The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  She wouldn’t be able to drive past the gate. It had been years—fifteen, was it? Even then the road had been impassable. She drove by feel, she thought, after so long. Some knowledge never left you. The time it took from highway to gate—she did not know the minutes—close to an hour—but it was a time she knew inside of her, her body holding time like a vessel. After fifteen years the trees and small plants by the side of the road were not the same. How could they be? But it was the same ground she had known so well for so long. There must be larkspur in that darkness now, the first few blooms of arnica. It’s dirt that tells you who you are, her father had once said, picking up that red brown dirt and letting it crumble through his fingers. The soil. The earth. It tells you where you came from.

  For all she had expected the feel of the road in her body to guide her, the gate materialized suddenly in the dark. She kicked the brake pedal in, felt the seat belt against her body as the car came to a stop. She stepped out of the car, still in her heels. Ridiculous to be wearing heels. She pulled them off and threw them into the foot well of the passenger seat, then pulled out her gym bag from the backseat and changed into the t-shirt, lycra pants, and tennis shoes she would have worn to run after work.

  Tina felt the air against her wrists and neck, cool air slightly warmed from what the sun had left lingering in the hard dirt. She reached in and picked up her stone and let it sit against her palm.

  She climbed over the old cattle gate, hearing the jostle of chain on metal. Her feet felt for the ground on the other side in the dark. A thorn stabbed at her ankle and she winced. Her home ground still had thorns.

  The clouds began to pull apart and starlight, ever brighter as her eyes adjusted, showed a faint path. There was no going back. She was committed now, just her in this dark and this desert. Fear came, and desire, too. A rush of longing for the openness, a terror of what it might reveal.

  “’Fraidy cat, ’fraidy cat!” Her sister’s voice called from the cabin from twenty years before, her father in from shooting squirrels with the rifle he kept above the door. “Tina’s ’fraid of the dark!’

  “Am not!”

  “Are too!”

  “Charge!”

  “I thought I could save her.”

  The woman had been lying in the street the next day they came through on patrol. Her black hair caked with dust. The blood had dried black.

  You couldn’t have saved her, there’s nothing you could have done, she’d said, Molly’s head on her shoulder. You did everything you could. This place—there’s nothing more you could have done.

  Too much, it’s too much, too many, Molly said.

  How much can one soul hold before it breaks?

  The stars, there were so many. Out this far, clouds torn away, you could see galaxies, worlds, other dimensions. Everybody should spend time looking into the night sky, Tina thought. Everybody should see these worlds. How many there are. How beautiful they might be.

  The dark no longer seemed so deep. It softened, still. There are so many worlds.

  The cabin loomed out of the starlit path, its small shape magnified by lack of light.

  “Hello,” Tina said quietly.

  The cabin did not answer. A small animal scurried off of the porch, unseen.

  She would not go in, not right away. The night was not cold. She sat on the steps of the small porch. There would be dust inside. It would take time to get it to a place where she could live. She had had enough of dust. The porch would be enough just now, in that quiet night.

  The owl spoke from a tree so close Tina imagined she could feel its breath.

  “Whoo hoo,” it said.

  “Whoo hoo,” Tina said back.

  “Whoo hoo,” it said again.

  The stars showed just enough on the porch to see the bench against the outside wall of the cabin and the old lantern, the one her father had taught her to trim. She reached over, let her fingers follow the curves of glass and metal. It was not smooth; the dirt and dust from years of wind had gathered in its creases and the metal was dented, rusted. Tina rubbed the grit between her fingers, felt the cut of it.

  She would clean and clean, it could be done. In a week she could have that little cabin cleaned, the broken things fixed. It would be fine. There would be so much dust, but here it could be cleaned. Here she could sweep, and make it go away.

  The mix of fear and deepest yearning changed, became anticipation and understanding. Her chest let go of a portion of the tension it held and she felt how much that tightness had become a part of her those past two years. She could give the things she carried over to this quiet place. This night, the sky, the land, was big enough to take her stories. Her sounds, the sounds could spin out into space. But rest might never fully come. Rest required letting go. It was the dust, you see. What she could not let go was that fine dust across an eye that had been bright, the way the dust could claim a thing.

  She stepped onto the dirt and then she screamed, a deep and animal scream from somewhere far away and deep inside, and as she screamed she felt herself alive. The stars soaked in her scream. The night lay quiet.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to the night. She let herself feel each breath that came, the way her chest expanded and released, the strain and relaxation of muscle tissue bone, and standing on the dirt and feeling every breath she thought that maybe some things lost could be recovered, some things forgotten learned again.

  The dark began to thicken all around her. She got up and tried the cabin door. It opened, and she went in.

  WAR PARTY

  by Michael Carson

  We agreed that if Blonde Hair drank one whiskey shot an hour he couldn’t get a DUI. And we held to this policy for the first hour, only fudging the interval by fifteen minutes in the second. By the third, we debated whether pairing the whiskey with cocaine diminished or increased one’s BAC. At some point during the fourth hour, the three of us consumed a liter of Canadian Club and three bottles of champagne and had difficulty telling the difference between lanes on the road much less hours in the day.

