Fast Lanes (6 page)

“No, you’re going to liberate me. I plan to spend exactly half this trip pleasantly stoned, playing with the radio and reading girlie magazines.”

“I didn’t know you read girlie magazines.”

“Only the really sleazy ones, the ones with no pretensions. And I don’t want any shit about it.”

He pulled off the road near Cuchillo and took a left off the exit. We could see the town in the distance, brown and white and hunched. Thurman drove in the opposite direction. The land was absolutely flat, wavering with heat, a moony unreal surface even as mirrors. Light glanced off like knife glare. The far mountains were blue and beige, treeless. “Pinos Altos,” Thurman said, “or the Mimbres range, I don’t know which. We aren’t far from Elephant Butte and the reservation.” He steered onto the berm of the narrow road, slowed and stopped as yellow dust rose around us. “Good spot for a ceremony.” He turned off the ignition and faced me. He seemed amazingly defined in that early, hot light, a film of moisture on his forehead, his big hands opening toward me in even gestures, describing small spheres as he talked.

“Now,” he said, “this is going to take twenty minutes. Remember, a standard is always the best transmission—it allows you to feel the machine and the road more efficiently than an automatic. Nobody who knows much about cars drives an automatic.”

“Automatics are for cherries, right, Thurman?”

He got out of the truck and stood looking in at me from the road. “Slide over.”

“Do we have to be so serious? It was a joke.”

“I’m not laughing. In thirty minutes this pleasant eighty-degree interlude will be over and the temperature will be climbing right up to about a hundred and ten. It’s early September in Texas. We will need to be moving. So pay attention.”

“OK.”

“It’s easy.”

“Nothing mechanical is easy.”

He sighed. “Are you ready?” He watched my face as I slid into the driver’s seat, then slammed the door of the truck and walked around to the cab. He got in and sat motionless, waiting.

“I’ll need a few instructions, if you don’t fucking mind.”

“Look, it’s hot in Texas. Let’s both take it easy.”

“I’m trying to.”

He looked away to where the road disappeared in mirage past a nothingness, and recited, “Right foot, gas and brake. Left foot, clutch. Now, push in the clutch, put the transmission in neutral, and turn the ignition.”

The engine turned over and caught. I wanted to get out of the truck and walk into the brown fields, keep walking. Far off, wheeling birds moved like a pattern of circular dashes in the sky. Something was dead out there, yellowed like the dust and lacy with vanishing. Thurman’s voice continued, but closer. He had moved over next to me. “Let the clutch out slowly. Give it gas as you let it out, enough gas at the precise moment, or you’ll stall. Now try it, that’s right, now the gas.…” The truck jerked forward, coughed, jerked, stalled. “Try it again,” he said, “a little smoother, gauge the release a little more, there you go—now.”

He talked, we jerked and moved, rolled cautiously forward, stopped. The fields remained silent. A mongrel dog ambled out of the brush and sat in the middle of the opposite lane, watching and panting. The dog was maybe twenty pounds of rangy canine, immobile, a desert stone with slit eyes. “Do it again,” Thurman murmured. “There you go,
give it gas, not too much. OK, OK, we’re moving, don’t watch the dog, watch the road. Good, good, now—if you go too slow in a gear, you force the engine to lug. Hear that? That’s lugging. Give it some gas.…”

He kept talking in the close room of the truck, both of us sweating, until the words were meaningless. I repeated the same movements: clutch, gas, shift, brake, downshift, up and down the same mile stretch of road. The mongrel sat watching from one side of the pavement or the other, and the last time we came by, got up and ambled back into the field toward nothing. I pulled jerkily onto the entrance ramp of the freeway as Thurman shifted for me, then onto the highway itself as he applauded.

“Do you forgive me?” I asked.

“For what?” He was watching the road, sitting near enough to grab the wheel. “Check your mirrors. Always know what’s coming up on you.”

I checked. “For last night,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. What happened was as likely in this scheme as anything else.” He reached under the seat for a pack of cigarettes, still watching the road. “I like you.”

“You know something? That one time we slept together in Denver was my first time in six weeks.”

“I figured.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pay attention—stay in your lane.” He turned and glanced behind us. “I mean it seemed like you barely remembered how. There are several like you around. Where are all the girls who were smart and feisty and balled everyone all the time?”

