The Fugitivities, стр. 13

The next morning, he packed and made his way to Penn Station. In the New Jersey Transit lounge, swirling crowds of commuters struggled against the stale ventilation, dodging and slipping around ragged drifters, counterterrorism units patrolling in military fatigues, and deceptive low-pressure zones where bodies people had given up on lay slumped against the side of a wall or sprawled on the steps under faux mosaics memorializing the old Penn Station, the one modeled on the Baths of Caracalla that they tore down in the sixties. It occurred to Jonah that Vernon, as the older brother, must have walked through those grand archways as a boy, holding his parents’ hands. Madison Square Garden, where Spike Lee watched the Knicks play, now stood in its place.

Once he was in the frigid railcar, everything was efficient and swift. Only a few minutes from departure, they were rolling under the Hudson in a tunnel built under conditions he could scarcely fathom, but which must have cost untold lives for every yard he now traveled. The train banked up over the meadowlands and refineries and trucking depots around Secaucus, stopped in the brick carcass of downtown Newark, and then proceeded to the gray terminal complexes of the airport.

His father was waiting in the rental-lot complex. He was calmer than Jonah expected, as if the situation brought a kind of neutrality to their relationship that made it easier for his father to be around him. It helped that his father had logistics to keep him occupied. They got in a midnight-blue Ford Focus, looped through the interlocking airport clovers, and merged onto the Jersey Turnpike.

After they settled into the road, Jonah’s father told him to reach into his travel bag and pull out a stack of CDs.

“Which one you want me to put on?”

“I don’t own no jive records, boy. Just put one in. We gotta have something to make up for this bullshit ride they gave me. Five times I told them over the phone, I want a Lexus and I ain’t payin no goddamn fees. Now Avis tells me all they have left is a Ford Focus. They got me paying for this golf cart when I was supposed to show up pushing a Lexus. Jonah, I’m telling you. Why you think I left this messed-up country in the first place? Why I left? Because a Nee-gro can’t get a fair deal. I mean how—how? And see, they know I gots the mo-nay. They just want to ruin my day a little is all. But I ain’t gonna let em. Boy, you listening to me? Don’t ever let them ruin your day. Give an inch, and they will get you everytime. Not a thing, not a damn thing changed since I left. Rental man tellin me this the best-selling car in America. Like imma take advice from you— the guy grinning in my face cause he clocked in on time at the Liberty Hertz rental desk this morning.”

“How ’bout this right here?” Jonah ventured.

A smile, the first he had seen since they had left the lot, beamed back at him.

“Okay. Now you talking.”

As they pulled out of a tollbooth in the southbound lanes, the familiar piano chords of one of the Gap Band’s Greatest Hits sent soul-stirring tremors through the little Ford. They nudged along for a while in heavy traffic, canyoned between big rigs, barracuda-grilled SUVs, Hummers fresh off the assembly line and ready for Baghdad beyond the Green Zone or a P. Diddy video shoot. You light my fire…The traffic thinned as they passed the gaslights and townships of the Jersey midlands with their names blazoned on the water towers…I feel alive with you, baby…

His dad was suddenly saying, “Your uncle Vernon could get down, boy, ooohhhweee, Jonah, when he was liquored up, like the time he started dancing at our wedding reception. Lord, I can see it now, like it was yesterday. He had your grandpappy’s funky chicken legs, and he could work them things too. You had to see him out there, puttin’ moves on ’em.” Jonah saw a wet line on his father’s cheek. The Band harmonized, urging someone not to keep running in and out of my life.” Jonah lowered his window a crack and squinted at the road ahead. Warm soupy gusts of chemical fumes and car exhaust buffeted the soulful audio-love inside. They were hurtling toward the prickling points of holding tanks, pharmaceutical plants, the megalith forms of malls and factory-discount outlets, RKO-style radio masts rising into irradiant haze. Everywhere and nowhere, isolated suburban lights winked like fireflies as they sailed down the trunk roads of the Garden State through the summer dusk.

Pleasantville was a residential community that fed off the perpetual transit of gamblers, criminals, and retirees passing through on their way to Atlantic City. His father had booked a room for them in a budget motel in the shadow of the casinos. But with the roads increasingly snarled in beach traffic, they decided to take a break and stop for dinner at the Walt Whitman Service Area outside Cherry Hill before making the turn on Route 40 that would take them toward the ocean. Over fried chicken and curly fries, his father started loosening up.

“You know Vernon never married?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But he had a woman. I’m talking back in the day. Before you were born. Wonderful woman named Evelyn Jones. One of the strongest, most beautiful women I ever seen. You would have liked her. I know she would have liked you. She was so damn smart. Her and Vernon met at night classes at Atlantic Community College. She came from poor folks, at a time when Atlantic City was beginning to decline, but she was doing good, you know, and she had a smile that just…it just had you wide open soon as she walked in the room. And your uncle Vernon was gone on this woman. But, you know,