The Driving Lesson

by Ben Rehder

  “Hey.”

  I turned around. Michele was coming up behind me, wearing a white tank top, a denim skirt, and sandals. She looked great. Her hair was hanging loose around her tan, freckled shoulders.

  “Hey,” I said back.

  She sat beside me. “My mom totally busted me. She knew a boy was in the house.” Then, before I could say anything, she said, “Just kidding. So what’s the deal? Your grandpa doesn’t want the pills?”

  She wasn’t being catty about it, just being curious, because I hadn’t told her much through Matt. He’d messaged her, and she had immediately messaged back, and I told Matt what to say, and here we were.

  I said, “Well, Opa wanted me to tell you he said thanks, but he didn’t think he should take them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mostly because they aren’t his. He’s really...I don’t know how to explain it. He’s very principled. He just always does what he thinks is right. More than any other person I know.”

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  “I think so. Sometimes it’s a pain.”

  “I was doing what I thought was right, too, you know. When I gave you the pills.”

  “Yeah, I know. He knows that, too. It meant a lot to him that you were willing to do that. To me, too. It meant a lot to me.”

  I took the prescription bottle out of my pocket and handed it to her. She stuck it in the small purse she was carrying.

  Now what?

  “This is a pretty neat park,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s okay. There are a couple of tennis courts over there.” She pointed vaguely past a grove of trees.

  “Do you play?” I asked.

  “District champion.”

  “Really?”

  “You bet. Two years in a row. How do you think I got these great legs?”

  I’m pretty sure she was just trying to make me turn red. Which I did.

  “I’m glad I got to see you again,” I said, and somehow, it didn’t sound as dorky as it might have.

  She cocked her head to one side and looked at me. “You wanna see the peace gardens?”

  “The what?”

  On one side of the park, along the banks of the Jordan River, was a place called the International Peace Gardens. I’ll do my best to describe it. It was basically separate garden areas — with statues and sculptures, arbors and crushed gravel walkways — representing the cultures of various countries. I thought it would be corny, but it was actually pretty cool. Everything was lush and healthy and colorful, with more kinds of flowers than I can name or remember.

  The Chinese garden had a pair of concrete lions acting as sentries on either side of a pagoda. The Swiss garden centered around a towering rock monument shaped like the Matterhorn. The Dutch garden featured a windmill and a gigantic wooden shoe filled with tulips.

  “They have a lot of weddings in the gardens,” Michele said.

  We were sitting on a bench in the Indian garden, which featured a large statue of Buddha. We hadn’t seen anybody else in at least ten minutes. The sun was below the tree line.

  “Yeah, I can see why.” It was very quiet here. Maybe the plants somehow sucked up the noise of the surrounding city.

  “People get married in the garden that represents where their ancestors came from. Like people with German ancestors get married in the German garden.”

  “Makes sense. But what if the man is from Sweden and the woman is from Canada?”

  “Maybe they have the wedding in one garden and the reception in the other.”

  I noticed that her thigh was touching my thigh, and I didn’t think it was an accident. She was right earlier when she said she had great legs.

  “If I were to get married here,” Michele said, “it would be in the Scottish garden.”

  “You’re Scottish?”

  “On my mom’s side. We don’t know about my dad’s side because he was adopted.”

  She was just making small talk. I knew that. She was making small talk until I worked up the nerve to kiss her. Why was it so hard, even when I was fairly certain she wanted me to do it?

  “We’re mostly English,” I said. “I had one great-grandmother who was German, but most of my ancestors were English.”

  “Top of the morning to you,” she said, in a really poor accent.

  “That sounds more like Irish.”

  “It does? How do you tell the difference?”

  “Well, one’s English and one’s Irish.”

  She bumped me with her elbow. “Smartass. Let’s hear you do it.”

  I made a big show of preparing myself, like an actor getting ready to go on stage. Then I did my best Austin Powers imitation. “Allow myself to introduce...myself. My name is Richie Cunningham, and this is my wife, Oprah.”

  It worked. Michele started to laugh. Hard. So, of course, I kept going.

  “This is me in a nutshell: ‘Help, I’m in a nutshell! How did I get into this bloody great big nutshell? What kind of shell has a nut like this?’”

  It feels good to make a pretty girl crack up like that. Finally, when she stopped, she said, “So, not to be a downer, but when are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  We both sat quietly for a minute.

  “I worry about you and your grandpa in that car.”

  “It runs great. We’ll be fine.”

  “No, what I mean is, if anything’s going to get you caught, it’s the car. The police will be looking for that car, and they seem to have a pretty good idea where you’re going.”

  “There’s not much we can do about that. There’s no way we can get another car.”

  Buddha seemed to be staring at me. I wondered what he was thinking.

  “Will you stay in touch?” Michele asked.

  “If I’m not in prison.”

  She laughed again. I was on a roll. “You’d look cute in those striped clothes they make prisoners wear.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, I do think.”

