by Ann Pearlman
I could ride on this road going nowhere, an oasis from life, forever. I like drifting, not having plans or commitments or appointments. Such a great variance from my life a month ago. There’s an irony in witnessing Tara and Aaron and Smoke and Red Dog and T-Bone hustling and eager about their rendezvous while I ride motionless, my things crammed in the truck.
Rachel is in the car ahead of me driving away from me, going faster than we are. I think about her laughing with Tara and Allie and cuddling with Levy and feel more alone.
Smoke watches the road. Maybe he’s planning to build a drum with some of the tricks that David told him about using goat hide and wood. He flexes his fingers to relax his hands, as though they’re tired from his imagined playing. His palms, even his fingertips, are thickened with calluses. I wonder if he can feel anything.
Maybe after a while you get calluses on your heart and there’s no more pain.
I’d have to stop loving Rachel. Mom. I’d be safe.
I look at the dark side of things. Still.
The land is flat and dry and dustless. The road is a straight shot through uniformity that seems endless.
And then I say, from out of the blue, not even realizing I’m saying it, “I haven’t been with any man but Troy.”
Smoke watches that yellow line. “That’s the way it should be,” he says after awhile. “That’s cool. My wife and I, we were together, partners, before we made love and when we did, it had an awesome . . .” he searches for the word, “sacredness. Not just body rubbing, and getting down, ’cause it is, you know, there’s the chance of a baby, a whole new life, a new human being.”
“I guess I’ll only be with one man.”
“You’re young. You’ll find another.”
I don’t know what young has to do with it. “What about that sacredness?”
He turns to me, those blue eyes of his still a surprise. “You can have that again. It doesn’t have to be just once in a lifetime.” He shrugs. “When you find love, sex is for two things: babies and closeness. Body sharing expands the joining, the partnership of being together.”
I didn’t expect this from him. I don’t know what I’d imagined, but not this. Something more about recreational sex. Maybe a recognition that sex with a new person is scary, but fun. But maybe men don’t experience that. I didn’t anticipate a discourse on the multilevel merger making love offers.
So. I try to imagine experiencing what I’ve shared with Troy with another man, but can’t, and go back to watching telephone poles like crosses lined up on the edge of the road.
And then I hear a siren. I look back, assuming it’s an ambulance, but actually it’s a cop—we’re being pulled over.
Smoke and I have been driving two hours, and we’re just on the other side of the Texas border.
The black and white’s lights whirl red and purple.
“Why’s he pulling us over?” I ask Smoke.
His eyes narrow. “Because he can,” he jeers. “I’m not going that fast. It’s a rental, so the inspection sticker is up to date. I can’t think of another reason.” His upper lip trembles slightly. Only someone close, sitting next to him, could notice.
My Honda and the tour van have disappeared. They’re that far ahead.
A slightly built cop strides toward us. Through the side mirror, I see him put his hat on as he walks. When he gets to Smoke’s window, I notice he’s so young he barely shaves—only his mustache, not his cheeks.
“You were speeding. I clocked you at seventy-five back there.”
We were keeping up with traffic, I think, not going any faster.
“Step out and give me your license,” he says.
That’s not how it’s done. The officer runs the license in the computer in his car while you wait in yours. Smoke slides from under the wheel, moving slower than usual. From the passenger seat, I watch him reach in his back pocket, retrieve his wallet, flip it open, and tug his license from its plastic window.
I wear a dress, just a simple knit dress in bright purple. It was what I saw first in my suitcase this morning when I hunted for the bathroom. I’m still wearing the hoodie, too. Now I realize the skirt has crept to my thigh, and I tug it down when I notice the cop staring. I turn to him and meet his blue eyes. He frowns at me and shakes his head, disapproving. At first, I’m not sure why. My dress at my mid-thigh? How worn I must look from crying? Then I realize it’s being with Smoke, a black man.
I don’t like how the cop glares at me, ignoring Smoke’s license. I only see Smoke’s back. The cop is a few feet away and we face each other.
“Where’re the rental papers?”
