Golden States

  At the top of the hill he worked himself into a hedge of oleander, full of dust and the faint sweet smell of the leaves. On the other side of the freeway was an arctic brightness, a barren, floating landscape that bore no more relation to the streets below than an aircraft carrier does to a midnight ocean. He crouched in the bushes, waiting for the traffic to break. Headlights came and came, if not from one direction then the other. They shone yellow in the white light of the high-intensity lamps. The lights appeared in the distance, grew brighter without appearing to grow larger, and then when they began to get larger they ceased gaining in brightness. There was a point, fifty yards or so down, at which they hovered, noiselessly, seemingly stopped, and then they shot forward, all noise. The black tires and gleaming body roared past, stirring up a gritty wind that fluttered the bits of trash at the road’s edge. After each car had passed a small whizz hung in the air, like the reverberation of a plucked wire.

  David gave up waiting for a clear field in both directions, and settled on a break in the westbound lanes. After a spate of heavy traffic no new headlights appeared, and he picked up his pack and ran. He crossed the hard dirt of the shoulder and made the asphalt just as another pair of lights appeared. Halfway into the closest lane he hesitated, wondering whether to turn back. The lights, though far away, were in the farthest lane and he would be running into their path, as if he were racing a train to a crossing. He decided to go. He sprinted over the first lane, and the second. Three more to go. Another pair of lights shone, in the lane he had just left. He had some trouble judging how near the first lights were; they seemed unnaturally bright. He kept running. The lanes were wider than he’d realized, and his strides felt short and slightly weighted, as if the approaching lights gave off a slow dull gravity of their own. He ran. When he reached the median the car was closer behind him than he’d thought possible. It might have been catapulted, so quickly did it shoot up from what had looked like a safe distance. He felt its wind on his back while he was still running.

  The median was a wide strip of weedy ground. An oily wind worried it constantly. Traffic on the other side was thick. David waited, with nowhere to hide, hoping each car that loomed behind its lights was not a police cruiser. He wondered if people were staring at him. It was impossible to see faces behind the black windshields.

  He began edging along in the direction of oncoming traffic, to give himself something to do. He saw a truck coming up, festooned with orange lights, and backed off a few feet out of respect for its bulk. The truck drew closer, its grumble rising. When the glare of the headlights struck David it blasted its horn, a gigantic sound that deafened him and nearly blew him over. The truck howled by, big as a freight train, its silver sides bearing letters that were too large to read, red A’s and R’s taller than David himself. The truck passed and after a half-second’s calm a vacuum sucked him up and pulled him, stumbling, to the very edge of the asphalt. He beat his arms against the wall of air, to keep from being swept out into traffic.

  Then David stepped on something in the weeds. A chill went through him, an ancient alarm. Something dead here. He looked down on the splayed hind leg of a dog, a little blackhaired dog with the ears and muzzle of a fox. The dog lay twisted, its front end wrenched over at an impossible angle, the tongue lolling limp. David jumped back. He double-checked the freeway, thought it was empty, and took off.

  The car was on him before he saw it. He felt the lights shine on his face like heat and when he turned they were right there, enormous. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He felt each one. He stood, just stood, greeting the car with an expression of bankrupt surprise while it swerved screeching around him, blowing his hair back off his face. The horn came a moment later, a diminishing bellow. Instantly the car was a hundred yards past, only its lozenge-shaped taillights visible.

  Other cars bore down on him, and David was a moment appreciating the fact that he was unharmed and entitled to keep running. The next car’s horn preceded it, a blossoming sound, widening and widening. He ran. When he reached the far shoulder he threw himself into the bushes there, dove into the darkness at their roots. The bushes were a cool, dusty,vegetable nowhere and he lay panting. He stayed a while in the sanctuary of the bushes, watching the cars whoosh past on the freeway. Now he could not go back. When he had regathered himself he crawled through the bushes and loped, at a sharp diagonal, down the embankment on the other side.

