Listen to Me (6 page)

“Did I wish you a nice day?” the man said. “My wife says I'm always wishing people nice days. She says I'm on autopilot half the time. Half the time, she says, I have no idea what I'm saying.”

A woman in the distance whistled.

The cowboy turned, gave a thumbs-up, then looked back at Maggie. “There she is now. Bet you anything I'm in hot water just for talking to you.” He tipped his hat again. “Nice day,” he said. Then he was gone.

Maggie didn't know what to say, only what not to say. She would
not
be telling Mark about this. He wouldn't have believed her.

Immediately beneath Maggie's moccasins was a freshly paved twelve-inch surface covering made of sand and rock glued together with man-made hydrocarbons, beneath which was a six-inch layer of recycled asphalt product, beneath which was an underlayment of gravel, beneath which—deep, deep, deep beneath—was the continental crust itself, igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. Some twenty miles beneath the crust was the lithosphere, beneath which was the asthenosphere, beneath which was the upper mantel, beneath which was the liquid outer core, beneath which was the solid inner core, where—on this particular day—the temperature was just shy of 10,800°F, as hot as the surface of the sun.

Some thirty-nine thousand miles above, Maggie shivered.

          The barista called his name. Mark turned to pick up the order only to find a large man in a Western-style hat standing between him and the counter. The man was gazing out the massive tinted window of the gas station in the direction of Maggie, who was now cleaning off the windshield with one of those convenience wipers they leave between pumps.

“You know the one about how to tell a wife from a girlfriend?” It was the man talking, though he wasn't looking at Mark. He was still looking out the window.

“Pardon me?” said Mark.

“It's a joke,” the man said. “The joke is that a girlfriend looks like she's just had a good fucking and—”

Mark coughed. “You have me confused with someone who's interested.” He stepped in front of the man and picked up the coffees.

The man stepped with him, resting an elbow on the counter so that Mark's immediate path to the exit was blocked.

“A wife,” the man said, nodding his hat in the direction of the window, “looks like she needs one.”

“You just said what to me?” Mark thought maybe the barista would intervene, but he was at the cash register at the other end of the counter, taking someone else's order.

“I'm fucking with you, Bucko.” The man laughed. “Just two guys joshing around. I like your wife. It's a compliment.”

This was the problem with gas stations, with rest stops in general. They were teeming with chance encounters between human beings who, under any other circumstance, would have no reason or opportunity to engage.

The question now was how to respond. Was there an action Mark could take that would be nobler than another? He wasn't sure, in this case, if Maggie needed defending. She wasn't present and hadn't heard and therefore couldn't be personally wounded. And yet to say nothing seemed potentially cowardly. He felt unsure of his role, his duty. Perhaps it was best in these instances—always best—simply to move on and away as quickly as possible, which was what he did, shoving past the man, a cup in either hand.

“Screw off,” Mark said.

Behind him, over the sound of the bell above the exit, which jingled now as he pushed his way out the door, he thought he heard the man laughing. He didn't turn around to check.

When Mark got back to the car, Gerome was in the backseat panting and Maggie was already in the driver's seat. She'd recapped the gas tank and returned the hose to the filling station. Now she was monkeying with the center vents, adjusting the air stream so that it was aimed squarely at the dog's face.

Mark put the coffees on the hood of the car and opened the door.

“What's wrong?” Maggie said.

He handed in the first coffee, and she put it in the cup holder.

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” she said.

Mark was sometimes startled by the way Maggie could read his face so quickly and effectively. It gave him the feeling that she was always aware of him, always aware of exactly where he was and what he was doing—whether she could see him or not.

He handed her the second coffee. “Nothing,” he said, “just ready to get where we're going.”

“Pit stops,” she said. “No one's favorite part of a road trip.” She secured the second cup firmly in its place. “Would-be cowboys are the worst.”

