Collateral Damage

There I was – laying down in the backseat of the Chevy Vega, being propelled at a ludicrous speed down highway 215 halfway between Las Vegas and LA. In the front seats, Brent and his wife Nancy screamed at each other – foul, hurtful messages fired back and forth between them like well-placed sniper shots. Brent still wore the tuxedo he and I rented in Seal Beach only 72 hours before, and which he wore to the chapel on the way out of town. I stared out of the open window, counted telephone poles, and listened to the newlyweds verbally sodomize each other.

The hot wind blew in from all the windows and whipped around inside the car like a localized, superheated cyclone. I had my sunglasses on, and Brent and Nancy might have mistaken me for asleep, but I’m guessing they were so caught up in their fury that they didn’t even remember I was there. I laid there thinking that if it wasn’t for their unborn daughter, this could have been their last fight, their final battle before the annulment and subsequent emotional aftermath.

But Brent and Nancy weren’t going to split; they were going to continue fighting just like they had been for the past two years. And because they were bound by principal and obligation to provide a good home for their daughter they would try to get along the best they knew how - inside the same small apartment in the government subsidized complex in Orange County.

It’s in that apartment that their daughter would take her first steps, read her first book, and whisper in her daddy’s ear about the new, cute boy in her class. It was in that apartment that she’d spend the first nine years of her life before the decade-long war between her parents eroded their resolve to the point of mutual surrender. In the span of one Friday night, Nancy would pack two suitcases and she and her daughter would leave – for good. Brent would spend the remainder of the month gathering the fragments of his life into cardboard boxes – pulling pictures off of the walls, sorting through ten years of memories, and trying to make sense of a suddenly senseless world.

We pulled into Baker to get gas. Brent and Nancy both got out of the car and Nancy went to the bathroom while Brent pumped. Through the rear window I could see what Baker claims as the world’s tallest thermometer. It read 102 degrees. I grabbed the cooler from the floor of the back seat, got out of the car and walked over to Brent who was leaning against the pump. “What’s up?” I said. “I’m sorry Tommy. You’re witnessing one of our worse fights. And you know the craziest thing?” “what?: I said, “I don’t even remember what the hell we’re fighting about, but I know it’s not over.”

Man, if Brent could have known just how prophetic that was. We both stared out at the highway that was laid out straight as a die into the distant hills. We didn’t say anything, just stood looking at the heat waves boil up from the horizon. I watched dust devils dance along the desert floor and carry brownish-red plumes of sand hundreds of feet into the air, but my eyes kept coming back to that road. I don’t know what Brent was thinking about – probably his future, maybe a little about the past, but I’m almost certain that somewhere in there he was thinking about his unborn daughter because with all the heat, the sand blowing in our faces, the recent and impending fight with his new bride, he was still able to let a thin smile grow across his face.

I was thinking about how the child was going to be born into a loving but very volatile home – that the most peace this child might know between that moment and the time she leaves the nest was right there in the womb. I had known Brent for twenty years, and knew that he would never leave Nancy no matter how bad it all got – he just didn’t have it in him to look after his own interests above anyone else’s – his low self esteem simply wouldn’t allow it. The decision to break up would have to be mutual, but in the meantime, their daughter would sustain the emotional scars, the collateral damage of their seemingly endless skirmishes. I saw all of this on that road, and Brent must have as well, but judging from the smile on his face he had somehow found an oasis out there, and at least for the moment, it didn’t matter that it was only a mirage, because the good thoughts were winning over the bad.

I glanced up at the thermometer –104 degrees. “Don’t worry about me man, I can’t even hear what you guys are saying.” I lied and Brent just kept smiling and then turned his attention back to the pump. I started walking in the direction of the bathrooms and noticed that my shoes felt sticky on the as fault and I realized my soles were melting. Nancy was walking out of the women’s room as I approached, and she didn’t raise her eyes to meet mine – just looked down onto the smoldering ground. The bottoms of her $1.99 supermarket flip flops were turning into molten black goo, to the point that she had to pull them up with each step and they slapped against her heels as she walked. I thought about how we were all being consumed by something. That there were troubles in our lives that ate us from the inside out if we let them, and now – now we were being consumed by the desert with only a thin layer of galvanized latex separating us and the percolating planet beneath our feet. The wind whipped up a screen of dust which blew between us so that when we passed each other both our eyes were closed tight, but I could hear her sticky sandals, and thought I heard her say ‘hey.’ I said ‘hey’ just in case, but I didn’t put much behind it and I’m sure it was lost in the wind.

When I walked out of the bathroom Brent and Nancy were standing in a patch of shade beneath the mini-mart’s awning. The two of them were some couple – Brent with his tuxedo shirt and pants, Nancy with her t-shirt, shorts and flip flops. I swung around to the far side of the pump island and grabbed a soda from the cooler. I looked over at the two of them - expecting to see them fighting, but they weren’t. Nancy was wiping tears from her eyes which I’d seen plenty of times, but this time it was different. Brent was standing with one hand on Nancy’s shoulder, the other on the underside of Nancy’s belly. They were smiling and laughing as they shared feeling their daughter’s kicks for the first time.

I looked over my left shoulder at the world’s tallest thermometer which now read 106 degrees. From there, my eyes moved to that highway. A big dust devil spun sideways toward it about a mile or so in the distance. It might get rough I thought – but then we all knew that, and after all,it’s the only road we’ve got.


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