DECEMBER 12, 2009
At an all-night truck stop, I go into the bathroom with Tyler. The mirror is a greasy sheet of polished metal bolted to the wall. Tyler sits on the edge of the sink. I clean the cut on his lip, wash off the blood dried on his chin, his neck. He closes his eyes while I do this.
A waitress brings tall plastic menus and automatically pours coffee, since it is either late-late-night or early-early-morning breakfast time. Tyler lets me order for both of us. We eat big, fluffy omelets, split a stack of pancakes, and drink too much crummy coffee just because we like sitting across from each other so much. We dawdle so long that I think Tyler has abandoned whatever urgent mission we’d originally set out on until he says, “You ready?” as if I was the one who’d been stalling.
There are only a few semis on the main highway. After a while, we turn off onto a road that shoots through the few scattered small towns. For a while there are one or two lights on in the towns we speed through. Then all the lights and all the towns disappear and it is completely dark. I turn on the radio. I think it will be funny to listen to crazy preachers and talk-show hosts ranting about “the puppet king, Obama, whose soul is owned by the Chicago Zionist Jewish machine.”
Occasionally, I can catch glimpses of tall pine trees. Since neither of us has said anything for a long time, I ask, “Where will all these babies that the government is going to force us to abort come from after Obama makes us all gay marry?”
Tyler is concentrating so hard on the empty road ahead that a few seconds pass before he gives a weak, delayed-reaction chuckle, never taking his eyes from the hole cut out of the darkness by his headlights.
All that I can make out are dead weeds growing up through the cracks in the buckled asphalt, but Tyler sees something that makes him slow down and squint at the left side of the road. He switches off the radio, as if silence will help his vision.
At a spot that doesn’t seem any more overgrown with scrub brush and spindly trees than any other, he says, “This is it,” and turns off onto a road that isn’t even single-lane, and has ruts running down it like a riverbed. Branches swat at the windshield and shriek as they scrape both sides of the truck.
Tyler doesn’t seem to notice the scraping sound that gets louder and louder the farther in we go. The road goes uphill and the engine groans. Tyler puts the truck into four-wheel drive. We come to a sagging gate held shut with a piece of chain and a rusty padlock. The instant the headlights flicker across the gate, Tyler stomps on the gas and we rocket forward. Pebbles spit out from beneath the back tires. He rams the gate so hard that the lock pops off, flies up, and lands with a hard thunk on the front windshield. It startles me and I shriek like a little mouse.
By the time he stops and we get out, the sun is beginning to crack a few thin streaks of a dismal gray dawn into the new day. The ground is rocky and uneven; the air is so still and dry and cold that I can blow out a stream of frozen breath so far I lose sight of it in the dim light.
I shiver. Tyler takes off his brown corduroy jacket and puts it on over my hoodie. I protest, but he doesn’t seem to hear me.
We watch in silence as the slowly rising sun, like the lights coming up on the first act of a play, gradually reveals the wreckage of an old, low-lying farmhouse. When he finally speaks, Tyler’s voice is different. Twangier. More country. A little mean. “So, what do you think of the old family estate? Should I have Madison and Paige and the whole gang out?”
“Is this where you grew up?”
“This is where my mom dumped me.”
I take his hand. It is dead cold. “We don’t have to be here.”
“Oh, we have to be here.” His hand trembles. He yanks it back, jams it into the pocket of his jeans, nods to a smaller shack beside the bigger one. “That’s where they put the mojados. The wets.”
The building is a converted chicken coop. The gray boards are bowed and popping away from rusted nails. Beside it is the hulk of a windmill. The blades are crumpled and the head is hanging down like a daisy with a broken stem.
I take his arm. “Let’s get in the truck. Turn the heat on.”
