Touchback

In American football, a touchback is a ruling which is made and signaled by the referee when the ball crosses into or through the end zone not in control of the team which put it into play.

The weather hadn’t changed much. From year to year there were occasional droughts, lightning fires and some few and far between snowstorms which laid more than half a foot on the ground. People looked forward to gully washers not as floods but as cleansings and that had not changed over time. The flowers differed now and then, poppies one year and asters the next. Most of the dogs were pit-bulls and that was a significant change from a quarter century before when everyone had a hunting dog, usually a lab and they used them for their stated purpose to retrieve jack rabbit and whitetail deer, sometimes a few ducks. Darla called hers a Lavender Pit-bull because he had the purple tongue of a Labrador with a chest like a bull and symbolized something truly profound even if he wasn‘t a profound animal who did tricks or knew even a smidge of his own symbolic nature and breed. He came when called, sat when told to sit and looked like he knew how to shake hands but really he was just very, very tender and loving and his hand shakes were nearly constant when Darla was around. He‘d touch her hand incessantly and somehow, Darla knew he‘d die without her to wake up to or wait for at the end of a long day. If it weren’t for him, she’d just pack up and leave and be done with this old place, there was little left for her now, nothing to stick around for and hardly anyone had noticed her return in the first place, four years before. She kept to herself and held a part time job in a nursing home which barely paid the rent and left her just enough time to recover for the next shift and enough time to compose a poem or read a ridiculous best-selling romance. She discovered she didn’t have the gift to nurse people anymore but could maintain enough semblance of a nurse to do an adequate job. Luckily, Jake made enough over there to make up the difference between a full-time job that she hated and a part-time one that she merely disliked, but he was a stern accountant in financial matters, in all matters really. And he wanted her back, wanted her with him. That much she knew but could not bear the stress of having to explain the weight of her thoughts and her persistent inability to manage whatever it is that most people manage quite easily day to day.

She had married young and had disappeared with her Jake after a year of residence in the mining town where she was born and raised. He was roughly her age, lean, very handsome and the best salesman in the world, after Billie Mays of course. He’d proposed to her after a short courtship, six weeks to be exact, just after she got bailed out of jail and had her first abortion and she had accepted based on his pitch, “Life is a gamble and if it works great and if not, we get divorced, it‘s no big deal.” As he proposed he tapped a number 2 pencil on her hand. It wasn’t a flashy proposal but it made sense and there wasn’t anything to keep her around save for her ailing and aged parents for whom she had become a burden in more ways than one, the several dozen friends her age who hadn‘t made it out including the generous majority of those who‘d already started raising families by their senior year and the best job anyone could hope for would be assistant manager at the one convenience store or the Dairy Queen. She had no goals, not for marriage or an education really even though she could have finished with a scholarship to a state university but didn‘t because of the interference of it. She was usually the smartest girl in class if not the most attractive (or even close to it) and people liked to sit beside her to improve their grades and she knew this, accepted it as part of the deal called friendship.

Like every other girl in town, whether they knew it or not, the goal was simply to get out, to just get out and not look back. Make it up to Phoenix or Flagstaff maybe. Her best friend dreamed of becoming a dancer in Vegas, the kind who took their tops off and put on headdresses the size of small children or car fenders but she ended up never leaving even though all indicators said if anyone could do it, she could. Never come back or at least try not to, do everything in your power not to. And how impossible that always turns out to be. Although she was completely unaware of that motivation so lacking in motivations as she was as to hardly recognize one if she saw one, she dreamt long and hard of Marrakech and it likely figured into her agreement to marry a total stranger, a foreigner to boot although something told her she would never really make it there. Marrakech was a sacred thing, there in the rock song, it was a real place somewhere and it was there in the only Michener she’d ever read, The Drifters. She thought she knew all about it and it would suit her very well. She believed that Marrakech must be the final destination where everyone might hope to end up one day. There would be elephants there and what could be better than that! Lots of good drugs too and she’d wear tunics every day and lay around in the sun just staring out, not wanting for anything else. Her failure to tan wouldn’t matter, she’d be the only white girl there and a bit of an oddity but this wasn’t much of anything but an afterthought. It was the idea of Marrakech she wanted not the real thing and it certainly wasn‘t the idea of herself in Marrakech but instead just Marrakech itself. Afterall, people often run away to foreign lands when they really want to, why couldn’t she? It was akin to the love of her black velvet poster of a tiger which hung on her bedroom wall, a bit out of place in the old miner’s shack but a seriously enjoyable escape mechanism for a less than truly popular teenage girl born to middle aged parents smack in the middle of a cultural revolution that somehow had left her out for reasons quite inexplicable to anyone and especially to her, just not a real tiger.