I snap open the glove box and pull out folded yellow pages, and hand them to him. I can’t remember whose name is on it, and then I realize it’s Smoke’s. Thomas Johnson. That’s his real name.
And then the cop says, “I want your identification, too.”
“I don’t have to show you my identification. I’m not driving.” I’m trying to think like a lawyer, but I don’t know the laws of Texas. And he has to have probable cause to search the car.
He frowns. Smoke shifts as he inhales.
I start to tell him I’m a lawyer, but just then he says, “Come with me,” to Smoke, and they walk to the patrol car. I watch from the side mirror. In his baggy jean shorts and T-shirt, Smoke looks three times the size of the scrawny cop. The cop puts Smoke in the passenger seat.
The passenger seat? If Smoke were a dangerous criminal, he would simply kill the cop and we’d be on our way. I don’t see why we’d be stopped for going a few miles over the speed limit anyway. I remember Troy and I being pulled over. He was going fifteen miles over the limit down a curvy two-lane blacktop. The cop looked at us, checked Troy’s license, saw that his record was okay, and gave him a warning. Not even a lecture, just a one-line comment about sixty-five being too fast for this blacktop. That’s why it’s posted fifty, he said. He wouldn’t want anything bad to happen, an accident say. It was the third time that year Troy received a warning. But truth was, Troy was always speeding. He was good at anticipating the police and so baby-faced, so polite when pulled over, they’d simply warn him with a short comment. Troy never mentioned that he was a lawyer. He’d take the warning and thank the officer.
I remember how I shook my head and tsked my tongue. “Someday that’s going to catch up to you and our insurance rates will go up,” I told him.
He didn’t respond to my admonition.
But Troy liked the sense of danger, and the feeling of velocity, I guess. Like diving through the air and flipping a somersault before he hit the water.
“Someday, there’ll be an accident,” I warned.
“Don’t say that,” he scolded.
No one ever ordered him out of our car. Not in California or Michigan or all the states in between. Where else were we pulled over? Colorado. Kansas. No one ever put him in the police vehicle. Is that how they do it in Texas?
I reach in my purse and pull out my cell phone and speed dial Tara.
“Hey,” she answers.
“We’ve been stopped by a cop. He’s got Smoke in his car now.”
“In his car? Is he arresting him?”
“I don’t know. They’re sitting there.”
“For what?”
“Speeding, he said. We were going five miles over the limit.”
“You’re kidding. Stay on the phone and keep talking. We’ll come back.”
So we wait. I talk to Rachel, who simply keeps saying, “Mommy. Mommy. Pizza. It’s our flavorite. Can we get some for dinner?” I guess she’s picked that up from Levy. I talk to her, my eyes on the black and white in the mirror. Smoke stares straight ahead, while the cop’s head is bent.
They sit there for what seems like hours. Smoke’s face is turned away from the cop, studying the sandy plain at the horizon or a billboard advertising GIRLS! I don’t know if he has a record, or a warrant. I know only a part of Smoke. Tara says he doesn’t do drugs. He saved Rachel’s life
, but I have no idea what his record reveals. Maybe they’ll take him to jail. The news stories about what police have done to black men whirl through my mind. Beaten to death, raped with nightsticks, unjustly incarcerated with bogus evidence. Smoke appears a likely scapegoat. Just your common dark-skinned heavy-set black man. They don’t know how he sweet he is, how he can make a drum cry, how he saved a little girl’s life.
If they arrest him, what will I do? Maybe I should stay and defend Smoke. But I don’t have a license to practice in Texas. And I don’t do criminal defense.
I can’t just walk away. Suddenly I care. Just a few minutes ago I could ride this curveless road forever. Off to wherever. Now it matters.
Smoke still stares from the cop’s passenger seat. I don’t see any movement from him, as though he’s frozen.
No matter what the computer shows, Smoke deserves someone to speak out for him, defend him.
The cop thinks we’re together. Lovers. Partners. I glance at my dress and realize I appear crumpled and worn. God, maybe he thinks I’m a prostitute.
“They’re still back there, still in the car. The cop is writing something,” I tell Tara.
