A tall, skinny guy in a gray hooded sweatshirt slumps against the wall next to my hotel room. His hood is pulled down so low that I can’t see his face. It’s long past midnight. I assume he’s asleep or passed out. But maybe he’s just pretending. I walk slowly toward him. A long, lucrative evening with an advertising executive netted ten diamonds from a tennis bracelet. I don’t want this stranger to steal them; they’re mine, for now.
The stranger stirs. He rises and stands swaying in the middle of the hallway.
“UncleRoss?”
“That’s right, UncleRoss.” He says my name in one slurred package, a brand-name uncle like UncleSam or UncleTom.
I smile thinly. “Ray said you might meet me somewhere.”
“Isn’t this Providence?”
“It’s Dallas.”
“I thought people were talking funny,” he says. “And wearing boots.”
I try not to look disappointed that Cray has managed to hunt me down. But it’s hard.
“Ho ho, Uncle Ross, really. I know I’m in Dallas, believe me. If you took the bus all the way from Vermont, you’d know exactly where you were too.” He pauses and pulls his hood away, revealing a big tangled mass of straw-colored hair. “Hey, do I smell like citrus-scented bathroom disinfectant?”
He leans his head forward and I smell no hint of citrus, just cigarettes. “No.”
“Good.”
I open the door and Cray walks in, throwing his backpack on the floor. “Television. Minibar. Bathtub. Heaven,” he says softly. He walks to the minibar and cracks off the plastic lock, then takes out an Amstel Light and flips the top off with one deft twist. “Mind if I have a cold one, Uncle Ross?” he says. Before I can answer, he drinks half of the beer. “Traveling makes me wicked thirsty.”
I perch on the other bed opposite my nephew. Since I last saw him he’s changed from shy to bold, innocent to canny.
“Good to see you, Cray,” I say. “Ray told me he needed a little time alone.”
Cray rolls his eyes. “Jackson’s getting a make over. Like I’m going to interfere or something. Dad just gets all weird and nervous when he’s working. You know how he is, Uncle Ross. Anyway, I’m just glad to get out of freaking Vermont for a while.”
“I thought you liked it there.”
Cray turns to me and gives me a flat stare that means I have to be kidding. He jumps up and turns the television around. “I’m still a little wired from the bus ride. I drank a couple of those energy drink things,” he says. “Mind if I watch something?”
I want to mention that it’s late and I’ve got to be on the road to Little Rock early. Or to be accurate, we have to get on the road early tomorrow.
The television flickers on. Cray operates the complicated remote like a pilot.
“How long are you going to be traveling with me?” I ask carefully.
“You mean how long am I going to be bothering you?” Cray scratches his head, smells his fingertips, reaches for his beer.
“Yes, that. But not really.”
“A month or so. But I’ll stay way out of your way. I’m just along for the ride. I’ll be like an invisible passenger. You won’t even know I’m here.”
I say nothing, just think of the weeks of shows ahead and wonder how I’m going to get any nightwork done with Cray around. He’s not the quiet boy he was last summer. He’s not a boy at all.
Cray turns to me, reading my thoughts. “You don’t have to do anything special, Uncle Ross. Just do what you normally do. Pretend I’m not here.” He pulls one grease-stained boot off, then another, and lets them thunk to the floor. Then he pulls the bedspread up to his chin, smiles at a cartoon of a flying dog.
“Underdog, sweet,” he whispers. “I fucking love Underdog.”
I take off my shoes and hang my suit on a hanger. I pull on a white T-shirt and climb into my bed, the sheets cold against my legs.
“I’m tired,” I say.
“Long day tickling the ivories?” I hear overtones of Ray’s sneery voice.
“You could say that. I’m going to sleep now.”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
I shut off the lamp on my bedside table. It’s dark in the room except for the low blue flame of television. Underdog circles a city.
“Anything new happening with you?” I ask, hoping Cray will turn off the TV.
“Not much. We’ll get caught up tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I say, not at all sure whether that’s good news or not.
We’ve been driving for about thirty minutes when Cray yanks off his headphones and tells me to stop.
I pull into the emergency lane and he jumps out of the car, leaps the guardrail, and scrambles up a gravel slope to a scraggly patch of woods. At checkout, I noticed six Amstel Lights on my bill. From a distance, I can’t hear him retching up his breakfast—bacon, eggs, toast, coffee, juice, and hash browns with hot sauce dumped all over them.
I wait for a few minutes in blessed silence. Cray filled the hotel room with his nonstop talking this morning while I was packing. In the end, I just tossed everything into my suitcase and left. I go through my upcoming gigs, tracing the route northeast through Little Rock to Louisville then over to the East Coast for a few weeks, winding up in New York and Boston. The idea of spending all that time with Cray in tow makes me cringe. I’m exhausted after one morning.
