Road Trip

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Day 1, Wednesday

Broderick, California: the streets were just a little rougher than he’d expected, and the houses just a touch too small; the bushes weren’t quite manicured and the cars not so flashy. Still, it was the eastern side of California and for that very reason alone it could not have been a more perfect place for the car to sit in Boyd’s opinion.

He’d left the map on the wall of his bedroom and bought himself a smaller, foldable version of similar design. With a red Sharpie, he’d carefully marked the pinned spots. It had been the last thing he tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket before he left the house.

The flight had been paid for, the taxes and transfers pre-arranged, and the money wired to the corresponding parties and ministries. There hadn’t been much left over, but Boyd was pretty confident the eleven hundred dollars in his wallet would cover the drive back to Syracuse. Barring any unforeseen catastrophes, of which he’d removed his credit card from the freezer, unfroze it from the block of ice it sat in, and tucked it into his wallet as a precaution, Boyd figured he should be able to manage without bankrupting himself. And if he kept to his plan of leaving early Wednesday, he’d be home by Sunday night and only use up three holiday days. That would leave the other seven days—from the ten that the cheap bastards he worked for granted him in a year—to do what he saw fit with the car around extra-long weekends once Boyd got it home.

Though it didn’t show on his face, Boyd was excited. Though any casual observer would note the frown that tended to furrow into his forehead without Boyd even thinking about it, or the firm set of his jaw that made everybody think he was constantly gritting his teeth, the feeling swarming his chest was damn close to what he imagined ecstatic to be like. It was so much more than just a car, or just a road trip…it was that thing he’d been planning for, that one thing, and it was finally happening. It didn’t matter that he still rented a falling down shack while all his buddies were buying houses. It didn’t matter that he didn’t own his own garage or that he had to scrape by on sixteen bucks an hour. He was getting his car. He was fulfilling a dream.

It was that flurry of emotion that gave Boyd the stamina to ignore the oversized man sitting to his left on the plane who snored most of the way there. It was the same rush that stopped him from losing his mind on the irritating woman to his right who kept bumping his arm with her laptop. He’d even been able to turn a blind eye when the brat in front of him kept popping over the seat to stick a tongue out at him.

When he’d arrived at the airport, Boyd had waited with a patience even he’d been surprised he could manage, for the cab that would take him from the airport in San Francisco out to West Sacramento. He didn’t get irate when they got stuck in traffic on the bridge even though bridges freaked him the hell out; especially ones that seemed as long as small countries were wide.

None of it mattered. None of the tiny issues were going to get in the way of his adventure. He could have charmed demons if he had to. The payback was worth the stress it took to get there. Nothing in life had ever felt so gratifying as the moment when finally got to stand beside that sweet little machine and call it his; when he got to hold the keys with the garish dangling eight ball and claim them.

She was beautiful.

Boyd barely said four words to the previous owner. Within ten minutes of arriving, he was sliding over the unmarked vinyl seat and tracing his palms over the leather braiding that covered the steering wheel. He was turning the key and nudging the gas pedal with a tease that the car responded to beautifully. She had an automatic transmission, but he’d already known that was the case and had deemed it something he could live with. Besides, a transmission could be replaced once he pulled a little money together, and if nothing else, it would make for an easy drive home.

“And that’s all you gotta do, baby,” Boyd told it, patting the seat beside him. “Just make it home.”

* * * *

The sun was bright and high, and everything around Boyd was as green as the gods could make it. While March was still in the grip of a winter that refused to die back in New York, on the west coast it was warm enough to pose as July. So oblivious to either dust or disturbance, Boyd drove with both windows all the way down and his elbow out. City life became panoramic views of brush-spotted meadows, that gave way to tree-lined streets, and when those streets became the more perilous rock-sided, mountain-winding, pine-dotted ones, Boyd didn’t even slow the car down. She handled like a dream—all power, no hesitation—and that was a reaction Boyd could respect.

It only took him two hours to get to his first destination.

Carson City was one of those pins that had been in place as far back as Boyd could remember. Boyd couldn’t recall the exact thing that had prompted him to put the pushpin in that name, most likely an old movie, or a youth’s novel—something with gold mines and bad guys and railroads that had been cool enough to tweak a young man’s imagination. He had, after all, been a fairly decent reader back in grade school when his head would slow down enough to let him do it.

The welcome sign wasn’t what he’d been expecting, not that he had an idea of what he’d been figuring to see; just a blue background with white lettering that received those passing by into “Carson City—Nevada State Capital.” There were no other details to study, and no pretty pictures to gaze at, but Boyd didn’t drive past it. He slowed. He got out of the driving lanes. He stopped. Then he opened the door, stepped out of the car, walked to the front of the vehicle, leaned carefully against the grill and stared. All that time, all that desire, and there he was. Him and his car. A journey thirty-five years in the making and he’d reached destination number one. And though Boyd knew without doubt that he looked like a damn fool propped there and grinning, the devil itself could not have convinced Boyd to wipe the smile off his face.

