Highway Elegy
by Liza Stewart
It is the fall of 2020. The sun will go down behind Devil’s Tower. That is where we are driving, towards that black thumb in the distance, the highway unfurling and unfurling. Time speeds up on the road, slows down when you’re going nowhere. I imagine there is a future and in that future I will be a writer. In three months’ time, shaving my head in the carpeted bathroom of a border town double-wide, I will receive a message from my brother cautioning that I am dangerously close to embarking on a lifestyle that is incompatible with reentry into society. The words are already there, unread, on the black screen of my phone.
Even though I’d lost at least one friend over the particulars, you said the details were what made the story. Art, like time, tells its own truth. A heretic is just a person who tells the truth too early.
⦿
The Lakota call it Bear Lodge, Hobbes says. Each tribe has their own oral history. In the shadow of the moonlit stone, we hear the owls’ chorus. In the morning, we will hear that his father has died. I bring Hobbes a burger from a bar that opens at eleven someplace in South Dakota, a town outskirted by used-up strip mines, their scraped sides a well never quite deep enough, nothing down there at all it would seem but keep digging until, at last, the whole project must be abandoned, like countless others we’ll pass, nameless and unknown to us beyond the blurred street signs, to the religion of down the road where luck will change. The well, the strip mine, the grain co-op, the garment factory, the mobile New York City morgues will be left behind or begin again. The burger will say I am here it is now you are a body and you are alive.
⦿
It will be spring before we return to Michigan, the frozen earth stubborn and unyielding. But an hour outside Montana, Hobbes pulls off the highway. He does not say he’s been cheated, that the magnitude of his loss has been eclipsed, hijacked by so many others. I stand beside him on the shoulder, between a plow-blackened snowbank and the Pontiac. There is a puppy in the trunk, next to a chess set we detoured to Denver to retrieve. It is my favorite of the collection I’d inherited from an uncle, and although we spared no time in the pursuit, one pawn would always be missing.
“You don’t get to have everything back,” he says.
Still, he will plant a tree for his father, and his aunt will sing Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever / and some say you’re gonna come back.
⦿
It is the fall of 2021 and we will move back to New York. My father cleared out the old wedding dress while I was away, says nothing about my hair, and I love him for this. I spend the afternoon dismantling and reassembling my life into my childhood closet, and I think you would approve of this and I think all these moments that add up to a life. What is it for?
We won’t talk anymore, my brother and I, on account of an exchange we’ll have when you die, but he texts to say of course writing your book is exciting, but I know you well enough to know that is not the reason you’re so far away all the time. You’re always chasing the next mountain. It’s very sad to me that you’re so transient all the time and that as time has gone by our lives have become ever more distant and now most of it only occurs in stories, rather than experience.
⦿
In many cases multiple histories exist from the same tribe. The Crow tell the story of many hungry bears near the rocks, and they scared two young girls. The girls climbed the rocks but still one large bear could reach them. The Great Spirit, seeing the bear was about to catch the girls, caused the rock to grow up out of the ground. The bear jumped and scratched at the rock, but the rock kept growing until the girls were beyond his grasp. For the Kiowa, as the rock rose higher and higher the girls were pushed up into the sky where they became stars. The Lakota have a brave warrior who went alone into the wilderness to worship the Great Spirit in solitude, and who, when he found himself standing on Mato Tipila, prayed to return to earth.
The words linger, leave behind a residue, eye-level layers of sediment like coal on the side of the road we passed.
“That’s not proof of anything,” I type. “It’s just a consequence.”
⦿
I will miss the trip to Richmond to see you because I believe there will be more time. And there is time enough, for Tofucken Thanksgiving and karaoke that night in Philly but there will not be summer in New Hampshire. That summer we drive south, stop at the antique store for rescue cats to buy your birthday gift, even though you’ll turn twenty-seven in the hospital.
The first try doesn’t take, we don’t even make it past the cemetery, pull over and smoke cigarettes in the rain before we turn back, head for home, like the night we were stoned when it rained so hard I thought it would always be America / I need a miracle / I can’t sleep at home tonight / send me a Hilton Hotel or a cross on the hill. You bent your head close to listen, your hair falling over your eyes. We make the trip to Richmond, listen to the laugh track at the start of “Hungry Like The Wolf” over and over, but we don’t see you.
⦿
It is the fall of 2022 and I come through the door of the house on Birthday Street to tell Hobbes our furniture will arrive the next day, but when I put my bags down I see his face and I know you will not see the furniture from New York or the house on Birthday Street or the American desert west. You will not see us get married.
Those years can never be done over.
Sitting on the floor of the kitchen where you made Thanksgiving, I will stare into my reflection in the oven door folded on the tile in a black jumpsuit and see that I am spent, a scratch-off lottery ticket flaking and peeling.
“We were making art in the face of death and uncertainty,” Hobbes says. “It was a radical act of defiance, to keep making art. Art for its own sake.”
⦿
It is the fall of 2020 although if it were summer some years later it would be my wedding day and we could fall in love again in Michigan’s north woods, my hair swept up and pinned in place with a veil’s comb. We spread out sticky notes labeled with the names of cities where we could live.
What I don’t think you know is that every single time you go you have something to look forward to, but all we’re left with is something to look back on.
The road is unfurling, unfurling. Hobbes rests an elbow on the worn planks of the wood floor. Firelight flickers across his face. There is a nighthawk. There will be an owl. It won’t be long now.
“All you have to do is figure out what kind of story you want to tell with your life.”
We do not know that we are falling in love or will fall in love or have always been in love. The sun is going down behind Devil’s Tower, like a black thumb in the distance. That is where we are headed.
April 7, 2024
https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/historyculture/first-stories.htm
Liza Stewart received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University in 2022. Stewart is the recipient of two fellowships for her work in community outreach and advocacy, and has taught writing in Chicago, Paris, Denver, Quito, and New York. She currently chairs the Creative Writing & Literature Department at the New Mexico School for the Arts.
