by Tonia Brown
Jonah sighed. He disliked it when employees tried to hold personal conversations with him. Well, he disliked it when anyone tried to talk to him, especially women. “He did, too. He just doesn’t want to go back.”
“Sounds like he needs a good prodding.”
Jonah glanced up to the cashier, who he now realized had been his waitress, and furrowed his brow. “A what?”
She smiled, obviously pleased to have caught his full attention after being ignored for the last hour. “A prodding. Someone to push him into it. Someone who can help him face whatever he left behind.”
“How did you …”
“Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing you two. Seriously, the only way to deal with something is to face it. A real friend would help him do that. A real friend owes it to him. Don’t you agree?”
That concern sparked again as the flame of worry burned brighter than ever. “Yes, yes I do agree. Thanks.”
The waitress was correct. Jonah owed it to Dale to help him face his past and sort out his problems. As Dale was surely flushing away his worries, Jonah formulated a plan.
It was as easy as falling asleep.
Or rather, it was as easy as waiting for Dale to fall asleep. Which, after the meal and with the steady rhythm of the highway, took no time at all. There was almost a kind of eerie coincidence to the happenings, a poetic timing to the proceedings. They were barreling down I-80, headed toward Reno. I-80. The very same artery that pumped traffic into the heart of the forbidden zone. Was it coincidence that they should land their first out-of-state gig in Reno? Perhaps, but maybe not. Maybe some force had been guiding their path all along, pulling them toward California and the life-altering revelations therein.
Jonah let the sleeping giant rest through the hour, as they passed sign after sign declaring the approaching city of Reno. But instead of taking the agreed-upon route, Jonah drove blithely past every single exit, ignoring each path in favor of his new one. They weren’t expected at the hotel for another day or so, which left them plenty of time to dip into California for just a few hours so Dale could face his so-called demons. Jonah watched Dale with a cautious eye until they were well past Reno altogether. Then Jonah pressed on, toward California.
Now it was a matter of keeping Dale asleep until they arrived at the state line.
What horrible act had Dale committed that would keep him from returning to an entire state? Jonah’s head filled with depraved doings and disgusting deeds, but nothing came to mind that he hadn’t already known Dale to have done. The guy was a shameless one-man sinning machine. And besides, Jonah supposed there was nothing under the sun that was so illegal in California—of all states—that engaging in it would leave a human being banned from returning. This meant the trouble was more personal, something from Dale’s past.
Jonah only knew three things about Dale’s Californian years:
The man grew up in San Francisco.
His mother died when he was just a boy.
For some mysterious reason, his father sent him to Idaho to live with his aunt. His dad never followed, and they hadn’t spoken since.
Jonah’s life was dull by comparison. He was born and raised in the same small town, went to college in the big city of Boise, where he obtained a useless degree, and then moved just a few miles from home when it came time to flee the nest. To top off his exciting life, he landed a job in the grand world of retail sales. Jonah was, in all essence, a hometown kind of lad, whereas Dale was an out-of-town transplant who never quite seemed to fit in. (How the two complete opposites became fast friends was a whole different kettle of fish.) With a heartfelt need to help his friend, Jonah was convinced that Dale needed to return to San Francisco to sort out whatever ‘demons’ he’d left behind.
And by ‘demons’, Jonah meant Dale’s father.
Less than thirty minutes later, Jonah’s pulse quickened as they approached the huge ‘Welcome to California’ sign. He white-knuckled the wheel once more as his attention split between the giant sign and the snoring giant. One mile. Snore. One half mile. Snort. One quarter mile. Snooze. As the distance closed and the state line drew near, anxiety gripped Jonah’s heart with palpable dread. This was wrong. He knew it, yet he kept on driving. Dale had asked him, as a friend, to let it go, but here Jonah was, driving straight for it. He couldn’t let it go. He had to know what was wrong with California.
“It’s too late now,” Jonah whispered.
The state line was a beacon of mistrust and lies. Jonah had broken his promise, and did it matter that he done so with the best intentions? No, he supposed not. They say Hell is paved with such attempts, and so, with a weary heart, Jonah cast his stones along that much-traveled path. He pressed his foot down, pushing the Ford ever closer to its dreaded goal. Twenty feet. Ten feet. One. None.
Two things happened in the single moment Jonah drove Dale into California.
First, Jonah swore he could feel the state line as they passed over it. Like some invisible thread that bisected him to the core, or a thin wire of awareness that passed through his being. And, on the heels of this awareness, there came a flood of guilt, a drowning sensation that Jonah had done something very, very wrong.
The second thing that happened was simpler and more realistic.
Dale awoke with a sudden jerk.
“Where are we?” he asked. From dead-asleep to wide-awake in a split second, Dale pressed his face against the passenger window and took in his surroundings. His attention snapped back and forth, from car to road to landscape, like an overexcited dog. After a few seconds of silence, he asked again, “Where are we?”
“Nowhere,” Jonah squeaked. He had hoped that Dale would remain in hibernation until they were entrenched in the state. “We’re an hour from Reno. Go back to sleep.”
