Me and Jim. Jim and me. Driving through Nazareth County. It’s late and darkness obscures the mesas jutting from the land like broken teeth. Jim gestures to the lights of an all night motel, the Comanche Motor Quonset, and pounds on the dash until he gets his way. He hasn’t had to drive. He hasn’t gone sleepless staring at the ceilings of strange places. Last night, I walked across the highway barefoot into the brambles and brush of an open desert. This morning, I awoke with no injuries. No cuts, scrapes or bruises. I am beginning to think it is beyond me to feel anything.
We pull in and I deal with the night manager while Jim eyes us both suspiciously. There’s a lone first floor room available with a single king bed. I bargain. I beg. And, in the end, I take the room.
I pull Jim’s old Lincoln around. The suspension creaks and whines. A large man stands near the door to our room. A rig rumbles not far off and I assume it’s his. If I had a choice, we’d drive through the night. But I don’t. Not yet.
Getting Jim into his wheelchair takes time. He stays prostrate like a child, unwilling to help in even the smallest way. I can feel the trucker grappling with his morality, watching a woman struggle like I am. But then he retreats into his room. I’ve found this is the way with most people. They don’t want to watch. They don’t feel comfortable helping. They just leave. If they pretend like we don’t exist, we don’t. 
A curl of drool works its way down Jim’s chin. I lift him up the curb, have some trouble with lock but eventually get us inside.
The room is spartan, clean enough, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and the chalky citrus of cheap air freshener. There is a painting of two doves in a wheat field, something vaguely Midwestern, out of place being that we’re in Texas. I can hear the muted drawl of the television in the next room.
“On dreamless evenings, my father would drink and my mother would lock herself in the attic, her sobs echoing through the cracks in the ceiling of my bedroom,” Jim says through his bottom lip. “I would escape here. There were camps of women in the woods surrounding the motel. For a gallon of milk they would make you feel whole again.”
“If you are trying to make me feel sorry for you, keep trying.”
“If you don’t feel sorry for me now, Lisa. I don’t think you ever will.” Then he says: “I’m half full.”
It’s difficult to get us both in the small bathroom. I stand in the shower, positioning Jim close to the toilet. I have to reach over him to do it and I can feel his breath warm the back of my neck. I open the valve and a thin stream of yeasty urine leaks out and into the toilet. Jim sighs in relief, a mimicking of an old habit, though it’s been out of him for hours.
I give Jim one of his pills and help him bring the whiskey to his lips. A month ago it seemed he was able to do it himself but the disease has been working on him quickly. When he’s asleep, I shut out the lights and leave the room.
The trucker is sitting in a plastic chair and smoking a cigarette. He’s not as large as he seemed before but he looks strong in the way men who do manual labor and drink too much beer often are; any muscular definition concealed by a layer of tanned fat. The crown of his red hair is thinning. I notice the beer on the ground, next to the chair.
“Mind if I have one?” I say and point to the sweating can.
He pulls a can from the small cooler next to him and hands it to me. He offers up a cigarette from his pack and I take it.
“That your daddy?” He says, a discernable amount of guilt in his voice.
“Sort of,” I say.
“Stroke?”
“Among other things” I say.
“My daddy had a stroke. Hard on everyone. I hate to say it, but it got easier after he went on. He wasn’t a good man, though.”
“They never are.”
He laughs.
“That your rig?” I say.
“Sure is,” he says.
“Want to show it to me?”
“Sure can.”
I finish my beer on the walk over and pitch it into the street. Moths bat against the lone streetlight illuminating the parking lot. I can hear the highway in the distance. A sprawling city of stars light the night above our heads. In this desert, there are stars forever, none of them bright enough to make any prayers against.
He opens the driver’s side door and, for a moment, I think he’s still not sure of what’s about to happen. As if I have any interest in the interior of his semi-truck.
Photos of towheaded children tucked into vanity mirrors. Pornographic magazines splayed on the dash. A tissue box stripped of its guts. I take stock of these things as he pumps inside me, grunting and whispering sweetly into my ear. He calls me beautiful. He’s surprisingly gentle. I put my hand on his ass, wordlessly beckoning him to move faster, harder. He shoves his thumb in my mouth, tastes salty, slightly acidic. He asks me where to put it. I watch his hairy, damp shoulders shudder as he deposits his seed into the vaginal folds of the tissue box. Of course, it’s only now that I notice his wedding ring.
“Did you?” He pants, wounded.
“No,” I say. “But I never do.”
 
