Keep the Change

8

In offering Joe the use of her car the next morning, a small pink convertible, Astrid had naively said to get a pound of snapper fillets and a choice of two vegetables and Joe had said he’d be back in a minute. Now clouds settled in the upper curve of the windshield, slowly wiped around, and disappeared. The yellow center line ticked in the side mirror. Lizards and tropical foliage managed to survive in the atmosphere of a New York subway. The traffic on the great divided parkway moved at a trancelike evenness maintained by the Florida Highway Patrol. He wanted to keep moving in case Astrid reported her car stolen.

In the end it was a day that was missing from Joe’s life. He didn’t turn on the radio until he left his motel near Pensacola the next morning. He realized he was about to hit the real torso of America and his spirits rose. He crossed into Alabama and took a few minutes out to view an arts and crafts fair in a vast baking parking lot. It was as if a thousand garages had been emptied onto a runway. Solemn people stood behind tables that held wan attempts at art in oil and ceramics and a twentieth-century history of appliances. Portraits of Elvis on black velvet. He pulled out onto the highway and resumed, having to go very slow for a mile until he could pass a pickup truck full of yellow lawn chairs. Battered, rusted cars passed with hard faces framed by Beatles-type haircuts. It seemed that before he even reached the Mississippi line, the sky had begun to grow, to widen: at the Escatawpa River the pines strained upward against a terrific expanse of blue sky. The highway was empty. The clouds stretching down to the horizon majestically ruled the scene. Joe was filled with a mad sense of freedom, free to eat fast food, free to sleep with a stranger. Instead of solving his problems, he had become someone without problems, a kind of ghost.

He passed a little bayou where a young fellow in knee-length surfer shorts covered with beer commercials watched a bobber rest on the mirror surface of water. This plain scene held a great mystery for him. There was a lovely waterland around the Pascagoula River with silver curves showing through the sea grass for a great distance while the road crossed in low, loping arcs. He stopped and watched fishermen unloading crab boats. He walked down and sat on a broken-off piling. A woman handed an old fisherman a pint of whiskey in a paper bag. She said, “If you beat me up like you did last weekend, I ain’t going to buy you no more of that.” Joe heard this with amazement.

He went to sleep in a motel. Outside in the parking lot, a couple leaned up against their car and listened to James Cotton sing the blues. “I don’t like white and white don’t like me.” Joe thought about that as he lay in bed. He couldn’t quite understand why, lying in this unknown motel in this unknown place, he felt such a desperate joy.

•

At seven in the morning, he was rolling through Danville Parish, Louisiana. Pine forests stood on the high ground between the bayous, pine pollen filling the air so that the car was covered with pollen and the air was so heavy with pollen there were times he thought he ought to turn on the headlights to see. But rush hour in Shreveport was different from other rush hours, the thickness of humidity, the crazy songs on the radio, flirtation between speeding automobiles. Secession had worked! The marquee in front of the Louisiana State Fairground announced county pig champions and English rock and roll bands. The radio advertised bass boats, fire ant control potions and the Boot Hill Racetrack.

Joe thought that crossing into Texas and getting past the Red River would give him the feeling of being back out West but it didn’t happen. The thunderstorms lashed the highway and it still looked like Louisiana with all the gums and hickories and tupelos. A home repair truck passed with a sign on its side that said, “Obsessed to serve the customer.” Nothing halfway about the South. Someone shot up behind Joe in a little Japanese car, face pressed against the windshield, passed, then lost his motivation. Roostertailing through the rainwater, Joe had to pass him again. The cloudburst intensified and a mile or two down the road toward Longview, Texas, a pickup truck went into sideways slow motion, slid across the meridian and went into the ditch. Three men got out and stared at it. These men seemed to feel their pickup owed them an explanation. Once he reached Longview, he could see back to the thunderstorm, see its grand and sculptural shape, its violent black underside. The radio said they were glad about the rain because it would keep the pollen down and people could get some relief from their allergies and wasn’t that what people wanted, some relief? Joe liked it for the feeling of dropping a curtain between him and the past, a welcome curtain. This was the highway and he was a ghost. It was a relief.

Somewhere past the Sabine River, Joe started to spot the little oil patches, the active ones with bright painted pumps, bobbing away and pumping oil. And oil patches that had seen better days, with their pumps stopped and the paint rusted off like a field full of giant grasshoppers that had died or reached some eerie state beyond normal death. The radio had used the phrase “nuclear winter” and increasingly Joe was relying on the radio to shape his thoughts. He was still thinking about fire ants. Fire ants in the nuclear winter.

Van Zandt, Texas, was blushing green in a deeply wooded succession of gentle, rolling woodlands. For thirty-five seconds, Joe ached to live there. Then by Terrell, glad to no longer live in Van Zandt, he was out of the woodlands and in an ugly cattle country that looked like Iowa where there were no fire ants and pollen and mulattoes in convertibles, and no race music on the radio. Joe went blank and stayed that way until he came over a big long ascent and there below him was a cloud of mesquite and telegraph wires and glittering buildings. The hard angles of light on each surface seemed to communicate that the West had begun and he was on his way home. The sky picked up the white edges of the ravines, rocks and subdivisions equally. The skyscrapers cheerfully said, “We see you passing, you ghost! So long, Joe-Buddy!” This was Dallas!

