Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  Still, I’m glad I say it, glad it pleases him, and I think it does, for before I turn away, I squeeze his shoulder and he meets my eyes and smiles just slightly, and for a moment in the cab’s deceptive light, he resembles that other person, the boy and young man I knew better, George A. Payne, my brother, whom I lost sight of through the long, long, selfish middle of the story he comes back so briefly at the end of.

  So now I whistle up Leon, who gains the high seat of the truck with one lithe spring, and the high beams splash the birches as we set off across the culvert and ride our groaning, overloaded rigs downhill, and I check the sideviews for him for the first time, and smell the meadows for the last one. And, oh, I want to slow it down, I want to make the clocks stop or reverse, but it’s no more possible than making the brook run backward up the slope of Northeast Mountain. Why do I want to slow what long since happened? Perhaps because if I don’t put it down in cold, hard words on paper, I don’t have to finally accept that it ever really happened.

  So the hard part of the journey follows in these next two hours, driving, dog-tired in the dark, down those winding secondaries through upstate New York with rigs that are unfamiliar and overloaded. All that passes without incident, with flying colors even, and in Albany we hit the Thruway, my jaw unclenches, my shoulders drop, my grip eases on the wheel, and we take 88 toward Binghamton, beyond which lie six hundred miles of interstate straight through to North Carolina.

  We spend two more hours on the road that night, and toward midnight, George A. flashes his brights at me, our signal, and we pull over at a rest stop and he says he needs to turn in, and we take the first exit we come to in Binghamton. I’ve been listening to election results come in on NPR, and Gore is winning, so in the motel parking lot, I do a little victory dance for George A., and he, a Bush man, smiles and nods sportingly, and lights a cigarette and watches through narrowed eyes, and doesn’t seem to take it personally.

  I remember that motel now, a Super 8 that in the lobby seems like any other. After we get our keys, though, we pass along the outer balcony, rolling our clacking bags behind us, past whole wings that are cordoned off and undergoing renovation, a construction moonscape. Outside his door, we say good night and hug, two back-claps, brisk as always, though I hold them in my memory. I kiss him on the hair above his ear the way I did when he was four and I was seven.

  –Sleep tight, buddy.

  –You, too, David.

  I roll on, and George A. goes off to sleep his last sleep in his clothes in a Super 8 just off the interstate in Binghamton.

  I wake at five, my usual hour, shower, and sit outside and watch the sunrise by the pool—Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged . . . no water and no lotos rising, just a Hurricane fence with green plastic webbing, just a red sky at morning, and not a very threatening one, just a smoggy smudge of one in the east, mellowing to gray overcast on an unseasonably warm day in a roadside motel in America with the whoosh of traffic and exhaust smells wafting off the highway: November 8, 2000. And years later someone will tell me, in connection with events in Florida—hanging chads and so forth—that Mercury was retrograde then, that that was why for the first and only time in two hundred years the Republic botched an election.

  I remember checking and rechecking my watch—6 A.M., 7, 7:30, 8. We have six hundred miles to go, ten hours if we push it. Thinking back, it’s the sole annoyance I recall from those eight days. Finally, around 8:30, my usual lunch hour, George A. joins me in the common room, teeming at that hour with heavy businessmen and traveling salesmen, high-mileage types like Bill, our father. And how many such motels, I wonder, driving how many trucks and U-Haul trailers that have gone missing from the company, has Ahasuerus lain down in and spread his tools out on the floor and looked around for signs and omens and reversed the handles if he had to to correct the mojo. Maybe the old man was onto something, too bad we don’t have him with us. We don’t, though, so we pour our milk on stale Froot Loops from the cloudy bin, as overhead the TV blares and tells us that the tide has turned his way for Bush by now, but, George A., subdued with sleep and mellow in my recollection, doesn’t gloat, he merely smiles and nods and shows forbearance, declining to retaliate for my end-zone victory dance the night before.

