Hope

16

The Getaway Vehicle

The sun rose and everything fell. At least that's what it felt like to me, as the whole planet apparently gave an abrupt dry-heave and deposited my whole surroundings and my person onto the floor.
"What the hell, Alex!" I hollered in my post-wake-up hoarse old man voice. I could hear him cracking up in the driver's seat. "What time is it?"
"Breakfast time!" he bellowed back in his radio-DJ voice. A generic-brand Nutri-Grain bar sailed through the air over my head in an elegant parabola and bounced off the back window.
"Where are we?"
"The highway, son! What's it look like?" Alex waggled his eyebrows at me in the rearview mirror. "Welcome to the fair state of Ohio!"
"Oh," I yawned. "Wow. We got far."
He waited for a second, either to relish his own comedy or to give me a chance to recant my statement, and then emitted a cat-like cackle. "Man, you must be tired! I-95 doesn't go through Ohio, Donkey Kong!" The light flicked to green. "We're in New York," he conceded.
"So can I actually drive here?"
"If you can manage to drag yourself up here -- and if you don't mind the lovely people of New York seeing you in your natural state..." he raised his eyebrows at my hair and complete lack of shirt. "Then sure."
See, the thing is this. According to the instructor my mom had for the mandatory parent class at that fine establishment known as McDougall's Driving Academy, Massachusetts is really stupid. By that I mean that apparently none, I repeat not one, of the states next to or anywhere near Massachusetts actually accepts a Mass learner's permit. I have no explanation for this except that New England apparently doesn't like making sense, and I'm not about to ask one of the friendly faces at the Registry of Motor Vehicles for better justification than that, so I guess I just have to be content with the fact that to drive anywhere except Massachusetts all I would have to do would be to pick up my car, fly it to Minnesota -- without touching down in any states on the way, mind you-- and cruise around the Midwest as much as I please, because Massachusetts and the Midwest seem to have some kind of deal or something.
In summation, Alex was making stuff up again. I am eighty percent sure that my permit was not even somewhat valid in New York, or pretty much any of the states on the Eastern seaboard. But Alex had slapped the Supervised Driving Log triumphantly onto the kitchen table just days before, with that gleamy movie-star laser intensity in his eyes that means he's just thought of a perfect "why not" scenario, and had jammed his finger at the headings of the glaringly blank little columns.
"Look. Date and time. Driving time. Day or night. Driving environment, weather conditions, skills practiced -- that's it. They don't ask where you're driving, just whether it's a back road as opposed to a highway. I mean, it's not like anybody's going to pull you over; your driving instructor lady made you drive in Rhode Island when you weren't technically supposed to, right, and nobody cared. And you need forty hours, which is just excessive in my opinion anyway, but..." he looked up at me through his ridiculously long eyelashes. "Why not knock off all forty in one shot?" He leaned back onto the refrigerator, acting like he was running out of points to make but knowing he'd said all he'd planned to say and had already convinced me. "Besides," he shrugged, like it was an afterthought instead of a priority, "It'd be fun. Who else do you know who's done that? And tell me you haven't always wanted to." At that point he pulled up a map of I-95 on his phone and slid it across the table to me, and I knew my summer plans.
"I think Mom probably wants me to try to get a job this summer," I heard myself say.
"I'll talk to her," Alex replied with the self-assuredness of a supervillain, and recognizing his ability to dissolve any potential attempt at parental veto, I knew that would be enough. Two days later we were at Camping World signing RV rental papers, and the day after that I learned how to merge for the first time with what felt like a hundred feet of metal behind me as we hurtled down the highway in a rectangular prism with the size and handling of a smallish single-family home.
That was my introduction to driving. I don't like driving. To me it is a nerve-shattering process of trying not to kill yourself or give other people an opportunity to kill you while in nearly-continuous motion, when there is a fairly strong likelihood that your road-mates are stupid and/or distracted and could very well just fly in out of left field and kill you anyway, to the point where I actually enjoy red lights and completely immobile traffic. This is even more terrifying when you're essentially driving a house down the street and still haven't acquired the instinctive knowledge of where your vehicle ends and everything else begins. Also, for those who don't know our nation's highway system that well, the point of I-95 is that it is a straight shot from Maine to Florida. This was Alex's grand idea that would let me get all forty driving hours that Massachusetts requires for a permitted driver to get their license. I don't think he mentioned once what he actually planned for us to do when we got to Florida, but he's always been very much an "it's not the destination, it's the journey" kind of person. As for me, I couldn't picture an end to our little odyssey in which that cheap, lumbering RV survived in one piece.
"Bro, that Benzo was zoomin'!" observed the second-WASPiest kid in America. "Did you see that guy?"
"Nope," I replied from within the shirt I was in the process of putting on. See, that's the thing about Alex. He's in his last year at Yale and he still sometimes talks like that- not to teachers or adults or anything, usually just people his age or younger. I think he feels like it makes him more approachable than just talking like I do, which he says sounds like a textbook. He doesn't like sounding pretentious. He just knows which people need to be impressed and which ones he wants to get a laugh out of. I padded into the little bathroom and tried to coax my hair into some recognizable shape. "When do you want to switch?"
"I think there's a rest stop somewhere soon where we can pull over," he yawned. He took a casual slurp of his jumbo-sized Cumberland Farms iced coffee and settled back in his seat.
That was when we heard the police siren.
It took me a few seconds of recovery to realize that my sudden-onset deafness came from the fact that the police car was right behind us, just a few sheets of metal away from my eardrum. It took a few more seconds and one exchanged look of terror for Alex and me to absorb that the siren was meant for us.
"What do I do? Do I just punch it?" Alex yelped, his knuckles stretched white on the steering wheel.
