by James Grady
“What about you guys?”
“Places to go,” said Brian, “people to see.”
“Is this the time you’re going to do more than just see?” said Doug.
“Shut the fuck up,” said his partner. Lovingly.
Three soda machines selling bottles and cans of caffeine & sugar & chemical concoctions stood sentinel near the ramp Condor and his escorts took to the glass front doors, past a bench where three probably just graduated high school girls sat, two of them wearing hajib headresses, all of them smoking cigarettes.
What struck Condor inside the rest stop facility was its atmosphere of closeness, of containment. The densely packed air smelled of…
Of floor tiles. Crackling meat grease. Hot sugar. Lemon scented ammonia.
Ahead gaped entrances for MENS and LADIES rooms. The wall between the restrooms held a YOU ARE HERE map and a bronze plaque with lines of writing that travellers hurrying into the bathrooms only glanced at but Condor read:
Drive, drive on. These are the highways of our lives.
Dwell not on the sharp quiet madness of our collective soul.
Call us all New Jersey. Call us all Americans, as on we go
alone together.
Nick Logar
Off to Condor’s left waited the gift shop, wall racks of celebrity magazines and candy, glass coolers with yet more cans of syrupy caffeine, displays of key chains dangling green plastic models of the Statue of Liberty, T-shirts and buttons that “hearted” New York, postcards that nobody mailed anymore.
He turned right, toward the food court, a long open corridor with garish neon signs above each stop where money could be exchange for sustenance.
There was ‘bucks, the coffee-centered franchise intent on conquering the world.
DANDY DONUTS! came next in line, sold coffee, too, essentially the same concoctions as ‘bucks but somehow not as costly.
The red, white & green logo for SACCO’S ITALIA seen mostly in airports, train stations or rest stops centered the food stops wall.
Italian green gave way to broccoli green letters on a white background: NATURAL EATS & FRO YO, where display cases held plastic sealed salads and silver machines hummed behind the counter.
Last in the line of eateries came BURGERS BONAZA, the third biggest chain of hamburger and fries and cola drive-ins of Condor’s youth, still clinging to that national sales rank partially because a dozen years remained on the company’s 50 year exclusive lease for this state’s Turnpike stops signed with an unindicted former governor.
“Come on,” Brian told Condor.
Gray tables lined the red tiles between the wall of eateries and the not quite ceiling-to-floor windows. Travellers sat on hard-to-shoplift black metal chairs.
Brian took a chair facing those front windows. Condor sat where he could look down the food court to the main doors, or look left out to the front parking lot through the wall of windows, or look right and see Doug shuffling in service lines. Behind Condor, a door labeled OFFICE waited near a glass door under a red sign glowing FIRE EXIT.
“What time is it?” asked Condor.
“No worries,” said Brian. “We’re where we belong and when we should be.”
Doug came to them balancing cardboard trays like a man who’d worked his way through college as a waiter. The trays held ‘bucks cups, plastic glasses of white yogurt and strawberry chunks, containers of raisins and granola, bananas, spoons, napkins, a white plastic knife almost useless for cutting someone’s throat.
“And six donuts?” said Brian.
“The secret to life is knowing how to mix and match,” said his partner. “Evens out health-wise with the yogurt. Gives us some bulk and energy for the ride back. Three classic chocolate donuts, three seasonal special pumpkin maple donuts. In good conscience, how could we pass those up?”
“You guys are driving back to Maine?” said Condor.
“Brooklyn,” said Brian as he sliced a banana into his yogurt.
“Somebody’s insisting on an overnight there,” explained his partner.
Two kindergarten aged boys ran past the table trailed by their harried mother.
“You wouldn’t believe Brooklyn now,” Brian told Condor.
“I didn’t believe it then.”
Doug said: “There’s this ultra-hip coffee shop not far from—”
“Hey!” said his partner.
“Come on,” Doug told his partner. “You can’t just show up hoping she will.”
The silver-haired man who was old enough to be the two gunners’ father smiled.
Said: “We’ve all done that.”
“What’s the worst that could happen if you finally talked to her?” said Doug.
Condor shrugged. “You could watch your dreams die in her eyes.”
“Me,” said Doug, “I was gonna say alimony, but troop, if you do not engage the enemy, you create no chance of success.”
His partner whispered: “Who’s the enemy?”
“Ourselves,” said Condor.
Brian blinked at the silver-haired legend. “My man: Welcome back!”
Condor ate his pumpkin maple donut as he stared out the window at travelers walking to and from their steel rides. Saw the guy dressed in padded black close the door on…yes, it was an old black hearse, walking away carrying a gym bag toward the south end of the rest stop and the rows of gas pumps controlled by attendants whose jobs were protected by state law. A yellow rental truck drove through Condor’s view.
Buzz went cell phones in his escorts’ pockets.
Doug read the text message, said: “Link-up ETA twelve minutes.”
Seven minutes later, these three men were at the facility’s main doors, Doug going through first, Brian posting drag, and Condor—
Flash!
From a cell phone held by a curly-haired woman on the other side of a glass door from Condor: blurry picture at best, and sure, she appeared innocently overwhelmed by carrying her purse and a takeout tray with two coffees, probably just clumsy fingers on her device, plus she didn’t seem to notice that Brian followed her to her car, cell phoned photos of her and her license plate and her driver who stereotyped husband as they drove to the Southbound exit just ahead of a rusty black hearse, while hundreds of miles away near Washington, D.C., their metrics became an I&M (Investigate & Monitor) upload.
