American Road Trip

by Sarah Black

  The visitor’s center at the National Monument was cool, the air-conditioning units working overtime. The place was deserted, only ranger vehicles and Border Patrol units in the lot besides our pickup truck. An older woman with curly red hair was working behind the information desk. She told us she was a volunteer and pointed us to the ranger’s office. Dave Holtz was the station ranger, and he’d been there for a year.

  Dave had a light brown ponytail tucked up at the nape of his neck and big brown eyes. He looked down at the pictures and postcard and then looked up at Easy, something complicated and sad in his eyes. “You look like him. Are you his brother? Cousin?”

  “Cousin,” Easy said. “He was here?”

  “He was camping for a couple of weeks about a month ago. End of March, beginning of April.” He stopped, and we both watched him. Something he wasn’t saying. “I told him I had a brother in Afghanistan and he told me about his last deployment. Said he’d been hurt, but it was nothing, no big deal. But he has a TBI, right?”

  “How did you know?” Easy pulled up a chair.

  “Nothing big, he just needed things repeated a couple of times. Like directions. He’d ask me for directions two or three times to the same place. His sleep was screwed up. A couple of times, I’d be doing patrols at night and he’d be laying out in this old lawn chair, staring up at the stars, smoking.”

  I exchanged a look with Easy. “Smoking what?”

  “He got reefer somewhere. It isn’t hard to find out here. I had to tell him to be careful, not to go over the border with anything on him. He went down to Mexico a couple of times, said he wanted to go swimming in the Sea of Cortez.”

  “He’s not still in Mexico, is he? I mean, as far as you know?”

  Dave shook his head. “I think he went out to California. He met up with these stoners. Two guys and a girl were driving around in an old VW camper van with flowers painted on the sides, like they wanted to relive Woodstock or something. They all took off together, said they were going to Malibu.”

  “Malibu?”

  “They said they were going to learn Zen surfing.”

  Easy was agitated, the news about the dope upsetting him more than me. I knew lots of vets who smoked for TBI symptoms, and PTSD. It made short-term memory worse, but kept anxiety down to manageable levels.

  “What in the hell is Zen surfing?” Easy asked when we were back in the truck, heading west. “You’re the yoga teacher in this truck, aren’t you? Can’t you look it up? Shit, he could be in a Mexican jail for having a joint stuck behind his ear.”

  “Settle down.” I made a note in our mission log. “Head back up to Ajo and I can check at the library. Or we can check tonight at the hotel. We’re close.” I reached over, got a handful of leg, and gave it a squeeze. “We have a real lead and we know he was here and in one piece. This is good news. We’re barely a month behind him.”

  Easy moved one arm up over his head, then down to his waist, the other gripping the steering wheel. I watched him for a few minutes. He was breathing in rhythm, holding up the heavens with one hand while he drove. Good. We were good.

  Chapter Ten

  I STUDIED the route to Malibu in the hotel in Yuma that night, another roadside motel, this one with a carved wooden Indian standing next to the office.

  Easy studied the headdress. “That looks like a Cheyenne headdress to me, and this is not Cheyenne territory. We’re in Apache country, right? Why can’t people do their research?”

  “They probably just bought it at an auction because they thought it would look cool outside the door. My Crow ancestor, she had a pair of moccasins with this little tail of fringe in the back. It was supposed to drag in the dirt and obscure your footprints. But somehow that style evolved into fringe everywhere, fringe on jackets, even sleeves. People just liked the look of it.”

  “The Sioux had those kind of moccasins, and so did the Comanche,” Easy said. “I read something about it in a book. Is it really that hard for people to be authentic? What did you find out about Zen surfing?” He was looking at the Domino’s menu next to the phone but must have seen my wince out of the back of his head. “What?”

  I pulled up the website I had found, with information about meditation and surfing, mindfulness and surfing, yoga surfing, the spirituality of water, and very much more along the same lines, with beautiful, enticing photos of the blue surf and sky. The pictures looked sunny and warm and friendly.

