Jagged Fields

Chapter 1

I gazed out my windshield and focused on the endless sandy expanse ahead of me. To my far left there were mounds of sand as large as mountains, uneven tan rivulets progressively rising higher out of the flat plateau. In the distance I saw jagged gray peaks capped with thick layers of snow. I idly wondered if I would be able to climb them on a warm day.

            I love driving through Utah’s deserts. It’s hard to buy into the gorgeous pictures of the wild west until it’s right in front of your eyes. Every turn reveals clay-like rock statues and desert-like ravines. While many long-distance drives feel cumbersome, I found this one to be intriguing, magical even. Sadly, my copilot did not share my sentiment.

            “I still don’t know why you chose to go this way. It takes, like, two hours longer than the northern route. Don’t you think I just want to get there?” Tony asked. I flipped my long brown hair behind my shoulder and stayed silent, hoping to dodge conflict by ignoring the question.

Tony and I were on our way out to Utah for a long weekend. The trip started out on the wrong foot. The night before, he had caught a flight home from Georgia only to be delayed for seven hours at the layover. That morning I’d picked him up in the form of a grumpy bear with its teeth bared. We discussed nothing but how hectic the trip had been, how awful the airport was, and how he couldn’t guarantee he would be able to stay in Oregon with me for much longer. I begged him to take a nap, but he refused. Instead, he made some phone calls that ended in screaming.

Now, here in the car he was too occupied policing my driving to take a nap, and man, did I want him to shut up.

            “Be careful not to drive too fast.” He was up all night, yet he stayed awake throughout the ride. We’d been on the road for four hours and had another four to go. The mountains were becoming sparser, replaced by mounds of sand.

            “We’re going to make it just fine; we’re not even past the border yet. Now please, just go to sleep.” I continued to cruise along at 80 miles per hour in a 75 zone.

            “Lately everybody is going against me,” he said, a frown clouding his gaunt face.

            “Me?” I asked.

            “A little bit of it’s you.”

             I sighed. “I love you, and I’m really not trying to make things difficult for you.”

            “Then how come you went this way when I told you that the other way was faster?”

            I sighed again as I fixated on the vast desert in front of me. “We’re already here, what do you want me to do? You told me this route was only twenty minutes longer. I just didn’t want to cut through the city again.” Anger began to flood my chest as we passed some tall mounds of sand. We were on one of the most beautiful highways in America, yet he couldn’t see past wasted time.

            He kept at me. “You said you had a bad feeling about the quicker way. I told you to go that way, but you had to go this way.” I glanced out the window at a large cactus, its wide arm lined with spikes that might enter one’s stomach and exit the back should they fall at the wrong angle.

            “I’m sorry honey, I didn’t mean to go against you,” I practically cowered then reached into the cup holder for my phone. I flipped it upright as I hit the ‘home’ button. We were driving straight, so I intermittently glanced between the screen and the road as I brought up the GPS. Once it loaded, I passed Tony the phone. “Check and see if there is another way.”

            “There isn’t,” he huffed. “It’s too late to cut through Wyoming because we’re in Utah.”

            “Just check,” I gritted my teeth and struggled to keep hostility out of my tone. He was probably right. The most recent exit bearing civilization was at least ten miles ago. The next intersection of a main road wouldn’t show up for another hour.

            He silently stewed as he typed the location into my phone. “I don’t get it. You said that we should take a nap before we left. I said that I just wanted to get there since we were already delayed. So wouldn’t you think I would want to take the route that was going to get us there the quickest!?” He was repeating himself and glaring at me.

            I had never seen him this upset before. I wanted to say that scheduling a return flight the day before our big trip was far stupider than taking this route. Instead, I settled on the response, “Look, I really want to get us there.”

            “But now it’s going to be hours before we get there!”

            I squeezed the steering wheel as tightly as my grip would allow and watched my fair skin turn pink. “Yes, it is going to take hours! Miserable hours because you’re fighting with me in the middle of a nine-hour drive! I told you to take a nap because this is exactly what I knew would happen!”

            “You just don’t get it. I feel like hell right now! I’m running all over the place in Georgia; then I have you going against me, always needing more. You just added one more thing!”

            “I understand that you were busy.”

            “Apparently you don’t!” his voice brimmed with hostility.

            “Well then try to make me understand!” I exclaimed. “You usually talk to me all day, but when you go to Georgia, I barely hear from you. I had to make some big decisions involving my career last week, and I wanted to discuss them with you. I’d also like to hear about your life in Georgia. We’re supposed to be a team.”

