Her son, Barry, was thirty-four years old and lived in St. Louis with his family. He had been moody and belligerent ever since Connie and his father had agreed to a separation. His sister, Ann, two years younger, had a job in the Kansas City area. She thought it was crazy for her mother, fifty-seven years old, even to consider a separation and divorce. Ann had not returned her mother’s calls this week.
Connie sighed, glancing at the calendar on the angled latticework separating the breakfast nook from the kitchen. She supposed that Ann, always Daddy’s girl, was trying to persuade Don to move back home. He had been gone for three weeks. Connie still felt they could work out their marriage somehow.
Feeling guilty about the kids’ unhappiness, she studied the calendar, where it hung among supermarket coupons she had stuck in the latticework like some sort of discount mosaic.
She stared at the intersecting shapes formed by the morning sunlight shining through the lattice onto the counter. Idly, she ran her forefinger along a narrow, diagonal shadow, following the angle and turning at the corner to follow another. She traced the angled, crisscrossed shadows in fascinated despair, gazing at the lines and corners of the pattern, each edge leading to another, every corner a chance to go somewhere else or just back where she started, around in circles—no, around in little parallelograms, she thought wistfully, remembering her high-school geometry.
Suddenly she grabbed the cereal bowl, walked to the sink, and tossed it in with a clatter. She hated the thought of being a depressed empty-nest mother and an abandoned wife, after a lifetime as a career woman. She just didn’t feel old. Her blond hair was streaked with gray, but was artfully blended, and still nearly shoulder-length. She looked much younger than the grandmothers she recalled during her own childhood, who had been stout and matronly in shapeless flower-print dresses. Anxious to leave the silent house, she hurried to the garage, her high heels tapping on the floor tiles like an engine desperately low on oil.
In August 1970, Tod Kwan stood on the shoulder of Interstate 270, somewhere north of St. Louis. A sheen of sweat covered him in the muggy evening as the sun blazed over the prairie country ahead of him. Crickets chirped loudly, mourning late summer.
He had tied a dark blue work shirt around his waist by the sleeves, over the wide belt holding up his low-slung brown jeans. His feet were hot inside weather-beaten, square-toed boots with scratched decorative buckles. When traffic came by, he held out his right arm, thumb up; his shoulder-length freak flag tossed away from his face in the wind of each passing vehicle.
An old VW bus rattled toward him, painted in swirls of blue and chartreuse dotted with white peace symbols. Its driver would be more likely to give him a ride than the Missouri farmers glaring at him from passing pickups. However, it pulled over about thirty feet up.
The passenger door opened and a slender young woman jumped out. She whirled, swinging long, blond hair, and shouted angrily, though traffic roar drowned out her words. A full, khaki backpack with the Boy Scout insignia hit the pavement. The minibus rumbled away, another chance lost.
Tod admired the blonde as she bent over for her pack.
She slung it over one shoulder with the ease of experience. Then she saw him. She paused, appraising him like he was a bag of seeds in a health food store, and walked toward him.
Watching her, he lifted his thumb again. She had straight blond hair parted in the middle, a slender frame, and a willowy walk, even while burdened by the backpack. A faded blue denim microskirt left her legs bare; sandals adorned her feet. She wore a loose, white peasant blouse with red embroidery at the neck.
“Hi.” She stopped about fifteen feet from him, like a cat judging whether or not to run.
“Have some trouble back there?”
“Oh, that jackass. I mean, not the driver, but this guy I was hitching with. The driver has this mattress in the back, you know, and he had some wine in this little refrigerator?”
“Right. I think I get the point.”
“I’m not a prude or anything, but I have to like the guy.” She watched him anxiously, still feline in her readiness to flee.
“Yeah, right.” He didn’t know what to say.
“So, um, where you headed?” Her blue eyes searched his face.
“Berkeley.”
“Oh, wow. Really?” Her eyes widened. “Are you from there?”
Tod stifled a laugh; he knew she asked in part because of his Asian descent. “No, I live in Ann Arbor. But I’ve been on the road most of the summer. I’m going to see some friends.”