When I return, our room is cool and dark, the air conditioner rattling. Jim is snoring softly. I kneel at the end of the bed and roll his jeans to his knees. His pale legs are as thin as my arms, just bone and skin. I stick a pushpin into the diminished flesh of his calf.
            “Jim” I say. “Jim, wake up.”
            He doesn’t stir. I push another and another until I’ve littered his legs with small, plastic spines jutting out at all odd angles.
            “Jim,” I say a little louder.
            “Miranda,” my mother’s name, he says through the veil of sleep.
            “Tell me the story,” I say. “Of the final dreams of the last Comanche as he lay dying on the plain, the sheen of cactus salve against the scars of his pox, the smell of gunpowder in the air.”
“I know him,” Jim says.
“I know that when he is dead, he will tend to no war brides.”
Why did Jim contact me? Because he wants to die.
Why did I agree? Because I want to kill him.
And, I suppose, in some small way I feel sorry for him. And maybe, somewhere deeper, there is the lingering ember of something else— a buried longing complicated by time and the nostalgia for youth and young pain.
He says no more. Sleeps again. I pull the pins out, watching small trickles of blood make their way down his leg. I let the blood dry there, knowing he will never see it. I roll his jeans back down and crawl into bed next to him. I move all the way to the edge and try to make myself as small as possible.
 
I was thirteen when my mother brought Jim home. She worked the bars around the bay and I guess he’d stop in enough, tipped well enough, to garner some extra attention. He was handsome— a swarthy, sun-kissed boat captain running deep sea fishing tours on the Gulf outside Galveston.
            Eventually, he began staying with us more regularly. He was never particularly shy; always avuncular in the way he played his games. A slight of hand, a poke in the ribs, the thigh, a scarred knuckle against my crotch. When he swore he was drunk and lost his way in the hall, picking the wrong room, fondling the wrong breasts, did my mother suspect? I don’t know. I’m sure she had her designs. But his checks were ample and suddenly dinners became more extravagant— fresh seafood and Mexican beer.
            Lisa says, he’d sing, drunk, my mother laughing. On a night like this, I wish you’d give me a great big kiss.
 
At the diner, I eat a bleeding steak and two eggs with a cup of black coffee. Jim sips a nutritional shake through a straw. The trucker sits in a corner booth but makes no attempt to make eye contact though I stare at him mercilessly.
            “Take a picture,” Jim says, slurring.
            I fight the urge to tell him about the trucker.
            Instead, I say, “How many more stops?”
            “Show me the map,” he says.
            His fingers dangle helplessly as he traces our intended path. He wants to see a swimming hole he favored as a child, another place that holds some meaning in his fading memories. I pay the check with his credit card and we leave. I catch the trucker watching me and his cheeks turn a rosy pink. I wonder briefly if he feels any sort of regret, or if we will ever meet in this life again and I hope not.
             The swimming hole isn’t far, a quick pull down the highway and then some turns on dicey back roads. The Lincoln bumps and shudders over every pebble in the roadway. The red dust kicks up behind us. Jim tells me to slow down. The Lincoln kicks and swerves and I almost lose control. Jim moans in a low, guttural way but I regain the wheel and right the vehicle.  
            It’s an undertaking getting Jim down the path to the water. At times, I have to drag the wheelchair behind me. Sweat begins to form and soon I am wet with it. The wheelchair almost tips and I struggle to keep it steady. Jim alternately curses and keeps silent.
Eventually, we come to the water’s edge. It’s still, stagnant. Bugs dart across the surface and flies attack Jim’s face. He swats at them with his wrists. Despite the uninviting look of the water, I strip and dive in. Jim’s plea to cease is muffled by the time I’m under.
The water is tepid, the color of weak tea. I kick around for a while, practicing my strokes. I used to swim all the time, then the wreck, and then I didn’t swim as much.
There is desperation in the way Jim is cursing at me. He wants me out of the water, doesn’t want to watch me ruining this solemn moment. But I want him to watch me. I want him to see me. I let my breasts float above the surface of the water drying on my skin in the sun breaking through the thatch of canopy.
 
