…a long, crazy story.
Back at home after a rougher than usual trip to Wasilla yesterday — Greyfox was enraged and distressed because I’d forgotten to take his mail with me, he forgot a plan he’d previously made, we both forgot that Mercury was retrograde, my legs were not functioning well, and my balance was thrown off by vertigo, for starters — I went to sleep not long after our 9:00 phone conversation. Next thing I knew, Koji was barking. Then there was a soft, tentative knock at the door.
Doug got up from the computer and answered the door. I heard murmured conversation but couldn’t make out words. Then he invited someone in and said to me, “Hand me the phone.” My headset cordless was on its charger behind my bed. Sleepily, I disentangled the electronic gear, handed it over and put my head back down on the pillow, thinking I’d drift back to sleep and let Doug deal with the intruder.
I could hear a woman’s whining voice coming from the open space in the middle of this one room that holds our kitchen, office, and sleeping quarters. She was mumbling, speaking of pronoun people: “she” this, “he” that, and “them.” Her speech was full of “shit,” “fuck,” and pejoratives about the unnamed people she was cursing.
When she expressed bafflement about how to use the phone, Doug helped her into the headset. Apparently, she didn’t know the number she was trying to call. I heard her mutter a string of numbers, then say, “six or eight…??” Doug responded with a voiced shrug. How would he know? In a little while she gave up all pretense of trying to use the phone, and asked if she could sit down. I sat up in bed and saw a disheveled, obese, middle-aged woman in expensive clothes. I could smell her perfume. I can still smell it in here hours after she left. Doug had been standing in the doorway until I sat up. He took that as a signal that Mom would handle the visitor, and returned to the computer.
She shifted from cursing her cousin (the relationship emerged later), to asking about the location of a “big, tall house,” that she had apparently been looking for back here on this little-used dirt road. We asked her if she meant Phil’s tower, and she didn’t know. She pointed at a red pillar candle on the coffee table, and said, “It looks just like that.”
One of her semi-coherent utterances mentioned finishing off a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with her cousin, which clarified matters for me. She said she had been “out here necking” one night at the “dead-end road,” and her boyfriend drove about “four miles” of “zig-zag” road and showed her this big tall house that looked “just like” our 8″ red pillar candle. Her impression was that it was on this side of the highway, back beyond here, but there are no roads out there.
Further questioning revealed that she did, in fact, mean Phil’s abandoned tower. The thing that finally clinched the matter was when I mentioned that it was so tall it was a hazard to aviation and was required to have a flashing red light on top. She said she was supposed to go change that light because it had burned out. That was consistent with my observations — or non-observations, because I haven’t noticed that light doing its job for quite some time.
We told her what road it was on, gave her detailed directions, and Doug drew her a map. She kept sitting there a while and then asked for the phone again. That time she was actually able to punch in a phone number and get her cousin on the line. The end of the conversation that I could hear was sarcastic and querulous. The cousin hung up on her and she cursed a while, then punched in another number and asked someone why he hadn’t come to get her. Apparently, he hung up on her, too.
Then she asked me for the time. She was looking at the time on the phone’s display and didn’t believe what she saw. By then, it was almost 4 AM. She said she thought it had been about six in the morning when she left her cousin’s house, “around the corner.” She said she was walking by on the street, saw light and movement in here and decided to come in and use the phone. I can’t repeat everything she said verbatim because it lacked coherence, and parts of it sounded like word salad. She asked what time it would get light. The season is changing and we hadn’t been noticing, so we couldn’t tell her.
She made a few more phone calls, woke a few more people, and cursed them to me afterward for being annoyed or hanging up on her. Interestingly, after the first couple of drunken mumbling calls, she was able to shift to a crisp, businesslike persona on the phone, but as soon as she was back to talking to me, she was slurring, whiny, potty-mouthed (her phrase — she was also frequently apologetic about her vulgarity), and semi-lucid. Doug made coffee. She and I drank it and ate some Danish pastry. She said she had come out here expecting to break into some cabin somewhere, get the spare key from a hook and drive off in her truck, which she had left parked there some time ago, but she had been told that the truck was towed away.
