Season's Greetings from U.S. Route 395

Darkness pursued us from the south like a helicopter, its blades rotating, tearing light from the sky in shreds as storm clouds hunched over the road. Reno’s neon stain receded behind us, and the bulge of US 395 propelled me ever closer to my birthplace, to Susanville.

“—and when Jesus said: ‘Lazarus, come forth,’ the dead man rose!” My father slid his palms from the steering wheel and raised them, upturned and splayed wide as if supporting the weight of two massive hanging breasts. He studied my face a moment before urging: “You see?”

I nodded to assure him I was listening until his head swung back to the windshield like the needle of a compass torquing to the north. The highway split, sending the left lane with its southbound traffic behind a ridge and veering out of sight. My father returned his hands to ten-and-two.

“It’s only through the power of the Holy Ghost,” he continued, “and the saving grace of our Savior, who, being our Savior, saved us, so are we saved. Rescued from damnation by the shedding of Christ’s blood so that we might be returned to the fold from whence we were once severed and brought to live with and worship Father God in eternal heavenly splendor.”

“Oh, right,” I said.

“That’s why I’m able to see my mother’s passing as a testament to His enduring love and faithfulness in bringing His children, whom He cherishes regardless of their creed, age, sexual orientation or other transgressions, to a higher plane of harmony.”

My father removed his garish yellow hat and beat it against the window on his left side, as if trying to force the thunderheads from the sky while they stalked across it. His hair swirled in a chock-a-block of gray.

“Make no mistake, for son, Jesus can resurrect the dead. Do you not know that if it were in accordance with His will, which it ain’t, but if it was His will, He could bring her back this very instant, so great is His sovereign might? But your grandmother is resting in His arms now, which is His will, and there’s a lesson to be learned here as a result. Do you understand?”

I told him that I did, although I had stopped trying to follow his logic at that point.

“As believers, as those born again, son, we can find peace in Him, and place our trust in Him.” My father cleared his throat. “That’s my comfort in these hours, these times of mourning. That is our comfort. Mine, yours, and all of ours.”

He replaced his hat as Beckwourth Pass went drifting through his reflection on the surface of the windshield and the desert landscape pulled itself near to the asphalt. Sand rattled in the chaparral, spilling across the highway’s single northbound lane. California wavered into view.

We braked at the border as a patrol officer in a tan rain slicker stepped out of his roadside kiosk and gestured for us to stop. My father cranked his window down and the man leaned in, mirrored sunglasses inching down the protractor of his nose.

“Afternoon,” his voice floated out, while his eyes chipped away at the interior of the truck’s cabin like twin chisels. “Or shee-eee-it, nearly dusk I guess.” He reentered the glassed-in booth, turned pages on a clipboard with feigned purpose, and fumbled beneath his protective gear for something to write with. “Do you have any produce to claim?” he asked, licking his lips as if the question were delicious.

My father chuckled: “Just some Granny Smiths.”

“Granny Smiths?” With his teeth he pried the cap from his pen and suspended it over the legal pad on his clipboard. “And just so that we’re on the same page, those are?”

“Well, uh, green apples, of course,” my father replied, “but I brought these from Lassen County just this morning. Say, looks like rain a-coming our way for certain.”

The officer snorted, glared at us over the rim of his Ray-Bans, drummed a slow and somber rendition of “Shave and a Haircut” on the clipboard with his pen, and waved us on.

“Strange individual,” my father remarked, as he rolled the window up, passed the booth and crossed the border, and I thought these the most insightful words he’d uttered all day.

The road poured out before us, California’s mountaintops slashing at the sky, and all at once—with an urgency I’d forgotten since the last time I’d seen it nearly ten years in the past—the forest rushed down from the foothills to cancel the desert. I felt Susanville, its dark tentacles probing the highway, seeking me out.

“But,” he added, “I suppose one of the Lord’s children, too."

[*]

Rain crashed headlong into the atmosphere and closed in around us as we passed Savoy Junction and the Feather River Byway. Earth deposits flushed across the gurgling concrete and broken noise pushed against the windows.

Somewhere up ahead—perhaps in the condo she had shared with my Uncle Dwight and his on-again/off-again wife Diane during the last four months of her existence, before pneumonia took control and strangled the life from her—my grandmother’s ash remains waited in a cardboard urn. I wondered what they’d look like, clumpy or fine, if they’d have an odor akin to that of wood-smoke or an ashtray, or if I’d see her image form in the dust as it was dumped into whichever body of water her two sons had agreed upon.

“Dad,” I said, “when are we going to do the spreading of grandma’s ashes?”

“Well, my brother is the one handling the scheduling, but it’s pretty much set for Tuesday, so after Christmas.” As was his custom, he emphasized the “Christ” to make clear exactly whose birth he was celebrating and looked over at me with a slight grin. “You still working on that eulogy, huh, son?”

“A little. I’m not finished yet.”

“It’s really the only time the whole family will be in Susanville at the same time, Sten and Cecil included. Edith too, if she can unglue herself from Frankie for a few seconds. But he’s invited too, I suppose.”

