by George Foy
‘Like hobos,’ PC said helpfully. ‘You know. King of the Road. Emperor of the North.’
‘Or performance art,’ the pilot put in, vaguely, pushing his flying helmet back. ‘The all-American art form. Something to do with the consumption of space. Just raw space. Eat it up on six-lane highways. Roads that never end. Cars so huge you could fit the average Asian engine in one of our fuckin’ carburetors. Leave behind a trail of styrofoam and, and polyethylene containers. America’s great hope for immortality; styrofoam permanence. Like this we mark our passing; in this we praise the vastness of the land we’ve consumed. Dag,’ he added, listening to his own words, surprised at his own eloquence, pleased Ela had heard it.
‘Our unhappiness lies in small spaces,’ Rocketman put in, thinking of Bellevue.
‘Maybe that’s why Nixon,’ PC said.
‘Who?’ Ela said.
‘Richard Nixon.’
‘Oh,’ Ela nodded. ‘The president, in history.’ PC looked at her. He wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not. ‘Any-hoo,’ he continued, ‘when Nixon needed to relax. The only way he could do it was to get in a limo with a secret service man and, like, drive for hours up and down the freeways.’
‘That’s interesting, PC,’ the pilot said.
‘Your conversation’s looking up,’ Rocketman told him.
‘Oh, thanks,’ PC said, ‘cool,’ in a hurt tone of voice.
Early snow bleached the hills. The landscape changed imperceptibly. The people moving beside them in cars and vans and trucks remained the same. So did the bumper stickers. ‘How’s my Driving? Dial 1-800-EAT SHIT.’ ‘My Son and My Money Goes to Tulane.’ ‘Let me tell you about my grandchildren.’ ‘Pay off the LORD.’
Once they were overtaken by a speeding convoy of Jumpers in three late-model RVs. The vehicles were plastered with labels that read BIOHAZARD and POISON and RADIATION DANGER or carried the little black-and-yellow propellor logo of nuclear waste. What they could see of the faces that glanced at them through the shaded windows was off-balance, misshapen. Radiation suits swung on hooks in the back. The pilot was driving; he braked hard, so the Jumpers would pass them quicker.
Otherwise it was salesmen, restaurant workers, computer repair people in Burmese-made Japanese cars two years old. Families in vans, retirees in Dodges. To kill the visual monotony they sometimes picked up a hitchhiker. Two of the hitchers were older men who both had seen their luck chipped away, like a brittle cliff on an angry seashore, each slide of rock starting larger cracks, till they had nothing left but the bitter freedom to move at the mercy of the highways.
The third hitchhiker was a dark young man with a goatee and slick hair. Raw anger filled his eyes and a violin case his hand. His movements were tight, almost miniature, and very fast. He was traveling to a fiddling contest in Dubois, Pennsylvania, he said. There he would compete for a prize called the Golden Bow, and prove to everyone he was the best fiddler in the USA. He would prove it to them, as they drove. He pulled out his violin, tuned it, tightened his bow. Sawing at precise angles in the confined area he reeled off the Faustus overture, all seven movements, in forty seconds, modulations included – fitting the rhythm of the tune to the percussion of potholes. The parrot whistled. The girl woke up, and let out a chain of low coughs.
‘I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,’ she told the bird. Her right thumb rubbed her left wrist, where the IV needle had rested.
She curled up in a little ball and went back to sleep.
The fiddler got out in Oil City. As he pulled out his violin case he leaned toward Ela and said, ‘You have three wishes. That’s my gift to you.’
‘I don’t believe in that crap,’ Ela told him. The fiddler left behind a half-empty pack of Merits, and a cake of rosin, and a smell of bad eggs that didn’t dissipate for another twenty miles.
In Roulette, Pennsylvania, they purchased cheap car-helmets because New York State required them and they didn’t want to get picked up for something that stupid.
