One Last Round

By Allison S. Kingsley

My journey to this cold and dank holding cell in Scottsdale, Arizona began the summer I scooped ice cream for tourists in floppy straw hats, Day-Glo bikinis and pastel camouflage muscle tees. Every morning at ten to nine, I went to a warehouse on North Avenue to get the Sacred Scoop ice cream cart. Bright yellow awning with hand painted angels, Mary and Baby Jesus floating among scoops of vanilla and chocolate. On the cart’s side was a white man’s rendition of God—flowing pearly hair, beard and mustache, looking down, hands splayed wide. I gripped the metal bars wrapped in crimson cross flags and wheeled the cart down the boardwalk. Clank-clank-clanking over the warped wood panels.

Bill called himself Billy in those days and had long murky hair knotted up like barbed wire. He was a recent college graduate spending the summer in Sand City to help start Save-the-Strip-from-the-Sip, a non-profit battling plastic straws. I was a recent college dropout working for my uncle who’d gone into ice cream after bankrupting himself in Atlantic City and finding Jesus at an AA meeting in the form of a recovering blond born-again-Baptist thirty years his junior. I was indifferent to Jesus, but employment options were limited after the manager at the Angry Wench found two liters of rum and a jar of maraschino cherries in my purse. I’d been raised without boundaries. No curfews. No mention of the emptied liquor cabinet or condoms in the laundry. My friends envied the freedom. I hated it. I’d become lost in the absence of structure and by twenty, all I wanted was to be told what to do.

—

It was Bill’s idea to come to Arizona. He’ll say he did it for me. But really, I spent the last five days at the Tropical Desert Palm for him, for us. Definitely not for me because this state drives me mad. Last time I flew to Phoenix, I watched the barren canvas stretching in all directions erupt into a stretch of aquamarine pools and polished white houses and thought, “The earth is totally screwed,” then slung back my vodka tonic and smashed the plastic cup into the seat pocket.

And the Tropical Desert Palm is the worst of it, with that the three-story-waterfall swallowing the sounds of foot traffic and the women in starchy grass skirts swaying to some bamboo xylophone and then the courtyard with all those pools among trees—non-native, some real, all illuminated with floodlights. I took Bill’s hand when we reached a teardrop hot tub at the edge of the golf course where I stared at a palm tree. The leaves glistened in the morning light, the trunk rutted with precision and I couldn’t figure out if it was real or fake.

You see, I arrived into this world thirty-some years ago unexpected and my parents never expected much because of that. “Expectations are a real drag,” Mom once said while sipping a daiquiri on our back porch and explaining why she never married Dad. And though I never doubted their love, I spent my childhood cataloguing how I’d be a very different parent.

Bill had his own catalogue and when we met that summer in Sand City, there was a deep, dark crater in him where memories of fishing trips or basketball games with his father should have been. He was just as lost as me. The difference was he needed someone to guide, I needed someone to follow.

“Did you know cow farts are more damaging than car farts?” Bill once asked, his voice echoing against the cooler’s insides where I dipped my nose to inhale Messiah Mint and Rapture Raspberry, flavors twisting into something sweeter than their parts.

“No,” I said as his bare shoulder brushed my skin, igniting the air between us, and I looked into his hoary eyes, the gaze so sharp, so precise, it almost hurt. I liked the exacting pain because I was like the ocean then. Unwieldy and amorphous.  

“No one does,” he said.

“You do,” I said, wiggling my hips the way Mom always did when flirting with men who weren’t my father.

Bill was full of facts like that. Facts that gave my shapeless self an anchor and at night, we’d stretch out like starfish in the sand. The tourists gone, the galaxy slowly waking, and Bill pouring his aspirations over me like a soft, cool breeze.

“I wanna do something that matters,” he’d say, threading his hand in mine, his fingers like emery boards. “Live with people who see all this consumption as destruction. You know?”

And though I didn’t know, hadn’t thought like that before, I said, “Totally.”

Totally. I always said totally.

And that’s how I landed out here, because when summer’s end closed in, Bill tugged on his musty-green friendship bracelet and whispered, “You’re better than this town, these people.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said, stacking an extra-large waffle cone with Crucifixion Cookies and Cream for a man with an armed eagle inked across his chest.

“I’m sure,” Bill said with the confidence of someone who’d been born into a world brimming with resource and opportunity, someone who didn’t need scholarships or financial aid, someone who could hate the trappings of wealth because he’d never known what it was like to be without. That was another difference between us. One we never spoke of.

