Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (38 page)

Before he went to bed himself, the driver said goodnight to his Volvo. He felt its tires, he felt the black grit in the oil, he sought the degree of damage in a pockmark on the windshield.

“That one must have stung.”

Derek Marshall!
That one stung, too.

The driver remembered what has been referred to as “that awful party.” He told his wife he was going to the bathroom; cars were parked all over the lawn and he went to the bathroom there. Little Carey was staying at a friend's house; there was no babysitter to see the driver slip home for his toothbrush.

A dress of his wife's, a favorite one of his, hung on the back of the bathroom door. He nuzzled it; he grew fainthearted at its silky feel; his tire gauge snagged on the zipper as he tried to pull away from it. “Good-bye,” he told the dress, firmly.

For a rash moment he considered taking all her clothes with him! But it was midnight — time for turning to pumpkin — and he sought the Volvo.

His wife was a dusty tomato-red… no. She was a blonde, seven years married with one child and without a radio. A radio was distracting to them both. No. His wife took a size-10 dress, wore out three pairs of size-7 sandals between spring and fall, used a 36B bra and averaged 23.4 miles per gallon …
no!
She was a small dark person with strong fingers and intense sea-blue eyes like airmail envelopes; she had the habit of putting her head back like a wrestler about to bridge or a patient preparing for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation whenever she made love…. oh, yes. She had a svelte, not a voluptuous, body and she liked things that clung to her, hugged her, hung around her… clothes, children, big dogs and men. She was tall with long thighs and a loping walk, a great mouth, a 38D….

Then the driver's sinuses finally revolted against the nightlong endurance test forced upon them by the air conditioning; he sneezed violently and woke himself up. He put his thoughts for his wife and all other women in a large, empty part of his mind which resembled the Volvo's roomy, unpacked trunk. He took a forceful shower and thought that today was the day he would see the Mississippi.

People actually learn very little about themselves; it's as if they really appreciate the continuous act of making themselves vulnerable.

The driver planned to leave without breakfast. You'd have thought he'd be used to ups and downs, but the early morning sight of the violence done to the Volvo was a shock even to this veteran of the ways of the road. The Volvo had been vandalized. It sat at the curb by the driver's motel room like a wife he'd locked out of the house in the drunken night — she was waiting there to hit him hard with his guilt in the daylight.

“Oh, my God, what have they done to you …?”

They had pried off the four hubcaps and left the cluster of tire nuts exposed, the tires naked. They had stolen the side-view mirror from the driver's side. Someone had tried to unscrew the whole mounting for the piece, but the screwdriver had been either too big or too small for the screws; the work had left the screwheads maimed and useless; the thief had left the mounting in place and simply wrenched the mirror until it had snapped free at the ball joint. The ruptured joint looked to the driver like the raw and ragged socket of a man whose arm had been torn off.

They had tried to violate the Volvo's interior with repeated digging and levering at the side-vent windows, but the Volvo had held. They had ripped the rubber water seal from under the window on the driver's side but they had not been able to spring the lock. They had tried to break one window: a small run of cracks, like a spider web blown against the glass, traced a pattern on the passenger's side. They had tried to get into the gas tank — to siphon gas, to add sand, to insert a match — but although they had mashed the tank-top lock, they had been unable to penetrate there. They had cranked under the hood, but the hood had held. Several teeth of the grille were pushed in, and one tooth had been bent outward until it had broken; it stuck out in front of the Volvo as if the car were carrying some crude bayonet.

As a last gesture, the frustrated car rapists, the wretched band of Joliet punks — or were they other motel guests, irritated by the foreign license plate, in disagreement with Vermont?… whoever, as a finally cruel and needless way of leaving,
someone
had taken an instrument (the corkscrew blade on a camper's knife?) and gouged a four-letter word into the lush red of the Volvo's hood. Indeed, deeper than the paint, it was a groove into the steel itself,
SUCK
was the word.

“Suck?” the driver cried out. He covered the wound with his hand. “Bastards!” he screamed. “Swine, filthy creeps!” he roared. The wing of the motel he was facing must have slept 200 travelers; there was a ground-floor barracks and a second-floor barracks with a balcony. “Cowards, car-humpers!” the driver bellowed. “Who did it?” he demanded. Several doors along the balcony opened. Frightened, wakened men stood peering down at him — women chattering behind them: “Who is it? What's happening?”

“Suck!” the driver yelled. “Suck!”

“It's six o'clock in the morning, fella,” someone mumbled from a ground-floor door, then quickly stepped back inside and closed the door behind him.

Genuine madness is not to be tampered with. If the driver had been drunk or simply boorish, those disturbed sleepers would have mangled him. But he was insane — they could all see — and there's nothing to do about that.

“What's going on, Fred?”

“Some guy losing his mind. Go back to sleep.”

Oh, Joliet, Illinois, you are worse than the purgatory I first took you for!

The driver touched the oily ball joint where his trim mirror used to be. “You're going to be all right,” he said. “Good as new, don't worry.”

SUCK
! That foul word dug into his hood was so
public
it seemed to expose
him
— the rude, leering ugliness of it shamed him. He saw Derek Marshall approaching his wife. “Hi! Need a ride home?”

“All right,” the driver told the Volvo, thickly. “All right, that's enough. I'll take you home.”

The gentleness of the driver was now impressive. It is incredible to find occasional discretion in human beings; some of the people on the second-floor balcony were actually closing their doors. The driver's hand hid the
SUCK
carved into his hood; he was crying. He had come all this way to leave his wife and all he had done was hurt his car.

