“A1A.”
Errol got a ride right away in a dry-cleaning van that took him as far as Homestead and could have taken him to Key Largo if he hadn’t got out early, abruptly, at a stoplight. He had been closely watched for miles in sidelong glances and gazes by the driver, a large, somewhat-handsome man who, with his carefully combed hair and clueless lopsided smile, resembled the young Ronald Reagan. Errol’s discomfort mounted until he felt compelled to explain his dishevelment. “I lost my boat, all my clothes and supplies. I’m afraid I’m a mess until I can get a shower and a change.” The man smiled at him for a long time before speaking.
“It don’t matter, son,” he said in an easy drawl, “I’m gonna fuck you anyway.” He spoke with relaxed confidence. Errol thought it best to consider this a settled plan until he could collect his thoughts. When the man reached toward him, Errol took his wrist and replaced it, saying, “Not now.” Watching the approaching stoplight, he asked, “Mind if I play the radio?”
“Baby, knock yourself out.”
Errol reached for the dial and wound around until he found one of several ranting evangelists. At the stoplight, he lifted the door handle and twisted the volume knob high. The radio poured out the screech to the hell-bound out yonder in radio land: Repent! The driver covered his ears, and Errol stepped onto the Dixie Highway with a grateful wave. Acknowledging him with a grim nod, the driver of the dry cleaner’s van turned down the volume, followed by a hand flap of dismissal, bent to see up to the light, and drove off on green.
He walked for a while until he came to the old stone castle, a mess of erratic limestone shapes he had once visited with Denise because of its reputation as the work of either (1) space aliens or (2) a Latvian immigrant. The latter proved to be the case, and the banality of his achievement was enhanced by the theory that it was a “monument to unrequited love.” That is why Denise made the wry suggestion in the first place, and she successfully searched the grounds for a cranny where intimacies were possible. He hadn’t really thought of her since he’d jacked off in his hand back on the island. They once sat in adjoining rocking chairs made entirely of limestone, so heavy that once you started them rocking they would go on without you. But just seeing it again—the huge stone gate, the rocks shaped like zodiac signs, and Florida vegetation taking it all back—gave Errol a hard-to-define heartache, time, time, time slipping away.
He had not gone far down Old Dixie Highway when he found a homeless shelter and the smell of food. He hesitated and then thought he wouldn’t last long without nourishment, so he went in to be promptly and cheerfully questioned by a nun at the front desk. He said he was hungry, and she said, “We’ll get to that once we issue you an ID tag!” She made one up on the spot and pinned it on him, ERROL HEALY, IN TRANSITION. She asked if he needed assistance recovering identification papers, if he would like some foot lotion, a phone card, legal advice, a place to sleep, or mail service. He wailed, “I want something to eat.”
“Our casserole program is just winding up. Head down the corridor; double doors on the right.”
“Where’re you from?” he asked to allay the effect of his cry for food.
“God loves us wherever we’re from,” she said with a laugh. “But okay, Green Bay, Wisconsin. I came for the climate.”
The dining hall was almost empty, but the sound of silverware stopped as he entered. Maybe twelve elderly people in two groups, one black and one Cuban, separated by language and folding chairs. A casserole remained on the steam table, and Errol cut himself a piece, cheese, sausage, tomato, which he gobbled despite its blandness, followed by glass after glass of sweet iced tea. A corrugated shield had been pulled down behind the steam table, and raucous voices could be heard from behind it. The fluorescent tubes lighting the room had a tremor that seemed connected to something inside Errol, and he glanced around wondering if some bulbs were better to sit under than others. He ate more than he wanted, hoping the calories would last and keep propelling footsteps or awkward conversations if he found rides.
Refreshed altogether, he walked past the front desk, where the same nun, working at a ledger, said, “Go Packers,” and he dropped off his ID tag. She smiled without looking up, and he was back in the rising heat of Route A1A, the Old Dixie Highway. He stood with his thumb out in front of streaming southbound traffic, cars, vans, motor homes; the police slowed but didn’t stop. The reflected heat from the pavement had begun to make him dizzy when a black Lincoln pulled over, well ahead of him by the time it got itself out of traffic; it wasn’t until he was already in its backseat that he saw Dr. and Mrs. Higueros, still in their anomalous sportfishing togs. Dr. Higueros at close range was still young, but quite old fashioned and friendly in a courtly way. They’d overnighted at a Super 8 in Pompano and showed him postcards: the Barefoot Mailman, bathing beauties picking oranges.
“Where are you going?” the doctor asked with a smile.
“Where are you going?” Errol shot back. Mrs. Higueros smiled rigidly; the decision to pick up a dirty stranger had not been hers, and Errol felt it when she muttered something to her husband about “ ’ippies.”
“To our family in Key West. Can we drop you along the way?”
Errol said, “Key West would be fine.”
* * *
—
Dr. Juan Higueros loved to make the noise of crushing the Styrofoam with both fists as he gathered the debris from their lunch. His raft had been made buoyant with Styrofoam, and he sometimes spoke of his love of Styrofoam with a wistful grin as he added that his family had always collected Styrofoam. “Did you put this on a tab?” Errol asked. Juan nodded. “Let me get one. I’m behind.”
