The Trip
Jason T. Stahl
Tim Lloyd couldn’t speak. In fact, he couldn’t do anything on the ride home from Nilesworth but sit and stare out the window, revisiting the infuriating moments spent just moments before with his neighbor and traveling companion, Norm Stutz.
“Stop doesn’t mean saying ‘Stop!’ or doing this,” Stutz had said, holding his hands about a foot apart and pushing on an imaginary wall. “Stop doesn’t mean any of those things, okay? It means doing this, okay?”
Stutz then held his hands out, palms facing each other, and clapped them together. He’d then clapped them together again, and once more - to make sure Lloyd got it.
“Do you get it?” Stutz asked again, looking at Lloyd as if he were an expressionless monkey. “Stop means this (clap!). And I’m gonna tell you right now, if my Bronco hits the trailer, I’m gonna be pissed.”
It was at that moment that Lloyd thought he could have easily reached out and throttled Stutz, screaming, “Is this the way my hands are supposed to go? Is this it?” all the while watching Stutz’s face turn blue, white spit foaming out of his mouth. But all he managed to do was lose his patience for the first time that weekend.
“Okay, Norm, I’m not stupid,” Lloyd had said, watching Stutz amble off to the Bronco.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, just...” Stutz replied, waving off the matter.
Okay, maybe Lloyd couldn’t install drywall like Stutz could, or build on an entire new addition to the house, or waterproof his basement. But dammit he could write, and that was more than he could say for Stutz, who didn’t even have a high school diploma, much less a college degree. It had gotten to the point where Lloyd was afraid to say anything, in fear that Stutz would correct him and tell him how it really was. Cooking bacon wasn’t just as easy as throwing it on the skillet on the fire; there was a certain procedure that needed to be followed. Stutz had even had the audacity to ask Lloyd if he knew how to make grilled cheese. After making it for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the past three years for his five-year-old daughter, Lloyd figured he could do it blindfolded with his toes. He wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Stutz had sidled up to him in the men’s bathroom, peeked over at him and said, “You know, I actually hold it with three fingers and aim at the middle of the bowl so any unexpected splashing won’t hit the rim or the floor.”
So eventually Stutz asked Lloyd if everything was okay, because on the ride to Camp Gildik he had been much more talkative. Lloyd couldn’t tell him the truth, so he told him a half-truth about how he was generally a quiet traveler who preferred getting lost in his own thoughts than making meaningless small talk. The girls in the back of the Bronco were making enough noise for all of them, bickering over McDonald’s toys they’d just gotten in their Happy Meals. Annie, Lloyd’s daughter, and Becky were both five, so each of them wanted the other one’s toy, but neither were willing to trade. Whenever the arguing got too loud, Stutz had simply turned the volume of the radio up. Way up. And that was the way it was going to be. Both Stutz and Lloyd had agreed that they’d let the girls duke out their differences by themselves over the weekend, with only minimal parental intervention. They’d done a good job of that until Stutz told Annie to shut up, another thing that irked Lloyd. Why was it that, when Annie got too loud, Stutz could tell her to shut up, but when Becky came over Lloyd’s house and bit him on the shoulder, he was supposed to smile meekly, pat her on the head and say, “Now, now, be good, Becky.”
Quiet, at least in Lloyd’s head, was good. He enjoyed not thinking about much, scanning the blue stretch of sky in front of them with clouds that looked like cotton balls. Ohio’s Interstate 71 running north and south was known by travelers as the “Death March” since it was long and boring as hell, so about the only thing to look at was the sky or an occasional lethargic cow grazing in the distance. All of the young and supple flesh exposed by college co-eds at the camp site was something on his mind, too. At least that got him hard.
They were about one hour into their journey home, near Maunakee, when Lloyd spotted what he instantly knew was someone’s turtle cap lying in a grassy ditch off the side of the highway. People had different names for the giant container they filled with junk and tied to the tops of their minivans before setting off for vacation, and turtle cap was just one of them. Others called it the “hamburger,” or simply the “cap.” Lloyd’s parents had had one themselves, and he distinctly remembered his dad bitching about how they should have put it on top of the van first before filling it the brim with golf clubs and beach chairs.
“Slow down,” Lloyd told Stutz, his curiosity growing as the turtle cap neared. They were almost on it now, and now they passed it in a flash. “Hey, pull over!”
“What the fu--, hey what?” Stutz said irritably. Lloyd grabbed the wheel and jogged the Bronco to the right to give Stutz the picture, which infuriated Stutz even more. Still, he obeyed and crunched to a halt on the gravel berm.
“Hey man, this is my rig, and don’t you ever - ” Stutz started, but Lloyd decided he’d had enough.
He got within inches of Stutz’s face, which had an orange trace of beard after the night’s stay without a razor. Lloyd knew what he wanted to say, and it would have won as Oscar for sure, but all he could manage was to lift his forefinger and say this in a menacing monotone: “Not now.”
Lloyd jerked the handle of the passenger door and nearly fell out of the Bronco.
“Hey, where the hell are you going?” he heard Stutz growl, but the closing door cut the space between them. The stale air and contained music from the interior of the Bronco was now replaced with the smell of honeysuckle and diesel exhaust, and the noise from vehicles speeding by on the highway was deafening. Walking by the Bronco, Lloyd actually felt it rock against him as it was buffeted by a semi that roared perilously close-by.
