AFTERLIFE by Ben Nickol

I’m at the restaurant twenty minutes before Angie, who begged me to meet her, decides she’ll show up. That’s nice of her, interrupting my day and then showing up eventually.
“Sorry,” she says, and collapses across from me, her purse dangling and hair windblown. “It’s just been . . .” she shakes her head.
“I don’t really have time for this.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
I wave over the waitress, so we can get this going.
“How’ve you been?” Angie says.
“Let’s just have you tell me why I’m here.”
“Don . . .”
“You used up your small talk time.”
The waitress arrives, and I indicate Angie. I have my coffee. “I’ll need a minute,” Angie says.
“She’ll have coffee,” I say, and the waitress hesitates, looking from one of us to the other, before disappearing.
Angie spends a moment watching me.
“What is it?” I say.
“Connor.”
I shake my head, “Jesus.”
“He’s not answering his phone. I don’t know what to do.”
“Stop calling would be one thing to do.”
“Don, he’s our son.”
“He’s grown up, Angie. He doesn’t want to be an adult, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She’s watching me again, with that where’s your heart, Donald? expression she never learned has no effect on me. “What’s my role in this, Angie? Can we get to that?”
“I thought you’d want to know your son is missing.”
“Missing. Well, that’s dramatic. He’s probably strung out.”
She nods, “Yeah.”
“You want me to call him?” I take out my phone.
“I don’t know if that’s . . .” she says, but I’ve already dialed. Any way I can dispense with this shit the better. It goes to voicemail, and I hang up.
“I’m worried,” she says.
“I see that.”
“I think someone needs to . . .” By the way she trails off, I realize we’ve come to the point. ““What?” I say. “Say it.”
“You won’t like this.”
“Say it.”
“Don, someone needs to check on him.”
I take out my wallet, and count money onto the table.
“Don,” she says.
“We’re through here.”
“How can you be like this?”
“I’m not like anything, Angie. He’s made his decisions.”
She’s crying now.
“I live with it. You should, too.”
“I know,” she says.
The waitress brings coffee, then vanishes. We sit in silence, except for Angie’s soft crying, while in the window swirls a light snow. It’s directionless, the little flakes like blind insects that’ve forgotten the way down. “Fine,” I say finally.
Angie looks up.
“Don’t look at me. Just – I’ll do it, then leave me alone.”
“Okay,” she says.
I thumb the money, then stand and pull on my coat.
“Thanks, Don,” she says.
“You should be more punctual.”

The only times I’ve visited Bozeman were to drop Connor off, his freshman year, and then again his sophomore year for a ball game. I remember a sunny town of restaurants and bars, with tall peaks surrounding it, but pulling off the interstate I find a gray, depressing place with muddy snow piled in the gutters. I can see just the footings of mountains, before they vanish in wet clouds. It was a six-hour drive from Spokane, which I made in five. I need to find Connor, tell him his mother’s worried, get a hotel and get back. In two days, bright and early Wednesday, I begin meetings to sell my business interests. There’s one buyer who wants everything.
Angie’s given me an address, whatever last address Connor gave her. I’m expecting the kind of lousy apartments he lived in ten years ago – sixty units stacked and scattered over a cheap five acres (the kind of housing I actually build in Cheney and Post Falls) – but the directions lead me past those places, past city limits, to a mobile court with a faded sign I can’t read. The dirt driveway bumps over a culvert, with brown water running in the ditch. The trailers are destitute, if saying so isn’t redundant, with ragged siding and smudged windows, the yards cluttered with damaged cars and toys. I look again at the directions. If the address were in a trailer court, you’d think it’d say that. Unit 8. I idle forward, until I reach a melon-colored place with a sagging blue porch. Blankets hang in the windows. Near the porch stands a ratty recliner with snow piled on it, and an empty pet cage.
