art by transatlanticalien
| [ [_prev chapter<< _] ] | [ [_index_] ] | [ [_>>next chapter_] ] |
Sunlight streams through the blinds the next morning, long white stripes that inch down the wall and over the carpet and toward the bed as Jimmy drifts between wakefulness and sleep. He can feel Kim beside him even though he’s not touching her, a weight and a warmth to his right.
Jimmy shifts a little. He’s so comfortable it’s easy to ignore everything else, easy to ignore his terrible thirst and the ache in his stomach and instead slip back into drowsy slumber, into the scattered half-dreams that linger snugly in the blurred corners of his mind: he and Kim in the bar having a playful argument about a leaky faucet; or driving together at night; or just the feel of her moving above him, pressing down on his chest.
Eventually, the sun catches him, flaring through a gap in the blinds. Jimmy turns and buries his head in the pillow.
There’s a little huff of laughter from his right. Kim’s voice comes as something just above a whisper: “You must feel like shit.”
Jimmy twists, peeking over at her with a single bleary eye.
She’s lying on her side, facing him. Her make-up is smudged, and her hair is loose and chaotic. With the way the sunlight’s hitting her and his sleep-blurred vision, it’s like she’s glowing, little filament strands of spun fire rising from her head.
“I’ve been worse,” Jimmy croaks. He shifts properly onto his side and rubs his eyes, then smiles.
Kim smiles back softly.
“How ‘bout you?” Jimmy asks.
Kim gives another little patter of laughter. “I’m just trying not to think of all the Tex-Mex we left sitting out in the living room overnight.”
Jimmy groans and presses his face back into the pillow.
“You did promise me you’d eat it all,” she says. “In between drunken imitations of John Wayne.”
“Oh God,” Jimmy says, voice muffled by the pillow.
Kim’s voice comes a few moments later with a twang: “Get three coffins ready!”
Jimmy snorts into the fabric. “That’s Clint Eastwood.”
There’s silence, so he tilts his head to the side again. Kim’s regarding him seriously. “Yes,” she says. “Yes it is.”
A thudding noise carries from the other side of Kim’s bedroom door—from the kitchen. Then the sound of a faucet running and the fridge door opening and closing. Cutlery clangs in drawers, sharp and piercing.
Jimmy looks from the door to Kim. “I can’t remember your roommate’s name,” he whispers.
“Eugh.” Kim makes a face. “Andrea. Please forget it again.”
“Andrea,” Jimmy repeats seriously.
Kim bats his shoulder. “Stop it,” she whispers. “She works at the café on Saturdays, anyway. We can wait her out.”
Jimmy nods. He stares at Kim, at the warmth in her eyes. It’s a wonder to him now that he ever found her hard to read, and he thinks she holds more expression in her irises alone than anyone else he knows does in their entire face. At the moment her eyes are shifting a little, flicking left to right between his pupils, brilliant skies flecked with paintbrush clouds.
He reaches out and lays his hand on Kim’s cheek. He remembers doing the same thing last night. His safe harbor.
He wonders what she can see in his own eyes. She doesn’t say anything. He can’t even hear her breathing. The only thing he can hear beneath their shared silence is the scrape of metal on china. A stool shifted back. Water in the sink.
Then the sound of the front door opening and closing.
Jimmy shifts forward and kisses Kim. She kisses back, her jaw moving slowly beneath his palm. His mouth is parched and dry and he’s desperate for cool water but he keeps going, and her fingers are on his forearm, curling tight, holding him fast.
One of them draws back. Jimmy looks at his hand on Kim’s cheek, at the size of his fingers next to her features. He shifts his thumb a little, stroking the soft skin near the corner of her mouth.
Her eyes tug down at the sides, and Jimmy desperately wonders what she’s feeling. Because of course it was silly to think he could see all of Kim through her eyes, could see all of Kim through anything, ever. He knows so little of her—just as she knows so little of him, so little of everything he left broken back in Cicero: ice and promises and knees and hearts.
He moves his thumb again. Seeing her there in the palm of his hand makes a terrible part of him wonder if she was somehow put in Albuquerque just for him, if the universe in all its great wisdom conspired for her to be exactly here, ready, when he arrived.
But he knows this isn’t being fair to Kim. If anything, the universe delivered him to her. She’s the one choosing to bootstrap her way after her dream; he’s just sitting, in the one space left open to him in the world, waiting.
He feels something clench in his stomach, like a fist tightening. It scares him to think that she might be the only thing holding him back from nothingness here, holding him back from losing himself beneath the vast and endless Albuquerque sky.
He closes his eyes for a moment.
When he opens them again, Kim’s expression has shifted.
She leans forward and kisses him once more, bringing her own hand up to his face and running her thumb along the side of his lips after she pulls away.
Jimmy feels the trace of her touch on his skin, gleaming.
Kim tips her forehead against his and stares at him, her eyes flickering. “How about just this?” she asks.
Jimmy breathes. “Okay,” he murmurs.
She nods against him, stroking the side of his mouth with her thumb again. “Okay.”
