“How about this rain?” I asked Stinky.
“Yeah, pretty B-A-D—bad! But my gas is badder. Boy, I got some real stinkers coming soon. Stay tuned! They’re coming!”
“Can’t wait.”
I checked the rearview mirror again. Ethan was intently staring at the back of my head, trying to decide, I’m sure, whether to accept my olive branch of a performance or continue acting up.
“I tell you, Dad, in retrospect, I’m not sure what you were thinking when you decided to make this trip,” Stinky said.
“I really don’t know what I was thinking either,” I admitted.
“You thought you were William Least Heat-Moon, didn’t you? You were going to take some kind of interesting, life-changing trip into America. See small towns, meet real characters, see mountains and streams, gain wisdom and insight. Have a real writer’s experience, and then maybe write about it, didn’t you? Break your twenty-year writer’s block by seeing America. A special trip with your special-needs son. Right? A heartbreaking best seller for sure. Real life Rain Man.”
“It crossed my mind, yes.”
“Instead you’re on a journey to hell, stuck in a car all day with Ethan and three teddy bears who you’re beginning to think are alive and you’re about to go crazy.”
“I’m not about to go crazy. Everything is okay. The storm will end. We will stop for lunch.”
Ethan seized on that word. “Lunch!”
I fell quiet, but it was already too late; the pickles-Sprite launch sequence had been activated.
“I starving. Lunch. Now. Eat. Now.”
“Ethan, it’s too early. Let’s drive for a while.”
“No! Eat! I starving. Starving!”
“You should have had breakfast. We need to drive now.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Eat!”
“Listen to your father!” Stinky Bear said. “Listen to him. He’s going crazy!”
“Shut. Up. Idiot!” Ethan said.
“You, shut up!” Stinky Bear said.
We drove for a few minutes in a miraculous burst of silence. Then he played his trump card.
“Poo-poo.”
I didn’t say anything. Though he might have been bluffing, there was a chance he wasn’t; he hadn’t gone that morning. This could, at least, partially explain his mood.
“Poo-poo.”
“Don’t start that.” I drove faster.
“Poo-poo. Poo-poo bad!”
“Jesus, God…”
“Poo-poo bad! Now! Now! Now!”
I glanced backward, caught a glimpse of his face, and recognized his poo-poo-is-rounding-third-and-heading-for-home grimace.
“Oh God. Okay! We’ll stop!” I flipped on my blinker even though the next exit was a while off.
“Now!” He hit-slapped me on the back of the head.
“Hey! Knock it off!” I was about to retaliate, threaten some kind of pickle or Sprite sanctions, when Karen called.
“Daddy?”
“Thank you, God! Listen, talk to him, will you? Please! He has to go to the bathroom. Just talk to him for a few minutes, calm him down, distract him. We’re driving.”
“I don’t want to talk to him right now.”
“You have to talk to him! He might go in his pants. He’s done that before.” I put the phone on speaker.
“Hi, Karen!” I yelled.
“Hi, Ethan,” Karen said. Her voice was soft, dull, resigned.
“Karen!” Ethan stopped stomping his feet. “Where. Are. You?”
“In a hotel. In South Carolina.”
“Where. Mom. Be?”
“She’s in the room next to me. Daddy?”
“Where. Mindy. Be?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Poo-poo. Bad.”
“Hold it, and Dad will stop.”
“What. Eat. Today?”
“Nothing, Ethan. I had nothing to eat today,” Karen said. She was doing a poor job of hiding her irritation, and this angered me. She only had to deal with him for a few minutes—that was all I was asking, a few minutes.
“Could you make more of an effort?” I said. “This isn’t the time to mail it in.”
“Can we talk now?”
We finally came to an exit, which I took at fifty miles per hour. “Actually, no. He has to take a crap. I’ll call you back.”
“Daddy?”
“I’ll call you back.” I ended the call and threw the phone off to the side.
*
After a long poo-poo break at a Cracker Barrel; and after I asked the elderly church-lady-looking waitress if they served alcohol; and after the elderly church-lady-looking waitress reacted like I had just asked her to breastfeed us; and after we ordered and ate fried chicken and fried ham with French fries; and after Ethan put my credit card in his mouth right before giving it to the elderly church-lady-looking waitress who reacted like I had just handed her a severed body part; and after we made a series of unscheduled pee-pee-Sprite-let’s-play-catch-with-the-orange-Nerf-football, let’s-take-the-pickles-off-of-the-McDonald’s cheeseburgers and befriend them (“Hey there, Mr. Pickle, what you knowin’?”); and after Ethan whined and pinched me hundreds if not thousands of times, he fell mercifully asleep in the back seat.