I climb the porch and pound the door, the latch so rickety that each pound reveals, through the jamb, a glimpse of the trailer’s interior. I pound again, and there’s nothing. Peering in windows, or at least the ones without blankets (though these are opaque with grime), I circle the trailer and then again climb the porch. “Connor?” I yell, but there’s no response. Vaguely, standing at the door, I understand I own this place. Anyways I paid Angie, when we split, and no doubt she pays the kid’s rent. So I shoulder the door open, popping it free like something spring-loaded. Within, I find putrid furniture, and plates and Styrofoam cups on every flat surface, including the floor. It’s no warmer inside than out. Strewn across the sofa, like cobwebs, are an assortment of oily blankets.
My eyes adjust, and in the next room, peering out at me, I see a bony face with long threads of moustache and hair like wrapped cables. “Who’re you?” I say.
“Like, who’re you? Busting in here?”
“Where’s Connor?”
“Man,” the kid says, and comes in the room. He drops on the sofa, and fishes a pipe from the cluttered table. “You need to respect individual boundaries.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
He pauses the lighter at his pipe, then lights and inhales. While holding the smoke, his voice pinched, he says, “Watch it, man.”
I glance around, as if Connor might materialize. “Look, I don’t have time for this. Where’s my son?”
Through the smoke, and through the smoke’s effect on him, he smiles at me queerly. “No shit,” he says.
“Where is he?”
“I can just barely see it. You’re like the dinosaur version.”
I want to break the kid’s neck, but then am disgusted I feel anything at all. You know what, I decide: this’ll do. I leave, and walk off the porch. If Angie wants, she can drive to Montana and interrogate junkies.
I’m backing out of the drive when the kid emerges from the trailer, waving for me to stop. I lower my window, and he leans on the roof. “What?” I say.
“Man, have you . . .” he peers around at the gray day. It’s raining a little. “Have you heard from Connor?”
“I don’t talk to my son.”
“Right,” he says. “I knew that. But . . . well, I do talk to him. And I haven’t heard from him.”
The rain’s flecking inside the car, on my arm and pant leg. “Is that a fact,” I say.
“Truth is, I’m kind of worried.”
A moment passes, the kid oblivious to the rain. “Has this happened before?” I say.
The kid shakes his head.
I’m thinking about Monday, about my meetings. I glance at my watch, then at the trailers all around. “Where should I be looking?”

* * *

The place the kid names is a bar, which isn’t surprising, but I wish it were a bar nearby. Instead, I’m following two-lane highways across vast tracts of emptiness, the low sky flat against the land. Here and there some sky drifts down, and splatters the windshield as I drive through it. Where there’s even spotty reception, I read emails from the bank and other entities relevant to Wednesday. A great deal must land correctly, in the correct order. Then my phone alerts me: Winter storm advisories across North Idaho and Western Montana. Hazardous conditions. I scan the horizon and don’t see shit by way of a bar, just ratty brush tangled with snow.
Where one highway meets another, across from some grain elevators, is a pinewood shack I guess is the place. Sitting in the parking lot, beside Buicks and rusty trucks, several of which are modified in strange ways – stripped to primer or their hoods missing, or parts of the bed cut away with torches – I look at the scrap of paper Connor’s friend gave me. It has the bar, but also names I should mention. The kid was weird about this. He’d gone in the trailer and returned with the paper; handing it through the car window, he said, “Well, Connor won’t really be there. He doesn’t drink.”
“What?”
“These people should know where he is, though.”
I looked at the names. They were all first names. “Who are they?”
“Man,” he looked off, “don’t ask that.”
“They’re dealers?”
“Listen . . . okay, some of them. That’s not important. They know Connor.”
I tucked the paper in my pocket.
“You didn’t get that shit from me, man.”
“Fine.”
“We didn’t even talk,” the kid said, and went back in his trailer.
I memorize the names, so I won’t be reading off the paper, then pop open the car door and cross the parking lot. Without my noticing, it’s gotten dark. Anyways at ground level it’s dark, the bar’s neon signs spilling across puddles. The sky’s the same gray.
Inside, the place is bigger than I’d imagined. There’s a wall of bottles with mirrored backing, and before the bar a row of occupied stools. The room’s silent. Some of the occupants glance at me, then at each other. Against the far wall is a stage, and near it some pool tables. On the jukebox stands a revolving Clydesdale, spangling lights over rodeo posters.
