by Malcolm Culleton
Reply to: Ride offered to Dallas 3/19 (UNO)
Craigslist ID: grk4x-3685879461
Sunday, March 17th 2013
Hello,
I might be interested in riding with you to Dallas. I have spent much of the year traveling the country, have been in New Orleans for a few months now and am about ready to go somewhere new.
I am 23 years old, male, drug free, no criminal background, honest, friendly, and can pay some cash for gas. Please get back to me soon if you’re still looking for riders.
“So,” said a woman’s voice, “you interested in riding with me to Texas?”
“Yeah,” I told the stranger on the other end of my phone.
“Cool! Any reason in particular?”
“Just want to check it out, I guess. Never been there before.” That sounded stupid.
“I have a friend in Austin,” I added.
“Oh. Well like I said in my post, I’m going to Dallas. Austin is… not too close to there.”
“That’s okay. I’ll go to Dallas first. Check it out, maybe spend a night or two in a hostel and see if I can string up another ride from there to Austin.”
“Well, I’m coming back to New Orleans on Tuesday, after my interview. So if that doesn’t work out, you can catch a ride home with me.”
“Good to know. I might have to do that.”
I wondered: was this a plan or a non-plan? Consciously or not, ever since Mardi Gras I’d been looking for an escape from New Orleans. Yet here I was, suddenly open to the possibility of coming back.
Danielle drove barefoot, her sandals stacked beside her in the footwell. Her dark, curly hair draped over the shoulders of her red-and-white muslin dress. I, her passenger, moldered in sneakers, my only sweater, and my only pair of jeans. She swung by the house where I was staying on St. Peter Street and we loaded all my stuff into her trunk: guitar case, hiking pack, half-broken bicycle. A few minutes later we were spinning towards the freeway, Danielle working pedals between her toes and barely touching the steering wheel. Loosey-goosey. The way that hippies drive.
Her car was a 1987 Isuzu Trooper: a snarling collection of navy-blue trapezoids with boxy-looking wheels. Every upshift or downshift caused its engine to growl reluctantly.
“It’s kinda incredible that this old-fashioned monster is still kicking,” she said as we climbed onto I-10 from the onramp at Rampart Street. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll finally be able to afford a new one if this interview goes well. But then I’d have to move to Dallas, so…”
She shrugged, screwed her face into goofy ambivalence. We passed the city limits. The horizon opened onto green, stalky bayou and piercing blue sky.
“How’dja end up in New Orleans?” she asked.
I gave her the short answer: something about taking a gap year after college to travel around and find myself. I’d been trying to convince myself that my two months in New Orleans meant more than that, and that I wasn’t just another 23-year-old idiot who’d gotten carried away during Mardi Gras, but that was getting harder and harder to believe.
“That’s awesome. I used to be a travelling person too, actually. Hitching, road trips, ride shares… that’s why I do my best now to pay it forward.”
She explained that up until a few years ago she’d lived in California, where ridesharing was much more common. She’d moved down to New Orleans a few years ago to work through Teach for America.
“I love NOLA,” she explained. “The city, the art, the people… I just moved in with my boyfriend to this super-cute house in the Bywater. So now we have a great home, a great community, two great dogs. I didn’t think I’d get to the in-person interview stage for this school in Dallas, but the thing is—if they offer me this job, I’d be a fool not to take it. I’m going broke working in New Orleans charter schools. Getting too old for the whole low-wage, low-cost lifestyle, just like I got too old for travelling.”
She was only twenty-nine.
Signs for Baton Rouge appeared. A few minutes later, the Trooper curved past Louisiana’s gold-domed capitol and arced high above yellow reeds, oil silos, and shotgun houses as we crossed the Horace Wilkinson Bridge. Since the lower Mississippi was surrounded by oil refineries and swampland, it was easy to assume, while crossing it, that the river itself was the source of the strong smell that I first noticed at this moment. Instead of worrying about it, I texted Patrick, my friend who’d moved to Austin, to explain that I was on my way to Texas and to ask if I could crash. We noticed an old-fashioned fire truck being advertised for sale on the side of the highway, and as a joke I saved the number to my phone’s contacts.
“Would probably still be an improvement over this car,” Danielle said.
Her quip made us notice, almost simultaneously, the lingering persistence of the smell from earlier. It was a dry smell: rubbery, smoky, grating. Lacking all the organic pungency of a salt marsh or a river. By now we were at least five miles and counting from the west bank of the Mississippi. And the smell was getting worse.
Then the sounds started. The Trooper’s engine grinded, snapped, and snarled. Danielle worked the clutch, upshifted, and tried unsuccessfully to accelerate. Something started thwacking angrily beneath the hood.
