Max and Willow.

The next morning I woke up in my parking space at about seven and moved my car down to the Wal-Mart. I pulled a blanket over my pounding head and slept until noon, when Greg called me.
"Hi, sweetie!" he chirped.
All I could do was moan.
"Are you okay?"
"MMMMMNNNNNNNHHHHH..."
"What's wrong?"
"I can't party like I uuuuussed tooooooo.... ooooowwwww...."
He burst out laughing. "Awww! My poor little baby's hung over!"
"GGGGGUUUUUUHHHH..."
'Go back to bed, honey. Call me later."

I woke up again at 1:30, to some strange looks from the people parked next to me. All of my RV compatriots were gone, and I was the sole ambassador of Wal-Mart Parking Lot Campers left. Shaking, I devoured aspirin, changed clothes, and drove around town trying to find the one sure-fire cure for hangovers: McDonald's.

I walked in carrying my now-battered copy of "Fear and Loathing" and a kind-faced man in front of me said, "That is the funniest book I have ever read!"
"Yeah! I like it!"
"I've probably read it three times," he continued. "I want to read it again, but I'm waiting awhile, until it becomes new again. Have a nice day!" He grabbed his bag and walked out the door, waving as he left.
People in Montana are super-nice! I thought.

I watched the kids playing in the play area and tried to keep my burger down. Then I meandered back over to Liquid Planet for a myspace fix and a little bit of work. The little barista guy parked his bike outside as I was walking in. "Thanks for the map yesterday, it worked great!"
"Oh! You're welcome! How are you liking Missoula?"
"I love it! Are you working right now?"
"No, I'm just here to pick up my check. I come back at 3. Hey, we're having music here tonight, like singer-songwriter stuff. You should come!"
"Awesome! I'll be here!"
But first, I had to shower.

I worked for awhile, until I could start to smell myself. That is unacceptable, so I drove around. And around. And around, trying to brainstorm a way to take a shower. Could I sneak into a hotel room before the maids came in? Was there a truck stop around? The gym at the University? I got on the highway to look for options and ended up missing an exit to get back into town. I was headed east, towards Bozeman and Clinton, but hopped off at the exit past Bonner, for a tiny town called Turah. It advertised a campsite about a mile down the road. I was leery of paying even fifteen dollars for a campground (this is on the uber-cheap, people), but how weird is it to show up somewhere and say, "I just want to use your shower"? I've been burned by that before, in Chicago, when I got charged fifteen dollars just to take a shower instead of pay for a room. Fifteen bucks is pretty expensive and I was worried this lady would pull the same thing on me. I bit the bullet and just decided to get a site for the night.
The owner of the campground, Kathy, was sitting outside the C-store with a little terrier when I pulled up. She led me inside and I filled out the paperwork. She gave me a map of the place and sent me on my merry way. Outside, I asked, "What's your dog's name?"
"C'mon."
"Huh?"
She laughed. "His name's C'mon. Like, come on, C'mon!"

I picked a site next to a large oak tree and took my tent, which was still soaking wet from the Mighty Flood of Glacier, out to dry in the sun. I was debating hanging it on a tall sprinkler stuck in the ground when a large, white-haired man in a stained white tee-shirt yelled to me from a tiny camper nearby. "You know how'ta work that thing? You wanna turn it on?"
"No, no. I was just thinking of drying my tent on it."
He came walking over, asking questions through toothless gums. "You what? I'm hard of hearing."
"I'm trying to dry my tent."
"Oh! Well, shit, you can lay it up on the picnic table over here! C'mon, I'll help ya."

He walked with a limp as we picked the thing up and carried it over to a table in the sun. "Now we need some rocks," he said. We weighed it down as he asked where I was from and just what in the hell was I doing in Montana. I was explaining as another white-haired man walked out of one of the huge fifth-wheel trailers parked in the campground. My portly, toothless friend interrupted me, asking the man, "What're you doing?"
"What're you doing?" he answered.
"Standing here listening to you ask me what the hell I'm doing!" They both laughed.
"Jessica," my friend said to me, "this is Mr. Walker. He's a good-for-nothing. We don't need your help, we're already done!"
"Fair enough," Mr. Walker laughed. "I was gonna see if you wanted help pitching that tent.""It's too wet!" the stained-shirt man said. "Go home!" It was clear that my new friend was the resident grumpy old man, but meant no harm.