The bartender gazes over his patrons’ heads at me, his face impassive. I have nothing to say to these assholes, and hope they won’t be difficult. “Afternoon,” I say, and the bartender nods. The drinkers are a wall of shoulders; none of them shift to make room, so it’s like calling over a fence. “I’m just looking for someone,” I say.
“Lot of someones here.”
“Right,” I say. I’m about to say names from the list, but already I’m fed up with this trail of crumbs shit. “Does anyone know Connor Heinz?” I say.
It’s like I’ve spoken to an empty room. No one snorts or coughs, or shakes his head.
“Splendid. You’re all a big help.”
Now someone speaks, a rodent-looking guy with a goatee jutting from under his cap, who pivots on his stool and says, “The fuck would we help you for?”
My hands go up, “I didn’t say you would. Just thought you might.”
“What else you want to say?”
“Derrick,” the bartender says. It’s one of the names from the list.
“No,” the man says. “He should share his feelings with us. Fucking faggot.”
One of the men leaves his stool and crosses to the window, where, whistling through his teeth, he says, “Look at that fucking car. Jesus Christ.”
“What is it?” someone says.
“I’m not sure I know what it is. Gracious.”
Another crosses and peers over his friend’s shoulder. “My,” he says. “Look at that. It’s like a killer whale.”
“No one knows Connor?” I say, and when nobody speaks I nod and move to the door.
“Now hang on a minute,” someone says. It’s a man at the end of the bar. He crosses to the window and glances out, then goes to a table and pulls out a chair for me.
“You know him?”
“Well, let’s have a conversation.”
“Don’t waste my fucking time,” I say, and hear a stool screech as someone behind me stands up. “Derrick,” the bartender says, but I’m not worried. I know guys like these, I’ve employed them all my life. They won’t fuck with a higher caste.
“Now just everyone take a breath,” says the one guy. He sits across from the chair he’s offered me. By the room’s standards, he seems affluent, in a denim shirt tucked into jeans, and sharp boots. He’s older than the rest. “Please,” he says, indicating the chair.
I sit, and he says, “Now that’s a Jaguar, correct? X something?”
I nod.
“Which is it?”
“XJ.”
“And you got the long wheelbase.” He knuckles the table, “I like that. You’re like a political figure.”
“You know Connor?”
The man leans back, appraising me. I nod, and slap my thigh. “I’ll be going then.”
“I guess it’s not a vehicle one acquires through patience.”
“Fuck you,” I say, and hear Derrick moving around.
“I know your son,” the man says.
It’s what I’m there for, but hearing it am disappointed. I was almost clear. “Sit,” the man says, and I do.
“Connor,” he says, “is a mess.”
No living human being could better attest to that, but I don’t like hearing it in this stranger’s mouth. “Go on,” I say.
“He just owes me money. That’s all.”
“So you don’t know where he is?”
“Oh,” he waves a hand, “I know where he is. He’s hiding from me.”
“But you don’t know where?”
The man laughs, “I know where. You didn’t raise a very clever son, I’m afraid.”
I’m silent.
“I’m just letting him get worried enough to rob somebody, so I get paid.”
“Where is he?”
“Should we go see him?” the man says. His face lights up like it’d be an adventure. “Let’s do it, let’s go see him. We’ll take your car.”

It’s one of those moments you can’t believe. It’s Monday; I should be organizing figures and getting everything lined up. Then I should be resting. Instead, there’s cowboys in my car – one beside me and one, Derrick, behind – and we’re following a dark highway towards, according to signs, Townsend, Montana. It was raining, but now just is foggy, odd shapes of it racing at the headlamps. “On your left here,” the man beside me says, and I veer onto a dirt road. We’ve gone a few miles when he says, “Radersburg, Montana. Home of Myrna Loy, if you can believe it.”
We don’t make it as far as Radersburg. The road enters some trees, where the man has me stop. Derrick hops out and passes through the headlamps on his way into the brush. “We’ll give this a minute,” the man says. While we’re waiting, he asks what my line of work is. I stare at the windshield.
“That’s all right,” he says finally. “People like us need to be secretive. It’s protection.”
