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Cooper Gallegos is a student in the Friday morning feedback class who has just completed the manuscript for her first full-length book, The Waterhauler, a series of interconnected stories set in the Mojave Desert in the 1970s. This piece came from a guided meditation leading the class back into a time "long ago, long before this time, when you were sitting in the back of a car..." The visualization when on for a along time, then ended with the words, "Now tell me what you saw and heard, how it smelled and felt in the back of that car."
The good thing about braids is you don't have to sit on a kitchen chair with your mother unsnarling the knots in your hair. Braids just stay in and the fray around your head keeps growing until you look like a dandelion or some other weed from the back yard. I get one of the window seats, me and my big brother because we're the oldest. My little sister and brother are wedged into the middle between us. My brother and I are not charitable, especially in the dark, and we spread out, squeezing our younger siblings into thin immobile planks who don't have enough air or space to complain.
Once in a while just to be sure that doesn't change I pinch my sister's elbow and she moves sharply away like she's been bitten by a mosquito.
We're on a road trip, just for tonight, so my stepfather can teach my mother to drive. Or so she can pass the test. She already knows how to drive. She's a brash driver. She drives down the center of the road. My stepfather who isn't much of a talker and always drives in the ivy on the side of the road, keeps his eyes on the glove compartment like there's a pistol inside and at any moment he could pounce on it and finish us all off. My mother is taking the back streets out of town. Our windows are rolled down and the summer night air is like a blast furnace. My sister's hair is a tangle, a thin web that hangs on her neck in the heat. But mine, tied up with ric rac around the ends of my braids to cover the rubber bands stays put. We're all sweating. I can see the sheen across my sibling's faces like we're a line-up of garden snails.
Our neighbors, who drive a yellow '55 Ford Fairlane, actually go places when they drive away. We just go in an infernal loop out past town where we leave the anchor of squat houses and their lit windows with families at dinettes digging into meatloaf dinners. Past their porches and porch lights, beyond sidewalks to where the goat dairy spreads its manured legs out and holds the countryside hostage with its smell. The trail of bleating goats sails by.
My legs are heavy and they itch on the cloth seat. My sister has looped her bare toes up into the rope that hangs from the back of the front seat and she sways her legs back and forth like she's enjoying herself. "Quit it", I hiss. She spits and the spit sags onto the front of her tee shirt. I smile in the dark just as the last house sails by. We're finally in feral country and Jack opens his eyes and in the dark says, "Keep to your side of the road." My mother wears a lot of bracelets and they clank up and down her arms as if the differential Jack is always talking about, is being wrenched from the undercarriage of the car.
"That's the trouble with you," my mother says. "You drive in the ivy. Afraid of your own shadow, that's what." I'm watching out my window, feeling the tug of my braids against the loose weave of the seat and I think of the Ord's Fairlane pulling up into a sunny parking lot at Disneyland. That family knows how to live. I can smell a skunk, a bit of road kill and my mother aims for it, drives the tires over its striped back so we carry the scent with us into the night.
There is nothing out here. Just the road and the smell of skunk and Jack who has gone back to his surveillance of the glove box and I'm thinking all of us will be lucky to live long enough to see something like Disneyland. The entire Ord family came home from that trip wearing black mouse ears attached to hats. I finger the ruffled bowl of my head, wondering about those hats.
My mother is peering intently through the front window. "We should get a radio," she tells Jack as she downshifts around a pothole.
"Too distracting," Jack says.
"Yes? Well, when I take a real trip I'm going to need company." I wonder if this trip might include a stop at Disneyland like a normal family. I wonder if this trip might include me.
"Se llevo mi polla galivan pollero!" my mother belts out. She takes a turn in the road and the two inside tires hit the dirt shoulder.
"Watch out!" Jack mumbles. He's clutching at the glove compartment with his two big stiff hands. I think this is it. He leans into the passenger door and moves his hands into his lap like a reprieve.
My mother sings, "Gavilan, gavilan, gavilan! Come on, you guys back there! Sing with me! Yo te doy todito gallinero! Tum Tum!" I've started to chime in when my mother ends the song and I breath in on the final note like the sway of the song was my last chance to escape this backseat.
"When are we going to get anywhere?" my little brother whines.
We are somewhere," my mother snaps. "That's the problem with you. You lack imagination. The whole lot of you!"
The four of us in the backseat stare glumly forward. There won't be any sun, no mouse ears. No point to this driving lesson. If we're lucky maybe out here where boulders and lupine and a snag of a tree or two are beginning to take over, we'll come to a 17-cent hamburger joint. If we're really lucky, it'll be on our side of the road.
"Just wait 'til I get my license," my mother shouts over the clang of her metal bracelets. "Then we'll have some real fun!"
When I was a kid our family owned a 1949 army green Hudson. My mother's driving lessons seemed to go on for months, all after dark when my stepfather got home from work. My mother finally did get her license. She then loaded three of her kids into the backseat and we headed to Mexico where she drove us around for the next year.
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