NJTPK RR(N) 01

The New Jersey Turnpike

A short story by Christopher Alexander

I turned off the radio. The song was long over, but I drove on, contemplating it while the road unfolded flatly before me. If anyone were around to see me I don’t know what they’d say: some bearded, balding trucker with his mouth hanging open, like his windshield had just called him a name. It was the first time I heard the song. I didn’t know whether it was a hit or merely country radio filler, but in any event it needed repudiating, outright derision and ridicule. Hell, at least comment. But none came: the song faded, the radio station played its jingle, the next number was cued. Who knows if the DJ even heard it? Others followed, songs extolling love, country, and genial hellraising. Through them all I heard it, like Poe’s heart under the floorboards. The more time passed, the more I could hear its throb, independent of the beat of whatever had come after it.

I reconsidered the song, tried to pinpoint what bothered me. The singer named the New Jersey Turnpike in the first verse. That was it, I thought. Right away he was on my bad side. He got pulled over by a State Trooper for speeding, and the cop gave him a hard time for his accent. Later he stops in a diner in Detroit, chuckles at his waitress’s tattoos, sneers that the biscuit he’s been served “ain’t like mama made it,” or whatever the hell the line was. He tells a transvestite he likes women that sing soprano. He wants to come home where others understand him, where they sit on the porch after working hard, all certain of Jesus’ final reward. I looked down on my speedometer, noticed I was some twenty-five miles over the limit. Hell with it, I thought. I was mad.

I began to sing to nobody. “New Jersey Turnpike in the wee wee hours. I’m all alone in the drizzling showers.” It was Chuck Berry, not even one of his twenty best tunes, but it still moved like rocket fuel. I sang the song’s refrain: “you can’t catch me. No, you can’t catch me.” I heard the record in my mind’s ear. It felt perfect, a true outlaw song, as if the wind on the cabin floor was the accompanying instrument. The tires hummed, slapping along the grooves in the road at a tempo. It filled in the pocket of my imaginary band. That joker’s Nashville playboys wouldn’t stand a chance. He sang a song of secession. Chuck Berry felt like a world opening up, even fifty years after he discovered it.

I felt better, and slowed down to about seventy. I kept the radio off a while longer, content to watch the sun set past my windshield. I wondered what my cargo imagines when they hear these sounds. No light, no air conditioning, the only breeze coming from the holes in the trailer. All they had were the sounds. I supposed that they could’ve conversed – the drives were never long, four or five hours depending on the border traffic. I don’t think they ever did, though. Whenever I opened their door, they looked at me like hiding children would the boogey man. They always flinched, raised a hand to cover their eyes no matter how dark it was outside. Maybe it was me they were frightened of, maybe they worried I would turn them in. But something in their eyes always told me no, at once damning and exculpating me. I felt as if I had docked at the end of the Styx. But I had no interest in any soul’s journey or punishment, or in the world that had meted them. I was merely the ferryman.

I started smuggling two years ago, days after I turned thirty. My father started driving trucks when I was born. He was always on the road, and I envied him for it. Anyone else married to my mother would’ve done the same, I think. It’s the reason I did, even though the job killed him. He jackknifed off a mountain, right off I-5 in Oregon overlooking the Columbia Valley. Nobody knew if it was ice, drowsiness, or too many medium rare burgers that did him in. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. The investigator felt sure it wouldn’t have mattered at that altitude, and we believed him. I’d driven that stretch dozens of times, taken that same curve hard, pushed the speed because it felt like I was losing to the moss. It was treacherous as shit, but it was also beautiful: Mount Shasta in the skyline, the valley beneath you a gradient blue and red. I envied my father his death, as well.

