Shit and Gasoline
It was the first holiday they spent together, Easter. Resurrection Day.
She’d met him the year he’d come back to town with the guys, from Standing Rock. When she’d asked, they’d told her how he’d been up at the front at 6 a.m. if he was told, soaking wet in the cold, Dakota wind. Which made sense—Crash was a whiteboy, a linebacker in high school. So it was the right thing to do, stand between the water cannons and the Water Protectors. Take it to the chest.
At first, she was relieved he was the kind of man who would do a thing like that. Though later she realized it had come with a certain level of glory for himself, which means that in the end it didn’t matter. This side of the line or that, his good old boy hung around him like the smell of propane. He’d be the first to tell you he bought that land. Paid for it with these here hands, these workboots, that worktruck right there. Full-sized, crew cab. Half-drunk case of Coors in the back, gravel matted into the floor, and covered in dust. Rolling dirty. Shotguns, hunting rifles in a pile in the bedroom closet, next to the bed. AR wrapped in a hoodie, laid on top.
This is an American love story, a firearm in every scene. Chiaroscuro. How she felt walking the darkest passage of the prison with a light. Walking the lowest level of the catacombs, and suddenly saw somebody. You might never meet a single other person in the dark. This she knew. So she took a chance. But the loss tangled up in it turned out to be more than she could tolerate.
He understood that. He’d believed all along she was weak. Told her so, on the telephone while she was laying in the dry bathtub alone in the dark, Mackinaw Island Super 8, her children asleep in the other room, on the king-size bed. That was the summer she spent thinking about dousing herself in gasoline, walking out into the middle of Lake Street and lighting a match. The only girl that could talk to him just couldn’t swim. Tell me what is worse than this? So she tried to hide it from him, silently crying through the satin light of Easter Day, and as it slipped away, into night. She missed her children, the family she’d lost beyond an unpassable chasm. That pretty picture. That nostalgic, pastoral ideal which was now forever withheld, even though she never would’ve gotten it anyway. Somewhere in herself, she knew that too. There is no perfect life.
They walked through the copse of trees at the crest of the little hill, past his dirtbike track and down into his meadow, the grasses rising high and ashen, golden wisps emerging gently from the thin crust of snow that their boots broke through, to hit the frozen ground. She stayed just behind his left shoulder, the cold breeze taking the smoke of his Parliament away. It was to be this way for quite some time, far longer than she could have predicted. Nine years facing a wall. The story of a monk in ancient China, who had to learn it the hard way. Sometimes it’s like that.
Swans had gathered a ways off, on the rise across the gravel farm road, their honks faint. A little cluster of white upon the greater whiteness of the snow. The corn stalk nubbins lumpy all around, the swans’ heads touching, close. Delicately beautiful from a distance, if you can’t hear how crass. Their arched wings and throats. Their gentle shapes against the oppressive, endless horizon.
Karl was a German Shepherd and black lab mix. A country dog. When he finally caught the scent of swans, he ran. As he got close, a galloping blur of black against the layers and layers of white, the swans took flight, erupting into the sky’s pearl gray. They landed, a little ways off. And Karl ran, barking, until they flew again.
It made Crash laugh, man’s best friend.
“Now he’s got ‘em,” he said, to no one in particular.
Then he started to shout.
“Get ‘em, Karl! Get ‘em! Get ‘em boy! Get ‘em!”
His voice a crack against the silence of the tilled, snowy fields that spread in every direction around his pretty little piece. 88 acres. The woods to which he was now steward, only because there were too many boulders there to plow, to make ethanol gasoline. His woods. His dog. His woman. The one he stole. Like the folks she’d watched stealing shoes, when they looted the Footlocker. Possessions were objects that could be owned, then stolen. That’s what they were. Objects. At the time Crash found something seductive in it. Same as he liked watching that ASMR video of folks in shackles and chains, getting deported. I’m talking about the fantasies people are living, the ones that got us here, with the fascists. A country boy can survive.
Both men were that way–country boys, a couple of hardcore motherfuckers. The ones you’d want on your team in the apocalypse. And they hated each other for it. Because there was a difference. One was the kind who believed in silence in the woods. The one the big boys always tried to fight. The one who could gut your elk. Skin it. Butcher it. Build you a booby trap. But Crash was the kind who believed that sometimes, you gotta make some fuckin’ noise. The one the big boys followed around. The one who could throw you one hell of a party. Teach you the virtues of throttle therapy. Show you how to hit that jump. Send it, land it. Or crash. Easier than waiting around to die.
He finished the Parliament and stomped his can of Coors and put the flat empty in his pocket.
Took her by the wrist.
“Keep up now babe,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “Sorry.”
