Spitting gravel and mud, Hana performed a fishtailing U-turn and headed south on Highway 8. Jack lumbered after her in “the Beast,” our affectionate sobriquet for the six-ton automotive leviathan Hughie had fixed us up with. I lifted Max out of his carrier, set him on my lap, and stroked his fur. His body was tensing, and I tried to calm him with pets and whispers in his ear. “We’re going to Oamaru through the Pig Route,” I said soothingly.
“You talk out loud to your cat?” Jack said, turning the wipers up to full speed as the sleet pelted the windshield with renewed fury.
“Max knows everything,” I said.
“Max?” Jack said. “Why does Miles have to go back to California?”
Ventriloquizing through Max, I said, “Because he found out he has a daughter.”
Jack darted me a look, then turned back to the road. “No shit?”
“If an email from a woman I haven’t heard from in over twenty years can be believed.”
“Wow. That’s heavy shit.”
“It is.”
“Wow. How old is she?”
“Twenty-five.”
“You let one slip by the goalpost?”
“It’s more complicated than that, Jack.”
“I might have some insight for you if you let me in on it.” He glanced at me with wide-open eyes and lifted eyebrows in a question mark expression.
“I’m still in shock.”
“And you didn’t tell Ella?” I shook my head. “I can only imagine what you’re feeling, Homes. That’s bombshell news. How do you feel?”
“Numb.”
He nodded, his face showing genuine concern. “When you feel like talking, brother Jack is here.”
“I’d rather not bring it up the rest of the trip.”
“I hear you, I hear you.”
“I appreciate that.” I produced my phone, loaded Google Maps, and put in Oamaru as our destination.
“Continue on Highway Eight for fifteen kilometers,” said the British-accented female voice.
“Turn that off,” Jack said.
“Just in case Hana loses us.”
“She’s not going to lose us. She’s got us on fucking GPS. Plus, she’s your publicist. She loses you, she loses her job.”
Jack turned to me. “If this Pig Route gets us there, you’ve got to give her credit. Whoever that Kiwi Rob is was clearly either fucking with you or had gotten an early start on his libations. Speaking of which, I’d love it if you got me one of those coffee drinks out of the fridge.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
I set Max down on the seat and took two steps into the passenger compartment. I opened the refrigerator and rooted out a can of cold brew, my feet spread wide apart in an effort to maintain my balance. The wind was gusting viciously, and Jack was jerking the steering wheel left and right to keep us on the narrow road.
I returned to the cockpit, opened Jack’s beverage, and set it in his drink holder. “Fuck, man, this looks bad,” I said. “Maybe I should radio Hana to book us a hotel tonight.” I started to reach for the Garmin.
Jack stopped me with a hand on mine. “She’s going to think we’re a pair of pussies if you do that.”
“I guess we can’t use pussy to mean coward anymore,” I said.
“We can do whatever we want and say whatever we want when we’re out of earshot of those brandishing their iPhones who would dare to take down two—”
“Washed-up celebrities?”
Jack laughed. “That’s us. Made it; never made it.”
“And then you die.”
“And then you die. Great line in your movie.”
A gust of wind blasted us, and the camper van violently heaved to the shoulder, the shoulder that wasn’t there. Flora raked the side of the van. Jack turned the wheel to the right and kept us on the narrow one-lane highway.
“Jesus, Jack.”
“We’re fine, Homes, we’re fine. I’ve got the Beast under control.”
Max looked up at me, alarm glinting in his unblinking eyes. Hana’s voice screeched at us. “How’re you guys holding up?”
I reached for the walkie-talkie. “We’re getting knocked off the road, but otherwise we’re fine, Hana. Thanks for asking.”
“Of course.”
“Maybe you should book a hotel given these weather conditions.”
There was no response on her end.
“Don’t ask her to do that,” Jack said. “If word gets out we’re hoteling it, it’s going to be bad optics.”
“To whom?”
“The Pacific Horizon people.” He threw me a sly smile. “And I heard there might be a documentary in the works.”
“That ain’t going to happen.”
Jack turned away, holding an expression on his face that suggested he knew something I didn’t.