I remember that he’s only sixteen, that he’s my nephew. I just have to come up with a way of being around him. I try to think of Cray as a troubled young man who needs my help, a teenager from a halfway house. Cray actually was raised in a barn—growing up with a homeschooling felon for a father and no mother around. Tired of living in lockdown, Linda, Ray’s wife, fled to northern California years ago to join an intentional community that raised goats and sold cheese.
I hold this benevolent notion of Cray for a few minutes, then it drifts away and is replaced by less kind thoughts. I look in the rearview mirror and see a ridiculous, fussy man, angry at having his little routine interrupted. What would Miles do?
Cray climbs over the hill carrying a paper bag. Fully recovered, he jumps into the car.
“Sorry you were feeling sick.” I pull back onto the highway.
“Sick? Not me. Just hungry.” Cray holds up a football-sized foil package. “Hombre Grande,” he says. “Saw the sign from the highway. Hombre Grande Special. Doesn’t that mean Big Man in Spanish?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Dad’s going to love this one.” Cray unrolls the foil package and reveals a burrito the size of a toddler. He pokes it with a fork and eats a bite, dropping bits of rice and brown meat onto the floor. The car fills with the smell of pig fat and refried beans. I open my window a crack.
“Dad collects burritos,” Cray says between bites, or during them.
“Probably hard to fit in an album.”
“Not the actual food, Uncle Ross, duh. We just write up its name and a description of what’s in it in a little book we keep in the kitchen. Burrito Grande. Bueno Burrito. Salsa Burrito. Burrito de Casa. It’s amazing how many words there are for the same damn thing. Like Eskimos have all those words for snow. Mexicans got them for burritos.” Cray lifts the Mexican child and takes a bite out of its soft white middle.
I put on my sunglasses and turn back to the road. “So you like Mexican food?” I say after a minute.
“No, not really.” Cray shakes his head. “It’s just that you can’t get it in Vermont. They’re always rolling up alfalfa sprouts and carrots in a whole-wheat wrap and calling it a burrito. That is NOT A BURRITO,” he shouts. It is the most vehement statement he has made so far, second only to his opinion that hotels are a BIG DAMN RIP-OFF, which he offered at checkout this morning.
“Now Uncle Ross, I know you’re a vegan,” Cray says with complete disdain. “But you got to remember, I’m from health food ground zero. I can get a wheatgrass shot pretty much every hundred yards in Montpelier. And the place is thick with organic cafés that serve . . .” He puts down the Mexican child and shakes his head slowly.
“You okay?”
His voice turns serious. “It’s just that . . . can I share something, Uncle Ross? Something kind of personal?”
“Sure, Cray.”
“This winter I met this girl who worked at a place called the Common Street Bakery, right in the center of town. They serve smoothies and salads and all that shit you like. Anyway, this girl Angelina used to cook there. She wore these short, tight T-shirts that showed off her incredible body. She had hooters that—”
I hold up my hand. “Spare me the details, please, Cray.”
“Oh, yeah. Dad mentioned you were a little weird about, well, you know,” Cray says.
I stare, wonder what Ray told him.
“And when she turned around, I could see she had these tattoos on her back, those f-shaped things, you know what I mean?”
“Like on a violin?”
“Exactly. Well for some reason, she had them tattooed on her back. And believe me, Uncle Ross, I wanted to play that violin.”
“I believe you.”
Cray leans forward and places his Mexican child, swaddled in foil, on the seat. “Anyway, I sat at the counter for hours just to watch her. I drank banana smoothies. I had salads with zen sauce on them—I’m not even sure what the hell zen sauce is. But I would have eaten bugs just to sit there and watch her.”
“Did you talk to her?”
Cray says nothing, turns away. “All winter. These long intense talks. Then one day, she said she could never love anyone who . . . wore leather shoes. Uncle Ross, does that seem fair to you? She said you should never eat or wear anything that once had a face.” Cray turns his own reddening face away, holds his palm toward me.
“Well, I have to say, I kind of agree with her on that one.”
“But isn’t that a bit . . . judgmental? I mean, can people only be with people who are just like them? What about diversity? What about opposites attracting? How do you explain that?” Cray turns to the window. “I think she could have been my only true love, Uncle Ross, and I lost her on account of MY DIET and MY FOOTWEAR. It just makes me really, really sad.” Cray’s narrow shoulders rise and fall.
I try to come up with something consoling. “I’m sure you’ll meet someone else. You’re too young to worry about that.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he whispers. “You’re old.”
We travel in silence, Cray watching the low trees and grassy hills unwind before us.
“I’m really sorry,” I say.
“About what?”
“About that girl you were talking about. The one from the restaurant.”
Cray’s shoulders start to rise and fall again.
“I’m sure you’ll meet someone else, Cray.” I glance over and see that Cray isn’t crying anymore. He’s laughing.
“Uncle Ross, I totally made that up. You’re still as gullible as the day is long.” Cray picks up his burrito and takes a vigorous bite that reminds me of a wasp stinging a peach.