  So we’re back out on the highway now, caravanning, me ahead and George A. following down 81, a straight shot from Binghamton and into Pennsylvania near Scranton; down to Lebanon, under the gray overcast, and it’s warm enough to keep the windows open; down through those lush fields with the stone barns the Amish built to last forever, decorating them with hex signs for magical protection; down through Harrisburg and Carlyle and across the Susquehanna where Lee sat, grieving, upon Traveller and watched the remnant of the Army of Virginia pass after Gettysburg, the same route I took with Bill and Margaret once upon a time, only in the opposite direction. And already we’re in Maryland, which passes in an eye blink as the dotted lines fly like tracer rounds and pass harmless underneath the axles. And somewhere between Maryland and the West Virginia panhandle toward 1 P.M., as I check my mirrors—left, then right, then straight ahead back through the windshield—George A.’s high beams flash and we pull off for gas and I ask him where he wants to eat and he chooses Taco Bell. He orders a couple of burritos, and we eat together standing at the counter, and I note the way he wolfs them, spilling a little and licking salsa off his fingers. I remember thinking at the time he’s let his hygiene slip, it seems of a piece with sleeping in his clothes, and only years later will it occur to me that in those eight days we spent together I’d never seen him eat that way any other time, that it may have nothing to do with hygiene slippage, but rather with the fact that he’s tired and overstressed from so much driving. He seems okay, but maybe I’m not paying close enough attention, which is another place my judgment must be questioned, where I must question it, and you must question me if you are going with us. And don’t hesitate to judge me as severely as I judged my brother, and maybe if you do, and if I can prove with your concurrence that I’m to blame for what’s about to happen, I can finally get some peace from the acceptance that I must have wanted this and caused it by some mystic spell or intervention. For didn’t I put my silver six-gun to my mother’s belly when she warned me he was coming, and haven’t I been angry with him ever since for winning her, and haven’t I wished him harm a thousand times in the moonlit underwater seven-eighths that drives the iceberg through the ocean?

  Though in my heart I know it was an accident, unwished and uncontrollable by me or anyone, still, if I only notice how George A. eats and draw the right conclusion, we might stop right here in Maryland or West Virginia, but I don’t notice, and it’s too late now, we’re on the road again and crossing into endless, high Virginia. We’re heading down the flank of the Blue Ridge through Winchester, Front Royal, Harrisonburg, up there where our father’s father’s people come from, and things at the end are circling back to resemble those at the beginning. And we’re just a stone’s throw from Woodberry now where George A. had his glory game and made eleven tackles and first got sick and saw Bill with his U-Haul trailer in the motel parking lot, who wasn’t really there and maybe that’s why George A. saw him, because Bill never really was, and George A. needed a real father as much and maybe even more than I did. We’re only an hour north of Roanoke now, and from there it’s a straight shot south down 220 to Greensboro, and an hour farther on lies Hillsborough, home, this house where Stacy’s waiting, with whom I’m starting over. Three and a half more hours, the hard part’s behind us, we’ll be home by dark, I’m tired but starting to feel excited. Who knows, tonight maybe I’ll get lucky in the big bed, and even if I don’t, I’ll get to hold my children, my daughter, two, and my infant son just four months old, I barely know him, but I want to, I want to be more than a phantom to my children. And George A., who lost his own wife and marriage, has helped me get here; when the Mayflower men and the big van were no more feasible than a summer on the Riviera, he’s
made it possible for me to get this chance to save my marriage and to be a father to my children and to watch them grow and help them and to have a life that’s something more than an alchemical relation with a mountain and a Taoist voyage into the astral planes inside me.

  We’re an hour north of Roanoke where the homestretch starts, and it’s coming on to 3 P.M., and we’re approaching Lexington where Bill lived for a year in high school. I’m listening to the election updates on NPR, and they’re increasingly troubling, and also keeping tabs on George A. in the mirrors—left, right, then straight ahead back through the windshield, every ten or fifteen seconds. I’m waiting for his brights to flash, being vigilant, you know, but they never do, it doesn’t happen that way, how you think it will, and the signals you prearrange to keep yourself and others safe according to the ur-control scenario are finally only magical and have no bearing on the outcome. And, oh, I want to slow it down, I can’t though, the clock is ticking, it’s coming on to 3 o’clock, we’re approaching the first exit coming into Lexington on 81, up there in the Shenandoah where our father’s father’s people come from, where Bill went looking for himself after he lost us, hauling a trailer like the trailer George A.’s hauling, full of things I think are indispensable, things I think I need, a dryer and a washer, how I wish I’d left them, left mirror, right mirror, straight ahead back through the windshield, every ten or fifteen seconds, four times a minute for twelve hours—almost three thousand times—I’ve looked for George A. in the mirror, and he’s been there, okay, each time till this one.