  The far side of the freeway was unknown territory. He passed through a neighborhood of ragged little houses, bungalows with patchy lawns and cracked, blistered paint. Music drifted from one, low horns and a woman wailing, though all the windows were dark. David hurried by.

  The houses gave out eventually onto a street he knew, a long strip with a McDonald’s and a Taco Bell and a Winchell’s Donuts, which were like old friends. He had been driven here before and gone to the Winchell’s. Everything was closed now. As he walked the street he noticed stores that had been invisible whenever he drove through with Mom. There was a dry cleaner’s with a picture of a faded, green-skinned woman in a flowered dress, and an insurance agency with its name on the window in gold letters and a gold trophy displayed inside, on the sill, along with two dead flies. There was a beauty parlor and a travel agency and a gift shop, all sad-looking and subtly wrong.

  The street rambled on, and David began to worry about his direction. He knew the freeway ran to his left, and so the busstation should be ahead and to the right. It was so different, though, on foot. The sky was low and opaque, without stars, and the street went on and on without turning into anything other than what it was, a flat broad boulevard lined with strange stores. He wondered if he had in fact been down this street before, or on another one like it. All the stores resembled one another. He had a sickening conviction that he was walking in circles.

  Several blocks later, just as he was beginning to give up hope, the bus station announced itself like a full moon. The circle of brilliant blue, across which the graceful white dog flamed frozen in midleap, rose over the roof of a car wash. He ran the remaining three blocks.

  The plate-glass windows and door of the bus terminal held in a heavy green aquarium light, and David stopped short, suddenly nervous. What if they wouldn’t sell him a ticket? He reached into his pocket to touch the money. If he didn’t have enough money to get to San Francisco, they’d be suspicious. He hung around the door, unable to move, until the man at the ticket counter looked up and noticed him. He walked in because he had no choice, and as he crossed the cloudy, dark green floor a part of him lingered behind, floating a foot back of his own head, monitoring the progress of his body. He saw himself go up to the ticket man and heard himself say, “Can I have a ticket to Santa Barbara?” Santa Barbara was the closest distant place he could think of.

  The man, who was old and brown-spotted, with a loose mouth, dipped his chin and looked over David’s head. “Traveling alone?” he asked.

  “Yes,” David said, and a vein in his neck throbbed so hard he feared the man would see it. “I’m going up to see my sister,” he added.

  “Your parents drop you off outside?” he asked.

  “There’s only my mom,” David said. “And she works at night. I walked over. We live down the street.” He was astonished to hear himself say it, and to find that he imagined the lie with fluid ease. He lived in one of the scrubby houses; his mother swept floors at insurance companies.

  The man scrutinized David’s face. He settled his mouth with a juicy suckling sound and said challengingly, “Thirteen fifty.”

  David dug into his pocket and pulled out the money. He had played it right. Proudly, he laid the bills and change on the counter. The man gave him his ticket, and told him the bus left in forty-five minutes.

  David went and sat in one of a line of molded blue chairs. He put his pack on the seat beside him. Only two other people were in the waiting room, an old man and an old woman, their faces furrowed in thought as if they were straining to remember, and they paid
David no attention. He had never been so entirely disregarded by adults before. The sensation thrilled him. Indifference was a sign of respect. These old quivering people (the woman’s lips formed silent words) thought he could take care of himself.

