The Boys of My Youth (20 page)

I said, “Of what? The way I look? The way I act?”

And he said, softly, “Everything, sort of.”

And it was true. Well, I decided to take a trip to Florida. I sat on my haunches in Key West for four weeks, writing and seething
and striking up conversations with strangers. I had my thirty-fifth birthday there, weeping into a basket of shrimp. I drank
beer and had long involved dreams about cigarettes, I wrote nearly fifty pages on my novel. It’s in my trunk at this very
moment, dead and decomposing. Boy, do I need a cup of coffee.

There’s not much happening this early in the morning. The highway looks interminable again. So far, no alligators. I have
a box of seashells in my back seat and I reach back and get a fluted one, pale gray with a pearly interior, to put on the
dashboard. I can do everything while I’m driving. At the end of this trip I will have driven 3,999 miles all alone, me and
the windshield, me and the radio, me and the creepy alligators. Don’t ask me why I didn’t get that last mile in, driving around
the block a few times or getting a tiny bit lost once. I didn’t though, and there you have it. Four thousand sounds like a
lot more than 3,999 does; I feel sort of embarrassed for myself.

My window is broken, the crank fell off in Tallahassee on the way down. In order to roll it up or down I have to put the crank
back on and turn it slowly and carefully, using one hand to push up the glass. So, mostly I leave it down. I baked like a
biscuit yesterday, my left arm is so brown it looks like a branch. Today I’m wearing a long-sleeved white shirt to protect
myself. I compromised on wearing long sleeves by going naked underneath it. It’s actually cooler this way, compared to yesterday
when I drove in my swimming suit top with my hair stuck up like a fountain on top of my head. Plus, I’m having a nervous breakdown.
I’ve got that wild-eyed look.

A little four-lane blacktop running through the Alabama countryside, that’s what I’m on. It’s pretty, too, better than Florida,
which was billboards and condos built on old dump sites. This is like driving between rolling emerald carpets. You can’t see
the two lanes going in the opposite direction because there’s a screen of trees. I’m starting to get in a good mood again.
The best was Georgia, coming down. Willow trees and red dirt and snakes stretched out alongside the road. I kept thinking,
That looks like a
rope
, and then it would be a huge snake. A few miles later I would think, That looks like a
snake
, and it would be some snarl of something dropped off a truck.

Little convenience store, stuck out in the middle of nothing, a stain on the carpet. I’m gassing it up, getting some coffee.
My white shirt is gaping open and I have nothing on underneath it, but who cares, I’ll never see these people again. What
do I care what Alabama thinks about me. This is a new and unusual attitude for me. I’m practicing being snotty, in anticipation
of being dumped by my husband when I get back to Iowa.

I swagger from the gas pump to the store, I don’t even care if my boobs are roaming around inside my shirt, if my hair is
a freaky snarl, if I look defiant and uppity. There’s nothing to be embarrassed of. I bring my coffee cup along and fill it
at the counter. Various men, oldish and grungy, sit at tables eating eggs with wadded-up toast. They stare at me carefully
while they chew. I ignore them and pay the woman at the counter. She’s smoking a cigarette so I envy her.

“Great day, huh?” I ask her. She counts out my change.

“It is, honey,” she says. She reaches for her cigarette and takes a puff, blows it up above my head. “Wish I wudn’t in
here
.”

“Well, it’s getting hotter by the minute,” I tell her. I’ve adopted an accent in just four weeks, an intermittent drawl that
makes me think I’m not who everyone thinks I am.

“Y’all think this’s hot?” she says idly.
“This
ain’t hot.”

When I leave, the men are still staring at me in a sullen way. I get in, rearrange all my junk so I have everything handy
that I need, choose a Neil Young tape and pop it in the deck, fasten the belt, and then move back out on the highway. Back
to the emerald carpet and the road home. Iowa is creeping toward me like a panther.

