Читать книгу Road to Paradise - Paullina Simons - Страница 16

The road wound through the fields. We rolled down the windows, turned up the music, the wind blowing through our hair. The Climax Blues Band yelled that we couldn’t get it right, and Kiki Dee croaked that she had the music in her. It was on Liberty Road, past Freedom, when the Blockheads were hitting us with their rhythm stick and I was flying, showing off my Shelby GT 350 to the blue skies, that I suddenly had to slam on the brakes for a black truck ahead of us.

“God, it’s crawling,” I said. In reality, though, it was probably doing forty. Gina groaned, I groaned. We continued singing, but it was one thing to sing and speed but another to sing at the top of your lungs, slam on your brakes, then dawdle along almost at walking pace.

The medium-sized, four-wheel utility truck in front of us was from the coal mines. Not painted black, but dirty black, covered with tar-like nicotine, its two smokestacks emitting black plumes. What was happening inside that it needed two smokestacks? Not only was it dilly-dallying as if on the way to execution, but it couldn’t stay in its lane. It kept rolling out to oncoming traffic. There was no traffic, but that was beside the point. It was a menace. We stopped singing.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“Maybe he’s drunk.”

“It’s Wednesday morning.”

“What, people can’t get drunk on a Wednesday? And it’s not Wednesday morning. It’s Tuesday afternoon.”

We passed a billboard, huge black letters on white board. “WILL THE ROAD YOU’RE ON LEAD YOU TO ME?”

“Did you know that reading billboards is responsible for eleven percent of all vehicular accidents?” stated Gina.

“Is that so?” But I wasn’t paying much attention to her or the billboards. I was entirely focused on the increasingly erratic truck. The driver could’ve fallen asleep at the wheel. I gave him plenty of room. No reason to tailgate; a good safe distance is what he obviously needed. We were two car lengths behind.

He had a bumper sticker on the back tail—everyone was so clever in this neck of the woods with their little aphorisms—I speeded up so I could read it: “I DO ME … YOU DO YOU.”

“Oh, ain’t he the comedian.” Gina laughed. “It’s supposed to be I do you, you do me.”

“He frightens me.”

“Ha,” she said. “I like him better already. He says leave me the hell alone and let me tend to my business. That’s priceless.”

“Yes, but what business could he possibly have that he’s weaving all over the road like that?”

“So slow down. Give him some room.”

“Any more room, and I’ll be in another state.”

“Maybe he’ll turn soon.”

“Turn where?” The empty country road stretched between fields and forests.

“Wait, what’s he doing?” Gina said.

At first it looked like he was turning, but he wasn’t. He was stopping. Suddenly and without preamble, his coal-tar vehicle zigzagged to a halt in the middle of the road right in front of us. We had no choice but to stop, too. Like for a school bus. Maybe he was in trouble. I didn’t know, didn’t want to know and didn’t want to be any part of his trouble. I didn’t want to help him. What if he had run out of gas? What if his door opened and he asked us for a ride to the nearest gas station? My insides filled with liquid nitrogen. No way! No rides to weaving strangers driving black trucks.

The passenger door flung open. There was shouting, and suddenly a girl was propelled from the truck onto the grassy edge. She didn’t hop out, she fell yelling, “You bastard! Hey, give me my stuff!” A hobo bag flew through the air, landing heavily on the grass. A man’s hand reached for the door, pulled it violently shut and the truck peeled away, leaving smoking tire tracks on the pavement, black fumes piping furiously out of the stacks. He drove fast now, and straight.

“Asshole!” the girl yelled after him, getting up, dusting herself off. She didn’t seem to be hurt, though I was trying not to look too closely. I put the ’Stang in gear and accelerated, not like the truck—in anger—but in fear. The girl stood, picked up her bag, turned to us, smiled, and stuck out her hitching thumb. She waved with the other hand. She was young, heavily made up, wearing not summer-in-the city shorts, but a white mini-skirt, a small electric-blue halter and lots of flashy costume jewelry. We passed her slowly, pretending like we didn’t even notice her, la-dee-dah. I whispered, “Gina, roll up your window.”

