A Regular Guy Read Online Free PDF Page B

branches, ticking. Jane listened to the sounds people almost never hear and forgot about driving and then snapped erect at attention when she caught herself swinging hammocklike into the lurching swoon of sleep. She opened the window and drove rigid, eating the air.
    No one passed but, twice, mile-long semis, and then it was just clutching the wheel hard, through an arc like an amusement park ride, the noise so whole it carried you in it. And it wasn’t up to her if it let you down again or not. But it did and she was still there, her teeth chattering loose, the truck wobbling on the plain dark road.
    For the rest of her life, moments from that night would rise into Jane’s memory to haunt and enchant her, though the sequence of the drive itself remained a mystery, so that finally she could only claim what her great-grandmother had once said after lifting a Ford off the junkyard ground to save her only child’s back: “I don’t know how I did it. I couldn’t do it now again if you paid me.”
    Jane wanted to stop and lie down in the seat, but she was afraid of day: if she couldn’t make herself wake up. She had the clock, she could put it by her ear or inside her shirt on her chest. She decided to pull over and eat just one Fig Newton. That would help. But it tasted dry and strong; she didn’t really like them without milk. Water from the round canteen tasted metal, sticking to the back of her teeth. She finally let herself sleep, holding the clock against her chest, then woke with a start and it was only a quarter hour. On her knee she had a scab. She picked it off and ate it, liking the tough opening taste of blood.
    Her mother had warned her not to let the gas go down to empty. She had painted a red line on the glass gauge with fingernail polish. But now the needle was hovering below and there was no filling station. When Jane felt frightened, she pulled on the wheel and made herself sit up straight. “I will always sit up straight from now on,” she told herself.
    She made numerous promises to any God that night. By the end, she’d promised her whole life away to goodness.
    Later, the road widened and she stopped at a ten-bank gas station,got her money out and put on her hat. She was trembling and her knee jumped when the man came over to help her. He was an old man and small.
    “Fillerup?”
    She handed him one of the twenties.
    “Okeydokey.”
    She picked a scab from her elbow, watching. When he put the hose back in its slot she drove away. That was done.
    At one point, Jane began singing all the songs she knew, the night everywhere around dimensionless and still beginning, and she came to understand that she knew very few songs, and of those she remembered only one verse and a scattered mess of words with spaces between. Most were from camp meetings and she despised them. After “The Farmer in the Dell,” she tried the Beatles songs her mother liked to hum.
    She did numbers then—picturing them, the line, the carry-the-one—and for a while she named the things she knew. Capitals lasted nine states, history was little better, and she remembered only the first two lines of a poem she’d once had to memorize: “By the shore of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water …” She now understood the point of memorization. Rhymes and numbers and state capitals and presidents could keep you out loud at a time like this. All Jane knew was what she hated.
    But she had been doing other things while her classmates chanted their gradual multiplication tables. In the tree hollow she had placed seven acorns, unfitted their hats and sprinkled each with salt: that was for Mack to come back with her mother. She’d made offerings too for weather and the end of weather. She didn’t plan. Each commandment came complete, sometimes in school, and she had to obey. One time, she took a nest down and put in the three broken parts of her mother’s sparkly pin. These were her small duties that guaranteed nothing. Only, if