Frontier Mosaic Nonfiction Spring 2015

Frontier Mosaic Nonfiction, Spring 2015

Cover Art: Glass Floats by Emma Shore

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The Hatred of Sound SHAWN FINLEY

The sound repeats, a three-second song bite looped imperfectly—my girlfriend’s phone alarm. I want to leap out of bed and dash the phone to the ground and grind it under my heel. In my apartment in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the alarm never gets to the second loop. At home, I unfold from bed and hit my alarm’s reset button, never the snooze—not once in twelve years did I hit the snooze. Elizabeth, pinning me against the wall in her Chickasha apartment, has her phone set to auto-snooze after five minutes. Her body heat is unfamiliar: at home, I sleep in my underwear, covered by only a sheet. I inch my way off the foot of Elizabeth’s bed. Sometimes, when I wake around dawn, I watch dust float in the morning light and listen to car doors and distant train horns pierce the monotony of Elizabeth’s faint snoring. Then comes the alarm and I sneak off the bed and slink off to somewhere quiet.

When I was in high school, years before I woke in Elizabeth’s bed, I remember the heavy groan of the hinges as my door swung open, the click of the light-switch, and the sound of the ceiling fan straining against static friction as it began turning.

“Are you going to sleep all day?” Dad said on those Saturdays.

I curled into my blankets and swaddled my head in a pillow. Dad told me again of waking at dawn all his life. Mom was usually in the kitchen with cinnamon rolls or pancakes, her voice like ice water.

“Quiet, please,” I said. “No voices, too early.”

“Been in the liquor cabinet again?” Mom said.

Less than five miles away from the room where my father woke me, there is a landing strip for Tinker Air Force Base. The large planes with radar dishes on their back, the A.W.A.C.s land there at all times, their engine noise loud, angry, and familiar. The planes never bothered me, not once in the eighteen-some-odd years I lived there. My parents telling me to wake up or asking what I wanted for breakfast sets me on edge.

Zippers zipping, bacon crackling, heaters whirring. The crunch of frost caked grass and wind howling through the trees. The fleeting cries of distant owls and the everpresent planes are the sounds of my adolescent winters. I walk up the road from our neighborhood in my winter jacket and across the intersection to sit on the red benches outside Carl Albert Junior High. Solitary cars drive by in the cold. No one is here except the janitors inside, and me sitting outside with the frost. The doors are locked; they open in half an hour. The best hours of February are these half-hours of frozen

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silence.

There were mornings when Mom woke around four or five and sat at the kitchen table, reading in a pool of yellow light. At six a.m., I would eat breakfast at the table at Mom’s insistence, food and drink long since banned elsewhere. Mom’s voice would be scratchy, a combination of tired and exasperated. Her voice then is my voice now on less than ideal mornings when someone knocks on the door at eight a.m. and I answer, wrapped in a blanket.

In my apartment that overlooks the bars of Washington Street, “The Strip” as locals call it, the trash truck rumbles past at four in the morning. The truck does not bother me when it makes the rounds, not even in the summer when the new drivers blast Ramble On loud enough for me to sing along through three walls. I only know of the trash trucks and their penchant for Led Zeppelin from summer mornings when I was nocturnal, in the days after Elizabeth and I stopped speaking to each other.

The fraternities and sororities of Oklahoma State Greek Life are out again, singing country and pop music at eight in the evening as the late summer sun arcs through my living room window. The crowds in front of the house across the street sing mechanically, more of a chanted half-song than music. In my room, I can hear their music, distorted by the surrounding buildings. I can hear their music through my sound-canceling headphones and my classic rock.

Sometimes, the whole of their house is turned out on the lawn, watching football on TVs in tents. I can hear the scores easily in my kitchen and the Greek Life cheering anywhere in my apartment. Later, in the fall, the sounds of country are pierced by angle grinders and the faint fizzing of arc welders as groups of men build towering monuments to tetanus from pipe as the rest of the houses spend hours poking tissue paper through plastic netting, “pomping” they call it, to create the murals of school and life in Oklahoma that will hang from those steel frames. I don’t understand their school spirit or their excitement over homecoming football. One year, our team won Bedlam, the match between Oklahoma State University and our supposed rival, University of Oklahoma, and the crowds tore down the goal post and filled the bars I can see from my bedroom window. Living with Greek Life housing is not a problem.