“How much?” I say.
“Pardon?”
“What’s Connor owe?”
“Oh, well, that’s a fluid figure. He owes what he can pay.”
After a while, I say, “Don’t get greedy.”
“Excuse me?”
“There’s a limit, believe me. I wrote Connor off a long time ago.”
“Now that’s not very heartwarming.”
“Just don’t ask for much. You won’t get it.”
The engine hums a little, then subsides. I notice, just then, the stereo’s playing softly. As if an idea’s just occurred to the man, he slaps my leg, “Hey, let me ask you something. You ever hunted pheasant?”
“What?”
“Pheasant, the birds.” He flaps his hands. “It’s quite an experience. They flush out of that grass, and wham. Tell you what, pull on ahead here. I’ll show you what it’s like.”
I look at him.
“Go on,” he says, shooing us forward. “About a quarter mile here. Get those high beams on, too. The halogens.”
I put the car in drive.
“The beams,” he says, “the beams,” and I punch on the brights. He slaps his knee, “Woo, look at that blue sunrise!”
The road leaves the trees and follows a wire fence into the fog, the brights glaring. We pass an electrical box, and the shimmering eyes of some deer in the field, but other than that it’s just fence and road. “Slow her a little,” the man says. “We’re right here.”
We thump over a cattle guard onto some two-track leading through grass. The car’s jostling. A rabbit flashes before us. “Little faster,” the man says.
“What?”
“Come on, faster.”
I accelerate, the car banging off bumps and puddles, and change rattling in the console. The track vanishes into an open area, at the end of which stands a decrepit shack, an old homesteader place folding like a penknife, most of its boards missing. Nothing in Montana matters to me, I’m there as a favor, but seeing that shack something falls out of my chest.
“All righty, here we go!” the man says, sitting forward. I slow as we approach the place, and when we’re almost upon it a side door flings open and a figure leaps out, in t‑shirt and jeans. He hauls off after the long shadow my headlamps throw ahead of him, and is almost to the field when Derrick steps out from the dark and socks him in the mouth, so that he falls in the dirt and is still. “Wham!” my passenger says, slapping my shoulder. “Flushed him!”

By the time I lead Connor from the bar, the two men watching us from under the eave and Connor walking unsteadily, my hand on his elbow, it’s daybreak and has begun to snow. The highway, as we drive towards the interstate, is discernible only as a flatness through the snow. We see one other vehicle, a gray dump truck, then nothing for miles.
“Take me back,” Connor says, by which he means to Bozeman. That’d be fine by me. I’d take the kid to Bozeman, Billings – I’d leave him in that very field. But I’m delivering this mess to his mother. I’m placing him in her hands, after which she can deal with him. Plus, Bozeman’s the opposite direction, and I have a meeting tomorrow, and it’s snowing.
He protests again, but feebly, and before long is sleeping.
After coffee in Butte (what a shit town), I’m feeling better than I should be, and can turn my thoughts forward. From where I sit at the wheel to 882 Ranchero Vista Drive, Palm Desert, California, there extends a clear path, like stones for crossing a river. I’ll bring Connor to his mom, and that’ll be all where that’s concerned. I’ll turn in early, then get to the office and line things out. By noon, we’ll have an agreement in principle, and by the end of the week paperwork. I decide I want to drive to California. I’ll hire the movers and just get out of there. On the way down, I’ll play Bandon and Pebble.
Then: gin and tennis, and steak dinners, till the reel runs out.
Snow rakes the windshield like thrown gravel, riding sudden gusts and the drafts of trucks we pass, but past Missoula everything stills, the forests grow taller and darker, and it snows vertically, millions of plump flakes tumbling through the trees. I scan the radio, and find a recorded voice repeating the storm advisory – nothing new. In the passenger seat, Connor’s curled like a fossil, and just as bony, his junkie limbs folded inward. I see the ribs under his shirt, and his ass is just knobs in his jeans. The side of his face is split, and it isn’t clear what’s bruise and what’s blood. Thirty thousand dollars he racked up to that meth cooker. I can’t think about it directly without wanting to open the door and kick the kid onto the highway. I’m sure it wasn’t thirty thousand – it probably was half that – but when thirty thousand is what gets you out of it, thirty thousand is what you owed. It wasn’t compassion that made me pay it, and certainly wasn’t duty. It was numbers. Thirty thousand buys me never spending a penny on this shithead again, or even having to hear about him, and gets me to Spokane, where tomorrow I’ll make that money a thousand times over.