Toward the end of the trip the girl spent more time awake, or at least three-quarters conscious. She was very hungry and ate two or three slices of pizza at a sitting. She drank lots of beer with the result that they had to stop beside a significant percentage of the kudzu groves between the Pennsylvania border and Gouverneur. They got good at this, however. They got so they could do a combined male-female pit stop in under two minutes. All the art lay in holding the bladder till you found the perfect combination of a steep embankment falling off the highway in a sparsely populated area, with lots of kudzu for added privacy. The men did not care so much, but Ela needed the protection. The dropoff shielded her from passing cars. It helped if the embankment faced south, since there was less snow on these slopes, and none farther down among the mutated weeds and the rusted bedsprings, the faded Zero Cola cans and the junked Uniroyals. The woman could squat in her own private shelter of matted kudzu, bladder output increased by the fantasies of lily-ripe bodies – stool pigeons, carjacked moms, child victims of the Buck Knife perversions of a small-town hardware store owner, lost kids come face-to-face with the sudden vacuum in the nub of the American dream and dumped by the side of the great American highway – flesh gone sweet and hollow as the badgers and maggots chewed it out from inside the duck tape bonds in the bottom of yonder culvert. She would race back up the slope when she was finished, still dripping a bit, buttoning her jeans, wondering if her nightmares were as visible as her underwear.
*
The Chevy, which had been running a little ragged since Pittsburgh, broke down south of DeKalb Junction, New York, on a hilly stretch of four-lane where the wind rushed like a midnight freight. It took the pilot fifteen minutes to figure out the fuel filter was blocked with sludge from the gas tank. It cost him another half-hour to disconnect the filter, blow out the fuel line, and improvise a new filter using shredded fiberglass from Rocketman’s cigarettes and wire mesh from the throat of a plastic funnel PC found under the backseat.
Everybody got out, gratefully unstrapping car helmets, to stamp around in the cold wind, and piss. PC tried to draw Ela into making a fire in the woods by the side of the highway. She was not interested. He made the fire himself, a little Boy Scout pyramid of gray smoke, litter, and hope. Blowing fastidiously on the meager glow. A pair of coywolves stopped to observe him, fifty yards down the shoulder. They sat like a married couple, two feet apart, their ears pricked and alert.
The girl came over to watch the pilot work, her arms stiff as she tried to stretch the pockets of her army jacket to deeper proportions. The pilot didn’t see her but he knew she was there. Maybe he could tell from her breathing by now, the slightly shorter breath of her smaller and constricted lungs; or perhaps their great proximity in the car, in this half-chase half-flight toward an unknown destination, had altered the consciousness of them all, the way jisi did; made them highly aware of the vector and intensity and color of the other person’s presence.
In any event, the force of her being there distracted him. He skinned his knuckles on a recalcitrant bolt. He’d been more conscious of her generally for some time, as a matter of fact; sometimes of the curve on each side of her mouth. Sometimes it was how dark shone the gray of her eyes. Sometimes he focused on the delicate bow in her lips, the tiny wrinkles beside the eyes when she smiled. Often it was the china frailty of her cheekbones, or the little bump in the ridge of her nose; he had a special fascination with that bump, it was a tiny flaw in an otherwise pleasant proboscis that set off by contrast the condensed delicacy of her features. How she curled herself in sleep.
He could not get out of his mind the brief glimpses of ass he had caught in the Fairview Hospital parking lot. It was hard to concentrate when you were so conscious of something else. He tried talking, to bring the awareness into the open. ‘I love old cars,’ he said, only half ironic. ‘I love the way they break down in odd places. That way, you get to become real intimately acquainted with a place. A place you’d never in a million years hang
around in by choice. You drive an old car, see, you put random variables in your life. Should be compulsory for people whose lives are too stable for their own good. Put it in the law books; anyone who pays their income taxes, oh, over two weeks before April 15th. Anyone with two 401 (K) accounts or more. Anyone whose vacations are planned and booked a year ahead. They are not allowed to drive anything except an American car built after 1983.’
‘Why 1983?’ Ela asked.
