“Hey!” Gpa yelled.
“What the hell?” I said.
As soon as she put the Blue Bomber in park and shut off the engine, she jumped out of the driver’s side and scurried up the slope. I followed her at first, leaving the door open, and Old Humper bolted out behind me into the wasteland of sagebrush beside the highway. I was suddenly terrified he’d come tearing back and run out onto the highway, but I heard Gpa’s door open too. I turned to him. He stood close to the car, but on the side with the traffic rushing past him at ninety miles an hour. He stretched his arms. I ran back to him.
“Come on, Gpa,” I said when I was beside him. “Let’s go get Old Humper.”
“Don’t call him that. His name’s Skipper.” Gpa was grumpy, but he let me guide him around the trunk to the lip and up the slope. I could see Old Humper in the near distance by a large rock. Corrina stood with her hands on her hips. “That girl is crazy,” he said as we approached her.
She kept her back to us. “Damnit,” she said.
“Hey,” I said. “You can’t just do that.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“You could have killed us. What if the car had spun out? What if another car had been too close? I’m serious, Corrina. That was stupid.”
She turned to me. “I already have one dad, Hendrix. I don’t need another.”
“What are you, nuts?” Frankly, I was freaked out. I couldn’t even keep my hands still—I had to thrust them in my pockets just to keep them from shaking. Why wasn’t she scared? She just stood there, staring me down, like we were two dogs about to dive at each other. Was she ever scared? Truthfully, I didn’t even believe that tough-girl act. She probably didn’t realize what she’d done—but that kind of obliviousness and recklessness was as spooky as Gpa’s delusions or black holes of thought.
“I’m sorry, all right?” I said. “But did you even see him get out of the car? On the side with traffic?” I pointed to Gpa, trying to be subtle, but he noticed anyway.
“I’m right here, Teddy. I’m not invisible.”
“Jesus, seriously,” Corrina said. “Stop worrying so goddamn much. It’s annoying.”
“I’m not the problem here. That was dangerous!”
“Stop shouting at me,” Corrina said.
“Look,” I said, quieting. “I’m sorry I answered the phone. It was an accident.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Corrina glanced at her phone again, then put it in her back pocket and marched into the sage desert, but in a different direction than Old Humper.
“Well,” Gpa said as we watched her walk away. “You should probably go after her.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Listen,” Gpa said. “You can’t let someone walk away like that. A person usually wants—”
“Gpa, you don’t have all the answers all the time,” I said. Then I took a breath. “Please. Just let her be.”
Gpa frowned and called after Old Humper.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to chase after Corrina—I did—but in the last few days I’d heard her ask for silence, I’d watched her take her space. The least I could do was respect that, especially after I had answered the damn phone like an idiot, bringing her father into the car, wrecking that whole sense of freedom we’d had so far. I’m sure he didn’t know who I was, or Gpa, or that Corrina could be with us, but I was worried what he might do, that somehow, on only this second day on the road, he could do something to stop us, to reel us back in before we’d even gotten that far. That was what fathers did, didn’t they? Show their power, both when you wanted it and when you didn’t?
Of course, I didn’t really know.
Much farther down the road, clouds gathered and cast a shadow over the desert. I watched Corrina walk a small circle and stop and stare ahead at the same clouds. To my right, Gpa had found something like a stick, and he played fetch with Old Humper.
“Hey,” I said to him. “Last night. We didn’t get to talk.”
“That’s all we did was talk,” Gpa said.
“I mean about my dad,” I said.
He remained quiet.
“Gpa, he’s my dad. Shouldn’t I know him more?”
“It was years ago, Teddy.”
“But what happened? Why won’t you and Mom talk about him?”
