The United States of Us

by Kate Sundara

  ‘See you in a week!’ says Ruth, patting Wil’s white Chevy. ‘Have a great trip!’ Mia and Ruth hug through the open back window. Brent and Georgia, also in the car, whoop excitedly, keen to get on the road, the rest of the Dale bunch waiting in tow.

  The road-trip was Wil’s idea and everyone else had been enthusiastic about it from the get-go: the proposal to drive three states east across America then up to Canada. Their destination Wil and Tess’s childhood home-town, where they’ll drop Tess off and pick up their other pals, Nate and Ramsey, coming to River Valley for the summer. A road-trip seemed the perfect way for the graduates to commemorate the years they’ve spent together, driving off into the big wide yonder in search of one last adventure before they all go their separate ways. To Mia, though, it’s a chance of escape. Crazy, she thinks, all those months she was so desperate to get to River Valley and now she can’t wait to flee the place. She might even do some of the driving if Wil lets her behind the wheel of his Chevy.

  A cold stream of formality flows through her as they drive up White Willow Lane. Mia braces herself as they near Zak’s house, determined not to look his way, and almost fools herself she’s succeeded till Wil catches her in his rear-view mirror. Neither of them say a word about it. Zak’s house bounces away in the reflection before disappearing behind a row of trees. It’s ironic to her how such a heavy place can appear springy in the reflection, how they can be driving halfway across the United States and the one person she came all this way to be with doesn’t even know she’s leaving town.

  As they turn onto the interstate, she glances down at the valley – now a miniature world, a child’s toy-set – with a rush of relief, like someone held under water being let up for air. Wil puts Mia and Georgia, sharing the back seat, in charge of music, with Brent, up front in the passenger seat, passing them a chunky wallet of CDs. The girls flick through the collection, choosing the soundtrack for their road-trip. A buzz of freedom and escape swirls in the air. Mia cherishes this feeling and hopes she can keep it inside of her and not dip back down into those valleys of dark despair. But revelling in this sensation of being able to breathe again is like tempting fate and not touching wood…

  Spotting a familiar figure on the roadside, a group sense of community pulls them off track.

  Enter a guy called Richie, all ‘three-hundred pounds’ of him as he proudly declares, squeezing himself into the back seat. If ever there was a time Mia wouldn’t mind losing one of her senses then, sandwiched between Georgia and Richie in the back of the Chevy, her sense of smell would be first out the window. Richie smells like he sounds: rich – rich with the heavy, curdling odours from the shelter; smells that you breathe in lumps, the sweet and sour smells of old sweat and masculinity, smells of the unwell and unwashed. How can Brent bear it, being so OCD and over-fragranced as he is? Maybe, for him, his aftershave subdues it.

  Richie, on the upside, is a jolly fellow and grateful too, mumbling thanks through his dirty beard as he nestles himself into every last inch. ‘Real nice o’ you kids to pick me up,’ he wheezes, his breath a nauseating green stench. ‘Boy oh boy,’ he says shaking his head, ‘I been kicked outta two cars already and I ain’t even made it out the valley!’ Richie laughs like gravel in a mixer then suddenly flinches and shouts, making everyone jump. Poor Richie: if it wasn’t his malodour that had offended his previous drivers, it was probably his Tourette’s that had.

  Time passes slowly, uncomfortably, with the big guy in the back-seat. Mia ponders what might cause such an affliction and whether or not – if someone had suffered from something like that in days of old – local legend might have attributed it to Coyote. She’ll have to ask Rosa when she gets back. Or maybe she could find something about it in the book Wil gave her. Whenever anyone asks Rich a question, he gives no response. It transpires that he’s mostly deaf, too.

  ‘This one’s for you, Mia,’ says Wil with a wink in his rear-view mirror. Onwards they go on their great escape, coasting along the highway into a glaring sun, Simon and Garfunkel’s America sweetening the rancid air as they sporadically flinch and shout along with Richie.

