The Grand Tour

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  So: Anne-Marie. Despite his lingering hangover and generally wretched condition, he felt compelled to give it a shot. He got a second round, and she drank it; he made jokes, and she laughed. Things were going well—shockingly well—until he leaned over and attempted a kiss.

  She pulled away. “Whoa. But.”

  “Sorry. I,” he said.

  “I’m. Wow.” She stood next to the booth, smoothing down her dress.

  “I thought,” he said.

  “It’s just.”

  “There was.”

  “I know,” she said, pulling her keys out of her purse and pulling a silver necklace with a silver ring dangling from it out of her décolletage. “But I’m married.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you’re”—she briefly searched the oaken walls of the room, as though what he was was written on them, as though it wasn’t obvious—“old.”

  “You could have left it at you being married,” he said. “That worked fine by itself.”

  “Sorry.” She went to the door and looked back. “Good luck.”

  Good luck. He sat there and drank his drink, thinking how there was no phrase in the English language more devoid of the sentiment it existed to convey. It was probably for the best—he put his odds of having achieved an erection somewhere between one to negative infinity against and none. He stared at the fine grain of the table, the less-fine grain of his own hands. That’s that, he thought—women, love, the whole shebang. Goodbye to all that. Who were you kidding?

  Back at the hotel, Vance was already asleep, on a cot at the foot of the bed. Richard was touched by the kid’s consideration, not to mention the way it reminded him of Victor, who liked to sleep in the same position. He lay on the bed, on top of the covers, not even trying to sleep, just searching for some kind of equilibrium within himself, a state of balance in which he could momentarily stop wanting things. Not finding it, he heaved himself up and made his way down to the lobby, manned by a desk clerk staring intently at his singing phone. Past the front desk lurked an unpromising sports bar called the End Zone. The sign featured a crude painting of Snoopy wearing a football uniform and leather helmet, doing his happy dance after scoring a touchdown. The sign was almost unbearably sad, and he had to look away from it to avoid bursting into tears.

  The End Zone was quiet at this hour and probably at every other hour, occupied only by a couple wearing matching Roethlisberger Steelers jerseys and eating cheese fries. The bartender—a dour, mustachioed fellow—emerged from the back with an affect that suggested he’d just been fondly nestling the barrel of a twelve-gauge in his mouth. After Richard’s third gimlet and third tip, the man grudgingly asked if he was staying at the hotel.

  “Why else would I be here?”

  “Good point. What brings you?”

  “I’m doing a book tour.”

  “No shit.”

  “Nope, no shit.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  “Me fucking up over and over.”

  “Well, looks like you’ve found the right place.”

  An hour or so later, Richard was completely alone. He missed Anne-Marie. He missed Victor. He missed the Steelers couple and looked back on their tenure at the End Zone as a sort of golden age of bonhomie. The bartender had vanished again, perhaps having slipped into the back and finished offing himself. The lights overhead had dimmed and made dark yellow spots on the bar, like pools of urine. His drink was gone and he wasn’t drunk. Through the window, a car’s taillights dwindled, twin red coronas like dying stars. Only two days into the tour and he was completely spent. The rest of the trip, not to mention his life, stretched out before him like one of those bleak country roads that eventually peter into nothingness—like the one he’d recently lived on, in fact. It was strange, after all those years living out in the desert—not happily, but with a certain amount of calm resignation—that two days in civilization had so thoroughly unmanned him. He thought of calling Cindy or Eileen again, but just as quickly banished the notion. Then he pulled the cell phone out and dialed.

  “Hello?” came the voice, thick with sleep.

  “You asked me the other night, at the thing, what advice I’d give young writers. And I gave you some glib answer, and I feel shitty about that. I probably acted like I think it’s all a waste of time, which I do, but still. Everything’s a waste of time, but books are better than everything else. There’s some kind of dumb honor in it, at least. You know what I mean? At least it’s trying, somehow. It admits death. It’s not just pressing buttons on some shiny thing. All of this technology, all these bells and whistles, are just distractions from the fact that one day you’ll wake up with blood on the sheets, right? No sight in one eye. There’s honor in looking into the eye, isn’t there?”

  He would have continued in this vein indefinitely, had someone not put a hand on his shoulder. Vance stood there, dressed in the same clothes he’d worn that day. He sat next to Richard and said, “She was a little young for you.”

  “And married.”

  Richard hung up the phone. They sat there for a little while longer, under the epileptic flicker of a Rolling Rock sign, until Vance finally put his arm on Richard’s arm and led him up to bed.

  ———

  The next day, the sky overhead was gray and mottled, a mirror image of the road underneath them. Vance had his elbow out the window, despite the chilliness of the air, and tapped his hand on the side of the car along with a rap song on the radio. Richard wasn’t offended by the vulgarity or the constant stream of obscenities or the jittery curlicues of the musical arrangements, but the insistent emotional sameness of it was oppressive. No joy, no despair, no love or humor, just pissed-off boasting, dick jokes, school-yard taunts. On this, as with most things, of course, he knew his opinion was wholly unqualified; yet again, as with most things, he didn’t let that stop him from airing it. “You really like this shit?”