The customer dropped a wad of ones in the glass tip jar and winked at me as Bill went on, “You could do anything Molls. You’re smart.”

Running my palm along the cart’s lid, pockmarked and bumpy against my sun-warm skin, I looked away, toward the labyrinth of rainbow umbrellas because it was the first time a man ever told me I was smart.

“You really think so?” I said, looking back into those ice gray eyes.

“Yeah. I really do.” Bill cupped my elbow and pulled me so close I could smell his ginger-polished breath. He leaned in to kiss me and when our lips parted, he said, “I’m going West and you’re coming with me.”

I looked away again, toward a seagull with a crumb of some kid’s fruit roll-up in its mouth and whispered, “Totally.”

Six days later, I packed three duffle bags into the trunk of Bill’s red hatchback and waved goodbye to my shithole hometown without ever asking exactly where we were going or what we were doing because I thought a better life fizzled and hissed out there. But really, I didn’t know what better meant other than not Sand City, and ten years later, as I sit here refusing all liquids because I don’t want to use the precinct’s bathroom again, I’m still not sure.

But those days on the road were beautiful because they were new and I was naïve enough to believe in better. For months we drifted on Bill’s savings—his father’s nudge toward the real estate business. “He’s just another baby boomer who traded folk songs and free love for greed,” was the only thing Bill ever said about his dad and though I knew rebellion against him was why Bill cared so much about cow farts, I never asked for more.

The hatchback zigged and zagged from Santa Fe to Moab to Bellingham. We attended rallies where abstractions of the earth, big and blue and green, were everywhere. Tank tops. Posters. Stickers. Bill told stories of the Tebeguaches and the Navajo and the Apache as we wandered the mesas and canyons that’d been stolen from them. Most nights, we slept on foam pads without pitching a tent. Whispering I Love Yous like lullabies. Counting stars like sheep. And as morning neared, we burrowed into each other’s sleeping bags.

By the time we drove into summer on Route 66, just outside of Flagstaff, Bill was itchy for more and he’d been reading about the Wretched Monkeys, an eco-terrorist group that employed petty arson at drill sites and logging roads. As small fires sparked across the West, Bill pined for friends like that, but all he had was me, still as shapeless and as malleable as the ocean. But by then, he’d opened my eyes, had me read books like that one about John Wesley Powell. I’d never learned that stuff in school, never learned how he warned us two hundred years ago we’d run out of water if we developed the west, never learned we chose progress, progress, progress while Powell thrashed in his grave. And once you learn, you can’t unlearn. So I was ripe to Bill’s ideas the night he roasted potatoes over the campfire and said, “I got us some spray paint.”

“Why?” I asked, dragging a joint to my lips, swirling the skunk of it between my teeth.

“Remember that obnoxious sign we saw for ATV rentals?”

I nodded. Tucked a grimy strand of hair under my ear.

“We green it out. Cover it. Then, we find another one and do the same. We do it to every sign attracting those gas-guzzling motorized tourists and then, we do it to McDonalds signs. We do it to Arby’s. To Wal-Mart. To Exxon. To every store promoting cheap plastic souvenirs that will spend eternity in a landfill.” Bill took the joint, let it smolder at his fingertips and continued, “We travel from sign to sign. Paint over the lures of America. I want to see it painted green.”

“You sound like a tree-hugging Rolling Stone.” I smirked the half-smirk of almost high.

“I’m serious, Molls, we dress in black and paint it green. We start doing something, anything to stop this sprawling and consumptive madness. It’ll be a big F U.”

“Sounds like a lot of spray paint,” I said as I watched him draw in a deep breath of weed, flickering the embers awake.

“Dad’s still funneling money. Can’t think of a better use.”

I leaned to the fire, gazed at yellow and red flames leapfrog over logs and said, “Totally.”

And so began the year of green spray paint and rigged climbing ropes and lots of weed. I was the buyer. Always paying cash, flashing a smile at some acned-teen working the register. Bill kept a tally in a yellow notebook. Two hundred signs by November. Five hundred by March. Seven hundred by the time summer came around again, our noses numb from aerosol vapors, hands always sticky in residue.

And thought all that spray paint never landed me in a place like this, it changed me. It wasn’t better I found, it was futility that found me because all those greened out signs changed nothing. And though we never talked about it, Bill felt it too.

