How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  “My husband’s beating me.”

  Then she was gone, like the kids, as if somebody’d pulled the connection out of her head. The car disappeared next, and I was left standing in the middle of the off-ramp with four other cars honking behind me.

  I stood there for a second or two, thinking how I’d blown the test and there was no point in going on and what Fat Joe would say, then I ran for my car and took it across 53 and up the VR I-15 on-ramp and back out onto the VR interstate looking for the green station wagon. I knew it was stupid to look for that wagon if the lady driving it was getting beaten up somewhere in real-land and I didn’t know where and I couldn’t even remember her license plate to stop and call the stupid police, I’d just been watching the kids in the back of a wagon doing ninety-three mph, I hadn’t been memorizing license-plate numbers, and I didn’t know what to do, and I wanted to do something, something, something. Before long, but before the ten minutes of my test were up, I was past Draper and the prison and going up the Point of the Mountain doing 102 and when I hit the top, the VR blanked out and a screen came up that said, “You are not a driver authorized to enter the Utah County Driver Simulation Net,” which meant I didn’t have the right kind of access to make the Salt Lake County net network me over to the Utah County net, and then the screen went all black in my mind: But before the words had come up I’d gotten one quick glimpse of the Utah County net, and it was all color, not city: I saw the sun glinting off Utah Lake and the green spring wheatfields and orchards around Alpine and a tall mountain south with snow still on the top and I-15 heading south to that mountain, the road looking like it had been polished and looking like it ached for me to drive on it.

  “So you blew that one, Clayton-boy. You blew that one — and you’re supposed to be my best driver?”

  I was unhooking my head and one of the wires had stuck in the back, so I kept working at it and looked at Fat Joe who seemed just a little too happy about my fifteen-cent-an-hour loss and said, “Yeah, so I want some practice time in VR.”

  And it wasn’t just VR fun I was after, though Fat Joe wouldn’t know that: I wanted to get back out on VR I-15 and look for that station wagon and write down the license-plate number if I saw it again.

  “You can practice when you don’t have runs to make in real-land, Clayton-boy.We’ve got one waiting for you now.”

  The wire came loose, and I hurried out of the car and into the kitchen: It was two pepperoni and mushroom pizzas on a Midvale run waiting for me, and the kitchen staff had already boxed up the pizzas, so I took them and ran, sat them in the backseat of my little Japanese fast car and buckled them down and slammed doors and buckled myself in and rolled down the windows while I pulled out onto 600 South heading west to the I-15 on-ramp: I never used the air conditioner because the drain on engine power would slow me down, and I was out there in real-land, which is weirder than VR: in VR you have people driving along trying to pass tests, most driving like they always meant to be good little boys and girls of the road and only a few like me driving like maniacs because we had different kinds of tests to pass — and it was only those people out there.

  But not in real-land.

  In real-land everybody had already passed their tests so they could all go nuts and all two million of them in Salt Lake Valley are out driving around all the time, usually heading for I-15, and you never know what to expect except lots of craziness and unpredictability and I loved it, I loved playing the game that went on in that traffic: Drive a fast car fast and you’ll find one or two or three others doing the same thing, and an interstate highway can become your own little VR game in real-land: slow cars doing sixty or seventy to block the road ahead when you can’t change lanes left or right and the other fast cars speed past and the drivers laugh at you, but you get your turn to laugh down the road when their lane is blocked and you can speed past, and you drive, weaving in and out, and nothing feels like it, nothing, with the wind whipping your hair and the hot summer air off the desert blowing over your skin and no music off the radio at all because you don’t need it, not then, not during the game.

  And I merged out onto I-15 and shoved my Japanese fast car up to eighty plus, close to ninety, because I wanted to play then, real bad, and the Happy Pizza clown head stuck on the hood of my car flapped around like you wouldn’t believe, but nobody was out playing the game, just me, I was the only driver weaving in and out, getting blocked and slowing down and speeding up again and weaving in and out, and I couldn’t help it: I kept looking around for the green station wagon with the peeling fake-wood side panels because a car like that existed somewhere in the valley and was probably registered to the lady or her husband and the lady was probably a hacker because how else could she get out onto VR I-15? A woman with a car like that didn’t have the money to buy her way on to the net.

