Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  When the road occasionally veers out of the wheat fields and overlaps with a real highway, I seem invisible, occupying a sphere all my own. The cars zoom by so fast, I am nothing more than a blur to them, as they are to me. At the rate a car travels, I cannot make out a face. Neither of us can manage a hello or a polite tilt of the head. I have left that dimension. My only acquaintances are the poor farmers puttering on tractors or families piled onto an old hay wagon drawn by mules. These people see me and always greet me kindly. I am one of them.

  One morning an old man on a moped buzzes by me. After he passes, I hear the sputtering cough of a tiny engine gearing down and turning. He pulls up alongside me and removes a handmade cigarette from the torn pocket of an old white shirt, brown at the seams. He is small and frail with a transparent face and a wheeze like a child’s rattle. He smokes constantly as he speaks in the slack accents of a rural man. If the deep drawl of inland South Carolina has a counterpart in Spain, it’s in the nearly indecipherable all-vowel nosespeak of this man.

  “You must be careful up ahead,” he advises.

  “Careful?”

  “There is much danger up ahead.”

  “Danger?”

  “Yes, and great torments and evil.”

  In Spanish the words ring medieval. “Hay tormentas y mal tiempos.” Great, I am thinking. At last, some action.

  “Will I encounter the tormentas soon?”

  “Yes, a day’s walk from here, when you come to the plains of Castille.”

  “What should I do?”

  “You should just be ready. I don’t know what pilgrims do. Perhaps you shouldn’t walk.”

  “Are the plains always full of torments and suffering?”

  “No, but when it comes, it’s bad,” says my thin mystic.

  “How do you know this?” I ask.

  He pauses, a bit sad. “I saw it on television.”

  As my shaman putters off, I marvel at this surreal answer, a charming mix of folklore and technology. In the mindless fog of pilgrim’s nirvana, it is a good hour before I am moved to open my dictionary and learn that these words mean “rainstorm” and “bad weather.” My shaman was quoting the TV weatherman.

  Every pilgrim claims a specific saint to serve as a guardian spirit. Saint Groucho of Marx, watch over me.

  The only relief from the wheat field is a tiny village named Hornillos. It means “Little Stoves” and was founded in 1156 to provide pilgrims with a last meal before walking into the vast emptiness of the Castilian plains. Now there is nothing left here for the pilgrim except a tilted shed beside the church, so infested with flies that I skip my daily siesta and continue to the edge of town. Three widows, black with elaborate lace, sit on a bench in the pose of eternal silence. They call out: “Un abrazo por Santiago.” A hug for Saint James.

  I nod my head to acknowledge them and their request.

  “Beware of wolves,” says one.

  “Wolves?”

  “On the plains, there are wolves,” says another.

  “Wolves?”

  “Sharpen your stick,” she says.

  “Wolves?”

  “A hug for Saint James, eh?” says the last widow.

  These words sound eulogistic.

  The famous plains of Castille are misnamed. They should be called the plateaus. A few miles outside Hornillos, the road zigzags up a fierce incline until arriving to a level lip. Ascending those last few feet is exhilarating. The cramped acreage of the bottomland opens to an infinite vista of—wheat. Wheat and more wheat, as far as the eye can see. Dorothy’s poppy fields on the outskirts of Oz hold nothing to this view. I have never seen this much of the planet in one take.

  I had been warned about the plains, not only by the old man, but by others who said that they were frightening and hot. There are no towns up here. No bars. No shed. Not even shade. The farmers drive here in their tractors to tend their wheat fields, and the occasional shepherd visits his flock. Otherwise, there is no one.

  No matter how far I walk, the horizon unwinds like a scroll, laying out more wheat fields. But the wheat up here is different. It is sickly thin and almost translucent up close, no more than eighteen inches high, struggling amid tough clods and rocks the size of fists. The larger rocks and boulders have been plucked out, probably centuries ago, and gathered into unintended cairns. They are blanched an unnatural white and pitted with hollows by centuries of wind blasts and hot sun, like monuments of skulls.

