Road Tripped

by Pete Hautman

  “Leave the kid alone, Bubby,” the counterman says.

  Bubby shrugs and lets his head sink back down between his shoulders.

  “You want something to eat?” the counterman says to me.

  I look around for a menu. The man points at a chalkboard above the coffee machine. Six items are listed: Jack’s Special, Jack’s Favorite, Jack’s Classic, Jack’s Lite, Jack’s Big Breakfast, Jack’s Gobbler.

  “What is Jack’s Gobbler?” I ask.

  “Turkey sausage, two eggs, hash browns, and toast.”

  “What’s the special?”

  “Turkey sausage, two eggs, hash browns, and toast.”

  “Are they all the same thing?”

  “With the lite, you only get one egg. With the big breakfast you get three.”

  “Are you Jack?”

  “I’m Sal. Jack’s twenty years dead.”

  “Oh. Okay, I’ll have the classic.”

  “How you want your eggs?”

  “Scrambled.”

  “Wheat toast or white?”

  “White.”

  He turns to the grill and starts doing stuff. I hear the ding of the door opening. It’s a woman with big blond hair and lots of makeup. She’s wearing a tight white top, even tighter jeans, and high heels.

  “Morning, Terri,” says Sal.

  “Hey, Sal.” She takes a stool in the middle, closer to me than the drunk guy. Sal pours her a coffee.

  “Can I smoke?” she asks him.

  Sal looks at me and raises his eyebrows.

  “I don’t mind,” I say.

  The woman takes out a pack of Marlboros and lights one up. Sal gives her a saucer to use as an ashtray. She takes a deep drag, holds it a second, then shoots the smoke out the side of her mouth.

  “Thanks,” she says to me. “I needed that.” She takes a closer look at me. “You’re just a kid,” she says.

  I’ve been trying to figure out how old she is. It’s hard to tell with all the makeup, but I think she’s younger than she looks. Maybe twenty or twenty-one, which isn’t that much older than me.

  “I’m older than I look,” I say.

  “Aren’t we all. Hey, Sal, you got any pie left?”

  “Apple okay?”

  “That’s all you ever have.”

  “Everybody likes apple pie.”

  “I seen your boobies,” the drunk guy says.

  Terri ignores him. Sal says, “Shut up, Bubby.”

  “Well, I have,” Bubby mutters. “It ain’t like I’m gonna do nothing.”

  “Damn right you’re not,” Terri says.

  “Could if I wanted,” Bubby says under his breath.

  Sal hears him and says, “Take off, Bubby.”

  “I didn’t do nothing!”

  Sal leans over the counter and gets right in his face.

  “Out,” he says.

  Bubby mutters, gets unsteadily to his feet, and shuffles out the door.

  Terri shakes her head and says, “Sal, if you kick out every degenerate reprobate comes in here, you won’t have any customers left.”

  “I always got you,” Sal says.

  I’m surprised to hear her say “degenerate reprobate.” Those aren’t words I ever expected to hear from a stripper, which is what I’m guessing she is. Not that I’ve ever met a stripper before.

  Through the window I see Bubby walking back across the road toward Girlz! Girlz! Girlz!

  “Do you work over there?” I ask.

  “I am an ecdysiast.” She taps the ash from her cigarette. “That’s a fancy word for a girl who takes her clothes off in front of guys like Bubby.”

  “I know,” I say, although five seconds ago I didn’t.

  “What are you?” she asks.

  “Me?” Nobody’s ever asked me that before, like I might actually be something. I must have some weird expression on my face, because she laughs. I look away, embarrassed.

  “Everybody’s something,” she says.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not.”

  “What are you so mad about?”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  Sal slides a plate with a slice of apple pie in front of her, then goes back to the grill and flips my hash browns. He has a little smile on his face, and I think maybe he’s laughing at me. I stare down at the little chrome rack with the napkin dispenser and salt and pepper and cream and sugar packets and a half-empty bottle of Tabasco sauce. I don’t look up until Sal delivers my Jack’s Classic: eggs, a sausage patty, hash browns, and toast. I pick up the fork and start eating. All I want is to eat and get out of here fast.

