First Call Magazine

A short story
By Daniel Felsenthal

The trunk was lined: two suitcases, Jim’s stuff, Kate’s stuff, a large sleeping bag, some food. Easy-to-make food, canned food, even some Lunchables. Literally Lunchables. Like they were nine years old. Lining the bottom of the suitcases were twelve grams of weed and rolling papers. Kate was asleep in her bed. Jim’s dad was there with Jim, leaning on the trunk of the rust-colored Wrangler.

“Listen, I can pay for a train to Laredo, at least.”

Jim didn’t want support, economic or otherwise. Being born in the trust-fund generation is a burden, he thought. It’s a weight.

“No, it’s fine dad, I just wanna do this without help.”

“Yeah, I get it Jim. It’s just worrisome.”

“It’s fine, Kate’s with me.”

Jim’s dad scoffed. Jim feigned offense.

“You think she can protect you? Mexico is violent, Jim. It’s scary. I’ve been watching the news.”

Jim knew Kate wasn’t exactly the road-trip type, or the drive-around-the-desert-smoking-pot trip type. But it was fine, because they were no longer together and she wasn’t coming. They broke up the previous night in a flurry of anger that turned to violence. He didn’t hit her, he wouldn’t have, but her nails left imprints in his tan Texas skin. He cut himself shaving, he told his dad. Bullshit.

Jim kept Kate’s stuff because they packed the car early the previous night. It was before things went sour, before they went to her house and he found out about the baby and she told him he needed to stay. And she had everything in there, all the canned food and supplies; she even had four grams of his weed in her bag, and he was too lazy and high to transfer it. He didn’t want his dad asking questions, anyway. And in a small way, he needed her suitcase, and he wasn’t thinking about the pot, although he probably needed that too. Really, he needed something to remind him. And that’s why his trip was doomed: he wanted to be reminded.

But still, this was it, he was leaving, it was done. Rich, rah-rah Austin, Texas; a piece of personal history. Jim shut the trunk and turned back to his father. His dad looked old in that moment, melancholy and lonesome. His face drooped like a sad clown’s, the unshaven gray hairs on his cheeks stark and lonely. His face seemed to plead safety, and Jim almost pocketed the keys and gave up. But he didn’t, because he had too much history behind him, too many memories of his nine and ten-year-old self poring over maps in his childhood bedroom, dreaming of adventure. There wasn’t any turning back.

“Dad, don’t worry, I’m gonna be fine,” he said instead, and he and his father awkwardly embraced, as though their bodies didn’t exactly connect. It was a second too short, the hug, a physical motion lacking in finality. Jim wondered if his dad smelt any substance on him. And then it was done and Jim was gone, his father left in the dust, sonless and wifeless and utterly alone.

—

Twenty minutes later and Jim was cruising. I-35 was empty, the sun still a solid half-hour from rising. It was just Jim and Pink Floyd at seventy-five miles-per-hour, Dark Side of the Moon serenading the Dark Side of the Freeway. It was times like these that Jim was happy to be alone, happy to have his music and nothing else. He didn’t need Kate with him; if she was here she would want to talk, she would fiddle with the volume incessantly and eventually insist that he switch to KGSR radio, so they could listen to Eric Clapton one second and Marvin Gaye the next. Jim didn’t understand radio, it was too sudden, filled to the brim with sound bites and lacking in real musical ideas. He thought life should be lived suddenly; music should be experienced in broad strokes. Kate was the opposite. That’s why she wanted him to stay. That’s why she wanted him to wait the long nine months with her, and who knows how much longer.

There I go, he thought, thinking too much again, thinking about her. The darkness was beautiful, easy, just him and the music and the eighteen wheeler ahead. It was the daylight that was the problem, when the rush-hour traffic bloomed out of those tiny hot towns and sped toward San Antonio. When Jim got frustrated, when he got stuck in between those early morning commuters, that’s when he wanted someone there, someone to occupy him. She should be here, he thought. She was supposed to. But she told me at the last second, the last damn second. Like he was just supposed to take the shit out of the car because she started throwing up and he found out. Because she couldn’t hide it from him anymore, because she wasn’t “fit for travel.” She had two months to tell him. Two goddamn months.