Jimmy peers inside one of the takeout containers in the living room. “Some of this might not be too salmonella-y, you know,” he says. “Like, these burritos are just beans and cheese.”
“So eat them,” Kim calls from the kitchen.
Jimmy swallows and closes the lid. “Point made.” He collects up all the containers and carries them over to the kitchen counter. Kim is staring at the steady drip of the coffeemaker, her arms loosely folded. He refills his glass at the sink, glancing sideways.
Kim changed into pajamas overnight, but he’s still in yesterday’s clothes: jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. He feels mismatched, and his body aches, a low level thrum he tells himself is the shitty tequila more than anything else. He downs his water in long slow gulps that do nothing to really quench his thirst.
Kim pours two mugs of coffee and hands him one, and he smiles his thanks. It’s warm against his palms.
“So, hey,” he says, following her as they wander back into the living room and settle on the couch. He realizes he’s unconsciously mirroring her movements, and he crosses one leg over the other just to sit differently. “How long ‘till you find out you came top of the class?”
Kim looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “The grades will be out in a week,” she says.
Jimmy nods. He sips his coffee. It’s so hot it almost burns his tongue, but he sighs as he feels it rush through him. “Nice coffee,” he murmurs.
“I used some of Andrea’s good stuff,” Kim says wryly.
He raises his mug and cheerses the air, then sets it down on the coffee table.
Kim is silent beside him, cradling her own coffee, staring straight ahead.
“Does this mean you actually get a break?” Jimmy asks. “No classes, no tests?”
“I start summer school in a couple of weeks,” Kim says. “But until then…yeah.” She turns her head to face him and smiles. “Yeah.”
“Wow,” Jimmy says, voice hushed. “A whole new Kim.”
Kim makes a little humming noise of agreement.
“Cause for celebration?” Jimmy asks tentatively. “A proper one, I mean?”
“Hell, Jimmy, I’m not leaving this four-foot square for the next two days,” Kim says, drawing a line around herself with her finger. “No interruptions, no obligations, no people, just me and the TV.”
Jimmy raises his eyebrows and tries to look as innocent as possible.
Kim looks him up and down, frowning contemplatively. “You get a temporary visa.”
Jimmy laughs lightly. “Thanks.”
“Only if you agree to bring me enough food and water to live until Monday morning,” Kim adds. “And you have to pick a movie from the shelf over there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy says, pushing up off the sofa and moving over to the entertainment cabinet. He scans along the spines of the video tapes, smiling to himself at the selection. He realizes Kim’s movies are organized by date, not title, and he runs a finger approvingly along the ridges of the 1940’s.
“If you want to stay,” Kim adds, voice oddly hesitant.
Jimmy turns back to face her and meets her eyes.
As if she thinks he didn’t hear, Kim repeats, “I mean, only if you want to stay.”
“Of course I do,” he says quickly, and Kim nods. He looks at her for a moment longer, then Kim turns away, twisting back to pull a throw off the back of the sofa. She folds her legs up beneath her, snuggling under the patterned blanket, and Jimmy returns to the video collection. “You know,” he says, “if you’re serious about this zone of comfort thing, I might have to kill your roommate.”
“Oh, she left a note. After work she’s up partying in Santa Fe for the weekend.”
He hears the high-pitched whine and static buzz of the TV turning on. “Well, good,” he says, fingers lingering on a title, and he smiles and slips the VHS off the shelf. “I wasn’t much looking forward to prison.”
Kim snorts. “You clearly think very highly of your cover-up abilities,” she says lightly. “But I guess you know firsthand—” She stops suddenly, falling strangely silent, and after a long moment Jimmy turns around. Kim’s staring at him, wide-eyed. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Kim, I don’t care if you joke about that,” Jimmy says, shrugging. “Seriously.”
“Okay,” she says, but she still looks off. She sighs. “I just feel shitty and hungover and I guess I’ve forgotten how to…” She trails off then waves a hand, marking a link between them.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He looks down at the video tape he’s holding, then back up to Kim, and he makes a little easy-going face. “Sitting and watching a movie sounds really nice right about now, though.”
Kim nods, and smiles at him. “Yes, it does.”
So Jimmy cracks open the box and slides the VHS into the player. A Matter of Life and Death starts up at the end, with Kim Hunter grinning and a bandaged David Niven whispering, “We won.” Jimmy steps back from the TV and wanders over to the sofa, dropping down beside Kim.
She finds the right remote and the two of them sit in silence while the tape rewinds. Jimmy curls his legs up beside him, and Kim hands him part of the blanket. He draws it over himself and then props his head up on his hand, watching the black screen and listening to the whir of the tape heads. He glances over at Kim and smiles, and she smiles back.
“Good choice,” she says. She looks back to the dark television in anticipation. “I love this one.”
There’s a cake for Kim at work on Monday, produced proudly by Henry during their lunch break.
“You didn’t have to,” Kim says, but she’s smiling.
Henry waves a hand. “It’s tradition. I like to look after you guys.” He starts slicing into it, handing out thick wedges on paper plates. Jimmy accepts his and leans against the wall, eating his slice with his hands.
