by Tim Johnston
Because if you dressed up for your boyfriend, then you didn’t dress up for your professor. Although either way you are a vain and stupid girl.
Phil stands watching her. Scratching his ribs.
But now the ball comes back over the net into deep court where her girls, her sisters, take it onto their wrists, take it lightly onto their fingertips and gentle it once more her way, nice and high, and she is ready, she is coiled hard and tight, a perfect rattlesnake of timing: “Gonna have to take a pass on that invite, Phil,” she says, “but could you give Troy a message for me?”
“Sure thing, man. Messages are my specialty.”
“Tell him I came to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
“Yes. I just found out I have cervical cancer. Stage four. I’m going home and I don’t want him to try to contact me.”
Pale, dull-eyed Phil, speechless. His face goes one way but his eyes stay on her. “I sense a certain lack of sincerity here,” he says, and without taking her eyes off his she presses her hand to his boxers and cups the whole soft works in her palm, her long fingers. His body bows and he shows the pinked whites of his eyes and gasps.
“Listen, Phil. I want you to tell Troy this—right here.” She holds his gaze. His balls. “You got that message?”
Thirty minutes later she’s in front of the house, fifteen minutes late, and Audrey is sitting on the porchsteps in her black peacoat and black watchman’s cap and sturdy winter boots, a seaman off to sea, and the girl has got some luggage.
“Damn, girl,” says Caroline, and Audrey says, “I know, I’m sorry . . . I don’t know when I’ll be back,” and Caroline takes half the load and they get it all squared away in the back of the RAV4 and they buckle up and they’re off. Five minutes later, doing forty down Union, Audrey cranes around to watch the bus depot go by and, doing so, sees the large blue gym bag in the back seat. Fully loaded, Caroline’s jeans, socks, her favorite sweater busting out. Audrey looking her friend over, then, taking note of the flannel pajama bottoms she wears, the old gray hoodie, the pink Adidas, and Caroline turning briefly to meet her eyes and then turning back to the road.
“What the fuck,” Caroline says. “Road trip.”
Because the truth is she’s glad for the excuse to get away, she says. If Audrey was just homesick for her pet chicken she’d still be on board, so will she please not sit there being so darn grateful the whole way?
They’ve got their coffees, and the RAV4 is climbing the eastern coast of Arkansas, up the 55 North toward Missouri. A gusty but otherwise fine day for driving.
Audrey is silent awhile and then says, “Who would have a pet chicken?”
“I’m just saying.”
“What would you even do with it?”
Caroline sighs. When asked by housing why she wanted a new roommate after their first semester, Caroline wrote: “Irreconcilable species.” No idea what Audrey wrote.
“Is it Troy?” Audrey says.
“Is what Troy?”
“Why you’re glad to get away.”
Caroline looks over, looks back to the road. “It could be a lot of things, Audrey. I might be having a psychological crisis. I might’ve decided college is a waste of time and money. I might be sleeping with my professor. I might’ve decided life is too fucking short. I might—”
“Which one?”
“What?”
“Callaway?”
“What? No. Seriously?”
“Buford?”
“Buford? He’s like, a hundred years old and smells like old bedsheets.”
“Nice eyes, though.”
“Nice eyes. Jesus, Audrey, I am not sleeping with my professor, I was just making a point. I was just posing hypotheticals—remember those? Remember when we talked about those?”
“Yes. But it just stuck out, that one.”
“Well”—pushing out the flat of her palm—“stick it back in.”
“All right. Sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Caroline says, flicking hair out of her eyes. Sliding a glance at Audrey, who sips at her coffee.
“Is that how you see me?” she says. “Someone who would sleep with her professor?”
“No. I never thought about it until you mentioned it.”
“But you went there pretty quickly.”
Audrey holds her coffee in midair. Then sips, and says, “Not because I think of you like that, though. But because you always surprise me, Caroline. You always do. I count on you surprising me. That’s all.”
