NOVEL EXCERPT (unfinished)

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So, the envelope.

First, there was a certificate notifying me of three years of service with Dynamo. Chandra’s voice sounded in my head: fancy. Gold swirls at the corners and a dignified printed font with my full name: Warren B. Fischer, and below, 15 July 2008—15 July 2011. I’d landed the job right after the Fourth, I remembered now. Today was Friday, July 22. The Human Resources department in Helena must be on the ball to get me this so quick. A smooth operating business, Dynamo Incorporated. A well-lubricated apparatus. There were a gas-station, after all ...

I held the certificate up to the fluorescent light. A neat watermark on the paper, the company D, and the signature of the President, Deborah P. Sauer, and Vice President, Stephen Sauer Jr. As I held it there and stared, my hand trembled. It made me anxious to see those dates, as if on a headstone. Three years of my life, spent like a vampire at an Idaho gas station, ringing up Copenhagen and corn dogs and tortilla chips. It made me visualize my mother’s headstone too, in the Rigby Pioneer Cemetery, alone but for her parents and the empty plots awaiting her siblings and me. My mother spent most of her life running away from her parents, Rigby in general, and where did that get her? Beside her mother and father, within city limits, until the Second Coming. Sometimes God’s keen sense of irony was evidence enough of his existence.

Twenty-five years old—six years older than Chandra, but she was a mature nineteen, much more responsible than the average Millennial—and what did I have to show? A few work shirts (Dynamo supplied the first one, a pea green fly fishing button-up to cater to the outdoorsy crowd), a steady paycheck, twenty-percent store discount, and an extensive knowledge of gas station capitalism. This wasn’t how I envisioned my life, not by a long shot. At twenty-five, I was supposed to be married, have a kid or two, certainly a college degree, and be settling down into a comfortable job or advanced study. That pipe dream was a thousand miles away. So the certificate made me depressed as hell, and I kept staring at that dash between the dates.

15 July 2008—15 July 2011.

My life: a plain, flat, uninteresting line; the simplest and most inanimate mark on the page; that dash, a pair of handcuffs; that bar, a spear through the heart.

I set down the certificate—“To save for prosperity’s sake,” as my mother said more than once—and wadded up the envelope to fit it inside the office wastebasket. As I did, I felt something else inside. I uncrumpled it and found a small envelope that Chandra had somehow overlooked. My own name was handwritten on the outside in a sure, slanted cursive. I’d never seen my name penned so elegantly. I opened this letter very carefully, a slice along one side, and gently shook out the contents. That was a trick taught to me by my companion long ago, when I was twenty and living in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Elder Powers was his name. Cameron Powers. He worried a lot about gutting his incoming mail, his only connection to the outside.

A button, a plastic gift card, and a piece of paper fell onto the desk. The button said: 3 YEARS! I took it and pinned it to the left pocket of my shirt, where I once wore my ELDER FISCHER missionary badge. I appreciated the slight heft of it there.

I unfolded the paper.

from the desk of

DEBORAH P. SAUER

President, Dynamo Inc

Dear Mr. Fischer,

I am well pleased with your service to our company. Rarely do we have an employee meet his/her three-year mark missing less than 2% of his/her shifts. In fact, in this three-year span, you are the only employee to do so. Dedication such as this does not go unrewarded. Please find enclosed a DYNAMO gift card of $25, redeemable at any of our locations, and a commemorative button. Wear it proudly! You are exactly the type of employee that Stephen Sr. would have hired!

As well, I encourage you to continue to apply yourself. Have you considered DYNAMO management as a career option? I will make the manager application and test available to you via the DYNAMO employee portal on the DYNAMO website. Please notify me if you do apply; I will expedite the process of your documents. We need employees of your caliber and commitment!

Sincerely, Deborah P. Sauer

A cartoon of a spaceman blasting off adorned the card, one fist on a hip of his spacesuit, the other pointed heavenward. Davy Dynamo, the icon with which Stephen Sr. opened his first store. Corporate still sported the big neon marquee above its front doors, or so I’d seen in company paraphernalia, idolizing Stephen Sr. and that bygone Space Race era. Our current logo, DYNAMO with lightning bolts for the letter feet, better suited the burgeoning millennium.

