by Ramsey Jester
As the car goes my friend is asleep in the passenger seat. In the back, to my right, my other friend is also sleeping. The twenty-one-year-old driver who says he’s eighteen and has been eighteen for both of the years that I’ve known him is nodding off. My body is big-spoon to the back of the driver’s seat, perched and pressed up so firmly that I can feel the heat of his sleepy body through the weed smoke and Febreze-drenched upholstery. My hands are hovering six inches from his flushed cheeks ready to strike like an outlaw with my arms bowed way out for a quick draw. I’m ready to slap the hell out of him once his head drops with that exaggerated thump, chin to chest like a child declaring his death in a game of cops and robbers.
The road feeds itself to our headlights. This nighttime vessel full of fragile beings; gliding around tight hillside turns, the steering wheel a Ouija board game piece working the hand of its possessor just slightly. Our lights flash off a tin-colored barricade dividing the road from its precipice. The halogen beams ease across the surface of the night. Reflective tiles above the barricade catch our lights for just a moment before the car is pulled round the bend, angled back into the darkness of the road ahead. My job, I remind myself, is to sit at the ready while my too-high, too-drunk classmates sleep and the man in front of me bounces his head gently against the pull of dreams.
I’m drunk too and still a little high and very tired. The world outside passes under the orange glow of street lights. “Crack it, please,” I say to the man in front of me, but he’s sleeping. I slap him, his head rises and he is back to his work. “Crack the window, please,”. Without movement or acknowledgment, the driver-side window lowers by an inch. In comes the night, bonfire smoke and pine. My hair thrashes in the breeze. Fresh air fills the car and soon the hair of my best friend rises slowly, dancing, apprehensive, there’s no gravity in his section of car, his own pocket of a storm. Both of my friends are dreaming and I envy them. Young boys like us need rest. I imagine their bodies going through growth spurts as they sleep in the moonlit blue womb of the sedan. Babies, both of them. Their round faces bobbing along, buoyant against the current of the passing night. My waking body is stunted by the weight of this unwanted responsibility. Like a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, if I sleep we die. Still, I’m calmed by the pleasant expression displayed by my friends as we twist, rise, and fall among the hills like riding a rollercoaster at some forbidden amusement park. We’re happy here, I say to myself. Happy even as we balance on the invisible string connecting my eager hands to both sides of our half-awake driver’s head. We have the look of a dysfunctional but content family that just completed their most successful Thanksgiving dinner ever, right here in the car and now all the carbohydrates and tryptophan from our gorging has come for us where we still sit.
The driver’s head dips. I deal him a whack with my right, then another with my left for good measure. His head bobs up in time for us to rumble over the textured road lines and into the oncoming lane. This is slightly sobering for both of us. Course is corrected. And though I know at this moment he is awake, I slap the driver once more. Nothing sounds above the noise of tattered wind as it whips around inside the car. My thoughts too start to sound like this. I ask the driver to roll the window back up but he can’t hear me. I take hold of his hoodie as far down his left arm as I can reach and lift it lamely over to rest it on the ledge of the door where the button for the window is. I ease it down with the precision of a claw machine operator. When his hand is in place over the button I wind up and slap him hard with my right hand. His body jolts and a flinch in his wrist activates the button for the window. A single press results in only a quarter-inch of movement. I slap again, this time with the left. The window has half an inch to go. I caution the next two whacks so as not to send him swerving too far to either side of this never-ending highway helix.
When the window is up I move the driver’s arm back to the steering wheel. The heads of my unconscious friends jostle softly with the car as it jerks left and right according to my slapping. So we go, darting forward, side to side down abandoned roads toward town, quietly, save the frequent clapping sound. My mind begins to wander into what-ifs. What if a beetle the size of a grapefruit erupts across the windshield and covers it in a viscous sludge? What if I’m unable to work a hand-free again without causing the car to drift too much? What if I drag the dead weight of his limb over to fiddle with switches and knobs looking for the wipers but can’t find them? What if I trigger the self-destruct sequence? To a poor city kid, the dashboard of a car might as well be the control panel of a space shuttle. I do remember that what controls the windshield wipers is on the lever connected to the steering wheel. But aren’t the lights also? Or are they on separate levers? What if I put us adrift in complete darkness by mistake? I slap the driver out of frustration.
Do your mothers know where you are?
“No, and I don’t know where she is either.”
A red light passes above us. It’s three a.m. somewhere. Ditches line the road on either side. I can’t recall if I have class tomorrow or if it’s summer. Still smells like summer inside the car. Outside to the right, I see my school go by. For the first time tonight, I know where we are, somewhere between seventh and eighth grade. A glimpse of the blood-colored brick building is all I get but I see that it too looked asleep. I try to calculate how many slaps it will take to get me home. Ash burns pock the headrest where other dutiful juveniles balanced blunts in their lips, arms cocked like mine are now. The rearview mirror holds our little bodies perfectly in its frame, telling us nothing about where we’re going.
About the Author:
Ramsey Jester is an emerging writer in the Pacific Northwest. His work has been published in BODY and the Licton Springs Review.