Driver's Education (30 page)

Randal says, “I spy something green.”

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you. It's the eighth time you've said it this morning. And this will be the eighth time I'll say this: we'll get there in time. I promise we'll get there in time.” Then, again: “I spy something green.”

He's trying to take my mind off all this, I know. He's been doing it
ever since I woke him in the middle of the night, when he was cocooned with the cat in the shotgun seat. Ever since my father called to tell me that my grandfather has had two more strokes. One small (“The doctor called it a TIA. Have you ever heard of that before? The T stands for ‘transient.' ”) and one large (“I took him home from the hospital the next morning, yesterday morning, and he seemed fine, but it happened that afternoon.” “How bad?” A brief silence during which I hear the strange buzzing, the eerie electronic melodies of a hospital in the background. “He can't speak.” “He couldn't speak after the first one.” “He can't see.” “He will, though.” “He's experiencing a lot of pain.” “That's why they made morphine.” “He's in a coma, Finn. They've got him on life support. There's a tube down his throat.” “That's ridiculous—get him off it.” “They can't.” The hospital's sounds fade as my father moves into a quieter hallway; they're replaced with the shuffle of fur and cotton as Dalloway stirs. I say to my father, “What's the last thing he said?” “He asked me to open the window.” “Is that all he said?” “Yes.” “Dad?” “What, Finn?” “I really wish you knew how to lie.”).

“Maybe it's not that green.” Randal pulls his feet up so his shins are pressing against the dashboard. Mrs. Dalloway, whom we've allowed out of the bag since her brush with death in Chicago, perches unbalanced on the peaks of his knees. She grips the khaki hem of his shorts with her dull claws. “Or maybe it's not green,” he says. “Maybe it's only greenish.” And then: “You could probably say that it's more of a brown. A brown green.”

“Please stop.”

“I'm trying to help, you know.” Then: “Just guess.”

“But who asked you? Who asked you to help?”

“Please just guess, Finn.”

In the south, there are more storm clouds gathering; they pull themselves together like weak, amorphous magnets. They'll be here in three hours tops, I think. I look out across the vacuous landscape.

“It's that tree,” I say.

Ahead of us, about two hundred yards, there's a gnarled twist of bark and branches—the only thing that obscures the horizon. We've passed
the tree before, I think: we've watched it disappear in the rearview mirror only to rematerialize two hours later. Its constant presence has led to debates over whether we're driving in circles, whether the road has somehow curved into itself without us noticing.

“You're right.”

“You should've picked something harder.”

He says, “There's not a lot to work with.”

•  •  •

In Nebraska's southwest, Interstate 80 follows the Great Platte River Road, which is a historic path that took pioneers to Oregon and Mormons to Utah and a great many other people to a Great Many Other Places. The road hugs the river; it forms a slight arc north but stays below the Sandhills, which are huge green dunes that roll like one-hundred-foot dice. And then it bows south, kissing Colorado's border but never crossing into it.

We drive for three and a half hours. We stop only when we have to: when we've run out of gas and when the trembling of Dalloway's leg convinces Randal that she's got to pee maybe, possibly, finally. He squats with the cat in the gravel, encouraging her and coaxing her, while I go to pay for the pump. Within the service station, there's coffee in machines labeled
UNLEADED, LEADED, SUPER, DIESEL
. I fill two cups with diesel. I purchase small boxes of cereal that we eat with no milk.

•  •  •

It's nearing four o'clock in the afternoon when we finally break from Nebraska's wall-less maze. The interstate leads us across the boundless arid prairies of southeastern Wyoming. Past low ranches locked in by hurdles of barbed wire, their irrigated lands patches of green in a vast quilt of dust. Past dry wheat fields and grazing cattle and flocks of shorn sheep. On three sides of us there are low flat-top mountains, steps of earth, the first we've seen in days. The plains press against them: prairies meeting foothills.

