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The Driver - Part Five

By Andrew Foster Altschul

When she sees him again it is almost spring. The winds have stalled and dropped and the thaw has begun. For the last few weeks she's gone from school to the salon to home, her spare time filled with homework and extra chores, browsing the college applications her mother piles on the table. Good to her word, her mother has not let her so much as touch the car keys; Chick takes revenge by smoking in her bedroom, leaving ashes all over the windowsill. After her mother goes to sleep, she steals a glass of wine from the bottle on the counter. She doesn't really like the taste, but she's trying to get used to it.

On this day, the first day of her new driving privileges -- "You come straight from school, no bullcrap," her mother lectured -- she parks in front of the Iron Horse, smiling at how easy it is to flout her mother's rules. You really can do what you want, she thinks. You just have to know what that is. You can spend your whole life following other people's rules, like her mother, held back by childish fear -- or you can set your mind to something and do it, and deal with the consequences later.

Green streamers and shamrocks hang from the ceiling and the tavern smells worse than usual. Trey's father waves. "I think he's out back," he calls to her. A few of the men at the bar turn as she walks past. "Tell him to get his ass in here and bus some tables," his father says when she opens the back door.

She finds Trey out by the tracks, hurling empty bottles against the gravel berm. He doesn't see her at first, and she watches as he picks a cigarette from his apron pocket, struggling to light it in the wind.

"Hey," she says. He looks up, startled, and takes her in. His hair is shorter and he's clean shaven. He looks younger, but more tired, the bags under his eyes darker than ever. "I came by to see how you're doing," she says.

"Hey," he says, blowing smoke into the sky. The trees overhanging the tracks have started to grow small, green buds and the old wood ties are soaked through with rain. In another few weeks, the valley will explode with green, rainstorms and heat erasing all memory of winter.

"How's work going?" she says.

He shrugs. "It's work."

"Yeah. Me too." The car keys feel good in her hand, heavy and cold and sharp. She tosses them in the air and catches them with a jingle. Trey looks up. "It would be a lot nicer in Mexico, huh?"

He leans against the building and smokes; she can see his hand shaking as he brings the cigarette to his lips. "I'm really going to do it," he says. "I know you don't think I will, but I will."

"I think you will," she says.

"I don't care if anyone else comes. I'll go alone if I have to. How hard can it be? It can't be any worse than this." He points behind him to the wall of the bar, the town on the other side in which they've both spent their whole lives.

"My mom says I can go visit my father next month," she says. "She says maybe he'll take me to look at colleges out there."

He nods and looks out at the tracks. "That's cool."

"But maybe that's not what I want to do."

"What do you want to do?" he says.

"What do you think I should do?"

He laughs. "You're not going to listen to me."

"Maybe I will," she says. She stares at the side of his face, remembering how he'd felt beneath her in the snow, a wild creature she'd held for just a moment. "Maybe we should just go," she says.

"Go where?"

She dangles the keys in front of his eyes, shaking them a little, watches a lock of smoke drift from his lips. "Anywhere," she says. "We could just get in the car and go."

"Yeah, right," he says, watching her cautiously.

She takes the cigarette from his fingers, his eyes so wide it almost makes her laugh. She takes a drag, feels it deep in her chest, next to her pounding heart.

"What about Billy and Sam?" he says. "What about gas money, and food, and all that?"

She shrugs, blows the smoke over his head. He stares at her and she wills herself not to look away. Shards of cloud move swiftly across the sky, music drifts from the tavern. Anything could happen from here, she thinks, and something inside her shudders at all the possibilities hanging in the air, some kind of future about to begin.

A moment later, he kicks a spray of gravel, climbs the berm and steps onto one of the rails. Holding his arms out to either side, he balances there, small against the background of trees. He looks down at her and she holds her breath as he starts to sing. But it's the same song she's heard him sing a million times before:

"And I guess that I just don't know... and I guess that I just don't know..."

Back inside, the darkness is close and muggy. "Say, Chick," his father says as she walks past. He leans on the bar and keeps his voice low. "A couple of these guys keep asking me your name. I don't want to say 'Chick' -- it sounds wrong."

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She's decided to grow it out, so maybe it will be long by summer. "It's Gail," she says. "But nobody really calls me that anymore."

"Gail," he says. "That's a beautiful name."

She smiles and turns for the door. "You've always seemed like such a smart girl to me," he says, clearing bottles from the bar. "I just don't understand what you see in a screwup like Trey."

She takes a step back to the counter. "That's not a very nice thing to say," she says. His father straightens, starts to say something in protest. But she leans toward him and looks straight into his eyes. "One day you might miss him," she says.

Back in the car, she rolls the windows down, lets the damp air clear out the stale smell. She starts the engine and puts it in drive, but before she pulls away, she catches a last glimpse of Trey through the open door, a gray tub in his arms heaped with dirty dishes. He shouts something she can't hear, scowling at his father, then moves beyond her line of sight. Her eyes fill with tears, but she blinks them back. She tries to imagine them the way she used to, lying on a beach together, holding hands. But that picture won't come. All she can see is a fuzzy image of herself: off somewhere in the future, sliding along on the black ice, moving erratically but always forward. That's what makes everyone so sad, she thinks -- no matter what happens, you keep going forward. And like it or not, everything you know eventually slides into distance as you skid and wobble and try your best not to fall, trapped forever in the long, graceful twirl of your life.

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