Our last paint job was a sign for a cheesy souvenir shop—Big T Trinkets & Toys—that’d been repainted after we’d greened it out just a week before and after we tossed the eight-thousandth empty can of paint in an overfilled dumpster and ran to the hatchback, silent in our giddiness, we fell into stillness as the doors slammed us safe inside and then Bill drove deep into the nearby forest and I watched nighttime flicker by the window while sipping tequila.

“I’m tired of smelling like toxic hair spray,” I said cupping the bottle in my hands, not looking at him because it wasn’t really the smell, it was the hopelessness exhausting me. There were too many signs.

“How far into that bottle are you?” Bill eyed the liquor I cradled like a baby. 

“What are we doing?”

“Dad cut off the funds last month.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I had to think about it. Ya know. It’s been a good run.”

I took in another sharp sip and stared hard into the silhouettes of spruce swaying against darkness while trying to imagine life without Bill, imagine where I’d be if he’d never showed up in Sand City. Still happy in my obliviousness, sure, but also lost in the lapping ocean waves of my childhood. Tears started to rise in my eyes as I swallowed down another sip and almost choked when Bill stopped the car. With a drop of tequila sliding down my chin, I turned toward him as he yanked on the parking brake and said, “Marry me Molls.”

“Are you serious?”

“Never been more serious.” He took the tequila from me, swigged some back and slammed it into the cup holder between us. “You’re it for me.”

“Totally,” I said and climbed over the shifter, curling into his body.

—

What irks me most about the Tropical Desert Palm is the water and I suppose that’s why I’m sitting on this pockmarked bench—water. And, as you now know, Bill.

After the road, we took what was left of Bill’s money, bought a marriage license, a one-bedroom apartment in Denver and re-enrolled me in college. Bill got a job teaching social studies because he thought he could steer the curriculum toward consciousness and three years evaporated like a spilled can of soda on a hot summer day. By the time I graduated, the hatchback’s engine no longer started without a jump, mysterious watermarks had formed like storm clouds on our apartment ceiling and Bill had stopped calling himself Billy. He’d also learned that sixth graders weren’t interested in stories about the natives who once lived where the school now sat. Spitballs. Passing notes. Holding their breath until they passed out. Those were the interests of his students and so when I told Bill a middle-aged man named Blaze who wore medallion belt buckles the shape of elk offered me a paralegal job at Cowboy Law in a town three hours west of Denver, Bill pressed into the loose rungs of the wooden kitchen chair, picked at a popcorn kernel stuck between his teeth and toasted me with his half-empty can of PBR and said, “I’d follow you anywhere, Molls.”

As we drove a clunky, rattling U-Haul into Deadwood Junction, billboards for Cowboy Law—The liability lassoers of the West—erupted along the highway. The worst was the woman in a petticoat and pearl-button boots roped to the railroad with mouth gaping: In a bind? Don’t delay, call Cowboys today! I already hated my job and my first assignment didn’t change that. I had to scan police records, then search the internet to find contact information for recent victims or relatives of victims or relatives of relatives of victims. The calling was left to Blaze’s wife, Linnet, who had a supple, luring voice.

It’s funny what you do to numb, to distract from the futility and hopelessness lurking everywhere. We bought a bungalow with a wrap-around porch, Bill found another teaching job and three more years evaporated into nothing but I barely recognized him, that silvery gaze dulled by all the difference we didn’t make and our weeknights passed with takeout or leftovers swallowed down against the disjointed hum of the evening news. In bed, I answered emails while Bill corrected papers, a box of organic, locally sourced fig wafers between us. We were lost to each other, to the world, but couldn’t see it then.

—

Bill would tell you I’m in this cell because I want a baby and that’s almost true. It was my idea but looking back, I can see I just wanted something to reach for with Bill again. When I suggested we get pregnant, he toasted me with a White Claw and said, “Sounds fun.”

And it was fun at first.

Red satin panties. Nipple tassels. Whipped cream. One time, Bill wore my lace thong, a moustache of chocolate syrup on his lips, holding a jump rope like a whip. But thirteen months in, it was effort. I stood at the edge of the bed in gray bikini briefs I’d bought in a five-pack at Target and said, “Let’s do this,” as Bill dusted fig wafer crumbs from his bare chest.

After another few months with no results, we sat in a fertility clinic hours from our house where I was jabbed and Bill came in a cup. By then, I’d taken to spending days scanning nursery designs and was convinced a baby was the only way I’d ever feel something less than futile.