Miles outside Cheyenne the road dips down briefly. It takes some rounded corners and finally begins to pull upward along the first inclines of the Laramie Mountains. There are pegmatite walls of bright chemical
colors; pinkish rocks that look like they were made of other rocks that were made of other rocks and then had been half-assedly stacked atop one another. We pass a town called Granite, and it's here that we encounter a very real problem.

At first she—Lucy—convulses violently. My foot's thrown from the gas pedal. I shift down to second and I try to brake, but this does nothing to appease her: she only thrashes harder, swerving to the sides of the road. And there is the shrieking: a terrible mourner's howl that sounds like the thunder of cannonballs shattering thin sheets of glass. My forearms flex and ache as I struggle to maintain control of her.

“Do something!” Randal screams above Lucy's wails. A frightened Mrs. Dalloway clings to his shoulder, burying her head against his neck.

“I'm trying!” I shout. “I don't know what the fuck is wrong with her!”

I shift down to first and Lucy protests even more vehemently. She throws her windows around in their frames, the glass threatening to splinter and crack. I cajole her onto a dirt shoulder along the side of the road and the sound of a million pebbles pelting her belly mixes with the wicked soprano of her cries. When I kill her engine, the sound lasts for two beats too long before dissolving into the silence.

Randal has his feet lifted from the floorboards. One hand encircles Mrs. Dalloway's thin neck and the other is pressed against the dash.

He whispers, “What the
fuck
was that?”

“Goddamn it,” I say. “Please not now.” Again: “God
damn
it.”

My hands still clutch the steering wheel, but it has gone completely still, lifeless. I press my eyes shut and in their corners I see spools of silk unraveling, changing colors from blue to red.

•  •  •

The spot where Lucy has decided to have her fit is outside Buford, Wyoming—an unincorporated community in Albany County. It fills a small swath of grass and earth that's eight thousand feet above sea level: it's the highest town on Interstate 80 between New York and San Francisco. Its population consists of a single person: the mayor. We read all this on a set of plastic road signs that have been hammered into the brown-red dirt.

“One person,” Randal says. “I bet he gets sick of himself.”

“Come on,” I tell him.

“Where are we going?”

“We're not sitting around here like a bunch of assholes.” I point toward the small cluster of buildings that constitutes Buford. “I see a gas station attached to that store. There's got to be someone over there who can help us.”

Dust chalks our ankles as we walk. The sky, which seems too close to us, is an atomic blue: it wraps around us, unfolding in the open spaces between particleboard clouds.

Except for a man in flip-flops refueling a two-story RV, the gas station is empty, and so we try the adjoining trading post. It's been retrofitted to look like an old hunting cabin: there are notched Lincoln Log walls and a sloping steel roof and a wood-planked porch raised on hewn pilings. Directly inside the glass front doors, there's a plaque describing Buford's long, if not entirely illustrious, history. It was founded under a different name in 1866, when it acted as a temporary home to men working on the transcontinental railroad, and at its height it boasted more than two thousand inhabitants. But then, as progress pushed the tracks' construction west, it took the laborers with it; the population's been shrinking since. Still, in 1880 they built a post office. And even though there was no one around to notice, they renamed the town after Major General John Buford, a Union cavalry officer who was actually born in Kentucky.

The store appears empty, but there is an overhead radio that is playing—of all things—Blondie, and as we push toward the direction of the cash register Randal hums off-key along to “Heart of Glass.” We weave through aisles stocked with tacky and fascinating stuff—whistles made from elk antlers; functional pens carved from slivers of bark. Jerky made from animals that should never be jerkified. The front desk is hidden behind curtains of postcards that display the trading post photographed from every possible angle. Randal selects one from the rack, flips it over, and reads the back as I chime a small silver bell for an attendant.

“You only have to ring that thing once,” he tells me. “This place isn't big. I'm sure whoever's supposed to hear you has heard you.”

“Well, whoever is supposed to hear me isn't moving fast enough.”