The turtle cap lie askew off in the ditch, about forty yards away. Feeling suddenly out of place and ridiculous for forcing Stutz to pull over, Lloyd started jogging toward the forlorn-looking cap, hoping to take a quick peek inside, find it empty, and head back to the Bronco if Stutz hadn’t altogether abandoned his ass.
About halfway there, he doubled over. The overpowering smell of greasy rotted guts hit him like a roundhouse blow from a prizefighter, and he nearly retched. It was just his luck that some deer cut in half by a Chevy Suburban lie near this cap, like some kind of curse warding off treasure seekers. Hey, maybe that was it. Maybe Lloyd would find enough greenbacks in this “hamburger” to finance both his kids’ college educations. Or stolen jewels he’d take to some pawn shop as soon as he got back to downtown Cleveland.
Perhaps the smell of rotting flesh had gotten to his head, Lloyd decided, and plodded on. He knew the thing would probably be empty. And that would suck, seeing as though his new Timberlands were now covered with marsh slime and highway grit. At one point, he wondered if he might actually find quicksand in this godawful ditch.
“Completely stupid,” came Stutz’s barely audible words in the distance. Lloyd looked back, and the white faces of Becky and Annie looking curiously after him from the rear window looked like two untethered balloons. Annie, he thought. What if I get wiped out by some trucker hauling beef to Iowa, all because I was delirious enough to believe there was something worth seeing in this beat-up turtle cap. But he couldn’t think that, because now he was right next to the cap, reaching down to unsnap the hinges he knew were there because it was exactly the same cap his parents used to have.
The rotted smell had gotten stronger, Lloyd realized, and he could still hear Stutz yammering in the distance. One hinge snapped away, and he wanted to pick up the corner of the cap and peek inside, but he figured he should unsnap the other hinge as well so he could get a full, unobstructed view of whatever was inside it.
But that wasn’t necessary. As soon as he opened the lid about a foot the smell hit him like a freight train, and his fingers slid into soft, decomposing flesh, and he thought if he were lucky he’d look in and see a deer some hunter had been hoping to bring home and make venison stew out of, but he wasn’t so lucky, it was a family of four, mom, dad, son, daughter, and their all-American look was now tainted by squirming maggots and black-green flesh.
Lloyd dropped the cap lid and made a noise he’d never heard himself make, a gibbering squawk that sounded anything but human. He landed square on his ass, and when he tried to get up, his feet found no purchase and slipped in the muck. When he did manage to stand up, he turned around, expecting to see the Bronco and Stutz inside the car trying to placate the girls. Instead, he saw a dull black sedan that looked like it had been left in an oven for ten years, parked just behind the Bronco. That didn’t stop him from continuing his mad dash to the Bronco, but the sight of two fat men holding pistols getting out of the black car did. There are some vague things in life, things whose meanings are puzzled over for centuries, first under the stars of some prehistoric night, then in some corporate board room in New York City. But this was not one of them. It was crystal clear to Lloyd why these men were here, that it was their turtle cap that had accidentally fallen off their ugly black car, and now they had to kill their fifth person of the day because he had most certainly seen the contents of the turtle cap. Lloyd perhaps thought these men would stuff him in there with the four other greasy corpses, and the thought made him projectile vomit into the weeds.
Lloyd had a feeling Stutz knew what was going on too, because the Bronco suddenly lurched forward, spraying gravel so that it ta-tinged off the black car. Lloyd could make out Stutz’s wild eyes in the rearview mirror, and Annie’s panicked red face as she watched her daddy being deserted and left in the hands of killers. A lot of good it does to know how to install drywall now, Lloyd thought amusedly, and he was surprised he could actually think that way while staring death straight in the face.
The two men were on him now, and he noticed one looked like Kid Rock while the other looked like Odd Job from the James Bond movie, “Goldfinger.” With all the traffic, he was quite sure they would first drag him into their car, then shoot him, but he wasn’t quite so sure when he felt both pistols press into his stomach.
“You shouldn’t mess with other people’s stuff,” Kid Rock hissed into Lloyd’s ear, pulling the trigger. A yellow flash, then Lloyd felt as though someone had stabbed him with an icicle, then had tried to stitch up the wound with a red-hot darning needle.
“Puh-lee -” Lloyd said, spitting blood into Oddjob’s face, and then Oddjob’s gun went off. Now, he didn’t feel anything. If anything, he felt like he’d just smoked a doobie the size of a cocktail weenie. And he remembered seeing Annie’s face in the back of the Bronco, a lonely white balloon bobbing up and down.
“Hey,” Kid Rock said, shaking Lloyd’s arm. “Hey now, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake -”
Lloyd awoke, expecting to see St. Peter but instead seeing Stutz’s hungover face scowling at him from the driver’s seat. “We’re home, man.”
Lloyd looked down and saw he’d spilt the icy remnants of his Coke on his crotch. I got stabbed with an icicle, he thought with a smile. Relief washed over him as he heard Becky and Annie’s voices tittering with amusement over what must have been Lloyd’s sleep-induced ramblings.
“I thought you said you’d drive some,” Stutz said, but he smiled as he said it, and it made Lloyd feel okay. “Next time, man. We’ll go camping next year again, and we’ll call it ‘02.’ Yeah, ‘02’ man.”
In the middle of the camping trip, Lloyd doubted if he’d ever go again. But it was really for the girls. And now he was feeling better about it. Maybe they’d take his car next time, and leave the precious Bronco at home. For now, the comfort of Apple Lane, the street where he and Stutz lived side by side, was upon them.