He stirs a little, and his jaw parts. When I look again there’s a thread of spittle. I’m like Derrick last night, I want to pound this kid’s face. To be hiding from his debts in a fucking shack, and then the next morning, after daddy clears him, to be sleeping like a baby. I’ll never understand that lack of pride, ever, and at thirty years old. Still, watching him sleep, I do see in his wrecked features the kid he was twenty years ago, when he’d fall asleep in the car, or at Mass, or play dead on the living room floor for his sister to find him, and I admit it’s a shame how things went. Back then we had his sister, and the four of us would eat eggs each morning, teasing each other some, before going our separate directions, he and Lisa to school, and Angie and I to work. Connor in those days even asked me about jobs and things, what adulthood was like, and I got to imagine him becoming his own person, he and his sister both, and carrying our family forward.
Look, I don’t know what impression I give. I’m not a heartless person. Lord knows losing his sister wrecked him. And then his parents’ troubles (it wrecked us, too). But things end, Connor, families included. They stop, and afterwards you have to go forward alone.

The weather report’s been the same message repeated – winter storm advisory, hazardous conditions – there’s been nothing about closures, but cresting a rise west of St. Regis I see a mile of brake lights snaking up the valley. “Fuck,” I say, and Connor stirs a little. “What?”
We stop behind a minivan, the driver of which has left his vehicle and is pacing the shoulder. “What’s going on?” Connor says, and instead of answering I hunt around on the radio. I check my phone, but there’s no reception.
“Was there a wreck?” he says.
“Be quiet.”
There’s nothing on the radio, and Connor won’t stop asking questions, so I get out and walk a ways up the road. In all the idling exhaust, the taillights ahead are shimmering, like things underwater, though I pass several cars that’ve been shut off, their windshields accruing snow. In one, a man naps under his coat. Farther on, children are flapping snow angels in the median. Finally, I reach a group of people standing at the cab of an eighteen-wheeler, the door of which hangs open. Perched up there, like some tree-dwelling oracle, is the truck driver, smoking a cigarette. His other hand holds a radio receiver, the cord of which leads over his shoulder.
“What’s the story?” I ask someone.
“Eh, road’s blocked,” says a guy I know immediately is a salesman. He’s got the company jacket and sharp hair. And evidently he thinks I didn’t know the road was blocked.
“Got a truck up there,” the driver calls down to me.
Peering up at him, wet flakes fall on my eyes and nose. “How long?” I say.
He glances down the length of his truck. “Oh, about as long as this one.”
I try not to seem annoyed. The man laughs, “No, I don’t know. Sounds ugly up there. It started with the truck, then everything else piled on. It’s where the lanes are split, so they can’t get any crews.” He shrugs, “Plus it’s snowing.”
I look up the highway.
“Where you trying to get to?” the man says.
“Spokane.”
“Yeah, that’s a common story. I’m just shooting for Wallace. I could as soon walk up and over.”
I try my phone again, but the signal hasn’t improved. It occurs to me I shouldn’t have left Connor alone with my stuff.
“There is 200,” the trucker says, considering his cigarette. “That might be closed too, I haven’t heard. And it adds some hours.” He shrugs, “But so does standing in the snow.”
“That’s the one through Sandpoint?”
The man nods, “Yup. Head up from St. Regis if you can get back to it.”
Already I’m walking through the cars. It’s difficult, because I’m stopped in the right lane, but with some honking and shouting I part the traffic enough to nose through to the shoulder. Now they’re honking at me, as I glide up the rumble strips. The emergency turnout’s thick with snow, but I accelerate into the turn and after some slipping and skating we’re in the empty eastbound lanes, gathering speed.

