The man is on the road and he drives through the Blue Ridge Mountains on his way to TN. It is late spring and the leaves are not doing their color show, but the mass of green in the leafy canopy of the mountain trees is just as pleasing to the man as he rolls through on I-40. He has not spent any time at all in the mountains of NC, it is his first time laying eyes on them in person, and he stops at a rest stop so that he can take it all in. He breathes deep, it smells like the heat of late spring, decaying leaves, and soil. He looks around himself at the horizontal formations of rocky layers of the mountains that sometimes formed walls at the roadside, and to the leafy forms of mountains, against the bright, Carolina blue sky on the horizon that make the hills of the piedmont as flat as a barren in his mind.
It is a good time to reflect. It seems that the rest stop is full of families and he can’t help but think of his own and the sincere concern and well wishes that his family had for him that morning as he stood next to his old brown car that he had worked over during the preceding week to ensure that it was ready for the trek to the west. His mother cried during their entire goodbye, even through the proud smile that she had for the man; that he had grown into a man who was decisive and unafraid of the risk of going out alone, a man who could do anything if he gave a sincere effort. She cried at the thought of him far away from her, not at the thought that he could be harmed or could fall on bad times; the man’s mother had faith that he could fare well. His father had helped him with his car over the week, and the night before he left, which was also the day that he graduated from high school, the two sat outside with a beer talking and laughing like friends. It was new for the man, who had only ever regarded his father as his superior, his disciplinarian, and the whole experience gave the man the confidence that his mother was so sure that he had. Before the man got into his car, his father shook his hand and hugged him firmly – the man shed a tear that he disappeared quickly with his hand, elated that his father supported his bold move. His sister only smiled as they hugged for the last time. She told him, “call me any time, all the time; we’ll always be close and I’ll always be here for you.”
The sunshine at the rest stop feels restorative; the man looks up into the sun and takes a deep breath like he is consuming the rays that are hot on his face. He stands next to his old brown car, and after taking one last look at the nature around him, the man gets back on the road.
It is late in the day when he crosses into TN and it is probably a mental thing, but he feels the difference, he knows that he has left his home behind. The cities that he drives through in the mountains of TN are definitely different than the home the man had left, but they are similar to the life he’d met in the Asheville area, where roads snaked through and along the sides of mountains and a wrong move could have ended his life. Not every town he passed on his way to TN had been the same, but he found himself taking stock of the ways that all the new cities were just like his hometown. There were usually red brick houses, lawns of green grass, or fields of tall, tan grass that moved in the wind, or fields of low, neat rows that would eventually grow into tall stalks of corn, or plantation-like mansions set into uneven hills with a thick coat of the greenest grasses, or small bodies of water, some still, others moved by the wind or by the water from fountains, or parks of rectangular trailers in white and rust yellow, or ranches with enclosures for animals, usually horses or cows. And all of that exists in abundance in TN, the man sees it there, but he is sure of a difference in it all. Maybe it is the smell of the nature that blooms there, different types of grasses must produce different smells, the man thinks with his window down in a town approaching Knoxville.
Just as the sun is going down, the man decides to find a place to sleep for a couple of days. He is in no rush to meet a destination on the west coast, in fact he has no real destination on the west coast, just a plan to eventually make his way to the Pacific Ocean. He doesn’t care how long the journey takes. The man had decided that he wanted his life to exist across many cities, not in any one particular place, so he figured that he could live like a nomad, a week here, a year there at a time. In Knoxville, he finds a place to sleep for the night and he sits with a newspaper in his motel room to see if there are any job openings that might keep him in the area.
As he gets comfortable in his room, the woman in the room next to him is pacing the floor, door of her room wide open. Every now and then, she stands in the doorway, looking both ways, out into the warm night. The motel is located just off the interstate along a road filled with restaurants and convenience stores on both sides.
The man decides to get some air and to take a walk to a nearby store, and as he leaves his room, he hears the woman in the room next to him shriek.
“Damn it, you came out of nowhere.” She is an older woman in jeans and a T-shirt. She is smoking and every now and then she coughs into a fist.
The man was startled too, but manages to apologize to the woman.
“I was just waiting here for my son to get back from that store, he left a while ago.” She looks worried and the man wonders if he can help her. He introduces himself and the woman tells him that her name is Sandra. “My son is Gary. He’s 15, not that tall, dark-skinned. Do you mind, if you see him, tell him to hurry back?”
The man doesn’t mind and when he is at the convenience store, he even asks the clerk if he had seen a boy like Gary that night.
“Kinda hard to say, man, it’s a convenience store, we get a lot of customers.”
The man buys some snacks and heads back to the motel, but there is a muffled sound that captures his attention. He looks over at the side of the convenience store that is dark in shadows and he sees two men beating a third person. The man is shocked, his mind goes blank, unsure if he can offer any help. The man has never been in a fight, maybe he’ll just get beaten up too if he tries to help, and then he remembers Sandra and he wonders if it is her son being punched in the stomach. Before the man can really think it all through, he imagines a big automatic weapon in his hands and a stocking on his face. He approaches the fight quietly and when he is close he yells, “stop right there.” The two assailants turn around and instantly their hands go up.
“What the fuck?” Both men say it in unison and the man answers,
“Get the fuck out of here.” The man doesn’t normally curse, but he wants to match the intensity of the assailants.
And as they leave, before the man can move to help the boy on the ground that seems to be Gary, he hears a woman scream behind him, and when he looks at her, he sees her calling the police. “There’s a man with a big gun and a mask at the convenience store! Hurry! He’s pointing the gun at me!”
The man looks down and sure enough, he is pointing the gun at the woman, but only because he is still holding it and is facing her direction. When he realizes it, he drops the gun and puts his hands up. “No, no, you don’t understand.”
The woman runs full speed for her car and the man is standing there in the parking lot, people looking at him wearily from the gas pumps. He can hear police sirens approaching.
The man imagines a fog that descends on the convenience store, a fog so thick that the first police car to arrive on the scene crashes into a gas pump and causes a deadly explosion.
By the time the fog disappears, the man is back at his motel room. Sandra’s room door is still wide open, but she is no longer inside. She had raced to the convenience store when she heard the explosion.
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