“Ann Arbor.” She drew a stray strand of hair out of her mouth. “Michigan, right? That’s supposed to be really cool, too.”
He grinned. “Seven student strikes this past school year.”
“Oh, wow. Um, I go to K.U. in Lawrence.”
“University of Kansas.”
“Right. This friend and I were going to spend the summer in this commune in Yellow Springs, Ohio, but I didn’t like it. So I’ve been kind of going home, but a girl shouldn’t hitch alone if she can avoid it. I do if I have to. But I’ve found lots of beautiful people with crash pads, so . . .” She shrugged again.
“Lawrence is on the way to Berkeley.” Tod could hardly believe what she wanted. “You want to hitch together? Uh, okay.”
“Cool. I mean, really great.” Relief washed over her face. She glanced at the shirt tied around his waist. “Is that it?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“That’s cool. I mean, you can really live off the land, huh?”
“I had some money, but that’s gone now. There’s a real community out on the road nowadays. Lots of college campuses have soup kitchens where you can eat and crash in exchange for work.”
“Communes, too. That one in Ohio helped people passing through.”
“Right, right. I’ve been to a few.”
“Doesn’t this highway meet I-70? That goes right to Lawrence. Don’t you think we’ll get someone going straight west?”
“Yeah.”
In early afternoon, dressed in his jeans and his white Western shirt, Tod took a flight to Wichita Falls, Texas. Denver was an airline hub; Amber had located planes headed for New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. She had also found flights to Jackson Hole, Gunnison, and Wichita Falls. He had picked one on impulse and had chided himself after takeoff, looking out the window at rural roads that looked nothing like the grid on his calendar.
Tod put on his headset and surfed channels. Chad and Jeremy sang about how that was yesterday and yesterday’s gone. This channel played all folk music. He whisper-sang about a man named Charlie on a tragic and fateful day and this train that don’t carry no gamblers.
The songs spoke of adventure and penniless wandering. They stung. His years of spontaneous risk were as lost as Charlie. Long ago, he had mastered every angle in his paintings, the slopes and peaks, each tree and rock, the snow or leaves. His work remained good and it remained the same.
He cranked up the volume to drown out his thoughts.
Just before the plane began its descent, another song told Tod you can’t hop a jet plane like you can a freight train, but he had come close. At the terminal, as passengers dispersed, Tod gazed out at the flat Texas plains. A highway led from the airport below a deep blue sky. The pavement beckoned as the grid on his wall calendar had drawn him—only this road was real.
By now he knew that his anger today was more than just a fit of temper. He had been a man of constant sorrow for a long time; how many leaves can one man paint before they make him cry? Amused at his absurd, bitter humor, he adjusted the strap of his carry-on bag and stepped out into the air of northeast Texas, humming a tune about how it was green, green on the far side of the hill.
Connie revved the engine of her rusted green sedan like a teenager. She pulled into the flow of traffic and snapped on the radio. Then she called her supervisor at the civil rights commission. As the phone rang, Connie sang in a whisper along with the stereo about a man walking down roads and a w
hite dove sleeping in the sand.
“This is Brenda.”
“It’s Connie. I’m not coming in today.”
“Are you okay? Wait, is it something about Don?”
“No, nothing like that. I just . . . need some time.”
“You have lots of vacation time. Just let me know, okay?”
“Thanks, Brenda.” Connie hung up, aware that her exhilaration had vanished. Her abrupt freedom left her shocked.
Singing softly about how many times a man must look up to see the sky, she reflected that she was a blank slate now: free from work, hardly a wife, the kids long grown. She could do anything she wanted.
Of course, if freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose, her life today was empty after all.
Ahead of young Tod and his new companion, the sun blazed red, low on the horizon. Mosquitoes buzzed around them. The evening rush from St. Louis had passed them by like a stampeding herd.
Finally a big, rusting, dirty, white Chevy Impala slowed down and pulled onto the shoulder to an abrupt stop. A young woman was driving. Another woman leaned out the open passenger window, looking at his blond friend and pointedly not at him.