  “It’s a lot easier just being pissed off all the time, isn’t it?” Terri says. I’m not sure if she’s talking to me, but I sneak a look. She’s done with her pie and is smoking another cigarette. Staring right at me. “You wake up every morning, and you know how you’re going to feel, like the world is out to get you and all you can do is react, and it sucks.”

  “What makes you think you know how I feel in the morning?”

  “I’m psychic.” She laughs. “Believe me, I get it. I’ve been pissed off my whole life. That’s why I smoke these.” She waves her Marlboro in front of her face, takes a drag, and lets the smoke trickle out through her nose. “It never tastes all that good, but it jolts me out of wherever I was. Changes the way I feel. Those guys across the street that were staring at my body half an hour ago were looking for jolts too. Same thing about being pissed off. You get this little hit of that good old adrenaline, a moment of distraction from the tedious business of being your own tedious self.”

  I’m holding my fork full of scrambled egg in front of my mouth and staring back at her like an idiot. She keeps talking.

  “You know what my dad used to do? He didn’t smoke, but every morning when he woke up, he’d sit up on the edge of his bed and slap himself across the face. Twice. Hard. Like, his cheeks would be bright red for half an hour after. Just to make himself feel different. He was my alarm clock. He was in the next bedroom. I’d hear it every morning at six twenty. Two slaps.”

  She sucks on her cigarette and tilts her head. “So what are you mad about? Parents don’t love you? Girlfriend dump you?” She narrows her eyes, looking closely at me, then nods sharply, as if my face has answered her question.

  “Told you I was psychic,” she says.

  “She blocked my number,” I hear myself say.

  “Ghosted you, huh? That’s cold.” Smoke jets from her nostrils. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing!”

  She nods, stubs out her cigarette, puts a ten on the counter, and slides off the stool.

  “Thanks, Sal.”

  “Later, Terri.”

  She takes one last narrow-eyed look at me.

  “You must have done something.”

  Groundhog Day

  Dad died on a Thursday morning in February. Groundhog Day. Mom told me he’d had an accident at the warehouse where he worked. I didn’t find out the truth until about ten days later, when Garf Neff told me.

  Garf was not my friend at the time, but I’d known him since the fifth grade. He was a quiet kid, not somebody you’d pay much attention to. All I knew about him then was he had the pointiest nose of anyone I’d ever met, and that his older brother, Jimmy, had died the year before at college. There was a rumor that Jimmy Neff had drunk an entire bottle of vodka and died from alcohol poisoning, and another rumor that he had ODed on drugs, and another rumor that he had fallen out of his dormitory window. I didn’t know then which was true—could’ve been all three—but I didn’t really care, because, like I say, Garf wasn’t my friend then, and I’d never met his brother.

  A week after my dad’s funeral—the first time I’d been back at school since he’d died—I was on the sidewalk after school waiting for my bus and kind of avoiding everybody, when Garf walked up to me and said, “Hey, Stiggy, hey. Sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I was irritated becaus
e I hadn’t been thinking about my dad at that exact moment, and Garf had just brought him crashing back into my thoughts.

  “It must be really hard,” he said.

  “Not really.” I did not want to talk to this pointy-nosed kid about my dad. I turned away and started walking.

  Garf caught up to me and said, “I kind of know what you’re going through. My brother killed himself, you know.”

  “I know that.” I started to turn away, then hesitated and asked, “Why?”

  Garf shrugged. “Nobody knows. He just did it.”

  “What, did he OD or something?”

  “He shot himself in the face.”

  I was shocked—not so much because his brother had shot himself but because I couldn’t believe that the rumors had been so wrong.

  “I don’t tell people that. Usually. But, you know, I figured you’d get it.”

  “Why?” I was genuinely confused. “Because my dad died?”

  “No, because he shot himself.”

