Joy Ride
Kendra was in the 38th minute of what AAA said would be at most a 45-minute wait when she thought about reconsidering, thought about just watching the VH1 Behind the Music marathon. She wanted to see the one on Styx again.
But then the truck was out-front and the guy wasn’t even waiting for her. “Hey, hey,” she said, coming out of the duplex.
“Hey, yourself,” he said with his eyes fixed on the rigging and his hands jostling the chains.
She watched him hooking up her ’88 Civic and marveled that he was shorter than her, even with the 10-gallon hat. If someone asked her later, she would describe him as “not quite Guatemalan, but maybe.”
He had on a lot of that Southwest cowboy, kinda turquoise jewelry. She always thought those stones were pretty and she’d like to perhaps have one piece, one little turquoise adornment for certain occasions, but the rest of the world seemed to wear it to clunky excess. And to Kendra, that kind of ruined the thought of having even one tiny fragment of turquoise jewelry in her possession.
“Where we takin’ it?” the driver asked.
“Well,” Kendra said. “I got a mechanic.”
“Well,” the driver said, “where might he be?”
“Well,” Kendra said, “I wanted to check with you first. My parents got me this AAA Plus when I first started going to school here, which means I can be towed more than 10 miles with no extra charge, right? But I’m not sure what the limit is and I can’t pay any extra charges.”
When she first left Ohio to attend the University of Miami, her parents made sure she never had to worry about extra charges. “You just concentrate on school. Leave everything else up to us,” her father had said. But by the third semester, as her grades began to drop so did her parents’ financial support. And by the time she bombed out of UM and began attending Miami-Dade, she had to start working nights.
“You can go pretty far on the Plus,” is all the driver said.
“OK, I’ll get my things,” Kendra said, darting back into the duplex and returning in seconds with a small bag and a cell phone.
The driver wanted specific directions but Kendra told him it would be easier if she just showed him and climbed in. She appreciated the big bench seat that put plenty of distance between her and the driver, and except for pointing him here or there, she mainly sat quietly and stared out the window until the driver said, “We’re almost out of Broward County here.”
“Is that OK?’ Kendra said.
“Not really, how much further?” the driver asked.
When she didn’t answer right away, the driver said, “What’s wrong with the car?”
“Radiator,” Kendra blurted.
“That’s all,” he said. “Because I noticed when I was hooking up that the transmission is missing.”
“Oh yeah, that, too,” Kendra said matter-of-factly, her eyes staying glued to the window.
“You don’t have a mechanic, do you?” he asked.
“No,” she said immediately. “I always hear people say things like, ‘I’ll have to have my mechanic look at it on Tuesday,’ so I just kinda said that. Like people say my bakery or you have to go to my pizza place. But I don’t have a my anything down here.”
She told him briefly about how her boyfriend was going to swap out the tranny but she swapped him out before the job was completed, and how her hours got switched at the restaurant so now she was going to have to go to school at night when there’s just “a bunch of old people there taking computer classes.” So, she’s going back to Ohio before they shut the utilities off at her apartment and ...
“Lion Country Safari.”
“What?”
“I’m coming clean,” she said. “I just want to go to Lion Country Safari. I always hear about it but since I’ve been down here, I’ve never had the chance and ... ”
“You called a tow truck to go to Lion Country Safari?” the driver asked. “Nobody’s gonna tow you all the way to ... ”
“My plan was that I would get towed more than once. Is there a AAA limit to how many times you can get towed in one day?” she said, frowning at him.
The driver began talking to himself to get it straight. “So, you have a car towed that you have no intention of fixing and you figure every time a tow truck reaches its limit in miles, you’ll just call another tow truck. ... Am I even the first one? Was that your house back there in Dania or ... ”
“That was a friend’s. I actually live in Kendall. But you’re only the second one,” Kendra said, hoping that would make him feel special.
“It ain’t so great,” the driver said.
“What?”
“Lion Country. It kinda sucks. That’s what I hear anyways.”
“Kinda sucks doesn’t sound so bad,” Kendra said. “It’s a beautiful day.”
“That it is,” the driver said. “I did hear they won’t let people in with convertible cars or them old vinyl tops ’cause the monkeys or something will rip ’em up.”
“Really.”
“The baboons. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Kendra reached into her little bag and pulled out a Pepsi can with a Lion Country special offer on it. “I saw it on this can and just started daydreaming about it,” she said, holding it up. “I just decided I wanted to go before I head back to Ohio.”
They were well into Palm Beach County now and Kendra just watched the exits going by while holding her breath. The driver seemed to be shifting even when there were no higher gears to be found and every time there was a grinding sound, she took it for anger. But when he turned off Southern Boulevard and started heading west, she felt a happy tingle shoot up her spine, like the first time she ate a champagne blue Freeze-a-Pop.
“I’ve never been there, either,” the driver said. “I don’t know why. I took my boys on that wooden roller coaster up on I-95. That wasn’t much to speak of either but ... Answer me this: How were you going to get around the safari once you got dropped off? You can’t walk around in them wilds, you know.”