The first time, I could smell my mother’s perfume on his neck mingling with sweat and seawater, the musky tang of fish guts. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want it. But I didn’t struggle against it either. I didn’t fight him.
 He poured soda water over the stain on the sheet and sopped it up with his t-shirt. I remember his naked body, hard and browned, in my bedroom juxtaposed strangely against the posters of the pale, stringy teen heartthrobs plastered on the walls around him. How my collection of plastic schoolgirl dolls watched him from their perch on the shelf. How he plucked one from the shelf and gave it to me while I lay there in such pain. How he crawled into bed with me and told me stories of the Comanche, his father and his father’s people. 
Later, my mother coming home and the sound of their lovemaking in the adjacent room. Jealousy and betrayal and guilt.
This went on for some time. No joy was ever derived but a secret pride, and a secret shame, welled within me when girls at school would talk of their desires. My budding adolescent sexuality had already bloomed and then withered. By the time I was sixteen, boys knew my name, said it in their furious night rituals and tried to invoke me into their bedrooms.
Summer before college, my mother slipped from the deck of Jim’s boat. He claimed she was drunk, that he tried to save her, but couldn’t.
 
I stay still like this, floating, my body weightless in the water. I close my eyes. My hair dances against the mud and becomes tangled in the riverweeds. Somewhere, far away, Jim is on the bank and straining his voice.
I pull myself out by an old rope knotted up to a live oak. The bark of the tree imprints a welcomed aching against the pads of my feet.
I slip his shoes off, the odor overwhelming. From the bank to the water, the incline is steep, steeper than I’d anticipated, but I manage to push him close enough so that he can just get the tips of his toes in. The muscles in my arms feel tired and strained. It feels good. My grip on the handles slip and the chair gets away from me. I make a meek gesture to regain it but it’s too late. Jim’s small body makes a satisfying splash as he falls from the wheelchair and disappears into the coppery liquid. I watch the bubbles burst against the surface of the water. His bag pops up first, floating piss illuminated by a slice of golden sun.
For a moment, the world is still and silent. The tittering of birds ceases. The ringlets echoing from the spot Jim once was begin to fade.
What are you thinking now, Jim?
I am pushed aside and fall to the dirt, skinning the soft butt of my palm. Then Jim is out of the water, aided by a man, soaking wet. The man works on Jim for a moment, pressing his lips against Jim’s, pleading with him to stay alive. I plead silently along with him. This isn’t the way I pictured it, desired it. Not yet. Not here.
Before long, Jim is sputtering into the dirt. The man breathes in relief and then looks at me. He stands, dripping. Jim is laughing, howling. A boy, can’t be more than eight, holds a fishing pole and asks Jim if he’s all right. The wind is cold against my naked skin.
“You should keep your boy away from him,” I say.
“Not here,” Jim says.
“He’s a pedo, you know. Likes young ones.”
The man says nothing but pulls his son away as if we’re contagious. I admire the veins in his forearms, the arch of his back underneath his t-shirt turned translucent. The boy keeps his eyes on me as his father gathers their things. I don’t hide from him. They move further and further down the bank until they are out of sight.
 “Not here,” Jim says. “Not here.”
 
I dress wet and we leave the swimming hole clothes clinging to our skin.
            “This is it,” I say. “Just the house now.”
            Jim says nothing. I pull onto the shoulder, drape the map over his knees, feel the sharp, hard angles of the bones there.
            “Will you show me?”
            He puts a knuckle against the paper.
            Driving through Nazareth County. Me and Jim. Jim and me. Time and geography seem to have no correlation here. Miles seem to stretch on forever as if we are traversing the ever-shifting distance between Jim’s own memories. Night descends in seconds. Windows of vacant buildings like lidless eyes watching from the darkness. Elegies of violence written in the sad verse of half-lives on their pilgrimage toward a twenty-foot tall neon bible demanding redemption, crackling vibrant pinks and greens. A grocery store burns and billows thick black smoke as we pass. I can feel the heat through the window. The stillness of the night remains save for the flames licking the blue-black horizon.
            “The trucks won’t come,” Jim says. “There’s nobody to save.”
             “This country is a truncheon. It demands submission.”
            “No,” Jim says. “This country is a coin with the face scratched off. No telling how to use it if it could ever be used. Holds no currency. An object as useless as a button found in a pocket for a shirt you no longer own. Just here,” he says and points.
            I turn down a darkened road. No light save from what comes from the moon through the trees. The Lincoln begins to wheeze, the wheel shakes in my grip.
            “She’ll make it,” Jim says.
            “She has to,” I say.
            “I wrote the title over to you,” he says and gestures to the glove box. “With good care she’ll go on ten, maybe fifteen, more years.”
            “I don’t plan on keeping it,” I say. “They’ll crush her. I’ll ask them to. I don’t want her organs to live on in some other automobile.”
            Jim deflates in the passenger’s seat. I swell.
            We drive for what feels like a very long time, past dirt lots and dilapidated houses.
            “Everybody left,” Jim says, sounding surprised. “Nobody left.”
            “Nobody left but you.”
            “Everybody left but me.”
            “You’re just coming back.”
            “Not for long,” he says.
            “Not for long,” I say. 
The house is a skull on the expanse of dirt. A portion of the roof has caved and small, black figures quiver in the eaves. The smell of decaying wild things and dogs gone missing.
 
