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We were driving west over the Panhandle, speeding through the dust-laden heat toward Black Mesa country, when Randy glanced over and said, “I think I’ve got a power, Quay.”
I returned his look with groggy, bloodshot eyes, and lay my head back on my pillow. I’d been napping since a little after Tulsa, and Randy had been killing the silence with one of his Johnny Cash albums, the one where old Black sings of blood and bullets and booze and Apocalypse, whichever one that might have been. It drove me crazy, Randy’s music; I’m a classical guy myself, a bona fide freakster for Brandenburg Concertos and Impromptu In C Sharp Minor, and Randy’s measured, mournful, Give-My-Love-To-Rose vignettes gave me migraines like dust gives allergies.
“Did you hear me?” Randy asked.
“I’m trying not to,” I told him, and yawned.
“A power,” he said again. “Like Superman. You know—a power?” He glanced almost crazily at the faded lines on the highway, then back to me.
“Yeah, whatever, dude.” The afternoon sun had toasted the underside of my rolled-up pillow; I turned it over to feel the warmth encircle my face like a large hand. “Sounds good.”
“No, really! I’ve got a power!”
“Well, if you got a power, I got a power,” I said, and yawned again, this time to drop a hint.
“I’m bein serious, man.”
“Whatever, dude.”
“Jeez, you don’t even want to hear?”
I gave my friend another squinty, half-conscious stare into nothing. He saw the look and turned down the radio. “I’m bein serious, you know.”
“I have a feeling,” I said, “this is going to be really stupid. Okay, shoot.”
He glanced down through the steering wheel and took note of his speed: eighty-seven miles an hour. Most of Oklahoma’s roads are sixty-five, but Randy kept it razor fast on the highways. He’d been in trouble with the Okie 5-0 before and should’ve known better, but a guy with a lead foot doesn’t think about burning again, and especially not how good old Dad won’t cut a check for next semester’s tuition, which the man had already threatened. The insurance on the Mustang was already rocket-high, and one more ticket was all it would take to break the beer fundage and the financial aid. If that happened, goodbye Mr. College, hello Mr. Navy. It was pretty much the Jenkins family deal (Randy’s dad, a retired officer, thought the whole idea of higher education without G.I. Bill backing was absurd), and Randy was nothing but a hair on the speedometer away from that future.
He set the cruise a notch below ninety and slid his foot off the accelerator to stretch his toes. He wasn’t wearing shoes, and the tops of his feet sported dull brown stripes from the sandals he wore to our weekend fishing holes and hiking trails. He looked like that quintessential Spring Breaker you see on the college brochures, the guy who’s either flashing the peace sign or holding up an acoustic guitar. Footloose and fancy free, to quote the old Chicago song. Or is it Alabama?
“Well?” I said. “You telling it or not?”
“Yeah, but I’m tryin to decide how,” Randy said, and stretched and popped his toes, like he didn’t know I hated it. “When a guy’s got a power, it’s kind of hard to explain.”
“Oh, of course. Of course it is.”
“Ha-ha, very funny.”
“Whatever, dude. I’m turning back over.”
“All right! Fine!” He popped his toes again. “Have it your way!” And he went right back to staring at the lonely, heat-baked highway, the broken yellow lines that zipped like George Lucas lasers underneath the car. In the course of our college careers we’d driven this highway nearly half a dozen times, and we never got tired of the rugged, meandering Panhandle country and tilting cedar fences that reached like open arms all the way to the rising hills and Black Mesa’s gaping embrace. There was something bonding in it all, and Randy and I had given our share of blood, sweat and tears on the work-study wagons every semester to share that experience. Plus, the chicks that awaited you at Lake Etling were too fine to pass up.
“Go ahead, dude, tell it,” I said at last, unrolling the pillow and putting it back in my lap. My hair must’ve looked a wondrous sight at that moment, having been splayed against the glass for the better part of two hours, but I didn’t care.
Randy huffed. “Quay, why don’t you ever take me serious, man?”
“Why don’t you ever say anything to make me, Randy?”
“I’m sayin somethin now, Quay.”
“Well, fine, Randy, say it. I’m all ears and a bag of pretzels.”
Randy glanced away, the stubborn Jenkins that he was. A half a mile rolled over on the Mustang’s odometer before he chanced another look back.
“Listen, this is the best way I know how to put it,” he finally said. “The only way, really, and if you laugh, I swear to God I’ll never speak to you again!”
