I listened for anything that sounded engine-like, but the air carried birdsong. The applause of pine needles. Before my legs stiffened, I used the milepost to stretch my back, my hamstrings, my quads, my calves. One round of reps. Five rounds. Ten.
My voice mocked me as it pinged through trees. “Goddammit! Where is he?”
Fifteen minutes later, Dad’s car wove into view. He rolled down his window, a chubby smile on his face, and threw open the passenger door. “I’m sorry, Andra. You know, I knocked on the door, and that woman opened it and a puff of smoke blew outta her mouth when she called me Hot Shot.”
But I wasn’t listening. Dad was never sorry when he said he was, and I never called him on it. Sorry was just a word he knew I expected. I stalked around the car and almost ripped his door off the hinge.
“Get out.”
“Huh?” He was still smiling.
“Get. Out. I’m driving.”
“You ain’t gonna leave me here, are you?” Dad rocked his way to stand and looked at me.
“Don’t tempt me,” I shot back and climbed into the driver’s seat, my temper a mask for childish tears I shed.
Forgotten.
Again.
Dad watched me from the passenger seat. The whole car listed to the right. My hands shook against the steering wheel. Sunglasses shielded emotion trapped behind my eyes, wounded feelings streaked with red.
“You wouldn’t believe that place. Vaiden, Mississippi. That woman had a farm—”
“I don’t care, Dad.”
“And it was the run down-est place I ever seen. Did I tell you she was eighty-nine?”
My knuckles were lobes of bone around tan leather. “Yes. You did. Several times.”
“Well, she opened the door. ‘Hello there, Hot Shot.’ It was the first thing she said.” Dad’s laughter rocked the car, and I compensated by jerking the wheel left. He grabbed the dash and kept talking. “She called me Hot Shot, and—”
“Dad! You already said that!”
“Well, I know I did, Andra, but I just can’t tell you how good it felt to be called Hot Shot after all these years.”
“Just don’t talk to me, Dad.”
We motored along in silence, over ground I already covered. But I was with Hot Shot. He couldn’t be quiet for long. If he was conscious, his mouth had to move.
“There’s milepost 105………………104.”
“Dad! I said don’t talk.”
“Okay…………103.”
“Dad!!!!”
“Well, I don’t understand why we got to backtrack so much. Why couldn’t we stay closer to where you stopped today?”
“Why didn’t you just stay with that woman in Vaiden, Mississippi?”
“She called me Hot Shot.”
“Oh! My! God!!”
I screeched into the parking lot of the Jackson Marriott. Dad’s hands scraped the dashboard. “What’re you doing, trying to kill us all?”
I put the car in park and jumped out. Anger was my default position with my father. For ignoring me when I was growing up. For lecturing me through my teens. For always giving his attention to everyone but me. I whirled on him. “Why did you forget me? I told you you’d go over there and forget me.” My chest shook against the bile that threatened to spew like hot lava.
Dad sat there. A little boy. Lost. “But she called me Hot Shot. She remembered me that way.” His shoulders stooped as he climbed from the car and shuffled past me. “Probably the last time anybody in my life’ll recall that part of who I am.”
“Well, what about me, huh? I’m your daughter, and I’m still trying to figure out who you are!”
Dad ignored me and went inside. Light flickered when he fired up the television. By the time I turned off the car and hobbled inside, he was mesmerized, news screeching ever more preposterous speculation about the Malaysian plane.
I locked myself in the bathroom and tore off sweaty clothes. The vein above my left eye throbbed. While the tub filled with steaming water, I sat on the cold toilet and breathed in the scent of eucalyptus, bath salt I added to cleanse shredded feet. Water crashed, and I closed my eyes and pretended it was a waterfall.
When I turned off the faucet, Greta Van Sustern joined me in the bath. She barked a litany of guesses and innuendo at yet another assembled panel of experts. I dunked my head and held my breath until stars danced through darkness. Water sprayed everywhere when I surfaced and shouted, “Can you please turn that down, Dad?”
