jerrys and Garcias. Career orientations changed as well, with resident rosters now including such occupations as birth artist, master composter, unicyclist, and the not-nearly-as-uncommon-as-you-would-think title of wizard.

  And Spaulding, unlike many small former factory towns, stayed clean. Littering was prohibited, recycling was adopted. Fast-food establishments were rare in Spaulding; organic bakeries, bookstores, coffeehouses, lined every street downtown. People rode bikes instead of driving cars when they could, and some of the hippies actually put on shoes and started running. Spaulding was still a charming place, only a little bit more healthy. The university offered degrees in environmentalism, eco-criticism, and folklore studies.

  The university football team won the Hemp Bowl.

  And today, if on a visit to Spaulding you were to find yourself the only person in the movie theater, and another moviegoer walked in, that person would come and sit next to you without a second thought, and might even lean over and ask to share your popcorn. Your new acquaintance might also mention that you should try it with nutritional yeast sprinkled on top instead of butter and salt. It tastes nutty, your neighbor would say, and it won’t clog your arteries or turn them to cement.

  Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent.

  It was with the fragrance of growing onions floating in the warm summer air that Maye, Charlie, and their dog, Mickey, arrived with an eighteen-wheeler full of boxes and an idea about creating their life in a brand-new place.

  It was, however, going to take a little more than that.

  Maye held her breath as they pulled into the driveway of the new house for the first time.

  They had been on the road for three days, driving through the desert of Arizona, the urban landscape of Los Angeles, the farmland of central California, and the mountains and lush valleys of Oregon. Now they were home.

  At least Maye hoped they were.

  Charlie didn’t say anything as he sat in the car, looking at the new house. Maye didn’t know what to make of his silence; in one moment, her stomach dropped to her feet thinking that Charlie hated the cottagelike look of it (it did look rather like a place two Germanic children would happen upon in the woods and nearly become a kiddie potpie), then, in the next moment, she thought the house was so perfect that there was no way he could do anything but love it.

  It was Maye’s responsibility to find them a place to live, so she flew up to Washington every other weekend. Courtesy of her patient Realtor, Patty, she had seen a wide variety of Spaulding abodes, including a farmhouse painted like a rainbow, which was what the owner’s children (Ocean, four, and Wind, six) had chosen, and a 1920s bungalow that was adorned in the colors of an iris—purple siding, chartreuse windows, dark green eaves, lavender door.

  “The owner loves col
or,” Patty tried to explain.

  “Yes, she does,” Maye said, nodding. “Brooke Shields lived in a house that looked like this in Pretty Baby.”

  “The inside is lovely,” Patty coaxed. “The seller, Louise, is an old friend of mine.”

  Taking the cue and not wanting to offend her any more than she already had by essentially calling her friend’s home a whorehouse, Maye followed Patty up the sidewalk until they were standing on the Technicolor bungalow’s wide, generous porch. Patty rang the doorbell, and a friendly woman in her forties answered it and invited them in.

  It was almost the perfect house. The Mission-style built-in oak china cabinet hadn’t been slathered with paint, and neither had the columns and the bookcases that flanked the entrance to the dining room. It was in those bookcases that Maye noticed something strange: each shelf held a row of crowns, some elegant and sparkly, some plastic and cheap, and one that rather resembled a Burger King crown found in a kid’s meal. What an odd hobby, Maye thought; it puts some of Michael Jackson’s to shame. There must have been thirty or forty of them, shimmering and gleaming in the light. What on earth is a grown woman doing with forty crowns that aren’t in her mouth? Maye wondered. Not to be cruel, but Louise was no beauty queen, and unless she was living out an unrealized homecoming fantasy à la Carrie, the whole thing was a bit puzzling.

  The two-bedroom iris house, it turned out, was too small, and Maye bit her tongue as hard as she could and did not ask Patty if they had just visited the home of Spaulding’s tooth fairy when they got back to the car. Offending her Realtor and the only person she knew in town would not be a smart maneuver, no matter how funny Maye thought her joke was.

  As Patty unlocked the door, Maye just smiled, forced her little comment back down her throat, and got in.