The Milk Still

You have been in the trunk of my car for a year now. I am just not sure what to do with you. I’m too angry to dump you in the ocean like I think you would have wanted. I’m too poor for a funeral. I guess I’m going east, so you’re going with me. I know you always hated the desert but I’m not sure you really have a mouth to complain with anymore.

When I see the first Joshua tree I am going to pull over and open your box. I am at least going to look. I’ll climb the mountain pass in my shitty old car and I’ll open your box with the desert widening out in front of me. If I time it right, it will be exactly sunset.

I don’t know what’s going to happen when I see you, all in ashes. I don’t know if I can ever point my head westward again after I open that box. Maybe I’ll sneeze and you’ll go everywhere. Maybe I’ll pour you out right there, by that McDonald’s that has a windmill in the parking lot for some reason. I don’t know. But I swear to you, I am going to look. I am going to look.

I mumbled all of this to you as I pushed my foot against the gas but I didn’t stop. The Joshua trees came too fast and I was weak. I flew up the Cajon pass with my foot almost flat to the floorboard but I just wasn’t ready. I thought of the thing you said that one time that really made me cry and I knew I would think of it and cry again. So I didn’t stop.

I passed other cars. It was a Thursday, I think, and there was more traffic than there would have been earlier in the week. These were people from Los Angeles, from Riverside, from Palmdale, Hesperia, Upland, all creeping northeast with me, up the 15. I looked into the window of a Camry as I shot past it and saw a fat woman bite into an Arby’s sandwich and squirt horsey sauce down her chin. We were all the same, just a bunch of sad sacks with an infinitude of dramas spooling out endlessly behind our eyes, screaming along the highway in machines we barely understand. I remembered the day you told me where you were born. When you said ‘Rancho Cucamonga’ I laughed.

“What the hell does that mean, do you think?” I asked. It was a silly question. You looked at me through dim porch light while hand rolling a perfect cigarette.

“Well, ‘cuca’ refers to the cuckoo bird. And ‘monga’ refers to its size,” you told me, deadpan. Then you smiled, your big teeth spread out like a poker hand.

It only took me ten minutes to get through Victorville and then I was out in the desert barrens. Traffic thinned out a bit as everyone found their pace cars. The air blowing out of my own car’s vents began to feel swampy and warm. I messed with the thermostat for a minute before giving up.

“Looks like the AC is out again,” I called back to you in the trunk. “That would have really pissed you off, right?” You didn’t answer because you couldn’t anymore but I bet you would have absolutely lost your mind. You probably would have made me turn around and go back to LA., but you power was gone and I had become untethered.

I rolled down the window and the acrid scent of creosote poured into the car. There were heaps of clouds sitting on the horizon, gilded orange with the last sunlight of the day. I was starting to think I might be ready to pull over at that crazy-name road out in the middle of nowhere. I said the name out loud and ignored the town of Barstow as it rushed past my windows.

“Zzyzx,” I said. I turned on the radio and cranked it to the far end of the AM band.

“Zzyzx,” said a voice from the speakers, “That’s zee-zee-why-zee-ex, all the way at the Omega end of the dial. Now this one goes out to Asheville Ashley from her beau, Bill “Boxie” Biloxi from Eponymous, Mississippi. You’re pretty far from the desert, lovers, but Cryin’ Curt cain’t resist a romance. Here’s one for the ages-” I snapped the radio off but a lush orchestral arrangement filled the car nevertheless. Vocals joined it, deep and kind:

Strangers’ arms reach out to me

’Cause they know I’m so lonely.

Then my mind goes back to you

Your sweet love sees me through.

It was the voice of a sad cowboy who can never love again. I realized that I somehow knew all of the lyrics by heart. I sang along, my clear, strong voice dopplering out behind the car in the hot twilight. I sang, though I felt like a hypocrite, always choosing Barabbas the bandit over your strange, priggish Christ. I passed Zyzzx Road without stopping as the music consumed me completely. I forgot, somehow, that I had turned the radio off. Over the darkening, distant mountains I saw lightning flash and fade. A small, yellow moon hung blandly over it all, passing no judgment.

Close to the town of Baker, I realized I had to pee. I took an off-ramp that promised Death Valley to the west, along with a look at the World’s Tallest Thermometer. I pulled up to it and idled my car. It was tall, to be sure, but disappointingly digital. 96F flashed on top of it in bright, electronic turquoise. I pulled across the street into the parking lot of an abandoned restaurant. It seemed like most of the town had been shut down; fast food places were covered in graffiti and a motel with mostly broken windows loomed threateningly over the main street. This was strange to me because the last time I had been through this place it was so busy that I had to wait in line to fill up my car.

The restaurant I had pulled up next to had once been called The Mad Greek: Home of the Spicy Pita. Some rakehell had crossed out the word ‘pita’ on the rooftop sign and replaced it with ‘pussy.’ as I peed between the wall of the building and my car I looked down and realized that I was wearing Ugg boots, despite the heat. I shook my head. I couldn’t remember buying them or even putting them on and I had a vague sense they weren’t my style. I stood up from my squat and my head spun. I leaned against my car for a moment, strange colors and unformed thoughts swimming through my brain. I wished there was somewhere I could buy some water but everything around me was closed.

