Caught in the Crotchfire Read online

  “Get up, Salem!” Viv screamed. “Get up!”

  I lunged forward, but again I fell back. Jeez-o-Peet, I was like a turtle stuck on its back. I flopped around, thinking that if I could just get on my knees I could find my way up.

  But as soon as I rose, I overbalanced and fell forward. I rolled on my donut and ended up on my back again.

  “Great idea!” Viv screamed. “Roll there!”

  I looked at her.

  She shooed me toward the finish line. “Go! Roll!”

  I rolled. I pushed with one foot and momentum kept me going. I rolled as fast as I could toward Montana. All in all, it seemed easier than running. I didn’t have to worry about falling.

  As I approached Montana I stuck my hand up. “Slap my hand!” I shouted as asphalt and sky rotated around me.

  He stared, horrified, at the crazy woman rolling toward him.

  “Slap my hand!” I screamed, my donut bouncing off his foot as I reached him. “Come on, I got here, slap my hand!”

  After another few second hesitation, he bent and slapped my hand, then straightened and stood, looking stunned. He looked from me to the beer belly guy and to Viv, opening and closing his mouth a few times. Probably he had not expected actual bloodshed.

  He finally shrugged and said, “Okay.” Then he lifted his hands and shouted into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have our winners! Let’s give all of our contestants a round of applause.”

  The crowd moved back into the parking lot and I accepted the congratulations of my friends, feeling like I’d just finished the final challenge of American Ninja Warriors.

  Dakota toggled back and forth between my old phone and the new phone, using his thumbs to scroll through the screen and push buttons so fast it was like he was disarming an explosive device. “I can’t believe you actually used this thing,” he said with a laugh. “I mean, my grandma’s phone is newer than this.”

  “Yes, well, it worked.” I wanted to be grumpy at him, but he did just give me a free cell phone, and I did want a free cell phone, so I settled for shrugging and trying not to look embarrassed.

  “Yeah, but for what? I mean, it doesn’t even have a browser.”

  “It could make phone calls! That’s what it was supposed to do. You know, some people don’t like to be tethered to their mobile devices,” I said, like any self-respecting old coot would do. “Some people like to see the wide world in front of them, be present in the moment. Pay attention to the road instead of causing accidents because they can’t look away from their hand for thirty seconds.”

  “Well, now you have a phone that makes phone calls, surfs the web, downloads apps, and will give you directions if you get lost.”

  I couldn’t help myself. Public humiliation or not, this was exciting. “I can finally get the Fat Fighters app!” I said. My Fat Fighters ring leader (that’s what they’d taken to calling their meeting leaders) talked about that stupid app in every meeting. Other Fat Fighters members swore by it. My kinda-bff Trisha said she used it more than her cookbooks and her meeting materials.

  “I’d be lost without it,” she’d said in our last meeting.

  “But now you’re losing with it!” the ring leader said, they’d laughed together like a gag-inducing Fat Fighters commercial.

  But the truth was, Trisha was losing weight faster than I was, but now that I had a smart phone I could maybe catch up.

  “I’ll download the app for you,” Dakota said helpfully. He made a few swipes with his thumb.

  Once it downloaded, he held the phone out for me. “Let me show you some of the features. See this? This is your home screen. It’s just like the desktop of your computer. All your apps are in here. Want to check your calendar?” He tapped a little square with a calendar on it. “Right here. Now you have all your important dates at your fingertips. Need to calculate a tip in a restaurant? Right here. Listen to a podcast? Here. Log into Netflix and watch a movie? Here. Need directions? Right here.” Tap tap tap.

  None of these things held any interest for me. I had no life, so I didn’t use a calendar. The only engagement I had to keep was my weekly probation officer visit, and not only was I unlikely to forget that – I was so paranoid about forgetting that I often woke in a cold sweat from a nightmare that I had missed it and was going back to jail – I only had one meeting left. So my calendar was wide open. Plus, I was too broke to go to restaurants where tipping was expected. And I never went anywhere, so I only got lost if I actually wanted to.

