Our mistake was, we stopped. The wolf told us, though, that was everyone’s mistake.
We’d traded off pretty consistently at that point, each of us driving two hours then handing the keys off to another bandmate. But after an entire rotation with only two pee breaks and heightened tensions, it was inevitable we would need a lengthier break from driving; four and a half years was an unexpectedly long length. I wish the wolf had never verified my goddamn assumptions about the network. I’m worried I’ll validate yours, and get you killed, but its integral to the story of the candles.
You know parts of the story, inherently; you’ve learned them
on long drives as a young child, or
having a job that keeps you on the highway, or
on adult, partially drug-fueled road trips. “Los viajes por carretera son cuando ocurre con mayor frecuencia,” el lobo dice, “cuando las velas obtienen sus colores.” *
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Gray clouds mute the sun and the double yellow lines form a rolling companion on your left as three lanes shrink to two and two merge into one and the last groupings of homes fade into factory farms, the speed limit increases, and the factory farms fade into abandoned farmhouses and space, then you see it, again. A rectangle building the color of sand, roughly the size of a small airplane hangar, or the separate, plastic-ed off garden section of a Walmart. A sparse, orderly lining of tinted windows along the side, no architectural flair except a narrow groove all around the building, like a thin layer of cream between sponges of a cake; a steel door, no knob. It looks official, the warehouse of some administrative body, but there’s no signage, and you could swear you’d seen one just like it…before, on another trip, or on this trip earlier, maybe back in another state?
But who stops at these buildings (and what is in those people’s hearts)? What do these places have to offer to the average driver? Certainly, the people who know how these buildings are utilized are on a government list which provides them electronic badges to get inside the door with no knob, but you’ve never seen trucks parked outside it; never seen any activity, so it must be active during the opposite of whichever time of day you’ve seen it.
But coming back to Denver from Portland, we’d seen two of them, and one we saw twice; day going, night coming back. Neri asked a question that’s passively plagued drivers for decades.
“D’you ever wonder what’s inside those things?”
“What things?” I responded from the backseat, looking up from a phone that had no service yet still occupied a place in my hand and most of my attention.
“The weird X-Files buildings.”
“Bad description. I always thought they were storage houses. But yeah, kind of always.”
“Cause…we saw that one two days ago—”
“And?” I snapped.
“—when we drove out, and there was nobody there. There’s nobody there now. Is there ever anyone there?”
I think it was Neri saying “there’s nobody there now” that made Sam pull over, say “Fuck it,” which were the only two words he’d said during his turn behind the wheel, and cross the double yellow.
None of us asked him what he was doing, because we all instinctively knew, but we all had different feelings about it. Which made it tough when we got there (there was no gate; you don’t remember seeing one from the highway, either, but you also could’ve sworn you did), opened the unlocked door and the saw the wolf, who asked us “Que color es en tu alma?” **
(to be continued)
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* “Road trips are when they happen most often,'“ the wolf said, “where the candles get their colors.”
** “What color is in your soul?”
©2020 by Saladin Thomas