Revenge Highway

I had the revenge all mapped out, which is a funny thing to say about a man driving a Lincoln through the Panhandle with his wife of twenty-four years in the passenger seat eating sunflower seeds like a woman at a baseball game. I'd spent three weeks planning it, ever since my retirement paperwork cleared and Caroline asked me what I wanted to do with my freedom and I said Brady Bolton's name out loud for the first time in almost thirty years. I was fifty-two years old, retired last month after thirty-four years in the Army, and I had a spiral notebook with a plan in it that would have embarrassed a younger man, probably should have embarrassed this one.

"You're doing the jaw thing," Caroline said, not looking up from her seeds. "The one where you chew on nothing and pretend you're thinking instead of stewing."

"I am thinking."

"You are stewing, Milt. There's a difference. Thinking has an end point."

I let that one go by, the way I'd been letting things go by for most of the morning, and watched the heat shimmer over the asphalt ahead of us like the road itself was sweating. We'd left San Benji before dawn, and now it was late August doing its late August impression, the sun sitting on the truck stops and the scrubland like someone who'd paid for the whole theater and intended to stay through the credits. The plan was simple on paper. Drive to Amarillo, then on into New Mexico where Brady Bolton had landed after his great betrayal, catch him at his office, and say my piece in front of whatever coworkers happened to be around. Humiliation, the notebook said. Public and thorough.

What the notebook did not say, because notebooks don't have to live with the consequences, was what Caroline would think of all this. She'd agreed to come, which I took as endorsement at the time, though I was beginning to suspect it was something closer to supervision.

"Gas," she said, as the sign for a town whose name I won't bother with came up, since the town itself barely bothered. "And I want pie. Don't argue."

"I wasn't going to argue."

"You were going to say we should make time, and then I was going to remind you that the man has worked at the same trucking company for eleven years and will still be there tomorrow, and then you were going to sulk, and I've already had my fill of sulking for one marriage."

So we stopped, and I pumped the gas while she went inside, and I stood there in the heat thinking about Brady Bolton at twenty-three years old, the year he took the promotion that was mine. We'd met in basic training when he was nineteen and I was eighteen, back in 1983, two boys from nowhere Texas, and we'd been thick as thieves for four years, and then a board came up and a billet opened and Brady went behind my back with a recommendation I'd written for him in the first place, turned it around, made it work for him instead of me. My file got buried. His got shining. Thirty years later I retired one rank lower than I should have, and he retired comfortable and fat and, according to the internet, a regional manager with a corner office.

Caroline came out with two sodas and a newspaper she had no intention of reading. "The cashier asked if we were headed to the lake," she said. "I said no, we're going to ruin a man's life, and she said that's nice, y'all have a safe trip."

"You did not."

"I did not," she admitted, "but I thought about it, and thinking counts for something in this car."

We drove on, and somewhere around the second hour of nothing but fence posts and heat she started in on my driving, which was her way of starting in on me without starting in on me.

"You know you drift left when you brood," she said. "The whole car leans. A person watching from behind would think we were drunk."

"I don't drift."

"Milt, honey, you've been hugging that center line for twenty miles like it owes you money."

I corrected my hands on the wheel, mostly to have somewhere to put them, and she laughed, that easy laugh she'd had since she was twenty-six years old and I was twenty-eight and we got married at the little chapel outside Fort Hood with half my platoon in attendance. She had been my steady anchor through every posting and every deployment and every year the promotion board looked the other way, and here she was eating sunflower seeds on the way to my vengeance like it was a trip to see her sister in Waco.

"This is serious to me," I said finally, because somebody had to say it.

"I know it is, baby." She reached over and put her hand flat on my thigh, which she has done ten thousand times and which still works. "I'm not making fun of you. Well, I'm a little bit making fun of you, but I love you and you've been carrying this man around in your chest for three decades and I'd like to see you put him down."

"He took my career."

"He took one promotion in 1987. Then you had thirty more years to take it back and you built a hell of a career anyway, and retired with a pension and a wife who still likes you, which is more than most men can say." She crunched a seed and spat the shell into the cupholder with the accuracy of long practice. "But sure. Road trip. I'm here for it. I packed the good cooler and everything."

The diner we found called itself the Best Little Truck Stop Diner in the Panhandle, which was a bold legal position to take, and the food was exactly as greasy as the price promised. We got a booth by the window, and Caroline ordered chicken fried steak and I ordered the meatloaf, and somewhere between the bread basket and the entrees she started telling the story back to me, which is where the afternoon turned.

"So let me get this straight," she said, putting down her fork and gesturing with both hands the way she does when she's warming up. "It's 1987. You and Brady are best friends. You write him a glowing recommendation for this promotion board because that's what friends do."

"He needed the help."

"He needed the help, fine. And then Brady takes your recommendation, walks it down the hall, and drops your own name in the trash can on the way, is that about the size of it?"

"He buried my file. He told the board I was staying at my current post by choice, so they'd think I wasn't competing."