“Who’s Frankie?”

“Edith’s boyfriend, obviously,” my father said. “Duh.”

I guess she gave up on getting with Keanu Reeves, I thought. End of an era.

“Your uncle Dwight will bring the urn on down from Chico, and we already decided on Susan River as the place to lay her ashes to rest. Go to that little restaurant across from the bowling alley afterward, probably. El Buen Burrito de Mexico or whatever it is they call it. Your grandmother loved Mexican food, so it only makes sense. You like it, huh, son?”

“Mexican food. Yeah,” I said. “Del Taco.”

My father said: “It will be like a family reunion kind of."

“On Tuesday.”

“Haven’t had a get together like that for quite a while.”

“Tuesday,” I said.

“Haven’t been able to do it, since you don’t, uh, visit anymore, Not since that summer when you were fourteen.”

“Fifteen,” I said. “Tuesday for the dedication, right?”

“Tuesday.” He cleared his throat. “If not then, Wednesday.”

“Wednesday? No, it has to be Tuesday.”

“Huh, son? What are you talking about?”

“You know that I’m driving home on Wednesday,” I said, “and I’m leaving early. Like four-in-the-morning early.”

“Wait, you’re not gonna be here for New Years?”

“I told you over the phone. I only have a week, and I have to be back for work Thursday morning. It was hard enough to get time off for Christmas. I made it a point to come for the dedication.”

“Ri-i-i-i-ight,” my father said. “And I thought you came for the car your stepmother and I purchased for you.”

“That, too,” I admitted.

“Well, we worked around your schedule, son.”

“Really? Because it doesn’t feel like you did.”

My father squeezed my shoulder. “Regardless, I was hoping we could ring in the ol’ new Millennium together, son. I mean, two-triple aught, it’s a special event.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I have to go back. So, I’m going.”

“Devine will be disappointed.”

Right, I thought. I’m sure my bitch of a stepmother will be incon-fucking-solable.

“Well, you won’t miss out, one way or another.” Gravel clattered in the wheel wells as my father eased the truck onto the highway’s shoulder and put it in park. “The ceremony surely will commence in a time that will not inconvenience everyone, all to the glory of God, and His glory will shine o’er the sorrow death doth bring to the doorstep of our hearts, for at that hour our mourning is no more, and her passage from this world to the heavenly plane is a new stage, a new chapter, a time for us to bask and bathe in the Redeemer’s glory anew.” He sighed, opened the truck’s door and swung one skinny leg out. “I gotta take a piss.”

The engine sputtered and quaked, headlamps battering through the darkness gathering on the highway. My father ventured a few paces from the side of the road and into a blackness that spread over him like disfigured hands as the rain soaked away on the windshield, wiper blades squelching out their staccato beat.

Finishing with a quick two-step, my father bounded back to the truck, the blue polo shirt he wore—with his first initial, Q, embroidered over the left breast pocket—clinging to his aged body.

“Whooo-wee! Looks like you brought the bad weather with you, son,” he said, as he slid into his seat and pulled the door closed behind him. “I haven’t seen it rain like this all year, but if you’re hoping for some snow this Christmas, weather like this here is a good indication we may get a dusting yet.” He shook his hat out, spraying water across the steering column, rivulets flowing down the wrinkled flesh of his arms with their bruises, scars, swollen veins and tangles of white hair.

“Whooo-wee!” he exclaimed again, throwing in a shiver that appeared to be purely theatrical in nature.

I told him it had been snowing when I landed.

“Huh, son? A-snowing where?”

“In Reno.”

“No,” he said.

“I saw it from the plane.”

My father coughed. “Ri-i-i-i-ight, the plane. It’s been snowing for weeks up in the mountains and the outskirts but hasn’t hit Susanville just yet. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“I wouldn’t mind a white Xmas,” I said, and regretted it at once. I had never considered using the abbreviation before—verbally or otherwise—and had no idea what had compelled me to employ it.

My father’s eyes widened, and I saw red striae emerge from behind the collar of his shirt and ascend the cords in his neck as his voice rose against me in anger for the first time in close to a decade, when he’d caught me scrawling NATAS on the canvas of my high-top sneakers. He slammed his hat against the dashboard where it ricocheted off, hooking around the gearshift, and I could almost sense the moisture on his skin sizzling and turning to vapor.

“Xmas!” he spat. “I can barely bring myself to repeat it. Have you not been listening to a thing I’ve said?”

Isn’t that obvious? I thought.

“Christmas, son! Christ! Without Christ—Jesus Christ—and the miracle of His birth, this holiday is empty. Worthless and commercial and entirely without meaning. If not for the womb of the Virgin Mary bringing Him as an infant onto this earthly plane, plus His crucifixion which was preordained on that fateful Bethlehem night, where would we be? Where do you think we’d be?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Hell!” my father bellowed. “Hell is where we’d be! Gnashing our teeth in the bowels of eternal fire while the Prince of Darkness stokes the mothering flames!”

