Road Trip
We pass an elk on the edge of the road. I turn in my seat to stare him down, tearing into my spicy elk jerky with my teeth, watching until the big buck is a brown dot as our car speeds away.
My husband keeps his eyes on the zigzag road, his knuckles paling on the wheel. He rarely drives, and never so far.
We met at the temple, kneeling in line for the blessing. We’d both moved to New York City for our advanced studies. We didn’t feel settled in this lonely country even after several years but neither of us were going home. It was a relief to relieve our families by marrying.
This is our first time on the open road of all the Western songs, bound for a California beach. We had no idea how far it would be and hadn’t brought any food, barely any money. In the morning, we did buy a whole pack of bottled water. Waste, my mother would say.
Our rental car is boiling; our cotton t-shirts cling. If we were home, this would be a van full of aunties passing out short eats, an uncle falling asleep, children clambering across each other in the back, someone proposing we sing. The highway narrows between sunless woods and the ocean, gray as smoked glass. The radio crackles in and out; garbled music I can’t catch.
Outside our speeding makeshift home, ancient trees steeple to a cloudless sky and the water stretches like a vow. I chug my water like it’s liquor, slap my feet on the dash the way American women do in the movies, hot buttery sunlight drenching my crossed ankles, my bare toes. I allow myself one pedicure each summer and this year’s color is a bright coral named Tart Deco. I lean back, stretch my Tart Deco toes to the horizon.
We smell the animal earth, rain behind the sky, sweat cooling on our arms.
This is why Americans swear this land belongs to them, that their god ordains it so.
The only food we have is the jerky a man sold us from a roadside van. He wore head-to-toe denim, a baseball cap shading his reddened face. As I exchanged our last crumpled dollars for the greasy plastic bag, he didn’t meet my eye. I asked if he killed the elk himself. Flattering questions are the best way to disarm whites. He muttered he cured it; his father hunted it. I asked the fastest route to the coast knowing we’d never take his direction. “I have no damn idea,” the man said. My husband took my hand, hurried me to the car. With each step I thought of what would happen if we met him in the dark, without money, us alone, him with all his kin.
In the car, my husband’s voice is soft when he asks me for the water. It is the first time he spoke to me since our fight this morning, which took its usual shape: who made us late, which road to take, should we separate. It doesn’t matter now. We can’t afford to be enemies.
The jerky bag is open between us. Empty bottles rock across the floor, hitting our seats, tap, tap, tap. I grab fistfuls of jerky—the best I’ve ever had—the sting of red pepper, the sweet tang of flesh on my tongue, fingers coated in grease, ready to wash it down with big gulps of water.
Soon, I will be sick from the meat.