On Highway 17

by B. Z. R. Vukovina

  On Highway 17

  Story 2 of Strummed

  ♦♦♦♦

  by B.Z.R. Vukovina

  For music lovers, and for musical lovers

  ♦♦♦♦

  Sweetmeats

  In some ways, there is no greater testament to the joy of the human condition than music and sex. Music can be as soothing as a gentle kiss, or as powerful as an orgasm. The most powerful music can make your heart beat faster and make the hairs on the back of your neck rise in excitement and expectation. Music can make you move, moan, dance and shout. Music is to the soul as orgasm is to the body.

  Music and sex are so visceral, so sensual that it seemed obvious to combine them. This book is that combination.

  If, as you read, you find your fingers beginning to drift, your body starting to move, and a rhythm rising within you, do not be alarmed. Let the story take its toll until you too sing out loud!

  -Kojo Black

  Also from Sweetmeats Press

  Paperbacks & eBooks

  The Candy Box by Kojo Black

  Sun Strokes by Kojo Black

  Immoral Views by Various Authors

  Named and Shamed by Janine Ashbless

  Naked Delirium by Various Authors

  Making Him Wait by Kay Jaybee

  Seven Deadly Sins by Various Authors

  Strummed by Various Authors

  Made for Hire by Various Authors

  In the Forests of the Night by Vanessa de Sade

  ♦♦♦♦

  A Sweetmeats Book

  First published by Sweetmeats Press 2013

  Copyright © Sweetmeats Press 2013

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing from Sweetmeats Press. Nor may it be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-909181-23-6

  Typeset by Sweetmeats Press

  Sweetmeats Press, 27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3XX, England, U. K.

  www.sweetmeatspress.com

  On Highway 17

  ♦♦♦♦

  by B.Z.R. Vukovina

  It may not have been Plymouth’s prettiest ’56 Savoy — pale woodland green with a russet, rusted underbody climbing past two parallel white-stripe highlights, all over dented and dinged — but its bald tires rolled sufficiently along the fresh asphalt of Highway 17 even as the battered engine wheezed and rattled. Breathing deeply in, Cob Augo didn’t mind any of it because the road was winding and smooth, his guitar sat safely on the seat beside him and, through his driver’s side window rolled fully down, the rushing air felt like noise against his ears, felt like time itself rushing by, sounding like fate and smelling of unspoiled dew mixed with the lacustrine aroma of the clear, calm, reflective surface of Lake Superior to the left meeting the fingertips-becoming-gnarly-mountainous-knuckles of the indestructible Canadian Shield to the right.

  Ever since Sault Ste. Marie, where he’d bid goodbye to Lake Huron and most everything else, the road had been so empty that every sign of civilisation, whether town or Town & Country, was a well-intentioned slap to the face, a reminder that he had to keep conscious because, even here, he still wasn’t alone in the world. Focus — he had to keep his.

  A logging truck rumbled by in the opposite direction.

  Cob gripped the steering wheel, and he checked the fuel gauge:

  One-third left.

  The truck disappeared into the rear view.

  The Savoy’s engine puffed, its body trembled and lurched.

  Cob bounced.

  The guitar strings resonated.

  The engine was getting worse, its behaviour increasingly and violently erratic. Where had he first noticed it? Somewhere in New York State before the Canadian border. But it had been subtle then, just an irregular heartbeat. Now it was obvious. Now, it was getting dangerous. Maybe he’d stop and have the car checked after all. He could afford the time. He had it all worked out, and with a day to spare. Even going the long way, going the northern route, he had a day to spare.

  The highway rose and ribboned around a rocky bluff.

  Below, the lake was dispersing the day’s sharp first light and for a moment Cob felt like he was driving straight into the brilliant water, destined to drown — or ignite — before the highway twisted away, down, and the lake was at his left again.

  The road levelled off.

  Cob took his palms from the steering wheel and rubbed them into his eyes.

  He needed a break. He’d been driving too long.

  So, that was the plan: if the next town he passed had a garage, he’d stop; he’d pay someone to listen to the engine while he drank a cup of strong coffee and maybe ate breakfast, maybe scrambled eggs and bacon.

  His stomach grumbled.

  He gripped the steering wheel. There wasn’t a truck this time, just a realisation: 1,300 miles and the courage to take the first step were already behind him. Only 2,200 remained. One-third in the fuel tank, two-thirds left to travel, and then all would be good. He couldn’t explain — or even understand — how he knew that, but he did. It was a certainty. Just get to Berkeley on time. Just do that and everything else will fall into place. This is the challenge. This is the most important journey of my life.

  He glanced at the guitar.

  It shone beautifully.

  ♦♦♦♦

  The town was called Black Bear Portage. The morning was windless and warm. The ruddy-skinned mechanic brought the hood of the Plymouth down with a gentle click and wiped across his forehead with a thick, oil-stained forearm. “Good car,” he spat. “Bad engine.”

  Cob didn’t say anything. He only felt indescribably thin in his thin trousers and the thin stripes of his shirt, his thin laces and his thin, insignificant body.

