Call Me a Cab

41

Westward into increasingly inhuman country. Route 70 re-appeared, as a two-lane road, a straight lonely line across the broken landscape, and we ran and ran under the hot dry sun, past black cliff faces and tortured boulders parodying trees, where nothing grew.

After Salina there was no Route 70 at all, and our path turned south along US 89. We found a sun-bleached diner for lunch, where the customers and waitresses were all uniformly parched and bitter, made juiceless and ancient by the sun and the hostile terrain. Our hamburgers were small and dry and gray, our french fries were twisted like torture victims, our coffee was watery.

During lunch Katharine said, “Tom, I can’t stand us not talking to one another.”

“I’m talking to you,” I said. “Constantly, in the cab, I’m saying whole sentences to you, pointing at weird rocks and so on. I’m just not saying them out loud.”

Smiling, she said, “I’m doing the same thing. It’s only this afternoon and tomorrow, could we try actually saying them out loud to one another?”

“There are things I could say about this hamburger.”

“Don’t. It may have been someone we know.”

Things were somewhat better after that, with casual conversation once more, but it wasn’t exactly the same as before. We were now like those radio call-in shows that put a seven-second delay between the person on the phone saying something and the statement actually going out over the air; just in case the caller has something obscene or libelous or otherwise unacceptable to say. I had a seven-second delay tape working in my head, checking all my statements before releasing them, and from her timing I suspected Katharine had the same. We were almost as we had been, but we were no longer quite live.

By circuitous paths we attained Interstate 15, a highway that rises in Montana at the Canadian border and runs south through Idaho and Utah before angling southwestward through a tiny corridor of Arizona and the bottom of Nevada — including Las Vegas — then crossing the Mojave Desert down into Los Angeles. This was to be our road from now on, and the simple absurd fact that we were traveling down the map rather than across it made the trip seem somehow easier, faster.

The countryside continued huge and dry and mostly empty, but it was gradually losing that alien quality; we were returning to Terra. The buttes and valleys were now like those in Western movies rather than science-fiction, and here and there were farms and low tundra-like forests. The descending sun today was off to our right, watching us benignly for a change. Katharine and I played Superghost and laughed at one another’s jokes.

It was around seven when we left Utah for our thirty-mile slice of Arizona. “These are called the Virgin Mountains,” Katharine said, reading yet another roadmap. I looked around at the tumbled striated barren lifeless sandstone all around us; not a soft place anywhere to put your foot, not a flat place to spread your blanket, not a shadow that wasn’t the transient shadow of a rock. The road was an undulating ribbon over chasms and gorges, between tall serrated peaks. “They can stay Virgins as far as I’m concerned,” I said.

There was one exit in Arizona, where a sign promised a town called Littlefield, but among the sharp boulders I saw only a small corkscrew road climbing painfully away into silence and absence. And ten miles later we attained Nevada, at a town called Mesquite. And crossed from Mountain to Pacific Time; our last lost hour.

“If I’d taken the plane,” Katharine said, “the decision would be four days in the past now. I’d be used to it, whatever it was.”

“If you’d taken the plane,” I said, “I’d be driving around New York now feeling uneasy, thinking I’d missed something and not knowing what it was.”

Katharine looked stricken. “Say something funny,” she said. “Quick.”

“I just did.”