Writing Exercise 1--Kate Hove

Harley planned to go back to his wife the day after Christmas, the day after drinking too much in the airport bar as he talked about elk season with the men from the Dakotas. It was somewhat anticlimactic, he knew, arriving after the festivities of the holiday were over, but it was the way things had to be done, and she would be happy for it in the long run. This is what he told the bartender—a small and elderly Asian woman with fuchsia colored lipstick that looked as if it would never come off—after the men from the Dakotas had left. She smiled when he said this, and agreed that “yes, that is how it must be done,” and then moved down the bar, wiping off the countertop with a white and blue rag, keeping busy as she tended to do. Harley was a large man and wore a camouflage ball cap and blue jeans that were tight enough to seem uncomfortable. He drank beer, translucent and flaxen, from a bottle— four before the young woman with the turquoise jewelry and long, black hair walked in and sat next at a table behind him. She did not perceive herself as eavesdropping, but acknowledged that airports are such—lonely and crowded—that it’s impossible to avoid overhearing others’ conversations. She heard Harley talk to the elderly couple at his left about the cattle he just moved out of the pasture because of the cold, and then he heard a small man with a large, swollen nose enter the conversation to ask if Harley was originally from where he currently lived, which was Casper, and Harley said no, that he was originally from California, born and raised, but hadn’t lived there in years. The small man sneered and proclaimed that that was the newfound problem with the West—it was becoming the new Florida for anybody with a lot of money, which mainly seemed to be Texans and Californians. Harley smiled with reticence and took a pull from his golden beer and then asked the elderly woman if he could buy her a drink, too, as he was ordering one for himself, and he then proclaimed that there was nothing wrong with having money and winked at the woman’s husband. The young woman listened to this as she feigned interest in a magazine, amused at the possibility of a dispute between the men. Then, when they did not fulfill this potential, and when she had exhausted her magazine, she ventured from the airport bar where she would sit and sleep in the waiting room for the next five hours. In the bar Harley would drink so much that later, waiting for the next leg of his flight out of the northland, he fell asleep in the oversized recliner reserved for first class flyers that had a mechanized back massager if you inserted a dollar worth of coins. He was jolted by a ticketing agent, whose voice he’d slept through even as she announced, one by one over the loudspeaker, each zone as it was allowed to board. He had been breathing heavily, perhaps even snoring, he thought, as he collected himself and boarded the plane. He spotted the young woman in the seat he was meant to sit in; he had reserved it, with intention, so he could be situated near the center aisle. She was looking at, rather than reading, her magazine again, and Harley had to clear his throat to beckon her attention. After addressing the situation—Harley relinquished his seat to her, flirtatiously—they began casual conversation. Harley worked in the oil fields on the North Slope for two weeks out of the month. The other two were his to use as he liked, although time after time he used them to return to his family. He asked the young woman about her family and she told him that her father had long been passed and since that time she hadn’t heard from her mother. Her father had been a truck driver; he drove a Peterbilt for a living, and had cherished it so much that incessantly he spoke of being buried in it when he died, and when he did, indeed, die, after a bout with emphysema left him incapacitated by his standards, it was because he shot himself in the head in the cab of the truck. The young woman had found him sitting in the driver’s seat, clutching the wheel, his eyes half open, his mouth half smiling, and a bullet hole that seemed to have hollowed out his entire head. Her mother left after three weeks—days and nights—of crying, and the last the young woman had seen of her was through the window in the front hall window as she loaded her suitcases into the back of the family station wagon. There in the driveway her mother looked emaciated from her tears, but the damp heat brought by the methodic summer storm still managed to dampen her body, and her gingham dress clung to her as she fell into the driver’s seat and drove slowly off, not looking back. The young woman was too frozen by exasperation to do anything; it was as if her mother had become so overburdened with grief in the past weeks that she had forgotten all else, including her own well being and her daughter’s, and the young woman, on the verge of turning seventeen, was suddenly alone, and in some sense, free. She wasn’t left with much—the house was on a mortgage and her father’s Peterbilt had blood stains and a bullet hole and tufts of hair stuck to the seat that made its value decrease. She left on the third night of her newfound isolation. She knew some Hispanic boys on the other side of town that drove motorcycles and would likely take her anywhere she pleased, and it so happened that when she stepped off the bus at their neighborhood and found them on the front stoop of Jim Salazar’s house, they were planning a trip north to the bike festival that weekend. They were only staying a few days, and if she decided to go she’d have to pack minimally, but they were happy to have an extra person with whom they could share fuel costs, and although they didn’t mention it, they wouldn’t mind at all if the young woman stayed in one of the rooms they had reserved. In time, that’s how the young woman became a housekeeper at the resort—she arrived with the Hispanic boys that weekend—her body vibrating from the pulsation of the bike, to streets full of people and single men and jukeboxes and country western bands in town for the weekend from Lubbock, and she decided she’d like to stay forever. The girl she was assigned to clean rooms with was from further south, and the young woman was quick to lap up any wisdom she had to offer: don’t make friends with any of the girls too fast, take as many of the travel-sized bottles of shampoo and lotion as she wanted (they didn’t get paid enough to spend money on things they could so easily come by, and they wouldn’t be missed), and never drink the Don’t Mess with Texas martinis at the bar. The men there were sweet enough; they liked to have a good time, and they kept an eye on the young woman when crowds of visitors came to town. Men who had lived there forever had names like José and Martín and to the young woman’s pleasure, they were wild. The young woman didn’t share all this with the roughneck, but thought about it in the time span of her mental thoughts in which everything seems to happen so fast. “So you lived in New Mexico? I don’t know how you lived so close to all those Mexicans. You’re not…Mexican, are you?” Suddenly the roughneck feared he’d made a mistake. Marcy smiled with graciousness and shook her head. “It’s just that everything’s got to be so difficult now. Spanish this, Spanish that. Se habla Espanol. But dammit, I get so tired of not being able to understand people.