I try again.
“What’s your final destination?”
She meets my eyes. She knows what I’m asking.
“Flagstaff,” she says.
I nod slowly. That’s all the validation I need. She’s still a drifter, a dreamer, an ambling vagabond. She doesn’t plan five minutes into the future. She can’t follow an outline for her life. She’s only capable of letting it unfold, one scene at a time. Dylan hasn’t changed. I doubt she ever will.
I leave a ten dollar tip on the table and slide out of the booth. I follow Dylan outside where the sun is already beating down on the black top. Even after a cup of coffee, my eyelids are heavy. I hand her my car keys.
“It’s your shift,” I tell her. When we get in the car, I text my parents to let them know I survived the tornado apocalypse. I’m surprised Dylan hasn’t texted Snickerdoodle yet. But then I remember Dylan’s attachment to people is out of sight out of mind. Nick might as well get used to it.
PART TWO: THE DETOUR
Gray
I wake up to music pouring through the speakers and the sun is glaring in my eyes like it’s mad at me for sleeping the morning away. I squint out the window at the farm fields bordering the highway, scorched and brown from the summer sun.
I hear the song Faith playing, by George Michael. If Dylan is right, and listening to local radio stations is a cultural experience, then it appears most of America is stuck inside an 80’s time warp.
I twist in the seat. My neck’s stiff from attempting to sleep and hold my head up at the same time. I blink at the dashboard clock with surprise. It’s already past noon. I look out the front window at a beige highway that seems to never end, just repeat itself over and over with monotony and sun-bleached billboards advertising fast food restaurants and hotel chains. It feels like we’re going nowhere, just circling a wide track of road. I suddenly feel too constrained. My knees are pinned. My legs want to stretch. I stare out at the western horizon and I just want to get to Arizona. I want to put distance between me and Dylan. I want to drop her off and drive away without ever looking back and think, finally, forever, we are DONE.
“Isn’t the open road great?” I hear Dylan say. “It’s like having wings.”
I turn my neck and wonder if Dylan is talking to me, or to herself. I watch her take a bite of red licorice, and then use it as a drum stick against the steering wheel to match the acoustic rhythm of the song. She’s nodding her head, singing along to the lyrics.
I stretch my arms out and Dylan notices and says, “Hey, look who decided to join us.”
I wrinkle my forehead and wonder what she means by us, as if she has an imaginary friend or a split personality. Either scenario wouldn’t completely surprise me. Dylan has always hovered dangerously between being mildly insane and having a full blown personality disorder.
I’m about to ask her this question when I hear a deep, scratchy voice from the backseat say something like, “Yup or Yeah or Yar,” I really can’t make it out. My neck is still stiff so I have to turn my shoulders and I look in the backseat to discover a third passenger. An older man, probably in his sixties, is making himself at home, eating a bag of popcorn. He smacks his teeth loudly, the teeth he has left, which are stained a purplish-brown. His thin, gray hair shines with grease. The deep wrinkles set into his tan face make his skin resemble a wood carving.
He doesn’t actually place the popcorn in his mouth, he tosses it in. Half the kernels miss and land either on his black, sleeveless shirt or all over my car seat. The loose, wrinkly folds of skin on his arms jiggle as he throws the popcorn. He nods at me and says either, “Hey or Ha or Har.” I can’t understand him. I do notice he’s missing his two front teeth and probably several more. How does he chew his popcorn? I sense a unique smell permeating through my car that wasn’t there earlier. It has all the subtlety of an overflowing trash dumpster.
I glare at Dylan and she’s chewing on another piece of licorice and nodding her head to the music like this situation is completely normal. And safe.
“Did I miss something?” I ask. The song Jack and Diane starts up on the radio and Dylan leans forward.
“I love this song,” she says and tries to turn up the volume, but I catch her hand in mine. She looks over at me.
“There’s a man in my backseat,” I point out, trying to stay calm. I pray that Dylan has more sense than to pick up a hitchhiker. Hasn’t she ever watched the evening news? More like the evening obituary report? I drop her hand.
“That’s Jim,” Dylan says as if this should explain everything. “I call him Slim Jim,” she adds.