“You heard. He was having an affair.” Gpa picked up the stick again and whipped it ahead with more force. “Right there, under my own damn nose, all the way back home in Ithaca. And I thought he was coming to see his sick mother on all those trips.” He looked back at me. “That’s what your mother thought too, you know.” Old Humper brought him the stick and Gpa wrestled with him to pull it out of his mouth. Gpa was the only one who played rough with Old Humper—they both liked it. “There’s not a lot more to say.”
“But come on. I mean, am I like him at all?”
Gpa let go of the stick and turned back to me. “No, Teddy.” He walked to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re nothing like him.”
“You can’t just make him disappear. Why would you want to?”
“Teddy,” Gpa grumbled. “You can’t possibly understand. Your mother and I just thought it best not to bring him up. There was no point in making you miss him more.”
Old Humper bounced in between us and looked up at Gpa. Stick still in his mouth, joyfully shaking his butt.
“And besides,” Gpa continued, “you have no idea how angry he made me. What he did to your mother. What he did to me and your grandmother. I never forgave him, Teddy.”
He bent down to Old Humper and pulled the stick away quickly.
“But—” I said.
“No,” Gpa said, turning away from me and throwing the stick. “This interview is over.”
He walked a few paces away, following Old Humper, and I let him go. Corrina was still about thirty yards ahead, staring down at her phone, then looking up at the darkening horizon. She put one hand to her head and held it there, and I was too far away to see the expression on her face, but for some reason, it reminded me of my mom, an image I had of her before she was corporate Mom, the boxy gray suit, the stone-stiff statue without emotion, way back from around the time my dad died, and I didn’t know if it had been before or after, but the image was as clear as if I was staring at a photograph.
Mom sat on the living room couch, surrounded by piles of recently washed laundry she was about to fold, and, having found a pair of Dead Dad’s underwear, she had begun to cry. She put it on her head, wore it like a mask, and sobbed loudly, moaning, half hidden beneath her terrifying costume.
Maybe Mom needed the suit to keep her from falling apart again?
Gpa was busy with Old Humper, so I walked over to Corrina. It smelled like rain, as if, even though I stepped through the dust, I could taste water in the air around me.
“Hey,” I said to her.
“Hey.”
“Let me ask you this,” I said. “Do you want to turn around and head back?”
“No,” she said. “We just got started. Besides, they wouldn’t even know I was gone if I hadn’t lifted the thousand dollars from the cash drawer in my dad’s office.” She beamed a fake smile.
“Oh, shit.”
“Don’t look at me like that. We stole your mom’s car. I had to steal something too. Plus, how the hell was I going to pay for anything when we split up?”
She looked at me for a long moment. “And where exactly am I going, anyway, Hendrix? What am I doing? You have somewhere to go. Ithaca. Where am I going?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s something in Ithaca for you, too.”
“I doubt it.” She kicked at the dirt. “I want a shot at something big. I don’t want to just be the girl who hung around some parties. I want a shot to play for someone important. I want a real shot, Hendrix.”
“I agree.”
She looked up suddenly. “Aiko!” she shouted. “Aiko! Oh my God, the Electric Warts are so big now and they’re in Brooklyn. I ha
ve to call her.”
When we got to Gpa, Old Humper was in strict obey mode, heeling by Gpa’s feet, and Gpa himself seemed to be in command mode, one hand clasping the other behind his back, shoulders square. He tipped his head toward the east. The clouds had already smothered the mountains ahead, and more spilled out over the desert like gigantic gray waves rising just before they break. “It’s coming quickly,” he said. “Teddy. Let’s get that, you know, Blue Bomber, on the move. Rain’ll be here any minute.” His expression was still and those brilliant blue eyes clear and present, and for a moment I had a flash of the old Gpa, the one I’d known just a few years earlier, the one who could hide a subtle smirk inside an order, as if he was laughing at himself behind a straight face.
“How you doing, Gpa?”
“This ain’t paradise,” he said, and winked. “Now, let’s get going.”
And down we went, Old Humper staying closer to Gpa after only one look and one word (Heel!), all of us clambering back into the Blue Bomber, Gpa checking the seat belt around Corrina’s guitar, the windows going up, Corrina starting the car.