“You know what?” she said, grinning. “I pictured all these big yellow school buses lined up waiting to go through and I’d just kind of invite myself on and I’d squeeze in next to some girl named Ashley and we’d fight over window space and laugh our heads off at some rhinos having sex or something.”
“This is a good time a year for daydreaming,” the driver said.
“I get things in my head, that’s what happens,” Kendra said.
When they pulled in — 110 miles from the memory of Dania Beach — there were no big yellow school buses or even so much as a Little Dude Ranch Daycare van.
The driver paid and got $5 off with the Pepsi can. “There’s some snacks in the cooler behind the seat if you want,” the driver said. “Got some Nutter Butter in there and some fruit roll-ups.”
Kendra grabbed a berry fruit roll-up and asked the driver if he minded if she rode in her own car behind him. “The cassette player still works so I could listen to some music and my camera’s back there,” she said.
“Oh, OK. But keep the windows up,” the driver said as she climbed out. “Those baboons can get crazy.”

The Sign of the Cross

“It’s right between the two exits,” he could still hear his wife telling him as he slowed on the interstate. “Look for a burned patch of grass and a flock of seagulls etched into the sound-barrier wall. Right beneath the third gull going south would be good. Perfect.”
A perfect place to die, Raymond mumbled to himself as he pulled onto the shoulder. From the start, he hadn’t understood why his wife wanted to place a cross at the spot on I-95 where her brother died in a car crash 11 days earlier.
They’d seen the flimsy roadside memorials — simple white crosses draped with small flowery wreaths — on occasion, but had never paid them much mind until Greg was killed. And then, they seemed to be everywhere.
“It’s almost like it’s a fad,” he’d said to his wife, trying to deter her.
There was one along a lonely stretch of U.S. 27 that just said “Moose,” and so many others whose names were indistinguishable at 60 mph. Once, he had even approached one when he’d gotten a flat out on 441. It was set back a ways and he went over and read the name aloud: Katlyn Maurich.
He paused for a second to try to picture what she must have been like. He immediately thought of her as young; not that young, but young enough that if she had met him, she would have thought he was old.
But he hadn’t given the subject much more thought until his wife wanted to put a cross up for Greg. He didn’t want to demean her intentions and, besides, he liked the idea of being the crossmaker. Generally, Greg had been a pain in the ass, but a couple of times, when Greg had been drinking and his defenses were down, Greg had embraced him and thanked him profusely for some small favor: “Remember that ride you gave me that night nobody else would? Thanks, man.”
So, he had gathered up some fresh scraps of wood, bought a pint of eggshell-white paint and gone about the task with the same meticulous enthusiasm he had had with his son’s last science project.
Gregory Doyle McGrath in black block letters was the first thing he saw when he opened his trunk to take out the cross. He was certain that the accident (which he’d been called to that night to empty the car out before the tow truck took it away) was about 50 yards farther up the road. But if his wife wanted birds, birds it would be.
What if all deaths were marked like this? He wondered. He recalled how his Aunt Dorothy had tripped and stroked out while reaching for a jar of mustard in an A&P in Rochester, N.Y., when he was a child. What if Uncle Drew had shown up at the market and tried to hammer a cross into the shelving just left of the hot sauces and ketchup?
So, yeah, marking the spot of tragedy didn’t make such sense, but plenty of things he did to help people these days didn’t really add up: helping someone pick up a leather couch from Rooms to Go that was going to put them miserably into debt despite no payments until 2002; building an addition to a neighborhood couple’s house, only to watch them divorce a month after its completion. Besides, the game was at 1 p.m. and he was looking forward to that. So, he’d do this and then he’d have that.
With a rubber mallet, he whopped at the cross’s peak, but the cross just kept sinking until it looked like a totem pole for a tribe of ants. So, he pulled it back up and moved it a little farther south.
The flock of birds would be flying away from Greg, more than over him, but it would have to do. And the paramedics had said they’d actually lost him on the way to the hospital. For all anybody knew, his soul took flight as the ambulance screamed past the Miami Subs on Federal.
“Here goes,” he said as he gave it another try. This time, the cross went in firmly. He walked back to the car and got the goodies his wife had sent with him: Greg’s key chain bottle opener with the words “Ron Jon Surf Shop” on it, the CD case to Van Halen’s 1984 (his favorite), a Piper High graduation tassel, a small wreath and some fancy tangerine stationery.
He put the possessions around the base of the cross, flung the wreath over the top, and then read the long letter his wife had written, before folding and weighing it down with the key chain.
There also was one sheet of blank paper. “In case you want to say something,” his wife had said.
But what? He thought. Better just a heartfelt letter from a sister who truly loved him than a note from someone who only tolerated the guy’s existence because he had occasionally thanked him for small gestures when he was drunk.
Instead, he got back in the car. But as he tried to build speed along the shoulder to join the traffic, he could hear his wife’s nagging voice rustling in his ear: “Why didn’t you leave a note? Why couldn’t you just take a minute? Is that too much to ask? There must be something you wanted to say to him while he was alive but never got the chance to.”
He stomped the brakes and reached for the tangerine slice of stationery that had slid down on the floorboards. His hand was trembling as he scribbled the note, trotted back to the cross and left the words lying there like his own epitaph.
“You’re welcome.”