An Endless River of Potatoes

My first night in that shitty motel room in a tiny Wyoming town I was exhausted and wiped out on malt liquor and I slept in my clothes on top of the bedspread. All night I dreamt of potatoes on a conveyor belt, an endless river of potatoes.

I’d driven straight through, twenty hours, to claim my mother’s body from the Wyoming Women’s Prison in Lusk. She’d been there for twelve years, after being convicted of paying a couple of greaseballs to whack my stepfather. My mother had worked with the two punks at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and she’d paid them 800 bucks to do a job that they’d botched badly.

I’m not entirely clear on how she ended up in Wyoming in the first place, but my mother had already done a previous, short stint at Lusk, this for embezzling money from the towing company she was working for in Sheridan.

I had learned from her infrequent letters that she was battling breast cancer, but I never knew quite what to believe when it came to my mother, and, despite her increasingly pitiful pleas, I hadn’t been out to visit her.

My father had been killed at the tail end of the war in Vietnam, and he was buried back in his old hometown in Wisconsin, alongside his parents and one of his brothers. I had no idea what I was going to do with my mother’s body, but I knew there wasn’t much I could afford, including, I felt certain, shipping her to Wisconsin to be buried next to my dad.

I met a chain-smoking old reverend out at the prison. He was hunch-backed and had faded tattoos up and down both his arms, all the way to the wrists. His white collar was filthy with grease, and the shoulders of his black shirt were so heavily dusted with dandruff that it looked like he’d been doused with baby powder.

The reverend didn’t have a whole lot of good advice for me, but he wanted me to know that my mother had been "redeemed." I didn’t ask for elaboration, but I got some anyway. She had turned her life around in prison, he told me, and had developed a deep, personal relationship with Christ. I heard a good deal more about this business, and the upshot was that she’d purportedly been at peace with herself when she died.

I guess I was happy enough to hear that. Good for her, I thought. It didn’t, though, much help me with my own present dilemma. I made a few inquiries and realized pretty quickly that a coffin and burial were out of the question. I made arrangements to have her cremated in Lusk.

It was approaching dusk when I went downtown to pick up my mother’s ashes, and afterwards, as I walked back up the street to my car, a kid in a devil mask burst from a bush, shook a plastic pitchfork in my face, and dashed back off down the sidewalk. It was, I just then realized, Halloween.

I decided not to wait around another night, and gassed up the car and got back on the highway. At some point I stopped and got a motel room along the road, and I took the box with my mother’s ashes into the room with me and set them next to the television. It creeped me out having them there, though, and because I was having a hard time sleeping I finally hauled them back out to the car at three o’clock in the morning.

The next day I realized that I didn’t want the ashes sitting there in the car with me all the way back across the country. They were in a plain cardboard box, and there was just something about it that bothered and distracted me. It also didn’t seem right to just shove them in the trunk.

At some point I pulled off at a primitive rest stop that was situated right on a fast moving river, and I hauled the ashes down to the shore, tore open the box, and removed the twist tie from the plastic bag. I crept out into the river a bit on some rocks and turned the box upside down. It was sort of nice at first; a little cloud hung in the air for a moment, drifted a bit on the wind, and then settled on the surface of the water and was carried away. The last batch, though, was sort of clumped together, and I had to thump the bottom of the box to dislodge the rest of the contents. A heavy clod of the stuff finally tumbled from the box, hit the water with a splash, and promptly sank like a stone.

The whole thing seemed sort of cold and pathetic, so I closed my eyes, tossed a quarter in near where my mother had entered the river, and wished her peace.