I couldn’t go back to my apartment because the woman I live with had told me that if I ever came home drunk she wouldn’t even say anything; she would just drive down the block to the U-Haul franchise behind the Big O Tires, and come back with whatever truck they had waiting for her, and take everything, even the oak rocking chair where I always sat by the window on Sundays reading The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. This one would do it, too. It was her chair.

Marjorie’s favorite trick: She asks me to go the grocery store with a particular list of things like bay leaves, muffin pan liners, or linseed oil among the usual eggs, cheese, milk, and hamburger, and when I forget this or that she asks, “And what did you get?” She pulls out the receipt and audits the money in my wallet. “You had twenty-six dollars in your billfold. The receipt is for twelve-fifty.” She actually said this one time. “You’re missing about four bucks.” She constantly assessed things. Bottom line, she had to be ready to leave at any moment because she knew I was an alcoholic, albeit a non-drinking one. Alcohol remained the defining non-act of my life. Instead of being the drunk who dropped by the mini-mart on the way home to buy two forty-ouncers of Mad Dog, I had become the former drunk who couldn’t risk dropping by the mini-mart even to buy a bag of Lay’s sour cream and onion potato chips.

Marjorie met her first husband at A.A. “Yes, I used to drink,” Marjorie’s A.A. spiel ran. “Although that’s misleading because ‘drink’ implies that I would eventually stop to swallow and breathe. Since my lungs could process gasoline, and since my throat was in a constant state of swallowing, I essentially had a bottle for a mouth. I didn’t even want air between me and my booze.” When she told me this the first time, I had to hand it to her. She had been there. Marjorie reconditioned her first husband, helped him get God and a job, and then he traded her in for a woman who could have kids. “The ground rules are simple. If you even smell like aftershave, I will leave you.” She had learned with her ex-husband to never drop the poise, to never settle back in her chair and stay awhile, to never forget what it was like to be an alcoholic. She always watched me, she said, because she watched herself. And that was exactly what I thought I wanted.

One day after work, I opened my wallet and thought I was missing five bucks. My immediate response wasn’t, Who stole this five dollars?, or even that Marjorie would really get pissed if I couldn’t account for the five dollars; I wondered if I had bought a beer and didn’t remember drinking it. On the drive back to Marjorie’s apartment, I retraced my steps, trying to account for each step in my day, but before I could account for that five dollars I said, Screw this, and drove straight to my old place and ordered a round of Budweiser.

My old place, in the days before Marjorie, was Jackie’s Inn, a tavern at the edge of Everett’s old lumberyards and docks. The bar itself had been outfitted in tavern memorabilia from the fifties. A Miller shade hung over the pool table, an out-of-place plastic imitation of Victorian parlor glass. A rubber woman, in denim shorts and a shirt tightly encasing her thick thighs and breasts, levered the caps off beer bottles with her serrated tin teeth. A long Coors Silver Bullet mirror lined the space behind the bar. The tables were thick, solid wood and slung low to the faded linoleum. A popcorn machine ticked on the counter. A hot dog roaster rolled oily frankfurters. The only other patron in the bar nodded his head when I ordered the beer. “Obliged,” he said, and turned back to the sputtering TV quickly enough to let me know he wouldn’t be buying me any drinks.

The old crowd had obviously dried out. When I rattled off my list of where’s so-and-so, the woman who ran the place—all I can remember about this woman was that her name wasn’t Jackie—shook her head. “I don’t know. Stopped coming by a long time ago.” I listened to the Stones on the compact disc jukebox and read some more of Gibbons. I drank and looked out the window at the nearly empty street. Minutes passed before a car drove slowly past the line of hotels and hardware supply stores that filled this part of Everett. Drinking beer after beer, I knew I didn’t have to do any accounting; I knew where the money was going. At two o’clock, the woman who wasn’t Jackie said, “Bar’s closed.” She locked the door behind me and the other guy. He slowly made his way down the sidewalk and I stumbled into the driver’s seat of the Subaru Brat and swerved to my favorite park to sleep and hopefully wake up rational enough to decide what I wanted to do.

Marjorie had made it clear what she would do. I had six years on her and already she seemed older than me. She wore her hair in a sensible bob sprinkled with gray hairs. She sat up in bed from eight thirty to nine fifteen reading S. S. Van Dine, J. A. Jance, K. K. Beck, civilized murder mysteries. When she turned off her light, she fell promptly to sleep. We were both readers, but her books seemed so sensible. They were short and cheap. She bought them secondhand for the price of a pack of cigarettes. She wasn’t pretentious enough to call them literature, but she did learn things from them, little tidbits about the ways fortune-tellers scam customers—nothing useful, but interesting stuff. They must’ve been funny, because she always chuckled while she read them. Marjorie also liked to walk.