  Easy studied the page in silence, then turned to me. “Are you fucking kidding me? Shit, I don’t want Domino’s. Let’s find a diner.” I must have winced again. “You can have a salad, Jamie, or whatever green food you want, and then do your stretches and fix your Qi and then you can explain that Zen surfing bullshit to me. But I will tell you right now that I am close to the end of my fucking rope.”

  “Understood.” Another man would have been in tears, or at the bottle after the miserable day, with bad news and a long drive through grim country.

  We found another Waffle House with all-day breakfast, and I ordered an omelet with spinach and onions. To my surprise, Easy ordered the same, with a pancake on the side. He spooned a pile of salsa on the omelet when it arrived at the table and pronounced it very good. “First,” he said, dressing the pancake in syrup and butter, “don’t even start to tell me how that shit is your fault. How he was reading the Mindful Vet and decided to start meditating and next thing you know, he was buying a ten-speed and heading for Malibu for a little Zen surfing. You are not”—he pointed a fork dripping with butter and maple syrup at me—“responsible for the actions of the whole fucking world.”

  I stared at the fork. “Can I have a bite of that pancake?”

  He cut it in half, slid a piece onto my plate. “Are we clear about that?”

  I studied the food. “There’s responsibility, and then influence. There’s a matter of accepting that a person’s actions set up consequences, and sometimes those consequences are beyond our control.”

  “Everything is beyond our control. Austin is a free American adult. We can’t control him. I don’t even want to.” He looked miserable all of a sudden. “I just want him to be close so if he starts to get into trouble, I can head him off. Be there to pick up the pieces.”

  “Okay, I know what you’re saying. I’m thinking about ripples, the way they fan out and keep going after the stone drops into the lake. The stone doesn’t control the ripples. But someone makes the decision to toss that stone in the lake. And everything that happens after stems from that one action.”

  “Jesus.” He stuffed pancake into his mouth. “Whatever.”

  “I want him to be close enough we can watch over him too. That is, if we are going to be we. Otherwise we can share custody. We could build him one of those tiny houses in the backyard of my grandmother’s house.” We both thought about the street for a moment, the motorcycles and the chop shop, the concrete blocks and chain-link fence. “Okay, maybe not. Maybe he and Tino can stay together and I can go live in a tiny house. He can go back home to Tennessee and I’ll go live in a trailer next to the methadone clinic and watch over him. I said I was in it, and I’m in it. I’m not going to leave you to handle things once we find him.”

  Easy looked at me, his eyes more tender than I was used to seeing in a public place. “Did you ever tell me how Badass lost that eye?”

  “He got in an argument over craft beer,” I said. “I’m not saying we’re gonna treat Austin like a pet, put him in a tiny house and keep watch over him. He’s got a say in all of this. We keep forgetting he’s part of what’s happening. I mean, he might make a decision that changes the trajectory of our little road trip. And he can, because that librarian is right. He has the right to determine his own destiny, as long as he follows the basic safety rules we taught him as an infantryman. Which means he stays with the platoon. He stays with us.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re rambling.” Easy got to work on the omelet.

  “I don’t know. It’s just w
e have to remember he’s got a vote in what happens. We’re a three-legged stool.”

  He stared at me. “We’re a four-legged stool. We’ve got Tino.”

  “Tino’s not a leg on the stool. More like an albatross. A millstone. No, that’s too big. He’s a pebble in my shoe.”

  “You have a head full of stones today, James Lee.”

  “I feel like we’ve been fighting. Or we’ve been at odds, maybe. Something. I don’t like it. All this raking over of old coals. You gonna make me walk over coals the rest of my life? Because I don’t think I can take it. But I can’t lose you again, not for any reason, even if you plan on torturing me.”

  He reached out, touched my cheek for a moment. “I’m not going to torture you.” I must have looked as miserable as I felt for him to touch me in a Waffle House. The waitress stared, eyes wide, and turned away with a jerk. Tenderness seemed to make some people uncomfortable. Fuck ’em if they didn’t like it, and fuck the horse they rode in on.