  A couple of hours into their drive and Richie bales out at Granston to continue his hitch the long journey south. Brent dangles his bare feet out the window, his aftershave, mercifully reclaiming its reign, riding back to Mia on the wind. Every now and then Brent lets one hand wander mischievously to the back-seat, to squeeze her leg or touch her knee, like he’s passing some sexy secret that’s just between themselves. A secret she dispels in gently manoeuvring him off her.

  They speed down highways, slowing down to pass through little ghost-towns with fallen-in sheds or over unsealed roads that run for miles across vast open landscapes and away into nothing. Buffalo graze around derelict beauty parlours, lone ranches stand at the foothills of mountains, worlds away from anywhere. Billboards for abstinence claim one side of the road, signs for a whore-house the other. Yes, this is America and Mia’s eyes are opened wide to its wonder and its obscurity.

  Richie’s the first in a whole bunch of interesting characters they encounter today – from hill-billies, truckers and bikers to the glee-eyed redhead standing in a laundry parking-lot with her Bible, high on glory, cooing to them about the joy of having nothing and of nothing being everything.

  Their first evening on the road and they’re blessed with a sensational sky: streaks of intense purple-red stretching out above native battlefields, a flaming sunset silhouetting strange solitary trees. Mia’s mind turns to the things she’s been reading about tribal ceremony. Like how, under certain moons, spirits can still be seen dancing on the plains, and how government had banned Ghost Dances when increasing visions started appearing. Driving past those sacred sites now, she feels the white feather talisman that Rosa gave her between her thumb and finger, the hairs on her arms stand on end and that same tingle runs like a river down her spine.

  Soon after sundown, they pull into a gas-station surrounded by plastic wigwams, an enormous tacky totem-pole, kitsch tribal monuments and an eyesore superstore. Weathered people push trolleys through the parking-lot. Mia watches a woman in a grey Mickey Mouse T-shirt, that looks as if it might once have been white, and other women, young and old, squinting and sheltering their eyes against the dust blowing in from the desert as they come and go from the store. Long scraggly-haired children chase about between parked cars, their dirty dresses in tatters, their skin dark and beautiful, the voices of their guardians lost in the wind.

  ‘They look like they’ve had the life beaten out of them,’ observes Mia.

  ‘They have,’ says Georgia.

  ‘It’s like a no-man’s land. What is this place?’ Mia knows what it is. It’s where battles of long ago took place. Something unsettling still hangs in the air between the scarred earth and a peculiar dusk. The rest of her party, chatting in the Chevy, are apparently less concerned by this absurd cultural-industrial monstrosity. She supposes it’s because they’ve seen it all before, have learnt the history at school, are accustomed to how messed up it is.

  Wil returns to the car with a fresh roadmap. Mia calls shotgun and sits up front beside him, map on lap, ready to navigate. It turns out he doesn’t really need her help; now he seems to know exactly where he’s going. Wil’s an easy, competent driver, beside him she feels safe, even when his mind’s busy sending questions around the car: What’s the most awkward date you’ve ever been on? Who’d be in your top five people from history you’d like to meet? If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be and why? To Mia, it seems Wil’s interest in people never wanes; he wants to really know his companions and makes them feel special in the process. His questions spark up conversation that leads to banter, that leads to laughter, that leads to the over-riding feeling of well-being. And, providing she can suspend all thoughts of River Valley, that everything, just everything, is going to be okay.

  Later on, Georgia and Brent are passed out in the back-seat, Brent with cap tilted over eyes, mouth
wide open, hand habitually rested on crotch. Mia’s eyelids are starting to feel heavy. Wil smiles at her and says, ‘You can close your eyes, it’s alright,’ and she knows that it is.

  She’s half asleep when he pulls over at a junction to give a stringy-looking woman standing at the road-side a ten-dollar bill. Mia is privately touched by his donation, that Wil is a good guy, regardless of whether anyone else is awake to notice it. I bear witness to that.

  Mia stirs from a doze, sits up and winds the window down. The moon and stars shine brightly. The others are still sleeping.

  ‘Feel free to pick something new to listen to,’ Wil offers.

  ‘I don’t know about new,’ she smiles. ‘You’ve got some real retro classics in this collection. James Taylor, Eva Cassidy, Nick Drake. You’re a man after my own heart.’