“Gotta find out what happened to that plane.” Cable news swelled even louder as panelists engaged in a hackneyed crescendo of guessing games and speculative fiction. “I can’t believe they don’t know where it is.”
“They’ll never find that plane, Dad!!”
Just like I would never find my father. My dreams for connection swirled down the drain.
I bypassed sitting with him and slipped into my room. Foam earplugs blocked out another sensational non-news program. They muted Dad’s diatribes, emotional reactions to everything he saw and heard, designed to keep people watching. To foment controversy and discord. To divide viewers.
Some relationships are simple division.
I wrapped a pillow around my head. My mother was coming to relieve Dad of sole responsibility for me. Or to smother me. After two days together, Dad and I called her. Independently.
“Please come and save us from killing each other,” we both pleaded in separate episodes.
She would spend three weeks on the Trace to finish the trip. If Dad was already driving me insane, I despaired at Mom’s arrival. In the moment, I wanted her. But with distance and clarity?
Even though Dad was maddening, Mom and I clashed like feral cats fighting over the same turf. I wondered if we could kill each other with hurtful words, pointy things we wielded with vengeful precision. With expert calculation. With intimate knowledge of wounds to cause supreme pain. In recent months, we found a happier place. But our truce was too recent to hope it would last.
I smothered my head and mumbled, “I can’t wait.”
HAVE LOVE WILL TRAVEL
The Sonics
It ain’t easy being caught between two women, especially if you love ’em.
My wife wanted a baby so bad. I kinda lost her after my daughter was born. She couldn’t breastfeed. Didn’t get no milk. But she wouldn’t let no one else hold a bottle to feed Andra. Linda was the only one to change her, give her a bath, put her to bed.
I looked at the two of them sometimes, off in their own little womanly world, and I wondered….
What was the point of my being around?
Here I was, a man who’d been doted on by his mother and sisters, who was always the center of their worlds, even after they found husbands. A man who just buried his dear mother in the ground months before, and I was an outsider. An outcast. A third-wheel in his own home.
Linda was always protecting her children, never got tongue-tied. I used to watch her with Andra, and I had no idea how she did it. How does a fella find stuff to say to a little human being, day after day after day? I’d come home from work too tired to do anything more than chase Andra around the house in them Groucho Marx glasses. She shrieked and laughed and begged for more, but after five or ten minutes, I was done. I watched her, bobbing up and down between me and the TV in one of them dresses Linda liked so much, busting with stuff to tell me.
Only I didn’t know how to listen.
When Linda called her, she always frittered away. Forgot about me. Left me stuck with my own ignorance about how to be a good dad.
She and Linda, they always talked about everything. They talked about the boys Andra chose to date. Never liked any of ’em, including that husband of hers. Andra used to call Linda every day once she got home from her first job. They’d talk for an hour or more, and I’d sit there, waiting for her to say she wanted to talk to me.
She never did. I was always the castaway.
But something changed around the time Andra turn
ed thirty-three. Don’t know what it was. All of a sudden, she was arguing with Linda all the time, them emotional, female fights I couldn’t understand. They’d hurl insults and storm out of rooms and make each other cry and everything……..I didn’t know what to do.
Turns out, that’s when Andra started calling me. A few minutes, at first, while Linda was at work. Conversations filled with gaps and stops and silences, but over the years, we worked it out. When Linda couldn’t find the way back to Andra, I was the one who explained how to get there.
Because I finally saw my daughter as a woman, inside the little girl we made, and I knew how to talk to grown-ups. I entertained her with stories. Shared my Hot Shot routine. And somewhere in there, I gave her a nugget or two from inside, and hoped she knew what she meant to me.
FIELDS OF GOLD
Sting
Milepost 165.
A Thursday.
The Mississippi Hills were a Chinese army of pine trees, flanking me in every direction. Branches entwined like clasped fingers overhead, a canopy that blocked light. I directed Dad to French Camp. Milepost 180. Our next overnight stop.
“Check out the place, Dad. Maybe drag some of our stuff inside.”
“Why? I can just wait for you.”
“Because I might be in bed ten minutes faster if you get some stuff out of the car!”