            “You want to know what I’m doing?” Tony’s face was scrunched tight with anger, his voice tainted with mockery. “What I’m doing is driving around delivering supplies and seeing a million different people every day. There’s nothing to tell, it’s pure business there.”

            “I get that you don’t have a lot of time, but I just wanted to talk to you! Just shoot me a text while you’re going to the bathroom or something. Constantly shifting from being around you all day to barely hearing from you is hard.” I knew I sounded lame, but my life revolves around consistency. Such is the way of being autistic: loathing transitions and unpredictability.

            “I didn’t bother you while you were away in Florida!” he countered.

            “Well, sorry that you feel I was bothering you!” I could hear my voice rising toward a scream.

            I clench up, and my body vibrates when I feel angry, anxious, or otherwise agitated. It’s something of a coping mechanism; I activate every plausible muscle in my body and fight for the contractions to overcome the fury within. I pressed down on the car’s accelerator as I clenched both hands tightly around the steering wheel, my speed matching my rage. I didn’t speak, just seethed as we shot across the desert.

             I maintained just enough control to keep the vehicle straight and the speed below 100 mph, inundated by Tony’s shrieks as I watched the cacti shoot by. After about a minute I slowed the car back to 87, about 12 mph over the speed limit. Boy this was making him mad, and it was evident that very few officers patrolled the barren area.

            Just then, sand blew against the windshield as a dust devil whipped around the car. I lifted my foot off the pedal and prayed that we wouldn’t be blown off the road.

            Suddenly, a loud ‘thump’ emanated below me. I peered into my rearview mirror but didn’t see anything on the road behind me. “What was that?”

            “I don’t know, it seems fine.” None of the many warning lights in my car sounded. The whirlwind of sand died down, allowing a clear view of the barren highway ahead.

            “Slow down!” The anger radiating from his eyes pricked the crux of my heart. At this point I was driving within the limit, but I reduced pressure on the accelerator. My body was tightly clenched up, my face contorted into a tight grimace. I squeezed my arm over my chest as tightly as I could, as though I could force my heart into place.

            “It bothers me when you do that. I know that it’s a part of your thing, but it’s weird.”

            I shrugged. The fact that I have autism is the most unique part of having a relationship with me. It may be challenging for my partners but is also exceedingly difficult for me. They can leave, but it will follow me everywhere I go for the rest of my life. 

            “You know that I have trouble controlling my body when I get upset.”

            When I glanced over, I was surprised to see tears trickling down his face. His dark eyes glistened against the sunlit moisture, exposing a gentle sliver of his core.

            “Are you crying?” I asked.

            “Yeah…”

            “It’s going to be okay,” I reassured him.

            “I don’t want to lose you,” he wailed.

            “Honey, I love you. I never considered leaving you; we’re just having a bad day.”

            “I love you, too. But things just got so bad.”

            I skimmed the side of the road, searching for a place to pull over. A vulture circled a sign ahead, partially blocking its view. It dove toward the ground, inches away from a sign bearing a gas station symbol. “No matter how bad things get for you, I will be here,” I told Tony.

            I pulled off into a Shell station and parked in front of the air pump. I stepped out of the car and scanned the tires. I did not see any flats or flaws, but I put some air in anyway.

Tony and I walked inside together and approached the counter. “Twenty-five dollars in pump five please,” he told the youthful brunette with a pimpled face as he passed her a 100 dollar bill. She narrowed her eyes and scrutinized it. “I don’t have enough change in the register to break this.”

            “Look, sister, I worked at a gas station for three years. I know that you have a safe with change in the back. Now get back there and break it for me.” He assumed a threatening posture that matched his menacing tone.

            She held the bill up to the light before turning her back and disappearing through a door behind the counter.

            “I’m going to the bathroom,” I said and proceeded to the back of the store. Once locked in a stall, I clenched myself into a tight hug and allowed for my body to rock back and forth.

            I was stuck in the desert with an angry man, one whom I happened to love. This was our first vacation together and it was already going to pieces. The worst part was that I couldn’t figure out why; he went from raging to sobbing over a missing puzzle piece that I could not quite pinpoint. He spent his entire days in Georgia delivering marijuana and hanging out with his friends, yet he couldn’t find a minute or two to text me. Furthermore, he was annoyed because I was asking questions. He accused me of working against him, but what exactly was I competing with?

            I knew his past, yet I’d believed him when he’d promised that this was only the past. Or was I just pretending to believe in him all along.