The road was just an ordinary thing. Made of black asphalt
with dashes of yellow running the length of it and dividing it in half. The hot
sun baked down on me and I sweat. I sweat and damp patches clung to the
underarms and the back of my shirt. The sweat dripped from my hair and my eye
brows and ran down my cheeks and my chin. As I walked along this ordinary road,
the sun baked down on the asphalt too, and that was some consolation. Not that
the road deserved to suffer, but the sweat and heat were irritating and I
needed someone or something to share my burden.
Every ten minutes or so a car would speed past. Most were
headed the way I’d come, but every so often a car would rush past me headed to
where I was going. When they did, I’d turn towards the car and stick my thumb
out, hoping beyond hope that someone would pull off and let me ride. But car
after car would only blast past, sometimes sounding their horns to warn me out
of the way. A heavy-set man in a silver Buick, a cigarette sticking from his
puffy lips. A blond girl in a red Honda, the music so loud I could hear the
beats as she flew past. A boy in a Mustang convertible, giving me the finger;
that dirty, dirty finger. I showed him mine too, but I doubt he noticed at all.
Each passed me, rushing on to their destinations. Whether they were too nervous
to let me in, or just didn’t care, I’d never know. It was unnerving to realize
the few people who happened to share the road with me, who happened to be
headed the same way, cared so little for just another guy living in the same
crazy world they lived in too.
I had wanderlust. You might know the feeling, the one where
you just have to get away from everything you know because you feel you’ll
burst if you don’t. And you finally get away, and you realize this is all you
wanted all along, even if you’ll have to face reality and let it all come to an
end and live the life society has planned out for you. That summer I’d decided
to pack a bag as full as I could, put on a new pair of denims and a tee-shirt,
and meet the unknown on my own two feet.
So there I was, walking a road I’d never known, being blown
aside by cars rushing past to fill in the pieces of their drivers’ busy lives.
And the sun was baking me like a cookie on a cooking tray. I thought about how
those cars were like portable worlds with their own environments so different
from that outside the metal and rubber and glass. Inside of them it was safe
and cool, but outside was cruel and hellish. They were bubbles of comfort
floating in a den of pins and needles.
A black truck appeared on the horizon behind me and I turned
and my thumb jerked out pleading, begging for the driver to slow and let me
ride. The truck didn’t only slow, it stopped. The driver, a woman with sun
glasses and a straw cowboy hat, looked nervously behind her before gesturing for
me to come towards her car. The heat made her offer impossible to resist and I
hurried to the passenger side of the car as she unlocked the door. As the door
swung out, smells from the interior wafted to my nose and I climbed into the
open seat. The truck, a Toyota Four-Runner, smelled like cigarettes and sweat
and alfalfa-hay. She let off the clutch and brought the truck up to speed. A
cassette player in the console played decade-old Bob Dylan songs and a rubber
chicken swung from the rearview mirror. A paperback novel lay on the floor of
the truck, the cover crumpled and bent. A Bradbury book.
“Hi,” I said, trying to break the ice and sounding nervous
all at the same time.
She looked at me and smiled, my face reflecting in her
sunglasses. “Hi,” she said too. “Sorry, this thing’s a piece of crap! The A-C
doesn’t work in half the vents and a couple of the windows are stuck.” Then she
shrugged and grinned. “But it runs, you know?”
I smiled and nodded. “Yeah,” was all I could manage to say
in reply.
We rode in silence for a couple seconds, each one feeling
like an awkward minute, until she spoke again. “So, where you headed?” Her face
was thin and splotched consistently from daily sun exposure. Her
blondish-brownish hair tumbled from the straw hat and disappeared between her
back and the backrest to her seat in the car.
“Nearest town. It doesn’t really matter. I just needed to
get off my feet and out of that heat.” I wiped a hand across my sweaty brow and
ran it down my jeans. “Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it.”
“So you’re running, huh?”
“No, not running. Kind of just wandering, you know? Seeing
what I can before the opportunity’s gone.”
“I’ve been there,” she said as if she were talking past me
and looking through me. The music from the stereo played on, a soundtrack to
the sudden silence.
“I hope you don’t
mind,” she said, sticking a cigarette between her lips and flicking a lighter
two, three times. The flame caught and licked at the end of the cigarette. She
blew a trail of smoke out the window and turned to smile at me again. “I
assumed you don’t want one, unhealthy habit you know.”
I grinned and shook my head. She was funny. “So, you
traveled a bit?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she replied, pulling on the cigarette. “You could
say that. Same as you too, just thumbing rides when I could. There’s a lot to
see out there, and you kind of just have to get up and see it.”