He didn’t respond. It was her habit to apologize. But what was the point? She didn’t know. Or maybe she did: desire for her degradation. It seemed everyone wanted it at the time: Crash and Suzanne, the other man in question. And so, she determined, she did it in an attempt to eliminate the impact of her very existence upon the world around her. To cancel out every action of her life, large and small. Zero emissions. So far, she had failed completely—they said she was like a coal plant, spewing chaos into the sky, black clouds of smoke.
Crash had told her: there are some things in life for which no apology will ever suffice. Which she couldn’t understand. How can people live like that? With the weight of unforgivable things? He didn’t hear her argument about the nature of possession. Nothing she said in her own defense seemed to matter. No evidence presented from the decade preceding was believed. So she apologized. Again and again. For nothing and everything, for all that, it seemed, she could never take back, could never make up. Not to anyone. Not ever. Not now. Everyone disapproving, on both sides of the argument, when it came to the question of responsibility, blame. Even Crash.
That was the first problem they had.
They reached the place where the trail he’d cut in ten years back entered the woods. Like stepping into a hotel suite the woods were, like entering a great hall, an oven, a place of transubstantiation. They walked the trail, the beautiful susurration of the winds in the crusty leaves above, and in the pines, in the pines. He took out this steel one-hitter he’d got when he lived out West. Packed it and held it out to her. But not all the way, so she had to lean down to put her lips on the cold metal and hold onto his wrist while he lit it, cupping his thickened hands around her mouth, like he was protecting the flame from the wind. And he watched her smoke it.
After that, they resumed their quest. To find the place where he would build it.
It would be beautiful, he’d told her, lying in bed the night before. And she’d been pleased, the capacity of his imagination seeming to swell in the dark, holding her to him by the neck. And he talked, making plans. How he’d build the deer stand first, but higher than usual, so a person could see above the tree line, to the county road and the farm road both. A lookout. A way to see the horizon, or just beyond. A way to see what was to come.
He told her how he’d make the trail split and have a smaller trail veer off, so if you didn’t know, you’d miss it. The place would be protected that way, their secret. He’d clear some trees, then pour the foundation. Put a platform up, frame in walls, and they could drive the truck down from the house and sleep beneath the stars.
He wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Wouldn’t have cut in a new trail, wouldn’t be planning to build anything at all if there wasn’t a woman around, telling him not to smoke in the house. A couple years earlier she’d spotted him up on the exit ramp, once he’d pointed the wheel for home and was just about to hit the cruise. I’m talking metaphorically. And eventually, she’d given him a lift. Saved him from himself, for a little while. Maybe it was an act of God, meeting like that, which was something they’d discussed. Both of them forever preoccupied with that eternal question: Che vuoi? “What do you want?” The you, in both their cases, being Nature, God. A substance consisting of an infinity of attributes. The attributes of God were easier to talk about than what was happening. When they talked about that, all they did was fight.
But perhaps the lift was one he’d given her, fishtailing on the gravels, the getaway driver, the great escape. So what did she expect? From the getaway driver?
An American love story, a story from the home of the automobile, commodity par excellence. Generations of her family torn apart by it, the auto. Her children’s picture-perfect family being only the most recent. Since Crash and Suzanne’s had been just the same as their grandparents—a romance born in Silverados, born to a couple of prisoners of the white lines, on the free, free way. Which is why, if you can follow the logic of association, when he pulled two fresh Coors from his Carhartt and handed her one, she took it. He knew she would. She could feel the coolness of the can through the deerskin gloves she’d bought from the farm and supply store the year before, now stained with blood.
She’d cut herself cooking was all. Hundreds of miles from here, a year ago in the city, almost midnight, now a faded memory. It had been her thumb, and they’d been drinking a couple bottles of a Lodi Red Blend he’d brought for his visit, so she hardly paid attention to the wound, hardly bothered about it until after they’d eaten their steaks. They didn’t really notice the blood at all in fact until they’d gotten back out into the night, walking the vacant downtown streets smoking Parliaments like there might be something to see there besides the boarded-up nightclubs, and the addicts.
But suddenly he grabbed her by the shoulders and walked her to stand under the illuminated marquee of an almost-abandoned theater I won’t name, its lights insistently flashing into the desolate city night. He was a good drunk—exciting, adamant. And he’d pulled off his work gloves, the pointer and thumb of the right glove filthy, ripped. Power tools. And the left glove. Boards and fasteners, nails.
“Babe, your face is covered in blood,” he’d said, licking his thumb and rubbing at her roughly. “I mean it is just completely fucking covered in blood.”
Maybe the blood was some kind of sign. But at the time, it just seemed like overkill, the ferocity of his response. But she didn’t care. Instead it had interested and surprised them both, their lack of embarrassment or disgust. Those two attributes having been characteristic of their respective pasts, and the handful of failed marriages they had between them. And yet here they were, with a sudden, strange experience of that thing they call ‘trust,’ of whatever sort it may have been. Both of them. Despite it all. If that was the kind of trust they wanted, fine.