Still enthralled with my bear encounter, I started telling him about it. He interrupted again, saying, "Wait, wait. Come over here. I want you to tell this story to my Will, too. She'd like to hear it." He led me over to the door of his tiny camper, where a gray-haired woman with gnarled hands and feet sat inside, reading a large-print Reader's Digest book. She was wearing a long blue tee-shirt with the sleeves cut off and nothing else. Some of her toes were missing and her feet were an odd shade of purple, and her teeth bit over her bottom lip. Still, as she slowly raised her head, her eyes were gentle and kind. "Jessica," he said, "this here's Will. She don't talk none, but she can understand you just fine. She had an accident. Now, go on, keep tellin' your story."

I started telling the tale again, how close the bear was, how scared I felt. I went slowly, making sure Will was following, because I have a habit of speaking too quickly. When I was finished, my friend, whose name was Max, said, "That's quite a story! Won't you come on inside and talk with Will some? She has a talk-box and she likes talking to people. She don't get to do it that often. Come on inside."
"Um, sure!" I balked at first because of the condition of the trailer. A strong smell of garbage and body odor was emanating from inside and I was afraid of picking up a bug or two. A palpable layer of grease and dirt covered nearly every surface, including the items on the small table and the pictures on the walls. Still, I couldn't deny hospitality such as this, especially with Will opening a dusty briefcase to reveal a computer-keyboard-esque contraption that barked forth a robotic, "Hello? Hello?" when she turned it on. Think Stephen Hawking, but a woman's voice.

Will has one working finger, her index finger on the left hand. While she set up the voice-box, she breathed heavily through a Perma-Traech, a permanent hole in her neck that allowed her to breathe. It was held open by a plastic collar around her wraith-like neck, and the piece on the opening itself looked like a lugnut. Max watched us, sitting across from each other, and smiled contently. "I'm gonna do dishes," he said, but when he saw me looking at the faded snapshots stapled to the wall, he started pointing them out. "Oh, you like pictures? Well, here we go -- this one here is Will when she was a young thing, before the accident." He pointed to a black and white photo of a beautiful teenage girl in a halter top sitting under a tree. "This here's Will's sister, that's Will's son, Chris, who was one-year-old when she had the accident, and that's Will's mother. She's quite a lady! This one's my sister and her husband. This here," -- he pointed to a yellowed piece of paper with words typed on it -- "that's a poem that Will wrote, she's a poet, and this one is a motorsickle that we used to take out sometimes. Will loved to ride that motorsickle!"

Will wanted to speak now. "Flor-ee-da." The box crackled to life. "Flor-ee-da. I used to live in Flor-ee-da."
"Really?" I asked. "How did you end up here?"
It took her a long time to answer, having to type the entire sentence with her one working finger. Finally, she hit the red button and the box said, "I pre-fer cold to heat and Mon-ta-na has nice-er weather. Flor-ee-da is so humid. And there are lots of bugs."
"Will left home when she was 13, she hitch-hiked!" Max offered from the sink, as he poured a frightening concoction of grease into a Mason jar.
Will smiled, and made her sign for "hitch-hike", licking her finger and then sticking her arm out.
I was astounded. "Thirteen?! You went out hitch-hiking at thirteen?" She nodded. "Oh, my GOD!" I cried.
She began typing on the box again, saying "I mare-eed at fif-teen. I was not preg-nant, just stu-pid. It was not Max."
"Yeah," Max said. "Will lived quite a life before her accident!"
"How old were you when you had the accident?"
"Twen-ty-one. Now I am for-tee eight. Seven-tee five miles an hour and palm trees do not mix."
I looked at Max, not sure if I should laugh at her joke. He laughed, so I did too. So did she. Still, he could sense my nervousness.
"Don't you worry about the joking. It's how we deal with the disability. What else is there to do, cry all day? I give her a rough time all the time, it keeps us young. Don't I, Willow?"
The box squawked, "Yes. You are a pain in my ass."
"You shut up, you ol' gimp!" he giggled.
"Am I lye-ing?" Will looked at me and smiled. Max burst out laughing at the sink. I was in awe.

