Road Tripped

by Pete Hautman

  I fell asleep and dreamed about driving, and I didn’t wake up until the morning light flooded in through the garage door’s frosted-glass windows.

  “Rumble”

  Kelis

  3:35

  My car reeks of cigarettes and fast food. I toss the crumpled McDonald’s bags onto Bran’s lawn. He was using the McDonald’s cup for an ashtray; it’s a quarter full of melted ice and cigarette butts and ashes. I throw that out too.

  I start the car. The gas tank is near empty. I put the car in reverse and look over my shoulder to back out, and I see Bran standing there. He waves and comes up to my open window.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “What do you want?”

  “Just wanted to say I’m sorry about borrowing your car, is all.”

  “You left me with an empty tank.”

  “Sorry. Tell you what, can you give me a ride?”

  I can’t believe this guy. He steals my car, and then he asks me for a ride?

  I force out a laugh. “Get lost.”

  I start backing out. He walks along beside the car.

  “I just need a lift over to Brookside.” He looks back at the house. “I gotta get out of here. My mom’s being a total bitch.”

  “Gee, I wonder why?”

  “Ouch! Tell you what, I’ll buy you a tank of gas.”

  A tank of gas? I could use that. And I’m curious. This version of Bran is like a different person. I might not have recognized him if I’d passed him on the street.

  “Okay, get in,” I say.

  “Thanks!” He runs around to the passenger side and gets in. “She wants me to go back to school and be a doctor or lawyer or some shit. Like she never heard of a gap year? I want to go to Europe, man. Someplace fun.”

  “Where’s the nearest gas station?” I ask.

  Bran points; I follow his directions. “School’s for losers. I went to KU for two semesters. Everybody I met there was some sort of asshole.” He pulls out a pack of Marlboros. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighs theatrically and puts away his cigs. “What a sucky summer,” he says.

  “It’s fall.”

  “That Allie, what a stone-cold frigid bitch she turned out to be. Can you believe her with that stinky Rasta Randy? Turn left up here.”

  I turn left.

  “People suck, man. Here, the QuikTrip on the corner.”

  I pull into the QuikTrip and stop at a pump.

  “I can’t believe I hung with those two for so long,” he says. “Allie waving those tits at me twenty-four seven.”

  “You going to pay for gas or what?” I say.

  “Yeah, yeah, relax. I’ll buy your gas.” He gets out and swipes a credit card—probably his mom’s—at the pump. I pop open the gas tank door. He says, “I suppose you want me to pump it too.”

  I get out and put the pump nozzle in the gas tank.

  “I hear you tried to rape her,” I say as the pump chugs away.

  “Who? Allie? That what she said? What a bitch. She was coming on to me, man! I try to join her in her little tent, and she goes apeshit on me. And that phony Rasta, Randy, he’s all, like, macho man all of a sudden. Like he’s saving her virtue. Virtue? Shit, she’d do it with anybody.”

  “But not you?”

  “Not you either. I’m going inside and grab a Coke.”

  Bran goes into the store. The pump clicks off. I pull the nozzle out of the tank and twist on the gas cap. I get behind the wheel and start the car.

  A few seconds later Bran comes out of the store looking pissed off. He gets in and says, “Asshole won’t let me put a Coke on my credit card. Minimum purchase, my ass. I just bought you a tank of gas! I swear to God, my whole life is nothing but one asshole after another.”

  I stare at him, at his fresh haircut and shave, at his clean polo shirt with the KU logo embroidered on the chest, at his mom’s credit card still clutched in his hand. It’s like looking in a distorted mirror.

  “Get out,” I say.

  He looks at me, startled.

  “Get out,” I repeat.

  “What the hell? Dude, I just gassed you up!”

  “Get out.”

  “Screw that! We had a deal. Let’s go.”

  He must see something in my face, because he shoulders open the door and climbs out, all the while yelling every profanity I know, and then some. He slams the door so hard, my ears pop.

  He’s still screaming at me as I pull away.