I nodded. “Did you have a favorite place you visited?”
“Oh, all of Europe is so pretty, you know. It’d be
impossible for me to choose just one place!” She said, smiling and placing a
hand over her heart. “Some places here in the states are breathtaking too.”
“You saw Europe!” I exclaimed, my interest aroused. I’d
expected her to have seen a bit of the US, but she hardly looked like a world
traveler.
She nodded while her eyes remained ahead of her, on the
road, on the distance; I couldn’t tell. “I loved every bit of it. I’m going
back. I just am. I was cursed with a wanderlust feeling, and I just have to
keep moving if I want to be happy. There are other places I need to visit too.
And I will. Anyway, what about you? Is this your first time out and about?”
“Yeah,” I replied, feeling a little overshadowed. “I’d so
love to travel to other countries, but for now I’m just taking it easy.”
“You want to do something, you just have to do it, man.
That’s how the world works. The earth spins on madly, never stopping. It never
stopped for me, and it sure won’t stop for you. And all the while as it spins
so endlessly, you just have to follow your dreams. Sometimes someday just has
to be today.
I smiled as she said it, like it was true and she was
reading what had been written on my heart. But I smiled and looked at her, and
looked out the window and denied it.
“It’s not like that,” I said, laughing.
She looked at me, still smiling, and nodded. “Sure,” She
said, blowing another puff of cigarette smoke from the car. “You can’t try to
do things; you simply must do them. Ray Bradbury said that.”
“Bradbury? The author?” I asked, pointing to the crinkled
paperback on the floor.
“Yeah.” She nodded. He also said ‘Stuff your eyes with
wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more
fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.’
I stared out the window; watching the vast, dry, sunburnt
ground swoosh past to be left far behind. I thought about what she said. What
the author Bradbury had said. I decided they were both right. I needed to make
things happen if I wanted them.
“Well,” she said, “We’re here. The nearest town. It’s a
small, trashy little place. Quite frankly, it’s a dump. But there’s a bus-stop
here, and busses pass through all the time. You should be able to take a ride
just about anywhere.”
The Toyota pulled past small, discolored, mismatched
buildings. She drove the truck up to a gas station and parked beside one of the
pumps.
I opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement. She
hopped out as well and walked over to the pump. I turned to her and stuck out a
hand. “Thanks again for stopping.” I said. “I’m Ben, by the way.”
“Candace.” She replied. “No trouble, it’s my pleasure.”
“Thanks all the same. I really appreciate it.” I said before
I turned and headed towards the gas-station. I asked the guy at the counter if
I could use their restroom and he pointed me towards a grimy room with a sink
and a toilet. I dropped my backpack in a relatively clean spot beside the sink
and relieved myself. When I washed my hands, I caught my own eyes in the mirror
and they looked at me, so hungry for adventure, and so resolute for once. It
was like they weren’t my own eyes after all. But they were.
I grabbed my bag and hurried back out to the pump, but
Candace and the black Toyota were gone. In that moment, I wondered if I’d only
imagined the whole thing. Like a desert mirage, or the hallucinations of a
fatigued mind. A bus pulled into the small town; stopping beside a long bench.
The doors swung open and passengers piled out before the few people waiting
climbed on. The bus continued to idle as I watched. Then I heard someone
calling, so I turned. It was the guy from the gas station.
“Dude. She came in while you were in the john.” He said,
holding out something towards me. “She left this for you, though. Told me to
make sure you got it.”
I took what he was holding out to me. It was the crumpled
Bradbury paperback. I turned it over in my hands and found it was solid and
real. I turned back the crinkled front cover and found writing scrawled in the
inside flap. It read: Hope you follow you
dreams. Make “someday” today.
I looked up from the book. The gas-station guy had walked
back to his counter. The passengers from the bus had all dispersed. I shoved
the book into my back pocket and sprinted for the bus; arriving just as the
doors closed and the driver revved the engine. I rapped my knuckles on the door
and caught the driver’s attention just as he was about to pull off. He rolled
his eyes at me and scowled before throwing the lever and opening the door. I
paid my fare and took my seat; pulling off my backpack.
As I settled into my seat, I peered out the tall window to
my left. Thinking, dreaming about what the road before me held. Because that’s
where I was headed. Candace had helped me make up my mind. Candace, in her
black Four-Runner with its windows stuck and the vents that wouldn’t blow air.
And her paperback of Bradbury; now my paperback of Bradbury. The both of them
had ganged up on me, outnumbering and overpowering me. And now I knew that
long, long road ahead of me would only be the beginning.
(Written in response to prompt “Road”)
