1
It took too long to get through the South, let alone reach the Southwest.
Josh drove first shift, then Bronwyn, then Griff. After Griff’s six hours’ were up, he got in the backseat and, without anyone being aware of it, put Tammy’s hands on the bulge in his pants and whispered in her ear that she should just keep stroking it. Tammy pretended she was getting the little bottle of Vaseline moisturizer from her handbag because her hands were drying out. Ziggy pretended to be asleep, but he told Josh later how, when Josh was driving and Bronwyn was talking a mile a minute about why Ayn Rand was the most brilliant human being who had ever lived, Tammy had unzipped Griff and given him a slow, easy hand job that had driven Ziggy nearly crazy as he watched through his nearly closed eyes. “He’s a big boy,” Ziggy told Josh later, when they got out to pump gas. “And Tammy was licking his ear the whole time she did it. Man, he is one lucky dude.”
“Too much information,” Josh said.
“He’s like the Alpha.”
“What?”
“The Alpha. Like in wolf packs. One male gets the hot chicks. All the other males—that’s you and me—never get laid.”
“I get laid.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“No, I do.”
“That’s why you’re all alone on this trip. Like me,” Ziggy said. Then, Ziggy sniffed his fingers. “God, even my fingers smell like sex. I can’t believe you and Bron didn’t notice. It was freaky.”
“Sleazy’s more like it.”
“Ah, you’re just jealous,” Zig said, and then went to use the restroom at the back of the gas station.
Josh glanced at Tammy, who was just going into the ladies’ room. Griff stood outside it, grinning, his hands in his pocket. Then, thinking nobody was watching, he tapped on the door to the ladies’ room.
The door opened.
Griff went inside.
Bronwyn was still in the car, smoking. Josh went over to her side. “Guess who had sex in the backseat today?”
“Please tell me this didn’t involve you and Ziggy in some way.”
He shot her a look. “Griff and Tammy.”
Bronwyn’s eyes seemed to squint into tiny cuts, then opened wider. “That whore. She just traps men with sex. That’s all it is.”
“Yeah,” Josh said.
“Like you’re any different.”
“I am.”
Bronwyn smiled, blew out a puff of smoke, and touched the edge of his wrist. “No, you are. You’re so different I thought you might be gay when I first met you.”
“Gay? I’m not gay.”
“Don’t get all defensive. It was the poetry you wrote. For creative writing. It was sensitive. That’s all. Not like the way other guys write stuff that’s all about them and their exploits. You wrote about something different.”
Oh Christ, he thought. Oh Christ. She sees me as a dickless wonder.
“I think they’re going at it in there,” he said, nodding toward the restroom.
“Gross.” Bronwyn sucked back some smoke, then heaved it out in a long sigh. She leaned forward into the dashboard, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray. “Let me tell you something, Josh. Something about some girls. There are these girls like Tammy that boys really like because of this whole sex issue. But girls know about who she really is. She’s a sad pathetic idiot who thinks her whole life should revolve around giving the worst kind of men what they want.”
“You’re just saying that because of him. Griff. You still want him.”
“Once. Maybe. Not anymore. I don’t think I could ever want someone who slept with some of the girls he’s slept with. Back when I dated him, you know, he’d only slept with a few girls. At this point, the numbers are reaching the populations of small island nations. Tammy’s just one of many, I’m sure.”
“You don’t fool me,” he said. “Not one bit. You like bad boys. Nice girl like you, rich family. It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Bite me, preppie boy,” she said.
2
Nobody thought Tammy should drive because she had too many beers during the day, and Ziggy somehow managed to get stoned, even though no one could specifically say when he did it. It was assumed he went into the bathroom at HoJo’s or Stuckeys or the Waffle Huts, and just got high fast.
They stopped six times the first day because Tammy had to pee so much. Or else, as Josh and Ziggy assumed, she and Griff had to sexually christen every sleazoid gas station bathroom in the Bible Belt. They drove through Memphis with Griff telling a story about how he got lost in downtown Memphis once and went to some big party there and passed out and woke up the next day in New Orleans. He thought it was a funny story, but no one laughed. Then, in Little Rock, Bronwyn called her father collect. He told her that she was an idiot to plan a trip like this with people she didn’t know and that he’d send a plane ticket if she wanted to come out. She hung up on him, and chain-smoked the rest of the day and evening, which got them to Oklahoma City, where they all crashed in one room at a Howard Johnson’s. They slept for eleven hours, until the maids finally banged on the door the next afternoon, trying to get them up and out.
They went from Oklahoma down through the Texas Panhandle, and Ziggy wanted to stop at El Paso for something, and that’s where things started to go seriously wrong. Griff and Tammy wanted to spend a day in Juarez bar-hopping, and Bronwyn’s period had started (she didn’t need to announce it, everyone knew when she went into snapping turtle mode), and Josh had to go rescue Griff from a fight at a badly lit bar, even though Griff had been the creep who was coming on to other men’s wives in the bar.
“What the hell are you doing?” Josh asked, yanking Griff by his wrinkled button-down shirt, out from the darkness of the bar, into the searing white light of midday. Griff crumbled to the ground, shielding his face as if expecting to get hit one more time.
“I’m havin’ a little fun. You know about fun?” Griff giggled, and wiped a smidgeon of blood from the edge of his lips.
“That guy could’ve done some serious damage to you.”
Griff raised his eyebrows in a “who cares?” attitude, and reached his hand up to Josh. “Come on, help me up.”
Josh gave him a lift up, and smacked him lightly on the back of the head. “Get back to the car. Jesus, now I’ve got to go back in there and get Tammy. Could you just stay out of trouble once in your life?”
“This isn’t trouble,” Griff replied, stumbling off in search of the others in the car, parked out on the main road. “The lacrosse trophies. Now that was trouble.”