  ‘You like that old stuff too?’

  ‘Do I! These are songs for the soul. Back when music actually had meaning.’

  ‘What about Zak’s music? He wrote a song for you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Was it about me? If so, then goodness knows what it’s based on, must be some distorted idea of who he thinks I am. Zak knows nothing about the real me.’

  Wil doesn’t comment on that. He just says, ‘I’m glad we’re into the same oldies. You choose.’

  ‘Maybe I’m choosing to live in the past.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just thinking out loud,’ she tells him.

  Sometimes I pop up like that. As a concept. Unexpectedly.

  They continue through the indigo night, for a good while just listening to quiet folksy music.

  ‘It must be good to have your archaeology. To have a focus like that in your life,’ Mia tells Wil eventually.

  He smiles. ‘It’s why I chose this school, why I came to River. I considered studying in Europe.’

  ‘In Holland – where your roots are?’

  ‘Oh everything is Holland’s already been dug up. You ever been there?’

  Mia, answering in Dutch, tells him she’s been to almost every European country.

  ‘What? You speak Dutch?!’ Wil’s face lights up, eyes and teeth penetrating the dark.

  Mia laughs. ‘No, that’s all I got.’ She picked up enough words from her travels and those Utopian peace-chants to string a sentence together. Wil laughs and she laughs again with him, not because it’s funny but because of how good it feels to make him laugh. Sometimes she thinks he just lets her.

  Wil’s a natural teacher; he seems to take pleasure in helping her pronounce his favourite phrases. Mia repeats them as they drive down hills, through prairie land and pine, past the shining solid shapes of buffalo and moonlit barns like starry-night scenes from a lullaby. And for a moment, driving through the quiet night beside him, to Mia everything feels as simple and safe as only it did as a child.

  Safe enough to ask…

  Ruth had mentioned in her empty bathtub the night they’d met that she wished she knew how Wil felt about her. Having got to know them both better, Mia is curious too. Ruth and Wil are her closest friends out here. She’s been holding out hope they’re a potential match. Love must work out for some of us, she thinks.

  Out of respect for them both she wants to suss out the situation super subtly.

  Mia checks the rear-view mirror, Brent and Georgia are still sound asleep. She takes a little breath. She’s already experienced Wil’s good nature on several occasions, how bad could his response be?

  Still, Mia’s nervous about asking, she’s not sure why.

  ‘Such a shame Ruth isn’t with us, she’s great company,’ she eases in.

  Wil smiles appreciatively.

  ‘Hey, you and Ruthie…’ she says with all the innocence and spontaneity she can muster, like she’s only just thought of it. ‘You’ve been friends a long while – no romantic prospect there?’

  Wil takes his time, as if wanting to be meticulous with his answer.

  ‘Ruth’s excellent. I hold her in the highest regard. But no, there’s no romantic interest. Not on my part anyways.’ He’s so clear-cut about it that Mia’s heart sinks for poor Ruth; she feels the very pinch of rejection. It reminds her of the Native American philosophy Rosa spoke of on a visit to her shack that one cannot hurt another without hurting oneself, we’re all interconnected.

  ‘So you’re not set on anyone right now?’

  ‘Well…’ He pauses. ‘Actually there is someone I like, but I’m pretty sure she’s still hung up on someone else, even if she pretends otherwise. She doesn’t see me that way.’

  ‘Well this girl you like must be crazy,’ she tells him.

  ‘She is a little crazy,’ he smiles, still looking ahead. ‘Quirky, for sure.’

  ‘You like quirky?’

  ‘I love it.’

  Love?

  Wil doesn’t take his eyes off the road.

  And just like that, Ruth has her answer, though Mia could never deliver it.

  * * *

  The roadhouse sign shines like a beacon in the wilderness.

  They pull into a huge driveway where only a few cars are parked outside the lavish looking lodge, half of it seemingly still under construction.

  ‘What’s a place swanky as this is doing in the middle of nowhere?’ quizzes Mia.

  Amber, climbing out of Eric’s Combi, points to an orange patch of sky where there aren’t any stars. ‘We must be on the outskirts of a big town.’