He pinned me with his eyes, the sound of rain pummeling the roof like metallic applause. The breakdown lane flooded, the road sloshed, the forest shook up and down the mountains.

“Must have heard that from your mother, huh, son?” my father said, the brimstone fading from his voice as he averted his face. “Just utter disregard for the most significant element of this holiday’s title in order save a few seconds. That sounds like Joyce to me.”

“I don’t know, Dad. I mean, it’s a common expression.”

“Figures. The world we live in now, I suppose, huh, son?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

My father cleared his throat and sniffed once. “Just,” he said, “don’t be unmindful of His sacrifice. Remain pure, I beseech you, in your heart and mind, like I am. I pray that I might be an example to you, a model for how to live a holy existence, for there’s no greater calling than that which comes by way of servitude, and we all must aspire to that.”

He shifted the truck into first gear and lurched back onto US 395, the headlight beams shuddering across the asphalt. Illuminated shards of rain fired through the downpour like glowing bullets.

“Jesus Christ,” my father said.

“Huh?”

“Remember what He did for you, son. His life for all of our sins. Remember the sacrifice that He made for you.”

“Yeah,” I replied.

[*]

We passed through the town of Doyle, smudged and nearly lost to the pull and suck of the rain, over Herlong Junction and past the Sierra Army Depot and training camp, where networks of yellow light squirmed in the fields and gunfire cracked the frame of the sky. Distorted noise roiled around us as Last Chance Creek lashed at the highway, and Honey Lake hauled its basin in from the darkness of prairies thrashing in the storm.

My father took the exit for Janesville, and we followed South Church Street to the Pilot service station. He handed me thirty dollars to fill the gas tank, and as I returned from paying the spectral, green-visored attendant, I watched my father lift a squeegee from its plastic trough and study the rubber blade. He’d donned his hat once more but had reversed it, and tucked silver strands of hair behind the sweatband with one hand while brandishing the dripping instrument with his other.

“Why even bother?” I asked, seeking shelter beneath the pump’s concrete canopy. I could smell the caustic stench of petrochemicals curling up from the pavement as the wind boxed and shoved the rain around. “The windows are already clean from the storm.” 

Seeming unable to hear me over the downpour, my father smacked the sponge against the windshield, smearing dirty water across its surface. He raised the arms of the wiper blades and scrubbed furiously beneath them, as if taking umbrage against filth that was both impervious to a combination of soap with liquid and invisible to the untrained eye.

When finished, he replaced the squeegee and looked in my direction, although his eyes appeared to steer beyond me and veer off into the rain.

“My hands are dirty,” he said.

All fervor and evangelical bluster had departed his speech, and the lost childlike quality of his voice sent a chill rocketing up and down my spine. Lyrics from a Nina Simone song my grandmother used to croak while “gimping around”—as I’d often heard her refer to it—in her kitchen stole across my brain, laced with a sense of déjà vu:

Let the wind blo-o-o-o-ow

Through your heart

The lines surrounding my father’s mouth twitched once, twice, and suddenly he grabbed the handle of the squeegee, flung it over one shoulder, and plunged both hands into the trough, submerging them deep as possible. Black washing fluid spilled onto the cement as he worked his arms back and forth, gritting his teeth and grunting with the effort, before yanking them out and rubbing his speckled palms together. He wiped his hands on his shirt, dead insects falling at his feet as the squeegee tumbled across the parking lot and went skittering into the intersection.

“Well, son of mine,” my father said, eyes snapping back to focus on me and the deep register of his diction sliding back into place.

“You okay, Dad?”

“Huh, son?”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeppers,” he said. “So go on ahead and pump premium. The holy Pastoralist, He hath created high grade petroleum for the benefit of His flock.”

He planted one moist, grimy hand on my shoulder, clamped down, and used his other to tousle my hair.

[*]

Looming before us—scratching its cold vinyl against the clouds—the Diamond Mountain Range ripped the storm apart. With one great swooooosh we were squeezed out into a clear, wet scene. Above us, the glittering baldachin of the stars expelled smudges of ashy light, and my father switched the windshield wipers off, muttering: “The Lord is good.”

The arterial roads of Buntingville pumped black concrete into the vein of the highway unfurling in front of us, and my father sunk one elbow into my ribs. “We’re almost there,” he said, like an excitable child. “See? Johnstonville.”

I traced the knurls and knobs of his outstretched index finger to a huddle of structures on the horizon, darkened and secretive behind a copse of wasted roadside trees.

“Johnstonville,” I repeated. “Yeah, I see it.”

My father brought the flat of his greasy hand down against the steering wheel, striking it twice. The orange light in the gauge housing trembled. “And after Johnstonville, after that—”

From beyond the blacked-out buildings and grottos of Johnstonville, a phosphorescent glow began its slow pulsating, and I imagined before me a colossal xylophone piecing together, its colored bars ringing and sending mangled notes across the sky.

After that, my mind insisted, comes Susanville.

“—after that, son, we’ll be there.”