Tyler doesn’t move. “The thing I remember most about her is her laugh. She had this smoker’s laugh. Shit rattling around in her lungs. Everywhere she went she had her smokes in one hand and a drink in the other. Know what she named me? Bronco. How sorry is that? Someone name a sweet, clean, newborn baby Bronco? Would you even name a dog Bronco? Ditched that sorry name soon as I could.”
He lets me lead him away like someone in shock leaving the scene of an accident. At the truck, he fumbles for the keys in his pocket, drops them on the rocky ground. I pick them up. “I’ll drive, OK?”
The branches scraping the sides of the truck seem even louder going out. It takes all my concentration and nerve to navigate the big truck over the ravines in the narrow road. Tyler doesn’t seem to notice or care that his truck is being destroyed.
Neither one of us speaks for a long time after we emerge and get back on a decent road. I don’t know what to say and finally ask, “So that wasn’t your mom’s place?”
“No. She lived in some piece-of-crap trailer one of her ‘boyfriends’ gave her. Mighta been my father. Who cares? That was my grandparents’ place.”
“Where’d your mom go?”
He shrugs. “My grandparents acted like she was dead. But who knows what that means, since my grandparents thought that anyone who wasn’t an android working machine was a waste of good oxygen. With them you were either working until you dropped or dead asleep just long enough so you could get back up and work until you dropped again. They had me bucking hay out the back of a flatbed truck by … Shit, I couldn’t have been more than five. My age. Another little detail nobody bothered to keep track of. I’m going to shift you out of four-wheel.”
He reaches down next to my feet, moves the shifter. The growl of the engine softens and the ride smooths out. I want to be back on a big highway with lots of traffic and lots of lights. I blow through a couple of small towns that are not much more than a few boarded-up shops with gas stations at either end.
A truck with wheels the size of satellite dishes zooms past us. Bumper stickers on the back proclaim IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THANK A TEACHER. IF YOU CAN READ THIS IN ENGLISH, THANK A SOLDIER and MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR MOM.
I reach across the seat and take his hand. Even with the heater on full blast, his fingers are still icy.
“What happened to …?”
“My grandparents? Died, I guess. They weren’t never …” He drops my hand, splays his fingers in frustration, corrects himself: “They were never prosecuted.” The mean country twang fades more and more the farther we drive. “County just let them go back home and die.”
“What happened? After?”
“CPS put me in this group home. For the first time in my life I was getting fed regular, didn’t have to work like a slave. Had toilet paper, soap, sheets on the bed, screens on the windows. And you want to know the really messed-up part? I missed them. I missed those heartless, ignorant peckerwoods. Missed my skank of a mother. I’d hear someone with shit rattling around in their lungs when they laughed and my heart would hurt, I missed her so bad. I woulda gone right back to my grandparents if they’d let me. How fucked up is that?”
“It’s what you knew. They were all you ever knew.”
“Hey, even a dog learns to keep away from someone whups up on him.”
“They whipped you?”
“See? I love it that you even ask that question. Where I come from, you’d be a fool to ask that question.” He laughs; it’s almost a real laugh. “You’d get the shit kicked out of you for asking such a dumb-ass question.”
He looks out the window and speaks only to give me directions. We are back on the highway before I can take a full breath. Farther on, out of nowhere, Tyler asks, “What do you call that kind of ice cream with chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry all in one box?”
“Neopolitan?”
“Yeah, neopolitan. There was this little black kid in the home had a face like that. Regular chocolate skin, pink scar tissue, and white where the color was permanently gone. Sweet kid. Smart too. His mother threw a pan of boiling water in his face.”
“Jesus.”
“He was my buddy. Idolized me because I gave him my granola bar at breakfast and also knocked the shit out of anyone bothered him. I enjoyed doing both. That’s what kind of psycho thug I was. So here’s Neopolitan with his face half melted off, and you know who he cried for at night? His mother. He begged to go back to her. He loved her. He thought she loved him. For real. Neopolitan taught me the most important thing anyone ever taught me: A mother, father, that’s random. That doesn’t have to be who you are.”