  “No One Knows”

  Queens of the Stone Age

  4:39

  Leaving Bran stranded at the QuikTrip feels fantastic. Payback! I showed him! I won! I’m free, while he’s stuck with being Brandon Fetzig in Perfect Village, and I got my car back. I can be anybody I want to be. I can go anywhere.

  If I can find my way out of this tangled mess of suburban streets.

  I pull over at a Starbucks and use their Wi-Fi to check my iPod. Turns out I’m just half a mile south of I-70, the freeway I took across Missouri. Now I know where I am, but I have another problem. I don’t know where I’m going. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

  I head north to the freeway and head east toward the Great River Road, on the other side of the state. A destination! When I get there, I’ll decide which way to go.

  The good feeling fades even before I get out of the city. Thinking about Bran gets me to thinking about Garf Neff, about something I said to him, that I thought I was an asshole magnet. Bran was saying almost exactly the same thing only in different words, and he’s an asshole with a capital A. So what does that make me?

  Then I remember something Allie said that night in the canoe.

  It hits me like a punch to the gut, as if an invisible airbag had exploded and slammed into my belly. I veer left, across the other lane and onto the shoulder, trying to breathe. A semi roars by, horn blasting. I take a shuddering breath, check my mirror, speed up, and pull back onto the roadway. I’m shaking.

  She said I was a lot like Bran. I thought she was just teasing, but now I’m not so sure. A lot of the other stuff she said made a lot of sense.

  Am I really like Bran? Does being an asshole magnet make me the asshole?

  Am I going back home to my mom, like Bran? Back to my suburban life with clean shirts and school five days a week? Is that where I’m headed? What will happen if I do? I don’t know if I can, and that scares me. What if I go back, and Mom tells me to get lost?

  I’ve hardly thought about my mom at all since I left home, and now when I think about her, it’s two-dimensional, like panels in a comic book. I have this thing. It’s called a mom. She eats, sleeps, goes to work, goes to yoga, goes to Zumba, and yells at me. She doesn’t really yell, not literally. She just complains. I guess she has a lot to complain about. Does she miss me? I don’t know. I’m sure she’s mad at me. She canceled the credit card. If I go home . . . what will I find? Open arms? Crossed arms? I mean, I stole her credit card and didn’t tell her where I was going. I haven’t called. Is she going out of her mind with worry? Or is she relieved that I left? One less problem to deal with. One less mouth to feed.

  Another semi roars by on my left. I look at the speedometer. I’m only going forty-five miles per hour. I speed up. I turn on the music. A song by Queens of the Stone Age comes on. I crank it up until it shatters all the thoughts in my brain. I blow past Odessa, Concordia, and Sweet Springs. I listen to my father’s music, marveling at the man I never knew. The Clash, Eminem, Motörhead, Marilyn Manson—a string of angries. How did I not know this about Dad, about his music? Marshall Junction, Chouteau Springs, Windsor Place—I see the exit signs, but the towns are invisible from the freeway. Columbia is coming up. I see a broken-down Ford on the shoulder. It looks like it used to be a cop car. It looks like Honeypie and Babe’s car. Maybe somebody stole it out of that Walmart parking lot and it broke down. I drive through Columbia without stopping.

  When I left Saint Andrew Valley, I was looking forward to mindless hours o
f watching fence posts flash by, but it turns out there is no such thing as mindless. Even with music pounding at my ears—Nirvana, Pink Floyd—I’m still thinking about stuff. I suspect that even sleep won’t turn off the thinking. I could be in a coma, and my thoughts would continue to churn, slowly, those little electrical impulses firing as long as my heart is beating. Was that what made Dad do it? Was dying the only way to make it stop?

