The Intuitions of Mim

“In high school geometry, they taught me that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But what about timing? If it takes me twenty minutes to go two straight miles In traffic during rush hour, but only fifteen minutes to take five miles of curving back roads to get to the same place at the same time, then I posit that distance has nothing to do with it.”
--Mim Carlisle, from her freshman English essay in argumentation, Professor Watters, section 7, room 104, Hudson Hall

I.
Tonight, Mim attends the salad bar at a family restaurant where only old people eat. This care of peas, mushrooms, and baby corn pays for the associate's degree Daddy once promised he would subsidize. Last March, he decided instead to exile her in red pencil on the divorce papers he had served her mother. Though she was making straight As then, it wasn’t from Professor Watters whom she had learned that trust fund was a contradiction in terms.
She muses now about her self-sponsored liberal arts education, how it is earned by hands which, at closing time, grow rawly numb from hand-dipping ice to bus tubs for the salad bar's nightly ritual: a salt, lemon and hot-water bath.
Mim removes an apron spotted with pickled beet blood, garbanzo gravy and Thousand Island dressing. She unties her mile-long hair. Wayne is cheating on her tonight, with Marisa, his first and least accessible love, a rich Greek girl now home from some foreign university. Her parents know enough to distrust Wayne's Ken-doll magnetism.
Mim is still learning.
Danielle, her roommate, is not at the apartment when Mim makes it home. Looking for a friend, she finds one in Danielle's Southern Comfort stash. Tonight, she can celebrate more appropriately. The pregnancy test came out negative last night. To toast the good news, Mim had shattered a half-empty Rainier bottle at Wayne's ankles, crying Hallelujah! through tears of hate and relief. If only she hadn’t slept with him three hours later, it might have been quite a victory.
Mim’s tears grab makeup along the way as she drives to Wayne's. At the curb, she parks so Wayne will see her when he returns home. Mim knows that if Marisa sees her, she won't stay the night. Not if it means making a scene in this shit neighborhood. For effect, Mim resists the urge to wipe her face clean.
--She must witness my suffering.
Her head swims. She is past noticing how the warm orange juice chasing her Southern Comfort acidifies her throat.
Suddenly, there are flashing lights and sirens. Police surround the 7-Eleven at the corner across from Wayne’s little house. She watches while teen-aged white trash gets cuffed, probably for shoplifting. Mim stashes her indiscretions under the seat and slouches to melt her drunken silhouette with the black vinyl. She can’t afford a DWI or an MIP on her salary and still pay for next fall’s tuition.
There is nothing to save when she wakes hours later to an empty driveway. Wayne and Marisa couldn’t have come home to find her, only to leave.
--Where would they go?
Mim steps out of the car, legs shaking, bladder full. On an impulse, she pees in the dog's dish on the back porch. There is no movement from the kennel while she does this, only the sleeping cream fur with its red-brown patches. She thinks how Wayne is probably true only to his dog, a hunter bitch. Even so, Mim recalls how the dog’s puppies died last spring in a Hefty bag thrown into the duck glades by the river. Six small skulls bludgeoned by his hand through a blind skin of black plastic.
--She can never know she was a Mom. Her thought, conveyed in Wayne's voice, impels Mim to dump out her piss.
--Enough.
Driving home, she allows alcohol ghosts to prompt far-fetched decisions. She will pack up and hit the road. Maybe join the army for college tuition, skipping the salad bar track, where being low on eggs means defrosting frozen ones before the eighty-something fifty-cent tippers complain.
--There was a time when you were glad to have eggs at all.
In the army, she would concentrate on career training. Maybe she would study photography then, something she always wanted to do, but never pursued because her parents thought it impractical. Whatever career she chose, she was certain she would be all work. No husband. No kids. And she would be grateful for all that she had, not like the nags at the restaurant, or her father and his second childhood, or Wayne, who only wanted what he couldn’t have at all.
Inside the apartment, her hair is a mile long for precisely ten minutes more. Then, with Danielle's beautician's shears, Mim chops blunt to the nape. Instantly different. It feels good.