Mark followed Maggie's gaze. In the distance, next to a large pickup truck with an after-market pair of plastic testicles hanging from the bumper, a man was looking their way.

Together they watched as he placed a large-brimmed hat on his head and tipped it in their direction.

“What made you say that?” Mark asked.

“Say what?”

“About cowboys.”

Maggie chewed at her lower lip. She was deciding whether or not to say something. Abruptly, she shrugged. “No reason,” she said. She buckled her seat belt, then glanced up at the rearview mirror and adjusted it slightly. “Just that people don't seem to mind their business like they used to. You know?”

Out the window, just to the right of Maggie's profile, a minivan trying to exit the station honked at a sedan taking too long to turn. There was a second honk, then a third, then an extended uninterrupted fourth that received stares from all around.

Mark scanned the parking lot. The truck and its driver were gone. “I know,” he said. He reached over and knocked on the steering wheel. “Let's blow this joint.”

They pulled out into traffic. It was four-thirty. The sun was a magnificent orange.

Mark felt bad for not telling Maggie the truth about the stranger in the gas station and the crude joke that had been made at her expense. But, he reasoned, in many ways he was protecting her. He was sheltering her from the quiet horror that actually
did
exist in their world. This wasn't the stuff of her news articles or crime procedurals. This was worse because it was real, because it potentially affected
them.

Be more patient,
he told himself.
Be more patient.

          They crossed into Ohio just after five. It was light out still, but the nature of the sky had changed. The ceilings were lower than when they'd passed the turbines in Indiana. The trees along the highway pushed back against an unseen current, and the leaves showed green, then silver, then green again. The car's windows whistled like teakettles—high, plaintive, stiff. A few times Maggie drifted into the rumble strip because the wind was so strong. Gerome had whined each time, but Mark didn't say a thing. He'd been silent since their pit stop.

Out of nowhere, the GPS system—which they used primarily to count down the miles, since they knew the drive inside and out, backwards and forwards—started beeping. Maggie had just taken exit 1 off I-70 in the direction of Eaton. Gerome shifted behind them but didn't get up.

“It's mad at me,” Maggie said, tapping the monitor. She said this more to hear a voice—any voice—than to be heard by her husband.

Mark punched a few buttons. “It wants us to stay on 70 until 75,” he said. “Then go through Dayton.”

“We never go through Dayton.” She watched the screen images change while Mark continued to push buttons. “What did that mean? That last message?”

Mark didn't answer, just turned the system off altogether. “We can keep track of the miles on the odometer,” he said.

“But what did that mean?” said Maggie.

“What?”

“
Restricted usage road
—what did that mean?”

“It didn't say that.”

“It did,” said Maggie. “Turn it back on.”

Her neck went hot. Mark was staring. She could feel his attention, though she refused to look his way. He'd caught the tenor of her voice, its unsteadiness. But if he thought she was imagining something awful, he was wrong. This time he was wrong. She simply didn't see why they couldn't consult the GPS every now and then. Wasn't that why they had it? For instance, what if there was a required detour or a road that was freshly out of service? All she hoped to do was save them time, avoid preventable trouble.

On the Enneagram, there was a pair of statements that perfectly summed up the current situation, as well as their opposing takes:
I've been careful and have tried to prepare for unforeseen problems
(Maggie).
I've been spontaneous and have preferred to improvise as problems come up
(Mark). Or so Maggie imagined; Mark had never taken the test.

Fine, then. Forget the GPS. Hope, after all, was the confusion of desire with probability, or however the saying went. But if they ended up having to “improvise” by taking a detour or turning around, getting back on 70 and going through Dayton—well, if they ended up having to do that, she'd have a hard time not gloating. That's for sure.

“Restricted road usage,”
said Mark, “is a ploy to keep away through traffic from smaller towns. It's just a way to funnel us to a toll.”