  Inside the lodge is also fabulously swish, with a floodlit pool and jacuzzi.

  ‘Everything in America seems so big and cheap,’ remarks Mia as they unload the cars, having secured rooms at a ridiculously low price.

  ‘Reception says we get super discounted rates because it’s under renovation,’ explains Eric. ‘Good news, guys; due to that, hardly anyone else is checked-in. We’ve the run of the joint!’

  Quickly, they’re all gathered around the bubbling spa in trunks and bikinis. Drinking-games and frivolity ensue around the pool.

  Mia is the only one to steer clear of the water, making an excuse about needing to phone England; she bought a calling card on the road today. Whenever water’s involved Mia makes an excuse. It bothers her way more than me. On the island she’d been more honest about it, not caring so much what people thought of her since she hadn’t got close to anyone; saying she didn’t like open water sufficed. With this group, things are more complex. She likes them, she’s bonded with them, she even cried on Wil, having not cried in years.

  She’s scared she’s becoming see-through.

  Tiredness and travel have left her with an unsettled, swimmy sensation on top of her emotional fragility, exacerbating her insecurity.

  Apprehensively, she passes the pool on the way to the lobby. Seeing the guys throwing each other into the water unsettles her on a cellular level, putting her further on edge. Josh pulling Brent into the deep-end, Eric clamouring on his back, pushing him under, shrieks and splashes bouncing off the walls. Mia envisions herself next to be hurled in against her will, out of her depth, unable to touch the bottom, surface closing over her. She’s overcome by a wave of nausea and a montage of memories: back at the beach on That Day, salt water shooting up her nose; a kid clinging scared on her back; her fighting against rip-tide to try to reach me and the last time she ever saw me alive. Whitewater and shingle siss in her ears, louder and louder – the same seeping sound that extinguishes moments of passion, the sound synonymous with a surge of adrenaline. Mia’s stomach tightens, resisting its force, but the chasm opens and the water floods in, bowling her over. She’s swirling, paddling upside-down, severing from the sea-bed, it slides away. Caught in the crosscurrent, aqua streams race past her, bubbles indicating which way is ‘up’ as the pummelling pins and needles of sand and shingle abrade her, underswell hauling her down into an oceanic abyss. Paradoxically pushed and pulled, her body dislocates as she’s torn between two worlds and she can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe. Two worlds: earth and sea, to four worlds: then
and now, to six worlds: now and now – to multitudes of realities stacking up behind each other like the twirling dimensions of fractals spanning both forwards and backwards in time. Propelled upstairs, she’s spat out into her hotel room, releasing a wave of puke into the dry sink. With a gasp of air Mia steadies herself against the basin. The spinning subsides, the space in her ears starts to silence. Silence like way down beneath the surface, beyond the struggle for life, beyond drowning…

  It’s been years since her panic came rushing to the forefront, even if, every day, she’s silently swirling in the slipstream of that day. The day that I left her. The day the currents of fate pulled us apart. The outcome has been way worse for her. To be left that way. I’m so sorry.

  She lets her gaze float up to her reflection in the mirror, to the feather talisman around her neck, the shaft down its centre, each barb stemming off it representing a choice, all coming back to that one life-path.

  ‘What’s up? Why’ve you abandoned the fun?’ Mia turns to see Brent poised and dripping in the doorway.

  She wipes her mouth and fills a glass from the tap, washes the sick down the drain. She takes a small sip of H2O, not salty. Standard and still. Manageable. Brent’s oblivious to the fact she’s just thrown up, but she can’t be bothered to alert him to it, nor to lie.

  ‘I don’t like the water,’ she answers quietly.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Well, if you won’t come to the party, guess the party’s gotta come to you… A private party.’ Brent kisses her with his moist mouth, presses his warm wet body against hers. She pushes him off her.

  ‘Stop, Brent. I told you. Not interested.’ She snatches her T-shirt off the radiator, pulls it on over her swimsuit. She’s not intimidated by Brent’s advances; annoyance is more prevalent than fear.

  ‘Ah, c’mon,’ he coaxes. ‘Loosen up a little.’ He takes her hands, she pulls them away.