“Thank you, everyone, for picking up my slack the last few weeks,” Kim says, holding up her plate of cake like a champagne flute.
Jimmy raises his own plate, and he calls out with the others in congratulations. “To Kim!” he says, and the others echo him. He grins at her, then chats to Burt absentmindedly while Kim and Henry catch up. Jimmy watches her out of the corner of his eye, smiling and gesticulating. Totally relaxed.
She wanders over to him and Burt a few minutes later.
“Well done,” Burt says. “I bet you killed it.”
“Thank you, Burt,” Kim says, nodding to him. “You ready for classes in the fall?”
Burt grimaces. “I might give it another year, you know,” he says, and then after a beat of silence he drifts over to talk to Henry.
“Easily spooked,” Kim says softly, looking after him.
“Well, we can’t all be Kim Wexler,” Jimmy says. He pops his last bit of cake into his mouth and tosses his paper plate into the garbage, then leans back against the wall. He notices Kim watching him and gives her a secretive little smile. “Gotta say, the real world kinda sucks,” he says lowly.
“Jimmy, we’ve only been at work for five hours,” Kim says, glancing over at the others.
Jimmy shrugs lightly. “Yeah, and it sucks.”
Kim smiles, almost invisible. “Okay, maybe.”
True to her word, Kim had barely left her sofa all weekend. The two of them had dozed away most of Saturday, burning through VHS tapes and local programming. Watching Kim sleep in the evening, his socked feet touching hers beneath the patterned blanket, Jimmy had tried to figure out how much of a deficit she’d been running on after the last few weeks, estimating a conservative three hours per night. He didn’t trust his math, but he knew it wasn’t a pretty number. So he sat as still as he could and tried not to wake her, just watched her breathe slowly, curled up against the back of the couch.
Sometimes, though, it would be he who drifted off. He’d awaken to Kim’s hand on his knee and her brightly saying, “Jimmy, you’re missing the good part!” as Snake Plissken fought in a death-match; or to her handing him an enormous bowl of ice cream in the middle of the night, and then the two of them would sit, side by side, eating it in silence as John Candy drove the wrong way down a highway.
“Ah, here you all are!” a voice says, and Jimmy comes back to the present to see George Hamlin striding into the breakroom, cane tapping. “And where is Ms. Wexler? Aha!” He moves up to Kim and holds out his hand, and Kim shakes it. “I’ve just heard the good news.”
“Well, I don’t know my resul—”
Hamlin Senior makes a dismissive noise. “We won’t let that stop us, will we? Come, let me buy you lunch and assuage all your worries…” He steers Kim out of the room, and the two of them vanish through the breakroom doorway.
Jimmy stares after her. The tense little fist in his stomach squeezes harder. It’s a lot easier to ignore the feeling when Kim’s around, but left too long and his thoughts drift inevitably back to the same hollow places as they’ve done since he arrived in Albuquerque.
So he shakes himself and gets back to work. He stands in a corner of the mailroom, folding up and assembling large archive boxes from flat-pack as the others finish printing the latest round of discovery on the ongoing Westerbrook divorce case. It’s easy, mechanical work, and, when he’s done, Jimmy lines up the empty boxes along one of the workstations. He gathers the folders of discovery and files them away on autopilot, then heaps as many of the boxes as he can onto a dolly.
“I got it,” Jimmy grunts to Henry, and he wheels the dolly between the workstations and to the elevators. When one arrives with a musical trill, he pushes the dolly into the cabin and rides the elevator up to the fourth floor.
It’s busier than usual today, and Jimmy has to weave between hordes of frazzled-looking associates. He turns a corner in the hallway, grunting as he navigates a water cooler.
Down the passage, through the open door to George Hamlin’s office, he sees a peek of a blonde ponytail, and he stops. Kim’s sitting, half-obscured with her back to the door, in a comfortable armchair opposite Hamlin Senior.
Jimmy sets down the dolly gently, wiping the back of his hand on his brow. He can’t hear what George is saying, but it’s not hard to guess. The older man smiles and then moves his hands to assist some explanation or other, pausing every few moments to listen and nod.
“Excuse me, Jimmy.”
Jimmy shifts aside just as Howard steps nimbly past the dolly, bound for his father’s office, too. Howard pauses in the threshold then enters, and Jimmy sees more of Kim now as she rises from her chair and shakes Howard’s hand.
Jimmy tips back the dolly, but lingers to watch Howard chuckle lightly then pull up a chair beside the other two.
The fist in his stomach clenches harder, white-knuckled beneath his heart.
But he wheels the dolly the remainder of the distance to Vernon’s office and unloads the boxes for the man, breathless.
Kim returns from her meeting and lunch with Hamlin Senior a little more withdrawn than she’d seemed before she left; but, instead of reaching out, Jimmy retreats a little, too.
