Interstate Read online

  For weeks later she has dreams almost every other night concerning her father—in one he says “Save me, I’m drowning in dirt,” in another he greets her with a formal handshake while she has her arms out for a hug and kiss, asks her to cup her hands, she does and he spoons a pyramid of earth in each palm and says “One more time?” in another she gets a telegram saying “My dearest child, I am completely in pieces and unmotivatedly scatterbrained, is there no rhyme not to say a season why you’re also not distraught, my deepest regards to those authorities above who might be able to do something to redress this, your loving poppy, Nat,” in another he’s a boy of about six sitting on her lap and she’s supposed to be his mother she thinks in the dream “but how’s that? since he’s this and I’m his,” when he says “Mamma grammar, divided we’re lame, together we contaminated, do you know that hysterical smote?—who said it second? ah, I could never teach you nuttin’,” and dives off into a hole in the sofa and disappears, in another he appears in the distance riding a horse, shouts “Hi-ho, my Margo, hi-ho,” and rides closer waving a sword over his head, stops under her bedroom window still shouting hi-ho, her husband stirs in bed m the dream and says in his sleep “Largo, heed the drosses, need the worms, give them crosses, sieve the burns,” she says “Glendon, wake up, be up, we’ve got to start making some sense,” and to her father from bed “Daddy, hide away, now, bow,” and her father says from below, still seated on the horse but sword sheathed, “Dearest Julie, I mean my darling Margo, I’m so lonesome, separated, throw me a rope, I want to crawl up and join you,” same night in another dream he’s standing talking to her cordially, seems like an art opening at a gallery, then a cocktail party at her home, he seems to be a friend of a couple she invited and he clinks her glass with his and says “So how’s the weather up there?” “Am I that tall to you?” “I’m talking real weather, lady: shrouds, tornadoes, lightning storms,” “Excuse me but who brought you, the Kahns, the Kanes?” “I’m still asking weather, missus, weather,” “Weather? where? we’re both in the same spot and consanguineous, Father, indoors,” “Hardly, earthly, cementally, it’s as dark as a person can see, though I love you neverthebestly, I mean beastly,” then he suddenly becomes a rat, same size and color as one but with her father’s face, and leaps onto her chest and starts scratching at her eyes and she swats it off and runs out of the house, her husband in pajamas, when in her dream she thinks “That’s funny, he only sleeps nude,” yelling from their bedroom window “Come back, he’s scampering up the vines, I told you we should’ve cut them down, now he’s coming through the window, don’t leave me be a solitary speck with him, he still has all his teeth and the rat can bite,” in another her father’s a mosquito buzzing around her head and she says “Stay away, now stay away—okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you, for I can get murderously allergic to bugs, having attacks like you’ve never seen,” and slaps at it but keeps missing, then she doesn’t see or hear it and while she’s looking around and listening for it it lands on her arm, she watches it stick its proboscis in, “Wait till it’s drawing blood,” she thinks, “even if there is some pain it’ll be worth it,” counts to six, whispers “Time,” and slaps it hard and lifts her hand to see what she thinks will be its squished bloody carcass even if it is a male, but nothing’s there and she yells “Damn air pockets, damned if they’re there, damned if they’re not, but I still might have nipped its tip if not flattened it and it’s dead or dying on the floor and all I got to do is step on it,” when it starts buzzing around her head and she says “I can take it, you don’t bother me so don’t think you do, I can take much more than this so you’ll just have to do your sneaky biting and then buzz away on your own, for I’m not wasting another wave on you,” in another she’s sleeping alone and he pushes open her bedroom door with his head and crawls into the room and up to her ear and says into it “I miss you, I miss your sis most persistently not to mention you, what dries up isn’t a scream, what cries down isn’t a dream, I can come up with these long after you’re sufficiently sick of them and me, fried, dried, you got it, so make more meaning out of me, my sweet, release me, let me already Margo,” and she says in her dream half asleep “But it’s you, goddamnit, you, I did everything good I could, cried, dried, so all right, didn’t fly, but that’s over and done with so now let me sleep,” and her eyes close and in her dream-sleep she dreams of hovering butterflies and bees, a flower garden with a deer eating the sweet peas, and a few hundred feet behind it an old barn with several big holes in the roof and its doors off and a buggy in a cow stall showing through and nothing else around but pasture with the tall grass being jerked by the wind, and she thinks “Peaceful, I like it, even the peas, by God, even the sky, blue with downy clouds, and thank goodness, nothing of him,” in