Chapter 14

Imagine you live in a house only every day your house is in a different town. We had three ways out of New Orleans Adam knew about. Adam took Fertility and me to a truck stop on the edge of the city and said to take our pick. The airports were being watched. The train and bus stations were staked out. We couldn’t all three of us hitchhike, and Fertility refused to drive all the way to Canada.

“I flat out don’t like driving,” Fertility says. “Besides, your brother’s way to travel is just a lot more fun.” The day after the Ronald McDonald House, we’re the three of us standing in the acres of gravel parking lot outside a truck stop cafe when Adam pulls a linoleum knife out of his back pocket and slips the blade open. “What will it be, people?” he says. Nothing here is going due north. Adam’s been inside talking up all the truck drivers. What we have to choose from is the following, Adam says, pointing at each. There’s a Westbury Estate going west out Highway 10 to Houston. There’s a Plantation Manor headed northeast on Highway 55 to Jackson. There’s a Springhill Castle going northwest to Bossier City on Highway 49, with stops at Alexandria and Pineville, then headed west on Highway 20 to Dallas. Parked around us on the gravel are prefabricated houses, manufactured houses, trailer houses. These are broken into halves or thirds and hooked to the back of semi trucks. The open side of each modular piece is sealed with a sheet of translucent plastic and inside are the murky shapes of sofas, beds, rolls of rolled-up carpet. Major appliances. Dining-room sets. Easy chairs. While Adam was chatting with the drivers, finding out where each is headed, Fertility was in the truck stop bathroom dyeing my blond hair black in the sink and washing the tanning bronzer off my face and hands. We stuffed enough envelopes to buy me thrift-store clothes and get a paper bag of fried chicken with paper napkins and coleslaw. The three of us standing in the parking lot, Adam waves his knife in a circle and says, “Choose. The men who deliver these lovely homes won’t be eating their dinner all night.” Most long-haul truck drivers drive at night, Adam tells us. There’s less traffic. It’s cooler. During the hot, busy day, the drivers pull off the highway and sleep in the sleeper boxes attached to the back of each truck cab. Fertility asks, “What’s the difference what we choose?” “The difference,” Adam says, “is your comfort level.” This is how Adam’s been crossing and crisscrossing the country for the past ten years. A Westbury Estate has a formal dining room and a built-in fireplace in the living room. The Plantation Manor has walk-in closets and a breakfast nook. The Springhill Castle has a whirlpool bathtub in the glamour bath. A glamour bath has two sinks and a wall of mirror. The living room and the master bedroom have skylights. The dining nook has a built-in china hutch with leaded-glass doors. This is depending on which half you get. Again, these are just parts of homes. Broken homes. Dysfunctional homes. The half you get might be all bedrooms or just a kitchen and living room and no bedrooms. There might be three bathrooms and nothing else, or you might get no bathroom at all. None of the lights work. All the plumbing is dry. No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you’ll never be totally happy. We choose the Springhill Castle, and Adam slices the knife along the bottom edge of the plastic sealing its open side. Adam slices only about two feet, only far enough for his head and shoulders to slip inside. Stale air from inside the house comes out the slice hot and dry. With Adam slid inside as far as his waist, his butt and his legs still outside with us, Adam says, “This one has the cornflower-blue interior.” His voice coming from inside the wall of translucent plastic, he says, “Here we have the premium furniture package. A modular living room pit group. Built-in microwave in the kitchen. Plexiglas dining-room chandelier.” Adam boosts all of himself inside, then his blond head sticks out the slice in the plastic and grins at us. “California-king-sized beds. Faux wood-grain countertops. Low-line Euro-style commode and vertical-blind window treatments,” he says. “You’ve made an excellent choice for your starter home.” First Fertility and then me slide through the plastic. The way the inside of the house, the furniture shapes and the colors, looked blurred and vague from outside, that’s how the outside world, the real world, looks out of focus and unreal from inside the plastic. The neon lights of the truck stop are just coming on, dim and smeared outside the plastic. The noise of the highway sounds soft and muffled from inside. Adam kneels down with a roll of clear strapping tape and seals the slice he made from the inside. “We won’t need this anymore,” he says. “When we get where we’re going, we’ll walk out the front or the back door just like real people.” The wall-to-wall carpet is rolled up against one wall, awaiting the rest of the house before it’s installed. The furniture and mattresses stand around covered with dry-cleaning-plastic-thin dust covers. The kitchen cabinets are each taped shut. Fertility tries the light switch for the dining-room chandelier. Nothing happens. “Don’t use the toilet either,” Adam says, “or we’ll be living with your business until we move out.” Neon from the truck stop and headlights from the highway flicker through the dining-room French doors while we sit around the maple-veneer table eating our fried chicken. This part of our broken home has one bedroom, the living room, kitchen, and dining room, and half a bath. If we get all the way to Dallas, Adam tells us, we can move into a house headed up Interstate 35 to Oklahoma. Then we can catch houses up Interstate 35 to Kansas. Then north on Interstate 135 in Kansas to westbound Interstate 70 to Denver. In Colorado, we’ll catch a house going northeast on Interstate 76 until it turns into Interstate 80 in Nebraska. Nebraska? Adam looks at me and says, “Yeah. Our old stomping grounds, yours and mine,” he says with his mouth full of chewed-up fried chicken. Why Nebraska? “To get to Canada,” Adam says and looks at Fertility who looks at her food. “We’ll follow Interstate 80 to Interstate 29 across the state line in Iowa. Then we just cruise north up 29 through South Dakota and North Dakota, all the way to Canada.” “Right straight to Canada,” Fertility says and gives me a smile that looks fake because Fertility never smiles. When we say good night, Fertility takes the mattress in the bedroom. Adam falls asleep on one length of the blue velvet sectional pit group. Pillowed in the blue velvet he looks dead in a casket. For a long time, I lie awake on the other length of the sectional and wonder about the lives I left behind. Fertility’s brother, Trevor. The caseworker. The agent. My all-dead family. Almost all dead. Adam snores, and nearby a diesel truck engine rumbles to life. I wonder about Canada, if running is going to resolve anything. Lying here in the cornflower-blue darkness, I wonder if running is just another fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a problem I can’t remember. The whole house shudders. The chandelier swings. The leaves of the silk ferns in their wicker baskets vibrate. The window treatments sway. Quiet. Outside the plastic, the world starts moving, sliding by, faster and faster until it’s erased. Until I fall asleep.