It’s not that he’s not happy for her, or proud of her, because he is, and he invites her for drinks that evening—it’s just that, as he watches Kim over the rim of his glass of golden beer, he wonders what it must be like to live with all these little markers of passed time: finals, then results, then summer school, then third year. Or, not even time, but progress. Movement. Rungs on a ladder, or just footsteps on the ground, showing that Kim is going somewhere.
The days roll on, and Jimmy feels worse and worse—that kind of insidious, creeping discomfort that feels totally unearned and unjustified. He’s happy enough to get by, and the mailroom is busy enough to keep him distracted, and Kim is there enough to light up the dark corners…and yet. And yet the hollowness in his stomach continues. And then, of course, Jimmy feels bad about not feeling better, and so the spiral carries on, like water down a drain, and soon, before he knows it, it’s Friday, and he and Kim are sitting opposite each other at Flying Star, poking at plates of fries and not speaking.
Kim pops a fry into her mouth and stares vaguely at a family sitting in a distant booth. Her brow is furrowed in thought, like it’s been for most of the last week. It seems a different kind of thought than the intense, case-law memorization he’s used to her harboring. This is unfamiliar, and he doesn’t quite know how to broach it.
She spots him studying her and smiles softly, then looks back down at her plate.
“You okay?” Jimmy asks quietly.
“Hm?”
Jimmy makes a little concerned face. “You okay?”
“Of course I am,” Kim says. She pops another fry into her mouth and crunches on it.
Jimmy nods. “Yeah,” he says, then he sighs. “So, memorial day weekend, huh? Any big plans?”
Kim looks at him dryly.
“Right,” he says. He swirls a fry around in the ketchup on his plate, then drops it.
Kim’s gone back to watching the other patrons, and he wonders what she used to do with herself during these free weeks in Albuquerque, over the holidays or after the end of her first year.
So he asks her, trying for offhanded: “What’d you even do before I showed up here, anyway?”
“Oh, you know,” Kim replies. “I went to class. I studied and nobody distracted me.”
Jimmy groans, and her face softens. “Come on,” he says. “Seriously. I mean, what about like now, between stuff?”
Kim shrugs, and pushes her plate forward, then glances over to the side again. “Just sat around and felt like I’d forgotten something,” she says, eventually.
Jimmy offers a little sympathetic noise. He takes a sip of his soda, pinching the straw beneath his fingers, then sets his glass back down.
“Like I'm missing something important,” Kim says thoughtfully, eyes still distant, but then she looks back to him. She folds her lips inwards and seems to be calculating something, and then she says, lightly, with a little shrug, like she’s just throwing it away: “Like I’m not working hard enough.”
"What?" Jimmy frowns, and he leans a little closer to her. “Kim, you work harder than anyone else I’ve ever met,” he says. Even his dad, he realizes, who’d been in that store by seven a.m. every morning seven days as week for as long as he—well, for as long as he could, anyway.
But Kim just shrugs again.
“Seriously,” Jimmy says. He stares at her hand where it rests on the table. He doesn’t know what it’s like to work that hard, because he’s never bothered to try anything that’s truly difficult. Work for him is either something to be waited out, like photocopying sheets of paper, or it’s…effortless. As effortless as smiling or talking or breathing.
As effortless as a problem he knows how to solve. He thinks about getting Kim that tort law book; he thinks about driving through Albuquerque in the streetlamp-striped sunlight and helping her study. And then he thinks that maybe it’s not just Kim herself who makes him feel better.
So Jimmy meets her eyes, and says, “Wanna get out of here?”
“Sure,” Kim says. “You done?”
But Jimmy shakes his head. “No, I mean, really get out of here.”
Kim raises her eyebrows, eyes glimmering.
“I’m serious,” Jimmy says. “We got three days ahead of us. We could just hop in your car and…”
“And?” Kim asks.
Jimmy reaches over the table and holds her hand. “Kim?” he says, and he grins helplessly at her. “Let’s run away.”
A smile crests Kim’s face like the sun over a wall.
They ride the rays of that sunrise out the door of the restaurant and into the twilight of the parking lot. Kim’s car is parked close by, and Jimmy slides into the passenger seat, twisting to face Kim as she pulls her door closed and slips the keys in the ignition.
She glances sideways at him and grins.
Jimmy returns the smile. He’s breathing heavily, from the adrenaline, he thinks, or maybe just the race to the car. “Hey Kim?”
She raises her eyebrows again, waiting.
“It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago,” he says, slowly, in between breaths. “We got a full tank of gas, a half a packet of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
Kim cocks her pointer finger forward coolly but doesn’t say the words, and Jimmy grins even harder.
But… “You for real?” he asks carefully. “You in on this? The two of us, fleeing into the night?”
“I’m for real,” Kim says, and she turns the keys, and the car kicks into life.
Kim pulls out of the space and wheels away from the parking lot, merging with the evening traffic, with the lines of glowing red brake lights that coast down the wide road. It seems busier than usual—the long weekend, Jimmy guesses—and everyone is driving with an easy leisure, like they’re heading for the hills, too.
Jimmy leans back in his seat, his mouth hurting from smiling. As they drift with the traffic, they pass students partying, spilling from restaurants and bars.