But she would have to pay. With everything.
“I don’t think you could ever do something to gross me out,” he’d observed. “I’d eat your shit if I had to.”
The shamelessness had elated them, holding within it the possibility for the attainment of all that they had already resigned themselves to live without. Both of them. And it had briefly filled them with an erotic fervor, with giddy delight at their unbelievable luck—to be wildly, madly, intoxicatingly, overpoweringly in love—a love that seemed to be wrapped up with the strength of the creator of the universe, with God. And for her, this notion had had, over the course of a few years, various tangible expressions—evidence that she’d been asked to set off on an impossible quest. That it wasn’t a choice.
In the beginning, she’d felt herself hypnotized, magnetized, she’d felt as if she had a sixth sense, a telepathic connection to Crash that proved the meaningfulness of that indescribable sense of ease they experienced when they embraced. “Primal,” they called it. And so, with all that, they had imagined themselves selected, remembered, elevated, transformed into beings wholly unlike all those dull, bitter husband-and-wife duos they’d see in the grocery store aisles, tolerating each other till their time ran out. In the beginning, Crash and Suzanne, they weren’t like those people, no.
Were they ruthless? Did she truly understand the implications? Maybe. Maybe not. But love like that? It sure is something.
It had been as if they’d signed some kind of treaty under the lonely, rippling marquee lights that night a year earlier, her face covered in blood. And for a little while it seemed to bind them together, as it still mostly did this cold Easter Day, Resurrection Day in his woods, as Suzanne wept, and as dusk spread from the edge of the sky to the treeline. He only turned once, walking just in front, to grip her by the forearm.
“Babe,” he said, searching around in her swollen eyes. “Don’t this make me your man?”
She didn’t reply.
He didn’t mind the tears. He only wanted her to stay. Not for the cooking, or the cleaning, or the mothering, or for the meeting of the parents. None of that. There was only one thing that he wanted—for her to carefully hold this thing that was within him, which had become so wildly fragile that it seemed, to such a man, horrid. Shameful. And so, as far as he knew, it must be kept hidden from view always, even if it was the very source of that shimmer in his eye so greedily coveted by everyone he knew—the big boys, the old timers, the girls, drawn like moths to the light emanating from this intricate, delicate, hidden source. But he wouldn’t show it to any of them—they couldn’t possibly understand. Not ever. All it would do was disgust them, or scare them away.
But it didn’t disgust Suzanne.
It only filled her with a sense of wonder that far surpassed anything anyone could ever live up to in real life. Love, as we know, being the realm of fantasy. And life, as we know too, being what remains of the day. What’s more, over the years this delicate, intricate thing had been shattered in so many places that if she agreed to take it, she would be required to hold it in both hands, in these woods, in this very place, for the rest of her life. She would be required to forsake everything for it, monstrous as it may be. So rather than fear or disgust, it filled her with an insurmountable grief for what was and could be lost, a grief that characterized that Easter Day, as she tried to determine if that was what God, through all the hypnotizing force she’d experienced, had been telling her to do.
This was the second problem they had.
And so they walked through the light snow and the dusk, to find where he would build it: the fort, the bunker, the den, the nest, the sanctuary, the shrine, the mausoleum, the crypt, the tomb. It would be far from the house, a tiny shelter with a concrete foundation, and particleboard walls, and with a roof of stars—a place where something fragile, and monstrous, could be kept secretly, forever.
When they finally found the place, it was like nothing really. But when they saw it, they knew. An oak at the top of an almost-imperceptible rise, slightly larger than the rest. Not a particularly unique oak, not special in any way, except maybe that it was a bit gnarled and weathered, dead branches here and there that he probably should go after with the chainsaw, tangled up with the branches of the saplings around it, all of them fighting for the sun. They looked and drank, the sky fading into merciful dark. When they’d finished their Coors, she started back toward the house alone, the kitchen light shining into the blackness. And he stuck his empty upside down, on the end of a dead branch.
So that later, the place would be remembered.
Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon is a writer, editor, and psychoanalytic literary scholar. She received her MFA from The University of Montana and her PhD from the University of Minnesota where her research focused on fashion and Spielreinian psychoanalytic principles in ‘68ist apocalyptic fictions. She is the founding Editor of the psychoanalytic literary arts publication Stillpoint Magazine (reopening in 2026) where she held multiple regular columns. Her first novel Nothing was published by Two Dollar Radio, and her short fiction has appeared in R&R Magazine, Hobart Pulp, Juked, and elsewhere. She works independently and in Minneapolis as the in-house writer at St. David's Developmental and Therapeutic Services, where she writes about relationship-centered, developmental psychotherapy, advocates for increased access to care for marginalized populations, and more. She lives in the Midway of St. Paul with her two children and her black cat.