Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb

Author:Eli Gottlieb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

PART

FOUR

TWENTY-TWO

EVER SINCE I HAD MY IDEA AND BOUGHT MAPS AT the mall I’ve been thinking about roads and also about what goes up and down roads which is mainly cars. Daddy loved cars and he bought new ones as much as possible. Cars were rooms with people in them that traveled fast and were called Biscayne and Nova, Riviera and Corvair, Bonneville and Torino. Their insides were of cool blue leather to sit in like swimming pools. They had panels of dangerous stalks and nobs on their dashboards and skins on their bodies painted fiery colors that made me afraid to touch them.

We took one to the beach once where my parents lay on the sand ignoring the folding waves and the sun and said to each other, “Isn’t this lovely?” before they fell asleep. We drove one up into the cool air in the mountains to “admire the view your father was so thoughtful to take us to.”

Because cars didn’t walk but rolled is why they needed roads to get anywhere. The whole world rolled from one place to another on endless wheels. The oldest picture of a wheel was found near the Elbe River in Germany. Today there are two million miles of roads in America for rolling on. Most of them are covered with asphalt. Asphalt is everywhere. It’s a semi-solid petroleum product that lives in the earth and was originally used as glue by Native Americans.

But the really interesting thing about roads is this: They are all connected. Every single one.

After I read Mike’s note I waited until it was late that same evening and I set out walking on the roads that would carry me all the way home along a single path. I had been planning to leave sometime soon but now everything was sped up and it was time to go. The campus was already asleep for the night with everyone in their beds weighed down by meds. I knew where I was heading or at least the general direction and I’d packed a plastic bag with a can of tuna fish and one of “chunked chicken.” Each of these had metal tabs on them you pulled to open with a hiss. Also I packed some water, a sheet and a protein bar. I wasn’t going to walk all the way home. Roads were for rolling so maybe I’d catch a ride in a car by hitchhiking or I’d get as close as I could and then call my brother to come get me in his car. Everyone had cars. The important thing was to be going away from Payton and getting nearer to where I was born. I wanted to smell the green air that used to rise from the lawn behind our house in the evening, and run thumping up the staircase that forever had the plaster archer shooting at it from the living room. I wanted to hear the piano make the music again that was a little bit like a car because you sat in it while it took you away somewhere.

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