“Where’re you headed?” The woman on the passenger side had short, curly, dark brown hair and gold-wire-rimmed glasses.
“Lawrence, Kansas,” said the blonde. “Where are you going?”
“Taos, New Mexico.” The woman in the car giggled.
The driver leaned toward the passenger side, swaying a wild triangle of curly brown hair. “We’re driving down across Missouri. We’ll pass through Tulsa on our way to Texas.”
The blonde glanced back at him.
“Let’s do it. You can go north from Tulsa up to Lawrence. The rides might be better there.”
“Okay.” She turned back to the car. “Sure, that’ll be great.”
“Outta sight. Get in.”
The blonde slid into the back and wedged her backpack behind the driver. Tod followed her and slammed the door. The car rumbled up the road, its power undaunted by age or rust. Both front windows were down, blasting summer wind into the back.
“I’m Deb,” the driver called over her shoulder.
“Sarah,” said her friend, opening the glove compartment.
“I’m Tod.” He was looking at his companion.
“Connie.” She smiled shyly as her long, blond hair fluttered.
The driver turned up the radio, loud. “. . . Tonight on this Million Dollar Weekend. Now here’s Tommy Roe with—”
A cassette tape snapped into place, shutting up the deejay.
“Yuck,” Deb said loudly, laughing. “Hey, you like acid rock?”
“Sure,” Tod yelled over the rush of air, but the fast, driving guitar of Cream’s “Crossroads,” starting in midsong, drowned him out. He turned to Connie, and they laughed together.
Sarah toked on a small, handheld brass water pipe, then handed it to Deb. The wind from the open windows swirled the smoke out of the car. Deb passed the pipe over her shoulder to Connie in a motion of casual trust.
Tod rocked in his seat to the song, observing that Connie knew how to use the pipe. He took a turn and passed it back to Sarah. Connie met his gaze, smiling tightly, and also bounced in her seat to the beat with him.
Finally, Connie let out a breath. “So, like, you must have been born here, right? I mean, you don’t have an accent or anything.”
“Right.” Tod heard that all the time, especially on the road.
Another Cream song followed on the stereo.
“Did you ever read anything by Alan Watts? He writes about yin and yang and balance and stuff. Or do you already know all that?”
Tod laughed, not sure how to answer. “I read a book of his for a class.” In fact, he had been raised with some of the values and principles she meant, but that didn’t make him an expert.
“I have one. And R. D. Laing. And On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.”
“Yeah, I’ve read something by all of them.”
“Cool.” She accepted the pipe from Deb again and drew on it.
Tod took his turn, then passed the pipe back to Sarah.
Idly massaging his arthritic finger joints, Tod walked along the sidewalk outside the airport, exulting in his unaccustomed freedom. Since he was doing nothing, he could neither succeed nor fail. He found a bus going into downtown Wichita Falls and got on. As the bus rumbled away, he felt an anticipation he did not understand. After all, he had never been there and had never wanted to go there.
He had no direction, like a rolling stone.
Connie drove cheerfully, with no thoughts beyond the traffic in front of her. She turned on the stereo and pressed the scanner. When she heard “Oh, Pretty Woman,” she stopped it to sing with Roy Orbison.
She smiled with lighthearted amusement as the song ended with the guy picking up a woman on the street. Today she could pick up a guy. She was long past worrying about pregnancy, and her husband had moved out. Her kids would never know.
Connie sobered, thinking about her job again. It was steady, being a civil service position. She had been idealistic when she had started. Now it was just work.
When Connie saw the entrance ramp to I-44 west, she took it.
A young guy in faded blue jeans and a sweaty, orange tank top stood on the shoulder with this thumb out. His long, straight brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Of course, nowadays she was much too cautious to offer a lift to a strange man.
That made her sad.
As the Impala rumbled across Missouri, cornfields with green stalks and ripening silk tassels blurred past them, ghostly and mysterious in the deepening twilight.
