Read Journal of the Dead Online

Authors: Jason Kersten

Journal of the Dead (6 page)

The friends pulled into Doylestown at about ten-thirty Friday night, driving the day’s last mile down a shady and narrow gravel road called Dogwood Lane, or
The
Lane, as the locals called it.
The Kodikian house lay at its very end, receded among some of the same trees that give the street its name. Unlike the house Dave grew up in, Raffi’s childhood home is spacious and contemporary, a two-story with wood paneling and a large deck.

The boys came in through the back door, hoping to surprise Raffi’s parents, but Hal and Doris had been waiting up. They greeted the boys warmly and chitchatted about the drive, but the friends were back out the door in minutes. They were hungry and eager to take a spin in Raffi’s dad’s car, a BMW Z3.

They met up with some of Raffi’s old friends from high school at a local Friday’s Bar and Grill, then finished off the night by shooting a few games of pool at one of the town’s few bars, Kellys, an Irish pub on Main Street. “We left around 1:30,” Kodikian later wrote, but as they stepped out of the bar they were still jazzed up from finally being on the road. Downtown Doylestown was mostly empty now; beyond Main Street, quiet lanes ran off into the night. Raffi swung the BMW onto a back road and stopped the car.

They knew that getting squirrelly in his dad’s car was a high-schooler’s game—but there they were, out in the boondocks in a high-performance luxury vehicle, a car they wished painfully they could take with them on the trip ahead. Raffi got out of the driver’s seat and let Dave take the wheel, directing him into the farmland outside of town. After the lights of the town were no longer visible, they switched seats again, and Raffi opened up the engine. They raced home through the darkened farmland, seeing only the road in front of them, reveling at the thrill of speed in a void. “Had a ball on the corners,” Kodikian later wrote.

The rest of the journal entries Raffi made on their road trip were brisk, as fast as the pace they kept. “Got up around 7 & jumped in the shower. Mom & Dad had coffee & toast waiting for us. She also picked some cherry & offered us pretzels—two kinds. We took the fat ones. She offered chicken but we declined,” he wrote of the next morning. Raffi’s parents wished they would stay longer, but almost as soon as they were finished eating they were back in the Mazda, on their way to Coughlin’s sister’s house just outside Washington in Gainesville, Virginia. That afternoon, reunited with her little brother, Kathleen and her husband, Mike, took the friends on their first tourist stop: Arlington National Cemetery. “It was hotter than hell,” Kodikian wrote, “but good to finally see it. Afterwards we got the kids food at McD’s, then got take out from Olive Garden. Picked up some rum & made Daiquiris at Katty’s.”

When the friends said their farewells to Dave’s sister and nephews the following morning, in a way their trip was only then just beginning. No more family stops lay ahead. From then on, it would be only them and the explorative possibilities of a thousand towns.

The lure of the road is the same as it was in Kerouac’s time, but the road is not. The America Raffi and David saw whisking past was arguably less innocent, and much more predictable. One of the revelations on the road today is not so much that America is wonderfully varied, but that it is so overwhelmingly the same.

Lined up near the off-ramps of almost every town they passed were the same signs: McDonald’s, Cracker Barrel, the Olive Garden. It was a forest of the familiar, with the same exchangeable architecture, the same procedure everywhere. At times it felt as if they weren’t really moving at all, but stuck in idle while a giant conveyor of road circulated the identical town past, again and again.

The only way to break the monotony was to leave the superslab and take some of the older highways and roads, which often still carry surprises. The small towns that we still equate with the American Dream still exist, just beyond the monolithic rind of chain restaurants, retail outlets, strip malls, and tract housing. Whenever they’d take a moment to get off the highways, they’d turn a corner and suddenly there it was, Main Street, with its old brick bank and square block of park. Too often part of its charm lay in its own decay. Every third building was boarded up, its mom-and-pop business long ago strangled by the interstate, or the population it once nested gone elsewhere. The little towns that have survived usually have one thing in common—the preservative balm of money—or they’ve had the fortune and foresight to position themselves successfully as a historical niche.

While the road is less arbitrary, it is much faster and infinitely more convenient. Most of the time they just bypassed the towns altogether, happily leaving their secrets indecipherable within constellations of halogen and sodium lamps that breezed past in the night. They knew that if they suddenly became too tired, there’d be a Motel 6 near the next off-ramp, or if they were too exhausted to search for a decent restaurant, there would also be a KFC, where the colonel’s chicken was as reliable it was a thousand miles ago. It was a wonder in its own right, the idea that they knew what they were getting wherever they were. Getting lost was next to impossible, even on the older routes, because it was only a matter of time before they’d cross another highway.

Raffi and David didn’t spend much time on the scenic routes. After leaving Dave’s sister’s house, they headed for Nashville as fast as they could. “The ride wasn’t too eventful, save a rain that
was bad enough to make us pull over,” he said of Sunday’s leg. “We got into Nashville around 6:00.” If his reckoning was accurate, they motored a distance of about 650 miles in only ten hours—good time when you factor in gas, food, and rest stops. Not the kind of time you make on a back road, but by sticking to a major highway, like Interstate 81, and keeping the speedometer pegged above seventy.

