Road Trip Read online

  4.

  “Can you see him?” Graces asks.

  “I can see as much as you can,” I reply, staring straight forward.

  “Not that direction. Behind us.”

  I look at Grace to find she’s facing the rear of the vehicle, looking through the rear windshield. How did I not notice that? I turn and face that direction. “I can still only see as much as you can, and no, I don’t see him.”

  She reduces her voice to a whisper. “Do you think he’s waiting outside Winnie?”

  “If he is, I don’t want to hang around to find out.”

  I turn back around and start the engine, at least try to. But it doesn’t start, just makes a sound like a giraffe choking on a large peanut.

  “Are you jimmying the key as you start it?” Grace asks.

  Like a lot of vehicles that have survived four presidents, its mechanics have developed quirks. Winnie’s quirk, as well as its windshield wipers only working if the taillights are turned on, is that you have to turn the ignition in a rapid back-and-forth motion, starting anticlockwise, to get her started.

  “I’m jimmying it, like every other time I’ve started it,” I say, getting a little frustrated. I knew we should’ve taken a rental instead.

  “Did you start clockwise?”

  “I thought it was anticlockwise?”

  “Nope. The other way. Wait thirteen seconds and then try again.”

  So that’s it, then. I wait that very specific length of time, and then start jimmying it again as I pump the gas pedal, but starting with clockwise, this time. There’s at least a little progress. Our giraffe’s managed to cough up the peanut, but the prognosis still doesn’t sound good for our long-necked friend.

  “Maybe it’s just overheated?” Grace asks.

  “While it was parked? Unlikely.”

  “Get out so I can get in the driver’s seat and try.”

  “And you’ll be able to, what, jimmy it better than I can?”

  “Now’s not the time for an argument, Jake. Besides, Winnie just needs a female touch from time to time.”

  I resist telling her I’ll remind her of that the next time she asks me to change the spark plug, and say instead, “That’ll mean having to get out and potentially being confronted by the lunatic hitchhiker.”

  “Good point. I’ll climb over you.”

  We coordinate my moving out of the driver’s seat into the shotgun seat, and vice versa for Grace, simultaneously. When she’s seated, Grace closes her eyes, clasps her hands together, and tips her head slightly forward. She remains in this position for ten seconds or so. She’s silent the whole time. And then I say, “Uh, honey? What are you doing?”

  She shushes me.

  Another ten seconds later she’s finished with whatever she was doing.

  She says, “You should never interrupt someone when they’re praying.”

  “You were praying? For what?”

  “To ask God or whoever for the car to start and for us to get out of this situation with all our limbs still attached.”

  “And that took a full twenty seconds?”

  “I said it the regular ten times, silly dummy. Everyone knows you’ve got to the say it ten times.”

  “I’ve never heard that. And I’m pretty sure that thing you said about everyone knows you shouldn’t interrupt someone when they’re praying is about sleep walking. You shouldn’t interrupt, or wake, someone when they’re sleep walking.”

  Grace gets a little frustrated herself. “Can I please just try to start Winnie before the prayer’s effect wears off?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Holding her breath, Grace tries to start Winnie Pooh, putting extra effort, I notice, into her jimmying.

  Still the same noise.

  We sit in silence a second, me knowing full well what’s coming next.

  Grace says, “You’re going to have to go out there and take a look under the hood.”

  I sigh. “Go ahead and pop it, then.”

  She does.

  Before I go out there, I say, “Do you want to make a video of me so that our unborn child will be able to hear what my voice sounded like and what I looked like, before, you know, I was killed by a lunatic wearing a fanny pack?”

  She frowns. “I think she’d like that, but I think my camera’s on the fritz.”

  Hold on a second. I was just busting her balls. What the…?

  I glance at the broken Sat Nav display bracket attached to the dashboard, and then put two and two together.

  I then take a deep breath, thinking about all those times I was unable to act surprised and appreciative when I received shitty Christmas presents. I think to myself, Don’t act like that, Jake, when she confirms what she’s just implied. Wait a minute, who else would I have thought it to? Never mind. There’s a more pressing matter.

  So I ask, “She?”

  “Yeah. Oh, sorry, did you not want to know the sex?”

  “Back up a moment, I was just being…” My voice trails off, in part because I feel lightheaded and because, yeah, she’s fucking with me. She’s looking at me like that time she walked in on me ironing the Y-fronts I would wear that day; I was only wearing socks.

  “Well played, Mrs. Hancock,” I say. I go to high-five her, because credit where credit’s due, but she leaves me hanging.

  “Glad to know where you stand on the whole us-having-kids situation.”

  “Is this still…?”

  “Yeah, I’m still getting you.”

  We high-five and kiss each other smack on the lips at the same time. Jeez, we’re a nerdy married couple.

  But Grace isn’t finished there.

  She puts on a Jane voice, of Jane and Tarzan, and says, “Now Tarzan fix car.”

  “I’m not sure J and T had a car, and that speech pattern, and the bad grammar, that’s totally Tar—”

  “Stop procrastinating.”

