In the bed of the truck eighty gallons of gasoline slosh in faded red plastic containers. Roger has his right arm around my shoulder. He’s lightly holding the steering wheel with thumb and forefinger of his left hand, his elbow hanging out the window. The afternoon sun on his reddened arm, short blonde hairs moving in the wind. My head rests on his shoulder and I can feel the vibration of the road through his body. We’re moving fast, flying over small cracks and potholes. There’s no reason to worry: Roger sees the larger obstacles—automobiles pitted near translucent by time, welded to the blacktop—well before we reach them.
Earlier in the day we were taking it slow. Descending from the hills whole chunks of the road were missing. On some stretches sand obscured it completely, but now that we’ve come into tableland there’s nothing but smooth miles and miles of pavement. Still, mountains loom blue and gray over the curve of the horizon. A hundred miles away? Two? I’ve never seen so much open space, so it’s hard to say. The road will be worse as we rise into the foothills. It’ll be split and fractured, unrepaired after cycles of freeze and thaw. And when night comes Roger will have more trouble navigating; only one of the truck’s lights is working. It’ll be cold.
But that’s hours, maybe days away—a lifetime from the warm winds of the desert plain, and then we’ll probably just stop where we are and camp out in the truck’s bed, wrapped in wool blankets and sleeping bags, everything smelling of gasoline. We’re not running from anybody or anything. We’ve got time to stop and rest. We’ve been driving since dawn, and I suppose stopping is something to look forward to.
But I’m not really thinking about that. I’m not long distracted from the ride. We’re going fast and I’m spellbound by the motion of the wind, how it picks up strands of my hair and sets them dancing before my eyes, how the heat waves rising from the road make it seem like we’re driving toward some lake or inland sea without ever reaching it. How I’m skipping school, and don’t give damn. Spewing stolen petrol gas into the sky, and Roger and I don’t care. Maybe there are wolves in the mountains —wolves and bears and cougars, bedtime creatures—and us without a gun or a knife or even a baseball bat. Maybe the truck will give out.
These are small concerns; I give them a passing glance, heartened to find how easily they fall away, and readjust my head against the comforting solidity of Roger’s shoulder.
My father, the mayor of Home, leaves the keys to town on his nightstand at night. Everyone knows everyone else, and what would be the purpose of stealing them? They’re mostly ceremonial, I guess.
Early this morning I tiptoed into my parents’ room and took them. I helped Roger steal the truck from the museum—that and the containers of gasoline from the sewage plant. Though the diagram explained what would happen, it still nearly scared us to death when the truck’s engine turned over. We thought it might explode; we knew it would wake everyone. But it didn’t, at least not until we roared down Main Street out of town. Staring behind us, I made out four or five windows lighting up in our wake: People I’d known my whole life, waking to the sound of escape. I imagine they’re confused, wondering where two kids would go. Maybe they know more about what’s out there, far beyond their front doors.
We want to find out for ourselves.
“Woo-hoo!” Roger yelled when he calmed down enough to talk and drive at the same time. “It’s nothing but the open road from here on. We’re gonna see the world, Sue! Everything there is.”
We don’t reach the mountains today. We stop in the middle of the road and watch the sun go down. The curved belly of the horizon is smooth, the path to it flat and treeless. I look forward to seeing something other than dirt and sand. The air is sharp in my nostrils, smelling now and then of something left frying on the stove until it’s cinders. All day I’ve found myself peering into the distance, half-expecting to see plumes of smoke, signs of settlement. Like something out of a book.
Roger and I start unloading the gasoline and water jugs. It’s getting colder.
“They’ve got enough fuel left, right?” I ask Roger. “To keep things moving?”
“Sure. They can just make more. Easiest thing in the world.”
I know this, of course. Gasoline powers the sewage sumps, but they rarely need to be turned on; by the end of the year there’s almost always a surplus of gas gone slightly bad. On New Year’s Eve we pour all of it into the river and light it on fire. The whole town gathers to watch the burning oilslick snake off into the night. I always wonder where it’ll go, how long it’ll burn. The next day we start the derrick pumping and begin the process of making more gasoline. Home rests above a seemingly inexhaustible lake of petroleum. It’s a small thing to outfit ourselves for the coming year.
Still, when I stop to think about it, I feel guilty about taking so much. Sleeping in Roger’s arms for the first time, with the wind so strong it sets the truck’s springs creaking, it’s all I can think about.