  “Jamie, we have some things to work out. I guess that’s the way it works with couples. I don’t know. Best if we’re going to make something between us that we work things out, right?”

  “I guess so. I always knew you’d be work, Easy Jacobs, despite your name.”

  “And I always knew you’d be work. Worth it, but I never assumed you’d be an easy person to live with, or love. I blame our mothers.” I raised my eyebrows at this, and he continued. “We were both raised by women who had strong yearnings. Yearnings for more. They wanted to experience everything, take a bite of the whole world.”

  “Why do you think that?” The pancake was like a small piece of heaven. I cut my half into seven rectangular pieces, each equal in size. Seven perfect bites. I thought of that song by Willie Nelson. I’d heard it as a duet with Ray Charles. “Seven Spanish Angels.”

  “Your mother was Hispanic from New Mexico, right? And she married a man named Hooker and named her son James Lee, in a nod to one of the great bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta. My mother was a librarian in a tiny town in Tennessee, and she never left except to go off to college. She named me Easy after a character written by a black mystery writer, mysteries set in Los Angeles. A place she had never seen and only imagined. Yearnings for a bigger world. That came down to us in the blood.”

  “You want to write something for the Mindful Vet about yearnings? It’s kind of a cool idea.”

  “You do it. You’re the Mindful Vet. I just want to be a hometown barber in a town with a good library, and I want to brush your hair and climb into bed beside you every night. And I want to look after my cousin and make sure he’s happy and, you know, people are being nice to him. Not taking advantage of him. A town with a library and a diner, and I’ll be happy.”

  “You want kids?”

  He looked out the window at the truck, where Tino was trying to escape, his tiny snout pushed against the crack we had left for him in the window, toenails scrabbling against the glass.

  “Why don’t we think on that one a bit?”

  BACK IN the motel, I studied the routes and decided on a straight shot from Yuma into California, across LA, and then north to Malibu on the Pacific Highway. If we hadn’t found him by Oxnard, we’d head down south again, keep looking. If he wasn’t there, we were stuck. No more clues. You could go anywhere in America from California.

  I turned to Easy. “Listen, have you checked in with your aunt? Made sure she hasn’t gotten any more postcards?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been sending her emails. She hasn’t heard anything. But she’s kind of got her hands full.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “He’s mad about Austin, about leaving the barbershop, about a methadone clinic in our town, about prostate cancer. He says this time he doesn’t want treatment. He told me he thinks he’ll bankrupt my aunt and she’ll lose the house. He had some of that do-it-yourself insurance until his Medicare kicked in. And at this point, the house is the only thing he has to leave her. He thinks after a lifetime working, all he has to show for it is cancer he can’t afford to treat, a son with a traumatic brain injury from the Army, and a barbershop run out of business by a methadone clinic.”

  “He was older when Austin was born?”

  “Yeah. One of those surprise babies that everyone thought was just menopause until he popped out. But he was a joy. They never thought they could have kids, and then this funny little guy shows up and it’s like sunshine broke through the clouds. My uncle, he always thought I would look out for Austin overseas. He said he never worried when we were deployed because he was with me. He’s tried real hard not to blame me. Austin only went in the Army because I did. He had to do everything I did, ever since he was a kid.”

  “Did your uncle want him to go into the barbershop?”

  “Oh hell no. No one in their right mind would give Austin a razor and turn him loose behind somebody’s head, and that was before the shitheads tried to blow his brains out his ears. I always knew it would be me to go into the barbershop with my uncle.”

  “But is that what you wanted to do? What would you have done if everybody hadn’t expected you to be a barber?”

  He hesitated for a minute, reached down, and picked up Tino from the floor next to the bed. They had made up after the leather shoelace incident. “My mom was the librarian in our town. It seemed like the best place in the world to me, room after room filled with books and quiet. I would have been a librarian, spent my life surrounded by books. But it didn’t take any time at all before the word got around that being a librarian was for women, and being a barber was for men. And those were just lines you never crossed.”

