Shadowbahn(8)

Train I ride, sixteen coaches long.





take the highway that is best


A quarter of a mile below and eight hundred miles away, fifteen-year-old Zema and twenty-three-year-old Parker are pulling out of Flagstaff onto Interstate 40 in their silver Camry when she reads the news on her cell phone. “The Twin Towers,” she informs her brother, “just showed up in South Dakota.”

? ? ?

Unlike the Ramseys and Nours and Ortizes and Hartmans and Pattersons, unlike Justin and Linda and Traci, Zema and Parker haven’t set out on their journey for the purpose of going to the Badlands. On their way from L.A. to Lake Michigan to see their mother, the siblings intend to drive old Route 66 cross-country from its origin at the now-desolate Santa Monica Pier.





Get your kicks on . . .


. . . plays the car stereo now, a song their parents used to listen to, their father preferring the version by a black forties piano player while their mother favored the one by a white sixties band from London. Either way, Parker now contemplates ruefully, whenever any of the hip-hop artists he used to listen to rapped about getting their kicks, the oldsters were less enthralled. Driving Route 66 together as a family was once their mother’s dream, because she always loved the story of Route 66.

? ? ?

Having been stopped at the California border, however, with the sandstorms of L.A. rising in the rearview mirror and their trunkful of contraband water seized by border guards, the siblings have abandoned the route. Parker says, “Don’t tell Mom,” and in rare accord with her brother as they skirt the southern vicinity of the Grand Canyon, Zema reads her phone. “Did you hear what I said?” she asks. He turns up the music in the car and she turns it back down. “All right,” Parker answers testily, “the Twin Towers just showed up in South Dakota.”





twentieth century


She cries, “Oh my God, we’ve got another two thousand miles, let’s not start!”

“So,” he says, voicing the thing that’s been nagging him, “are we going to run into what we did last night every time we try to find a motel to stay?”

“That was my fault?” When he doesn’t answer, she sits up in the passenger seat and repeats, “Wait. That was my fault?”

“I didn’t say that.” He glances over at her.

“Watch the road.”

“Did I say that?”

“Would you please watch the road?”

“I am watching the road.”

“You’re not.”

? ? ?

After a pause he says, “Are we going to have to get two rooms every night? We’ll be broke before we’re halfway.” When the motel in Flagstaff refused them a single room, hair-trigger Parker almost lunged at the owner behind the front desk as Zema pulled him back. “A little f*cking twentieth-century, isn’t it?” Parker exploded at the motel manager, who shouted back something about transporting underage girls across the state line, pointing indignantly at Zema. Parker wanted to break off the man’s finger. Only when his sister got Parker outside did it hit him. “Underage?” he said, looking at her in confusion.





third crossfade


Zema said, “Don’t you get it? It’s not a race thing,” and the horror on Parker’s face might have made her laugh if she hadn’t felt as mortified. “Well, we don’t exactly look like brother and sister,” she reasoned.

Parker considered this a moment before announcing, “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Likewise, dude. Let’s just go on to the next place, okay?”

? ? ?

But at the next place they still wound up taking two rooms. That Zema has assumed her mother’s last name on her student ID and Parker his father’s on his driver’s license hardly makes less complicated that she’s black and he’s white. “Why didn’t you just keep Dad’s name?” Parker complains outside Winslow behind the wheel of the car. “You used it all the way through seventh grade or whenever it was.”

“I like Mom’s name,” Zema answers quietly, and then, “Not like I’m choosing Mom over Dad.”





song of Sheba


She says, “Where is South Dakota anyway?”

“Why are we going to—?”

“The Twin Towers,” she says, shoving the phone at him, “look.”

“Uh, trying to drive here. . . .”

“Look.” She holds the phone in front of his face and he swats it away. “Jesus, Sheba!” he cries, before correcting himself—“Zema”—under his breath. For years after they adopted her from Ethiopia at the age of two, the family called her Sheba, as in Queen of, a thousand years BC. Now to compound the confusion of last names, Parker’s sister has taken on her given Amharic birth name . . . so how are we supposed to keep straight what to call her? fumes Parker.

? ? ?

If at least she kept the same last name, we might be able to get one f*cking motel room together, he thinks. Zema persists with the phone and he grabs it from her and looks, swerving. She shouts, “Watch the road!”

“You’re the one shoving your f*cking phone in my face!” He says to the phone with a glance, “Okay, I see it. Yup, looks just like the Twin Towers.”