another she and a grownup Julie enter an empty cottage she and her family rent for two weeks every summer, wonders where’s the ramshackle furniture that practically makes the place in addition to the missing woodstove and the picture postcards of artworks she’s tacked to the door frames and the owner till now hasn’t taken off, hears tapping under the floor and says “What’s that?” “What’s up?” Julie says, “I don’t hear or see anything,” “That tap-tap, tap-tap, it’s even louder now and could be a code of some sort, Morse, lost, from under the floorboards,” and Julie says “You’re seeing things again, hon, for what floor, who boards?” and she says “And pardon me, my nearest miss, but you’ve either lost all your sensory powers or I don’t know what, lower powers, infrapowers,” and says to the floor “Tell her in taps or words if there is someone down there for I don’t want to appear hard of feeling,” and he says “Yeah, it’s me, Daddy, to you both though you’re so much apart, hidden from you while I’m hiding from one of the Axis, and if they find me, the Nazis particularly, I’ll be pitched into an infinite dip like everyone else of my kind, first shot, stabbed or gassed or eaten by dogs or two of those or three,” “Maybe Julie can help you, sir, but I’ve got to inform you I’m not that sort of daughter and don’t see how I could ever be, in fact now that I know you’re there and wanted, if I don’t say anything I’ll be risking all our lives for yours—even mine, let me tell ya, which I have to admit is to me of much less significance, feeling deep down that being last on line and kind’s the only thing,” “Please, enough with heartfeltness and panoplied philosophies, pry open the fucking boards, help me out and to get away for I’m too goddamn weak to, and take me to my mother cunt where there are no such things as axioms and Nazis, then I’ll be free and never again need to ask you for anything for me,” “No can do,” and Julie says “Who you speaking to, hon, me?” and she says “Yup, you, nope, me, maybe, unclear, over, under,” in another she draws up a pail from a well and he’s cramped into it, chin pinned to his knees, rubbing his knuckles and looking asleep, pail’s seams stretched and buckling, in another he says to her in a barrens with no houses or other people around “The weather’s been so inclement out here, I can’t see any shooting stars this year, there are only another few days till the peak of the shower’s over, I wish I could go back to where I started from to see it better, would you buy me a ticket?”

  Next morning she says to Glen “Again, another one of those deadly daddy dreams, what gives with them? last night there might have been two, maybe three—you know, I really can’t take it anymore, I mean I can probably take it so long as I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it, but I don’t want to take it anymore, goddamn guy won’t leave me alone and I think I know what it all means, not ‘goddamn,’ that’s just what was in my last dream or one I remember as last, the goddamn cursing, but you know what I mean, and it’s not, I swear—how do you like that? ‘swear,’ ‘cursing’—but it’s not that I believe in spirits or anything like that, and I’m aware that cementarians or something—that’s from another dream about graveyards, the made-up word I mean if it is made up—don’t stick much of the cremated person’s dust into those soup cans, maybe a tenth of it someone in the know once said, so for me perhaps one fifth f
or two cans, but I almost feel that his ashes are talking to me in their way, or his spirit’s doing the talking for his ashes, or it’s neither of those, which is probably the case, for things like that can’t be, can they? and it’s just my mind which I don’t think will be normally composed for months unless I get his ashes and dust and bone fragments and eyeballs, for christsake, and whatever back together again, two cans, I don’t plan to mix them and put them in one, that’d be too complicated and messy and probably smelly and not something I’d ask anyone to do and I certainly won’t, but one on top of the other or side by side but at least as close as two cans can be in the same burying place,” and he says “So you have to do something about it, what else can I say?” and she says “Good advertisement for plane travel and what I was thinking myself, you think you can handle the boys for up to two days?” and calls work and says she won’t be in today and possibly the next and drives to the cemetery, at the office there asks if she may dig the can up herself, she knows exactly where it is and she brought a garden trowel for the work, and the person in charge says they’d get into all sorts of difficulties with the gravediggers’ union if they let her do anything with the trowel but fluff up the earth a little around the privets or dig up some weeds and she says “Good, so a professional digger will have to do it, I don’t care what the charge so long as it’s done in the next hour though I hope you’ll be fair, this isn’t a casket I’m asking you to unearth but a small can which is maybe at the most, or was when we put it there, a foot and a half underground,” gravedigger’s taken off another