END OF THE ROAD

​

E.J. McBride

 

“The tropical plants,” Penny said, pointing at the thick date palms guarding the entrance to our apartment complex, “that’s what I liked best about this place.”

      It was pretty. Even our neighborhood, a run-down part of a predominantly black section in North Pasadena, was lush with the kind of foliage Penny and I had only seen in botanical gardens. We’d spent a lot of time those first weeks in California walking up and down streets taking it all in.

“It’s much greener than I thought it would be.”

      “And hillier,” I said.

      We stood looking at each other a moment. Then I went back into the room to get Penny’s other suitcase. She stayed outside in front of the van, our Volkswagen camper, looking up at the mountains. The mountains were barely visible, blocked out by a yellow blanket of haze. We hadn’t seen the mountains, really seen them, in several days. The smog had gotten so thick that I felt like I was having trouble breathing.

      “You want to come in?” I asked after getting the suitcase. “Say goodbye to the room?”

      She shrugged. “It’s only a room.”

      It was only a room: a “furnished room” with a tiny bathroom, a kitchenette, an olive-green couch that converted into a bed, a worn green rug, a television. The TV was a twenty-four-inch with a picture that looked smoggier than the air outside, but it was Penny’s favorite thing in the apartment. We’d spent a lot of time watching late-night television, shows like Saturday Night Live that were filmed “back home,” as she called it, in New York.

      “It’s not just a room,” I said. “It starts out as a room but then you fill it up.”

      The van was something we bought together a couple of weeks before leaving New York. In the two months we were on the road, it became much more than transportation. It was where we slept, where we made love, where we were living our lives. It was our home.

      In the van, heading for the freeway, I put my hand on Penny’s knee. She didn’t respond. On our trip across the country one of the things she would sometimes do was sit naked in the passenger seat while I was driving. She would sit down low with her feet up against the dashboard so that passing cars would see only her face and maybe her feet, but I could see everything, and it drove me crazy. Everything about Penny drove me crazy.

      Penny had been my first love. Six years earlier, when we were teenagers, we spent an entire summer groping and clinging to each other on rooftops and in the backs of garages, under apartment house staircases and even occasionally in one of our bedrooms. At the end of the summer, I went off to college and lost her. Before I made it home for Christmas, she had met Tony Romano. He was 35 at the time; Penny was 17.

      During the three years of Penny’s marriage, we saw each other only accidentally, but always I would long for her with an ache that was physical and deep, unlike any other pain I’d ever known.

      “You better get the brakes fixed,” Penny said as we headed down the freeway toward the Greyhound Bus Depot. “As soon as you have some money.”

      Money.

      “I will. Unless I sell it first. If I can get a decent price, I’ll sell it. I’ll send you half the money.”

      “If you don’t sell it, get the brakes fixed. Brakes are important.”

      She was sitting up straight, staring out at the narrow, twisting freeway, the oldest and most dangerous freeway in L.A. Penny no longer looked comfortable in our rolling former home. She was wearing make-up and a dressy pants suit, things I hadn’t seen since we left New York. I reached for her hand and took it in mine. She squeezed back. I held on to her hand all the way down the freeway until we reached our exit downtown.

      “When it was good, it was really good,” she said with a little attempt at a smile. “We always had … chemistry, didn’t we?”

      I wanted to look at her deeply, to try to get through those pretty green eyes into her complicated brain. But I had to keep my eyes on the road.

      “Florida was fun,” she said. “I liked Florida.”

      She wanted to stay there. To get a house on the beach somewhere. But that was just a fantasy. We didn’t have any money. We’d spent a month in Florida, sleeping in the van, bathing in the Gulf, cooking on our Coleman stove in the open air, making love in every way two people can.

      One night in Key West, she talked about her mother. We were lying side by side in the back of the van. It was the first time she mentioned her mother since the funeral weeks earlier. “Mom liked you,” she said. “She liked to see us together. Did you know that: the way she talked about you?”

      Her eyes were wet and her body started to tremble. I took her into my arms and held her as tightly and securely as I could for as long as she would let me.

      Penny’s mother had killed herself. Overdosed on sleeping pills. It was to me that Penny came for comfort, not Tony Romano. Their separation was fresh and ugly, full of threats and abuse. So, when her mother died and she needed someone to hold her, Penny came to me.

      “You can keep the spoon rest,” Penny said, with a half-smile. “You never know when you might need one.”

      “You mean you’re not taking it? On the bus?”

      “No,” she said with a straight face. “I’m giving it to you.”

      The spoon rest was something I’d teased her about during our weeks on the road. It was a flat silver thing with places for two teaspoons. It was something you might find in kitchens of homes that were a lot fancier than any home Penny or I ever knew in Brooklyn. In our home on wheels, I couldn’t have thought of a sillier thing to bring along.

      I watched her pull her hair back away from her face, her amazingly sensual lips set in a playful smile, and realized that even here, at the end of the road, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

      With me on the road, Penny had tried to live my lifestyle but we both knew her future would be different. It would include money. She needed it, wanted it, craved the security she believed it would bring, lusted after the possessions it could buy. Her attitude was understandable: she’d grown up with nothing. No father, mom on welfare, never enough clothes, barely enough food at times.

      I would like to have given her pretty things. Clothes and cars, furniture and jewelry. Maybe in another time and place I could have. On the road at Christmas, we agreed not to buy each other gifts. My money was almost gone, and we were having car trouble that was going to leave us broke. But I went into a department store on the pretense of getting some cheap oil and bought her a small jade sea horse, the kind of thing you wear on a chain around your neck. When I gave it to her that night, it was like I’d given her the moon. “A sea horse of love,” she called it, and immediately put it on.

