Contenders. Erika Krouse
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Then, “No, the person who wrote on it.”
“He was your aunt’s teacher.”
“Was he your teacher? Or daddy’s?”
“No. I saw him occasionally, and Chris wasn’t interested in karate. Nina mentioned him a little, when she talked at all. Which was never.”
“Karate, like karate chops?”
“Yeah.”
Kate karate chopped the dashboard. She karate chopped Isaac’s arm. She karate chopped her bagel, which was already stale in the dry Colorado air. She flipped the postcard over. “The President of the United States was the daddy of a chimpanzee?”
“No, Kate. He was acting. It was fake.”
“Like you?”
Irritated, he said, “Like his presidency.” Then he realized that she had been talking about his acting. Not about his fakeness.
She studied the picture up close until she was cross-eyed. “Shouldn’t you be nice to him?”
“Ronald Reagan? He’s dead, honey,” Isaac said, and instantly regretted it. “He had Alzheimer’s disease, and bankrupted our country. His presidency led to George Bush’s presidency, which led to George W. Bush’s presidency, and the only good thing I can say about that is that I got to reuse my ‘Impeach Bush’ bumper stickers until I sold my Jeep, and they probably increased the value.” He looked at Kate, whose mouth was open.
“You’re weird,” she said.
Isaac wondered if Nina even knew that her brother had been sick, was dead. AIDS is such an isolating disease, but even before that, Nina had been excised from Chris’s life so completely, her silhouette remained in the space left behind.
So why did Chris will Kate over to a ghost? Isaac glanced at the little girl, who was narrating the sights of Denver to No-Hair. “This is a gas station,” she whispered. “This is some dirt.” Her legs were strewn about the seat like a couple of Pick-Up Sticks. Shadows encircled her eyes. She still wasn’t sleeping.
“If we don’t find her this time, we can come back again, right?” Kate pushed and pulled on the automatic door lock button. The doors made a chunk! noise over and over.
“Stop playing with the car.”
“Why?” She chunk!-ed it one more time.
“Kate,” slow, rising. But at least she wasn’t whispering and cowering, which, frankly, got on Isaac’s nerves.
“Why don’t we just look her up in the phone book?” she asked.
“She’s unlisted. Or, she doesn’t have a phone.”
“Everybody has a phone,” she whispered to No-Hair. She started licking her hands and smoothing down her own hair like a cat, straightening her overalls. She pulled down the visor mirror. She pinched her cheeks and bit her lips to make them red. “Why don’t we look back in your old town?”
“Grand Junction?” Isaac tasted dirt, the way he always did when he thought of his hometown and 28½ Road.
It took until Isaac’s adulthood to realize that normal towns don’t have fractions in their streets. 28½ Road is exactly twenty-eight and a half miles from the Utah border. There is also 295/8 Road, 30¼ Road, and so on. He always thought that if Grand Junction had a motto, it would be, “We’re Not Utah.” But it looked like Utah—stenciled with canyons, dry as alum. The valley was made of sawdust and petals, sunshine and frost. Despite the heat and thirst, in Isaac’s day, there was a feeling of imminent prosperity in the air. See, there was oil in them there hills.
It’s hard to imagine prehistoric whales and dinos swimming above Colorado’s snowcapped peaks, but it’s also hard to imagine that humans would come to burn the remains of these gargantuan animals in Kia Rios. When the prehistoric sea retreated, the lagoons filled with peat, coal, sand, and dinosaur corpses. This witches’ brew turned into oil shale, which rose like bread and turned into the Colorado Rockies.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that a hundred million years of causes and effects presented a one-time solution for the oil crisis. Exxon moved into the Western Slope with the objective of mining petroleum from what the Ute tribe used to call “the rock that burns.” The plan was simple: strip mine the hills, and squeeze serviceable oil from the shale.
Grand Junction grew big. Then oil prices retreated in the early eighties. Oil shale was more trouble than it was worth. On a day locals called “Black Sunday,” Exxon laid off their employees and skipped town.
Over the next year, Grand Junction dwindled to a third of its size, as people moved away to wherever there might be jobs. Home values halved. Partially-built office buildings sat fallow on their foundations. Banks sued, frantic. Schools sank into disrepair. Grand Junction turned into Grand Junkyard, and stayed that way for over a decade. Even after the town finally recovered, the Black family didn’t.
The problem with poverty is that there’s nothing to do except beat your children. Isaac remembered Chris’s black eyes, the finger bruises on Nina’s arms. There was no way to explain any of this to Kate. “Nina would never go back there,” he said.
The address on the postcard led them to a yellow ranch-style home with purple petunias in front. As soon as they knocked, an older man poked his head out the door. Three feet below him, a beagle poked out his head, too.
The man was short and compact. He wore a faded, tight-fitting Hawaiian shirt and dress pants. His sparse hair was dyed a startling shade of black, the kind that absorbs light instead of reflecting it. He was Caucasian, with a perma-tan that had faded to a mottled yellow. His skin had an astounding number of wrinkles, like a piece of paper that had been repeatedly crumpled and smoothed out again. Isaac couldn’t remember Jackson’s face before, but he now recognized him immediately. The dog sniffed the air.
“Hi,” Isaac stuttered, “Mr. Jackson. I-I was wondering if, ah. Um.”
“I don’t believe in your God,” Jackson said and began to shut the door.
“No, I’m not—it’s Nina, I’m looking for Nina. Sorry to intrude. Mr. Jackson, please.” He snatched the postcard from Kate’s hand and stuck it through the narrowing crack in the door.
Jackson picked the postcard from Isaac’s outstretched hand. It took him so long to read it, Isaac wondered if he hadn’t written it after all, or if he could, in fact, read.
Finally, Jackson waved the card in the air. “How did you get this?”
“Chris had it. Her brother. She had already left by the time it came to their house. I know it was a long time ago, Mr. Jackson, but we were hoping you might know where she is.”
“Just Jackson. It’s my first name.” Jackson motioned them inside.
Isaac felt oversized inside the low-ceilinged house with its geriatric smells. The beagle thwacked his tail against the legs of the furniture. He crouched on the carpet and began peeing.
“No! Hank! Stop it!” Jackson shook the dog by his collar with a surprising strength. The dog stopped peeing, eyes round. Jackson threw a dishtowel over the spot and stepped on it with his slipper. “Submissive urination. He pees like a girl when he sees visitors. It’s embarrassing.” Jackson had a singsongy, truncated way of speaking, like he was distracted by the beat of a song in his head. His yellow shirt was tucked into his khaki pants so smoothly, his outfit almost looked like a bodysuit. Every remaining hair on his head was in place. Nina had said that he had gotten blown up in Vietnam. She said that he had killed twelve men with his hands. It was hard to believe from this man with a potbelly and freckles on his bald spot.
Kate held out her hand to the beagle, who tongued it. Jackson pointed at a distended couch. They sat on it and were instantly enveloped. It smelled like wet dog and old scrambled eggs. Jackson scrubbed at the pee spot on the floor and sprayed half a can of deodorant on it, and then the house smelled like deodorant, too.