The Last True Love Story

by Brendan Kiely

  I didn’t see any other signs for a detour, but that made me more nervous. While the highway hadn’t been crowded, at least there’d been trucks and RVs and a few other cars on the road with us. Now we were alone. And then, as the 40 bent a wide arc north and east, I saw the problem. The face of a butte near the side of the road had crumbled and buried the highway beneath a long slope of boulders, rocks, and gravel.

  I slowed down and came to a stop in the middle of nowhere. There were no cars ahead, only the rubble maybe a mile down the road, and there were no cars behind. I thought about driving over the sandy median strip and doubling back to the detour sign, but there was another dirt road ahead of us, and I looked through the map on my phone and it indicated that the Indian Service Routes connected with Route 6, and I figured that would save time. After all, what had I learned in geometry class? The shortest distance between two points was a straight line. It seemed that was what the service roads were for.

  I turned onto the dirt road, but after only a short distance the road became sandier and I had to slow down. At one point we hit a divot in the road and the bouncing woke Corrina up.

  She gazed around us. “What the hell?”

  Gpa piped up too. “What’s going on?”

  “A shortcut,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” Corrina said. We hit another divot and the Blue Bomber slid sideways in the sand. “This is not good. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “There’s a detour,” I said.

  “This can’t be it.” Corrina cut the music and began playing with her phone to find a map. “Where are you taking us?”

  I wanted to explain, but I was having more and more trouble controlling the car. The sand seemed to get deeper and the Blue Bomber kept fishtailing and bouncing. Gravel churned below us and splattered the undercarriage.

  “You are a madman!” Corrina yelled.

  Gpa and Corrina both kept yelling at me to slow down, turn around, and stop and explain, and I kept hoping I’d see some sign of Route 6 ahead so I wouldn’t have to explain, so I’d show them I could get us there and get them both where they wanted to go, but as their voices rose and the car drifted and dropped and shook, I couldn’t see anything but the vast, dry nothingness ahead.

  Then we hit a rock and we heard a small explosion, and the Blue Bomber popped up in the front and slammed down in the dirt in a ditch at the side of the road. Everyone was silent in shock, until, with both hands on the wheel, I finally spoke. “Fuck!” I yelled.

  I tried to go in reverse, but the wheels spun, and Gpa told me to stop. Despite how many times I tried to explain what I had done and why I had decided to do it, Corrina kept saying, “Detour. Detour. Can’t you read?”

  Gpa got out, and I thought he was going to survey the Blue Bomber for damage, but he wandered around back and walked across the road and stood there looking into the emptiness. Old Humper jumped out and followed him. Except for the lone butte way back in the distance, the rest of the desert was a wasteland of beige-burned dead grass and dust. There was nothing else to see except the sky and the ripped and tattered blanket of clouds above us.

  PART II

  Now

  CHAPTER 18

  THE PROBLEMS WE CAN SOLVE

  We live in three times at once: always in the present, but the past, too, like our shadow trailing behind us, close on our heels, and when we pivot, it spins with us, and suddenly it’s our past that’s ahead of us, casting its dark outline over the future—at least that’s what it feels like to me as I pace in the desert, thinking back to LA, and then turn, and with the afternoon sun behind me, watch my shadow stretch out in front of me, pointing east to St. Louis. I’m not sure I’ll get there, but if I do, the ghost waits for me there, but with another woman.

  And now, as Corrina and I lean against the car and gaze into the yellow-dry desert in the distance, I can’t explain why I feel this collision of memories, emotions, and expectations, but I do not regret it, not even the ones that are boiling with fear and anger. It feels okay to feel all this right now.

  “Have you ever fixed a flat?” I ask Corrina.

  “No. But it can’t be that hard, can it?”

  “No,” I say, although I don’t believe it.

