Wheels of a Delta 88 spin fast on winter-ravaged Upstate roadways. Fallow fields, half-encrusted in snow, the rest furrowed in frozen field-rot and iced-over mud, unfurl themselves on either side of a moonlit ridge. Spent barns bending under a zillion stars. Homey, yellow dash lights and a large speedometer with its needle moving quickly right, then left. The lemon moon waning. 
 
Klokko heading east into the Catskills terrain he’d known since he was a boy riding in the backseat, pretending to be asleep as his dad, all grunts and groans, negated everything his Ma said. 
 
His younger brother, Gerard, took the place of Pa in Ma’s eyes. He always gave her what she wanted, what she needed, until he left the picture too early. Far too early.
 
There was a comfort to this landscape, especially in the dark when it matched his dreams, and not just his guilt at never having measured up.
 
The Oldsmobile purred through sleeping hamlets and villages lit by scattered streetlamps dimmed by dead bugs, ringed with winter’s dirt crust. Klokko made sure to stick within the speed limit…on the upper side. 
 
The stiff-necked, rail-thin, scraggly-bearded driver took in all he passed. Empty storefronts, boarded-up boarding houses with scattered appliances on multiple porches. Street lots centered by corrugated metal storage sheds and dark homes, some asbestos or vinyl-sided, some peeling paint and emitting the flickering blue light of unwatched late night television talk shows. The occasional brightly lit soda pop machine or convenience store. Dying fluorescents skittering their way back to black. The sad, endless look of late winter/early spring on the edge of the Catskills.
 
Klokko ejected the Big Pink tape he’d been playing for days and surrounded himself with strumming guitars and harmonized male voices. The Everly Brothers on lush 8-track; Let It Be Me split into halves, connected by a whirr and a click and another whirr. Accompanied, always, by this great fan’s breath-singing—whistles and hums and an occasional word or two at a half-pace behind the song.
 
On the passenger side of the wide, blanketed front seat was an apple crate of worn tapes. Grateful Deads and solo Garcias, Beatles and Beach Boys, Creedence and Elvis and Roy Orbison, even Frank Sinatra. Sicilian folk songs Klokko could only phonetically mouth the words to; strange ten-cents-a-shot jazz tapes without covers. He cranked the music high and pushed the bass tones, the treble.
 
The whiteness of the road’s edge lit swatches of forest cut into by modular homesteading. Old lawn ornaments and picnic tables; battered, front-less mailboxes of all ages and dentedness. An endless rope of sagging, pole-hung telephone and electric wires echoing the center white and yellow lines’ straights, dots, and dashes.
 
Klokko, back in his normal driving mind, flashed back to other journeys at other ages and times. Gerard in the front seat between Ma and Pa on night drives home from his mom’s uncle’s farm up in Washington County, Klokko stretched out on the back seat under the blanket he now sat on, watching the night sky stay steady above the car, above the entire world they passed through fast and fleetingly. 
 
All dead now, except Pa. 
 
Klokko passed the time, during those drives or when left at home, with counting. Wishing, yearning games that used the cracks in roadways, the alphabet letters in directional signs and advertisements, cows and sheep and front-yard chickens, the patterns on peeling wallpaper and the floor’s cracked linoleum, alongside his own limited way with numbers. A cracked barn equaled Uncle Artie’s farm; three sevens and his mother and brother ended up in heaven. He imagined the happiness of blue-lit homes in small towns; watched kids playing on tire swings, walking with bent twig fishing poles down back roads, sliding down long edge-of-town fields on runner sleds or trash can lids. If at home, he’d remember his imaginings from the road.
 
Breathe in, breathe out.
 
The moon rolled up over a distant hill, backlighting road signs and telephone poles and distant trees in a hollow.
 
 Klokko turned off the headlights and whooshed on through the ice-edged, equinox-approaching night in the direction of the slow-rolling lemon moon, careening down rural backroads with the force of all memory, hope, and yearning pushing him onward.
 
Should he U-turn back home or sit the night out at Sid’s Ford? He could wait for the dawn light to strike his beloved lady’s windows, to climb across her far wall and kiss her sweet eyes awake. He could then open his car door as she opened her front door on that porch he knew so well. Could watch, lovingly, as she stepped out onto the road without looking in either direction to come to his long-closed, now-open arms to say, if only with eyes and spirit and heart, “It's alright. Come to me, now, as I’ve come to you. The time’s ours, dear. It’s our time.”
 
Klokko thought of all those songs that are so good you can’t help but stop them halfway through to start them all over again to hear them better, to not miss any of it with one’s meandering mind.
 
Somewhere behind him, a car crested the hill as he drove, lightless.  He turned his own beams back on. A cluster of mobile homes appeared to his left, a plywood school bus stop to the right. A faint orange glow emanated from behind a hill. He knew this town, knew that in its center was an all-night gas station, nestled into a corner, where someone would say “hi” and nod matter-of-factly in his direction.
 
I want my own memories now, Klokko muttered while putting a new 8-track in the player. I want my own story, finally.
 
All around him surged the sound of The Band’s Music from Big Pink, and his soul’s doppelganger, Richard Manuel, singing about his own father, his own tears of rage.
 

***

 
“They’ll be getting up right around now. Jessie Ketchup’s what people call her. She put ketchup on everything back in kindygarten, back in Sunday school, you name it. Some say it was to make up for her dad being gone and all, raised by just her mom. Jessie Ketchup’s true as heaven, truer than hell. Pretty girl, she is, too. Real pretty.” 
 