job and can’s dug up and she takes it home in the shoebox she came with, wraps it in several layers of aluminum foil and plastic produce bags, phones her father’s cemetery and tells them what she’s coming for and they say it’s all right though of course there’ll have to be some costs, phones her travel agent, arranges for a friend to be home when the kids get there and calls Glen to say she’s leaving now, “I’ve been thinking,” he says and she says “My mind’s made up so don’t try to change it,” “It’s not that but can’t it wait till the weekend when I’ll be freer to take care of the kids and your leaving won’t be such a shock to them and you also might have had more time to think about it, because for all you know your bad dreams might end for good here tonight,” “I’ve already made all the arrangements, not that anything like that can’t be changed, but I don’t want to keep the can around the house for that long, it wouldn’t be right for the kids or good for me, I also don’t see myself bringing it back to the cemetery and asking them to rebury it, so I just want to get the whole thing done with and if all goes well I’ll be home tomorrow around midafternoon,” drives to the airport, flies east with the wrapped can in her carry-on bag, stays at a hotel near the airport, the can in the bathtub behind the drawn shower curtain while she sleeps, gets up early and doesn’t remember having any dreams about her father or Julie or graves or holes or anything alluding to them, breakfasts and cabs to the cemetery and tells one of the owners she doesn’t know where the other can’s buried except that it’s around her sister’s grave so if they don’t have any record of the exact location, which isn’t to say the can couldn’t have shifted underground, they’ll probably have to go get a gravedigger to search for it, something, she said, they probably would have done anyway what with the possible labor trouble with the gravediggers’ union, while two men poke around Julie’s grave with poles she thinks of her and closes her eyes and says very low “You know, I don’t pray, I mean, never, I’m telling you, maybe not since I was a little girl and was afraid of God and thought he’d kill me if I didn’t pray so I felt forced to, but I’m doing it now for you, my darling sister, so if you’re near and you hear me please know I love you and have always loved you more than I can say or can express in any kind of way and feel you got the rawest deal anyone could get in this world and I only hope it never hurt and that things where you are now are all right for you, and I’m sorry I haven’t been out to see you since I don’t know how many years ago, when I was still a teen, I think, the last time, but I live far away and it isn’t easy but that’s no excuse for all those years, and I miss you too, meaning I miss you much the way Dad always used to say he did, said it in words and letters to me and also in my dreams since he died how he missed me but especially you, Mom you must know how much she loves you for I know how often she visits you even though she lives a few hundred miles away, and of course you know what I’m doing today and if you don’t it’s that now all of his remains or what’s left of them and I’m hoping his spirit too if there is one will be beside you, and I also think so much of what it might have been for me if you had lived, this I’ve been thinking since a little after you were killed and have never really stopped thinking it since, been for us both, really, both, so, that’s enough, there could be more but I don’t think I can go on any further, I hope you heard if you’re there or the essence of the message got through to you or just got to you or just eventually does in some way, essence or the whole,” cries, someone pats her shoulder but she doesn’t see who, breaks down, walks off by herself to be alone, wishes she’d brought flowers for Julie and her father and grandparents whom she never knew, thinks she saw a flower stall about a half-mile down the road from the cemetery but too late for that and she picks some flowers bordering another burial place out of view of Julie’s grave, there are lots of them around this plot and they seem like fast-growing and abundant healthy flowers so she doesn’t think the grave owners would mind, goes back to her family’s gravesite, “Found it,” one of the grave diggers says while she’s arranging some flowers on her grandmother’s grave and he holds up a rusting can, same size and kind as the one she has in her handbag, she says “Think it’d be all right if I do the honors?—it’s what I came for,” “Your privilege, I guess, I’ve no objections, and hole’s not so wide or deep as for you to fall in,” she asks him to make the hole a bit wider, unwraps her can, switches around the cans behind her back till she doesn’t know which one is which, doesn’t look at them till she sees just their tops in the ground, buries them side by side and touching each other, pushes the dirt over them till the hole’s filled, tamps the earth around it till it’s flat and says “Okay, Dad, now rest in peace,” and goes back to the cemetery office and asks the receptionist there to call a cab to take her to the airport.

