Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (14 page)

“Looks like mud, stinks like whiskey,” the bouncer was saying when Tim caught up. “Okay, I’m stumped.”

The bouncer was about to dip his fingers into the box for a taste when his flashlight struck the label, which caused his hand to snap back as if it had been burnt.

“What kind of kink is this?” he asked.

It was Ivan who looked down at his rubber sneaker tips before he answered:

“Grief.”

INSIDE, THE BASS NOTES throbbed at a frequency that interfered with the swallowing mechanism in Tim’s throat. First thing, he looked at the flimsy stage to see if the woman dancing was indeed wearing a cowboy hat. No, he saw with some relief, but she
was
wearing cowboy boots, white cowboy boots that she seemed afraid of stamping down too hard lest the entire stage collapse. Everyone looked as if they were packed in heavy syrup: a few girls traipsed around in their underwear, their trays bearing cups of coffee and glasses of soda pop. When Ivan finally recognized the girl from the library, planted like a lily in a forest of stumps, he shot up his hand and hailed her: “Dang Kim Nhung!” But her only response was to curl her lip and turn her back.

Tim saw that her buttocks were flat like a boy’s, separated into their precincts by a purple satin ribbon. When he realized that she was dancing for two lummoxes who had been in his class a few years back, he tried to press himself flat against the darkness like a shadow. Still one of them cried out: “Yo Mister Fitz!”

The walls echoed:
Mister Fitz Yo Mister Fitz Yo Mister Fitz. .
Or could have been a dozen of his students.

What she did was barely a ripple, waves traveling up her arms and then back down. Meanwhile, methodically, she touched various parts of her body, but not the parts he expected: instead her hip, her shoulder, an elbow, her knee. As far as Tim could tell, her legs were necessary only to hold up her torso within viewing range.

When the song was over, she approached them testily, grinding her gum between her teeth. “Library Man,” she said, adding in a voice that would have been underneath her breath except that she was shouting to be heard above the din, “You have to call me Tiffany. What are you doing?”

“We were in the neighborhood,” Ivan shouted back. “I was telling my friend about you.”

She gave a shrug in Tim’s direction before setting one hand on her hip. “Can’t talk now; I’m working. But I could get you guys a soda. You still have to pay five dollars for them, though. Each.” So they ordered two Sprites and watched the stage, where the girl in the boots took two steps in each direction, then agitated her hips. Stomp stomp hips. Stomp stomp hips.

“We came to see you naked,” Ivan blurted cheerfully, when Dang Kim Nhung Tiffany returned with their drinks. By mashing her small breasts up toward her throat, her purple bra was able to manufacture the facsimile of a cleavage. To keep from staring at it, Tim watched the stage where the girl was wrapping up. Stomp stomp hips one last time, and then she curtsied.

Dang Kim Tiffany shook her head. “They don’t want to put too much Asian onstage: I just do tables. And sorry, Library Man, but I think dancing for you would do a number on my head.”

There were no stairs for the girl onstage to get down, so she had to inch off the edge while wriggling her white boots in the air. They had fringe that reminded Tim of the undercarriage of a carpet sweeper. Meanwhile, Ivan yodeled happily,
But that’s the beauty!

“You wouldn’t be dancing for us, it’d be for his dad.”

She glanced around the room then, as if expecting to find him abandoned in a corner with a portable oxygen tank, until Ivan shook the box to make the clod thump.

“He’s just ashes, see? Nothing you have to worry about.”

Dang Kim Tiffany did not believe it until he opened the box and let her look, and even then she would not dance until Ivan offered her the contents of his wallet: twenty-six dollars. Plus his change. The bills she stuffed into her bra with the coins wrapped inside them. “Okay, Library Man,” she said. “Just to show you I’m not sentimental about the dead.”

She took the box and set it on a chair, and when the next song rose up, her wavery-arm dancing began, and again she touched strange places on her body. Tim could see, in profile, the restless movement of her lips, could hear her reciting the names of the bones: tibia, fibula, femur. “Cat Scratch Fever” was the name of the song the random universe had delivered up, and Tim watched the box shimmy along with the rumble of the bass, as if there were something live inside it.

When the song ended, she turned and handed the box to Tim. “Anatomy test tomorrow,” she explained.

“You must have taken one of those time-management courses.”

“You be surprised how much work I get done here. And practical experience: the other girls always want me to palpate their breasts.” This all she shouted through the megaphone of her hands: “That means I feel them up! Everybody here is always freaking out that they got lumps! They bought themselves boobs, and now those bought-boobs are leaking! The bigger the boob, the more poison oozing out!”

A WATER BAR was an insignificant thing, Tim realized, but its worth was easily measured: you kicked it and right away you knew whether or not it would hold. Water bars may have been at the low end of technology’s food chain, sure, but still they were responsible for nothing less than the shape of the landscape, for the sides of mountains staying up, for one’s way becoming or not becoming impassable with mud.

He’d wanted his father to understand this, but Sam hadn’t, or Tim hadn’t tried hard enough to explain. He was hoping that explanations somehow wouldn’t have been necessary, that Sam would look down at the water bar and suddenly understand: how Archimedes was wrong about the size of the lever you’d need to hold up the world, how even a two-foot length of cedar could, with the proper placement, perform this feat. And then Sam would have looked up and seen the mountains rumpling and rerumpling for mile after mile, and he would have understood why his son had left Chicago.