* * *

Highway 200’s a good choice, because it doesn’t traverse a pass – it’s riverbank straight into Idaho – but maybe 20 miles from the Idaho line there’s another jam of brake lights. Emergency vehicles ease up the shoulder, in no hurry.
I’ve turned around and am headed for Plains, where there’s a route north to Highway 2 – it’s three o’clock, and my phone says we can hit Spokane by nine, with the time change – but approaching Thompson Falls I remember there’s another pass, and actually several, from there over to Wallace. We messed around on those roads years ago, on a fishing trip, and I must be exhausted because briefly I think this is that trip, today, and when we get to the mountains Connor and I will grill hot dogs and swim. Then I’m driving through snow again, while my junkie son stares out the window. The passes I’m thinking of are almost certainly closed – they’re logging roads – but if they’re not we’ll save half a day. I hit my blinker, and turn off into the woods.
Within several miles, I know I’ve made a mistake. The route’s open, but not recently plowed, and negotiating the curves I feel beneath the tires no road surface at all – it’s like sailing on clouds. There aren’t other cars, which makes the driving easier but feels like a message I’m ignoring. The snow falls, a sky descending as drifts rise to meet it, and we’re losing light. But if we get over the pass, I’m set for tomorrow, and California.
At what couldn’t be a worse time, with the road steepening into switchbacks, and me having to take them at speed, to keep from sliding backwards, Connor seems to come off something. It starts with a tightening – his already curled body curls smaller on the seat, and he presses his face against the door. He unfolds and straightens, his legs extending under the dash, but then curls again, like a burning leaf.
“You all right?” I say.
He waves me back, as if I were approaching.
“Connor.”
When he unfolds again, I see he’s sweating. The blood that’d dried on his face is once more glistening, like fresh blood, and he’s left streaks of it on the door. I keep my hands on the wheel, and my eyes on the road and on Connor, all at once. “What do you need?” I say.
“Forget it.”
He’s still, then sits upright and punches buttons on the door. Those don’t yield anything, so he jabs buttons on the console, and turns dials.
“Stop it,” I say. “What do you need?”
His hand’s shaking. “Fucking . . .” he says, and hits one more button before curling onto the seat.
“You want the window?” I say. Sweat’s staining the back of his shirt. “Heat? What do you want?”
“Just drive,” he says, his voice quivering. “I’m fine.”
He’s not fine, but wrestles his tremors into something manageable, a low boil he curls around, like an animal he’s captured.
I could say it’s his fault, but Connor’s episode actually has nothing to do with the last steep incline before the pass, which I see coming and accelerate towards – thirty miles an hour, forty, snow flying at the windshield and trees whizzing by – but which absorbs our speed easily, in maybe fifty yards, the trees slowing and snow tapering down the hood, until we’re stopped. We slide a little, the tires spinning, before I throw the car in park. I’m thinking we’ll slide farther, but that seems to be it. I drop my hands, and gaze up the last twenty yards to the pass, the car still except for Connor’s trembling. “Well,” I say. “Fuck.”
The wise move is to back down to where I can turn around, and go back through Plains, but we’re so invested that going through Plains we wouldn’t make Spokane till morning, and I already lost one night of sleep. I leave the car, and trudge up the road through the gathering shadows. Indeed, this is the pass – there’s a sign at the crest. Looking back, I see the car so close I could hit it with a snowball. I hear the dinging of my open door. “Fuck,” I say again. After some rest – it’s the altitude or lack of sleep (or the being 67 years old), but the little hike has drained me – I start back down.
“Connor,” I say through the door. I say it again, and he peers over his shoulder like a child waking for school. “You need to drive,” I say.
“What?” He looks around, “Where are we?”
“Take the wheel.”
Unable to climb over the console, he falls out into the snow and walks around the front of the car. Hugging himself and shaking, I can’t believe how frail he is. He’s like a dying little tree. “What’re we doing?” he says.
“You’re driving,” I say. “I’ll push.”
“You’re pushing?”
“Just take the wheel.” I walk around to the back of the car. Once inside, Connor calls through the window, “What am I doing?”
“Just on three!” I shout.
