Key to the Highway

By R. M. Wanderer

What would you do if your brother pleaded for your help to finish a botched suicide?
This is what is asked of Jay. Jay loves his brother and can’t bear to leave him helplessly suffering. But kill your brother?
Fionna, the matriarch and ghost, narrates the story of her family’s trials that result in self-discovery and reckoning. This is the story of Jay growing into his human skin as a result of the challenge his brother has demanded. And it is the story of Fionna’s attempt to let go of her family and accept her death, to let go of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. M. Wanderer
• Release date: Sep 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311141606

R. M. Wanderer

R M Wanderer lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife. He writes and plays music as much as possible given his massive work schedule and social obligations, more or less.

Book preview

KEY TO THE HIGHWAY

a novel

by R. M. Wanderer

Copyright 2012 R. M. Wanderer

Ebook Formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

"sure can tell you, seein what I seen,

gonna make a good man crippled,

gonna make a good man mean…"

Someone to Save Me, Kelly Joe Phelps

To Marcia,

the warm heart of my life

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE

When I was a young girl, long before I had crossed the puddle, I heard it. The first time was shortly after Grandad died. It was springtime as I recall and I was just a sprig, as Dad said. At first I thought the sound was waves lapping on the wooden belly of a boat...smells like a Coffin Boat, Dad said. Half were dead when they docked in Boston. Stench worse than rotten spuds. A story that reached way back to the old days. It was not words; it was a sound almost like the current of Grandad breathing in his raw wet way. It was time I heard. It was time knocking on the edges of my heart. It was our rhythm, the chanting lub-dub lub-dub of life. It was the syncopated moments and long years I heard.

* *

Can you believe it? Here we sit with faces slack like every damn thing is just tickety boo. Kate gazes right through Jay like not a solitary thing in creation has happened, like she's not all twisted up with accusations and recriminations. The lake sucks at our toes with these lazy slurpy sounds, the sun hangs there like a roman candle shot out of Mount Hood, teeters there between up and down, burning like hell. Like it'll hang there forever. And nobody makes a peep. Not a word about the disintegration of this family, maybe because it's us, all of us, that's crumbling like dust, it's our family, and we are each one of us too petrified to speak and besides it's still sunny out. You can't mention death on a day like this. And looky there, everyone else down by the lake is making happy noises and it just seems too damn morbid to mourn now, the grief too close so we nod howdy at the chaos that swirls around us like ash and settles on our sunburned shoulders and on our bare souls. It all feels too final to be for real.

Bennetts and a few friends form a ragged circle around the dying campfire; Kate, Jay (our kids, well, thirty-five, forty is no longer kids, I guess) and my old man Bennett encircling the smoldering log and the basketful of lunch that no one has touched. Chicken baked in mustard sauce just the way Old Bennett always wished I would have baked it. Pears. Tuscan bread with olive oil glistening on its brown skin, pasta salad, a hunk of pepperoni, cheese with a wood-handled knife stuck in it, salmon jerky, fresh chocolate chip cookies, the huge gooey kind that Kevin liked, and a cooler half-empty of Blitz-Winehard Dark. That's where all the action is — the cooler. And I have one too, held tight in my mitts and I tip it down like a sacrament and became slowly, surely invisible. Gone. That's me. Vanished.

Still, I'm in the air like radio waves, and my boy Jay picks me up all the time like his fillings are a crystal set. He hears me. It's not precisely words he hears, it's more like music, but it's got my voice in it too. Sometimes it sounds like one of those whatsits, a dijeridu I think they call it. Me and Jay are like the peak and the trough of the same radio wave. Jay, he hears me and I can feel him reaching into the air. Reaching out towards me with his fingers spread, a high wire act balanced somewhere between heaven and earth. Kevin could just barely hear me over the boiling of his blood. And Kate. Well, she just flat-out refuses to listen. It messes with her faith in the rational world I suspect. Well, that's not the whole story, that logical world.

They all said I was dead— took the big plunge into the frozen peas, but they knew better — my kids did. They knew we'd all be in one big mulligan together eventually. Jay explains to strangers sometimes that his mother died, but he knows better, he is afraid it's as simple as that, but he knows better. He says it simple like that because that's the way people expect it to be said and because that's his worst fear, but he knows it just ain't so. He hears me all the time. Or maybe feels, sound coming up through the earth to your feet. Maybe like the rumbling from inside a mountain — a low echo, never stops. It gets you in your guts and shakes everything loose until quick you've got to find a ditch. Jay's fingers are poised on the guitar strings, he plucks them each in a roll that lifts into the air real soft and heads nowhere in particular, drifting moth-like and all tentative. But beautiful and sort of steely. A single, lonesome note just hangs around for a sec and then there are some more notes and it all weaves together into the song that Jay is singing. Trouble in mind. Am I blue. But I won't be blue always. Every blasted one of them knows who Jay is singing to, and Jay seems to almost see his brother Kevin there: a beer in his paw, his silvery beard trimmed close, so close you can see his shiny chin, he'd be grinning to beat the band, the way he did.

