I was talking then, because Thurman said, “No, no joke.” As he said it I could feel the water again, around us, between us.
“I lose track of where I am,” I said.
“Stand still. You’re OK now. No one’s trying anything. It’s me. Remember me? The driver?”
“Yeah. I remember you. You’re the one born in Dallas.”
“Right. That’s good. Now listen. We’re going to walk out of the water and dry off for five minutes. I’m not going to touch you. You’ll feel fine in the sun and I’ll smoke a joint.” He turned in the water, holding my wrist, pulling me gently toward the shore.
“I can’t put that dress on again,” I said.
“Then leave it for the next refugee. Leave it where it is.”
“No one should wear it.”
“You can wear my shirt,” he said. “You’ll look great in blue denim and no pants, like Doris Day in a pajama movie.”
• • •
Thurman had seen a lot of Doris Day movies in Dallas, in neighborhood theaters that weren’t the Ritz. His two older brothers kissed girls in the balcony while he sat in the back row downstairs with the Mexicans. Blue-eyed Doris flickered in a bad print to the tune of bubbly music and wetback jeers. Thurman said he liked Doris in those days because she was so out-of-it she made no sense to anyone, and she kept right on raising her eyebrows, perky, not quite smart, as wads of paper and popcorn boxes bounced off the screen. Afterward he walked home with his brothers across the freeway, up long sidewalks to what was just a few houses then, not yet a suburb. His brothers told tales on the girls and teased him about sitting with the Mexicans. At home they sometimes shook him by his heels over the toilet, flushed it, and threatened to drop him in. That, said Thurman, was a precursor to all of Dallas in the ’50s and early ’60s: fringed shirts, steaming sidewalk grates globbed with saliva in the summer, first-time gang bangs in a whorehouse with steers’ heads on the walls. Not just the horns, he said, the whole fucking head, stuffed, like it was a lion from Africa. And football, always football; Thurman’s father was a successful high school coach who took pride in featuring his own sons on his teams. One after another, he’d coached, punished, driven them all to a grueling and temporary stardom.
When I met Thurman he was floating and I was floating home. He drove a Datsun pickup and he lived in the foothills near Denver. He had a small wooden house with a slanted kitchen, a broken water heater, and a new skylight framed in white pine against old ceiling boards and dangling strips of flowered wallpaper. He played music with friends of mine and did carpentry and called me up once to eat with him at a good Indian restaurant. He’d been in the Peace Corps in Ceylon and he said you should eat this food right out of the bowls with your hand, but only one hand. The other stayed in your lap to prove you used separate hands for eating and for cleaning yourself.
He stayed with me that night, mostly because I liked the way he looked from the back as he bought oranges later, threading his way through the panhandlers at an open air market. He had a cloth bag swinging at his hip but none of them asked for change. He was big and broad-shouldered in a blousy white shirt, redheaded and ruddy; he’d gotten slightly dressed up and called me without really knowing me to pretend a good dinner was no big deal. He was probably lonely, but he moved nicely, mannish, not arrogant, tossing the oranges into a bag with the casual finesse of an ex-athlete still in shape at thirty. The sun was going down; it was early summer; the fruit was stacked in green trays like pretty ornaments. I didn’t really want Thurman but I liked him and it was time to sleep with someone. I knew he’d be patient and slow and if I got a little high it would be OK, I’d feel better. But we went on too long, he woke me again in the night, and the next morning he wanted to stay around. He’d lived with someone quite a while in San Antonio; it had broken up three years before, but he still dated history from that time; all the towns he’d lived in since, Berkeley, Austin, Jackson, Eugene, Denver, all the western floater’s towns. We talked about money—how I’d spent mine having mono I’d caught waitressing and eating off plates, how he was making a lot building houses in the mountains with a crew of dealers from Aspen. Finally he drank his orange juice and left. I didn’t think of him much until a month later when I read his notice advertising for riders on a bookstore bulletin board. He was taking off for a while, down through Texas and Louisiana, then up the coast. I went looking and found him installing wooden doors on a cold-storage cabinet at a natural foods store.
“You leaving for good?” he asked. “Going home?”
“Leaving here for good. I won’t stay home long.”
