Sundays after Mass when Joshua doesn’t show for dinner, Maggie often rolls the old Chevy Impala from the garage, and packed with their sleeping bags and tinned foods, drives them out of the city. From Ipswich Street out along Calistas and then over the Bay Bridge they travel; every weekend driving farther and farther, Maggie moving them southeast in a strange if unconscious parallel with the rail tracks to their left, winding and twisting into the foothills beyond the city and, farther still, the semi-arid desert plains with their small, desolate, single-intersection towns about which the wind seems to constantly swirl fine red sandstone dust. At first Duncan enjoys watching the passing landscape and changing country as Mother shows him the roads she’d traversed as a young woman many years before his birth and the quality of her voice—exuberant and filled with life—as she tells him of a time, smiling as she does so, when it seems she believed everything was possible. But as they move ever farther from the city—perhaps minutes after they’ve passed the red-winged horse of the Mobil gas station on Route 5 or the Nightstop truckers’ motel with its large neon green cactus just after Harlow and perhaps as Mother begins to feel the distance between them and the city widening and only the vast American landscape looming on the horizon and threatening to engulf them—something strange and inexplicable happens to her. She begins to mutter to herself: I can’t do this, I can’t do this, and swears, Shit, Shit Fuck! and grapples with the steering wheel, and in her fit of cursing, they take the next exit that comes upon them and turn north, his mother in a foul mood until the lights of San Francisco show themselves upon the horizon, shining blearily through a fog as night comes down.
Sometimes they will drive until Maggie realizes they are almost out of gas and they have to refuel, and at other times she simply drives and drives, refueling at one roadside gas station after another until, inexplicably panicked, she turns the car around and heads home or until she seems to wake suddenly—eyes blinking, eyelashes fluttering, tongue licking her lips savagely—from her fugue. And always she stares at Duncan in confusion, as if he is a stranger sitting next to her, and he wonders if she remembers a single thing they spoke of during the many hours of those trips, or if she even thinks of him or of Joshua, in his single room at the Langham Hotel, lying awake listening to men retching, puking, and loosing their bowels into the shatencrusted toilet at the end of the hall.
And mostly Duncan is too exhausted to care about or to try to understand these seeming fits. Instead he closes his eyes and waits for the smells of the Gravel, the Bends, and the Bottoms, the shift whistle from the Edison plant, the pungent tannic odor from the tannery, the rumble and grind of the diesel engines motoring out of the rail yard, or, hopefully, the sight of Joshua’s Indian aslant the curbstone before their house to tell him that they are home again.
C’mon, sweetie, Mother says as she leads him, half-asleep, from the car. We’re home, and there is a flatness to her voice as if she has momentarily stepped far outside of herself and her voice is coming from very far away, or as if someone else has taken her place, someone who is merely mimicking her, and he can only think of the disembodied voices of lost astronauts that murmur through Brother Canice’s radio late in the night. Soon she retreats to her bedroom with a bottle while Duncan, now suddenly awake, stares at the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, as it shudders and sways slightly with the thumping bass reverberations from her stereo sounding from down the hall, and wonders where she goes to in these moments, what manner of madness affects her, and, if somehow, he is responsible for it all.