He was probably right, but she'd never seen such a notice before when they'd made the drive, and she knew he hadn't either. No matter. Just then, she didn't feel compelled to engage. She'd learned that winning was often about who could be quiet longest. This wasn't a theory she had discussed with her therapist—in part because she suspected it might have been deemed morbid, perhaps even destructive—but in silence was power. In Maggie's ability to ignore her husband was the added bonus of occasionally making him feel as though he'd been dismissed or, better, as though he'd been the one to overreact, not her. And so she focused on the road—on its double yellow lines, its faint bend to the east—and said nothing.

After a little while, Mark turned away from her. Maggie cracked the front window and the car howled. This got Gerome's attention. He stood, stretched, then sniffed at the air, at all the midwestern smells filtering in. Chickens. Hay. Cows. Manure.

They were on US-35, headed southeast into Ohio. The sun was slanted low and bright to their right, in spite of the copper clouds ahead of them. The air itself was tea-toned, a pinkish brown, almost shiny. The angle of the light seemed funny, somehow off, as though the sun were being reflected back and forth by the darkening storm clouds and its position wasn't exactly what it should have been. A magic trick. A sleight of hand. Prestidigitation in the sky.

This—US-35—was the ugliest leg of their trip, and they'd be on it for the next couple hundred miles or so, until it dumped them into West Virginia and onto Interstate 64. Maggie almost always drove this stretch. She didn't mind the reduced speeds, and she wasn't too bothered by all the stoplights. They were punctuations in an otherwise uneventful trip. Don't misunderstand: she didn't actively enjoy these 200-some miles—who could?—but she didn't . . . Well, she didn't take their ugliness personally, the way Mark sometimes seemed to.

To her, Ohio was just sad. Sad and neglected. A state that didn't know it was already dead. Like animals at a kill shelter. They didn't know that all that water and all that food didn't mean anything about the possibility of a future. All it meant was that some good people were fighting a war they'd already lost. What the animals couldn't know: they were already dead.

As a pre-vet, she'd been acutely aware of the rancor non-pre-vets felt for kill shelters. But Maggie and her peers never chimed in when the outsiders started up. They understood, and Maggie in particular—without any of them then having all the facts—that kill shelters existed in the same way no-kill shelters did. Nobody
wanted
to kill the animals—nobody who volunteered at a shelter, anyway: she'd read the article last week about those kids up in New York who poured lighter fluid on a three-legged dog and then set it on fire. But that was different. With kill shelters, the reasoning was straightforward: the money and space simply didn't exist to maintain the animals while they might have waited to be adopted. The idea that volunteers at kill shelters were happy about all those soon-to-die kittens and puppies? A preposterous notion, which brought her back to Ohio: just because you were born there, just because you had been raised there and hadn't had the sense or opportunity to get out, that didn't mean it was your fault. In the game of geography, you and yours simply hadn't lucked out.

Mark, though—and Maggie knew the diatribe by heart because she'd heard it dozens of times before—he believed that Ohio deserved itself. Those first few times during the early years of their marriage when they'd made the mistake of stopping at major travel plazas and witnessing firsthand the overweight families in their over-large T-shirts eating their oversized meals in their over-tall cars—the sight had filled Mark, every time, with a noiseless sort of rage that could last all the way to Virginia, to his parents' farm. And Maggie knew this for a fact because she'd felt the noiselessness in those early years; she'd been the recipient of its meanness. She, not Ohio, was the one who handled that odium, and so, very quickly, she established a new route—one that favored the smaller, slower roads they were taking now—and she volunteered to drive the segment so that Mark might sleep his way through.

Ahead, in the far, far distance, there was a crack of lightning.

“Did you see that?” said Mark.

Maggie rolled up the window. They car sealed itself with a
whump.
A sign on the side of the road indicated that the speed limit would reduce in the next mile.

Mark messed with the radio. “We should try to get Gerome to do something sometime soon,” he said. He stopped at a weather station. Local schools were already being canceled on Monday. It was only Saturday.