  He forced himself to stay in his seat, though he ached to walk around and check things over. A row of vending machines stood against the opposite wall, and he worked hard to appear as if he was not trying to determine what was for sale. Candy, Cold Drinks, Cigarettes, and an especially interesting one called Traveler’s Aids. It sounded both musical and dirty, and try as he might he could not identify a single item behind any of the illuminated windows. He sat still, remembering not to jiggle his legs. He would get to Santa Barbara and hitchhike from there. He and Billy had hitched rides around the neighborhood, and David believed he had a certain power to make cars stop for him. It had to do with the way you held your face and your thumb. Friendly but not too eager, happily above it all, ready for a ride but just as ready to stay there on the curb, enjoying the sunlight. He had had to be especially charming to make up for Billy’s scowl and his jabbing, dangerous-looking thumb. David always knew that when people stopped, theywere stopping for him and not Billy. A spasm of joy came over him. His life would rise and rise, because he was smart and quick to give a right answer and able to do what needed doing regardless of the risk. Because he was him. He noticed he had started to jiggle his legs, and stopped. The old woman murmured on, soundlessly, telling herself the same thing over and over.

  When the bus arrived, the dark had taken on the charged thinness that comes before the light. Only David rose for the bus; the old people remained seated. As he passed the Traveler’s Aids machine he saw with disappointment that it contained Kleenex, a black plastic comb, a rain bonnet, a shoe horn, and two magnets in the shape of Scotties, a black and a white.

  The bus smelled of rubber and disinfectant. Several people sat scattered around. There might have been a rule requiring everybody to sit at least two rows away from everybody else. David took a seat toward the rear, two rows down from a man with a crew cut and a dragon tattoo. The man was chewing gum, and as David passed him he blew a small mean pink bubble.

  David settled himself with his pack on the floor between his feet, then changed his mind and hefted it up onto his lap. The bus pulled out, grumbling, full of its own weighty, swaying power. It cruised down the strip, and the first gray light gathered in the sky. David sank into the bus’s movement, relieved to be without power of choice. Stores slid by, restored to their proper size and unimportance, and a phrase of Janet’s drifted into his head. She’d said that being stoned made things funny and remote. Travel was like being stoned. The bus stopped at half a dozen stations, all of them both odd and familiar. Sometimes a few people struggled on, carrying suitcases or parcels, looking winded and beaten even this early in the day. At one stop no one got on at all. The bus’s pneumatic doors whooshed open, hung, and closed again. It moved on. By the time it gotto the open highway, hilly country covered in high yellow grass, dotted with gas stations and restaurants, the sun was throwing long shadows that raised the detail of every swell and rivet on the gas pumps. He saw a passing truck turn off its headlights and declare the beginning of day proper.

  He did not start getting anxious until he saw the first sign for Santa Barbara. It hit him like a revelation: he was going to be alone in a strange city, with less than four dollars in his pocket and hundreds of miles to cross. Up until that moment he had imagined a transformed self getting off the bus and setting out to hitchhike; himself turned into a character on a TV show, canny and capable, moving with brisk certainty from one action to the next. Now he saw that he was rattling headlong into his own future, and that he remained unchanged, a disorganized bundle of vague impulses, likely at any moment to just sit down and stay. As the bus rolled along he dug his fingernails into his palms, to keep himself alert and ready for action. Since no one could see him clearly, he allowed himself to jiggle his legs.

  The bus reached the Santa Barbara station the same way cars approached on the freeway—first too slowly and then too fast. It seemed to ride endlessly through the outskirts, motels and gas stations and chain restaurants, with sign after sign saying santa barbara; then the city popped up and they were there, pulling into a berth at the station, where the bus shuddered and stopped with a gassy sigh.

  He shouldered his pack and meekly disembarked. The sun was strong by now and the morning heated up, full of the smell of gasoline and burned coffee. David walked into the station and fought an impulse to sit down, as if he was waiting for somebody to pick him up. He stood in line at the ticket counter, and when he reached the woman (middle-aged, aloofly annoyed, with a string of red, white, and blue plastic beads hung around her neck), he asked how to get to the highway.

  “Coast Highway?” she asked, and he could not tell whether she was suspicious or just confused.

  “The one that goes to San Francisco,” he said.

  He saw her sizing him up, and saw in her eyes the decision she made. There were people stacked up behind, it looked to be a long, bad morning, so just give the kid directions and get him out of the way.