“Does this place have a TV?”
“Goodbye, Dad.”
I waved into his exhaust and prepared to muscle everything into another stop.
A vibration ran up my leg. I reached into my pocket and retrieved my phone. It worked overtime during my first week, flooded with messages of encouragement and support. But by the middle of week two, the torrent of upbeat sentences slowed to a trickle. My smartphone pierced the silence and frightened me when it beeped. The novelty of my walk wore off for everyone, about the time it steamrolled me.
Maybe they wouldn’t notice if I quit.
My thumb ached as it scrolled over Alice’s words.
Hey Andra.
Been thinking about you a lot this week.
Hope things are going okay.
Before I could stop myself, I typed three pathetic words.
I miss you.
I hit ‘Send’ and piled on a few more.
More than I can say.
Little dots pulsed in a comment bubble, mimicking Alice’s brain thinking through a proper reply.
Is it that bad?
My data plan wasn’t large enough to compose a comprehensive answer.
My father wasn’t a nurturer. Not like Alice was. I stared into the chasm of remaining time before my mother landed in Mississippi. Emotion and exhaustion conjured a canyon so vast, so boundless I couldn’t fathom the other side. On his watch, I took care of Dad, and I inherited my inability to nurture from him. Whatever misgivings I had about Mom melted in a haze of exhaustion and drained emotions. My knees buckled, and I collapsed, my shoulders shaking with sobs.
I couldn’t type that I had to unload the car at our last bed and breakfast after a full fifteen mile day, because Dad couldn’t believe he had to climb stairs again. I didn’t know how to tell her I sent him for my dinner, and he was gone two hours. He ate a heaping plate of fried onion rings. And talked.
Always, he talked.
Even though he recounted his litany of food restrictions, he found a different place for dessert. I cringed when I imagined him chatting up the ice cream parlor staff. “I’m a diabetic, and I cain’t eat sugar. And I’m on Coumadin, so I cain’t eat greens. And peanuts aggravate my hemorrhoids, so don’t give me none of them……….But I’ll take a triple dip of your butter pecan in a sugar cone.”
When he finally returned with a squished bag of cold food, I couldn’t find words to tell Alice I almost choked. I wouldn’t admit I hauled everything to the car that morning. My tortured muscles forced it inside.
My spoiled thoughts were nothing compared to what Dad would likely tell Alice about quality time with me. The onslaught of my period was a siege in a lost war. My stomach was a putrid pulp. I was nauseated at one end, gassy at the other. With every movement, I complained, cried or cursed. I couldn’t stand me.
Some adventure.
I picked myself up and brushed dirt and grass from my knees. Lies came easier when filtered through an electronic screen.
I’m all right.
Really.
Before I could change my mind, I hit ‘Send,’ stuffed my phone in my pocket and pressed onward. Technology and tantrums, two t’s that always dwarfed my speed.
When I limped up to milepost 166 and tried to snap a shot of my foot, my stomach heaved. I leaned on the metal post and shrugged out of my backpack. “Where is my Natchez Trace Parkway map?” The sight of food made my stomach clench. Underneath my sandwich, I found the map and flipped through sections. “One-two. Three-four. Five! This is it.” Lines and dots littered its surface.
“What’s around here? Anything?” I wondered right before I doubled over. My bowels threatened to detonate, but the map showed nothing for ten miles. I wadded it up, zipped everything into my pack, pinched my legs together and forced them to walk. “If I just keep moving, I’ll get past this,” I whispered as I wiped cold sweat from my upper lip.
Ten steps, and my gut wrenched again. Holding my butt cheeks together, I ran up an embankment. Into the woods. Without a care for snakes, bugs or poison ivy, I ripped down my pants, clutched a gum tree, and ejected a noxious pile of feces. I stepped away from the stench and tried to pick a splinter from my ass, but I couldn’t turn my head far enough to see it. “This is what I get for lying to Alice. I should’ve just told her everything about this stupid trip sucks,” I muttered as a car blasted its way south. “Dammit!” I jumped back and almost fell, my forgotten pants still around my ankles. Full-frontal, I faced the highway. The car blew its horn, leaving cackles of laughter and a rebel yell in its wake.
