Kate and I had married after graduate school and took the money from our gift cards and put it in the bank and left for the Sea of Cortez. We were in love and we had that sort of goofy glow that makes other people think you're on pills. My dog Buddha had turned nine that April and still had the shiny eyes of a pup. We packed my old Camry with warm-weather clothes, a few underlined copies of books no one read anymore, and a box of the trinkets we collected following signs to yard sales on Saturdays. We played a beginner's course in Spanish and repeated back to the kind-sounding woman. But she moved too fast and we wanted slow, so we gave up before we left Pennsylvania and decided that maybe the language would just come to us like English had, that we needed to empty our minds out and start over: "Giant, smiling babies born from the sand," Kate had said.
We listened to the Talking Heads, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones and we had the windows down and she flashed a few truckers her nice little tits and we ate biscuits and fried chicken at the Cracker Barrel on the Indiana/Illinois cross and we stayed in some real sleazy motel with a plastic whirlpool tub and suspect stains on the carpet and we made love standing up and played music on the alarm clock radio and danced even though neither of us could and we laughed, that's what I remember most, that pure laughter.
"Lately I have this dream where I'm conducting parakeets, like a symphony, and they sing these songs in Spanish I've never heard before," Kate said.
"Are they any good?"
"They're the best."
Crossing the Missouri/OK line on the 44, the heat got trapped in Buddha's fur and she wasn't feeling too well. She had a weak bark and we had the music turned up and didn't know anything was wrong until we smelled it. We pulled over and the whole backseat was covered and Buddha hung her head, embarrassed. Luckily, Kate had prepared for this sort of accident and she cleaned up what she could and put a blanket down in back. She poured a little Pepto in a cup and Buddha lapped it up and lay back against the seat with her legs stretched out.
You have to pay $3 to enter Miami but you don't know why. The town is not unlike some decaying carnival that had been left a decade ago. There's a gas station, a Subway, and a half-dozen one-room Indian casinos and bingo halls with smoke seeping out of the walls and a dark cloud hanging overhead. It like seemed the sort of place where monsters were born and just past the horizon parents were warning their children with the tales of banished freaks so that they would not leave the house.
We walked Buddha on the only patch of grass outside the gas station, filled up the tank, and bought some sanitizer and baby powder to make the car smell more pleasant. We went into a nearby Ambassador's Inn for a free coffee and whatever was left over from the continental breakfast. We were operating on short money, taking what we could.
We sat in the lobby of the motel to cool off and drank our coffee and shared a cream-filled donut. Kate had on one of her little sundresses and the front desk clerk was eyeing her with the carelessness of a longtime married man.
"How's she look?" I said.
The man squinted and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Mighty fine woman," he said. "My first wife looked like her."
"You sure about that?"
"I know every man in love thinks their girl looks like no other, but they did have a resemblance. She left me a long time ago. You going to pay for your coffee or not?"
I gave the man two crumpled dollar bills and he folded them out on the counter and put them in the cash register.
When we were outside, I told Kate to take off her dress.
"Put on something that doesn't show the world your peach," I said.
She smacked me across the face and though we've been in scuffles before, I couldn't remember her actually striking me. She walked to the car and I looked out across the long stretch of dried up fields all the way to the horizon and I thought that if everybody gave five bucks to Miami, Oklahoma, maybe it'd be a better looking place.
But what was really happening was that all the good energy we had leaving Philadelphia had been sucked up by the earth and I felt road-weary and disconnected from the man who had set out a few days before. Kate drifted in and out of sleep and didn't speak and even the dog was silent.
Night was rising up over the sun and we were outside of Elk City when I saw a group of turkey vultures flying just above the roadway. There was a gutted animal off to the side of the white line and one of the vultures left the pack and swooped down and I tried to speed up but the vulture smacked the windshield. A tremendous thud boomed off the glass, and a web of cracks spread across the pane. I broke hard, smoke steamed out from underneath the tires. The vulture lay in the middle of the road, feathers scattered, its head torn from its body, wings splayed out like the claws of a dead scorpion.
"You killed it," Kate said.
"I know I killed it. Don't you think I know?"
"I'm just saying. I mean, Jesus."
"You're not crying are you?"
"It sounded horrible."
"If you cry, I'm gonna throw you out of this car."
"What if I mourn?"
"Don't mourn."
"Fine," she said, and fluttered her eyelids. "I just think you should at least say a prayer or something, don't you?"
"That vulture wouldn't say a prayer for me. Why should I say a prayer for it?"
"It's not going to be responsible for killing you."
"What if I had swerved out of the way and driven us off the embankment? You think that vulture and those other vultures up there would come down and have a service for the two of us? No. They'd probably start pecking at us until they were fat and full and flying into more cars."
"You're a sonofabitch," she said. She looked at the vulture in the side view mirror. It looked like a small hump of dead, muddy leaves.
"Please don't cry," I said.
"You wouldn't throw me out so I'm going to cry a while."
"Go ahead, then. I won't stop you. Cry for a bird. Right now there're probably a million people dying horrible deaths, but here you are crying for a bird."