Max asked me, "So are you in college?"
"No, I graduated awhile back. Did you go?"
"Yeah, I was a psychology major. Then I went to grad school. You ever taken a GRE exam?"
"No."
"Well, lemme tell ya, that is the hardest test you could ever take! I got a nose bleed right in the middle of taking it, that's how high my blood pressure was! I decided that it wasn't for me!"
"So what did you do after that?"
"Nothing. Fucked around. I raced boats and rode motorsickles. But you tell us more about you. What's your story?"
"Eh, nothing much. I just wanted to write about people who don't suck."
"Does your family worry about you?"
"Is the pope Catholic?"
"I like you, girl."
"I like you guys too."

I told Will, "I love the name Willow. It's so beautiful."
Before she could type up a response, Max said, "That's not her real name. I named her that, about ten years ago. Her real name is Belinda. But I call her Willow, because Willow goes to the willows. She loves nature, loves being in the woods. So that's her name now. Y'know, Willow's got all her mental capacities workin' in there. All the doctors said she was a vegetable, but man, she proved them wrong!"
The box spit forth, "I am not a weak-ling." Willow held up her arms like a body-builder and grinned widely.
"That's right, Will. Strong as an ox!"

Willow began typing again and the box said, "Amerigo Vespucci"
I looked at her quizzically. "The guy who discovered America before Columbus?" She tried to nod, closing her eyes and trying to lift her head. "What about him?"
"Fourt-teen fif-ty one. Amerigo Vespucci. I re-mem-ber. Nuns ham-mered shit into my brain."
"She's tellin' you the accident didn't take away her memory. She remembers everything, even up until a few seconds before the accident. She was the one drivin', y'know, but it waddn't her fault. She gone to pick up another guy from work and he was on acid. Thought something was comin' at the car, so he jerked the wheel and they smacked into a palm tree."
Willow typed away and we waited patiently to hear what she had to say. Finally, the box croaked, "My ribs were bro-ken, lots of bro-ken bones, my eyes were black and blue, and I was so swo-len. My son screamed when he saw me. No won-der."
"Will made her mother bring Chris into the hospital, because for some reason she believed he was in the car too and had died. That's when Chris lost it, when he seen her. Quite a sight."
"I'll bet." I whispered.

Willow began coughing through her traech-tube, a bizarre rattling sound. She held a paper towel up to her throat to catch the phelgm that dribbled out. "You best watch out from where you're sittin'!" Max warned me, sitting across from her. "She's li'ble ta shoot that stuff right out at you. Sometimes you catch her off guard, make her laugh and it'll come shooting right out at ya like a bullet! She done got me a couple times!"
I bent over, as much from laughing as self-preservation, until Willow had extracted everything she could.

When she was finished, she typed something into the box. "Kris-pee Kreme." She looked at Max with a mischevious grin. He asked her to repeat it. "Kris-pee Kreme," her box said, as she made the sign for "hitch-hike" again.
He threw his head back and laughed. "Krispy Kreme, that's one of her sexual adventures. Willow, I swear, for someone who stopped livin' at 21, you lived a lotta life. She wants me to tell you about the time she went hitch-hiking and got picked up by a whacko in a Krispy Kreme truck. This guy, he was a foot guy. Loved feet. A fetishist, you know. So little Will here, all'a fifteen years old, she gets in this truck and he starts goin' after her toes!"
Willow put her index finger in between her teeth -- her sign for "scared".
"Yeah, that's right, Will. Scared. So she ran away from this nut and then went and bought herself a gun!"
Will typed into her box. "I got it from my girl-friend. Ill-ee-gal as hell."
I laughed. "Man, you are brave! I'm way too blonde to own a firearm, I'd kill myself."
"Yeah, Will's a crazy thing," Max said.
She typed into her box. "I would ra-ther have an ill-ee-gal gun than a slashed throat."
I agreed.

"I like your giggle," Max told me. "You've got a great giggle."
"Thank you," I blushed.
"Yeah, Will used to have a great giggle, too."
"She still does." I said emphatically.
He paused. "You can hear Will's giggle?"
"Can't you?"
He looked mildly shocked. "You can hear Will's giggle?" he repeated.
"Well, yeah. It doesn't sound the same as yours or mine. But that doesn't mean she doesn't laugh. Does it?"
"Who is this miracle who wandered into our house?" Max asked Willow.