“All right then,” I said, but frowned. “Just don’t swear to God, dude. You know how I hate that. Seriously.”
“Sorry.” He took a deep breath, let it out in a rush, and began:
“You remember that wreck we got into our freshman year? The one on Tarver’s Road, back when I had that pickup, the one with the busted heater hoses?”
I frowned. “Dude, how could I forget that? I got my head split open right up the middle, don’t you remember?”
“And had to get like a dozen stitches, right?”
“More like a hundred.”
“Whatever. What I’m sayin is, I didn’t get a scratch, Quay, not the first damn scratch, and we tumbled, what, fifty feet over that bridge?”
Truth be told, the distance from the bridge on Tarver’s Road to the dried-up creek bed beneath had been more like eighty, so far down that the front end of Randy’s 1978 Chevy Sierra had crumbled in like month-old melba toast. I don’t exactly remember that wreck, particularly the part where my head had kissed the windshield at fifty miles an hour, but I do remember the four-day holiday at the Tulsa hospital, lying under cold white sheets and staring at the pictures Randy had brought in the day after, the pictures of the Chevy sitting in Ted Landers’ dump yard, the old 350 peeping out of the accordioned hood like guts from a soldier’s peeled-back belly. In bad shape, that truck, but Randy was right: He’d walked away from it, not a bruise or cut or bump on his entire body.
I didn’t say any of this to Randy as he drove—I don’t believe it’s best to share old stories about wrecks on road trips; there’s such a thing as kismet, I believe—but I did ask what he thought his point might be because I knew he’d say it anyway.
“My point is,” Randy said, “we’ve been in like lots of accidents together, and none of them ever seemed to hurt.”
“You at least.”
“Exactly!”
“So that’s your power? The ability to walk away from accidents?”
“One aspect, I think.”
“Dude, you’ve watched too many Bruce Willis movies.”
“Quay, seriously ...”
“Don’t you think it might just be luck?” I asked. “A kind of fluke? Twist of fate? Or maybe even something ... God-sent?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Randy said. “Luck is a credit line, Quay, and people run out. They step into a busy street, a bus whizzes by, and they don’t even know they’ve just lost credit. Goes even more for all us thrill-seekers, the parachuters and the mountain climbers and the guys on the skis that conquer K2. We’re talkin dozens of accidents, Quay, and I never got hurt. You, on the other hand, have been in the hospital half a dozen times—count em, six times, Quay—and every single time I’ve walked away feelin nothin but a little shook up and sick to my stomach.”
“Still,” I said, “I really don’t think that’s power.”
“I’m not so sure anymore.” He scratched at his goatee. “Just not so sure, man. Somethin’s goin on. Somethin strange. Too many accidents. Just too many.”
“Yeah, you’re frickin accident prone,” I said. “Whoever’s responsible for keeping up with you is working double-time, I bet.”
He didn’t reply.
“So what do you think it is?” I asked after a moment.
He stared at the road. “I think I might be invincible, Quay.”
I blinked at him ... and then laughed. Such a word coming from a guy with tan lines on his big toes. “Invincible, Rand? C’mon, invincible?”
“Maybe so. Yeah, maybe so!” And then he grinned.
“Hey, listen, don’t talk like that.” I frowned extra hard, just to make him understand I wasn’t joking. “That’s really stupid. Don’t ever talk like that.”
“And why not?” He was still grinning, and I suppose I knew why: Humans, as a whole, are caught up in the fictions and don’t have time for the truths. Randy, the quintessential Spring Breaker, was the classic case of that. He was grinning because the fiction was a heck of a lot more fun than the truth. Or so he thought.
“Because,” I said, “only God is invincible.”
“Well, maybe I’m God,” Randy said.
I felt myself go cold all over. I turned back to the road and lay my head back on the pillow and couldn’t say a word for the longest time, just sit and stare and listen to Cash, whom Randy had turned back up after our philosophical discussion. The sun bore down and the Mustang turned into a dark red streak on the dusty path to Black Mesa. To the left and right the sprawling pastures looked like ponds of flame, the trees dotting here and there like standing shadows reaching for the freedom of the road. The view beyond the windshield looked like a painting in the windowsill of some rustic art collector, a world of greens and oranges and burgundies and whites, divine chiaroscuro transformed into unstill life. The stark, raving beauty of Oklahoma.
“I tell you what,” Randy said, turning Cash back down to a road noise, “let’s put this thing to a test, find out once and for all if what I’m sayin is bull.”