The next morning I woke in my favorite place in Everett, the natural preserve along the reclaimed industrial tidal flats where Interstate 5 comes north out of town. The black odor of river mud and rotting milkweed and brine soaked through the Brat and drove out the reek of unfiltered Camels and alcohol-induced sweat. The weight of all the time I’d wasted, the family I’d lost, and how close I was to losing even this woman who at least understood me pressed a flood of thoughts out of me, thoughts I didn’t really want to have at six o’clock in the morning. Even last summer, when Marjorie introduced me to this place, seemed like years and years ago. We came here to walk along the river slough to the site of an old farm. Between the freeway and the smooth surface of the lake, a sewage treatment plant’s huge rotor spiraled water up into filter tanks like a massive toy, a gizmo with seemingly useless moving parts.

My son Dillon had once left a plastic truck in my overgrown lawn. The grass had curled up during the months since my last dry spell. I had woken restless one morning and had started to mow the front yard. The Evinrude mower had mixed Dillon’s Mac truck into shards of yellow plastic and mulched grass. The blades had flung a hanger-wire-thin axle into my thigh. I hadn’t noticed it at first. I felt a prick on the back of my leg. I reached back to scratch the itch and felt an inch of wire jutting from under my butt cheek. I touched a nub sticking out under my front jeans pocket. Blood hadn’t even started to flow yet. I hadn’t known who to blame—my son for having hidden the truck in the lawn, or myself for not being home enough to mow the place. I still walked with a limp when I went to prison years later, and it became known there that I had been wounded in a knife fight.

Blackberries had grown along the Snohomish River in huge clumps. With Marjorie asking me not to go into the bushes, I had stepped into them and filled my Seahawks cap with the rich fruit and eaten as I walked along with her. The heavy berries had tasted a little rancid, almost artificial, like they had been molded from Crisco. I had gorged on them. Past the tidal flats and the old farm, near the lake, the bushes were mountainous. The swollen vines looked like purple garden hoses. I had filled cap after cap with the berries and eaten and eaten until I passed a fence with a sign that read, “Do Not Enter. Sewage Lagoon.” I realized then that what I had thought was a wide, natural lake was actually a shallow pond of raw sewage fermenting in the treatment process. Every toilet bowl, every sewer pipe—everything, really—emptied into this artificial lake that surrounded the North Everett Sewage Treatment Plant. These flat ponds were filled with algae, and birds swept out of the sky and landed on the smooth water, shattering the reflection of the Three Sisters and Mount Rainier.

Before I met Marjorie, and especially before I met the girl before her, I can tell you, I was feeling worthless and like I had lived my entire life. I had wasted the years I lived with my first wife, Janice, smoking pot and just floating through the long evenings listening to records until I was busted for the first time. I didn’t even notice my children growing up under me. In the King County Jail, I was turned on to coke, and I started a higher-profile business in the boom eighties, until I was finally busted again. I’d just finished two years at the Washington State Correctional Facility in Monroe, and I didn’t know where Janice or my two kids had gone. Where do you start looking for people you figure don’t want to be found anyway?

I started working lunch, making fish and chips and hamburgers in Everett, where my parole officer worked. For the first couple of months, I spent most evenings at the library. I had become used to an iron-clad schedule in prison. Once you find a routine, it’s hard to change.

Everett was an old navy town held hostage by people who didn’t even know they had the place by the balls. This sounds like a joke, but it’s not: What’s the difference between a couple of years of active military duty and a couple of years doing time? The food’s the same. You sleep in a bunk in a room with other men who’ve had their heads shaved. You don’t control your time. I think the difference between a soldier and a convict is that rules force a soldier to kill for money while most of the folks languishing in prison got there because they broke the rules in order to get money, or they killed someone free of charge.

