Random Acts
You must’ve aimed your silver Cadillac toward the only open lane at the six-wide tollbooth and handed the old man double the toll. When he took your money, you told him something along the line of wanting to pay for the next car. Maybe you saw headlights in your rearview mirror. Maybe you didn’t. When the old guy caught your intentions, maybe you noticed he didn’t have any teeth in his mouth, but somehow made his words as clear as a redneck poet. And you were probably pleased with yourself behind the wheel of that fancy car as you eased onto the twenty-mile stretch of empty causeway before you. And, while you drove, maybe you swept your mind of everything except the hum of your tires on pavement. But then, BRIGHTNESS! The interior of your car flared blinding white as high beams blasted through the prism of your rear window—we were right on your ass.
***
Throwing your money around like you’re doing a motherfucker a favor. As if you’re Napoleon tossing coins to peasants. “Fuck you,” I said to the old man in the tollbooth. On this night, you pitied the wrong guy. The gulf between your kind of rich and the likes of me has always been wide, but on occasions when my path crosses with the likes of you, it’s rarely peaceful.
***
It isn’t yet midnight, but the road’s plenty quiet to pay you back. And like a train barreling through a tunnel, Randy’s rattling pickup truck roars closer behind you, the light intensifying. I’m already in the right lane, you gesture into the rearview mirror. Me and Randy just laugh. Our bumper inches from your bumper. You squint through the glare bouncing off the rearview mirror, and suddenly we’re so close you no longer see headlights behind you. I’ll bet you can’t see anything but the silhouette of the truck’s cab. Its engine feels like it’s in your trunk and its vibration makes you shake.
Randy swerves into the left lane and guns the engine to pull alongside as I lean out the window, my arm raised, taking aim. My shirt’s off so no sleeves flap in the wind and interfere with my accuracy. As soon as I get even with your quarter panel I let one fly. It makes solid contact, like a chipping hammer on a ship’s bulwark. You swerve a little toward the guardrail.
I bounce the next shot off your door and Randy laughs us farther into your lane. You probably duck, hunch your shoulders or something. I wonder if you shout “Sonsofbitches,” or “Hail Marys.” In your window I see only my reflection, the veins in my neck surging and venomous.
Your hands likely squeeze the wheel. You might consider pulling over. Maybe you hope we’ll pass. Maybe you want to stand on the gas pedal and outrun us. Call the police! you surely think. Your hand’s likely trembling on the steering wheel as you wonder if you can make it to a call box in time. The next shot rings off your roof. You brace yourself, praying I wouldn’t shatter glass or hit you directly and damage your fancy fucking car.
For the first time maybe you see the streetlamps lining the bridge’s rails. Their halos reach into the night illuminating you. Both sides are lit along the way, but two in a row are out on my side and in that half-darkness I see through your window. Air sucks out of my lungs. If I knew a woman was driving, I might not have thrown the quarters.
Maybe you think of me as a hoodlum or a hellion, but I’m a genius, because geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people and clean the air. Kierkegaard said so. You might think I’m too simple for philosophy, but I spent some time locked up in Kansas and a book about him was all I had to read my first year there.
There’s no way for you to know this, and so I ignore that as I ignore the sting of gnats on my shirtless torso as I lean out the speeding truck, pumping my fist into my chest.
The truck leaps forward in spastic bursts of engine-revving madness, but keeps pace with your car. All you know to do is maintain your lane. And as you do, your grip probably tightens on the wheel. You surely wish this was over.
I hurl insults to tell you what’s up so you’ll never pull any shit like that again. Not everybody will go this easy on you. I’m tempted to have Randy follow you so I can fuck you up for sure, but at the next darkened streetlight I catch another glimpse and you are beautiful. You’re wearing some type of evening gown, your hair is up and you have these dangling earrings. You have fear on your face, too. Real terror, as best I can tell, and it messes up your image behind the window. It reminds me of the face my ex-wife made before she took sole custody of our kids.
I raise my hand again.
You duck farther, fearful of driving, terrified of stopping.
My Uncle Earl visited me in Kansas one summer day after I got out of solitary for fighting. He didn’t bring me anything, but he leaned into the glass with the phone at his ear and said, “Never swing an axe when a butter knife will do.”
I think about that in that instant while I watch the crackled texture of the white stripes perforating the blacktop that passes beneath me. Thick paint, like the shitty lead-based coats sticking shut the window in my childhood bedroom.