“How about we don’t, say we did,” I told him.
Randy spat laughter. “Where’s your spirit of adventure, man? Where’s the Quay who bungeed off the Cotton Bridge and grabbed a goddamn fish with his bare hands!”
“He’s ten miles back with a guy who used to have common sense,” I replied. “And don’t take God’s name in vain. You know how I hate that. Seriously!”
“You’re chicken, man.”
“Chicken? About testing some stupid idea of invincibility? Yeah, I guess I am, Rand. About as chicken as it gets.”
“C’mon,” he said, “it’ll be like one of Dr. Havert’s essays. Describe in a well-organized, well-developed paper what it’s like to have The Power.”
“You’re nuts, dude. Absolutely nuts.”
“Not as bad as bein chicken!”
“Famous last words,” I said.
Randy sniggered. “Nah, you’re just chicken.”
“Look,” I said, getting angry, “let’s just stop and stretch a little, put this crap behind us. Maybe we can grab a bite at Sal’s. That’s just up the road, ain’t it?”
“Five more miles,” Randy answered, and the thought of hot food must’ve rendered the whole notion of his invincibility moot ... at least for the meantime. Randy never could resist a stop at Sal’s. In the years we’d been coming to Black Mesa for Spring Break, we had never passed up what Sal Grimmett called the Beef Bender, a two-pound cheeseburger with a whole side of onion rings and an extra large Coke, all for just over three dollars—virtual manna for the American college student. I’d never successfully put down a Beef Bender myself, but Randy Jenkins had put down four. His mug was still pasted somewhere on the walls probably, in between the three-hundred-pound truckers and the skinny salesmen with the hollow legs and unstoppable metabolisms. Sal Grimmett liked us. He met us at the door every year and gave his Beef Benders the best touches he knew how. We were Spring Breakers, and he liked our kind because we liked his. No spitting in our burgers, no sir.
Five miles later, we pulled into the diner.
Sal’s was one of those Route 66 kind of joints reminiscent of old Lucille Hamon’s gas station near Hydro, the one with the haunting little cross in the window and a marker that reads “Mother of the Mother Road.” Sal Grimmett and his food is a lot like that; he conveys a sense of the everlasting, as though you fully expect to see old Sal’s fat butt standing in his greased-up kitchen until the end of times, blocking the creak-swing of that dirty wooden kitchen door as he barks “Two BB’s hold the heartburn!” to Bob the short-order cook with the bad hair and the Oakland A’s ballcap. In fact, you sort of feel as though Sal will still be standing there as long as Bob with the bad hair is cooking the burgers. They’re a team, Sal and Bob, a lot like me and Rand, and Sal’s always got Bob’s back, a lot like us. Yes sir, that’s Sal’s Diner, and when we pulled in, our stomachs already rumbling for a Beef Bender, Sal met us at the door in keeping with tradition.
Ten minutes later, after Sal had said his hellos, shared a little of the latest road gossip, and jotted down our orders on a ketchup-stained note pad, Randy and I sat chewing on crackers in the corner booth by the bathrooms and tried our level best not to bring up the previous conversation. I could tell he wanted to say something about it, and at the same time, he could tell I wanted to avoid being a jerk. We didn’t like to argue, me and Randy; in the four years we’d been roommates, we’d only gotten into what I’d call serious tussles about three times, and one of those times concerned who had sprinkled Ovaltine powder all over a mutual friend’s bedsheets. Nothing too severe, in other words, but even those times weren’t all that fun. Randy and I were friends, you see. We had that kind of friendship. The kind you know you’ll still have when you’re sixty-two and retirement’s knocking and you’ve run out of Maxwell House so you bum the last can. The kind of friendship that stands at a bus stop and waits, maybe even holds an extra bag. The kind of friendship that sits in a corner booth at a place called Sal’s and orders the same kind of cheeseburger just because it’s all you know.
Yes, we were friends, and because we were friends, Randy Jenkins, the quintessential Spring Breaker, couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“So,” he said, “what do you think?”
I looked up from my crackers. “About what?”
“The test, man. The well-organized, well-developed essay, ‘What It’s Like To Have The Power.’ Want to take it for a spin?”
“No, Randy. N-O. It’s stupid, dude.”
“Listen.” He pushed his Coke aside and leaned in close. “Think back, Quay. Seriously—think back. All those accidents, all those fender-benders. Whatever the cause for those—Father Time wantin to put me down early, wantin to take a bite out of my life, whatever—I never got hurt. It’s simple math, Quay. I never got hurt, and you and me both know—and it’s a fact, Quay—that I should probably be deader than a damn doornail right now. Hell, should’ve been dead at the bottom of that bridge on Tarver’s Road, probably.”
