WHAT WAKES JOE IN THE MORNING IS EMILY SCRAMBLING out of bed to run to the bathroom, where she vomits long and loud, moaning between retches.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Mollin yells from somewhere.
Joe’s doing okay himself, not a hundred percent, but nowhere near as rotted as he expected to be. Emily closes the bedroom door when she returns, puts her back to it, and slides to the floor to sit cross-legged with her chin on her chest. Joe remembers his promise to her from last night but hopes she’s forgotten asking for it. Her first words, though, are “When are we leaving?”
“Are you sure you’re up to it?” Joe says.
“You changed your mind.”
“No, but you don’t look like you’re in any shape for a road trip. Maybe we should chill today and go first thing tomorrow.”
Emily gets to her feet and rakes back her hair with her fingers. “I’ll be fine after some coffee,” she says. “Worry about yourself.”
Joe ignores the argument raging in his head. He knows, he knows, he knows it would be a huge mistake to drop everything and drive Emily to Texas right now, when his own life is in shambles. Mollin wants her out of the house, though, so Austin or no Austin, he has to make at least that happen.
Mollin’s doing shoulder presses on the patio. Joe goes out to talk to him while Emily gets ready. It’s already hot at ten a.m. The trash in the pool stinks.
“Dude, your girl,” Mollin says, making a face. “I almost puked myself.”
“Five more minutes and we’ll be out of here,” Joe says.
“Not to be an asshole or anything…”
“It’s cool.”
Mollin sets the bar down and wipes sweat off his face with his forearm.
“I might be going out of town for a while,” Joe says.
“Where to?” Mollin says.
“Austin.”
“Right on. Austin’s cool.”
“I want to thank you for letting me crash here the last few days.”
“No problem,” Mollin says, extending his fist for a bump. “We’ve got history.”
Emily seems to be feeling better after washing up and brushing her teeth. Joe packs his stuff, and they head out. She’s on her phone looking for the nearest Starbucks when they pass a doughnut shop.
“Ooooh, a maple bar,” she says. “Pull in there.”
They sit at a tiny orange table overlooking the shop’s parking lot. Someone’s etched a tag into the window, some nonsense six inches square that warps Joe’s view. The coffee’s burnt, but his doughnut is excellent.
Emily’s on her phone again. She turns it around to show Joe a map. “It’s twenty-two hours to Austin,” she says.
He knows, he knows, he knows this is his last chance to get out of the trip. Instead, he uses two fingers to enlarge the map and says, “All the way on the 10, huh?” He was serious when he told her he loved her the other day, and now he guesses he’ll prove it.
“Yeah, but we’ve got to swing through Vegas,” Emily says. “One night, have a little fun.”
The last time Joe was in Vegas was for that fucked-up Christmas at his mom’s, which was no fun at all.
“And the Grand Canyon, too,” Emily says. “I’ve never been there.”
Neither has Joe, but he wonders when this turned into a sightseeing trip. “You’re not in a hurry to get to Texas?” he says.
“We have to stop anyway.”
Joe sips his coffee. The Asian lady who sold them the doughnuts slips out from behind the counter to wipe the tables. Joe remembers coming here as a kid. An old white guy owned the place then, always said “God bless you” when he handed you your change.
Their next stop is a gas station. Emily goes into the store while Joe fills the truck. He pops the hood to check the oil and coolant. A homeless man offers to wash the windshield. Joe tells him to go for it. Skinny Black dude, crusty jeans hanging off him, dead leaves in his hair. He does a decent job, though, even using newspaper to get rid of the streaks from the squeegee.
“Watch out for the fire,” he says.
“What fire?” Joe says.
“In the mountains.”
Joe looks north toward the hills, follows them east. Smoke smudges the sky in the distance.
Emily comes out of the store with a tube of Pringles and a six-pack of Heineken.
“Provisions,” she says.
Joe digs in his pocket for a couple bucks to give the window washer. All he has are twenties.
“How about a beer?” he asks the guy.
“Sure,” the guy says.
Joe takes one of the Heinekens and hands it to him.
The quickest route to Vegas, according to Emily’s phone, is the 5 to the 14 to the 138, picking up the 15 in Victorville. They breeze through Santa Clarita, but traffic slows and backs up after that. The problem turns out to be the fire. The dry, scrubby hills north of the freeway are ablaze, and the truck crawls bumper to bumper toward a towering plume of peach-colored smoke. When everything eventually comes to a dead stop, Joe turns on the radio and finds a news station. He and Emily sit there, feeling trapped and antsy, listening to a reporter talk about a brush fire off the 14.
“Someone doesn’t want us to leave,” Emily says.
Three fire trucks race past in the breakdown lane, and a few minutes later traffic begins to move, everyone inching along again, creeping closer and closer to the blaze. Joe glimpses flames up ahead. His eyes sting from the smoke in the air, and delicate flakes of ash whirl like snow and cling to the truck’s hood. Emily’s recording the apocalyptic scene on her phone. She turns the lens on Joe and asks, “Are you scared?”
“Are you?” he replies.
