A Meaningful Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

heaps of smashed granite. Bad cess on them, Lowell thought. Teach them a lesson. He was going back, and he felt like being smart with everybody.
    At the summit the car behind him began to honk its horn. A little fuzzy from lack of sleep and too much thinking, Lowell glanced in the rear-view mirror and sluggishly began to pull over to let it pass. Then, in a swift double take, he looked in the mirror again, floored the accelerator, and shot back into the lane with only inches to spare as the car behind hooted madly and slammed on its brakes. It was his father’s car. He’d recognized it all in a flash, and there could be no doubt about it whatever: a green 1954 Kaiser sedan, the paint dull and the chrome ring missing from the left-front headlight, Idaho plates, Ada County numbers. And behind the oddly shaped Kaiser windshield, were the blurred, perplexed faces of his father and mother. Lowell drove faster.
    They were over the peak now. It was all downhill, and the Ford ought to be able to outrun the Kaiser in no time. Anybody could outrun his father, no matter what they were driving. As a small boy in the back seat of the car before the Kaiser (a gray Frazer with an enormous blunt snout and a buffalo medallion), Lowell would watch with dismay as cars and pickups whipped past them with meteoric speed, even prewar Hudsons with tiny old men at the wheel. “Faster, Daddy, faster,” Lowell would urge as a city bus crept abreast, then lumbered slowly ahead, its driver glaring at them. “You can’t be too careful with a car,” his father would reply. “There are a lot of Canyon County drivers on the road.” Lowell was never able to see what Canyon County had to do with it. The important thing was that everybody passed them. A vehicle had only to make its appearance behind them—even a road grader—for Lowell’s father to slow to a crawl to let it past, warily scanning its plates for the dread Canyon County insignia.
    Lowell hit sixty on the curving downgrade, but his father hung in there as though their bumpers were magnetized. It was kind of terrifying and it could not end well, no matter what happened. His father honked again, two short toots and a long insistent bray, and his mother waved a handkerchief behind the windshield. Lowell hunched up his shoulders and scrunched down in the seat until his eyes were on a level with the top of the dashboard, but he couldn’t see the road very well that way and presently he sat back up again. Just then his father made a desperate bid to pull up alongside. Lowell foiled this maneuver by pulling over into the middle of the road just as a huge cattle truck as wide as a house struggled into view around a curve mere feet away. Lowell ducked back into his own lane in the nick of time, nearly colliding with his father, who was audaciously attempting to draw abreast on the right. When Lowell was able to look in the rear-view mirror again, his father seemed to be talking to him through the windshield and his mother had covered her eyes with her handkerchief. Lowell took the next curve at seventy. It did him no good; his father never faltered. Lowell guessed he was really in for it now.
    Far too late, large numbers of plausible explanations of his presence at the top of Donner Pass sprang into mind. For example, he could have pretended he was coming out to greet them, never mind that he was going the wrong way, he’d gotten tired of waiting; it was a little thin, but it would have done in a pinch. Or he could have said he was visiting a friend—that was always a good gambit; his parents had worried constantly that he didn’t have enough kids to play with, and he was always able to get away with being sighted in strange places (such as the sewage plant or the drive-in theater) by pretending that he was on his way to, or on his way back from, a visit to a friend. His parents were usually so pleased by word of this fictitious destination that