Freedom’s just another word

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye.

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road

There are people, I have come to understand, who do not so much enter your life as happen to it, like weather, like a river rising in the night beyond its banks, like the sudden darkening of a summer afternoon when the clouds gather over a country that has known too many summers and too little rain, and afterward, when they are gone, you find yourself measuring all the years that follow against the brief season in which they were there, wondering whether it was happiness or merely the absence of unhappiness that you mistook for it, and whether there is any difference, in the end, between the two.

I met Bobby in Baton Rouge, though I have sometimes thought I met her much earlier, in the Kentucky coal country where the earth was black and the colliers came home black and the wives soaped and scrubbed and rinsed their shirts on washboards until the water ran grey, or perhaps before that, in some place neither of us remembered, because there are meetings that seem less like beginnings than recognitions, as though two people, having travelled separately through all the long miles of their respective misfortunes, finally arrive at the same desolate station and discover that they have been expected there all along.

I was waiting for a train that afternoon, sitting on my backpack beneath the station eaves, my jeans worn white and fraying at the cuffed hems, my pockets holding less than the price of a decent meal, and the rain coming, as it often does in Louisiana, not from the sky but seemingly out of the ground itself, rising in a wet vapour from the earth and gathering in the air until the whole world seemed to be waiting for something to break. I was a young man then, though I had already acquired a sham veneer of Haight-Ashbury bohemia, and there is a difference between being young and having a future, a difference I did not understand until much later. After a false start as a sculptor, I was trying to find an open road.

Bobby came along the highway with her thumb extended. The truck was a diesel, its engine rattling like an old man coughing up his last confession, and the driver, a broad-shouldered fellow with a tobacco-stained moustache, stopped long enough to ask where we were headed.

“New Orleans,” Bobby said.

I remember that she said it without looking at me, as though she had already decided that wherever she was going I would be going too, and that this, rather than any declaration or promise, was the beginning of our life together.

We climbed into the cab, and the driver pulled back onto the highway. The rain began almost immediately, first a fine silver mist, then a steady drumming against the windshield, and Bobby took my hand, her fingers cool and narrow, with a small scar across the knuckle of her right index finger, and I thought then, without the slightest scintilla of evidence or iota of doubt, that I had found something which no amount of bad luck could take away.

Her voice.

I cannot honestly tell you what sort of voice it was, because voices are among the things that memory distorts most faithfully, preserving not their sound but their effect, and I remember only that when she sang the blues the cab seemed to grow larger, the road longer, the rain softer, and the old truck driver, who had been cursing the weather and the record price of diesel since we climbed aboard, stopped speaking altogether.

The highway a brook, singing to itself as the semi tires flowed over it.

I took a little harmonica from my red bandana, the only instrument I possessed and perhaps the only possession I had that had ever seemed worth keeping, and began to play along with her, softly at first, then with a little more confidence, and the driver joined us whenever he recognized a tune, which was often enough, and there we were, three strangers in a rattling truck, bound for a city neither of the young ones had any business calling home, singing as though the whole world had been made for that particular afternoon and would continue only so long as we kept the music going.

It was later, in New Orleans, as a half-moon was sinking through a spume of cloud behind a black sycamore at the end of the street, that Bobby explained freedom to me.

We were sitting on the steps behind a boardinghouse, drinking coffee that tasted of burnt chicory, and she had been talking about a man she had known in Memphis, and another in St. Louis, and a mother who had wanted her to settle down, and a father who had never settled anywhere himself, and finally she laughed though there was no real humour in it, and said that freedom was simply having nothing left that anybody could take from you.

I have thought about this for a long time.

It once seemed to me a bitter definition, the sort a person invents after life has taken everything else, but Bobby said it as though it were a blessing, and maybe it was. For what did we own? A backpack, two changes of clothes, my harmonica, her little silver comb and the road, which belonged to no one and therefore belonged to us. We had no mortgage, no children waiting at home, no job from which to be dismissed, no family whose approval we required. We had tomorrow, which was another way of saying we had nothing, and nothing, as Bobby understood it, was a thing a person could sometimes hold without being afraid.

So we travelled.

From the coal country of Kentucky, where the mountains stood like enormous sleeping animals against the sky, to the broad California valleys where the sun seemed to have forgotten how to set, we went wherever a ride or a little money or a passing fancy took us. We slept in cheap motels and once in a barn, and once beneath a bridge outside Tulsa when the rain came too hard to go on. We ate eggs in roadside cafes, drank coffee from chipped cups. Learned the names of towns that would never have known ours. Bobby could make a meal of almost anything, and could make a home of almost nowhere.

