Day Out of Days Read Online Free

unconscious, bleeding form of his father he then jumped into a Chevy and never stopped driving the rest his life?
    That’s it in a nutshell.
    You’d think he’d be over it by, now, wouldn’t you?
    You’d think.

Indianapolis
(Highway 74)
    I’ve been crisscrossing the country again, without much reason. Sometimes a place will just pop into my head and I’ll take off. This time, down through Normal, Illinois, from high up in white Minnesota, dead of winter, icy roads, wind blowing sideways across the empty cornfields. Find myself stopping for the night outside Indianapolis, off 78, just before it makes its sweeping junction with 65 South to Louisville. I randomly pick a Holiday Inn, more for its familiar green logo and predictability than anything else. Plus, I’m wiped out. Evidently there’s some kind of hot-rod convention going on in town, although I seem to remember those always taking place at the height of summer, when people can run around in convertible coupes with the tops down. Anyway, there are no rooms available except for possibly one and that one is “smoking,” which I have nothing against. The desk clerk tells me she’d know in about ten minutes if there’s going to be a cancellation. I’m welcome to wait, so I do, not wanting to face another ninety-some miles down to Kentucky through threatening weather.
    I collapse into one of the overly stuffed sofas in the lobby, facing two plasma-screen TVs in opposing corners, both tuned to the same “reality” channel showing reruns of surveillance footage from convenience-store holdups: teenagers in hooded sweatshirts, one hand holding up their baggy jeans while the other pumps nine-millimeter slugs into screaming victims, who claim they have no access to the safe. I ask the desk clerk if she can please turn theTVs off, or change the channel, but she says she has no control over any of it. The TVs are on some kind of preordained computer system, much like sprinklers in Los Angeles or security garage lights everywhere else. I ask her if she can at least mute the sound so I don’t have to listen to the agonized groans of the victims or the raging insanity of the gunmen, but she says that she has no control over that either. I pick up a travel magazine off the glass table and leaf through it, pausing at every picture with a bikini-clad woman lounging beachside holding tall icy cocktails and staring smugly at the camera. The screams and groans and gunfire from the TVs keep repeating in looped cycles and soon lose all sense of being connected to murder. I find myself anticipating the next scream the way you would a familiar lyric in a pop song. (Here comes the high, shrieking temper-tantrum sequence just after he pops off a spray of four rapid shots.) I’m not sure how long I hang there in limbo in the lobby but it feels like way more than ten minutes.
    A tall, skinny woman in a cloth Pat Nixon-type coat and a blue bandana comes through the revolving doors, pulling a small suitcase on wheels. She smiles at me as she passes and I feel immediately sad for no reason that I can put my finger on. She pauses at the desk to get her key, then continues on toward the elevators, giving me a quick glance over her shoulder as she disappears down the hallway. Again, I felt this little stab of melancholy, or maybe emptiness, maybe that’s it. I stand and stretch, then walk over to the desk and ask the girl if she knows anything more about the cancellation. Not yet, she says, but reassures me that the possible guests will be calling any second now. They’re coming in from Tupelo, Mississippi, everything depends on the weather, she says. I return to the squashy sofa and collapse again. (Isn’t Tupelo where Elvis was born?) I notice the yellow spine
of a National Geographic
at the bottom of a stack and dig it out. The feature story is titled “The Black Pharaohs—Conquerors of Ancient Egypt.” A man wholooks very much like the young James Earl Jones is depicted on the