“Then why go? For the hell of it?”
“It’s a long story, Thurman. I’d rather not go into it here by the plum nectar and the juice cartons advertising Enlightenment.”
“You’re a cynic,” he said, measuring the blond frame of the door. “That’s why you’re leaving. You can’t take it here in Paradise where everyone is beautiful and girls aren’t allowed to wear makeup.”
“You’ve got it. I want to go back to my hometown and buy mascara.”
“You wouldn’t be caught dead in mascara.” He lifted the piece of glass against the frame, checking the fit, then set it down again. Looking at me through the open door of the cabinet, he held the lock in one hand and rummaged in his apron for screws. “I accept you as my rider.”
I looked at the floor, then back up at him. “The thing is, I need to get there pretty quickly. My father is sick.”
“How sick?”
“Just sick. He has to have an operation in two or three weeks.”
“Well,” he said, and ran his hand along the wood, “you’d almost get there in time. Three weeks would be the best I could do. Stopovers on the way. But you won’t have to worry about money. Just pay for your food.” He looked away from me, leaning back to fit the lock. “Is it a deal?”
“Its the best deal I’ve got.”
“Good. I’m leaving in four days.”
“Thurman,” I said, “is this a kissy-poo number?”
He tested the hinges and shrugged. “It’s no particular number. Whatever works out. Besides, you can handle me. I’m a pushover.”
“Fine. I’m going home to pack.”
I turned and walked out, and as I hit the street I heard him yelling behind me, “Listen, can you sing with the radio? Can you carry a tune?”
We pulled out of town at dawn. I had the feeling, the floater’s only fix: I was free, it didn’t matter if I never saw these streets again; even as we passed them they receded and entered a realm of placeless streets. Even the people were gone, the good ones and the bad ones; I owned whatever real had occurred, I took it all. I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle. The vehicle was the light, the early light and later the darkness.
“Hey, dreamer,” Thurman said, “what are you doing?”
“Praying,” I said.
He smiled. “I did some speed. I’m going to just keep going. Sleep when you want to.”
“OK,” I said.
“New Mexico, tomorrow morning.”
“Good. That will be pretty.”
Thurman drove straight to an all-night stop in Albuquerque, the apartment of a stewardess he’d known in college. It was the first floor of a complex right off the freeway, motel terraces and a Naugahyde couch. She was gone and it seemed she’d never been there, empty shelves and pebbly white walls with no marks. I sat up in bed while my legs still shook from holding him.
“You could be such a good lover,” he said. “I can feel you have been, but you’re so busy stepping out.”
“This mattress is too soft.” I moved away from him. “The sheets feel heavy. I’m going to sleep in the other room on the floor.”
“The floor,” he said. He lit a cigarette. “It’s a shame you can’t levitate, so that even the floor couldn’t touch you.”
I went in
to the living room and pushed the furniture against the walls. There were only three pieces: the black couch and chair and a Formica table. They all seemed weightless, like cardboard. I lay down in the middle of the carpeted floor with my arms out and my feet together, counting each breath, counting with the hum of the air-conditioner. I went away. I heard nothing until I felt him in the room. He was sitting beside me, cross-legged, in the dark.
“What are you scared of?” he said.
“I don’t know. Going back.”
“Explain. Tell Thurman.”
“I can’t. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe, like living under blankets.”
“Hot?”
“Hot, but cold too. Shaking.”
“Then don’t go back.”
“I have to,” I said. “It doesn’t help anymore to stay away.”
He stood up and went to the bedroom. I heard him pull the sheet off the bed in one motion, the sheet coming clear with a soft snap. He brought a pillow too, stood at my feet, and furled the white sheet out so it settled over me like the rectangular flag of some pure and empty country.
“It’s midnight,” he said. “Get some sleep. We need to be out of here early.”
By nine A.M. we were two hours south of the city on Rte. 25. We didn’t talk; the road was a straight two-lane, the light still clear but thickening with heat to come later. Both of us had wanted out of that apartment by dawn; we’d drank a half-carton of orange juice we’d found in the spotless refrigerator, drank it as we pulled out of the parking lot, shrouded in a half-stupor of fatigue. Thurman held the wheel steady with one knee, staring ahead. “Can you drive a standard shift?”