“To Ithaca,” she said.
“To Brooklyn,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “There’s a song for that.” She fiddled with the phone until she found it. “Beastie Boys. Licensed to Ill. 1986. ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn.’ ”
And it played as the Blue Bomber kicked up gravel and we pulled out into the right lane and then picked up speed and crossed two lanes to the left, and around us the whole desert sank into a deeper shade of gray as the rain came down and washed the dust from the rocks and the brush and cast us all into a dark, midday kind of night.
CHAPTER 13
DESERT STORMS
There were two things I had not considered before we left: how often we would need to get gas, and where we were going to sleep each night.
Corrina pointed to a sign as we blew past it. “What’d that say?”
“ ‘Grand Canyon sixty-two miles.’ ”
Then we passed a sign that indicated the next two exits were for the Grand Canyon—sixty miles to the north.
“What I’m looking for,” Corrina said, “is a sign for gas. We’re hovering too close to empty.”
“Great,” I said. “We’ll stop at the next station.”
“Hendrix?”
“Yeah?” I was still floating from my moment inspiring Corrina, and despite the rain, enjoying the ride up into the high-desert forests.
“Have you seen a gas station anytime recently?”
“No.”
“This is serious.”
I looked back at Gpa, who was asleep, and then thought about what would happen if the car ran out of gas and we drifted to a stop at the side of the road in Arizona and how we’d be stuck without phone reception, and as soon as someone did help us, they’d have to find out who we were and we’d be shipped back to LA, failures.
We were quiet for a few more miles, until we finally saw a sign for a Mobil. It was along the highway, but when we pulled into it, there was a man in coveralls pulling plastic trash bags over the pumps. “No good,” he told us. “I’m out of gas.”
“How is that even possible?” I asked as we got back on the road.
“Hendrix, we are in the middle of nowhere,” Corrina said.
We got back onto the 40 and kept heading toward Flagstaff. Corrina didn’t sing along with the music.
Twenty miles down the road we saw another sign for gas. The station was just off the highway, only a hundred yards off the exit on the access road. It was called Feed and Mercantile, with the Texaco pumps out front, and the station had a short green roof hovering over a front porch, complete with a little wooden railing I imagined one might tie a horse to if one had one, and if anybody still did that kind of thing.
Two old men sat slumped up next to each other like dried apricots on a wooden bench that looked like it might collapse if anyone else joined them. They smoked and remained motionless as they watched us pull in. We parked in front of a pump and I jumped out to figure out how to fill the tank. Corrina had filled it the day before. I lifted the nozzle and the switch and followed the directions, but no gas came out. I was under the black-and-red Texaco awning, but the rain swept in sideways and beaded against my face. I looked around the pump and the apricots stared at me. The pump in front of us had a piece of paper partially taped to it, so I jogged to it and tried to read it, but it was ripped in half and the blue ink was smeared, making it illegible.
Corrina opened her door. “You have to pay cash up front sometimes,” she said over the rain’s attack against the plastic and metal awning.
But that wasn’t it, and I knew it. I climbed back into the car, before I got any more soaked.
“They don’t have gas here, either?” Corrina asked. “Jesus, the whole area must be out.”
“What do we do?” I asked.
“Let’s see if we can make it to Flagstaff.”
But when she turned the key in the ignition, nothing happened. There was a revving in the engine, but nothing turned on. “Shit,” Corrina said. She hit the wheel. “I should have kept the motor running.” She tried the key again and again but nothing happened.
“We’re out of gas,” Gpa said from the backseat. “You’ll fry the transmission if you keep turning that key.” I hadn’t realized he had woken up, but now that he was awake, I was glad he was with us, and really with us.
“What do we do?” I asked him.
“Find gas,” he said. “That’s it.”
