They don’t have what I need at the gas station. They have tampons, but I need pads, with wings. I’m not being picky, it’s a matter of life and death according to Mom. If I use a tampon, I’ll die from toxic shock. My body is a compromised system. A two-inch wad of cotton and string can kill me. Everything can kill me.

I pay for the gas. I have my sweatshirt tied around my waist to disguise my lumpy crotch. I’ve replaced the sock with paper towels: Absorbent? Check. Comfortable? So not.

Odd is leaning against the bumper scratching his cheeks. Whiskers itch, I guess. My problem is bigger than his.

“I need to go to real store, Odd. Like a grocery store or drugstore.”

“We could use some real food,” says Odd.

“That’s right, food and stuff,” I say.

“Alrighty then,” says Odd.

 

Odd is pushing a shopping cart. I think we could have made do with a little plastic basket, but he’s pushing a shopping cart. If I were on my own with a basket, I could just turn away and hide if another customer comes our direction. I could be stealthy and this shopping trip could be over so fast. But I’m with Odd, and he’s steering a cart down the narrow aisles making squealing-tire noises when he turns a corner. I wish we could just go our separate ways, but I’m the one who’s paying. He picks up a watermelon and starts thumping his knuckles against it. What’s he thinking?

“No watermelon, Odd. We can’t eat a watermelon in the car. You can have bananas or oranges . . . no juggling the food . . . we could get stuff for sandwiches . . . that’s a lot of pop . . . I don’t think we need that much . . . you shouldn’t eat Lucky Charms every day . . . I need something . . . here, you just wait here . . .” But he doesn’t wait. He trails along behind me with the cart right to the feminine hygiene products.

“Alrighty then. That explains the bearanoia,” says Odd. He picks up a bale of super-extra-long-overnightpads-with-wings.

“Put that down,” I say.

“It’s OK, Polly. I go to the store for my mom all the time,” he says and flips it into the cart.

“That’s not what I use.”

“What do you use?”

“Just shut up for a minute and let me find it.”

“Hey,” Odd yells at a butcher putting packages of steaks out in the meat cooler, “We need some help . . .” The butcher turns around and comes over. “She needs . . . What is it you need, Polly?”

“Look, I’m sorry we bothered you. Everything is under control.” I toss a box into the cart. It isn’t my brand. Tough shit. Will it kill me? Maybe not. But the humiliation is a sure thing.

At the checkout while I’m sliding my card through to pay, Odd says to the cashier and the bag boy, “She gets really cranky when she’s on her period . . .”

I want to tell him he can’t have his Lucky Charms, but I’ve already paid for them. The bag boy is putting them in the sack.

 

“Why do you have to act like that, Odd?”

“What?” He’s feigning clueless.

“Like that, in the store, like a jerk.”

“I was trying to be helpful. And friendly. You’re not friendly, Polly. You never smile at anybody.”

 

“Ever been to Elkhorn, Polly? Ever visited a ghost town?”

“I’ve been to Virginia City.”

“Pfft. That’s Disneyfied. Nobody sells ice cream in a real ghost town. Ever visit a real ghost town? Ghost town cemeteries are the best. You gotta see a real ghost town cemetery. And I’m gonna fix you up.”

“Is it far?”

“Naw. It’s just on the way,” says Odd. He doesn’t say on the way to what. I don’t ask.

 

There are fish in Hebgen Lake, but they are safe from us, even the gulpers that will rise for almost anything. We are driving by on our way to a ghost town without ice cream.

“. . . suspected pirate mothership near the Seychelles. There have been seven hundred twenty-six incidents of piracy since January 1, a marked increase in activity despite active multinational suppression efforts,” says the radio.

“Hey, Polly, we could be pirates! Think about it. Like old-school pirates. We got the qualifications,” he says, and then reaches down and knocks on his robot leg. He’s got a point. We might have to get a parrot, and I’d have to start wearing my eye-patch, even though it is uncomfortable, since that is part of the uniform. And I’m skinny enough to be a pirate, at least the ones that show up lately on the TV news.

Pirates makes as much sense as rock stars. Maybe more.

“We’d need a boat,” says Odd, “But hey! We can just steal one! That’s what pirates do, they steal boats.”