They watched in silence as a passing sign made a liar out of Jonah. It proclaimed that the sunny state of California was very pleased to welcome them.
“Jonah?”
“Umm… yes?”
“Why did that welcome sign have the words ‘Sunny California’ on it?”
“Did it?” Jonah half asked and half said—half hoping Dale would think this was all just a dream and go back to sleep. “You’re imagining things.” As he said this, they passed a billboard that assured Dale that Jonah was indeed a liar by offering the cheapest hotel prices available in the sunny state of California. Exit seven, only five miles on the right!
“Jonah?” Dale asked.
“Dale?” Jonah asked.
“Are we where I think we are? And you better not say what I think you are going to say, or God help me, I will rip your head from your shoulders and shit down your neck!”
Jonah thought long and hard about this question. There was no use denying it anymore, as Dale was eyeing a steady stream of highway markers and billboards that revealed the lie for what it was. He would rather not have Dale make good on his head ripping, neck shitting promise, but the jig was indeed up.
Jonah drew a deep, soulful sigh, and said, “California.”
Dale said nothing in response, which surprised Jonah. Jonah was further surprised when Dale grabbed the steering wheel and tried to flip a bitch against the four lanes of busy interstate traffic.
“What are you doing?” Jonah screamed.
“I have to get out of here now!” Dale screamed.
The car wandered from lane to lane as the men fought for the wheel and screamed at one another. Cars honked and swerved, some very close to Jonah’s Focus, and a multitude of middle fingers and fists raised in their direction in shows of aggression.
Jonah swatted at Dale’s death grip on the wheel. “Let go! You’re going to get us killed!” After Jonah landed a particularly nasty blow, Dale relinquished the wheel.
He stuffed his fingers into his mouth as he eyed Jonah with distaste. “You gotta get me out of here, man,” Dale said, around his mouthful of fingers.
“What is wrong with you?”
“I have to go back!” Dale
snatched Jonah by the collar of his t-shirt, which made driving very difficult. Once again, they were all over the road as Dale choked Jonah into submission, crying, “Take me back! Take me back!”
“Dale!” Jonah coughed. “I can’t breathe!”
The maniac released Jonah, but kept up with the begging and pleading. “Jonah, you have to go back now. Please. I’m begging you.”
“Get ahold of yourself. You’re acting like a crazy man. Stop being such a crybaby.”
Dale took on a sudden hurt look. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am your friend.”
“Then why do this to me? I told you I couldn’t come back here. Take me back. Now!”
Jonah wanted nothing more than to grant that single request, but four lanes of traffic and no available means of egress made it a very hard thing to do, indeed. “I will as soon as I can. Let me find an exit.”
Before an exit presented itself, something else did. Over the honks and aggression of the other drivers, a familiar noise arose: the whine of a siren. And with it came the steady pulse of blue lights in Jonah’s rearview mirror. A motorcycled officer waved for them to pull over.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jonah said.
In a faint whisper, almost too low for Jonah to hear, Dale said, “God has nothing to do with it.”
Jonah wondered what this meant as he eased the car into the far lane and onto the shoulder, as a good driver should.
“What are you doing?” Dale asked, aghast.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m pulling over.”
“Don’t pull over.”
“What?”
“Keep going.”
“Dale, it’s the cops. We have to stop.” Jonah put the car in park and cut the engine.
The sudden silence produced a heart-wrenching wail from Dale. “No! Keep going. Go! Go! Go!”
At this point, Jonah began to wonder about Dale’s sanity. There had been times in their past when Jonah had contemplated the idea that Dale might be a bit off his hinges, but this was the first time he bore witness to such a livid display of psychosis. Dale twisted and squirmed in his seat, shooting glances at the cop dismounting from the motorcycle behind them, then back to Jonah. As the officer approached the car, Dale pawed at his door handle, but Jonah had long since child-locked the thing. The big man grew more and more agitated, clawing at the door as he whimpered and begged Jonah to let him escape. But Jonah would not be moved. He remained a shore of sanity against Dale’s swelling tide of madness.
Until Dale started to crawl across the front seat.
“What are you doing?” Jonah asked as Dale scooted toward him.
“If you won’t get us out of here, I will!” Dale yelled.
Jonah squealed as Dale attempted to usurp the driver’s seat by force. “Stop that! We can’t both be in the driver’s seat!”
“Then get out of my way!” Dale was all arms and legs and wild intentions. “Move over!”
“I can’t!” Jonah tried to push Dale away, but it was no use. The man rolled onto him like a train—almost as heavy, nearly as unstoppable—shifting his full weight straight onto Jonah’s lap, among other places. Pain bloomed from Jonah’s groin, firing warning signals of eminent collapse to his overworked brain. “Jesus! You’re squashing my nuts! Get off before you castrate me!”
A tap sounded from the driver’s window. Dale fell still somewhere between the steering wheel and Jonah, who had fallen still somewhere under and around Dale. And this was how the officer found them, tangled in a mass of limbs and frustration and painful testicles, stuffed into that narrow space between the driver’s seat and steering wheel. A space meant for one man, not two idiots.
