Goodbye, Arkansas

51 BARRETT HATHCOCK GOODBYE, ARKANSAS I crossed the bridge the first time to amuse a girl. Her name was Clay Ann and she came from Amarillo, Texas. At the time, during that desperate fall of my freshman year, I was on her heels in the way I was on the heels of every woman who smiled twice at me. I’d call Clay Ann a neo-hippie if that wouldn’t diminish her exoticism for me. She was a hippie’s hippie , an aggressive female slacker, an endangered species at my college. She showed those hippie pretenders—with their Phish bumper stickers and compulsive Widespread Panic concert attendance and overpriced marijuana paraphernalia—how a true degenerate behaved. She came to class more than once knocked clear out of her skull on some pills but never had the druggie’s wisdom just to pipe down and not go for the daily participation grade. She would smoke pot in her dorm room with no rolledup towel underneath the door, no pretense of hiding what she was up to. She was generous and communal not only with her drugs but with her drug-related wisdom: “Barrett,” she said to me one time, “whatever happens, don’t ever do acid. You’re entirely too paranoid and insecure already. It would destroy you.” (I consider this some of the best advice I’ve ever received.) In retrospect I’d like to think she was a lesbian, but in truth she was really just not that into me. But before making this discovery I found myself driving her around Midtown Memphis one night, trying not to be boring. “Have you ever?” she asked. “No, I don’t think so.” “You need to. It’s amazing.” I gunned the engine up the incline of the entrance ramp, sending us away from the civilized light of downtown and into the dark wilderness beyond. I was nervous double-fold because this seemed like the beginning of some sort of intimacy and because I was running out of gas. Somehow I hadn’t noticed this until we’d hit the ramp onto the bridge, but there it was—the fuel gauge warning light. It bespoke of a routine personal flaw: ev- colorado review 52 ery time I pretended to be cool, to live without mundane cares, to engage in unprepared bridge-crossings, or their equivalent, the reality of the world tripped me up. Here the culprit was the willfully devious gas gauge. No matter what car, it always runs the same way: You fill it up, and it takes forever for the first quarter of a tank to disappear. The next half a tank vanishes somewhere—I’ve only been to school and the dry cleaners!— and then you’re down to the precarious last quarter of a tank. And this last purportedly equal fourth vanishes while you’re getting out of the driveway. So there we were: the fuel light alert, the needle collapsed at the end of its register, and a short life’s worth of panicky thinking about fuel and cars and the perils of wooing while driving, combining in my mind as we elevated to the bridge’s full height and its central illuminated M-shaped arch began to encage us. “Just how long is this thing?” I asked. “Look at the fucking water!” Clay Ann shrieked, her head out the window. I had fleeting concerns about the possibility of her head getting cut off by one of the passing struts, but shoved that concern aside to calculate the amount of increased drag and decimated fuel created by her open window and outside head. But then all of that was superseded by the need to keep the car in its lane and not swerve into the oncoming semitrailers. What I couldn’t notice then but would come to appreciate later was how beautiful crossing the river could be—the perpendicular highway of water glinting in the bridge light and moonlight, the car rocking along, encased in that industrial-age skeleton, one’s view broken briefly every second by a passing rib. Then I drove fast, noticing so little, while Clay Ann leaned aggressively outside, letting her...