Slow River

On the smell of a 7 Mile garage and all that came to fade

The text came across Jake’s phone as he sat in his truck, the reflection of October’s golden canopy on the windshield. A blue Ford pickup, 1994. He’d been driving it for 25 of its 32 years, and it was battered but still running. A grocery getter. Not common for Ford, they’d say. As Merle Haggard sang before Jake was even born, the country was “a snowball headed for hell”, and you get 10 years out of these American bastards anymore. That’s a known reason that contributed to the downfall that even most people in the Rust Belt who are old enough to remember would agree upon.

Years ago he would have been fishing. Trout for sure, before the PFAS warnings came out. The forever chemicals used in just about everything since 1950.

The grey text bubble was from Heather. He knew it was about John. By the length of it. Gone a year now, the grief was the reason they started talking again.

He wished he still smoked. He was probably smoking when they met. Why wouldn’t he have been. He closed his eyes and saw her, amber hair and eyes, one of the kinds of women he wished he could meet for the first time again. But they don’t seem to exist anymore. And if they do, he wouldn’t know where to find one. He drank in the memory of her essence. Then he read the message.

“I allowed myself to travel fully back in the grief frequency the other night. Listening to the song we made that night. And I felt him instantly. Standing with me. Holding me as I cooked and cried. Telling me that he’s so proud of me and that I’m doing amazing and that I’m going to have everything that I want.

I was cooking while my laundry dried in the dryer next to the apartment building, on a rare week of zero sun in Rio. I turned off the gas instead of letting it simmer and being reckless. I rode the elevator down from the 11th floor to go get my sheets, and a beautiful man entered on the 4th floor. He spoke with an accent that has half Rio/half French. He was drawn to me, but he sensed the grief. He could see I’d been crying.

And it reminded me why I’ve been so terrifying to some people since he passed. There is nothing as terrifying as the energy of losing someone you deeply love. It’s the last thing anyone ever wants to happen to them, and they pick up on it immediately.

I am, at times, a walking eulogy without an audience. But it’s when I am deepest in my loss, that I feel him the closest. So, sometimes I go back there. To remind me of how real and immense the loss is. To remind me of what I had. To remind me of how real it was. But I don’t want to stay long. Because I didn’t go with him, and just maybe there is a reason for that.”

He wished he could respond. A heart emoji to acknowledge it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t access words like hers, even though he felt them deeply. So he didn’t respond. But he did feel. He hit the steering wheel, vibrating the entire dash. And he spun out on the rocks. Even if it was just the crows over the Huron River that saw him, he was happy with that. He was happy to make a mark.

Heather couldn’t help it. The screaming inside on the days where the emptiness took over. John’s passing was a long line of tragedies. Lost loves, lost loved ones, lost babies. There was no lasting reason for it. Most anyone who had caused it was dead or long gone. She would outlive them all, she thought. But when the emptiness was there and there was no alcohol to soothe it, she opened the gates and all her unmet needs would simply spill out. To the most open ears. And lately, they’d been Jake’s. Again.

She could drink right now and it would feel immediately better. She’d also probably wind up hitting a tree driving wasted and so it was better that she didn’t. She would die either way. Certainly while drinking. Possibly while feeling. She chose the latter. There was still something she needed to do. It couldn’t simply be … this. Another year. Another decade. Another 25 year class reunion. As her back began to ache more and her sleep worsened. Four hours per night now, if she was lucky. The doctors would ask “how long it’s been going on” and the answer was always, for as long as she could remember. The last time she got a proper sleep was around 28. All systems would have been functioning well then. Despite her best efforts. She was healthy. She didn’t want to feel any worse. That was it. So she didn’t drink. But fuck, did she want to.

She had traveled many miles. She’d been to Rome and Athens, Mexico and Brazil. The lands where the great casanovas roamed. And they were handsome and charming and they would always meet her where she was when she was feeling good. When she was comfortable. When she was confident. They could light their cigarettes with her spark. But they would run at the first sign of depth. At the first sign of the cracking open of the abyss. When the oil would come oozing out of her and flood the windshield. When the darkness was so thick, only the curve of her eyelids would be recognizable.

But Jake loved to watch the shifts in her. They were something to observe at the very least and to fix temporarily at most. He could make her laugh. He could buy her her favorite gas station drink. He could roll her a spliff. He could fix her with his hands, like anything that could ever possibly enter a garage. Like the clouds rolling over a hunter’s moon, and the moving shape of it as the season would go on. It was like meeting nature itself. A vision quest like his uncles sent him up near Big Bay when he was 11. He shot his first deer. A nice six pointer.

His brother, Tim, two years older, didn’t get one until his 20s. And even then, he’d had to bate it. Tim would say that he loved Jake. But all he ever did was try to be more like his little brother. And fail miserably at it. And when he failed, there was nothing Tim liked to do more than act like a giant asshole. He’d taken his wingspan to the test and rushed all the jars of all the screws their dad had collected for years, shattering them on the floor once for attention.

