That next morning he told her, I’m driving, and she saw he had been rescued by a good night’s sleep, saw in his eyes the bright pure restlessness to author a better adventure than the one they’d been muddling through, and she thought, stepping out of the shower, wiping the steam from the mirror to admire herself, There’s my Cannibal Man.
On the road, he began his all-American love affair with the rearview mirror, stealing furtive upward glances at the past receding.
New Orleans: See ya’, sugar.
Baton Rouge: Bon soir.
The Mississippi River: HAPPY TRAILS.
Life as a Simp: *DELETE*
The Dead: Farewell and Godspeed.
New York: Laytah.
As they sped westward across the Atchafalaya Basin, he asked her to reach into the back seat for the book he was writing. After a minute of searching she said it wasn’t there and he said yes it is.
What? she said, alarmed. Eight pages?
The dissertation was eight hundred pages, he explained. These were the only ones I thought were good enough to be in the book. Something was lost in the transfer, he mumbled.
I see, she said. She fancied the subtitle: “Ontological Codes and Signifiers in Marrow-Sucking Ceremonies.” What now?
Give them to me, please. His window opened with a blast of sauna-like air, and he watched in the mirror as the pages fluttered like snowy egrets before skittering down the asphalt and diving into the bayou.
Oh my, she said quietly.
Anything but more of the same. Hasn’t served us well.
Yuh.
In the boiling August haze of Lafayette he rocketed off Interstate 10 and reprogrammed the GPS. For someone who thought the IS F was impractical, he was sure making a meal of all the options she’d chosen. She looked at him with an air of grievance, waiting for an explanation. What? she said. More freaky deliveries?
Worse, he said, reaching over to pat her bare knee, his fingers playing with the hem of her tangerine sundress. We’re targeting Dallas. I think it’s time you met my mother.
He thought it was sexy when she groaned, Oh God, do I have to?
She hit him lightly on the arm. Hands on the wheel, mister.
They lunched on crayfish and oyster po’boys in Alexandria, sat baking for an hour in Shreveport’s beastly rush hour, and slept that night in Tyler, Texas, after a brisket barbecue dinner during which she noticed a steep increase in her fiancé’s usually modest appetite.
In the morning he was on the phone. She rose up on her elbows, puzzled. His mother had left a message on her answering machine, letting it be known that she had fled the August heat of Dallas for the high country of Colorado, and, he explained to Julia, he was determined to track her down.
But why? She abandoned you.
Exactly.
Terence? Isn’t this a showdown we can postpone?
When would you like to have it? he asked. On our wedding day?
At the dusty crossroads of Shamrock, Texas, they turned west, following the Mother Road, the legendary Route 66, to Amarillo and then to Tucumcari, as the scrubby plains began to mass into vast paleolithic tablelands and buttes appeared like the broken teeth of giants. They accelerated. Through the endless miles he began to feel like he was wearing the car, becoming the Beast.
Look at those strange horses, she said, halfway to Santa Rosa, gazing out at a desert of red sandstone and salmon-colored dirt, tumbleweeds and cacti canopied by the bluest sky she had ever imagined.
Pronghorn, he said. They turned north and drove, awestruck, through pinyon-covered foothills flanked by stunning peaks, past the rustic mining towns of Madrid and Cerrillos, turning off the air conditioner and lowering the windows to breathe the astringent cool air made fragrant by sagebrush and juniper. They entered the upper Rio Grande Valley, arriving in the peachy light of sunset in the colonial oasis of Santa Fe.
They dallied for days, smitten with the fiesta-like pulse of the 400-year-old city, and for the first time since she had told him she was taking the job in California they somehow reconnected with whatever it was they had.
That is, of course, until they took the High Road toward Taos into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Because he said he felt a spiritual affinity with the penitentes who crawl on their knees 28 miles from Santa Fe, every Good Friday since the 18th century, to eat the holy, allegedly healing dirt at El Santuario de Chimayo, Terence and Julia stopped to visit the sacred site. She lost him in a swirl of the pious and the tourists, and then found him in a tiny pocket chapel, kneeling beside a white-haired señora at the edge of a hole in the mud floor, the two of them scooping dirt into their mouths, and she thought, Sheez, he’s lived with cannibals, he’ll eat anything .
Back in the parking lot after that spectacle, they met a mountain hippie sitting in a folding chair beside a cardboard box full of three-month-old blue heeler pups. The dogs were free for the taking.
Time to start a family, eh? said Terence, picking up what she felt sure was the runt of the litter.
Terry! No! she said, appalled. There’s no room in the car.
Time to make room, I guess, he said, smiling winningly, and she glared at the smear of mud on his teeth.