Friday’s Story #6 — Part 3
By: Keith
Continuation from Memorial Parts 1 and 2
Kentucky was beautiful at 9 o’clock in the morning. Light fog seeped through thick foliage and hung over the highway and the streams and rivers East of Lexington. We stopped at a truck stop to go to the bathroom and buy more unhealthy snacks. I bought coke, a few bananas, and Doritos – enough for both of us. I took over for Larry and we continued the drive. Modern highways provide little excitement. We drove on without saying much to each other. Occasionally I would mumble something about a local radio station that I thought was particularly hick. Larry kept trying to see inside other people’s cars to see if they were smoking or eating or fighting or something. He saw one guy picking his nose. The trip continued with only our bladders reminding us to consider how far we’d traveled.
We descended the Blue Ridge Mountains into Virginia and the landscape became suddenly boring again, beautiful and boring. Billboards for Culvers restaurants were replace, in the matter of a mountain range, with billboards for Hooters and Dairy Queen. Houses were no longer dilapidated and towns seemed almost prosperous. The Pueblos, almost all of them, were poor. I remembered that. Their trailers were beaten and rusty. Their streets were dusty and rough. West Virginia reminded me of that community in North Santa Fe, at least what I saw from the highway which was insufficient to form a judgment, but I did.
“Larry” I said, “Did you plan to say anything at the memorial?”
“No, I didn’t. Did you?”
“I thought we’d just go and listen and see if there was something from Scott that we could salvage.” I don’t think anybody even knows we’re coming.
I learned about Scott’s disappearance by fluke through a friend who barely knew him but had happened to be living in coastal North Carolina when he read about the disappearance in a local newspaper. We had drifted apart to such a degree that I almost hadn’t even known Scott was dead. I could have gone another 20 years, or a lifetime, without knowing. Our promise to each other was seeming more and more childish. It’s almost unbearable how something that seemed so important 20 years ago could almost have completely vanished into history without even a breath spoken about it. Death can do that. It creeps up on you while you’re thinking of something else, and it takes you before you finished what it was that you had to do. The important things in your life get downgraded, and you get thrown in a box, incinerated, or eaten by fish. Doing drugs in the desert was only as important as our perception of that event. We knew nothing at the time, and we might very well find, in a day, that this great right in our lives had been nothing more than youthful ignorance. Had we been merely impressed by poverty. We could still be living out that fantasy. The one where we had become better people by hanging out, for a night, with jobless Indians who did drugs for fun.
“Larry, we’ve got to do this you know.”
“We’re obligated.” He said. “It’s sad. I think we’re stupid for doing it.”
“I know. I want to see that place again.” I really did.
“Me too, It’ll make a nice little trip.”
Then I told Larry we ought to try to steal something that Scott had owned and use that instead of his ashes. We laughed like crazy for a minute before agreeing it was a good idea. “We’re driving all the way across the country to steal our old friend’s shoes or something!” I thought that was just hilarious.
The hotel that night was full of a group that had come from a horse show. I wondered where their horses were. I imagined them being tied up to a post outside in front of the Jacuzzi. The memorial was the next morning. We didn’t have a plan. We ate Doritos on our beds and watched HBO until midnight. “Larry,” I said. “Don’t rape me in the middle of the night!” We laughed and fell asleep.
Read next week, The End
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I’m enjoying this story so much I don’t want it to end.