“I think that might be the fan belt,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky, rattled. “We’d better get off the road.” She eased the Trooper out of the lane, onto the shoulder, and down an exit ramp towards the boggy expanse of a commercial catfish farm. There was a small truck stop along its reed-tinged periphery. We pulled in.
There were only two tractor-trailers, wedged way up into the corner of the parking lot, so we had our pick of empty spaces. Danielle chose one near the diesel pumps, hoping it would be easy vantage point from which to flag down a trucker. We climbed down from the Trooper. She yanked open the hood.
“Shit,” she said—”this might not be good. Do you know anything about cars?”
I muttered quietly that I didn’t.
“Okay,” she sighed, “let me see if I can find someone.” She walked towards the truck stop building on the other side of the fuel court. I leaned against the Trooper and gazed out over the fish ponds, feeling just as useless in this moment as I did in New Orleans. I had nothing to offer. I was just taking up space.
Danielle returned a minute later. “It’s dead in there. We’d better just keep going. At least find someone who can tell us how serious this is.”
She turned the key and, thankfully, the engine started. Since it was obvious that we could no longer keep pace with the highway, we continued to follow the two-lane rural road that sliced between the truck stop and the catfish farm. Our top speed was steadily diminishing. Eventually Danielle flagged down a farmer who was driving faster than we were on a green John Deere tractor.
“There’s no way that engine’s gonna make it all the way to Dallas,” he told us, after a cursory look under the hood. “Y’all be lucky to make it to Bunkie, four miles up the road.”
Half an hour later, we made it to Bunkie. The town was a cluster of pillbox houses, constricted on one side by railroad tracks. Dusk was falling; we spied a mechanic shop—set back from the road in a squat, brick building—but it had closed for the evening. It was cattycorner from a fried shrimp takeout, thankfully not closed. We crunched the Trooper into the sandy gravel parking lot and sat nearby, eating po’boys at a wooden picnic table. Silhouettes of trees loomed tall and thick. The air whined with mosquitoes, smelled vaguely of sulfur, and was warm.
Throughout our dinner Danielle kept the Trooper’s engine running. She was afraid that it wouldn’t start up again if she turned it off.
“I don’t want to have to get a tow from all the way out here. We’d have to get towed all the way back to New Orleans. And tow trucks charge by the mile.”
“What about your job interview?” I asked her. She shrugged and pointed across the intersection towards the mechanic’s.
“They don’t open ‘til 8:30 tomorrow. If they open. So I guess I’ll have to cancel the interview. I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
We quietly finished our sandwiches. I realized that we have no choice. We’d both return to New Orleans tomorrow, one way or another. The least I could do in this moment would be to say something comforting, but of course I didn’t.
“Wanna explore this weird little town?” I said instead.
We drove the Trooper about a hundred yards to a Sunoco gas station with a huge, empty parking lot. It looked like the kind of place that makes most of its money on cigarettes and malt liquor and had a good chance of staying open all night. Danielle parked in a dark corner and finally shut the engine off, figuring we could sleep in the car here if we had to. We set out on foot down a badly-lit sidewalk towards what we thought was downtown.
We walked past boarded-up storefronts, a granite bank building, and a disused, Creole-style hotel. Near the tracks, an old caboose had been preserved to honor Bunkie’s long-defunct passenger service—as they are in so many other former railroad towns. Near it was another hotel, this one a cheap-looking motor inn that was open. We briefly considered inquiring about vacancy, but Danielle didn’t want to pay for it. I almost offered to pay for both of us, but then decided that I didn’t want to give her the wrong idea.
The more we wandered, the more I felt a thrill in this desolation, this rural, small-town wildness. The streets were empty, darkness cloaked us—there wasn’t anyone alive besides the two of us who knew we were here. We were a random accident, a two-person surplus in an almost empty place. But that feeling of usefulness felt the exact opposite of how it felt in New Orleans. I wasn’t exposed here. I was sneaky, invisible.
Eventually we turned around and slipped back towards the gas station and the Trooper. We stopped inside to buy six-packs—they’d help us fall asleep, Danielle reasoned, in the sticky front seats of the car. We climbed inside the vehicle, pushed back the headrests, and shot the shit for awhile. We talked with diminishing coherence about travelling, about not travelling, about nothing—laughed, muttered, lolled our heads and watched the still, silhouetted branches above the moonroof. After four beers I left the car and scampered off to piss in a margin of weeds between the well-lit street and railroad tracks. I imagined a train rushing past, linking this small town to anywhere, and thought about the universality of alcohol, of awkwardness, of strangers taking temporary comfort in the art of talking around each other’s feelings. The more we drank, the more relaxed Danielle seemed about missing out on her interview. I convinced myself that maybe a crazy adventure like this one was what she really wanted all along, anyway.
