Cotton

David Franke

 

In 1967 the Volkswagen Beetle was given a 12-volt electrical system, and they upgraded the engine that year to 1493 cc. Mine was blue, if I could call my parents’ car mine, and I did, and I assumed along the way some vague credit for the intelligent way it was designed, with the rear engine heavy over the driving wheels and all.

I read a book about the Beetle’s history that said this design helped Rommel drive through the deserts of Africa in the Second World War. Now it helped me drive through the winter in Ames, in the abysmal cold, street lights blurring and warbling through the windshield ice as I drove from work to Cotton’s apartment. In the dark driver’s seat, on the empty road, steering with my knees, I pulled out my box of Marlboros, lit one with an Ohio Blue Tip match I skittered over the dash, and pulled on it for the familiar hit. I steered with my cold right hand, cigarette clenched between my knuckles.

With all the engine weight in the back, I slurred around snowy corners, oversteering to skid straight into the lane, heading up the slight hills of campus and by the Cyclone—our fatalistic team icon—past the apartment building I got lost in during one very strange acid trip, past Ames Fruit and Grocery where my parents shopped, past the hamburger joint where they said the cooks spit on your burgers, past the trailer park where my brother’s best friend lived, up Lincoln Way, the main highway through town, the old road that threaded through Iowa from NYC behind me to San Francisco in front of me, my wheels tracking two lines, no traffic, just this car, snow-blowing sideways across the gridline highway all the way to her building. It was maybe only two miles, but I was shivering now, really cold. It was like 20 below even before all that wind. The parking lot was unplowed — not a problem for a driver of my skill, though, executing a 180 on the ice before crunching to a stop.

This ordinary late-season dark felt like Christmas Eve somehow. I flicked my cigarette out the window, turned on the dome light, and opened the Marlboros. Inside, one cigarette had been flipped upside down, a dark dot in the box. If the dark one dropped into my lap, it was going to work, she’d say okay. I tried to be cool about it, as if I was just grabbing another smoke, not engaging in augury. I turned the box over and tapped. Two cigarettes fell out into my lap, neither one special.

They called her “Cotton” because she said she was from the south, but I knew she grew up here. She had gone to my high school five or ten years before. She knew the trailer parks and the grocery stores, she knew the kids who painted their graduation year on the water tower. This hard winter wasn’t strange to her at all. But she came back from Texas saying “y’all” like she earned it. She came back with a baby, stories about drugs, and with a body different from the stiff, straight lines of the girls I knew, and she knew how things worked.

I hunched against the wind on my way to the door. She was pale and wore a nightgown, translucent even in the dim light; she let me in fast and told me to be quiet. There was a daughter I never saw in all the times I went over—maybe three, maybe younger—asleep in the next room. Cotton didn’t want to talk, didn’t let me sit down. She just sent me to the bathroom to take a bath. My Hardees uniform I just threw on the floor, greasy polyester stained with ketchup. I soaked in the tub a while, thinking about my luck, about the danger of pushing too hard or getting too confident, and about the spooky interior mechanism that could tell when you were overeager and wrecked your chances. I was thinking about playing it cool and thinking about how just touching her arm or seeing her muscles move under her skin turned me on. I knew she wasn’t a beautiful woman. It never occurred to me that she lived alone, worked part time somewhere. I didn’t ask her middle name or her daughter’s name. I swooped under the bathwater entirely, getting my head wet and coming up for air, sliding my hands all the way down my Robert Plant hair to squeeze out the water. I shook my head, spraying the walls like sheepdog, dried off and put my dirty clothes back on.

The apartment was dark, and she was sitting on the couch, watching the Olympics. All I wanted to see were the long jumps. Being up there, hung up in the air like that, falling for what seemed like a day and half, did they expect to land right, the smooth line of their decent merging with the smooth sleek line of the hill? Or was the whole slow fall terrifying, full of images of snapping bones, bouncing and flailing into the ice and snow? I thought of Evel Knievel jumping his motorcycle over 17 semis.

