by Carrie Sanders
The fabric seats in the gold Oldsmobile were damp with sweat and smelled like hamburger grease. The girl was sitting in the backseat behind her mother, leaning her forehead on the window in the hopes that it would cool her down. Her brother hummed alongside her, behind their driving stepfather. They had been on the road for hours and they were all tetchy from the heat and boredom. They were in the long, flat part of the state and the radio wasn’t picking anything up. The mother complained that reading had made her carsick, and the stepfather suggested she unroll the window and stick out her nose like a dog.
“Like a dog?” the mother exclaimed.
“Like a dog like a dog!” the brother repeated.
The trip was a surprise for the kids. One night the mother and stepfather came home from the bar and the kids were still up. The stepfather had made a drunken soft-eyed promise to take them on a trip they were bound to love. A surprise road trip to see something wonderful. The mother was less enthused, muttering “They ain’t gonna give a whip.” She had taken to substituting her swear words after the neighbors complained about the brother yelling “shitting bitches” repeatedly at the 4th of July block party.
The stepfather sensed that the enthusiasm for this trip was waning, so he tried to drum up more interest. “I’m telling you, you kids are just going to love this. Just wait until you see it! Almost there now! 15 minutes and I guaran-tee you that it’s gonna knock your socks off!”.
“They ain’t gonna give a whip.” the mother muttered. “Whip whip whip!” the brother repeated. The girl looked out the window and chewed on her ponytail.
The car wound alongside the river and they approached what looked like a huge concrete wall. “There it is kids! Just have a look at that!” The stepfather pulled the car into the parking lot. “The Grand Coulee Dam!” The mother sighed, the girl scratched at a mosquito bite on her ankle and the brother said “Dam dam dam.”
They parked up and the stepfather got out of the car first. “C’mon kids! You all are not gonna believe this!” He hitched up his pants and rammed a cowboy hat on his little bald head. The mother was always slow to move from a stationary position and it took her a minute to uncoil herself from the front seat, putting one fat sandaled foot slowly out of the car at a time . The brother had been cooped up in the car so long that he had a lot of pent up stuff to burn through, so he flapped and smacked and twitched. The girl stood a fair distance away from all of them and stared at the concrete wall.
“Have a look at this! One of the biggest man made structures in the world, kids! Boy howdy, are you in for a treat!” The mother sighed again and they all made their way across the hot grey parking lot and towards the visitors center. “We can’t miss the tour! There is enough concrete in this dam to build a road from Seattle to Miami, can you beat that?”
The tour was led by a uniformed, older bearded man with a limp and the girl remembered nothing else about it. They looked at concrete, and they looked at water, and the mother said “Oh really” a number of times the way she did around other grown ups. The stepfather asked about megawatts and irrigation and pump generators. The brother yipped and barked his way all through the place, startling folks.
They got lunch at the snack bar, flabby french fries and grey hot dogs. The stepfather gazed over at the dam and shook his head, whistling like you would at a pretty lady in a cartoon. “Ain’t that a beaut!” The mother rooted around her handbag for a toothpick, stacking tissues, lipsticks, snacks and papers on the bench beside her. The brother rocked and blinked.
The girl watched a large family at the table next to them as they unwrapped thick sandwiches and little bags of fruit. The children all had long beautiful hair. The parents smiled and fussed over them while they ate. The girl thought they all looked so clean and brand new, like they had never sweat or worried about doctors’ bills. The girl thought their house probably smelled like apples and shampoo.
The stepfather stood and hitched his pants up. “Time to hit the road! Gotta beat the traffic!” The mother hated to be rushed; “For Chrissakes, can’t a person just be for a minute? Makes no difference to me when we get home. I’ll go when I am good and ready.” She fanned herself with a Star magazine; “I don’t give a whip.”
“Whip whip whip” said the brother.
Carrie Sanders is an American writer living in Scotland after a career in international education. She writes short stories, drawing inspiration from her life as an expat and her eye for the absurd. When not reading or writing, she unwinds in the North Sea followed by a nice flat white.
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