Two For The Road

Two For the Road

By

Matt McGuire

We took off that summer, two latter-day saints hell bent for ladder bars on bad trucker speed for the end of the road that ran cross-country to the left coast and through nothing but brush, bastards and beltways. We were getting away from our deadpan lives and our dead end jobs at the Circle K. Wherever we went, there we were, but where we were was getting us nowhere so somewhere else sounded better than there. I was popping two pearly white gravestones an hour and you were hanging out the window, howling at the moon and trying to levitate my rustworn, red little Toyota truck above the road and the rats—redemption loomed on the horizon and the wind was in your hair. The demons in your breast called for a reckoning, a vision quest unlike any experienced since Eisenhower built the means of getting from Shithole to the City of Angels in less than 48 hours.

We took a wrong left turn in Memphis and ended up piss down in Mississippi, sucking up coffee and counting pennies in between rattles of the pill-box and the tink, tink of rain drops on the windshield. We got out somewhere in Rankin county and asked for directions—some redneck, half-gypsy, gray matter starved gas station attendant told you L.A. was a long way from hee-haw-hillbilly-next-to-nowhere-fuck-your-sister town and we screeched off leaving a black mark from the edge of the down trodden Delta to Houston by God Texas.

Interstate ten was a long ribbon of nothing and no one. Blazing hot pavement and scrub trees, dry mouthedness and dusty, raw reflections were the denizens of the dust bowl poured out before us. Salvation slaved behind a fruit stand at the roadside in the form of a half-schizophrenic, Mexican lolita named Pico De Gallo and her fifty dollars worth of unspent money orders. She jumped in the back with a bag full of soybeans after a quick courtship and started taking off her poncho, flashing her titties and waving a bottle of Mescal at the wannabe cowboys, drifters and dung salesmen. We fed her a handful of pharmaceutical go-getters, and she bought us a couple of fish tacos and enough go juice to get past the parvenu midlands. I made her come twice behind a bent-backed Indian billboard and cut her loose somewhere near El Paso where we almost ran out of gas. I told three Chicano cutthroats through chattering teeth that I was St. Thomas the Unbeliever, risen from the dead and looking for the stigmatized faithful descendents of Signor De Leon. They gazed morbidly into my wild, interstate eyes; my short-long greasy hair and tattered jeans weren’t reassuring, but the shortest one cracked a snake-oil medicine man kind of smile and whispered something to his compadres. Turning back to me on the heel of his boa-skinned boot he gave me five bucks and a look that said, “turn your face to the setting sun hombre, you’re full gone loco and your cojones need resizing”. I counted my blessings and the beads of my Benzedrine rosary to the tune of a half a tank of gas and a pack of Tahoes, sucking their butts till the cherries bloomed red, ripe and long in the cool, starblown Texas night.

When we hit Arizona you lost the other half of your mind and ran around a rest stop, tearing your clothes off and flashing your tits to the illegal and the illegitimate—we scooped up handfuls of bone dry Phoenix dust and flung them to the wind, savoring the flavor of freedom and sensing the impending border of our destination just over the next flat stretch of road that seemed to run on forever but, like every other road, was destined for the sea. We busted California wide open, literally, when I ran through the border check at 35 mph and got my tires shot out by the CHiP on duty.

I went to jail. You went to detox. I tried to look you up on Yahoo people search at the library a couple of weeks ago—I found two addresses and the phone number of your Dad’s ex. Curiosity killed the confusion when I called your stepmother in Roanoke; she said you had been sober six months and you never wanted to speak to me again. She tried the old Baptist hellfire, “you need to get saved” stuff on me, but when the line hung silent she hung up with a stiff “Fuck you, Marko.” I stood awhile longer in the pay telephone booth, listening to the rain rattle on the roof and counted out my last dollar and twenty-seven cents. Exiting the booth, I ran raggedly across the street to the self-styled “American Owned” Citgo station, slapped my life’s savings down on the counter in front of the de-turbaned Iraqi attendant and faded off into the downpour with a locked and loaded bottle of Colt .45, headed down the road that ran to the sea.