      Getting a gift mattered to her. Having a token, something she could hold in her hand, a symbol she could refer to, meant a lot to her. So I bought it. In lieu of a wedding ring. And then, with the trinket around her neck, we made wet sweaty love, grinding against each other for a long time, trying our best to burrow beneath the protective cover of each other’s skin.

      After Christmas, trying to save the little money we had left, we began hopping campgrounds the rest of the way to California. To avoid paying the fee, we’d come in after the office closed and leave before they opened early in the morning. That gave us time for a quick shower and four or five hours of sleep. For Penny, whose security depended so much on material possessions, those must have been tougher times than I even imagined.

      “I want to thank you,” I said, as we approached the downtown exit, “for living so simply these last months. I know you would have preferred … a lot more comfort.”

      She just kept staring out the window.

      I parked the van in front of the bus depot. As soon as we got out, a tall, dirty looking man approached from a doorway. He had matted hair, bloodshot eyes. He mumbled something in our direction.

“No,” Penny said, glaring at him. “Go away.” Her tone was harsh. If she were a dog, it would have come out as a growl. The man backed off and returned to his doorway.

      Tough little Penny, so tough yet so fragile. In Florida she talked about having a baby. “We could throw away my pills and have a baby. A baby girl. Would that be okay? A baby girl?”

      “That would be perfect,” I said.

      She wanted to do it right. To raise a baby the way she’s supposed to be raised: with a mother and father, with nice clothes and toys and good schools and all the things other kids had when Penny was growing up. The things she didn’t have.

      At the depot Penny bought her ticket: one way to New York. Then she came back to me, took my hand and pressed against me. I could see that every man in the place was watching with envy. That’s how it was with Penny: walking with her made you a celebrity, the focus of attention.

      We had been in California only a week when I got a job. It was for a marketing company, giving out free movie tickets and asking people’s opinions about the movie. It paid a little more than minimum wage, but it paid weekly.

      Penny was sitting on the couch in our little room the night I got home with my first paycheck. It was almost dark in the room and the television wasn’t on. I stared at her in the shadows for a minute until her head turned. “I need to go home,” she said.

      I nodded. Truthfully, I knew it was coming. You always know, even if you don’t let yourself admit it. “Do you want me to come?” I asked. “We could sell the van.”

      “No,” she said. “I need to go alone.”

      I didn’t try to change her mind. No reminders of vows, promises. We had run out of road and we both knew it. The next couple of days we made love more frequently and more athletically than ever. We needed that pause, that break from reality. Maybe for us sex had always been that: an escape from our inevitable parting, a brief tenuous connection in our otherwise incompatible lives.

      The bus was scheduled to leave at eight. At ten minutes of, there was an announcement that it had arrived. Penny and I walked to the back of the depot and looked at the massive Greyhound with its tinted windows and giant windshield so different from our little van. As we stood near the bus, a big athletic-looking guy about my age in a tight T-shirt and a Dodgers baseball cap came down the steps and smiled directly at Penny. He looked her over in an obvious way that made me hate him. I brought Penny’s two suitcases over to the driver who loaded them into the luggage hold of the bus. When the bags were on, Penny came back to me and kissed me on the mouth, a real kiss. I held her against me. When we let go, I could see that her eyes were wet.

“Say hello to everyone,” I said. “Tell them I’ll be back in the spring.”

      She nodded.

      Penny was standing between me and the bus when the Dodger fan returned. His eyes cruised over Penny’s body again as he came toward us. “Better get on if you’re coming, sweetie,” he said to Penny.

      “Asshole!” I said.

      He turned toward me. “What?”

      I hit him.

      Not a real punch, more of a push. I took a step toward him and shoved. His head jerked back. Then he whirled around and came at me. For a few seconds we were out there, two strangers grabbing and swinging at each other in a Greyhound bus depot. I could hear Penny screaming as the guy pushed me up against a car and landed a good shot that bloodied my nose. I twisted loose and slammed my fist into the side of his head, two, three, four times. Finally, people got in between and pulled us apart. My head was spinning; I could hear a repetitive pounding: a thrump . . . thrump . . . thrump.

      The driver delayed his departure for ten minutes while Penny got some tissues soaked in cold water to press against my nose and sat with me on a bench. My shirt was red with blood when the driver eventually got back on the bus. He looked out at Penny and motioned. She stood up and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she said.

      I looked at her without understanding.

      “For fighting for me,” she said. Then she turned around, walked to the bus and went up the steps. It seemed crazy, watching her go, but there it was. At the top of the steps, she turned around and gave me a little wave. Then the door closed behind her.

      I sat staring at the big bus, listening to the loud rumble of the engine, waiting for … something. For that door to swing back open maybe, for her to come running back out, but she never did. Still pressing a wad of tissues against my nose, I walked back, past several homeless people, to the van, our little home on wheels. From there I watched the big Greyhound pull out, make a right turn and continue down the street. For a brief moment I thought about following it. But my nose was still bleeding so I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

      When the bus turned at the corner and the red taillights disappeared, it occurred to me that I would never know what happened on Penny’s bus ride to New York, and beyond. She was gone from my life, as invisible to me now as a rain cloud after the storm has passed.

      When I got back on the freeway, heading north to Pasadena, my nose finally stopped bleeding.