In two hours they climbed away from the heady skyscrapers of glass and steel and the clammy street fogs, dipping in and out of pockets of smog before they hit the five lane interstate. Ashley reclined lazily in the passenger seat, the sun visor up, basking in the refracted rays of the midday sun.
They followed the serpentine trail of the I87 roadway, meandering through a bitter series of corners and diminishing rows of grey stone before rising over the Tappan Zee Bridge and moving out into the country, and passed Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, leaving the crazy hubbub of city centre roads further and further behind.
Gabriel watched Ashley through the rear-view mirror as she stared through the dimpled pin-pricks of the roof-lining, eyes unfocussed. She’d hardly said a word since they’d cleared the Hudson. Watching her through the mirror it was obvious what was going on inside; the thoughts behind the eyes. She was afraid to ask about what had happened immediately before she’d opened the door on his unconscious body. They were the same thoughts — We’re the same, you and me… We’re the same — that had curled lazily through Gabriel’s mind five times an hour since he’d woken, the ones he hadn’t dared give voice to for fear of making them more substantial.
More real.
And they were eating her up, these thoughts, and still she was saying nothing.
So they drove in silence, passing into and out of Scranton before Ashley opened the glove box on a few sun-bleached cassettes sheltered between dirty chamois leather, the black flap of his shoulder holster and a box of tissues, half-hidden in the cool shadows, their lettered inlays faded beyond reading.
She picked one at random, pushed it into the player. The tiny screen was lit up by an insipid glow, a double row of squares pulsing like a heartbeat in rhythm with Leonard Cohen’s end of the world vocal.
“Happy happy, joy joy.” Her first words for over an hour. Her last words for another hour.
Through the rear-view mirror, Gabriel watched his battered old fedora slide between the speakers.
Near sun down, Gabriel turned off the interstate and drove down into Small-town USA, parking on the wide main street across from the ramshackle wooden form of Al Straker’s General Store, in line with a neat row of Jeeps, Toyotas and dusty old Fords. The blinds were down and the awning was up. The sign on Straker’s door said:
CLOSED FOR THE NIGHT
WHY DON’T Y’ALL COME BACK AND SEE US
IN THE MORNING
Much of the town looked like Straker’s; box houses of slatted wooden frames squatting in the middle of small patches of Eden, bordered by blacktop. No sidewalks. No cars to talk of either. Not driving.
They went for dinner at Sal’s Country Kitchen, choosing to sit out on the veranda and catch the last of the sun’s failing rays. Beyond the rail the glitter of an old creek puddled, catching rainbows from the sky and throwing them out in hypnotic ever-decreasing circles of shifting colour. The creek’s watery sides lined with cypress and pines.
“Beautiful,” Ashley breathed, her voice as slippery as the invisible fish bathing beneath the surface.
“Yeah,” Gabriel agreed, thoughtfully. “And then some.”
When the food arrived they were both pleasantly surprised. Sal, it seemed, had discovered the secret of the perfect pizza.
“So, what do you reckon?” he asked when they got back to the car. “Do we look for a cheap motel for the night, or do we go on?”
“What do you fancy? You’re the one driving. It’s going to be long gone midnight when we land.”
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders, working out a cramp before he’d even got in behind the wheel. “I could probably do with a break from the driving but otherwise either way suits me just fine.”
“No problem then,” Ashley grinned, holding out her hand. “Gimme the keys.”
Hand around his jaw, Gabriel whistled out a short breath. “Don’t know about that… The old girl’s a bit on the sensitive side, needs plenty of T.L.C. just like her old man. You think you can handle that?”
“Just shut up and give me the keys.”
“Whatever you say, honey bunny,” and then to himself. “Anything for a quiet life.”
“Treading on thin ice, Rush,” she warned. “Very thin ice.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Okay, wise guy. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
Opening the side door and ducking into the passenger seat, Gabriel nodded thoughtfully. “Right, I think I’ll shut up now.”
“You do that,” Ashley agreed, sliding the keys into the ignition and turning over the rest-cooled engine.
“Music?” He asked as she reversed out between the lines of parked jeeps.
“Help yourself.” It was the closest he was going to get to a yes.
There was a trap in the glove box, a lure to hook him back to everything he was trying to forget; memories and music entwined like forever lovers. The haunting strains of Tears bringing back the sad, timeless feeling of watching the seasons fail while his mind ran back to the day everything in his old life died, moving him gently toward the tears of the title.
The song finished seconds before they rejoined the interstate. Gabriel cut the next song short, rewinding the tape to play it through again.
Even concentrating on the darkened road and the tube-like tails of light streaming out before her to form an elaborate grid of gold and red, Ashley could feel the pain haunting him.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked as he rewound the tape again.
“Not much to talk about, really.” Gabriel lied, fingers concentrating for him.
“Try me anyway. I’m a good listener.”
“Maybe later,” he said, giving himself up to the same army of ghosts again.
“Whenever you feel like talking,” Ashley said softly, moving out to overtake a hulking Merry Maid pantechnicon.
He was asleep by the time they passed the last exit for Utica, curled up in a tight foetal ball with his face pressed against the glass of the passenger door.
“Next stop, paradise,” she told his sleeping form, seeing the sign for Syracuse lit up in the distance, the soft voice of her words too quiet to be heard above the humming of the Black Hawk’s rumbling engine.
Gabriel groaned and half-stirred.
Without the distraction of cars on the other side of the glass, and little else out there to hold her attention for more than a few seconds, Ashley felt deadly caress of sleep creeping up on her. The regular monotony of passing alone through the dull puddles of sodium light, soporific in itself, and the ebb and flow of Gabriel’s breathing, didn’t help.
With the stars acting as token light-bearers in place of the sleeping sun, Ashley pulled in at one of the roadside cafes.
She had nearly overshot the turning, attracted at the last minute by a barbershop beacon that flashed OPEN irregularly; its slow moving life, the shadow of a working waitress up against the window and the overriding need for a caffeine fix calling out to her.
She left the engine idling so as not to wake Gabriel, and ran across the asphalt to a small, anonymous serving hatch. It was a pleasantly mild night.
“Coffee?” she asked a wire grill and was rewarded a pasty faced nod. “Great. Make it strong. No milk, no sugar.”
Before shouting the order back into the kitchen, the waitress made a show of wrapping a well chewed ribbon of gum around her painted nails.
“Thirty five cents,” she muttered matter-of-factly, replacing the balled up piece of gum and chewing.
Ashley pulled a rumpled bill out of her tight hip-pocket and handed it over. “Keep the change.”
The girl’s face mellowed as she pocketed the sixty-five cents change; the stranger walking into and out of her life.
Gabriel hadn’t so much as stirred.
As she sipped at the steam wreathing liquid, Ashley reached across and, keeping the volume low, turned on the radio. The last few words of the midnight news bulletin before the intrusion of the station’s tuneless jingle. She killed the noise, and opened the door again to throw the empty cup out through the crack.
They made Syracuse in good time, passing the city limits sign a little after 3 a.m... Twenty minutes later, she took the Studebaker up onto the fine gravelled path that crawled around the edge of a shimmering moonlit lake, the tires crunching on the stone chips covering the track. She eased the car to a stop beside a gatepost, a short way from a dark-shrouded hunter’s cabin. A finger-thin sliver of moonlight reflected on the ripples of shallow water lapping against the shoreline.
Ashley leaned across to wake Gabriel.
“We’re here, Gabe,” she whispered, shaking his shoulder gently until he groaned and opened his eyes. “We’re here,” she repeated, quietly, as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stretched.