By mid-morning, he was nervously drumming along to the stereo and thinking about calling her. She would probably be up by now; it was already ten. He took his phone out and had already scrolled down to the “K’s” before he realized there was nothing he could say. Sorry just doesn’t cut it sometimes. He had left her at home with a long three months before she would start at UT and a huge mess growing in her stomach. His huge mess.

Five minutes later and Jim was arched over the front seat, pulling Kate’s bag from the back into the passenger seat. I’ll use the stuff in her suitcase first, he thought. He had a couple joints pre-rolled in each bag, an old habit from when he would drive around downtown Austin every night with Kate, laughing and hot-boxing his car. This traffic, though, was barely driving. He could roll one up before the cars even moved.

The weed made him feel better, made him think about the music again. He was already at track seven of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It was one of his parents’ favorites, a remnant of his mother’s adolescence and Jim’s childhood, an album that evoked the same feeling every time: an intense need to travel. Aimlessly usually. Or at least to some place aimless.

It was adventure, something grand and distinctly American that brought back Jim’s nostalgic childhood memories of atlases and road maps picked up at local gas stations. I was so smart when I was younger, Jim thought. He didn’t think it in a self-adulating way; if anything he was disappointed in himself. But still, he always knew his path led him here, to this highway, to this soundtrack. He wasn’t exactly academic, just smart, smart enough not to go to college, he always thought. His dad thought otherwise, but who the hell was he? Some big shot doctor who’ll practice medicine until he’s seventy, pay his taxes, move to a nursing home when his brain goes at eighty-five, and die a few years later. It’s all so predictable, so boring and stupid, Jim thought. His mom knew, the crazy, wild-haired hippy who somehow ended up with his father. She knew how to run; she did it when Jim was nine. She knew how to disappear, how to live with the land, and eventually how to die: frozen to death in some northern Canadian province.

By early afternoon he had switched from pot to Lunchables. Pepperoni pizza Lunchables — the best kind. The land was becoming more and more barren, filled with thin, yellowing shrubbery and pale sand. The ground looked scorching, foreboding. His original plan to take the scenic route with Kate around the desert, smoking and sleeping in the car for a of couple days, didn’t seem all that appealing after all. But maybe it would look different if he was with her, if he wasn’t angry and obsessed with the idea of speeding to Mexico as fast as possible. A direct trip was necessary now; if he didn’t put as many obstacles between him and Kate as possible, he might decide to abandon his trip and go back to her. He knew it; he wouldn’t admit it, but he knew it. Some things are more powerful than dreams.

An hour later, and Jim saw the letters. Huge, red, white, and green, they spelled out “Mexico” like some poor imitation Hollywood sign. Still, Jim didn’t need grandeur, he knew what Mexico was, what lay ahead. Was Mexico really where he wanted to go, given a choice? No. He had dreamt more of hidden Amazonian tribes and the Northern Lights as a kid. But still, it was there, five and a half hours without traffic. And people were afraid. So afraid that they wouldn’t go anywhere near the border. Jim was always intrigued by the border towns. It was weird, how much spilled over, the culture, the people, even the violence. It’s a rarity, he thought, a permeation of the American bubble. A wake-up call to the privileged.

Crossing the border only took a few minutes; no one was going into Mexico now, only trying to come out. He put Kate’s bag in the back, made sure anything incriminating was hidden and entered the “Nada que declarar” line. The search was painless. The man who checked his passport looked him over, spending several seconds on his facial features, as if this little white boy had a fake passport. The man spoke in broken English.

“You really wanna go Nuevo Laredo señor? Solo?”

“Estaré bien.”

The man smiled mirthlessly at something. Maybe it was Jim’s Spanish, maybe it was the thought of a pinprick American teenager getting mutilated by Mexican gangs. Jim thought his Spanish was fine; he didn’t worry about language, or any of the more dire possibilities.

And then the desert stretched out once again, hugging the gray dullness of the highway. This time, the burning sand was Spanish tinged; it was Mexican. It was where no one in his high school, none of his friends, none of them would go. It was what he wanted. He had made it.