We crawled past the somnambulant towns of Cromwell and Bannockburn, then descended along the frozen lake into Clyde. The sleet slanted in curtained waves, and Jack had to gear down to forty miles per hour to keep us from getting blown off the road. Hana had slowed up and was keeping a watchful eye on us in her rearview mirror. She radioed us frequent updates in her upbeat spirit—“We’re making good time”—even as the skies darkened ahead of us and the sleet that had turned ominously to snow again reduced our visibility and whitened the surrounding landscape to a wintry desolation.
As we passed through Alexandra and angled northeast onto Highway 85 (the Pig Route!), the heavy skies surrendered to gravity and it began snowing hard. Jack leaned over the steering wheel and squinted at the disappearing road ahead of him, crow’s-feet etched at the edges of his narrowing eyes. For the first time that morning, he appeared concerned.
“I hope this has some kind of four-wheel drive equivalent,” Jack muttered. “The Pacific Horizon folks told me the Beast goes down into some pretty low gears.”
“This snow is insane,” I said, tensing, one hand bracing the dash, the Southern California born-and-raised boy in me not used to snow, let alone blizzard conditions and closed mountain passes. “Worse comes to worst, we pull over and get a hotel, and Hana has to reschedule.”
“We’re going to get there,” Jack insisted. “Don’t go all negative on me. Fucks with my resolve.”
I radioed Hana: “Does this snowstorm concern you?”
“Does a bear shit in a church?” she radioed back.
Jack and I exchanged looks and chuckled.
“Woman’s got a sense of humor,” Jack said.
“There are no mountain passes on the Pig Route,” Hana said. “It’ll get warmer when we get to the ocean.”
“We’ll take your word for it.” I turned to Jack. “And don’t tell Hana what I told you.”
“How long have we known each other?”
“Too long.”
“Exactly my point.”
The countryside flew past in all its rural beauty. The small towns we passed through bore the architectural feel of Hollywood western cattle towns. Jack and I settled into a rhythm. We reminisced on old times in between exchanges of concern about the howling winds and heavy precipitation that alternated between snow and sleet. Jack, God bless him, did not bring up my “California issue.” He knew I was wrestling with something deeply personal.
At Hana’s suggestion, we pulled over at a gas station in the tiny town of Omakau so we could refuel and I could take a leak.
Hana and Jack were conferring when I returned from the bathroom, but they stopped talking abruptly, so I naturally assumed they were gossiping about me. No doubt Hana was asking Jack about my welfare, how I was doing, since there was always general concern about my occupational negativism. If Jack bailed she would be left all alone with me. She feared me, the way others feared me, because in my voice was always the portent of an impending humdinger of a panic attack.
I threw up my hands. “I’m fine,” I assured the bedraggled crew. “Looking forward to the Tough Guy Book Club.” They broke into smiles of relief. “Assuming we don’t wash away into the South Pacific and end up drifting on a raft to our doom because the roads are washed out.”
“He’s kidding,” Jack translated to Hana.
“I’m sorry for the biblical storm, Miles,” Hana said.
“It’s not your fault, Hana. The book came out in winter, I couldn’t wait until the summer to sell it, this is the book tour. You and my man Jack are going to get me there.”
“It’s all good. You’re good. Let’s go. We’re cutting it close.” She pivoted in place and strode back to her Subaru.
Jack and I climbed up into the camper van and resumed our cockpit seats. I fed Max a treat and whispered more reassuring words to him.
We barreled on into the freezing rain and the buffeting wind, the taillights of Hana’s Subaru blearily visible through our blurred windshield. My A Year of Pure Feeling book tour was off to a wobbly start, as the Kiwis are fond of euphemizing. Jack and I had somehow found ourselves in a six-ton camper van on the “Pig Route,” headed to Oamaru with a ridiculously young publicist leading the way. Gone were the days of flying from city to city, hunkering in Marriotts overflowing with courtesy gifts of wine and fruit baskets, gearing up to read chapters to a hundred-plus fans clutching my novel, eagerly awaiting my autograph. Fast-forward ten years, and here I was at the jumping-off point to the Doomsday Glacier in a camper van in sleet and snow and barbarous winds en route to the Tough Guy Book Club. I shook my head and exhaled a laugh.
“What?” Jack said.
“I was picturing myself driving the Beast all alone, in this weather or, God forbid, with some hired driver who doesn’t know me. I’m glad you finagled your way on board. It’s good to have someone who knows me.”