  The afternoon moves slowly and seems ripe with portents and signs. Up ahead a dark figure appears on the horizon, clad in black from head to toe. As it approaches, I start to worry a little. I am out here all alone. I fondle my Swiss Army knife, always in my left hip pocket like a talisman. Maybe it’s one of the highwaymen or blackguards so often mentioned in the old books.

  Pilgrim testimonies frequently speak of the terror of the Castilian plains. Even by medieval standards they were considered unnaturally barren and inhabited by strange beasts. In April 1670, an Italian pilgrim named Domenico Laffi left Bologna for Santiago. He saw many odd things along the way; but here, on the plains of Castille, according to his diary, he saw a pilgrim attacked and eaten alive by a swarm of grasshoppers.

  As the ebony figure gets closer, the wind picks up and blows its black skirts from side to side. But what is it carrying? An eight-foot pole with a long crescent blade. This is not a hallucination, but definitely a tall man in a black robe carrying a scythe of exaggerated proportions, a badly cast Mr. Death from a high school drama.

  As I get closer to him, it is clear that he is not on the road, but far off to the right, cutting or weeding the wheat. His large hood envelopes his face. He shouts something unintelligible at me. Maybe it was hello. Maybe it was a request for a hug of Saint James. It sounds oddly urgent. Another warning, perhaps? I wave grandly and pass on.

  The narrow channel of dust that scores these wheat fields is so dry that the ground has cracked open in places. Why hadn’t I noticed these before? Did these fissures yawn open a few moments ago? These are not minor cracks, the kind I would expect on a dry road burned by the sun. No, these are crevices. I could trip on one. My gaze goes downward, oxen-eyed and cautious.

  Now, I am a little scared, I will admit. In South Carolina, they call it getting snakes on the brain: You’re walking in the woods, having a dandy time, and suddenly you hear something rustle in the bushes. For the rest of the day, any slight movement and you jerk back in panic. That’s having snakes on the brain. I got them on a wide-open plain, and suddenly it’s crowded up here —wolves, carnivorous grasshoppers, serial-murdering scythe-toting shepherds, poltergeists, and cracks open to hell.

  I also don’t want to look up because I have seen the clouds rolling in. Big, glorious, Hollywood clouds. These are Steven Spielberg props—cottony bales that hang so low over these plains, I imagine I could reach up on tiptoe and finger their dark, feathery bottoms. Some remnant of childhood superstition keeps my eyes on the ground. To look up would encourage them to break open and soak me with rain.

  About ten feet in front of me, a small brown bird wings its way out of the clouds and falls lifelessly on the road in front of me.

  Oh, come on.

  I am jabbering aimlessly to myself. I have sung every song and recited every poem I know. Movies that I have visually memorized, Diner for example, have played from beginning to end out here in the whistling expanse of the spacious Castilian Gigantoplex. A few weeks ago the wind bore only the squeal of a phantom car. That was then; today it’s a hallucinatory open house. I hear singing in the wind: four-part harmonies of Renaissance madrigals, shopping mall renditions of Christmas carols, all the top-forty hits fried onto my synapses before I left (the opening mandolin riff of REM’s “Losing My Religion” perversely floats up every ten minutes like a human-rights violation). I hear arguments and conversations—my mother frets again about my quitting my job, Madame Debril offers her apologies, an old girlfriend confesses she can’t live without me. It’s an audi
tory Rorschach out here.

  The distant clouds have grumbled a few times. I try not to listen to what they have to say. The horizon never changes—a thin black line drawn between the brown wheat and darkening clouds ahead. From time to time the fields betray a slight upward incline. As I make my way up, I hope to see a gorge or valley appear on the other side, maybe even take in the warm sight of buildings. But one mild hump leads only to another, more wheat, more stones. In the middle of this new field, three dogs scour and sniff in the distance. I open my pocket knife and sharpen the point of my stick.