  INTERSTATE 2

  Driving home, thinking of his mother and him when he was little more than a baby, a photo. First only his mother for a moment. Doesn’t know where the thought came from or why the picture popped in. But suddenly—forgets what he was thinking of just before her, probably nothing much of anything—there was her face and neck and open-collar top of the summer dress she was wearing in the photo and then the whole photo, backdrop and concrete ground and crossed knees included, her shoes and his bare feet, even the white border or frame or outline with the notched or jagged edges or whatever one calls them when they’re by design kind of frayed, the style for years then, which he knows has a name because he recently read it in an article on photography but forgets or never recorded it in his head. Something he saw on the road set off the thought? He was thinking, he now remembers, of the car radio, what the call numbers were, if that’s what they’re called, of the public radio station of the little state he was driving through, 90.1 or 90.3 or 89.3 or 5, which he somehow thinks is one of them from the trip up a couple of days ago or should he try to find the public station of the much larger state bordering this one, which could also be one of those, when the photo first appeared to him. Bumper sticker “Save the whales, harpoon a fat chick” was the last one he noticed or remembers. Few minutes ago few miles back. But that’d have nothing to do with his mother since she was, till she started dying and became gaunt, slender all her life, even in her child photos, and though “chick” could relate to him in just his age in the photo, he doubts it was that. Said to himself when he saw the sticker “Stupid, how can a guy drive with it on his car? Stamps him as offensively dumb. Or if he’s driving someo
ne else’s car, how can he without feeling embarrassed unless he also thinks it’s funny? But could be he never noticed it or realized, if it was someone else’s car or maybe even in all the time he owned the car, if he’d bought it used with the sticker on, what it means.” So not that one and no billboards he can recall or signs of any kind along the road and nothing on the radio, because up to about an hour before the thought he only had on solo piano and harpsichord tapes, and nothing about the music or instruments could relate, since his mother didn’t like that kind or play. Also no people in passing cars he can remember reminding him of his mother or her sort of pompadour hairstyle in the photo or her clothes or anything like that when she was that age, early thirties, or him as a toddler or just his mother, period, at any age, even when she was home and then in the hospital dying. He thinks “toddler” ‘s the right word for someone just under or around one. Or anything obvious or just somewhat concealed he saw or thought suggesting that particular photo, so maybe it was something from underneath. But to be a toddler don’t you have to be up and sort of walking with short tottering steps? And he wasn’t walking or even standing on his own when that picture was taken, his mother said, which was why she was holding him sitting up in her lap. He’d learned to walk and talk late. Maybe his kids playing or squabbling—but you don’t learn to talk, maybe not even to walk, and if you’re delayed it’s only because you started late. Or for a while the youngest angelically sleeping or something they said or did in back of the car or just being there with him acting as both mommy and daddy today and for the next few days had something to do with it in some way, but he doesn’t see how one of those would. Doesn’t know where the photo is now. Not among the ones he owns. Those he goes through about twice a year, either because he happens to come upon the two toiletry cases they’re in in his desk at home—three to four times a year’s more like it—when he’s searching for something else in the drawer or because he wants to look at his kids when they were younger or babies or just-borns in the hospital that day or next or his wife at their marriage party they gave or a couple of years before that or after, before the kids were born, and especially sometimes the two nude Polaroids of her he took when she was eight months pregnant with their first and had breasts twice the size they usually are and the only shots of her, at least one of them, other’s just shadow, with pubic hair. His mother’s photographs, if he doesn’t have them, are all gone, so it’s gone, though he doesn’t know how he let that happen. Particularly this one and a number of other old to ancient ones—his parents as children, his father as a lifeguard and in the army, their marriage photo and his mother’s first day at work in a bakery when she was fifteen, her parents here and in their original country, her grandparents only there, some with them young and one with her grandmother or grandfather with his or her parents and grandparents, but was photography even born then or that advanced where one could take family portraits? That article he read said something about it but he forgets what, though he thinks the reason he got it out of the library was to find out. But the missing photographs had something to do with a plastic bag they were in in her basement where most got damaged or ruined by the moisture down there along with being in the enclosed bag for so many years, making it even worse. So he threw most of these out, didn’t he?