Interstate (33 page)

“Those two laughing men before,” Margo says a couple of minutes later, “did they actually bother you so much where you got scared? They did us, me and Julie agree,” and I say “‘Julie and I, Julie and I,'” and Julie says “I said they scared me only a little but not so much,” and Margo says “That's not true, we were just talking about it,” and Julie says “Don't lie, I didn't say those men were so bad, only for a little,” and Margo says “She doesn't know what she says, even right after she says it,” and Julie says “Not so, you're lying again,” and swings at her it seems because Margo says “Dada, you told me to tell you when she's hitting me so I'm telling you instead of hitting back, she just punched me in the arm,” and I say “Did it hurt?” and Julie says “It couldn't have, I missed her,” and Margo says “All right, so she almost did it,” and Julie says “‘Almost' isn't doing it,” and Margo says “You aimed to hit, that's bad from the start,” and I say, “Girls, girls, enough already, arguing over what you said about those men and now this is silly and swinging at anyone about anything, even if you intend to miss, is dead wrong. And now you're distracting me even worse than those guys. Anybody mind some music? I think I know the public radio station in this neck of the woods. 91.1 or 91.9—one or the other, for we're somewhere between Philadelphia and Delaware and I've heard them both on these trips,” and Margo says “Not your music, do me a favor; I don't like it. Can't we have some of ours for a change?” and I say “Maybe it'll be interesting talk or folk music or something, even someone reading for kids, but we're not going to listen to your music—that you can do when you're home in your own room, for it stinks,” and she says “That's not nice, I only said I didn't like your music, I didn't use profanities against it,” and I say “‘Stinks' isn't a profanity and anyway, all of it?—all my music? You don't like any of it? That Bach Christmas stuff we listened to last Christmastime, in New York on that twenty-four-hour radio station that goes—you know, the Columbia University one run by students—all night for eight days or so with just Bach and maybe some of his family? You said you liked some of it. That was to me like a breaking-open moment for you with good music when you said that and without any prompting from me. I think it was part of the Mass and then those organ preludes played on the piano. And also, just a few weeks ago when I played the tape, the Messiaen
Journey Till the End of Time
or
for the End of Time
—no ‘journey,' just a
Quartet for
is what it's called, with the flute part that you said you especially—clarinet and piano part, I mean, that you—” and she says “All right, I don't like most of your music but might have liked them, but you still shouldn't have cursed mine,” and I say “Anyway, not ‘stinks,' your music; just it's so young, so you know, not for me,” and she says “That's not what you want from us for an apology when we say something you don't like and you're right,” and I say “Okay, okay, I've got a headache, I probably was shaken up by those men more than I thought. Maybe I've also been driving too long, I should take a break, it's been an extralong weekend and I got tired of living in a cramped space in someone else's overheated airless home, so cut it, will ya?” and she says “If you insist,” and I say “Don't get cynical with me, don't be sarcastic,” and she says “If you insist,” and I say “Listen you!” and Julie says “Daddy, stop, for what'd she say?” though she has good reason to be cynical and sarcastic, or just mad at me. For why didn't I apologize right off—“That wasn't a smart” or “sensible” or “tactful” or something “way to express myself, I admit it”—and end it then? I could still do it but don't feel like it now. I doubt I could get the right words out, any words about it out, and she'll also think I'm only saying it to smooth things over rather than that I believe it. I do believe it, I'm just not a good one for apologizing, but I'll do it later, later will be okay, in the car, at a rest stop, or home; I'll have a drink, look at the mail, newspaper, open a book, just a nice quiet one with the drink, but I'll also have to make supper—what are we going to eat?—and if the kids aren't around or don't want to come in when I need help—they could say they've been in the car most of the day and want to play outside—set the table, do everything, bring all the junk in from the car, put things away, do the wash after three days and what was here before, maybe two loads, and the dryer, mix some fruit juice for them, salad dressing, so on. Maybe we can have—the kids can, I'll just have coffee and then at home a piece of cheese, carrot and celery and bread and wine—dinner on the road. And smoked turkey if any's left and hasn't spoiled, tomato, mustard. Sure, they'll like it and anything they want: sit down at Bob's Big Boy, salad bar which they love going up to a few times—there'd be no rush and then, over that table while they're eating and after I say “Anyone want dessert after this?” say I'm sorry and why. “It
was
probably still those guys,” et cetera…“My ‘music stinks' remark stunk,” and so on; but now forget it and I reach for the radio Play button. “Anybody mind some music? Oops, sorry, I already said that, excuse me, and look what it brought, tee-hee.” No response, so maybe they didn't hear, and usually when I imitate that kind of laughing they find it funny and laugh. I look at the rearview and flip it around; they're looking at me through it, dour faces, almost scowling, so