  “I don’t think they use stripes anymore. I’m pretty sure they make them wear orange, which would totally clash with my complexion.”

  She took my chin in her hand and turned my head from side to side, appearing to examine the tone of my skin. “I’d say you’re a spring. You need to wear warm colors.”

  Our faces were about a foot apart.

  “Warm colors?” I said. “What does that mean?”

  “Peaches. Yellows. Like that.”

  And that’s when I finally worked up the guts. Turns out Mormons kiss just like everybody else.

  16

  “This is way cool,” I said.

  “I told you it would be.”

  “I had no idea.”

  It was nine-thirty on Friday morning, and Opa and I were more than one hundred miles west of Salt Lake City, driving through the Bonneville Salt Flats. We’d gotten up early, but before we’d left, we were faced with a question: Which way to go?

  At this point, there were only so many routes to choose from, unless we got completely off the interstates in favor of smaller roads. As usual, it was a balance. We didn’t want to waste much time, but we didn’t want to get caught, either.

  Interstate 15 up to I-84 was the shortest, most obvious route, but that was the problem with it: It was the most obvious route. We didn’t want to be obvious. Sticking on I-15 all the way into Montana, then taking a left on I-90 — that would’ve been my second choice.

  But Opa had suggested going west on I-80 out of Salt Lake City so we could see the salt flats. In fact, he was fairly insistent on it.

  “Then what?” I’d asked, looking at the map. “Take I-80 all the way over to Sacramento? That’s gotta be four or five hundred miles out of the way.”

  “No, we’ll take one of these state highways,” he said, pointing. “I think 95 looks good.”

  “Which will take us back to I-84, and I thought we agreed to avoid that.”

  “Then we could just stay on 95 into Idaho, past
Clearwater National Forest. We can work our way over to Spokane, then take 2 over to Seattle, or pretty close.”

  “That doesn’t look like much of a highway,” I said.

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  He seemed to be feeling pretty well this morning, all things considered, but it had become obvious that that could change in a matter of hours, if not minutes. That sort of took the adventure out of me. I just wanted to get him to Seattle as soon as possible. I’d seen two highway patrol vehicles this morning, and I’d held my breath each time, but they’d zipped passed us in the opposite direction without taking notice. How long would our luck hold out? Probably not long if we stayed on the interstates. Ultimately, we’d agreed that we’d take state highways and we’d occasionally jump onto an interstate as necessary. And we’d start that plan just as soon as we’d passed through the salt flats.

  “Is it really just salt?” I asked. As we cruised along the interstate, there was an immense white plain stretching for miles on either side of the car. I’d never seen anything like it.

  “Yep, just like regular old table salt. You could scrape up a handful and throw it on your supper.”

  “Why is it all here?”

  “All of this used to be underwater. The ocean is gone, but the salt was left behind.”

  “But why? I mean, there are a lot of places that were once underwater, right? So why aren’t there salt flats in all those places?”

  “Good question. That’ll give you something to look up later.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Nope. I’m sure there’s a logical reason. Ask your science teacher and see how happy it makes him that you care about something like that.”

  “Her. There’s only one science teacher for sophomores — Mrs. Townsend.”

  “Okay, ask her.”

  I had to smile. “I can’t believe I finally asked a question you couldn’t answer.”

  “Don’t you worry, there are a lot of questions I can’t answer.”

  “Name another.”

  There was only a slight pause before he said, “Okay, how did we get here?”

  “Well, first we went west on I-20 out of Lubbock....”

  He knew I was kidding around. He said, “The thing is, when we don’t know the answer to a question like that, it’s tempting to fill in the blank with...something. Maybe we’ll know the answer someday, and maybe we won’t, but there’s no shame in saying, ‘I don’t know.’ No sense in making something up.”

  There was very little traffic on the interstate, so I was able to go slow and just enjoy the scenery. I found myself gazing at the mountain peaks on the horizon beyond the salt flats. It was like some strange landscape on another planet. Sort of like that scene in Star Wars where Luke is riding that floating vehicle across the plains. I almost expected to look up and see an extra moon in the sky. Okay, not really, I’m just making a point.

  I was thinking about the way the Grand Canyon was formed. “How come there aren’t big ruts through the salt from erosion?”

  “That, I can answer. Every winter, the flats are flooded by a thin layer of water, and that sort of smoothes everything out. When the water evaporates, it’s like a brand new surface. It’s perfect for racing. Ever hear of the Blue Flame?”

  “I think so. It was a rocket car or something.”

  “Yep, and it set the land speed record of more than six hundred miles per hour. That was in 1970. Then, in the nineties, some guy broke the sound barrier over in Nevada.”

  “How fast?”

  “I can’t recall exactly. Seven sixty something.”

  I couldn’t even imagine that. “Man, if we could go that fast, we’d be in Seattle by now.”

  “And just think of everything we would’ve missed,” Opa said.