  I wished I’d looked even once at the license plate on that car.

  It was more of the predictable same-old family routine when I got home that night after work. My mother would ask “How was your day, Clayton?” just like she did every day, and I’d say “Fine, just a lot of driving,” and I’d never be able to tell her or Dad just how I drove and the kind of fun it was and what I’d felt, and my father would look up from his paper and not say a word because he was pissed that I’d taken a pizza delivery job, not something at his bank to keep me busy through the summer till I hit the one year of college I’d get before my two-year mission preaching religion. I looked at them and wanted to try to tell them I had taken a VR driving test to maybe get a raise in the slow afternoon hours after the lunchtime rush and that I’d seen this woman getting beaten by her husband and that I didn’t know how to find her to help her. But I didn’t know how to tell such a story to my parents; there’d be too much to explain, so I didn’t say a word about it.

  “Supper’s at seven,” Mother said, and I just stood by the fridge getting a drink, and I looked at us and thought we all seemed like little robots going about doing what we were programmed to do, no matter what happened in our lives: Mother programmed to make supper, Dad programmed to read the paper and disapprove of me, me programmed to go up to my room and do who knows what till supper, my two little sisters programmed to wear expensive clothes and be little brats, and I thought, God, I’m going to break this programming, I hate it, so I said to Mom, “Let me help. I’ll set the table and get the water — did you want us to drink water tonight?”

  And she looked at me surprised and said water would be fine, and Dad looked at me and I knew what he was thinking: that’s a woman’s work you’re doing, Clayton, you’re a fucking man doing women’s work, isn’t that a great kind of son to have? He would hardly move his arms and the paper when I tried to spread the tablecloth on the table or put his plate down in front of him, but he didn’t try to stop me either because I was after all just a son who might just as well do work to serve him and we all ate supper and didn’t talk much; Dad had the TV on, and I stayed behind to help Mom clean up and she said, “Well, isn’t this a surprise?” But I just wanted to be close to her, and I kept thinking about the lady I’d seen in the green station wagon and what had probably happened to her.

  We finished rinsing the dishes and putting them into the dishwasher and I went up to my room and stood in front of the mirror in my bathroom and played one of the other games I played with myself: Clayton, the little Robot Boy. I twisted an imaginary knob on the upper-right-hand corner of the mirror to turn me on and left more fingerprints there and wondered what Mom or one of the housecleaners thought about that little circle of fingerprints that was always on that spot of my mirror waiting to be wiped off, and I said, “Hi. I’m Clayton. I’m programmed to comb my hair just like this, with every hair in place, and I’m programmed to eat at certain times and take showers at certain times and I always did all of my homework well when I was in high school so I could get good grades and get accepted into a Utah college that doesn’t really care about grades, it just wants to know if you’ll go to church eve
ry Sunday you’re enrolled with them so you can sit and hear people talk about being a Christian, never asking ‘What would a Christian’s life actually be like?’ while outside the air-conditioned church building decent women are getting beaten up by their own husbands and you even see it on VR I-15.”

  I’d seen it.

  I sat down on the edge of the tub and looked at myself in the mirror. I hated Clayton the little robot church boy whose life was all programmed for him: college, mission, marriage, kids, college, career as a lawyer or banker, and numbers and money and deadlines all my life and maybe I could even die on schedule: write it in my day-planner sixty years down the road — Wednesday, June 16, 3 P.M.: Die. Contact funeral home beforehand. Prepare final will that morning.

  I stood up and twisted the imaginary knob and changed the program: I became Clayton, the pizza delivery boy, and I remembered me the first day I’d played the game out on the highway on a pizza run, the day I’d caught on to what had always been going on around me but which I’d missed because I’d always driven so slow and predictably and couldn’t see it through my slow-driving programming, but when I started driving fast I’d found a whole subculture of people who drove just that way, people who made driving to the grocery store an adventure, and driving south to Midvale an event, and if you got a ticket it was just the price of admission to the game which you wouldn’t stop playing because it made you feel so alive.