there
, wrong again. At least they can see I'm back to being in a good mood but maybe they didn't catch that or don't want to, harboring their, well, hurt, as people do. Harboring? Nothing on the two public radio stations, one of which I thought I could pick up here, and I dial around. What seems like a public station I didn't know of on another frequency: the voices and subject, news analysis or sociological or medical call-in show, something about TB and lack of public awareness of it which is only increasing the current pandemic, and turn it off. “Good, that was boring,” Margo says and I say “Boring, and in a car on a long trip I can almost listen to any discussion, debate or talk. Not religious, though, meaning not a religious discussion or lecture unless it's mostly secular, meaning with the emphasis not on holy spirits and God who art in heaven and doctrines and dogmatisms and no-no's and don't-do's and so forth. Common everyday morality and ethics and holy-book interpretations can be okay, and who-am-I's and what-am-I-doing-here's and where'm-I-going's—questions, you see, so long as they're not accompanied by the rigorous—
rigid
self-righteous…well, you know.” Neither asks what some of these words mean or for me to go over any part of it again because she didn't understand and I don't offer immediate unasked-for definitions and sentence use of them as I often do and maybe say some of what I said in a clearer way. They want to be quiet, or at least not speak to me, let them. Why do people act like those guys before, that's what I'd really like to know. So untouchable, mean-spirited, worse. Maybe killers or brutes as I thought. Hyenas, jackals, if they're not the same thing. Some word or words or term. I don't understand this country, for it really doesn't happen anywhere else, meaning as much. “Oh, it doesn't, and the whole country?” someone could say and I'd say, I'd say, well, “In this kind of wacky pass-by almost violence and also the actual violence other places, yes, or almost. I mean you don't need too many thugs like those guys to make living lousy and unlivable.” For why do we produce so many killers and bastards like that, and if not that then people so firmly dumb—not “firmly” but determinedly or something; almost religiously; doggedly dumb. I like that, and into the double D's again for some reason. But also, I read—what did I read? In my head and then it went. Something about how much of the country's functionally illiterate, whatever percent—forty was it, fifty? I mean the comparisons with all other Western countries and the more advanced ones elsewhere were staggering, but what's that got to do with what I was thinking? Well, I thought…but maybe it's simply, or this would help somewhat, that directions for everything should be made easier. But where was I? Something about killer bastards and doggy dumbness. I read and read about it in articles and such and…what? I don't know. I forgot. I'm impossible. So goddamn stupid sometimes. Don't be so hard on yourself and fill yourself with guilt, Lee says and she's right, but I am, I do, impossible, stupid, guilty, hard on myself, other things like that, lots of times. I just don't think straight, so often. I just don't…but formulate it in your head the point you want to make. Try, as a diversion and maybe a test: what you say inside you can say out. Do it articulately, confidently, not so much eloquently, but comprehensively—comprehensibly?—just
intelligently
and directly, and ask and answer that way in your head too. So: these guys…they're in a car…they drive up beside us on the highway—no, go into the general thing of it. There, perfect example: “the general thing of it,” as if that means anything, and “go into,” which is such sluggard speech, almost a slur. What I'm really saying here, and say it well, already, is there's—is that there's a social malaise in this country—good, and good word too, malaise, came out spontaneously, though the “social” should go because it's such a cliché—and it seems to be spreading at its own speed through the—chuck the “at its own speed”: familiar, not needed, and what's it mean anyway? It's spreading, period, from here to there and nearly everywhere to the point where just about nowhere's safe. It's global, or almost, or getting there. Brought about by a tremendous—you also don't need the “tremendous”; just simple words and sentences and no superfluous or fancy adjectives. Brought about by societal and familial—society and family changes and increased mobility and home and job transience so no or little strong neighborhood feelings and allegiance anymore perhaps and lots of divorces and drugs don't help, which is—to get deeper into it—to speak about it more deeply—and the movies and songs being played and performed and television and video games, some of them with gang rapes and beheadings in them but yet for kids. And guns, of course, the numbers of them in the dumbest hands, and how's it help to have a strong or tight neighborhood anyway if hoodlums and brigands, you can even say, are zipping through it in cars and robbing and shooting up people and zipping back to the Interstates because of their easy access, invisibility and fast escape? That came out sort of okay. And maybe the scarcity of jobs or just the shortage of them and so many poor-paying ones, but I don't know, and shifting values and morality, though all that's “societal” or “society change,” isn't it? People hardly even read anymore, and one has to think that only