A Voice In The Night Read Free

their shared life. He liked that she was better at it, would watch and weigh, do the homework, tell him the truth. His trust changed her. Her cynicism retreated, replaced by confidence born of his belief in her.
    “And we don’t have to stay here. We can cross the Hudson River ya know. They’ve got bridges and everything.” She pantomimed the crossing by porpoising her hand in front of his eyes, a visual aid, and comic relief. He laughed hard, mimicking her porpoise-hand back at her with a grin that told her they had decided something that summer morning, in the Healey, in a dusty place at the side of the road. Four weeks later the newlyweds left for San Diego. In later years they would pull out the color snapshots from the cross-country trip. How young and golden they were then, the effect amplified by the fading of the stronger colors, leaving a sepia light that seemed to emanate from them both. How unaware they were of the miracle and controversy they were driving toward.
    They packed the Healey with a small duffel of clothes, lashed to the luggage rack. Behind the seats rode pieces of Luke’s growing library, books that he’d began educating himself from after abandoning school. The rest of their things were on a moving van, grinding slowly across the continent, packed along with four other households heading west.
    At 21, their bodies were immune to the punishing ride of the roadster. They experienced every turn, every road surface through the seats of their pants, awash in the insistent heating system of the car. Although it was July, the Healey poured engine compartment heat up their legs and across their bodies due to a peculiar design whose only control was a pair of doors through the firewall that could be closed to, in theory, turn off the heat. In fact, they had little effect, and they were bathed in perspiration much of the time, their shorts and tee shirts thoroughly dampened after each morning’s opening miles.
    West of Harrisburg, they wheeled into a single-tabled picnic stop along a quiet stretch of Route 22. “We’re that TV show, ya know. Route 66.” She hummed the program’s sweeping theme, rocking from side to side on the bench to animate it, her arms conducting an imagined string section. “Soda. I need sooodaaa,” Luke mugged. She pulled two Coke’s out of the grocery bag and the church key, passed them over for him to drain in a single swallow each. She continued the theme as she pulled lunch out like magicians’ rabbits. Through their lives, she would whisper the music to him when she wanted to bring back the shear freedom of the journey west. Through nights of sick children, the storm of public criticism he would be forced to endure, she could summon back those two weeks on the road with a few bars of it, their shorthand for shared happiness. He would nod. Yes. He remembered.
    At Pittsburgh, they stopped by KDKA, America’s first real radio station, disappointed in the grimy studios of the broadcasting landmark. Pittsburgh itself at first seemed even more sinister than Luke had envisioned, listening to the station late at night in his boy-room. The night sky was on fire as they hit the eastern outskirts, the Bessemer furnaces of the steel mills belching columns of it skyward like searchlights. At one point she almost reached for his hand, seeking reassurance that they weren’t driving into the very gates of Hell.
    But The Golden Triangle downtown was all new and revitalized. On Seventh Avenue, they passed KQV’s glass-fronted studios and slammed on the brakes, reversed back up the street and looked into the glitter, chrome and flashing lights that surrounded Chuck Brinkman the deejay that was on the air at the moment. They tuned to 1410 and listened for a few minutes. “That’s what it’s supposed to be like,” Luke said. They eventually pulled away from the curb, edging west in the night, scanning for a motel and sleep.

Chapter 4
    He started out low and intimate, and stayed