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At some point even the silence becomes too loud to bear.
The radio had long since fizzled away into a humming static that momentarily broke into fragments of big band music or sorrowful guitar or some man’s monotone rambling whenever they passed through one of the many scatterings of buildings that were charitably called towns. Neither of them bothered to turn it off, it was better to have the warm fuzz of dead air than to have to fill the air themselves.
Joey fell in and out of consciousness, always coming to with a soft noise of confusion before he looked around himself and regained his bearings. Sometimes Arlo mentioned the general area of where they were (“Just passed into Missouri, I think, or maybe Arkansas.” she had said, acrid cigarette smoke spilling from her parted lips), sometimes she didn’t bother at all (“Just go back to sleep.”). Most of his time was spent simply staring out the window at the rolling bluegrass fields dotted with abandoned farms and other such buildings that stared right back at them.
It’s quiet in the car and Arlo is alone.
Not ‘alone’ in a classical sense but alone nonetheless. The long stretches of Americana had a way of making her feel both entirely abandoned and ruthlessly scrutinized at the same time. At a certain point it all fades into a green and gold and ruddy red mess that stretches one and on and on and will swallow her whole if she lets it.
Or maybe she’s just being dramatic.
Sometimes, when Joey’s asleep and the staticky silence roars in her ears, she pulls the car to the side of the road which is more often than not just a ditch littered with broken bottles and forgetting things; she turns off the ignition and crawls out of the car. She stretches her arms first, then her legs, then each hand starting with her right then her left. Habits are comforting, after all. She steps back from the car until she can make out of shape of Joey in the passenger seat―his head pressed against the glass and his hands folded delicately in his lap, the sort of delicateness he never seems to afford himself when he’s awake.
She looks out at the bleach blue sky and thinks about screaming. She thinks about turning around and driving back to Augustine, back to her safe life, thinks about telling Joey that they’re chasing corpses. She never does.
She gets back in the car, she keeps driving.
-
A song is playing on the radio.
It startles both of them to suddenly hear the plucking of guitar strings after hours of silence.
“Christ!” Joey mutters, eyebrows furrowed. The song continues to play and he leans forwards, looking intently at the radio, “... perdiendo el tiempo, pensando, pensando. Por lo que mas tu quieras. Hasta cuándo, hasta cuándo… ” he mutters along to the song, voice growing softer as he speaks, “Oh.”
“You know this song?”
“Yeah, well, uh, kind of.” he sits back though his eyes are still fixed on the radio, “It’s an old song. My, um,” he sniffs, “mamá used to sing it all the time. She used to ask the nurses to put it on during her chemo appointments. I guess I just…picked it up at some point.”
“Hm.” her fingers dance across the cracked leather steering wheel as the singer continue to croon, “How much do you know?
He says, “Enough. It’s a cover though.”
“Sing it for me.”
He raises his eyes to meet her, she presses, “Humor me, kid. Or at least tell me what they’re saying. I don’t speak Spanish.”
“I know you don’t. But why―”
“Humor me.”
For a moment, he stares at her then he settles back into his seat and starts to sing in a soft, thin voice, “... siempre que te pregunto. Que cuándo, cómo y dónde. Tu siempre me respondes. Quizás, quizás, quizás.”
“And kee-sas , that means…”
“ Quizás .” he corrects with a slight smile, “It means maybe. The whole song’s about this guy and his girlfriend or wife or whatever and how she can’t give him a straight answer about anything. He’s asking her all these questions and she just keeps going quizás, quizás, quizás.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe.” she hums, “That’s annoying.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s just a song.”
“Sure.” she knocks his arm, “What other songs did your mom like?”
His face goes entirely blank, his teeth scraping across his bottom lip and his eyes glancing out to the rolling fields. “I…” his hands flex out, stretching the words written across the back of his palms. DON’T FORGET. “She liked Jazz a lot. When she first moved from México she lived with this woman named Francine or, m-maybe, Phyllis and she was the bassist for this jazz band and they used to have rehearsals in my mom and her’s place. So she used to always listen to Jazz. I think it made her happy, remembering the jazz band and that woman.” the song on the radio fades out and the entire station begins to waver as they exit the signal’s radius. “She stopped listening to it when she got really sick though, never let my dad turn it on. I don’t know why.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t.” he practically spits, expression hardening like the cold marble of a statue “I want to remember her right. I have to.”
“Maybe even she didn’t know why.” Arlo tries as the signal reverts entirely back to static, “Sometimes people do things without really knowing why.”
“Maybe.” Joey turns to look out the window.
Arlo sighs in sotto tone.
Quizás, quizás, quizás.
-
Arms, legs, hands (right then left).
“What are you doing?”
Joey’s leaning half-out the driver’s side window, face soft with drowsiness and hair all pushed to one side. His sleep-clumsy hands fumble to fit his hearing aid back into his ear so Arlo waits until he’s finished to speak.
“Taking a break.” she answers, rolling her neck, “Sun’s going down.”
Joey looks up like he’s just noticed the sky and its deepening colors, the faintest hint of stars just begin to twinkle in the deep dark blue, “Oh, shit, I didn’t mean to sleep that long.”
“Language.”
He rolls his eyes, “Sure.” he props himself up further on the edge of the window, “Where do you think we are?”