All I do is sing when I drive. Sing and drink: coffee, Coke, water, juice, coffee. And think. I sing and drink and think.
On the way down I would sing, drink, think, and weep uncontrollably, but I’m past that now. Now I suffer bouts of free-floating
hostility, which is much better. I plan to use it when I get home.

A car swings up alongside me so I pause in my singing until it goes past. People who sing in their cars always cheer me up,
but I’d rather not be caught doing it. On the road, we’re all singing, picking our noses, embarrassing ourselves wildly; it
gets tiresome. I pause and hum, but the car sticks alongside me so I glance over. It’s a guy. He grins and makes a lewd gesture
with his mouth. I don’t even want to say what it is, it’s that disgusting. Tongue darting in and out, quickly. A python testing
its food.

I hate this kind of thing. Who do they think they are, these men? I’ve had my fill of it. I give him the finger, slowly and
deliberately. He picked the wrong day to mess with me, I think to myself. I take a sip of coffee.

He’s still there.

I glance over briefly and he’s making the gesture with his tongue again. I can’t believe this. He’s from the convenience store,
I realize. He has on a fishing hat with lures stuck in it. I saw him back there, but I can’t remember if he was sitting with
the other men or by himself. He’s big, overweight, and dirty, wearing a thin unbuttoned shirt and the terrible fishing hat.
His passenger-side window is down. He begins screaming at me.

He followed me from that convenience store. The road is endless, in front there is nothing, no cars, no anything, behind is
the same. Just road and grass and trees. The other two lanes are still invisible behind their screen of trees. I’m all alone
out here. With him. He’s screaming and screaming at me, reaching out his right arm like he’s throttling me. I speed up. He
speeds up, too, next to me. We’re only a few feet apart, my window won’t roll up.

He’s got slobber on his face and there’s no one in either direction. I slam on my brakes and for an instant he’s ahead of
me, I can breathe, then he slams on his brakes and we’re next to each other again. I can’t even repeat what he’s screaming
at me. He’s telling me, amid the hot wind and poor Neil Young, what he wants to do to me. He wants to kill me. He’s screaming
and screaming, I can’t look over.

I stare straight ahead through the windshield, hands at ten and two. The front end of his car is moving into my lane. He’s
saying he’ll cut me with a knife, how he’ll do it, all that. I can’t listen. The front end of his Impala is about four inches
from my white Mazda, my little car. This is really my husband’s car, my beloved’s. My Volkswagen died a lingering death a
few months ago. There is no husband, there is no Volkswagen, there is nothing. There isn’t even a Jo Ann right now. Whatever
I am is sitting here clenched, hands on the wheel, I’ve stopped being her,
now I’m something else. I’m absolutely terrified. He won’t stop screaming it, over and over, what he’s going to do.

I refuse to give him an inch. I will not move one inch over. If I do he’ll have me off the road in an instant. I will not
move. I speed up, he speeds up, I slow down, he slows down, I can see him out of the corner of my eye, driving with one hand,
reaching like he’s grabbing me with the other. “You whore,” he screams at me. “I’ll
kill
you, I’ll
kill
you, I’ll
kill
you…”

He’ll kill me.

If I give him an inch, he’ll shove me off the road and get his hands on me, then the end will begin in some unimaginable,
unspeakable style that will be all his. I’ll be an actor in his drama. We’re going too fast, I’ve got the pedal pressed up
to 80 and it’s wobbling, his old Impala can probably go 140 on a straightaway like this. There will be blood, he won’t want
me to die quickly.

I will not lose control, I will ride it out, I cannot let him push me over onto the gravel. His car noses less than two inches
from mine; I’m getting rattled. My God, he can almost reach me through his window, he’s moved over in his seat, driving just
with the left hand, the right is grabbing the hot air. I move over to the edge of my seat, toward the center of the car, carefully,
without swerving.