Who could forget? Josh thought. Who could forget someone having stolen all the lacrosse trophies at Jackson College that had been won over the past ten years, the prize sport of Jackson. Why the Gods of Jackson had played lacrosse. Griff and his frat brothers had stolen all of them, then pissed in them, and left them in front of Dean Egan’s house at the edge of campus. Griff was a moron and a thief, and he’d been like this since as long as Josh had known him—which was only two years now.
3
In Las Cruces, New Mexico, they got pulled over by the cops. Griff told Bronwyn to show the cop her boobs so they wouldn’t get the ticket. “My sister did that once. She had these big boobies. And I was riding shotgun, and this cop pulled her over for going 85 in a 55 zone. She just unbuttoned her blouse three inches down and acted all babylike, and he didn’t give her a ticket. It works. Honest.”
They saw the first billboard before they reached the eastern edge of Arizona. None of them really noticed it at first. Only Ziggy. He had been smoking a joint for lunch, and started laughing after they’d passed it.
“What’d it say?” Tammy asked.
“Something about the Unspeakable.”
“Unspeakable? What the hell is ‘unspeakable’ supposed to mean? You can’t speak it or something?”
“Exactly,” Bronwyn said, only nobody detected the bitchiness in her tone.
“Something unspeakable and unknown. An ancient wonder of the world. Coming up somewhere. Off some exit,” Ziggy added.
Ziggy kept complaining that he couldn’t sleep because of all the bumps they hit in the road, so Bronwyn had them stop the car. She went to the trunk, opened it, and drew out a couple of blankets. She rolled one up for Ziggy’s pillow and threw the other one over him for comfort, although it was a warm day. Ziggy closed his eyes soon after, and they all snickered a little as he snored. Then, suddenly, he let out a bloodcurdling scream, to the point where Griff nearly pulled the car off the road.
Ziggy glanced around: They all stared at him. “I had a nightmare,” he said.
4
The second sign stood about fifty miles farther up the highway among a mass of billboards about trading posts and outlet malls in Tucson. This time, Josh read it aloud as it went by, “Come see the mystery! The great ancient wonder! The Unspeakable, Unknowable Attraction! The Secret of the Ancient Aztecs!”
Then, he read off the last bit, about mileage and turn-offs to get to the site, “Hey, we’re apparently only two hundred miles from the great mystery of the asshole of the universe.”
“I love those kinds of places,” Bronwyn said. “When I used to travel with my dad, we’d stop at all of the roadside attractions. Sometimes they were just rattlesnakes in cages. Sometimes they had what looked like babies in jars.”
“I saw John Dillinger’s dong once,” Griff said.
“Bull.”
“I did. It was in this museum in D.C. It was so big they kept it in this long jar. Just floating in this formaldehyde gunk.”
“Nasty,” Ziggy said. “That’s nasty. You die and then they cut off your dick and stick it in a museum.”
“Don’t worry, Zig. Yours is safe,” Griff laughed. “There’s no itty-bitty museum.”
“I want to go see the unspeakable and unknowable attraction,” Bronwyn said, flicking her cigarette out the window. She stretched out, and pressed her bare feet up against the dashboard. Josh looked at her feet, and noticed that they were small and perfect, with toes that didn’t intrude on each other, as his did.
“What route was it on?”
“No idea,” Josh said, watching the road, watching her feet.
That night, in Tucson, they stayed at the cheapest motel they could find (The Roadrunner Inn). Josh sat up to watch the news and then Johnny Carson before drifting off to sleep with his face not far enough away from Ziggy’s smelly feet.
Nerves were shot by the time they got back on the highway the next morning. Griff insisted on driving, and nobody had gotten a good night’s sleep in the motel because Ziggy was sick and the toilet wouldn’t flush and the smell alone kept them awake, to say nothing of the broken-down air-conditioning and the way the heat had shot up sometime after crossing Texas to New Mexico, and then, at its worst, into Arizona.
On the road, Ziggy kept having them stop because he got carsick every few miles.
5
Bronwyn spotted another billboard for the Unknowable Mystery, and this time it was more explicit.
YOU’RE NEAR THE MYSTERY! THE UNKNOWABLE, UNSPEAKABLE TERROR OF THE ANCIENT WORLD IS JUST DOWN ROUTE 19 AT THE BRAKEDOWN PALACE AND SUNDRIES. NAVAJO BLANKETS! TURQUOISE! ARROWHEADS! FIREWORKS!
“I intend to be the unspeakable, unknowable mystery of the modern world,” Bronwyn said, and Josh watched as she closed her eyes gently. He thought she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
Josh knew he shouldn’t shut his eyes and lean against Bronwyn and fall asleep. But he couldn’t help it.
6
He dreamed that he and Bronwyn were in a deep green forest. The trees towered over them, like a cathedral of nature. The fern beneath their feet was like a bed. Bronwyn began to undress, stepping out of her panties, finally, and he began to feel her all over. She gyrated against his touch, and soon his clothes had fallen away, and Bronwyn went on her hands and knees. She glanced up at him, smiling. He took her there, on the fern, on a soft mossy floor. He felt the intense pleasure of warm wet heat when he went inside her, and she began whispering something about how he needed to wake up now. Only he didn’t want to wake up.
Then something shifted in the woods, and the trees began to vanish, one by one. He didn’t care, because he felt so good inside Bronwyn, but soon, they were in an open space, and it was not Bronwyn beneath him at all, but Griff who said, “This isn’t trouble, Josh. Don’t worry. This is good times!”
That’s when he woke up.
7
“Holy shit,” someone said.
Reality banged against him. Light of day. Heat in the car. Leaning against Ziggy now instead of Bronwyn.
The car had come to a stop in what seemed to be a ditch.