Flashback

But during these five days and nights he’s seen and listened to “Gauge” Devereaux, a black man from the South who says openly that the return to the epithet “nigger” is a statement of failure by his race and the nation at large. Devereaux has been driving his big rig for thirty-eight years and has no plans to stop now just because the cities he delivers to have become separated by wider and wider tracts of chaos.

Val’s listened to the fireside stories of Henry Big Horse Begay, a Navajo who—with his wife, Laurette—has been driving his rig for twenty-six years and who defies any bureaucrat or army or roadside bandit to stop him. Henry laughs openly—his one missing top tooth making the others seem all the whiter—at the irony that the white men who put his people on reservations are having their Manifest Destiny rolled back like a cheap carpet, but I’m convinced that there is absolutely no malice in the man. He’s simply a student of history.

—It happens to every race and group and nation, Henry Big Horse Begay says, still laughing. The days of greatness roll in like some great, undeserved tide, are smugly celebrated by the lucky peoples—even as mine once did—as if they had earned it, which they had not, and then the tide ebbs and the nations and tribes and peoples find themselves standing there dumb and dumbfounded on the dry and garbage-strewn beach.

Strange to hear an ocean metaphor from a man who grew up in the deserts of Arizona.

Val listens to others like Julio and Perdita, who grew up in the teeming eastern cities but who had found happiness only on the open highways—or what is left of them—and to spanics such as the Valdezes, who were born in Mexico but who have driven American Interstates since the 1980s and who refuse allegiance to any clan or gang or nation that defines itself at the expense of outsiders. And then there are the Ellises, Jan and Bob and their three kids—the children being “cab schooled,” as Jan likes to say. They’re from the South, they’re evangelicals, but they’re also witty, clever, soft-spoken, open-minded (they say they consider proselytizing an intrusion on others and don’t flaunt their faith), and the three kids—according to Val, who spent a long afternoon with them—know more geography, history, astronomy, literature, and basic science than any of Val’s fellow high school juniors.