The breath for counting isn’t there, however. I lean against the car, and when the breath is there, I yell: “One . . . two . . .” and then take another breath, “ . . . three!”
I heave against the trunk, and then the wheels are spinning and the car almost levitating, like a planchette. But then I’m drained, and the car wallows in its ruts. “Do it again!” I wheeze, though I mean to shout it.
“What?” Connor yells.
I draw a breath, “On three!”
This time, I push only a moment before my legs give and I slip into the snow. The car slides over me, like a lid, under which the tires scream like table saws and choke me with slush. The recognition of being killed is sudden and whole.
Everything’s still, and I smell exhaust. A door slams, and Connor’s ratty sneakers trudge past me. “Dad!” he shouts.
I try to tell him I’m fine, but am too exhausted. There’s hands on me; he pulls me out like a drawer. “I’m okay,” I say.
“The fuck are you doing?”
His ghastly face, hollow and bloodied, hovers at mine. “I’m fine.”
“Get in the car,” he says.
“We have to keep going.”
“Get in. I’ll push.”
It happens dreamily. He helps me into the car, and shuts the door. Then there’s counting, and shouting, and I’ve put the car in gear and am driving. In the rearview, I see my emaciated son in his t‑shirt, his neck tendons straining, and then I’m floating up the mountain, evergreens gliding by. Connor trots after me, and then falls in the snow.

We rest awhile, our faces and hands at the heater, before I put the car in gear and drive us off the mountain. I’m clear now – except for one more small pass, we’ll run straight into Spokane – and being clear, I can imagine the next few weeks, and few years. Going down there, I’ll follow seacoast to Pismo, along the grassy parts, and then up along the cliffs, before cutting across to the Valley. That far south there’s no farms, but I’ll still stop somewhere for nectarines. My place in the desert is perfect, just a Mission-style rancher on the 10th hole of my club. I’m done with the Jag. I’ll find something upbeat, maybe a Carrera, and then pack it with mothballs and drive the golf cart everywhere. The club has good restaurants, and a bar. I bet the pro shop sells any clothes I need.
It’s a beautiful vector, sailing out from this frigid wilderness, where the light’s falling rapidly, the woods swelling with shadows – but with the heater blasting, and with everything these last 24 hours, I’m not feeling very strong, and frankly I don’t know how far along that vector I can travel. Not very far, it feels at the moment. With all this money I’m coming into, and with the companies soon off my hands, it feels like I can go any direction I want, but only a few steps that direction before collapsing.
I’ll rest tonight. I’ll feel stronger tomorrow, and stronger still the day after. But if I’m not bullshitting myself – and I don’t bullshit myself – this exhaustion didn’t begin today, or yesterday, whatever day it is. I’ve been exhausted awhile, and the shit in Montana just inflamed it. The inflammation will go down, I’ll feel better, but the exhaustion isn’t going anywhere. It’s like seepage from the walls. It’s not fast, but only flows one direction. I’m 67 years old. And it’s not just me. Maybe three months ago, on what would’ve been Lisa’s 28th birthday, I went to Angie’s for breakfast (a tradition), and the same thing’s happening to her. She’s moving slower, and the house she’d kept so fashionable all those years, updating everything all the time, has slipped into that near past, the way old people’s houses do. It’s the fashionable of yesterday.
Connor’s trembling again, and is huddled at the heater like it’s a campfire. “You all right, son?” I say, and he shrugs and rubs his palms together. I don’t know how serious his problems are, if they’re the kind of thing a person gets past. But it occurs to me that any continuance any of us has, is his.
The turnoff for the campground is gated, with prohibitive signs, but I stop in the road and look back through the trees at all the stillness packed away in drifts and darkness. Connor blows in his hands, “What’re we doing?”
“We had a weekend here,” I say.
I don’t think he’s heard me.
“The two of us, and your mom and sister.” Another glance at the woods and I’m driving again. There’s a little farther to go.

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Ben Nickol is the author of a collection of stories Where the Wind Can Find It (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2015). His stories and essays have appeared in Boulevard, CutBank, Fugue, Hunger Mountain, and The Los Angeles Review.