Endless Miles

Endless Miles

  by Christine Morgan

  https://christine-morgan.com/

  https://facebook.com/ChristineMorganAuthor

  Copyright 2010 by Christine Morgan. All Rights Reserved.

  Endess Miles

  “I got a riddle for you,” T.J. Lawton said, to no one but a tumbleweed bouncing by on its bristly course. “How can a guy have driven a hundred thousand miles by the time he turns twenty-one, and never leave the same town?”

  The tumbleweed didn’t answer, so T.J. did it himself.

  “I dunno, but it helps if he’s me.”

  The interior of the pickup’s cab was like a broiler even with the windows down. A hot, dry breeze spit sand against the no-color paintjob and flapped the sheet of plastic where the rear window had been.

  A better question, he supposed, would be along the lines of why the shoemaker’s kids went barefoot. That had been one Lorraine had often tossed out at Bert, meaning how come, what with Bert being a landscaper and all, their trailer sat in the middle of a yard as lifeless as Mars. But it applied to mechanics equally well. Here he was, twenty-one – today no less! – and his truck was only slightly less sorry than the relics in the automotive graveyard out behind the Speedway.

  In a few minutes, it’d be time to get to work. For the moment, though, he could sit here on cracked vinyl, listening to the wheezing sigh of the engine cooling. He took the last swig from a can of warm, flat Dr. Pepper and crumpled the empty, tossing it onto the floor in the passenger footwell where it joined dozens of its fellows.

  The Joshua Flats Speedway rose like the disinterred remains of some enormous prehistoric beast. The parking lot around it, asphalt under a heat-shimmer, resembled a puddle of tar. Easy to imagine the skeletal bleachers as all that remained of a dinosaur, sicked back up by the tar pits that had sucked it down.

  The Speedway was at the outskirts of town, where Joshua Flats surrendered once more to the mighty Mojave Desert. With the exception of the strip of gas stations and fast-food places that made up the town’s main drag, it was the only business that made any money now that the borax operations in the surrounding hills had shut down.

  And passing through town … not leading to it but leading away from it in both directions, the road. Two-lane blacktop until it reached the bustling metropolis of Joshua Flats. There, it widened dramatically to include a central turn lane.

  T.J could see the road from here too. As always, the sight of it triggered a gnawing sensation in him that was both hunger and despair. That road had been a symbol of his dreams for as long as he could remember.

  The dreams came back to him now with aching nostalgia. When he’d been a little kid, he’d longed for the day when the road would bring his real parents to him. He sometimes waited in the shade of the trailer for hours, on dozy hundred-plus degree summer days when the sky was the color of burnished pewter and the distant mountains were hazy mirages. Waited, waited for the moment when a car would arrive. A nice car, a sleek sedan humming contentedly to itself. It would have soft seats, and cool air blowing from the vents. His real mother and father, she sharing T.J.’s red-blond hair and he having T.J.’s angular features, would whisk him into that car and away, into the life that should have been his.

  It had never happened. He remembered, ruefully, the embarrassment that came one day when a sleek sedan had turned into their scabby driveway and a woman in a trim suit got out. He’d thrown himself at her, sobbing in amazed joy, only to have her turn out to be an Avon lady. That had pretty much spelled the end of his reunion fantasy.

  As a teen, obsessed with MTV, he’d developed another that involved a dynamic red roadster with silver and gold zigzags down the sides. It would come roaring into view and slew to a stop, full of pent-up energy like a crouching jungle cat. Its idling engine would be the beast’s restless snarl. The doors would open and a trio of rock and roll goddesses in sunglasses and miniskirts would emerge. They’d single him out of the staring crowd at the A&W, draw him into the plush shadows behind the tinted glass, and away he’d go. Never to look back.

  Needless to say, that hadn’t happened either. And was even less likely than his real parents showing up. Escape down the road? No chance, my friend. No chance at all.