Jason Blume, my cell mate, was eighteen when he shot his father and mother and little brothers in a farmhouse just outside Carnation, on the Snoqualmie River. He and I talked a lot because we know the same places along the river and, unlike most of the people filling that prison, we had grown up along the banks of the Snoqualmie and Snohomish rivers and knew where Monroe was in the scheme of the world. These out-of-state drug dealers who’d set up residence in the Seattle neighborhoods of Lynnwood or Ballard or Capitol Hill suddenly found themselves out in the woods, out in the middle of fucking nowhere, where I suppose they believed a prison should be. The killer, Jason Blume, and I knew the hills around the prison. We talked about what it would be like to escape into the Cascade Mountains, where we would live a life of plenty and isolation in the steep valleys and live like Emerson. For me it had always been a fantasy. I had always thought I could make it out there. Jason Blume cupped his coffee and sat back in the chair. He looked out the high windows at the surrounding hills and mountains, scowling so hard his lips buckled. The light from the window caught on the hard rims of his brown irises. “I could fucking do it, man. I’ve been out there before. For weeks and weeks my brothers and I would just hike along the ridgetops. When we were hungry we would slip down and fish a lake, pick blueberries, and feast like wild men.” He sat in our cell, nostalgic and a little manic about his family, whom he’d tied down in the vinyl kitchen chairs and executed.

So I guess prison was like a mind-opening experience for me. I made new friends with the kind of people I would never have made friends with before. I realized that if someone like Jason Blume could come to terms with what he’d done, even to the point of missing his victims, I had a lot to look forward to. It wasn’t like I’d killed anybody. Afterward, they returned me to the only town in the Pacific Northwest that made sense for a man just out of prison, Everett, with its wide, well-neoned boulevards. Navy hot shits zipped up and down the streets in new Nissans and Mazdas. Old boys from way upriver or from the salmon fishing fleet, out for a night of drinking and whoring, hollered to each other on the street corners.

I was rehabilitated and they threw me into a place like that.

I had been going to the library for a couple of months and just enjoying the smallest things, like being able to walk down the pier and sitting in the damp winter night smoking Camel after Camel. I started to drink. At least, I figured, it wasn’t illegal. Soon I drank so much, it ought to have been illegal. I had a string of places I liked to go, ending every night around two o’clock with the same crowd of tired faces at Jackie’s Inn. By mid-paycheck I’d be so poor I’d have to survive on Red Rose Wine and food from the grill where I worked. Sitting in the library, reading a Louis L’Amour when I was aching from not even being able to drink, I realized I hadn’t made it. I looked out the window, not even able to concentrate on this high-flying Western, and I wanted to get high because it was better than this. I could sell and snort and just roll along faster and faster until something gave. I knew I needed to start something. I picked up a course catalog for the local community college on the way back to my apartment. At home I circled two classes and on payday I immediately cashed my check and enrolled in them.

The night before the first day of school, I was so nervous that I ironed my secondhand oxford shirt and dug out a tie I had once bought for interviewing years before, when my ex-wife Janice and I had still been dating. How this particular thing, this tie, had lasted for all of these years, when so many things, not even sofas and houses, had survived, made me chuckle at how stupid things can turn out. I’d take the houses back, sure, but it was sort of nice to have this tie to wear on the first day of school. I thought I looked sharp. The tie had been made so long ago that it was beyond style. It had that early sixties look, splattered lines of color falling away to a deep blue background.

I fell asleep remembering college, the rallies, the girls with long hair who would go to class stoned out of their skulls, and the long afternoons attempting to study in the library but instead talking to the kids around me and eventually heading off to their places to drink wine and listen to records. I mean, sure, school had probably changed, but if I was to make a comparison with how everything else had changed, I’m sure kids weren’t just drinking beer and smoking dope anymore. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up.

The kids in my first class were younger than my own children are now. They didn’t talk to each other. They all had short hair, backpacks, and stacks of books. They silently took notes during lecture and hurried out of the room, quickly withdrawing from the minimalist Quonset-hut-style buildings, leaving them as flat as helium balloons four days after the party. In all that rush amid the kiosks announcing lectures and concerts and film series, I felt like I was in the middle of things, not exactly involved in it, but more like I was the principal sitting in on the class of a young teacher.

One day after class, Marjorie, one of the kids my age, fell in next to me as I left my archeology class. “You’re new,” she said. “Getting your associate’s?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I stopped and she stood next to me. She wore a faded sweatshirt and blue jeans, but I could tell she was thin under the bulk of her clothes. Her hair had been pulled back in a barrette, an oversized silver clasp. Her hair, a scraggly blonde color fading to gray at the edges, was natural and something I sort of liked. She didn’t pretend that she was one of the kids. She seemed sort of settled into her middle-aged body like a person settled into a chair for a long read with a difficult book.

“Name’s Marjorie,” she said. And then she walked away.

I kept my eye on her. And I could tell she watched me. If I had known any of her friends, I would have written her a note.