“They say he broke every bone in his body,” I told her.

She agreed he was an idiot. “He’s saying, ‘If y’all are stupid enough to pay me to break my bones on TV, then okay, pay me!’”

The figures on the screen swooped and slipped with skiers, and as we talked, she let her hand fall on my leg, pressed her hip against mine. When she lived in Texas, on the Army base, she and her husband spent most of their time shooting up, and she told me that if she just smelled dope it would make her throw up now. I wondered what it smelled like, whether I’d take the needle without flinching.

I was damp and warm, and we talked about the last Olympics, back in 1972, the massacre—and you got the feeling the announcers were sort of hoping for some action, something scarier than bobsled races. I don’t ever remember us kissing. Her strong thighs were outlined under her blanket, and one foot was curled up under her. Her skin was soft and extremely smooth, and she moved into my touch, rather than sitting stock still, so different from the bony girls from school. In the jittery television light, Cotton would disappear into the dark for a second and then return to view. She turned away from me and I started to despair, but she said it was okay. She reached behind herself, took my hands and put them on her waist, curling up onto her knees. I had heard about this. She stayed there and helped me find my way and pressed back. She kept disappearing and shaking under the TV’s light, but I closed my eyes started to understand that you could do this slowly, smoothly; you could go faster and then slower. The television mumbled in and out of ads and announcers. There were times when I thought she was very beautiful, when it was as if she could catch me up, snatch me out of the air. She made me feel like I was in only one place for a change. She didn’t hurry me, and when we were done, she rolled back up to sit on the blanket, leaning against me. There had been no terrorists. Everyone on the long jump had apparently survived.

We were ketchup, sex, cigarettes. The blue balloons of our smoke mingled in the blue light of the television. I looked around for the first time since I got there. She had this couch, a chair, a TV on the kitchen table and a bassinet. I felt—I wondered what she did all day. So I told her why Palestinians didn’t show up to kill Israelis. I explained to her how the VW had been designed for Rommel in the Second World War. I explained that the babysitter my parents hired—her best friend—found my pot.

“She flushed it,” I told her. “I told her that it cost $30 an ounce and that she owed me that money because throwing it away was like stealing. So she paid me!” I laughed.

She said “Be quiet, now” but smiled at the rug.

We shook our heads at all the stupid people in the world.

I said I had to go. Spending the night wasn’t on the radar for either of us. I walked out into the increasing storm. The engine cranked slow in the cold oil but started, and it got me home, late now. I walked down the stairs past my parents’ closed door, slinking into the basement. I hated their weird relationship in there, the angry sleeping they did, the mumbled arguments they boiled late at night. But there was no light under their door.

I closed my door and groped for the switch to the blacklight. It flickered to life, painting an electric watercolor of the room. Graffiti drawn with a special crayon emerged from the walls of my room: ZoSo, LSD, giant pot leaves. I put Dylan on the stereo and lay down. The storm surged outside my basement room and clouds of snow billowed under the ambient light. In the song, travelers are emerging from the dark. They have come a great distance; they are unknown and dangerous:

Outside in the cold distance,

A wildcat did growl.

Two riders were approaching,

And the wind / began to howl.

I lay there with all my clothes on, Hardees uniform, winter coat, feet crossed at the ankles, boots dripping into the sheets. I lay loose and long on my waterbed, smoking a Marlboro I set on a cardboard box when I was done, filter down for safety. Outside in the cold distance—I listened to the wind blow down from Alberta to Montana and over the Dakotas, surging over half of Iowa before finding me here. It ran its fingers over the house and then kept leaving, arriving and leaving, over all that long distance while I lay still, believing things.

 

David Franke lives in upstate New York where he’s working on a memoir set in rural Iowa, from which “Cotton” is an excerpt. Growing up in Iowa provided more than adequate amounts of love, mental illness, addiction, science, Jesus, and complicated expressions of sexuality. His other project is a “deep map” which respectfully and thoroughly studies a specific place—in this case the Tully Valley in Onondaga County, NY.