I turned this note over to see if anything more was written on the back. Nothing. I liked that. The fact that there wasn’t a scribble to get the pen going, or a false start, gave me solace. Perhaps this small contentment came from my expectations being met. I had the idea that Mrs. Sauer was a complete woman: proper, classy, professional, adroit, sure-handed. I hadn’t known many women like that. The fact that she took time out of her day, which I assumed was very busy as acting president of a far-reaching chain of service stations—to write this personal message made me proud. Not proud like I’d finished a marathon, but proud that a woman connected a positive connotation to my name.

I tried to picture Mrs. Deborah Sauer, but I didn’t have an idea of where to begin. Instead, I considered my own mother, her curly brown hair, her soft eyes, the slight lisp when she said her Ss. One of a kind, Ms. Gaye Fischer. Gaye for light-hearted, glad; Fischer for Mack Fischer, the man she ran off with when she was seventeen. Mack, a drifter who came to work the farm with W.P. and Hank, convinced my mother that true love involved risk and uncertainty. They got hitched in Nevada on their way to Tucson, where Mack had his people, and it didn’t last much beyond my arrival. After a year, my mother filed for divorce and moved us to Henderson, outside of Las Vegas. That’s where I had my first memories, of the gray desert, of Gaye’s painted fingernails; of sandboxes that I feared were quicksand. I was loony for quicksand in those days, Saturday morning cartoons to blame. I grew convinced that quicksand would cause my demise. One Venus flytrap of a sandpit, somewhere in the desert, not a branch or a vine to grab hold of, and me, all alone, drowning in the dirt. But my mother’s hands were always there for me. I’d take one of hers in both of mine, we’d walk around the edge of the sandbox on the railroad-tie border, and I’d dip in my toe to make sure I wouldn’t sink. Then one foot, back to the border. Then both. My mother clapped and cheered when I finally had the courage to stay in. If I panicked, my mother’s hands with those painted nails always awaited me. As predictable as the sunrise, as dependable as time. The hands, I remembered well. They were thin and pretty and soft. But the nails were a different story. I’d tried to recall the tone of her nails the last time we were together but, depending on my mood, the color morphed. Sometimes they were Coastal Surf, but then, weren’t they Ginger, or Butterfly Stroke, or Snappy Sorbet, or Mint Envy? Once, in a confusing and sexy dream, Fishnet Stocking. Another, Stiletto. And the worst, a combination of Sable and Tilled Soil and Kentucky Grass—like how they probably were now, as nails grew even in the grave—and that made me sad as hell. Really low, thinking about her resplendent nails, long and curling and cracking, all while the rest of her turned to rot.

Maybe that fixation attracted me to Chandra’s bracelets so much. She wore one for just about every color in the watercolor palette. I didn’t buy into that horseshit that the bracelets denoted specific sex acts. One, she was pretty much only with Zeke. According to her, their relationship went up and down, so I doubt they hooked up all that much or, at least, consistently. Two, the sheer amount of bracelets combined with Chandra’s time spent at work, her age, and her location made the equation unfeasible. She hadn’t had the time or population density to achieve such a vast sexual repertoire. Really, the bracelets were about show, most likely purchased in bulk at the Idaho Falls mall. The truth about Chandra was that she barked but didn’t bite. She wanted people to think east when really she was west. She claimed Wicca when she’d been baptized Mormon. That rap music, for instance. She played it in the store because other people could hear her playing it. But really, she adored animated movie soundtracks. I laughed out loud when I saw that playlist on her phone. She claimed it was for Destinee, but I didn’t buy it. Here Chandra was, fronting this confused gangster Goth façade, when really she imagined herself wearing sexy kaftans.

But I could hardly fault her; we all lived double lives. Take Hank, this bald, thick, staid, potato and grain farmer I call my uncle. He bought a How-To harmonica kit—eight CDs, a couple of mouth-harps, a neck harness, the whole shebang—and taught himself to play one August while cutting wheat in the thresher. He said it took him five weeks and an entire tin of Bag Balm for his lips. He played well, according to him, and even figured out a few hymns. But with Hank, I had to about get down on both knees and beg him to play. The only reason I knew about his skill was because last year I went out with him to do some research and he didn’t hide his neck-harness well enough in his lunchbox. It took me an hour of cajoling, and then he only played the first few bars of “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.” Stubborn old crow, Hank. If I had that talent, I’d be serenading Dynamo customers all night long. Or I’d move to Nashville.

