Finding Seth Haines: Part VI
Bears and Manna
I took a few weeks off because work obligations were… let’s say… abundant.
In any event, welcome to Part VI of Finding Seth Haines. Before we get started, it’s time for reader participation.
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VI.
Susan Morgan paid $19.99 for a bed and a shower. The big blue key chain attached to the little brass key read 219, which meant Susan had to drag her body up a flight of stairs. Each stair was a chore because Susan had not really slept since Utica, but the movement was a relief after the endless journey on that bus full of so much flatulence and cigarette smoke.
She'd never taken the time to articulate her working theory of human psychology, but if she had, she'd have put it this way: there were two kinds of people in the world. Those who are comfortable thinking a lot of thoughts and feeling a lot of feelings and people who can’t sit still. Years later, she'd come to realize she was in the latter category because thinking thoughts and feeling feelings is an inconvenient thing.
When she wasn’t moving, these are the things she thought about: hungry men; her momma, who’d whiskeyed her liver to death when Susan was just a toddler; her daddy who’d expelled his own overactive brain from his head while Susan was a senior in high school; her smallness; the plague of taxes and inflation and the suited senators who taxed her paycheck; the vastness of the universe; the fact that her tiny self had been vomited into this universe of hungry men and dead mothers and fathers and senators.
For the souls of those who’ve departed, Lord hear our prayer.
She jiggled the key in the lock until the door gave way, then walked into a beige room with sticky blue carpet. There was a television just in front of the bed, and she turned the switch before falling onto the bed, which was too comfortable for such a cheap motel. On the tube, glamorous women in white dresses with pink makeup danced and sang Susan into a tranquilizing sleep, where she found herself in the backyard of a ranch home overlooking a Black Bayou, grizzly bears danced in thick fescue to “Like a Virgin.” A woman stood on the porch and watched those bears. It was her mother—or at least a woman who looked like the photos of her mother, all long-legged and long-fingered and holding a Virginia Slim between the fingers on her left hand. Then, a strange thing happened, which is not all that strange in dreams. Susan became her mother or at least the woman who looked like the photos of her mother.
A warm and soft snow fell from the sky, or maybe it wasn't snow at all. Maybe it was something like tiny flecks of sweet bread. She held her head upward and stuck out her tongue. As those sweet snow flecks fell to her tongue, a kind of fullness settled over her.
The sun was setting over the water when a whole posse of alligators crawled to the shore. They rose like ancient dinosaurs from the depths of the inky water, and they raised their snoots upward, too. After they'd eaten their fill of this snow-bread, they turned to her. Come to the yard and dance, they said in French, which Susan didn’t speak.
She made her way into the yard, reached for the nearest alligator claw, and that’s when she realized the fescue was blue and covered in that sweet, sticky snow. The bears paused their dancing, looked at her, and the largest of them—the one wearing a priest’s collar—cocked his head in wonder before falling to the grass and laughing like only a dream bear can. Then, every creature great and small filled the yard, and they all fell to the grass, covered their bellies, and rolled in laughter. Even the alligators put aside their tendency toward violence.
When Susan woke from the dream, she was laughing, which surprised her because how long had it been since she’d had this kind of sleep or this kind of laugh? Maybe California was magic.
The alarm clock by the bed blinked the time: 10:30. If she didn’t move in double time, there wouldn’t be enough time to shower, pull on her costume, and make her appointment. And this was the most important appointment of her life. She was attending the gameshow, The All New Let’s Make a Deal.
Here's how the idea had come to her. There’d been a small television in the diner where she’d been employed less than three days ago. On that television, the cooks watched The All New Let’s Make a Deal while frying eggs and bacon and lusting after new furniture and kitchen appliances and especially the Chevrolets, Pontiacs, and Fords offered to costumed contestants who agreed to play humiliating games. The show—and all the shows like it—was a drug for the masses akin to religion, and the MTT used it to arouse the hunger of the line cooks, factory workers, and Susan Morgans of the day.
Then that priest had asked her what she wanted.
Then Susan went to the bathroom and cried.
Then she decided to quit Utica—all of it.
Then she set her mind to showing those fry cooks that she wasn't so small or hopeless or a piece of fried ham to be gobbled up.
So, she thought, she'd go on that game show and win a car and they'd stand around the large griddle and ask, Is that our Susan Morgan, the small girl with the gap in her teeth?
In 1984, this is what $19.99 could buy: a hotel room with MTV, but no hot water. So, she stood under a cold trickle and did her best to wash the smell of Greyhound and Virginia Slims off her goosebumps. Having dried her hair, she pulled on her costume—two rolled-up tee shirts taped to each shoulder, a blue Buffalo Bills jersey, a pair of blue sweatpants, and a backward Buffalo Bills hat because she could not afford a helmet. She looked at herself in the mirror and smiled.
One day I’ll fill you up, she said to the gap in her teeth.
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