The Book of Skulls

chapter twelve Oliver

I drove for five hours without a break. It was beautiful. They wanted to stop, to piss, to stretch their legs, to get hamburgers, to do this, to do that, but I didn’t pay any attention, I just went driving on. My foot glued to the accelerator, my fingers resting lightly on the steering wheel, my back absolutely straight, my head almost motionless, my eyes trained on a point twenty or thirty feet in front of the windshield. The rhythm of motion possessed me. It was almost a sexual thing: the long glossy car leaping forward, raping the highway, me in command. I took real pleasure from it. I actually got hard for a while. Last night, with those whores Timothy found, my heart wasn’t really in it, Oh I went three rounds, but only because it was expected of me, and in my thrifty hayseed way I didn’t want to waste Timothy’s money. Three pops I had, the way the girl said it: “You want to work off another pop now, sweet?” But this, with the car, the long sustained unending thrust of the cylinders, this is practically a kind of intercourse, this is ecstasy. I think I understand now what the motorcycle freaks feel. On and on and on. The throbbing underneath you. We took Route 66, down through Joliet, through Bloomington, on toward Springfield. Not much traffic, lines of trucks in some places but otherwise hardly anything, and the telephone poles going ftick-nick-nick past me all the time. A mile a minute, three hundred miles in five hours, even for me an excellent average for driving in the East. Bare, flat fields, some of them still covered with snow. Complaints from the peanut gallery, Eli calling me a goddamn driving machine, Ned nagging me to stop. I pretended I didn’t hear them. Eventually they left me alone. Timothy slept, mostly. I was king of the road. By noon it was apparent we’d be in St. Louis in another couple of hours. The plan had been to spend the night there, but that no longer made sense, and when Timothy woke up he got out his maps and tourist guides and started figuring the next lap of the trip. He and Eli had a fight over the way Timothy had planned things. I didn’t pay much attention. I think Eli’s point was that we should have headed for Kansas City, not St. Louis, coming out of Chicago. I could have told them that a long time ago, but I didn’t care what route they took; anyway I wasn’t keen on passing through Kansas again. Timothy hadn’t realized Chicago and St. Louis were so close together when he first sketched our route.

I tuned out on their squabbling and spent some time thinking about something Eli had said last night while we were running around sightseeing in Chicago. They hadn’t been moving fast enough for me, and I tried to nag them into hustling some, and Eli said, “You’re really devouring this city, aren’t you? Like a tourist doing Paris.”

“I haven’t ever seen Chicago before,” I told him. “I want to get in as much of it as I can.”

“Okay, that’s cool,” he said. But I wanted to know why he was so surprised that I was curipus about strange cities. He looked uncomfortable and seemed eager to change the subject. I prodded him. Finally he said, with the little laugh he uses to tell you that he’s going to say something with insulting implications but you mustn’t think he’s serious, “I just wondered why someone who seems so normal, so well-adjusted, is all that interested in sightseeing so intensely.” He amplified, unwillingly: to Eli, the hunger for experience, the quest for knowledge, the eagerness to see what’s over the next hill are all traits that pertain primarily to those who are underprivileged in some way — members of minority groups, people who have physical blemishes or handicaps, those troubled by social hangups, and so forth. A big good-looking muscular clod like me isn’t supposed to have the neuroses that engender intellectual curiosity; he’s supposed to be relaxed and easygoing, like Timothy. My little display of intensity was out of character, according to Eli’s reading of what my character ought to be. Because he’s so far into the ethnic thing, I was ready to have him tell me that the desire to learn is fundamentally a trait found in his people, with a few honorable exceptions. But he didn’t quite come out with that, though he was probably thinking it. I wondered then, and still do, why he thinks I’m so well-adjusted. Must you be five feet seven, with one shoulder a little higher than the other, in order to have the obsessions and compulsions that Eli equates with intelligence? Eli underestimates me. He’s got me stereotyped: big dumb handsome goy. I’d like to let him look inside my Gentile skull for five minutes. We were approaching St. Louis, now. Racing along an empty interstate highway through open farmland; then into something dank and dismal calling itself East St. Louis; and finally the gleaming Gateway Arch, looming up on the far side of the river. We came to a bridge. The idea of crossing the Mississippi absolutely left Eli stoned; he stuck his head and shoulders out of the car, staring out, as though he were crossing the Jordan. When we were on the St. Louis side, I stopped the car in front of a shiny circular mote. The three of them rushed out and scampered around like lunatics. I didn’t leave the driver’s seat. Wheels were going round in my head. Five unbroken hours of driving. Ecstasy! At last I got up. My right leg was numb. I had to limp for the first few minutes. But it was worth it for those five beautiful hours, those private hours, alone with the car and the highway. I was sorry we had to stop at all.