Truth be told, the revolution was just outside her bedroom window and banging to get in. Which revolution gets there first though, that’s always the question and no doubt there were others like her in that border town where a person is as far away as someone can get from two places at once, la frontera. Things happen there in a kind of cultural silence on both sides of an imaginary line and in some cases, there are people who migrate to just such places to take advantage of exactly that sort of thinking and others who try to run as far away as possible and run into the exact same characters from which they ought to hide themselves. Of course, she had no idea of that then but certainly had learned through experience that her predicament now had as much to do with provincialism as it did chance or exploitation, as much to do with borders as it had to do with the lack of them. Destiny hadn’t occurred to her at fifteen, it was just a plaything used by much more sophisticated and deserving people to introduce simple young girls, Christian ones in particular to strange new delights and at bargain prices, no questions asked and such young girls are taught to be grateful for the chance to be considered somehow a part of the diffuse and elusive elite come to save them from such annoyingly poor circumstances. Michener may have been one such type of Pied Piper and like Sister Carrie in Dreiser, that girl is a concept that never outgrew the society in which it was born, if there was one which is to say, that agency of humankind seems utterly tireless and timeless and doesn‘t have an age, a frequency or a means for pinning it down to one cause or the other like television or drugs. It’s more about innocence, more about biology and less about the real forces that keep people together or drive them apart that can only be attributed to something like fate. They just don‘t teach many people though, not anymore, about the facts of the matter because it is too complex, somehow a part of religion and entirely too iffy.

She pulled up to the thrift store on Tuesday afternoon in the middle of August 2010 during one of several heat waves if you can call them that in the Sonora desert. A monsoon was preparing to dispense the afternoon rains again and inside of the shop, the nearly unbearable humidity was a serious threat to her hope of finding something interesting, something useful, something not too damaged to be ashamed of but not to new to be a source of guilt requiring a lengthy explanation to Jake. She liked old things anyway better than new ones that always had too many strings attached like having to throw them away in a hurry when you had to leave or sell them for a quarter of their real value, why not just give them away instead and Darla usually did but Jake didn‘t like that much. It had been an oddly beautiful day although she hadn’t really considered it as such until she opened the thrift shop door and walked in, then it became a necessary acknowledgement. Her senses had grown truly keen since her recovery, too keen and had even become a burden at times even if she was grateful to be done with the abstract principle of her old abuses, the cost of sobriety was sometimes too much to bear and she‘d hobble back to bed in the middle of the morning or when she was supposed to be doing the housework or even heading off to work.

Strange things kept happening that day beginning with a morning run-in with her homeless brother whom she hadn’t seen in over a year even though she heard about his affairs from this person or that one and he flitted about the town in broad daylight. Darla gave him a quick hug and motioned to Frank who was in the beat-up truck her brother had just hobbled out of in the gas station. He was looking like he was in the downward spiral instead of the less frequent upward one, the type that people described to her when she would ask, “How’d he look?” Frank had thrown away a lucrative career as an abstract painter who was showing at galleries in Europe in order to get back to what we were all used to and that was a love-of-your-life relationship with harmful chemicals, from airplane glue to liquid plumber. “We’re going to pick peaches in this old truck!” Frank said this as if we’d been visiting each other on a daily basis ever since the day he urinated on a house fire next to the elementary school when we were eleven years old and as if to say, if you want to come you are most welcome. No doubt my brother had been reminiscing about the old peaches and the old days when peaches meant something to us all and Frank thought it might be possible to strike up a friendship although I’d heard he’d come out of the closet the year before. It was pitiful to see him once again in such company but it was just as pitiful to see Frank in such company too. It was good at least to know that the two of them were alive and had some time to spend together picking or stealing peaches as the case may be. So many of us had already been interred at the town‘s only cemetery, death by overdose, heart failure and psirrhosis, from neglect and more importantly just plain old ignorance. She next ran into a patient she’d taken care of and filled her in on a few details of why she just happened to be in the court building that morning and how surprised they both were to run into each other so soon after the woman‘s discharge from the nursing facility and as if the meeting had been staged by someone other than Darla and the sickly older woman who would probably die from complications rather than from the cancer itself. She hooked her up with another acquaintance who worked there as if she was obligated to both of them, a woman she’d also run into unexpectedly a few minutes after the first one. She was also undergoing chemo and encouraged them to support one another in a follow the leader fashion, this way to your death or your survival sugar, here‘s how and only they can know how that‘s done Darla thought to herself but with a slight feeling of having intervened in other people‘s fate without an invitation.. She’d forgotten about the employee’s health when she quit her bureaucratic job the year before and felt miserable about that serious type of spiritual faux pas. This happened throughout the day, nearly imperceptible events and with each one Darla became conscious of that feeling again, the type in which two or three consecutive things of the same order occur one right after the other. By the time Darla noticed the third she always knew there was something to pay attention to, it was as if the omnipotent had a language of contact, knew how to reach her and that she would listen, maybe even take action if she had the psychic energy to do so.