I had my own obsessions, ones that didn’t involve my Dynamo persona, the identity by which most people knew me. Back at my trailer, I had nine full notebooks of character backgrounds, scene sketches, plot outlines, and analyses for this daytime soap opera I was writing called We are Pilgrims, We are Strangers. The cast centered on Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, and was set in Rigby in the 1920s when he lived here. I envisioned the show to cover a lot of ground too: prohibition, loss, frontier living, Mormonism, racism, small town life, doomed love. But most of all, the show was about genius; how hard work and a good idea could lift a person out of the lowest valley to the highest peak America had to offer.

The concept came to me before I started working at Dynamo, the first year I lived in Rigby. I was drunk, walking around town on the Fourth of July. I deviated from my regular route and ended up on the road that led to the lake. Halfway there, I decided to jump the barrier fence and walk in the gutter along State Highway 26. I grew dog-tired, like if I took one more step I might pass out and die. Too much tequila. So I hunted around for a place to sit. Up ahead I saw a dark rectangle illuminated by the oncoming traffic. I discovered a large marquee—almost billboard-sized—painted in the Rigby High colors maroon and gold, illuminated by a few small spotlights. It read:

Welcome to RIGBY

BIRTHPLACE OF TELEVISION

Philo T. Farnsworth

Easy off—Easy on!

I stood there and picked over the four lines again and again, and their meaning never really clarified. Maybe the sign’s purpose was to catch the attention of traffic and get them to exit at Rigby? Cars and pickups whizzed by, and some blared their horns. I was getting my bearings and figuring out how to get back to town when … in the sky. Fireworks. Idaho Falls put on a fairly elaborate Freedom Celebration, and the red horsetails and white fishes and blue spiders filled the heavens. Something in my brain sparked, the word television and Philo’s strange name coupled with the pyrotechnics. That was when I felt the initial impetus for We are Pilgrims, We are Strangers. Or, shortened: Pilgrims & Strangers. Abbreviated P&S. But really, the more I thought about it lately, I called it P.O.S ...

When Chandra started in the winter, I tried to explain to her my show’s concept. She wasn’t interested, she said, because she hated daytime TV. Everything except Judge Judy. That I could understand—different strokes for different folks. But I was explaining fascinating history about the town that she called home. How could she not be engrossed by the fact that the man who invented a contraption—a machine found in almost every home in America, influencing young and old alike—had discovered the scientific idea for it while living in (using Chandra’s misnomer) butt-zit Rigby? This floored me.

To impress her further, I told her about all the money I’d saved to buy a car to get down to Hollywood to pitch my script.

“How much you got?” she asked. “None of my business. Just curious.”

“Over fifteen-hundred bucks,” I bragged.

“Damn! How much do you make an hour?”

“Minimum wage, same as you.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be fair for Dynamo to pay you more, right?”

“You’re missing the whole point,” I said. “Pretty soon, I’m leaving this dead-end town. I have a grip of cash and a golden ticket. What do you think about all of that?”

“Hell, I’m not surprised,” she said, chewing her gum obnoxiously. “Even I knew about Farnsworth and Rigby. What, you didn’t take Idaho History class in Fifth Grade?”

“Honestly, Chandra. Ask me something about electromagnetic imaging, or Farnsworth’s three sons, or, hell, about General Hospital! What do you care about a bank?”

“I go to Zion’s Bank. What about you?”

“ I manage my own money. Does that satiate your curiosity?”

“Jesus Christ, cool your jets,” Chandra said. “I was just asking. You know me. I got an inquiring mind.” She held up the copy of National Enquirer she’d been perusing.

It took me a minute to calm down. It was not easy to bear my soul to Chandra and have it dismissed like so many date invitations.

Before she left, though, Chandra did say, “Bud, your, um, book or whatever, it sounds real good.” That made me feel a little better.

All of this led me back to Mrs. Sauer’s note, and her invitation. Because of P&S, no, I hadn’t ever considered Dynamo management as a career option. In fact, I’d only taken the job to fund my research. I didn’t want it, and the thought of another year in Rigby made me want to punch myself in the guts. Once I received my next check and paid my bills, I’d break $2000. I’d buy a car, pack up my shit, say adios to my few friends and family, burn my Dynamo clothes, hit the road, and belt “California, Here I Come” all the way to L.A.—just like Philo did.

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