The Highway Kind(32)

“Everyone says we get them coming up the arroyo,” I said, “illegals, I mean.”

“My friend? Wrote those books? He says we’re all illegals.”

Daddy came around to collect me then. Standing by the kitchen counter, we had a supper of fried bologna, sliced tomatoes, and leftover dirty rice. This was Daddy’s night to go dancing with Eleanor, dancing being a code word we both pretended I didn’t understand.

That night a storm moved toward us like Godzilla advancing on poor Tokyo, but nothing came of it, a scatter of raindrops. I gave up trying to sleep and was out on the back porch watching lightning flash behind the clouds when Daddy pulled the truck in.

“You’re supposed to be in bed, young man,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

We watched as lightning came again. A gust of wind shoved one of the lawn chairs to the edge of the patio where it tottered, hung on till the last moment, and overturned.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Daddy said. “Most people never get to see skies like that.”

Even then I’d have chosen powerful, mysterious, angry, promise unfulfilled. Daddy said beautiful.

It turned out that neither of us could sleep that night. We weren’t getting the benefits of the weather, but it had a hold on us: restlessness, aches, unease. When for the second time we found ourselves in the kitchen, Daddy decided we might as well head down to the garage, something we’d done before on occasion. We’d go down, I’d read, he’d work and putter or mess about, we’d come back and sleep a few hours.

A dark gray Buick sat outside the garage. This is two in the morning, mind you, and the passenger door is hanging open. What the hell, Daddy said, and pulled in behind. No lights inside the garage. No one around that we can see. We were climbing out of the car when the visitor showed up, not from behind the garage where we’d expect, but yards to the right, walking the rim of the arroyo.

“You know you have coyotes down there?” he said. “Lot of them.”

“Coyotes, snakes, you name it. And a car up here that ain’t supposed to be.”

“They won’t be coming back for it.”

“What am I going to see when I look under that hood?” Daddy glanced at the arroyo. “And down there?”

“About what you’d expect under the hood. Down there, there won’t be much left.”

“So it’s not just more of the same. I’d heard stories.”

“I’m sorry to bring this on you—I didn’t know. It’s taken care of.”

Daddy and the man stood looking at one another. “I was never here,” the man said. “They were never here.” He went around to the back. Minutes later, his car pulled out, eased past us, and was gone.

“We’d best get this General Motors piece of crap inside and get started tearing it down,” Daddy said.


We all kill the past in our own way. Some slit its throat, some let it die of neglect.

Last week I began a list of species that have become extinct. What started it was reading about a baby elephant that wouldn’t leave its mother’s side when hunters killed her and died itself of starvation. I found out that 90 percent of all things that ever lived on earth are extinct, maybe more. As many as two hundred species pass away between Monday’s sunrise and Tuesday’s.

I do wonder: What if I’d not been born as I was, what if I’d been back a bit in line and not out front, what if the things they’d told us about that place had a grain of truth? Don’t do that much, but it happens.

“When the sun is overhead, the shadows disappear,” my physical therapist back in rehab said. Okay, they do. But only briefly.

And: “At least you knew what you were fighting for.” Sure I did. Absolutely. We steer our course by homilies and reductive narratives, then wonder that so many of us are lost.

A few weeks ago I made a day trip to Waycross. The water tower is gone, just one leg and half another still standing. It’s a ghost town now, nothing but weightless memories tumbling along the streets. I pulled in by what used to be my father’s garage, got my chair out and hauled myself into it, rolled with the memories down the streets, then round back to where our visitor had parked all those years ago. Nothing much has changed with the arroyo.

You always hear people talking about I saw this, I read this, I did this, and it changed my life.

Sure it did.

Thing is, I’d forgotten all about the visitor and what happened that night, and the only reason I remember now is because of this movie I saw.

I’d rolled the chair in at the end of an aisle only to be met with a barrage of smart-ass remarks about blocking their view from a brace of twenty-somethings, so I was concentrating on not tearing their heads off and didn’t pay much attention to the beginning of the movie, but then a scene where a simple heist goes stupid bad grabbed my attention and I just kind of fell through the screen.

The movie’s about a man who works as a stunt driver by day and drives for criminals at night. Things start going wrong, then go wronger, pile up on him and pile up more until finally, halfway to a clear, cool morning, he bleeds to death from stab wounds in a Mexican bar. “There were so many other killings, so many other bodies,” he says in voice-over near the end, his own and the movie’s.

After lights came on, I sat in the theater till the cleaning crew, who’d been waiting patiently at the back with brooms and a trash can on rollers, came on in and got to work. I was remembering the car, his mention of Mexico, some of the conversation between my father and him.