Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

“Every car ought to have it.”

“Is that right?”

He nodded, pushed the button to raise the window. The guy was saying something else but he pretended not to hear. He pumped another smile at the two of them and got back on the road

The girl hadn’t said a word. He thought, Too bad you weren’t a little better looking, lady. We might of gone for a spin, just the two of us.

North across the uncompromising flatness of Kansas. Medicine Lodge, Pratt. At Great Bend he crossed the Arkansas River. A little farther on he crossed the Smoky Hill. The traffic was light and the car was a pleasure to drive, cruising effortlessly over the straight and level road. Endless grainfields punctuated by little towns you were in and out of without noticing their names.

Space. Endless space. If your eyes were good enough you could see to the end of the world.

Brief pit stops at roadside places in the middle of nowhere. A gravel road would cross the highway and somebody would open up a gas station on one corner and somebody else put a diner on one of the other corners, or maybe a general store. Quick stops for gas, for a Coke, for cellophane-wrapped crackers spread with peanut butter and cheese. Then back in the car and back on the road and north again.

Russell. Luray. Osborne. Roadside signs shouting at him, telling him to visit Jewell County State Park, to stop at the Wayfarer’s Rest Motor Lodge, to drink Dr. Pepper, to prepare to meet his God. Eat, drink, go, buy, stay, see—

The signs kept turning into voices. People wouldn’t leave you alone. You got in your car and closed your windows and sat back and drove and they still had to yammer at you. Do this, buy that. Of course you could turn off the signs the same as you turned off conversations, you could let them go right through your eyes and out the back of your head.

Smith Center, and 281 joined up with 36 and headed east. U.S. 36 was a better road but it was taking him east, and after about seven miles 281 cut north again. He almost missed the turnoff; shutting out signs, he shut out the road sign as well. He spun the wheel, cut off a trailer truck and was rewarded with the blast of a horn.

Another handful of miles and he was out of Kansas. A sign told him Nebraska welcomed careful drivers.

Across the Republican River and up through Red Cloud and Cowles and Blue Hill. Between Ayr and Blue Hill a jackrabbit came out of the brush and onto the road in front of him. He swerved to miss it but the rabbit sprang the wrong way and took a wild bounce off the left front fender.

He screeched to a stop, threw the car into reverse. He found the rabbit a few yards off the road. The animal was not at all bruised or bloody, and the only thing wrong with it was that it was dead. He picked up the soft carcass and held it for a moment, then set it down very gently in the roadside brush and ripped up handfuls of grass and weeds to cover it. Tears welled up behind his eyes and he felt a wave of dizziness coming at him. He closed his eyes and tightened his hands into fists and took deep breaths until everything straightened itself out.

He got back into the car and just sat there for a few minutes. He unlocked the glove compartment and took the gun out. He spun the cylinder a few times. Then he put the gun back and relocked the glove compartment and drove on.

Fields of wheat and sorghum. Vast open plains, with no trees but those clustered around the farmhouses or lining the streets of the few towns. Towns like Hastings and Doniphan, and then the North Platte River, and finally a town called Grand Island.

He had been thinking off and on about the girl with the buckteeth. Her face kept getting mixed up with the face of the dead jackrabbit. It was more, he decided, than the obvious similarity of the teeth. There had been a rabbity quality about the girl, although he had not recognized it as such at the time.

He did not often think about girls. The ones he had known had always been a disappointment to him, although it was difficult to say just how or why they had failed to come up to his expectations. He did not know exactly what those expectations were.

He did know, though, that there would someday be a girl who would be right. Such a girl existed. He was sure of this, and just as sure that their paths would cross when the time was right. He was in no hurry for this to happen. Like everything else, she would come when the time was right, not before and not after. Things always came when it was time for them to come. Like the car.

Sometimes at night, when the uppers were wearing off and the downers just starting to hit, he would sing love songs that he made up spontaneously by himself, both words and music. He did not try to hold onto these songs. Sometimes, while singing softly to himself, he would recognize a bit of melody or a string of words as something he had employed before, in one or a dozen earlier songs. But he never took the trouble to polish a lyric or carve a melody line into finished form because he was not sufficiently interested.

Grand Island. He drove around, wondering where in the hell the name had come from. They called it Grand Island, and as far as he could make out it wasn’t either. Flour mills, canneries, packing plants. Stockyards, evident to the senses from blocks away, and houses built unbelievably close to them. He wondered how a man could live so close to a stockyard, how he could breathe that stink day after day.

It was early afternoon, but he knew that he was done driving for the day. That rabbit had bothered him. Ever since he hit it he’d been driving slowly and braking at shadows.

And there was that other rabbit that he couldn’t get all the way out of his mind.

Buckteeth and pimples, and an expression on her face that did a lot of nothing for him. So if he still kept thinking of her that meant it was time for him to get himself a girl.

He found a motel, took a room. He showered again and changed his socks and underwear. He drove around until he found the town’s main business street — which wasn’t all that hard to find. He walked around a little, had a Coke and a piece of apple pie at the lunch counter in the five-and-dime, bought a pair of shoes and two pair of socks at the Florsheim store, bought two shirts and a pair of pants and a plaid double-knit sport jacket at Kleinhans Menswear. He used up a lot of old Walker’s cash money, but now that he had the man’s suitcase it only made sense to get something to put in it.

He did some more driving. Around two thirty he passed the high school. He made a point of driving past it again fifteen minutes later, but still saw no signs of activity. He came by again just after school let out and drove once around the block, making a quick recon of the girls and letting his mind play around with attitudes and opening lines. Next time around he slowed down, pulled up next to two girls who were standing and talking, hit the button to drop the window.

One had dark-brown hair; the other’s hair was just a shade lighter than his own. The brunette was the prettier of the two. She wore a black-and-white checked skirt and a lime-green sweater. There were freckles on her cheekbones and across the bridge of her nose. The other girl wore a dark-green skirt and a white blouse. Her breasts were unrealistically pointed. Her face was sour; you could see already the woman she would become, dyspeptic with the little injuries life kept inflicting on her, always bitterly resigned to continual dissatisfaction.

To the brunette he said, “Now what’s a girl like you doing outside on a beautiful day like this? You should be spending the afternoon all cooped up in an air-conditioned car.”

They looked at each other and giggled. The brunette said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Texas. But I’m around here now, so this is your lucky day,”