Road Tripped

by Pete Hautman

  “I just meant . . .” What had I meant?

  • • •

  I’m still not sure.

  I think about Bran, drunk, crawling into the tent after Allie, and what would have happened if Randy hadn’t stopped him. And how Randy made Bran leave, and how that led to Bran stealing my car, and now Allie was sleeping with Randy, who she’d told me she’d broken up with. . . . Was that the same thing? Would Allie know what Gaia had been talking about? I think about the stripper at that café, whose job it was to make men want her body. Would she know? I think about Garf’s sort-of-cousin Kelsey, who, according to Garf, “sort of seduced” him. Was that really what happened?

  Anyway, I keep thinking about that day at the beach.

  “River Deep—Mountain High”

  Ike and Tina Turner

  3:37

  I am walking because I don’t know what else to do. I follow the road along the lakeshore, listening to the iPod. The wind coming off the water feels like tiny knives. I jam my fists in the pockets of the hoodie. There’s a crumpled piece of paper in the right-hand pocket. I take it out and almost toss it, but then I think what my dad would say about me littering, so I stuff it back in the pocket. I’ll wait until I see a trash can.

  I turn north into a residential area. It looks kind of like Gaia’s neighborhood—lots of ramblers and double garages. I keep going, one foot in front of the other. At least if I keep walking, I’ll stay warm. Eventually my jeans and shoes will dry.

  Maybe Bran didn’t go to Kansas City. Maybe I’ll find the Mustang parked by the side of the road. Maybe he left the keys in it.

  A woman with a big, crazy voice is singing about love. I know that voice, but I can’t think who it is, so I check the iPod display. Tina Turner. She was in a movie I saw once.

  Maybe I’ll look up and find Gaia standing in front of me. It’s not impossible. I construct an elaborate fantasy in which she has concealed a GPS tracker in the Mustang and tracked it down. I find her sitting in the passenger seat waiting for me.

  The damp jeans are chafing my crotch. I stop and try to adjust them. I’m on a sort of highway, a four-lane road with lots of businesses. I just passed a QuikTrip, a school, and a shopping mall. How long have I been walking? I have no idea where I am. The sun is high, and it’s warmer now. I unzip the hoodie and look around. Ahead on the right I spot a Burger King sign. The same BK I ate lunch at . . . was it just yesterday?

  My stomach pulls me forward, and a few minutes later I’m sitting in a back booth with a Whopper, large fries, and a thirty-eight-ounce Coca-Cola. I wolf down the burger and drink half of the Coke, then slow down and pick at the fries while I sort through my options.

  I’ve already figured out that reporting the Mustang stolen will only make things worse. Maybe the cops will find it sometime, and see that it’s registered to my father, and maybe Mom will be notified. I’m really not sure how that works. Or they might find it and stick it in an impound lot and never tell anybody. I could call my mom and tell her what happened, and she could report it. But that would mean calling my mom.

  I have her credit card. It still works—I used it to pay for the food. So she must be seeing these charges on her account. She knows how to access that stuff online. She must know I’m alive, and roughly where I am. I could use it to buy a bus ticket—or even a plane ticket—home. That’s probably what she’d want me to do. Do I want to go home? I think about what’s waiting for me, and except for one very pissed-off mom, I got nothing.

  I take out my wallet and count my remaining cash. Three hundred and six dollars. What did I spend a hundred bucks on? Food, sodas, a John Deere cap—it adds up.

  The fries are gone, and I haven’t figured out one single thing. I watch a guy in a Burger King shirt wiping tables. Maybe I could get a job doing that. I think I could handle it. He gets to my table and points at my tray.

  “Want me to take that for you?”

  “Sure.” He lifts the tray and its contents with one hand and wipes down the table with his rag. Pretty fancy service for a Burger King. As he carries my tray and trash away, I remember the crumpled paper in my pocket. I dig it out, and I’m about to walk it over to the trash can when, out of curiosity, I flatten the paper to see what it is. It’s a cell phone bill. Three pages. Dated last July. $240.16, including the unpaid balance from May. The name on the bill is Brandon T. Fetzig. The address on the bill is in Prairie Village, Kansas.

