Chapter Thirty Eight

Driving around at night.  This was what the Remedy did when he’d almost had enough of her.  He got into his car and drove.  Sometimes he drove so far that he ran out of both gas and money.  Sometimes he drove so far that he didn’t know where he was, or how to get back.  The car would come to a stop on some god forsaken highway, and he’d wander out into the daylight, his legs stiff and his back aching, squinting upward at the sun.

        A day’s drive into Montana, staring downward from the Continental Divide.  Or upwards within the reach of Whitefish, not so far from Glacier.  Another day’s drive up from the Tri-Cities, with the shadows of Hanford stretching down the length of the prairie sun.  Or along the Colombia, gazing over to the other side, where Oregonian deserts waited.  Casting along the roads past Blaine into Canada, getting stranded in traffic jams and following ferries over the waters to quietly overpriced islands.  Or even further into remote Alaska, buying drinks from bartenders flush with dividend money.  South, south, and further south still into Oregon and the wilderness behind Crater Lake, or the heights of northern California, or over the hump from Sacramento into Reno, never stopping to gamble, never stopping for women, only stopping for gas or liquor.  Once or twice into Mexico, into the deep Babylon that stretched from Los Angeles into who knew what other countries, populated by who knew what other men as desperate as he was – or more so.

One particular spell of thinking/driving had sent him into Utah, and once there he had slept in his car for several days, beside a river that flowed over white rocks.  He stole money from a convenience store to fund his return trip.  He had been desperate to leave that place, but once he arrived in Seattle he was still more desperate to leave once again.  Once in the city, the river with the white rocks didn’t seem so bad at all.  It was at least a better place to be alone.

        This time he was somewhere in Idaho or Oregon.  Not so far, really.  It was the middle of the night, and it was not easy to tell where he was.  He only knew that the trees were growing more numerous around him.  There were more and more evergreens, with a birch or two glimpsed alongside tiny lakes where cows slept standing up.  There were also signs of commerce, a few billboards set up alongside the road.  The air was very dry.

        But he wasn’t so far gone that night.  He hadn’t been drinking, and he still had money in his wallet.  He wasn’t going to wake up in a strange place the next morning.  He wasn’t going to lose his self-control.  He had a rough idea where he was, and if he really wanted to know he could watch the roads for signs.  There.  Eugene was less than an hour distant.  It had to be Oregon.

        His hair was going gray, he was almost forty, and he was desperately and irredeemably alone.  Loneliness had always been a feature of his lifestyle, but the worries over his hair and his age were something new.  His parents haunted the periphery of his panic, and as he drove he kept remembering their loving faces, and how they had pinned their dreams upon him before they burned to death.

        Had he really been a ladies’ man, he might have drawn comfort from his conquests.  But while these conquests might have satisfied others, he could only see each dalliance as a prelude to eventual abandonment.  His lovers were drawn to him by a shared sense of insecurity, by a similar lack of control over their lives.  They were willing enough to spend the night with him, but they would never stay.  

These other women also came to know that She had marked him out from the others, and that She was always ready to claim her rights.  She had hobbled him just enough, in some way that he could never truly fathom.  He knew that he could drive to the ends of the earth, and she would remain confident in her hold over him.  She could pull him back from anyplace, from anyone, at any time she wanted.

        The motor in the car was giving out, but he found it hard to care.  If the car broke down he would walk, and if he was lucky a snake would bite him, so that he could die old, alone, and graying in the desert.  Then she could wonder why he hadn’t come to work the following week.  Then he could be the one in control of something – for once.

        The road was going up.  He thought that he might have been ascending a mountain, but it was impossible to tell for certain.  Beyond the interior of the car almost everything was black.  The taste of clay had left the air, and the spaces between the trees were filled with blackberry bushes, with ferns, and with nettles.

        One of those girls was his, she had said.  One of their daughters.  She was certain.  And as he sat there in her living room, he thought about how half of that home was really his – the wife and one of the daughters.  He thought of how much more might be his, if sentiment counted for anything at all.

The other half of that home was her husband’s, but somehow her husband held the controlling share.  Her husband was dealing out all the cards, and the other players were making the best of their hands.  He, not her husband, was forever a stranger in his own house.  He, not her husband, was the intruder.  This was, at least, the way she made it sound.

        And then he thought again of how she would never leave her husband, and how she would never commit to either side.  He thought of her endless manipulations.  He thought of her cunning, and a beauty that could not be denied.  

He saw her at work, and they were strangers to each other.  He was a stranger everywhere.  He was a man without a home.

        His child.  He was her father.  But he had no money to give his child, nor any fatherly bits of wisdom.  She would grow up never knowing who he was.  Her mother would see to that.  Unless he did something.  Unless he did something.  But what could he do?

        More trees.  It began to rain lightly.  He switched on the windshield wipers and turned the radio back on.  But the radio wasn’t working.  Interference.  Had to be the mountains.  The road began to wind around and around itself, four lanes merging into two.  The motor complained again, and the car wobbled strangely.  Still he would not stop.  It didn’t matter if he crashed the car.  Crashing the car would have only been another way of ending the argument.

        The last time he had seen her there had been an argument that hadn’t ended with his walking out the door.  The argument was waiting for him back in Seattle, and he wondered if he would have the strength to end it after he returned.

The miles of road between her house and this lonely place added fuel to his resolve, and if he closed his eyes he could see himself inching closer to that argument in another state.  He had wasted so many years already.  He knew this.  But it wasn’t too late.  He had to believe that it wasn’t too late.

        He would end it when he got back to the city.  He would tell her that he was done.  He wouldn’t listen to what she had to say.  He wouldn’t allow her to twist his words.  He would steel himself against the love he still felt for her.  He would remind himself that all the waiting was in vain.  In the end, if he continued waiting, he would just be a greater loser.  He had to remember to remind himself of this.

        So many years pissed away, but he still had a chance.  He was a father after all.  Maybe he could start learning how to live in the right way.  There had to be something to that.  People did it every day.  Turning weakness into strength.

        Suddenly the road was covered in snow.  Just beyond the glow of his headlights he made out a forest, and the eyes of a coyote glinted back at him from the other side of a guard rail.  There was still a lot of living to do.  Maybe he was older and fatter than he once was, but he still had eyes and hands and a mind ready to experience it all.

        Even if tomorrow was the last day.  He had to tell her.