  That first day I’d hooked up with a blond-haired girl in a red Ferrari and a thirty-something guy in a Japanese fast car like mine and the three of us would weave in and out of the traffic and laugh at each other when one of us had to slow down and race to catch up to the others. Down by Draper, we all took the same exit and stopped at a Sinclair gas station and all of us laughed about the fun we’d had, and they pumped gas into their tanks, but I didn’t need to, I’d just come in to talk to them, and I said, “I’m Clayton,” after we’d talked for a while, and I held out my hand to the guy, and he and the girl looked at me like I was some kind of alien and wouldn’t tell me their names — and they didn’t care about mine. It didn’t matter to them. All that mattered was that I’d had a fast car and that I was smart enough to learn how to drive it fast and that when I was out on the road I would play the game with them. So those were the rules and I learned them and I never again tried to follow anybody off the road to try to talk. It wasn’t the point.

  And I turned the knob and changed the program and I was Clayton, the Peace Corps volunteer of the future, though the future was fast coming up to meet me: I’d sent in my papers and was waiting to hear back and I hadn’t told my parents and I didn’t know how to. They wanted me to do one set of things with my life, and I wanted to join the Peace Corps then maybe do some of the things they wanted. So I just skipped that entire inevitable conversation and imagined I looked like Indiana Jones with a shovel, not a gun, black stubble on my face and me wearing a fedora, and I was saying, “Yes, sir. I’d be glad to go to Ethiopia and show them how to dig ditches and teach them to have fewer kids,” and maybe I’d actually help the people there, and I imagined I was setting off with my Bible and Book of Mormon and the shovel — but I was mixing up my programs, the mission program and the Peace Corps program, and I sat back down on the edge of the tub and thought how all my programs were mixed up because I didn’t have a central program to guide them: I’d just been programmed to do this or that so much I didn’t know what Clayton really wanted or how to cut through the programs to ask the questions to even find out what Clayton would want to do with his life if he were ever asked, if he ever asked himself. I was so programmed to want what I was supposed to want I couldn’t even ask myself questions I needed answers to because the old programs would all keep running in my head and block the answers and I wondered if any of us could ever break out of the programs that ran us?

  And I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, I’m going to go tell Mom what happened today. It’s not part of any of our programs. Seeing what I saw upset mine and it will upset hers and maybe we’ll be able to talk to each other about more than the stuff we’ve been taught to think about and talk about.

  So I went down and found Mom in the kitchen reading the paper; it was her turn to read it now. “Mom,” I said. “We’ve got to talk.”

  And I told her what had happened, and she sat still for a minute, not looking at me, then she said, “Don’t call the police if you see that lady out there again. Her husband would be a sweet angel while the police were there, but once they left he’d beat her for sure and maybe the kids. Just get her license-plate number and talk to her and see if we can help. Maybe we can send her somewhere — to her parents? Now tell me what that car looked like again and what the woman looked like.” And I did and she hugged me after a while, and I thought this was a good program we were downloading into our systems. A different kind of program, because I’d made some decisions and taken some chances. When I went to sleep that night I didn’t feel so much like Clayton the Robot Boy in the mirror, and I liked not feeling like Clayton the Robot Boy.

  Fat Joe let me do some VR practice the very next afternoon, and he merged me out onto VR I-15 and let me loose, and who should I see driving along in her cute little red Mustang convertible but my mother, with the top down but her windows still up so she wouldn’t get blown too much and her black Gucci sunglasses on and a scarf tied down around her hair. She waved and cut in front of me and took the 21st South exit and I followed her into the parking lot of some abandoned warehouse by the off-ramp. She stopped and I swung around and parked next to her with my driver’s-side window facing hers so we wouldn’t have to get out of our cars, just roll down the windows. Mom reached over to turn down her music: she was listening to a CD of some old-fashioned group, Def Leppard or Scorpions, and I didn’t even care then because I was so surprised to see Mom.

  “I’ve been looking for your green station wagon for two hours,” she said. “No sign of it.”

  I thought, wow, Mom — we’re calling out the cavalry for this one, you and me, and I said, “How have you been looking?” and she said, “Driving up and down the interstate — Bountiful to Draper, and back again.”

  “I think she’ll come,” I said. “I think this is a release for her — maybe a kind of escape. Maybe she’s even planning to escape and she knows she’ll have to do it in her old station wagon, so she’s practicing in VR, learning where the speed traps are, seeing what her theoretical car can do.”

