The Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels

Author:Leonard Michaels
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: prose_contemporary
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

We left Berkeley on December 14, driving south on Route 5, straight, flat road policed by aircraft. Jesse, eleven years old, twisted the radio dial searching for rock music. Ethan, fourteen, in the backseat with the luggage, was reading. For no reason, they’d begin to fight. Holding the wheel with one hand, I smacked at them with the other until they stopped. They were bored. There was nothing to see but the canal, a vein that leaked life out of Northern California into the agricultural empire of the Central Valley and beyond that into real estate from Los Angeles to Mexico.

At twilight we checked into a motel near Barstow. The boys chased each other about the room and began wrestling. I stepped outside and waited until they’d wrestled themselves into a stupor.

Early the next morning I woke them and said, “Shower and pack. We’re going to the Grand Canyon. It’s ten miles deep and full of snakes and panthers.” They cheered. I left for the motel office. The sunlight was brassy, the air was cool. Big trucks running down the highway pulled at me. Get out in the energy. Go.

Behind the motel desk stood a woman about fifty, with a red loaf of hair, like body and blood mashed into her personal fashion statement. While figuring my bill she said, “Going home for the holidays?”

“I’m delivering my sons to their mother. We’re divorced, passing them back and forth. I’m doing it for the first time.” She looked up, startled. I was startled, too. I’d been babbling, as if I’d owed her a confession in exchange for what she offered in her hair. It got to me, bespeaking desire beyond consummation on this planet, bulging upward, packed and patted into shape, bursting with laborious and masturbatory satisfaction, like a bourgeois novel, the kind you live with for days or weeks, reading slowly, nourished by its erotic intimacies and the delicious anxieties of a plot, wishing it would never never end.

“I once drove my Labrador from Berkeley to Sacramento,” I said, “and gave it to a family that could take better care of it than I could. Then I had to sit by the side of the road for half an hour, until I could stop crying and drive.”

“You’re talking about a dog?”

“Yes. A Labrador retriever. Now I’m going to New York.”

“You’re going a funny way to New York.”

“We’ll stop at the Grand Canyon and have some fun. I’m taking a southern route to avoid bad weather.”

She stood very still, as my meaning sifted down and settled inside her like sediment in a wine bottle. I said again, “Bad weather.” Her head dipped, the red dome a second head, making a slow double bludgeon of assent. “But it’s better than none at all,” she said.

“That’s a fact.”

“It is,” she said. We smiled together. She was a nice lady. She had nice hair. I yearned to be within its fold. I yearned to be taken into her hair.

I returned to the room. The boys hadn’t showered.

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