tung."
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.