I started to drink coffee sometimes with Marjorie and a few of her cronies, older students like me who had already lived lives in the outside world. We valued the community college promise of a better life, its deeply embedded illusion of self-improvement. We needed it. These men and women, with stomachs they had long since given up on restraining behind thick belts, their polyester-blend slacks, their cardigans littered with an infestation of pills, their baseball hats and harsh growths of facial hair, were damaged goods in comparison to the Gap clothes and the Spin haircuts of the kids. Loose jeans and baggy sport jackets trickled past Marjorie’s table, not registering the presence of Howard and Edna and Ron. My fellow oldster classmates looked like kitchen staff on a break. I actually was kitchen staff on a break. I sat down with them, finally, because I was tired of being invisible.

Anyway, they looked like they were having a good time. Howard had just broken out laughing, a loud cow bellow that showed his small teeth in his bubble-gum-pink gums. “How long have you been here?” Howard asked. He was the one in the baseball hat; golden block letters spelled out the battleship Nimitz across the bubble of his forehead. He wore a T-shirt and a blue cardigan and tight new blue jeans. I saw as he adjusted his hat that what I had mistaken for a thin watchband was really a cord of rawhide with a large turquoise amulet. He laughed and said, “You can only be young once.”

“But it sure lasts a long time,” I said.

I was cramming for another class in archeology one day, and this woman with incredibly long, black hair kept turning her head and filling my textbooks with fine, black strands. I’d gently sweep them away. Her hair smelled like some sort of flower. At this point I hadn’t had sex in maybe four years—the two years in prison, where I’d thankfully avoided sex, and the two years before that when I had been married to my coke-jacked adrenaline rush. Now I’d been clean and exercising. I felt twenty-five and I was surrounded by twenty-year-old girls who had just moved to their own apartments. She kept getting her hair in my book. Finally I said, “Excuse me, miss, you keep getting your hair in my book.”

“What? Don’t you like my hair?” She had turned around in her seat. Now, she wasn’t gorgeous or anything, but she was a nice kid.

“It’s lovely,” I said. “But I’m trying to study.”

“Suit yourself.”

Three minutes later, I had a book full of hair again. I pulled hard enough on her hair that she gasped. “Sorry,” I said.

The other oldsters noticed what had happened in class, and I could tell Marjorie was furious. Her husband had left her for a much younger woman. “These young cunts only want one thing—money. As soon as she finds out you work at a grill and drink like a fish, she’s out of there.”

“Do I look like I want a date?”

“Yes,” she said as she zipped her backpack. “But I don’t date drunks.”

I thought about the young girl for three days, even though I knew I should have been thinking about Marjorie while I worked the grill during the evening. I drew out a mental diagram: Marjorie represented sobriety, a future, and a woman who been places, while the girl represented drunkenness, youth, and no future. That was hard to argue against, because when that no-future finally rolled around, I’d just be back to where I was now. I smoked through my last cigarette break, started scraping the wide grill plate as the waitresses began to pack up the tables. I walked home, showered for a long time, the whole after-work routine a familiar and constant movement, so familiar that I didn’t have to think, I just kept it up and kept moving. Three days after the hair incident, I followed the girl across campus. Her butt was really flat, but she had a waist narrow as the neck of a Coca-Cola bottle. “Hey,” I said.

She turned and looked over the grassy slope where I had stopped her. Other students crossed the space with books in their arms or lugging heavy backpacks on one shoulder. I could see Marjorie standing with Howard and Edna near the door to the history portable.

“Are you, like, stalking me?”

“No. I was just wondering if you’d go to dinner with me.”

“Yeah, sure. I never have plans for Wednesday. Wednesday?”

“That would be good.”

“And a movie,” she said.

“I’m not really up for dinner and a movie. Unless you like to talk your way through the movie.”

“No, I don’t really like people who talk in movies. When I saw White Nights I had the manager kick this couple out who were sitting in front of me and kept complaining about Baryshnikov.”

“I was kicked out of White Nights for complaining about that commie dancer; what’s his name?”

“Baryshnikov?” She laughed. “You’re stupid.” She dropped her bag and pulled a pen out of the pocket on the side of it. She wrote her number and address and apartment number on a slip of paper that turned out to be an ATM slip. She had three hundred and eighteen dollars in her account, and the slip said five dollars had been drawn out that morning at eight thirty. Five dollars. Only a fucking twenty-year-old college kid would pay seventy-five cents to draw out five bucks. I looked back for Marjorie. I was having second thoughts about getting involved in all the stupid shit I did when I was twenty, but Marjorie was the only one to know what was good for her and had already headed for cover.