A huge plane flies so low over the truck, Joe can count the rivets on its belly. It drops a load of bright red retardant onto the fire, which is now only a quarter mile in front of them. Before they reach it, flares, orange plastic cones, and gesticulating highway patrol officers force the F-150 and all the other vehicles off the freeway at the Acton exit.
It’s stop-and-go on the subsequent detour down frontage routes and back roads. The truck is stuck in a line of vehicles that stretches as far as Joe can see in both directions, and it takes half an hour to go five miles. Joe’s hangover finally hits, and Emily’s energy flags too. She sinks into sullenness, turning off the radio and staring blankly out the windshield. Joe can’t think of anything to say and doesn’t try. They creep along in tense silence.
A set of rubber bull balls dangles from the trailer hitch of the truck in front of them. The driver of the Jeep behind them is playing a game on his phone. Joe watches in the rearview mirror as the guy purses his lips in concentration, thumbs tapping wildly. Emily suddenly comes back to life. She scrabbles for the six-pack and tears a can off it.
“Do you want one?” she asks him.
They’re sipping their second cans when they’re allowed back onto the freeway outside Palmdale, and soon they’re speeding across the desert toward Victorville. There’s no feeling of relief though. It’s ugly, barren country dotted with ugly little clusters of decrepit mobile homes and scorched stucco ranchers haunted by paroled child molesters and deranged end-timers who wound up here after being run off from everywhere else.
The beer’s gone by the time they reach Barstow, and Emily has to pee. She points out a McDonald’s and says there’s good, she’ll get something to eat too. The trek across the parking lot is like walking on a hot skillet. They pass an empty bus and find the passengers, Chinese tourists clutching outlet mall shopping bags, lined up at every register inside the restaurant. Their guide shouts instructions, pointing out the soda fountain, the restrooms, the seating area.
“What do you want?” Joe asks Emily. “I’ll order while you go.”
He’s still in line when she returns from the bathroom, so she grabs a table. He has the order memorized, but his mind goes blank when he finally reaches the counter. The cashier fidgets impatiently while he stutters and stammers and squints at the menu, struggling to get everything straight again.
He carries the tray to where Emily is sitting. Her head’s on the table, her cheek resting on the backs of her hands.
“Rise and shine,” he says, his own head pounding.
Emily sits up, bleary-eyed. “Wow,” she says. “I’m wiped out. Maybe there was something toxic in that smoke.”
Joe hands her a box of McNuggets. “These’ll set you right,” he says. “You didn’t say what sauce, so I got honey mustard and barbecue.”
Everyone else in the dining room is Chinese. Joe decides they must be on their way to Vegas instead of coming back because they’re in too good a mood to have just spent a few days losing their asses. A young woman at the next table unwraps an old woman’s hamburger, cuts it in half with a plastic knife, and sets it in front of her. At another table a kid uses his phone to film himself slurping a shake.
Joe works on his Big Mac and fries. He’s not hungry but feels like he should get something in his stomach besides a doughnut. Thinking his headache might stem from dehydration, he twice refills his cup with Coke. Emily eats only three of her nuggets before making a face and closing the box.
“Do you want something else?” he asks her. “Ice cream?”
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom again,” she says. “I think I’m gonna vomit.”
Joe tells her to meet him outside when she’s done. He has a cigarette under a jacaranda tree in the parking lot, sharing the shade with three of the Chinese tourists, who are also smoking. The sky’s a flat, featureless white that makes him feel like he’s trapped inside an eggshell. Emily approaches, pale and projecting discomfort.
“I should have listened to you earlier,” she says. “I’ll die if I have to sit in that truck any longer. Let’s get a room here and start fresh tomorrow.”
They check in to the first motel they come to, a Super 8 next to the freeway. Their room’s on the second floor, overlooking an Indian medical clinic, then a bunch of railroad tracks, then desert. It smells like weed and deodorizer, and the fake wood flooring is curling up in one corner, but Emily says, “Fuck it,” and falls onto the bed.
Joe gets a bottle of Tylenol out of his kit bag and swallows three capsules with a glass of nasty tap water. He’s exhausted but doesn’t think he can sleep.
“I’m gonna get some beer,” he tells Emily. “Do you want anything?”
“Please don’t bring back any alcohol,” she says. “I know I’ll end up drinking, and I don’t want any more today.”
“Okay. Fine,” Joe says.
“Some Perrier would be good though, or any kind of sparkling water.”
Hoping to tire himself out, Joe walks instead of drives to a supermarket they passed on the way in. He regrets it after one block, with the heat and the dust and the semis rattling like they’re about to fall apart as they lumber toward the freeway. He’s the only fool on foot except for a tiny Latino, a child or a dwarf, crouched in the thin strip of shade cast by a power pole. A cloud of flies lifts off a dead cat in the gutter, and Joe breathes through his mouth as he hurries past it.