We reach the foothills around noon. After winding through a series of switchbacks the road straightens out along a high plateau perpendicular to the mountain range. Treeless. There’s no water and it’s as cold during the day as the lowland was at night. Thankfully the truck’s heater works, but it stinks up the car with the smell of seared motor oil. The road’s a mess, and we have to go slow.
It’s disappointing, of course; I imagined there would be pine trees—maybe even elk. We’ve got pictures of them in the museum, including maps of where they should live. Somebody marked where Home is on the map (someone always does), smack dab in the middle of a place somebody used to call Colorado. According to the map, there should be high concentrations of elk and deer in the area. There should be all sorts of animals. I imagine there should be all sorts of trees, too. There are always trees in the old pictures.
“Didn’t you think there’d be more?” I ask Roger.
“More what?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t you picture more everything?”
“I don’t know what I pictured.” He shrugs, eyes never leaving the road. “This must be the way it’s supposed to be.” He pats my leg.
He seems unconcerned, but I wonder how things can change so abruptly from one day to the next, from one part of the world to the next. I think of Home, with its orange groves and sparkling irrigation canals. It’s like the lip of Home’s Valley is a boundary line, and we crossed it willingly. I wonder if Roger realizes how close Home is to complete desolation, if he sees the same nothingness outside his window. Does he even wonder where all the trees went, or where all the birds are? Does he have the presence of mind to worry that, having crossed the boundary, we might not be able to cross back?
The sun passes behind the mountains. We park before an immense a mudslide that covers two-thirds of the road. It’s too dark to see how far it goes around a bend in the road, and Roger decides to wait until tomorrow to make our way around it. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and when I’m done I run my fingers through the ancient grey-black soil, finer than sand and paper dry. I wonder: If I dig down deep enough, will I find moist soil, something to support the seed of something that will spread its leaves and reproduce?
When I wake up, it’s still dark. My back’s sore from sleeping on ribbed steel. Roger’s still asleep. We’ve got our backs to each other, both of us curled up, knees to our chests. It’s colder than I could’ve imagined. Without trees and cloud cover, there’s nothing to hold in the heat. It’s bright, though; the moon’s out, near full just over the side of the truck, white as bleached cotton.
Something’s changed. I don’t know what I’ve been dreaming about. Probably my parents’ goose-feather mattress, comforters piled on me and my sisters. But I’ve got the feeling my mind’s been busy, working on something ever since I fell asleep. Maybe it’s been thinking that I’ve made a mistake—that I don’t know where I am. Roger and I’ve got no map. Didn’t think we’d need one. We left too eager, without considering where we’d go or what we’d find when we got there. It would be obvious, surely. It would be something to see.
But even if there is something, what will it look like? How’ll we know the proper place when we get there? How does a person recognize something he’s never seen?
There’s nothing to see out here.
Past the mudslide, the road straightens out and slopes ever upward. It’s hard to tell because the rise is so gradual. Staring forward, the horizon looks normal, but if I turn around and look out the back window the road seems to drop precipitously away from us. The whole world has become tilted. When Roger stops to refill the tank and check the oil, I get out to stretch my legs. For a moment I’m disoriented, taking in the scope of the plateau. My inner ear wants me to lean back, to make the world flat again. The wind blows from every direction.
“Sue?” Roger asks. He’s standing with the passenger door open, waiting for me. “Let’s get going. What’s wrong?”
I shake my head. I don’t relish the thought of returning to the car. It’s too close. I’m getting tired of the smell of engine oil. I smell my forearm; it smells like gasoline, like Roger. It would take a few warm baths to smell like myself again. My breath stinks; everything I eat has begun to taste like iron, like burnt dust.
“Didn’t you think there’d be more?” I ask.
Roger walks over and puts his arm around my shoulder, guides me back to the truck. Before starting the engine, he rests his forearms on the wheel and stares ahead. The tips of his fingernails are black, packed with engine grease.
“You seemed so happy the other day, Sue. What’s happened since then?”
I’ve kept track of the gasoline supply. We brought sixteen containers, and we’re down to nine. We’re getting close to a no-return situation. If we turn the car around after that point, perhaps we can just coast back down the plateau with the engine turned off—and still have enough to get back to Home. Maybe Roger will let me drive when he gets tired. We’ll be welcomed back, of course. Maybe someday I’ll tell my children about the trip. A cautionary tale.