II.
Hangover, 1. Salad bar, 0. To hell with the job. With a quick, wet sweep, she wipes away the black blurs under her eyes. In the mirror, she recalls last night's decisions; today they bear reconsideration. Forgoing a shower, she heads out, noteless, before Danielle can stop her. If Mim comes back, she'll join the army then, or not at all. Through a headache's lens she questions the appeal of subordination to a mostly-male regime. Shopping at Fred Meyers, she finds waterproof matches, hot dogs, buns and chips. Mim leaves town with fourteen bucks and change to her name.
Intuition chooses her roads. There are places she revisits. The diner just off I-5 with its giant cinnamon rolls. The view of the twin nuclear towers across the valley. The worn-out logging bridge over Deep River, where her family used to fish for channel cat. At the top of one steep grade, she spies a pullout marked as a vista. From the view in her approaching car, she sees nothing but cloudless sky. But then she turns off the engine, swings her cramped legs out onto crunchy gravel and creeps up to the edge of the road against a cautionary gust of wind. There, she marvels at the emerging sight of the Columbia River --a sign announces The Cathlamet Channel--with its wide venue gleaming like molten silver. Its passage is marked by bold neon buoys.
--Why didn’t I bring my camera?
She kicks pebbles into the void which separates the sky from the water while leaning on the same guardrail through which a trucker will jackknife his rig next fall. She wonders what it is about this place which makes it so hard to leave. Could it be the wind, lusty and soothing all at once?
Mim makes the coast at Fort Canby by six o'clock. The ranger station is closed. Why does she think camping is free? The fee: ten dollars. Her car rattles in idle. A quarter-tank, the orange needle reminds. She will have to leave at dawn to skip her bail.
At a campsite along the dunes, every fire she lights blows out. Mim remembers a lagoon, a jetty and the beach where she nearly drowned as a kid. It was the undertow that did it. A sheet of water coursing over her face, flecked with bubbles and sand like fancy imported glass. She recalls wiggling kelp sucked back by the sea, its elastic tendrils taking her with it.
--Why not?
She hikes barefoot to the shore.
The lighthouses are still there, the blue-bleached shells of mussels from which only seagulls will eat and the giant seaweed bullwhips the tide leaves back. Mim enters the beach --is embraced by it--as if it’s an old, familiar room.
Walking, thinking.
--What am I gonna do? Drive until I find my place in the world?
She would know it. There would be a pink, stucco-sided diner with a Waitress Wanted sign in the window and driftwood chimes hanging from the gutters. Maybe there would be an apartment above it, or an upright trailer to let out back. The tips would be good in the summer, the food would be fried and salty. She would date the short-order cook if he was cute and straight. On days off, she would command the beach any time she liked, or smoke clove cigarettes inside the laundromat to piss off the old people. Off-season, she would read ragged paperbacks, listen to the drizzle, watch for whales through a quarters-only telescope. Maybe she would be poor, but there is content for Mim in the idea of humble living, with its freedom to be, to simply be.
Someone has planted a driftwood cross on the beach, necklacing it with sand dollars. Mim takes in this shrine, the lighthouses, footprints, dune grasses and sands rippled by tides into superficial seafoam crusts.
--This is my world.
At last light, she is back at camp, eating all the chips before catching fire to driftwood. She didn’t pack a chair or a sleeping bag, but she has her pocket knife, which carves for her a roasting stick from greenwood. Over mediocre flames, it cooks hot dogs, which she eats dry.
Next site, there are trailer people who are her parents' age. They wave. Campground folks are always friendly. She hopes they stay away, aware she looks young for nineteen. Instead, they marry themselves to lantern-lit rounds of rummy and S'mores. Mim guesses they don't have kids. All parents suspect all kids. People who aren't parents don't have that knack.
She makes a bed of her car's back seat, which means she doesn't sleep at all this night. A Japanese car, it is too small even for her. Through the back window she watches for shooting stars which never come and wonders if anybody misses her.

