The Alternator

1. Joy to the World

He traced the river delta cut into his mind, seeing the branches in the aged cracks of the powder-blue Formica table. He pressed down hard on those fingers with the really bitten-down nails, feeling sharp pain in the quicks as he traveled back up the Mississippi, along the Rogue river, the Snake, the all-defining Rio Grande, how the Tennessee flowed north up into Kentucky Lake. He didn’t even need to reference the Rand McNally any more, it was all stacked upstairs, a library of maps imprinted on his psyche, more a part of him than anything a stranger could gather from his scant words or actions. He was fused to the nervous system of America, its blacktop veins, neurons firing imaginary station wagons and motor homes through the Gateway Arch to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore onward on orderly numbered byways to all points west where Lewis and Clark and novice gold prospectors traveled blind, solely dependent on scouts and stars. As he grew up under the white buzzing lights, there were usually a few of the cockier truckers who could be goaded by the regulars to yell over at him from their spinning countertop stools, asking which roads would get them to Bakersfield from Salt Lake or how many tolls would they pay rolling into the chaos of Boston. He’d slowly take off his fuzzy orange headphones as if gathering up the data flowers in his poppy-field mind and suddenly explode in a way that could make them jump a bit and get a jingle of the crowded keyrings they all wore clipped to the belt loop of their stale stiff jeans… reciting a route that sounded straight out of an ancient Latin Bible of lost scripture, a monotone chant that was exact and chilling. The caffeined-up interlopers would laugh nervously into their chipped mugs and sip the last of their bitter black coffee, until they left a meager tip and crawled back up into their cabs and took a gander at the pages themselves. His sermon was always true and, if they were humble, they would learn a thing or two and cut their run by half a day.

Most days you could find him in the very last booth by the bathrooms facing the door, next to a dull window he rarely gazed through. There might be a piece of half-eaten toast smeared with orange marmalade sitting next to a scabby elbow and half a glass of thick whole milk that the kid guzzled religiously. He still had the trusty maps, his atlas, with him every day, held together with paper clips and duct tape, even if he no longer needed it. There he would be, pushed into the corner of split vinyl and concrete wall, whether it was a sunny humid soup or a cold wet winter day under low-hanging clouds just a few feet away on the other side, flipping from state to state, each page its own story, its own equation of green state parks holding the lines against human encroachment or secret government testing grounds. One page turn would transport you from Utah to Vermont. He could reach to the back and take a swim through the sparse two-laners of territorial Northern Canada or the dense chaos of Mexico. If his companion wasn’t splayed out on the table with tired pages begging a final release from the rusty staples of the once glossy cover in a crooked stack, it was rolled up with a fat rubber band on the bench next to him waiting ever-patiently for their next adventure.

His dear old dad stole a glance every now and then, in between flipping a mat of hash browns or a row of fatty grey sawdust-infused patties. He was proud in a curious, itchy way that he never could communicate. He never could find the map that bridged the gap into his son’s world. Even when he was showing him off to the customers, “Ask my boy over there, he knows every road on this continent, by God,” he felt to be no more than a carnival barker and was left only hoping if his son’s exploits would produce more loose change scattered on top of the check. Still, it was sure good having him around and he loved him dearly from afar. Slaving eight days a week cooking breakfast and lunch in a no-name interstate truck stop didn’t leave much time for father-son bonding activities, so a man took what he could get through osmosis, 20 feet away, breathing the same food-ridden air. Felt like he had a permanent ticket to a show sometimes, seeing his offspring grow up sitting in a booth as if on a stage, the only one noticing the nuance in his son’s performance, barely ever a glimmer of emotion exposed to the crowd but it was there if you knew the tells, the slight tics, a tiny cough before he reached for the milk glass. Second-guessing always hung heavy on his thick shoulders. Was it the right thing years ago when he first started leading the boy over to the diner before daylight? Got him out of his mother’s hair as she was overrun by those days already with a host of demons. He didn’t protest, just put on his little overalls and took his daddy’s calloused hand and out the door they went into the still-sleeping world. It was just a bit more than a stone’s throw from their mobile (not any more) home to the diner, walking around potholes filled with fetid water, cheap beer cans, abandoned truck tires and oil-slicked mud but he never needed to be carried, walked true like a little soldier. The very first day he grabbed that atlas – it was about as big as he was then – out of the wobbly spinning metal rack and climbed up into the booth and stared right through the thing with big eyes like he had been waiting to do it since he came into this world. Never had a day of schooling, he would brag to anyone, and no one ever did come around to check in as to why. Somehow, through the maps, he learned to read, meeting his fingers together time after time after time along the mileage tables he learned his math. His classroom was the whole US of A, the father reckoned – he would study the Everglades down to the Keys in the morning and be floating along the Colorado by lunch. Sometimes in those early days, his dad would walk over during that lull between breakfast and lunch, sit across from him and push across a fresh glass of milk, point to that glossy oversized book and ask the tiny kiddo if he wanted him to show where the two of them were in all that. Intensely green doe eyes, the green of a jungle as seen from a plane after a hard rain, would look up from maybe the top-heavy mess that was Delaware and there would be no connection. Dad would try to explain that it was a map of the country, their country, and they lived in it along with millions of others. Everybody was in there. It was real if you looked out the window. Nothing seemed to land. His mouth would open a bit and some jam might get reclaimed from the corner of his mouth with a flick of the tongue. He would understand one of these days, Dad would figure, it was a lot to bite into. One day he just flipped the upside-down pages to Alabama, the very first map in the book, as it so happened, and left a greasy fingerprint from the morning orders a hair off I-65 right near nowhere.

“Here,” was all he said.

Like a true scholar from a forgotten time working by a candelabra or a whale-oil lamp, the boy carefully earmarked the top corner of the now sacred page, a text that was beyond him now but would be understood with divine providence at a later date and went back to the Great Lakes. Dad slid out of the booth, mussed up his son’s stiff unruly hair and went back to scrape the griddle. He had an ignorant faith. The kid would turn out just fine.