The girls face forward. The fields sweeping by, unrolling like great corduroy rugs, brown and white, the white not cotton now but lines of ice from the storm caught in the furrows. Above them bends the deep and empty sky. Audrey reaches to touch the colorful loops of beads that hang from the rearview mirror. The beads click when they get swinging, and in the thick of them, like a little thing nested there, is a white rabbit’s foot, stained in shifting spots of colored light. The RAV4 was a gift from Caroline’s father, the rabbit’s foot a gift from her brother. Not so lucky for the rabbit, said Caroline’s father. And: A moving vehicle is no place for luck, daughter. May this vehicle be safeguarded by intelligence, by great care and caution, and not the amputated paw of a rodent.
“So what is it, then?” Audrey says, and Caroline swipes at her eye—a single tear, where did that come from?
“Let’s just say it includes but is not strictly about Troy,” she says, and neither girl says another word for a mile, two miles. Then Audrey says, “I’m sorry, Caroline,” and Caroline says, “Screw it. Screw him. Are we going to listen to these tunes or what?”
They are just a few miles into Missouri when the first text comes, a two-note chime, and Caroline’s heart jumps to it like a trained animal.
But she defies the chime, her heart’s response to it. Eyes on the road, hands at ten and two. They’ve been listening to an old Radiohead CD—the RAV4 is pre-Bluetooth by, like, one year—each in her separate thoughts, and Caroline waits for the end of the song before she fishes up the phone from her tote bag, reads the message, places the phone in her lap and takes the wheel two-handed again. Now it begins.
The phone chimes and vibrates on her upper thigh, sending its hum, its message, deep. The times when he would text at night and she would hold it there, waiting, her heartbeat beneath it, in her belly, everywhere . . .
A full minute passes without a third text and she lifts the phone, and the car drifts and she corrects with a jerk. She holds the phone at the crown of the wheel, as if she’s going to text back, and Audrey, reaching, says, “Here, let me,” and takes the phone from her. “What do you want to say?”
The first yellow speech balloon reads: WTF, C? Where r u? The second reads: U don’t know what u think u know. In class, will call u in 1 hr.
Caroline tosses her hair and says, “Tell him, ‘You don’t know what I know. Don’t call me, I’m driving.’”
Audrey thumbs it in and sends the message and places the phone in her own lap, and Caroline eyes the phone there, her phone, in a lap not hers, before looking away.
She turns up the music and taps at the wheel and bobs her head to the beat, but it’s no use; it’s as if there’s a third person in the cab now, as if they’ve picked up a hitchhiker. They wait to see what he’ll say.
The phone chimes and vibrates on Audrey’s thigh. She reads aloud: “‘Please please be cool, C’—C as in the letter C,” Audrey says. “‘Gotta talk to you.’”
“Tell him, ‘Talk to Phil,’” Caroline says. “Tell him, ‘Ask Phil how he liked it this a.m.’”
Audrey looks over. “Liked what?”
“Just type it.”
She types and sends the message, and Caroline tells her what happened with Phil, and Audrey sits holding the phone. Silent for a long while.
“What did it feel like?” she says at last, and Caroline gives her a look.
“What do you think it felt like?”
“I mean,” Audrey says, �
��in that context. The fact that it was Phil.”
Caroline sputters her lips and turns back to the road. “The usual, Audrey. Nothing to write home about.”
The sun is going down; the swaying beads catch its light and throw prisms on the girls’ legs. Music pulses in the speakers.
“Phil,” Audrey says after a while, as if to herself. “I hope you washed your hand.”
And Caroline laughs then, deeply and truly, and the laugh releases the Georgia in her chest like walking into her memaw’s house, like the drug-strong smell of hot pecan pie, and she says in the voice of home, “Oh, Audrey, sometimes I just love you.”
And Audrey—who loves this voice, who has always loved this voice—says, “I know. It’s the same with me.”