“Why are you whispering?” But before she could turn the crank, the girl called out. “Hey, come on, be Good Samaritans, help a sister in need, will ya? Give me a ride.”

Gina shook her head, I stared straight ahead without acknowledging her, and as we passed, the girl’s hitching thumb morphed into the middle finger to our departing yellow Mustang. “Thank you!” she yelled. I stepped on it, catching her in the rearview mirror walking uphill in high-heeled wedge sandals and her spicy blue halter.

“Who wears sandals like that?” I asked.

“Who wears a skirt like that?”

We drove in silence.

“We couldn’t pick her up,” I said.

“Of course we couldn’t.” Gina glanced at me askance. “What are you even talking about? We made a deal.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Shelby, did you want to pick her up?”

“Slightly less than I want to be scalped,” I returned. The ridiculous part was I now had to stop and look at a map to see where we needed to turn to get on Penn Pike, but I couldn’t stop. I was afraid the girl might pursue me and force me to explain how I promised I wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, not even a girl my age shoved roughly out of a black truck by angry hands.

I was going eighty on a local road, through fields with mountains up ahead, past abandoned gas stations.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gina asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you driving like a maniac?”

Silence again.

“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” I asked.

“About what? Can you stop for a sec and check the map? I don’t see the turnpike signs anywhere.”

We did see another billboard, this one from the American Board of Proctology: GIVING SOMEONE THE FINGER DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A BAD THING.

“I mean, that girl could’ve been trouble, right?” I said.

“Oh, her. Why are you still talking about her?”

We turned up the music. Diana Ross plaintively wanted to know if we knew where we were going to. Gina plaintively wanted to know when she was going to be fed. Having lost my sense of how far we’d come, whether we even were still in Maryland, I made a series of rights and lefts hoping the zigzag would eventually lead me to the toll road that transsected the entire state of Pennsylvania, as per Rand-McNally road atlas. Past a meandering town of antique stores and law firms we drove, past a deserted little town with not even a sandwich place for us to hang our hats, and, still hungry, we left the churches and the placards behind, the girl, too, and drove through the Appalachian Trail, sunlit and hazy, covered with a silken green and gold canopy. I pointed out a street sign that said Applachian Road. “You’d think that since they live here, they’d know how to spell it.” We chuckled at that, and then again at a sign that stated without punctuation: SHARP CURVES PEDESTRIANS 4 MILES.

For four miles we looked for these pedestrians with sharp curves. Liberty Street had long since become Appalachian Trail with the tall filtering trees looking almost yellow with their light green sparklings. After the trail was Hagerstown. The shops along the way seemed too dinky for us. Finally, our long-awaited toll road! With a shopping center and a Subway sandwich place.

At the table I stared blankly at the open map. Gina wanted to know if Toledo was in Pennsylvania. I glared at her over my tuna sandwich. “Toledo is not in Pennsylvania. It’s in Ohio. Everybody knows that. God, Gina.” Why was I so suddenly annoyed?

She shrugged, unperturbed, fixing her hair and applying lipgloss before eating.

“Did you say you were going to school to become a teacher?” I asked disapprovingly. “How are you going to teach little kids if you don’t know something like that?”

“The reason I don’t know it,” Gina said patiently, eating her Cheddar and Swiss on rye, “is because we weren’t taught it. And the reason my kids won’t know it, is because I won’t teach it.”

“But isn’t this something we need to know? Where things are?” I pointed to the state of Pennsylvania. “Look. I want to show you.” For some reason Gina had unreasonably irritated me with her torpid unhelpfulness. I flipped open my spiral, started to write down how far we’d come. I estimated it to be barely sixty miles. And it was nearing three in the afternoon. How in the world was I going to drive another 420 miles to Toledo? When I said this to Gina, I could tell by her glazed-over eyes she thought it was a rhetorical question she had no intention of answering. Her attitude seemed to be: I sit in the passenger seat, you drive, you get me to Eddie. For my part, I sing, pretend to stare at a map, look out the window and give you a little bit of money.

“Gina, you have to help me. I can’t do this on my own. I’m going to get lost.”

“Why would you get lost?” She sounded frankly puzzled. “You just looked at the map.”