“Nothing obvious here,” the doctor said when the results came back. He suggested we try Intrauterine Insemination. “You got this,” he said, rubbing hands together as if our reproduction chances were plotted on a roulette board in Vegas and he was about to roll the die.

Blue and yellow and pink liquids cluttered the bathroom counter.

“What’s that stuff gonna do to me?” Bill asked one night when he noticed his nether regions were a swirl of almost purple etched in green.

As we neared my fertile days, the nurses said, “Abstain, abstain!” like the failed sex-ed programs of the George W. Bush years. But unlike the horny youth, we heeded the advice as pastel-colored mucus leaked from me at accelerated rates.

On the day the egg dropped, Bill and I traveled to the clinic, stopping at an interstate rest stop that smelled like rotting lettuce where he slipped into a stall with an old Victoria’s Secret catalogue so he could harvest his half of the baby an hour before arriving at the clinic where his sperm was spun and spun then put into a technologically advanced turkey baster that was greased and jammed into my uterus while Bill read recipes he’d never try in Good Housekeeping.

We always stopped at Dairy Queen for an Oreo Blizzard on the way home. Bill would scoop up an exacting Oreo-to-ice-cream ratio and feed me like a child as tears swelled in my eyes. “We’re still young, it will happen,” he said with the same confidence he had the summer I worked at the Sacred Scoop and in those moments, I trusted him completely. 

“No bueno,” the doctor said, soft and deflated at the end of a long voicemail when blood had spotted my grey bikini briefs after the sixth Oreo Blizzard.

“We can try in vitro,” Bill said, as I wilted into his arms.

“We can’t afford that.”

“I’ll ask Dad,” Bill whispered. He hadn’t asked for money since his dad cut the funds years ago. He barely talked to his dad. Phone calls and visits were always truncated by business and I wanted to tell Bill no, but I wanted to have something to hold even more. So I just nodded and that’s how we ended up at the Tropical Desert Palm.

—

Over the first four days, we barely saw Bill’s dad. He was there to talk about strip malls with middle-aged men who wore tweed jackets despite ninety-degree temperatures. I think he’d hoped Bill would tag along, hoped Bill had finally come around to wanting in on the family business, but Bill and I just sat by the pool. Lathered our noses in zincky lotion, drank sugary cocktails garnished with mini-pink plastic flamingos and waited for an opening to ask for money. But every night his dad brought a new investor to dinner leaving no room for Bill to wiggle into the conversations with our procreating woes.

“I knew it wouldn’t work to meet him on his terms,” Bill said after we’d left his dad with some investor for the fourth night in a row and returned to our room to drink from the mini bar.

“You didn’t know until you tried,” I said, running my hand along his thigh.

“He’ll never see me as a person. Not unless I choose his life, his path.” Bill’s left eye twitched and there was a sorrow I’d only ever seen when he talked about the loss of another species or a lodgepole pine forest desecrated by beetles. We sat in the stillness of disappointment for a long time while I longed for those days on the road when hope was all we thought we’d ever need.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said as I walked onto the balcony where I gazed out at the golf course under the glow of scattered lampposts. “Look, takes a lot of water to keep a desert green.”

I could feel Bill’s eyes sharpen on me as he crushed his IPA and it felt so good, the fire of our youth, our beginning, wrapping around us, tugging us into the hotel room where I grabbed my purse, then we slipped out the door, past the pools and waterfalls and onto the fairways.

We walked along the course, slinking into the shadows and then Bill ran ahead, waving me toward a pond next to a large wooden shack.

“The watering system is probably in that shed and I bet the irrigation inlet is in that pond,” he said, shimmying out of his clunky Chacos.

“Inlet?”

“A tube that’s sucking up the water and sending it out on the greens.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Clog it. Can you get me some sod. Maybe a few rocks.”

I scanned the horizon. Nothing but empty sidewalks and abandoned fairways. I dug into the grass, tore at it with my fingernails, scooped it up like a baby.

“Just drop it here,” Bill, now wearing only his beige pants, said as he stepped into the pond and pointed to the grass beside him. I ran to the other shore, picked up a few rocks.

“Hard to see down there,” Bill said as he shimmied along the water and I dropped the rocks next to the sod. “Just gonna feel for the inlet with my foot.” He inched around the edge, then circled inward as I watched him. Then looked away, toward the distant pool patio with its nighttime crowd that reminded me of Sand City with their cover-ups turned nightwear.

