So, as it sinks in that I am tooling the byways at the helm of what is now almost certainly an officially reported stolen car, transporting a fugitive secret-spilling spook of an old man, we cheerfully add to the gumbo the fact that we are carrying consignments from two distinctly different classes of controlled substances. Three if you count the prescription medications that we purchased with no prescriptions. And they probably will count that, so, three.
“Congratulations, Jarrod.” What else is there to say, really?
My Da cannot read my mind, though sometimes it does appear that way. He can, however, still read signs of a situation as well as anyone anywhere.
“You have to lose him, you know,” he says icily.
“What?” I look at him, the road, him again.
“Watch the road.”
“No. I mean I got the road. We’re not losing him.”
If talking about Jarrod in highly worrying terms registers with him at all, he is not highly worried about it. He is even singing “Jolene” along with Dolly Parton, though he appears to believe it’s “Moline.”
“Lose him, Young Man. He is useless, and probably going to compound everybody’s problems with that damn dope of his.”
I grip the wheel hard and stare straight ahead. “No.”
It starts to rain a little. It starts to rain sheets.
“You’ve come this far. You have come a long way now. You know what it means, to do what needs doing. Ask yourself again, right now and all the time forever, “When what needs to be done needs to be done, can I do it?”
I look at Jarrod’s battered and weathered and childlike mess of a face in the rearview, the watery wide eyes looking now out the windows at the endlessly passing same tree. At school he could be your show-and-tell if your topic was useless, and I bet at least one classmate tried it when he was at school, and I further bet he went along with it just to be accommodating.
“When what needs to be done needs to be done, I can do it, Da.”
“That’s my boy.”
“But I will decide what needs to be done. And Jarrod stays with us.”
My grandfather’s eyes go mental with more horror than when he saw his dead wife in my sister. Then the wide eyes narrow, a bit, and a bit, until it resembles more disappointment and distaste. Like he’s looking at a half-built structure already falling apart from shoddy workmanship.
“That boy,” he says, pointing flagrantly at the passenger in back, “is going to be your downfall.”
“Am I?” Jarrod says with majestically poor timing. I give him a quick quadro-shush.
I do not reply to Da, just continue on the long, winding, watery road to our destination.
12
Who are you when nobody is watching? Da asked me.
Is there ever nobody watching? I asked.
Good answer, he said.
13
“I must have fallen asleep,” I say.
The car is in a small ditch, with nothing but field visible for miles. It is a monotonous two-lane nothing of a road splitting farms that have corn growing like natural skyscrapers all along the right view, and some hip-high rag balls of common green whatever covering all the land to the left. It is the most boring scape of any land anywhere, and if it does not put you to sleep, then you are some kind of indefatigable driving machine.
Anyway, it’s not as if there was any other consciousness in the car to help keep me alert at the time.
“See, I told you this boy was going to be your undoing,” Da says as Jarrod climbs down to check the situation because it is after all his stolen car.
“What did he have to do with it?”
“Subarus suck” is Da’s logic.
“It doesn’t look like anything’s broken,” Jarrod says, lying right down in the muck to look underneath. The pouring rain has stopped and been replaced by moderate rain that feels like many tiny knuckles rapping on my skull.
The right front wheel has lost contact with earth where I tried to jerk the wheel back up in the direction of the road at the last second. The other three are in touch. There is reason to believe two of us may be horsepower enough to get the thing righted while a third one navigates the vessel onto the pavement.
“Da,” I say, shaking my head as I say it, “with your hip and all you’ll be no good pushing, so you’ll need to drive.”
“I love to drive,” he says, clapping once and crab-walking down the short embankment to the car.
“Yeah.” I sigh. “I’m aware.”
I make my own way down the slope to the rear of the car, where Jarrod waits, his entire front now lacquered in rich farming mud.
“Feeling strong?” I ask, as the wind picks up and starts blowing sideways into our ears.
“No,” he says.
But we all do what we have to do. I explain to Jarrod the concept of rocking a car out of a predicament, rather than plowing it out. I try and coordinate with Da by shouting at him because he is old.
“Da,” I say. “On the count of-”
Revvv-revv-revvv.
The man loves to drive.
“Da!” A little louder. “We are going to try rocking-”
Revvv-rev-revv.
“Aw, hell, put it in gear!”
He lets the clutch out, and drops it into first, and Jarrod and I start plowing with all our might.
“Rock, Jarrod, don’t plow.”
He tries rocking; we rock in opposite rhythm. I adjust, and so does he, so we rock in opposite rhythm. I believe I hear Da making revving noises with his mouth as the wheels throw ever more mud over Jarrod and me. He is enjoying himself so much, I don’t think he cares one way or the other whether we get back on the asphalt.
I feel the wheels catch, grab, we fall back.
“This hurts!” Jarrod says.
“Rock, Jarrod.”
Jarrod rocks. We push, back off, push, back off.
Revvv-revvv-revv, and ka-fump, the car flops up there and rubber hits road.
And keeps going.
Jarrod and I are lying on the lip of the road, where we flopped with the last heave. We watch as Da lights out for the great unknown and his next adventure without a backward glance.
“Isn’t he turning around?” Jarrod asks, as we stand up and watch. There is no brake light activity yet.
“It does not appear he is,” I say. “And I don’t like the way the car’s looking, either.”
The Subaru is doing a fast-motion little shimmy action all the way down the highway, like a very happy, motorized springer spaniel.
The stretch of road between the farms is long and flat and straight, so we have a good long look at the end of this particular endeavor as Da leaves us definitively behind, in the rain.
Until he hits what is probably a nice wide slick of water-oil mix, hydroplanes left to right clear across the road, down the ditch, and into the corn. It looked to go quite smoothly, as these things go.
“Come on,” I say, starting at a full gallop.
“That is a long, long way,” Jarrod moans, but follows.
A few seconds later, we see this small figure, out of the corn fields, up on the embankment, and waving at us to come.
I slow to a stroll.
“Oh, look, he decided he missed us,” I say to Jarrod.
“You think he did?” he says. “I bet he did.”
I still feel bad for what I did to him before, so in a way he’s lucky now because a certain level of stupidity has to be punishable.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Danny? Are you gonna do it again?”
I put an arm around him and knock his head with mine.
It feels like one day and two weather systems have passed by the time we reach Da. The sun is shining, and he’s smoking a cigarette and waving us in the last hundred yards like we’re in a marathon. A pickup truck has pulled over-after running right past us-and the driver is smoking and joking with my grandfather when Jarrod and I finally troop in.