All The Darkness You Need

Chapter 8: The Tradition

Jen found a place to rent: the carriage house of a larger home above Sunset Plaza and the view of Los Angeles below was dreadful by day but stunning at night. She got a job as a receptionist at an art gallery and she loved California with the westering heart of a million young Americans before her.

She made friends with a girl who worked in an old independent bookstore and the two of them would go, every Thursday night, to another art gallery that sold memberships to the night for ten dollars and gave away champagne until dawn.

There was a deep house DJ every week at the champagne gallery and the girls would dance and laugh the night away. In the art gallery house music club Jen made even more friends and her first year in California was all she had hoped for. Throughout that year she kept the yellow rose and it never faded and it never dried. It remained as fresh and bright as the day Jesse had given it to her. She smelled the rose everyday and she thought about the boys often.

On Halloween night the following year she imagined them starting the race again in Florida. She cheered for them in her heart that night and the next day.

Then, on the night of November second around dark, she made her way to the truck stop alone and she sat in the parking lot as the Sun fell and colored the idling semi trucks orange and gold. She had bought a white VW convertible and she leaned on the curved hood and watched the lot.

Just as the sunset went dark a shining navy Oldsmobile with cream double stripes roared into the parking lot and parked beside her. She cheered like a schoolgirl and jumped up and down for the winners as the two boys go out of the car. Their faces alight with joy that she was there. The three hugged and they went into the diner and ate breakfast.

They drank coffee and talked long into the night. Jesse and Dan told her about the race. About things they had seen on the roads in Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas and New Mexico. They said that they had never seen the guys in the 'vette and they were pretty sure those guys had taken the long way and had been solidly beaten. They had fought it out with the Chevelle again twice. Once in Texas and once in Arizona. They never spoke of the wreck. As dawn approached Jen congratulated them on winning for the tenth time and the boys headed outside in the failing dark. Once again, as Jen pushed the glass door open and walked back to her car, the race car and the boys were nowhere to be seen and she drove back home to sleep through the day and work another year in the gallery.

The next year Jen met a guy, a studio musician who played piano for recording bands, and the two fell in love and in time she stopped going to the house music clubs and she spent more and more time with her boyfriend. But she still went to the truck stop alone in November and she saw the boys that next year as well and they ate and talked of the race until near dawn.

Jen became the manager of the Art gallery and in time the curator for a museum in the valley and she married her boyfriend and they had a boy of their own.

On his third birthday she arranged for a sitter and she reminded her husband of her night alone and he, as always, indulged her eccentricities. Jen met with the boys once again. The only one to greet the winners of a cross-country race through eternity. And all the while her yellow rose remained bright and fresh and her husband could not understand it and Jen treasured it above all material things. It reminded her of her youth and of her mortality and how the choices we make define us. She loved the rose but she loved her little family more and she spent every waking second that she could with them save one darkening afternoon each year at the beginning of November.

Jen's son graduated high school and then college and she became an art history professor at a small college. Her husband grew to be a celebrated musician and together they grew happy and old together. Jen was in her late forties and her son's graduation from college was the most joyful day of her sweet life.

That October the weather grew cold early in the month and by Halloween night it had snowed at Jen's vacation home in Northern California and she sat by the fireplace and thought of the boys in the race. She had met them at the finish every year since her ghostly road trip in her twenties and it was something she could never have explained to anyone so she never tried. Over those years she and the boys had many conversations over breakfast at the diner about the race that year. They also had many conversations about life and death and the world of the dead or dying. The boys knew full-well that their life was a shadow and a threat to any sane man. They knew that their ghostly existence was just a memory but when Jen asked why they persisted they discovered together that the reason they were able to keep going was the same reason that any life sprang forth at all or ever lived a single breath or a hundred years in flesh. The reason was love.

For they did so love the road. And they did so love the drive. And they did so love the race and seeing the country and the rainstorms on the horizon and the little jackals that howled when the moon was full. And the wolves. And Jesse said that he loved to hear the wolves in the Texas hills howl at the full moon in the pitch-black darkness. He said that the Native Americans believed that the wolf was a messenger from the spirit world and that when the wolves howled at night, their souls walked on the moon.

And then as Jen confirmed arrangements by phone to stay one night in an L.A. hotel in the next few days in November she did notice her rose in its clear glass vase on the mantelpiece. She hung up the phone and walked to look at her flower. In the vase its stem was dried and the yellow flesh of the petals parchment tan. The rose had faded and dried and tightened in the night and she knew that the boys had moved on.

She went to the truck stop alone at the end of the race anyway but the boys never came. She ate in the booth alone but she could not eat much and she cried for hours. She thought of the road and the race she had ran so many years ago with the boys and she wished them well and she prayed for their souls. And she prayed for the souls of her husband and child and she looked out from the diner windows and outside the Sun did rise.