“Molls!” Bill screamed.

He was at the pond’s center, immersed to his neck, head tilted back, mouth agape.

“Molls, help!” he yelled again.

“What?”

“I’m stuck. The freakin’ inlet found me.” 

“Stay calm,” I said, trying not to imagine a gaping hole sucking Bill underground.

“Easy for you to say.”

“What’s stuck?”

“My pants. It’s got me by the pants!” He went under, jerked around a bit, then resurfaced.

“Okay, okay.” I stepped toward the pond. “Can’t you just take them off?”

“These are my fav Pranas.” He went under again as I watched the rings rippling out, out, out. Then his head erupted. “Also, I’m freeballing it.”

“Oh God.” I stepped back, reached up under my skirt and pulled my underwear off as Bill started splashing toward me.

Bill, arms wrapping his chest, stepped to the shore and collapsed onto the grass next to the pile of sod and rocks.

“This is all I’ve got,” I said, holding up the red satin bikini briefs.

He pulled them on. His thighs looking like wet sausages and his belly hanging over the shiny red waistband.

“You look very European,” I said handing him his plaid button-down.

While he caught his breath, I walked toward the woodshed next to the pond. The door was unlocked. Hoses and nozzles and white PVC pipes twisted up and down and around the plywood walls. I waved Bill over.

“Bingo,” he said when he got to me. “We can plug the tubes. What’s in your purse?”

“Gum? Lighter?” I said, digging out the items.  

Bill held the lighter against the pipes, melting hole after hole while I chewed and chomped and slid gum through the openings, clogging the tubes. The lighter was near empty by the time I too was saturated in water and laughing and Bill grabbed me, pulling me to the ground as pipes hissed and spit and sputtered. We made love the way we had in the days of the red hatchback, the ground spongy and assured beneath us, the taste of mutiny sweet on our tongues, ignited by the way we were better and bolder together than we could ever be apart.

—

This morning, we were still giddy as a grass-skirted woman refilled our mugs with imported coffee and we picked at a platter of mango and papaya, sucking in the sweetness.

“Took the morning off,” his dad said, startling us from behind as he placed a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “Thought we could catch up over a round.”

Bill hated golf even more than me, but nothing could shake the morning’s levity.

“Sure Dad,” he said, slicing into a crescent moon of cantaloupe.

“Great.” his dad stepped back. “Why don’t you kids pick up the cart when you’re through with breakfast. I’ll meet you at the driving range.”

We both nodded, and then as his dad walked away, we picked at more fruit, sipped more coffee, and said nothing because some things were better left unsaid.

After changing into the stiff collared t-shirts and khaki shorts we’d bought at a second-hand store in Deadwood Junction and hadn’t yet taken out of our suitcases, we headed to the Pro Shop. The golf cart was a sparkly turquoise with bright pink hibiscus petals running like waves along the sides and the salesclerk chewed a thick wad of gum that muffled his directions as we nodded, pretending to understand. But we didn’t understand and every pathway leaving the Pro Shop looked the same, so Bill turned right, heading away from, instead of toward, the driving range. I didn’t mind because the breeze of movement felt good against my arms and as the speakers along the pathway hummed with tropical bird song, I closed my eyes.

“Oh no,” Bill said, slamming on the brakes. “My wallet.”

“What?” I said, opening my eyes to see a security guard standing next to the now-drained pond, holding Bill’s favorite pair of Pranas and talking into a radio.

“It’s in my pants.”

The guard slipped the radio into his holster and I asked, “Should we make a run for it?”

“It’s too late Molls,” Bill said taking my hand. “It’s hopeless, all of it.”

“Totally,” I said, as sun ricocheted off the perfectly rutted trunk of palm tree, real or fake, I still didn’t know.

And so, here I am, waiting for Bill’s dad, the man with the money, to finish one last round of golf and come bail us out. Maybe I will take some water now.

THE END

Author Bio: Allison S. Kingsley is a writer living in southwest Colorado. In 2016, she traded a legal career in Manhattan for running shoes and a used car and set out to live a simpler, less material-driven life. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Litro Online, Another Chicago Magazine, Ninth Letter and New York Times (Modern Love), among other places. When she’s not writing, she’s trail running with her border collier, Pippi, and operating an off-the-grid backcountry lodge at 12,000 feet above sea level with her husband.

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