Eventually our conversation fizzled. I could hear her snoring. I stretched out, hands behind my head, and closed my eyes to the moonroof.
Around 3 AM I woke abruptly. Had I dreamed about the chirp of a walkie-talkie? I noticed a pale thread of light, flickering against the pitchforked branches above the moonroof.
I looked through the window to my right: nothing but empty parking lot. I looked to my left: a police cruiser, lights off, parked next to us. It hadn’t been there before.
I shook Danielle. “Wake up, we’ve got cops!” A flashlight seared through the window.
“License and registration!” A voice demanded. Danielle sat up, dazed, rubbing her eyes. “You can’t sleep here, you know that? This is private property.”
I fumbled through my pockets for my wallet. Figuring I’d have to be the one to say something, I tried to prime myself for the moment. Danielle was quick, though.
“Oh, officer,” she wailed, “we just didn’t know what to do! My husband and I were driving across the country, and our car broke down. This is our honeymoon!”
She bent forward, pressed wet cheeks against trembling knuckles, then reached out across the console, grasping for me. I took the cue and held her hand. “Oh Honey! Please, officer—we just need a mechanic! We just want to go home!”
Danielle wiped away real tears, then cried them again as she handed our documents towards a black glove beyond the window. We could feel the officer thinking.
“Okay, ma’am,” he said. “It’s gonna be okay, alright? I’m just going to have to run these licenses, make sure this vehicle isn’t stolen.”
The flashlight disappeared. We heard boots, a car door opening, and a long sequence of garbled radio calls. All I could make out was some chatter about the states that had issued our licenses: Pennsylvania, California.
Finally the glove handed our licenses back through the driver’s window. “Alright,” the voice said. “You can stay put tonight, but sleep with one eye open. It isn’t safe out here.”
I sat bolt-upright after the cruiser departed. Black sky turned pale blue, exposing us.
I couldn’t close even one of my eyes.
In the morning we took the Trooper in to the mechanic. Just as Danielle suspected, the fan belt was broken. Nothing could be done about it—at least, nothing could be done today, with parts that were in stock. That left us with only one practical option: turn around and putter back towards New Orleans at whatever speed the Trooper could handle. Crawl back as close as we could from where we came from, so that whenever we would eventually have to call a tow truck, we’d hopefully be able to afford the fare.
We thanked the mechanic and started back through central Louisiana: lime-green swamps, coppices of kudzu, flat fields of sugarcane. Instead of talking, we passed the time by listening to the only CDs Danielle had with her—the box set of Billy Joel’s entire discography.
I didn’t think I could take it: more weeks of bumming around conspicuously, using up the couches of various friends and half-friends, serially wearing out my welcome. Who was left for me in New Orleans—the irreverent group of gutter punks I’d seen lying around on the levee, twisting flower-shaped tchotchkes from the shells of PBR cans? The thinning herds of Missourians who still wandered from bar to bar, beating the ancient track of St. Charles Avenue like parched elephants, their expressions like stunned hurricanes?
My problems seemed stupid, though. Not worth mentioning. I’d just watched Danielle lose not only her car but a rare opportunity to land a stable, well-paying job. I felt like she deserved to care more—to grieve, to process, to be angry in general, and to be angry with me specifically for acting so goddamn useless. I thought back to holding her hand last night; the only gesture of support that I’d really given. I’d been impressed, in that moment, by her ability to force herself to cry in support of the lie she was telling. It only now occurred to me that those tears might’ve been real.
The Trooper rattled along like a cranky old washing machine. 25, 20, 15 miles per hour. My face to the window, I scanned the scummy puddles lining the side of the road. Searching for alligators, or anything else that was trying to hide.
In Alto Requires
by Irakli Mirzashvili
Malcolm Culleton is a fiction and nonfiction writer from southeastern Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in Marrow Magazine, Floyd County Moonshine, and Confetti, amongst other publications. Malcolm earned his MFA from Chatham University in 2023 and currently lives in Pittsburgh, where he teaches writing.
Irakli Mirzashvili grew up in a family of visual artists in Tbilisi, country of Georgia, and enjoys working in oil pastels, creating collages, and photography. His artwork has been exhibited in the United States and Georgia. His art has been published in The Adroit Journal, Camas Magazine, New Delta Review, Ponder Review, Sheepshead Review, Peatsmoke Journal, and Phoebe, and it is upcoming in The Writer’s Foundry Review. After living in rural Alaska, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and the great plains of Kansas, Irakli resides in the Austin, Texas, area. He earned degrees in political science and law.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 