  “Jay-Z? I don’t know, I guess so.”

  Playing up the ignorant old-timer angle—which, being old and ignorant, was not hard to do—he said, “My jewels, my money, my bitches, my boats.”

  “My boats?”

  “Yachts?”

  “It’s not all that stuff. You should keep yourself open to new things.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. There’s too much stuff in the world, too much crap. You should try to keep yourself closed off to as much of it as possible.” Richard reclined fatly in his seat, irritated by the kid’s determined innocence and by the length of the pauses he took before he spoke and by his long, mournful face, its look of defeated hope. He said, “Besides, you’re one to talk. When was the last time you did something new?”

  “I’m doing something new right now.”

  “What, driving me around?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean something meaningful. Falling in love. Eating fifty hard-boiled eggs.”

  In obvious reprisal, Vance changed the channel, cranking the volume on some horrible classic rock station playing a horrible classic rock song. Over a burbling sea of organs and mandolins, the lead singer wailed lyrics that seemed to be, horribly, about chess, admonishing the listener not to surround themselves with themselves. Richard yelled, “So, how long are you going to chauffeur me around, anyway?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “You ever been to San Francisco?”

  “I’ve never been anywhere.”

  “Why don’t we say San Francisco. I’ll get a rental there.”

  “That’s only tomorrow. I had kind of hoped—”

  “I know, it’s really too bad. But let’s say San Francisco.”

  They stopped for lunch at McDonald’s, and, waiting in the drive-thru, Vance suggested they take a small highway west and get on the 101. He’d heard the 101 was incredible, he wanted to drive down the coast. It was a travel day, and lacking a good reason to say no, though that was his inclination, Richard grunted an assent into his leathery McDouble with cheese. All along th
e way, beefy clouds barreled overhead in what looked like time-lapse photography, but when they reached the ridgy shoreline where the highway met the 101, a giant wall of fog hung over the churning water, like some kind of cloud factory that cranked out the cumuli traveling inland.

  The craggy splendor of the drive reminded Richard that he had once, decades earlier, taken the PCH from Carmel to Los Angeles. He remembered it being much the same as this: dramatic cliffs, crashing surf, salt-sprayed air, winding roads, old people driving RVs at eight miles an hour. The noncoastal sections of the drive were remote, and the little towns they passed—with their bait shops and flounder shacks and tie-dyed-kite stores and whimsical woodworking concerns—were already abandoned for the off-season. The only person they saw in downtown Waldport was a defiant seagull standing in the middle of the narrow road. When Vance got out of the car, it reluctantly walked away, like a dignified town elder with his hands clasped behind his back. Maybe it was the mayor, thought Richard.

  It had been the summer of 1977 when they’d taken the PCH. A stranger had snapped a photo of Eileen (buckskin moccasins, baseball jersey, pigtails) and him (triangular bellbottoms, vest, shag helmet) smiling next to his old VW on an overlook. This photo had hung totemically by their front door in no fewer than five different apartments and houses they’d occupied. He had no real feeling about the image captured in the picture, but he had a vivid sense memory of the picture as the last thing he saw before exiting their home. Over the years, its continued presence had made him variously happy, sad, and finally irritated by Eileen’s insistence on reminding him of better times. Like an addict—a love junkie—she was always trying to reclaim the high of those early days.

  Richard and Vance passed from Oregon into California on a homely little stretch of road, the border parallel with a red-barned gift shop. A new blue-and-yellow sign on the right welcomed them to California, and an old white-and-green one on the left effused OREGON THANKS YOU, COME BACK SOON! No, Richard thought, that was unlikely—he guessed that Oregon had seen the last of him. They drove on, regaining the coast just as the sun was dropping quickly into the sea. In the vicinity of Eureka, they began stopping at hotels, but each one was booked up solid—an infuriating development after having seen no more than a dozen people in nine hours of driving. It turned out every room in the area had been reserved months in advance for something called the Blackberry Arts Festival.

  “You want to camp out?” said Vance as they drove away from the fourth place they’d tried.

  “No.”

  “I keep some gear in back. It could be pretty nice.”

  “No.”

  The next motel they encountered, ten miles south of town, was a dreary cluster of run-down stand-alone huts called Famous Ray’s. Richard assumed the name was in honor of a locally famous murderer who had done his best work on the premises. At the front desk sat an old man bent to the newspaper, pencil in hand, a ragged Jumble with many letters tentatively written in and scratched out pinioned before him on the peeling linoleum.

  “Name?”

  “We need a room.”

  “No reservation?”

  “No.”

  “You kidding?” the man scoffed, returning to his work. “It’s the Blackberry Arts Festival.”