But no one can make it as far as Joliet, Illinois, and not be tempted to see the Mississippi River — the main street of the Midwest, and the necessary crossing to the real Outwest. No, you haven't really been West until you've crossed the Mississippi; you can never say you've “been out there” until you've touched down in Iowa. If you have seen Iowa, you have seen the beginning.

The driver
knew
this; he begged the Volvo to indulge him just a look. “We'll turn right around. I promise. I just want to see it,” he said. “The Mississippi. And Iowa …” where he might have gone.

Sullenly, the Volvo carried him through Illinois: Starved Rock State Park, Wenona, Mendota, Henry, Kewanee, Geneseo, Rock Island and Moline. There was a rest plaza before the great bridge which spanned the Mississippi — the bridge which carried you into Iowa. Ah, Davenport, West Liberty and Lake MacBride!

But he would not see them, not now. He stood by the Volvo and watched the tea-colored, wide water of the Mississippi roll by; for someone who's seen the Atlantic Ocean, rivers aren't so special. But
beyond
the river … there was
Iowa
… and it looked really
different
from Illinois! He saw corn tassels going on forever, like an army of fresh young cheerleaders waving their feathers. Out there, too, big hogs grew; he knew that; he imagined them — he had to — because there wasn't actually a herd of pigs browsing on the other side of the Mississippi.

“Someday…” the driver said, half in fear that this was true and half wishfully. The compromised Volvo sat there waiting for him; its bashed grille and the word
SUCK
pointed east.

“Okay, okay,” the driver said.

Be thankful for what dim orientation you have. Listen: the driver
could
have gotten lost; in the muddle of his east-west decision, he could have headed north — in the southbound lane!

Missouri State Police Report # 459: “A red Volvo sedan, heading north in the southbound lane, appeared to have a poor sense of direction. The cement mixer who hit him was absolutely clear about its right-of-way in the passing lane. When the debris was sorted, a phone number was found. When his wife was called, another man answered. He said his name was Derek Marshall and that he'd give the news to the guy's wife as soon as she woke up.”

We should know: it can always be worse.

Certainly, real trouble lay ahead. There was the complexity of the Sandusky exits to navigate, and the driver felt less than fresh. Ohio lay out there, waiting for him like years of a marriage he hadn't yet lived. But there was also the Volvo to think of; the Volvo seemed destined to never get over Vermont. And there would be delicate dealings to come with Derek Marshall; that seemed sure. We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

He had seen the Mississippi and the lush, fertile flatland beyond. Who could say what sweet, dark mysteries Iowa might have revealed to him? Not to mention Nebraska. Or
Wyoming!
The driver's throat ached. And he had overlooked that he once more had to pass through Joliet, Illinois.

Going home is hard. But what's to be said for staying away?

In La Salle, Illinois, the driver had the Volvo checked over. The windshield wipers had to be replaced (he hadn't even noticed they were stolen), a temporary side-view mirror was mounted and some soothing antirust primer was painted into the gash which said
SUCK.
The Volvo's oil was full up, but the driver discovered that the vandals had tried to jam little pebbles in all the air valves — hoping to deflate his tires as he drove. The gas-station attendant had to break the tank-top lock the rest of the way in order to give the Volvo some gas. Mileage 23.1 per gallon — the Volvo was a tiger in the face of hardship.

“I'll get you a paint job at home,” the driver told the Volvo, grimly. “Just try to hang on.”

There was, after all, Indiana to look forward to. Some things, we're told, are even better “the second time around.” His marriage struck him as an unfinished war between Ohio and Indiana — a fragile balance of firepower, punctuated with occasional treaties. To bring Iowa into the picture would cause a drastic tilt. Or: some rivers are better not crossed? The national average is less than 25,000 miles on one set of tires, and many fall off much sooner. He had 46,251 miles on the Volvo — his first set of tires.

No, despite that enchanting, retreating portrait of the Iowa future, you cannot drive with your eyes on the rear-view mirror. And, yes, at this phase of the journey, the driver was determined to head back East. But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

Almost in Iowa (1973)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

I loathe the subject of divorce — my own especially. When people start telling me their divorce stories, I feel stricken with the same combination of pending illness and apprehension that I feel when encountering “turbulence” on an airplane and the pilot asks us all to put on our seatbelts; I want to get off the plane. I do not tell stories about my divorce, nor have I ever written about it — nor would I. I feel most strongly that writers who have children, and who have been divorced,
should not
write about their divorces; to do so is a form of child abuse. I even detest watching movies about people who are divorcing; personally, I think that pornography is less offensive — it's less personal.

With this in mind, I haven't much to say about “Almost in Iowa,” except that it is a story about divorce— or at least about a pending divorce — and therefore I hate it. My first choice was not to include it in this collection, but my publishers persuaded me that
other
people might like it. I yielded to their opinion, because I would never claim to have the slightest degree of objectivity on this subject. “Almost in Iowa” isn't about
my
divorce, anyway. I was first married in 1964 and divorced in 1982 — almost 10 years after I wrote this story. (I met my second wife in 1986 and was remarried in 1987.)

“Almost in Iowa” was first published in
Esquire
(November 1973). I suppose I once thought that the story was awfully clever; rereading it now, I am struck by a quality of loathsome cuteness — not a very remarkable observation, because I have long associated
Esquire
with writing that is loathsomely cute or smart-ass (or both).

The story also reminds me of a student's story I once made fun of — that previously mentioned story about eating from the point of view of a fork. In this case, the car is a better character — meaning a more developed character — than the driver. A man who would leave his wife at a party in Vermont, and not call her to tell her where he was until he got to Illinois, is a shallow sort of lout; in “Almost in Iowa,” my sympathies reside entirely with the Volvo.