Road to Paradise

I was stuck on the numbers. One plus three did equal four, but what did it have to do with Given? I couldn’t decipher the meaning. Gina glanced at it and instantly said, oh how stupid. It took me another shameful mile to figure it out. Then I felt stupid. And resented her, like it was her fault. But numbers sometimes confuse me. I can’t see past them. RUL8? Master’s Ministry proclaimed I was, but they were praying I wasn’t 2L8.

“I’m a good person, I have nothing to be forgiven for,” Gina said. “I’m so beyond that.”

Didn’t Emma once tell me, when I was preening, that just as you’re about to put yourself on a pedestal for being good, the devil knocks you down with pride right back where you belong. I kept quiet.

Chapel View, Chapel Lane, Chapel Hill. Freedom.

3 (#ulink_22b72501-f9b0-516b-9c5b-6b41d7ee3778)

The Black Truck (#ulink_22b72501-f9b0-516b-9c5b-6b41d7ee3778)

The road wound through the fields. We rolled down the windows, turned up the music, the wind blowing through our hair. The Climax Blues Band yelled that we couldn’t get it right, and Kiki Dee croaked that she had the music in her. It was on Liberty Road, past Freedom, when the Blockheads were hitting us with their rhythm stick and I was flying, showing off my Shelby GT 350 to the blue skies, that I suddenly had to slam on the brakes for a black truck ahead of us.

“God, it’s crawling,” I said. In reality, though, it was probably doing forty. Gina groaned, I groaned. We continued singing, but it was one thing to sing and speed but another to sing at the top of your lungs, slam on your brakes, then dawdle along almost at walking pace.

The medium-sized, four-wheel utility truck in front of us was from the coal mines. Not painted black, but dirty black, covered with tar-like nicotine, its two smokestacks emitting black plumes. What was happening inside that it needed two smokestacks? Not only was it dilly-dallying as if on the way to execution, but it couldn’t stay in its lane. It kept rolling out to oncoming traffic. There was no traffic, but that was beside the point. It was a menace. We stopped singing.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“Maybe he’s drunk.”

“It’s Wednesday morning.”

“What, people can’t get drunk on a Wednesday? And it’s not Wednesday morning. It’s Tuesday afternoon.”

We passed a billboard, huge black letters on white board. “WILL THE ROAD YOU’RE ON LEAD YOU TO ME?”

“Did you know that reading billboards is responsible for eleven percent of all vehicular accidents?” stated Gina.

“Is that so?” But I wasn’t paying much attention to her or the billboards. I was entirely focused on the increasingly erratic truck. The driver could’ve fallen asleep at the wheel. I gave him plenty of room. No reason to tailgate; a good safe distance is what he obviously needed. We were two car lengths behind.

He had a bumper sticker on the back tail—everyone was so clever in this neck of the woods with their little aphorisms—I speeded up so I could read it: “I DO ME … YOU DO YOU.”

“Oh, ain’t he the comedian.” Gina laughed. “It’s supposed to be I do you, you do me.”

“He frightens me.”

“Ha,” she said. “I like him better already. He says leave me the hell alone and let me tend to my business. That’s priceless.”

“Yes, but what business could he possibly have that he’s weaving all over the road like that?”

“So slow down. Give him some room.”

“Any more room, and I’ll be in another state.”

“Maybe he’ll turn soon.”

“Turn where?” The empty country road stretched between fields and forests.

“Wait, what’s he doing?” Gina said.

At first it looked like he was turning, but he wasn’t. He was stopping. Suddenly and without preamble, his coal-tar vehicle zigzagged to a halt in the middle of the road right in front of us. We had no choice but to stop, too. Like for a school bus. Maybe he was in trouble. I didn’t know, didn’t want to know and didn’t want to be any part of his trouble. I didn’t want to help him. What if he had run out of gas? What if his door opened and he asked us for a ride to the nearest gas station? My insides filled with liquid nitrogen. No way! No rides to weaving strangers driving black trucks.

The passenger door flung open. There was shouting, and suddenly a girl was propelled from the truck onto the grassy edge. She didn’t hop out, she fell yelling, “You bastard! Hey, give me my stuff!” A hobo bag flew through the air, landing heavily on the grass. A man’s hand reached for the door, pulled it violently shut and the truck peeled away, leaving smoking tire tracks on the pavement, black fumes piping furiously out of the stacks. He drove fast now, and straight.

“Asshole!” the girl yelled after him, getting up, dusting herself off. She didn’t seem to be hurt, though I was trying not to look too closely. I put the ’Stang in gear and accelerated, not like the truck—in anger—but in fear. The girl stood, picked up her bag, turned to us, smiled, and stuck out her hitching thumb. She waved with the other hand. She was young, heavily made up, wearing not summer-in-the city shorts, but a white mini-skirt, a small electric-blue halter and lots of flashy costume jewelry. We passed her slowly, pretending like we didn’t even notice her, la-dee-dah. I whispered, “Gina, roll up your window.”

“Why are you whispering?” But before she could turn the crank, the girl called out. “Hey, come on, be Good Samaritans, help a sister in need, will ya? Give me a ride.”

Gina shook her head, I stared straight ahead without acknowledging her, and as we passed, the girl’s hitching thumb morphed into the middle finger to our departing yellow Mustang. “Thank you!” she yelled. I stepped on it, catching her in the rearview mirror walking uphill in high-heeled wedge sandals and her spicy blue halter.

“Who wears sandals like that?” I asked.

“Who wears a skirt like that?”

We drove in silence.

“We couldn’t pick her up,” I said.

“Of course we couldn’t.” Gina glanced at me askance. “What are you even talking about? We made a deal.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Shelby, did you want to pick her up?”

“Slightly less than I want to be scalped,” I returned. The ridiculous part was I now had to stop and look at a map to see where we needed to turn to get on Penn Pike, but I couldn’t stop. I was afraid the girl might pursue me and force me to explain how I promised I wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, not even a girl my age shoved roughly out of a black truck by angry hands.

I was going eighty on a local road, through fields with mountains up ahead, past abandoned gas stations.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gina asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you driving like a maniac?”

Silence again.

“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” I asked.

“About what? Can you stop for a sec and check the map? I don’t see the turnpike signs anywhere.”

We did see another billboard, this one from the American Board of Proctology: GIVING SOMEONE THE FINGER DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A BAD THING.

“I mean, that girl could’ve been trouble, right?” I said.

“Oh, her. Why are you still talking about her?”

We turned up the music. Diana Ross plaintively wanted to know if we knew where we were going to. Gina plaintively wanted to know when she was going to be fed. Having lost my sense of how far we’d come, whether we even were still in Maryland, I made a series of rights and lefts hoping the zigzag would eventually lead me to the toll road that transsected the entire state of Pennsylvania, as per Rand-McNally road atlas. Past a meandering town of antique stores and law firms we drove, past a deserted little town with not even a sandwich place for us to hang our hats, and, still hungry, we left the churches and the placards behind, the girl, too, and drove through the Appalachian Trail, sunlit and hazy, covered with a silken green and gold canopy. I pointed out a street sign that said Applachian Road. “You’d think that since they live here, they’d know how to spell it.” We chuckled at that, and then again at a sign that stated without punctuation: SHARP CURVES PEDESTRIANS 4 MILES.