  We empty the trunk and find the spare and the jack kit under the lining. It doesn’t look impossible. There aren’t that many tools. But once we get down to it we discover that we’re not sure if we don’t know how to use the tools, or if the Blue Bomber is tipped too far forward in the ditch and we can’t jack it up at this angle.

  We’re both sweating, and Corrina’s held her hair back with one of her tie-dye bandanas, and she stands and walks away. “Hendrix,” she says. “What if we don’t make it?”

  I know she’s still mad at me and probably having second thoughts about coming on this crazy trip too, or at least having to deal with me and all my baggage. “What am I doing?” I blurt out, but then it all comes ripping out of me. “My mom is going to find out soon, and when she does she’ll kill me, Calypso’s probably going to ban me from ever seeing Gpa again, they’ve probably put out a Silver Alert, and your dad’s probably called the cops already. What am I doing? Why did I think I could do this?”

  I try to calm down and look out into the emptiness. The barrenness. The sun is still a blinding ball in the late-afternoon sky, and what comes out of me has the sound of anger but it’s not, it’s just free. “I’m just trying to give him something he wants and something no one else can or will. He’s my Gpa, but he’s all I have for a dad. Mom’s always lecturing me about how important it is to be involved and do activities and meet people, and not once does she come to any of the things I sign up for. He does. Or, he did. And now look at him. It’s not fair. I just wanted to show up for him for once. That’s all!”

  “Yeah, well, I’m here too,” Corrina says to me. “It’s not only your problem.”

  She’s right, of course.

  And she continues. “I don’t know what I’m doing out here with you and your crazy Gpa either.” She looks around. “I don’t even know which way is LA and which way is New York.” She looks into the sky to figure it out and points west, toward the sun. “You know, after my dad’s calls and texts and all his pressure, pressure, pressure, I looked up the distance to Guatemala City. You know what’s crazy? It’s almost exactly the same distance from LA to Ithaca as it is from LA to Guatemala City. It’s the same distance, and yet, what would I do when I got there?” She hesitates. “One seems so possible, and the other not.” Her lip trembles. “I don’t have an Ithaca. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  She quiets and walks away from me, and I want to pick up a rock and bring it down as hard as I can on all the problems of the world like this one. Can you still love a person if you can’t help her solve her problems? Are you any use to her at all?

  I’m breathing heavy and I step away from the car because my body wants to do something, like smash something or climb a mountain, because everything that is in me wants to come out. It’s the hot, suffocating press of the afternoon, and I’m so slick with sweat I wonder if this is how people dehydrate, actually feeling all the moisture dripping out of them, and I need a break. I need to walk away from Corrina and Gpa and Old Humper and wander on my own into the dust and see if I can divine anything at all in the tide of blood pumping in my veins or the scattered swirl of pebbles in the dirt. But there’s nothing out there, and just as I think we really are coming to the end, and that I have failed Corrina and Gpa and myself, I see Gpa leaning down, inspecting the tire and the tools.

  He holds the jack in one hand and the wrench for the lug nuts in the other and walks around the car. He opens the hatchback and sits on a wedge of space in the trunk. He’s muttering to himself, and as I begin to worry what he might do with the tools in his hand, he beckons me, and then he waves to Corrina, too. At first she stares at him from twenty yards away, but then he calls her name, and she nods and walks to him.

  “Look,” Gpa says when we’re a
ll standing side by side again. “Let’s fix a problem we can fix, and let’s get back on the road, because we can’t spend the night in the middle of the desert waiting for a miracle. We have to do something about this.” He hands me the jack and Corrina the wrench. “Follow my instructions.”

  He directs us to the hatchback, where we sit and push, and press the back of the Blue Bomber more firmly into the dirt, then walk around to the ditch and do the same over the front right wheel, then get the jack square under the car, close to the flat left tire, and he teaches me how to use the jack. I’m terrified the whole car is going to crash down on my arm, but it doesn’t. He coaches Corrina as she twists off the lug nuts and hands them to me, and together, all three of us, we get the busted tire off and the spare on. Corrina gets behind the wheel as Gpa and I push, and after spinning in the dust and the dirt, the Blue Bomber begins to slide and crumble the bank of the ditch, and when the back two tires are set on firmer ground, the car climbs out of the ditch. Corrina reverses out into the middle of the dirt road and then stops.