She knew things about me I had never told her. That I hadn’t known myself. This is something I have never understood, how another person can come to know the secret rooms of your soul without ever having been invited inside, how she could look at me across a table in some nameless town and say, “You’re thinking about your father again,” when I had not thought of him in years, or so I believed.

She knew when I was afraid. She knew when I was lying. She knew when I was pretending to be happy because I feared that happiness, once acknowledged, might be taken away.

And she sang.

Sometimes she sang in the morning while washing her face in a motel sink, sometimes at night when the windows rattled in the wind, and sometimes in the truck of a stranger who had agreed to take us 50 miles down a road that had no end.

Her songs were not always sad, though the blues was what she did best, and there were nights when she sang so softly that I could scarcely hear the words, but I felt them in the darkness, as one feels the distant whistle of a train long after it has passed out of sight.

I began to believe that happiness was not a place to which we were going but the sound she made while we were travelling. And so it went, until we ran out of continent in California. It was near Salinas, in that country where the fields stretch out under the immense western sky, and the earth has a richness that seems almost indecent after the lean hills of Kentucky, that I lost her.

I have told the story many times, though never the same way twice, because the mind is a poor historian and a tireless inventor, and because there are certain events which, having happened once, continue to happen in the imagination with such persistence that a man can no longer distinguish the original from the thousand recollections he has fashioned around it.

Some say we must have quarrelled. Perhaps we did.

Some say she had been planning to leave for weeks, that she had met a man in Monterey, that she had spoken of a house and a garden and a life in which the mornings were not spent looking for rides and the evenings were not spent wondering where the next meal would come from. I remember her speaking of home, though I cannot remember when, and I remember thinking that home was something people invented to make leaving seem more difficult.

Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe she had always been going home, and I had merely mistaken the journey for the destination.

I remember the sunlight that afternoon, a hard, unyielding brightness falling across the highway. I remember the smell of sand and sea and gasoline. I remember her standing with her bag in one hand, looking at me with that expression I had seen before, in the mornings when she woke from dreams she would not describe, and in the evenings when the songs were finished and the silence came. I remember the breakers running down the shore in long, shuddering strokes.

She said something. I have forgotten what.

I remember that she touched my cheek, and I remember that I did not ask her to stay, which is a thing I have spent the remainder of my life trying to explain to myself. Pride, perhaps. Or love. Or the terrible conviction that if a person must be asked to stay, then the staying has already become another kind of departure.

She walked away, the way the dead sometimes walk away as we call after them in dreams.

I watched her until the road and the distance and the afternoon light took her from me, and then I was alone, which was not the same as being free, though I would spend years pretending in the charnel house of memory that it was. Seagulls wheeled above the line of the surf. They wheel above there yet.

For a long while I continued travelling. I went north and south, east and west, through towns whose names I have forgotten and others whose names I cannot hear without thinking of her. I found work when I needed it and lost it when I did not. I slept in rooms where the radiators knocked and in fields where the stars seemed close enough to touch. I played the harmonica, though less often, and when I sang I sometimes found myself stopping in the middle of a song because the next line belonged to Bobby, and I could not bring myself to sing it without her.

There is an exquisite misery in remembering lost happiness. Quotidian misery at least has the decency to remain where it happened, but happiness runs in a circular motion, and it travels backward and it enters the present without knocking.

A man may be sitting at a kitchen table 50 years after the fact, with a wife who has never wronged him and grandchildren asleep upstairs, and suddenly he will hear the slap of windshield wipers against glass, feel the pressure of a young woman’s hand in his own, smell the rain on the Louisiana highway, and find himself once more in that truck, young and poor and rich beyond calculation, while the years and the pretty people that came afterward vanish like smoke.

I have wondered whether Bobby found what she was looking for.

I hope she did. I hope she found a little house somewhere, with a porch and a garden and a window that caught the morning sun. I hope there was someone who listened when she sang, someone who knew when she was afraid and when she was pretending not to be, someone who understood that her restlessness was not a refusal of love but perhaps the very form love had taken in her.

And I hope that on certain rainy afternoons, when the sky darkens and the windshield wipers begin their familiar rhythm, she remembers me. Not as the man who lost her. Not as the man who could not give her a home. But as the boy beside her in the truck, with his worn-out jeans and his harmonica wrapped in a red bandana, holding her hand while the rain came down and the driver sang along, believing, with all the foolish certainty of youth, that the world could never be larger than the cab of that truck, nor time longer than the song they were singing.

Because I would trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.

Not for the years. Not for the road. Not even for the life we might have made had she stayed. Only for that one afternoon, when the rain was falling on the highway and, delirious to be holding Bobby’s body next to mine, I had not yet learned that a man can possess nothing and still have everything to lose.

Everything behind me, nothing ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.