Creative Nonfiction:  Doug Milliken

The Obvious and Unperceived

            Locked in a climate-controlled torpor and hustling over the dusty stretch of US-395 between Lake Mono, California, and Reno, Josiah decided we needed water. “Aw, shit yo, I know this awesome place.” A mile later, tires growling from pavement to gravel, we turned sharply off onto a dirt road cutting vaguely into the desert. “Hydration.” Sprawled over the backseat, Tanya grumbled groggily into her daughter’s lap. Makenzie barely stirred in her sleep.

            Between cacti and wild sage, the road twisted arthritically, forked, and soon we had to turn around, follow the other bend, finally stopping where two trucks and a short man baked purple with sun blocked our way. The man stood shirtless in the road, leather Stetson perched atop his head like a crow above a carcass. Nearby, another man – tall, skinny, and stooped – stood uneasily with a screwdriver in his craggy hand. Late afternoon sunlight false-gilt the scene into old faded film. Neither man said a word.

            “Hey, what’s up, fellas?” Josiah hopped out from the station wagon and began talking quickly, gesturing widely, as if cutting a deal: this is what you want. Barely visible, among gravel and sand, small things moved all around us. Josiah rubbed two fingertips with his thumb. The men climbed into their trucks and drove away, revealing the hot springs bubbling beside the road. The air above the water danced with a gasoline ripple of haze. Sauntering back to the car, Josiah began peeling off clothes and tossing them through his open window.

            “You’ll love this place, dude, it’s fucking great.” He stood in his boxers, thumbs hooked beneath the waistband, but he made no move to remove them. “Shit man, when I was younger, Nate and I used to take chicks down here all the time, right, get them down in the water and—”

            “Josiah?” Tanya’s voice rose like a ragged length of rope from a well. “Where are we? Why’d we stop?”

            “We’re in Reno, babe.” He trotted down to the water’s edge, a sneer curling the corners of his mouth. Tanya said nothing, maybe went back to sleep. Our last morning in Yosemite had taken its toll of her. All she wanted was to see Bridal Veil Falls before we left; we drove around the park for two hours, completely lost and getting farther from the falls – Josiah and Tanya taking turns screaming at one another – before reluctantly giving up and heading home. On the way out of the valley, we spotted the far away falls, little more than a long white line among the distant green and grey. Resigned, Tanya traded seats with me, crawled in the back with her daughter, tried to erase her disappointment through sleep, but Josiah’s tantrum lasted until high on the Tioga Pass beyond Yosemite, when it no longer mattered how certain he was that he knew the way. The ensuing silence was crisper than the mountain air through which we passed. Now, in the desert, it just seemed stale. Opening my door, I kicked off my dirt-caked boots and followed Josiah to the springs.

            Water bubbled from a hole calcified and crusted in fungal yellow, white, and orange; from what Josiah kept saying, the old men had found the spring when they were teenagers, had used whatever tools they could find – dull knives, cheap screwdrivers and rebar – to gouge a narrow channel from the spring to a pit dug some yards away. In the years since, they carved other pools among the bristling flora, eventually laying some cement to make the original tub into an outdoor jacuzzi, shapely with built-in seats. “Pretty slick, huh?” Sulfur hung like doom in the air.

            “Oh yeah.” I stepped in, water fizzing carbonic on my skin. “Like a weasel.”

            “Fuckin’ A.” And he snapped on his Ray Bans. “Fuckin’ A.”

            Lounging in the water, Josiah picked up the thread of his revelry, speaking excitedly of all the things done here by he and Nate to young girls years before. “This one chick, she was like fourteen and, man, she got so drunk, she’d do just about anything.” Oblivious to my pointed lack of interest, he eagerly detailed the girl’s sad vita but cut his regaling short when Tanya and Makenzie sleep-staggered down to us from the car.

            “This place stinks, Josiah.” All the features of Tanya’s face were angled inward, as if her face were tying itself into a knot. “Why aren’t we in Reno?”

            If his laughter strove to be playful and mocking, it came off condescending. “Calm down, shit, we’re like an hour away.”

            Makenzie shaped her face like her mother’s. “Don’t swear.”

            He halfheartedly splashed her. She halfheartedly screamed.

            “Josiah.”

            “Oh relax, Tanya, it—huh, it was a joke. Relax. Get in the water, yo, it’s hot.”