III.
Everything about her makes Mim believe at first that ditching camp is criminal. Racing heart. Knotted gut. Wide eyes. Dry mouth.
--May as well be shoplifting.
There isn't a soul at the front gate, though she spots a green truck near a cluster of outhouses. When she hits the open road, she laughs at herself.
--As if stiffing the ranger is going to land me in prison.
She wonders briefly how bad that would be.
There is a gas station in Ilwaco across from a harbor where charter boats groan against their rubbed-raw floats. Suddenly she has to use the bathroom. Mim spends a half hour in the ladies’ room until the gas station guy kicks her out. He insinuates she is shooting horse in there, though she has never done such a thing. Maybe pot, speed, coke, a dot or two of acid, but never heroin, though she has always been curious.
Weak, hungry and tired, now Mim is mad. Her body isn't done. When she reaches inside the car's console for her wallet, she sees the castoff label for the hot dogs on the floor of the car. "Keep Refrigerated."
On her way out of town, Mim kinks from stomach cramps and the delayed awareness she has spent the night in a tin can spawning a bad case of food poisoning. Her car pitches and dies. She tries to be optimistic:
--There are more miles ahead to Nowhere than there are to Somewhere.
A guy in a nearby garage, busy with Sunday morning projects, stops and offers to check her engine. He is a mechanic, he says. Diagnoses her battery "Tits up," offers her a tow. She has only two dollars. No credit cards, no checkbooks. Mim relaxes, though; the mechanic is nice, quiet. He doesn't ask questions or push her for a blow job.
--Must be a born-again.
He even offers to buy her car from her --"For parts," he shrugs--though she can only read charity in his offer. She tells him she is going to walk into town and make some phone calls. On her way, she spots a used-car place. Closed. She wonders about accepting charity.
Her two bucks covers coffee and toast for an hour at the diner down the street. In the ladies' room she sits for another hour, breathing in the unlikely comfort of deodorizer. Her body eliminates. Nobody kicks her out this time.
The mechanic is sipping hot coffee on his front stoop when Mim returns for her car. She sells it to him for cash. A hundred bucks lightens her steps back into town, though with no ride, she is still stuck.
She knows it is time, now, to make humiliating phone calls. To Danielle, or maybe Wayne.
--Did he make it home? Is Marisa there? Did he miss her?
Nobody is home. Mim asks the waitress at the diner about buses. She tells her through a squint how the Lewis & Clark scenic line doesn't run on Sundays. The nearest station is across the bridge into Astoria.
"Can't walk that bridge. Too narrow and long. The wind'll kick your ass right off. We're talkin' the mighty Columbia, sweetie."
Slouch.
"People hitch over all the time. Bible thumpers around here always happy to lend a lift." The woman shrug.
Mim considers this, looks out the window in time to see the mechanic driving her car easily down the road toward the bridge ramp. She could kick herself.
--I still have stuff in that car.
Nobody picks her up. An hour passes. The gravel along the last shoulder before the bridge is sharp-edged under the soft soles of her Keds. Worse, her diarrhea is back. Pacing like a caged animal, she holds it in. A squad car pulls up.
"Take it off the street." The cop is not interested in explanations. "Don’t you know it’s Sunday?"
--So much for charity.

IV.
The guy comes from out of nowhere. Mud all over shoes which don't even match. She believes people can be judged by their shoes. He notices her stare.
"Somebody stole mine while I was asleep." He shrugs. Later, Mim will learn that shoes, any shoes, are a luxury.
"Need a ride?" She imagines this dumpster diver, Ethan, with muddy, mismatched shoes, might actually have wheels. Instead he talks her into thumbing with him.
"People pick up couples. They feel sorry for the girl. Else they think chick hitchers are who-ers."
She decides Ethan is Canadian and, therefore, safe.
They land a ride outright from an old fisherman in a truck who spills stories about yarded lumber, donkey whistles and spotted owls. Hopes for Astoria disappear; the fisherman is heading north. Mim is annoyed. Ethan whispers he knows a place ahead where she can catch The Silver Dog. To pass the time, Mim counts Jesus Saves signs nailed to the evergreens along the road’s edge.
Ethan talks to the old fart, feeds the conversation. Mim guesses Ethan is maybe twenty-one. Later, she will learn he is thirty. By then, the glamour of this will be lost on her. The reeking honesty of their situation then --a situation which she hardly imagines today she will support in less than a year--will dampen any excitement given to courtship with older men.
Just past a tunnel, Ethan tells the old guy to let them out.
--Where's the bus stop?
Ethan says nothing at first, just walks down the road in the same direction as the ride. They are oceanside when he turns and drags Mim down a slope into stinking mud flats. They are knee deep. It reeks of rotten fish. She shouts. Ethan smacks her hard. Mim holds back, hopes he won't hurt her, though she figures herself dead. Ethan only cranes a look up the hill.
A state trooper has been tailing them. The car cruises past them, the eyes inside unseeing. Ethan says he didn't want the old man to get hassled for picking them up. Mim blinks.
"I pushed you because I saw heat in the tunnel." He apologizes and explains how he runs drugs for a Russian woman who grows marijuana near Salish. The cops pressure him to narc. He resists

. "Money's too good."
--How much money is good money to a guy with mismatched shoes?
A few strides up the road is a trail into the woods and a creek with falls. Mim washes off muck from the flats, takes a drink and wets her blunt hair.
--Where to now?
Ethan nods at the forest.
When they reach the cabin, dusk is failing to a moonless night. All Mim can see is Ethan's stealth through the trees and the shadow-shape of a building in a perceived clearing.
They kindle a fire and drink from a bottle Ethan retrieves from the cabin. One day Mim will appreciate how smart she has been, buying waterproof matches. They will end up lasting her for months.

