And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (18 page)

“You know that job in Memphis I was talking about at the beach this summer?” he said. “They called me today and they want me to come down for an interview Monday morning.”

It was Thursday night. The plan was to hunt Saturday and Sunday and come back Monday. John was trying to let me down easy and he seemed really broken up about backing out. I knew this job was important to him, that the opportunity was one he'd been dreaming about since college. So I couldn't be mad at him. I couldn't hold it against him.

“Maybe I can get them to fly me from Iowa to Memphis for the interview,” he said. But it was too late. I couldn't expect him to pass up an opportunity just to join me on my first hunting trip. I collected my gun, shook his hand, and told him not to worry about it, that we'd just go some other time.

No Dad, no John. It seemed that for my first big hunting trip, I would be on my own. Just me and the manliest group of relatives possible and yet I remained excited. I would be leaving early the next morning and I didn't have time to feel any other way.

It was just something I had to do.

14

The Drive to Iowa and My Missing License

M
y in-laws were in town to help with the kids while I was gone hunting, so Rebecca and I decided to let them have our bed and, with no guest room for the offering, we blew up the air mattress we use on camping trips and set it up in the living room. When we lay down, my intention was to get some sleep, call it an early night in preparation of an early morning. But instead, we did what we always do. Much to the detriment of a well-rested mind, we flipped on the TV to watch one of my wife's favorite shows, a teenage drama about the sex lives and torment of centuries-old vampires and their human friends. Anticipating a narcotic effect, I set the alarm on my cell phone for 4:01
A.M.
and put it in the kitchen of our tiny condo, then nestled down next to my wife.

I've never understood the vampire craze that swept through American pop culture in the early part of the twenty-first century. The idea of a bloodsucking boyfriend and his naive love interest just never carried a whole lot of water. And yet, for my wife, it was catnip. The woman who took more than four months to read my first book managed to read all four books in a popular vampire series in less than two weeks. She waited on line for midnight premieres of new movies from that same series and was constantly on the lookout for entertainment involving forbidden lust and craven wanting. I came to understand that vampire stories were an upstanding suburban mom's secret pleasure, like men who troll the magazine racks at bookstores looking for that lone copy of
Playboy
that someone has removed from the plastic wrapping and tucked furiously—presumably due to the sudden arrival of wife or child—behind a stash of photography and clay modeling magazines.

“These things are all about sex,” I told her as we tucked into our fourth episode of
The Vampire Diaries
(she had borrowed an entire volume of DVDs from a friend) during our blow-up bed watch-a-thon. “Why don't they just say it?”

“They are not all about sex. Why would you even say that?” she retorted, an odd sense of offense in her tone.

“This girl wants to be with her boyfriend. She loves him. But he's a vampire and there is, therefore, a chance he will get excited and tear her heart out. It's all about the questions surrounding a girl's decision to lose her virginity to the evil and timeless beast that is the teenage boy.”

“Shut up,” she said dismissively. “It's not about sex. It's just about vampires.”

“Do you think vampires are sexy?”

“Some of them are.”

“Then it's about sex. Sex, sex, sex, sex.”

She threw a pillow at me and turned the volume up on the TV and I decided not to press the issue anymore. I checked my watch. It was already after midnight and in order to make it to Iowa by midafternoon, I needed to be up in less than four hours, so I rolled over, turned off the light, and left my wife to her vampires.

I
t felt like my eyes had just closed when the annoying
bleep-bleep
of my cell-phone alarm clock woke me. I've always been amazed by Rebecca's ability to sleep through an alarm, particularly this one. I had set it to the loudest, most-eardrum-crinkling sound I could and nearly leaped off the air mattress to shut it off. I turned to see that my wife had not so much as flinched, looking peaceful with visions of vampires dancing through her head.

I got dressed, having laid my clothes out in the dining room the night before so I wouldn't wake my in-laws up in my room, and, with a kiss on Rebecca's head, slipped out into the predawn darkness.