“What are you majoring in?” Connie asked.
“I thought about trying fine arts, but . . . I don’t know.”
“Oh, wow, you play music or write poetry or something?”
“I used to paint.” He folded his arms. “I’m not very good. I ought to find something I’m good at.” He shrugged.
“Like you’d be a doctor or an engineer or something instead?”
Suddenly Tod grinned, amused that she had picked professions often associated with someone of Asian descent. “I don’t know.”
“I get it. You don’t want to sell out.” Her blue eyes looked large and guileless. “But painting’s great. It’s your own thing.”
“Nobody would want the stuff I paint. What about you?”
“I’m a sociology major.” She wrinkled her nose. “But I don’t know if I’ll stay with it. So, is Alan Watts cool?”
“Yeah.” Tod laughed; her question seemed absurd, but she’d meant it. “He writes for average Americans. Maybe kind of simplified.”
She nodded, studying his face intently. “Sometimes I just feel so, you know, being a white girl . . . you know?”
“Huh?” Tod wasn’t sure if his confusion was her fault or his.
“I mean, I’m not black, so the civil rights thing, I mean, I’m in favor of it, but I’m not in the middle of it. And I can’t be drafted, so I kind of feel guilty about all that. I want to contribute something. I don’t know what.”
“Oh.” Tod was lost. He accepted the pipe from Connie again. It wouldn’t help him sort it out, but right now he didn’t care.
“So, like, you do get prejudiced against?”
He laughed at her garbled phrasing.
“No, really, I mean it.”
He shrugged again, aware that she wanted to hear dramatic stories of being mistreated. The truth was more subtle. Many incidents were well intended—effusive appreciation of sweet-and-sour pork or Connie assuming he might become an engineer.
The demanding, incessant roar of “Sunshine of Your Love” came on as he took another turn with the pipe and passed it.
“That’s The Very Best of Cream,” Tod said suddenly.
“I guess you really don’t want to talk about it, huh?”
Tod sighed. “Look, most white liberals haven’t taken up my people as a cause. Tha
t’s fine—but when I answer a question like yours, I get arguments—that we don’t really have any problems.”
“I’d believe you,” she said softly.
He heard the sincerity in her voice. “Okay. You have any idea how racial the war is? The way most GIs talk about the Vietnamese? Or how they treat guys like me who go over? If I went, I figure if the enemy didn’t kill me, the guys in my own platoon would.”
Her blue eyes searched his face as though trying to see inside him.
Uncounted years later, Tod got off the cool bus in the heart of Wichita Falls, back into the blazing heat and stifling humidity. Feeling like a drifter, he looked for a place to eat, squinting up and down city blocks laid out on a grid like the days on a calendar.
Tod found a coffee shop, where he ordered a meatloaf special. Edgy and restless, he ate quickly. He mused that everything he had ever done in his life had brought him here for this meatloaf.
When he finished, the city grid no longer beckoned. Instead, he felt like a rat in a laboratory maze of city streets, local roads, and major highways that would take him on an inevitable route no matter which way he turned. Outside, he strode up the sidewalk, afraid to question a growing sense of purpose. He hurried even faster, going anywhere and going nowhere, but always going where he had been headed since he had smashed his painting.
Connie relaxed behind the wheel. She still didn’t have a destination in mind. Among green cornfields and tall trees, she watched signs go by: Mt. Vernon, Sarcoxie, Joplin.
Her route clipped a corner of Kansas and entered Oklahoma. She drove through prairies of varied greenery under a bright blue sky, with subtle hues mixed as though on a palette. The signs continued: Miami, Afton, Vinita.
She stopped in Claremore for chicken-fried steak, an unhealthy midwestern indulgence from her childhood that she had shunned for years. Then she filled the gas tank and drove on through Tulsa, where she found an oldies station playing “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.” She sang along, about lazily wandering the country in the early seventies. Long ago, she had ridden through Tulsa one night. Beyond Oklahoma City, the signs picked up new names: Chickasha, Lawton, Wichita Falls.
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 5