I roll down my window carefully, then reach over with one hand, grab Hombre Grande from Cray, and toss it out. In the rearview mirror, I watch the big man bounce along in the underbrush for a few moments before deconstructing into a brown cloud.
“Hey, I wasn’t done with that!”
“You are now, hombre.”
We drive silently again, northeast Texas racing by in a smear of stunted trees and rolling hills dotted with black cattle. Cray puts his headphones back on, silver and sleek with a wire that runs down into a bulging pocket of his orange cargo pants. He nods his head.
I watch the yellow lines ticking past, each one taking us closer to Arkansas. I never like playing there—low on BMWs and good diamonds. But I’ve never been so anxious to see Little Rock, where I can put more than two feet between me and my passenger, his eyes shut tightly, oblivious to me, the world.
Cray sleeps, headphones on, head pressed against the passenger window. The afternoon shifts into a minor key, amber sunlight turning even the most egregious roadside rest stops and gas stations into Hopper landscapes. I think of waking Cray to show him, but why bother?
As soon as that thought passes through my mind, I realize that too much time alone has left me hyper-attuned to landscapes, less so to the people in them. But then again, driving draws out budget insights.
We drive across a flat stretch of highway, the billboards old and advertising motels that no longer exist, bungalows for thirty dollars. Cray turns in his sleep, avoiding the bright sun. I peer through my sunglasses at the road ahead, see it waver in the heat.
Cray is one of the last relatives I have left, but I can’t seem to muster up much empathy for him, even though I know he needs it. He’s lost, just the same way I was at his age. Why can’t I help him more? After all, I’ve given stacks of money to complete strangers, but I’m almost incapable of being in the same car with Cray. I wonder if I’ve become too solitary after years on the road or if I’m allergic to my family.
The Wolfshead family is receding day after day until there is nothing left except the loaded memories Ray and I carry with us, filtered even further by Cray, the latest generation of the deft and devious.
But I don’t particularly want to explore our mutual history or the connections that make us relatives instead of strangers. I just want to stop, shove Cray out by the side of the road, and drive away.
“I’m going to write a novel,” Cray announces out of the blue, lifting his headphones and leaving them around his neck.
I slow, take the exit to Little Rock. “I didn’t know you had literary ambitions.”
Cray makes a scrunched face. “I don’t. I just want to make a big pile of money.”
“Why don’t you just have Dad print some?”
“I mean real money, Uncle Ross, and a segment on E! or some shit like that.” Cray nods, his eyes widen a bit. “That would be way cool. The chicks at the organic place would be all over me like nori flakes on brown rice.”
“So what would it be about?”
“The thing on E!? It would be all about me, dumbass.”
“I mean the book. The book you’d write to get an article written about you.”
“It would be about . . .” Cray pauses, searching. “It would be about love.”
“About love, that sounds interesting.”
“Ho ho, Uncle Ross, I don’t think you know what I mean. You’re thinking some kind of nice novel where two people meet and find they’re soulmates and wind up walking through poppy fields and holding hands. Isn’t that what you’re thinking about?”
“Not exactly, but close enough.”
“I’m talking about a book that gets rid of all that crap and just gets right down to it, Uncle Ross. Two people doing it every ten pages or so, without any worrying about all the long conversations, details that no one cares about, fancy descriptions no one really reads. Just following the natural buildup and release of sexual tension. We’re talking genitals, Uncle Ross. Genitals and friction.”
“Aren’t those the two motivating forces in Greek drama?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“I think you’re on to something, Cray.”
“I know I am, Uncle Ross. I know what people like. And it isn’t being bored by some smarty-pants author trying to impress them with all the crap he knows.”
The car goes silent.
“I need a great title.” He concentrates for a minute, squinting and working his mouth into various shapes. “I think I might call it The Good Parts,” he says finally.
“Won’t that kind of take the mystery out of the whole thing, Cray?”
“Uncle Ross, people DO NOT WANT MYSTERY. THEY DO NOT WANT SUBTLETY. They want lusty full-frontal action. That’s why they invented the Internet—to bring porn to the people, pronto. Books are lagging way behind. That’s why no one buys them anymore.”
“But you’ll take care of that.”
“Yes I will, Uncle Ross. Yes I will. I’ll just do a little of this on my computer.” Cray holds both hands horizontally in front of him and hammers his fingers up and down. “Soon as I get home.”
“Can’t wait to read it, Cray.”
“You’ll get the first copy, signed, Uncle Ross. Seeing you in action out here on the road has really inspired me.”
I look over at Cray slouching in the passenger seat. “To write a porn novel?”
“No, to do what I want to do. And not worry what other people say about it.”
“Well, that part sounds fine, Cray. I’ll just tell you what I tell people who want to play music—don’t quit your day job.”
“I don’t even have a day job, Uncle Ross.”
“Exactly.”