Road Trip

It was the peak of hay season. The boys had gotten used to the routine of solitude by now. The rest of the family had gone crazy in the divorce. Their mama was living in Atlanta, Daddy was wearing Reeboks and spending all of his time in Panama City with his new wife, and their sister was living in a town neither could pronounce somewhere in California. The family land that had been so vehemently fought over in court sat idle and neglected. They had cut and mowed all week fixing the tractor in between with pliers and sparking wires between black grease creased hands. The evenings began with cans of Miller Light and usually ended with one rebuilt truck digging another out of the middle of a muddy creek with a come along. It was around dusk when the idea was first mentioned, but not until after 9:30 and several Millers that they backed the least ragged out truck up to the farm gas pump. The boys filled every milk jug and plastic container they could scrounge and laid them neatly in the bed of the truck. They were no stranger to siphoning gas from the state trucks parked on the side of the road but neither had ever been west of Selma so there was no way to count on this practice to sustain the trip all the way to California. The house their parents built sat dark and unshaken as they cleaned out the cabinets of canned goods grabbing a handful of dirty clothes to stuff behind the seat. On the back of an unopened insurance bill they wrote “Dear Daddy, We’ve gone to California.”

In the summer 1995, I was living in Central California in a studio duplex with a view of the drug park across the street and a 300 lb neighbor named Rudy; who instructed in no uncertain terms upon moving in to not call the cable company because he had rigged the duplex so we all got it for free. I was standing in front of the swamp cooler at the end of the day trying to dry the sweat in my hair before a blind date at the Red Robin with a rock climber when the phone rang. The familiar shrill of my Granny’s voice blasted into my ear “Do you know your brothers are coming to see you in California?”

At this point it had been 24 hours since their departure. Apparently they had called from Dallas to confirm that it was true. I knew immediately why. They saw Dallas as a safe distance from the family, their first step out of the true south. No sheriff could pull them over past this point and if the truck broke down they were really on their own. But what I was really thinking about was what my two brothers must be feeling and how I wished I could see them driving through the western states right now. This was long before cel phones were part of our reality and from the family’s perspective, the only reference point anyone had was the time it had taken me to drive out a few months earlier. We were all calculating where they might be based on my solitary haul west. I could barely sleep that night. My dad’s family was furious and convinced I had put them up to it, possibly even sending them money. My dad’s brother called my mom’s sister, a line of communication that had not been crossed since the divorce to try to gather information on who exactly knew what and when. It turned out we were all in the same boat for a change.

I hardly slept the night I heard my brothers were driving to California. There had been no word for over 24 hours as to where they were but the thought that they were headed my way was like believing in Santa Clause on Christmas Eve. The center of our family was shifting west for the first time ever. How long would they stay? Were they planning to move in with me? Would the three of us set up house and have the family neither of our parents had been able to hold together? I fantasized into the early morning until the phone rang a little before 7 AM. It was the 15 year old. He was calling from Barstow to ask exactly what the name of the town in California was and which direction they should go from there. I frantically gave him directions and then asked “What do you think of California so far?” I had decided to take them camping while they were here. “So far it stinks” he quipped back “I mean literally, it’s smelled like rotten eggs ever since we crossed the state line.”

A few hours later the three of us crammed into a Denny’s booth over 5 blue plate specials when the boys deduced the rotten egg smell had really been the battery dying on the truck. They had driven in the night with flashlights shined out the window somewhere in Oklahoma when they realized the battery wouldn’t make it. The truck arrived in a state in which it had to be pushed off in order to crank which included a nice backfire in case the spectacle of 2 boys hollering “punch it” to one another didn’t grab enough attention from onlookers.