  T.J. got out of the truck, exchanging the baking oven of the cab for the direct blaze of the sun. His lunchbox beat against his leg. He’d had to park out at the edge of the lot, because there was a race tonight and Mr. Jervis wanted to keep the prime spaces for paying customers.

  Endless miles, endless circuits of the Speedway track. Racing stock cars. Jouncing over the hummocks on a dirtbike when Jervis turned the arena over to motocross. Demolition derbies. Test-driving the array of used cars that came in by the dozen. He would do better to measure his life by miles rather than years.

  Could have crossed the country every which-way by now. Could have driven across the ocean, or halfway to the moon, if there were bridges. Could be far, far away from here.

  The road. The road was the key. A passage to everyplace. To anyplace but here. The road was opportunity, possibility. Go west, young man, as the saying went … except would he? West was the dirty urban sprawl of Los Angeles, west was the sea, west was the edge and the end. But east … if he went east, he’d see the country. He’d see landscapes he knew only from books. The ever-changing views, from the wide rolling plains stretching forever to the horizon, the high crags of mountains with their eternal mantles of snow, rivers, cities, forests.

  A yearning ache speared him. The worst part of it was the way it was so hopeless, the tolling of a bell echoing through dead places where only dead ears could hear.

  No one was going to take him away from Joshua Flats. He’d been here since he was too young to remember anything else, and he’d be here for the rest of his life. It was like a planet unto itself, with dense gravity ten times as strong as Earth’s. He’d never manage escape velocity. Hardly anyone did.

  He could think of a few who’d tried, and knew what had become of them. Shelley Merlink, Miss Joshua Flats, changed her name to Michelle Merline, and off she went to Hollywood. Rumor had it she’d been busted in a vice sting three years ago. Or Carl Billings. Carl had gotten out. Had to join the Army to do it, though, and all it had gotten him was a quick death in a tank-training mishap. Or Trisha Cody. She’d run away last summer after a fight with her folks, and been picked up hitching between here and Barstow. Picked up by someone who’d left her in a dry creek bed. Most of her, anyway.

  No escape. T.J. knew his future as surely as if it was written out for him in letters of fire.

  He could feel the sticky give of the tar beneath his boots, smell the horrible pungency of it. Sunlight poured over him like scalding water, striking bright sparkles from chips of stone embedded in the asphalt.

  Soon, the sun would descend toward the mountains and turn into a fiery burnt-orange ball that cast the Joshua trees as coarse black shadows against a riotous sky. The acrid tang of smoke from brushfires was faint but discernable on the air.

  T.J. trudged on, toward the gate. He could see others who worked the late shift making their own treks from their own beat-up vehicles. Heads down, nearly all of them wore jeans and T-shirts. Baseball caps and cowboy hats. Most of them were built like Bert. Thick and brawny. The sort of men for whom a night of beer and bowling was an evening on the town. The sort of men whose wives had big hair and bigger bottoms.

  The sort of man he was destined to become?

  “No,” T.J. said, not intending to speak aloud and startling himself with the hoarse, frightened tone of his voice. “No, dammit, no, I don’t want that.”

  His eyes sought and found the road again. Wonderful road, endless miles stretching away, leading anywhere and everywhere.

&
nbsp; Do it, he thought with sudden harshness. Get in your truck and go, just go, do it!

  Inner objections rose clamoring up, all the stupid senseless reasons for staying. He had a job, a place to stay. He knew people here. Never mind that a decent mechanic could find work anywhere. Never mind that the place he stayed hadn’t been home since Lorraine died. Never mind that most of the people he knew liked things just the way they were, and scorned anybody who presumed to ‘think big’ of himself.

  Do it! Go!

  But the tug of gravity, the insidious comfort of habit, proved too strong. T.J., his lunchbox swinging, crossed to the gate.

  He put in his shift, adding more endless miles to his life roaring around that ½ mile oval stretch in the red-and-white Art’s Auto Supply car. After, he did a few hours in the back lot, stripping down the dead hulks to make like an automotive