And then, on their left, the Aztec Motel, boxy and misshapen, like you can still see the hands that built it. Jimmy’s noticed it before, but tonight as they approach it in the dusk it catches his eye as if for the first time. The outside walls are hung with plates and art and sculptures like it’s a gallery all in itself, small and overlooked. And yet it’s unmissable, because beside the tiny building is a sign, a glowing beacon, three times taller and neon-lettered in red and blue, screaming the name: Aztec Motel.
A reminder of the road this used to be.
Jimmy feels the car slow down and knows that Kim is looking at it, too.
The traffic eases off a little, and they pass more old motels whose neons glow steadily brighter in the darkening evening: De Anza, and Zia, and Desert Sands, all unique and artful, and Jimmy feels like he’s in one of those old montages. Sinatra and Vegas lights.
He turns to Kim and feels laughter bubbling up out of him, so he doesn’t stop it, and she glances sideways at him with the reflections of the passing neons in her eyes. He suddenly wants to say thank you, but he doesn’t know for what—for driving with him, for not asking where they’re going, for just being here? But then she breaks the eye contact, turning back to the road, and he pops open the glove-box instead. Kim has about a dozen cassettes, and a couple of them spill into his hands.
“Any requests?” he asks.
Kim shakes her head, smiling lightly.
So he cracks open the first case he sees and slides the tape into the deck. It starts up: a soaring bassline and ragged guitars beneath a woman’s voice, reedy and emotional. Jimmy settles back into his seat and winds down his window, letting the soft night air whip across his skin. The mountains before them are shifting, moving closer, and he taps his foot in time to the beat, happy not to speak, happy just to listen and to feel the drone of the tires on the cement.
Soon, they leave the city behind, flying over the busy headlights of the freeway and twisting up into the Sandias. Small towns of ancient houses squat in the foothills, almost invisible in the dusk, and Jimmy’s ears pop as Kim weaves higher and higher between the slumbering old settlements. The last of the sun is setting behind them, coloring the clouds burnt orange in the rear-view mirror and dark purple above the hills ahead.
As they climb, the road narrows to one lane each way. Kim’s headlights pick out ragged shrubs and trees among the dirt-colored land, flashes of strange silhouettes along the embankments. Few cars pass them in the other direction, and, until they criss-cross the headlight-striped freeway again, it’s easy for Jimmy to imagine that they’ve left the world behind completely. The car hums beneath him, and the singer on the stereo is raw and beautiful, and he closes his eyes for a moment, letting the movement lull him, letting his body unwind.
Jimmy expects them to summit the hill with each corner, but as they round every bend he finds that the road continues impossibly upwards, still climbing as if into the clouds. Behind him, the shadowed amber clouds of the sunset slowly dim, darkening to reds and violets and then vanishing completely, until you’d never know there was anything behind them at all.
Some time later, the music ends, and Jimmy flips over the tape. As the band starts up again, he drums his hand idly on his knee and glances over to Kim, who’s nodding her head to the beat and staring calmly into the curving road ahead.
And then finally they reach the top of the mountains, cresting a rise in the road, and a vast flat countryside opens out beneath them. Jimmy can see the lights of the freeway bending downwards, the vanishing red brake lights of the cars, and here and there the glimmer of a distant living room window, lights in an expanse of darkness—boats on the sea.
The woman on the album sings about something called a honeychain, and Jimmy turns up the volume until it’s rattling the speakers and the bass buzzes in his chest. He rests his forearm on the bottom of the window and the air rushes past, a downy wind over his skin. It smells, he thinks, like woodsmoke. Like woodsmoke and gasoline.
They glide smoothly down the mountain on a gentle decline, passing through towns that can’t quite be called towns, and Kim slows a little as they go by ancient gas stations and souvenir shops and highway restaurants with no lights on. Caravan parks and rest stops. The two of them peer inside, brief encounters with these past places, with old soda machines and gas pumps. And everywhere along Route 66: the rundown motels, or just their signs—empty places where motels used to be. Arrows and suns and stars.
The album ends, and Jimmy picks another, feeling for it blindly in the dark interior of the car. He turns the volume back down and lets the first track play, watching Kim, her face shadowed and dark until they pass an oncoming car and she’s made briefly vibrant.
“I always wanted to do this,” Kim murmurs, and Jimmy wishes he could see her expression more clearly.
“Me too,” he says, instead. “Reckon we could make it all the way to the East Coast?”
Kim gives a little laugh. After a moment, she says, “Why stop there?”
Jimmy holds his hand out the window, cupping the air and then releasing it, feeling the pressure of it on his skin. They’re down on the flat now, the land around them vast and empty, with no lights of civilization beyond the road, just unbroken darkness. Before them, pairs of headlights flicker into existence, so far away they’re almost invisible.
The first billboard for Clines Corners shows up at least five miles before the junction itself. It’s an enormous, colorful thing, blinking into the cone of Kim’s headlights: Clines Corners. World Famous Travel Center.