I filter much of the noise, but at these times, they sift into my life.

July fourth fireworks and the panicked dogs they bring; nothing. Overloud drunks in the alley behind my apartment, stadium cheers, and hooligan’s four a.m. fireworks; awful. Gum smacking, throat clearing, and toenail clippers. “Good morning,” in a level tone. At my parents’ house near Oklahoma City, the tornado sirens test every Sunday and Wednesday at noon and sound when the town is under tornado alert. In Stillwater, the town tests the sirens once a week and only sounds them when a tornado touches down. The sirens of my parents’ house were predictable, the differences in

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volume and pitch could tell you if Norman, Edmond, or Del City were under alert. I knew where danger was and how long I had to hide in the bathtub with pillows and a flashlight.

Fingernails on blackboards, sniffles, and slurping bother most people. Others have odder sounds such as humming, hard consonants, or loose change in a pocket. Some people find certain sounds annoying, other people experience tensed muscles, increased heart rate, or disgust. It’s called misophonia—the hatred of sound.

One morning, summers ago when the rain refused to fall, crickets in droves littered the short stretch of walkway outside my apartment. Opening the door let in dozens who scurried along the baseboards or dove beneath the fridge. Outside footsteps met with crunching. At night, one or two would chirp, sometimes outside my window or along my baseboard. Instead of the near constant hum of crickets while camping or the long, sharp drone of summer cicadas, the crickets would chirp only a few at a time. My roommate took out insecticide and washed the walls in poison. I still see the hundreds of legless crickets as my roommate swept them from our balcony and onto the cars below, hitting the concrete with a sound like rain.

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The Pennies MATTHEW MITCHELL

It was the weekend after I got my first car. I was seventeen and I spent my time driving around excited with newfound freedom. I stopped at random places that caught my attention because I could. That’s how I found myself at the estate sale.

I never found out whose estate it was, only that the sale was being conducted by the owner’s children and they wanted everything gone. Only the big stuff was priced: furniture, major appliances, and the car—everything else just said “make an offer.”

All the cabinet doors were wide open; boxes sat gap-mouthed all over the garage.

It was an antiquarian playground and digging through this absent stranger’s life was a treasure hunt amongst the junk.

I found an old typewriter with a carrying case that they were thrilled to sell for ten dollars, an old corded jigsaw that they gave away for seven bucks, and a large bucket filled with pennies that they gave me for free. It’s ironic really, because this bucket was where all the real treasures were hiding.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by coins. Little pieces of history you could hold in your hand. I loved to sort through them, arranging them by date. As I got older, the collecting became more refined, and begging my parents for spare change became begging them to take me to a coin store. Pennies were always my favorites.

I was giddy with excitement. I abandoned all the thoughts of exploring the town in my new car and raced home with my bucket of pennies. I settled at my desk, my lamp and magnifying glass ready in case any dates were difficult to read.

To start off, I didn’t even look at the face. I sorted the pennies by reverse design— wheat ear or memorial. Surprisingly, most were of the wheat ear, and there were even a few older designs as well. There was one that really stuck out; the penny didn’t look copper. I set it aside for further study later and continued sorting.

I organized all the memorial pennies by decade and put them with the others in my collection. I already had memorial coins from each year and mint in my collection, and the wheat ears from the forties and fifties swiftly joined them. The thirties were skimmed through; I was looking for any coins from thirty-one. While already in my collection, the coin is still valuable. The San Francisco mint produced less than a million of the coins that year. Finding none, I moved on to the twenties and slowed down.

I whooped out loud when I found an elusive twenty-four D, a low mintage year

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that eluded me for ages. And I nearly cried when I found a twenty-two, only to be crushed when I squinted in and spied the barest ghost of a Denver mint-mark—that knocked somewhere between $20,000.00 and $30,000.00 off its value. I finished with the twenties, a few other somewhat valuable coins popped up, but my heart wasn’t really in it. It was over a week before I sat back down to finish the sorting.