  “Out the door,” she said, “and left. Eight blocks down.” She looked with sour anticipation over his head at the next person waiting to be dealt with.

  He found the highway with no trouble, after walking eight blocks along a street just like the one at home. The highway ran through town rather than skirting it, lined with restaurants and gas stations, thick with traffic. Alongside the highway was a wide dusty shoulder, where gravel and bits of broken glass caught the sun. He hesitated on the shoulder. A Sambo’s stood behind him, cool and kindly under its red-and-yellow sign. He went in and had a glazed doughnut and a glass of grape juice at the counter, and thought they were the most delicious things he had ever tasted. Then he walked to the side of the road, arranged a careless smile on his face, and offered his thumb to the passing cars.

  There were other hitchhikers arrayed by the road, all much older. The man closest had a pyramid of frizzy black hair and a gold front tooth that sent out a shiver of light when he smiled to acknowledge David’s stare. David turned away.

  Cars sped by. He realized that Mom had discovered his absence by now, but her life had slipped into a suspended state and he could not quite imagine that time moved for her as quickly as it did for him. He thought that if he got in a car and raced home he could almost catch up with himself, jump back into his bed like a spirit returned to its body, the journey wiped clean.

  Cars shot by, and David kept a watch on the horizon forpolice cruisers. He wondered if the gold-toothed man was looking at him. He felt a ticklish heat on the back of his neck. As the cars passed he tried to read the faces of the drivers for kindness or cruelty, since he was not quite sure whether he hoped somebody would stop or feared somebody would. Many of the drivers were serious-faced men in coats and ties who drove on without glancing at him, not even in curiosity. There were younger men as well, and some women; they tended to notice him, but all roared on. David felt a warm sting of shame on his face, for asking something of strangers who had no idea he was unique and privileged, with a whole universe inside his head. To their eyes he was not different in substance from the man with the gold tooth. It occurred to him that the man might believe himself to be just as real and worthy of attention as David was, though he imagined the man was more used to disregard. He moved farther away, regretted the blatancy of it, and bent over to retie his shoe, as if he’d had to walk twenty paces for that purpose. When he straightened up he could not stop himself from glancing back at the man and there it was, the tooth, shining. David adjusted the straps of his pack and sang “Beat It.” to himself.

  The first black man to pass stopped for him as if they were both members of the same club. The man drove a brown Chevy, dull with dirt, and pulled onto the shoulder just past the spot where David stood. He was a moment in registering the fact that this was a ride. For him. The car waite
d, its brake lights glowing through the storm of dust it raised. He could not think of what to do. He imagined bolting back to the Sambo’s, but feared the humiliation even more than he feared the man. He trudged to the car, hoping the man might lose patience and drive on. When the man motioned for him to hurry up and come inside, he obeyed.

  The man had short woolly hair and bloodshot eyes sunk deep in slack gray-black pouches of flesh. He wore a sport shirtcovered with orange jungle flowers, and his big chocolate-colored arms looked taut as sausages.

  “Shut the door,” he said. “You letting the flies in.”

  “Sorry,” David said, and shut the door. The man accelerated, and pulled back into traffic. David sat hugging his pack.

  “What’re you,” the man said. “Eight, nine year old?” “Thirteen,” David said indignantly. The red eyes shifted suspiciously in their crepy pockets and David added, “Almost thirteen. August the third.”

  “And where you going, Almost Thirteen?”

  David could not think of a lie. This man was too foreign to lie to. Who knew what he might or might not believe?

  “San Francisco,” he said. “I ran out of money for the bus.” “You ran out of money for the bus. Your momma know where you are?”

  After a moment, David said, “No.”

  The man nodded, pleased to have been right. “I thought she didn’t. What you going to do in San Francisco?”

  Here it got complicated. He was willing to tell the truth, but couldn’t think how. For a moment he wasn’t certain himself why he was going to San Francisco. He disliked the man for confusing him so. “Nothing,” he said, and was appalled to hear himself giggle.