The Rules of the Road, page 26
“I just can’t believe it. It’s been so long. I’d love to catch up, apologize properly for how things went down.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“I’ve never forgot,” he says.
“I wouldn’t have come here if I thought you had,” she says, handing him her phone number.
Some say that forgiveness is our most unnatural act as a species.
Still, others will say that it’s not so special, that it’s a societal behavior that has developed to benefit the collective, a practice that has ultimately helped our species to survive.
I don’t know where it comes from or why we do it, whether it’s from a higher power or evolution or this or that. It’s not important.
What’s important is the power wielded by the wronged.
The effect it can have on the two people involved.
What’s important is that it feels like a choice.
The universe may give second chances, but it doesn’t choose to.
There’s nothing more beautiful than a second chance.
In a waiting room full of older women and women in various states of pregnancy, Buck sticks out like a sore thumb. He stares straight ahead and taps his foot quietly, takes glances up at the ceiling.
How do I know what year it is? I don’t, but in his facial hair, there’s more gray than not. Save for the cowboy hat, he looks roughly the same as he did in the Kroger parking lot.
A door opens. A woman in scrubs says his name and gives him a little smile, motions for him to come back.
I’m not privy to the goings on of what happens behind that door, but later on I’ll find out that it’s not a pregnancy they were there for. Later on, I’ll find out how the universe treasures second chances. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.)
Her hair never grows back the same after the chemo, the chemo that didn’t quite seem to work the way the doctors had hoped. So, she keeps it cut short.
“Easier to manage out on the road. I’ll be able to get ready almost as fast as you,” she’ll joke to him.
And that’s what they decided they would do, take a final road trip. Once all the bargaining and sadness was exhausted, they planned it all out, right there on their bed with the afternoon light shining through the curtains. There was still so much she had wanted to see, so much she wouldn’t get to, but they might as well die trying.
She was on her belly, hand propping her chin up as she wrote in a notebook while Buck stroked her ankle and leg.
“You wanna see Niagra? It’s a total tourist trap out there,” Buck says.
“What? I got this thing for waterfalls. It’s like the top ten in the world and in our backyard practically. Ooh, I better not forget Yosemite,” Carla says, adding it to her list.
“Now that I can jive with. Nothing like the West.”
“Yawn. You and your wide-open spaces.”
“I’ve got a thing for vastness.”
Days and hours pass on the road like so many miles on the odometer, except with this engine there’s no service that’s due once it hits three thousand or whatever. There’s just the inevitable. Maybe the salvage yard if she’s an organ donor.
Still, it’s not like you could tell at first glance. No signs of terminal illness rain on Carla’s parade. She seems happy, if tired. Buck’s a different case. Although he puts up a good show in front of Carla, bloody knuckles and a cracked bathroom mirror at a service station in Mississippi beg to differ. He wraps his hands in paper towels and saunters back to their vehicle, whistling a tune.
No road trip ever goes completely as planned, but when a terminal illness looms, more accommodations must be made. There are bouts of nausea and fatigue, plates of the best chicken fried steak in 3 counties that go untouched, days spent sleeping in and lounging in motel rooms, sights left unseen.
There are the other things that stick out to me as I ride in the backseat and witness it all, the country passing by through the windshield.
On I-20 outside of Shreveport, Carla leans out the window and cocks her arm and pumps it vigorously at a trucker. He returns the salute with a blast of his loud horn. In that moment, with her smile and short hair windblown by the interstate, she looks so full of life. If deceptive looks were enough to beat cancer, she would’ve done beat it. That’s for certain.
Later that same day they stop at a roadside stand and buy a quart of boiled peanuts. Buck turns his nose up at them, says his grandpa made him eat them plenty of times and that he’s never been a fan. He still eats a few for Carla.