  Mom agreed. We went back out onto VR I-15. I went ahead fast, looking, while Mom came along behind at a slower pace, just in case the lady merged onto the interstate behind me.

  I drove down to the Point of the Mountain just past Draper, right up to the Utah County net, then turned around and drove north to Bountiful, then headed back south again — when there it was, the green station wagon, merging onto VR I-15 from 21st South and going fast. She passed me, and I sped up to keep up with her, and the kids waved at me again, waving hard and laughing like they recognized me, which they probably did thanks to the Happy Pizza clown face stuck on the hood of the car, and I merged into the right lane so I could get up alongside her, but a Brink’s armored car roadblocked me doing sixty-five, and I had to change lanes again, weaving in and out till I could get up alongside her. I honked and waved and motioned for the lady to pull over and she looked at me but then wouldn’t look back, just sped up.

  Great, lady, I thought, I’m only trying to help you, and I followed her along till 45, and she took that exit and went down the hill, and I followed, thinking maybe we’d stop at the red light and talk, but suddenly she gunned the car again and sped through the red light, across 45, up the on-ramp, and back out onto VR I-15. I just stopped at the red light. It was obvious she didn’t want to talk to me.

  Mom pulled up alongside me and lowered the electric window on her passenger side. “She won’t talk to you because you’re a man,” she said. “Let me go ahead and try. Don’t follow us for a while.” Then Mom sped through the red
light and out onto VR I-15, and I just pulled off to the side of the road.

  A cop car stopped behind me five minutes later, and the cop got out and asked me what I was doing.

  “I’m just thinking,” I said.

  “Well, it’s costing your company money for you to come think in here,” he said, and I told him to write my company a letter about it, which pissed him off, but since thinking wasn’t illegal yet, all he could do was tell me to get my car off the side of the road and into a parking lot somewhere, so I took it out onto VR I-15 instead. I motored along pretty slow — doing the speed limit, actually, because I didn’t want to come up on Mom and the lady too soon, but I never did see them. I was down past Draper and heading up the Point of the Mountain when Fat Joe broke into the VR and told me I had a run to make. Before he could pull me out, I raced my car up into the Utah County net boundary and caught a glimpse, again, of the country that lay beyond in VR and looking better than I ever remembered it in real-land: all green in the valley and white snow on the blue mountains and I-15 shining below me, and no sign of the big cities down there, Provo and Orem. I wondered why I couldn’t see the cities.

  When I got back from Fat Joe’s run, which took me all the way out to Sandy, he had another waiting for me in downtown SLC, some banquet of ten pizzas, but my mother was sitting in the front diner by a window, eating a pizza of her own. “What happened out there?” I asked her, and Fat Joe told me to get out on my run, I could bother the customers on my own time, and Mom said, “Send one of the other boys. This one’s making a run for me in about ten minutes,” and Fat Joe looked at her as if to say “When did you buy this place so you could order my help around?” But he sent somebody else out on the run and didn’t say anything. Mom was, after all, a paying customer, and you don’t argue with those types when you’re in the pizza business.

  I pulled up a chair at Mom’s table, and she said, “This lady is in bad trouble: her husband beats her two or three times a week and has put her in the hospital twice. She left him once before but went back to him, so I don’t know what to think. You know how people in her situation are: they can’t let go of the person killing them, and they leave them and then go back to them, and who knows what she’ll actually do in the end, but I told her,‘Honey, you’d better get ahold of yourself and break this marriage apart before your husband kills you, so you can raise these three babies. If you don’t want to think of yourself, think of them.’ And she thought about it in those terms and told me she’d leave her husband again. She has a sister who just moved to Baker, Nevada, who will take her in, and the husband doesn’t know the sister’s gone to Baker, so the lady should be safe with her. I told her we’d drive her out there. The Nevada courts can get her a divorce by the weekend. So this is the plan: she’s going to call in a pizza order anytime now. You’ll take it to her in my car, which is faster than yours. When you get there, she and the kids will come out to pay for it, get in the car instead, and you’ll drive her on to Provo. Your Dad and I will meet you at the courthouse, where she’ll arrange for a restraining order on her husband. Then we’ll all go on to Baker.”