  He fell asleep for several hours after that, so it was up to me to navigate. When I reached Wells, Nevada, I took 93 up through Twin Falls, Idaho, then I got on I-84. The towns and cities zipped past. Jerome, Wendell, Bliss, Mountain Home. This part of Idaho reminded me of parts of Texas. Not the pretty parts.

  Opa woke a little later, stretched and said, “Where are we?”

  “Coming up on Boise.”

  He nodded and picked up the map.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  He raised his head and truly thought about it. “Pretty darn good, actually. I could use a rest stop soon, and something to eat. After that, I suggest we go west on 20 and eventually work our way over to I-5. They won’t be expecting us to come up from that direction.”

  And that’s what we did. Just thirty minutes after Boise, we crossed over into Oregon, and even though neither of us said anything about it, I considered it a victory of sorts. Oregon was one of the two states that allowed assisted suicide. We’d made it that far. Now, just a little farther. It all seemed within our grasp. By the time we found another mom-and-pop motel in the town of Bend at nine that evening — meaning we were now just six or seven hours from Seattle — I thought we were home free.

  Of course, I was way wrong.

  17

  The state police cruiser appeared behind us at 10:14 the next morning, two hours after we’d left Bend, as we were making our way through the Mt. Hood National Forest on State Highway 26.

  One minute my rearview mirror was empty, and the next I could see a vehicle zooming up on me at tremendous speed. At first I thought it might be a park ranger. But, nope, it was a trooper, in a dark-brown Crown Victoria, with a heavy-duty grille guard and a low-profile light bar on the roof. I was really surprised to see a trooper on that stretch of road meandering through the evergreens, so far from the major highways. He came up on us so fast, as if he were in a hurry to get somewhere, that I was hoping he’d go around our little Honda.

  He didn’t.

  “Opa?”

  He’d had his eyes shut for several miles, but I could tell by his breathing that he wasn’t asleep. “Yeah?”

  “There’s a state trooper behind us.”

  He opened his eyes but he didn’t sit up. “For how long?”

  “He just appeared out of nowhere. Maybe he was hiding somewhere along the road.”

  “Were you speeding?”

  “No.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Just following us. Pretty close, too. Like, right on my bumper.”

  “But no lights on?”

  “Nope.”

  We drove another few hundred yards.

  Opa said, “It’s kind of tough for him to pass right here. Let’s wait and see if he passes when he gets a chance.”

  A half-mile later, there was a stretch where the trooper could have gone around us easily. No traffic at all. He stayed where he was.

  Opa eased up a little straighter and glanced casually into the passenger-side mirror.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s not a lot we can do.”

  “Should I pull over and see if he passes then? If he wants us, why isn’t he turning on his siren?”

  “I don’t know.”

  All I could think of was the Texas license plate on the rear of the car. Might as well be a neon sign. I could clearly see the trooper in the mirror. “It looks like he’s talking to somebody. He has a microphone in his hand, I think.” My voice sounded higher than it normally does. I was nervous.

  “Just settle down, Bud. It’s going to be okay.”

  Several miles went by and the trooper remained behind us. Not doing anything, just following. Close. No lights, no siren.

  The highway widened to four lanes as we approached a small community called Government Camp. The trooper did not pass. On the other side of town, the road went back to two lanes, and that’s when the trooper finally switched on his lights. My mirror was filled with flashing red and blue. Opa let out a little groan. Oddly, I was calmer now than I was before. I’d been expecting this. I kept driving.

  Opa was still watching the trooper in the passenger mir
ror. “Bud?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to pull over?”

  I didn’t answer right away.

  “Bud?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think I ought to?”

  He chuckled, which I wasn’t expecting. “What’s the alternative?”

  “Just keep driving. Not fast. Just like we’re driving now.”

  “Just keep driving?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was giving it some thought. Finally, he said, “That might not be a bad idea.”

  It wasn’t like we were racing around curves. There was no danger to anyone. I wasn’t going to try to outrun the police. That would’ve been crazy. But I wasn’t ready to give up. We were so close. We were about an hour from Portland, and from there it was a straight shot up Interstate 5 to Seattle.

  “Pull over!”

  Boy, I jumped. The trooper was using the loudspeaker mounted behind his front grille, and loudspeaker was absolutely the right name for it. It was like he was sitting in the backseat of our car with a bullhorn.

  “This is the Oregon State Police! Pull over to the side of the road!”

  I didn’t. I wasn’t going to. “Do you think he knows who we are?” I asked Opa.

  “Without a doubt.”

  “So he knows we aren’t dangerous.”

  “Well, he should.”

  We came upon a beat-up old Chevy truck moseying down the highway, but the driver pulled over to the shoulder and let us pass when he saw the trooper’s lights behind us.

  “Will he try to stop us?” I asked.

  “He’s already trying.”

  “No, I mean like run us off the road or something.”

  “I can’t imagine. I think he’s going to be as careful with us as they’ve ever been with anybody.”