For anyone not accustomed to getting up this early—and here I have to assume that's most people—there's something genuinely surreal about being on the road before five
A.M
. Unlike, say, one or two
A.M.
, when you might have to contend with night owls and barflies on their way home for the evening, this time of morning is eerie in its silent emptiness. The sky is especially black. The roads especially open. I grabbed a cup of coffee from the gas station where I normally go on my way to work and found that it was fresh-brewed and delicious. It made me wonder how long the stuff I drink hours later in the day has been sitting there. Best not to dwell on such things. In the thirty or so miles from our home to the Indiana state line, I passed a single other motorist. These are roads that a couple of hours later would be choked with traffic and I had them essentially all to myself. It was wonderful. For someone who loves to drive, what could possibly be better than having an entire interstate all to yourself?

I set the cruise and popped the first CD of John le Carré's
The Mission Song
into the player on my dashboard. The narrator's voice was a silky baritone with a slight central Africa accent. I listened for perhaps a half hour before my eyelids began to feel like antique quilts and I turned to a morning talk show for some relief. I didn't begin regretting that third episode of
The Vampire Diaries
until I neared Indianapolis. I could feel that hollow, empty feeling that comes with sleep deprivation. I tried slapping my face and rolling down all the windows. I put on some hard rock music, but to no avail. I was falling asleep just two hours into my day and with eight or nine more hours of driving ahead of me; I knew I wouldn't make it. So I decided to stop at a McDonald's on the east side of Indianapolis for a fresh cup of coffee, a pee, and some food.

Getting up early for a drive to Iowa is something of a family tradition for me. My dad used to insist that we leave our house in Cleveland in the wee small hours in order to reduce the likelihood of getting stuck in Chicago traffic. Plus, he, like me, loves the feeling of being on the open road. I was going nowhere near Chicago on my route, but traffic was a concern. There was some construction on the west side of Indianapolis that might slow me down, so I wanted to make my stop brief, but when I pulled into a parking spot in the still-dark night and turned my car off, the level of my exhaustion came to bear and I didn't have the energy to get out and go inside.

Just fifteen minutes,
I told myself.
Fifteen minutes, then I'll get some coffee and be on my way.

I reclined my seat and, with elbow over eyes, drifted quickly to sleep. I was awakened forty minutes later by a knock on my window.

“You okay in there, buddy?” said a man in a blue dress shirt and dark jeans. The sun had come up, but was still low in the sky and the man's face was pressed close to my window. I must have looked dead, lying there in such an unnatural position. I shook my head and inclined my seat.

“Yeah, yup, fine,” I said.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “You looked dead.”

“Nope, yup, fine,” I said and realized that I must sound either drunk or mentally disabled. I wanted to say something clear and intelligent. “Thank you very much for your concern.” And with that, he began to walk away, turning to flip a concerned wave in my direction and telling me to have a blessed day. How kind of him, I thought, to show such concern. And then I realized that I was parked in the back of the lot and his car was near the door. There was no possible way he just happened to be walking by and noticed me. There was nowhere to be walking to. With my seat reclined, he would have had to have been peering into my window, casing my possessions in order to see me lying there. By the time I realized that I should probably get the man's license plate number just in case, he was gone and I was once again in the vertical and in need of both a urinal and a pot of coffee.

A
part from a little bit of traffic around the Indianapolis airport, the drive was a breeze. I set the cruise and listened to le Carré's toffee-voiced narrator as the sun rose in my rearview mirror and the Midwest came alive to my right and left.

When Rebecca and I were young and dating, I took her to Iowa for my cousin's wedding. It was a crucible of sorts. Would she be able to remember all my cousins' names? Would it take her as long as it had me—I was twelve or thirteen by the time I figured it out—to remember that Carolyn and Sue are the same person? Would these fluffy, red-cheeked, good-natured people approve of my cheerleader girlfriend? Would she survive an eleven-hour drive with my parents? We left before dawn—she, my mom, my dad, and I piled into my dad's Buick Park Avenue. Some time around the west side of Chicago, my dad offered Rebecca a challenge. He would buy her a steak dinner if she could keep track of and, upon arrival at my grandmother's house, tell him the exact number of cornfields we passed from the point we crossed the Mississippi River to the time we rolled through Mason City. For the first hour or so, it seemed like she was trying to keep track. Her head swiveled back and forth. She made mental tick marks after every fence line and country road. She must have really loved me early on to want to impress my dad so much.

Eventually, she gave up and when we arrived, true to his word, Dad asked her for the count.

“So?” he said. My family has a way of doing this—loading entire thoughts into single word questions.