  “Only drunks drink that shit straight,” Blonde Hair told Black Hair as he tore the foil off another champagne bottle with one hand and steadied the steering wheel with the other.

  “I have to get to the party,” I told Black Hair. My face felt flush. I kept checking my cheeks and forehead for fever.

  “We should keep to one shot an hour,” Black Hair said. “I don’t want to be stuck overnight in Jersey.”

  They were hippies I think. Or libertarians. Something. I had met them before, and they had told me their names. But I had forgotten them. The people I had come up with left in middle of the night, sick and tired of New York. Dan had broken a chair at the first apartment. Stacey had been bored. She never liked being far from home. Will’s nose started bleeding. I stayed on with these two, friends of Will, or his cousins, until we blacked out at an apartment in Battery Park. We woke up around seven overlooking a giant hole where two towers had been, and left quickly, taking with us all the unopened champagne we could grab and a liquor bottle from the kitchen counter. I don’t know who lived there.

  “We need cigarettes,” said Blonde Hair. His hair was not nearly as long and natty as his friend’s, but stringy and unwashed. He had it cut recently though, just around the ears. Black Hair’s neck was a mess of unkempt greasy curls. They spun endlessly around on themselves, and he periodically rubbed his hand through the unctuous wave as if he had fleas.

  Blonde Hair spun the wheel expertly. I admired his dexterity, the way in which his hands passed over one another, long fine fingers with perfectly sheared cuticles. Around the roaring semis we maneuvered effortlessly, falling in and out of each lane as if the entire highway’s movement were synchronized. We must have been inches, centimeters away from their massive spinning wheels and yet we never touched. I felt like a juggler’s ball.

  “Well, yes, of course,” I agreed. “We need cigarettes. But after the cigarettes we need to get to the party.�
��

  “I can’t drive any faster,” argued Blonde Hair. “You see, if I drive any faster, I’ll be drunk.”

  “One shot an hour,” Black Hair said. “You can just tell them you had one shot an hour. They’ll understand.”

  “The cops are fascists here. Union fascists.”

  The sun beat down lazily on the window, and I dozed. The car was like a cradle, the lane changes long desultory rocks—first one side, then another, back and forth, forth and back.

  “You can’t be in a union and be fascist,” said Black Hair.

  “Well, of course you can. Unions are fascist. Read a book.”

  “Fuck books.”

  I interrupted.

  “Do I look sick? I think I look sick.”

  Black Hair glanced back at me. His lips were thick and his chin drooped—a basset hound with a basset hound’s sad dull eyes. I touched my cheeks again. My fingers grew warm. The champagne was very dry, and each time I put the glass to my lips my throat constricted. We were out of whiskey though, so I tried again and again and hoped for the best.

  “You’re not sick. You are definitely not sick. I know sick people.”

  Above me strips of headliner fluttered down like confetti. It took all my willpower not to pull at them. Blonde Hair or some previous owner had stapled the sagging roof fabric up and it ballooned down in three distinct parachutes. The fourth balloon had popped during the trip and long strips tore away in the wind, whipping against the seat, into my lips and out the window. If I pulled my head off the window and my back off the sticky leather, my hair would rub against this soft material.

  “Why are we stopping?” I asked.

  “Cigarettes. We need cigarettes. Cigarettes will help your fever.”

  I laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?” Black Hair asked.

  The green Oldsmobile had pulled into a rest stop and parked between two white trucks. Black Hair and Blonde Hair stumbled out of the doors into the sun toward the service plaza.

  “Get me a water,” I yelled through the open window. “I’m sick.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” one of them shouted back.

  I felt very alone. The semis glided by, screaming down and up the turnpike, tearing me this way then that way, my torso from my head and my head from my torso. There were so many vehicles, so many shapes and sizes. I rubbed my cheeks again and tasted water in the air.

  After about five minutes or maybe twenty, my bladder tightened. I did not listen, focusing instead on everything else, the sun, the sound of my breathing.

  They did not come back. The cars and trucks screamed at me.

  My bladder tightened again, loudly.

  I pushed at the door, brushing the confetti aside, moving toward the golden arches, remarking on the two white trucks, the wide-open sky an indifferent blue.

  I could not find the green Oldsmobile. The sun had grown larger by the time I left the restroom, and was now obscured by a fog, a heavy orange incandescence. I walked back toward the white trucks but there were no white trucks. There were other cars, but no trucks. I turned around and went left and then right, the fenders and bumpers brushing against my knees. After many different color cars, I found a green Oldsmobile.

  Someone had fixed the headliner. Fabric no longer hung down in my face.

  “Excuse me,” said a man in the front seat. The man had a long skinny jaw, two lines that ran all the way down into his neck. His lips moved after the words came into my ears. He had very little hair, and what hair he did have was brown. His eyes were wide as the blue sky.

  “I have to get to a party,” I said.

  “Are you all right, son?” he asked

  “I’m sick,” I told him. I felt he would understand. “I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to war.”

