Polly!

Scene 2

Scene 2

The drive started out okay. Driving through the city streets and onto the freeway—simple enough to manage. The day was warm and the Corolla’s air conditioning was broken, but the 460 air conditioning—four windows open at 60 mph—helped make it bearable. The car didn’t have a CD player, but there was some good music, classic rock, on the radio. That was good, at least. As long as he was trying to remember the lyrics to sing along, he didn’t have to think about things he didn’t want to think about.

It was early midmorning, commute hours. There was still a lot of traffic on the other side of the road, but almost none on his. He was going counter-commute, away from town. Nothing to slow him down.

He transferred to another freeway, moving from four lanes on a side to two. What traffic there was was still on the other side, leaving him free to move. He leaned a little heavier on the gas pedal. The wind whipped by, almost drowning out the radio. He cranked up the volume.

The road went eastward over the hills and down into California’s hot central valley. This was the place where only the foolhardy dared go in the summer without air conditioning. Well, the foolhardy or the desperate. He supposed he fit into one category or the other.

With the hills now between him and the city, the radio station started to fade. Even cranking up the sound still further wasn’t working—there was more static than music. He started pressing the “Seek” button to look for something else. He discarded a couple of talk show stations—one sports, the other some fatuous commentator bent on stirring up the listeners’ anger—and a Spanish language station. He tried switching to FM, but there was almost no reception for that at all, so he went back to AM and eventually found a music station that played a range from oldies to classic rock. Listenable, if a bit mild for his mood.

The temperature was climbing rapidly, now. The wind going by was just as hot as the air inside the car, and he was starting to sweat. He pulled into a gas station, filled the tank and bought a pack of water bottles. They ought to keep him going for a while.

He drank the first bottle in half an hour, and it was sweating out of him almost as fast as he could put it in. He opened the second bottle and poured some of it over his head. That seemed to bring the temperature down a bit more into the bearable range.

After forty miles of this, he branched off onto a two-lane highway. There was virtually no traffic here, and he had the road to himself. He checked his watch: Ten-thirty. He was making decent time. If he kept up this pace he might even make it to the ranch before dark—certainly before it got too late.

The land around him was slowly changing from cultivated farmland to scrub and brush. In his rear view mirror, the mountains were shrinking as he moved deeper into the heart of the valley.

This radio station was beginning to fade on him, too, with bleed-over from a more local station. This new one proudly proclaimed it played both kinds of music, Country and Western. For his money, that was just one step above rap, which was one step above static.

So he listened with little interest to the twangy tunes of despair. After the third different male singer sang a woeful tale about his woman leaving him, he angrily shut off the speaker and kept on driving.

Big mistake. For the next fifteen miles or so his mind raced far ahead of his car along the mostly-straight road. The IRS. Barbara. The fire. The store. Barbara. Taxes. Fires. Even country music was better than silence.

The temperature kept rising. He drank the rest of the second bottle of water and poured part of the third over his head again. It had less effect than it did last time. At least he was glad he had cloth seat covers instead of those cheap leatherette ones; having his skin stick to that sizzling fabric would make this drive three times as uncomfortable as it already was.

He looked over at the seat beside him. The stack of insurance forms was sitting there, weighted down by one of the sacks of clothes to keep it from flying all over from the wind. He’d taken a quick look through it when the insurance agent had handed it to him. They wanted all sorts of information, probably even his father’s maiden name and his grandfather’s astrological sign. He’d had a fire, for God’s sake! Most of his records were gone. How was he supposed to give them information about his business finances when all the data burned up?

No. This wasn’t the time for those thoughts. This was the time to listen to bad C&W and meditate as he drove through the desert.

His speed crept up past eighty. With no traffic on the road, there was nothing to hold him back. At least, on a deserted highway, there wasn’t much chance of catching the Highway Patrol’s attention.

Right on cue, there were flashing lights in his rear view mirror. Cursing, he pulled over to the side of the road. He knew the drill; he got out his license and registration and handed them over to the officer. The officer returned them, along with a speeding ticket. All very polite and businesslike. They were both back on the road in less than fifteen minutes.

The temperature was really climbing now. He poured the rest of the third bottle of water over his head, and could practically feel it turning to steam and evaporating as soon as it touched him. He chugged the fourth bottle, and it did little good.

He stopped and refilled his tank at a small station that claimed to be the last stop for gas for the next fifty miles. The gas was hideously expensive and his resources were running low, but this beat the surprise of the unpleasant alternative, the way his luck was running these days.

A few minutes later he started losing the country station. He began looking desperately for another one. All he could find way out here in the middle of nowhere was a religious program. What was that doing on in the middle of the day? This wasn’t Sunday. Weren’t those things reserved for late at night when they wouldn’t bother decent people?

“These heathen ee-volutionists want to tell you this is all an accident,” the preacher was saying. “If you found a watch lying in the middle of a field, would you say, ‘What a weird thing, that all these pieces of metal just happened to come together in the middle of a field and assembled themselves in a way to tell time’? What a stupid, ridiculous, nonsensical, asinine, thick-witted, foolish, silly assumption that would be! Or would you think that some person deliberately made the complicated watch for his own purposes? A watch implies a Watchmaker as surely as night follows day.”

“Yeah,” he answered back to the radio in annoyance. “An imbecilic Watchmaker who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care if he left his watch in the middle of some stupid field. Maybe the owner lost it or threw it away because it kept lousy time. What if you left an iron bar in the field and came back a few months later and found it coated with reddish dust? Would you assume someone came along and painted it? Or would you think it just rusted, jerk-off!”

The radio preacher ignored him. “What these people can’t see is it’s all part of a grand design, a design so big we can’t see all the details. God’s plan is so big that it wraps all the way around us like a large, comforting blanket. God’s plan is vast and it’s for all of us, and we all play our part in it.”

“Does God’s plan include burning down my store?” He was shouting at the radio now. “Does God want me to be homeless and bankrupt? Is the IRS some subtle part of God’s plan? Does God need my eight thousand dollars that badly? Is it God’s plan to give me a speeding ticket? Or make Barbara leave me? What is God’s plan doing for me? Where is this blanket of love, anyway? It’s got some awfully big moth holes!”

He punched at the button furiously to shut off the radio. The moisture on his face was as much tears as sweat, stinging his eyes and making it harder to see where he was driving. If there’d been any more traffic he might have been in trouble, but there was no one around to hit. He at least managed to keep the car on the highway.

Even the silence was better than listening to garbage like that. Even listening to his own thoughts was better. Even though the thoughts were angry, even though they were confused, even though they were depressing and filled with despair. At least they were his thoughts, not some hypocritical con man’s.

He went through the rest of the bottled water very quickly, half in his mouth and half over his head. None of it seemed to help. It was still unbearably hot.