  Closed Mondays

  Most of Gaia’s black T-shirts had paintings by artists I’d never heard of, like this one that was printed with a bunch of pinkish shapes that looked like body parts, but I couldn’t make out what was what.

  “What’s that on your shirt?” I asked.

  She looked down. “It’s a painting.”

  “Did you paint it?”

  “It’s a Lee Krasner painting.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “It’s a her. She was married to Jackson Pollock. My dad gave it to me.”

  Another time she had one with this wavy black-and-white-striped image that made my eyes all jiggly. She told me it was a painting by Bridget Riley. Later I looked up Bridget Riley online. She made all these wild op-art things. I noticed that one of her paintings was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, so the next day I suggested to Gaia that we go there.

  “I didn’t think you were interested in stuff like that.” She sounded surprised.

  “I liked the shirt you wore yesterday. They say on their website that they have a Bridget Riley painting. Also, it’s supposed to rain, and the museum is indoors, and it’s free.”

  “Oh. Have you ever been there?”

  “No, but I know where it is.”

  “Okay, sure. How are we going to get there?”

  That was a problem. My mom was still mad at me for taking Dad’s car, and Gaia didn’t have her license, so getting to the Walker would require taking a bus. I’d never liked buses. I didn’t even like taking the bus to school, and that was only about a ten-minute ride. But we figured out which bus to get on, and what bus to transfer to, and it wasn’t that bad except for this one smelly guy sitting in front of us.

  By the time we got to the Walker, it was raining. We ran down the sidewalk and up the steps to the glass doors.

  “Uh-oh,” Gaia said.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the sign on the glass.

  CLOSED MONDAYS.

  “Is it Monday?” I asked, stupidly.

  “It is definitely Monday.”

  So much for my great idea of going to look at art. We stood in the shelter of the entryway and looked out at the wet world. It wasn’t pouring, just a steady, warm drizzle that made everything look soft and shiny.

  “We could walk through the sculpture garden.” Gaia pointed across the street. “I mean, since we came all this way.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was so embarrassed, I’d have agreed to anything. “If you don’t mind getting wet.”

  “We’ll have it all to ourselves. Nobody looks at art in the rain.”

  We crossed the street to the sculpture garden, an open area the size of several football fields. There were dozens of sculptures, many of them enormous, and no people in sight. Right in the middle was a fifty-foot-long bent spoon holding a gigantic bright red cherry. Water was squirting out of the cherry’s stem. We walked up to it as close as we could get. The handle of the spoon was arched over a small pond; its bowl rested on a tiny round island.

  “That’s Maeve’s favorite,” Gaia said.

  “You came here with Maeve?”

  “We used to come here a lot.”

  I thought I had suggested something fresh and new for us to do together, but for Gaia this was just a rerun.

  “One time we climbed the spoon handle.” Her eyes looked bright as she remembered. “We got halfway, and the water was spraying on us, and we were laughing so hard that Maeve slipped. She grabbed my hand, and we both fell off and landed in the water. God, we got in so much troubl
e!” Gaia was grinning all across her face, and all I could think was that I’d never seen her smile like that. “My dad was so mad!”

  “When was that?” I asked, even though I didn’t really care. I kept thinking that I’d never seen Gaia laugh the way she remembered laughing with Maeve. I mean, we laughed, the two of us, but not like that. Not like we could fall off a spoon bridge because we were laughing so hard.

  “Eighth grade,” Gaia said. Her smile shrank down to nothing. “I miss her.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said.

  Gaia shot me a look.

  “I mean, I’m sorry she’s gone,” I said quickly.

  “No, you’re not.” She turned away. I followed her along the walkway, trying to figure out what I’d said. I mean, I knew what I’d said. I just didn’t know how bad I’d screwed up. It turned out we were okay, though. Gaia led me over to the coolest thing in the whole sculpture park: a giant, bright blue rooster on top of a light-gray, flat-topped metal pyramid. The rooster itself was the size of an elephant, and it was the bluest thing I’d ever seen. We looked at it for a while, and we were both smiling.