  The mechanic stubbed at a meaty chin with a fat thumb. Cob imagined the man must think him slow.

  “Good car, bad engine,” the mechanic repeated. “Like a good woman with an evil heart. Know what I mean, son? One that looks good while doing you wrong.” Cob nodded. “But nothing that will get the best of us. No, sir. Isn’t a woman or engine can’t be fixed by the right man with his right hand.”

  “How long?” Cob asked.

  The mechanic leaned his heavy body on the Plymouth, which sagged under the weight. “Two days, if parts be cooperative.”

  “How much?”

  The mechanic started to mumble something, dropped his gaze, and Cob realised the man was honest and had an honest man’s aversion to bartering.

  “I need it tomorrow,” Cob said. The mechanic raised his eyes. Cob raised his wallet and opened it. He removed a series of bills without counting them and placed them on the hood of the Plymouth. “But, son….” The mechanic’s dry protests stuck in his throat as his dilating pupils counted the money. His lips turned pale under a set of wiry grey whiskers.

  “Tomorrow,” Cob repeated. “Early morning.”

  “Yes, sir. But, sir,” the mechanic said. Cob took a step toward the passenger’s side door. “A young man like yourself should save what he earns. Should save it and….” Cob swung the door open and took out his guitar, handling it tenderly, gingerly, like one handles innocence, or one’s gentlest lover. “…and…and spend it on a thing worthwhile. A thing
like an education, son. That’s what matters these days. An education at one of those good, big city schools. Life is not what it was when I was young. It’s not just hard work. It’s brains and taught trickery they want now.” Cob slung the guitar over his shoulder and turned to look the mechanic in the face. “If you want to be somebody, that’s what you got to have,” the mechanic was saying. The money had disappeared from the hood.

  “Tomorrow?” Cob asked.

  “Early in the morning, sir,” the mechanic said, before looking away.

  Cob made toward the open garage doors, through which he could see the sunlit surface of Highway 17.

  I am going to school, he thought. But I’m not going to pay and I’m not going to learn. I’m going because I want what I know I will become.

  ♦♦♦♦

  Feet planted outside, cheeks warmed by the sun, Cob stopped and beheld: morning had arrived but Black Bear Portage looked as dormant as it had an hour ago, when he’d first pulled in. The highway was empty — the highway that cut the town in half. Things cut in half often die. They twitch and bleed out. His mind began composing lyrics. But, before it could finish, his stomach whined so pathetically that Cob was forced to turn his attention to a more pressing matter:

  Breakfast.

  From across the highway, a restaurant beckoned. The Tasty Totem, its sign proclaimed; and, below, the goofy smiling face of a pipe-smoking Red Indian made it clear that: “Ours may not be the best — but they are the only prices in town!”

  Cob shut his eyes, didn’t look both ways and crossed the street. When he was safely on the other side, when the ground felt dirt soft again, he opened them. So, fate is still on my side, he thought — as a logging truck thundered by only a few feet behind him. A reminder, he reassured himself, and felt the breeze tickle the hairs on the back of his neck.

  ♦♦♦♦

  Inside, The Tasty Totem was more restrained and less kitschy than its outside suggested.

  A few patrons sat in scattered pairs, engaging in morning conversations. The bitter smell of coffee and cigarettes twirled in the air: emanating from hot cups and glass ashtrays, rising, being pushed back down by an army of slowly rotating ceiling fans. A television hung in the corner. Its black-and-white picture flickered, its sound unsynchronised and distorted. Two men sat staring at it. John F. Kennedy was on the screen. The men’s mouths were open but silent. Kennedy’s mouth was moving. He was reciting, “We have another sober responsibility. To recognise the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age, without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of responsibility.”

  “Hey,” another voice said. This one was undistorted and distinctly feminine. “Hey, you.”

  “…I am requesting of the Congress new funds for the following immediate objectives: to identify and mark space in existing structures public and private that could be used for fall-out shelters in case of attack….”

  “Yeah, you. With the guitar. In the door.”

  Cob’s spotlights came to rest on the face of a dark-haired woman sitting alone at a table littered with jars of —

  “Jams. Jellies. Spreads. Curds. Marmalades. Mushrooms.”

  “…food, water, first-aid kits and other minimum essentials for survival….”

  She was wearing a pale pink dress. Her hair fell in long, straight bunches like sheets of black Bristol over her neck and shoulders. She was leaning forward. Cob was staring, imagining strawberry jam running down, sticking to the skin of her —

  “…air-raid warning and fallout detection systems….”

  “I’m only teasing,” the woman said and straightened her back, puffing out her chest, perhaps thinking she’d made Cob uncomfortable by singling him out. “Come, sit, order breakfast.” She smiled not insincerely; then, turning her head, exposed the perfect tendons of her neck and yelled out, “Arnold, customer! Maybe you can sell him a buttered piece of toast so as he buys one of my jams you didn’t.”

  The tendons dissolved softly back into skin. Her face returned to Cob, who hadn’t moved.