            “The sun is hot, Josiah.” But a few minutes later, they were perched on the cement lip, legs slowly swishing through the water while they glowered at us reproachfully, as if I also were somehow to blame. Looking away, I watched the afternoon sky fade almost to nothing above us.

            Our last night in Yosemite, we took the park bus from our campground to the Tenaya Lodge, the resort for campers too pampered to camp. We were painted still in tones of sun, dust, and sweat from our day-hike up Nevada Falls: in a polished compound of uniformed wait staff and middle-aged couples clad in impeccable L.L. Bean, we were road-worn refugees. We wandered among the staring throngs, enjoying the attention, then chanced upon an emptying banquet hall. Someone had been married in the mountains. We helped ourselves to leftovers, played the obnoxious party crashers – the uncouth adults, the gleefully screaming little girl – and were eventually pressured to leave. Strolling back through the lodge under the baleful surveillance of a staunchly mustached maitre d’, we acted the family evicted, victimized but united. At the parking lot bus stop, though, waiting for the bus, a silence fell among us: something had happened and I missed it. Tanya and Josiah sat tensely on the bench, arms folded, an apparent space between them, and Makenzie and I wrestled in the dirt until Josiah roared for my niece to shut up. She was howling.

            Cupping a handful of water, Josiah sniffed it experimentally, then rubbed it over his face. “I bet this water has, like, an alkalinity of about 3 or something, honest.” Alkaline water was his newest obsession, his healthiest habit. “It’s so good for you.” Last week, it was flax.

            Steam rose like flies from road-kill. Josiah’s bleached-ivory smile gleamed at his captives. In one week, he would run raging from a crowded restaurant on Virginia Street and away from Tanya sitting shocked with the waitress waiting at her elbow; in one week, he’d find the solace of revenge in the body of a stranger he’d later meet at a club. One week before saying how he needed some space to breath, how he felt suffocated by every woman he had ever known. In this burning pool of desert water, he filled the hot springs like a plague.

            Tanya squinted painfully in the sun. “Josiah, let’s go, it’s been almost an hour.”

            He stared through his sunglasses, parted his lips, and mewled something grating between a baby’s cry and a detuned cat’s yowl. A moment passed before anyone realized this was the whole of his response.

            “Josiah, I really need to get back—”

            “Just relax. You’re so uptight—”

            “Well I’m sure if you had to work tomorrow, you might—”

            “Think I don’t work? I fucking—”

            It was around then that Makenzie erupted in screams, loud and panicked like the end of all things to come. We jerked to look, and at first nothing seemed the matter; then we saw the fat white spider crawling up her leg, from her knee up onto her thigh: a walking curd of cottage cheese. Makenzie’s arms were raised up over her head like a Christian bearing witness, but her scream bore nothing but dread.

            Tanya and I turned away, inured to this behavior and ready to let Makenzie scream herself hoarse and bored, eventually take care of the spider herself, but Josiah lurched forward and swatted at the creeping thing: an act more of frustration than charity. Catching air off his knuckles, the spider launched forward onto Makenzie’s lap, started up her belly, and something suddenly changed in the tone and pitch of her screams, making them real, tears streaking over sun-pink cheeks. Josiah stared dumbly, uncertain, perhaps even smiling. And maybe her screaming was funny. Or maybe it was terrified.

            Reaching across the water, I brushed the spider into the pool, to swim its eight-legged breaststroke to some other, safer shore.

            For a moment longer, not realizing the spider was gone, Makenzie continued to scream, then dropped her head sheepishly, ashamed. On her mother’s cue, though, she glared menacingly Josiah’s way. He smiled his donkey grin, but it faltered. I watched the spider swimming pointedly toward the pool’s edge, only to turn within inches of solid ground and swim another way. Where else could it possibly go? Ignoring us, his smile now a grimace in the sun, Josiah gazed far off over the scorched and scoured hardpan, perhaps thinking of a time when the women in his life seemed so much more compliant, or at least more silently opposed. Fuming without speaking, Tanya waited and stared.

            But how can you see what’s obvious when what you want overshadows, comes bubbling hot and precious from the seared infertile ground? How can you see the end until it’s over? The spider swam in circles, going nowhere.

            Soon after, whistling along empty highways, we were back on our way to Reno – forgotten tracts and clapboard shacks passing – as if nothing had happened.

Doug Milliken, all rights reserved