Kate nearly sees her brother Kevin too, sitting there on the log next to her, and she wonders who the blazes else is present in this tribal gang—-visible and otherwise. She sees me in the skin on the back of her hand and maybe wishes she didn't, stuffs her hand back into her pocket. Then, she can't help herself, her brain just works this way, she wonders one thing, wonders another and keeps on wondering until it sends a shiver through her bones. Soon enough she'll know. She'll know more than she wants to know. Kate sniffs at the drifting air and smells a faint and fleeting stench like death just for an instant; a rotting fish abandoned on the shore somewhere upwind. And she raises her nose to the breeze hoping not to smell it again. But she does. She flares her nostrils, like the bloodhound she is. She's right. This little beach of ours is crammed to hell with ghosts. And us.

The water's down. It's a drought year. The beach is big and dry and it's just beginning to tick down from the eighties. The rhododendrons all along the margins of the woods are going leathery and shriveling up, strutting their survival stuff.

At first it's just Kate that joins in singing. Sometime I feel like livin, sometime I feel like dyin. Jay smiles, surprised, pleased, she doesn't sound half bad, he opens his thin-lidded eyes and nods. The two voices blend together; they're even in the same key. They feel something like relief perhaps, this one last time, all of them knowing they are blowing away, scattering like dry leaves, like smoke, and it's sad, but in the middle of this song, somehow, they have given up fighting this big old festering wound called the world. Even Old Bennett is grinning like he suddenly gets it.

Fionna sees all this, that's me, Fionna, the one who nods to the nice song and pops another Blitz. The pull tab erupts into the air and seems to call out a sort of soulful percussive part of their song that echoes into the big palm of this sky. Ffffsssstttt, it echoes off the surface of the water like it means something and it ricochets around the lake's rim over and over like the chorus. I'm all alone at midnight and my lamp is burnin low.

What's-his-name, Kate's boyfriend, stands knee-deep near the shore watching us Bennetts, ponders his almost-in-law part in this play. He watches Jay tip his head back and belt it out. The sun gonna shine in my back door some day. And Kate sings with a slight tremor in her voice. I go all chicken-skin looking at my kids, the way the world works and all.

And then Jay plays through once with his slide real slow and slick. The slide wavers almost a full step on the sustained notes, and it sounds warm and human and mournful. It coaxes the hurt right out of you, like voodoo. When they come around to the chorus for the last time, you can hear the basso profundo, it's Old Bennett, his lips are hardly moving, but his belly sucks in air at the same moment as the others. Trouble in mind, am I blue. But I won't be blue always.

What's-his-name stands knee deep in the lake. He gazes back at this odd gang of Bennetts that drips with what he suspects might be a farewell of some kind though no one said they are going anywhere. Still, it soaks them through; you could bottle it and ship it to France if you wanted. G'byes in the air, guitar with a steely edge that sounds like an echo. Funny how parting sears an image in your heart like a branding iron: a look, a gesture, the finger pressing against the lip, the aroma of a smoldering campfire, the stinging in your red eyes... funny how parting binds people together almost as much as it cuts them apart. These Bennetts sing, grin, weep, clap, everything right now. Life is what it is, I suppose.

What's-his-name lifts up two handfuls of water and watches it drip from his up-stretched hands, watches the sun catch it and turn it into cool fire. You can tell a mile away he's done some drugs in his better days. Still got longish hair, what's left of it. He takes a deep breath of air, his chest rises into the sun, he looks like he might blast off. And then he just spreads his arms and falls backward into the lake, and all them Bennetts laugh like there's no tomorrow. They laugh like he's Harpo re-born—-like there's nothing funnier in this whole damned world. Like his two handfuls of water has quenched the flame in them.

Here's how this song began: my two boys sitting stiff as pilgrims, looking past each other in the Northwest Passage Tavern on a rainy Saturday night seven days ago.

CHAPTER TWO

It was the syncopated moments and long hours I heard. It reached way back before all the Bennetts and Corrs and all. Not a quick little jig, that much was clear from the start. I know Grandad would've preferred a jig or at least a smart little air, with his big white head-back roar of a laugh, he would have made it a funny, sweet song if he could have done. But it reached way back behind him, and he was just a single, quick little verse. But a nearly happy verse, beneath the minor chords of sorrow and travail.

