Alice Buell Lawrence

The following story originally appeared in Argentum, the literary arts magazine of Great Basin College.

Flats, by Alice Buell Lawrence

There’s something about being right there on that edge, the edge of it all, almost safe but not, near that point, but stopping to consider it. A meditation moment. Wanting to tip into security, but also wanting to soak in this bland whisper of danger for a little longer.

That was one reason my turn signal was on, why the horizon was right there and I wasn’t scurrying to it just yet. The other was my bladder was way too full, the massive drink I bought 100 miles behind me having migrated south. I was going west. We weren’t on the same page.

No more than a dozen miles ahead was Nevada, a wall of neon and security lights from casinos and hotels and venues hosting acts popular four decades prior. Above those winking and chasing and flickering lights was nature’s offering of a show. Orange and magenta and plum like those little juice barrels that are just sugar and water and food colouring. They formed a strip of sky above the casinos and above the mountains behind them, lurking below the clouds already darkened by night, and the moon and stars up above them. It was dark and twinkling here in Utah, here where I was almost but not quite safe. The radio was on, but I was outrunning the station out of Salt Lake. The Bees were playing some team in Texas. There had been a delay. Early innings.

The road leaves a lot of time for solitude, for getting lost. That goes double when you don’t trust anymore, an idea laughable from this side. And when you drive an anonymous sedan, you don’t really get the camaraderie of driving a real truck, joining in with the boys at stops and on the CB. I had to stay in my head and across the radio dial.

And lately that has meant getting lost in my dreams. The unconscious ones, not the career-day ones. The ones where I visited the same city, over and over, a small fragment in a small part each night, which is really like the world we live in already, small, almost random fragments that are a sliver of what we do over here.

The dusk light shone across the salt flats, some water shimmering in the distance toward outcroppings like stony yachts on a dead sea. I tried to notice them as I looked around at the other cars at the rest area. I was almost safe. I was not safe.

Three trucks. None of the ones on this route drove trucks. They did in Nevada, but not Utah. Five SUVs. None of them were the Fords that the locals used. All good. These were families and guys with goatees with t-shirts with guns and symbolism that suggested what they stored in their basements. These were recreational radicals at best. They still went to soccer practice like anyone else.

The cars looked okay. Sedans. Some hatchbacks. Plates from out of state. People drifting through. Still okay. It should be okay.

Except for the one. The one had tinted windows. The plates were something special. It’s been long enough and close enough on occasion to have a sixth sense about these things. I know it will happen eventually. But not now. Not this trip.

I made to park, turning the lights off as I angled in to a stop. No one wanted to be blinded as they picked out some Fritos or wandered onto the flats for some social media post or stared up at the colours of the sky. They were such good colours this time. They felt more vivid. The West always feels vivid. It never rains for us. All of that magic is held up higher.

The bit about dreams is how much safer they are. Even the falling dreams, the ones where you hit your own mattress, the Sealy safety valve. There aren’t consequences, only possibilities. I’m the only one who actually gets hurt.

I parked as far away from that one car as I could get. Getting out of the car was a reminder that my bladder really needed to be rid of that Big Gulp, thank you, and I hurried in, past the drink and snack machines buried behind prison-level metal grating and the trash can long since overfilled and the scattered chew and butts and nicotine pouches that tell me, yes, I am indeed still in the West.

The inside reminded me of a post-apocalyptic Burger King—I decided this on an earlier trip, one a few years ago when I wasn’t as careful and wasn’t doing as much, moving as much. The probation years, if you like. The stalls and walls were this institutional orange, tagged to oblivion and targets for fists and feet, frustrations that only manifest in the transient loneliness of the Interstate. We can’t stop. We can pause, but we certainly can’t stop.

I picked a stall and sat. I counted the seconds, probably because that’s what I do with numbers. I remembered once hearing on the radio, static as the distance became too much, that a scientist had researched how long the average mammal pees and it was something like 20 seconds. I got to 15 and then 20 and 25 and 30 and the relief was palpable. Big numbers. Pushed it this time.

Too much to hope for toilet paper. I used the tissue in my pocket. Good enough.