His dad was six Killians in, a normal after-work, pre-dinner load. “Pick it the fuck up, asshole.” He said, glaring at Tim, without moving a muscle. That was the scariest thing to Tim. How their dad could be unfazed by anything, when he literally just constantly wanted to scream. “Fuck you.” He said, but picked the pieces up one by one. Jake helped him. It took two hours to clean it up. “This is good enough” Tim said, long after their dad had gone to see what was for dinner. “There’s still more here you jackass,” Jake said. He combed the floor and its intricacies and shelves and dust and biker magazines and 70s smut. He might need those screws at some point. Somebody would. So might as well have them all in one place.

Jake was always their dad’s favorite because he was quiet and agreeable. Happy to sit in the garage and tinker when he was invited to tinker, and sit still and observe when it was time to learn. Jake inherited the whole garage and sold it at auction. He gave Tim half. Tim had more money - he’d become much more … successful, but it was Jake that their dad thought of when he thought of someone continuing his legacy. By the wood-burning stove, carving whatever needed to be carved with a knife he’d made himself from stainless steel and an Eastern Ash grip, carved in the shape of an Annie Oakley pistol.

The only thing he ever said about Jake and Heather fucking in Jake’s room was “Don’t let your mother walk in. If she walks in, stop and pretend you’re just watching a movie. And don’t let me walk in either. If I walk in, I’m next.”

He was a good dude, but he was a crass motherfucker, Jake would say. Now 8 years after his death, the scent of kerosene and cigars dipped in Bourbon is still much louder than a whisper. He remembered flipping the tape on ZZ Top’s “Degüello” and he remembered the first time Heather heard it. They drank as much of his dad’s Jack Daniels as they could get away with, and he rolled her cigarettes. Not much but 22 years in the middle, and the way that things rust.

The last time Heather called the house, after their final break up, after Jake left her and moved his things out of the Lansing apartment he’d gone to share with her while she went to college, his dad answered. “He’s not here, darlin’. I’ll tell him you called.”

“Do you think he hates me?”

“I doubt it.” He paused. She had probably caught him four Killians in, judging by the hour (5 pm) and what he was about to say.

“I taught him a lot of things, but I never taught him how to love a woman.”

Heather never talked to Jake’s dad again. Fifteen years passed between conversations between the kids themselves.

She was still impossibly beautiful. Jake and many others thought so. From the liquor store at M-52 to the supermarket to the Speedway. “Man she’s pretty enough to be a movie star, even with no makeup. No shit done to her. And she’s a real person. Imagine if she was a movie star. All made up. All worked out. All glimmering life all the time. She’d be the most beautiful woman who anyone had ever seen.

She’s the kind of woman they would have gone to war for, he thought. And she’s right here. In my phone. And I don’t even know what to say.”

He finally texted. “Nobody like him.” She hearted it 6 minutes later.

The hidden turn off to the river isn’t hidden from anybody who lives along the stretch of highway. It’s only hidden from people from Ann Arbor, who sometimes would show up in their foreign-brand cars and take pictures of the water for their socials, or whatever. He wanted to make it out of there before he wasn’t alone.

John’s death felt particularly unfair because he was not trying to die. The rest of them had chosen a way out, a slow way out, but a way out. John wanted to keep on. He fought through the diagnoses. The rounds of chemo. The multiple surgeries. Always sending a before and after selfie, with a lively smirk and a quieter one. And never talking about it other than to say “it’s going” when someone asked how it was.

They all loved each other so much. Heather wasn’t his or John’s. They all belonged to each other. They were children of the same long shadows of green oaks in September, before they would shed their leaves. They had punched their time in and time out together. They had called landlines to report their opinion of the new Rage Against the Machine album when it came out. They had sat in the parking lot of the Taco Bell, making each other cackle with inside jokes. They had drunk their proudly Hey Mister’d beers in the fields at night under a cap of stars. They’d had silly sex that didn’t lead to much but laughter, in the back of old cars, along undeveloped property, on their dirt roads.

Chief Pontiac’s people lived on this river. Canoeing the length back and forth, hunting animals, and fishing. Nesting in the blessed thickness of the forest. They traded furs, especially beaver - the warmest and most resilient along the Great Lakes, with the other tribes and even with the French, before the Westward Expansion was in its full effect.

It still smells of dark earth and a sweet fragrance of decaying leaves. But in Pontiac’s time, the power of this forest’s density would have felt immense, cradling an unpolluted river, which would later be named after his people. Long after most of them were killed by the same white beast that would eventually kill all of Jake and Heather’s friends.

A beast that you don’t see coming until it’s already slicing your throat. And the ones who are spared the blade will shoulder the metallic ache of nostalgia. For a place that no longer exists, and will never exist again.