“So what?” she shot back, whip smart and unintimidated by my old man.

“How many was it?”

“Do you really know the answer?”

“Of course I do,” he said. I fully believed he did too. My dad keeps ledgers for everything: records, notes, accountings. The guy lives for data. I had no doubt he knew the exact number of cornfields we would have passed, and I felt a nervous sweat forming in my palm. I wanted her to be right. I needed her to be right. I loved her that much too.

“Well, I may have missed a few, but I'd say around 547,” she said confidently and threw me one of those looks that says
I have no idea what I'm saying and this whole business is ridiculous.

“Oh, too bad,” Dad said. “You were off by just a little bit.”

“Oh well,” she said. “So how many were there?”

“Two,” Dad said. “One on either side of the road.”

Groan. Eye roll. It was a joke. One of the better of my dad's career as a merrymaker, but a bad joke nonetheless. It would take me years to appreciate his forethought and patience—he asked her to keep track a good three hours before we crossed the big river and he waited another three once we were in Iowa to follow through. I had to give the old man a little bit of credit; once he committed to something, he certainly followed through.

I think about that joke every time I find myself driving west in the direction of Iowa. And I began thinking about it as I climbed out of the shallow valley of Peoria, Illinois. As a rule, I don't like driving through Illinois. Indiana, sure. Iowa, fantastic. But Illinois is flat, even for the Midwest, and kind of ugly. Plus, the whole state feels somehow neglected once you leave Chicago, like an afterthought. Driving through Illinois, at least the parts of the state I've seen from major interstates, seems stuck between east and west; between urban and rural; between salt-of-the-earth and road salt. My mom hates it. She was born and raised in Chicago and goes out of her way to never step foot in that city. I once had to beg her to accept Rebecca's offer to join her after I had a chance encounter with a man whose daughter was a producer on the
Oprah Winfrey Show
and he had gotten me tickets. Mention the word
Chicago
to Mom and she literally cringes. Perhaps the rest of Illinois suffers in my opinion by extension and association. Except, I love Chicago. Of all the big cities in the United States I have spent any significant amount of time in, it is my favorite.

D
riving across the “Illini Plains,” as Kerouac called them, is an exercise in endurance, a man versus boredom fight to the death. Thirty or so miles from the border, my cruise unmolested and le Carré's narrator bringing his story to an end, I was nearly out of fuel and decided to stop for gas and a hamburger. The gas station was just off the highway and seemed to cater to truckers and, judging by the crowd around the soda machine, unwed teenage mothers. It was one of those places so starkly on its own, so out of place among the surrounding landscape, that I couldn't help but ponder the thought process that went into its construction.

Developer:
“I've got an idea, let's put a gas station that serves pizza, hamburgers, and Chinese food in the middle of nowhere.”

Builder:
“What do you mean ‘the middle of nowhere'? Are we talking near the Danville grain silos?”

Developer:
“Grain silos? Preposterous! I'm talking way in the middle of nowhere. Nothing else around!”

Builder:
“Nothing? What about a McDonald's?”

Developer:
“No way!”

Builder:
“Burger King?”

Developer:
“Nope! Nothing! Nothing but fields, baby! And we can have an entire aisle dedicated to air fresheners in the shape of medieval weaponry!”

Builder:
“An entire aisle?”

Developer:
“Maybe two!”

Builder:
“Let's go crazy! We can sell mud flaps and CB radios and pregnancy tests!”

Developer:
“Can the mud flaps have silhouettes of naked women on them?”

Builder:
“Are there any other kind?”

Developer:
“Yes!”

Builder:
“But wait! Who will come to this place?”

Developer:
“Truckers and unwed teenage mothers and, maybe, one day, a wayward author!”

Builder:
“Genius! . . . Well, except the author. He can't come.”

Developer:
“Agreed.”

And . . . scene.

I ordered a cheeseburger wrapped in plastic from behind a large, glass-front deli counter and, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might not recommend eating meat products from such a place, found to my amazement that it was, in short, one of the best things I have ever put into my mouth. I'm not joking. Delicious doesn't describe it. It was juicy and fresh and almost enough to change my general opinion about rural Illinois. Almost. And since I hadn't ordered from a clown, king, or redhead with pigtails, I didn't feel like I had cheated my moratorium on fast food. My goodness, can I split hairs.