By the time they pulled into Nashville, they were eager to leave the car. Like always, it didn’t take them long to sniff out a local pool hall, where they ordered some Guinesses and food. “Immediately didn’t like the bartender,” Raffi noted. “He poured the beers half way to let them settle & dropped $2 on the bar. He then stood around for 5 min, far longer than necessary. One of my biggest pet-peeves.”

After shooting a few games, they walked around downtown Nashville, then drove to a campground just outside of town. “I was glad that Dave liked the city as much as I did,” Raffi wrote.

They kept up the dizzying pace. The next day, Jeff Rosen, Raffi’s friend from work, got a phone call from Raffi and David. They were at a bar in New Orleans.

“They called me up to make sure I was having fun at work,” he said. “They were about to cruise Bourbon Street.”

That morning, they had raced out of Nashville, headed for Memphis. But instead of stopping in the city they had driven straight to Graceland and taken the obligatory tour, tarrying just long enough at the colossal gift shop for Dave to buy a postcard,
which he later sent back to the folks at the town hall. With the rest of the afternoon in front of them, they decided to barrel on down Highway 55. The entire state of Mississippi had gone by in a blur of oaks and off-ramps—miraculously without a single speeding ticket. They had pulled into New Orleans in the late afternoon, found a youth hostel, and decided to call Jeff and rub it in.

In the background, Rosen could hear a television, Bob Barker’s voice setting the stage for the Showdown Showcase during the final minutes of
The Price Is Right.
He quickly picked up a pen. “Whenever one of us was out of work, he would watch
The Price Is Right
and we’d bid against each other in the Showdown Showcase. We’d do that for beers. Whoever was closest without going over won beers off the other guy.”

Rosen couldn’t remember who won the beer that day, only that afterward, Raffi told him he had to go. “He was gonna go smoke a cigar on Bourbon Street,” said Rosen. Jeff was glad that his friends were having a good time.

By the end of the next day, they were in Austin, Texas, and exhausted. They wanted a real bed, so they booked a room in a Motel 6 not far from the center of town, then called a cab. They were sick of driving, and wanted to knock back a few drinks in the Southwest’s college capital.

Over beers at a local bar, they talked over their itinerary. They’d been making great time—they were a whole day ahead of schedule—but the pace was starting to get to them. The trip was more than half over, but all those miles seemed disproportionate
to what they’d actually seen, which really wasn’t much more than a few streets, bars, and tourist traps in five different cities. Their plan for the next day was to swing northwest to Amarillo and the Texas panhandle, then west toward Santa Fe. From there it would be a straight shot west to the Grand Canyon, which they were planning to see on Thursday.

As they discussed what lay ahead, Dave remembered something he’d heard during one of the many going-away conversations he’d had in previous weeks. “If you have a chance, check out Carlsbad Caverns; it’s pretty incredible,” an uncle of his had told him. The caverns, Coughlin now realized, were almost due west of them, which meant that seeing them wouldn’t put a big dent in their Grand Canyon plan. They could simply head north on Thursday instead, swinging through Phoenix. He ran the idea by Raffi.

Kodikian thought it over. The only drawback to the plan was that it meant he would have forgo a large chunk of his (and Jack Kerouac’s) favorite highway, Route 66, the famous “Mother Road,” which in the Southwest lay withered and abandoned alongside Interstate 40, like a molted snakeskin a thousand miles long. He had been looking forward to seeing it again since ’97, but he couldn’t ignore the excitement in his friend’s voice. It was, after all, Dave’s trip.

Yeah, that sounds good, he told Dave. Let’s check out Carlsbad Caverns.

5

W
ater is the ink of history in the American Southwest, and Raffi and David were now approaching a region whose story was written by a nine-hundred-mile-long river. It runs the length of eastern New Mexico, down into Texas, where it merges with the great Rio Grande. It was none other than the defining artery of the Old West, that muddy ribbon of water a cowboy was always either east or west of—the Pecos River.

Prior to the Civil War, most cowboys and settlers stayed far east of the Pecos, especially the part of it that ran through southeastern New Mexico. The surrounding desert was controlled by the Mescalero Apache, who resisted Spanish, Mexican, and later American colonization with as much ferocity and guerrilla expertise as any tribe in North America. The Chihuahuan Desert was the center of their world, their very name derived from a cactus that grew there. They knew the locations of every water pocket it harbored, and fighting them in their own desert was suicide.
Anyone willing to venture into southern New Mexico needed to be bold and well armed, and have a very good reason for being there.

There were two such men: Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, Texas cattlemen. At the time, hundreds of thousands of wild Spanish cattle roamed Texas, and making a fortune was a question of rounding up a herd and driving it to market. Comanche and Apache Indians controlled most of north and west Texas back then, so the traditional routes had always been east to New Orleans, or a riskier ride north into Illinois. By 1866, however, the markets in these states were saturated and the trails crowded. The markets in Colorado and Wyoming, however, were ripe for the picking, thanks to newly discovered gold fields near Pikes Peak. Goodnight and Loving knew that whoever could drive a herd to Colorado stood to make a killing.

Other books

Sparhawk's Angel by Miranda Jarrett
Lovers and Liars by Brenda Joyce
The Amber Room by Berry, Steve
Bitter Sweet by Connie Shelton
The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele
Tengo que matarte otra vez by Charlotte Link
The Future of Us by Jay Asher
Forbidden Love by Elizabeth Nelson