The thing that I would say if I had one of those big trucks where they can talk to each other is that, over the past few weeks, I’ve decided that I need God to exist. I guess I don’t care which one. I just need one of the ones who’s really omniscient, like can read my neurons like they’re doomscrolling humanity. I need a God because I need someone to see my dreams. These little fragments that tell me who I am. These tiny stories that maybe say something worth sharing. I need them to see these glimpses. And maybe someday we can talk about them together.

Hands washed, looked in the mirror, saw bleary eyes through the etchings. Just a few more hours to where the Interstate and the US highway met, hoping the contact was there and nothing went sour and that I would get to my hotel room tonight. Then I could gently drift off to some flavour of Law and Order or something.

I stepped out. There were people milling about. There was laughter. There were vacations.

There was that car. It had moved down the parking lot, and it had stopped behind mine.

Fuck.

I should have known not to stare. I should know when I’m being watched. But I was also far enough away that I probably looked like I was looking at the sky, the colours deepening as overhead turned more from blue to navy to black. They would have seen a romantic. A pity it was a burner phone or I would have taken some pictures.

I got my legs to move after some stern words to myself; I turned toward the desert, toward the salt. The dead part, the part where there were the lights of cars out exploring and lights from phones and a bit of desolation turned tourist. I walked and I heard the crunch under foot. I stopped. I counted. I counted more than I did in the stall. I put my hands in my pocket as I shivered. It was not cold.

I was less than two hours away. But the clock wasn’t running. Not counting down from 120 yet. They had to move. Or I had to run.

The other pocket had a few bucks in it. Have to carry cash. Cards can be tracked. Cash is safer, but I never quite carried enough of it. Most of what was left went to gas. But there was enough. I turned to back to the pavilion and the vending machines.

It was all concrete, brutalist tourism. There was a viewing tower, backlit by both the fading sky and by Nevada. It was really right there.

“Hey, you like sour cream and onion?”

A scratchy voice. A voice that had smoked. But an androgynous voice. As androgynous as the human it came from.

She… they?… were next to the snack machine. Slight and relatively short, greasy blonde hair. They could have been 14 or they could have been 40. Slightly tan. Rumpled pants and worn boots and a t-shirt from what looked like a sandwich shop; under the logo it said Hilton Head, S.C.

“Mine are stuck. If you buy one we’ll get ’em both.”

I had two dollars left. There was a green bag hanging by a corner, the red and blue logo of some company I had never heard of pressed to the glass. Most of the rest of the snacks were equally anonymous. Someone was also selling local country music CDs toward the bottom.

“Sorry to ask.”

I told them—I went with them because the last thing I needed right then was to piss someone off–that it was no bother at all. I really did like them. I put my money in.

There were some beeps. It spat out three quarters in change, and then the coils unwound some more. The stuck bag didn’t budge, the one I ostensibly paid for riding up and on top of it. The machine said thank you in it’s cheery toothpaste-blue font.

“Fuck,” they said, giving the metal grate a mighty kick. The machine was out of reach. So were the chips.

I muttered sorry. They laughed, a quiet, humourless bark. I turned around and the car was still there.

“What say we take a walk,” they said. Their eyes flicked over as well. “The sky’ll look good from the tower. You look like you need a break.”

They told me things as we walked up the ramp, the switchback of concrete gentle and long and still warm from the day’s sun. They told me their name was Early. They told me that this was their favourite part of the day and year. That they usually lost track of the day and month until they went to one of the gas stations on the Nevada side and it had the date on the lottery machine or the you-must-be-this-old signs for liquor or smokes. That this was the seventh year. Of what I didn’t know. We reached the top.

“This is my favourite spot out of all of it, Ace,” they said. They held their bony arms out expansively, out toward the desert and the headlights, the traffic of the Interstate behind us. The last patches of light were starting to fade.

“This is where I’m free. Where I can go out and run and scream until I fit in my body again.”

We stood in silence, leaning on the railing. There were lights on the cliffs just over the border. There were a few gaps in the tire noises from the trucks pushing on through the night, trying to chase down the light that was fading. The last charcoal-magenta bits were being shouted down by promises of loose slots and keno and some game I had never heard of.

“All of this is a dream anyhow. We’re all running, right? It’s like that running in a dream where we don’t quite get anywhere. There’s promise in one direction and darkness creeping over another and studious practice at dropping bombs behind us and… and there’s this in front of us. There’s forever. And those are the best dreams.