  She’s right. It’ll start getting dark in an hour or so.

  I get out of the car, look around, and don’t see any sign of our hitchhiker. Weird.

  I look underneath Winnie, feeling like an idiot, and don’t see him there, either. On one side of the car is a field full of some crop with yellow blooms, on the other, a field full of what can only be described as the random and wild type of foliage you’d find in the garden of the crazy old guy that lived on your street when you were a kid.

  The only guy on the street no one went trick ‘r treating to.

  I guess he could be hiding in the field. Not the most relaxing thought, admittedly.

  Braylon or whatever his name is, not Mr. Jenkins.

  As I walk around to the front of the vehicle, I contemplate the age-old question of why it’s impossible to go on a road trip with your new wife without coming across some psycho you expect to feel obligated to punch in the face.

  When there, I lift up the hood and stare at it for ten or so seconds.

  Grace leans out of the driver’s-side window and asks, with a little too much optimism in her voice, “Well?”

  “Yep, that’s an engine, all right.”

  “Does it look like there’s anything wrong with it?”

  “How would I be able to tell?”

  “Maybe there’s smoke coming off it or something?”

  “No smoke. What did you mean by ‘or something’?”

  “I just threw it in there, like miscellaneous problems or what not.”

  “Everything seems to be in the right place, as far as I can tell.”

  “Try jiggling some of the wires. Maybe one’s come loose.”

  How many wires can I see? More than you’d find in your average movie-prop bomb. But despite the bad odds, I get to jiggling. Look at me, I look just like a bona fide mechanic. If this doesn’t get Grace hot and ready for the love nest motel we’ll likely never reach, I don’t what will.

  After I’ve hit about half of them, I say, “Try it again.”

  She does, and what do you know—bingo!—it starts.
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br />   This being a husband thing is way easier than I remembered.

  I run back around to the passenger’s side, a big grin on my face.

  But before I get in, Grace says, “Uh, Jake, you forgot to close the hood.”

  “Silly me.”

  With the vehicle as good as, well, when George W. was in office, and with the hood back in place, it’s time to get going.

  But Grace has a question before she puts pedal to the metal, “Which wire was it, so we can screw it tight the next opportunity we get?”

  “No idea. I just wiggled a bunch of them.” She looks pissed. So I say, “What? The mechanic or whoever will be able to work out which one’s the loose one.”

  “I suppose. Did you see him out there?”

  “Who? The mechanic who hasn’t ripped us off yet?”

  “No, the hitchhiker.”

  I shake my head. “He’s long gone.”

  “To where?”

  “Beats me.”

  “He can’t have just disappeared. Think about it.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t see him.”

  “So where did he go?”

  “I don’t know.” And then I think of what I thought while I was out there—saving our asses. “He could be in that field over there, hiding among the—”

  “Rapeseed blossom?”

  So that’s what it is.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does that sound likely to you?”

  “No, but I thought we could get the hell out of here and think about that over a drink or two, safe and sound in our motel room. Let’s get going. I could eat a horse.”

  “Maybe you should drive.”

  “Why not.”

  We do that thing again, where Grace climbs over me while I climb under her, swapping seats.

  After I’ve wiggled my butt into a comfortable position in the driver’s seat, I start to press down the gas pedal as I say, “Hey, check this out,” and attempt a racing start, like I’m in a stock car.

  The wheels skid for a second or two—wow, I had no idea Winnie Pooh was capable of this—and then they gain traction.

  At the point of acceleration, two things happen: Grace punches me on the arm, for my tomfoolery, and we hear two distinct thuds on the roof of Winnie, before we hear a less-distinct thud on the road behind us, like that of a large mass landing on the unforgiving asphalt.

  5.

  We skid to a stop. Jesus, what the hell was that?

  Grace and I sit there momentarily, frozen, and then look at each other. Coming to the same conclusion. I ask, “How did a bit of road kill get on the roof?”

  Or at least I thought we came to the same conclusion, as Grace says, “Jake, I don’t think that was road kill.”

  “Shit. Do you mean?”

  She nods. Then says, “Turn around and look.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Just do it.”

  I take a deep breath and then slowly turn around. I stare at the road behind us for around five seconds. And then turn back around.

  Silence a second.

  Then Grace says, “Is it?”

  “Yep. It’s Braylon, the hitchhiker.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Unless the deer in this area of the country wear fanny packs, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Was he moving?”

  “Don’t worry. He was lying completely still.”

  “Jake!”

  “What?”

  “Why’s it a good thing that he’s not moving?”

  “As opposed to running towards us in a murderous rage because we… Have we technically run him over? Anyway, I’d say it’s a good thing.”

  “That’s a human being out there. We should go out and check if he’s all right.”

  “Be my guest,” I say, indicating the passenger-side door with an open palm.

  She doesn’t move.

  “See,” I say, “totally a good thing he’s lying probably momentarily unconscious, giving us time to think.”