When I was seven my mother told me a story. She took out the Bible and read from Genesis, where God pulls a rib from Adam to make Eve, or makes them both at the same time—I’ve never been sure about this point. She read about the Temptation, when Eve is seduced by the snake and eats the fruit. “From that point on, man was a sinful creature,” my mother told me. “And man doesn’t just mean males, like your brother and father. It means everybody. Never forget that everybody was punished for what Eve did—and Eve alone. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be responsible for that?”
I think about this in the cold dawn before our fourth day on the road. I wonder who’s responsible for bleaching the air so that it burns in my throat, for cooking the soil so that nothing will grow in it. Who carries that burden? In Home we all do chores; when the time comes around, everyone helps bring in the harvest. When a house needs repairing, everybody pitches in. Two summers ago, it didn’t rain for eighty-seven days. The river nearly dried up. It was the whole town that suffered, the whole town that survived.
For all the desolation beyond the bed of this truck, man still goes on in Home’s little valley.
And who’s responsible for that?
Not Roger and I. Not anymore.
We tip over the edge of the plateau mid-morning. The road drops in switchbacks to the valley floor half a mile below. There’s an ancient lookout area off the road, and we stop and get out to scope the land. Dust, kicked from the lip of the plateau, fills the air. I cannot see the valley’s walls extend, but at its bottom something glitters. We continue—slowly; the steep road’s a mess of cracks, potholes and rockslides—and whatever’s below moves in and out of view, gradually revealing a jumbled angularity, shining facets. We lose sight of our destination for a long time, and then we’re around the final bend.
Roger hits the brakes. Before us the road dips, disappearing into a mass of corroded cars, their numbers fading into the distance. The valley is filled with cars, rust-orange and bleached plastic-grey—slopes and depressions of cars, as if some massive hand dropped them in clumps. The sun is reflected in uncountable pieces of glass—broken windshields and rearview mirrors. Pools of it as fine as sand gathered in folds of crumpled, corroded metal.
The walls of rock to either side of us create a natural bottleneck.
Roger hasn’t said a word. The road’s run out.
Here’s where we’ll stop, I suppose, I want to say. There’s no getting the truck over this. This is something to see. Aren’t we glad we came, Roger? Instead, I say: “Roger, we’ve gotta go home.” I don’t tell him I’m worried sick over what we’ve left, that we’ve only got seven cans of gas left. I want to ask him where we’re going, if he thinks we made a wise choice.
He flexes the muscles of his jaw. He doesn’t look at me.
“Roger.”
He opens the door and steps out. I get out and stand before him, but he can see right over my head. He’s looking at the ocean of wrecked cars like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. As if he just stares long enough they’ll disappear and be replaced by a new Home—terraced rice paddies and green hills for sheep, a river running through the center of town; fish in the river. Anything but miles and miles of dead machinery. No sound but the settling of dust.
I grab ahold of his sleeve and tug. “I want to go home, Roger.”
“What’s Home?” he asks. His eyes are bloodshot, twitchy in their sockets. “What’s there?”
I pull him around to face away from the wrecking yard.
“Everything. Home. And we better get back to it in case it’s the only one left.”
I lead him back to the truck. He doesn’t fight me but he doesn’t help, either. It’s like moving a wheelbarrow with a jammed wheel, or a piece of heavy furniture.
He wanted to see the world just as much as I did.
The sun is a finger’s breadth above the mountaintop when we stop to empty the sixth container into the tank. Roger doesn’t leave the car. I try to meet his eyes in the driver’s side mirror, but they are fixed on a distant point down the road.
“We’re going to have to stop soon,” he tells me an hour later.
I wipe my sleeve against the windshield and peer ahead. “Let me drive.”
“It’ll be too dark.”
“I can see just fine.” It’s true. The road’s straight. The moon’s full tonight. Roger and I’ve known each other our whole lives: his eyes are as good as mine, but tonight I can see the road and he can’t. I want to go home. “I’m driving, Roger.”
“You don’t know how.”
“I’ve been watching you. It’s easy. It’ll be fine.”
And it is. Roger falls asleep. I turn off the engine and coast. The road seems to glow.
Roger snores. Maybe he’s dreaming of the place we set off to find.
It becomes stale in the cab, too close, and I roll the window down an inch. Air rushes in, bitter but welcome. The tires on the road sound like wheat berries being ground—like river rapids or cloth ripping. I imagine the pavement is paper and I’m tearing it to shreds as I pass. Behind us, the road disappears, lost to memory.
When we roll into Home, there’ll be no proof we ever left.