I knew exactly where he was going and tried everything in my power to shift the focus elsewhere: to the diner, the swoosh of the paddle fan on the smoke-browned ceiling, heck, the crackers. But it wasn’t working. Randy was in the moment, and that moment would not be ignored, for so sayeth Randy.
“Okay, Rand, I call.” I crossed my arms over the table. “Let’s assume you’ve got a power. The power of invulnerability, let’s say. The power of surviving every bad thing that comes along. What do you think gives you this power, dude?”
Randy looked aside, thinking. “Maybe I was born with it. Maybe it’s—hey, maybe it’s genetics!”
I nodded. “Okay then. If it’s genetics, think back to every time your mother or father got into an accident. Did they get hurt?”
He didn’t have to think long before disappointment settled in. “Yeah. Damn. Yeah, I guess they did.” He glanced up then, so quickly it made me jump. “Damn you, Quay! You damn religion major! You always gotta disprove science on everything!”
I laughed. “It’s not science, man, it’s common sense. Heck, I went to the hospital myself the time your dad fell off his ladder, remember?”
“Okay, so what is it?”
I sighed. “Have you ever stopped to think something might be protecting you?”
“God, here we go—more religion stuff. Like what, Quay?”
“Dude—” I laughed again “—you can believe you were genetically encoded to be invincible, but you can’t believe it’s something external?”
“Damn religion major,” he said.
I grit my teeth. “Religion’s got nothing to do with it. Religion is weak anyway. Religion is a coffee grind at the bottom of the cup, nothing more than a major in college. There’s a world of stuff above it, and that’s the stuff that means something, the stuff that gives existence its true flavor.”
Randy just looked at me.
“What I’m trying to say,” I continued, “is that you have to stop thinking about yourself sometimes. It’s a big universe, Rand, and while Fate or Death just might be after you, and while it’s throwing everything it’s got at you like some kind of mad bomber, there’s still a big universe out there, and something else watching how everything else goes. Dig?”
Randy fumbled at a cracker. “You’re talkin about God again. You and your God, I swear.”
I threw up my hands. “Believe what you want. It doesn’t change anything.”
“So my power—it’s God.”
I sat back. “What else could it be?”
Randy looked around. Took a big breath. Picked at the end of his straw. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he replied. “I don’t think so, Quay.”
Before I could say anything else, Sal Grimmett came waddling back up, balancing two white plates piled tower-high with Beef Benders on one hand. Our mouths instantly started to water. Sal and Bob save the day, I thought.
“Two Benders, gentlemen,” Sal said, and slammed the plates down in front of us, their contents steaming and looking absolutely heavenly. Randy grinned, but he still looked upset. “I had Bob put a few slabs of bacon on there for you no charge. Hope you like, boys.”
“Hey, Sal, I got a question,” I said. Randy shot me a look, his eyes panicked. Don’t you go there! that look yelled. Don’t you even go there!
“Shoot, kid.” Sal wiped his big hands across his dingy apron. “I’m all ears and a bag of pretzels.”
I snorted laughter. “That’s weird! I just used that expression today! Maybe I got it from you, huh, Sal? Last time I was here?”
“Yeah, maybe so!” Sal chirped. “Two peas in a pod, huh?”
“Quay,” Randy said. “Don’t, man. Let’s just eat.”
I ignored him. “No, seriously, I do have a question. Randy here, he thinks he’s got some kind of power. Crazy, huh?”
Randy’s face turned as red as the ketchup bottle.
“Oh? A power?” The big man leaned back, put his hands on his sides.
“Thinks he’s invincible,” I said. “You know, like Bruce Willis? Ever see that movie? Anyhow, my question is, do you think that’s possible, Sal? That a human being can be invincible?”
Sal moved his hands to his belly. “Man, these folks today!” he replied, chuckling. “I had this talk with Bob just two days back! Old Bob back there thinks he’s the same! A friggin short-order cook!”
Randy took a bite out of his Bender, but for the first time in years he looked like he wasn’t enjoying it very much. The diner was empty except for us, and I could tell he was thanking his lucky stars for that: The guy was embarrassed. But I wanted him embarrassed. Maybe he’d forsake this invincible idea before Black Mesa and we could both go back to having our Spring Break fun.