“Yes, but so did you!”

“Yes, but I’m not driving.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Look, I’m hopeless at maps. It’s just how it is.”

“I’m not very good either,” I retorted, “but I still have to look, still have to figure things out.”

“So figure it out.”

I crumpled up the map like a soiled tissue. I didn’t finish my sandwich. “Ready?” I jumped up and left the table without even glancing back to see if she was coming.

Was it ridiculous for me to be this ticked off? We were not yet in Pennsylvania, the state next to New York! My original plan had been to cross the George Washington Bridge at ten a.m., drive on I-80 for two hours and be in Pennsylvania for lunch by noon. So how was it more than a week later and we still weren’t there?

I had lots of reasons to be simmering. It wasn’t the geographical ignorance that was irking me; after all, I was no Henry Stanley myself. What was getting to me was the supreme geographical indifference. Not just, I don’t know where I’m going, but I don’t care.

In the parking lot, the sunshine beating down, stomach half-full, the Interstate up ahead, things bubbled up and spilled over. Molly, Aunt Flo, too long in Glen Burnie, the prickly sadness about lost closeness.

“Look,” I said, whirling to Gina on the sidewalk. “This was a really bad idea. You clearly don’t want to be here, don’t want to do this. I don’t blame you. Why don’t I drop you off at the nearest Greyhound station and you can take the bus back home. You’ll be there by tonight. Or go to Bakersfield. Do whatever you want. Just …”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Sloane, come on …”

“Gina, I am not your chauffeur, while you sit in my car with your eyes closed and act like Molly.”

“I’m not that bad, am I?”

“Almost! You see me struggling and yet you refuse to help me out by looking at the map.”

“You wouldn’t stop the car! How is that fair?”

“You’ve got absolutely no shame for deceiving me. We’re going to see your stupid aunt in Toledo and you won’t even help me figure out where we’re going!”

“We’re going to see my stupid aunt, as you put it, because we stay with her for free. Your little spiral notebook likes that, don’t it?”

“I’m not your hired driver, Gina. You want to get to Eddie? Take a bus. Or fly. Call him from Bakersfield airport, ask him to come pick you up. But I can’t do this anymore.”

“Shelby, we’ve been on the road five minutes …”

“Yes, and doesn’t it feel like five centuries?”

“I’m sorry, okay?” She waved her hand dismissively, not remotely sorry. “I’ll look at the map, if you want. Jeez, I didn’t realize it meant that much to you.”

“You know what means that much to me? You pulling your weight. You helping me out. You sharing in this. I’m not your mother.”

“Okay,” she said, quietly now. “I thought you had things under control, you and your written-down plans.”

“Leave my plans out of it,” I snapped, looking around for a phone booth. “Yellow Pages will tell us where a bus station is.”

“Sloane, come on. I said I’d try to do better.”

“What is this try? Yeah, and I’ll try to put the gas into the tank, and I’ll try to put the car into first, and I’ll try not to turn the map upside down when I look for your aunt’s house. What’s with the try?”

We went on like this for a few more minutes. But the bubble had burst; deflated I knew I could not take her to the bus. I also knew three other things.

One, I did not have enough money to get to California without her.

Two, I was hoping a little bit she would talk me into driving her to Bakersfield.

And three—I couldn’t do this by myself. When I got out to pump gas, I made Gina get out with me, her mother’s imprecations notwithstanding. Not so much for company, but because I couldn’t get out of the car without some man, young, old, white, black, Hispanic, hassling me. Saying hello from his car. Smiling, coming over to see if I needed help. Now I’m no beauty. I’m either somebody’s type or I’m not. That’s not the point. And maybe they were coming over for Gina. Cute little Geeeeena, her shorts and blouses always tighter than mine, her breasts bigger. All these things, true. But that’s not why they sauntered over. I started bringing Gina out of the car only after I realized that every time I went to get a can of Coke, male strangers were giving me the eye. I knew, if I put Gina on that bus, my own trip would be over. For a number of good and not very good reasons, I wouldn’t be able to continue. Fear—but justified or unjustified? Real or imagined paranoia? My bravado was big, but some of my vexation was at myself, a thin thread of self-hatred for not being braver, the kind of girl who could pull into a gas station and get out of her car without worrying that some man was going to be casing her from ten yards away, hiding in the camouflage of Pepsi bottles and potato chips. But it was hardwired; I didn’t feel safe, and Gina made me feel only marginally safer. Still, even a few degrees of confidence was better than not being able to pump my own gas for 3000 miles. This is one of the reasons the bus felt unsafe to me, to Gina, to Gina’s mother, to Emma. This is one of the reasons a car was better. It allowed a measure of control, no matter how illusory, and I thrived on control. You could lock the car. You could hide in it. You could speed away. They’d have to catch me first on my canary Pegasus.