  There was a sound that was not a sound, a hollowness, a vacuum, a blankness. Garf’s mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear him; I felt this pressure on my ears and the silent thudding of my pulse. My own mouth was moving and I couldn’t hear myself either, but I knew what I was saying. “No, he didn’t.”

  Garf took a step back and held up his palms. He was still talking and I still couldn’t hear anything at all, but I wanted desperately for him to stop. I moved toward him, and his eyes got big. He backed away quickly and was swallowed by the crowd.

  My hearing came back, and the first thing I heard was my own breathing. Then the rumble of the bus engines. Then the buzz and chatter and shouts of everybody piling inside. I couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped in a bus with all those voices. I forced my fists to unclench and turned away. I walked all the way home staring at my feet and imagining punching Garf Neff right on the tip of his pointy nose.

  • • •

  Mom didn’t argue or try to change the subject when I asked her point-blank how Dad had died. She lowered herself onto the sofa and told me to sit down.

  “Dad’s having a hard time.” She spoke in a flat voice, her usually mobile face hardly moving, her dry eyes darting off to the side as if Dad might be in the next room listening. “I mean, he was having a hard time. He’d been fighting this thing for years—since before you were born, actually.”

  “Fighting what thing?” I asked.

  “Well, he wasn’t a happy person, you know.”

  I’d never really thought about that. His happiness.

  “And sometimes he’d get very, very sad. He took medicine, and that helped. He took it every day, even though he didn’t like the way the medicine made him feel. But sometimes his sadness was more than the pills could handle.”

  I got it then, what she was saying, but she was talking to me like I was a little kid, and that made me mad.

  “You mean he had depression,” I said.

  She jerked back as if I’d slapped her.

  “I’m not four years old, Mom. I know about depression.”

  Mom blinked. Her eyes darted to the next room again. “ ‘Depression’ is an ugly word. We never talked to you about it because Dad didn’t want you to worry. When things were bad, he worked really, really hard to act like everything was okay. Sometimes even I didn’t know he was having his . . . troubles.”

  “His troubles? You mean when he was depressed,” I said.

  She seemed to sink into the sofa, to grow smaller.

  “Garf Neff told me Dad shot himself,” I said.

  She breathed out. I could hear the air hissing from her throat. It went on for a long time before she stopped and breathed in again.

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then, “The last few months were hard for him. Since the accident.”

  I thought for a second she meant that Dad shooting himself had been an accident. Then I realized she was talking about the other accident—the forklift accident that had happened back in October.

  The Other Accident

  Dad blamed it on the forklift. He said the brakes went out. He’d crashed a two-thousand-pound pallet of car batteries into a shelving structure, causing a couple hundred thousand dollars of damage and almost killing himself and two of the floor workers. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but Dad was put on leave. He thought he was going to get fired. That was a bad few weeks—all he did was sit around the house talking about how it wasn’t his fault.

  The investigation didn’t really solve anything. The forklift had been wrecked so badly that they couldn’t say for sure whether it was because of a mechanical problem or operator error. They finally let him go back to work, but they wouldn’t let him run a forklift anymore. They gave him a desk job. He hated that so much, it was like a fog of dark coming off him.

  • • •

  Mom, sunk into the sofa, not looking at me, said, “Your dad loved driving that forklift, even though he complained about it. But that desk was poison to him. Some days he’d leave for work and just go to the park by the river and sit there all day. I didn’t know he was doing that until one day his boss called looking for him.”

  “Was that the day he . . . ?”

  “Yes. He drove to East River Park and sat on a bench, and that’s where he . . .”

  “Shot himself.”

  She nodded.

  “But we don’t even have a gun!”

  “He bought it the day before. It was one of those guns people use for hunting ducks.”

  “A shotgun?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was flat and calm, but her face looked about to shatter.

  I wanted to ask Why, but what came out of my mouth was, “How?”