I threw a small wink at Sal—I don’t think Randy saw it. “So what do you tell him?” I asked. “What do you tell a short-order cook who thinks he can’t be hurt?”
“Funny you ask,” Sal answered. “Just the other day, Bob, he takes this big skillet off the stove, don’t have hisself a good grip, and drops the friggin thing right there in the kitchen, hot grease and all! Except, thing is, I’m walkin by when it happens, so I get the stuff poured all over my friggin left foot! Had to spend a whole day at the doctor, but old Bob, he walks away with nothin but a red face! How’s that for irony?”
I was about to turn the knife a little more when something I didn’t expect happened: Randy threw his burger down and stood up. “All right, smartasses, y’all don’t believe me—?” He grabbed the keys to the Mustang, which he’d tossed onto the table when we got here. “—then let’s just put this to the test!” Then he pushed past Sal and headed straight for the door. Sal just looked at him, confused, and wiped his hands again.
“Rand, sit down!” I jumped up to run after him. “I was only fooling around! Trying to have a little fun! Stop, Randy! I mean it, dude! Get back here!”
I knew what he intended to do, but Randy was a good five paces ahead of me and was already hopping into the Mustang before I could even reach the diner door. Sal followed me out, and by the time we’d stepped outside into the dry heat, Randy had cranked the car and had put her in drive. We watched helplessly as he unrolled the driver’s-side window and poked out his left hand, index finger pointing due west down the road to Black Mesa.
“That old cedar tree!” he yelled. “See it, Quay? See it?”
I looked where he was pointing. A half a mile up the road, sure enough, stood a tall, gangly cedar tree, looming on the parched horizon like an old giant’s fist. It looked like it had been there for centuries. I glanced back at Randy, about to scream NO!, but he was already rolling back onto the road ... and grinning as he went.
“I’m gonna run this goddamn car right into it, Quay!” His voice carried across the dusty air like an insignificant yap of thunder. “We’ll see then who’s laughin, won’t we! I’m gonna walk RIGHT AWAY FROM THIS CAR, and everybody’ll know then that I’VE GOT THE POWER!”
And then he sped off, the Mustang’s tires grinding in the gravel.
I ran after him, screaming, “RANDY! YOU CAN’T BE ALONE! I’VE GOT TO BE WITH YOU, RAND! DON’T DO THIS! IT’S NOT TIME! I’VE GOT TO BE WITH YOU, RANDY!”
But he was too far out to hear.
I jogged to the middle of the road and stopped there, my heart hammering, my eyeballs bulging. Sal met me a moment later, his face crimson with the heat, and the two of us watched as Randy’s red bullet made a kamikaze track straight for the cedar tree. He veered once, a little to the right, but I realized with sick panic that he’d actually veered to align with the tree.
A second later we heard the crash.
A great fireball followed, a bellowing cloud of black that mushroomed like an H-bomb and rose under a blistering canopy of red and orange. I felt my blood freeze up again, and I ran, down the road, toward my friend, knowing all too well what I’d find once I got there, but running still, giving it great lopes that felt a heck of a lot like flying. I glanced back at Sal as I went, but he had sprinted back into the diner, apparently to call 911. Not that it would do any good.
I reached the end of the half-mile and stopped in my tracks, guarding my face from the wall of heat as the flames licked away the Mustang’s red paint, turning both its devastated frame and the victimized cedar tree into a shrieking mutilation of carbon and smoke. I dropped to my knees, my stomach wrenching, when I saw the figure in the front seat burning like an oak post. I could still hear his voice, a haunting melody, murmuring words like power and invincible over Johnny Cash singing of great fiery rings and stumbling down, down, down.
Randy was dead.
I stood there for a long time—I’m not exactly sure how long. Even when Sal pulled up in Bob’s rusty Ford Station Wagon and put a hand on my shoulder, I didn’t budge, didn’t even turn to register his presence. Randy, the quintessential Spring Breaker, was dead.
Which meant that I had failed.
“Don’t even think that,” Sal Grimmett told me, standing quietly behind me, taking drags from a Pall Mall. That he could smoke while standing before such a bellowing inferno was beyond me. That he could smoke period was irony in itself. “The Boss don’t like that kind of attitude. You win some, you lose some. You know that, Quay.”
I nodded slowly. But I wasn’t even sure about what he’d said.
“Maybe we’re doin ... too good of a job,” he muttered.
Wiping away a tear, I unfurled my wings and flew away for reassignment.