V.
She will not come to know who has done the graffiti until later. The walls inside the cabin are covered with words. Evidence of romantics and nomads. Obscenities. Doggerel. Satanic verse. John 3:16. The partial ceiling marquees the names of favorite local rock groups who might have competed in The Battle of the Bands. Mim finds comfort in the words KGON Rocks! --hot red letters screaming from black bumper stickers lining one wall. It is the logo of her favorite rock station in Portland. There, amidst the urban tattooing of Ethan's lost home, it yields for her a curious sense of belonging.
It is a flop, this one-room hunting cabin. Ethan tells Mim his father willed it to him. A kerosene fire half-burned the place a dozen years back. Ethan, then too high to care, let it go until he hiked in one spring to find tramps squatting there, trashing the place.
"People break things when they're high." He has decided to reclaim it. Mim wonders if it is all Ethan has left.
This isn't a bad place. Except for the cold dampness of it, the place reminds her of a tiki hut. Thin, webbed moss drapes from the trees.
"Old Man's Beard." Ethan fingers its delicate tapestry, then hands it to Mim, deferent.
There are vines, berries and birds. The spreading arms of trees around them weave a natural ceiling. When it rains, Mim doesn't get wet. She only knows it is raining by the gentle rattle of drops against leaves.
Later, when a social worker intrudes upon their space, Mim will promise to lay up plastic to keep out the rain. For now, though, she thinks the fresh air is cleansing. Wholesome.
--Free.
What she doesn't find wholesome is the debris. Head shop paraphernalia. It reminds her of the import palace at that mall in Vancouver. She and her friends used to go there in tenth grade to bootleg. Not that they would use any of the stuff. At least that hadn’t been their intention. It was just to have it, to learn how to hold a finger over a bong's hole or to line a pipe's bowl with new mesh. Important social skills. Later, Mim will become a pro at fabricating her own devices. She will know then to doubt the mechanisms of strangers, always corrupted by some unidentifiable, toxic essence.
She tells Ethan now that she is hungry. Ethan says all she needs is a chase. Mim doesn't know what he means, so Ethan shows her. He has the rubber strap, the needles, the dope. Says it will make her forget her hunger. She pauses. The offer is a kind of freedom: a choice, for peril or escape. Accepting the chase is as effortless, though, as quitting her job, her roommate, her Wayne, her life.
--What life?
"Take off your shoes and socks."
Flinch.
--Eww.
She can't imagine sticking a needle between her toes.
Ethan is astounded. "Most people hate it in the arm." Stick. Smack.
She doesn't remember much about this first time. Bobbing without moving, imagining without thinking. So buoyant she doesn't notice how Ethan has left. No matter. The heroin's delicious, a syrup so sweet and rich, she decides it really is better to scratch the pancakes.
Late afternoon, she threads her way to lucidity atop a thick, mossy log. Ants crawl underneath, building empires into dead wood. She hears them before she sees them, the elk. Fifty head, as big as elephants. There is the thundering of their hooves against turf, the bursting of twigs and the jaw-grinding of leaves. Artificial calm keeps her. At any other time, she might have grown paralyzed by their presence, these elk, she might have felt like she did when she had dodged the ranger. Today, though, Mim watches, hypnotized.
--This is my world.
When Ethan tells her later that the herd is real, she will get the shakes while wondering about connections between nature and what is unnatural.
In the morning, Ethan returns with food and provisions. He laughs at Mim for wanting more when she asks him about the chase. "Don't we all." He tells her he is saving it up for the housewarming.
After he offers Mim a cold breakfast of cereal, dried fruit, cheese and orange juice, he starts collecting trash like he really means to play house.
Mim marvels at his initiative. Once the cabin is cleared of garbage, Ethan produces a chisel for rending rot and splinters from window sills and door frames. She isn't sure why she wants to stay. But where to? After she feeds her breakfast waste to the licking fire, she picks up a broom and begins to sweep at the pine needles clogging the spaces between the cabin’s floorboards. Every few minutes, she peers into the woods to see if the elk have returned.
--Some day, I’m going to take pictures of you, she decides when the first velvet-eared creature returns.

*  *  *

This story was first published as a contest winner in Fine Print, 2000, sponsored by Authors in the Park.

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