Then a mile or so later, another one: Open 24/7 since 1934.
Then another, flashing past them: Exit 3 Miles Ahead. Worth Stopping for Since 1934.
It’s followed by more and more, advertising drinks and t-shirts and souvenirs. Jimmy lets out a little chuckle as yet another billboard appears, and the silhouette of Kim’s head turns to face him briefly.
“We do need gas,” Kim says mildly.
“And I could use a snack,” Jimmy adds.
He sees the curve of her profile nod. “That’s settled, then,” she says.
A few minutes later, they finally see it: great neon letters in the dark, yellow and red like they’ve been branded on the sky. So Kim curves off the road and around, slowing down to a crawl. An enormous tower says Travel Center in all-caps at the top, and on a flat building beside it is the name itself, given strange weight after so much anticipation: Clines Corners.
Kim pulls into a parking space out front, and turns to Jimmy.
“Bet you never thought I’d take you some place nice like this, huh?” Jimmy says, and Kim rolls her eyes and pops open her door. He chuckles and slides out of the car.
It’s a balmy night, not cold at all as they stand beside each other on the forecourt. Jimmy looks up at the enormous neon letters. They burn trails into his eyes, and when he finally turns back to Kim he can still see the ghosts of them, dancing.
He stares at her, and inhales, breathing the woodsmoked air.
They walk together to the entrance to the travel center. The doors open with a hiss, and the two of them step through into an enormous, windowless room. It’s part convenience store, part gift shop, all madness. The whole place has that plasticky familiar smell of every dollar store Jimmy has ever been inside. Fluorescent lights glare harshly above them, and he can hear one humming and guttering nearby.
The travel center is so crowded with shelves and items it’s hard to move, but he and Kim edge their way along an aisle. Jimmy picks up a ceramic horse and holds it up to her. “Do you need this?”
“Uh, Jimmy, I’d at least go for the palomino,” she says, pointing to a different horse on the shelf—a pale gold one, frozen midleap.
Jimmy chuckles and puts the horse back down. They move deeper into the store, wrangling with rows of novelty mugs and plates. Kim stops by a shelf crammed with shot glasses, and they look through those for a few minutes, dozens and dozens of different designs and embellishments. They talk between themselves quietly, as if wary of disturbing the plush roadrunners and ceramic dogs that leer at them from nearby.
A huge yellow New Mexico flag hangs from the ceiling, and Jimmy has to duck under it to continue. The store seems to carry on forever, or at least it’s hard to see the back of it through the mess of shelves and displays. Down one wall are stacks and stacks of t-shirts, and Jimmy wanders along past them, running his eye over the designs. The Zia sun symbol is everywhere, punctuated by Route 66 signs and American flags.
There's an old radio playing in this corner of the store, patriotic-tinged muzak that warbles a little on the high notes. Horns from some animal Jimmy can’t guess hang from the walls haphazardly. He stops to inspect a shelf of orange-tipped toy guns, then, inexplicably, racks of Halloween costumes. He and Kim have drifted apart, but he sees her head peek over some shelves and catches her eye.
He holds up a Frankenstein mask and shrugs.
Kim shakes her head solemnly.
Jimmy smiles and hangs it back on the rack, then continues his loop. He finds himself back by the t-shirts and he lingers for a moment then grins, tucking a plastic-sealed one beneath his arm. The New Mexico flag blocks his path again and he ducks under it and wanders over to the other side of the store, past shelves of candy and snacks—and he sees, of all things in this nowhere travel center in the middle of empty field after empty field, bags of Jays potato chips. He laughs once to himself and grabs a couple.
There’s a display of fireworks on a wall nearby, and Jimmy approaches it. Enormous boxes with colorful jagged text are crammed onto the shelves, the cardboard bent at the edges as if they’ve been stored here for a long time. He smiles at one called the ‘Runaway Train’ on which a cartoonish old prospector is blocking his ears before an exploding locomotive.
“You sure you’re old enough for those, champ?” Kim asks, stepping up beside him.
“Maybe stick with some of the little ones, huh?” Jimmy says, pointing to a lower shelf.
Kim pats him on the shoulder. “That’s the way.”
And he does grab a box, grinning cheekily at Kim. “How can I not?”
She laughs lightly, and they walk through the aisles of food together. Above a row of drink fridges is a banner. The lettering is old and faded and the font looks like it was chosen about twenty years ago. Route 66: The Mother Road.
“Just like The Grapes of Wrath, huh?” Jimmy says quietly, staring up at it.
Kim makes a humming noise. “I think we’d have to be going in the opposite direction for that.”
Jimmy looks down at her. She’s holding a bulging plastic bag like she’s already bought something, but he can’t see through the opaque plastic. “Speaking of going…” he says, and then he meets her eyes again. He doesn’t want to ask the next question, doesn’t want to shatter whatever strange serenity they’ve settled in, but it slips out: “How far d'you wanna take this, Kim?”
Kim glances away, gaze skimming over the rows of Evian water in the fridge.
And Jimmy starts preparing himself for whatever answer she’s going to give, nodding a little in advance. He adjusts his grip on the fireworks and chips.