My father was a proud union man making proud union wages. The name on my trailer read Blanco Industries, proud parent company of Blanco Market. There were no union men – or women – in Blanco. There were no people at all, in fact. Only associates: sales associates, floor associates, warehouse associates, and finally delivery associates. I made more to start than my dad did after ten years, I know, but I dreaded the day I would get sick. The shifts were irregular, too, seniority or no seniority. Months went by when I couldn’t make the nut, and I had a pretty pathetic nut. No wife, no kids, no computers: just a record player and an easily compromised taste for good whiskey. When the man approached me about his Mexicans, I was in a listening mood. He accepted my counter-offer, and suddenly I was in business.

The route was from El Paso to the warehouse in Mexico. I never saw them: I only knew that I had cargo when the money was in the glove compartment. Otherwise, I drove home with an empty truck. Blanco was paying me to deliver material to Mexico, not Mexico to material. When the money was there, I took a breath. They could’ve had the truck to themselves, but to make things safer they had constructed a false wall toward the back of the truck, and packed themselves in. No fewer than ten people in an eight by four space. All this happened in the two hours or so it took to track the manager down. Blanco paid the asociados next to nothing, but there always seemed to be hundreds. I was certain that they were whom I was carrying back.

I hated that hidden room, because I was never stopped at the border. Cargo or no cargo, it never happened. This is supposedly in violation a few treaties, but border patrol only ever asked for my driver’s license, certification and manifest. Some of the US guards complained that I should use a passport after 9 11, but that was it. There were a dozen Blanco trucks crossing the same point every day, and usually the same drivers as well. Who knows what the guards were thinking? We could’ve run riot throughout Mexico, and many of us did. They would’ve let Osama bin Laden himself through if he was wearing the right uniform. They never asked us to declare anything, although presently I had an answer:

“Only that I have finally lived long enough to hear the worst song ever written.”

But I was stopped coming home. A tall, thin black customs agent, no hat and no hair, peered at me from his window. He asked me where the warehouses were, their exact addresses and supervisor. How long I had been at the warehouse; did I buy anything while I was there. He examined my certifications and order log closely. “Sir, are you aware that it’s federal policy to present a passport while crossing the US border?” he asked, never looking up from the papers.

“I apologize, sir,” I said, leaning out of the cab. It was very hot outside, and already I was beginning to sweat. “It won’t happen next time, I promise.”

“Do you cross this border often, sir?”

“Twice weekly.” The cargo was with me far less often, twice a month, sometimes less. This I didn’t share with him.

“Sir, I must insist that next time you have a passport, or we will not let you cross.” He handed my papers back to me, than looked at me, noticing something. “Sir, are you intoxicated?”

My face betrayed my surprise. “No, sir, I’m not.” This was true, or anyway, I wasn’t any more than usual.

The agent only nodded. “Sir, I’m going to need you to pull over to the side of the road.” He pointed to the bank just past the border booths, and motioned me on.

I said nothing, but I complied. I came to a stop. The sun was setting but it was still hot outside. Texas: eighty degrees in the winter, and the sun sets forever. A big orange ball hung over the horizon, like holy egg yolk. I turned the radio on. Garth Brooks came on, sang an old favorite. “I’m much too young to feel this damn old,” he sang, but at the moment the line fell. “I’m not so sure about that, Garth,” I said to my windshield. “Not sure at all.” I watched the cars line up at the border, saw them pause at the windows, and speed right past. Another Blanco truck pulled in, containing what? TVs, couches, perishables, unmarked bills? He drove past. Evidently, he had a passport.

I sat there a long time, I felt dizzy. Perhaps I was drunker than I thought I was. My thermos was empty of its Bushmills and Coke. My trailer was full of undocumented Mexicans. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know the penalty. A mandatory minimum in federal prison, I knew, but how many years? Five? Fifteen? Maybe just a fine? There was no one I could even give up. In two years I only met the man once, never learned his name. I could only give a description of a short, potbellied man with wiry facial hair. He spoke good English and had a reedy voice. Good luck finding those in Mexico, I thought. The cars continued to pass me.

