Putting on a sports coat he told her yes it would do, and then they sneaked out of the house to the Merc. Soon they had parked in the gravel before a highway cocktail lounge and café. As they stepped out and up onto the long porch, he said. “Wouldn’t it be a typical blow if they asked to see my identification.”
“You mean they might think you were too young to buy a drink?”
“Yeah,” he said, as lightly as possible. But he wanted to prepare her in advance; it occasionally still happened.
“Then we’d leave,” she said.
“No,” he said, “I’d show them my identification. I’m not too young.” Or don’t you grasp that? he thought with some irony.
The waitress served them without comment. The place seemed quiet and warm, with no noisy people. In fact there was virtually no one there except themselves. They seated themselves in a booth at the back, away from the jukebox. Presently, however, a man and woman entered, both of them obviously travel-weary. They seated themselves at the bar, and as they drank their drinks they laid out a map of Idaho and Utah and began arguing in sharp, accusing voices.
“They’ve been on the road,” Bruce said.
“Yes,” she said, indifferently.
The couple, middle-aged and well-dressed, could not decide which route to take across Oregon. There were three routes in all. The waitress and the bartender had never driven any of them, so they were no help.
“I’ll go talk to them a second.” Bruce said. He got up and walked over to the bar. “I’ve driven the middle one,” he said to the couple, who stopped talking and gratefully listened. “Route 26. I’ve never been on 20, but they tell me it goes over a lot of desert. 26 is mostly through forest. It’s fine. Very little traffic, and some nice towns, and the scenery is terrific.”
“What about 30?” the man asked.
“The only part of 30 I know is through Idaho,” he said, “and it’s lousy. But all the roads in Idaho are lousy.”
“We found that out,” the woman said. “We thought we’d try going across Idaho instead of Nevada this time, and we’ve lived to regret it. I’d take 40 or 50 across any time, in preference to 30. It’s like a goat trail, up the sides of canyons—and all the awful construction work. We’re completely worn out.”
“It’ll be better,” he said. “Once you get into Oregon.”
The man asked, “Do you live around here?”
He started to answer, No, I live down in Reno. But that was not true, now. “I live here in Boise,” he said. “I just moved up here.” He added, “I just got married.”
The man and woman had noticed Susan, and now they both turned to wave politely at her and say congratulations.
The waitress, overhearing, went to the bartender, conferred with him, and then brought a tray of drinks for Bruce and Susan. “Wedding present,” the bartender said, from where he sat on his high stool.
“Thanks,” Bruce said. He felt embarrassed.
“What’s your wife’s name?” the woman asked.
He told her, and the man said that their names were Ralf and Lois McDevitt and that he was in the trout fly game. His company manufactured lures for fishermen.
Bruce invited them to join him and Susan, and they did so. The four of them chatted and joked for a time, although it seemed to him that Susan did not enter in, much; she answered politely, but she volunteered very little and her voice remained low, without luster. And she did not appear to be following the conversation.
Ralf McDevitt asked him what business he was in, and he told him that he and Susan operated a mimeographing and typing service. And then he added that he wanted to change what was now an office doing a service into a store selling merchandise. For a long time he and McDevitt discussed retail buying and selling. He told McDevitt about the chain drugstore across the street, and the dime store, and the Japanese portable that Milt Lumky had talked to him about. Once, he noticed that Susan was frowning at him. Evidently she did not approve of him talking so openly about business, so he switched the conversation back to driving and the various highways. That remained a topic for at least half an hour. In that conversation Susan took no part at all.
“We better get going,” he said, deciding that she was tired.
The McDevitts congratulated them again, shook hands with him, gave them their address in California, and then Bruce and Susan said good night and left the cocktail lounge. There, near his Merc, the McDevitts’ dirt-stained Buick was parked, with a water bag dangling from the rear bumper, bugs by the thousands dead and dying on the hood, windshield, front bumpers and fenders, and, inside the car, piles of luggage.
It made him conscious of the road. Here they stood, at the edge of the highway that crossed to the coast, into ‘and out of one state after another. Mile after mile of it… in the night darkness he could see only a few hundred feet of it. The rest vanished. But he sensed it as he walked by the McDevitts’ car.
And he could smell the hot, thinned motor oil that had begun to leak out of the crankcase of the car. It had gone so far, had gotten so hot and been in use so long, that oil now coated the entire underside of the motor.
Years had gone by before he had learned what that smell was. The smell appeared only when the repeated combustions had broken the oil down and nearly destroyed it; carbon had formed on the valves, and scale on the pistons, sediments had sunk down and been expelled from the crankcase through the breather pipe, and the watery crap that remained had been blown out past the oil-seal at the end of the crankshaft, to fly out at the clutch housing in the form of a spray that gradually, hour after hour, became mixed with dust and road grime and bodies of bugs and rock fragments and older oil from previous cars, and the smell of tires, and the smell of the entire car, its metal and rubber and lubrication and fabric, even the smell of the driver and passenger who had been sitting in their seats ever since sunup, getting out only to use the restrooms at gas stations and to eat at roadside diners and to ask instructions in roadside bars and to see what was making the peculiar noise on sharp curves. To Bruce, the smell had a dark nauseating undercurrent. It meant that a motor had been used and overused, and would have to be rebuilt or at least overhauled, given new rings, especially new oil rings, because oil was being forced out under the pressure that built up in the crankcase, but at the same time he thought of that motor wearing itself out on the mountain grades, in the Sierras, and on the long stretches of the desert that got it hotter and hotter; the motor had not broken, it had been worn out doing what it had been built to do. It had worn out over seventy thousand miles of road. Twenty-five times across the country …
“What on earth possessed you to rattle on to them about out personal business?” Susan said curtly, as they entered the Merc. “I could hardly believe my ears.”
He said, “The man’s in the trout fly business. He doesn’t even live here in town; they’re passing through. What possible harm could it do?” He had prepared himself for her accusation; he saw it coming.
“The first rule of business is that you keep your affairs to yourself,” she said, still fuming.
“No harm was done,” he said.
“It’s the idea of it. What was it, the drinks? Is that why you rattled on and on? I almost got up and walked out; I would have, but I didn’t on your account.”
They drove in silence for a time.
“Are you going to do that continually?” she asked.
He said, “I’ll continue to do what I feel is best.”
“I don’t see how—” She broke off. “Anyhow, it’s done. But I hope you have better sense in the future.”
“What’s wrong?” he said, aware that something deeper was involved.