“Sure, and what’s going on with Angela?”
“All good. Nothing new. I don’t know how they can stand it there. The sun never comes out. I get a cold just from visiting.”
“You’re a new grandpa. You have to go. You only need warmer clothes and lots of them.” This went all the way back to catching a ride with Dr. and Mrs. Higueros, when the doctor spoke just enough English to gently needle the dirty hippie in the backseat.
LITTLE BIGHORN
In a four-door clunker that would have perfectly served a salesman from State Farm Insurance, Coral and I drove from Ohio through what I think of as the Old Midwest, small colleges on the only hill in town; farmhouses with neglected woodlots and haunted outbuildings, like the writhing structures in Burchfield paintings; towns that had lost their caregivers but were still inhabited by the old, shuffling along unrepaired sidewalks to a post office they hoped would not be taken away; ostentatious courthouses with pigeons in the empty windows and vacant doorways. I’m not sure Coral cared about this extravagant pathos. This was her last trip before law school, and she wanted to keep it light.
“That was a bank,” said Coral. A tattoo parlor now. Coral had a tattoo, a little one, rarely seen. I’d seen it. I didn’t know who else had. She got it in Prague. “How about it? Something for your neck?” Across the way was a cannon, fetched home from the Civil War, even as the bodies were left in the ground down south. My thoughts lingered on the soft-blue skies and clouds of Ohio that must have once cheered these little places. A roadside marker celebrating the optimism of Johnny Appleseed just seemed cruel. Coral, fanning herself with the road map, and staring at yet another Evangelical church, asked if Jesus was making these people fat. The harder light of the Dakotas would be less melancholy, fewer people to fill the air with their vanished hopes. The windshield and satellite radio would press everything but the flattened images of landscape into the background. I don’t know why I felt this way. Perhaps, it was a foreboding based on leaving home and the whole idea of Idaho.
We had only taken one long road trip before, and it ended in disaster. I think she may be claustrophobic, but in any case, she went on a rant about absolutely everything. That was one of those autumn–in–New England trips, and the truth is neither of us was very interested in anything about New England, especially the little towns and
churches. I remember a lot of Halloween shit in doorways; so that’s when it was—November—and no sunshine. We started by arguing about what to have on the radio, and it went on to some sort of irrational abhorrence of New England itself, altogether ridiculous, as we know zip about New England, but we couldn’t stop arguing. In a chowder joint near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, road weary and tired of talking, I asked Coral how she felt about the witchcraft trials, and thinking I was referring to her, she blew sky high. I said, “That’s it, I’m driving home.” And Coral said, “Hasta la vista.” And I left, car and all. I so seldom feel actual rage that I might have been a tad pleased with myself. Anyway, the gauntlet was down, and she had credit cards. The next stop was to have been Salem, but if she figured that out, I never heard about it.
A short time afterward, she went off to Europe with a sly frat boy from Denison. They made several stops before coming home: Versailles, the Hermitage in Russia, Prague, and a Battle of the Bulge tour, which must have been a real hoot: the only evidence of the trip I ever saw, a photograph of Coral and Mr. Slyboots in front of a German tank. I took her back, though we don’t say that these days. Perhaps, Coral returned herself to me. Do such things clear the air? Hardly, but we were doing quite well, considering.
I was headed to my new job in Boise, but on the way we would visit old friends Niles and Claudia in Montana, who were joining us on a trip to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Our shared past seemed a big part of our lives, and maybe they’d restore some of the excitement of earlier days. I suppose it was my idea that we needed restoration. Coral had little interest in the visit, and anyway, from Boise she’d be flying back to school, and so we’d have to find a way to work it out. Time with friends from more ardent times would help to carry us over.
In college, Niles and Claudia were hard-partying style mavens who seemed to live on the edge of disaster. Now it was woodstoves, homemade clothes, and life off the grid. Niles acquired found-art things, like a decommissioned iron lung from a medical museum in Youngstown, Ohio. They were each from different parts of the upper South, Niles from a family of recently risen professional people—two doctors and a judge—and Claudia from old, landholding, jobless, bourbon aristocrats and dilettante politicians with ancestors in the Confederate Congress. Sometimes, when they talked about home and their “people,” you sensed Claudia thought Niles’s family was all toadies no matter what they’d achieved, while Niles thought Claudia’s people were parasites who had pauperized themselves with alcohol, horses, and quail. Sometimes Claudia made up stories about the sources of Niles’s family’s wealth, the most farfetched that they had made a fortune by patenting an African American folk remedy for stool softener, the only family in West Tennessee with a porta-potty in their coat of arms.
Coral and I, pallid midwesterners, spent less time partying and more time in bed in our garret above the knitting store with its view of the tire repair shop, practicing as much safe sex as schoolwork allowed. My father and grandfather were anxious for me to join their fading iron-ore business and from time to time sent their viceroy, an alcoholic CPA with tobacco-stained teeth, to urge me to “take advantage of my advantages.” The old mine would barely provide a living. I needed a job.
