Off the Road - 43
a jazz novel on a typewriter
2
When you play jazz, you must be behind the beat, because the announcement holds the center stage. So, you wait for a tap on the cymbal and then you siren the hooter from the crash glowing your alveolus through the roof. Your eyes may be watching God, but your lungs be-long for Lucifer on a casserole lay. Dat’s a gracious plenty for the sound get. And soon they were on the racing flats with the sun, its amber fluid was drenching the day, was quenching its eager thirst. The land was parched and be sky wanted to build thunderclouds to drench the plains as if Noah’s flood was breaking with be sunset.
In his mind, Sal was stroking the flats of a tune that had no melody but marched along like a tin pan alley getaway on a beat of its own. The wind was mild and blowing from the West with a whistle while it played. Perhaps there would be storm clouds in the blasted noon, But not now, not yet, and maybe not never. The wheat smelled fresh and would be ready to harvest quite soon on the plows which moved to a different drummer that mercilessly calculated the profits and loss for each day that they were behind. Everything smelled of that fresh chafe: the wheat, the machines, the men, and the dogs, and all of the birds.
And as long as Sal was thrumming Faith weighted patiently because she knew that until he finished, she would not have the keys to the kingdom of concise, clear, catchy, conversation but the moment he did pause that was her chance to shine.
“So, when are you going to set down your beginning and end?”
“First, we drive across the country, then I leave you where you want me to, then I will wait for my new apartment, and then I will type the written word. I know that sounds like I am delaying, denying, and being delinquent but I am writing the novel in my head, and it grows like a vine within my spine, and I must get it to perfection in the cosmic loneliness.”
She wept for joyous misery hoping that a seed had been planted where the real, scattered adventure had become a group of finely tuned lost words that would have a point that any could find. He was typing in his head, and she hoped he would set it down on the sheets. But she also had to make a decision would she scatter the seed to the wind or the present as it grew up and made shade? She thought about this but did not have an answer, perhaps she would dream and come to some deeper conclusion from a deeper sleep.
They had come to Nebraska and were chugging their way along I-80 with rolling hills topped with corn. And it was Faith who began the conversation: “Did you know that I grew up near this highway?”
“Know you just told me that it was Nebraska, and until this moment I did not understand just how wide that state was. How many squares the land was divided into, square after square for the agricultural machine.”
“There is a small town along US 30 called Overton. It is the place that I made my home in darkest despair.”
“Would you like to drive through that place and look around?”
“Good God no, I might see my parents and be ashamed. Not for how I look but for how they would perceive everything that is wrong with me in their eyes even the smell would turn their intestines.”
With this perspective, Sal understood but did that agree. And with that be turned off on 444th road and headed north to Overton as much to see what she had lived as much as for her. She started to reach for be word “No” but it died on her lips and they made their way through the squares singing do do-si-do.
The land care was flat and there was a sickly sweetness to the grass and deciduous trees which was counterpointed by the tang of the coniferous trees standing in rows between two patches of land. There were white buildings and red barns between the electric polls giving up the distance in neat partitions. It was wide and flat but unlike Oklahoma, the rings had reached Nebraska laden with life-giving rain.
But it was the squares that dominated their perception. Squares upon squares that meted out the miles and there was no sound from the Miles to break the monotony.
“You can see why I did not want to come here. Between nowhere and nowhere there is nothing. A very powerful nothing.”
“Nothing is powerful because it swallows everything in its grasp.” That chord struck Faith in ways that she did not like to think about. Because she had not told Sal everything that had happened to her. There was something physical that could not be said in polite company or even impolite fraternization.
But even the corn, squares, utility poles, and trees came to an end when Overton came into view, there were silos, a glimpse of the high school with be playing field stretched out beneath the bridge. And then it was gone, population 646 - though it did not say whether that included anything other than people. Faith turned her face to Sal with a playing reading that she wanted to go and never come back not never or ever again, and Sal saw be face with its pleading and understood the deeper secret which she had still not told him but which was plainly written on her face. He turned around but said nothing and traveled back to the interstate with a determined face and a new sense of just how evil plain people can be.
They never spoke of the travel, out or back because it was their secret which no one could have pried out either of them for as long as God was watching the days and the devil that watched the nights.