Half an hour passed. The sun had only sunk an inch. Suddenly another vehicle pulled over in front of me. It was a plain white trailer hitched to a Peterbilt. Was this another drunk, or was there a sincere crack down here at the border? My pulse quickened when a brown shirted man asked the driver out of his cab, and had him open the hatch. The official went in. The Mexican driver stood outside. He looked terrified, sweating in the reddish dim light of the setting sun. Now it looked like a blood orange. After a few minutes, the guard came out. Two perfectly white horses followed him. They looked like they hadn’t been fed in months – I saw their ribs, and their bellies undulating quickly. Another brown shirt came to take the man away, the first one following them with the horses.

Moments later the black customs agent knocked on my window. He was wearing mirror sunglasses, surely for effect, I thought. “Sir, could you please recite the alphabet?” I looked in his glasses, and saw myself doing so. “Can you recite it backwards?” Again, I did so. “Have you ever been convicted of a DUI?” I said I had not, but this was a lie, the aftermath of a concert back in New Jersey. I was hoping he wouldn’t call my bluff. He folded. “Sir, it is against the law in all fifty states as well as Mexico to operate a motor vehicle while intoxicated. In the future, I’d advise approaching the border with more caution. Have a nice evening, sir.” He walked away, and I could no longer watch myself under scrutiny.

I started the truck. The sky was finally growing dark. A burgundy sliver hung over the horizon. Somewhere in California the sun would look spectacular, a brilliant tapestry of pink, red, and bruise-purple over the ocean. There was only land in Texas, and only a clear prism through which to see the sun. I drove on.

I turned the radio back on, switched it to the AM band. Someone was interviewing a biographer of another writer, Sayyid Qutab. The author said that Qutab was very influential on the Islamic ultra-radicalism of the past few decades. He came from a very wealthy Egyptian family, but worked briefly for a time somewhere in Colorado. He made few friends, and his earliest writings were about the decadence of American society. Everything he saw was an offense to Allah: the women wore their hair out and danced lascivious dances, using their sexuality to reduce the men to dumb brutes. These brutes in turn made the country a shallow, commercially driven wasteland of soda pop, corruption and Christianity. The last straw came, though, when he got a bad haircut. He turned his haircut into a metaphor for everything wrong with the country, its Democracy, liberalism and religion. Such a servant, Qutab argued, would never have survived in a just Muslim society.

“What was wrong with it?” the interviewer asked.

“It was too short,” the author replied. I laughed out loud. An ultra-conservative foments Jihad because his hair was too short? That was just funny.

The interview continued. Qutab was eventually imprisoned and murdered by the Egyptian government. He had since become a martyr, and his writings were read like Tolstoy among the faithful. He became another traveler who saw the world without ever really leaving home, and was loved for it. I turned the channel.

I pulled the truck over well after nightfall. Usually I picked the same spot right off the interstate. It was within a stone’s throw of a motel, and no one was ever around to see me. The stop at the border spooked me, however, and I decided to go a little further up the road. I was about five miles away from the motel. Texas: empty space everywhere. I put it in park and walked out of the cab. Immediately I began hearing voices inside of the trailer:

“Ayuda! Ayuda!”

“Help!”

I ran to the back of the trailer. I undid the hatch and ran inside. I took the keys out of my pocket and fumbled for the right one. The voices grew louder, there was a genuine panic. I found the right key, silver, and I unlocked the door. A massive breath of sweat, vomit and offal engulfed me for a moment, and then was gone, chased away by shrill screams.

“What is it? Que? Que?”

Ten voices shouted “La nina no esta respirando!” on top of each other. I understood girl and “no.” I couldn’t see anything in the dark, so I took my keys and aimed the pen light. They looked like those animals you see on nature shows, who’ve been living in darkness for millennia. Their faces were shining from sweat, eyes more white than iris. They were all gesturing wildly, pointing toward the floor. “Ella no esta respirando!”