—not his infant one, which wasn’t among them, but those where there were no faces anymore and the photographs were mostly mold. He was in shorts in the photo, no shirt on, no doubt diapers underneath, the shorts of course. Whenever he had a shirt on, no matter how hot the day, then underneath it an under one, for that’s how his mother was right into his teens. Backs of her fingers clinging to him around the chest, short-sleeved summer print dress, she looked so beautiful, even with what to him seemed like too much lipstick and showing too many big teeth and the comical hair. She was a beauty all right, no question of it, dark, hair and skin, small features, high cheeks, gracefully slim, though big breasts in the photo because she was probably still suckling him, or he suckling, she nursing, since hers, unlike his wife’s, were any other time pretty small. Less chance of breast cancer he once overheard her say, so of course she dies of it, where even the little ones she had had to be lopped off. “If I hadn’t nursed you I bet I would’ve been spared,” she said, “not that I’m blaming anyone. I wanted the experience if I was only going to have this one child and it was also then the rage.” He said he thought that nursing gives one a better chance of avoiding breast cancer, but read that ten to twenty years before he said it and wonders if doctors still think it’s true. Or was he thinking of prostate cancer and masturbating, but anyway, maybe her breasts could be the “whales” and “fat” and he the “chick,” if that’s the way the mind works, or just his, but too far-fetched so seriously doubts it. Taken in the narrow backyard of their apartment at the time. First-floor floor-through. Tall green wooden fence behind them, though photo was black and white, painted that color to simulate grass and leaves, she said, couple of clay pots hooked on nails on the fence with some kind of ivy inside. All the vegetation they had back there except for a few plants from grapefruit seeds in coffee and big juice cans and an ailanthus tree from a neighbor’s yard covering part of theirs, none of that in the photo. Summer deck chair she’s sitting on, the attached foot and leg rest. Lots of curly hair, both, or hers more wavy than curly, his a bit lighter than hers. Who took it? Not his father. No matter how simple the camera, and he thinks the only kind they ever had, and they got a second when the first broke, was where you pressed a button and the front part, looking like a bellows, sprung open. His father didn’t make coffee, toast breads, boil eggs, change pillowcases, draw blinds, take pictures, work the TV, line the garbage pail with newspaper, didn’t even put in lightbulbs—he said he usually got the screwing-in part caught and was afraid if it shorted he’d have to disconnect and even change a fuse, besides not knowing how to open the stepladder to reach the socket. “I’m inept—how do you like that word?—at everything but my work and getting to and from it,” was how he liked to phrase it whenever she asked him to do a chore, and which she said was his alibi for doing nothing around the house as if he thinks his son and she are his slaves. But his light to lighter hair. She in fact used to say he was blond till he was five or six, “what they call a towhead in other religions,” but he never saw any evidence of it. No envelopes with hair, or photos, and none of his relatives remembered him that way. Also used to say his eyes were blue, at least a bluish green, till he was three, but his father said that was hooey and just another example of her wanting to think of him as some rich little patrician kid just as she’d like to see herself as a rolling-in-dough old-money lady. “Anyone for Jell-O?” his father liked to joke when he thought she was putting on an aristocratic voice or even an English one and manner. “Crickets, anyone?” was another, hand raised as if he had a tennis racket in it. “Then rickets, rockets?” till she told him to cut it out—her voice and accent, if she had one, were as regular and natural as anyone’s and she was a person without airs. “What are some other examples?” he asked his father and remembers him saying—they were sitting in the sand, no blanket or towel under them, maybe their one time at the ocean together like that, meaning actually down at the water and not on a boardwalk or seeing it from a bungalow deck—where he can even remember his father’s bathing suit and without summer sandals or shoes or just socks, which means of course how long had his father had that suit before he saw it?—maybe from before their marriage, so twenty to twenty-five years? A suit can stay in style as long as that? Just stay in a drawer without being moth-eaten? Anyway, it’s—bathing suit and beach—they’re, rather, what made that time in the sand especially memorable, though he forgets what beach it was—if it really was an ocean and not a lake—even what state it was in. Did they take a long car trip one summer, or just a short one, a week, two, a few days? Certainly one to Canada and back or cross-country or tour of the South, let’s say, he’d have no problem remembering. And it had to be some time when he was between ten,