  This time, when I check, there’s something different in the mirror, not so different, though, not really even worrisome, George A.’s drifted just a bit across the line onto the shoulder. How many times, though, have you done this, or seen someone do it in the car ahead of you, a small lapse of attention followed by a quick recovery, and maybe you step on the gas and pass the other driver with an angry look or gesture, and maybe he shrugs as if to say, I’m sorry, or flips you off for being angry and intolerant. You know how it is, though, you go on down the road and thirty seconds later, when your pulse recovers, it’s as if it never happened. This is how it is now, and this is the box in which I start to put what’s happening in the mirror before I glance back through the windshield. Maybe George A.’s reaching for the lighter, maybe to change the channel on the radio, maybe after those burritos and six or seven hours on the road he’s a little drowsy and nods off for just a moment and comes to on the shoulder and scares himself and jerks the wheel too hard as he comes back toward the center of the highway . . . What happens, I’ll never know, but the next time I look, as George A. comes back from the shoulder, the single motion of the Explorer and the trailer becomes two motions, the synchrony is broken, but still it isn’t troubling, the U-Haul simply woozes toward the center of the road as the Explorer woozes back toward the shoulder, it’s all so slow and languid, though there are two motions now, not one, both seem unthreatening, though I have a sinking feeling as I watch them in the mirror. And then the trailer’s inboard side nudges slightly up the way you nudge a shoulder when you’re putting on a backpack. It rocks up on a wheel and comes back down and sways a bit, like a gymnast in a dismount in the moment between sticking it or stumbling, and in the two, almost three thousand times I’ve checked those mirrors there’s been no moment and no motion such as this one, so I’m no longer staring through the windshield or using the right mirror, I’m watching this with fixed attention in the left one, and though the motion’s troubling now, it’s still recoverable, still in the realm of the close call you’ve had if not a thousand or a hundred times, once or twice at least, and you’re still here to tell the story.

  The next thing in the mirror, though, I’ve never seen or been in, and the voice that says it’s still recoverable is starting to seem less and less rational, more like a magical incantation. After a couple of those slow and woozy motions that I tell myself are really not that worrisome, the trailer cracks the Explorer like a whip in a sharp violent motion and the Explorer jackknifes and turns perpendicular to traffic, and whatever near misses I’ve had or seen or been in, I’ve never seen or been in anything like this one, and I’m watching in the big side mirror, chanting, No, huh-uh, no, no, aloud or maybe only silently even as another voice inside me whispers, It’s going to be okay, because it has to be so he can be so I can be according to the ur-control scenario. Watching this in helpless disbelief and terror, I will everything to go back to normal and recover, requiring God to make this restoration out of fairness, as the Explorer, moving at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour, is coming sideways down the highway perpendicular to traffic. And suddenly upended by its own wheels, it rolls and crashes on its top and begins to fly and bounce and fly and bounce, leaping and spinning with horrible exuberance that makes the universe seem under the control of something joyful and malignant and comes to rest on the passenger side against the safety railing, and the trailer, which has broken from the hitch, goes down the center of the highway round and round like a dervish with the yoke and safety chain striking sparks off the roadbed.

  As I pull the big truck onto the right shoulder, Leon, my brindled hound, looks up at me as if to say, Why are we stopping . . .?