A truck passes us towing a green drift boat. It’s got smiling, up-turned curves—the better to scoop me up and deliver me to the river of happiness. It would be fine to fish from a boat like that. A boat like that could make a person turn pirate.

“. . . released by the Russians after seizing a Russian oil tanker are presumed dead. The pirates’ small vessel had been stripped of all weaponry and navigational equipment before they were set adrift,” says the radio.

“Alrighty then, not pirates,” says Odd.

“We could fish anywhere along here,” I say.

“We’re going to Elkhorn,” says Odd.

“Can we fish there?”

“Like you just said, we can fish anywhere,” says Odd, and he just keeps driving past the channels of the Madison River. People come from halfway around the world to fish here, but us? We can fish anywhere, so we just blow right by.

 

I send my dad a message, “Madison now its all good.”

I delete thirty-seven messages from my mom.

 

“So Odd is a family name, huh? I heard you say Grandpa Odd last night. Is it short for something? Because, you know, it’s a bit odd,” I say.

“Har-dee-fucking-har,” says Odd, “Is your name short for Polyester? Polyhedron, maybe?”

“It’s just Polly,” I’m a little ashamed of myself. Odd’s probably been putting up with crap about his name his whole life. It made me cry when the other kids called me Pollywog on the playground, but Odd has to be a lot worse.

“Odd is a real common name in Norway,” says Odd.

He doesn’t say another thing to me until we stop for gas, then all he does is ask for the toilet key so he can use it while I pay for the fill-up. The key is attached to a long chunk of broom handle with the words “PEE KEY” written on it. I hand it off to him like a baton in a relay race. When we get back onto the interstate, he rolls down his window and reaches down by his feet. He’s still got the pee key. He chucks it out the window.

I just shut my eye and shut my mouth. There is no point in asking him why he needs to be such a jerk. He probably didn’t even use that pee key. He probably just wants the whole world to start peeing all over stuff like pack rats. I don’t say anything. And he doesn’t say anything, right back.

 

When he finally does talk, it comes out of nowhere.

“Gramma Dot, I lived with her when I was little. My mom tried to kill herself back then. She would have done it, too, but she didn’t want to make a mess so she was fiddling around getting everything ready. Gramma Dot just dropped by unexpected and tumbled to the situation. They put my mom in treatment, and after that, Gramma Dot, she took care of me. It was better for everybody.”

I don’t know how to talk back to that. We don’t do crazy in my family. Not like that. Odd comes from crazy people. I look at him. There’s nothing to see. But now I know his head is full of snakes, all crowded in there and biting each other. It’s been going on so long they are immune to poison. Not to pain.

“I’d take care of her, Polly. If they’d let me.”

 

Elkhorn the ghost town is less dead than I expected. There are trucks and four-wheelers parked around. Someone has hung out laundry. A thin track of smoke rises from the stovepipe on another cabin.

“See that?” says Odd, and he points to a grey, weathered building with a balcony staring out over the town. No Juliet is up there waiting for Romeo. No paranoid lawman with a gun has a rifle waiting for the bad guys. It’s a ghost town. Romeo and Juliet are both dead. Lawman? Dead. Bad guys? Also dead.

“Right there, in that building, a guy shot another guy at a dance. They had a little disagreement about whether the band should play a polka or a waltz. That’s what my Gramma Dot told me. But come on, I want to show you the coolest thing.”

Really? There is something cooler than laundry, four-wheelers, and Gramma Dot’s tales of getting shot for waltzing?

 

The coolest thing is the graveyard. We are using Odd’s definition of cool, which includes tombstones with little lambs kneeling on the top to make sure we know there are children buried in that dirt. One of the graves has a full-size tree growing right up through the middle of it. Some of them have fences around them. The dates on the ones I can read say 1889 mostly. Must have been an epidemic, or a school burned down, or some other screwed-up tragedy. Been there. Seen that, the latest version.

Odd is going from grave to grave like an optimistic dog that thinks there might still be a useful bone in one of them. Then he stops, unzips his fly and pees all over a grave.

“Odd! Stop that!” I yell, but it’s too late. He just shrugs and zips up his pants.

“This would be an interesting place to die,” says Odd.

