Road Tripped

by Pete Hautman

  “You mean if I think some guy is going to be a jerk, then he decides to be a jerk just for me? I turn him into a jerk with my mental powers?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “No stupider than what you said.” Garf and I were always calling each other stupid.

  “Whatever. I seem to attract more than my share. Like that dick Nestor.”

  “Who’s Nestor?”

  “Calculus. He tried to confiscate my phone this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a dick. All I did was check for a text.”

  “You’re not supposed to do that,” Garf said, not looking at me, still flipping through the bin of comics.

  “Yeah, well, I walked out.”

  “You walked out?”

  “What did I just say?” Garf could be kind of slow.

  “You said you walked out.”

  “I took off.”

  “You just left? On the first day of school?”

  “Yeah. I’m done.”

  Now Garf looked at me, tipping his head to the side like he thought he was being shined. “You serious?”

  “I’m done with calculus, anyway. I don’t need it to graduate.”

  “Oh! I thought you meant you were dropping out.”

  “I’m thinking about that, too.”

  “What about Gaia?” he asked. “I didn’t see her today either.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Gaia.”

  He gave me this Garf look. “Okaaay . . . ?” he said, dragging it out and putting a question mark at the end.

  I turned my back and walked out of the store.

  “Kiss Them for Me”

  Siouxsie & the Banshees

  4:39

  I am lost in Iowa and it’s after midnight. I haven’t seen the so-called Great River Road in hours of driving. The roads have weird names like C7X and XC3, which is not helpful, and the main attraction is a roadkill raccoon every half mile or so. I know I should stop and ask somebody for directions, but then I think about my dad, who would never do that because he would never admit he was lost. We always found our way home eventually.

  The only thing that’s keeping me awake is the music. Dad’s iPod is full of the weirdest collection of tunes I’ve ever heard. Nine hundred songs, everything from the B-52s to Beethoven. I never knew. He never listened to music at home. We never talked about music, except when he’d ask me to turn down whatever I had blasting in my room. I figured he hated rap and hip-hop and everything else I listened to, but on his iPod I find 50 Cent, Kanye, Dre, and Snoop Dogg. The Sex Pistols and the Pixies. Nirvana and Babymetal. Babymetal? Dad listened to Babymetal?

  Of course, most of it is really ancient stuff: the Beatles, the Stones, Buddy Holly, and a ton of stuff I’ve never heard of. Eddie Cochran? Wanda Jackson? Lesley Gore?

  I set the iPod to shuffle. Rihanna puts the subwoofer to the test as I roll through a tiny town called Elkport where nothing is open. I can barely keep my eyes open. I figure I can use Mom’s credit card and stay wherever I want, but first I have to find a motel, and I’m not having any luck with that, so I pull into a rest stop in the middle of nowhere—two trees, a picnic table, and a trash can. I park next to the picnic table, turn off the car, and crank the seat back as far as it will go, close my eyes, and sink into something that resembles sleep but isn’t really, because Gaia invades my thoughts like a dark angel. I try to push her aside, but every time I do, she comes back at me from another direction.

  Gaia

  I got to know Gaia Nygren in May, at the end of my junior year.

  Gaia was a year behind me in school, in tenth grade. I’d known who she was from way back in middle school—I’d seen her hanging around the edges of things—but we’d never actually talked. Her older brother Derek was a senior. Every school has a Derek—the guy who gets straight As and gets elected class president, which makes him kind of a dick by definition. Gaia was his quiet little sister who nobody paid much attention to. I didn’t even know her name back then. Everybody just called her “Derek’s sister.”

  That didn’t last. When she started tenth grade, she showed up with her hair dyed black, a stud in her left nostril, lots of eyeliner, and all-black clothes. Another baby Goth, I figured. She wasn’t exactly on my radar, but you couldn’t help noticing her.

  The first time I ever really talked to her, I had skipped American history—a crock, my dad would’ve said—and walked over to the McDonald’s across the street from the high school. Gaia was sitting in a booth by herself picking at a red cardboard container of fries. I bought a double cheeseburger and a Coke and slid into the seat across from her. I sort of surprised myself. It was a bold move.

  She regarded me from beneath her mascaraed eyelashes. It was as if she was wearing a shell, looking at me through bulletproof glass. Her black T-shirt read, Life Sucks and Then You Die.

  “You’re Gaia, right?”

  “Last time I checked,” she said.

  “Okay if I sit here?” I unwrapped my burger.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?” I took a bite.

  “Because you’re eating that. It’s gross. Do you even know what’s in it?”

  “Don’t care.” I slurped down some Coke. “You ever wear anything that’s not black?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you used to be blond?”

  She glared at me. She had a good glare.

  “Do you have to dye it every day? Or is once a week enough?”

  “No.”

  “No, what? Every day?”

  “ ‘No’ as in it’s none of your business. You’re really rude, you know that?”

  “And you’re really negative,” I said. That made her blink.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Everything you say starts with ‘no.’ I think you might be the most negative person in the universe. I’m Stiggy, by the way.”

  “I know who you are.” She looked me in the eyes, just for a second, then looked away.