In the rearview mirror a speck appears. Don’t look, watch your front end. I glance up again; it’s a truck. He can’t get me.
It’s a trucker. Without looking at him I jerk my thumb backward to show him. He screams and screams and screams. He’s not
leaving. Suddenly a road appears on the right, a dirty and rutted thing leading off into the trees. He hits the brakes, drops
behind, and takes it. In my rearview mirror I see that the license plate on the front of his car is buried in dried mud. That
road is where he was hoping to push me. He wanted to push my car off the highway and get me on that road. He was hoping
to kill me. He was hoping to do what maniacs, furious men, do to women alongside roads, in woods. I can’t stop pressing too
hard on the gas pedal. I’m at 85 now, and my leg is shaking uncontrollably, coffee is spilled all over the passenger seat,
the atlas is wet, Neil Young is still howling on the tape deck. By force of will, I slow down to 65, eject the tape, and wait
for the truck to overtake me. When it does, when it comes up alongside me, I don’t look over at all, I keep my eyes straight
ahead. As it moves in front of me I speed up enough to stay two car lengths behind it. It says
England
on the back, ornate red letters outlined in black. England.

That guy chased me on purpose, he
hated
me, with more passion than anyone has ever felt for me. Ever. Out there are all those decomposing bodies, all those disappeared
daughters, discovered by joggers and hunters, their bodies long abandoned, the memory of final desperate moments lingering
on the leaves, the trees, the mindless stumps and mushrooms. Images taped to tollbooth windows, faces pressed into the dirt
alongside a path somewhere.

I want out of Alabama, I want to be in England. The air is still a blast furnace. I want to roll my window up, but I’d have
to stop and get the crank out and lift it by hand. I’m too scared. He’s out there still, waiting behind the screen of trees.
I have to follow England until I’m out of Alabama. Green car, old Impala, unreadable license plate, lots of rust. Seat covers
made out of that spongy stuff, something standing on the dashboard, a coffee cup or a sad Jesus. The fishing hat with a sweat
ring around it right above the brim. Lures with feathers and barbs. I’ve never been so close to so much hatred in my whole
life.
He wanted to kill me
. Think of England, with its white cows and broken-toothed farmers and dark green pastures. Think of the Beatles. I’m hugging
the truck so closely now I’m almost under it. Me, of all people, he wanted to kill. Me.
Everywhere I go I’m finding out new things about myself. Each way I turn, there it is. It’s Jo Ann he wanted to kill.

By noon I want to kill him. I took a right somewhere and got onto the interstate, had the nerve to pee in a rest area, adrenaline
running like an engine inside me, my keys threaded through my fingers in case anyone tried anything. I didn’t do anything
to earn it, I realize. His anger. I didn’t do anything. Unless you count giving him the finger, which I don’t.
He
earned that.

As it turned out, my husband couldn’t bring himself to leave me when I got back to Iowa, so I waited awhile, and watched,
then disentangled myself. History: We each got ten photo albums and six trays of slides. We took a lot of pictures in thirteen
years. In the early years he looks stoned and contented, distant; in the later years he looks straight and slightly worried.
In that last year he only appears by chance, near the edges, a blur of suffering, almost out of frame.

Just before we split, when we were driving somewhere, I told him about the guy in the green car. “Wow,” he said. Then he turned
up the radio, checked his image in the rearview mirror, and smiled sincerely at the passing landscape.

W
e adore Dave Anderson. He plays
basketball in his driveway for hours each day, dribble, fake-out, shoot, dribble some more. He has smooth brown hair cut
straight across his forehead, like the Dave Clark Five Dave. We watch him until we’re so bored we’re falling asleep, then
we call him up. It’s like a commercial during a TV show. His mom hollers at him, he sets the ball down, steadies it with his
foot, opens the screen door, and gives it a kick back against the house so it shuts with a flat slam. The last thing we see
is tennis-shoe rubber. We always hang up after he says hello, and then a minute later he’s back out, drinking a bottle of
Pepsi that he holds by the neck, walking around the court, dribbling in slow motion. He has no idea it’s us.