Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

Now imagine driving alone for well over a thousand miles with a corpse your only companion. A Hope & Crosby On The Road movie this was not.

I’d been traveling for almost 14 hours and it was getting seriously dark. I was tired, I was upset, I was hungry, the coffin and its passenger were creeping me out to the nth degree, I needed to stretch my cramping legs, I’d missed the rest-stop entrance a few miles back (I was busy trying to make out the TripTik printing under the dim glow of the dome light), my bladder was grumpy, and I was pretty sure that I’d gotten onto the wrong stretch of highway at the interchange, so I decided, fuck it , I was going to take the next exit and find an all-night gas station and ask for directions.

That’s right— ask for directions: I am not one these guys who feels genetically obligated to never admit that he’s lost. If I’m going somewhere I just want to get there, preferably not too far behind schedule, in one piece and with my sanity intact; if that means I have to endure some twenty-something kid behind the counter of a Sip & Piss laughing at me under his breath as he shows me the best way to get back to where I need to be, well…there are worse humiliations that can be suffered, even if I sometimes do feel like belting that kid one upside the head. (And I swear it seems like it’s always the same kid behind the counter, regardless of where you stop; personally, I think they’re being manufactured in some top-secret government facility dedicated to creating as many aggravations as possible for American drivers so we don’t notice that the gas prices always start to go up on Wednesday night, right about rush hour.)

According to my TripTik, the next exit—happy-happy-joy-joy—was twenty miles farther down the highway. If I was right and it turned out I should’ve taken the I-70 West ramp, then I was almost 25 miles away from where I should have taken the exit, which meant by the time I got back to where I needed to be I’d be about 50 miles in the hole.

I turned up the radio, which was tuned to a “classic rock” station, and was just in time to hear the DJ introduce The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” with the words: “Can you believe this song is older than I am?”

I wanted to reach through the radio waves and strangle the little fucker.

I don’t think of myself as being ancient (I’m only 44), but it still blows my mind that there are people out there who don’t remember when “Baba O’Riley”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven”, and even Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” were brand-new. Hell, half the DJs working these “classic rock” stations probably have no idea that “Smoke On The Water” tanked in the U.S when it was released as a single from the Machine Head album; it was only when it released as a single from Made In Japan that it became the monster smash—not to mention the first riff every kid learns to play once they get a guitar—we all know and pretend to loathe.

Told you my mind starts sorting through useless trivia if I spend too much time on the road, so don’t start bitching about how this has nothing to do with anything.

I cranked up the volume and pressed down on the accelerator—almost anything from Who’s Next turns me into a speed king—and before Roger Daltrey was finished roaring about the teenage wasteland, the exit was in sight.

Or, rather, an exit.

I checked the odometer and saw that it had been just under five miles; there wasn’t supposed to be an exit for a while yet.

You know those moments in life that, when you talk about them later, you always preface with something like, “I should have known because …”? Well, there’s no “because” here; yeah, what happened a few moments later was odd, no question, and I wish to hell I could say that I knew or sensed that something in the world was about to wander off the highway permanently, but the truth is there was nothing that set off any serious alarms. By now, I was so tired and cramped and sore and hungry and all the rest of it that I didn’t care about the shadows that had broken into my apartment, or Miss Driscoll’s morbid hobby, or the two thousand dollars, or my date with redheaded Kimberly— nothing .

On the TripTik map or not, that next exit was mine. If I’d turned down the radio and listened carefully, I bet I could have heard my bladder cheering.

That said, I can tell you now that if I had decided to wait for the following (and TripTik- acknowledged ) exit farther down, all of this still would have happened—hell, I could have taken any exit from this point on and it wouldn’t have changed anything.

The sign said, simply: EXIT.Nothing more; no town name, no number, no white arrow pointing in the correct direction. All of this both registered with me and didn’t (like the total number of deaths from the I-71 accident); I saw it, knew something about it was odd, but just didn’t care. I wanted to feel solid ground and not pedals under my feet for a few minutes.

As soon as I merged onto the ramp the light above the EXITsign blinked twice, made a sputter-buzz kind of noise, then went out completely.

I wasn’t prepared for how damned black it became after that. Nowhere on either side of me was there another light, so all I had to see by were the meat wagon’s headlights. I clicked over to the brights and slowed down, just in case some possum, squirrel, dog, or deer decided to make a break for it and test my reflexes.

The first roadside memorial (a cross made of plastic flowers, sporting several ribbons) barely registered with me when it faded into the glow of the headlights. I drove on. The cross glided past. One of the ribbons snapped backwards and flapped in the breeze as if waving good-bye.

I thought of the miniature monuments Miss Driscoll had erected around her tracks.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find something creepy about these monuments (be they HO-scale or life-size). I understand that those left behind have to do whatever it takes to deal with their grief, but if it was me and someone I’d loved had died in a wreck (probably in bloody pieces and great pain) the last goddamned place I’d want to erect a monument to their memory was the spot where their final agonized breath had been drawn and expelled. And since the maintenance of these things is the responsibility of those who erect them, that means you have to make an at-least quarterly pilgrimage to the place—assuming that you don’t have to drive past it every day on your way to or from work. How can you pay suitable respect to someone’s memory when you’ve got semis and SUVs and busloads of screaming kids roaring by every few seconds? Cemeteries may not be the cheeriest places to visit, but at least it makes sense to mourn there. Grieving by the side of the road in front of a monument no one but you gives a shit about just strikes me as distasteful…but then, I’ve never had to confront that particular kind of grief, so it’s easy for me to pass judgment: Dianne—my ex-wife—always pointed that out to me—that it was easy for me to judgmental about these memorials; she found them to be deeply moving.

Dianne never brought up my shortcomings to try and make me feel small; she did it because they, in her words: “…keep the best of you hidden from me and everyone else. You’re not the cynic you want everyone to think you are.” I never saw it that way, nope; as far as I was concerned, it was her way of proving to me once again that my moral compass was fucked up and wouldn’t I just be the best person if I saw the world just like her .