I look around at the dark trees creeping up on the cemetery and the old graves smothered with purple-flowering knapweed. There’s not a cloud in the sky, but there is a jet trail. The wind has blown it into fragments that look like chromosomes. The wind will keep blowing and the trace of the jet will be nothing. The people on that plane are hundreds of miles away already, I figure. They are thinking about wherever the fuck they are going— Minneapolis or some military base, who knows? I look at the dirt again. At the graves and the sagebrush. This place isn’t that interesting right now, and I’m alive. I can’t imagine being dead would make it better. Odd and me, we disagree on the definition of interesting, too.

“We could be ghosts in a ghost town.”

Then Odd reaches into the messenger bag he has slung over his shoulder. I imagine he’s thirsty or needs to medicate himself, but instead of the aluminum flask or the prescription baggie, he pulls out a gun. The barrel has a dull shine, like a black snake. I can smell the gun oil. The only sound is a squirrel bitching.

“What will it be, Polly? Polka or waltz.”

“I can polka.” I don’t say that I doubt he can.

Odd says nothing. Then he lifts the gun and points. Not at me. Not this time. He points to my left and a little high. KRAAAK!

There isn’t even much of an echo.

“Missed,” says Odd.

Missed what? I have no fucking idea what might have been worth obliterating. None at all.

 

Odd’s crazy, and he has a gun.

Once a gun is in the game, everything changes.

He walks behind me down the trail, down the hill. I could run, probably, but I can’t run faster than a bullet.

I can feel him at my back like a weight, like a mountain lion a deer never sees until it drops and reaches around to choke out the air and ride out the puny struggle. I can hear his steps, the little difference between the true foot and the fake one. I feel the pine needles and little rocks underfoot and I wish he would slip. I’m listening for that moment—the moment when he slides a little and he has to catch himself. That is the moment when I will run.

But we get to the car, and I’m still waiting for that moment. I open the door and get in. I stare straight ahead. I can hear Odd open the door. I hear the locks click shut. My hand is still on the handle, but I don’t know if the automatic lock will keep it shut if I try to get out.

“Put your seat belt on,” says Odd. Then he turns the key.

 

We pull off the main road onto a track between the trees. Maybe somebody pulled some logs out of here with a skidder. Maybe somebody used this place for a kegger. Whatever. The Cadillac drags itself along, its elegant belly in the dirt, thumping on rocks or roots.

When Odd lets the car stop, we aren’t far off the road, but we are invisible. Not that there is any traffic to see us in the first place.

“Here we go,” says Odd, “Perfect.”

Perfect for what?

Perfect for crazy.

 

You build the fire this time, Polly,” says Odd. Then he sits down on a deadfall log and takes off his leg. He looks tired. Tired and crazy.

I start scraping off a bare place to build a fire.

“There’s no water here, Odd. What if the fire gets away from us?”

“It ain’t gonna get away if you pay attention. Just do it right, Polly. The fire won’t get away.”

I imagine my bones, some of my bones, left behind after the fire. I imagine somebody poking at my falling-apart ribs and finding the melted slug that ripped through my heart. I imagine the back of Odd’s skull all blown out from where he put the gun in his mouth. And there in the imaginary ashes is the gun—and the robot leg. And that’s all that’s left.

“Ass in gear, Polly. We need that fire.”

The air around me is still and hot. The sun won’t be gone for an hour. I start picking up branches that shattered off the deadfall.

It’s just like T-ball. Everyone can play. Even I can play. Odd’s head is the ball. The bat? The bat?

These pine branches are great firewood, tinder-dry and brittle, even the big ones. There is no strength left in them. They are that dead. They are no use to me.

The bat . . . is his robot leg. I don’t need to hit a homer. Just try, Polly. Just hit the ball and run.

I move as fast as I can. It’s not as heavy as I hoped but there’s nothing else right now. Grip and swing. It’s good enough. It’s a good enough hit. I just let go and the robot leg flies off into the bushes. Be careful with the bat Polly, you might hit someone if you just let it go. I did. I did hit someone. That was the plan. Now run, Polly, run, run.

But I trip and fall hard on my stomach in the dirt.

No I didn’t trip.

It’s Odd. He’s got my ankle, my leg; he’s crawling up my body.

I hit him hard but not hard enough.