Unbidden, she spoke defensively and petulantly about her drug use’s being nobody’s business. She returned to that theme a few times, tediously. Several times she mentioned her “pastor,” and some “Institute” in Anchorage, where she evidently lives. In one of the phone calls she told someone she was doing end of life care for a hospice patient. She mentioned to us that her cousin’s husband is “passing” from cancer. Are those related matters? Who knows? Another of her phone conversations mentioned needing to be at the courthouse in Palmer this morning on, “a misdemeanor.” In greater detail, she talked to me about a felony matter involving her son. No question about this, she lied to the guy on the phone about the magnitude of the crime.
She talked on and on about places and people, past and present. When she mentioned Ray and Paul and Lobo Tire, I knew that we had friends in common, so I said, “The Flores brothers?” and she confirmed that we both knew them. She asked me how Paul was doing — we both knew that Ray had been sent to prison for 20 years shortly after the turn of the millennium. When I told her Paul had died, she denied it. “He couldn’t have.” I told her about it, that he was supposed to pick his kids up from school, and when they got a ride home with friends they found him dead, of a heart attack, in the driveway of the motel he was running.
She just wouldn’t believe it. Then she talked about somebody else, possibly her cousin’s husband, who was “passing” from liver cancer from “toxic exposure” he’d had at Lobo Tire. I said I knew about that “toxic” situation at Lobo Tire — it was a meth lab. The denial came out again. She said it couldn’t be, because “meth labs blow up.” I responded that they blow up if something goes wrong, but even if they don’t blow up they produce toxic fumes. I told her about the hazmat team that cleaned up the motel rooms at the place down by the highway, also known as Lobo Tire while the Flores brothers lived there and ran a tire service shop.
I had been watching the sky for signs of dawn and pointed out to her that it was growing light outside. She glanced out the window and said that it was getting light so she could now see where she was going, but she made no move to get up and go. I asked her if I could take her anywhere. She mentioned another set of mutual friends of ours, in Willow, but it was barely seven and she said they wouldn’t be “open” until nine. She talked about going back to her cousin’s, dragging out a tent, setting it up and getting some sleep. She maundered on some more, and I asked again if she wanted me to take her somewhere, or if she was going to walk back to her cousin’s.
She gave me a helpless look, and mumbled a list of options in a querulous tone. I answered, “Whatever… whatever gets you out of here.” She was sobering up a bit by then, gave me a rueful grin, said, “I hear you on that,” and started struggling into her leather coat. This woman’s conversation had been sprinkled with references to spirituality, and she occasionally affected a superior, sanctimonious attitude, but she was filled with hatred and anger, unable to face the reality of death, and afraid of the dark. At one point while she was here, our tomcat Pizarro scent-mark sprayed her pant leg, but she declined my offer of a spritz of Febreeze, saying that it would serve “those people” right at the DA’s office.
She was far enough gone on alcohol that she could have been in a blackout when she got here. She might even have still been in blackout when she left. The instantaneous shifts of persona on the phone suggested to me that she’s a high-functioning alcoholic. Our conversation revealed that she is a poly-addict, guilt-ridden and defensive / defiant. I wouldn’t be surprised if I hear from her again. I gave her my business card. Maybe she’ll find it in her pocket someday….
My Barn Buddy farm has expanded as far as it can, and I have it set up in six rows of different crops that take different times to mature, with a seventh crop in the seed bag to replace the next one that completes its life cycle. Then I buy seed of the one just reaped, to fill the next space, etc. My pretty rotating crops are chosen for both aesthetics and their high value in game gold. I got up one morning recently and found that he had replaced 2 rows during the night, replacing my pretty and pricey crops with TURNIPS, the ugliest, lowest value crop available.
Recent Comments