The lights on the highway sign spell out orders directed at us. They tell us to take exit 127 instead of exit 112, the one we were told to use in the literature. The traffic ahead is intimidating in its size and it glistens, so we decide the sign’s order is for our own good and take exit 127.
We drive for maybe ten minutes on a country highway with large expanses of verdant farmland flanking us on both sides and very few stores before we follow the lead of the cars ahead, corroborated by yet another sign, this one permanent, telling us to use the shoulder if we are headed to a certain Event. A serpentine row of vehicles lies ahead beyond view, and framed in the tiny side-view mirror I can see a number of cars pulling to the shoulder behind us, piling up quickly until they are out of sight around a curve. After a few minutes it becomes obvious that we are not just moving really slowly, we’re not moving at all. It is clear that this fact is not lost on others in this line because passengers begin to exit their motor vehicles and walk down the shallow divot adjacent to the shoulder and sit shirtless together and crack cans of beer of various size and brand. An epicene-faced male wearing women’s sunglasses stands on the door of the SUV he’s riding in and smokes a cigarette. What looks like his little brother slides out of the vehicle and stands beside the door, wearing a standard-issue navy-blue bandanna and sort of marvels at his smoking epicene sibling. They exchange some words, and the younger brother is handed a smoke and a pack of matches, which he struggles with before finally lighting the end of the cigarette with a puff and a flare.
This dude with a tie-dyed bandanna hanging out of the pocket of his oversized black jean shorts is the first I see piss through the barbed-wire fence onto the soy crops. The cars move about thirty feet, so the pissing black-shorts guy becomes displaced, and by the end of his piss he has to walk a bit to catch up with his ride, as do all the others who sit along the highway guzzling from their cans. This type of movement happens regularly for the next twenty minutes or so, causing groups of pedestrians to congeal and disperse along the road side as they catch up with their home vehicles. At one point, the epicene-faced male ends up well behind his vehicle of origin and at the end of one interval of catch-up his brother greets him with a water bottle, from which they both drink. A lot of people piss and get left behind and have to walk pretty far to reach their cars. The heat that pours into the windows as if flung from five-gallon buckets has already gotten inside us, beneath our skin, and it presents itself as stubborn.
While stopped in front of a conventional brick-laden rural home, a large female wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with a sagging neckline comes out from underneath a large spruce tree pulling up her pants at the waist, elbows back, and talks about what a congenial and private place the tree’s canopy is for a girl to urinate outside. She mentions that there is even a hole, as if the tree’s shade were meant for such a purpose. The commode she describes strikes me as dangerous, and if I had more motivation to move my lips in this heat I would say something to her listeners about snakes or rodents and their sordid interactions with human nether-regions. As a pair of shirtless males shuffles past our window, backs arched and glistening from the heat, I hear one with a shaved head mention that he’d lost all his money somehow and now he is left here this weekend with nothing but a ticket, six one-dollar bills, and three E pills. A lot of people are walking now, catching up with vehicles, drinking beer, pissing.
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