There There(40)

    “Smoke?” Jacquie says.

Harvey pulls out a smoke for himself and makes a vague grunting sound Jacquie has heard other Indian men use before and knows means yes. “I used to drink with these twins, Navajo guys. One of the twins didn’t want the truck to smell like smoke, it was his girlfriend’s truck, so we pulled over on the side of the highway. We’d brought a handle of tequila along. We drank too much of that, talked nonsense for a couple hours, then decided we needed to distance ourselves from the vehicle. We stumbled out into the desert, ended up getting so far out we couldn’t see the truck,” Harvey says.

Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’d want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it. Something she always notices is how much confidence and lack of self-doubt people have. Take Harvey here. Telling this terrible story like it’s captivating. There are so many people she comes across who seem born with confidence and self-esteem. Jacquie can’t remember a day going by when at some point she hadn’t wished she could burn her life down. Today actually, she hadn’t had that thought today. That was something. That was not nothing.

“And then even though I can’t remember having passed out on the desert floor,” Harvey says, “I woke up and the twins were gone. The moon hadn’t moved too far, so not too much time had passed, but they were gone, so I walked toward where I thought we’d parked. It was all of a sudden real cold, like I’d never felt before. Like it’s cold when you’re near the ocean, like it’s cold in San Francisco, that moist cold that gets to the bone.”

    “It wasn’t cold before you passed out?” Jacquie says.

“This is where it gets weird. I must have been walking for twenty minutes or so, the wrong way of course, farther into the desert, that’s when I saw them.”

“The twins?” Jacquie says, and rolls up her window. Harvey does the same.

“No, not the twins,” he says. “I know this is gonna sound crazy, but it was two very tall, very white guys with white hair, but they weren’t old, and they weren’t so tall that it was freakish, just maybe like a foot and a half taller than me.”

“This is the part where you tell me you woke up to the twins lying on top of you or something,” Jacquie says.

“I thought maybe the twins had slipped me something. I knew they were Native American Church guys, but I’d done peyote before and this was not that. I got maybe ten or so feet away from them and stopped. Their eyes were big. Not in that alien way, just noticeably big,” Harvey says.

“Bullshit,” Jacquie says. “This story goes: Harvey got drunk in the desert and had a weird dream, the end.”

“I’m not joking. These two tall white guys with white hair and big eyes, hunch-shouldered, just staring off, not even at me. I got the hell out of there. And if that was a dream, then so is this, because I never woke up from it.”

“You act like when you’re drinking your memory is, what, reliable?”

“True enough, but get this, when the internet came out, or when I started using it I guess is a better way to put it, I looked up tall white guys in the desert in Arizona, and it’s a thing. They’re called the Tall Whites. Aliens. No joke. You can look it up,” Harvey says.

    Jacquie’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She gets it out knowing Harvey will think it’s to look up these Tall Whites. It’s an unusually long text message from Opal.

    I already assumed you would have told me if you found spider legs in your leg, either when we were younger or when I told you about Orvil’s, but that assumption doesn’t make sense because I found spider legs in my leg right before everything happened with Ronald. And I never told you I found those legs, I mean until right now. I need to know if it happened to you. I feel like it has something to do with Mom.



“I read one website that said the Tall Whites are controlling America now, d’you see that?” Harvey says. And Jacquie feels sad for Harvey. And for Opal. And about these spider legs. If she’d ever found spider legs in her leg, she probably would have ended it right there and then. She suddenly feels so overwhelmed by all of it that she gets tired. This sometimes happens to Jacquie, and she feels grateful when it does, because most of the time her thoughts keep her up.

“I’m gonna get some sleep,” Jacquie says.

“Oh. Okay,” Harvey says.

Jacquie leans her head against the window. She watches the white highway line stream and waver. She watches the lines of telephone wires rise and fall in waves. Her thoughts wander, loosen, reach out aimlessly. She thinks about her back teeth, her molars, how they hurt every time she bites into something too cold or hot. She thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been to the dentist. She wonders about her mom’s teeth. She thinks about genetics and blood and veins and why a heart keeps beating. She looks at her head leaned against her head’s dark reflection in the window. She blinks an erratic pattern of blinks, which ends with her eyes closed. She falls asleep to the low drone of the road and the engine’s steady hum.