Corrina put her head down on the wheel. “I can’t believe I let it get this low,” she said. “Before they got the electric, the ex-hippies had a rule about gas in the car. Never let it drop beneath a quarter tank. The one time I ignore that. The one time!” She lifted her head and stared out into the rain.
I pulled out my phone, but we were in a dead zone.
“We can’t just sit here,” Gpa said.
“I know,” I said, but I saw he was about to step out of the car. “No,” I said. “I’ll ask inside.”
The rain picked up and whipped me as I ran over to the porch. I stomped my wet feet by the front door and glanced at the apricots. Up close, I could see they both had thick white mustaches, and they both blinked and squinted, but said nothing.
“Can we get any gas here?” I asked them.
They rolled their gummy lips but said nothing. They turned their heads back to the car, or the distance, or whatever the hell was running through their minds, and I went inside.
The convenience store was packed with Route 66 memorabilia and T-shirts and candy on the shelves and beer and soda in the two narrow refrigerators. Two ceiling fans spun slowly overhead. The cash register and lotto station were on a small desk built from the same slats of wood that covered the walls of the store. The lights were dim and warm, and maybe because of the rain, the store seemed cozy and inviting. Nobody else was in the store, but I heard the faint sounds of music coming from another room, and through a narrow wooden doorway I could see large plastic bags stacked on shelves, and I walked around the desk to that room. The bags tuned out to be sacks of grain and pellets for horses and poultry, and again, no one else was in the room, but the music was a little louder, or I could just hear it better, I wasn’t sure, nor was I really sure if it was music, or if it was just voices that sounded musical, but they were so damn interesting, because they pulled me toward them even though they seemed to be coming through the walls.
The rest of the store was still empty, and because the music was traveling through me now like an itch I couldn’t scratch away, I walked around to the front and to the hallway where I’d seen the sign for the restroom and found another little hallway with a row of post office boxes and a door half ajar at the far end. The sound was coming from behind the door, and now it was clearer to me that it was voices, but in a language I couldn’t understand, or one that seemed familiar but like in a distant, barely recognizable memory. Through the open door, I could see
bales of hay along the cement-block wall, straw spread across the floor, and the skinned pelts of small animals hanging from the ceiling.
When I emerged into the small, makeshift barn, I saw two white girls about my age or a little older standing near the back wall, swaying and looking down near their feet, droning with a kind of undulating, melodic wail. I was immediately embarrassed that I’d walked in on them, but also mesmerized by what appeared to be a funeral they were holding for what looked like a dog in a hole they’d dug in the ground by their feet.
They didn’t turn to face me, or even seem to know I was there, and I would have dumbly stood there in the doorway to the barn forever if Corrina hadn’t suddenly grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back into the hallway with the post office boxes. The wailing sang on behind us, unbroken, like the thump and the hiss of the surf on a cold, dark night back in Venice.
“What are you doing?” Corrina asked as she dragged me out to the front of the store.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard it and I had to find out what it was.”
“You look like you were in a dream.”
“They were holding a funeral.”
“That’s depressing,” Corrina said. “And creepy. This whole place is creepy.”
“And no gas,” I said.
She led me out onto the front porch past the apricots and back out into the rain. She pointed around the other side of station. “There’s a little driveway,” she said. “I can see something else down there. Cars. A garage. Let’s go check it out.”
She started to walk away, but I grabbed her arm. “We can’t just leave Gpa on his own back here,” I said. “What if he wanders?”
“What? He’d do that?”
“He could,” I said.
Corrina nodded toward the garage. “Look,” she said. “The driveway to the next garage runs downhill. Maybe we can push the car down there.”
We doubled back to the Blue Bomber and Corrina explained what we needed to do. I didn’t have a clue about how we could possibly manage pushing a car, but once she got it in neutral and we pushed it out from under the awning, we realized we could do it. Gpa wanted to help, too. The window was down, and he shouted from the backseat.
The Last True Love Story Page 10