I sighed. She sighed. She apologized. I apologized. We hugged, awkwardly. Hugged for the first time in almost two years, and drove out to the Interstate. She asked if I wanted a piece of gum and even unwrapped it for me. “Are we going to put it behind us?” she asked, and I wanted to say with a falling heart, put what behind us, but instead said yes, hoping she was talking about the argument we just had. She opened the atlas, and asked where we were, and when we saw we were near Emmaville (Emmaville!) she found it in the atlas.

The scenery had changed dramatically from Maryland to Pennsylvania. Where Maryland was rustic and rolling, Pennsylvania was all about the green-covered Alleghenys. Every five minutes on the Interstate there was a warning sign for falling rock. WATCH OUT FOR FALLING ROCK. What were we supposed to do about that? Swerve out of the way down the rocky ravine? The highway curved and angled, and every once in a while ascended so high it seemed like I could see half of southwestern Pennsylvania and a little bit further. I kept saying the mountains were pretty, and, in response, Gina regaled me with Pennsylvania trivia.

“Did you know the Pennsylvania state insect is the firefly?”

“Gina, do you remember how you couldn’t pronounce firefly when you were a kid?”

“No.”

“You called it flierfly.”

“Did I? I don’t remember.”

“You did.” I trailed off. “It was so cute.”

“Well, fine,” she said. “The state insect is the flierfly. And did you know that George Washington’s only surrender was in Pennsylvania, in Fort Necessity?”

“George Washington surrendered? Aren’t the mountains pretty?”

“On July 4, 1754, to the French.”

“I don’t understand. How can you know so much about Pennsylvania, but not know where Pennsylvania is?”

“I’m going to be a teacher. And what does one have to do with the other?”

I was tired. It was my usual afternoon exhaustion. This Penn Turnpike wasn’t dull like Jersey, flat and straight, but it didn’t matter; even the high vistas through the Alleghenys couldn’t keep me from drifting off to sleep. The next rest area wasn’t for twenty-seven miles, and there is nothing more debilitating than trying to drive when your eyes are gluing shut. It’s worse than falling asleep in math class. Worse than falling asleep during final exams, or oral exams, or at the movies on a first date (more accurate to say one and only date) with someone you really like, worse even than falling asleep on the couch after having too much to drink with your friends. There is a different component that enters into falling asleep on a gently curving road through the mountains doing seventy. You’re going to die, my brain kept yelling at me. You’re going to die. Wake up. You will never get anywhere. You will not go to college, see your mother, get married, have a life. You will have nothing. You will be dead. Wake up!

It didn’t work. I opened the window, gulped the hot air, banged the wheel, turned up the music, tried talking except I couldn’t string two words together.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Gina.

I couldn’t explain. I tried chewing gum, one stick after the other; I had a wad of gum twenty sticks big in my mouth. That helped as long as I was chewing; trouble was, I wanted to be sleeping. An excruciating twenty-three more miles passed before I finally pulled into the rest area.

“What are we doing?”

“Sorry, I have to close my eyes for a sec.” I parked in the large lot away from other cars. I rolled down the window and tilted back my head.

“But it’s the middle of the day!”

“Yes. I can’t explain. It’s just—” I fell asleep nearly instantly, couldn’t even finish the sentence. Not even fear of death could snap me awake.

“Sloane!” Gina’s voice sounded alarmed.