I saw her shoes first in the light’s periphery. I had a horrible moment of clarity before I pointed my light down to the floor. She was thin, with unshaven runner’s legs. At first I thought she may have been violated, but her legs were only bare from her shorts. What I first thought was dark blood streaking down her legs only grew darker on inspection, and gained thicker texture. It was shit. A wheat-colored paste that pooled above her belly trailed up the middle of her white t-shirt, up her neck and into her mouth. Some had gotten on her hair, curled over her neck. Her eyes seemed to have no iris in them at all. I felt something turn in my stomach, and I ran out of the room.

I placed one hand against the trailer, one on my stomach, and I threw up. Something got stuck in my esophagus, it felt like a large stool. The thought helped it pass; it was only more undigested food, flavored by vomit and whiskey. Behind me, I heard footsteps, and I saw two of the boys run past me, out into the starry Texas night. Then I heard two more, and two more after them. Did they know the way to the motel? I wondered. Did they care? I had never seen that before; they usually stayed together. I watched their figures recede into the brush and the darkness. They couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

I wasn’t ready, but I went back to her. I turned the light on again. Three boys and one girl had stayed behind, standing with their backs flat against the wall. They surrounded her. One of the boys stood behind her head. His eyes looked down at her face. A pubescent mustache was visible in the light. I tried to get his attention. “Boy? Hey, boy!” He looked at me. I crouched down at her feet, made a motion with my eyes to do the same. He opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t.

I exhaled sharply. “I need your help.” I said in English. “Por favor?”

He knelt down. I handed the penlight to the girl on my right. I crouched by her feet and looked at the boy. He didn’t look ready, but he put his hands under her armpits and looked at me expectantly. I nodded, and began to count. “Uno. Dos.” We both hunched our shoulders and got ready. “Tres!” The third number came out as a shout, somewhere from the back of my mouth. The boy lifted with his legs. Maybe he was one of ours, I thought.

She was light, but the room was thin. I walked backwards in small steps; the boy avoided the shit and vomit on the floor. The girl was unsteady with the flashlight. It gave me a vague, disassociative feeling that I was watching a snuff film with my mind’s eye. It felt like I was having a nightmare in an interrogation room. It made me dizzy, and I felt like sitting down, or throwing up, or evaporating into thin air. I couldn’t do any of these things, though. I stayed locked in my vertiginous nightmare all the way out the door of the room, and onto the corrugated floors of my trailer, until finally the stars of the night met me on its lip.

We laid her flat on the floor. I got onto the ground, and carefully the three boys helped her into my arms, like she was my bride crossing a threshold. She was light even in my arms. I didn’t need the boys at all, but they followed me out of the trailer, into the brush. I counted the steps away from the road, and when I came to fifty I knelt down and laid her gently on the ground. The five of us looked at her. It was obscene to leave her in the open like this, on top of the earth, a door prize for the vultures. But I could think of no alternative. If we went to the authorities I would be imprisoned, and they would be sent back to Mexico. I searched their eyes, wondering if they had made the same calculations. They looked to the ground.

I swallowed hard, simultaneously preparing to say something and watching myself prepare to say something. “Dios?” They looked at me, expressions unchanged. “Catholic?” I made the sign of the cross and gestured with my arms. “Homily?” I was aware I sounded like I was talking to dogs. I was sincerely lost.

The boy with the mustache touched his right hand to his fore head. “En el nombre del padre, y del hijo y del espíritu santo.” Our hands followed his. We all said “Amen.” There was a long pause as we waited for him to speak. Perhaps we misunderstood him. Finally, he opened his mouth. “Padre,” he said, his voice high and sharp, “your servant died on her journey to another world. On her journey home to paradise, please watch over her more carefully.” We made the sign of the cross again, the bookends to a plea. He walked to her head, placed his hand over her eyes, and with thumb and forefinger, closed them. Then he placed his finger in the ground above her head, and drew a cross in the sand.

“Sabe su nombre?” he asked the others. They shook their heads. He looked at me. I understood that nombre meant name, and I also shook my head. He frowned, looked back at her, and with his forefinger he wrote out a word over the cross: “Iris.”