“I have a confession,” Jack started. I waited. “Hughie had already made the decision. He knew we were friends, he knew I was in Oz, so he called me and asked me to come on the trip with you. He knew you would bail if you saw a camper van and a Kiwi driver you’d never met.”
“You—and Hana—knew about this last-minute change of plans with this camper van?” I pounded my fist on the dash.
“Well, it wasn’t last minute.”
“It was to me.”
“Sorry.”
“What? Did he offer you money?”
“No. And I wouldn’t take it if he had. He’s trying to save money.”
“He doesn’t believe in the book?”
“He said something about how you had shifted gears and written something less commercial than the first one,” Jack guiltily admitted.
“Let me get this straight: he’s going to lose money on the book, but he’s going to make it back on this documentary he’s hatching?”
Jack stared expressionlessly at the road. “Something along those lines,” he mumbled.
I turned back and stared through the windshield at the whiteout that greeted my dismay, seething. It wasn’t the first time someone had thrown themselves at me with flummery and then sharply turned a corner when I dared to defy expectations and not repeat myself. “I don’t fucking care what Hughie thinks,” I said. “The book is published. It is what it is. It’s the book I wanted to write. And remember, time is the harshest critic”—I wagged a finger at Jack—“not the naysayers massaging their worry beads and bemoaning their vanishing dollars.”
“Amen, brother. Amen.”
“Let’s stop in Palmerston, guys,” screeched Hana over the walkie-talkie.
“Palmerston,” Jack echoed.
“Coming up,” I said, staring at Google Maps.
Palmerston was on the East Coast of the South Island. Nearer to the water, it was a few degrees warmer and the alarming snow had stopped falling, but the wind and rain were as torrential and brutal as ever.
A bedraggled but determined Hana huddled with us in the convenience store where we purchased a few snacks. “We’ve got enough time for a meal at the Star and Garter,” she said. “Google it, and I’ll meet you there. I’m going to race ahead to check on things with Garret.”
“Garret?” I asked.
“Head of the Tough Guy Book Club.”
“All right, Hana, we’ve come through the worst of it. I think we can make it,” said Jack.
“See you there,” Hana said as she marched back out into the rain, no doubt questioning her newfound profession: book publicist in the twenty-first century, declining days of the Age of the Anthropocene, when books were being supplanted by social media, video games, dark web chat rooms, women dancing half-naked on Instagram and TikTok, and young men hurtling themselves off fjord cliffs in wingsuits. No time for Dostoevsky or Austen, let alone Miles Raymond.
“I like her spirit,” Jack said, watching her disappear into the rain.
“Plucky woman,” I concurred.
“You want to take over the wheel, Miles?” Jack extended his hand to give me the keys. “I need to go in the back and return some emails and take a snooze.”
“No problem.”
I climbed into the driver’s cockpit. Max was meowing, so I removed him from his carrier and set him on the passenger seat. He stood on his haunches and tried to peer over the dash. For a brief moment, it appeared as though he wanted to get up on the dashboard for a better view, but with his disability, there was no way he was going to be able to launch himself on his spindly hind legs. And that saddened me. I glanced back through the passageway toward the rear. Jack was sprawled on the lounge cushions pecking away at his phone, raking a hand through his tousled hair.
“Stage-four clinger?” I inquired, sarcasm inflecting my voice over a backward glance.
Deep in thought, and without glancing in my direction, Jack answered with a thumbs-up.
I started the engine, which came to life with a satisfied snarl, and turned onto the main road out of Palmerston, remembering to drive on the left side.
Palmerston to Oamaru was an hour’s drive on New Zealand’s Highway 1. It wound in and out of the coast, featuring glimpses of windblown, white-capped seas. I needed both hands planted firmly on the steering wheel because the powerful, fickle winds would push the camper van this way and that of their own volition. There were moments when the wind caused the camper to lurch violently to one side, and I had to use all my driving skills from the million miles I had driven growing up in Southern California to keep it on the narrow one-lane highway. Even risking petting Max with my left hand brought disaster into the equation. Jack seemed to be rolling with the swaying of the vehicle, sans complaint, oblivious to the danger, not caring if we went off a cliff and plunged into the ocean. Jack and I had that sentiment in common. We had come through the worst of it—today on the Pig Route, and in the past in our respective “careers.”
We were down, but we weren’t out.