He stayed on the arid farm roads until Beaumont, where the sun blasted like an angry god. He took twelve miles of highway and then exited again and found another empty road and bore into it, his tires spitting stones.
In his mind, he spoke to his wife. Once, he muttered a sentimental word aloud and then looked up in his mirror, embarrassed.
Outside his window, America refused to shift into the one he saw on television, the one filled with lights and noise. With his elbow resting on the open window, America was Mexican laborers and fruit, dust and soil, cattle and untethered dogs. His son had loved this America. He’d run through its fields and awakened under its skies.
Edward churned out of Texas and through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland. For three nights, he slept on side roads. He shat and pissed in its fields, burying what he left. What he bought in this America’s garishly lit stores, he consumed reluctantly. He buried the packages in graves beside his own waste.
North of Philadelphia, out in Bucks County, he pulled into a Quaker village named Newtown. He grunted once at the sight of a meeting house that looked more like a barn than a church. The heat had relented some in the still-lit evening. Outside the truck’s cabin, the neat rows of corn stood tall. In town, he slid the truck into a service station where he’d eyed a telephone stall. He parked beside it and stared at it through his open window. From his breast pocket he removed a creased slip of paper.
He looked at its digits though he knew them well. He grunted again, a thick, primal sound. He pulled the door handle then and stepped out.
A woman answered on the third ring.
“Ms. Louise?” he asked, his deep voice calmed and soft. “It’s me.”
“Who is this?”
“You know who this is.”
“Don’t tell me what I know.”
“You know.” He looked out the booth’s blurred Plexiglas window. Someone had carved a name into it. He studied the letters but couldn’t form them into a word his mouth knew how to utter.
“Jesus, Bobby.”
“It’s not Bobby anymore.”
“You’re back? After all these years? Where are you?”
“Near enough.”
“Bobby, I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
“Well,” he said, and then stopped.
“I’ll call the police. I will.”
“They don’t care anymore. All of them are probably dead by now.”
“No, they’re not.”
“How’s Mister?”
“Oh, Bobby. He’s long buried. Has been for going on six years.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate.”
“He needed to go. He was old. I’m old now, too.”
“We’re all old now.”
“What did you do, Bobby?”
“Where’s Solly?”
She paused. “I’ve lost track.”
“Leave the backdoor unlatched,” he said. “I don’t want to have to break it.”
“No, Robert. Don’t.”
“I’ll see you soon,” he said, and returned the phone to its cradle.
* * *
Up I-95, he kept in the far right lane and watched the industrial towers standing still and blazing in floodlights, breathing fire and smoke from their open mouths. From a sign on the side of the highway, New Jersey welcomed him. He breathed in deeply through his nose. It had been twenty-seven years.
The vehicles around him flowed through the veins of the high- way like good blood, slipstreaming and clean. He kept his elbow out the window but removed his cattleman hat for fear of attention.
Edward pulled off in Trenton and followed the streets of his youth. He was a tourist in his own life and recognized little. He slowed at the metal fence that ran along the edge of his boyhood schoolyard. Nearby was the tree under which he had spent his afternoons hiding, curled in a ball, the crook of his arm and his knees soaking in his tears. He could picture his father’s Buick parked and breathing fumes and saw Solly, too, her knuckles bloodied and her hair pasted to her scalp with sweat. He remembered the men and women who came the night they were finally saved, how the policemen ushered him and his sister into the car, the sounds of the rending, the threats from his father thrown from the porch, the curses from his mother, and the car easing into Ms. Louise’s and Mister’s driveway. All of it was there in the bony prison of his skull.