A month later, this was the scene: I lay on the floor of the girl’s parent’s house. I couldn’t remember her name or her parents’ names. Her parents were my age, lawyers or something. They’d been out of town for a month and would be back in a week. I’d been working on a bottle of Canadian whiskey that someone had brought to the three-week-old party. Friends her age had passed out long ago. If I hadn’t had a liver and a metabolism conditioned by three hundred years of alcoholism, I’d have been out long before. Instead I was lying on the floor remembering what the world had looked like when I was a kid. I used to spend most of my time on the floor staring up at the bottoms of tables, up at the ceiling of our home in Seattle, a house from the turn of the century with elaborate designs in the acoustic tiles. At the girl’s house, I lay in front of this thing, this artwork installation piece of crap, an obvious status symbol of how much money their family could afford to waste. Here they were with this lovely house that we’d trashed and a lovely daughter who’d slept even with me. Most of the young boys at the party had screwed her. At one time in the course of the festivities I had found myself in a room of thrown-off boyfriends. “Why are we here?” one of the young guys was saying. “She’s even slept with him!” He had stuck out a long finger at me. “It’s not fucking polite to point,” I had said.

I lay on the floor, one of the only awake people in the house, when in walks the girl and a girlfriend I’d never seen before. The bottle of whiskey sat next to me, but I had gradually become so two-dimensional that even the bottle was too tall for me to grab. “Art?” the girl asked me. “Art, the party has been over for three days. Jesus Christ.” This sweet girl and her friend had to carry me to the sink, a beautiful porcelain hippie sink, handmade with fat purple cartoon earthworms wriggling over the whole thing. They lay me facedown in the sink, my legs draped down to the floor.

She asked me, “What is this sink attached to?”

“My fucking asshole.”

“No.” She leaned on my back, pressing my chest painfully into the edge of the counter.

“The sewer?”

“Good. Correct.” She poured the rest of the bottle down the sink. “And you keep drinking this stuff, that’s where you’re going.” She lifted the bottle up, curling her back, and hurled the bottle down. The hard rim of the bottle’s bottom slammed into the hand-fired porcelain. The entire sink basin smashed. We watched as huge chunks of porcelain bounced on the tile floor and big shards shattered and other pieces whizzed under the table and into the next room.

There I was at the sewage lagoon, where I had eaten the fruit grown from the soil gathered from the drainpipes and sewer mains. I could barely see the treatment plant across the old farm fields, through the low-lying clouds and dim morning light.

I opened the door of the Subaru and stood to stretch on the pavement next to the car. Flattened splotches of gum had accumulated on the asphalt, some so old that their white skins had cracked and peeled. I grabbed my backpack from the floor of the passenger side and walked down to the muddy Snohomish River. The cold river curled away into the fog along the parking lot. In the misty light, I couldn’t see anything around the surface of the water. An eighteen-wheeler screamed on the I-5 overpass that floated somewhere way above the river in all that fog. The noise settled back to the slapping river water on the undercut clay bank and the almost-imperceptible groan of the Snohomish flowing toward Puget Sound. I took off my pants and shirt and underwear as quickly as possible. From my backpack, I took out my Ivory soap and soap case, the one I had used in prison. They made us buy this crap, so I took it with me. I’d gotten so used to the ritual of setting my bag down on the sink and washing that I can’t imagine how I ever managed before. On top of my clothes, I lay my folded underwear. I raised the bar of soap into the sky and plunged into the water. I pulled myself onto the bank, put on my jeans, and walked back to the Brat, where I put on a warm, dry T-shirt.

I started up the Subaru and took a deep smell of myself. I smelled like river mud and rainwater. I wanted to go home and forget everything that had happened to me. I wanted to go home and make sure that Marjorie hadn’t given up on me. As I drove home, back to Marjorie, I passed a white farmhouse. All along the road next to the big mailbox, yellow lantern heads of daffodils hung over the rushing ditch. I stopped and dug around in the back of the car and finally found a knife I’d taken from Denny’s to scrape the Subaru’s spark plugs. I took a big step over the stream. It was full of swiftly running water that pulled the long blades of green grass along. I looked at the house. It had that early morning look—all the lights were off, the chimney was still, water rolled down the windowpanes, and I knew that I had gotten an early enough start for once. I leaned into that bed of cold flower stalks and cut down six daffodils, getting the sticky flower blood all over my hands. It smelled rich and sweet and I knew if I hurried I could get home before Marjorie woke up. She’d wake up and there’d be eggs cooking and fresh flowers that her man had brought home to her after his morning swim.

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This is part eight of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.