“Well, we’re running away, right?” Kim says finally, staring at the fridge thoughtfully. “We have to go somewhere…” A line appears in the middle of her forehead and then vanishes a few moments later, and she turns to him and grins. “I think I know where.”
Kim leaves to gas up her car while Jimmy pays for his various purchases. He steps back outside, and the night air feels even warmer than earlier after the air-conditioned interior of the store. He spots Kim standing beside the gas pump and wanders over slowly, stretching out his shoulders before returning to the passenger seat.
A minute or two later, Kim hops in beside him and pulls her door closed with a snap. She glances down sideways at the bag between his feet. “So what did you get, then?” she asks.
“The fireworks, obviously,” Jimmy says, flicking his eyes to her and smiling. “Got some Jays chips, very Chicago, you’re gonna love them, plus some other snacks, and a shirt, and then on my way out the door I found—” he pulls out a strapback hat with a picture of a sombrero stitched on the front and wedges it on his head “—this rad hat!”
Kim nods slowly. “That is very rad,” she says.
“It’s a hat on a hat!” Jimmy says, holding out his hands winningly.
“I can see that.”
Jimmy scoffs and takes the hat off again. “Fine, what about you, what’d you get?”
“Just some shot glasses,” Kim says, and she tucks her bag behind her seat.
“All right, woman of mystery, I get it,” Jimmy says, rummaging beneath his bags of chips for the sealed t-shirt. He tears open the plastic wrapper and shakes the shirt out, then pulls his current shirt over his head and replaces it with his new one. It’s bright turquoise, a little too big for him, and on the front is a road sign for Albuquerque with a thoughtful Bugs Bunny standing beside it. Jimmy grins at Kim. “So, what d’you think?”
Kim looks back up at his face. “Very cute.”
He pops the hat back on, too, and raises his eyebrows at her expectantly.
Kim snorts. “Well, if you need a new disguise to buy some dynamite from Speedy Gonzales, you’re all set.”
“I just want to be prepared for anything,” Jimmy says lightly. He buckles his seat-belt and then grins at her. “Speaking of—still not gonna tell me where we’re going?”
“Nope,” Kim says, popping the ‘p’.
“All right, I love it,” Jimmy says. He cocks his finger forward. “Hit it.”
Kim gives a light little laugh, and she pulls out of the gas station. Jimmy rifles for a new cassette tape and pops one into the player, then looks back up to see that, instead of getting back onto Route 66, they’re driving over it, heading south.
“Oh, I know where we’re headed now,” he says, as they glide down off the overpass. “You’re kidnapping me and taking me to Mexico.”
“Damn,” Kim says. “Can’t get anything by these McGills.”
Chuckling, Jimmy pops open his bag of Jays chips. He looks inside and shakes them around. “How old d’you reckon these are?” he asks.
“Honestly, Jimmy?” Kim says idly, hands tapping on the steering wheel. “Tom Joad probably left them there on his way to pick grapes in California.”
Jimmy scoffs.
“You know that big speech? ‘Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there?’ Well, he was wrong. That’s where he is, Jimmy. He’s in that bag of potato chips,” Kim says. After a beat, she holds out her hand. “Go on, gimme some, then.”
He and Kim crunch their way through the chips as they coast along the dark highway, listening to women sing, layered and beautiful, about beetles and eggs and blues and bells.
“No, no, no!” Jimmy shouts, thumping his palm down on the console between him and Kim. “He would’ve been okay, she’s obviously gonna look after him—”
“This is a stupid argument,” Kim says.
“It’s not—”
“Jimmy, he’s a human being! He can’t suddenly, I don’t know, grow gills or whatever.”
“He might!”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kim says lightly. “I guess I thought we were having a serious discussion.”
Jimmy shrugs. “I didn’t realize I was speaking to a monster who thought Daryl Hannah decided to up and drown Tom Hanks.”
“Eh, he was nothing but bad news,” Kim says. “Grow gills,” she echoes, after a moment. “That man is dead at the bottom of the Hudson.”
“Wow,” Jimmy says.
They’ve been driving for hours, trailing headlight beams along the highway. The road’s straight and flat, curving only every now and then to duck through a small town whose residents are all asleep, or twist up a mountain range for a short time before descending again. They had followed the train tracks for a while, and once Jimmy had seen a train rush past, lights blinking in the windows, but for the most part the journey has been sparse and lonely, in that way that two people can be lonely together. Just he and Kim and the darkness outside.
They fall into silence again a little while later, comfortable and warm. Jimmy glances over at Kim every so often, but it's hard to see her in the dark, so mostly he watches the flickering shapes of shrubs and fence-posts go by in the headlights, or the rhythmic flashes of the yellow road markings before them—off and on like a pulse. Tiredness begins to weigh on him, and the steady hum of the car and the soaring music feels ready to drag him under.
He counts the yellow lines like sheep.