After a minute, he got to his feet and walked away, following the same direction we had been going. It was as if she had been a detour along a straight path. The others followed behind him, slowly. I saw their young backs grow small in the light of the moon. There was a road ahead, a state highway maybe two hours walking distance. If they headed west on that road, they would find El Paso pretty quickly. They’d find plenty of people willing to help them the rest of the way. I stood there watching them leave. Texas. Even at night, the land was flat enough to see for days, and the children who left me behind, like the sun, never seemed to finally vanish beyond the horizon.

I walked back to the truck. The girl left the keys on the floor of the trailer. I took them in my hand and closed the hatch. I sat in my cab for a few minutes, not thinking anything. A coyote howled, far away. I turned the ignition. The radio came back on automatically, an army of strings and French horns. Muzak. I reached over to turn it off, but I recognized the melody: “America” by Simon and Garfunkel. It was one of my dad’s favorite songs, and mine too. I sang the words over the pabulum. “Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike – they’ve all come to look for America.” When I was a teenager, these words stung me: I would recall driving with my family over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, leaning up over the window to peer into the other cars. I would imagine their lives, their languages, the foods I wouldn’t eat and prayers I wouldn’t understand. Tonight, the song washed over me. I hadn’t seen another car in two hours. It was the wrong vehicle for this stretch of road, and for that kind of journey in this century. I released the emergency break, heard it creak and collapse. I pulled away.

I turned the station and found a preacher shouting over the static. He was quoting from Revelations, but I didn’t listen. There was a certain charm to it, listening to a snake healer in an age where a satellite knew exactly where I’d been tonight. Let the man shout down the apocalypse, I thought. Let there be a new country where the National Anthem sings of the Jersey Turnpike in fear and hatred. Let the radio broadcast them all, every pitched voice that dreaded the outside forces that were coming. They were the last, desperate bright lights of stars that had long been dead. I pulled back onto the interstate and turned of the radio.

Moscow, Idaho
March 17 - 23 2007

Notes for the Reader:

1. The Spanish was provided by Google translation; the eulogy is presented here untranslated due to its complexity and my feeble grasp of the language. I invite all Spanish speakers to suggest a translation.
2. The brief, unhappy biography of Sayyid Qutb serves our narrator and his story fine, but the careful reader might benefit from more. Qutb was an Egyptian civil servant who memorized the Koran by the age of ten. Growing increasingly radical and dissatisfied with the Egyptian monarchy, the rheumatic, taciturn man was sent to Greely, Colorado in 1948 on a sort of educational exchange. It was here he made his trenchant observations of American culture, in particular women’s method of dress and “Negro dance music.” At one point in The America I Have Seen, he unfavorably compares relatives in mourning to a roost of chickens. He returned in 1950 and was an instrumental early member of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the Egyptian revolution, led by Nasser, deposed King Farouk, the Nasserrists fell out with the MB. There was an assassination attempt, and Nasser ordered prominent members arrested. Qutb was imprisoned for ten years, during which time he became truly radicalized, and wrote his best known works: a thirty part critical study of the Koran entitled In the Shadow of the Koran, and the manifesto Milestones. His philosophy can briefly be summarized (admittedly reductively, but not unfairly) thusly: governments in the Muslim world were living in a state of offense to Islam (or ignorance of Islam, the term for which is Jahiliyya), and therefore were not truly Muslim and illegitimate; that democracy was inherently anti-Islam, since it prized the rule of the many over Sharia rule-ergo-Allah; that Jihad must be implemented to bring about Sharia rule, at first defensively against governments in the Muslim world and then offensively through the rest of it (as the idea of coexistence with Jahiliyya was intolerable). He was released in 1964 but was rearrested in 66 on what were almost certainly fabricated charges. After he was hung to death, his writings were disseminated through his brother, a University Professor. Professor Qutb was a favorite teacher of Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.