“Maybe,” I said, “except I haven’t for a while. I’m not sure I still know how.”
“What?” His voice was flat. “You’re twenty-three and American and you can’t drive?”
“I have a license. Just never used it.”
“Why not?”
“Because when I was sixteen I pulled into the driveway in my mother’s car, sideswiped my father’s car, and rear-ended my brother’s car.”
Thurman shook his head. “Wonderful.”
“I was only going ten miles an hour—there wasn’t much damage. Scratches and dented chrome. But afterward my driving was a family joke and no one would let me behind the wheel.”
“I can imagine.”
“Besides, it was a small town. My boyfriends had cars.”
“Well,” he said, “this is no small town and there’s no boyfriend in sight. You’re going to learn how to drive.”
“Thurman, are you going to liberate me?”
“No, you’re going to liberate me. I plan to spend exactly half this trip pleasantly stoned, playing with the radio and reading girlie magazines.”
“I didn’t know you read girlie magazines.”
“Only the really sleazy ones, the ones with no pretensions. And I don’t want any shit about it.”
He pulled off the road near Cuchillo and took a left off the exit. We could see the town in the distance, brown and white and hunched. Thurman drove in the opposite direction. The land was absolutely flat, wavering with heat, a moony unreal surface even as mirrors. Light glanced off like knife glare. The far mountains were blue and beige, treeless. “Pinos Altos,” Thurman said, “or the Mimbres range, I don’t know which. We aren’t far from Elephant Butte and the reservation.” He steered onto the berm of the narrow road, slowed and stopped as yellow dust rose around us. “Good spot for a ceremony.” He turned off the ignition and faced me. He seemed amazingly defined in that early, hot light, a film of moisture on his forehead, his big hands opening toward me in even gestures, describing small spheres as he talked.
“Now,” he said, “this is going to take twenty minutes. Remember, a standard is always the best transmission—it allows you to feel the machine and the road more efficiently than an automatic. Nobody who knows much about cars drives an automatic.”
“Automatics are for cherries, right, Thurman?”
He got out of the truck and stood looking in at me from the road. “Slide over.”
“Do we have to be so serious? It was a joke.”
“I’m not laughing. In thirty minutes this pleasant eighty-degree interlude will be over and the temperature will be climbing right up to about a hundred and ten. It’s early September in Texas. We will need to be moving. So pay attention.”
“OK.”
“It’s easy.”
“Nothing mechanical is easy.”
He sighed. “Are you ready?” He watched my face as I slid into the driver’s seat, then slammed the door of the truck and walked around to the cab. He got in and sat motionless, waiting.
“I’ll need a few instructions, if you don’t fucking mind.”
“Look, it’s hot in Texas. Let’s both take it easy.”
“I’m trying to.”
He looked away to where the road disappeared in mirage past a nothingness, and recited, “Right foot, gas and brake. Left foot, clutch. Now, push in the clutch, put the transmission in neutral, and turn the ignition.”
The engine turned over and caught. I wanted to get out of the truck and walk into the brown fields, keep walking. Far off, wheeling birds moved like a pattern of circular dashes in the sky. Something was dead out there, yellowed like the dust and lacy with vanishing. Thurman’s voice continued, but closer. He had moved over next to me. “Let the clutch out slowly. Give it gas as you let it out, enough gas at the precise moment, or you’ll stall. Now try it, that’s right, now the gas.…” The truck jerked forward, coughed, jerked, stalled. “Try it again,” he said, “a little smoother, gauge the release a little more, there you go—now.”
He talked, we jerked and moved, rolled cautiously forward, stopped. The fields remained silent. A mongrel dog ambled out of the brush and sat in the middle of the opposite lane, watching and panting. The dog was maybe twenty pounds of rangy canine, immobile, a desert stone with slit eyes. “Do it again,” Thurman murmured. “There you go, give it gas, not too much. OK, OK, we’re moving, don’t watch the dog, watch the road. Good, good, now—if you go too slow in a gear, you force the engine to lug. Hear that? That’s lugging. Give it some gas.…”
He kept talking in the close room of the truck, both of us sweating, until the words were meaningless. I repeated the same movements: clutch, gas, shift, brake, downshift, up and down the same mile stretch of road. The mongrel sat watching from one side of the pavement or the other, and the last time we came by, got up and ambled back into the field toward nothing. I pulled jerkily onto the entrance ramp of the freeway as Thurman shifted for me, then onto the highway itself as he applauded.