  I reached my hands out. “I’m sure I can figure it out.”

  “Let me just show you one more thing. You know how iPhone has Siri? The search engine you ask your questions to, and she gives you the answers? Llano Wireless has that too, except it’s called Windy.”

  “Wendy?” I asked.

  “Windy, with an ‘i’.” He tapped an icon in the top left corner that looked like a wind cloud man with its cheeks puffed out. He smiled and then said into the phone. “Windy, where is the nearest place to get my oil changed?”

  “Oil changed?” came a very West-Texas sounding voice. “There’s a Jiffy Lube around the corner and about two blocks to the east, and Walmart does oil changes, too – that’s half a mile north. Of course, if you want to be industrious and change your oil yourself, like men used to do, you can get five quarts of Baker State at Napa Valley Auto for $1.59 each. That’s what my husband would do…”

  Dakota grinned. “See?”

  “What the heck?” I said, taking the phone from him.

  “That’s my aunt Windy. She lives out at Sundown.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I know!” He grinned wider. “Check this out.” He leaned toward the phone. “Windy, where can I get a new smart phone?”

  “What is this nonsense?” Windy cackled back after a second. “You don’t need a new smart phone. You already have the best one made. By those fabulous Channing brothers at Llano Wireless. You can trust them. I used to change their diapers!” More cackling.

  “What the heck?” I said again, for lack of anything better.

  “That’s different,” Dakota said. “She must have changed it overnight. Yesterday she was saying, ‘I used to bust their bottoms.’”

  “Mmm…I see.”

  “This is how we keep our costs low. My brother, my cousin and I do all the programming, we lease our towers locally from the big companies, and we keep our network low.”

  “I know, I heard all about it from Montana yesterday.”

  “See, most people never use 95 percent of the area they pay for. I mean, are you flying from New York to Los Angeles? I’m sure not.”

  “I’m trying to save up enough for a new bath mat,” I said.

  “Exactly. We spend the majority of our time within 500 miles of home. So why pay all that money to have service in Wyoming if you never go to Wyoming?”

  “You don’t have to keep selling me,” I said. “I was sold when you said you’d give it to me for free.”

  “We just want to make sure you take full advantage of all the features. We want you to be so in love with this phone and find it so easy to use in every part of your life that it actually becomes like an extension of your own hand.”

  “That actually sounds…a little frightening.”

  “I know, right? Like a sci-fi movie, where the machines turn on the humans and we all become slaves to killer robots?” He laughed. “But don’t worry. That probably won’t happen.”

  Viv came up carrying a wide, flat box. “Look what I just won! Two dozen Krunchy Kreems!”

  She opened the box and held it under my nose. The heavenly aroma of fried sugar wafted up.

  Instantly, my stomach growled.

  “Those are fresh from the bakery in Wichita Falls,” Dakota said. “I drove there yesterday, spent the night in a hotel and got up at the crack of dawn to get them. I just got back into town around nine this morning.”

  Viv hooked a donut on her finger and took a bite. “You know th
ere’s a place in Amarillo, right?”

  “Of course we do! No way in heck we’re giving them our business!”

  “You prefer to spend twice as much on gas, take twice the time and stay overnight in a hotel to giving Amarillo your business?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Good man,” Viv said.

  The guy fiddled with the phone some more. “Okay, I transferred the number from your old phone, so you don’t even have to worry about that. And I can transfer your contacts – oh, you don’t have contacts.” Then he squinted and looked at the screen of my flip phone. “Wait…three? You have three contacts?”

  “I like to keep things simple,” I said.

  “Seems like you could just memorize those,” he said with a shrug.

  “One would think,” I said.

  “Okay, you’re all set.” He handed it to me.

  As soon as the phone hit my palm, it buzzed and rang.

  I gasped and jerked my hand back. The phone went flying.