By the time he was prowling Nuevo Laredo, he was fascinated, encapsulated in his new environment. It was strange. The streets of Nuevo Laredo were nothing like the Streets of Laredo. There were no glorified cowboys, the storefronts were mostly abandoned. People walking on the sidewalks wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t acknowledge his existence. They were all in their own spheres; they walked quickly and avoided connection with anyone.

And then Jim passed the police station. It was empty, the windows broken, the sign covered in blood-red spray paint. The walls were pockmarked with holes. Suddenly, Jim was scared.

It was probably the packed back of the open-air Wrangler that set them off. It was an attractive nuisance, you could say, filled to the brim with brands not sold anywhere on that side of the Río Grande. And so they attacked. They broke the glass of the passenger window first, smashing it to smithereens with their Remington, jabbing it against Jim’s head, yelling “¡Salte del carro!”

Within seconds Jim was on the ground, pleading. He saw a woman across the street, just standing, watching in fear, like she couldn’t move. He tried to yell “¡Ayúdame!” but she just ran, dropping her plastic purse on the way, never looking back. And within seconds, the gang grunts had bashed him over the head with the Remington. He was so scared he didn’t even feel it. He tried to lift his head, but it was heavier than usual. And then they hit him again. And this time he didn’t move. Everything went black.

—

And then he was broken. On the floor, legs against the wall, teeth in the back of his throat, in some dingy basement. His hair was matted down, bloody. He had been punched, kicked, beaten, yelled at. They threw his weed at him, told him they would come back and kill him. And he screamed, he kept on screaming, “please, I have a child!”

Jim was worried now, his brain sputtering, overloaded. A peaceful death wasn’t waiting for him.,. He wondered what his mom felt, stranded in that Canadian winter, when frostbite kicked in and her movements became slow. He wondered if it was like this, this certainty of death. If she thought about anything. Did she think of him? Did she wish she had been with him that last year of her life? Was she able to think about anything besides survival? Did she even want to survive? He wanted her to. That year she was gone, that was the only year he ever prayed. He was about nine years old, and every night before bed he kneeled at his bedside and prayed that she would be okay. He would pray to anything, bibles, atlases, even his Spider-Man Comics. Anything substantive, anything he could appeal to, anything that might absorb his incomprehensible grief. He really believed it would help. It was the last time he believed in much of anything; the rest of his life had been one long opposition, one long rebellion. Not even his mom went that far. She was just flaky, crazy, untrustworthy, and ultimately, completely irresponsible. Like a repressed memory, he suddenly understood something for the first time in years.

She hurt him.

This trip was doomed. He knew it since Kate told him he would be a father. It was all too perfect, too similar to be coincidence. He knew, somewhere deep down, that his life-long idolization of his mother had led somewhere, to some parallel existence, and ultimately, to death. He just didn’t know what that meant.

Now he did. Death can’t be worse than this; this physical pain washed over with gallons of regret. Regret for the child that will pray every night for his father, the single mother who will inevitably drop out of college, the old man rotting away over TV dinners and a dead family.

Jim started rolling over, detaching his frail body from that cold wall. But before he could do anything, there was a bang. Then a second. Then some yelling in Spanish and then some more. Jim couldn’t look down, he didn’t want to think about what he would find, what they did to him. They say it takes a minute to feel the bullet. He couldn’t imagine it. The last thing he would see is this gray fucking ceiling, this broken light. His whole life, it came down to one room. A broken light and some bad decisions.

And then someone lifted his chair and he was surrounded by men with guns. Tons of them, everywhere, everyone with a blue jacket on, like some dumb gang insignia. The Mexicans were on the floor. It took him a second, but then he understood.

“Geez,” the DEA agent said, “you’re some kinda stupid pot dealer, aren’t you, kid?”

“No, sir.” Jim replied, wheezing in relief. “My dad’s a doctor.”

This entry was posted by firstcallmagazine on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 10:11 pm. It is filed under Articles, Daniel Felsenthal, Fiction, No. 5, Vol. 12. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.