“Do you forgive me?” I asked.
“For what?” He was watching the road, sitting near enough to grab the wheel. “Check your mirrors. Always know what’s coming up on you.”
I checked. “For last night,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. What happened was as likely in this scheme as anything else.” He reached under the seat for a pack of cigarettes, still watching the road. “I like you.”
“You know something? That one time we slept together in Denver was my first time in six weeks.”
“I figured.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pay attention—stay in your lane.” He turned and glanced behind us. “I mean it seemed like you barely remembered how. There are several like you around. Where are all the girls who were smart and feisty and balled everyone all the time?”
“They got older,” I said. “I used to ball anyone too, just based on his eyes or his arms. It’s easy when you do it a lot. You get stoned and you don’t even think about it. Easy. Like saying hello.”
“Guess I missed the boat,” he said. “You must have been great to say hello to in the old days. I wish I’d known you then.”
“Yeah, I bet you do.”
He smiled and lit a cigarette. “But don’t you ever miss it? Weren’t those days fun sometimes? Think ab
out it for a minute. Everyone laughed a lot, didn’t they? Group jokes and the old gang. All the dope, everyone with a nickname. Food and big meals and banjos and flutes. People weren’t stupid; they just didn’t worry. The war was over, no one was getting drafted. The girls had birth-control pills and an old man, and once in a while they fucked their best friend’s old man, or they all fucked together, and everything was chummy. Right?”
“Sure. That’s right.”
“Ha,” he said.
If I remember right, what we did was this: Rte. 25 from Denver to Albuquerque, 10 to El Paso, 20 to Dallas, 35 to San Antonio, back on 10 to Houston, Beaumont, New Orleans, 65 to Montgomery, 85 to Atlanta and Charlotte, 21 to Wytheville, Virginia, 77 to Charleston and West Virginia; passing through, escaping gravity in a tinny Japanese truck, an imported living quarters. Love in a space capsule, Thurman called it, hate in Houdini’s trunk. But there was the windshield and the continual movie past the glass. It was good driving into the movie, good the way the weather changed, the way night and day traded off. Good to camp out for a day or two in a park or a motel, buy a local paper, go to a rummage sale. It was good stopping at the diners and luncheonettes and the daytime bars, or even HoJo’s along the interstates: an hour, a few hours, taking off as we’d walked in, as if we had helium in our shoes. Everyone else lived where they stood. They had to live somewhere, and they’d ended up in Tucumcari or Biloxi or Homer, Georgia. All of them, waitresses and bartenders, clerks standing behind motel desks in view of some road, and the signs, place names, streets, houses, were points on a giant connect-the-dots. The truck is what there really was: him and me and the radio, the shell of the space, thin carpet over a floor that reverberated with a hollow ping if you stamped down hard. There were the rearview mirrors turning all that receded sideways, holding the light in glints and angles and the pastels in detached, flat pictures so that any reflected object—car, fence, billboard—seemed just a shape, miraculous in motion. There was the steering wheel, the dash with its square illuminations at night, a few red needles registering numbers. The glove compartment: a flashlight, the truck registration, an aspirin bottle full of white crosses, dope and an aluminum foil envelope of crystal meth in the first-aid box, two caramel bars, a deck of cards. Under the seat were some maps and a few paperbacks, magazines, crumpled wrappers of crackers and health-food cookies and Popsicles, Thurman’s harmonica. The radio whined and popped and poured out whatever it caught in the air. In the desert there was nothing but rumbling crackles and shrills; we turned the volume way up till the truck was full of crashing static and rode fast with the roar for miles, all the windows open streaming hot air. But mostly the radio was low. He talked. I talked. We told stories. We argued. We argued a lot as we approached Dallas, where we were going to spend a couple of days with his parents.
Fast Lanes Page 4