By ten minutes to five o’clock Oklahoma City’s mainline highways and arterial avenues are stop-and-go, clotted with cars. Everyone flees, riding the brakes in one last dash for home, like some slow-motion replay of the land run. The rush hour crush reveals the essential loneliness of this city, which by six has been abandoned by all but the most industrious denizens. But right now, at twelve minutes past quitting time on a Monday in September, ninety-three degrees in the shade, flushed faces are boiling in Ben’s rearview. The road is a parking lot, gridlocked with thousand-yard stares, brows twisting and scowling in reflective, cartoon rage.
Ben signals his intent to merge onto the interstate. He checks his blind spot, steers the big black sport utility vehicle into the lane, gives a quick wave of thanks into the wing mirror. He’s never been ticketed. Drives four miles faster than the speed limit, surrendered to the flow, like a retiree soaking up the sights.
He dials the stereo to the AM band and waits for his favorite talk radio show to start.
So much of his life is whiled away in this car. He’s done the math and it comes out to almost two full workdays a week. There’s the forty-five minute commute bookending his day, into the city and back again. Several trips to the sticks, remote places like Canton or Antlers, up to two hours each way. The Sunday lunch with Cecil in Perkins. And during basketball season the midweek road trips to Stillwater can last hours if he doesn’t judge the traffic right.
Ben fell asleep at the wheel once. Gentled by the amniotic drone of Firestone rubber whining over the road. He awoke to the sound of plastic safety stanchions slap-slap-slapping at his front bumper. Had to stop the car on the road shoulder and catch his breath.
He still dreams about that night Cecil was hurt. A pitch-black highway. He’s conscious of watching two distinct selves, each sleeping in different places: asleep in the car; asleep in the bed next to Becca. There’s a seeping feeling, a steady diminishing of control. But the Bens won’t wake up. The car and bed both drifting slowly off course, diverging into a double darkness.
Ben cranks the A/C in his SUV. He read somewhere that warmth is a soporific, and now he won’t drive anyplace without a vent blasting cold air at his face. Becca says it calls to mind a dog with its head stuck out the rear window, jowls flapping in the wind drift.
A funky bass guitar lick leaks from the speakers. The Pretenders are wondering what’s happened to Chrissie Hynde’s hometown back in Ohio.
Crash Lambeau, “the most dangerous man in America,” ramps onto the airwaves. “Be afraid, ladies and gentlemen,” Crash says, tongue-in-cheek. “Be very afraid. Chrissie said it best. You just heard her. Our cities are in danger. But it doesn’t end there. Oh no. It’s much more insidious than that. The freedoms guaranteed to you by the Founding Fathers are disappearing. Every minute of every day that Slick Willie and his feminazi shadow president Hillary occupy the White House.”
Crash isn’t buying what big government’s selling. He sucks down a big breath and launches into an incredulous riff on recent developments. “I mean, if it wasn’t for all of you real Americans listening out there right now, this socialist Hillarycare bill might have actually squeaked through Congress. Big Brother would be stealing money from your paychecks to fund a government takeover of one-seventh of this country’s economy. And in return for your hard work, ‘Billary’ and their fascist intelligentsia would be dictating which doctors you’re allowed to see.”
Ben’s no dittohead. But he can’t stop listening. There’s something fascinating about the Lambeau phenomenon. At the very least, it keeps Ben awake on these long hauls home. Here’s a guy, not a single marketable skill other than his mouth, talking to himself from some soundproof studio. Earning millions and influencing elections.
What Ben wouldn’t give for that kind of clout.
Crash riffs on.
“Now. Fascism is a word thrown around on the left by people too dumb to understand what it means. In deference to these idiots, I’ll be doing the rest of this show with half my brain tied behind my back, just to keep things fair. Because I have talent on loan from God, people.”
Crash’s soundman gives up a badum-tish! rimshot.
Crash laughs, a rich, chocolate chuckle.
“Let me simplify it for the intellectually handicapped. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fascism as ‘A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.’”
Crash wields words like a martial artist. No one can touch him. Threatened by an argument, he redefines the battlefield, dodging the attack altogether. He turns terms inside-out, obliterates entire lines of reasoning. Fact is fiction. Logic is passion. Reason is propaganda. Meaning is irrelevant. There is only the freewheeling tickertape of Crash’s inner dialogue.
“Don’t let these cosmopolitan, so-called . . . intellectuals confuse you with their convoluted logic and statistics. This is how they win. Misdirection and obfuscation. In a society where state-run media and liberal universities indoctrinate our youth into the idea that speech should be ‘politically correct’—a term worthy of George Orwell if I’ve ever heard one—ignorance isn’t just bliss. It’s essential to our survival as a democracy! Ignorance, my fellow Americans, is downright patriotic in this day and age.”
He’s fashioning language from whole cloth. A new school of thinking. An otherspeak.
Crash returns to the defeated healthcare bill.
“Know how you can tell if a Clinton is lying? One of them is talking. I saw you all infiltrate Hillary’s stump speeches to drown out her lies. And when Herr-Doctor Clinton stood up in that town hall to stump for Hillarycare, we were ready with our secret weapon. How can Slick Willie argue with a fellow soul brother like Herman Cain? He’s the poster boy for Clinton’s demographic. And there Cain was, in Technicolor, taking Bill to task on national TV.
“We engineered a bloodbath ladies and gentlemen. You, me, Bill Kristol. My man Newt. What a team. Oh. It was beautiful. There’s not another word for it. The bill was dead on arrival. Mitchell just won’t admit it yet. Give yourselves a pat on the back.
“But don’t rest on your laurels. This war is just getting started. There are more important battles ahead. Like Generalissimo Janet’s crime bill. What a piece of work. A ban on our second amendment freedom to bear arms. You saw what happened down in Waco. This crime bill passes, you’d better get used to seeing more of that kind of thing in the news. You want my honest opinion? Every man, woman, and child in this country should own a gun. The Founding Fathers knew we’d need to defend our freedoms against jackbooted thugs like these Clintonistas.”
Crash fires one last volley over the bumper music before giving up the bully pulpit.
“Freedom is not a crime, ladies and gentlemen,” Crash says.
The Pretenders are back again, still trying to find Hynde’s version of Ohio.
“Not yet, anyway.”
Ben hears a big rig Jake-braking in the traffic up ahead, sees it burp-burp-burping black palings of brume into a blue-swept sky. The exhaust spirals heavenward, thin dieseled rifts in the moment. And why does this feel like a premonition, of a sudden, or a memory, these fissures? As if the world’s been broken.