  “So, what are you doing here?” I asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”

  “I got kicked out.”

  “What for?”

  “They told me to go home and change my shirt.”

  “Oh.” I read the words on her shirt again. “My dad would’ve liked that shirt.”

  “Your dad sounds like a piece of work.”

  She must have realized what she’d just said, because as soon as the words left her mouth, she sort of jerked back and her eyes went wide, then darted off to the side.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot. I heard about your dad. Sorry.”

  “Life sucks and then you die, right?” I took another bite of burger.

  The shell closed back over her face. “Whatever.” She examined her container of fries, selected one, and bit off the tip.

  “Really sorry,” she mumbled.

  “Not your fault.”

  “I suppose you miss him.”

  “Mostly I’m just mad at him.” I had never said that out loud before.

  She nodded. “I get that.”

  I think that was when I started to like her.

  “What was he like?” she asked.

  “Tusk”

  Fleetwood Mac

  3:33

  I wake up to thumping right next to my head. Blearily I look out the window and am blinded by a flashlight. The light is lowered. I blink away afterimages and make out a face. A cop face.

  I roll down the window. The cop is an older guy, maybe my dad’s age.

  He says, “How you doing?” He shines his light into the backseat.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Been drinking?” He has his right hand on his belt, next to his gun.

  “Nope.”

  “This your car?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “It’s still in my dad’s name, but he’s deceased, so it’s my car now.”

  “License?” he
says.

  I take out my wallet, nice and easy, and hand him my driver’s license. He squints at it.

  “Long ways from home.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m trying to figure out if I’ve broken any laws. Is sleeping at a rest stop against the rules?

  “Where you headed?”

  “I’m driving down the Great River Road,” I say.

  “Well, you ain’t on it.” He looks at my license again. “Seventeen. How come you’re not in school?”

  “I’m taking a break,” I say.

  The cop is thinking. I can almost hear the gears grinding in his head.

  I say, “Look, I was planning to stay with my cousin in Dubuque, but I got lost, and I was getting tired, so I figured the safe thing to do was pull over and sleep for a while.”

  “You got a cousin in Dubuque?”

  I nod, even though it’s not true.

  “That’s fifty miles east. How’d you wind up here?”

  “Like I said, I got lost.”

  “Sit tight,” he says.

  “Yes, sir,” I say. Back home I couldn’t have stopped myself from being all sarcastic and mouthy, but here, in a different state, with just me and the cop in the middle of nowhere, I’m pretty nervous. I mean, he isn’t being particularly scary—it’s not like I’m afraid he’s going to shoot me or anything, but what if he throws me in jail? I can’t expect my mom to come bail me out a half hour later.

  The cop takes my license back to his car. The clock on the dash reads 3:09.

  At 3:31 he comes back. I think he was checking to make sure the car hasn’t been reported stolen. I hope he doesn’t ask me for an insurance card, because I’m not sure Mom kept the Mustang insured.

  He hands me my license, and says, “You rested now?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good, because you can’t sleep here. No overnight parking.”

  There are no signs or anything saying that, but I don’t argue. I’m pretty sure this guy has what it takes to be a first-class asshole, so I keep my mouth shut for once.

  • • •

  Three thirty in the morning, and I’m back on the road, heading east toward Dubuque, where I don’t have a cousin. I thought all this driving would give me time to think, but what’s happening in my head is more like stirring a pot of garbage soup, around and around, like things I could’ve said to that cop. Some of them are pretty clever. My dad was clever. He always had some remark, no matter the occasion. Like when my uncle Donny saw that my dad had bought a Mustang, he said that my dad must be having a midlife crisis. Dad said, “Give it up, Donny. You’re only half a smart-ass, and it ain’t the smart half.”

  I guess it isn’t that funny, but it was at the time.

  I think about some of the other things Dad said, and stir them round and round.

  Dad

  I was eight years old the first time I realized my dad was full of it.

  We were on Gray’s Bay, Lake Minnetonka, trolling for walleyes. He’d rented a little aluminum boat, and he’d fixed me up with a spinner and a minnow. We’d been out for quite a while when my rod tip doubled over and the line went zipping out of the reel.

  “Set the hook, Stiggy!” he yelled.

  I just held on. To his credit, Dad did not grab the rod out of my hands. I won’t bore you with the whole epic battle except to say that eventually I got the fish in close to the boat and saw its sleek, green-and-yellow-spotted flank, one wild shiny eye. A northern pike, as long as my arm.

  Dad leaned over the side with the net. The fish made one last desperate dive under the boat. The line scraped audibly against the keel, then went slack. I reeled in and stared at the broken, twisted end of monofilament quivering in the breeze.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “He’s gone, Stiggy,” Dad said.

  My dad’s name was Ronald. He had a brother named Donald and a sister named Veronica. It was confusing because they called one another Ronny, Donny, and Roni.

  Donny and Roni came over to our house for a cookout the day after I lost the fish. Dad was telling Donny about how I’d lucked on to a big one with a little number one spinner, and a minnow no bigger than a guppy. That part was true. Donny listened with a bland, attentive expression because he was the youngest of the three siblings, and even though he probably knew that my dad was full of it, Donny didn’t show it.