As she stepped into the thrift store she noticed a slight woman sitting on a used couch that was covered in a natty gold brocade. She was wearing a giant wide-brimmed straw hat, just as she had worn so many years ago when Darla was first introduced to her while sitting on the concrete ledge just inside the Latent Image window. Her eyes were the size of golf balls, hyperthyroid she thought to herself, and colored all the way around in that habitual, deep charcoal liner and shadow that was her signature just like the blue mole she painted below her angular, fine and high cheekbones and meant to be a beauty mark and what a strange thing those are. The look was highly smudged like that of a drug addict on a binge and terrifically noticeable although it seemed she might have lightened it up just a bit or from the looks of her clothes, she was on a tight budget. There was no one in the world like her and it just had to be. It just had to be her with those lumps of coal and crystal blue gems embedded in the hollowed out sockets. The hat framed her pointed witch-like but eerily beautiful face and distributed a soft glow on it, disguising the thin lines above her lip and softening the effect nicely. She could be mistaken for a woman half her age which must be at least 65 by now, give or take a couple years. She had always been a vain woman or perhaps she liked to hide underneath the copious amounts of face paint and war pencil but for sure, she had not changed her style in all those years and could probably do herself up in absolute darkness and without a mirror with a bit of mud and a stick.

She looked up and caught Darla’s inquisitive look but looked down again and for a moment, Darla thought she might be mistaken. This happened to her all the time and was one of the reasons Darla seldom went anywhere except the post office and the thrift store, once a week to buy a gallon of milk, dog food and dog chews for the pooch and a frozen dinner for herself. She’d look at someone’s face and notice something and an entire volume of the story would burst into her head as if it were an uninvited solicitor or unpaid bill. It was a troubling feeling but somehow irresistible and kept trying to force her into telling itself to whomever would listen but the shame and anger it might ignite was just too hard to bear even though a quarter of a century separated her from it. It still hounded her if she was too bold and took too many chances like trying to paint kitchens. She reminded herself often of the anniversaries but as the years went by, she’d forget one on occasion until a week or two later. She’d startle and carry on with whatever task she was on that particular day albeit with a definite sense of melancholia, remorse or both. The feelings had improved a bit over time through self isolation and been replaced by new worries, by false successes and the never ending trauma of time as it delivers the constant barrage of normal life incidents and changes but it never really went away altogether. It just took longer and longer to get there and she entertained herself with the idea of a novel that included every moment of a person’s life and the fact that no one would ever be able to finish it. Why bother with it anymore and that would settle any notions she harbored about revealing the people she had known then, to themselves and in no uncertain terms. The result of such chronic suppression however took a high toll, almost high enough for Darla to consider checking herself in to a hospital on one occassion for a shot of Ativan or Valium and a pat on the back, come back-see you soon kind of thing. She knew people did that sometimes but for her, a hospital was just no place to go when you are feeling sick.

This took a heavy toll in other areas as well. She’d get a new job and work to become the best at what she did and end up quitting again at some imagined slight, this happened over and over and finally Jake accepted the fact that she just wasn’t quite right in the head. She started to paint the kitchen and by the time she got to replacing the last hinge on the last cabinet door, the freshly painted utility closet door was peeling again. She nearly broke her back fighting an incessant influx of weeds and planted a garden with her favorite Mexican gray squash, cherry tomatoes and German thyme and by the time the squash blooms burst, the deer attacked it all by night and left nothing but stubs and footprints. Nothing ever seemed to get completed, to come full circle or find itself a pleasant enough grave and fall right in. That in itself, the loss of a few beloved vegetables that she probably would never get around to eating, would throw her into a day-long battle with her obvious depression that she had come to accept as PTSD although she was confused as to which particular event was the cause of her anxious predicament. Was it that or this? Was it the war or the Louvres? Could it have been the wreck or was it the last job she had left? In any event, it didn’t matter, it was a result now, not a cause.