It goes two in the morning. The red lines of the digital clock on the dash flick over, and he’s almost starting to wonder if Kim’s taking him to Mexico after all when she finally slows on the outskirts of a darkened city. The road widens out and other cars start appearing again near bright stores and all night drive-thrus.
He and Kim coast beneath the streetlamps, glancing idly at the shopfronts and vacant parking lots. She’s studying everything with an intensity that makes Jimmy sit forward eagerly, and he tries to follow her gaze, wondering what she can be looking for.
Eventually, she slows outside a motel, whose enormous neon sign seems a perfect mirror of the beginning of the trip. White Sands Motel, it says, and then beneath it in smaller letters: Vacancy.
“White Sands Motel?” Jimmy murmurs, as Kim pulls to a stop on the forecourt. He clears his throat. “This us?”
Kim glances over at him and makes a face. “Where’s your sense of adventure? Wait here,” she says, and she hops out of the car and then peers in. “Maybe clean up our crap?”
Jimmy fills the empty chip packet with the garbage they’ve accumulated over the last few hours then scrunches it all up into a ball and tucks it into the glove box. He hums to himself and rubs his eyes with the pads of his fingers.
The bright neon of the motel sign flares blearily in his vision, but he studies it until Kim comes back.
She drives them over to one of many blue-doored rooms and parks up outside. “The guy back there said they’d just aired-out this one,” Kim says, and she glances at Jimmy. “A little bit Norman Bates.”
“I’ll check behind the picture frames,” Jimmy says, and he stifles a yawn behind his hand.
They get out of the car and Kim unlocks the room, jiggling the key in the lock for a while before it sticks. She pushes the door inwards. The motel room is small and cramped and, whatever the guy had told Kim, it smells like it hasn’t been properly aired since the place was built.
“Oh, wow,” Jimmy says, taking it in. “I don’t think anyone’s even been in here since the 70’s.”
“I thought you’d rather share a bed again than pay extra,” Kim says lightly, gesturing to the bed.
Jimmy nods, and he kicks off his shoes and flops face forward onto the covers. “Mmrf,” he says, then a few moments later he rolls onto his back. He waves his hand over the air like he’s making the letters appear before him: “The White Sands Motel.”
“Shut up,” Kim says. “Go to sleep. We’ll see it in the morning.”
“Okay,” Jimmy says, and he rolls back over onto his stomach. The duvet smells dusty but not too bad, really, and Jimmy nestles his face into it. He hears Kim moving around the room, and then the bathroom door opens and the shower starts running a few minutes later.
It’s strange to think that it was only earlier this evening that they were sitting in Flying Star eating burgers and fries. It feels like a lifetime ago already, and Jimmy realizes that if you asked him how the two of them got here he could barely figure out how to answer. He lies there pondering it, wondering if they’d even spoken aloud before deciding to follow Route 66 out of Albuquerque.
Eventually, the noise of the shower shuts off and he hears the bathroom door open again.
“Budge up,” Kim says, and he scoots over, but keeps his face pressed down into the covers.
“Man, driving is tiring,” he says, voice muffled.
The bed shifts beside him. “Oh yeah, that must’ve really taken it out of you,” Kim says wryly.
Jimmy sits up and glances over at Kim. She’s wearing an oversized, novelty Route 66 shirt, and he lets out a bark of laughter. It’s dark blue and tie-dyed with an enormous graphic on the front. “Wow, gorgeous,” he says. “I like the American flag and the motorbikes.”
“Hey, I brought this from home,” Kim says, and Jimmy chuckles.
He groans and swivels his legs off the bed, then shimmies out of his jeans so he’s just in his boxers and the turquoise Bugs Bunny shirt. Kim’s climbed under the covers and he peels them back on his side then slips in beside her. The bed is comfortable enough, and Jimmy stifles another yawn behind his fist as he pulls the duvet up over his chest. He can feel tiredness tugging on him harder now that he’s horizontal, and he lets his muscles sink into the mattress.
“Tomorrow, huh?” he murmurs, rubbing his eyes again, determined to keep them open for a little while longer. “Tomorrow we go to Mexico?”
Kim gives a light little laugh, and then yawns. She reaches beside the bed and flicks off her light. “Tomorrow,” she says, rolling onto her side. “Night, Jimmy.”
Jimmy turns off his own light, and adjusts the covers over his chest again. “Night, Kim,” he says softly, staring upwards.
There’s a crack of light shining through the hotel room’s curtains, and it spreads out over the flaking paint of the ceiling like a prism, refracting, shifting colors a little as it thins and fades. Every so often cars and trucks drive past on the main road outside, a humming rush of wheels. In and out like a swell.
“Thanks for asking me to run away with you,” Kim whispers some time later, voice so soft Jimmy almost doesn’t hear it.
He breathes. His right hand's resting between the bed-sheets near his thigh, and he shifts his pinky finger slightly over the cotton. He can feel Kim in the bed beside him even though he is not touching her, a weight and a warmth on his right.
“Thanks for running,” he says finally. He closes his eyes.
| [ [_prev chapter<< _] ] | [ [_index_] ] | [ [_>>next chapter_] ] |