he’d say, the way he sees it in his head, and his early teens. Just him and his father or with his mother but she wasn’t with them on the beach that day, or maybe she was, strolling along it or wading or swimming or going for refreshments or back to their cabana to change if there was one. He tries to remember it, her in a swimsuit, which wasn’t so rare, the three of them on the beach or walking back from it to the car or someplace or even looking for seastones or shells along the water, but nothing comes. A trip like that, place to place, lake to lake, ocean to lake or whatever…And it could have been after Labor Day for several days, or Indian summer October because his father couldn’t get away sooner and they took him out of school that one time for it, but an event like that he’d remember easily. But one night here and other there, since there were so few trips of any extent with them—he can’t right now remember one, so maybe there was none, though does remember summer vacations for two weeks to a month in various rented bungalows and once in the mountains with them with an aunt who rented one—but anyway he wouldn’t think he’d forget a fairly to semifairly long car trip like that, especially if it was just his father and him traveling together, when a car pulls up, he looks at it after a while because it stays even with his but is in the passing lane. Man in the passenger seat is staring at him when he turns to it and he nods with no expression and man smiles and he smiles back and goes back to his no-expression and quickly looks front and thinks What gives with this guy? Funny look, even a menacing one, and kind of a sinister smile. Nah, he’s being paranoid again. Gets like that a lot, or just sometimes. It’s living in the city and reading its papers and occasionally seeing its TV news, or maybe just having been brought up in one and in a rougher city than his now and often in a tough neighborhood or bordering on one. But then it was different, isn’t that what they always say? But it really wasn’t. There were plenty of violent gangs, kids occasionally mugged you on the street in daylight and tried to bugger you in the boys’ room in high school or that’s what they said they were going to do, and some of them who you even knew beat the shit out of you if you so much as gave them what they thought was a dirty look. But at least they didn’t shoot you on the spot over nothing or at least not with anything more sophisticated than a zip gun, which half the time blew up in their faces instead. But he sees a look like this, he thinks he’s being threatened, when a couple of times it turned out the other person thought his look was threatening him. That mean the other person’s paranoid too? He’ll have to think about that. It could be that because he felt threatened he started to look threatening and that’s when the other guy felt threatened, but who knows. But with this one, and why don’t they move ahead instead of staying exactly even with him, or fall back and get behind him if they’re not going to pass? Maybe this is the speed the driver’s settled on as the fastest he can go without being pulled over, sixty-five on a fifty-five-miles-per-hour road, and he like a lot of drivers likes to drive in the passing lane. If another car pulls up behind his and wants to pass, he’ll move over to the next middle lane. But that is paranoia, isn’t it: someone you think’s threatening you when he’s not? His wife says it’s just a projection of his own hostility, something she thought up or read but those were her exact words, and maybe it is but at the time he told her that was just a lot of Freudian crap, or Jungian or Rankian or whoever he used, without knowing much about Freud and nothing about the others. His kids know the word? Bets not, or not the youngest. With this man though, and car’s still even with his and when he turns to it the man’s staring at him kind of creepily again, and he nods and looks front—maybe, but he doubts it, but maybe he’s just a character who doesn’t know how to smile right or look nicely at anyone he doesn’t want to con or get something from or is trying out his creep look on him for someone else he’s going to really do in later on and could be driving to now. Or else he’s carrying out some sort of grudge on him meant for someone else—maybe even the driver—but is doing it in this car-quick kind of distant or removed or anonymous way. For it’s just two cars driving fast next to each other on a major highway for a few miles and then in another minute or two one of them will speed up or drop back or exit and they won’t see each other again. Thinks of looking over again, but maybe he shouldn’t for if the man really has nothing against him and it’s just the unfortunate way he looks or even some facial paralysis making him stare or smile like that, but probably not, then he might start getting angry at him for constantly turning his way, like “Who you looking at, sucker—something you see you don’t like?” But looks anyway, almost in hopes of finding the guy minding his own business, and there’s that same awful smile and their car is much closer now, might even be straddling the dividing line—it is, he sees, by a little—and the man if he leaned out of it and stretched his arm could almost touch his car. “Hey, watch out, you’re too near,” he says, but the man’s window is up while his is down and the man says “What?” and actually smiles nice and looks pleasant when he says it and indicates with his hand for him to roll his window down. Down? What’s he mean? His is up and mine’s down. Forget it, guy’s a wise guy or stupid or just nuts but more likely just a wise guy and driver doesn’t seem any better, nodding at him now but with this look of seriousness and with his right hand, while he holds the wheel with his left, making a rolling-down motion. He nods, looks front and steers the car to the right till it’s almost straddling the line, and slows down to around fifty.