All This Life

But it didn’t happen. There was no great immigration to Reno or its “suburbs.” The new people never showed and the chains never wormed their way in, and Traurig and towns like it became not ghosts, exactly — people lived here and worked hard — but there weren’t any real opportunities. You could commute into Reno or Tahoe to find better employment, or you could burrow into a union gig like Rodney’s dad and uncle. You could work those cracked and charred highways, repaving asphalt and cleaning up debris, scraping cooked carcasses like burgers from grills, feeling the meat jimmy from the road to your shovel, the slaughterhouse smell following you home. The nice and terrible thing about work on the highway was that it was never done, not with the sun’s ruthlessness breaking what you’d fixed a few months back. Always fissures to fill. Always a rattler to peel off the road.

Sara takes the turn on the freeway, moving toward Reno.

“Where?” Rodney says.

“A great spot on the Truckee River,” she says. “It will be a while. Enjoy the music.” Sara turns the volume up and kicks the car up to seventy-five. If no semis clog up the way, they should get to the river in about an hour.

It’s unfortunate about not having his pad and pen. He could’ve asked Sara to scrounge something up from her house before they bolted, but he didn’t want to be there, with Hank, knowing that any minute his dad and uncle and the Wombats might attack and who knew what would happen from there. Rodney was wrong about heavy metal guitar — it’s a good accompaniment for rapping. They challenge each other, and they bring out the best in one another. They are greater than the sum of their parts.

If he had a pen and pad now, this would be the perfect time to talk to Sara. They’re stuck in the car, which is actually pretty clean, no trash or to-go cups or papers littered about. The only item is the broken side mirror, riding down by Rodney’s feet.

This could be one of his plays. A one-act. A reconciliation. Something about long-lost friends on the run finding common ground.

But before his play gets the chance to start, Sara turns the volume down on the stereo and says, “I’m fucked, Rodney.”

“Huh?”

Sara says, “Me. I’m. It’s. Um. Uh. Shit.”

She’s talking like me, thinks Balloon Boy.

“Um, it’s,” she keeps going, “like, I’m, uh, I’ve been screwed and my life is ruined and I don’t know what to do.”

“What,” he says and four seconds later, “happened?”

“I don’t want to tell you what happened,” she says. “I don’t want you of all people to judge me.”

“I. Can’t.”

Sara looks over at him. “You can’t judge me?”

Balloon Boy shakes his head at her. “No. Way.”

It comes out of her like she’s the MC with his anger, and Sara meets his and tops it. But she’s not rhyming or staying on the beat. She stomps on the car’s accelerator and gets them up near ninety and the car works from one lane to the next, passing people, and her words mimic their motion, careening, zigzagging, snaking this way and that, telling Rodney about her boyfriend who posted a video of them having sex online and she probably lost her job this morning and everyone is texting her about the video and pretty soon there won’t be anyone left on the planet who hasn’t seen Sara in such a compromised position.

“It’s like,” Sara says, “it’s like I’m frozen. The real me doesn’t exist anymore. All that’s left is the girl in the video. My whole life has been erased except for those minutes. That’s all I am.”

I know exactly what you mean, thinks Balloon Boy.

“Slow,” says Rodney.

“What?”

He points at the speedometer. “Slow.”

“Sorry.” Sara brings the car back to seventy.

Rodney snatches the snapped-off side mirror from the floor and holds it so Sara can see her reflection. “Your. Face. Is. Great.”

It takes him nineteen seconds to get it all out, and he expects Sara to get impatient, to roll her eyes. He expects her to deflect or joke away his sentiments, but all she says is this: “You’re still the same?”

Rodney turns the mirror around so he can see his own reflection. “This. Guy. Likes. You.”

Only eleven seconds. That might be a record for four syllables.

“I’m not going to cry,” says Sara, reaching for the stereo, turning the volume back up.

They don’t talk the remainder of the trip. They drive over a bridge with the river running underneath it, about forty feet below. Once over, Sara takes a turn off and wends down a dirt path and parks near the shore.

She gets out of the car and walks toward the water, kicking her shoes off as she gets close. The back of her shorts and shirt are covered in dirt and Rodney wonders why.

“Come on,” she says. “I want to show you something.”

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