We wait for an unfathomably long two minutes, during which I continue to ring the bell and Randal's cheeks grow red. The man who finally emerges from an unmarked door tucked behind the cashier's desk is old and worn—the color of unpolished shoes. He wears a denim work shirt and faded jeans; his grey hair is parted and combed over to disguise a bald spot shaped like France. One of the elk-bone whistles hangs from his neck. On his head: a red ball cap sporting the words
BUFORD: THE GREATEST ONE-PERSON TOWN IN THE WEST
! Above his heart: a name tag reading
FRED
.

He's been eating sunflower seeds: when he smiles two soggy halves of shells cover a front tooth. He places a bearish paw over my hand to stop the bell from ringing.

“Welcome!” Fred says. His hand on top of mine feels older than it looks: cracked instead of creased; thin instead of callused. “Welcome to Buford—The Greatest One-Person Town in the West!” He adds, “Thank you so much for paying us a visit!”

Randal says, “But I thought there was only one of you.”

“There is!” He releases my hand but then picks it up again, this time giving it a hearty shake. “And all of us love our visitors!”

Fred takes hold of Randal's fingers with his other hand, so that he's shaking both our hands. I watch as Randal struggles through the algebra of Fred's last sentence, his eyes pulled together.

I tell Fred, “Our car broke down about a hundred yards down the highway. We were wondering if there was someone over at the gas station who could help us out.”

He picks a sunflower seed from his incisor and he nods; I watch the flesh that hangs from his chin shake even after his head has stopped moving. “Yes, yes. We can help with that, all right. Get you back on the road lickety-split.”

The air that's been trapped in my throat since we arrived pushes through my lips as a happy whistle: I sigh, relieved.

But then: “First, though, a tour! Let me show you around, get you acquainted with the place. There's so much to see here in Buford. So very much to see.”

“We really should get going.”

It's useless, though. Fred has already swung around our side of the desk, his strange, laceless shoes shuffling like dull sandpaper along the floor. He's got the whistle balanced between his thin lips and he toots it lightly as he walks, like he's leading us through some labyrinth that only he can navigate.

“Sweet pepper venison jerky,” he says, stopping. He throws Randal a plastic package printed with a picture of a grinning cartoon deer. “Voted the tastiest jerky by the citizens of Buford for twelve years in a row.”

“So you voted it the best jerky for twelve years in a row.”

“Go on,” he says, “give it a try. If it's not the best thing you've ever tasted, you get your money back.”

“But we haven't paid anything,”

He adjusts his belt buckle, which is large, and brass, and says
BUFORD
. He's short and sinewy, Fred, but he's got this unexpected gut: the fabric between the buttons of his denim shirt pulls apart, revealing purple flesh, some freckles, a lone white hair. He watches us—waits.

Randal tears the package open with his teeth. He hands me a shriveled port-colored strip, and then takes one for himself. The meat's tough but workable; we both chew it like cows grinding cud. It's sweet but also salty—honey from a sweaty bee.

“It's actually not that bad,” Randal says.

Fred claps. He stomps a foot.

I tell him, “Fred, we really need to get that car working.”

“Right, yes. Right, of course.” He wobbles on his heels, turns. He makes like he's heading for the exit, but when he reaches the end of the aisle he pulls a hairpin turn and leads us down the adjacent row. “But first!” he shouts. His hands are buried up to the wrists in a pail of chipped, flinty stones. “But first you'll want to take some of these! Authentic Indian arrowheads! Collected by the citizens of Buford themselves!”

I take one of the stones. It's paper thin, brittle, the size of a small frog. Across one of its surfaces,
BUFORD
has been written with Wite-Out in an uneven scrawl. I look into the bucket of a million rocks: each one contains the same tag.

I pocket the arrowhead and feel its thin crust split between my fingers.

“Thanks, Fred,” I say. “Now—”

“The car.” He points his finger at me. A used-car salesman desperate for a deal.

“Yes, the car.”

“I know just the fellow you should talk to.”

“Thank God.”

He blows the whistle once—this time louder than before—and he slips through the door behind the cash register, his back hunched over, his shoulders dropped.

“We're never going to get out of here,” I say once the door's clicked shut. “We're never going to get the car fixed. This guy is nuts.”