She boo-hooed all the way to the Motel 6 in Elk City, where she took a napkin from the glove compartment and cleaned up her eyes, crossed one leg over the other, and stared out the window.
There was a pudgy girl not more than thirteen sitting next to a baby in a truck. She inched over to the driver's side window and looked out at our windshield.
"You got a pretty big crack there," she said.
"We killed a bird," Kate said to her by way of confession.
"It's not the worst thing in the world," the girl said.
"See," I said.
The girl stepped out of the truck. She had a sweep of bangs hanging just above her eyes and a case of makeup on her face. She put her finger to the crack and drew it down to the broken windshield wiper and then around the web.
"Watch yourself," Kate said.
The girl looked at Kate through the cracked glass and then the baby started crying. When she turned around I saw she was wearing a pair of tight shorts that said TNT on the back. She held the baby up to her chin like a fiddle and Kate got out of the car and asked if she could hold her.
"Whose baby is this?" Kate asked her.
"It's mine," she said.
"It's a beautiful baby," I said.
"I know that."
"And your husband's inside?" Kate asked.
"My husband's in New Mexico."
"Then who's with you?"
"My father. We're on our way to kill that motherfucker."
"He must deserve it," I said and went and stood by Kate. I put my hand to the baby's chest and felt its beating heart.
"I got to change its diaper," the girl said.
Kate hesitated and then held the baby out to the girl. I felt nauseous and needed a cold shower and hot food. I wanted to be gone before the girl's father came out of the lobby. I decided we should see about a different motel.
"Good luck," I said to the girl.
Elk City is a sprawl of motel chains and fast food joints. I had to think at one time a man and his wife built a house there and thought the world of the place, and if there were a window unto us in the afterlife they couldn't have been too proud to see that land that gave them so much happiness turned into a truck stop.
We unloaded our traveling suitcase and Kate showered and I watched a replay of the Tyson/Douglas fight from '91. Kate stayed in the tub a long time and I could hear the scratch of a razor against her legs and then, a few minutes later, a little moan, and I knew she had given herself an orgasm.
"Feel better?" I said when she stepped out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around her head and another around her body.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and shook her hair out of the towel. I looked at her in the mirror behind the television set. She started weeping and I shut the television off.
"We should do something," she said.
"About the girl?"
"About the baby," she said and turned and looked at me as if I were that baby.
"I think the man in New Mexico is in worse shape than the baby, don't you?"
She was quiet. She stared at the rusted air conditioner.
"I don't think going to Mexico is a good idea," she said.
"Why?"
"I don't have a specific reason. I just feel it. Something bad is going to happen to us there."
"Something bad will happen to us anywhere if it's meant to happen, isn't that what you believe?"
"The bathroom sink is filled with dead crickets," she said.
At some point during the night, Buddha hopped up on the bed and nestled in between us. I was glad because I was having trouble falling asleep; Kate's body was cold and I could hear the trucks going by on the highway and the spirit of that dead vulture threw its shadow on the wall. I turned and listened to the dog breathing and it lulled me into a solid six hours of rest.
In the morning, Kate packed up the bag and put it in the car. We had coffee from a Denny's and leaned forward on the railing of the open second floor looking out over the eighty foot advertising signs launched into the sky and I told her I loved her more than anything and if she wanted to go back to Philadelphia than I'd take her back.
"Do you think it's the right thing?" she asked me, and I knew she was asking about the future and that part of the reason she loved me was because I didn't believe in the future and had told her as much during our long talks in bed when we didn't sleep until the sun rose and ate breakfast at two in the afternoon at a place called Stella's that's hard to find.
"I think it's the right thing," I said.
We had planned to drive through the southern states and up the east coast on our way home from Mexico, but going the same route back was faster and made sense considering our spirits were low and we didn't know how many more hours Buddha could sit in the car with us. I had to keep my head at a 45-degree angle to see clearly out of the windshield and I told Kate to pray that it didn't rain because the wipers were broken.
Somewhere in Ohio there was a downpour and I put on the emergency lights and stuck my head out the window and made it to a gas station. Kate went inside and called her parents and the owner of the station let Buddha walk around and sniff the used tires. He was a kind, older man with a big gap between his front teeth and the sort of doughy face that let me imagine him as a boy.
"Grab one of those sledges and let's take her out," he said.
The two of us beat in the windshield until it collapsed. It was such a rush. I raised the sledgehammer and put a dent in the passenger door, then another on the hood. I knocked out the headlights and all of the windows. The owner stood back and shielded his face. Buddha barked. Kate rushed in and cried for me to stop. But I had to keep going until my limbs were exhausted, until I had left every ounce of energy with that car.
Kate was scared and I probably was, too, though it's difficult to remember what I was like that long ago. Driving the rental back to Philadelphia, we looked out at the city rising like steps from a deep well in the Earth and I felt better thinking that there were two people passing us by who were leaving our city in fear. I'm sure things could've been different, but I don't blame Kate and I still love her the same. She's got these shimmering green eyes like sunlit ponds carved out of grass hills. She flashes those songs just enough to make love known, and it feels that a sort of life different than this one is still possible and whether or not that happens doesn't matter so much.