But instead, to get out of the rain they’d gone to a diner in Packwood, where all Tim could think about was how his young mean father was now old and mean and weak, and it was Ivan who’d finally perked up with an idea over dessert.

“I know! I know!” he said as he tucked into his second slice of pie. “We’ll take your father to see the Patriarch.” The Patriarch was a tree that could be found on old maps, named by the forest’s first explorers, an ancient douglas fir located on an unmarked deer path that took off from behind the trailers where they’d lived. When their work for the day was done, they used to sit between the roots of the tree with their backs propped against its trunk, drinking beer while the raindrops rustled in the branches. Silently, they would pay homage to their muscles flecked with dander from the woods. They would press the cold cans against their bruises.

This was where they were headed now, with Dang Kim Tiffany wedged between them in the truck. Hers was a snap decision, she said, brought about by the catalyst of Sam: once she’d danced for him, she felt compelled to see the ceremony’s end. And she’d never been to the mountains, despite having lived in the Northwest since she was six, her own father being afraid of them because he said they were the home of ghosts. The storms were ghosts wagging their beards at the children who’d forgotten them too soon. And the gullies were where they reached over the mountains and scratched with their long fingernails. Her voice reminded Tim of a little bell being rung by an impatient woman.

“Every weekend he made us dig for butter clams. That’s the story of my life: clams and more clams.” She and her mother built driftwood fires and cooked lunch right on the beach. Dang Kim Tiffany was wearing Ivan’s cloak because the boss had taken her pack, which contained her clothes, hostage. “No leaving with customers,” he barked from behind the bar where he dispensed the soda pop. “Plus you got three more hours until you’re off.”

He’d seized one shoulder strap of the pack while she pulled on the other, and — after they’d stood for a while at a standoff — she let go and sent him crashing into the glasses stacked in plastic racks.

“Who needs it?” she said as she crossed the parking lot in her purple underwear, in her silver high-heeled sandals that were now heaped on the floor of the truck like a pile of chicken bones.

Ivan asked, “So do we still have to call you Tiffany?”

Her earrings jingled when she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Library Man. When I finish med school everyone will have to call me Dr. Dang.”

They made the rest of the trip in silence, passing the reservoirs that stretched so ominously black between the foothills and the Pacific Crest. Dang Kim Tiffany fell asleep and snored quietly while drooling onto Tim’s jean jacket, which he was surprised to find had more of an erotic effect on him than her dancing; it had been a long time since he’d found himself on the receiving end of a female slump. She breathed through her mouth, which smelled like hay, her nostrils small, her hair perfumed by smoke. When they finally stopped, he could hardly bring himself to wake her. Groggily, she sat up and said, “This is not what I expected of the wilderness.”

They’d pulled off at a roadside clearing littered with paper diapers balled up in the brush. Their trailer was gone, and the concrete pad that it had sat on was now cracked and spiked with thistles. The tall firs that ringed the camp had been logged off, their stumps overrun with blackberry vines.

But the trail was where they remembered it, angling uphill from the back edge of the clearing. Ivan beat back the brambles with his cane, while Tim took the rear and shone a flashlight at their feet. Dang Kim Tiffany refused their elbows and instead waded through the dark as if she were crossing a river, going by feel, her bare feet seeking out the bare ground where the deer had trotted on their errands. Ivan’s cloak made her look like a dark shrub with a tiny human head. Whenever she stepped on something sharp, she’d flinch but not permit herself to say a word.

This was the same trail they’d taken Sam up when he’d visited six years back, though now, with the trailers gone, the undergrowth had reclaimed it. With Sam, they’d hiked slowly, and now they hiked slower still, Ivan humming “Cat Scratch Fever” and dragging his bad leg while a nearly naked woman walked behind him. So there was beauty, Tim thought, and also decay, and the years were just a factory for changing one into the other.

But the Patriarch was something that did not change — at least not perceptibly, to Tim’s relief. A good six feet in diameter, big enough that each side of the tree had a climate of its own. Mossy on the uphill side, with roots that sat atop the soil like hands, the other side bare, the roots disappearing in the duff. Six years ago, when he finally reached the base of it, his father had tipped his head back and emitted one long whistle.

“Well, son, you got me,” he said. “When it comes to trees, I’d call this one right here chapter and verse.” But then immediately he’d turned and started walking back.

“Okay, I seen it,” he called over his shoulder. “Now I guess we can head on home.” And when Tim opened the box and shook it gently to let the ashes scatter, they did not. Instead, the wad of them thudded to the ground and rolled into some prickly underbrush.

“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you bozos call a decent burial?”

No way, José, over her dead bod: she said Tim would have to fish Sam out and break him into pieces small enough for the wind to carry. Maybe they’d have to dry the ash to make it light enough: she dispatched Ivan to gather firewood.

“No green sticks,” she called as he shambled off. “Do you even know the difference, Library Man?”

Ivan’s voice came from the other side of the night’s black wall when he said, “You may not believe this, but we were rangers once.” And though Tim knew his father’s send-off was getting way too complicated for this time of night, he also knew he had no choice but to follow the woman’s orders. The first step meant finding Sam, and to do that he had to get down on his knees.