  “I don’t know if it’s funny or awesome,” I said.

  “It’s both,” Gaia said. “That’s what makes it so great.”

  “Hey, if I climb up there and get on top of the rooster, will you take a picture?”

  “You can’t get up there,” she said.

  “Yes, I can.” The base was steep, and about ten feet high, but I figured if I took a run at it, I could make it to the top.

  “Don’t be so juvenile,” she said. “We’re not in eighth grade.”

  So much for creating a new sculpture park memory.

  The next thing we looked at was a bronze of an eight-foot-long rabbit jumping over a giant bell. Gaia didn’t like that one, so I pretended not to like it too.

  The drizzle was getting heavier, so we headed for a glass-roofed pavilion that was sort of a sculpture all on its own, but before we got there, Gaia stopped in front of a life-size statue of a naked woman stepping out of the ripped-open belly of a wolf. I couldn’t tell if the woman was supposed to have killed the wolf and had just decided to stand inside its corpse, or if she’d burst out of it like the creature in that movie Alien. Gaia stood looking at it for a long time. I wanted to get out of the rain—it was coming down harder—but Gaia wasn’t moving.

  “This could be me,” she said.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re getting soaked.”

  Reluctantly she turned away. We ran to the pavilion. We got there just as the clouds got serious. The rain pounding on the glass above us was loud, and we could barely see across the garden. The giant chicken was fifty yards away, but all I could see was a blue chicken-shaped smudge.

  I caught a whiff of something burning and looked around. We weren’t alone. A man wearing a hat and a raincoat was standing at the other side of the pavilion smoking a cigar and looking out at the rain.

  “Frederick!” Gaia called out, startling me.

  The man’s head jerked around. Gaia was walking toward him.

  The man said, “Why, Ms. Nygren, fancy meeting you here!”

  I followed her over to him. Up close I could see that he was older than I’d thought. He had a gray, pointy chin beard, slightly yellowed teeth, and wrinkles all around his eyes. His cigar was long and pencil-thin.

  “An inclement day for outdoor art appreciation,” he said.

  I didn’t think that was particularly funny, but Gaia laughed.

  His eyes went to me, then back to Gaia.

  “This is my friend Stiggy,” Gaia said. “Stiggy, this is Frederick.”

  Frederick put his cigar in his mouth and held out his right hand. He locked his eyes on mine as we shook hands, then let go and returned his attention to Gaia.

  “Art date?” he asked.

  Gaia smiled—was she blushing?

  “Art dates are the best,” Frederick said, and laughed. “Gives you something to gawk at besides each other.” He puffed on his cigar and smiled as he let the smoke trickle out.

  “We were going to see the Bridget Riley painting,” I said, wanting to sound knowledgeable. “But I forgot it was Monday,” I added, which made me look stupid.

  “An easy mistake to make. So many days in a week. I conflate them frequently.”

  I thought he might be making fun of me, but I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know what “conflate” meant.

  “Frederick is a sculptor,” Gaia said.

  “That’s right. I come here to scope out the competition.” He chuckled.

  “I like the blue chicken,” I say.

  “Many people do. I imagine the Spoonbridge and Cherry is your second favorite. Grotesquely bright colors are quite popular with the public.”

  Definitely making fun. When I didn’t say anything, he turned back to Gaia.

  “Gaia, dear, how is your father?”

  “He’s good.”

  “Excellent! Give him my regards, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Very nice to see you.” He waved his cigar in a figure eight, like a priest giving a benediction. “Please proceed with your art date.” He bowed slightly, tugged down the brim of his hat, and strolled out of the pavilion into the rain.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Frederick Baldwin,” she said. “He teaches at the U.”

  “Where your dad teaches?”

  “A different department.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. “He’s kind of sarcastic.”

  Gaia’s eyebrows came together. “Why would you say that?”

  “Just the way he talked.”