The city was quaint, historical, and well-kept, but it was no more exceptional than any other city he’d seen in his life. Though he saw his fair share of cowboy hats, he didn’t see a single horse.

When he’d driven past the few things there were to see, crawling at the posted twenty-five miles per hour through the town center, and made his way through to the other side, Boyd pulled over once again. Grinning to himself, he pulled out a notebook, flipped it open, and put a mark beside the first entry. Carson City—check.

From there it was Bakersfield, and he made the seven-hour drive in just under six for no other reason than he spent the time accompanied by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the King himself. The music was an unexpected bonus. When he’d stopped outside of Carson City to top up the tank and stock up on supplies, he’d popped the trunk to unload his goods and found a sixteen by ten-inch wooden box. To his utmost delight, the box had contained eight-tracks of the best of the best that the late sixties and early seventies had to offer. So, as the scenery rolled past him, Boyd had crooned along at the top of his lungs and hadn’t even noticed the miles.

Bakersfield was massive, not at all what Boyd had been imagining. He drove past all three raceways—drag, dirt and the oval still under construction—but he didn’t bother to get out. They looked unremarkably similar to what he’d already seen on television. The drag strip was just a strip of tarmac, the dirt track was just dirt, and the oval track thirteen years in the making was surprisingly anticlimactic.

It was the racing he’d gone for, and he was there by choice. Yet it was a choice he questioned as soon as he saw the sign. It was one of those homemade jobs, black stencils on a white background—some supporter’s way of proving their right to hate. “We won on 8 once. We can do it again. Keep marriage holy.” If it he hadn’t been so far from home, if it had been dark, if the area wasn’t so busy, Boyd told himself he just might have pulled over and kicked the sign down. To Boyd it was hard to believe in that day and age, in a state like California, an attitude like that still existed. Not that there weren’t any haters back in New York, because there were. They were everywhere. He just expected more from a place where the sky was always bright, the sun was always high, and where the lives seemed to be so blessed. On the outside, it seemed to be a place so perfect that one might imagine that something as simple and true as love would never be questioned. After all, everybody needed it. Boyd couldn’t figure the point on questioning where it came from, or in what form it got offered in.

If he hadn’t been so damn busy trying to find a way to keep trudging through his own life, Boyd had no doubt he’d be trying a little harder to find his own Mr. Perfect. Thirty-five was a funny number though. It was too young to give up completely, but too old to convince one’s self that there was much worth in putting a whole lot of effort into the process. Besides, he needed only check the reflection in the rearview mirror to confirm he was no prize, by any means. The gray was already creeping into his temples and the dishwater brown hair it weaved itself through was hardly extraordinary. The ever-deepening line between his eyebrows and the spidery ones at the corner of his eyes were no beacon of sensuality either. Though he could still say with some pride that his eyes were just as cool as they’d been when he was a teen—diamond eyes his momma used to call them, as they were such a light blue they seemed to have no color at all—but the rest of him was about as everyday as things came. He had decent arms and shoulders, but in the kind of build that a person didn’t really notice if a shirt rested over top. His gut hadn’t taken over like a lot of men his age, though that had more to do with the fact Boyd was just too damn tired by the time he got home at night to bother fixing anything, and too damn broke to buy anything on the way. Yet no amount of even half-decent body could fix the fact that he usually looked like he was ready to snap someone in two, or that the frowns he wore had left forever paths on his face, or that he spent too much time in either the sun or the cold and those extremes had beat the f**k out of his skin.

Boyd didn’t realize he’d been volleying his gaze from rearview to sign, sign to rearview, until his eyes started to get heavy from the effort. He’d originally planned to stop. His stomach was grumbling, and he was exhausted. He’d been driving straight for ten hours if he included the casual rolls through both cities, and a body didn’t take well to sitting for that long. But his current train of thought was bringing him down and Boyd couldn’t ignore the pull that told him to just get out of the city and move on. Los Angeles was only two hours away, less if his foot got a little heavy, and if he could do ten hours, he could damn well do twelve if it meant he’d drag his head back into having a good time.

With a nudge from his boot, and a growl from the engine, Boyd merged on to the interstate and tore over asphalt.

He reached the City of Angels at ten minutes to midnight, tired beyond comprehension, too tired to gawk at the people that still roamed the streets, and too tired to even think about maneuvering through the multi-lane junctions and twisty-turning chaos that made up the LA roadways. He found a little dive on the outskirts of the city, with wide windows and parking that would allow him to watch the car through those windows. He set the anti-theft bar on the steering wheel. He locked up the glove box, both doors, and made sure the trunk was secure. Finally, he left the curtains in the room open and dragged the bed closer to the window. With one last look through the glass, Boyd tapped his forehead and saluted the resting vehicle. “Sleep well, sweetheart.”