“Afraid so,” I said.
“Well shit, I thought so. I used to chase you off this place ’bout every month back in the day.”
I tried to let out a friendly laugh. Natasha looked back and forth between us, and Emily grabbed at Natasha’s long blond hair.
“Even had you in jail once. Your daddy had to come and bail you out. And now you’re starting a family of your own, I see?”
“Yep.”
The old man put his face in front of Emily’s and stuck out his withered tongue. Emily giggled.
“Well, I hope you raise it better than your pa raised you.” He laughed again, then sat back down and turned the motor on. “Do say hi to your pa when you see him.”
My father had been dead for two years — done in by a heart attack in the middle of the freeway — but I smiled and said, “You bet. I’m sure he’ll get a real kick out of it. I’ll tell him first thing!”
Natasha and I watched him drive off and then headed back to the car. The sun was hidden by a cloud, and the temperature felt comfortably warm. I put my arm around Natasha, and she shrugged me off. I was feeling all right though, as if I had fought in a noble war and been sent home before being blown apart or disfigured for life. When we got to the car, there was a long key mark down the left side.
We strapped the baby in the back and rolled down the windows, Natasha putting another cigarette between her beautiful lips. Suddenly I remembered: Carrington Smith. That was the farmer’s name, although when I had known him he’d been fat and mean, and now the years had eaten away at him until he was thin and kind. I had a lot of years to go before I got to that state though.
We pulled back onto the road. I turned up the radio and let the muggy air wash over me. I knew an ice cream and fireworks shack a half hour more down the road, if it was still there. Might be just the kind of place to take a wife and child.
SOME NOTES ON MY BROTHER’S BRIEF TRAVELS
1.
I don’t know. My little brother just got sick of town, tossed a few things in the car, and drove across the country to an old mining town in the mountains of Colorado. He drove straight there in about twenty-eight hours, stopping five times in four states for coffee and gas station sandwiches.
There isn’t much else to say about that.
He got to town in the early afternoon and slept for half a day. For the next three months, he walked around photographing the dusty maws of abandoned mines.
Then he came back.
2.
The first thing my brother Foster noticed when he reached the mining town was a man in a chicken costume dancing in the late morning haze. It was a big foam costume, the full football mascot treatment. The man was holding a sign for a regional fast-food chain in one hand and flapping the other in mock flight. It was the kind of soggy, gray day you get in the mountains. Everything was covered in some kind of sad cloud.
My brother had been driving, as I’ve said, for twenty-eight hours, and his body had reached that special combination of no sleep, caffeine, and a stomach full of salted snacks that makes you believe it’s possible you might never die. The man in the chicken costume was at an intersection where the main road turned off into a gravel road that wound up the mountain. It seemed as if the whole world might dissolve into gray for all time, then suddenly this dazzling yellow figure emerged from the fog.
You have to remember that this was during the recession, and people were taking whatever job they could get.
3.
I can’t say if it was because of a girl or not. My brother and I are close in our way, but we don’t talk about certain things. Neither of us is good at communicating. Foster called me once during his exodus, and I e-mailed him a few times, links to amusing news stories I’d seen or thoughts about upcoming films we were both interested in. Then, of course, I visited him near the end. My father had amassed a decent number of frequent-flier miles that were going to expire, and he had been bugging me to use them. It seemed like a good enough reason, and anyway, I myself was having issues with a woman that could only be solved by distance.
My guess is that our hometown felt used up to my brother. He had lived there his whole life. We grew up on the outskirts, moved to the center as teenagers, and he had gone to college there as well. Not me. I fled to the big city up north as soon as I could. But my brother bounced around trying to decide what to do with his life before he finally left town. It was a university town stuck in the center of North Carolina. Even growing up, there wasn’t much to do except sneak into frat parties or hang out at the cafés and record stores dotting the edge of campus. What I’m trying to say is we’d already done the local college experience in high school, so I can imagine how repetitive life was starting to feel for my brother. After graduation, Foster spent the next few years trying to avoid our parents, who were still in town, and his old friends, whose successes made him feel angry and alone.
Perhaps I’m projecting.
Let’s just say that he felt detached from everything. He had walked by every storefront a thousand times. The dishes at his favorite restaurants had turned into the bland, familiar taste of our mother’s microwave specials. He wanted to see flat plains with horizons dotted with nothing except the occasional dinky town nestled in the dust.
I read the e-mail from my mother on my phone while I was naked and urinating. “Foster made it to Colorado,” it said. “I don’t think he’s had a real meal in days. Can you call him? I’m worried.” I was feeling tired and drained myself. I had just finished making love to my girlfriend, who had made us stop halfway through and started tearing up. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, and then suddenly she stopped crying, stood up, and said she wanted to switch to doggy style. I asked if she was sure. We finished that way, without being able to see the other’s face, and afterwards she crawled on top of me, laughing.
Nearly thirty straight hours of driving. I know there are people who can bend pieces of metal with their bare hands or live in a glass box without food for weeks. I’m not saying it’s worth writing up in the newspaper, but it does make you wonder if you can ever really know a person.
4.
Five things Foster noticed on his speed tour of the United States:
a) The way Kansas is shaped, a flatness bent only by the horizon, makes it impossible not to feel alone.
b) When you emerge from the highway woods, the first sign of civilization is always a large green water tower. What do these towers do? Neither he nor I could think of any instance of them ever being used. Perhaps they weren’t even full anymore, just old relics left as a reminder of leaner days.
c) The image of an orange sun slowly rising over the blue mountains of Appalachia, which my brother pulled over to photograph only an hour into his trip, has the exact unreality of an early color film.
d) The number of small mammals that survive off tourist scraps at rest stops could form an army large enough to conquer Chicago.
e) The subtle changes in fast-food architecture, especially the fake adobe walls of burger chains in the Southwest, are ripe for a postmodern cultural studies thesis—“Capitalist Simulacra in Regional Restaurant Chains” or some such. Perhaps I’ll pitch a blog post about it someday.
5.
It was late at night and Foster had crossed the Mississippi River into a new state. He pulled the car into the bright parking lot of a midwestern McDonald’s.
His legs felt as if they were tingling with TV static. The position of his body while driving had dug his belt into the veins of his legs for hours, cutting his circulation down to a dead man’s. He limped around the parking lot to try to shake the blood back down. A couple walked by, chatting and checking their paper bag for their extra order of fries.