The small pile of pennies from the teens stared me down, but I refused to get my hopes up—still apprehensive after the near miss with the twenty-two. The first few coins had no real value. But then I found them. The two coins I never thought I would own: a 1909 San Francisco and a 1914 Denver. The fourteen spoke well enough on its own, miserly mintage numbers that year spiking its value, but the ‘09 had one more secret to hide. I flipped it over and there, in small letters, was the ever elusive V.D.B. The tribute to Victor David Brenner, the man who designed the Lincoln cent.

Nothing else of interest was found amongst the remaining pennies; a few equally disappointing wheat ears and Indian heads. But then I remembered that one coin that I pulled aside due to its odd coloring. The back of the penny looked similar to that of an Indian Head, though when I flipped it over everything stopped at the sight of the eagle with wings spread in flight. The flying eagle penny isn’t my oldest coin; that honor belongs to an ancient Roman coin that I found at a store, but it is by far my favorite.

Its date, 1856, marks it as not only a flying eagle penny, but The Flying Eagle Penny, the very first American penny.

Since I found it, that penny has held a special place in my heart. It’s neither the oldest nor the most valuable coin in my collection, but it’s the most valuable to me. It wasn’t something that I just picked up from a store, or at an auction. I found it, amidst a sea of its kin through sheer luck. Now, I always keep it with me in hopes the luck continues to flow. It’s my good luck charm, it’s a sign of my first freedom; it’s my penny. The penny.

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Lady in Nude SHANLEY WELLS-RAU

“There’s a naked woman on the sixth floor. Can you go see what’s happening?” crackled my radio. The male security guards didn’t want to go up, and I was the only female supervisor on property during swing shift.

It was my favorite shift to work at the Peppermill Hotel & Casino, becoming a lifestyle after my promotion to shift manager. Start work at five p.m., get off at one a.m. with plenty of time to hook up with friends and party after work. I had the days to take care of business, go to Tahoe, smoke pot at the river, or sleep late. Sure, there were a couple of times when I woke up looking outside at that in-between light of twilight or dawn in a panic, not sure if I was simply “almost late” or an entire day late for work, but generally the five to one fit my circadian rhythms and social life perfectly.

“How do you know there’s a naked woman?” I asked a couple minutes later as I stepped into the security office.

“Come look at the screen,” said Larry, the monitor-watcher on shift that night. I walked around the desk to peer into the black-and-white security feed showing what was, yes indeed, a naked woman walking around the hotel hallway. She didn’t look how a naked woman in a hotel casino should look—rather, she wasn’t doing what I expected a naked woman would be doing.She just seemed lost. She was ambling, not drunk, not trouble-making, just walking; shuffling a few steps one way, stopping, then turning around and walking back.

“The guys just don’t want to go up there, but we’ll be watching in case you need help,” he winked. “Just call on the radio if you need us.”

I took the service elevator up to the sixth floor stopping by the housekeeping storage area to grab a clean bed sheet. This was my first naked person. I’d had dead people. People fucking. Crazy people. Angry people. Horny people. Vomiters. People who wanted to know who took their marijuana. “Would you like to file a police report on that, sir?” Rich people trying to buy my, uh, time. Germans. French. Brits.

Southerners. Drunks. Asians. Aussies. Thieves. A guy who covered every surface in his room with aluminum foil. Pro athletes. Joan Jett. Billy Idol. But I’d never had a naked person.

“Hello, ma’am? Can I give you this?” I said as I approached her, holding out the opened bed sheet in each hand like a curtain to fold around her. “I don’t want you to get cold.”

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As she accepted the sheet, warm embarrassment spread through my chest. She was an older woman, probably in her 70s. She could be my grandmother. I could see that she was in fact not naked. She was wearing a nude-colored bra and large underwear, covered with flesh-colored panty hose and no shoes. The colors, or lack of, made her appear naked on the crappy black-and-white security feed. My eye fell on the thick strap of her industrial bra, a grandma’s bra. I turned around to look up at the camera at the end of the hallway and give the security guys a nod.

