Read Online Fast Lanes by Jayne Anne Phillips - Free Book Online Page A

truck passed us doing eighty, rocking the cab. There was a bawl and a smell and it was gone. Thurman sat with his back to the passenger door. “Take your hands off the wheel,” he said.
    “Thurman, what is this?”
    “I’ll tell you what it is. You’re in trouble, and no fast lane is going to help.”
    “I don’t want help. I’ll just keep going until I find a way to get off.”
    “Good for you, sweetheart.”
    “Screw you.”
    “Hey, don’t worry. You’ll get no help from me. Last time I quit fast lanes I made myself a promise—no more Samaritan crap.”
    “You’re all heart.”
    “You’d better worry about your own heart. You’re the one with the racing pulse and the shakes, sleeping on floors and getting picked up by three jokers in a disco.”
    “OK, Thurman.”
    “Not OK. I’ve been there, I know what you’re doing. You spend half your time in a full-throttle heat and the other half holding on when you realize how fast you’re going. You don’t even come up for air. Your insides are blue because you’re suffocating. Your guts shake because you scare yourself. You get close enough to see death doesn’t give a shit about you.”
    I turned off the ignition and the truck was silent. Noises of the highway went by, loud vibrations that took on the quality of musical tones. I don’t know how long we sat there, maybe only a few minutes.
    “Death isn’t supposed to give a shit,” I said, “is it? Death is a zero. Blue like ice is blue. Perfect. Barnes is perfect. Yourfather will be perfect, my father. All of us, cold and perfect.” Thurman moved close to me across the seat. We were both sweating. He pulled his damp T-shirt away from his body and touched the cloth to my face. I whispered, as if someone were listening to us, “I don’t mind the heat. I guess I want the heat.”
    “I know, I know. And we got heat. We got plenty of heat for you here in the USA.”
    The cotton of his shirt was soft and worn. “Let’s drive,” I said. “Who’s driving?”
    “What the hell. You drive.”
    “Do you want me to stay in the slow lane?”
    “I don’t care. Drive on the berm, drive up the median, drive upside down.”
    I pulled onto the highway with a few jerks but no grinding of gears. Thurman turned the radio back on to a gospel broadcast. There was a choir singing strong and heavy about a land on high in the sunshine; their group vibrato wavered in the dashboard.
    “You’re something else,” came Thurman’s voice. “You never did take your fucking hands off the wheel.”
    “I guess I didn’t.”
    “Jesus. I don’t know why I should worry about you. You’ll probably come out of this with a new refrigerator and a trip to Mexico.”
    “Sure I will. A trip to the Gringo Hotel in Juárez, where they eat dog and hand out diseases.”
    He lit a cigarette and gazed out the window.
    Close to home, we drove through Virginia mountains in the rain. I had moments of total panic in which I seemed to be falling, spread-eagled, far away from myself, my whole body growing rapidly smaller and smaller. I could feel the spinning, the sensation of dropping. I held tightly to the door handle and concentrated on the moving windshield wiper in front of me, carefully watching its metal rib and rubberblade. I willed myself into the sound, the swish of movement and water, dull
thwack
as the blade landed on either side of its half-rotation. Runnels of rain and the tracks of their descent took me in; I could smell rain through the glass, smell clean water and washed leaves. I sat very still and the spinning of my own body slowed; the aperture of my senses widened, opened in a clear focus. Then I could feel the seat under my hips again and my feet on the floor of the truck, the purr, the vibration of engine. The capsule of the truck’s cab existed around me: damp leather, a faint musk of bodies. Close to me, Thurman would be humming tunelessly to himself, staring ahead into the rainy mountains and the twisting