  Dakota and Viv both shrieked. We watched the phone arc through the air. Then Dakota did a dive – I kid you not, a full-out dive – onto his stomach and caught the phone right before it hit the pavement.

  I bent to take the phone from Dakota’s hand, while he gaped like a fish, the breath knocked clean out of him.

  “Sorry. Hello?” I said into the phone.

  “They’re robbing me. They’re robbing me right now. This is it.”

  My heartbeat kicked up a notch. “Are you sure, G-Ma?” I said. “What do you see?”

  G-Ma typically sat on a stool at the counter or in a rocker recliner behind the counter, watching the TV under the counter. That counter was basically her whole world. And her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. So the robbers might be there, then again it could be an actual paying customer.

  “A white car, just like they’re talking about, four doors, and four people are getting out. This is it, Salem. I’m gonna stand my ground. I don’t care, I’m not about to let them just waltz in here and take everything I’ve worked all these years for — ”

  I tilted the phone away and mouthed to Viv, “Call 9-1-1 and send them to G-Ma’s. She either about to be robbed or she’s going to shoot someone.”

  I turned back to the phone. “G-Ma, be calm. Remember, you’ve thought this before. It might be actual customers this time.”

  I heard the cock of a gun.

  “G-Ma?”

  “Hang on.” I heard a thunk and figured she had set the phone on the counter. I could just see her lining up behind the counter, aiming her gun at the front door.

  I heard the creak of the motel door opening. Then a shriek.

  “Oh! Sorry!” G-Ma said. “Come back, it’s okay.”

  “Never mind,” I said to Viv. “They’ll probably get calls from whoever that was just now anyway.”

  G-Ma came back on the line. “Well, heck. They ran off.”

  “They did?” I asked, managing to sound somewhat surprised.

  “Crud. Oh well, if it had been the bandits, I woulda had them.”

  “Better luck next time,” I said.

  “Thanks. Gotta go!”

  I hung up and stared at my shiny new toy.

  “I take it your grandmother didn’t kill the bandits,” Viv said as we walked slowly toward her car.

  “Not yet. Give her time, though.”

  “We’d better catch them first,” Viv said.

  “We might as well,” I said, flicking through apps on the app store. I already saw a few dozen I was sure I couldn’t live without. “The police aren’t doing it.”

  “That’s what that old guy was ranting about on the news last night.”

  “What guy?”

  “That old coot with the junk yard. Or is it a roofing business? Anyway, he owns a business over in High Point. You’ve seen him, he’s on the news all the time. The one who looks like Redneck Santa?”

  I nodded, but I had no idea what she was talking about, and my attention had become riveted on perfect golden circles of sunshine in Viv’s hand.

  “You want a donut?”

  I wanted a donut. Any donut. But especially a Krunchy Kreem donut.

  But I shook my head. “I had a dream this morning that I dove headfirst into a big pile of cheeseburgers right in front of Tony, and then he didn’t want to kiss me.”

  “More for me.” She chomped into another donut because she has the metabolism of a hyperactive three-year-old and about as much empathy.

  I leaned against her car, still a little concerned about the dream and irrationally mad at Tony. “I think Tony is turned off by my weight gain,” I said. “You see how he is — he’s fit.”

  She made a sound of appreciation that bordered on inappropriate, which I chose to ignore.

  “He’s filled out since we were married, but he’s not fat. I’m fat.” I looked down in dismay. I had lost thirteen pounds at Fat Fighters, but there was still way too much acreage between the front of my body and the back of it. “For a while there, I thought we were getting our relationship on track. But I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to want any kind of physical contact other than a peck on the cheek and an occasional handhold.”

  “Maybe he’s just taking his time.”

  “Maybe. But I’m going to stay away from the donuts until I get back into my old jeans, just in case.”

  “Sounds wise,” she said as she chewed. “So, we need to do a stakeout tomorrow on Clovis Highway and catch these bandits.”

  “I can’t tomorrow,” I said. “Probation visit. My last one.”

  “Really?” She, my hand to God, licked her fingers and then hooked her finger around one more donut.

