Peter Blair: Off the Road

One February dawn, a laundry bag over my shoulder,
weighed down with clothes, tablets, the Bhagavad-Gita,
On the Road, I hitch-hike the Edgewood ramp
of the Parkway West, join the flow of cars, India calling me,
in a ski jacket and poncho, leaving the job, the hills,
the rivers, the past. Truckers honk and laugh
as their K-Whoppers slam me with walls of icy air.
I feel like a clown, half-sublime, half-miserable caught
in my life’s dead end. I’m a straight man to a high school kid.
He drops me at the Turnpike, says he’ll blow up his school
someday. Not knowing who I am, drivers see themselves
in my escape, face blackened by road soot.

You got it made, says a guy who takes me to St. Louis.
He drives cars from eastern cities for dealers out west.
I’m going everywhere and nowhere; I can tell you a lot
about the St. Louis bus station. Snow-swirls snake
across prairie fields. In Missouri two guys in a rickety car
push it to 100. Chassis shaking, swerving, rattling on loose
suspension, they eye me in the mirror. Where you headed?
California, I shout over the racket. California? The light dims
in their eyes, and the car crunches to a stop on the shoulder:
Get the hell out. Back in the wind’s cold knives, I watch
their bald tires peel out, “Farm Use” on their dented plates.

Two hours I walk, thumbing. The sun arcs to the horizon,
and a station wagon stops. A red-faced, burly guy says, You
gotta be cold! He’s leaving his wife, heading to Dallas
to work oil rigs. Texas, L.A., India, catch a freighter
to Calcutta, so I sleep . . . Hey, pal I’m going back.
In orange light, his car fades down the ramp, swerving
in whipping wind. It’s long shadow passes over
the snowy highway as he crosses against the sun, and waves.
I wade through deep snow in the median, trudging
up the entrance ramp to a lonely deserted Stucky’s.
I call my parents, collect. My mother howls, Come home.
I’m like the rattled dog I see darting across the Interstate,
listening to each sibling, Come home chanted like a sutra.

The red sun out the van’s back window sets over Dallas,
rises over India. Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight,
blasts on the speakers, until I’m at the St. Louis bus station.
All my money buys me a ticket to Terra Haute, Indiana.
The night bus careens through dreams of mountains,
a snow-capped Vishnu bleeding icy water to the plains.
In morning light, I look across the lane for me passing
2 days ago, but I’m gone. I exit-hop across Indiana,
no ride longer than 20 miles. Desperate, I stake out a Buick
with PA plates parked at a Ho Jo’s and beg a guy to take me
toward Pittsburgh. My father will pay you, I say in a swirling
wind of wrappers and cup-lids stuck through with straws.

He’s black, a Baptist preacher, says, Jesus was with you
all the way down the highway. I doze several hours
until midnight, and the Indiana snow changes to 3 rivers
appearing from a tunnel. Soon I’m at my door. My father,
who keeps a night stick when he drives through Homewood,
a black section of Pittsburgh, who grumbles about Afros
and gangs, hugs the preacher. These kids today are lost,
he tells my father. Not feeling lost anymore, I go upstairs, flop
on my bed, sink into a weariness immense as a prairie.
The Bhagavad-Gita still in the laundry bag, I wonder
what if anything I’ve lost: maybe the road that receded
through snow and ice into an illusion I called India,
or maybe just another life, another exit, far down the road.

—

Copyright 2015 by Peter Blair writing for Vox Populi

Peter Blair