  I don’t want to die. But I wouldn’t mind being dead for a while. Eastville, Kingdom City, Danville. I exit the freeway and turn north to avoid Saint Louis. It’s better on the smaller roads. More things to see, decisions to make, cars and animals and people to avoid. The music changes. Somebody I never heard of named Peggy Lee is singing about fires and rejection and circuses and death, then Regina Spektor, who I have heard of, singing about her broken heart, then Suzanne Vega singing about a kid whose parents are beating the crap out of him, and my cheeks are wet because it’s so sad to think that there are people who have shittier lives than me. Then a Beatles song comes on, and it’s so cheerful and sunny, I can’t stand it, so I shut off the stereo and drive.

  After another half hour I turn east. Sooner or later I’ll hit the river. I imagine driving right into it, imagine the car plowing nose-first into the sluggish, muddy waters, then sinking. They say it’s impossible to open the doors because of the water pressure. You have to roll down a window and let the water in and hold your breath until the car is almost full, then open the door. The Mustang has electric windows. Would they work if the car was sitting at the bottom of a river? Am I strong enough to break the window with my fist? I remember the guy at the Foodland punching the window. He was bigger than me, and he couldn’t break it.

  It doesn’t matter. I know I’m not driving into any river. I just like to imagine it: one scary moment when I am not thinking about Gaia or my mom or my dad or what I’m going to do next.

  Superman

  When I was six, I thought my dad was like Superman—infinitely strong, invulnerable, and knowing everything there was to know. He could pick me up with one arm, answer any question, shrug off any injury. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d been able to fly, or if bullets had bounced off his chest. I guess that’s how a lot of six-year-olds look at their dads.

  I wanted to be Superman too. I’d tie a red beach towel around my neck to make a cape and fly around the house in my underwear with my arms thrust out in front of me. One time my dad came out of the bathroom, and I charged at him and, with every ounce of my forty-eight pounds, rammed both fists into his belly. Well, maybe it was a few inches below that. I wasn’t that tall.

  I expected to bounce off and fall to the floor giggling, but I didn’t. He fell to the floor, gasping, his face contorted with pain. It scared me. I’d never seen him like that before, never known that I could hurt him, never known that anything could hurt him.

  “I’m sorry!” I said. He tried to laugh it off, but his face was all twisted, and it took him a minute to get up. He walked all hunched over into the living room and lowered himself to the sofa.

  “I’ll be okay, Stevie,” he said.

  I think it was a first for him, too. I don’t think he knew until that moment that I could hurt him.

  “Highway 61 Revisited”

  Bob Dylan

  3:30

  I choose roads semi-randomly, moving in a generally easterly direction, dodging thoughts of guilt and grieving and loneliness. I become a connoisseur of barns. The best barns are big and a bit crooked, weathered but still in use, with a cupola up top and fading ads painted on the sides. I do not like the ones painted colors other than red, or with metal sides, or with holes in the roof.

  One of those barns—one of the good ones—has a side covered with an old tobacco advertisement, barely readable. I slow down for a closer look. I can make out some of the letters:

  A R K T W A

  CIGARS

  ARK TWA Cigars?

  Oh, I get it. “MARK TWAIN,” with the outside letters worn off. I must be getting close to Hannibal.

  I come up over a low rise and see a billboard: WORLD-FAMOUS MARK TWAIN CAVE.

  Definitely Hannibal. I don’t want to go back to Hannibal. Been there, done that. I turn north on the next road I come to—a dirt track that might not even be a road. Could just be a long driveway—brown cornstalks on my left, a fallow field on my right. After a mile I decide it’s a road, so I keep going. Eventually I hit US Highway 61, the same Highway 61 that goes from Minnesota all the way to Louisiana. There’s a Bob Dylan song about it on the iPod. It’s a divided highway with not much traffic. I turn left, the direction Hannibal isn’t. That means I’m going north, toward Minnesota.

  Am I going home? I still don’t know.

  Almost immediately I see a billboard for the Mark Twain Casino and RV Park, and I wonder if I turned the wrong way. But the Mark Twain Casino is in a place called La Grange. I keep going. At the La Grange exit I pass a hitchhiker. I drive past him, go about a quarter mile, then pull over and back down the shoulder until he sees me. He waves and runs to meet me. I stop the car; he opens the door.

