lickhaven

[a story]

Sarah described everything. She nattered about the trees, the telephone lines, the color of the gravel on the roadside shoulders. It was how she dealt with the long boring ride, but it drove Doug crazy. He wanted to close out the world when he was driving, let everything he was passing by roll over him, without words, without thoughts, just stuff coming by, coming through.

“Mace, can you shut her up?”

“If you want her to be quiet…”

“I don’t want her to be quiet, I want her to shut up.”

Sarah didn’t hear him because she was talking about a woodchuck they’d just passed, its guts spread along the edge of the road. “Everybody must have run over it, there was nothing left but red streaks, you could hardly tell it was fur.”

A recurring image pounded at Doug’s mind, the one he got when they wouldn’t leave him alone, his hands turning the wheel, slowly, deliberately, running the car off the road and into a bridge abutment at 60 miles an hour. He felt it push the grill in, the hood up, felt the engine whirling into them, churning them up like a blender.

“You know what we’re having tonight?” he said. “For supper? We get to camp, I’ll start up a big fire, then come back and scrape that groundhog off the road and fry it up in the cast-iron pan with squirrel-shit sauce. Um, ummm.”

“Eee-yew,” squeaked Masie and Sarah together.

Too many people in the world, too many goddam people, why don’t they get run over in the night by semis, stupid as squirrels and skunks, why don’t they all just walk out on the highway and freeze in the headlights and piss themselves in front of an oil tanker, find them in the morning smeared all along the road, crackers and jungle bunnies and wetbacks and yuppies all together turned into a paste. And there wouldn’t be penalties when you hit one. You wouldn’t even have to report it, just part of driving along.

“I have to pee, Daddy.”

“Course you have to pee. You have to pee, everybody has to pee. Whenever I try to get somewhere, everybody has to pee.”

Doug pulled onto the shoulder. “OK, we’ll all get out and pee together.”

“Not in the woods, Daddy, what if somebody comes along?”

“That’s all there is out here – woods. What else you see but woods? No gas stations, there’s a law about gas stations here, no gas stations in a national forest.”

He drove back onto the road, hen pulled over again where there was enough room and lots of tall grass and behind it more trees if Sarah wouldn’t squat in the grass. “Somebody comes and sees us, likes what we’re doing, they can pee with us. Whoopee.” 

Fifty feet up the road he saw a dead raccoon. You didn’t see as many of them, raccoons were usually too smart to get hit. This one wasn’t bloody, just lying on its back, four feet straight up, the claws curved in, like a sloth that had let go of its branch.

Doug looked down at the raccoon and forgot he’d been going to take a leak. He liked raccoons, they gave people the finger. It made him mad that this one had been taken out. He wanted to bury the raccoon, but he didn’t have a shovel. He wished it was a lawyer or a gas station attendant or a news commentator. That clown with the stupid red hair on the morning kids’ show.

Back in the car, Sarah was quiet as road kill. He wondered how much he’d upset her, being  jerk. A father.

“Hey.”

No answer.

“Hey, Sass.”

“What, Daddy?”

“Everything OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t mean it about supper.”

“I know that.”

“Groundhog tastes terrible. But rabbit… bunny burger…”

“I don’t think it’s funny, Daddy.”

The miles pulled them along, just trees, signs for curves, an occasional tiny bridge over a tiny stream. And dead animals, more road kill than he’d ever seen. Six or eight rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs like doormats, another raccoon, things with no shape left. Warm winter, early spring, everything mating, big litters, nothing dying until it reached the road and something hit it.

“Those Indians are still burning tires,” Masie said.

“Tires? What tires, what do you mean?”

“Protesting something. They pile tires in the road and set them on fire.”

“What are they protesting about now that they didn’t protest about before?”

“Taxes. I don’t know.”

“That’s exciting, enlivening news.”

“What if we run into them?”

“Tires? Indians?”

“Everything’s a joke.”

“Most things.” He saw his hands gripping again, the wheel turning, the bridge abutment.

The camp site was dry enough for the tent, but the recent rain had soaked all the wood lying under the trees. Doug wanted to have a real campfire for once, instead of eat canned crap and crawl into the tent and fall asleep, all of them. He wanted to make a stew and cook it in the covered cast iron frying pan right on the fire, push foil-wrapped potatoes down in the coals. It didn’t taste any better, the potatoes with knotty hard places, but you knew you’d done something. Here he was out in the woods, trying to find dry wood and make a fire like an Indian while the Indians were burning rubber tires.

He set up the Coleman stove and warmed canned crap in an ancient saucepan.

Night slipped down slowly, a smoother texture when you’re outside, you don’t just turn around with the light on and see it’s dark out the window. You try to watch the sunset out here, but most times the trees get in the way so you watch the yellow-pink-maybe-orange glow behind them. Or you sit and read at the table until little by little you miss some of the words, bend closer to make out the print, then you can’t get it to make any kind of sense.

Doug refused to bring a Coleman lamp. They burned up the night, turned you into a fat, stupid pile of flesh, made you laugh too loud and act like an asshole. So while Masie put Sarah to bed in the tent, Doug sat at the table and looked into the trees until everything was dark but the stars. The almost slate-blue sky still gave off light, a negative light that made the trees darker.

After he’d been sitting for awhile, the road kill spoke to him.

“Death at sixty miles an hour pushes your insides outside, along come the watchers with their tsk tsk, poor little critter. What’s so poor about eating mice or crawdads or grubs out of logs, whatever moves itself along your way? Let me tell you what we watch – gnomes with pointy hats dancing down from the mountain tops, flattened ointment tubes, daisies looking for love picking their own petals, used rubbers stuffed between the rocks, the last of the Mohicans searching for yesterday, year-old news dissolving into dirt, mob hits at the bottom of the lake. Us deadies, watching from our grisly gory roadside, get to guess what killed us, Toyota, Buick, Dodge, Hell’s Angel, truckload of cement. What’s it matter? Somewhere, everything matters, but you have to be in the place where that something matters, because if you have what matters and you die in the place where it doesn’t matter, you’ve lost it all, the big piece of cheese and the little seed together, Hitler hit by a semi it’s six million more Jews praying gypsies singing, driver humming to a dreamy country song deer leaps swing sideways windshield cracks jackknifed semi forty-car pileup kid dead would have been a Nobel Prize winner instead of ketchup for crows, us more alive being dead and stinking like outlaws’ socks rolled over run over run down flattened than you lying under stars shining a billion years Crab nebula stretching its claws, us drained dirt brown little things alive inside our guts squirming in the moonlight crooning songs to dwarfs under hills gnome chorus to the stars, you asleep not alive not dead. time to WAKE UP

Doug snapping awake by the dead fire he never lit, crawling into the tent, trying to understand, get his mind around what it must be like, what it must be really like to lie dead

Beside the road.