“So what’s going on tonight, ma’am? Are you staying here?” I asked quietly. I should not know that her breasts did not fill out the cups of the cheap bra, leaving puckered wrinkles above the nipples. She did not respond. Surely this woman didn’t wander in from the street with no clothes on. Someone would have tracked her before this. She had to be a guest or visiting a guest. Maybe someone brought her up here. “Is this your floor?” Again, no response. I quickly scanned the 30-room floor for any open doors, luggage, purses, bags, clothing, or shoes. There was nothing. All doors were closed up tight, and the only squatters in the hallway were a couple of room service trays with dinner remnants and empty wine bottles.

“Are you staying here with someone? Your family? Your husband?” Nothing.

“Your children, maybe? Girlfriends?” Nothing. She wasn’t speaking. Just looking at me. Maybe the questions were too hard. Let’s go back to basics and start with something easier. “Ma’am, what’s your name?” Nothing. “Ma’am, your name? What do people call you? Your first name?” No response.

“Okay, let’s go down here and get some privacy,” I coaxed, putting my arm on her shoulder to steer her towards the staff staging area at the end of the floor. Inside the enclosed housekeeping room, I motioned towards a bar stool, its orange velvet seat looking out of place among the stark white towels and bedding. She climbed up, hugging the crisp bed sheet around her like a victim from a cruise line disaster.

I picked up the wall phone and buzzed security. “Okay guys, I’ve got her. I don’t know what’s going on, but I think she’s staying here or might be visiting someone here. There are no clothes in the hallway, no open doors. No indication of anything and she’s not talking,” I said quietly, not wanting her to think I was speaking disrespectfully about her.

“Is she drunk?” was the obvious question from the other end. Dealing with drunks was part of the daily life of anyone working in the business.

“No, I don’t think so.” I looked over at her. She didn’t smell like booze. She wasn’t any more wobbly than an older lady without clothes should be. She didn’t seem like she was on drugs or anything. I began to suspect dementia. Could she be foreign? Language issue?

“Put me through to the Front Desk,” I said. Maybe someone had called looking for

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their older lady with no clothes. Maybe someone had found a pile of clothing somewhere. But no such luck. The Front Desk had no leads.

Antonia popped her head around the door. “Hi Shar-lee. Do you need me?” she asked, her thick black hair shiny even under the fluorescent lights. I smiled. Most of my employees couldn’t say my name, but their attempts always cracked me up. And God bless them for speaking more than one language. Antonia was a bright faced young woman from Guatemala. What she had gone through in her home country and all those in-between to get to the United States I didn’t know. Her journey through war zones as a woman alone was being revealed to me in little drips of stories as she grew to trust me more through the years. The men called “coyotes” were expensive and dishonest. Guatemala was not safe for her. She had her American citizenship, though I wasn’t sure how, but not even her husband knew about that. He was Mexican—they’d met in the US—and she never wanted him to know for fear he married her or was staying with her for her citizenship. An American ID with a Hispanic name on it could bring “mucho dinero” on the black market, so even though they had been married for five or six years, he still didn’t know.

“Hey Antonia,” I said to her. “Thanks for coming up, but I’m good.” That was code for, this lady speaks English, I don’t need translation, but thanks. Even though I had no idea if this lady even spoke.

“Where are you on the dirty rooms?” I asked as she stepped closer to show me the night’s list of vacant and occupied rooms that were dirty. Trying not to look at the woman, she told me which ones were VC or SC, vacant clean or stay clean, and which had yet to be done. “Okay, go back and take Virgil over to Building C to help you finish over there,” I said, relieved that the always happy Filipino was on shift. He probably couldn’t do anything helpful if a wandering drunk got too pushy, but if I couldn’t be with the crew, at least having a male with them made me feel better when they had to go to an outlying building.

Virgil was the only male in my little United Nations of employees. I had no idea how old he was. He could have been anywhere from 35 to 65. His English was terrible, but he understood a lot and spoke Spanish in addition to his native Tagalog.

Throw in my Spanglish skills and we did all right, me and Virgil. He was always smiling. He never walked, always trotted in a run-walk everywhere, and could be counted on for anything. Big puddle of vomit in the hallway on four? Call Virgil.