She sets her arms at her sides, “Does it matter?”
“Guess not.” he relents, “Do you want me to hand you your lighter?”
She nods, already reaching her hand out, “Sure, give it here.” he drops the scratched up thing into her waiting palm. Arlo pulls a cigarette from behind her ear. Running low , she thinks, they’ll have to stop in the next town they see to grab more. The cigarette sits in the corner of her lips as she sparks up the lighter, the sputtering fire casting both her and Joey’s face in a brief moment of warm orange. She lights the cigarette and hands the lighter back to him.
Joey inspects the lighter, rolling it over in his hands. He places his thumb against the wheel and strikes it over and over again until a steady flame erupts. The fire reflects like broken glass in his eyes. He watches as she takes a drag,
“I’m not giving you a cigarette.”
“Ew.” he frowns, extinguishing the lighter, “No, they smell like ass.”
“Hey.” she ashes the cigarette, “Language.”
“Arlooooo.”
“Look, I get enough shit as it is and I don’t want anybody saying that I’m a bad influence on you. I’m helping mold the next generation and all that bull.”
Joey snickers, “Then you probably shouldn’t smoke in front of me.”
“Turn around then.” she scoffs.
The sun fully dips under the horizon leaving behind a whole sky full of shining stars in its afterglow. Arlo smokes the cigarette down to the filter while Joey silently takes in the world surrounding them; he grabs his phone at some point and begins taking pictures. His tongue peeks out in concentration as he snaps a photo of road ahead, the road behind, and then the sky itself; each time the flash momentarily lighting the world up in white. He inspects each photo for a moment then hums to himself and takes a picture of Arlo.
“What was that for?” she asks, blinking away the sudden light of the flash.
“I wanted a picture.” he pockets the phone, “You know I don’t actually think you’re a bad influence, right? I actually think you’re, I don’t know…pretty cool, I guess.”
The corners of her mouth twitch downwards, “Really?”
“Yeah. I mean,” he shrugs but his expression is thoughtful, “you know about my…bipolar thing and you still don’t treat me like I’m some freakshow o-or like a bomb that’s about to go off. Or worse, like I’m some project for you―the poor crazy deaf kid that you gotta fix. You don’t do that. You treat me like I’m a person.”
“Joey, that’s…” she shook her head, “that’s bare minimum , kid.”
“It is. And some people can’t even manage it.” he says, “All’s I’m saying is that if you’re trying to be a big, bad influence on my life then you’re doing a pretty shit job.”
Arlo blinks, the declaration fitting somewhere in her mind that she hadn’t realized had been empty. She swallows, taking one last drag from the cigarette, “I…thanks. I guess.”
“Anytime.” he smiles then redirects his attention to the sky, “You said you watch a bunch of science stuff. Know any constellations?”
She smiles softly, stubbing the cigarette and grinding it beneath her boot, “ Quizás.”
He groans, “You’re getting a lot of milage out of that word. Spanish is a whole language, ya know.”
“I’m aware.” she points upward, “Still―constellations. I know a few.” she slaps the roof of the car, “Hop up.” he clambers out of the window and awkwardly onto the top of the car, sandwiching himself between the metal railings. Arlo points, “See that one?”
“That one?” Joey points just slightly too far left, Arlo grabs his wrist to correct.
“That one. That’s Pisces.” she traces the constellation with Joey’s hand, “The fish one.”
He squints, “That looks literally nothing like a fish.”
“It’s symbolism, smart guy. Or metaphor.” she says, “One of the two.”
“One of the two , she says.”
She slaps the back of his head and ignores his ensuing amused cry of annoyance, “Do you want me to show you constellations or not?”
“Yeah, yeah, keep going.”
“That ones Andromeda. And there’s a whole story about it and the other two next to it―Perseus and, uh, Cetus―but the really cool thing is the Andromeda galaxy is in that constellation. A whole galaxy.”
“Whoa.” Joey gaped, he looked up in quiet awe before whispering, “You think they can see us?”
“Hope not. Hell of a lot of pressure.”
“True.” he says, “But a bit comforting though, to know you’re not alone.”
She smirks, “You’re philosophical tonight.”
“I guess. Something about this whole place ” he makes a loose gesture to the vastness around them, “makes me feel a bit…”
“Poetic?”
“Yeah?” he pouts slightly, “I dunno, maybe, like…raw? Like I'm split open. I’m just saying, it’s nice to feel like something’s looking out for you, right? Even when you’re out here. Even if you’re just a stranger to them, ya know?”
She looks up to Andromeda; she looks at Joey who is looking at her, “I think I do.” she coughs, burying the feeling rising in her chest, “You know, radio waves can actually reach deep space. They go far, like infinite far, they never end. As fast as light.” Joey nods, Arlo doesn’t look at him, “What I’m saying is. Technically, uh. Those Jazz songs your mom liked so much―they never stopped playing. Never will. For space, at least. For those aliens watching us in Andromeda.”
Joey breathes out slowly, “Huh.” his adam’s apple bobs against his throat. For a moment, Arlo fears she’s stepped over a whole host of lines but a shaky grins blooms across the teenager’s face, “I-I hope they like them, then.”
She lays her hand carefully on his shoulder, “I'm sure they do.”
“Tell me about another constellation.”
“Alright.” she says, “Alright.”