Firework by Eugene Marten

Author:Eugene Marten [Marten, Eugene]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780988518308
Publisher: Tyrant Books (Perseus)

OUT OF THE red canyons 80 became 84 and they drove past the Great Salt Lake. To the east a mountain range rose into the clouds and there were whole towns splattered under the rocky pleated foothills like pieces in a board game. The lake was long and blue. There were boats and jet skis and beaches and islands, some the familiar reddish brown, others so pale and bright they hurt to look at and the air rippled over them like some old movie slipping into a dream state.

It had been a while since Miss D asked if they were going to the beach.

Littlebit shook her head. “It ain’t nothing but salt.”

“What that do?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“It’s people in it.”

“They boatin. Ain’t nobody gettin wet.”

Miss D thought. “Will it turn us white?”

“Worse than that,” Littlebit said. “Pink.”

Jelonnek turned on the radio. Miss D asked if there were sharks.

“Mormons,” he said.

“Say who?” Miss D said.

“That’s they religion,” Littlebit said. “The mens can have all the wives they want.”

Miss D was scandalized. “Even the reverend?”

“I don’t think they do that anymore,” Jelonnek said.

“That’s what I heard,” Littlebit said.

“So if we lived here,” Miss D said, “he could marry both us.”

“Theya put him under the jail.” Littlebit said. “He ain’t no Mor-man. He already got one anyway.”

“Do he?”

“No he don’t,” Jelonnek said.

“Who to believe?”

“They common law,” Littlebit said.

“I don’t think I like her,” Miss D said.

“She ain’t did nothin to you,” Littlebit said.

“Could we just?” Jelonnek said.

“If he quit his job,” Miss D said, “he can quit her.”

“True that,” Littlebit said, “but true this: just cause you went away doesn’t mean you left.”

They left the lake behind and conversation with it. Jelonnek thought maybe they’d fallen asleep but he didn’t look. The mountains veered away except for one to the east that looked like it belonged in a motion picture logo. Perched on a ledge over a creek, the fuselage of an airliner reborn as a bar called The Crash Landing. They drove past bleached rock and cinammon-colored hills rounded into domes, through a stretch of high desert scrub into the next state. It was hot, his left arm was sunburned and the left side of his face red like the symptom of an inner divide. The radio crackled. They were low on gas and coasted down into a broad green valley of farms, miles of irrigation pipe. Jelonnek looked for potatoes, all the potatoes, like they’d be heaped in drifts and mounds from the edge of the road on, but saw fields of yellow flowers with long leaves like vines, and a sign directing them to where the stuntman of renown had tried to jump a fifteen-hundred-yard canyon with a rocket-powered motorcycle.

The needle was below E when they pulled into a patch of dirt from which sprouted a pair of ancient red gas pumps with rounded tops and shoulders, one of them canted like a tombstone. A low white wooden building with a single window, a pickup truck parked near the door with a bumper sticker that read I SUPPORT THE TROOPS.

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