  We all tumble back into the Blue Bomber. Corrina turns and spins out and turns again, until we creep forward and cut wide arcs around the biggest dips and holes and rocks in the road. When we finally make it back to the intersection with the 40, I look back to see where we’ve come from, and it seems more like a cloud of dust disappearing back into the horizon line, and all I can think about is how scared I was that I had stranded us there.

  We’re quiet for a long while as Corrina takes us across the median strip and west on the 40, and it’s like we’re going backward, the wrong way, and time, that bastard, is really against us. Corrina doesn’t seem mad as much as contemplative. She doesn’t even have any music on.

  “That was stupid,” she finally says.

  She doesn’t have to say more for me to understand. “Yes,” I say. “It was a bad idea. I was dumb.”

  “Wow,” she says. “That was so easy.”

  “What?”

  “You admitting that you were wrong.”

  “Of course it was easy. I’m wrong most of the time.”

  This makes her laugh. “You are dumb, but you are no idiot,” she says. I like this. “Hendrix? One thing is for certain. You are a dumbass.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out why I always like dumbasses.”

  “Are they all as dumb as me?”

  She laughs. “Nope. You are the dumbest of them all.”

  I grin. “There’s a poem for that.”

  She laughs again. “Of course.”

  CHAPTER 19

  FATHER LOTUS

  We take the 40 to Route 6 to the 25, and the Pan American Freeway into Albuquerque, where the late-afternoon sun fills the town with an orange-yellow haze. We look for a place to eat and find green-chili-smeared burritos and tacos in a giant diner called the Frontier, but we eat the food by the car again. By seven thirty we’re back on the 40 heading east out of Albuquerque, and with Corrina behind the wheel and Gpa and Old Humper in the backseat, the music back on, the summer sun still hanging late into the day, and the road spinning beneath us as we glide across a froth of dust and concrete, we know we need to put miles behind us deep into the night.

  But we have two problems. It is, after all, nearing the end of our third day on the road and we wanted to be much farther east than we are. I’d wanted to be in Ithaca tomorrow, but we’re still making our way through the desert. We need to get road behind us, and the great wake of our route needs to bend north as we sail east.

  “Can we drive through the night?” I ask Corrina.

  “Maybe,” she says. “If you sleep while I drive and then I sleep while you drive.”

  “We could be in St. Louis before noon.”

  “Yeah,” Corrina says. “And we have to stop there.”

  “No we don’t,” Gpa says.

  Corrina looks at me and frowns, waiting for me to respond, but I don’t, because, in fact, I’m not sure I want to stop there. The thought of meeting her suddenly scares me, even though she’s the one who can probably tell me about all the big stuff I want to know, and even more, all the small stuff I’ve always wondered. How did he laugh? Did he wear slippers? Would he hold the door open for strangers? Did he wash the dishes every night? Did he think wool was too itchy? Was he a pepperoni or plain cheese pizza kind of guy?

  None of this is important, but all of it is, and it makes me think about all the questions Corrina has too. Goddamn it feels bad: I have my Ithaca, I have my St. Louis, too. What does it mean, if now, after all this, I don’t go?

  “We still have a long way before we get there,” I say, and I’m grateful neither of them pushes back. Instead they let it go, for now.

  For most of the ride, my leg has been a piston in the passenger seat keeping time with the rip and rumble of the tires on the pavement, but somewhere thirty miles or so west of Santa Rosa, as Corrina slows the Blue Bomber amid the thickening traffic and we eventually come to a stop, I find myself adjusting in my seat more, sitting up and stretching my back. I’m butterfly-pumping my knees. And we sit dead still for the entire duration of two Sleater-Kinney songs, before I finally explode.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Corrina says.