Doug and Condor posted near the parked van.
Forty feet away, an easy (for him) pistol shot, Brian drifted amidst parked cars.
Zen. They were here. They were now. Not waiting: being, doing. Ready for.
The red car drove around the dragon facility from the Northbound entrance. A Japanese brand built in Tennessee that glided ever closer to two men standing by a gray van near the white gazebo.
Where the red car parked.
She opened the driver’s door. Let them see no one rode with her (unless they were laying on the back seat floor or huddled in the trunk). Kept her hands in sight as she walked toward them and yes, it was only a cell phone in her left hand.
Statistically, most people shoot right handed.
“Hey,” she said: “Aren’t you friends of Gary Pettigrew?”
“Don’t know the guy,” answered Doug. Said guy and not him or man.
“So where you from?”
“Where we’re going,” answered Doug, sounding ordinary enough for any eavesdropper (none around) but not a likely response from a random stranger.
“Then I’m in the right place.” She grinned. “Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”
Her left hand showed them the package’s picture in her cell phone.
“You must be Condor,” she said, extending her right hand to shake his.
“Vin,” corrected Doug. “But yeah.”
She was young. Short black hair. Clean caramel complexion and bright ebony eyes. Dark slacks and a white blouse under an unbuttoned navy blue jacket.
Said: “Want to see my credentials?”
“If you’re bogus and got the recog
nition code, you’ll pack fake flash,” said Doug.
“Damn it! I’ve been dying for a chance to whip out my I.D.: Homeland Security, up against the wall!”
“Rookie,” said Doug.
“Who else would get stuck with a one day road trip up to here and back to D.C.?”
Her voice stayed easy. “I’m Malati Chavali, and is that guy walking this way one of us?”
Doug smiled: “Yeah, Rook’, he’s with us.”
Brian drifted to her red car, glanced in the back seat, turned and said like that was the reason for his detour: “Where do you want his two bags?”
“What do you think?” she said to Doug—looked at Condor. “I’m sorry! I should ask you, it’s not like you’re…”
“Just a package?” said the man who could technically maybe be her grandfather.
“And you want me to call you Vin, right?”
He shrugged. “Mission requirements.”
“Speaking of,” said Brian. “We gotta hit the road.”
“Brooklyn calls,” joked his partner.
Condor’s suitcases went in the red car’s trunk.
He and its driver Malati watched the gray van pull out of its parking space and drive onto the Northbound ramp…gone.
“Can I ask you a favor?” she said to the sliver haired man as they stood in the cool morning air. “I know you’re probably anxious to get to your new apartment—row house, actually, on Capital Hill—your Settlement Specialist will meet us there, we’ll call her when we hit the Beltway and…The thing is, I’m dying for coffee.”
“Wouldn’t want you to die,” said Condor. “How would I get where I’m going?”
“There is that,” she said.
They walked toward the rest stop’s facility.
“Before we get where there are ears,” he said as they moved between parked cars lined in rows of shiny steel, “you’re Home Sec’, not CIA?”
“Actually, detailed to the National Resources Operations Division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—there’s CIA on staff there, too, but me…Yeah, I’m in Home Sec’. For now. Grad school at Georgetown—”
“Don’t vomit your whole cover story first chance you get,” said the silver-haired man as they neared the main doors. “Even if it’s true. Maybe especially if it’s true.”
Laughing coworkers in Groucho Marx glasses strode past them.
Malati whispered: “Sorry.”
He held the building door for gave her. “Shit happens. So far, ours works.”
She smiled thank you as she stepped past that older gentleman.
Heard him say: “Should you have let me behind you?”
A chill claimed her amidst the thick air inside the rest stop facility.
She answered: “I don’t know.”
Condor shrugged. “Too late to think about it now.
“I’m going in there,” he said, pointing to the MENS room. “Get your coffee and we’ll meet at a table.”
“I thought I was in charge.”
“Good,” he said. Walked into the bathroom, left her standing there. Alone.
Five minutes later, he spotted her sitting at a table in the food court facing the restrooms, the gift shop and the main doors. Tactically acceptable. The wall of eateries waited to her right, the windows to the parking lot on her heartside. Her eyes locked on him as he walked toward where she sat with two cups from ‘bucks on the table.
“Please,” she said, “sit. We’ve got time.”
“You sure?”
“No. But we can make it work.”
He settled on the black steel chair facing her.
“Look around,” she said. “Most people are tuned out. Plugged into their cells or tablets. Not really here. Plus there’s nobody behind me, right? Nobody behind you. Nobody close enough to hear even if we’re not careful what we say.”
He gave her a nod and the smile that wanted to come.
“I’d like to start over,” she said. “The coffee’s a peace offering.”
“OK. We’re probably going to have to stop at least once before D.C. anyway.”
“When you want, when we can.” She took a sip from her cup, left no lip stain.
Don’t think about red lipstick. Gone. That’s the forever. This is now.
Malati said: “Somehow now I don’t think you’re just, say, a former asset or KGB defector who’s been in a retirement program and needs routine relocation.”
“What do you know?”
“The codename I’m now not supposed to use.” Malati shrugged. “Vin. Weird first name, but whatever, Vin: I volunteered for this nobody wanted it gig. Extra duty. Trying to prove I’m competent, trustable, a team player with initiative.”
“What do you want?” he said.
“To do more than earn a paycheck. Serve my country. Do some good.”
“And under that essay answer?”
“I don’t want to be somebody who doesn’t know what’s really going on.”
“Reality,” he said: “I’ve heard of that.”
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.
