September 7, 2017
When the left rear tire on his 1989 VW camper blew in the desert just after 4:00 P.M., it felt to Pete Jardine like the first time he’d stopped since leaving New York five days before.
Five days? Six? Time had ceased to be a measurable line. Instead a series of snapshots that bloomed and faded. Silver mountains under a blue sky. A burned-out Texaco. A lake on which he’d watched a solitary cormorant preening itself, savagely. He had continued to function. He had eaten, gone to the bathroom, slept. But like a quiet automaton, a melancholy robot that had been given all the (insufficient) programming it was ever going to get. Somewhere back there on the road, he’d turned forty. When he thought of the digits, four and zero, they seemed the definitive notation of precisely where and what he was right now: an ordinarily betrayed American man, stranded in the middle of nowhere.
He got out of the VW, followed immediately by the dog, Pablo, a rangy mongrel the color of burned toast. He and Vicky had got him from the ASPCA shelter on Ninety-second Street six years ago, when love had been the central certainty and the world a bright arena designed solely for their own adventures. Pete hadn’t decided to bring him when he left New York. Pablo had just followed him out of the apartment and got into the van and Pete hadn’t had the capacity to turf him out. Hadn’t thought about it, even. In those moments, everything had happened in a dreamy, inevitable flow.
The desert afternoon simmered. Pete stretched, looked up at the blue-white sky. Sun-heat fitted the back of his head like a skullcap. He set Pablo’s bowl down and half filled it with water from the plastic bottle. He didn’t know if he was in Nevada or California. He’d kept off the interstates. Lonely blacktop and small towns he’d never heard of. He’d begun with the clear thought of driving to the Pacific. Don’t think about anything until you get to the Pacific. Everything could be postponed until he stood with his bare feet in the cooling surf. But now that he was within reach of it he didn’t feel ready. Maybe he would head north for a while, if only for the milder weather. The Pacific went all the way up to Canada, after all.
He went to look at the tire. It was a write-off. The thought of changing it gave him some pleasure. It would provide him with meaningful action for the first time since New York. Manual labor. There was honor in it. He opened the trunk and took out the jack and lug wrench. Pablo, tongue lolling like a little pink scroll, went mooching off into the scrub.
Vicky’s face from that last afternoon. It had happened in the way these things happen, courtesy of simple cause and effect. He had come home from work just after midday with the beginning of a migraine. It was a Friday. Vicky was supposed to be having lunch with her friend Nadine. As soon as Pete entered the apartment he knew it wasn’t empty. There was a reflex flurry of panic when he thought: Someone’s broken in—but his body had barely tensed (he’d felt his scalp tighten at the thought of a burglar, a man he’d have to confront, fight) when he heard Vicky in the bedroom. And in that moment he had known not only what was happening but that everything for quite a long time had been leading him to it.
The desert around him was bone-pale. The lug wrench was already hot in his sweating hands. Fix this and pull off at the next town. Drink an ice-cold beer. Eat a refrigerated ham sandwich. The last few days had returned him to simple needs and impulses. It was a quiet, blissful madness to have left his life behind him—but he knew it couldn’t last. It made him sad to think of going back. Doubly sad, given the smallness of what had happened. Next to the world’s genocides and famines it was nothing. At the time he had thought it was unbearable. But the word “unbearable” made a liar of you if you didn’t kill yourself. And he hadn’t. Wasn’t going to. The death of another middle-class marriage was nothing—yet his reaction to it had felt like the most natural thing he’d ever done. As natural, in fact, as getting married in the first place.
He and Vicky had met at a party six years ago. Vicky had arty energy and ambition and petite bitchy blond good looks, but not enough talent for any of it to come to anything. There were unfinished novels. Acting classes. Poetry slams. A year singing in a band that never played anything but bars. Whereas Pete had graduated NYU film school in ’98 knowing that he didn’t have what it took to be a filmmaker, and had instead gone to work in his uncle’s interior design company, where, as of four years ago, he’d become a partner. Vicky didn’t mind the money, but after a while she dropped the pretense of having a creative career of her own. Then it was just the dangerous energy and petite bitchy blond good looks. As a couple they understood what they had: Pete was the steady force keeping Vicky—just—from going off the rails. It was a joke between them, that he was reliable, romantic, conservative. It was what she loved in him, his tender sanity.