Later on, I asked Max, "So how did you two meet?"
"I was her caretaker when I dropped out of grad school. In between the bikes and boats."
"Wait. So you met her.... after the accident?"
"Yeah. She intrigued me. One time I was tryin' ta get her bra off to put her to bed and I couldn't do it and she smacked me. She said, 'Get away from I'll just sleep in it!' So that made me wonder. Little things like that. And we just fell in love. Been together almost fifteen years now. We have a good time. Don't we, Will?"
"Speak for yourself," said the robotic voice and Will laughed through her traech tube.
"Oh, you shut up, you ol' gimp!" he laughed.

Their shaggy sheep dog, Chickie, barked at a bird outside. "You oughta get yourself a travelin' dog," Max said.
I told them about the dog in Browing, the new mother that I almost took with me.
"Yeah, you need yourself a dog. There's all kin'na strays that wander 'round here. Maybe you should take one'a them. Will and I had a dog for a long time, a Rottie. She drove all over with us. An' sometimes, when we was travelin', we'd have to sleep in the El Camino and she'd have to take the floor. She hated that! Still, she was the sweetest dog. Name was Head. So last Christmas Eve, she died. We was all broke up about it but couldn't do nothin'."
They both began giggling an infectious giggle while he explained the rest of the story. "So's I stuck her in the back'a the Camino and let'er freeze up."
"What did you do then?"
"I waited til she froze and then I drove'er over to the cliff by the canyon an' rolled'er down the hill! God don't mind!"
By this time they were both laughing so hard I thought one or both of them would stop breathing. I dodged Willow's phelgm cannon again, barely breathing myself.

At one point Max began explaining how they lived in the tiny camper. "We're both frugal. Don't need much. She's absolutely great, because with her disability she could be a real prima-donna. But she's independent. When things got expensive, and we wanted to live on our own, we thought we'd try this out. We like it fine. It's good for Will, 'cause it's so dang small. If she falls, she falls into something. Plus, she likes to drink beer and get blasted and she stumbles all over the damn place but can't hurt herself too bad."
Willow banged on the table and shot him a silly grin -- her sign for "shut the hell up".

I wondered how they survived with the smell -- by this time I had been visiting for at least an hour and was beginning to grow nauseous. I also marveled at how they didn't get sick in that environment. The bodies of broken toys but immune systems of steel.
"Yeah, we ain't got no water, so it gets hard to heat the water for dishes and stuff. But we found if ya' just rinse off the dishes with cold water and don't use no soap, and ya let the food dry on the plates, as long as ya let it dry real good you can use the plates again and ya won't get sick. The soap won't come off wit' cold water, so we just rinse 'em."

My stomach churned at the thought. Here was a paradox. People who fed my soul, who made me feel alive, but whose way of daily life was literally making me sick. "How do I write about this?" I wondered.

"Also," Max said, interrupting my train of thought, "we ain't got a bathroom, but this here five-gallon bucket works just fine." He kicked whatever bucket he was referring to, and it must not have been emptied in awhile. A putrid stench of stale urine and feces swept through the stuffy camper and almost knocked me over.
I didn't understand. There was a fully-functioning bathroom just 20 yards away. "Why don't you use that?" I coughed, trying not to breathe.
"Well, sometimes in the middle'a the night, you gotta shit and you don't wanna go all the way there. 'Specially with her disability, we can't get around as fast. So we use this and we like it just fine."
It did make sense, but I was about to lose it. Max started looking around for something and I excused myself. "Be right back," I croaked.

I ran to my car, went around to the side opposite the camper, opened both the front and back doors, squatted inbetween and vomited on my shoes, as quietly as possible. Lucky for me, the both of them are hard of hearing. While I was wiping off my shoes, again I dismayed over how to handle this one. Two of the most beautiful people I'd ever met, who just happened to live lives difficult for others to understand, or stomach. How to write about them without sounding derogatory? Or if they read it, without offending?

I'm still wondering how to manage it.