“Asshole!” I shouted, as another cramp sent me straddling the tree again. Explosive diarrhea shook my whole body. When I was finally done, I fumbled with my backpack to pull my toilet paper from the front pouch. Plastic broke free, and I stared at a zip-lock bag and sobbed. “Two squares of toilet paper. I can’t clean all this with only two squares.” I dumped everything on the ground, but my pack contained nothing wipe-worthy. Brown liquid ran down my fingers and puddled in my sleeves as I tried to mop up with two squares. I unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Gatorade, leaned over and launched the sticky drink between the folds of my butt crack. I used more to wash the mess from my legs and feet. When I pulled up my compression leggings, skin, sugar and shit squished under a layer of lycra.
“I quit! I quit! I quit!” Waves of pain shot through my legs as I ran down the grassy embankment, pounded my backpack on pavement and screamed. I whipped out my mobile phone to summon my father, to tell him I wasn’t an adventurer, to come get me, to take me home, to embrace the failure I was. NO SERVICE taunted me from the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
“Dammit!” I slung my abused pack into tarmac a final time and sunk to my knees. “I can’t even succeed at failing.”
Three hundred and sixty degrees of trees, with a narrow road in between. I panned my eyes over the landscape until, seasick, I collapsed on a faded yellow dash of paint that marked the highway’s center.
Maybe somebody would come along and run over me. Put this torture session to an end. Maybe then I’d be a martyr to the memory of whoever, instead of a failed, feces-encrusted quitter.
Ten minutes later, when my darkest thoughts didn’t summon a single vehicle, I zipped my phone into my pants and staggered on. Meriwether Lewis wouldn’t quit, I told myself. Not when so many people were watching.
Who was I kidding? ‘So many people’ wasn’t even fifty.
A flock of cardinals fluttered across the road ahead of me. A whirling red cloud. I dried tears with stained fingers and listened to their music ping-pong across pavement.
All my life, I believed cardinals were g
ood luck. Mamaw, my mother’s mother, collected cardinal paraphernalia and scattered splashes of red all over her house.
After Mamaw died, I believed every cardinal was a message from her. That she was somewhere, even if she was only in my heart. Or in a dancing pack of cardinals, leading me north.
Sunlight freckled the forest interior. I squinted through pine needles and barren branches for glimpses of red and gray. Color dove in time with the cardinal concerto. I tried for my camera, to capture the moment’s mythic quality, but a feathered body buzzed my head. Fleeing wings whispered an order through a faint zephyr. “These moments are building blocks of memory…………..live them. All of them.”
Life was easier when I lived it once removed, but my walk was a baptism of moments. I drowned in experiences that pulled me under, slowed me down. I couldn’t fathom how people like Meriwether Lewis ventured into the unknown, discovered new peoples, and propelled themselves onward by the force of determination. I was ready to quit over one upset stomach and shredded feet. How did Lewis and his men battle the elements for more than two years?
Cardinals flew through my sightline as I shifted my gaze northward. “There’s some sunlight up ahead. If it isn’t a mirage. Maybe I can get warm.”
Forest gave way to a muddy field. Still dormant. Percolating with the rebirth of spring. Without realizing it, I ran. Earth licked my shoes as I galloped through a ditch. My lungs burned by the time I pulled up at the far end of the field and surveyed the landscape.
Green shoots, mottled with a thousand yellow heads. Daffodils nodded and swayed. I heard them whisper, “Stay here. With us.”
When I threw off my backpack and collapsed in their midst, they clapped and welcomed me. I lay there, panting, while clouds merged and parted in the sky. I worked my arms through golden trumpets and ran stems between my fingers.
For the first time, I forgot my schedule. The next milepost. Where I needed to be.
Because I was where I needed to be.
In that field. Experiencing those moments. Without thinking about foot pain or a migraine. How much I stank. The reality of walking would be there when I decided to leave. Tears stung my eyes, and I swiped the grimy track one made to my hairline.
Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace Page 8