A wave of cold air breaks over him, a welcome shock, when the doors slide open at Von’s. He gets a cart and walks the aisles until he cools down. Emily might be on the wagon tonight, but he’s going to want some beer, so in addition to two bottles of Perrier, he picks up a twelver of Bud Light and a bag of ice. There’s a cooler in the truck’s toolbox. He’ll stash the beer there and slip out of the room when he feels like having one.
On his way back to the motel he spots a bar that shares a crumbling parking lot with a Dollar General and a Little Caesars. OPEN 6 A.M., a sign says, HAPPY HOUR ALL DAY! It’s so dark inside, he has to pause to let his eyes adjust. The girl pouring drinks is a stone speed-freak: bony, scabby, twitchy. She hits a pen and exhales a cloud of cherry-scented smoke before asking Joe what he’ll have.
“A draft Bud sounds good,” he says.
“Does it?” the girl replies.
When she sets the glass in front of him, he asks if it’s okay to smoke.
“Okay for me, but not for you,” she says. He can’t tell if she’s serious but doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of making him ask, so leaves his cigarettes in his pocket.
The only other customer is a bald, buff Black guy playing strip poker on a machine at the end of the bar. “This is some bullshit right here,” he says to the bartender. “It cost me ten bucks to see this bitch’s titties.”
“You coulda seen mine for five,” the bartender says, and cackles like an old witch.
Joe downs his beer quickly. He’s almost finished when someone enters from outside, riding a blinding bolt of sunlight. There’s ten feet of stick on either side of Joe, but the guy stands next to him so close, Joe can feel the heat coming off his body.
“Baby, baby, baby,” he says to the bartender. “Let me get a Bushmills on the rocks.” He’s a postman, a long-haired, ponytailed, goateed postman. He shuffles his feet, squints at the floor, and backs away.
“Dude,” he says to Joe. “Did you piss yourself?”
Joe looks down to see a puddle under his stool. “That’s ice, man, melting,” he says. “There must be a hole in the bag.” He stands and lifts the dripping sack to show everyone.
“Get that shit out of here,” the bartender says.
Back at the motel Joe puts the ice and beer in the cooler and locks the cooler in the toolbox. The room’s freezing, the air conditioner working itself to death. Emily has undressed and is lying under the blanket and spread.
“You want a glass of this?” Joe asks her, holding up the Perrier.
“Give me the bottle,” she says.
She scoots away from him when he crawls into bed. “No touching,” she says. “I’m still super nauseous.” He rolls over so he’s facing away from her and falls asleep listening to the bathroom faucet drip.
He wakes at sunset and sneaks out for a smoke and a beer on the tailgate of the F-150. The heat’s broken, and it’s pleasantly breezy in the lengthening shadow of the motel. Folks are standing outside their rooms on the second floor, forearms resting on the walkway railing, gazing out at the desert gone purple and pink and orange in the distance and the deepening blue of the sky. Two Black girls have dragged out a chair, and one sits in it looking at her phone while the other braids her hair. They’re playing music and at one point start singing along to a song together before dissolving into laughter.
“You sounded great,” an old cowboy walking a pair of ancient poodles calls out to them.
Emily’s sitting up in bed, watching TV, when Joe returns. She’s ready to eat, so they walk to a Panda Express on the other side of the freeway. They pause on the overpass to watch traffic zoom by below, headlights and taillights coming and going, a faint orange glow to the west, the first stars shining brightly.
The fluorescent lights in the restaurant make the travelers wolfing down two-item combos look like they’re all about to die. Joe and Emily order orange chicken, beef with broccoli, and fried rice and take it back to the motel to eat at the table in their room. Emily climbs back into bed afterward, but Joe’s wide awake, still on bartender time. He goes down to the truck, where he guzzles one beer and grabs another and sets off for the train tracks behind the Indian clinic. He walks along a chain-link fence meant to keep people off the rails until he comes to a spot where someone’s cut a hole. It’s tight, but he squeezes through and climbs the raised track bed.
Four pairs of rails run here. Two have long strings of well cars double-stacked with containers parked on them. Joe tosses a rock at a container to hear it clang, then climbs a ladder to sit between two of the cars. The metal against his back is still warm from the sun. He writes JOE HUSTLE in the grit caked on the nearest container and imagines someone seeing it while unloading the box in China or Africa.
An approaching locomotive sounds its horn. Joe hops down and sees it coming slowly up the outside track, running west, its headlight showing all the dust in the air. He lays a penny on one of the rails and backs off to watch the train pass. It takes a while to get to where he’s standing. He waves at the engineer, who blows the horn again in response. What follows is a five-minute parade of military vehicles—Abrams tanks, MRAPs, Strykers—riding on flat cars en route to who knows where. Pendleton, Twentynine Palms, Afghanistan. Joe’s mind chants Motherfuckers motherfuckers motherfuckers in time to the click-clack of the cars’ wheels on the rails. He drains his beer and hurls the can at a passing Bradley. He snatches up a rock and throws that, too.
“Hey!” a fat security guard yells from fifty yards away, waddling toward him with a flashlight. Joe hurries back to the hole in the fence and makes his escape, but without the flattened penny he’d planned to present to Emily as a souvenir.