makes things worse. Anyway, it's all killing things or they are, the malaise is and most of those reasons I gave are, and those guys before—real good books, I'm saying, the ones that say yes this is the way people think, feel and live and life shouldn't be to scare people off the road or shoot them in the head—were an example of—the result—just examples, those guys were, of it, the malaise. See? This couldn't be worse. I just can't think well or straight or at least put words together about what I want to say, inside and probably out. Meaning aloud, and inside should come easier than out, right? Just try to steamroll through, maybe that'll work. For years ago…Because years ago, thirty, forty, did people drive along and—people didn't drive by your car and do things like those guys did or anything like it. There was such a thing—there was road courtesy and same kind of behavior or thereabouts when you walked past someone on the sidewalk. You didn't stare him down; nobody shot you a look; people weren't provoked so fast; they didn't have this idea that they had to have respect from other people twenty-four hours a day. I'm talking about when I was a kid growing up in a big city and even when I was in my teens, twenties and thirties, almost. Actually, in my teens other teens were a lot like that, they just didn't have the weapons they have today. But as an adult other adults for the most part smiled at one another naturally, genuinely, not hostilely—I'm talking about from another car. But people in almost all situations were less aggressive to and suspicious of one another than they are today. Forget “suspicious of”; it's got nothing to do with my argument, or little. But if they looked into your car from theirs, they—though my dad did tell me that when I was a boy and sleeping in the front passenger seat next to him, someone spit through the window at him from a car when they'd both stopped for the light, but that was when a race riot was going on in the city and he'd by some mistake driven too close to it. Or maybe someone ran up to the driver's window when we'd stopped and spit at him. But people then were mostly polite, had better manners, I'm almost sure of that, at least in cars and on the street, and if they didn't they still didn't bait you over nothing and weren't provoked by the slightest thing or give you killer smiles. For that's what those smiles were with those guys. I bet they do have guns. I bet they are up to no good. I bet by the end of the day someone's going to get roughed up by them or one of them and maybe a couple of people, even to three or four, over drugs, being shot in the head. And they're all around, these guys, that's what I'm saying. It's not just the newspapers, I hear it from relatives and friends. They're robbed, their homes are broken into, cars stolen, they're pistol-whipped without being robbed, they're beaten up in a bar because some stranger thinks they slipped a laxative into his drink, one friend's son is intentionally run down when he's changing a tire, another's caught in a crossfire at high school on his way to class and gets a bullet in his lung, a woman at work has her apartment cleaned out one day and is mugged on the bus the next and then stuck in the buttock by a passerby the third day with what the police say was a hatpin. I even know two women this year who have been raped, one by her husband she's separated from, but still, it's something I think someone like him never would have done under the same circumstances ten to twenty years ago, so why? For all of these, I mean: why the increase in their happening, and all over the place as I said? Just that people are more violent or prone to it and defensive and short-fused and just argumentative and angry at things and have less inside them somehow to control themselves and also the frustration that comes from having no language or just ability to speak, something like me but much worse, to say calmly or just some way what's bugging them and to end it at that, to walk away from it I'm saying, or drive away if that's what it was in today's case. But all those reasons can only be taken so far and don't really go deep enough. For it's also just wanting, this killing and mugging and stuff, quick cash to get whatever they want from it—drugs, flashy cars, hundred-dollar sneakers, you name it—with no feelings for people and the consequences of what they do to them and so on, but what causes that? Parents again, or rather the absence and shortcomings of them, and television, movies, society, et cetera, just examples all around of real people in the legit world doing everything they can legitimately to make a ton of money too without any feelings for who they screw. Oh I don't know. You also hear about lack of religious upbringing or influence of religion today and very little teaching of right-behaving beliefs and such on what people do, but I still don't know and for sure didn't say that clear. This is where I get off or should, when I have to try and figure out the whys of overall things from personal experiences and information I'm not really a good put-togetherer of. But I also have to say that good people are around too, of course, and they make up the majority by a vast lot, but that there are more than enough bad ones to make it rough going for the good, something like that. In other words, to rephrase it, good people vastly outnumber the bad, that's a known, or at least people who don't physically harm or threaten other people, but in the long run—not the “long run” so much as just—