I opened my eyes. Rolling up her window, Gina was shaking me awake, pointing to the black tar-truck in the parking lot, not twenty feet away. The driver, a fat man with tattoos on his neck and shoulders, was yelling something, gesturing to the backseat, and giving us, or something behind us, the finger. I almost wanted to turn around to make sure his girl wasn’t in the backseat.

“You got the witch in the back with you?” he yelled. At least I hope he yelled witch. “Tell her I’m not done with her! Not by a long shot!” He screeched away, rough-looking and sweaty, erratic on the exit; he nearly hit a sedan pulling into the lot as he was pulling out. After we’d watched him weaving through the service road onto the Interstate, Gina rolled down her window and yelled, “Screw you, mister! Go to hell where you belong!”

“Oh, very good, Gina. And brave.”

Gina turned to me. “Awake now?”

“You betcha,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Jeez, what was his problem?”

“Dunno. I guess he thought that girl was with us.”

I didn’t want to tell Gina I was glad I wasn’t alone. The man, big, angry, with a red bandana on his head, looked like the poster boy for public service announcements exhorting you never, but never to talk to strangers. I slowly got on the road, not wanting to catch up with him. But sure enough, in seven miles, doing eighty to his sixty, his “I DO ME, YOU DO YOU” coal contraption loomed ahead, and when he saw us smoking him on the left, he gave us the finger once more. Gina gave him two fingers of her own, and gesticulated wildly, pretending to be furious, silently mouthing things through the glass. She rolled down her window, and with the eighty mph wind whipping through her hair yelled for real: “Good luck trying to catch us, buddy!”

“You’re crazy; stop it! You’re going to get us into serious trouble.”

“What’s he gonna do? Race?” Gina rolled up her window. “I can’t believe that chick got into the truck with him.”

“She must be brave to hitchhike.” I said it wistfully, as in, I wish I were brave, not, I wish I could hitchhike.

“Brave? You mean stupid, dontcha?”

“Maybe.” I thought. “But she doesn’t have a car like us.” I patted my wheel as if she were a silky kitty.

“She could have taken a bus,” said Gina.

What, to be safe? I said nothing, but I was thinking that perhaps the girl who could get into a truck with a man who looked like that would probably not be the kind of girl who’d be afraid of taking a little bus.

Gina settled into her seat and closed her eyes. “I think that’s why you were upset before. At Subway.”

“Why?”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think you think we should’ve helped her out. Given her a ride.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I hope you know by that crazy guy, just how many kinds of wrong that would’ve been.”

I didn’t say anything.

After another 200 miles of turnpike speeding, I gave up any hope of getting to Toledo by nightfall. Scratch the last item on my list. It was ten at night and we were just nearing Cleveland. “Have you got anything to say about Cleveland?” I was exhausted.

“Yes!” said Gina, all sparkly. “Cleveland was the first city in the world to be lit by electricity. Back in 1879.”

“Hmm. Looks like they’re all out today.” It was dark in the distance and unlit. “How far to Toledo?” I asked the tollbooth operator.

“A hundred and twenty miles,” she replied.

Too many miles. We’d already traveled 454. Ten minutes later, we had ourselves a spare room in Motel 6, right off the Interstate. It was on the second floor, had two double beds, an old TV, and a broken air conditioner. It smelled only vaguely of other people. The sheets were white and starchy, not soft and pink like those Emma had bought me for my thirteenth birthday. It was our first motel room, well below budget at forty-five dollars, which pleased me. Gina was in the shower singing “By the Banks of the Ohio” and “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal” as I was laying out my clothes for tomorrow and brushing my teeth. I had intended to turn on the TV, but I liked the sound of Gina’s happy soprano voice, I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal, and the din of the shower through the open door, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal … I lay down on the bed, the lights on, git up here, mule, here comes a lock. I was going to write a list for tomorrow and think about my mother … we’ll make Rome ’bout six o’clock … but all I could think about was that girl and why didn’t we stop. Oh, we couldn’t, no, we couldn’t, but if that were so, why did I have her young face, her short skirt and hitching hands in front of my eyes, her lilting voice in my head as the last things I saw and heard before I fell asleep? One more trip and back we’ll go, right back home to Buffalo …

Come on, help out a sister in need …