I scratch for something to fight with. Pine needles, dirt . . . nothing, nothing. I twist over so I can fight back. Now he has a hand over my mouth and both of my wrists tight in the other. So I pull my knee up hard. It doesn’t put an end to anything, but his hand slips a little and I buck my forehead into his face.

Scrambling knees, hands, on my feet, by the car.

The door is locked. Back door locked. Other side locked. Locked.

Then I hear Odd. He’s sitting with his leg and his stump splayed out in front of him toddler-fashion. He has the keys and he’s shaking them over his head. He’s laughing. It’s not an evil laugh. It’s just a gut-busting, funniest-thing-in-the-world laugh. He puts his hand up to his nose and wipes at the blood.

“Shit,” he says, “Shit. Suck me sideways, Pollywog.”

OK. So that happened.

I’m leaning against D’Elegance and I’m breathing ragged, but I can feel the adrenaline dropping . . . dropping. I rest my head on the car. I just don’t have the energy to do anything else.

“So,” says Odd, “Let’s heat up them beans and eat nachos.” He wings the keys at me.

I grope at space and I miss them. “Dumbass!” I yell, after I hear the keys land. Somewhere there, in the pine needles and the dust, are the keys. And until I find them we can’t open the trunk and pull out the can of refrieds and the bag of chips.

Until I find the fucking keys, we go hungry.

“You are such a dick.”

“Bitch,” says Odd, in a cheerful sort of way, and he crawls back onto the log by the fire. “And get my leg out the brush when you got a chance.”

 

“You should probably carry this,” Odd says, handing me the gun. “Things can happen to girls. You might need it.”

“Need it for what?”

“Bears, rapers, serial killers, drunk squirrels that want to make a nest on your head . . .”

I reach out and take it, not because I’m afraid of bears or serial killers. I take it because Odd shouldn’t have it. It’s top-heavy in my hand. The weight is in the barrel, not in the plastic grip and clip hiding inside. I pop the clip. I check the chamber. Unloading a gun is a thing my dad thought a girl should be able to do. He taught me to do that before he taught me how to aim.

“It isn’t going to be much use if it isn’t loaded,” says Odd.

That’s the point, I think, but I don’t say it.

 

“Maybe when you get home, you and your mom can have a shoot-out. I bet that woman can fire a rifle from the hip.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your mom. She’s fierce. And she’s still pretty hot. I’d hit that.”

“Stop! Shut up! Shutupshutupshutup!”

“I didn’t say I was gonna try. Just that, you know . . .”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. People don’t talk like that about moms.”

“I’m sorry Polly. I just meant nobody should be able to make you do nothing you don’t want to. Not even your mom.”

 

“To Gramma Dot and Meriwether Lewis,” says Odd.

“To your Grandma Dot and Meriwether Lewis,” I say. When I hand the red aluminum flask back to Odd, I ask, “Why only Lewis? Why not Clark too?”

“Because Lewis kept his shit together for the whole trip, and then he blew his brains out. He probably wanted to do it the whole time, but he didn’t. Gotta respect that.”

It isn’t nice to ask, So how do you feel about your suicidal mom, then? but I think it. And Odd must know what I’m thinking, because he answers.

“She had the post-parting depression, my mom.”

“Post-partum?”

“Yeah, that. Buck says she was going to kill me first because I gave it to her. He says that was the plan.”

“That’s not the way post-partum depression works, Odd. You know that? Buck got it wrong. He was just a kid when it happened. He was probably scared and confused.”

“He mighta been, back then—but not when he said it. He was in high school. He was an adult. I was six. It was right after everybody decided that mom was better and it was time for me to be part of the family again. I was crying because I didn’t want to stop living with Gramma Dot. That’s when he told me I was only alive on accident.”

Odd gives a twitchy shrug and takes another pull off the flask. “To Meriwether Lewis,” he says, then he hands the flask to me. I take a drink, but I don’t say anything.

I make sure Odd gets drunker than I do, and then, when he lurches off to pee, I pull my wadded up, bloody socks out of the pocket of my shorts. I shove the gun into one sock and the ammunition in another. Then I shake out my sleeping bag and drop the whole mess in there. There might be better hiding places, but it’s good for now.

