The Drive
by Douglas Cole
They did not speak. They drove. Gabriel was used to it, knew this was how his father was in his most unguarded times, silent. They drove out onto the highway and headed north, driving in the dark. Then they pulled off onto the access road and went down into the town. The streetlights were fixed in a blinking pattern, yellow all around. They did not see another car. Then they drove up to the ferry terminal, paid a cashier in the booth and went onto the ferry. Neither of them said a word.
They stayed in the truck for the crossing. It smelled of leather and mink oiled boots and rifle iron and cigarettes. Gabriel’s father opened a window and smoked and blew the smoke out the window and leaned back in the seat and turned on the radio. He fiddled with the dial and came onto a Hank Williams song and let it sit. The ferry horn sounded three time and the boat pulled out into the sound and rocked softly while they listened to the music. This was the same way they’d go to see his cousins, Gabriel thought, but the thought was meaningless because they were not going to see his cousins. The path was familiar, that was all. He looked out at the blackness of the water, the far faint lights of homes on the islands. What was it like to live on an island? It seemed like a dream, desirable and at the same time unreal. He did not want his life the way it was, now that he was a bad kid. On an island he would be alone.
Daylight was beginning to form, glowing up along the eastern mountain range across the sound as they drove off the ferry and onto the two-lane highway. Then they were back driving through the darkness of trees, alone except for the eyes in the forest. His cousins were out here. They were probably asleep right now.
They went on through the mill town with its sandstone buildings blasted by salt waves, and then back into forest, the endless corridor with the boles fluttering past in the gray illumination of the car lights, and Gabriel thought of sasquatch, the creature of the woods, looking out from the deep of the forest. The road was becoming as they drove on it, because they drove on it and believed a road must be there for them to drive on. Really, they were still asleep in their beds. Really, they were asleep in another life and would wake up curious about these scenes that would quickly fade as they went into the rush of their other worlds. And the people in those worlds were only asleep in other worlds, and this went on for a long time, maybe forever. This is what he kept thinking as they drove in the dark, away from the sunrise that would soon overtake them, that was overtaking them even now but only in the stream of sky above, changing from darker gray to lighter gray to light, while the trees retained their impenetrable darkness.
Douglas Cole has published six poetry collections and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Drive”? I’d just finished writing The White Field, my first published novel but not the first one I’d ever written. The White Field is written in the first person. A point of view that worked for the character in that book. Then…once I was finished, in the sense of having written, typed, edited once a full draft…I was hit by a barrage of voices. There was Sara/Michelle, in flight after providing condemning evidence at her father’s trial; Jones, an expert with money on his way down with a bad drinking problem; and Gabriel, a kid from the northwest on the cusp of adulthood, hovering for a time in that kid-zone of dream. These three characters spoke in turn to the tune of a full braided novel, of which this one piece from Gabriel’s story is a snapshot—the tension of that space where the real, the unreal, the past-present-future blur.
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