He sipped his coffee. She’d gotten black and a couple to-go creamers so he could decide. He popped the lid off the cup, poured in cream, thought: Why not?
“Yesterday, our bosses decided I was no longer crazy.
“Or,” he added, “at least not so crazy that I couldn’t be released to a kind of free.”
Though most people would have seen nothing, Condor sensed her tense up, but she sat there and took it.
Malati said: “Are you?”
“Not so crazy or kind of free?”
“It’s your answer.”
And that made him like her. Told him she might be worth it.
“Guess we’ll see,” he said. “You’re my driver.”
“Just for this road trip.” She blurted: “I want to learn.”
Motion outside pulled his eyes from her to look out the window.
A school bus: classic yellow, slowing down out front. The school bus seemed to wobble, stopped haphazardly near the rows of citizens’ parked vehicles.
He nodded toward the school bus. “Did you ever ride one of those?”
“I’m not supposed to vomit my cover story. Even if it’s true.”
“Lesson one,” he told her. “Give trust to get trust.”
“That’s not my first lesson from you.” That acknowledgment made him like her even more as she added: “Yeah, I did bus time in Kansas City.”
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” he quoted.
“Hey!” she said. “We’re talking Kansas City, Missouri. Whole different place.”
They laughed together and as she relaxed into this is where I’m from stories, he looked around at where they were.
Sitting at a table by himself was a forty-ish man munching a morning cheeseburger, tie loosened over a cheap shirt already straining against too many such meals, a franchise manager who couldn’t figure out why his boss hated him. Two tables away sat a thirty-ish mom leaning her forehead into one hand while the other held the cell phone against her ear for the report from the school on her daughter who’d been the teenage pregnancy that ended getting out of what was now both their hometown. Two male medical techs in green scrubs munched on fried chicken, one was white, one was black, neither wanted to get back to the hospital where they could only give morphine and more bills to a cancer warrior. There sat a down vest over a white sweater blonde beauty, like, OMG machinegun texting her cell phone and being super careful to not say she was scared to death because she had no clue about what came after nineteen. The gray-haired couple barely older than Condor sat staring everywhere but at each other and seeing nowhere better they could go. The two years out of college man who worked the night shift at a factory job one level above the summer work he’d done to help him pay for school sat drinking Diet Coke against the yawns, dreading tomorrow with its first of the month loan bills coming to the clapboard house where he lived in the basement below his working parents who loved him so much. Like Malati noted, many of the road-dazed travelers seemed hypnotized by screens.
We’re all packages transporting from some there to another where.
And yet, thought Condor, we find the hope or the dreams or the responsibility, the dignity and courage to push ourselves away from the tables at this nowhere transit zone, get up, get up again, go outside, get in our cars and go, go on, get to where we can, tears yes, but laughter at it all and at ourselves, because if nothing else, this is the ride we got and we refuse to just surrender.
The Nick Logar Rest Stop.
These are the highways of our lives.
“…so my parents wanted me to go into business, but,” Malati shrugged, “profit doesn’t turn me on as much as purpose.”
Children. Chattering. Squealing. Half a dozen of them running through the main doors TO THE BATHROOMS! ahead of a woman teacher shouting: “Stay together!”
Condor and Malati looked out the window.
Saw a straggling line of second graders, marching across the parking lot from the school bus. Some kids wore Halloween glory — a witch, a fairy tale princess, a ghost, a cowboy, Saturday morning cartoon costumes. All the kids carried an orange “Trick or Treat!” plastic bucket in the shape of a pumpkin stenciled with black eyes, a toothy grin and a corporate logo from the chain drugstore that accidentally ordered too many of the buckets to sell but cleverly recouped a tax donation to their local elementary school. As the children marched, those pumpkin heads swung wildly on wire loop handles gripped in their tiny hands.
“Time for us to go,” said Condor.
Didn’t matter who was in charge, they both knew he was right.
At the main entrance, Condor—no: Vin, his name is Vin—the package brushed her out of the way as he held a door for a man not much older than Malati, a guy in a wheelchair who was rolling himself up the ramp, a Philly vet named Warren Iverson who wore his Army jacket from the 10th Mountain Division and a smile on his boyish face.
Malati realized Vin didn’t just notice the vet with wasted legs, Vin saw him.
Said: “Better hurry, man. A stampede of short stuffs is coming up behind you.”
“Always.” Warren rolled past the silver-haired man in a black leather jacket.
Malati leaned close to Vin as they stepped outside and aside to let the parade of costumed kids squeal their way into this wondrous rest stop oasis.
She whispered: “You keep doing stuff like that, you’ll ruin your tough guy act.”
“Be your cover,” Vin told her. “Besides, looks like he’s one of the men and women who pay when we fuck up our job. Or some politician fucks it up for us.”
He shrugged.
“Do what should be done, nothing special about that,” he told her sounding so much like her father.
But only he heard the beep…beep…beep of machines webbed to a hospital bed as he said: “Probably I owe guys like him something beyond coulda and shoulda.”
She understood what he said but not what he meant.
Just walk beside him. Figure out what you can.
“My car’s still there,” she said as they started down one ramp to the parking lot.
The red Japanese motion machine, squatting way over by the north border fence and the white gazebo where exiting the Turnpike Southbound came a black hearse.
The black hearse parked in a row of cars near Malati’s red ride. As the hearse glided to a stop, Condor envisioned the YOU ARE HERE map mounted on the wall between the bathrooms. Nick Logar was one of the few rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike that serviced traffic going both directions. The padded black-clad driver got out of the hearse, opened its back door. If he’d forgotten something at this rest stop from when he left earlier behind the Southbound suspect cell phone photo couple, Mr. Black Costume would have had to drive about ten miles before he could exit, get back on the Turnpike north, then drive here, but…But then he would have needed to drive past this place or through it, go further north to another exit turnaround, again maybe ten miles away in order to come back and exit southbound back into the rest stop, into here.
Why make that long circle drive?
What’s that sound? thought Condor as he and Malati neared the bottom of the ramp to the parking lot where two burly men stood with unlit cigarettes dangling from their lips. The man wearing the COUNTY SCHOOLS windbreaker pulled a silver lighter from his left front shirt pocket, clicked it open and thumbed its wheel to summon a flame and ignite the white papered cancer sticks, barely a pause as that bus driver said: