Page 87 of Good Dirt

The Road Home

1988

E d was going seventy-five miles an hour and there was little to see but the headlights of his own car on the macadam. He eased off the gas pedal as he dropped down toward the Refuge County line and cracked open the window. He wanted to smell the night, the way it settled in at that hour. The air was cool, there was no traffic to speak of, and for just a few minutes, he felt as though the world was his alone. Until he saw the headlights of another car behind him grow very close, and very quickly.

The other car, a station wagon, switched to the fast lane and pulled parallel to his. The passenger rolled down his window and extended his right arm as far as it could go. A young man with blondish hair, holding something like a business card. Ed squinted and even smiled briefly as he tried to read it. Crazy kid, he thought. On the card, written in dark ink, were three large letters. Actually, now that they were coming into focus, Ed could see that they were the same letter, written three times. Ed didn’t think that anyone really used those letters anymore in those parts, except in news reports or books about hate groups of the past. But there they were.

Ed was no longer smiling. He lifted his foot off the pedal, slowing his car significantly as the other vehicle sped up and flew into the darkness. The white men in the station wagon were barely adults, more like teenagers. Like the college sophomore, an engineering student, who’d been interning with Ed for two months. But that young man on the passenger side of the other car, holding the business card out for Ed to see, had made Ed’s blood run cold.

Ed checked his rearview mirror. Thank goodness, Soh hadn’t seen anything. She was still sleeping, her head leaning against the car window while her hand rested on the seat holding their three-year-old son. Ed wanted to chase the other car and yell at the men. It’s 1988, for Chrissake! he wanted to shout. “And this is my road,” he whispered to himself. “This is my home.”