‘Because that was ten years after the big oil crisis,’ the pilot said.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Well.’ The pilot put back a ⅜ socket wrench, and opted for a quarter-inch. ‘If it’s built before ’83, it’s old, so parts wear out, and the car breaks down. But we’re lookin’ at the positive side, too. It took Detroit ten years to retool after the oil crisis. Detroit wheels before ’83 were built heavy, bad for fuel, but with good solid Indiana steel. Engines you could practically crawl inside to work on, and lots of space for feet. It’s sort of what we were talking about, yesterday, in Ohio? The idea of space. That’s the other part of my law. You have to fix your own car. Brings in the other random variable in your life; how many different ways your engine tends toward entropy. See, you have to figure out what goes wrong when it breaks down. Suss out how to solve the problem. Keeps your mind alive. Keeps you from getting bored . . .’
He noticed a drop of condensation collecting at the end of the carburetor intake valve, which he thought he’d sucked dry. He put it in his mouth and sucked it again, cautiously, but not cautiously enough, because gas had collected in the angle of the pipe and he got a thimbleful in his mouth. The gas seared his mucous membranes and flooded his head with dead vapors. He pulled back from the engine as if he’d been shot, whanging his head on the open hood. He spat out the gas, gagged, spat again, hopping in pain, clutching his head all the while. He grabbed a beer from the cooler, ripped off the top and rinsed out his mouth four or five times, but his membranes continued to burn.
He noticed the girl walking up the road, away from the car. Her shoulders were shaking. When she turned around he could see she was laughing, and trying to hide the fact. Her face was pink with the strain of it, and the cold. She looked a thousand times healthier than the first time he’d seen her, through the ambulance window.
‘What’s so fuckin’ funny?’ he demanded, hoarsely.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean – are you okay?’ The laughter turned into a coughing fit, and subsided.
He took another sip of beer, and spat it out.
‘It’s poison,’ he said, trying not to feel hurt by her response.
She bit down on the cough. Her hair whipped in the wind. ‘Can I do anything to help?’
‘It’s okay.’ He rubbed his head, where it had hit the hood.
‘It’s just – you seemed to go crazy there, for a minute. I shouldn’t have laughed.’
‘I’ll give you a shot of unleaded ten percent ethyl someday, see how you like it,’ he told her.
‘It feels so good to laugh,’ she said. ‘I feel like I haven’t done that in years, till I saw you.’ She was still smiling, but she put her hand on his arm and said, ‘Please forgive me’; and his bad mood and pain seemed to be sucked up into the warmth of her fingerpads, and was gone.
*
Back in the car, PC, who was annoyed with Ela for ignoring his campfire, vented his frustration on everyone.
‘This is getting crazy,’ he said. ‘This crummy broken-down car. Like, this trip makes less and less sense. We don’t know what we’re doing.’
‘Sure we do,’ Rocketman said, glancing at the pilot. ‘We’re going to Poland. Right?’
‘It’s a lead,’ the pilot agreed, with more confidence than he felt. ‘And Ela can help us, there. Right, Ela?’
The girl was humming to herself in the front passenger seat, Cole Porter; ‘You’re the Nile, you’re the Tower of Pisa; you’re the smile, on the Mona Lisa . . .’
‘Ela?’
‘Of course,’ the girl said. ‘I heard you.’
The pilot glanced at her sharply.
‘You do know something, right? I mean, you said you got Christmas cards.’
She nodded. ‘Someplace in Switzerland. Some kind of service. I can’t remember the name.’
‘He wrote you. He must have mentioned something?’
She shook her head.
‘He didn’t write?’
‘I told you he did!’
‘So, what did he say?’
She looked out the window. An ozone flurry was scudding, parallel to their course, to the south, sprinkling snow like confectioners’ sugar on a wall-mall with outriders of service strip running alongside it for several miles in each direction.
‘Ela?’ the pilot prompted.
‘No,’ she burst out, ‘not really. Just a few lines. “Thinking of you. Hope you have a happy holiday season.’” The bow of Ela’s mouth flattened out. ‘It was like one of Roger’s Christmas cards, from the company. “Thank you so much for your patronage. We look forward to doing business with you in the coming year.” But there was one thing.’
They were all looking at her now.
‘The pictures.’
‘What pictures?’