The Black Hills were lovely out of nowhere, and after resisting roadside invitations to powwows, cave tours, and cliff diving, we stopped to eat at a café with a handwritten menu and Cinzano awnings. We had the luncheon special, called Aces and Eights after the cards held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was killed, elsewhere known as a cheeseburger with fries. Soon back in our car, we drove in silence for nearly one hundred miles. Then Coral said, “It’s not travel, it’s not anything.”
“Go ahead and roll down the window. Let’s see if there’s any reception.” I was daydreaming about Claudia and her air of mischievous promise. “Prick tease with a drawl,” Coral had once said.
We crossed the Montana line, and it looked the same as South Dakota. We knew that it got better up ahead, but so far our impatience compressed everything. We drove as though we were beating our heads against the same freeze-frame; Coral wasn’t taking it well. She leaned against the door and moaned. She nodded to herself and asked, “Is that the arms of our Lord behind those clouds?” She fluttered her lips with her forefinger to suggest derangement.
Niles went on to graduate school while Claudia worked answering the phone in a nail salon; but she still said “Yay!” a lot. And “Boo!” I thought it was cute, Coral not so much. We watched the presidential elections together, and every time Tim Russert put up a card representing the delegate count from one state or another, Claudia yelled either “Yay” or “Boo.” By the time we learned who the new president was, Coral and I were ready to jump out of our skins. We just wanted one of these goobers to win and put us out of our misery. Every other night Russert praised his father, Big Russ, who was a saint, wise, generous, self-effacing. After one too many anecdotes about Big Russ’s goodness, Claudia drawled, “If big Russ doesn’t fuck the babysitter, I’m gonna kill myself.” One more election and Coral would be a lawyer; in two more, a judge; by then Niles and Claudia would be back in Tennessee with other people. Nothing we could possibly have imagined.
Coral was at the wheel as we turned in at their mailbox, and I was riding shotgun with a huge bag of caramel corn on my lap. It rained a little, and the dirt road up to their house, mostly dark except where overhanging trees had kept it dry, was cut into the side of a hill and wound upward until suddenly it opened on a clearing with a view of the valley and the scattered small town below. In the middle of the clearing stood their house, an old bungalow with various modern appurtenances: attached greenhouse, solar panels, and, flapping away, the customary Tibetan prayer flags. A weathervane on the roof seemed to have been modeled on Sputnik, spinning around without pointing anywhere.
When you haven’t seen people for a long while, even old friends, dauntingly precise adjustment is required, something akin to acting. The struggle to get out of my side of the car caused me to upset the generous sack of caramel corn. Coral cut her eyes at me. But by now Niles was on the porch, I was standing in the caramel corn, and Coral was calling out that I had made a big mess as usual. Claudia stood a pace behind Niles so that she could gaze directly at me.
Niles viewed our arrival without enthusiasm. Claudia stared into the middle distance. Coral muttered from the safety of her open car door, “What on earth is going on here? They’re staring at us. Let’s appear puzzled. Show them your puzzle face!”
We strode up and hugged them as though whatever was missing we would replenish by the vehemence of our greeting. We squeezed away at the lifeless couple, and then held them at arm’s length like two fish we had just caught. Niles, head thrust from the top of his turtleneck, said, “Here’s the news: Claudia and I are not getting along. We thought we could sort it out before you got here but, well, we didn’t.” Later I would picture this thrusting head and high-colored face. “Doubtless,” Niles continued, “Claudia is as vexed with me as I with her.” Mystified by Niles’s diction, I asked what we should do about the caramel corn. I just couldn’t think of what else to say.
“We need some space,” recited Niles. His turtleneck suggested a maddening jauntiness. “If you could take Claudia with you, it would do us both a world of good. Would you consider it?” He smiled in the way of comedians who wished to convey that they weren’t sure this was a joke. “Would you? Pretty please?”
“Why not?” said Coral. It didn’t sound like her. It was just a squawk and seemed directed at me. She knew as well as I that we were hosed. I kept nodding without saying anything.
“This is friendship,” said Niles, discovering some lint on his woolen carpenter’s vest. He frowned skeptically as if his own observation had been foisted on him, then smiled abruptly. “Guys, I can’t believe you’re doing this. As I recall, your last road trip went badly.” I looked to Coral for a response, but it was not forthcoming.
We went back down the same highway heading for th
e Little Bighorn Battlefield. Claudia in the backseat with her small suitcase said, “We’ll be fine. Niles is a bore, but I’m used to it. People like that come out of nowhere.” Coral swapped moisturizers with Claudia to lighten the atmosphere, then touched the end of her nose in thought. “Honestly, we’ve just been in that awful place too long. An audience of one, the shack nasties. Too many books, especially that long one about the Danube. Ask me anything about the Danube.” She turned to me and asked if my teeth were mine while I recalled “The Blue Danube Waltz” thinking it would contain a hint about where the fuck the Danube was. “They seem brighter than before. Niles collects stuff no one wants. He thinks that if he dislikes something it will soon be valuable. He moved the iron lung into the living room. He gets in it and thinks about the stock market while it breathes for him. Coral, how would you like ten years with a premature ejaculator?”
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