"Right, so they give Brady the billet, and you find out from a guy in the motor pool, secondhand, weeks later. And your big response, your masterstroke, your decades-long counterattack, is to retire, buy a Lincoln, and drive at him across two states with a spiral notebook."

I couldn't help it. The notebook got me. "You know about the notebook."

"Milt, I did the laundry for three weeks. The thing was under your socks. I read it, I made grocery lists in the margins." She picked her fork back up, grinning now. "The part that kills me, the part I want carved on your headstone, is step four. Confront subject. Establish witness. You wrote establish witness. Like you're gonna get a notary to come along."

"It's a sound plan."

"It's a plan a man wrote at two in the morning in his underwear, is what it is." She was laughing now, really laughing, the big unguarded one, and a guy at the counter turned to look and she didn't care a bit. "Baby, listen to me. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying you've been rehearsing a speech to a man who doesn't know you're coming, for a wrong that's older than our marriage, and somewhere on this highway you've got to ask yourself what you actually want out of it."

"What I want is for him to know what he did."

"He knows what he did. Men like Brady always know. They just never got caught caring." She cut into her chicken fried steak and pointed the fork at me. "So we'll go see him. I'll sit in the Lincoln with the AC running, and you can go establish your witness or whatever, and then we're going to eat somewhere with a patio, and you're going to tell me on that patio whether it helped. Deal?"

"Deal," I said, and for the first time since the notebook, the road ahead didn't feel like it was leading somewhere dark. It just felt like road.

We crossed into the Amarillo outskirts around six, with the sun finally starting to quit on us, and I picked a motel off the service road because it had a vacancy sign that only buzzed a little and a pool I could see from the office that nobody was using. The kid at the desk charged me fifty-nine dollars and looked at my convertible Lincoln like it was the most interesting thing to happen to him all week, which, fair enough, out here it probably was.

The room had two beds we didn't need and an ice machine down the hall that sounded like a helicopter taking off every time somebody fed it. Caroline claimed the bed nearest the window, kicked off her sandals, and sat cross-legged on the spread unpacking the good cooler like she was setting up base camp. Crackers, that little tub of pimento cheese she swears by, two apples, and a bottle of wine in a plastic screw-top bottle that cost four dollars and change, because we had stopped at a grocery outside Dumas and she had picked it up off the bottom shelf on purpose.

"That's not even wine," I said, nodding at the bottle. "That's wine-adjacent."

"It's four dollars, Milt. At four dollars you don't get to be a sommelier, you get to be grateful." She twisted the cap off and poured some into the motel glasses, which were plastic and slightly cloudy and had probably survived three ownership changes. "To step four. Confront subject. Establish witness."

"I will throw you out of this car."

"You will not, I'm your navigator." She clinked her plastic glass against mine and drank, and made a face, and drank again, which pretty well summed up her whole relationship with cheap wine. The AC unit under the window rattled and blew air that was only nominally cooler than the room, and outside the light went from white to gold to that deep fried orange the desert does at the end of the day, and I sat on my bed drinking wine that tasted like a grape had once been in the same county, and I have to admit I felt pretty good.

Caroline finished her glass first and refilled both of ours without asking, which is marriage for you. Then she got that look. I have known that look for twenty-four years and it has preceded every home renovation decision, every dog, and at least two arguments that I started out sure I could win.

"Okay," she said, settling back against the headboard and pointing her glass at me. "I've got a dare."

"You're fifty years old."

"A dare is ageless. Here it is. You have to tell me the real reason you brought me on this trip." She took a sip, watching me over the rim of the plastic glass. "And before you say witness, or navigator, or that somebody has to work the cooler, think about how many times you've watched me watch you lie, and how that went for you."

I drank some more of the four-dollar wine, which did not help at all. "You're the witness. It's in the notebook."

"The notebook also says I'm your, hold on." She reached into her canvas bag, and I realized with genuine alarm that she had brought the notebook, the actual notebook, my socks had apparently not been a secure facility. She flipped it open past the grocery lists. "Here it is. Step three, arrive with spouse, as moral support, quote, unquote. Milt. We have been married twenty-four years. When have I ever provided moral support by riding silently in a car? You brought me because you wanted a witness to the fact that you were doing it. You wanted somebody there when you finally said the thing, so it would be real, so it would count, so thirty years of carrying it would land somewhere other than back in your own chest." She closed the notebook. "Am I warm?"

The AC rattled. Out in the parking lot somebody's truck door slammed and a dog started up and quit. I looked at my wine, and the wine offered no counsel.

"I didn't plan it," I said finally, because the four-dollar wine had loosened whatever bolt holds a man shut. "When the retirement papers cleared, I sat at the kitchen table for three weeks with that thing, and every version I wrote had you in it somewhere. Not doing anything. Just there. And I kept telling myself it was because you'd worry if I disappeared for a week, which is a lie, because I could have left you a note