‘On the postcards. They were all going east.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I noticed that,’ she said. ‘I thought it meant something. My mother says he’s crazy, but I thought it might. Mean something, I mean.’ She took in their expressions, and her chin stuck out in defiance. ‘The scenes. They were always sunrise. And the paintings, they were always of places further east. “Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi,” by Eugène Delacroix. “The Golden Horn at Daybreak,” by Fritz Thalow. “Sunrise on Alexander’s Camp at Persepolis,” by Jean-Auguste Ingres.’
‘Phew,’ Rocketman said. ‘That’s all you know?’
‘Like the addresses,’ the pilot murmured, watching the ozone flurry depart.
She did not answer.
‘I been wondering.’ Rocketman looked at the trees that their speed turned into ribbon candy on the side of the road. ‘I mean. Why are you doing this? It’s – strange. I don’t mean to offend you, Miss. But you could be a BON plant.’
Still the girl said nothing. She was looking at her lap now. Her mouth had regained its curves, and they were all strapped down. The pilot felt a rush of sympathy for her, an instinct to protect something complex and pure.
‘That’s bullshit,’ he yelled angrily. ‘Bullshit. What’s the matter fuh you, Rocketman? We just busted into her life, man. We went to her house. We snuck into her hospital room. No one knew we were coming here. You tellin’ me that’s some kind of BON setup? Once they start using that kind of subtlety, it’s all over.’
‘I just wanted to find my dad,’ the girl said, softly, still watching her lap. ‘And I wanted to get out of that place. I was gonna die, in that hospital. I knew it. I could feel it.’ Her voice shook, almost imperceptibly.
‘God.’ Rocketman’s breath went out of him, at the sadness in her tone. ‘I din’ mean. You know.’ He waved his hand awkwardly.
‘Anyway.’ The girl’s chin lifted again. ‘None of us know each other. For all I know, you guys are the cops!’
‘I guess we’ll just have to take each other on trust, to some extent,’ the pilot said. ‘All of us are runnin’. None of us can be too fussy, since we’re on the run. That’s something about running. It’s kinda like highway driving. You gotta narrow your perspectives, till all you see is the road ahead. The sideview only slows you down.’
He leaned on the accelerator, to underline his words. The V-8 growled, and pushed them back in their seats. A sign read, ‘MOOER, NEW YORK, 27 MILES.’
It came to the pilot, he had no idea how much BON wanted to bust him, and therefore he did not know, and had never known, how long they might pay for surveillance on his folks’ house. But the momentum of this journey was considerable. It had built with every mile spent going i
n this direction, and he wasn’t sure he had the energy to change destinations now he was forty-three miles from home.
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘And once again he was overwhelmed by the vague and mysterious idea of border.’
Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The pilot drove up Shoot Flying Hill. He used the binoculars from his chartcase, carefully checking the two roads leading to, and around, his parents’. The stunted trees of the old orchards, like an encampment of dwarves, occupied the fields around. The hills humped each other comfortably into Quebec, into Vermont. The green of pines, the metal fuzz of birch and maple. Rust of old wire fences, granite of far older walls.
No parked vans, no UAVs.
Finally, with a feeling of dice already thrown, he rolled the Chevy down Apple Farm Road, and into the frozen-dirt driveway of the house he’d grown up in.
Home. Two-storied, frame-and-shingled. Eaves crooked, dormers snaggled, the house looked like a bunch of yellow wooden boxes all crashed into one another. The Canadian border ran invisible under the woodshed, the porch and the kitchen, and out the other side. The oldest part of the house – the kitchen, front parlor and root cellar – was built when George the Third still called this land his own.
The pilot carefully opened the gate by the woodshed and drove the Chevy and its passengers into Canada before going inside and telling his folks he was back.
When he walked through the kitchen door his father was standing at the parlor entrance. The light was behind the pilot, and the old man was not wearing his glasses.
‘Hello, Papi,’ the pilot said.
The man just stood there. He still had a lot of hair but now all of it was white. His moustache was gray. His eyes were a little pink. The lines in his face stood out strong and grim. He wore the same green cotton workclothes he’d always worn. He gripped a pair of needle-nose pliers in a hand whose tendons were drawn taut.