  The woman in the seat next to him, her eyes rolling lightly, said something to the man. She held another version of her, a miniature thing with the same eyes, nose, and hair. The thing fingered her chin.

  “Where are you from, son?” said the man, loudly, too loudly. “Did you say you were in the military? Are you all right?”

  “I’m not in the Army yet. I’m going to the Army tomorrow. I start tomorrow. Tonight’s my party,” I explained patiently, slowly, trying to keep my tongue from the words.

  “I think you need to go somewhere else,” said the woman, and I turned to her. Her lips had tiny ruts in them where words gurgled.

  “We can take you,” said the other one. “Where do you need to go?”

  “My party. My war party,” I said.

  I looked down at my hands. They had become very heavy, almost as heavy as the warmness in my cheeks. The little thing in her lap gave me an eyeball full of empty liquid. It rolled around and around and I shifted and squirmed so it would not know me.

  “Here,” the lines that were a man said, “lie down. We can take you where you need to go.”

  “I need to talk to you outside,” said the other one, her split lips red as the ends of her nails. The little thing’s small hand had risen up into her hair. It ran like my hand might have run, caressing downy cheeks. I wanted to put my warm cheeks there next to those warm cheeks and fall asleep underneath all that hair.

  “The least we can do,” came through the air, into my head with all my other thoughts.

  Through the windshield, I watched them move their hands and mouths. She pointed at the building, and then her thumb at the car. Her eyes rolled and rolled. The little thing grabbed at her hand.

  I shifted my feet against the seat, and wondered if they had cigarettes. They did not look like the kind of people who had cigarettes. There were only stuffed animals next to my feet. I would push them and they would stay clinging to my foot. They would not roll away. They had eyes and mouths and ears stitched to their bodies.

  Through the windshield, the man kept on nodding his head, as if to say, yes, I understand, of course I understand, but we have a certain responsibility. We have to do something.

  “No you don’t,” I said to the stuffed animals.

  My forehead grew warmer, dangerously warm. I was contagious.

  Opening the door, I fell out onto the ground, spilling out like water, and the words they shouted at me made no sense. I picked myself up and ran. The bumpers scraped against my knees. Tennessee, New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut cut at my jeans, but I did not care. I was not afraid.

  A green 1996 Oldsmobile pulled up next to me as the cars disappeared. Black Hair hung out the window, the champagne bottle’s rim peaking over the edge. His eyes were very sad.

  “What the fuck, man? Let’s go. We got cigarettes.”

  The confetti swayed first this way and that, tickling the back of my neck.

  Black Hair apologized when he remembered the water.

  “I forgot,” he said, earnestly.

  I did not like being away from my friends, from the people I knew, because other people in the world would become sincere for no reason, blindly and dangerously. I lived in fear that someone would hold me accountable for what I said or did or expect me to hold them accountable for what they said or did.

  They offered me a joint as a consolation. The tires squealed in the waxy asphalt and I coughed terribly. It poured out my nose.

  “I need some sleep,” said Blonde Hair, his delicate fingers cresting over the spinning wheel. “I know my limits.”

  I could feel the motor pulsing against my forehead, churning air in one side and out the other, below as above, within as without.

  “Road trips are great,” said Black Hair, his hair shinier and moving ever so lightly in the terrible breeze.

  “It’s not a road trip if you’re going home.”

  “It’s on the road. It’s a road trip.”

  “I need to pull over. I need some sleep, maybe.”

  “No,” I shouted over the wind. “I need to get to the party.”

  I was running high, spinning like a top.

  “I have a party tonight. My parents spent a bu
nch of money. I only get one party. You can’t pull over. We can’t pull over again.”

  “I’m really tired.”

  I waited for more but that’s all Blonde Hair said.

  “You can come to the party too. You can both come to the party.”

  “Will they have food?” asked Blonde Hair.

  “Of course, they’ll have food. It’s a going-away party.”

  He stared down at the empty pint in his lap.

  “Where you going?” asked Black Hair suddenly.

  “The Army.”

  “There’s Army everywhere. I mean there’s like five thousand fucking bases. Global War on Terror means we all signed up for the war. Everyone. You, me. We’re all in. Whether we like it or not.”

  He had a point. I could see his point.

  “You have a point,” I said, blowing smoke at the strips of felt.

  “Can we at least get some more whiskey?” he asked, as if I had a choice in the matter.

  “Yeah, I think it’s been an hour,” said Blonde Hair.

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re doing me the favor. I don’t see why not. I don’t see how another stop can hurt.”

  By the time we were back on the road, the sky had darkened. A storm had blown in from Pennsylvania. Thick drops slapped against the windshield—first a few, then a thousand. You could barely hear the music. I could only hear parts of what Black Hair was telling me. It came to me brokenly from the bottom of a well.

  “I don’t believe in war . . . you can kill now but why not later? . . . Why not ever? . . . I respect what you do but I don’t see how it makes the world a better place . . . it’s just bad juju in my opinion.”