There was a perfect Texan urban river bottom at Grand Prairie with scrub willows whose roots gathered trash in the flash floods that shot through new neighborhoods. Joe was maddened by joy at being in the country of the West. He felt that he would find a restored coordination for his life here. This was the West’s job. Gustav Mahler of all people was on the radio. Great Southwest Parkway! Lone Star Homes! Texas Toyota! A subdivision of multifarious grandeur, half-timbered Tudor homes baking in the dry air and clinging to the hillsides. A sign in front read From the 80’s. Joe could not understand the message because he thought they were talking about the decade of these homes; then he realized they meant the price of the units. Holy fire ants! Little places like that?

He crossed the Trinity River in a bright sun that made approaching traffic flash its windshields in a stream of glitter, along the edge of the Fort Worth stockyards. A radio preacher shouted, “Satan is playing hardball!”

On an awful-looking scrapped-off former mesquite flat north of Fort Worth, he passed “Fossil Creek, The Community on the Green. Next right, Blue Mound, Texas.” Getting on toward Wichita Falls, the radio briefly stilled, there began to be well-kept ranches, lots of horses, the houses on elevations with windmills to catch the breeze and fanciful entryways welded together out of rod and angle iron. Fetishistic paved driveways. There were things here in Texas that made Joe nervous, but he blamed it on whatever produced that radio religion, fire and brimstone delivered at a nice dance tempo.

It began to grow stormy looking and the conflict of spring and winter produced a cascading immensity of light that Joe felt levitate him as he drove in and out of vast shadows. State Highway Department trucks were ignited from within by a tremendous yellow light. The signs shone fiercely at him with their brusque messages. Railroad track crews were lit up like the cast of a Broadway show. A windy squall separated itself from the general pattern and arose before him like a dead king in an opera. A battered farm truck passed with a tuxedo hanging in the rear window. There were flattened armadillos on the road. The weather looked worrisome — worrisome and bad enough to drive him back to Astrid. Or, if it wasn’t for the awkwardness of driving her car, he could have given her a call. He could have said, “I’m en route!”

So, he stopped at Henrietta and ate pinto beans and corn bread and listened to a distant kitchen radio issue fairly dire weather forecasts. The restaurant had wooden booths and a few young men in work clothes sat sideways in them with their arms over the back and spoke in courtly tones to the black-haired, aging waitress.

Back on the road, Joe saw at a considerable distance the British flag emblazoned on a solitary billboard. But when he drew close, it turned out to be an ad for Beech-Nut chewing tobacco. Tumbleweed blew furiously across the road near an old brick high school that stood like a depressing fortress against the distant horizon and slate, moving clouds. There were cotton fields and, here and there, cotton wagons were drawn up on the side roads. The sign in Quanah said, “Stop and Eat with Us. Willie Nelson Did.” Joe noted that the goofy faces of the Deep South, the tragic and comic masks donned down there, had been replaced by a kind of belligerent stare. The highway signs said, “Don’t Mess with Texas.” It didn’t look too damn friendly out there. Maybe it was the weather.

Right after he crossed the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River a train approached from a distance. When it came close, all that was visible was its windshield; the rest was a vast blowing mound of snow and ice. What’s going on here? Turn on the radio, my friend. He got another preacher, this one explaining that the mind does not work the exact-same as a Disposall and we cannot grind up the filth that goes into it. We must be careful not to put filth into it in the first place.

Suddenly, he was driving on a solid corrugation of ice in a whiteout. It just dropped from the heavens and put an end to visibility. He hunched over the wheel as though to examine the road even more closely than he could in a normal seated position. The outer world was filled with phantom vehicles, some floating by at eye level, others sunk to one side plainly disabled. A human silhouette arose and vanished. It was terrifying. It was a regular bad dream. He thought, I am being punished for stealing, for doubting the truthfulness of my aunt and uncle in withholding my lease money, for not painting and for walking out on a good woman.

He came up behind a twenty-year-old luxury sedan heaving along sedately. He clove to that sedan. It had a bumper sticker that said XIT Ranch Reunion and Joe tried to tag it as it appeared and disappeared in the snow. He passed an old tractor-trailer rig full of fenceposts and woven wire jackknifed in the ditch. Then he lost the sedan; it seemed to dematerialize in the whiteness and he was alone. He slowed to ten miles an hour and felt his insides labor against the white indefinite distance before him.

A fashion center for babies was advertising on the radio. They had a special for those hard-to-shop-for preemies. Including diapers for their little thumb-size bottoms. Then all of a sudden, a great miracle occurred, simultaneous with news of these glorious infants. The sun came out on a perfect world in the middle of which, surrounded by hysterical people, a Greyhound Vista-Cruiser lay on its side: red, white, and blue with tinted windows, in the ditch. Joe crept by in case he was needed, but the passengers were having their moment as they watched the driver set out orange cautionary cones, and they didn’t seem to need or want Joe, who had not been with them when it happened but rather with the well-dressed babies of the radio.

A little way past the town of Goodnight, he could see cattle running the fenceline in wild amazement at nature. A truck went by like the home repair truck back in Louisiana but this one said, “Don’t sleep with a drip — Call a plumber!” The day was almost done. Joe flew through the slush to Amarillo, took a room, ate in a Japanese restaurant and went to bed. He felt like he was breaking his back trying to get through Texas. This ghost wanted to go home.