Fast Lanes (5 page)

W
e walked down a grassy knoll to the lake

“The truck should be OK there,” he said. “Place is deserted.”

Behind us the pickup sat squat and red in the sun, a black tarp roped across the boxes and trunks in the bed. Hot and slick, the tarp shimmered like a dark liquid. The rest stop was a small gravel lot marked by a low wooden fence and three large aluminum trash cans chained to posts. Beyond it the access road, unlined and perfectly smooth, glittered in a slant of heat.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Somewhere in west Georgia.”

I could close my eyes and still feel myself across the seat of the moving truck, my head on his sour thigh and my knees tucked up. The steering wheel was a curved black bar close to my face, its dark grooves turning. We hadn’t spoken since pulling out of the motel parking lot in New Orleans.
Now I stumbled and he drew me up beside him. The weeds were thick and silky. Pollen rose in clouds and settled in the haze. The incline grew steeper and we seemed to slide into the depths of the grass, then the ground leveled and several full elms banded the water. The bank was green to its edge. We entered the shade of the trees and felt the coolness through our shoes. He stepped out of his unlaced sneakers, pulled off his shirt and jeans. The belt buckle clanked on stones. Then he stood, touching the white skin of his stomach. His eyes were blue as blue glass, and bloodshot. He hadn’t slept.

“You all right?” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“You’ve got no obligation to me,” he said. “I don’t tell you who to pick up in a bar. But at eight o’clock this morning I began to wonder if I was going to have to leave you, and dump all that crap of yours in the middle of Bourbon Street.”

He turned, moving through high grass to the water. I saw him step in and push out, sinking to his shoulders. “Thurman,” I said, but he was under, weaving long and pale below the surface.

I took off my dress and let it fall into the grass white and wrinkled, smelling of rum. The lake seemed to grow as I got closer, yawning like a cool mouth at the center of the heat. I was in it; I sank to my knees as water closed over me, then felt the settling mud as I lay flat and tried to stay down. I held my knees and swayed, hearing nothing. Their faces were fading, and the lines of white coke across the gleaming desk top. I rolled to my side and the water pushed, darkening, purple. It was Thurman, moving closer, changing the colors, and I felt his hands on my arms. He pulled me up and the air cracked as we surfaced, streaming water.

I wasn’t crying but I felt the leaden air move out of my chest. I felt how he was holding me and knew I was shaking. My heart beat in my throat and ears, pounding. He held my heavy hair pulled back and bunched in one hand, and with
the other he poured water down my neck and shoulders, stroking with the warmth of his palm in the coolness. He said low disconnected words, mother sounds and lullabies. I felt my teeth in my lips and my forehead moving slowly against his chest. Holding to his big shoulders, I could feel him with all my body.

“I drew a map to the motel on that napkin and you lost it, didn’t you,” he said. “I knew you would. We were both drunk when I gave it to you.”

Behind his voice there was a hum of insects and locusts and the faraway sound of the highway. The highway played three chords beyond his reddened arms; a low thrum, a continual median sigh, and a whine so shrill it was gone as it started. The sounds separated and converged, like the sounds of their voices in the room last night and the driftings of music from the club below. There was a discreet jarring of dishes or silver at a long distance, and the sound of the bed, close, under me, but fake, like a sound through a wall that might after all be a recording, someone’s joke.

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 into 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?”