  “. . . so Stiggy reeled that monster in. And, Donny, you should’ve seen it. A twenty pounder if it was an ounce, as long as Stiggy is tall, I swear to God. If I’d managed to get that thing into the boat, it would’ve sunk us. It was humongous!”

  That was when I realized my dad was full of shit. Of course, I didn’t think of it in those terms—I was just a kid and hadn’t learned to swear yet. But it was a big deal for me, to hear my dad being full of it, because up until that day, I’d thought he was pretty much perfect.

  • • •

  To be fair, according to Dad everybody was full of it. His favorite word was “crock.” I heard it almost every day growing up. Dad would see some politician on TV, and he’d say, What a crock, or That’s a crock. He never said the whole original expression—“crock of shit”—because Dad never swore when I was around. Sometimes he’d just shake his head and say, Crock! One word.

  Dad was a world-class crock server himself. He used to come home and tell us how hard his job was. You would think it was the hardest job in the world, to hear him tell it, even though all he did was move stuff around a warehouse with a forklift.

  When I was ten, they had a bring-your-kid-to-work day. They made me wear a hard hat; it was so big, I had to tip my head back to see anything. I watched Dad lift a wooden pallet of crates full of machine parts fifteen feet in the air and slide it onto a steel rack. He had an expression on his face that I’d never seen before: smiling, relaxed, and utterly focused on his task.

  “That pallet weighed as much as a car,” he told me, proud to be showing me what he could do.

  I spent the whole day in the warehouse watching my dad move stuff from one place to another. They even gave me a job for a while, clipping plastic tags on to pallets. When it was almost quitting time, Dad wanted me to get into the forklift and drive it a few feet and make the fork go up and down, but his supervisor said no way.

  “Insurance, Ronny. If anything happened, we’d all be out of a job.”

  “I just want him to see what it feels like to work the levers!” Dad said.

  “Sorry, Ronny. Rules are rules.”

  After the supervisor walked off, Dad muttered, “What a crock.”

  • • •

  Dad thought church was a crock, but Mom and I went every Sunday to Saint Mary’s. I used to look forward to it—not so much because of the mass but because I got to see Cella Kimball and her ponytail. That was when I was eleven years old. I still look at girls with ponytails. I blame that on Cella, who I never once talked to and I’m certain remains, to this day, unaware of my existence.

  Dad used his Sunday mornings to do yard work: mowing, raking, or shoveling snow, depending on the season. We had a big yard. When we got home from church, he would often be in the garage, fixing whatever tool had broken that day. Dad liked fixing broken things. He always let me help him. We had a little riding mower that was twenty years old, and we fixed it all the time. We put new blades on it, replaced the tires, kept it greased and cleaned. Dad said we could squeeze another twenty years out of it.

  • • •

  Dad always had time for me, even when he was busy with other stuff. One time he was putting in a lot of overtime at the warehouse, and Grandma had just broke her hip and had to go to a nursing home. He was coming home late every night and making lots of phone calls and filling out insurance papers. Mom told me to leave him alone, but I went and told him about some stupid thing that had happened at school—I was just a little kid back then and didn’t know any better. He looked up from the papers and said, “Let’s go for a walk, Stevie.” That’s what everybody calle
d me back then.

  It was the middle of winter and dark out, but we walked all the way to the Canton Express and ordered egg rolls to go. We ate them on the walk home. I don’t know what we talked about. It didn’t matter.

  • • •

  That first time I talked to Gaia, sitting in McDonald’s watching her pick at her french fries, I told her stuff about my dad that I’d never told anybody else.

  “He was an okay dad, even if he was full of it sometimes,” I said.

  “My dad’s full of it too,” she said. “But I’d miss him if he was gone.”

  “You want to do something sometime?” I asked.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Go see a movie or something?”

  “With you?”

  “Yeah.”

  She pressed her lips together, then said, “Okay.”

  “Give Me Back My Man”

  B-52s

  3:53

  It’s five in the morning by the time I get to Dubuque, and I’m starving. I pull into an all-night diner at the edge of town, across the highway from a place called Girlz! Girlz! Girlz! with a flashing neon woman on the sign.

  The diner is called Jack’s Eatery. It looks like it’s been here since World War II. There’s a row of cracked-vinyl-upholstered booths along the window, and a counter with stools featuring the same cracked vinyl. Two old guys who look like farmers are sitting in one of the booths. A younger guy wearing an Iowa Hawkeyes cap is hunched at one end of the counter over a cup of coffee. I take a stool. Not the one farthest away from the Hawkeyes fan, but with six stools between us so I won’t have to acknowledge his existence. Behind the counter, a man with a gray buzz cut sees me sit down and comes over with a pot of coffee. He grabs a thick white mug on his way, and pours it for me without even asking what I want.

  “Thanks,” I say. He nods sharply and puts the pot back onto its pad.

  The guy in the Hawkeyes cap watches me add cream and four packets of sugar to my coffee.

  “Swee’ tooth, huh,” he says. I can tell he’s drunk.