Carla is full of other road trip games and superstitions. There’s an ongoing game of punch buggy that’s really just a love tap that she gives him whenever she spots a VW bug. There’s the rule that they must hold their breath when they pass a graveyard. There are the panhandlers she tries to tip every time that they can. She says it’s good luck.
At every hotel, they fill an ice bucket. She likes to chew on it when she’s nauseous and can’t seem to keep anything down. Keeps her from getting dehydrated.
Outside of Roanoke, Buck tries to change the radio station during a particular song, but Carla slaps his hand. She’s having a good day and driving for once.
“Hey there, mister. What do you think you’re doing?” Carla asks.
“Aw, c’mon Carla. This song is so long,” Buck mock whines.
“It’s ‘Free Bird’ though. You never change ‘Free Bird’. It’s supposed to be long.”
“Do you realize how many times I’ve had to play this song on the air?”
“I’m sure a lot. But it’s totally sacrilegious to skip it.”
“Alright, alright,” he concedes.
Full circle comes during a nighttime drive west of Des Moines, Iowa. They’re trying to make it to Omaha. Out on the shoulder, their headlights cut across an object.
“You see that?” Buck asks.
“No,” Carla says drowsily from the passenger seat. Her head is leaned back on the headrest.
“A single shoe on the side of the road.”
“Hm.”
“You ain’t ever seen that? A shoe just sitting there? Why is it always just one shoe? How did it get there?”
“Maybe it’s a dude with one leg that doesn’t need it anymore,” Carla replies, her eyes still closed.
“Maybe,” Buck says.
All road trips must come to an end, and this one is no different. This one ends prematurely. We never have as much time as we think.
Wooden rafters and neon beer signs and rows and rows of bottles reflected in the mirror behind the bar. Lilting pedal steel wafts from a glowing jukebox in the corner. The longneck bottle is cold in my hand and the beer inside is like nectar; it’s the first thing I’ve consumed since I started this trip. Thus far, I haven’t thirsted, I’ve never hungered. But it’s here and I don’t remember how I got here, and I can interact with it, so why not?
It’s finished before I know it, but there is a bartender at the ready, leaving me another on a cardboard coaster. To my left and further on down the bar are several patrons and to my right is Buck. He’s got a cowboy hat on and his hair is gray.
He turns and looks at me.
Is this possible? Have I inhabited the memory of someone else’s body?
“So yeah, I just don’t see that there was ever any point, you know? It should’ve been me, it should’ve been me. The hurt I doled out. The life I lived. I deserved it,” he says, like we’ve been in mid conversation.
“You’ve been through a lot,” I find myself saying automatically.
“Others have been through worse. They all keep trucking. Hard-wired, I guess,” he says and takes a drink of his glass, ice and bourbon.
“Are you thinking of checking out?” I ask.
He’s a ghost, a vengeful spirit of the sound waves.
He chuckles. “No. Far from it. I’m checking in.”
“I’m not sure I read you.”
“This life is a rigged game. You can play by the rules and do everything right and it won’t matter. I’m through with playing, but that don’t mean I’m quitting. In fact, I’m just going to the other side of the table,” he says and drains his glass, crunches his ice.
“How do you plan on doing that?” I ask.
He turns to the bartender and raises his index finger, turns back to me. “I already did,” he says and gives me a wink. “You figuring it out yet?” he asks, his voice drenched in static.
He turns the dial, changes the station. I lose myself in a cacophony of white noise. The bar hisses and fades, crackles into nothing.
* * *
The town of Hooper, Montana, isn’t a big one. At this point in time, you can tell its boomtown days have long since passed. Tourism from the surrounding mountains buoys it a little, keeps it on life support, but it slowly slips toward the inevitable.
These are the places that have been forgotten, places where you can go to be forgotten. Seemed like the kind of place that was tailor-made for Buck to end up after a long journey.
Even back before “The Rules of the Road” entered my life, I’d pass towns like these, these villages nestled in the most serene yet isolated places and daydream about what it would be like to live there. I’d wonder, how does one end up here? I guess I had an answer.