“I mean, you’re running.”

I really tried. I gripped the railing a bit harder. I thought I killed the reaction. But Early’s knowing smile, one with a molar missing—which surprised me for some reason, thinking maybe there would be less for them to work with, a different number—it told me they knew.

They shouldn’t have known. I looked like every other parent out here driving an anonymous bubble. I did this because I didn’t stand out. I didn’t acknowledge Early because I knew better. That didn’t mean they were wrong.

The car was still there. The passenger door was open.

Early turned back to the darkened desert.

“We do what we have to do.”

There were other footsteps coming up the ramp.

“Back that way there’s just that tree thing that probably talks to aliens,” they said, pointing to the east and the highway sculpture lost in the night. “And behind us is where they practice to kill people. Out there is where we run as fast as we can but never seem to get away.”

They fixed me with a stare.

“And that way,” they said, looking toward the border. “That way is our opportunity. It’s where the goodie-goodies from the Valley go to feel like they’re being naughty and to gamble away their benefit cheques. It’s where the truckers stop off for a cheap meal and a rub-and-tug. It’s where the hustlers who ain’t shit show up because they were fucking useless down in Vegas. It’s where everyone pretends virtue and vice are worth anything.”

They lit a cigarette. The steps were still coming.

“We know better, right? We know that all of it is desert. It’s just that some of it has more lights and more shade and more air conditioning than other bits. All of it. The cities or the empty, all the way to the ocean. It’s the same shit. We make it how we can.”

“Excuse me,” a deep voice said from behind us. I tried to unclench all sorts of things.

“Yeah?” Early piped up, half challenge.

The figure points to my car. “That belong to either of you?”

“Naw,” Early says before I can react. “We got the camper down on the end. Somethin’ wrong with it?”

The figure pauses. He thought he was right. I didn’t want him to know he’s right. Not right here on the edge, but I can’t step to safety just yet. I looked up and out.

“I bumped into it when I dropped my phone,” he said.

“You need us to call the cops for ya?”

“No, thank you. I can’t even see a scratch on it. But I wanted the owner to know.”

Early shrugged. “Probably out there somewhere,” they said, thumbing back out over the desert.

I had picked out one good cloud at this point, trying to decide when the colour left it entirely. The two of them were talking and then they stopped talking and the footsteps went away.

“Thank you,” I said at last, quietly.

“We get by,” they said, looking back out over the now-darkened desert. “We run.”

It got cold in short order. The tire noise became less frequent. It was very much night.

“We should head to the camper,” Early said, and I could hear their smirk. “Then you’re giving me a ride into town.”

We walked down in silence. Early grabbed a canvas pack from under the ramp, and we circled around a trailer at the end of the row of cars, out where the parking spaces became long. The other car had pulled away.

“Had they known, they wouldn’t have played the game,” they said, standing on the edge of the curb. “Give it 10 or 20 and we can go.”

We did. Then we went. Early, me, my nondescript car, and a few million in cargo.

The lights grew brighter in a hurry; we passed the port of entry station for Utah and then it was Nevada and everything was like an electric-blue daylight. Virtue to vice. It wasn’t a big difference.

“This exit,” Early said. They aimed me at a gas station across from the row of casinos. “Good enough.”

We shook hands, which seemed weird, but hugging would have been weird, too, and there seemed to be something owed for a conspiracy of affection.

“We all run in one way or another,” they said. “Your job is to get where you’re going, do the thing, and then run this car out into the desert and run away. Don’t let them lock you down.” They smiled, hoisted their pack, and waved.

I got back on the highway and spent the next two hours waiting for the lights to come on behind me. Empty valley after empty valley. I was sure there would be choppers and SWAT teams just around the next bend. Just a little bit more, if I could keep running, and I would open the trunk and they would take it out and I would be handed a fat envelope that meant I was good for a bit longer. Then I would check in and I would sink into the bed and I would listen to the detectives catch the bad guys. Or maybe it would be a good time for us to go through some glimpses together.

One of these times, probably. There’s a lot to say. But that happened later.

I turned the radio on. The game was still going. I didn’t know the score.