Shadowbahn(18)

Parker’s mood (take two)


She turns in the seat onto her side as if to curl up and go back to sleep. But then she sits up and stares out the passenger’s window. “You were having a nightmare,” says her brother.

She says, “Where are we?”

“Texas.”

“Where in Texas?” She leans into the dashboard to peer out the windshield, shaking herself awake.

“Across the border.”

“I was awake when we crossed the border. That was a long time ago.”

“Not that long. You were asleep,” he adds, “dreaming.”

? ? ?

She says, “It was still light when we crossed the border. You and that border cop . . . I thought you were going to get us thrown in jail.”

“What would they have thrown us in jail for? We haven’t done anything.”

She blurts, “You don’t have weed in this car, do you?”

“I stopped doing that,” he answers, “a while ago.”

“You did?”

“I smoked it when I was depressed, and it just made me more depressed.”

“So,” concludes Zema a moment later, “you don’t know where we are,” the night outside her window only proving it.





you can’t leave ’cause your heart is there


“I didn’t say that,” answers Parker.

She turns on the radio. “Then where are we?”

“There’s nothing but talk”—he nods at the radio—“and I don’t want to listen to it.”

“No music?”

“No.”

“Where are we that there’s no music on the radio?” He watches her turn on their father’s playlist. Blood’s thicker than the mud, it’s a family affair.

? ? ?

For a while they listen, not saying anything. Parker thinks of when their father played songs on the tiny radio station back in the canyon where they lived, and where any reputation he might ever have had as a novelist was overshadowed by his taste in music and latent talents as a bartender. People always joked (maybe) that he should give up writing books for mixing drinks, to which his father muttered, “Yeah, no one’s ever said, I don’t understand your martini.” Now, in the car, Zema says, “Remember when Dad played songs on the radio station?”

“I was just thinking about that.”

“They finally kicked him off,” recalls Zema. “Why did they kick him off?”





dead-free


A landmark: two consecutive unsolicited sentences about their father. “Remember we were gone awhile?” Parker says.

That was the low point for the family. They lost the house, and their mom went missing a week in Ethiopia when she tried to locate Zema’s biological mother. “Why did Mom go back to Ethiopia that time?” says Zema. Were you guys going to give me back? she’s always wondered, even as she doesn’t actually believe that.

As though he has read her thoughts, Parker quietly answers, “Mom just wanted you to know. Who your birth mom is. She figured you would want to.”

? ? ?

Zema still stares through the windshield at the road they can’t see. “So they kicked Dad off the radio because he had been gone awhile?”

“I guess. Also he kept saying things between songs that pissed everyone off, like, ‘Welcome to Grateful Dead-free radio, where you can listen with the complete assurance of knowing there’s no possibility whatsoever you’ll be subjected to Grateful Dead music.’” Then his father would play songs with titles like “Search and Destroy” and “One Nation Under a Groove.” Parker says, “The more every hippie in the canyon hated it, the more he kept doing it.”

“What’s grateful-dead music?” says Zema.





juke


A small animal runs in front of the car, too fast for them to be sure what they saw and faster than Parker can swerve for. “Shit,” whispers Parker. “Do you think I hit it?”

“I didn’t feel anything,” she says. “I think we would have felt it.”

“Remember that time—”

“Dad ran over the rabbit?”

“How bad he felt?” Parker can still see the look on his father’s face at the thump of the car when the rabbit suddenly darted out of nowhere. He even shut off the music afterward.

? ? ?

Parker says, “Finally,” turning up a song on the playlist, “something from my lifetime.”

Catch me at the border, I got visas in my name. A Sri Lankan–Brit woman singing to the percussion of cash registers and the sampling of a quarter-century-old punk band—one of the rare instances of musical consensus between father and son. Parker was ten when this song was a hit, around the time Zema first became part of the family. “Dad always mixed up the songs,” she says.

“Right?” says Parker.

“On his radio show, too. You think you’re listening to one thing,” says Zema, “then you’re listening to another.”





jook


Parker says, “He did it on purpose.”