  “Not that. Someone should go out there to check on him.”

  “And that person has to be me?”

  “You’re the one who…”

  “Who what? Started driving, not even thinking it was a possibility that lunatic was hiding on our roof?”

  “You’re the one who accelerated like that.”

  “Again, I did that while assuming I wasn’t going to dislodge the lunatic hiding up there.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it in the first place, whether you thought someone was up there or not.”

  “Or not, is what it was.”

  “Huh?”

  “Okay, I can see why that was confusing. I definitely thought no one was up there.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Let’s just stop arguing.” I think a second. “The way I see it, we have three options. We can go out there, check on him, and then phone an ambulance or whatever.”

  She frowns. “What are the other two options?”

  “We can drive away and anonymously phone an ambulance, say that we saw a guy lying in the middle of the road, injured.”

  “I don’t see that as an option. And wait, what’s the third option?”

  I glance at the rearview mirror. Then say, “We can sit here arguing, until he gets up and starts wandering towards the car, zombie-like.”

  6.

  My third option wasn’t that. I was going to suggest we just drive away and let him lie there in the middle of the road, for the next driver to come along and find. Guy wouldn’t have deserved it, but I have neither faith in myself nor Grace to pull off the anonymous call without A) identifying who we are, B) incriminating us, or 3) sounding ridiculous.

  Wait a minute, since when does “3)” come after “B)”?

  Anyway, the reasons I think either one of us would mess it up are, Grace is too honest, and I, well, I’m not good on the telephone in high-stress situations. This one time, while leaving an answering machine message to my friend to tell her our mutual friend had died, I signed off by describing my legs as looking like two pythons raping each other.

  Sure, I got cut off, and had intended on saying a variation of goodbye before hanging up, but the fact that it snuck in there, whether mid-message or not, is a savage enough indictment of my telephone skills.

  I would’ve been in favor of the third option, acknowledging it would’ve been difficult to convince Mrs. Mary Mother Hancock sitting beside me it was the smart thing to do. But as soon as I saw him in the corner of my vision, rising from the asphalt like a fanny pack-wearing member of the undead, then seemed like a good enough time to inform Grace of the change in circumstances.

  Granted, it’s not the clearest form of communication for such a vital bit of information, confirmed somewhat by what Grace says next: “Jake, have you lost your freakin’ mind?”

  “I have not. There he is, attempting to limp towards us.” I point at the rearview mirror.

  Upon seeing him, Grace does an impression of a chipmunk in a vacuum—the space kind, not the home appliance.

  I say, “Should I still go out there and check his pulse?”

  She ignores my quip, as she’s distracted by the sight in our rearview. Then says, “Does he look okay?”

  “Okay would be a stretch.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I’d say the third option is favorable.”

  “What, staying here and arguing?”

  That’s right. I haven’t told her yet.

  “I was going to say, our third option, before I noticed our friend’s new likely prognosis, that we should get the hell out of Dodge and let the next driver find him lying in the middle of the road.”

  “Explain to me how that’s still an option.”

  “Then allow me to amend it: We could get the hell out of Dodge and let the next driver find him barely able to walk as he craves the taste of our blood on his lips.”

  Grace thinks about that for a second, battling
those iron-clad morals of hers, until Braylon starts running towards us, as best he can, saying he’s going to make us pay.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  “Let’s.”

  That stock car racing start? This time it doesn’t earn me a punch in the arm.

  7.

  We make it a couple miles before Grace starts getting cold feet.

  “Do you think we’ve made the right decision?”

  “Look down at your chest, Grace.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  She does.

  Then I say, “Your heart, it’s in there, still beating?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then there’s your answer.”

  “But he looked really hurt.”

  It’s true. By my count, which is usually accurate below around twenty, he’d made it seven and a half steps before I put my foot on the gas, which he’d achieved in around two minutes.

  I’m no medical doctor, but I’d say he had to have at least one broken leg, and the way his left arm was hanging from his shoulder indicated he’d be lucky if he got away with having to rehab a niggling rotator cuff injury with three sessions of hot yoga every week.

  “He did,” I confirm.

  “Then maybe the right thing to do was to restrain him long enough for an ambulance to arrive?”

  “In my experience, wife dear, which is plenty, a good rule of thumb is if you have to likely wrestle someone to the ground to make it safe to wait with that person until an ambulance arrives, then you shouldn’t be waiting for the ambulance with that person.”

  “I suppose, but we’ve just committed a hit and run, a felony. Not exactly the way I expected us to start our marriage.”

  “Would we say hit and run? It was more like drive, have the person roll off the roof of our vehicle—which some might say is a natural consequence in that situation—and then run when we noticed he wasn’t too pleased about it.”

  “Still seems like a felony.”

  She’s still pensive. How do I know? She goes to bite the nails she had manicured and painted for our Vegas wedding. Just in case you’re interested, she’s got what are supposed to be hearts painted on them.

  I stop her by saying, “Honey, I don’t think that Chinese nail salon uses food-grade nail paint.”