04-09-2021, 12:57 PM
City-dwellers did their driving in cities. Young, they practiced lurching in caveat cars under the squint of city-dweller instructors who smelled like mildew and scorched coffee. After, they crept through congested side streets at fifteen miles an hour. They refused the zipper merge and cut people off on freeways and steeled themselves against the infernal orchestra of blared horns and epithets. They commiserated with one another about parking. Some, exempli gratia Courtland Farr III, gave up on the whole production and sold the two-door Toyota that was their high school graduation present in favor of the simplicity of walking across town or calling an Uber.
So driving to The Reaches in the daytime had been a novel experience but not a bad one. There was something untethered and auspicious about the driver’s seat, something quintessentially American Road Trip in the space between here and there relative to the stop-start-start bottlenecks he associated with the verb “to drive.” He had rolled the windows down, cranked Croce (playing then, too) loud.
Leaving was different. The kid sitting so close churned a thick unease -- should have let him/made him sit in the back, after all. The dog whined unseen. Darkness and low visibility and awareness of his own not-quite-sober state made him tense up, made him grip the wheel harder than he had to. Still, he screwed his attention on the road, drove too slow, and figured what was the worst that could happen?
Jude talking about a sister, and it was funny, he had assumed without thinking about it that they shared only-child status. Something about the cloud of entitlement he floated around on. But it must have just been the magical powers. Sister out looking for him. Wasn’t that nice, two of them.
A little thing, splat on the windshield. Near’s focus splintered, he swerved a bit to avoid what had already collided. Corrected himself. Overcorrected himself. Failed to correct the correction. Braked, hard. It was how shit like that always happened, wasn’t it? Pebble, snowball, avalanche, a car spinning off the road into found footage woods. He was pretty sure he was silent while it happened, that he didn’t voice the “told you so” that came to him, unbidden and hideously smug, considering, right before part of the car crunched against something harder -- tree trunk, telephone pole -- and his vision flashbulbed white.
So driving to The Reaches in the daytime had been a novel experience but not a bad one. There was something untethered and auspicious about the driver’s seat, something quintessentially American Road Trip in the space between here and there relative to the stop-start-start bottlenecks he associated with the verb “to drive.” He had rolled the windows down, cranked Croce (playing then, too) loud.
Leaving was different. The kid sitting so close churned a thick unease -- should have let him/made him sit in the back, after all. The dog whined unseen. Darkness and low visibility and awareness of his own not-quite-sober state made him tense up, made him grip the wheel harder than he had to. Still, he screwed his attention on the road, drove too slow, and figured what was the worst that could happen?
Jude talking about a sister, and it was funny, he had assumed without thinking about it that they shared only-child status. Something about the cloud of entitlement he floated around on. But it must have just been the magical powers. Sister out looking for him. Wasn’t that nice, two of them.
A little thing, splat on the windshield. Near’s focus splintered, he swerved a bit to avoid what had already collided. Corrected himself. Overcorrected himself. Failed to correct the correction. Braked, hard. It was how shit like that always happened, wasn’t it? Pebble, snowball, avalanche, a car spinning off the road into found footage woods. He was pretty sure he was silent while it happened, that he didn’t voice the “told you so” that came to him, unbidden and hideously smug, considering, right before part of the car crunched against something harder -- tree trunk, telephone pole -- and his vision flashbulbed white.