They drive out of day into night, out of cotton country into wheat and then into corn, all such fields indistinguishable in the dead of winter, all brown and empty, increasingly drifted in dunes of snow. Off to their right somewhere the wide Mississippi slugs along through its turnings, back the way they’ve come, south as the girls drive north. The girls talking and talking until, in the midst of a lull, Audrey works her head into a pillow stuffed up against the passenger window and sleeps.
Caroline drives on, alone now and aware of the car around her—the road beneath it, the four small dashes of rubber that connect car to road—in a way she hadn’t been just a moment before, and soon enough she puts it together: that this awareness, this alertness, comes with the surrendering of the same thing in her passenger, and that this is an intimacy, this exchange, modern in its specifics and yet ancient to the species, old as blood: the deep, unthinking trust of children who slept in open caves, who sleep now in cars piloted by their parents flying down deadly highways; the fierce tenderness of responsibility that pounds in the chests of parents, the father or mother at the wheel . . . and following this current of thought Caroline doesn’t think of Troy for miles, and then she realizes she hasn’t thought of Troy for miles and it’s all over—he’s back. Those eyes. Those hands. The smell of that chest.
She would like to let Audrey sleep but they need gas, and ten miles later she takes the exit and pulls into the station, and Audrey raises her head, then pushes the black knit cap up from her eyes.
“Where are we?”
“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“We were never in Kansas.”
“I know, Audrey.”
They take turns in the ladies’ and then they look over the food: the wedges of old pizza, the paper baskets of breaded chicken parts, the fat corn dogs that crack them up just to think about putting them in their mouths, finally settling on a family-size bag of Cheetos and two milky coffee drinks in glass bottles. Audrey offers the last of her cash but Caroline waves her off. The big dude behind the counter looks from one girl to the other, boldly, as if to make some kind of point. Caroline catches and holds his eye: Is there a problem, bubba?
Outside the air is so cold, and there’s the smell of snow although they can see the deep glitter of outer space, and they stand awhile with their faces lifted, lips pursed, blowing pale breaths that rise and vanish in the stars.
Audrey drives now, and they talk, and Caroline learns that Audrey’s father has lung cancer—the cancer is back, actually—and there’s no hope. Her mother died when Audrey was just seven, a rare blood disease, and there are no brothers, no sisters—Caroline knows these facts from the dorm room days, from those early days when they were still trying—and she understands that in a few months, or however long it takes, Audrey will be an orphan at the age of nineteen.
The cold night rolls by, northern Iowa, flat and snowy, a few farmhouses lit up in the empty reaches. Caroline imagines Audrey out there—walking out there in her winter boots, her black knit cap, all alone. She reaches to touch the colorful beads, the white rabbit’s foot within, so soft. Everything strange from this vantage. A girl who is not her sitting in her seat, hands on her steering wheel. As if she’s been transformed. If she looks in the vanity mirror now what will she see? Her mind is playing tricks on her. She needs sleep.
She sips the cold coffee drink through a straw and says, “What will you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . after. Will you come back to school?”
Audrey doesn’t answer. Then she says, “I don’t know,” and sinks her hand into the Cheetos bag.
Caroline slips her own hand into her tote bag and steals a glance, but no new messages. That’s seven hours now.
Not that she’s counting.
Not that she’s thinking where is he where the fuck is he.
Not that she’s picturing certain big-eyed skanks swatting their eyelashes at him.
Audrey, at the helm, sails on. Steady as she goes. Taking her time catching up with and passing a semi, giving the old boy behind the wheel a nice long look down into the car. Caroline sitting there in her pajama bottoms with the shells and starfish so faded they could be anything, What’re you looking at, truck-driver man? Why don’t you watch where you’re driving?
When they are well past the semi and back in the right lane again Audrey says, “Want to hear what he told me, last time I saw him?”
“Who?”
“My dad. The sheriff. The ex-sheriff.”
“Sure.”
“He said there’s never a good American with a gun around when you need one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s what I asked.”
“What did he say?”
“He said if it were just him and the doctors and the bills, it’d be over already. Says to me, ‘I’m not afraid of dying, but I got a certain reputation to uphold, don’t I? Folks sure would be disappointed.’”