  Times like these I wondered why Viv was my best friend.

  “Really. Last one. Three years of peeing in a cup and paying fines. Over.”

  “You can still pee in the cup sometimes, if you miss it.”

  “I think I’m good, thanks.”

  Even though I was excited about the new phone, I couldn’t stop thinking about Tony and that crummy dream. It hung like a cloud over what was otherwise turning out to be a decent day.

  It wasn’t just the dream, though. The dream was a sign of a problem that had been lurking around the edges of my consciousness for a while. My recent attempts to inspire Tony to…heightened passion, let’s say, had been less than successful. I’m using the phrase “less than successful” because I’m trying to avoid the more negative “a crushing failure.”

  Mine and Tony’s marriage was…well, there were probably lots of words for it, but “different” covers it nicely. We’d been married over ten years, but we’d only spent the first nine or ten months together. Ours had been a shotgun wedding. I was eighteen and pregnant, and he was a scared kid who believed he needed to do “the right thing.” When I was in a car accident somewhere along the sixth month and lost the baby, I had assumed he was relieved and happy to have a reason to get out of the forced marriage. When he shocked me by living up to every word he’d said in front of the priest that day, I handled it in my typical clumsy, hurtful fashion. I pushed him away. I treated him badly so he would see what a train wreck he had married and do the sensible thing, namely leave me high and dry. When he didn’t, I pushed harder. When he still didn’t, I left.

  I filed for divorce, dove into a bottle of Bacardi Silver Label rum, and didn’t crawl out again until almost a decade later. When I did, I discovered that Tony had never signed the papers and that the marriage I had assumed was long dead was still hanging by one very odd (to me, at least) thread: Tony had pledged “til death do us part,” and he actually meant it.

  I had asked him why he hadn’t divorced me, and he said, “Because God kept telling me ‘no’.” What does one do with that kind of information? Before I became a Christian, I wouldn’t have wasted five seconds on it. But since I was a Christian by that time, and I had made a commitment to do my best to follow God’s will, at least as much as I could possibly understand it, I was left to ac
cept the fact that I was, indeed, a married woman.

  It wasn’t as if we were now living like a regular married couple, though. I’d come to realize that Tony was just as freaked out about the possibility of a life fully commingled as I was. He lived in his nice brick house shaded by big trees, and I stayed in my sad little trailer in Trailertopia. We’d agreed to take things slowly, “be ourselves,” and not rush into anything. And boy, were we not rushing.

  A few months ago, in a state of needy panic induced by surviving a near-death experience, I’d made up my mind that I was going to let Tony kiss me — a real kiss this time. The kind of kiss that loving husbands and wives shared. I wanted him to kiss me the way he used to, in those first months of our marriage when we no longer had to worry about getting pregnant because that train had already left the station.

  In my naivete, I had assumed this was something he wanted to do, and was simply waiting for a signal from me. You remember what people say about assuming? Turns out I just made an ass of me.

  And here I thought I had been confused before, when all my neuroses had been centered on whether I could handle being married to Tony. I had hurt him. Treated him very badly. Just looking at him carried a ton of guilt, and I didn’t deal well with guilt. I was clinging to my sobriety one day at a time, sometimes one second at a time, and I didn’t know if I could work through all the stuff with Tony at the same time.

  Besides, I had spent years making myself hate him. He was weak, ineffectual, too passive for someone strong-willed like me. He hadn’t wanted me enough to come after me. I needed someone stronger than that, someone determined.

  But…how much strength did it take a young, hormonally active man to commit to a marriage so clearly destined for fiery destruction — an unfathomable amount, that’s how much. That’s what Tony had.

  Which made him so hot.

  I had practically thrown myself at him that evening. And it wasn’t as if he completely shot me down. He just didn’t respond. What I’d planned as a passionate, spit-sloppy lip meld had quickly and much too easily become a chaste, dry peck. The kind you’d give the uncle who was your third favorite out of three.