  Pilgrims don’t like dogs. At the museum of Roncesvalles, the one icon I remember most vividly was a wooden bas-relief of a pilgrim being devoured by five or six dogs. One greyhound was stretched the entire length of the pilgrim’s height, his paws set on the poor man’s shoulders and his maw ready to sink its teeth into his face. The pilgrim’s expression of primal horror was finely carved and particularly memorable.

  A pilgrim gets to know dogs pretty well after a while. Dogs are everywhere in Spain. Trained ones work with the shepherds to control flocks of sheep. Each yard has a savage dog chained to a stake. Every small town is overrun with skinny strays. They snake around the corners of buildings and nose up the alleys, prowling for scraps. Tailless cats with slack bellies scramble in their wake.

  In America, dogs are domesticated. In Spain, even yard dogs are wild to some degree. Animal training is not how a Spanish pet owner spends his time. People are expected to learn how to deal with dogs, not the other way around. Pilgrims learn this in a jiffy.

  Dogs generally keep their distance. They are pack animals and aren’t particularly brave. I know the timbre of their bark and what it means. A pilgrim learns to speak the idiom of a dog’s bark as fluently as a parent comes to know the meaning of a child’s cry—the squall of wounded pride, the chugging yelp of a skinned knee, and the sickening tocsin of bloody pain.

  Dog’s barks are similar, and one can understand this language. A healthy throated sound, deep in the bass register, is a statement of territory. It is a declarative sentence and nothing more. As long as the pilgrim maintains his pace on the road, he hasn’t much to fear. But there are other grammars. Skinny dogs, desperate from hunger, can let rip with a fierce scraping sound. In the syntax of the wild, these are the irregular conjugations. Be very afraid.

  Direct eye contact is not good in such circumstances. Wild dogs, like thugs in New York City, don’t like being stared at. It implies some kind of judgment. Peripheral vision is key. These three dogs are deep inside this field but well within my scope. As I approach their parallel, they send up a few introductory barks. I have no fear because I read them perfectly. They won’t be bothering this passing pilgrim. These are territorial claims, pure and simple, nothing more than warnings to stay on the road.

  Suddenly all three break into a furious sprint, tearing at the air with their howls. They are coming straight for me.

  I can see that they bear the marks of wild Spanish dogs. They are plagued by mange. One is large; the other two are medium-size. One has a dead ear, permanently bent over. Another runs a little crabwise sideways; his backside is rubbed raw, absolutely hairless in bleeding patches. These are seriously ugly dogs.

  The leader is the one with the bleeding rump. They pull up short some twenty feet from me. I walk very slowly but deliberately. I don’t want them behind me. The three stand side by side, moving as one. They begin to circle. They stop in front of me and I inch closer. The lead dog rips with a frightening bark, fierce shredded blasts. He knows what he means, and I read him clearly.

  A strange fear overtakes me, and it’s one I have never felt. Of course I’m scared of them attacking me, alone, on this empty plateau. But that’s not it. I am scared because I know that I am prepared to kill them. I have my knife in my left hand and my stick in my right. My breathing is rapid. My pupils must be pinholes. We are locked in direct eye contact. My frontal lobes have closed down and handed off total control to that reptilian stub in the base of the brain. Nerve bundles that haven’t been tickled since the Pleistocene epoch have taken over my main features. I am instinctively making faces. My mouth is pried open and my teeth bared. Sounds gurgle in the back of my throat. There are no choices left. I am almost standing on the outside, watching, when it happens.

  On the plains of Castille, I bark. I didn’t know humans made noises the way birds of prey caw, cats caterwaul, or coyotes bay. But we do. And you can’t really appreciate the human ululation signifying the will to kill until you’ve felt it pour out of your very own face. It’s a ragged, oscillating sound (Tarzan isn’t that far off). Strange, it’s rather high up in the register, pubescent, and not all that dignified, even comical in its bestial ineptness.

  With my pack still on my back (to drop it would signal cowardice), a force that says it is better to charge than to be charged sweeps through me, and I bolt directly at my enemies. My knife is gripped underhanded, and my spear waggles in the air. And then I bark—again and again. It originates somewhere in a sleeping pocket of my solar plexus and screeches through my vocal cords with the force of a childhood vomit. My entire body convulses with explosions: “Lalulalulaluaaaaaaa.” More or less.