  “What!” Arnold yelled from the kitchen. “And turn off that goddamn prattle box. I heard the same goddamn speech last night, and the night before, and every goddamn night since the end of the goddamned war. Find me a fall-out-goddamned-shelter from that.”

  The men watching television closed their mouths. One got up and flicked off the president mid-word: “cont—”

  The chair opposite the woman slid out from under her table. She motioned for Cob to have a seat. “I make my own preserves and other jarred eatables,” she explained, the tips of her fingers absentmindedly caressing the slick surface of the plastic tablecloth.

  “Customer!” she yelled at Arnold. “He’s hungry. He wants breakfast. He’s about to leave.”

  Cob unslung his guitar and leaned it against the edge of the table. The woman smelled like fruit, perspiration and sugar, he decided, lowering himself into the chair. For a moment there was silence as she studied his face and he browsed her edible wares — a silence which she broke suddenly with a spontaneous jerk of her arm.

  The glass jar crashed to the floor and shattered.

  “Winnie Youngblood,” the woman said as her wild blueberry spread flowed out onto the Totem’s white tiles. “Master preservationist of Black Bear Portage, and uncoordinated.”

  She held out her hand and Cob shook it. Her grip was firm but caring — unorthodoxly feminine. “Cob Augo, folk songwriter of Boston, Massachusetts,” he introduced himself. “And fated.”

  ♦♦♦♦

  She’d already eaten. He ordered eggs, bacon and a house-special coffee that tasted like burnt caramel.

  As he shovelled the food into his mouth, washing it down with flavoured caffeine whenever his throat felt textured and parched — making sure not to seem too famished, too eager — he told tales about his journey, his Plymouth, the timeline and the one day he could afford to lose, here, all while keeping silent, mental track of the precision with which her lips twitched before she smiled and the way her nails, groomed to perfect, polished curves, tapped on the metal lids of jars to emphasise favourite words and phrases, and how soft her shoulders, now hidden beneath her dress, must look when she wasn’t wearing one, when she was naked, alone, relaxed.

  Winnie listened and asked questions.

  Cob noticed the frequency with which she blinked. He noticed, too, that as she-spoke-he-spoke, their voices and the hungry pauses between them created a kind of harmony — a music: his chewing, the rhythm; Winnie’s fingernails, a beat; over which her questions and his answers became the smoothest melody.

  Never had a woman made him feel this way.

  He had loved, yes. But this sensation was different. Love was long-lasting and powerful. Love could cause pleasure and pain. Love enticed into sacrifice and selflessness and helped achieve fulfilment. But love was not joyous. Only music was joyous. Only creating gave joy. Here, this morning, Winnie was making him feel the way only an audience and his guitar had ever made him feel.

  “I’m going north around Lake Superior and through Port Arthur,” he answered, “because that’s where I was born.”

  “When was the last time you went back?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “I was fifteen.”

  The conversation expanded in ripples: and what about Boston — where had the journey started? “Club 47.” Had she heard of it? She hadn’t. “And Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger?” No and no, and California was but an orange Hollywood fantasy and Massachusetts impossible to spell. “And what about you, Cob Augo?” Her eyes opened wide. “Are you real, or are you just a fantasy, too?”

  His teeth broke through a strip of crispy bacon.

  They both snickered.

  Soon his plate was empty and the taste of coffee w
as fading from his lips, the restaurant’s front doors swung open, swung closed, and tables saw patrons come and disappear, yet, still, they sat and talked. From his favourite pair of pants to how he’d learned to play guitar, from nylons to steel, six strings to twelve, to Christmas memories and how each had lost their virginity.

  “Tell me the end of it,” Winnie said abruptly.

  The needle scratched the record.

  The music stopped.

  The sentence was too direct. Their melody tripped over its own undone shoelaces. Winnie stopped tapping on the tops of her jars. And, just like that, Cob found himself back in the only restaurant in a backward Ontario town called Black Bear Portage killing time until a dull grey-haired mechanic cured whatever disease was festering inside the engine of his ugly ’56 Savoy.

  The end.

  “The California end of it,” Winnie said. “What’s in Berkeley? That’s where you’re going. You told me that. I want to know what happens when you get there.”

  “I become famous.”

  Winnie exploded with laughter —

  Cob’s jaws tightened.

  — which she suppressed into an echoing, diminishing scoff. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you.” She put her hand on his. Her skin was darker, his fingers longer. “I suppose I laughed because I don’t understand how someone can simply become famous.” She smiled. “But, remember, I only put things into jars.”

  “Folk is the future of music. Berkeley is the future of folk,” Cob blurted out, hurt. “And I have gigs booked. I met a man in Boston at a club. He’s given me dates in all the right coffee houses. Because that’s what they drink in Berkeley. Coffee. They don’t sell alcohol. And everyone drinks the coffee and stays up late and actually listens to the words you’re singing.” His excitement seethed. “All I need is to show up on time and play.” He grabbed the neck of his guitar, which was still leaning against the table. “I just need to play my songs on this guitar and, if I do, nothing else matters.”