Page 12 of Better off Dead

“I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark here and say, I don’t know, you’re on a cross-country road trip, so…clothes? Nightwear? Toiletries? Personal items?”

“I’m wearing my clothes. They have toiletries at hotels. And my personal items are in my pocket.”

“You have one set of clothes?”

“How many does a person need?”

“I don’t know. More than one. What do you do when they need to be washed?”

“Throw them away and buy more.”

“Isn’t that wasteful? And impractical?”

“No.”

“Why not take them home? Clean them? Re-use them?”

“Laundry’s not my thing. Nor are laundry rooms. Or houses.”

“So you’re homeless, in other words?”

“Call it what you like. The reality is, I have no use for a home. Not at the moment. Maybe I’ll get one, someday. Maybe I’ll get a dog. Maybe I’ll settle down. But not yet. Not for a long time.”

“So you do what? Just roam around the country?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“How? Do you even have a car?”

“Never felt the need.”

“You prefer hitching rides?”

“I don’t mind it. Sometimes I take the bus.”

“You take the bus? Really?”

I didn’t reply.

“OK. Back to the guy who was driving you this morning. Why his sudden one-eighty?”

“He wanted to buy some old British sports car. He’d been to Texas to buy a different one. But he backed out. The seller tried to rip him off. Something about numbers that didn’t match. I don’t know why that’s a big deal. I’m not much of a car guy. So he was driving home again. To someplace in western Arizona. He wanted to let off steam. So he wanted an audience. So he picked me up. Outside a motel near El Paso.”

“Wait a minute. We’re nowhere near the regular route west from El Paso.”

“The radio said I-10 was snarled up. Some kind of multicar accident. So he took a bunch of smaller roads. Cut across the southwest corner of New Mexico. Made it all the way past the Arizona state line. Then his phone rang. It was his wife. She had a lead on another of these old cars. In Oklahoma this time.”

“But you wanted to keep heading west. Why? What’s out there for you?”

“The Pacific Ocean.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Call it a whim. I was in Nashville, Tennessee. There’s a band I like. I caught them at a couple of clubs, then when I was on my way out of the city this weird bird flew by. For a moment I thought it was a pelican. It wasn’t, but it made me think of Alcatraz. Which made me think of the ocean.”

“And you thought the ocean was somewhere up this road?”

“No. I got bored of waiting for another ride. I started to walk. And I saw a giant stone structure at the side of the highway with an arrow pointing this way. An obelisk. Or a monument. It was covered with carvings and fancy patterns. And it made me curious. I thought, if the sign’s that elaborate, what will the town be like?”

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