  “Dude!” he says. “I thought that was you!”

  “Hey, Knob,” I say.

  Hahn/Cock

  I had to take a running start. It took me three tries before I made it up the steep side of the metal pyramid. I grabbed one of the big blue chicken legs and pulled myself onto the flat top. The bright blue rooster towered above me. I stood up and rested my hand on the chicken’s wing and looked out over the sculpture garden.

  That was a week after Gaia left, when I’d been torturing myself by going to all the places we used to go.

  “Now?” asked the girl standing below me holding my phone. I didn’t know her, but she had agreed to take my picture.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “It looks even bigger with you up there,” she said.

  “Just wait.” I circled the chicken, looking for handholds. One of the tail feathers was within reach. I gripped it with both hands and pulled myself up onto the chicken’s back, and straddled it like a rider. From the top of the chicken I looked out over the sculpture garden. I could see the freeway, the Basilica, and behind me the Walker Art Center. Two guards came out of the doors and started running toward us. I waved at the two girls.

  “Okay!” I shouted.

  The girl with my phone took a picture. She moved to the side for a different angle and shot me again.

  “Got it!” she yelled.

  I slid off the rooster’s back, then down the side of the pyramid. The guards were fifty yards away. I grabbed my phone from the girl, yelled, “Thanks!” and took off running.

  When I got home, I texted the photos to Gaia’s number. She wouldn’t see them, of course. None of my texts were going through. But I sent them anyway.

  “Yon Yonson”

  Traditional folk song

  Bob the Knob is wearing the same clothes he had on the first time I picked him up, and he doesn’t smell any better. I crack my window and ease back onto the highway.

  “Did your farm job not work out?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. “It was okay. Didn’t last, though.” He shows me his gap-toothed grin. “Had a little altercation with the boss. So I guess, for ol’ Knob, it’s back to the lab again.”

  “Lab?”

  “Just an expression. I got folk up in Wisconsin, maybe find work at one of the mills up there. Maybe get some dental, get my choppers fixed.” He grins. “It’s all good.”

  “How so?”

  “Things work out, is all. Always have. I been blessed.”

  Knob does not strike me as a man who has been blessed. He could use a shower, a change of clothes, and a new canine tooth—in that order.

  “So where you headed this round?” he asks.

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “You got to find your people, dude,” he says. “Folks down in Hannibal, those weren’t my people.” He draws a breath and sings:

  My name is
Yon Yonson,

  I live in Wisconsin,

  I work in da lumber mill dere.

  I walk down da street,

  And da people I meet,

  Say, “Hey, what’s your name?”

  and I say,

  “My name is Yon Yonson,

  I live in—”

  Knob breaks into a coughing fit, thankfully ending the song.

  “Born and raised,” Knob says when he’s done coughing. “A man’s got to know who he is.” He gives me an intent look. “You know who you are?”

  “Yeah, you told me last time. I’m a nexus.”

  “Oh. I guess I did.” He sits back. “Anyways, it’s true.”

  We ride in silence for a time. Every so often he shifts around, trying to get comfortable, and a waft of funk comes off him. I roll my window down a bit more and wonder why I picked him up. I suppose because he was a familiar face.

  “You got a gal?” he asks. People keep asking me that. I wish they would stop.

  “Not anymore.”

  “She give you the heave-ho, huh? Been there. What’d you do to piss her off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You best find out, dude, or the next one’s gonna dump you too.”

  Next one?

  He says, “Nothing happens but what there’s a reason for it. Like, you picking me up both coming and going. You think that’s a coincidence?”

  “I don’t know what else it could be.”

  “Me neither, but it’s damn sure something.”

  “You don’t believe in coincidences?”

  “Sure, I do. But I don’t believe they’re coincidental, know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Just seems like coincidences come at the oddest times.”

  I didn’t think Gaia dumping me was a coincidence, but Knob was right about one thing. There was a reason for it.