  Now from the enclosed cab out into the world, into the exhaust smells, the whizzing sound of traffic, underneath the muggy gray November overcast. I climb down from the truck and hurry across the highway from the right shoulder to the left one, not darting because my knees no longer dart, where cars are whooshing by at seventy-five and eighty miles an hour, though some of them, by now, are slowing, the drivers and passengers looking intensely in their mirrors, the rearview and the side one, or rolling down their windows and pointing back with animation. I’m moving up the left shoulder, not exactly running, but a sort of power walk, my shot joints jarring with every step that used to take me twelve or fifteen on any given Sunday. There’s gravel and then glass shards crunching underneath my shoe soles, and I can see the Explorer on its side against the railing with the upper wheels still turning. As I draw near, there’s debris along the roadbed, pieces of my life with Stacy, like flotsam where the ship sank. Is it now or later that I see the Zip disk? I really can’t remember. If I do, I’m pretty sure that I don’t pick it up yet, nor does it occur to me to wonder how it’s come to be there, how it got out of the drive bay of the computer and through the rolled-up windows to land here, thirty yards behind the accident, and since I don’t pick it up I don’t yet see the red flecks I notice later.

  Instead, I’m thinking, George A. may be hurt, I have to get him out, but he’s okay, okay, I think I’m preparing myself to see him, preparing what I’m going to say . . .

  –George A., are you all right?

  –I don’t know, I think so, just get me out of here.

  –Okay, don’t worry, help is on the way. Hold on. I hear the sirens coming.

  This is the conversation I’m having with him in my head, trying to ward off the sinking feeling, but, oh, it’s getting deeper as I near the car, and traffic in the other lane is slowing, people are gawking out their windows, their curiosity is so human and so horrible, it offends me deeply, though I know they mean no harm, they’re just glad it’s someone else, not them, the same way I’d be. Only today it’s me, and it’s George A. Today’s the day the spell breaks and we’re all alone before the Urals.

  And here I am, and there he is, slumped from the driver’s side into the passenger seat as though asleep. Still in his safety belt, his waist and feet are higher than his head, which is almost at the level of the road, and I kneel and touch his shoulder through the shattered windshield, I call his name and press and press and call again.

  –George A.? George A.?

  Though Stacy’s brother, later, at the salvage yard, will warn me away from the Explorer with a look, at the scene I remember very little blood. George A.’s eyes are closed, slightly tensed as though bracing for impact. He has a serious expression,
like someone with a bone to pick who’s starting to realize you aren’t going to see his side of it. Clearly, he’s unconscious, he looks almost like a boxer who’s received a KO punch, only any moment, when they break the ammonia capsule beneath his nose, he’s going to startle to, and look around, and get it, only on the seat beside my brother’s head there’s a small puddle of clear fluid, and it troubles me, I can’t think what it is, it isn’t water, it’s thicker than water. I’ll later wonder if it might have been brain fluid, but it would have been bloody in that case, wouldn’t it, and the puddle isn’t bloody, it’s clear as water, only thicker. Is that when I notice? I think so. George A.’s feet—still behind the pedals—are tremoring, not violently or spastically, but very gently, very softly, the sort of tremoring that suggests things winding down, things concluding, not recovering. A dire feeling comes over me, a feeling like the shadow of black wings passing overhead, above the scene, the sort of wings that leave frost behind them on the earth, on every blade of scarce-created grass the passing shadow touches . . .

  –George A.? I say again. George A.?

  Kneeling there, calling through the broken windshield, I hold his hand, almost a third again as big as mine, and warm the same way mine is. There’s a woman standing over me, reaching down to touch my shoulder, regarding me with an expression I don’t want to see. She’s trying to coax me away from him, speaking in a gentle voice, the way you’d speak to a child or to a frightened animal, not condescending, just gently, respectfully coaxing me to rise and come away and leave my brother here, and I know what this coaxing means, somewhere inside I do in the small, small place where I’m still sane, the small, small place where I’m not casting ancient spells of prophylaxis and reversal according to the ur-control scenario, where is where I am right now, in the magic kingdom that I’m the king and only god of, where nothing ever happens except as I command it, and nothing can ever hurt me so long as I stay inside the magic circle, and maybe that’s why something inside me larger than I am bids me to go back now to that awful scene upon that awful highway to suffer now what I didn’t suffer then because I wasn’t really there the first time.