I wish I could say it ended when I left for college, that I never saw him again. But that wouldn’t be true. I’d go back to Galveston on the occasional holiday, leave a sprig of holly or a can of beer at the sun-faded memorial to my mother.
I’d see Jim at the same bar my mother once worked. He’d collided violently with his fifties. The booze made him fat and the sun marred his skin, flaps of cracked wrinkles around his joints and the back of his neck. I’d watch him watch the girls there, playing his games, a slight of hand, a poke in the ribs.
The bar and half the town were torn down by a hurricane. Sometime after, he started to ebb little by little and people would ask, “Have you heard what happened to Jim?”
 
“My father was full-blood Comanche,” Jim says in what was once a living room. His voice scratches at the back of his throat, echoing in some pockets of the house.
            “But not the type who held any romantic notions about his people,” I say.
            “No, not that type. But he got his slice of the plain.”
            “After pox had laid it to rest.”
            “I found him bleeding on the floor here once. Twice. Countless times. It wasn’t always like that but it was mostly like that.”
            “You’ve told me the stories.”
            “Let me tell you one more. The Comanche death dream. I want to hear it one last time.”
            “Soon, the time is coming for silence, Jim,” I say. “There will be no more stories.”
            “You know it. I’ve told it so many times. You could tell it to me by now,” and he croaks a laugh.
            “I said no,” my voice is louder than I expect. A few small bats stir in the slats of the ceiling.
            “Okay,” Jim says. “Then come on with the silence.”
            I tap a few of the pills into my palm and feed them to Jim, slipping them between his lips. I put the mouth of the bottle to his and help massage the cocktail down his throat. He finishes off the bottles. Both of them.
            I unbutton his jeans pull them around his ankles, exposing the wounds I’ve inflicted on his calves and shins but he doesn’t take notice. I hold his soft, unwashed organ in my hands, smelling sulfuric, and pull the tube from him. I begin to work my hands around him like I used to.
            “Lisa,” Jim says.
            “Not me. Say her name.”
            “Lisa,” he says again and I can hear the gasp of passion in his chest.
            “Say her name.”
            “Miranda,” he says.
He says my mother’s name and I let go, the doughy gnarl hanging sadly in the tangle of his coarse pubic hair.
            “I say it every night. But I don’t see her. I see you.”
            “You look just like her now. That’s all I see. You believe me. That I did all that I could. The water black and impenetrable. I couldn’t find her. It swallows me. That death.” He holds up his wrists to show me the damage.
            “Not enough,” I say. “Here’s where we end.”
            “Stay, Miranda, stay with me.”
            “Lisa,” I say but my voice doesn’t sound like my own. 
            And I leave. And I can hear him yelling, screaming my name, her name and the names of all those deities who’ve abandoned him. I see him one last time in the urine yellow light of the headlamps. Pale, ghostly, naked and alone.
            I drive back through Nazareth County. I can feel the tears streak down my face but I can’t reason why. I am removed from the action like I’m watching Lisa cry while she drives.
I return to our room, my room, at the Motor Quonset. The trucker sits in his chair; appearing as a doll I left behind on a shelf in my mother’s house.
            “Lisa?” he says.
            “No,” I say keeping my stride. “You must have me confused with somebody else.”