1.
In West Texas at night, the sky blinks with a thousand red eyes from the lights at the center of wind turbines. These lights are meant to ward off low-flying planes, but they magnetize bats and birds, which fly straight into the blades. You can look this up on the internet if you don’t believe me, or you can go during the day and circle the turbines’ trunks. Fill your pockets with bones picked clean by desert scavengers.
People who grew up in West Texas before me don’t remember the wind turbines; they remember the fairy cities of oil refinery plants. I’ve seen those, too. Lit up like a million electric bulbs for the roughnecks who work through the night. Whenever I drive down a flat, dark highway and I spot a shimmering in the distance, I think of the man who was smart enough to siphon the liquid bodies of dinosaurs from the earth and call it gold.
If you’re lucky, my mother said, you’ll marry someone rich. She said this as strangers carried everything we owned out of our Pennsylvania house: our kitchen table, our loveseat, our silverware, our books. Little orange price stickers winking at me as they left.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You pay for a pink lampshade in cash and a stranger buys it back for less.
My mother didn’t believe in God, she believed in self-help. She stayed up late at the kitchen table surrounded by stacks of shiny books promising muscles and miracles. She leaned into the yellow light, clicking and unclicking her mechanical pen to underline precious words of advice. As in, “you must release the identity that keeps you chained to your addictions.” Which is what she said to me when she told me that she was selling our house and everything in it and checking herself into a rehab center in rural Vermont.
Isn’t all of Vermont rural? I asked. And then, What about me?
You can either stay with my sister or go live with your dad in Texas.
2.
A shrink once told me that people with nasty parents grow up to be irresistible. He also said we carry our childhoods into adulthood, like soldiers marching with their backpacks through the night.
Even now, when I wake up in the middle of the night and feel like I’m the only person left alive, I remember that somewhere in West Texas, a refinery plant is burning as bright as daylight and a man in a hard hat and neoprene suit is reheating coffee in a microwave. I bless him. He blesses me.
3.
To keep, to toss, to give away, to sell. These are life’s big questions.
My mother and I went through my closet sitting cross-legged on the floor among heaps of clothes ripped from their hangers. We followed the instructions in Manifest with Less to shrink my wardrobe to fit into two black duffels. My mother blindfolded me and then held old dresses and t-shirts and blue jeans in front of my face and asked, Yes or no? When we got to the wool sweaters, she tugged down the blindfold. Do you want to take this to Texas? I shrugged. Does it get cold in Texas?
4.
After the war, people from everywhere moved to Texas to make their fortunes in oil. My father’s father was one of those people. He worked as an oil rig inspector for most of his life, and when he died, he left my father a confetti inheritance — tiny tracts of land and mineral rights scattered across the state. He also left him a Filofax of names and phone numbers written on napkins and the ownership of a defunct motel called the Fallout Shelter way out west in Apollo, Texas.
If you drove past Apollo on the highway, you’d see a cheap restaurant and a gas station and a string of churches with blinking neon signs. I once asked a trucker passing through if his route always brought him to Apollo. Where’s that? he asked. The motel is even farther away.
No one knows why my grandfather bought the motel — he and my father weren’t speaking when he died — but after the divorce, my father decided to claim it.
5.
I started folding my jeans into neat stacks and asked my mother why she and my father got married. It was an accident, she said. You got pregnant? No, she said, the accident was getting married.
What did you like about him? I asked. I wanted her to tell me something I could rewrite into a memory, but she denied me. We went to school together, she said, we had friends in common.
In the words of one conservationist, it’s a horror to watch. When an eagle flies into the blade, its wings are erased from the sky. Not a splattering, but a slicing.
6.
I hadn’t seen my father since he moved to Texas, and what I remembered didn’t amount to anything.
He was a psychologist who taught classes at the university during the week and saw patients on the weekends. I only visited his counseling office once or twice when he lived with us, but I remembered that it had stained glass windows, parts and pieces from some holy scene that he salvaged from the demolition of a nearby church. I remembered that he liked how the outside light filtered into the room through the reddish bodies of the saints. He said it felt like staring at the sun with your eyes closed.
7.
Forgetting is its own kind of alchemy. Time turns ghosts into gold. When my mom asked me to choose between living with an aunt I saw every week and a memory, I chose the shinier thing. I had forgotten what he was like.
8.
The morning we drove to the airport, neither of us spoke. My mother drummed her lacquered fingernails over the steering wheel and sometimes hummed to the radio. The gold bangles on her wrists clanged together as she fiddled with the dial.
Mom, I said when we pulled up to the curb, what if he doesn’t show up?
Call me Simone, she said.
Simone, I said.
He will. She squeezed my hand. And if not, call my sister.
9.
In West Texas, people are dying to save you from eternal damnation. Drive down the highway during the day and look up. Smack between billboards for gentlemen’s clubs and water parks and new suburban developments, you’ll see signs — often engulfed in plastic flames — that read, “If you think it’s hot here … ”
Circle circle. Dot dot dot. Whether you believe or not, West Texas is hot as hell.
Some think the heat is clarifying. But the heat makes me dumb.
10.
I waited for him for hours after my plane landed. I crouched on the hot concrete just outside Arrivals and stared into the front windows of every car that passed.
My aunt once told me that she said Hail Mary whenever she had time to kill. We were fastened into the two front seats of her car riding through the dark tunnel of an automatic car wash. Giant sponges pummeled the doors and spumes of white foam blurred out the glass. Not that I believe, she said, raising her voice above the whine of the conveyor belt, but what’s the harm? It might be good to stock up for future sins. She taught the prayer to me line by line until the fans finished drying her car and the mechanical noise that made our privacy bearable sputtered out.
My skin had started to burn. I undid the top buttons on my blouse and tried to remember what she had taught me. I fanned my face with my hands, but I couldn’t stop myself from dissolving into half-sleep, into oil on the concrete. A renaissance painting of the Virgin at the Airport. I glowed, I radiated as I picked at my nails. Shades of ochre. The trunks of cars opened and slammed back down. Even my ankles were sweating.
I tied my coarse yellow hair into a braid and pinned it to the top of my head to cool off, to catch a breeze on my neck. But the weight of it. The chemical stink of my shampoo burning into ether.
I waded back into the dimly lit airport, through the revolving door and into the cave of the women’s bathroom where I approached a tall woman applying mascara at the sink. I asked her to cut off the braid from the base of my skull. She agreed with a shrug, wiping her forehead sweat with the back of her hand. I unearthed a pair of craft scissors from somewhere deep within my backpack. But the blades were too rounded, too soft, so she had to dig into the braid, again and again, snipping, cutting, ripping until the hair fell loose. When I emerged from the bathroom, braid in hand, I saw my father pulling up to the curb.
Hi there, he said.
And then, Jesus, you look like your mom.
•••
Crawford Hunt holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and is a 2020 A Public Space Writing Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.