How you end up in a place like this is that you drift across the backroads and blue highways of these United States. You stop in one-church towns. Towns with a couple of stoplights and that’s it. You pick up the local newspaper and scan the classifieds, look at the bulletin boards at the local I for HELP WANTED signs. When that doesn’t yield anything, you just straight up visit the town’s only radio station, tell them your credentials, ask if they’re needing any help. Eventually you find the place.
It’s a white brick building in the middle of a spacious and empty lot. It’s bordered on one side by a row of identical senior living houses. A radio tower stands erect at the back of the property, a beacon flashing in the evening. There are faded and rusty letters that read KOTR.
This is KOTR Radio in Hooper, Montana. It’s where Buck has landed after years of radio, years of travel, years of solitude. The station plays classic country year-round and has a minimal staff, spread thin and shorthanded. When Buck arrives, it is largely a one-man show, run by an old cowboy by the name of Rusty Miles. The two of them hit it off quite well.
“Now the pay ain’t great, but I got a room you can rent free as part of the deal if you’re interested. It ain’t The Ritz or anything like that, but it keeps the rain out,” Rusty says.
It’s a guest house of sorts in the backyard of Rusty’s house on the edge of town. It’s a single room building, but it has a bathroom with a shower. Rusty’s right that it isn’t much, but to Buck it’s all he needs.
It’s really the only thing that’s kept him going after all these years. A microphone and a soundproof room. A transmitter and a tower. A voice and a listener. It’s his goal to die in the radio station. He wants his last words to be uttered over the airwaves. He wants his last words to be, “Buck Hensley, signing off.”
The routine is simple, peaceful. He works days and some nights. They have an automated system that can broadcast pre-recorded taped playlists and advertisements, but he has gotten in the habit of working into the wee hours a few nights a week. It’s a callback to his days as a small-time midnight man, back when he was starting out. Everything loops back around.
He reads the local news, the community bulletins, the obituaries and weather reports and high school football scores. There are announcements of church rummage sales and missing pets and Myrtle Mae Fletcher’s 90th birthday celebration at the senior center. Snacks will be provided.
On the evenings he doesn’t work, he sits on the back patio of Rusty’s place. It’s a routine and tradition Buck is fond of. Rusty will pour himself a single tallboy of Coor’s Light in the same restaurant style red plastic tumbler, sit in his lawn chair and stare out at The Ruby Range. Buck will have a little more to drink and they will talk until the stars come out and the mountains turn into monstrous silhouettes.
One of these conversations stands out in particular. I guess that’s why I get to see it.
“Sonuvabitch my knee’s hurting something awful today,” Rusty says one evening, rubbing his left knee. “Must be a front coming in. You ever hear of them radon mines up in Boulder?”
“No. Do tell,” Buck replies.
“Place up in the mountains. Kind of a touristy place. These old mines that are supposed to give off a healing energy. Go in there and sit around for a while. Buy a bracelet after. I guess it’s related to radiation ‘cuz they don’t let pregnant women and children in and you can only go a few times a year.”
“You oughta go up there for your knee, eh?” Buck says.
“Thought of it. But it seems too good to be true. A cure for pain . . .” he trails off.
“Guess there’s no escaping it,” offers Buck as he takes a drink from his beer.
“If I was gonna mess with that, I’d try the place up at Buzzard’s Roost not too far from here. They don’t advertise it. It’s a healing spring at the end of this old mining tunnel. They say you go into it and you will hurt no more forever.”
“Wow.”
“It’s kind of a local legend. Although some teenager supposedly went up there one day. Got in the water. Went missing a couple days. They found them wandering the mountains out of their damn minds. They kept saying how they had seen something. One wouldn’t talk for weeks. They ended up chalking the whole thing up to some bad shrooms.”
“Damn, Rust. I can see why you wouldn’t hurt no more messing around with something like that.”
