Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons
in Reno, in August!
The first day I ate the musty, half-eaten candy bars the girl had kindly left behind and an open bag of potato chips. The second day I finished a bag of peanuts and tortilla chips so stale they tasted like shoe laces, but I ate them anyway and was grateful. I drank water from the tap.
Inside me was detritus from weeks on the open road. The stop sign near Valparaiso, Indiana. The Sand Hills of Nebraska. The Great Divide in Wyoming that, I thought then, split my life into the before and after. Silly me. Yesterday Paradise. Today Reno. Like still frames. Here is Shelby driving her Shelby—the car dreams are made of. I have a picture; it must have happened. Here is the flat road before me. Here are the Pomeranians. Here is the sunset in St. Louis. Here’s the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Black Hills, the Yellow Dunes, the casinos and the slot machines, and Interior, South Dakota, with Floyd, that sad, tattooed boy.
Do what you like.
Indeed.
When we spotted her a second time, we couldn’t believe it was the same gal. I slowed down, we looked. Can it be? we said. It is. Should we stop? No, no. No hitchhikers. But she waved to us; recognized us. Look, it’s fate, I said. What are the chances of running into the same girl in different states, hundreds of miles apart. I don’t believe in fate, said my friend Gina. Come on, I said. You gotta believe in something. What do you believe in?
Not fate, said Gina, pointing. And not her.
I cajoled. We’ll give her a lift down the road. When it stops being convenient, we’ll let her off. I saw her in the rearview mirror running toward us. Running and waving. That frame is on every page in my helpless head. Seeing her get closer and closer. This is what I keep coming back to: I should have kept going.
If only I hadn’t gotten that damn, cursed, awful, hateful, hated car. How I loved that car. Where was it?
At night I paced like a caged tiger, growling under my breath, choking on my frustration. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t lie down, couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Night was senseless; day was worse.
During the day, I prayed for night to come. But at night I barricaded the front door with two chairs and a dresser; I chained and locked it, and locked the window looking out onto the open landing. I didn’t turn on the TV because I wanted to hear every footstep coming close, but every footstep coming close made my heart rip out of my chest. Now that the others were gone, I thought at any moment “they’d” be coming for me; a few days ago there were three of us and today only I was left. Otherwise how to explain my car’s vanishing, my friends’ vanishing?
On the third day of rain, I thought I was losing my mind. I couldn’t recall the farms of Iowa anymore, or when we crossed the Mississippi. I couldn’t remember if I’d graduated, the last name of my good friend Marc, my home phone number. I didn’t know what to do. The girls were gone, my car was gone, my money was gone, phone numbers had left my head, and a man at the reception desk was smiling at me with his filthy grin saying, “Stay as long as you like, dahrlin’.”
On the third morning I slept. I had nothing to eat and nowhere to go. I didn’t know where relief was going to come from, and I couldn’t allow a single thought without doubling over in fear and despair. Perhaps my hitchhiker was wrong and the Eastern spiritualists right. You should train yourself to let go of all passions. Train yourself to let go of all earthly things, detach yourself from life.
Think only not to think.
Will only not to will.
Feel only not to feel.
God have pity on me, I was crying in my self-pity, on my knees in front of one bed, then the other, my forehead sunk into musty blankets.
Help me. Help me. Please. Why hadn’t I insisted she tell me what the fourteenth station of the cross was? She told me that no prayer asked in faith could remain unanswered at the fourteenth station; and when I asked what it was, she became coy. “You’ll have to learn one to thirteen first,” she said. Where was I supposed to learn this? On U.S. 83 in South Dakota? In the Badlands? From junkyard Floyd? Besides, back then I was curious but fundamentally indifferent. And why not? I was young, the sun was shining, my car was fast like a jet, and on the radio, one way or another, it was paradise by the dashboard light every night for the local girls. I should’ve insisted she tell me, because now, when the only thing that remained true was that I was still eighteen, I didn’t know where to turn.
Maybe that Gideon’s Bible in the musty drawer would shed some light on the fourteen stations, but no. I was by the side of the bed, kneeling in the paper shrapnel, my fingers sightlessly tracing the words I didn’t and couldn’t understand, closing the Book, opening it to a random page, sticking my finger into a paragraph, struggling to focus. This is what I got:
Lift up thy hands, which hang down, and thy feeble knees.
I got up and climbed into bed. It was still raining hard. How could I stand one more day in here, waiting, listening through the curtains for the steps of the one who was coming to kill me? I didn’t know what time it was. It felt early, though I couldn’t be sure because the night before in my helpless terrors, I’d smashed the alarm clock with the heel of one of my newly-bought summer sandals. This morning was so dark and gray, it could’ve been after dusk, or before sunrise. It just was, without dimension.
Suddenly there was a knock on the door. Not the tentative knock of an illegal immigrant asking to clean my room, but the insistent, demanding knock of a man’s fisted knuckles. I jumped out of bed and hid in the closet.
“Police. Open up.”
I threw on some clothes and peeked through the hole in the curtain. I moved furniture out of the way and opened up. Two cops in different uniforms stood outside on the second-floor landing.
“Shelby Sloane?”
“Who wants to know?”
One flashed his badge. “Detective Yeomans. Paradise Police Department.”
The other flashed his badge. “Detective Johnson, Reno Police Department.”
“Do you have anything to eat?” I asked.
“What? No. Are you Shelby?”
I felt like falling down. Nodding, I held on to the door handle. I said nothing; they said nothing.
“We found out what happened to your car.”
“Did you.” It was not a question. It was as if I already knew. I wanted to say, well, took you long enough to find a car of which only a single one—mine—was made in the year 1966. One car, and it’s taken the police departments in two cities three days to find it. Good job.
“I’m real hungry. Is the phone working?”
“How would we know if your phone’s working?” said Yeomans from Paradise. “Where did you call from when you reported the car missing?”
“I don’t know.”
The two cops exchanged an awkward look, then cleared their throats.
“Look, we came to see you on a matter of some urgency.”
“About my car?”
“Uh, not quite,” said Yeomans. “We need you to come with us. We’d like you to come with us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Did you do anything to cause yourself to be under arrest?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
“Do I have the right to remain silent?”
“You always have that right.”
I chose not to exercise it. “Is something wrong?”
They nodded.
I fought for words. “Is the car in Paradise?”