  “You’re not living in that town anymore. And you’ve learned to cross lines.”

  He shrugged, wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I’m okay being a barber. It’s fine, James Lee. I just need to get that boy back in the saddle and then….”

  “And then we’ll see,” I finished. “And if we can’t find him, we’ll keep looking. Okay? We’ll go home, make some more money, and hit the road again until we find him. But I think we’re going to have to stay together, because I don’t think I’ll make it if I lose you again.”

  He nodded, buried his face in Tino’s knobbly head. “Ditto. Jesus, that’s some bad dog breath. I need to get you a breath chew at the next Dollar Store we pass.”

  EASY WAS restless in sleep, his worries plain in the way he rolled around. I was up before dawn, working on our mission log. We’d forgotten the fan in the last motel, and neither of us could sleep. He woke up when he smelled the coffee.

  “I keep you up, Jamie?”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t sleep either.” I brought him a cup, poured another for myself. “I’ve been keeping track of receipts. We’ve spent just over half of our available money. Gas is expensive right now, and your lovely orange girl is thirsty.”

  He lay still. “That went fast. Faster than I imagined.”

  “I’ve left us four hundred put aside to get home. That’s the bare minimum we need for gas and food.”

  “I left our jelly in the fridge at the Grizzly in Flagstaff. Sorry.”

  “I know. I’m not putting you on peanut butter and jelly just yet. And assuming we find him in Malibu, we are more than two-thirds of the way through this mission. So we’re cool. I just wanted to update you.”

  “It’s straight through the desert until we get into LA, right?”

  “If we go straight through, then we should be in Malibu tomorrow.” I looked down at Tino, who was nosing under the bed for something to pee on or chew. “Maybe we can catch us some crabs. Tie a string on him, throw him into the surf.”

  “A dog who survived a javelina attack should not be used for crab bait.”

  “It wasn’t really javelinas. He got a pair of scissors stuck in his eye.” I walked to the bed, climbed in beside him. “I love the way you smell in the morning, when you’re still warm and sleepy.”

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth yet. You’ve already shaved and showere
d.”

  I nuzzled under his chin. “That’s okay. This is my favorite spot, right here.”

  He groaned a little from deep in his chest, put his hands on my waist to hold me still. “Jesus, Captain. I haven’t peed yet either.”

  I rolled off him, sighed. “Hurry up.”

  He took his time getting into the bathroom, letting me get a good look at his bare ass walking away from me. I heard the toilet flush; then he leaned against the doorjamb, his toothbrush in his mouth. “You gonna stay in your boxers and tee shirt, James Lee?”

  I climbed out of bed, pulled the shirt over my head, and stepped out of the boxers. He disappeared into the bathroom, then came out, drying his face on a towel. He tossed the towel on a chair, reached for me, and ran cool hands down my belly. He undid the braid until my hair was flowing in waves across my shoulders, ran his fingers through the long black length of it.

  “Would you look at all this pretty smooth skin, all this nice, smooth muscle.” He ran his hands down over my ass. “That’s yoga, baby. You make it look good.” He lifted me into his arms until I could wrap my legs around his waist, hang on. We were mouth to mouth now, chest to chest, belly to belly. He slid his arms around me, held me tight against him, and buried his face in my neck. I leaned into him, and the fall of my hair covered his face. “James Lee. I’ve missed you. You can’t imagine.”

  “The first time with you, I knew it was forever. When I fucked it up and lost you… it was hard to find a reason to keep living. I kept thinking maybe I’d see you again one day, one more time, and you’d have found a way to forgive me.” He kissed me then, so deep and strong, with so much tenderness that the tears started up in my eyes. “Are you going to marry me this time?”

  “I will if you ask me. Or you can keep me waiting another three years. Three more, and three more and three more, however long it takes, I’ll be waiting.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “I would have married you the first time we sat in a diner together. When you leaned over and kissed me and tasted like cherry pie.”