I WROTE ON ANYTHING I HAD—road maps of Tennessee or Wyoming. Brochures from Welcome Centers in Lousiana and Georgia and Virginia. I wrote in a tiny notepad I'd grabbed from a gas station bathroom in Wichita Falls. I kept it in a compartment below my Alpine.
You'd conditioned yourself. Truckers Atlas over and over, an old Modest Mouse CD from your glovebox. The Lonesome Crowded West.
Never, ever, ever go through a pay-by-plate toll—only a booth manned old-fashioned for cash—which will force you off the Interstate a lot. Pull off to re-route yourself. Find a Love's, a TA. Truckers are your friends, if you mind your own business. Conversation. Cigarettes. Directions.
Food.
They'll always leave an unlocked cab, leave it idling; trudge into a poorly lit building for a Monster, a RedBull, a 5-Hour Energy. I'd dug up treasure troves in cabs across Texas. Mostly beef jerky or bags of chips. Cash. Enough for half a tank. Enough to get Dirt Nasty to a border.
Driving didn't help your hopelessness. It did, you'd learn, help Dirt Nasty. It kept your '02 Civic breathing, kept it growling, kept you going, going, going. Once I'd stopped in New York, I'd let it set for days, and Dirt Nasty would sputter, wouldn't start immediately. My battery was dying, practically deceased already. It was over a decade old, a Diehard, I found out when I replaced it; its survival contingent on keeping it going, on cross-country mileage you'd added unknowingly. Everything a vague blur, for as long as you could remember?
No, I'd lost pieces of myself across America.
They laughed. Incredulously, you're supposed to replace your battery every three years, before trophying your Diehard off as if it wasn't the last part of you from a year-long haze of loss. You could've broken down in Nevada. You could've disappeared somewhere between Utah and Wyoming. In Nebraska. You could've died somewhere in your fifty thousand miles of darkness in America.
No, you'd lost yourself.
I'd drive for days; I'd jot down meaningless bullshit I look back on cluelessly. My mind a weathervane, Brian had been singing, singing... singing... Everything plotted into a few songs you couldn't forget, you'd never forget, unless you forgot Wes, too.
Eventually, you did.
Names. Streets. Interstates. Blurring. I'd pull off, track myself; I'd retrace my steps into Louisiana again in June.
It's all vague, I'm telling you. I didn't know.
You'd taken generational—mother-daughter—advice in your pocket, felt for it, remembered it. Every little trick you'd been told to stay safe while walking alone at night, as a pre-teen, a teenager, an adult; to check reflections, keep keys between your knuckles, to look ahead, never look back, never let anybody think you don't know where you're going.
Mom telling you to blend in, exist quietly. Shadows. Darkness. Sarah had told you to pretend you're on a call with somebody, preferably your father, a Sheriff, if you can improv it, explaining you do have pepper spray, you know you'll use it. Assuring.
Somebody is waiting for you.
Somebody knows where you are.
Somebody will miss you if you disappear.
Even if nobody is, if nobody does, nobody will.