Diapers clogged up a toilet in 1232? Virgil’s there with the wet vac. His name was really pronounced Vur-heel-ee-oh, and I called him that from time-to-time. He called me “boss lay-dee” through his big smiling teeth, and he never let me carry anything heavier than a clipboard. I got the impression he was alone in this country, but he never revealed anything about family. But, one year, when Antonia was pregnant, he

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brought out a chain and pendant to swing over her belly to determine if the baby would be male or female based on the direction of the swing. He predicted correctly.

We were having a girl.

The heavy door closed behind Antonia as she left to go find Virgil. I turned back to my sheet-wrapped dilemma still perched on the wayward bar stool.

“Okay ma’am. We have a problem here, you and me. I don’t know how to help you unless you start talking to me,” I said. I started to think I was out of my depth. But if I couldn’t fix this, what would happen then? She didn’t even have on shoes. “Where are you from? Do you live here in Reno?” I asked hoping she would trust me and speak.

She looked at me and said very quietly, “California.”

“Oh! Okay! See that’s good. That’s helpful.” Most of our weeknight customers were from California, usually from the mid and northern parts. The Reno-Tahoe area was a short drive and a convenient place for our neighbors in California to get away for some debauchery.

“Where abouts in California?” She looked at me and said nothing more. Damn it.

We looked at each other. Her eyes were wide open looking at me in amazement and what was that—possibly fear? One eye was a little glazed like my elderly dog’s.

Cataracts possibly. She really didn’t give off the vibe of a hooker or drug dealer. Not sharp enough for a card counter or professional gambler. Not smooth enough to be a thief. Where the fuck would she put anything—unless she was a distraction for something bigger. But a distraction would need to be chatty and disarming. This woman was just … nothing. It was as if she were trying to disappear.

“Ma’am. Please tell me where in California you are from. What city do you live in?” I tried again.

“Modesto,” was the mumbled reply as she looked away. Again with the disappearing thing.

“Okay! That’s good! Central Valley, huh? Did you come here on a bus?” thinking maybe she was on one of the old-lady gambling buses traversing the Sierras every week to bring in Californians hungry to gamble. No response. No eye contact. I started to ramble, “It’s nice over there in the Central Valley, huh? Have you always lived there?” thinking I could get her to start opening up. She looked at me and blinked.

I reached over for the black wall phone again. “Yeah, Front Desk.” As I’m transferred I look at her wondering what was going to happen to this nude-colored lady. “Yeah, Rick, got any buses in from Modesto?” I heard clickety clack through the earpiece as my counterpart at the Front Desk checked the hotel reservation system. “Uhhhh, let’s see here,” he said. “Nope, nothing.”

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Dammit. “How about Merced or Stockton?” I asked. Gawd those places are shitholes. “Fresno?” It’s a long shot. More clackety clacks. Nope, nothing. “Hey Susan,” I heard Rick speaking to one of his desk clerks. “We don’t have any busses in from Modesto do we?” All I heard of the response was a mumbling underlying the bings and dings of slot machines out on the casino floor next to the front desk.

“Shanley, no. There’s nothing.” Good lord. “Okay, Rick, you guys start looking through guest records to see if there’s anyone from Modesto staying on six. Or wait, make it the whole North Tower. And look for Stockton and Merced too.”

We hung up. A clerk would have to page through each guest record individually and note the address given and room checked into. Many people who come to a hotel in Nevada do not always give their correct address, or even name for that matter.

Many of the financial transactions were conducted in cash, so a name couldn’t be matched with a credit card record. This was long before cyberspace and handheld devices made tracking people so easy. The hotel casino business had no world wide web in the late 1980s.

“How did you get here? Did you drive by car?” I tried again. “Maybe you rode with a friend or a family member?” Nothing. “Do you know anyone in Reno? Maybe you came to see someone?” Her eyes were fixed on the wall, her face turned away from me. It was as if she wanted one of us to disappear.

People disappearing, death squads, civil war, desperate poverty—that’s what Antonia had fled in Guatemala to live out her American Dream working at a crappy job as a maid cleaning up after drunks, skiers, and gamblers. What was this woman in front of me fleeing? Clearly her clothing, but what else? It was time to get tough.