  “We’ll move soon,” Gpa says from the backseat. “Probably construction.”

  I keep craning my neck to see if I can find the beginning of this long line of traffic. I look at my phone and the GPS is useless. The highway is highlighted red for thick traffic, but there’s no explanation, no signs for construction, no indication that there has been an accident or a tragedy and that emergency vehicles are on the scene.

  Occasionally we inch forward, but we don’t get more than a car length or two before we stop and sit again for a few minutes. Eventually I realize that cars are also backed up on the other side of the highway, but a mile or so down the road all the traffic on both sides circles the junction of the frontage road along the highway and a smaller road heading north. Many of the cars around us are as packed as ours. Kids around our age, some older. There are a couple of minivans and VW buses.

  We sit for another song, and Corrina finally gets out of the car, leaving it running, and pushes herself up, one hand on the roof, one on the open door, so she can see too. She looks into the car next to us. “Hey,” she says to the white kid with dreadlocks coiled in a bun. “There a show out there?”

  “Yeah, man,” he says to her. “Yellow Mountain Amphitheater.”

  “Oh, shit,” Corrina says. “I’ve never been there. Who’s playing?”

  “Father Lotus.”

  Her face lights up. “He’s awesome.”

  “Playing a double set,” Blondlocks goes on. “Supposedly playing his entire new album for the first one.”

  “Dude,” the driver of his car says, leaning forward and speaking to Corrina. “You should come with us.”

  “Wish I had a ticket,” Corrina says.

  “Look for a miracle,” he says. “They happen.” He cranks the volume in his car to what must be a Father Lotus song, loopy, electric, psychedelic rock, and the boys nod along.

  Gpa has passed out in the back. He’s snoring, and Old Humper’s got his head in Gpa’s lap. Blondlocks nods again, but he’s nodding toward Gpa. “He can just hang out with the car at the village. It’s cool. If I had a ticket, I’d give you one.”

  “Two,” Corrina says, thumbing at me, and it feels like she just grabbed Blondlocks by the arm and flung him back to Arizona.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Right.”

  Blondlocks glances back at Gpa and then reaches into the glove compartment. He lights a joint and puffs at it while he listens to the music. The smoke drifts into the Blue Bomber. I’d like to think he’s an idiot, like he’s just waiting to get caught, but there are no cops, and truth be told, across the highway–cum–parking lot, little wisps of smoke drift up and out everywhere and disappear above the dusk-reddened desert.

&nbs
p; We sit for almost half an hour and Corrina chats with the guys about Father Lotus’s first two albums, and they love it because she knows way more than them. She declines the joint, twice, asks if I want it, playing cool-kid politics, but at some point, as Blondlocks takes a sip from his thermos and hands it to Corrina, she’s not thinking. She’s all caught up in her monologue about Father Lotus’s signature layering technique, that whether it’s electric or an acoustic set, he’s a mastermind of orchestration. Blondlocks is rapt. He’s listening to her like she’s the opening band for the show, or it’s the preshow interview, the backstory that makes the concert even more exciting. He’s just one of those guys who’s happy and dumb, and too stupidly high to realize what he’s doing, and his friend, the driver, isn’t looking when Blondlocks passes the thermos, he only glances over after Corrina has stopped talking to take down a big gulp.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he yells at Blondlocks.

  “That’s disgusting,” she says, passing back the thermos.

  “Oh, shit,” Blondlocks says.

  The traffic begins to move and the driver whacks the wheel of their car as he rolls forward. He’s talking to Blondlocks, but we can’t hear because we haven’t rolled up along with them. Corrina’s just sitting there, letting the traffic move ahead.

  “That was dumb,” she says.

  She lifts her foot from the brake and we roll forward and then actually drive because the cars on our side of the highway are moving now. “Are you okay?” I ask, because she’s quiet, and it’s not like her at all.