God's Gym by John Edgar Wideman Page A

us before dark. Deliver his cargo to Hinckley on schedule. Mercifully, the whistling stops when giant white flakes begin to pummel us soundlessly. Shit, he mutters, shit, shit, then snorts, then announces, No sweat, boys. I'll get us to Hinckley. No sweat. Tarzan Smith twists round from the front seat, rolls his lemur eyes at me,
Right,
and I roll my eyes back at him,
Right.
    The Studebaker's hot engine strains through a colder than cold night. Occasional arrhythmic
ftutter-fluups
interrupt the
motor's drone, like the barely detectable but fatal heart murmurs of certain athletes, usually long, lean Americans of African descent who will suddenly expire young, seemingly healthy in the prime of their careers, a half-century later.
Fluups
worrying the driver, who knows the car's seriously overloaded. Should he pull over and let it rest. Hell, no, lunkhead. Just let it idle a while on the shoulder. Cut off the goddamn motor and who knows if it'll start up again. The driver imagines the earful of them marooned, popsicles stuck together till spring thaws this wilderness between Chicago and Hinckley. Slows to a creepy crawl. Can't run, can't hide. An easy target for the storm. It pounces, cuffs them from side to side of the highway, pisses great, sweeping sheets of snow spattering against the tin roof. How will he hear the next
fluup.
His head aches from listening. Each mile becomes minutes and minutes hours and hours stretch into an interminable wait between one
fluup
and the next. Did he hear the last one or imagine it.
lifluup's
the sound of doom, does he really want to hear it again.
    Some ungenerous people might suggest the anxious person hunched over the steering wheel obsesses on
fluups
to distract himself from the claustrophobia and scotophobia he can't help experiencing when he's the only white man stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere with these colored guys he gets along with very well most of the time. C'mon. Give the driver a break. He rides, eats, drinks with them. To save money he'll sleep in the same room, the same bed, for Chrissakes, with one of them tonight. He'll be run out of godforsaken little midwestern towns with the players after they thump the locals too soundly. Nearly lynched when Foster grins back at a white woman's lingering Chessy-cat grin. Why question the driver's motives. Give the man the benefit of the doubt. Who are you, anyway, to cast the first brick.
    Who handed you a striped shirt and whistle. In the driver's shoes—one cramping his toes, the other gingerly tapping the
accelerator—you'd listen too. Everybody crazy enough to be out on the road tonight driving way too fast. As if pedal to the metal they can outrun weather, outrun accidents. You listen because you want to stay alive.
    Or try to listen, try to stay alert in the drowsy heat of the car's interior, your interior hot and steamy too, anticipating a rear-end assault from some bootlegger's rattling, snub-nosed truck. Does he dare stomp harder on the gas. Can't see shit. The windshield ice-coated except for a semiclear, half-moon patch more or less the size of his soon-to-be roommate Smith's long bare foot. The driver leans forward, close enough to kiss the glass. Like looking at the world through the slot of one of those deep-sea diving helmets. Squinting to thread the car through the storm's needle eye makes his headache worse. Do his players believe he can see where he's going. Do they care. Two guys in the front seat trade choruses of snores. Is anybody paying attention. Blind as he is peering through snow-gritty glass, he might as well relax, swivel around, strike up a conversation if somebody's awake in the back.
    It's fair to ask why, first thing, I'm inside the driver's head. Didn't we start out by fleeing a conference hall packed with heads like his. A earful of bloods and look whose brains I pick to pick. Is my own gray matter hopelessly whitewashed. Isn't the whole point of writing to escape what people not me think