“You’re witnessing the glories of driving while black,” Tara says. “Once, Aaron got a ticket for a cracked side-view mirror. A side-view mirror. And I got a ticket for slightly rolling through a stop sign when Sissy was in the car. She was wearing a baseball cap sideways, trying to look cute. I think the police thought she was a dude.”
“Yeah, and Troy only collected warnings because we were beneficiaries of driving while white. White and middle class.”
Tara laughs, “He was a speed demon.”
“I had no idea, Tara. No idea that you went through that. Now I’m getting a taste of it.” For the first time, I realize the cost of her love for Aaron, the breezy way she assumes the hardship and annoyance of racism in their day-to-day lives. My heart goes out to her, and with that, the separation between us narrows.
The cop and Smoke get out of the car and walk toward us. “They’re coming,” I inform Tara. My heart pounds in my ears.
They’re at the back of the truck, fiddling with the door. It slides open.
I leave the car. My legs tremble slightly as I walk toward them.
“Did I tell you to leave your vehicle?” the cop scolds. His badge blares sun at me. A plate above it says James Whitlock. His skin is pink, the visor of his cap shadowing his face. His neck skinny like a boy’s.
I inhale. “These are my things, in here.”
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
“I want to search the contents of this van.”
I narrow my eyes. “You have no probable cause.”
“He broke the law.” He jerks his head toward Smoke. “Mr. Johnson was speeding.”
He scans me up and down. My knit dress was perfect for southern California, but too sparse for west Texas. I’m still wearing the gray hoodie, one hand jammed in the kangaroo pocket, the other still holding my cell phone. Flip-flops. I haven’t paid attention to myself. I’ve barely remembered to bathe.
“We’re supposed to unload all this? Right here?”
“I’m thinking of taking you to the station.”
I hear Tara scream from the cell phone.
I suspect that James Whitlock can hear her, too, so I turn away.
Whitlock’s neck turns beet red and he frowns, squinting his eyes so deeply his pupils are hidden. He spins away and starts pulling out goods from the van, throwing them on the side of the highway.
“Hey, that’s my painting,” I protest. “And that’s my baby’s high chair!”
Rachel’s plastic and metal chair, with her bumble-bee suction toy still stuck on the tray, falls onto the dirt shoulder. Suddenly the silly innocence of the orange and neon-green toy ingloriously sitting on the side of the highway, the fact that Rachel is not with me, the relics of my once happy life somewhere between the Texas border and Amarillo, all bring me to tears, and I sob.
Smoke puts one arm around me, and then I’m in his chest, crying. I see Rachel lying limp on the side of the swimming pool, her chest motionless, her eyes closed, her hair dripping water while Smoke’s thick palms press air into her skinny curved ribs, protecting the treasure of her lungs.
“She’s okay,” Smoke says.
“Your baby?” Whitlock points to the fallen high chair and then to Smoke.
“Her baby. Not mine. In the car up ahead. Her husband just died.”
“Well, we’ll get through here and you can be on your way.” Whitlock is visibly shaken by my sobbing.
Then Allie, Tara, Levy, and Rachel pull up behind us. Allie and Tara get out of the car and walk toward us. Rachel starts screaming from her car seat, “My high chair! My google-bee!”
Whitlock yells, his hand on his belt, “Get back in the car or I’ll have to call for backup.” Tara returns to the Honda and Whitlock opens the drawers of our dresser, finding my assortment of rolled T-shirts, folded jeans, and underwear.
Rachel still cries for her toy.
Out of another drawer tumbles ponytail holders, headbands, and barrettes. Makeup. Whitlock opens a box of books and takes one out. Summary of California Law (Torts 5), the red leather binding reads. He frowns and looks at me.
“You a lawyer?”
I nod.
He puts the book back in the box, refolds the top, then wipes his palms on creased pants. He keeps his back to Allie and Tara watching him. He opens another box filled with copper pans that Mom bought as my wedding present. Then clutters of Rachel’s sucky cups and her favorite bowl.
He throws the dishes back and jumps down from the back of the U-Haul.
“Get back in your vehicle,” he orders us.