  She hesitated, her shoulders seemed to slump even more, then she said, “He held it between his legs, and he shot himself in the neck. He might have been trying to shoot himself in the head, but he missed.”

  I laughed. There was nothing funny—in fact, it was the unfunniest thing ever—but this laugh came ripping out of my throat like vomit, erupting without reason or warning.

  Mom collapsed in on herself as if my laugh had crumbled her bones.

  I should have felt horrible—I did feel horrible—but mostly it made me angry. Angry at both of them. I stood up and walked away, leaving her slumped on the sofa like a broken doll.

  • • •

  Dad had bought the Mustang the summer before he died. It wasn’t one of the ones with the big engines. Not the GT. Not the Shelby. Not the Boss. Just a plain old Mustang, used, with a little six-cylinder engine. But it was black with red leather seats, which was cool, and it had a kick-ass sound system with a subwoofer under the backseat.

  Mom stored it in the garage after he was gone. She told me it was mine, but I had to wait until I graduated to drive it. If I needed to drive someplace, I had to borrow her Toyota, which was a hassle for both of us.

  After Mom told me about how Dad had really died, I went out to the garage and started up the Mustang. I’d been doing that every other day just to keep the battery charged, and to listen to music. I’d synced my phone to the stereo so I could listen to my tunes, hip-hop mostly, for the beats and the energy. That day I cranked up some Dre. Old-school. Something about those big beats coming off the subwoofer calmed me.

  It was weird sitting in his car. The last time Dad used it he had driven over to East River Park. The police had towed it to the impound lot. The only time I’d driven it was from the impound lot to our garage, where it had been sitting ever since.

  Sometimes I thought I could still smell him—a faint odor of work sweat, and those licorice candies he used to suck on to keep himself from smoking cigarettes. Sometimes I had a few seconds when I thought he was still alive.

  • • •

  A funny thing happened a couple months after my dad shot himself. Not that it was funny funny, unless you have a sick sense of humor. I
was thinking about forklifts, and wound up on YouTube watching clips of forklift accidents. Apparently people think forklift accidents are amusing, and they are, I suppose, if you’re not the guy on the forklift. Or his kid. I watched a bunch. Some of them were pretty sensational.

  One of the most spectacular ones showed a forklift ramming into some big metal shelves, floor to ceiling, all loaded with big crates. The shelves collapse like dominoes, and the crates come crashing down into the aisle and hit the row of shelves on the other side of the warehouse, and they come crashing down too. The entire warehouse is completely destroyed in this huge chain reaction. I was watching it for the third time when I noticed a sign on the wall: WEST CENTRAL DISTRIBUTING.

  My dad worked at West Central Distributing.

  I watched it about ten more times. It was one of those grainy surveillance videos and kind of hard to see, but I’m pretty sure it was my dad driving that forklift.

  • • •

  Garf and I had gotten to be friends by that time. After the day he told me about my dad, I ran into him at Brain Food, and we talked about comics, and that was cool. He never said much about his brother, and I didn’t talk about my dad, but it was always there. Like, we’d been there. Both of us.

  I sent him a link to the forklift video. He texted me back: LOL. Cool.

  I got really mad for a few minutes—but then I realized he had no idea it was my dad driving the forklift. He probably didn’t even know what my dad did for a living.

  I didn’t have many friends. In fact, Garf was pretty much it.

  The thing with Garf was that I could say anything, and he was fine with it; we were okay. Almost as if he wasn’t there, like he was this shadow. No, not a shadow, more like an observer—someone there to remind me that I was real, that I was in the world. Maybe it was the same for him. Anyway, there was this connection.

  Later I got connected to Gaia, but that was different.

  The Thing That Happened at Wigglesworth’s

  The first time I did anything with Gaia—I guess you’d call it a date—I got us kicked out of Wigglesworth’s Juiceteria. I remember what I was wearing: my usual jeans and one of my dad’s flannel shirts. Gaia had on black jeans and a black T-shirt with a print on the front: an orange rectangle with a bright yellow blob in the middle.