“If you’re dead from uranium poisoning or crazy from a mercury spring, then I guess that’s one way to do it,” Rusty laughs and drains his cup.
Much free time is consumed in Rusty’s garage. There’s no room for vehicles here; it’s been converted to a workshop full of radio equipment and parts. Shelves line the walls, and there are a couple tables in the middle of the room. A workbench with a transceiver sits along the back wall.
It is in this room where many hours are spent discussing all manners of electromagnetic radiation, particularly radio waves. There’s talk of frequency modulation and amplitudes and ionospheres and ground wires. It all sounds like Greek to me. I failed my college physics class, and I can’t help but zone out to their lengthy discussions.
They tinker with Rusty’s HAM radio, the one on the workbench. They hear broadcasts in Portuguese and French, Russian and Chinese. Rusty tells Buck how you can bounce a signal from all the way down here off the surface of the moon, how he’s even done it before way-back-when.
Buck hauls around a book titled Radio Wave Propagation Theory, fills its margins with notes. He tinkers with a military surplus high frequency antenna, a portable job that he sets up in the backyard one afternoon. It sets up on a tripod and wires run from a central mast. A battery pack serves as a power source and there’s a radio handset connected to that.
He fires it up. He’s transmitting. He whispers into the receiver. It’s a prayer to whoever’s out there, whoever’s listening. But the power source will not reach his intended listener. There’s just not enough power.
He says, “Carla, are you out there? It’s me, Hank.”
“You ever hear of WLW? What they did in the ‘30s?” Rusty asks one evening during another back-patio session.
“Yep. Actually did a spell in Cinci. Awful chili. I know all about the superstation. 500,000 watts,” Buck replies.
“Ha. Yeah. Whole Lotta Watts. They said that’s what the letters stood for. You ever hear the effects of all of that power on the folks that lived near the tower?”
“I don’t think I heard that.”
“The radio waves were so powerful in the surrounding area that a gas station couldn’t turn its lights off. Neon signs stayed on. It rattled gutters. Strangest of all was that people reported hearing the station from the strangest places: water faucets, radiators, and barbed wire fences!” Rusty stamps his foot and laughs.
“Wonder if there’s a limit to it all?” Buck wonders out loud.
Up a gravel switchback road, the jeep bumps along and kicks up yellow dust. The road runs across a flat stretch that’s interspersed with pines and then a meadow before climbing upward once again. The road stops at a clearing and a flat patch of gravel. There’s graffitied initials on some large boulders, some empty beer cans and broken bottles. A rugged trail leads up through the pines.
After a brief but strenuous hike, an opening appears on the mountainside. There it was: the long tunnel that felt like forever and the headlamp illuminating the passage. There were the glowing crystals embedded in the wall that breathed and sighed as we passed. A sonorous, salient drone could be heard. The smooth surfaces of the glowing purple rocks that burned with such brilliance that the headlamp was no longer needed. All of that fluorescence. The pulsing stalactites like coral.
At the end of it all was the cavernous chamber with a large hole in the center of its cathedral ceiling, an opening to the sky, and the wind blew through the hole in an incessant caterwaul.
There it was: the great transcendence, the years of tears and the days that followed. The antenna at the center of the room, the limitless energy, the water dripping into an ankle-deep pool that glowed in an ultraviolet hue. He kneeled at the rocky shelf in the center of the room where the tripod was installed, and the antenna jutted up and was welcomed by the wide opening above. The purple glow grew brighter and the lights and static and warmth enveloped us. And it was there that I saw you and there that I knew.
Epilogue
I awoke in a saline haze amongst the fragmented vision of a hospital room. Images faded in and out. A blurry non-sequence: the TV mounted on the wall, the sunlight filtering through the vertical blinds, the whiteboard with the nurse’s name on it, the bed’s side rails, the weakness of my legs. From there, a feeling of waking up over several days.