"What? No, don't 'punch it'! Pull the heck over!" I leapt into the passenger seat and threw on my seatbelt as Alex shakily guided the RV onto the side of the highway. I gazed with amazement upon this irrational, shaking, ghastly pale kid to which my brother had been reduced. The cop walked up to the window. I didn't actually see him walking, but when I picture it I imagine that it was vaguely reminiscent of a cowboy approaching a duel. "What are you freaking out for?" I laughed, a little uneasy. "You haven't done anything wrong."
"Well clearly I must have done something, or they wouldn't have pulled us over!" Alex whispered shrilly as he slid the window down. A refrigerator-sized, coffee-scented guy straight out of a late nineties episode of Law and Order stared down at us.
"Can I see a license, registration, and proof of insurance, sir?" the cop asked gruffly in a New York accent rivaling Jerry Orbach's. Alex slowly stretched a shaking hand into his sweatshirt pocket for his wallet while I snapped open the glovebox and got out the papers. The policeman brought Alex's license up to his nose. "Alex Giordano?" Alex appeared to make some attempt at speech but couldn't get his throat to work or something, so he just nodded hollowly. "An' you're from Massachusetts?"
"Yessir," Alex finally rasped. His voice sounded like he was eight.
"This your RV?"
"We rented it," I replied, handing him the rental forms for the RV.
The cop nodded toward me. "What's your name, kid?"
"Eliot, Eliot Giordano. I'm his brother."
"Where are you guys headed?"
I decided to take that question too, since Alex still hadn't regained his color or full use of his larynx. "Florida. We're road-tripping down 95. We just left Massachusetts at about six this morning."
The officer's eyes narrowed like he believed us but didn't want to. After a couple years he exhaled and unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket.
"Have you ever seen this guy?"
The paper had a color picture of what I could only describe as...well, as Alex, basically. The haircut, facial structure, even the eyebrows were exactly the same. The guy looked more plausibly like his brother than I did, by a long shot. Except for the eye color, the layer of stubble, a few distinguishing freckles, and the text box below him saying that he was wanted for robbery, the guy might have been Alex's twin.
"His name's Ryan Girard. Held up two convenience stores and a pawn shop in the Bronx. Some witnesses said he may have gotten away in a large vehicle, a big SUV or a van or an RV of some kind. Sorry to hold up your road trip with this, but..." He gestured at the poster. "I think you'd agree there's some pretty good resemblance."
"Yeah, no, absolutely. Are we okay to keep going?"
"Yeah, of course. Thanks for your cooperation, call us if you see anything. Enjoy New York." He started back to his car. "Better yet, have fun in Florida!" he added, chuckling. "Send us some nice weather."
"Will do. Thank you, sir." I looked over at Alex. "Um, Alex?"
"Yeah?"
"We can go now. The guy just said." Alex started the RV and got back onto the highway, still not making eye contact. I'd never seen him like that: no retorts, no wit, no character he was playing. And since when was I able to have a socially successful conversation with an authority figure? It felt like we'd switched personalities, like that Freaky Friday movie my mom dragged me to in fifth grade because she wanted to see if it was as good as the original.
I decided to throw the awkward silence to the wind. I cracked up laughing. "I can't believe the cops thought you were a bank robber! I mean, what are the odds of that? Guy who looks exactly like you, driving the same RV..." He let out a whimper like a wounded animal and I broke off. "Just sayin'. Too bad your twin's a bank robber, bro." That got him to laugh. I clicked the radio on, and for about two songs' worth of time we both relaxed a little.
Then I saw a police cruiser through my window. It was parked in the exit of a rest stop, presumably to catch people speeding. I made solid eye contact with the officer in the driver's seat. He said something, still following me with his eyes, and his partner next to him looked up. He raised his radio thing to his mouth, without taking his eyes off me even for one half of a second, and said something into it. He threw it in drive, switched the siren on, and headed into our lane.
"Ohhhh crap. Alex--" He let out this weird, short little barky scream and swung into the breakdown lane. I was genuinely fearing for his sanity at this point. He handed his info to the officer without saying anything, before the guy even had a chance to ask him for it.
"Another police officer stopped us a few miles back," I explained. "We're from Massachusetts, we're on a road trip, and I promise my brother is not a bank robber." The guy laughed, said everything looked legit, and sent us on our way after encouraging us to alert the police if we saw anything. "Well, you guys get full marks for vigilance around here," I told him. "Seems like everybody's looking for this guy."
"You'd think they'd communicate or something, you know? Like, tell their buddies down the road that we're clean and they shouldn't stop us," I wondered aloud as we set off again.
Apparently not, because not even five miles later we were seeing the red and blue flashes in our rear view mirrors again, and I was reasoning calmly to a woman who looked like my freshman year gym teacher that there was no way my brother could have boosted anything in New York when clearly he was a Yale student and would have still been at school when the heists took place two weeks ago. When she tramped away Alex wearily flopped his head down on the steering wheel with such force that the horn beeped a little. We drove on to the next rest stop without saying anything. As we were about to go into the place, one of those gritty little establishments that litter the Northeastern roadside and smell like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese, he finally spoke.
"Eliot?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks."
"Anytime, partner in crime." We looked at each other and I finally got him to smile. He straightened his spine a little, and his head regained some of its kingly carriage.
"And we're never going to bring this up again." It wasn't quite a threat or a question, just an Alex statement. For once I didn't feel that heavy inevitability that meant something would be done simply because Alex said it should be. In all likelihood I would bring it up again. No, I would definitely bring it up again. And I would laugh. A lot. So would he, probably, even though now he was still at the point of feeling the presence of a change and wasn't quite ready to see the singular ridiculousness of the simple event.
"No promises."
Some kind of understanding had been reached, I felt. Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.