When I got my bearings I glanced across the street. Movement on the digital display of the World’s Tallest Thermometer had caught my eye. It had stopped showing the temperature and instead was scrolling a short phrase. ‘Hey kids, kill your parents!’ it implored, over and over.

“Oh my God, whoa, that is hilarious, what in the fuck?” I said out loud, blinking my dry eyes. I scooted over to the trunk of my car in my pee-splattered boots. “Dude, get out here, you gotta see this shit, you’re gonna fucking lose it.” I popped the trunk. You were just sitting in there, along with some jumper cables and a battered Southern California road atlas from twenty years ago. I picked you up and held you aloft so you could see the thermometer. 95F, it flashed. “Aw, I guess you missed it,” I told you. Then I realized with a gasp that I was holding you for the first time in a year. The waxed cardboard of your box felt moist in the heat. Your lid was held on by two blue broccoli rubber bands. I pulled them off and put them on my wrists.

Inside your box was a plastic bag that was rolled down tight against your ashes. It was sealed by a white sticker printed with your name. I pulled the bag open and looked at you, the reduction of you; fine gray silt like the powder that protects the wings of a butterfly. I slipped my finger between my chapped lips. Next to me, The Mad Greek lit up in full operation. One by one, fast food restaurants and gas stations blazed into life. Cars began pouring in from the highway and I was glad I peed when I did. The Chevron next to The Mad Greek turned itself on and I was blasted with the unforgiving white light of a neutron star. With my spit-wet finger I touched your surface. Moon dust, I told myself, and I licked your ashes away. An eighteen-wheeler pulled into the parking lot of the Chevron and hissed its air breaks, making me jump. A small cloud of dust puffed out of your box and I slammed the lid back down. The huge truck’s radio was blaring and I heard this:

“Well, I’m way too old for names, dreamlets, but they used to call me the Umbra. But before that, when the old mule stumbled and those kind peasants pulled me out from under that stumblin’ stone out in the far barley field, hey, they crossed themselves twice and called me names I had never heard before in a tongue too old to mention, and who could blame them! And before that I was just the wind. These-a-days they call me Cryin’ Curt, the lovelorn scourge of the desert. But as the poet said, what’s in a name? Ol’ Curt is simply here to bring you the most classic of hits, night after night.” The same strange DJ’s voice I had heard earlier blasted out across the lot. “Now, this next one goes out to all of the listening liars and all of the thoughtful thieves-” Before the song could start, the semi cut its engine and the radio fell quiet. I moved my head in an attempt to see the driver through the windshield but it seemed as though it was covered with a thick layer of dust and I could see nothing. I evaluated the truck and saw that all of its tires were flat and it looked like it had been there at the edge of that parking lot for a long time. I shook my head. A chubby Oaxacan family trundled by me on their way into The Mad Greek, giving me a wide berth. I scooted by a Kia Soul containing a couple who seemed to have just been fighting. They stopped to watch me pass, staring. The woman said something to the man behind the glass that made both of them laugh.

I moved on, toward the semi. I approached the cab, cradling your box under my arm. The driver’s side window was rolled down and I hopped up the side stairs to take a look, hoisting myself up by a mirror that stuck out like a stunted wing.

The interior was covered with months of dust and garbage. Bottles littered the floor, filled with what I hoped wasn’t pee. Weird wires hung from the shredded ceiling. I looked directly down and saw your hat, the one you didn’t like anymore, sitting right in the middle of the driver’s seat. I felt my dry mouth drop open. It was so familiar; just an ordinary brown pork pie, slightly crushed, that I knew would smell exactly like your head. I grabbed it and jumped down, placing it on my own head and what I could suddenly see made me stagger. It was the world as you had seen it, with a sky overhead as dark as obsidian filled with the type of five-pointed stars a child might draw. The couple in the Kia now wore strange masks; the man’s like a demon with a forked tongue lolling out and the woman’s like a wild pig with a pushed in snout and sharp-looking sliver tusks. All of the fast food restaurants and gas stations around me now bore huge smoke stacks that were belching black smoke up into the even blacker sky. On the cracked pavement before me I watched glowing arrows appear, leading back to my car and away down to the highway. Their blue-green light swelled and faded with my breath.

“Holy fucking shit,” I mumbled. The pig-lady in the Kia raised what looked like a Buffalo wing to her bizarre face and bit it in half as she stared at me. “No wonder you were so grumpy,” I said to you in your box. The arrows brightened. “But this path you had; it’s so obvious. Why didn’t you ever take it?” You said nothing. I made my way back to my car, avoiding eye contact with the Kia-couple. I focused on placing my foot in the exact center of each arrow as I whispered through the parked cars like a ghost.