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The Higher You Go
The van lurched as Colin passed sedan and accelerated to 80. “We’re gonna make some cash, Jo. They got blue laws in St. Louis. We’ll be sellin the only beer inside a fifty miles!” Jo leaned her head against the glass and looked out at the smear of yellow fields. Since Mize had overdosed at one of the campgrounds behind them, Jo wanted to reach out the window, drag her finger along the speeding landscape and bring it to a stop. But Colin insisted that they go north. His hand had draped her hips; he put his forehead to hers, and told her that the money they made on this leg of the tour would pay for a trip anywhere she chose. “New Zealand, Jo. Remember that,” he said. For the first time since Mize’s death, Jo pictured the howling wild shore of Karekare, the rugged husk-colored scrubland. She knew they could get work in the orchards, earn enough money in a season to keep moving. It was a taut bright picture back home when she first conjured it, and long after the time it took to forget what was behind the last door she’d slammed. Living with her father, Jo had learned that survival required shutting down resistance to barbs of hostility; finding some pocket inside her imagination to dive into when sudden meteor showers of violence split the even sky. Her home was prone to abrupt changes in climate that observed no known pattern of physics. A thing set down and entrusted to the laws of inertia was likely as not to fly from its place while one checked her watch or glanced out the window. The sky was not always above though it could be once she habituated to searching the birdbath for the quivering light of stars. The thing called certain was as transient as its translation was demanded. This had the effect of making ordinary events seem bizarre to Jo. Walking downtown she sometimes wondered if she had slipped off to the circus, if PT Barnum weren’t up ahead peeking out from behind a doorjamb. She often cut school and wandered the streets paying more attention than she could have in class. Passersby dribbled pieces of conversation so that were deliriously peculiar. A man perched stiffly atop what looked to be a homemade bicycle and rode in circles mumbling repeatedly, “I know your race. Made of sheep!” Each little pilgrimage was delicious because so often she was afraid. Here, fear was tongue to laughter’s bell. Sometimes she kept walking to a farm past the town’s limit. Barefoot, she ran between rows of corn, the crisp leaves cutting her cheeks. Out of breath and unaccountably elated she stopped at the woods. Rivulets of moss green poured through the tops of trees silent burning trajectories to the ground. She had no preference for beauty. A wave of light falling on the bones of a dead baby bird could fill her eyes for days. The air above a swamp thick with flying things cold animate her imagination into autumn. But down the cracked cement squares of sidewalk, beneath the glare of a bare bulb, the meteors returned with such fury that Jo developed a knack for seeing the fist behind the flower and blood in any birth. Colin came into her world like an ambulance. He was visiting his cousin who grew weed in his kid’s backyard playhouse. One Thursday the summer after graduation, Jo walked down her front steps to buy a quarter bag with the first of her graduation money. Colin opened the door. Sunday morning she went home to grab her import CDs and her guitar. There they were; lumbering down the highway, passing packed churches, leaving a suffocating emptiness. She immediately loved the melting scroll of scenery that slid against her window, the swell of hope that came with ticking off the miles to the next town, looking up the highway, breathing out the names; Bible Hill, Tennessee; Panther Junction, Texas; Loving, New Mexico; Hatchie Bluff, Wyoming. She secretly enjoyed the open stares they drew in small towns and highway cafes. Necks above flannel collars, eyes beneath John Deere caps followed the sleepy, disheveled girl and the boy with an easy smile. In their wide caravan of friends, Colin’s uncomplicated manner and sure gait smoothed her uneven contact with others. Everyone knew Colin and he’s chosen her. Somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains they stopped at a 24-hour restaurant where Colin bought from a machine a sticker than said, The higher you go, the higher you get. They laughed at this as the van climbed up through the flame-colored leaves. They held hands because it was true. There was nothing in sight to quell the sunlight that had bled through their histories and revealed to each the other. They met Mize at a truck stop on the Florida-Alabama border. A storm off the coast was dumping heavy rains on the Gulf and making a quagmire of the interstate. Mize stood beneath the eaves as if he meant to stay dry, though he appeared unconcerned that the overflowing gutter was soaking his backpack. When they noted that he had neither cover nor companions, Colin ran through the downpour to lead the stranger to the van. He lit a glass pipe, passed it to Colin, and