The officer lowered his helmeted head to window level. He stared at the pair from behind dark sunglasses. He didn’t look pleased.
“Hello, sir,” Jonah said, his voice oscillating from boyish to mannish to boyish again.
In an act of incongruity, Dale whispered, of all things, “Too late. Too late.”
The officer continued to look very displeased. He tapped on the glass again, then motioned that he would like for the glass to be gone.
Jonah granted his swish by rolling down the window as best he could with a lap full of Dale. He glanced at the eye-level nametag, but couldn’t make out the man’s name. It wasn’t that the name was obscured. The letters were perfectly visible, they just didn’t make any sense. Every time Jonah tried to make the letters form a word, the whole thing slipped away in a puff of confusion, and he lost the idea of what it could have been.
“Afternoon, Officer,” Jonah squeaked. “Can we help you?”
The officer looked to Jonah, then Dale, before he did the last thing Jonah ever expected the man to do. He smiled. It was a wide, leering grin, an ear-to-ear white, shining light of a grin. It was not the smile of a happy man. It was something else. Something uncomfortable. Something unsettling.
It was the most frightening smile Jonah had ever seen.
The officer then removed his glasses, revealing a pair of eyes so blue that Jonah winced at their electric glow.
“Looks like you boys are in a bit of a pickle,” the officer said.
If Jonah had been in his right frame of mind, he would have realized that the officer’s accent wasn’t native to California, nor was the man’s choice of words. He spoke with a low, country twang. A rich, Southern brogue. If Jonah had been in his right frame of mind, he would have realized that the reason the man’s grin was frightening was because he had way too many teeth for a normal person. Jonah, if he had been in his right mind, would have also noticed that the man’s eyes and teeth shone brighter than the California sunshine, which was also unnatural—though not impossible, thanks to better living through chemistry. But these things were neither here nor there, because Jonah was most certainly not in his right frame of mind. He was, at the moment, in a very wrong frame of mind. The frame of mind most psychologists would define as panic.
“Pickle,” Jonah echoed, unsure what the word meant.
Dale said something entirely different, though not unexpected. He said something that Jonah was afraid Dale was going to say, though it was Jonah’s fervent wish that he wouldn’t.
“Fuck you.”
Chapter Three
I-80, California
The officer lost the mile-wide grin, and Jonah nearly lost control of his bowels. “Please step out of the vehicle,” the officer said, and backed away to give them room to do just that.
“Thanks a lot,” Jonah said, as he untangled an arm.
“What?” Dale asked as he unwound a leg.
“You know what!” Jonah grunted as Dale shifted off of his lap. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
“Me? You’re the stupid fucker who drove us here. I told you I couldn’t come back to California, man. Weren’t you even listening to me?”
“I just thought—”
“What? That you would do me a favor by shitting on my wishes? I asked you to forget about it. You promised.”
For a moment, Dale was as serious as death, and in that moment, guilt rose over Jonah. “I’m sorry, Dale. I really am.”
“Sure. Sorry. Too late for that now, numb nuts.”
“I thought I was helping you. I didn’t realize you were going to act like a complete jackass the moment we crossed the state line.”
“I’m not being a jackass; I’m being realistic. You have no idea how much you’ve screwed me.”
“Anytime, boys!” the officer shouted from the front of the Focus.
“We’re in for it now,” Jonah said.
“What’s all this ‘we’ shit?” Dale asked.
Jonah growled, “One doesn’t make a proclamation such as ‘fuck you’ to an officer of the law and get away with it. No sir. No how. Not in my book.”
“In your what?”
“My book! In my book, there’s a certain logic to the world, where saying ‘fuck you’ to an officer of the law brings about conseque
nces. Even if you aren’t the one who said the actual words. Even if you’re just in the proximity of said words. Such as having the speaker of said words straddling your junk!” Jonah jerked his car door open and rolled out into the stale roadside air.
Dale popped out of the passenger side, yelling, “Yeah? Well, in my book, best friends don’t drive you to California when you specifically asked them not to!” He slammed the door, rocking the little car with his anger-fueled surge of strength.
But Jonah didn’t care about the car at the moment. The only thing he cared about was making his point. He strode to the front of the vehicle as he asked, “Your book?”
“Yeah. My book.”
“I’m surprised you even know what a book is.”
“What? I don’t get a book ‘cause I ain’t as smart as you?” Dale arced around the car too, heading toward Jonah until they were nose to nose, shouting at one another.
“Your book,” Jonah started, “if you even have one, is handwritten in crayon on construction paper, and illustrated by cutouts from porno magazines and beer advertisements. Your book is a treatise on how many ways you can hump a sleeping girl without waking her. Your book is a running column of numbers on what amounts of what liquor you can drink before puking your guts out. Your book is dog eared and torn to pieces and has a flip cartoon in the corner of a stick figure jacking off. Your book, if you have one, is just… wrong!”
“At least my book is interesting,” Dale countered. “At least my book isn’t just a manual on one hundred ways to masturbate to pictures of women that will never fuck you while the rest of it is how to betray your best fucking friend!”