DEVIATION

CHRISTOPHER WATTS PHOENIX

My mother died when I was seventeen and every third Thursday of the month since, a letter from her comes in the mail. At first I was surprised, pissed actually, thinking it was someone’s idea of a joke. When it turned out not to be, I thought it would end up as some sappy gesture she cooked up on her death to help me remember her and heal. As if the remedy to a gunshot wound was a Band-Aid rolled in thumbtacks. I guess that ended up being the problem, they didn’t just remind me of her, they wouldn’t stop. Month after month, year after year and after seven years they haven’t faltered.

Mostly she complains about the weather in Phoenix. An anomaly I can’t begin to understand since she was born in Delaware, lived in Massachusetts most of her life, and died in Minnesota. From what I know, she never visited the Southwest. Maybe it was a dream of hers, maybe she used to sit in bed crying, holding a post card from the Grand Canyon that said “Heaven’s Playground Wishes You Well!!” while my father stumbled out the door and my brother and me cowered in the corner to lick our wounds. I suppose I don’t really remember.

“It’s too hot!” she cries in the letters. Time after time, “It’s too god damned hot!!”

She asks me questions in the letters. More questions than she ever asked me when she was alive. Back then we talked on the phone once every six months, and most

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of the time she just needed money, no care in the world about me. After death something changed. The letters asked, “How are you? How’s your brother? Does he stay out of trouble? Do you stay out of trouble? Have you met a nice girl? What’s her name? Do you remember your father?” Questions I have no way of answering, the envelopes always have only the proper postage and my address. They come to me, but I don’t know where from. For how unusual this sounds to others, I’ve come to accept that they come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Why chase ghosts? Why chase what you never had and never had you? I read through them once or twice each time and throw them in a drawer in my office.

My most recent letter was unusual. It arrived as the others have; a crisp white envelope that smells like her perfume. I cracked it open along the end and blew into it, the wisps of old cigarettes and her hair curled up into my face. I opened it expecting the same one page, flowingly hand-written letter, but instead found something less and yet more. “I need you Jonny Angel,” she says followed by the address from a suburb in the southeast of Phoenix.

So what do I do? She called me the same name she did when I was small and she would rock me to sleep before dragging herself to the bathroom to clean the blood and junk out of her nose. She’s my mother. She’s my mother and she needs me. I go.

I call my work for the time off, it’s a computer integration firm nestled near the Puget Sound. They don’t seem to care much, it’s a dead end job for me where the glass ceiling presses down harder every day and I stopped fighting because what was the point. I

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lock my studio apartment up tight as a tomb and hit the road.

I drive southeast out of Seattle and over the mountains, bobbing through speck towns in places and bright lights in others. The first day I’m driving for seventeen hours and thirty-seven minutes. I had planned on driving straight through, but I pull off and stay in the closest town, which of course with journeys like this, is Las Vegas. I’ve never been much of a gambler but I tell myself, “Loosen up! Don’t be a pussy!” Words of encouragement that help me pull my worn down Toyota into the neon lights of the Showtime Hotel and Casino.

The room’s nice. It’s plain, but good for me. It has what I need without the bullshit of what I don’t. That hint of pure oxygen in the air is tantalizing; tantalizing in the way that you recognize it from a bleak, white hospital room, but also from the grittiness of nature at the same time. I like that smell, it’s clean. I sit in my room watching TV until the phone rings.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Lansing? This is the front desk.” A soft male voice.

“Yes?”

“This is quite irregular sir, but someone just dropped off three hundred dollars in chips and requested that whatever guest was staying in room 712 be given them.”

“Who would do that?”

“I’m not sure sir; it was left on the desk in some sort of plush bag with a note attached.”

I agree to claim the bag. I’m cautious, not stupid. The hotel lobby is thinning out as the heart of night

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approaches; the “normal” people have already retired to their rooms while the clacking of dice and shattering of small fortunes and dreams echoes from the casino floor.

It’s a woman now at the desk as I approach, she has a beautiful smile and I feel self-conscious of my own teeth when looking at hers. I sign a claim sheet and show my room card, and eventually I’m handed a small purple sack. The feel is immediately recognizable. I’m angry. It’s the velvet purple sack for Crown Royal, my father’s whiskey. I remember them being strung across the carpet like toys in a good kid’s house, and my brother and I played with them as if they were such, hiding rocks and bark in them, pretending to be jewel thieves. Thieves that could have a new life anywhere they wanted with their loot.

I make my way to the casino floor and spend three hours bouncing back and forth from blackjack to roulette. On my third trip to the blackjack table its 2:30 in the morning and a woman sits at the far end of the table. Her hair is violent red and from where I’m sitting she has eyes black and hollow like a shark. I play a few hands in silence, she slides to me.

“I’m Lana.” Her words a slick razor.

“Jon.”

“Just passing through, Jon?”

“I am,” I say. “I’m making my way to Phoenix.”

“I’m heading east, Savannah, if I can make it. What’s in Phoenix? Wife and kids?”

“What’s in Savannah? Sweat and tobacco?” She laughs out loud. “I suppose I might be chasing my childhood.” I tell her.

“The chase can be the best part. You want to join me for a drink?”

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We sit at the bar for most of the night. She tells me about growing up in Georgia and how her family had a sprawlingly beautiful farm. Sweetest peaches in the state, she says. She misses it. Tomorrow she’ll hop on a bus and get out of here. She’ll leave broken Vegas in the rearview forever. She wants to sit on the white beaches, suck on peaches, and watch the Atlantic roll in and out. She flashes her eyes and flaps her lashes and through the seething haze of watered down liquor, I think I love her. She asks if I have a room. I do.

All the way up the elevator we kiss. She sucks on my neck, nibbles my ear and bites my lip. I push myself hard against her and before I notice we are tumbling down the hall, breaking through my room door, and sprawling on the bed. I almost miss that our clothes come off. She tells me things no woman ever has. Talks like the women in porn and by the end I’m thrusting on top of her and she whispers, “Cum in me.” I do.

An hour later I wake up to see her slinking through the shadows, so close to them she might not actually be there. She sees I’m awake, but I say nothing. From the floor she scoops up her clothes and the rich velvet bag I dropped on the way in. As she opens the door a stream of light splashes across her face and I think she winks at me, and then is gone.

In the morning I check out from the hotel, have the valet pull the car around, and head back into the morning dessert. Gliding into Phoenix I feel lead in my gut. I’m unsure of what is waiting for me at the tiny, hand-written address. Maybe a long-lost aunt or the same ghost who left the purple bag, or maybe so rightfully it is my mother reincarnated as a cactus. Who knows? I don’t. But as I lose myself into what might be,

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I find my eyes wandering eastward, dreaming of peaches and the Atlantic.

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