NaNoWriMo 2008 Project

Synopsis: Paradise Hills

Odd people living odd lives on the edge of the Great Plains in Paradise Hills, Wyoming. 1982.

excerpt: Drugs To Make You Gods

Andy wasn’t really such a son-of-a-bitch. He was, like Thelma had said before, kind of sweet. Sweet in that “Golly gosh” and “Land Of Goshen” kind of innocence. What in the hell am I supposed to do with something like that? I’d been trying to figure out since the first time he showed up at my place in pursuit of a semi-friend named Gail, trying to get in her pants. Trying, and there was a joke contained in that, itself. Gail wasn’t someone you would consider a challenge when it came to putting out. Not crawling into the sack with her was the sort of thing I held on to as a matter of pride. The only thing I had making me unique in a room filled with 30 guys .
Well, me and Andy.

* * *
excerpt: What Exactly Happened On That Drive Home?

"I discovered girls and drugs in the same summer. I was busy that year."

A good place to start and funny as hell to everybody sitting around the table except for the person it was designed to set laughing. She wasn't chuckling and had that look on her face that hinted at me being much more than not funny.

"Did you meet him then, Nina," Ruby asked just trying to draw her into the conversation I think. I guess she was going for one of those buddy kind of things, where soon they'd be inseparable friends complete with gestures only the two of them recognized and frequent trips to the bathroom, together. Only in that instance it would become the Ladies Room which was fine distinction here but something that needed to be recognized. They knew the difference and any guy who'd been around girls for longer than a campfire hootenanny knew it too.

Girls are funny that way. They have strange and foreign ways not available to the imagination or the understanding of the average guy. This was the way of their world and it was best if you just accepted it and moved on. Hang round too long and you were getting into a fight you couldn't win. A fight where things had to matter and you have to care. If you don't then you are really the scum of the earth and there's nothing anybody, sure as hell not your buddies, can ever do to save you.

It's us against them. Face up to it now and accept that where we go from here really doesn't matter. It's the reason we want to go there that is going to make all the difference in the world here. It's the law of the wild for romance and here, like in many other dark and magical arts, the girls got it over on us fifteen ways to Sunday.

A long way to Sunday you say? Not the sort of place you'd be going? And hell! What if there's a game on you want to see or have got some money on? That would change the entire complexion of the dance, now wouldn't it Charlie?

"No."

Nina was the queen of the one word response. She had a skill where she could completely stop the conversation without even having to turn her head or twist a little bit in the chair. It was something she owned and used like a weapon. There was so much of her and so much of what the world should be in that response.

First of all, she shouldn't be living in a world where the people she barely knew were trying to make jokes and involved her in them concerning a new boyfriend. Well, I wasn't even a new boyfriend yet. I was more on spec or approval. She was dating me the way a careful consumer test drove a car or took two different routes home to find out the quickest given different traffic and weather conditions.

Something else she did and was quite proud of. I didn't think much of it at the time. Or maybe, in that early stage when I was still trying to find a thousand ways to love her in the idea that would make her love me. Maybe then I thought it was cute but nothing that I would ever have to put up with when it came to real time in the real world. By the time we were settled down and I'd bought her a washing machine we'd be way beyond it.

Maybe she'd be laughing at it too. By then I hoped she would've developed at least a modicum of self-deprecating humor. It would've been refreshing in this woman.

The thing was she was making a point and the point was for me and anyone else who might be standing near enough to pick up on it and take it away to ponder. She was always teaching a lesson, in that wild west "schoolmarm" way she had. I loved her for it. I thought it was incredibly fucking sexy. It made it a lot of fun to strip her naked and fuck. Like pulling the shroud off of a hidden piece of art and getting to see it years before the artist was ready to release it to the world for viewing.

I thought of her that way. I really did. I thought she was beautiful and there were more than one or two or three or more guys in every place we went together who agreed with me. It was fun being with a girl that pretty. A girl so alluring that nobody could help themselves. They would ache to try.

and it was fun being with her when they did because she could be the cruelest coldest bitch in town and cut them to pieces without even stopping long enough to catch a breath. She was fucking amazing that way. She truly was.

How could I help but love her? Hey?

Oh, but the point she was making here? Multi-faceted I said? And that is the truth. It was aimed at me, letting me know this wasn't a funny story in her opinion and it would probably be honest and I would be doing well if she never heard it again. Okay?

Si.

And she was stopping Ruby, holding her at a distance with the certainty of a stiff arm from a linebacker forcing an opponent down before they'd reached them. She had a way of doing that. She was petite. That is the really nice way of saying it. Fact was she was tiny. Teensy tiny and yet she was or seemed to be so powerful. She had a way of stopping me in mid-step and pushing me back a pace or two.

It wasn't just me, either. Ruby was probably one of the toughest chicks I'd ever been around. God knows I and a lot of the brighter men I knew who'd met her were terrified of her. She was one of those people that just looked like trouble. One peek and you knew you didn't want this in your pocket or lit and standing behind you. She was crazy like that and dangerous like that. She crackled and threw sparks when she was just standing in the middle of a room and there was a lot of people who'd been burned by them. Collateral damage, most. Nothing she'd set out to do, they just happened to be in the way when she got started and she didn't have any way to control it.

Nina was the first person I'd been around who could stop Ruby before she'd really gotten going. I don't know what it was. Some weird sort of girl competition that, like many other parts of a feminine relationship, were just beyond the ken of a simple guy like myself and I had to sit back in wonder. Always amazed and ever aware but never exactly sure why. Maybe it was a "less than" thing that was going on between them? Something that was there in the quality of each, like something worked into the warp of fine fabric that only somebody with experience would ever be able to recognize?

Go figure.

So my joke was off like a ton of bricks and the best I could hope to do was stay out of the way of the fallout. I didn't want them on my feet or on my head and if I could avoid that then I could make it through to try redeeming myself. There might be a way to be forgiven but there was no way in hell to recover or explain. I'd learned that in the short time Nina and I had been together. I'd realized quickly, in one little spat we had in the middle of a movie that had cost me getting to see the end, and long ride home with a woman who was so blaringly silent that she was deafening.

I learned a quick lesson then and I still wanted her so fucking badly that I was willing to change. I was anxious to do whatever it might require, bending and twisting and shaping myself to be the one she loved.

I was a silly son=-of-a-bitch. Let's face it. I was doing things that a kid with his head pumped full of pot and fantasies would be likely to do because I didn't know any better. I still wanted what I wanted so badly that it was worth doing whatever I might think was going to help, no matter how misdirected and wrong I was.

In the case of Nina, I was totally misdirected. I thought she might love in the same panicked way that I did. She did not.

She would love me the way a woman loves something fragile. She would love me knowing that most of the attraction was contained in being able to hold me in her hands. The control she felt. Being able to twist me to refract beams of light from the lamp but if, and when she was ready it would all be over. As simple as dropping me. Not even throwing. Not even a hard toss toward a brick wall or a rugged cliff ledge. Just a few feet with the pull of gravity and there’d be nothing left of me. She knew that.

I did not.