Every Little Thang

At the Roadhouse the cashier is a pretty young woman whose lips don't lie flush against her teeth, which makes her look French.  She has a bright red hickey on the front-side of her neck the size of a half dollar.  She doesn't smile at me, probably because I am openly checking out her hickey.  To the old man in front of me, though, she says "How's every little thang?"

I finished my quiche quickly, with still a lot of tea in the silver kettle on the table next to my mug, so I carry my mug and Harper's and purse over to the other room, where you can sit by a gas fire and chill.

I am chillin when a guy I know from the lodge walks up with a stroller and sits next to me.  He is twenty-two and has a two-month-old baby.  He reads his newspaper quietly and I read my Harper's, and pretty soon he says, "Ever seen one of these?"

He shows me a black-and-white picture the size of a postage stamp in the Classifieds section.  I look at it closely.  "It's an Ultralight," he says.  Beneath the photo is printed "Ultralight Aircraft Trike."

"No," I say, in a way that invites hearing more.

"An Ultralight's like a cross between a motorcycle and a kite."

"What!"

"Yeah.  They're pretty unsafe.  I think the rate of death in owning one is the same as a smoker's - something like one in three."

"Holy shit," I say, and look at the picture even closer.  "I'm surprised they're legal."

"They barely are," he says.  "I went up in one with a buddy of mine about ten years ago.  It was pretty fun.  We went up about a thousand feet, which is the highest you can get without needing oxygen, and then spiraled down in circles for about twenty minutes until we were close enough to touch down on the Talkeetna air strip."

"Oh my God," I say.  "That sounds really scary, but really fun."

"Yeah."

Companionable silence.

"Have you ever been up on a glacier?" he asks me.

"Yeah, last summer I landed on one.  This summer I flew up around the mountain but we didn't land.  It was fun."

"Yeah," he says, nodding, "It is fun.  One Fourth of July we went up and had a picnic at Base Camp."

"That's cool."

"Yeah, but don't ever smoke a cigarette if you're up that high.  I got altitude sickness really bad."

"Ugh."

"Yeah.  Lack of oxygen.  I got real nauseous, a headache.  It took like twenty minutes to go away."

"You don't smoke anymore, do you?"

"No," he says.  "Or drink.  If I drink I want a smoke.  And I don't have self-control when it comes to drinking, so I know I can't do it."

"Well, that's good you figured it out so young.  What are you, twenty-two?"

"Yeah.  Well really my body figured it out for me.  My senior year of high school I was drunk every night.  Finally a couple days after graduation I couldn't walk, so I went to the doctor's and they said my appendix had burst."

"Oh no!"

"But then they couldn't find it when they opened me up.  But they saw that one of my kidneys had died, and so they took it out, and also part of my liver."

"Oh my God!"

"Yeah.  And then my intestines were swollen and pushed my stomach up to where my lungs were, and my lungs up into my rib cage, and my ribs punctured both lungs."

"Wait, what happened to your appendix?  Is it still floating around in there somewhere?"

"No, it just disintegrated.  They vacuumed it out in little pieces.  Actually the surgeon went on lunch and they brought the janitor in with a mop to clean it out."

I laugh.

"So then they didn't staple up the incision in my stomach very well and it came open.  It looked like a vagina."

I laugh.

"I wasn't the first one to think that, either.  My friends saw it and they were like, 'Dude, that looks like a pussy.'  So I went to the doctor's and they said they wouldn't sew it back up again because they didn't want to trap infection in.  So I just had to let it heal naturally."

"Oh my God.  That's like Alien.  Good thing it did."

"Yeah.  You want to see it?"

It is not every day a young man asks me if I want to see the vagina-scar on his stomach.  I did want to see it but felt shy to say so.  "Do I?" I asked, instead.

He lifted his shirt.  It looked like nothing, like a patch of skin where hair doesn't grow on an otherwise hairy stomach.  "Oh, that's not too bad," I said.

"Yeah," he said as he dropped his shirt, sounding disappointed.

"You should go visit high schools and tell this story so kids know not to drink to excess."

"They wouldn't listen, though."

"Yes they would," I said.  "That's a horrifying story."

"I really wasn't taking care of myself.  I was living on alcohol and Hot Pockets."