  The dogs jerk forward, but the force propelling me toward them won’t let me flinch. Like any good bluff, you can’t let up on your pose and you have to suffer the consequences if you get called on it. My face is squeezed into a Nordic mask of blood-red fury. I lunge and bark. The effect is a threat that translates roughly “I will slice open your bellies, smear your entrails in this dust, and perform grand pliés in the viscera.”

  This is a simple, straightforward message, and one that on some primal level they comprehend. And without further linguistic exchange, they signal their comprehension by suddenly sprinting into the wheat field and leaving me be.

  They continue barking. But I know this sound well. This is the cry of losers; they are trying to save face. This is the canine equivalent of shouting insults—from a distance—at the big guy who has just laced you in the playground. I storm up the road, unafraid that they are at my back. (I glance once or twice to make sure.) But they haven’t moved. The two pack dogs bark the loudest—a kind of toadying sound. Maybe they are kissing up to the lead dog, who snarls.

  My hands are shaking. My pulse, which is usually high with all the work of walking, is racing. The succubi who have haunted me all day redescend, and a new spookiness consumes me. I am carrying on a delightfully stupid but vaguely reassuring conversation with myself when a grand blast of thunder rolls across the plains. The clouds are now in full costume dress, big black tumblers wheeling from left to right across the stage before me. They have dropped a little more in altitude, brushing my hair with static. A sweet metallic aroma fills the air, and I see a few drops of water darken the blond earth.

  Vast sheets of rain explode from the clouds as I frantically pull out my poncho, logically located at the bottom of my pack. The wet plastic sticks to my skin, and the dripping cowl obstructs my view. On the horizon a broad streak of light flares, as if someone turned a spotlight on and off. It’s sheet lightning, well known to be harmless. But I count the seconds—thousand one, thousand two, thousand three, thousand four, thousand five, thousand six. A peal of thunder sounds. I remember my father teaching me this trick when I was a little boy. Each second between the blast of light and the sound of thunder represents a mile. This is part of the lore of storms we learn as children. I am dredging up a good deal of that lore just now.

  The lightning is six miles away. How much farther do I have to go, and will I walk into this lightning storm? I have been walking for nearly five hours. A kilometer is roughly twelve minutes’ walk. And how many kilometers is it to the next town? And how many kilometers equals a mile? Two point two, or is that kilograms? It’s metric, so isn’t it the same? But how could it be? Gallons and miles don’t share the same ratio as kilos to kilometers. But maybe—

  A jagged white line tickles the horizon. This
is not sheet lightning anymore. Thousand one, thousand two, thou—

  Not a good sign.

  Another flash of light momentarily drains all the color from the landscape. I saw this one hit the ground—far up the road, but still within the field before me. I walk to the left side of the road since the clouds are tumbling to my right. I pick up my step. What was that other bit of lore? Lightning strikes the tallest object. My eyes sweep the panorama of endless wheat fields— midget stalks stretching to two feet at best.

  I am six feet one. Lore is surfacing freely.

  Never stand beneath an electric line.

  Never stand beneath a tree.

  Lightning is just a gathering of static electricity.

  Lightning doesn’t come down to earth but actually moves up to the sky.

  In a car you are safe because the wheels are made of rubber.

  My shoes are made of rubber.

  Lightning never strikes in the same place twice.

  A bolt blasts the earth directly in front of me, maybe fifty yards away. This is a network of bolts, like a grid. A tic-tac-toe board of light and heat. The thunder booms at once. Should I turn around and back away from the storm? Can I outhike a storm? Should I curl in a little ball and try to hide among the wheat? Should I stand still?

  I decide to run in a forward direction and augment it with a bit of heartfelt shrieking and babbling. With a pack on my back, this job is neither graceful nor particularly effective. I can’t scare away lightning like dogs. This really is some kind of message. The dogs failed, so they wheeled out Zeus’ old-standard deus ex machina.