It was a soft day when I first heard it —- pearly gray skies from hill to sea, and the air was dripping wet and thick. My mother's roses were just verging open, heavy with buds and the lavender bush was stirring up a breeze with its fancy smell. I took in a deep breath of her and Mother said, That's the thing, lav, you're comin' on brilliant.

That's when I heard the lapping, almost watery splash of waves, but it was the sky herself was rocking. I stood up and looked all around me, at the empty road and the hot wires hanging overhead and the house behind, and the sidewalks both ways, for some truth. When I saw there was no sense to it, pretty soon I knew to just relax. I said, Okay, Missus Watery Air, what do you have to say for yourself? And she hasn't stopped since then, a constant whisper like ghosts. I say, Take your time, Missus Air & All, we got time for your story, we got all the time in creation.

Now it's me, too, is Missus Air & All. I'm in the sky like radio waves, and my boy Jay listens. He hears me, Jay does.

* *

For a dead man, you sure are drunk, Jay said. He glanced at his brother Kevin and then down at his own thin white fingers fiddling with the beer label. Jay thought, I can't believe I said THAT. Oh boy. What a dope. His lopsided smile melted into his big buttery cheeks. Jay tore the label from the beer bottle and attempted to resurrect a smile for his brother's sake. Jay's teeth were yellowish compared to the whiteness of his face. He looked like an animal that was not built to smile — wrong muscles, wrong lips, something. His upper lip sort of curled up over his red gums. He pushed his glasses up his shiny nose with a finger. His hands were soft and the fingernails of his right hand were pared just so for picking guitar. His curly black hair stuck out over his ears and over his collar.

Jay always looked like he hadn't expected to see you standing there, like he was just about to remember who you are. Just on the brink of remembering something — that was his look. Eternally in a fog. He often spoke just an instant before he had thought about it. It was like Jay was a half second out of phase with the rest of the world.

Jay changed that spring, although I don't know that his timing improved. Jay was sort of a tadpole with dinky hind legs the misty May night this whole thing started. But he was about to emerge from his primordial swamp of selfishness, he was about to breath air for the first time. He grew a backbone and joined the human race that spring. Sure, he is a little person with a little story. But you know what? All the little stories, they're not so little after all. They're life. We're just a mess of people swimming in trifling detail, but if you step back a sec, you see it's really everything. Who was the famous philosopher that said, Don't sweat the small stuff. But look, Einstein, it's all small stuff. And the heroes aren't just the big guys that cure cancer or stand in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.

They are also us small fries who work all day for some stranger, doing something that doesn't need to be done, evenings home to a nest full of souring fantasies, a pocketful of debt, the family all bedding down in a mire of illusions, mis-communications, tears and tittering and then we get up and do it again. Not because we can't think of something else to do, but because we just love those snot-nosed kids or the moonrise from the bedroom window or just that breath of clean morning air. Little guys. Big heart. You get my drift.

There sat the brothers Bennett at a small round table near the long mahogany bar in the Northwest Passage Tavern. It was getting crowded; people pushed past each other, smiling, shouting, making the scene. Jay had no use for Kevin's complaints — or anyone else's for that matter. He was preoccupied with his own. He played in a blues band and thought of himself as the tough guy that all the songs were about. It was preposterous of course, but he hadn't yet even come close to figuring that much out. I loved him all this time, you know, I loved him in spite of his weaknesses. I could feel deep inside him, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he would grow a spine. Like every son's mother thinks, maybe. Well, he did. Jay was about to breathe real air. And things changed.

Well, Jay, you sumbitch, Kevin said slowly, forming each word like wet mudpies, if you were dead you'd be drunk too, wooden you?

I guess, Kevin. I guess you're right. Jay leaned back in his chair and watched. Kevin's attention wandered back to his beer; Jay relaxed and sank back into the chair. Jay felt this familiar fraternal friction, this communication that wasn't quite happening. He felt it in his fingers, which so often did his talking for him, though Kevin hardly needed an explanation. This was the way it had always been with Kevin and Jay, half the time frustrated and fed up with each other, the other half so close words were unnecessary or inadequate. Lately it had gotten a little heavy on the fed-up side, as far as Jay was concerned.

And tonight might take the cake. Kevin comes in half sloshed to where Jay is working and acts like the mayor, smiles and waves at some guy as if he was Kevin's best friend and he doesn't even know his name, and if there were only babies to kiss, oh yeah, everything's great—-if it's so great, how come you're so drunk Jay might ask, but doesn't bother, cause he knows the answer. So Kevin