  “I think he’s nice. I’ve known him forever. He’s a friend of my dad’s.”

  I hated that she had so much history. I hated that anything mattered to her except me.

  “Cactus”

  Pixies

  2:17

  Prairie Village is a suburb of Kansas City. That’s almost three hundred miles away.

  I’ve never hitchhiked before. All I know is you stick your thumb out, and sooner or later somebody pulls over and you hope they’re not a robber or a murderer. I stand on the entrance ramp to I-270 westbound and watch about a million cars blow past me without slowing down. Finally one of them pulls over.

  The car looks normal enough—a boxy Ford Flex, a family car. The guy driving looks normal too: a paunchy, middle-aged salesman type with graying hair and wire-rimmed eyeglasses. I climb in, and he pulls off the edge of the entrance ramp and accelerates onto the freeway. Country western music is playing on the radio.

  “Where are you headed?” he asks.

  “Kansas City,” I say.

  “Goin’ to Kansas City,” he sings, then laughs. I don’t get it. He says, “I’m only going halfway. I can get you to Columbia.”

  “Cool. Thanks.” I’m not sure where Columbia is.

  “Do you like music?”

  “Um . . . yeah?”

  “I’ve got satellite.” He gestures at the stereo. “Anything you want. Ninety-nine stations. You like polka, there’s a polka station. Sixties rock, eighties rock, show tunes, gospel, rap, you name it.”

  The guy on the radio is singing about his dog.

  “This is fine,” I say.

  “So you like country?”

  “Whatever you like is fine with me,” I say.

  “Are you in school?”

  “No.”

  “I like your cap. Grew up on a farm. The old man loved his John Deere. You ever drive a tractor?”

  I think about my dad on his forklift.

  “No,” I say.

  “I got three kids. My oldest is about your age. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” I say, giving myself an extra year.

  “Robbie’s seventeen. Smart as a whip. Just started his senior year.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Wouldn’t want him hitchhiking, I’ll tell you that. Not these days. Too many crazie
s.” He’s tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel in time to the music.

  “I suppose,” I say.

  “Do you use drugs?”

  “No.”

  “A lot of drugs out there. So what’s in Kansas City? You got a girl there?”

  “No. Just visiting a . . . friend.”

  “Robbie has a girlfriend. Beautiful girl. Cheerleader. You into sports?”

  “Not really.”

  “Robbie’s on the basketball team. Only six-three, but he’s the best player on the team. Lettered when he was a sophomore. You know what those letter jackets cost? Arm and a leg. Arm and a leg, but he’s a great kid so it’s worth it. He’s going to Dartmouth next year, already accepted, with a scholarship to boot. Ivy League. You going to college?”

  It’s going to be a long ride to Columbia.

  Boots

  By mid-August, Gaia and I had fallen into a routine. I’d text her when I woke up and suggest something we could do. She’d text me back, either saying okay or suggesting something different.

  My mom had recovered from me taking Dad’s car back in July, so she let me use her Toyota now and then, which made things easier. Sometimes Gaia and I would just drive around listening to music. She didn’t like hip-hop, but we both liked older alt-rock like the White Stripes. She liked Florence and the Machine. And Regina Spektor. And Johnette Napolitano. I’d never heard of most of them. She liked girl singers. She was sort of sexist that way, like with her art shirts. I guess the word isn’t really “sexist,” but I didn’t know what else to call it.

  Anyway, some of our best days were spent driving around listening to music, syncing our phones to the crappy stereo in Mom’s Toyota. Sometimes we’d talk about the bands we both liked, but more often about the ones we agreed to hate: Coldplay, U2, the Lemonheads, Beck, the Beatles. . . . Our list of hateable bands was long, and it didn’t make a lot of sense because I didn’t mind some of them, but it was more about what we could agree on. It felt as if we were the only ones in the world who knew what sucked.

  I used to argue with Garf about music all the time. He was mostly into dubstep and reggae, which he claimed were related, and for some reason I could never figure out, he loved Captain Beefheart.