Somewhere along the line, Pete had understood that she had decided to love his tender sanity because she feared how much she would hate him for it if she didn’t. He loved her, on the other hand, without inversion or compromise. The only fracture was his suspicion that he wasn’t enough for her. In spite of her artistic failures she was hungrier than him, riskier, more imaginative and more violently alive. Worse, it became apparent to him after the first flush of mutual adoration that he wasn’t entirely floating her boat in the sack. There was a yearning impatience in her when they had sex, as if she were confined to a space too small for her. She often, post-coitally, picked a fight with him. (A lousy reversal of make-up sex, in fact.) Without asking, he knew she’d had better lovers before him. He wasn’t rough with her, for one thing. They’d worked their way through a little bondage and spanking at her insistence, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it. Again, it had been made into an affectionate joke, what a gentle guy he was. But the yearning impatience in her remained, sometimes became outright anger. The last couple of years, their evenings had featured stretches of uneasy silence, intolerable if not for Netflix. They saw more of their friends, separately. Sunday mornings, which had formerly been filled with lazy potential—brunch, cocktails, the Times, sex—became the week’s dreaded low point.
And yet there was still love. There was still, from time to time, sex. They didn’t have the arguments. It was worse: They didn’t bother having the arguments. They were like a couple standing on a damp lawn at night watching, sadly, as their house burned to the ground.
Which was why, when he pushed open their bedroom door that afternoon five or six or ten days ago to find Vicky facing him, naked on all fours, getting pounded in the ass by a muscular guy with Celtic tattoos on his forearms and his hands wrapped in her short blond hair, Pete’s overwhelming feeling was one of sad recognition, as if he was seeing the obvious punch line to a bad, long-winded joke. There was even (he thought now, unscrewing the last lug nut) a feeling of wretched relief.
He hadn’t said a word. Vicky had looked up at him with cat eyes full of ecstasy and heartbreak. The guy fucking her had his eyes scrunched shut, as if performing a feat of tremendous concentration. Absurdly, he didn’t see Pete the whole time. Pablo walked out of the study and joined Pete in the hallway. Pete watched for a moment, felt his entire life deflate, then turned and walked out of the apartment. Pablo followed him. Pete had got into the VW, started the engine, and begun driving. The Pacific was a blue promise on his mind’s horizon. He would get there and wade in up to his shins. Until he’d done that, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
All four lug nuts were off. He eased the wheel from the threaded bolts. Somewhere in the scrub the dog was barking. It sounded quite a way off. Pete straightened. “Pablo!” he called. “Pablo?”
More barking.
“Pablo! Here, boy. Pablo, come on.”
Silence. Then more barking. It sounded, incredibly, like there was more than one dog. Someone camping out here? Pablo wasn’t the friendliest canine when it came to other dogs. Pete sighed. The heat and the work with the wheel had brought out a sweat. He squinted in the direction the dog had gone.
“Pablo?”
Nothing. Low stunted dry bushes obscured his view. The air in the distance rippled. He locked the van. Deal with the spare when you’ve found the dog. Urban reflex made him check his phone. No reception. He took the lug wrench with him, though he didn’t quite know why.
In the heat it felt like a long time before he heard the dogs again. He looked back toward the road. The white roof of the VW was visible, but it was farther than he’d imagined.
“Pablo?”
Growls and the sound of scuffling, off to his left. Maybe fifty meters. Then snarls—and a yelp of pain.
“Pablo!”
Pete started to run.
The dog was bent low, hackles up, facing off two coyotes over a dark patch of dug-up earth. There was blood on his muzzle. More blood on his flank.
Pete didn’t think. For a moment absolutely everything left him except fear of the coyotes and fear for his dog.
Blank, surrendered wholly to an instinct he didn’t know he possessed, he screamed and charged the coyotes, flailing with the wrench.
The animals turned tail and fled.
Pablo got, trembling, to his feet and limped to his owner,
“Jesus, Pab … Hold on, let me take a look. Easy. Easy, boy.”
The wound in the flank wasn’t deep, but the left foreleg was gashed to the bone. Pete stuffed the lug wrench into the back of his jeans and picked the dog up. Pablo was oven hot, panting.
Quick with the spare wheel. Vet. Shots. Fuck. Rabies?
Pete was trembling himself. Adrenaline in this heat. His arms felt weak and light. He was drenched in sweat. The afternoon silence was a kind of noise.
He glanced down into the earth the animals had dug.
Even with the adrenaline flowing he wasn’t prepared for what he saw.