“What did you say to that?”
“I said, ‘Daddy, if I ever hear you talk like that again I’ll shoot you myself.’”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Deputy, now that would really shake things up, wouldn’t it.’”
The girls smile at each other, eyes shining, and face forward again.
A swarm of bright insects dive into the headlights and burst their translucent guts on the glass. Not bugs, Caroline realizes—it’s some kind of weather, thick and whitish, but not snow. Sleet. The pavement, gray and salty-white for so many miles, begins to darken, to glisten.
Audrey eases up on the gas. “I don’t like the looks of this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t feel too great driving your car in this stuff.”
“Audrey, let me remind you: Caroline from Georgia, Audrey from Minnesota. Grandpa Sven probably had you driving the snowplow when you were just a wee lad.”
“I don’t have a Grandpa Sven.”
“Plus this car has four-wheel drive.”
“Is it on?”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“But it’s your car, Caroline. You have a feel for it.”
“Audrey, we’re like an hour away, aren’t we?”
This is true: they are an hour, in good conditions, from Audrey’s father’s house, where they will say hello to the man, brush their teeth and fall like dead women into Audrey’s bed. But after eleven hours on the road, the last hour will be the longest and cruelest, whatever the weather, and finally it’s the girls’ bladders that make the call—oh man, that coffee drink went straight through them—and they take the next exit, only to discover that the nearest gas station is two miles from the highway, but by now the idea of a bathroom has such a grip on them that they take the two miles anyway, a hilly and curvy two-laner that feeds them down into a valley and onto a narrow trestle bridge with a rusted and bullet-pocked sign that may have once named the river they can see below, wisps of snow moving snakelike across a black face of ice, or perhaps the sign issued a warning about the narrowness of the bridge or its tendency to freeze before the road. In any case, once across the bridge they rise out of the valley again, steeply, and travel another half mi
le through a gray, disheartening slush before they at last reach a remote station—a dubious, sickly lit shoebox of a building, blurry after so long on the road . . . Christ, is it even open?
It is, thank God.
Baby wherever u r, whatever u r doing, I will b there. Just tell me.
Caroline thumbs in a reply, stares at it, then wipes it out and drops the phone back into her bag.
The sleet ticks and ticks against the glass. She cranks up the heat and directs it onto the windshield and lets the wipers loose for two crusty swipes. Maybe ought to get out and go at the glass with that scraper she bought when the ice storm hit last week. Inside the gas station, on the other side of fogged glass, sits the big gal with her big pink Midwestern face, pencil in her fist, solving her puzzles. Giving the girls a good long look when they came in. Hardly room to turn around in there between the counter and the racks, let alone steal any of her dusty old crap, The ladies’ is around the side of the building, girls, here’s the key, thin, cheap key attached by a short hoop of what looks like dried possum gut to a wooden souvenir backscratcher from Phoenix, Arizona, of all places, and blackened from handling, black grime under weirdly realistic fingernails, and that’s what you give people to take into your nasty-even-for-a-gas-station ladies’ room?
Two other vehicles are parked at the station, Caroline observes, neither here for gas, or else finished with gas and moved off to the side of the building, opposite to the bathroom side. One a low-squatting wagon with a driver’s door of a completely different color and the windshield blinded over in sleet; the other an old two-tone pickup like her papaw’s down in Georgia . . . Papaw forever headfirst into its open hood, Hand me the five-eighths now, Sweetpea . . .
Caroline tapping the wheel with her nails and looking for Audrey to appear in the yellow light again, give the big gal back her backscratcher and get her ass back to the car. The falling ice ticking away on one side of the windshield and hot air blowing on the other and the thin streams of water finding their way down the curve of glass and Come on, Audrey, Jesus . . . and suddenly Caroline goes cold all over, her heart jolting as if something live has bounded in front of her, and she looks again at the pickup truck. The windshield catches the yellow light of the station, the glass recently wipered and still too warm for the sleet to build its white shell as it has on the wagon.