“They got older,” I said. “I used to ball anyone too, just based on his eyes or his arms. It’s easy when you do it a lot. You get stoned and you don’t even think about it. Easy. Like saying hello.”

“Guess I missed the boat,” he said. “You must have been great to say hello to in the old days. I wish I’d known you then.”

“Yeah, I bet you do.”

He smiled and lit a cigarette. “But don’t you ever miss it? Weren’t those days
fun
sometimes? Think about it for a minute. Everyone laughed a lot, didn’t they? Group jokes and the old gang. All the dope, everyone with a nickname. Food and big meals and banjos and flutes. People weren’t stupid; they just didn’t
worry
. The war was over, no one was getting drafted. The girls had birth-control pills and an old man, and once in a while they fucked their best friend’s old man, or they all fucked together, and everything was chummy. Right?”

“Sure. That’s right.”

“Ha,” he said.

If I remember right, what we did was this: Rte. 25 from Denver to Albuquerque, 10 to El Paso, 20 to Dallas, 35 to San Antonio, back on 10 to Houston, Beaumont, New Orleans, 65 to Montgomery, 85 to Atlanta and Charlotte, 21 to Wytheville, Virginia, 77 to Charleston and West Virginia; passing through, escaping gravity in a tinny Japanese truck, an imported living quarters. Love in a space capsule, Thurman called it, hate in Houdini’s trunk. But there was the windshield and the continual movie past the glass. It was good driving into the movie, good the way the weather changed, the way night and day traded off. Good to camp out for a day or two in a park or a motel, buy a local paper, go to a rummage sale. It was good stopping at the diners and luncheonettes and the daytime bars, or even HoJo’s along the interstates: an hour, a few hours, taking off as we’d walked in, as if we had helium in our shoes. Everyone else lived where they stood. They had to live somewhere, and they’d ended up in Tucumcari or Biloxi or Homer, Georgia. All of them, waitresses and bartenders, clerks standing behind motel desks in view of some road, and the signs, place names, streets, houses, were points on a giant connect-the-dots. The truck is what there really was: him and me and the radio, the shell of the space, thin carpet over
a floor that reverberated with a hollow
ping
if you stamped down hard. There were the rearview mirrors turning all that receded sideways, holding the light in glints and angles and the pastels in detached, flat pictures so that any reflected object—car, fence, billboard—seemed just a shape, miraculous in motion. There was the steering wheel, the dash with its square illuminations at night, a few red needles registering numbers. The glove compartment: a flashlight, the truck registration, an aspirin bottle full of white crosses, dope and an aluminum foil envelope of crystal meth in the first-aid box, two caramel bars, a deck of cards. Under the seat were some maps and a few paperbacks, magazines, crumpled wrappers of crackers and health-food cookies and Popsicles, Thurman’s harmonica. The radio whined and popped and poured out whatever it caught in the air. In the desert there was nothing but rumbling crackles and shrills; we turned the volume way up till the truck was full of crashing static and rode fast with the roar for miles, all the windows open streaming hot air. But mostly the radio was low. He talked. I talked. We told stories. We argued. We argued a lot as we approached Dallas, where we were going to spend a couple of days with his parents.

“Where did you come from?”

“Thurman, I came from where I’m going.”

“I mean in the beginning, like Poland or Scandinavia.”

“Wales. But there, in West Virginia, since the 1700s. A land grant. So much land they parceled it out for two hundred years of ten-children families, and only sold the last of it as my father was growing up.”

“Sold it to who?”

“The coal companies. Pennsylvania and New York coal companies.”

“Uh-huh.” He adjusted the rearview mirror. “Why aren’t you back there mobilizing against strip mining?”

“Mobilizing? You make it sound like a war.” I turned on
the radio, and turned it off. “I guess it is a war—New York hippies against New York coal companies.” I looked away from him, out the window. “I don’t have any excuse, I just wanted to get out.”

“You know West Virginia is the only state left where there are no nuclear reactors?” He took a drag on his cigarette and smiled at me across the seat.

“They couldn’t put a reactor there,” I said. “The land would open like a boil, like an infected Bible, and swallow it.” I caught his eye and smiled back. “Impressive. You’re up on your eco-lit.”