  Ten minutes later, they cut off from the 101 and drove alongside the bay, curving around on a spit of land that looked out onto the Pacific and offered spectacular views of a nearby power plant. It was unlit and seemed abandoned, its white-blue domes glowing ghostly in the bright moonlight. Vance stopped the car along the shoulder and retrieved a brightly colored nylon tent from the trunk. Richard got out of the car and followed the kid down a gentle tree-lined slope to a scrubby area twenty or so feet from the water. He gingerly lowered himself onto a large rock just on the dry side of the lapping water and turned toward the land. He liked the sensation of having his back to the ocean, ignoring the majesty, not being humbled.

  Vance squatted to pound in the tent pegs with a rubber hammer. Richard said, “This is the kind of place where people get murdered, you know.”

  “It’s beautiful here.”

  “I’m not saying it’s not beautiful. It’s just a good murderin’ spot. No decent murderer could resist killing someone here.”

  Vance got the tent pitched and then set himself to building a fire, scurrying around and gathering little sticks and dry leaves. In spite of himself, Richard admired the kid’s outdoors facility. Although he’d grown up in East Tennessee, spending much of his life near mountains and otherwise living close to or in the boondocks, he’d never been much for camping or nature. What had he been much for? he wondered sometimes. Drinking, being hungover, chasing skirt, getting in stupid fistfights, arguing with girlfriends and wives, trying to make amends, regretting things, all the while trying to put something meaningful on paper, and usually failing.

  After eating rancid Vienna sausages and granola bars procured earlier at a mostly cleaned-out convenience mart, Richard and Vance sat around the quietly crackling fire. Richard pulled out the half-empty pint of Old Grand-Dad that he’d bought from an adjoining liquor store while Vance was using the convenience mart bathroom and couldn’t stop him. Vance waved away the proffered bottle.

  “Come on, have a drink,” said Richard.

  “I told you, I don’t drink.”

  “If you can’t have a nip of whiskey sitting in front of a fire by the ocean, I don’t know what.”

  “Fine.” Vance pressed the bottle to his pursed lips, tipped his head back, and made an unconvincing show of swallowing whiskey that probably never entered his mouth. “That’s awful.”

  “Everything good for you tastes bad.”

  The water was insistent behind him, like a small child tapping on his back, and he twisted to see what it wanted. Far away, the lights of a fishing boat flashed. Crabbing, most likely, out for forty-eight hours at a time. That should have been his life: out there on all that black water, a world without end—no one to rub up against, hurt, or be hurt by. One wrong move, a towering wave or unsecured mainsail, and you’d be drifting to the ocean floor, completely erased from the world’s record. It sounded fine to him, the proper order of things. He’d lived his life far too messily, and even as he’d moved into the desert, thinking it would burn everything down to its simplest essence, it hadn’t worked—here he was, in the world again. He needed to push off shore in a leaky rowboat and never look back.

  Vance sat cross-legged and was writing in a notebook he’d pulled from his bag. He kept glancing over at Richard as he wrote. Finally Richard said, “You drawing a picture of me or something?”

  Vance looked down. “No.”

  “What then?”

  “Just recording the moment.”

  “You go around taking notes all the time?”

  “Don’t you? How do you remember things for later?”

  The fire danced in front of him, and he was thirteen again, hunting with his father for the first and last time. Scared shitless of killing a deer, and—equally—disappointing his newly returned father. Holding the .22 in his arms like a snake that might bite him—even then he’d had no taste for firearms or shooting things. He liked reading about people shooting things, but that was as far as it went. Silence later around the fire, after a fruitless hunt that had culminated in a clear kill shot he’d refused to take. The deer had bounded away in a graceful, ungainly seesaw. His taciturn father drank something from a bottle like the one he held now, a brown sloshing liquid, probably whiskey, though he didn’t know for sure. Unlike him, the old man hadn’t seen fit to share—he hadn’t earned a drink. Men got a drink. “I have this thing called a memory,” he said. “Other than that, mostly I make shit up.”

  Vance shrugged and continued writing, and Richard scooted closer to the fire. He lay back in the rocky dirt and looked up at the pin-pricked sky. The sky was better than the sea, he thought, infinitely more vast, yet humble—not crashing and clamoring for constant attention. The sky was the real God,
fit for worship; the sea was a small god, jealous and mean. He shouldn’t have been a sailor—he should have been an astronomer, stationed in Greenland. His mind wandered to the Dutch one, or was he Danish, with the golden nose. What was his name? One of those things that he’d heard as a child and had stuck with him. He feared losing information like this to the ravages of time and alcohol, and so he closed his eyes as he strained to remember. The name was there and then not there in the same instant, an afterimage of itself. He couldn’t get it by brute force and began going through the initial letters. Would one light up as he scrolled through? T seemed right; it had a soft glow. As he lay there his mind wandered further, an image of the table of Henry VIII, who died from overeating. Was that true? Or poisoned by his own urine, that was someone. Burst stomach either way. Those were the days—maggots festering in the caked-on makeup of courtesans, the writhing painted faces of the ladies of the court. Rampant venereal disease. He’d had VD when the clap was still called the clap. Three horse pills cured it. The good old days—going around with a gold nose on.