She smiled gently. “Maybe a little. Frank, you’ve got to admit this hasn’t been very exciting so far.”
“Did I promise excitement? Did I ever say it was going to be exciting? We’re going to spend a week in Vegas, for chrissake. Isn’t that excitement enough? Can’t we take a few days away from that to have an educational experience?”
She looked toward the middle of the motor home. “I’m afraid the kids have had all the education they can take.”
He grunted and leaned over the wheel. “The kids! My kids. The zombie and the human garbage disposal. The Jacksons they ain’t.”
“Frank, their summer vacation just started. They’ve been nine months in school. The last thing in the world they’re interested in is an educational experience. Don’t you remember what it was like when you were their age?”
“It should be fun for them, too.” He was losing ground and knew it. “I mean, seeing that big diamondback cross the road. You know how many kids never get that close to a real, live rattler?”
“Every kid in L.A. gets to the zoo.”
“That’s not the same thing as seeing it in its natural habitat,” he protested.
“I’m not sure I-40 qualifies as a natural habitat, Frank.”
He nodded to himself. “You’re gonna fight me on this one, aren’t you?” He swerved slightly to avoid a piece of broken crate littering the pavement, pulling into the fast lane to go around it. He barely bothered to glance at the sideview mirror. There’d been so little traffic since they’d left the outskirts of San Bernardino he felt they had the highway to themselves. In a sense they did.
The Sonderberg children attended private school. The public schools didn’t let out for another two weeks. That was another reason why they always vacationed this time of year. The usual tourist destinations were still devoid of high school and college students and families traveling with kids. Only Wendy was upset, bemoaning the lack of boys her own age to chat with.
Frank worried about his daughter’s preoccupation with members of the opposite sex, only to have Alicia reassure him that it was nothing but another phase. Wendy was no worse than any other pretty girl that age, and better than some. It was all part of growing up. Like her son’s admittedly regrettable overeating problem.
Alicia had to admit that her son’s junk food binge was lasting longer than was healthy. His continued inactivity wouldn’t be so bad if he was, say, a computer genius or something. But he was quite average, well-meaning enough but in no way exceptional. In that regard he was much like his parents. Frank Sonderberg had risen above his station through sheer determination and hard work. Maybe when Steven was older he would begin to show some skill, or at least a little of his father’s drive. To date, however, the boy had proved himself relentlessly ordinary.
Nobody appreciated what he was trying to do for them with this trip, Frank mused. Not Wendy and Steven, not even Alicia. They knew only city life, the big house, the private schools, vacations, and shopping sprees. It wasn’t right. He enjoyed all those things himself, having worked hard to gain them. But there ought to be some balance in a person’s life. Frank was big on balance.
If you lived in the city then you should spend some time in the country, and if you were a country person you needed to experience the sophistication of the city. Balance. Television couldn’t compensate. Watching the creatures of the desert on Nova or Disney or Nature wasn’t the same as encountering them in the wild.
Their brief sight of a family of javelinas in a gully just the other side of Barstow had been instructive. Alicia couldn’t get over how “cute” the two babies were. Wendy wondered why all the fuss over a bunch of hairy pigs, and Steven spent the whole evening at the RV park whining about bacon and pork chops. While there was something to be said for reducing an experience to its essential elements, his family had a way of doing it that transformed the extraordinary into the mundane.
Maybe he was expecting too much of them. Especially the kids. He doubted they were all that different from their friends. Everything had been given to them. Alicia knew better, but his decision to drive instead of fly to Vegas was clearly baffling to her as well.
Indifference and muted hostility. Those were his rewards for trying to act the responsible father. For trying to show his family something of the world beyond Los Angeles. Side trips to San Diego, San Francisco, and New York didn’t count. He’d sired an urban family, pure and simple. To Wendy and Steven a wildlife expedition consisted of going to the beach and fighting to avoid anything organic while playing in the surf.
He looked up at the map secured by magnetic clips to the bare metal dash above the radio/cassette player. Fifty miles to go to Baker, the minuscule outpost of civilization that lay between Barstow and Vegas. This was one of the emptiest spots in California. Nothing to the south, Death Valley to the north.
In point of fact, he reluctantly confessed to himself, it was pretty boring. Not like the Pacific Northwest or the bayous of the Deep South. Not that he was intimate with those regions, either. He was an armchair explorer, letting someone else’s camera be his eyes. Until this trip.
He was ready to admit defeat, conquered by apathy. Already he’d discarded his original plan to take several days between San Bernardino and Vegas to explore side roads and beckoning arroyos. Not even the unblemished night sky had been sufficient to enthrall his offspring.
“We saw it all at the planetarium, Daddy.” So much for his daughter’s sense of wonder. As for Steven, he could only decry the absence of a laser show.
“Right,” he muttered to no one in particular. “I give in.”
Alicia glanced over curiously. “You give in to what, dear?”
Instead of replying he turned his head to the right, shouted toward the back of the motor home. “Hey! You kids!”
Steven looked up from his comic book. “What’s up, Dad?”
“We’re going to—Get that thing off your sister’s head, will you?”
The boy shook his head violently. “Uh-uh. If I touch ’em she’ll hit me. Shes always hitting me.”
Alicia finally managed to catch her daughter’s eye. Wendy rolled her eyes and nudged the earphones back from her ears. Mötley Crüe drifted weakly through the motor home.
“What is it now?”
“You win.” Frank kept one hand on the steering wheel.
Wendy glanced at her little brother, who shrugged. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I give up. I try to introduce you to a new experience, try to show you something unique, and I’m just wasting my time. I know when I’m beaten.”
“Frank, watch the road,” Alicia cautioned him.
“I am watching the road. Not that there’s anything to watch.” He waved his hand at the cream-gray concrete. “There’s nobody else out here. We’re the only ones stupid enough to drive this stretch of road in the middle of the day, right?”
That wasn’t entirely true. Eager gamblers crammed into old Chevys and Toyotas occasionally rocketed past the motor home, exceeding the speed limit by a good twenty to thirty miles an hour in their haste to reach the neon lights and gaming tables just over the state line. They vanished rapidly over the shimmering, heat-struck horizon.
“We’re not making any more stops,” he explained tiredly. “We’re gonna drive straight through. When we get there we’ll check in to a big hotel, just like everybody wants. I’ll turn the motor home in to the rental agency and we’ll fly home when vacation’s up.”
“Wow, that’s great, Dad!”
“Thanks, Pops.” Wendy slid her headphones back into position, closed her eyes. “That’s really rad of you.” Her upper body began to sway rhythmically.
“You’re both welcome.” His sarcasm was lost on them. He saw that Steven had abandoned his comic book in favor of a Transformer toy.
