DRIVER
499
Muriel's underclothes hung drying on a cord rigged across the
back seat. She wanted to settle down. I tried to dissuade her from
this
step, the one of all that would lose me to her. Had she forgotten
California? Ah, she didn't
need
California now! The denouement
can be imagined. One cool blue morning that Fall, or the next, I
left our secluded cottage-a last rose blooming by the gate, a letter
of farewell written and ready to mail when I stopped, if I ever
stopped. I got into the car for the first time in three days. A miniature
Muriel waved from the house into my rear-view mirror, then stag–
gered abruptly and lurched with a whine out of sight. I was off, life
lay ahead one more! In the nearest town faces stopped me. It was
the morning after Pearl Harbor.
A voice on the radio was already predicting the rationing of fuel.
I quickly appraised the situation. Six months too old for the
draft, I could settle down where I was, with Muriel, in the middle
of our continent. This life at best would permit me the daily drive
of a few miles to and from some nearby parachute or food-packaging
plant. I decided on the spot to enlist in the Ambulance Corps. Weep–
ing over the telephone, Muriel promised to wait. Laughing, I
promised to send money. A year later I was driving in North Africa.
I think of landscapes, of roads erased by sand forever rippling
under washes of light. A grove of palms, women in veils, the tank
burning on the horizon. Above all, a vastness in which hovered black
birds of indeterminate size. Whatever the scale, it was not human.
This comforted us; we permitted ourselves colorful, passionate acts,
at once proving and outweighing our tiny statures.
Made up of volunteers, our company had an odd, aristocratic
flavor. Books were passed around-Tolstoi,
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
collections of fairy tales. These showed me how far I had gone along
certain roads never noticed while concentrating upon their macadam
counterparts. I found in myself traces of the sage, the pervert, and
the child.
Nothing bored me, nothing frightened me. Up from a half–
hour's sleep in the shade of a wall, I would face into a warm wind
blowing at the exact speed of my life. The laugh and the wound,
the word of the wise man and the bullet's sunburst through glass,
converged and drove me onward, light as a feather.
It
became all