said, I asked the old guy if there was backroom or something I could crash in to wait out the storm. "Whadid he say?" asked Colin, inhaling deeply. Mize thought for a moment, assumed an expression of naïve perplexity, and said with a mock Southern drawl, "Mercy, no. Mercy, no, son." Jo and Colin laughed at the mime of the old man’s astonishment. Mize spoke with somnolent rhythm with no intention to entertain. People were place to him. Mountains, or urban skylines; furious sunsets, and bars at 8am were people who showed him kindness, or stole from him; who were desperate or tedious; boys who tried to seduce him, girls who passed out in the stairwell. He looked with real focus at a spot on front of him as he recalled these scenes, and to Jo it seemed as if he released on e tranquil breath between each word. Jo listened for a long time to him talk about a girlfriend out west only to realize later, that they hadn’t been out West at all, but Central America and she wasn’t his girlfriend but a woman in the market selling silver cuffs. Colin spoke as well, but whenever Mize came to the end of tale, Jo asked another open-ended question so he couldn’t as anything about her. Later, weary and grateful for the van’s hushed asylum, they listened to the rain and the shifting of the wind. When Colin and long disappeared to sleep and Jo hovered in the flaxen glow between the world and unconsciousness, she heard Mize say gently, I know you, sister. Mize traveled with Jo and Colin until his death. One night while Colin stayed behind at the show, Mize called at the couple’s tent. She lit a small candle and they leaned back to listen to music. It became clear that the whorls in her palms were mouths opening and opening, swallowing her into a familiar stripe of light where she wouldn’t be able to close her eyes. Rocking, she wailed at the walls of the tent. Mize listened, not disinterested. Colin, back from the show, entered. He held the back of her hand in his palm and patiently showed her how the skin stretched over the bones’ how each whorl was as singular as a wish, or a seed. He told her the past could not attach itself to her. If you’re going in, he said, I’m coming right after. In this way, he never failed to pull her back from the tiny fires in her brain. When dawn came buzzing past the stars, the mouths had been keening for hours, but her skin was slippery and the road was water. The next day Jo did not dream of Karekare – the roiling grace of its waves – but of the exquisite stillness of Mize’s body. His eyes had seemed to rest on some placid plane of composure she envied. He was found dead days later. If it was sad, it was part of life here, where so many had a stake in remembering a d a ritual to forget. Someone made the thin comment that the spirit of their friend would remain. The words bewildered Jo. Nothing is as vivid as gone. In her grief and guilt during the coming days, she lapsed into the old gloom. When his kisses and coaxing couldn’t cheer her, Colin brought her little packages wrapped in gossamer paper. It was late afternoon when they reached St. Louis. The crowd was huge, coming in every kind o vehicle down the access road that wrapped and crossed the blacktop parking lot. Colin unloaded tubs of iced beer and talked with enthusiasm about upcoming shows, setlists, and money to be made. Jo spoke suddenly, "It could have been you. Or me." Colin stopped working. “That’s not going to happen to us, Jo. I miss Mize but he took some stupid chances.” Colin paused to light a cigarette, and then said, "Could be he wanted to go." Jo remembered the night in her tent, how she’d given herself up to her fears. Mize had studied her with flaccid fascination, but there was nothing within or about him that related to her struggle between facing her memories and the magnetic spin of forgetting. What she had taken for his serenity was absence. He had already chosen. She spoke softly: "Maybe you could." Jo looked across the parking lot to a distant crest and saw that someone had built a fire. With her eyes on the small blaze, she swayed lightly on the shoulder of the road and tried to tie the moment to what she sensed stretched before her. She studied the wide, smooth ridges pressed in to the road by years of passage. As a row of cars approached, Colin quickly grabbed for her. She swung away, stumbling into the trickle of traffic. A car stopped suddenly, a few inches from where she passed. The dust carried with it a voice: Baby, where you goin. Jo’s body was already cleaving an arc in the evening. She walked, looking to her left, then right through the ginger colored air. It was an erotic expanse flanking the wire of survival. Its shoals and trenches were luminous but she’d gotten close enough to see that their candescence was a sleight of twilight, a gorgeous impotent luxury. The headlights ahead and around her fused in to a molten ribbon, a clear dauntless circle. She moved with its ebb and surge, not knowing if she was traveling toward a start horizon or the strum of her center but believing, and going, going. Back
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