You can probably still taste the chocolate truffles that waiters in bowties carried on silver trays. You look like you want nothing more than to reconnect with that sweetness. That wanting—creamy bitches like you are always wanting what they don’t have. Just like my ex-wife. She’s a creamy bitch like you and I never earned enough money to please her either. Fuck you both.
After cresting the apex, you probably realize the police wouldn’t make it there in time if you called them now. “Those bastards,” you probably say.
You don’t know us and you don’t know what we’re capable of. If you were thinking clearly, you might trust the horsepower under your hood to leave us in your dust.
Maybe you feel dirty for the endorphin-rush that makes you squeeze your thighs together beneath your beaded dress. I bet your heart pounds in rhythm with the truck’s tires as they clack over lane reflectors. The galloping through your ears makes it impossible to hear my words, and, instinctively, your finger lowers the window an inch.
***
Randy keeps us lined up with your car. With your window lowered, I see someone next to you. Is that your old man? What’s wrong with that guy? He’s not moving. Is he sick? Or drunk? Either way, he isn’t getting it up. He looks hollow and out of it. Maybe this party you’re coming from was pretty fun and you got a little high on Moët, maybe even did a little coke in the fancy marble-lined bathroom with six sinks and a nice little Guatemalan woman to hand you a linen hand towel embroidered with the hotel’s initial. Either case, you’re going home to nothing rigid south of his belt, but I have something to get you through the night.
You want to tell your man how scared you are, how dying behind the wheel or on that dark stretch of pavement is the last thing you want for either of you, but he’s in no condition to offer strength or security.
The smell of brackish water on either side of the causeway is foreign to you, but it fills your nose from the death-black surface so far below the bridge that jumping isn’t an option. Even if not for the height, the effort would be too much for that guy in your car. If we get you, you’d be a rag doll in my hands—and you’d love it. That guy next to you would be forced to watch, disregarded in the passenger seat.
You probably fear your sister or your daughter having to settle the affairs left behind if you die on that causeway. Your earthly remains. Your personal effects. You wonder who would touch your underwear, if they would find the dildo and vibrator you hid in an old shoebox on the top shelf of your closet—the box you haven’t touched in far too long.
With your black beaded dress and up-do hair, you’ve obviously been social all evening; maybe you want just to talk. You ease up on the accelerator. Try to hear. You have such passion and ambition on your face that I want to reach out to you, but your hands grip the wheel with fear.
I holler more. The truck speeds up and slows down. Lunging.
You look at the man in the seat next to you, his suit coat swallowing him. Maybe you pretend he’s shirtless and the tie loosened around his neck is a tattooed snake winding over his heart, like on me. Maybe you don’t. But you can’t pretend I’m not right there on the other side of you. I’m the passion, the coarse hair and muskiness you miss atop you all those afternoons home alone. And now I race along beside you. Images of candlelight give way to the reality of streetlights and the maniacs in the pickup truck that’s edging closer toward you.
You slow down.
When Randy gets close enough, I see your face covered in the black trails women get from crying. Two streetlights later, I notice your hands on top of the steering wheel, palms together and fingers pointing upward—prayer hands on the steering wheel. Fingers straight as if you say Ah-men instead of A-men. Prayer hands and crying.
That’s when I show you the remaining quarter in my hand and then exaggerate the act of dropping it down harmlessly so you won’t misinterpret my actions. “I’m done,” I say, wiggling my fingers. “No more. See?”
Randy swerves quickly out of and then back into place.
I reach around and smack the truck’s roof. The wind is a steady shove on the left side of my face and it starts to burn like too much sun. “Keep it straight and slow,” I holler back to him.
As we get close enough, I reach out, put my hand on your window, palm flat up against it like they do in prison. But it isn’t like that, is it? I’m putting up one of the prayer hands.
The smile that spread across your lips is like my ex-wife’s on our wedding day. Her smile was reason enough to marry her. And yours is similar. I wonder if you smell like her, but realize you must buy perfume from the expensive counters I pass on the way into the mall. It doesn’t matter. You reach over with your left hand to press it to mine.
Despite the wind, I get a rush of warmth through my chest, my arms, my legs. We hold this embrace for a couple dozen clacks of the lane reflectors.
Our hands separate as we approach the first exit a mile after the causeway ends, and I assume you live in one of the designer homes along the bay.
We’re heading to the other side, toward the power plant that throws ninety-eight percent steam into the air through the giant smokestacks barely visible on the other end.
“You want me to follow that bitch?” Randy asks.
“Don’t follow her,” I say. After taking my seat, I punch him in the neck. “And don’t ever call her that.”
As your brake lights fade from my side-view mirror, I’m left looking at my hand.