“Well look,” she said, “if you’re going, I vote we go right after the amortization panel, so we can see the desert in twilight. We can spend the night on the road, see the Grand Canyon as the sun’s coming up, and be back for dinner.”
“You got it all figured out,” Howard said, smirking. He was beginning to go for it. In his mind, agreeing to go made it his idea.
“I’m a good planner,” Frances said.
His smirk became a proprietary grin. “I never plan anything. Things just work out, whatever.”
“We wouldn’t make a good team, would we?” She was already standing beside the table, primed to head for the Avis desk in the lobby. She was thinking about a big red Lincoln or a Cadillac. The car could be the kick — not the company.
“I guess we might as well enjoy it,” Howard said and suddenly seemed amiable. “We’re out where they blew up the atom bomb, right?” He gazed at her with dumb pleasure, as if he’d forgotten he liked her, but had just suddenly remembered. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe she was confusing him with Ed — lumping men in the same heap and missing their finer distinctions. Exactly like the lesbians did.
“It’s New Mexico,” she said, waving at the New Jersey gals, who were making gestures with their hands to indicate they thought something was up between her and whoever it was she was having lunch with. “Where they blew up the A-bomb was New Mexico.”
“Well, whatever. Same desert, right? Bottom line?” He looked pleased.
“Bottom line. I guess so,” Frances said. “You get to the heart of things. You probably already know that.”
“I’ve heard it before,” Howard said, and rose to head for his room.
In the car he wasn’t on the proper side to see the sunset. Interstate 15 to Flagstaff was nothing but arid scrub, with forbidding treeless mountains on the other side of the car, where the sun was setting. Mostly all you saw was new development — big gas stations, shopping malls, half-finished cinema plazas, new franchise restaurant pads, housing sprawled along empty streambeds that had been walled up beside giant golf courses with hundreds of sprinklers turning the dry air to mist. There was nothing interesting or original or wild to see, just more people filling up space where formerly nobody had wanted to be. The reason to live out here, he thought, was that you had lived someplace worse. These were the modern-day equivalent of the lost tribes. The most curious feature of the drive were the big jack-rabbits that’d gotten smacked and were littering the highway by the dozens. He quit counting at sixty. Mary believed atmospheric conditions humans weren’t sensitive to made animals throw themselves in front of cars. In Connecticut it was deer, raccoons and possums. Someday it would start happening to people — maybe these people out here. Maybe they were members of a cult that was planning that.
Frances had rented a new red Town Car — the ultimate Jew canoe, she called it — a big fire chief’s sedan with untouched white-leather seats, red floor mats, unspoiled ashtrays and a heavy new-car smell. He wasn’t allowed to drive because he wasn’t Frances’s husband, which was perfect. To get comfortable, he’d ditched his conventioneer clothes for his green terry shorts, a white T-shirt and an old pair of basketball sneaks. With the seat pushed back, he could stretch his legs and doze on the headrest. The whole thing was set up right.
Frances was in high spirits behind the white-leather steering wheel. She’d brought her Grand Canyon book, her cell phone and some noisy Tito Puente CDs that featured a lot of loud bongo music. She’d changed into tight white Bermudas, a blue sailcloth blouse with a white anchor painted on the front, some tiny sapphire earrings and a pair of pink Keds with little tasseled half-socks. She’d also bought a quart of cheap gin, which they both started drinking, minus ice, out of white Styrofoam cups.
The plan was to eat dinner in Flagstaff, drive ’til after dark, then stop at whatever motel was near the canyon entrance, and be up early to see the great empty hole at daybreak, when Frances believed it would be its most spiritually potent. “I never knew I wanted to see it. You know?” She was driving with a cup in one hand. “But then I read about it, and knew I had to. The Indians thought it was the gateway to the underworld. And Teddy Roosevelt killed mountain lions in it.” She’d already poleaxed one of the big jackrabbits. “Oooops, sorry. Shit,” she said, then forgot about it. “Conquistadors came there in fifteen-ninety-something,” she went on, casting a mischievous eye at Howard, who was thinking about the run-over rabbit and staring moodily out at a big cinema complex built to look like an Egyptian jukebox. A vast, unlined, untenanted expanse of black asphalt lay between the theater and the highway. Soon enough, he thought, it would be stuffed with new cars and people. And then in ten years it would be gone.
“I never thought about it,” he said to whatever she’d said, considering what movies the cinema would specialize in. Westerns. Space movies. Idiot comedies about golf. It was California all over again out here, just worse. “Californicate” was the word that went around realtor circles two years ago. The gin might be affecting him, he thought.
“As big as the Grand Canyon, isn’t that what people say?” Frances had gone on dreamily. “My father used to say that. He was an immigrant. He thought the Grand Canyon meant something absolute. It meant everything important about America. I guess that’s what it means to me.”
“‘In one sense it’s a big hole in the ground formed by erosion.’” He was reading aloud now off the back of her Grand Canyon guidebook. Up ahead, another big gray-and-white jackrabbit sat poised on the shoulder as cars whipped past. He stared at it. The rabbit seemed on the verge of venturing forward, but was waiting for what it must’ve felt in its busy rabbit’s brain to be the perfect moment. In the opposite lane, semis were hurtling south toward Phoenix in the twilight. This rabbit’s got problems, Howard thought. Overcoming man-made barriers. Circumventing unnatural hazards. Avoiding toxic waste on the roadside. “Watch out for the rabbit,” he said, not wanting to seem alarmed, taking another sip of his warm gin.
“Roger. That’s a copy, Houston,” Frances said. She had the lip of her white Styrofoam cup pinched between her fingers, letting the cup dangle under the top arm of the steering wheel. She made no effort whatsoever to steer clear of the bunny, poised on the berm. She was drunk.
And just as the Town Car came almost abreast of the big rabbit, a critical split second after which it would’ve been spared and perhaps made it across all four lanes to sleep easily one more night in the median strip — in that split second — the rabbit bounded forward straight into the car’s headlights, never looking right or better yet left. And whump! The Lincoln sped over it, bopping whatever part of the rabbit was highest and tumbling it senselessly across the highway.
“Ouch! Damn! Oh shit. That’s two. Sor-ree little Thumper,” Frances said. “Bummer, bummer, bummer.”
“Why didn’t you change fuckin’ lanes?” Howard said.
“I know.” Frances had not even looked in the rearview. “It’s on my karma now. I’ll be paying for it.”
“It’s really ridiculous.” He glared at her, then back out into the darkening scrub. It’s fucking idiotic, he thought.
“I’ll get shaped up here,” she said.
“Not for that rabbit you won’t.”
“Nope. Not for that Mr. Bunny Rabbit,” Frances said. “He’s part of history now.”