 

I’m ready for sleep before Odd is done drinking and poking at the fire with a stick. So I get my sleeping bag and go to D’Elegance. “Welcome home,” says D’Elegance, “You can make a little nest on the lap of my back seat. You can pet my velvety cushions. Welcome home.”

 

Welcome home.

The thing about home is that it ought to be a place you remember, but I never saw this room before. My mom was busy here while I was making great strides to recovery in the hospital. My mess, my stuff, is all gone. She painted everything she couldn’t replace and replaced everything she couldn’t paint. I mean everything. The light switch is new.

It’s very clean and serene. Pale lemon, pale honeysuckle, pale pale.

All the stuff I had taped to the walls is gone. It was mostly things the kids at Kid-O-Korral gave me. Blue-painted macaroni whale? Gone. Smeary finger-paint pumpkin? Gone. It wasn’t like I was attached to that stuff. I just didn’t know what to do with it. Throwing it away didn’t feel right. Those things were gifts. At least the little kids thought they were gifts. So I taped them up on my walls. And the valentine heart Bridger made me last year out of a Wendy’s receipt when he remembered he’d forgotten it was Valentine’s Day? “True LOVE forever”? That’s gone too.

The mix of makeup and pens and hair ties on my dresser is gone. Actually, my dresser, the one I had since I was eight, is gone. This one is new. The drawers are bigger, but I don’t know what’s in them. Maybe my clothes, but maybe not. How far did she go cleaning house? Far enough to find the Altoid tin with condoms in it?

She is determined that the MRSA isn’t ever going to get me again. Thing is, I’ve got it. I will always have the MRSA. It is too late for hand sanitizer. It is too late to kill 99.99 percent of germs.

“Mom. It’s beautiful. Thank you.” We hug. “But I’m tired. Can I just rest for a while?”

“Oh, baby, sure baby. Do you want me to help you change into some PJs?”

“I just want to lie down.”

“OK, baby, OK.”

I curl up on my new bed and stare at the wall. I stare at the new art that’s there to replace the macaroni whale and true love forever.

I guess it’s very serene and spa-like, that art. It’s a study in soft folds and muted pastels.

Oh, shit, it’s my Blankie. Mom found my Blankie— and she framed it.

My Blankie. I learned to call it my “transitory comfort object” in psychology class. I learned that the little guys at the Kid-O-Korral needed to get weaned away from the ragged blankets, the stuffed bears, the things they liked to touch, to suck, to smell. “Your cozy will be safe in the cubby. You’re a big girl now.” It was a step toward healthy independence. The whole time I was doing that to the little kids, Blankie was in my pillowcase on my bed at home.

And now Blankie is on display in a shadowbox frame, draped carefully to hide the corner I sucked until it was nothing but a raggedy fringe. Poor Blankie, pinned up in there like a big flannel moth. Poor me, if I need some transitory comfort.

In case of emergency, break glass.

 

Breakfast is graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate. S’mores are too much trouble.

“Do you control your impulses, Polly?”

“What? What impulses?”

“Impulses. All of them. Pick an impulse. Do you like, use the three-question technique or something?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“The three-question technique. One: if I do or say this, how will it work out for me? Two: if I do or say this how will it work out for others? Three: if I do or say this, will I be following the rules? Those are the questions. They are supposed to lead to better decisions. So I wonder, Polly, is that how you decide what to do?”

“I do what’s right, Odd, if that’s what you mean. I know the difference between right and wrong, and I do what’s right.”

“Well, I was just asking, because it seems to me that you make some pretty strange choices in the impulse-control department,” says Odd, and he touches the place where I clobbered him with his leg. “Maybe you could use the three-question technique, too. Just sayin’.”

“And be more like you? That’s great.”

“Yeah. It is,” says Odd. He is smiling, and the morning light melts all over him like butter.

 

“We got a choice this morning, Polly. We can go home, or we can go to Portland and tear Bridger a new one. I’m thinking Portland.”

“What do you have against Bridger?” I ask.

“Me? Nothing personal. But you’re my friend, Polly, and he treated you like shit.”

I don’t know if I’d call Odd my friend, but Bridger did treat me like shit.

“Portland,” I say. Easy as that, I’ve got a new plan. I’m going to Portland and tear Bridger Morgan a new one, that crap hound.