“Ma’am, if you can’t help me help you, I’m going to have to turn you over to Security. We’ll need to go down to their office,” I said, in what I hoped was a stern tone. She blanched. Okay, then. We’ll keep heading in this direction, I thought.

“There are no female employees in our Security Department; I’m the only woman supervisor on shift. The guys down there will have to involve the Reno Police Department because you can’t stay here if you’re not a guest. I really don’t want the police to take you away.”

Fear, embarrassment, nerves all skittered across her face. We looked at each other for a long minute. Such a long minute that I thought I was back to square one, dammit. But then she swallowed, paused, and inhaled a large gulp of air, for courage I thought, and began to slowly reveal herself to me in little puzzle pieces that didn’t make sense at first. Another hour of questioning, listening, cajoling, more listening— these were the cost of those one- and two-word bits and pieces. As I received more and more of them, I was able to put together a story.

She was here with a man. “No,” she said, when I asked if it was her husband. She was

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a widow. Oh, a romantic overnight in Reno. She was in a hotel with a man who was not her husband. She didn’t want us to know that. They weren’t married to each other, but she was a widow and he was not married to anyone else from what I could gather.

They were of consenting age. Footloose and fancy free. But she carried so much shame for being caught in a hotel with a man to whom she was not married—that was the cloak of invisibility I’d been detecting as she kept trying to disappear.

They had checked in and gone to the room together. She went into the bathroom to “take a bath” she whispered. Did people really take baths in hotel bathtubs, I wondered. A flash of an errant pubic hair from guests past caused me to cringe.

Instead of taking off her under things, she stepped from the bathroom. For this she gave no reason, but I imagined her opening the bathroom door to present herself to him in her granny panties, panty hose, and nude bra. What a scary step for this widow, who had probably never been naked with another man but her husband. I imagined a youthful version of her with tight skin, laughing and confident in her 1940s thigh-high stockings, garters affixed to a steel-trap of a girdle, pointy bra patriotically hoisting her breasts like torpedoes. Of course, she left her panty hose on over her panties.

That’s how she did it the last time she offered herself to a man—except 1980s thick crotch-reinforced L’eggs panty hose were not sexy like those coveted wartime silk thigh-highs. She said, “turned right.”

I said, “You turned right? From the bathroom?” She nodded, her eyes resting on mine briefly before shifting back to the wall. As she left the bathroom, she turned right towards the outer door instead of making a left turn into the hotel room. “And you opened the door and walked out?” She nodded. I leaned back, imagining her opening the bathroom ready to make her big reveal to the man who was not and could never be her dead husband. Taking a deep breath, she turned in the wrong direction and accidentally opened the outer door to the room. “When you stepped into the hallway, the door closed behind you, didn’t it?” She nodded, looking down at her panty-hose reinforced toes.

As soon as she stepped into the hallway, she probably froze with panic, but the room door closed hard behind her and locked. One or two turns the wrong way and boom—she was lost with no clue which room was hers. That’s when Security saw her wandering around and I entered the picture.

After another hour coaxing out the name of her gentleman friend, I was able to confirm his existence and room number with the Front Desk staff. They were glad to be able to stop leafing through guest records. When I let her back into the guest room, I could see an older gentleman sitting in a chair by the window watching TV. The Sierra Mountains made a gorgeous view out that window, though they were unseen at the moment in the dark. She’ll like the view in the sunlight tomorrow, I thought. Her

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friend looked up as she entered, but he didn’t seem concerned. He probably thought she was taking too long in the bathroom.

“Shar-lee?” hissed my radio.

“Yes, Antonia,” I replied to the mouthpiece as I let the door to room 619 close behind my nude-colored rescue.

“We ready for you inspect these,” she said.

“Yeah, okay, be there in a sec,” I said, pausing outside the closed door. I imagined the 1940s version of this woman, her hair coiled up in confidence, fingernails painted fire engine red. In my mind, she laughed as she leaned in for a handsome soldier to light her cigarette resting suggestively between her fingers.