“I’m a good hippie carpenter.”

“There are no hippies anymore. There’s a fairy tale about working-class visionaries.”

“Just a fairy tale? No vision in the working class?”

“Vision everywhere. But in the real working class, vision is half blind. It’s romantic to think they really know—”

“You don’t think they
know
?” He flicked his cigarette out the window and raised his voice. “They know—they just don’t
talk
about it. My grandfather was an Irish Catholic plumber who died of cirrhosis. He used to sit in his chair while the news was on the radio and fold his newspaper into squares. Then he’d unfold it and roll it into a tube, a tight tube the width of a black snake. He’d whack it against the arm of the chair in four-four time, while the announcer kept going and my skinny grandmother grated cabbage in the kitchen by the plates.” He checked the mirror and pulled out around a cattle truck. “They knew plenty, sweetheart. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t call me sweetheart, and I didn’t say they weren’t perceptive or frustrated. I said their isolation was real, not an illusion. They stayed in one place and sank with whatever they had. But us—look at us. Roads. Sensation, floating, maps into more of the same. It’s a blur, a pattern, a view from an airplane.”

“You’re a real philosopher, aren’t you? What do you want?
You want to sink, righteous and returned to your roots? Is that it?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Sink. I don’t know how.”

“Oh, Christ. Will you shut up and light that joint before we pull into Dallas?”

I took the joint out of his cigarette pack and looked for matches.

“Here,” he said, and threw them at me. “No wonder you live alone and sleep on floors. You’re ponderous and depressed. Nothing is any worse than it’s ever been.”

“No,” I said, “only more detached.”

“Detachment is an ageless virtue. Try a little Zen.”

“I am,” I said, and lit the joint. “I’m living in Zen, highway Zen, the wave of the future.”

He didn’t laugh. We pulled into Dallas and Thurman finished the joint at a roadside park in sight of three Taco Bells, a McDonald’s, and a Sleepytime Motel. He squinted behind the smoke, drawing in. “What does your dad do?” he asked.

“Retired.”

“OK. What
did
he do?”

“Roads. He built roads.”

“Highways?”

“No. Two-lane roads, in West Virginia. Hairpin turns.”

The joint glowed in his fingers. Dusk had fallen, a gray shade. The air was heavy and hot, full of random horns and exhaust. I could see the grit on Thurman’s skin and feel the same sweaty pallor on my face.

“What is your father like?” I asked him.

He exhaled, his eyes distanced. “My father is seventy-one. Lately he’s gone a little flaky.”

We sat in silence until the dope was gone. Thurman turned on the ignition. “You’ll have your own bedroom at my parents’ house,” he said, “and I sure hope your sheets aren’t too heavy.”

•  •  •

The house was a big old-fashioned saltbox on an acre of lawn, incongruous among the split-levels, badly in need of paint. Drainpipes hung at angles from the roof and the grass was cut in strange swaths, grown tall as field weeds in patches. An old Chevy station wagon sat on blocks in front of the garage. Thurman and I sat in the driveway, in the cab of the Datsun, looking.

“They’ve gotten worse, or he has. I’ve hired kids to cut the grass for him and he won’t let them on the property.”

“Did they know we were coming?”

“Yes.”

The front door opened and Thurman’s mother appeared. She was small and thin, her arms folded across her chest, and it was obvious from the way she peered into middle distance that she couldn’t really see us.

“You go first,” I said, “she’ll want to see you alone.”

He got out of the truck and approached her almost carefully, then lifted her off the ground in an embrace. She didn’t seem big enough to ever have been his mother, but a few minutes later, as she looked searchingly into my face, her handshake was surprisingly firm.

The inside rooms smelled of faded potpourri and trapped air despite the air-conditioner. Only the smallest downstairs rooms seemed lived in: the kitchen, a breakfast nook, a small den with a television and fold-out couch made up as a bed. The large living room was empty except for a rocking chair in the middle of the naked floor. The room had been dismantled and holes in the plaster repaired; three large portraits in frames of uniform size were covered with painter’s cloths and propped against the wall. Above them were the faded squares of space where they’d hung.

“Oh,” I said, “you’re painting.”

“Well.” She surveyed the room. “We were going to paint three years ago, but we never did.” She smiled.