Sid Ford’s talking a mile a minute as I turn back towards the sun. I slip on my shades. Don’t want him to see the yellow in my eyes.
 
An old car starts to pull in as we stand there, Sid talking and me listening. But it quickly U-turned and headed back the way it had come, squishing slugs as it went. The old man shook his head and opened his mouth as if to tell me a whole new story related to the green Oldsmobile and its driver.
 
“What’s with all these slugs?” I ask, unable to get my eyes off the slimy exodus going on as the day warmed to something more than the usual thaw, as if a door to Hades had been ripped open. Some had made it to the highway’s double yellow line as if trying to escape the fate of what remained in the road edges’ shrinking soot-snow patches. 
 
“They do that every once in a while. Gets really bad in summer, and occasionally during one of these early thaws. Never seen it quite like this,” Sid explains, starting into a long description about why slugs crawl onto asphalt in the first place. A natural death wish, like porcupines licking the bottoms of cars, getting after the sweetness of transmission fluid. Or gnawing on houses painted with toxic paint. 
 
Looking at his oil-blackened hands, then up and over his shoulder towards the open bays of his garage, I’m hit with memories of my pa. Ed.
 
I’m a slug. What have I done with my life? I’ve been a fool and, worse, a dangerous fool. I hate it all: Mickey Twist and Jim Morrison. Bob Dylan and my place in The Band. Beatles and Stones; all the music. I hate rock and roll and what it has done to us. I hate this fucking geezer yapping at me in a high-pitch monotone about goddamned slugs. 
 
I’ve fucked it all up, but good.
 
I remember the look on Liz’s face when she first met Mickey Twist, looking on him the way I’m looking at these slugs. Twist in a Jag, all smooth and talking just to her, all “misters” and “ma’ams” beside the Woodstock Village Green. Sun just perfect on bright October leaves. And she, gripping my hand in hers, her other hand on her pregnant tummy. 
 
It was good she didn’t see my look, like the one I’d just given the Ketchup girl. She’d have slapped me upside the head, then left me. 
 
But maybe she did see.
 
We had talked. I told her Mickey was with the record company. A&R. Artists and something or other.
 
“Tea and sympathy,” Twist said with a smile, shaking our hands and scooting away.
 
“Is there a pay phone?” I interrupt Sid Ford. He says no but if I can keep it local, he’d let me use his.
 
“Woodstock’s all,” I say. “Gotta check on my wife and boy.”
 
I walk into the station’s crowded office, eyes open for a phone amongst the parts catalogs, calendars, pieces of this and that, and newspapers. When I spot a cord I follow it under a copy of the Woodstock Times, not yet yellowed like everything else in the room. The phone’s old-style, heavily rooted to the desk. I try Liz’s number.  Busy. I try again, just in case I got it wrong the first time. It just rings, unanswered. Same thing happens a third time and then, on the fourth, it starts going busy again.
 
At least I’m no longer getting people treating me as dead air or some odd, unimportant ghost calling in from the other side.
 
“That’s it,” she told me a year or two into the routine that resulted from Twist’s presence in town. 
 
“I’ll restart my career. Move back to my parents with the kid. Make it in Woodstock on my own, if I have to.”
 
“Like hell,” I said, raising my fist in the doorway. “That’s my kid. You’re my wife.” She slammed the door and locked it. How could I have ever explained that I just wanted to hit myself? 
 
And so, she left. The first time. A second time, too.
 
Jesse Ketchup comes across the road from her front porch as I’m on the phone. She’s leaning against my car, speaking with Sid. She wears Capris and a Hello Kitty muscle shirt. The chill air lends her flesh goosebumps. Small nipples scream howdy. There’s something familiar about her, just as there’s been something familiar about everything these past days.
 
“Missy here says she has a question for you,” Sid says as I approach. “You get your wife and kid on the line?”
 
I shake my head, looking out at the slick of slug guts, the sun catching it just so.
 
At the mention of “wife” the teen girl seductively raises a red sparkle-toed foot to scratch behind her calf and pouts. 
 
“I seen you somewhere?” the girl asks. “You been parking out here across from my window, mister. Or are you just famous or something?”
 
Sid laughs and shakes his head, moving to open his bays. 
 
“Kids,” he mutters. “She asks this of every guy who pops through.”
 
Jessie Ketchup reminds me a bit of Dawn. It’s her attitude, that saucy way she has. A bad girl looking for a bad boy.
 
“Didn’t you hear me ask you a question, mister?” the girl asks louder, pushing her hands back a bit on the car door so her tits point my direction. “You as bad as them slugs.”
 
“I got a good-looking boy almost your age,” I say. “You be careful now.”
 
“Listen, I’m sorry about Jessie, but she being…” Sid’s saying.
 
I wave a hand and tell him he forgot to ask for money.
 
“Oh, I figured you’d just be having a credit card and I can’t take credit cards,” he answered. “But you being from Woodstock and all, you’ll be getting back to me. You hear about…”
 
“Thank you, Sid,” I interrupt before he can launch another diatribe. “Listen, I was wondering if you’d finished that Woodstock Times in there. If so, would it be…”
 
“Oh, that’s a humdinger of an issue. Just out yesterday. Already read it cover to cover, I did.”
 
He scampered back inside and reappeared with the newspaper before finishing his sentence. 
 
“Sid, you’re a good man,” I said as I took the paper from him. I was close to home now. I had a lot of questions that needed real answers.
 
 
© Paul Smart 2023
 
This is an excerpt of the novel Overlook by Paul Smart, Recital Publishing 2023.