I inhale. “Let me put my possessions away. Can my sister help me?” For the first time ever, I want Tara with me. I don’t beg him, though a part of me wants to. I feel helpless before this scrawny kid powerful in his blue uniform, his gun pulling his waistband. He nods.
“You,” he points at Tara, “help her.” Then he goes to the car, gets in, writes some more, and returns to present Smoke with his ticket. “Here’s a ticket for speeding, Mr. Johnson.” He says the Mr. with the hostility of irony. “You’re in Texas now. Obey our laws.”
Smoke looks down, but his jaw clenches in fury.
“What bullshit,” Tara says through her teeth.
I hug her. “I had no idea, Tara,” I say and kiss her cheek.
Her lifted eyebrows and grin express her joy and surprise.
Tara and Allie pull out and continue down the highway. We’re safe in our U-Haul once again with the remnants of Troy’s and my life. But now, I feel so violated.
“I’m sorry.” I clear my throat, still clogged with tears.
“You’re not the fucking cop.”
“It was harder because you were with me.”
“Maybe. But that’s not your fault either.”
“At least they didn’t take us to the station and unload everything.”
“What the fuck? I should be grateful he didn’t give me an ass-whupping? I should be grateful they didn’t lynch me?” He says the words in a monotone with even rhythm. But the press of rage, familiar bitterness, and endless sorrow in his voice are palpable.
“He thought we were drug dealers,” he says.
“Really? Dealers?” I guess we fit the profile. “In a U-Haul?”
“Figured drugs were hidden somewhere in the van. Why else would we be together?”
I try to imagine myself as a drug dealer. Me, who writes a list and uses a GPS to go to the grocery store. Me, who checks her figures three times before turning in her tax return. And I chuckle. “Yeah. Right. Wouldn’t I make a great drug dealer?” And then I remember my accusations of them using hard drugs.
Outside, curved black slices of tires lie helter-skelter. Evidence of fast tires on too-hot roads. Evidence of poorly made tires with deadly flaws, evidence of accidents that no one has bothered to remove. The
y lie there like corpses, the relics of trucks and vans that have passed this way.
An hour or so later, we stop for gas, bathroom, and coffee. Smoke sees me grab six packets of artificial sweetener, tear them open simultaneously, and dump the powder along with French vanilla creamer into the pale liquid.
“You shouldn’t be putting all that fake stuff in your body.” He shakes his head.
“Who are you, my father?”
Troy had complained, too: “You don’t know what that excessive amount of chemicals will do. The rats died.”
Smoke shoots me a frown. “You know you shouldn’t be doin’ that.”
“I can’t live forever,” I say.
He shakes his head.
A teenage cashier stands behind the counter. He has a crew cut, brown hair, and a plaid shirt tucked into belted jeans. He smiles when I approach with my chemical-laden coffee, a package of trail mix, and jerked beef sticks. “You wear a dress every day?” he asks, as he takes my money. His cuffs are evenly folded to reveal a watch.
“Just today,” I tell him.
“It sure looks pretty. Real pretty.”
Just then, I feel a tug on my dress and there’s Levy looking up at me. “You want one?” he holds a yellow M&M between his thumb and index finger.
“Sure.” I open my palm.
“Here you go, Aunt Sky.” Aunt Sky. I don’t think he’s called me that before. He carefully places the candy in my hand. And then he smiles. His smile is exactly like Mom’s.
I see her in his face.
For the first time, I realize he looks like her regardless of his skin color, or size, or gender. How did I not notice this before, this family resemblance? Why did I only see him as Tara’s brown-skinned kid and not identify Mom in him? I bend down and hug him. “You have your grandma’s smile.”
Levy laughs. “Everyone tells me that.” Then his face gets serious. “But I didn’t take it from her. She shared it with me.”
Now I laugh. I wonder what’s changed that I can recognize Mom in Levy. “I’m so lucky you’re my nephew. You’re my flavorite.”
He giggles.
I get behind the wheel to roll us to Oklahoma City. Smoke sleeps, his head resting on the window, his hands, palms up, crossed in his lap. A mix CD of Coltrane, Ray Charles, Ola Tunja, Art Blakey, and early Staple Singers keeps me company.