Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

There was a half-melted ice-cream sundae at my place. I took a bite of it.

“Are you okay, Dex?” the woman asked, looking concerned.

It annoyed me that I’d been their topic of conversation.

“Yes, but I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

“No one’s forcing you, Dex,” Russell said. “You can do whatever you damn please.”

My mom is looking back at me as we push through town, by the stores on Bridge Street on our way to the lake drive. She wants us three to get along, to be a family. It’s our chance to leave Oswego she says, maybe even upstate New York. Russell’s company is headquartered in Florida, and he’s due for a transfer.

There is a huge orange snowplow ahead of us spraying snow about. Russell flicks his wipers to full speed. He swerves side to side waiting for his chance to spring us out into the open road. Eventually the plow driver, a thick-bearded man in a blue woolen Giants hat, pulls to the side to let us by.

We’re curving out on Route 104 along the lake, with the orange sun cutting down beneath the clouds, and I think about how long it’s been since I’ve been outside, I mean really outside. I take in a couple lungfuls of air.

Russell steps hard on the gas pedal and the Jeep begins to bounce off the snow craters beneath us. “Yeeeeee haaaaaa!” he yells. He laughs and my mom does too, but she says, “You’re going a little too fast.”

“Anything you say, babe,” he says, but he doesn’t slow down. My knees keep knocking me on the chin, until I cover them with my hands and then they hit me — about once every twenty yards.

The lake flies by, endless and white. It looks less like the Sahara than the moon, pocked and jagged, and I wonder how long you could walk out on it and not fall in. Russell says he’s driven twenty miles across, but I guess that figures.

The fish and hot dog stands are boarded up good, and the Rudy’s sign is swinging hard on a rusted-out chain, slapping against the side of the building. The road narrows as we swing by the summer cabins that perch like gravestones on white lawns.

I’m thinking of my father driving Russell’s Jeep. I’m thinking of him fidgeting with the gadgets, running this thing slow and deliberate as if it was made of glass. Russell isn’t thinking of anything except how radical his Jeep is, though I might think that too if I had a Jeep.

With a burst of speed, we weave around a bend and my mom says, “Really, Russell. Slow down.”

Russell says, “I am,” and he whips his head back at me. “Am I going too fast for you, Dex?”

I say, “Yes,” but he laughs like I’m joking, and he reaches over to his breast pocket. He somehow pulls out a cigarette with his right hand, sticks it in his mouth, lights it, and while he’s looking down we hit a sinkhole and my head hits hard against the roll bar. There’s a high drift in the road ahead and we swerve out of its way toward a utility pole. Russell slams on the brake, sending us past the pole into a spin, and I fall forward into the back of my mom’s seat.

“Jeezus,” Russell says. He has lost control. His mouth is open and empty.

“Jeeezus,” he says again, and he’s winging the wheel back and forth as though he’s bringing a ship in during a storm. I’ve got my arms around the top of my mother’s seat and she’s holding her hands straight out into the dash. We are sliding fast toward a culvert. Russell is panicked. It’s scary, but part of me is happy because Russell is fucking up.

We wash off the road, through mounds of snow pushed off by the blowers, and as we smack the bottom of the culvert, I bang my head in the same spot as last time. It’s like a kick from a metal boot. I run my hand through my hair and I touch blood. The skin around the gash is puffed and sticky and my temples are throbbing.

Russell lets out a deep breath from his lower lip, which blows his hair up, and he takes his glasses off. His eyes are startling. They are gray and deep set, surrounded by white skin, where the sun’s been blocked.

“Jeezus, you all right, babe?” he asks my mom.

She says nothing. Her face is ashen. She breathes hard and fast and the music is blaring now. I’ve still got my arms frozen around my mom’s headrest.

“I’m sorry, Dex. You got the worst of that, didn’t you?” Russell says. He breathes onto his blue glasses and wipes them clear with the bottom of his sweater. He turns the CD player off, then leans back to look at my head.

“It’s okay, Russell,” I say and pull away.

“You know we’re really lucky,” he says. “Really lucky.”

And I guess he would think that, but I don’t put much stock in that kind of luck. You could always say we could have died there and feel lucky until you die, but that’s an idiotic way to go through life.

“Let’s go home,” my mom says, and there’s an edge now to her voice. “Let’s get this thing on the road and drive home.” Russell reaches his hand around her shoulders and my mom tilts away, her eyes trained across the lake.

Russell’s cigarette is burning on the carpet before him and he stomps it out, pounding his foot hard into the floor. My mom glares at him and then out the window again and Russell says, “Can you give me a break here?”

For a while my vision is blurred — glassy and dim, like film shot underwater. Then it is clear, but framed by moments of blackness like a slide show. I sit for a while in the snow, particles melting into my jeans, and I watch Russell and my mom moving around the Jeep, talking, plotting, their bodies appearing near me, then a few yards away.

The lake and the sky are the same white now and it is as if we are caught in a cloud. I look out over the ice and let the whiteness spread through my brain, the wind now a steady moan around my ears. I feel Russell’s hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Dex. Get up and help us out,” he says, and he reaches under my arms to lift me.

The motor is idling. My mom is in the driver’s seat, and Russell and I stand behind to push. He has graded a wall of snow and dirt with his boots to keep us from sliding back.

“When I say ‘Go,’ move this thing into gear,” he yells to my mom.

We count to three and then Russell yells, “Go! Go! Go!” and the wheels sound like buzz saws ripping through the ground. The Jeep climbs two feet and then falls, like a house, pushing us aside. The air around us is filled with fumes that seep inside my lungs and splotch the snow black.

“Let’s try it again,” he says. My head feels feathery and I am of no use here. I want to take a bath and go to sleep. The light is beginning to fade and the temperature has dropped a few degrees. The wind is snapping at our faces.

The two of us rock the Jeep up and back, up and back, and then, like we’re charging a castle, we lower our heads and surge.

“Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” And we get the front wheels on the road and almost the back wheels too, but it isn’t enough. The Jeep pins us back into the snow and I am sweating now. Russell is exasperated. I know he’s thinking it’s my fault somehow; if it had just been him and my mom, this wouldn’t have happened, which is bullshit. These things happen, even to people like Russell.

He digs in. “We got it this time, Dex,” he says. “We got it licked.” We lower our heads together, dig our shoulders and bent arms into the rear corners of the Jeep, and like two friends we push through the mounds of snow and earth. Everything is giving beneath us, the ground is moving backward, and Russell is yelling, “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” screaming now until the Jeep, wheels spinning wildly, mounts the culvert onto 104. My mom’s momentum carries her a hundred yards down the road. She is whooping and so is Russell. He makes a snowball and hurls it at her.