William J Scheick - "Gridlock" (2006)

WILLIAM J. SCHEICK

Born in New Jersey, William J. Scheick received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1969. That same year he joined the Department of English at the University of Texas. A nationally recognized authority on colonial American literature, with numerous books on such figures as Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, and Cotton Mather, he has also published books on English fiction, modern American women authors, and other literary subjects - twenty-two books in all. He is also a widely published creative writer who continues to publish stories and photo-journalism dealing with plants, another one of his interests. His story "Gridlock", published here for the first time, captures a very real aspect of modern Austin. Many Austinites pretend there is no traffic problem because they live in sequestered old suburbs and do not experience the other life of Austin, the one lived on Mopac and various other clogged arteries.

GRIDLOCK

Another red light. A trip that should take fifteen minutes now requires at least thirty-five, on a good day with no accidents. The new Austin - Gridlock City.

He presses the brake pedal and grips hard on the steering wheel. There are seven cars, he counts, doubting he'll make it through the intersection before he loses the next green light.

It isn't just the increasing proliferation of cars, he is convinced. Certain city overseers seem intent on worsening traffic by beginning numerous road projects at the same time - most notably, as far as he is concerned, on the two major intersecting arteries of Enfield and Lamar. He was not at all surprised, though he was still irked, to learn that federal or state road-money only flowed into the city when construction sites were actually underway. So it paid for the city to tear up far more roadway than it would or could complete in a reasonable amount of time. Projects were started, then left for another day while the money appeared promptly in some bureaucracy bank account.

He doesn't make it through the green light. So he's waiting again, reading a sign: your taxes at work. He feels the scorching sunlight through the windshield despite the air conditioner blowing a sharp cold eddy into his face. His eyes burn even more from the insistent cloudless glare. Out of the blue, a line of verse some English professor explained years ago races into his mind: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."

Actually he had found a way - not efficient, but manageable - around the Enfield-Lamar debacle. He took Guadalupe to Sixth, then turned west. But there was a tricky left turn, before entering Mopac Expressway, where cars backed up in a single lane for several blocks as the traffic signal went through successive changes.

Within a week - he rubs his aching left temple remembering it - Sixth Street was also torn up. No workers present, only cautionary-orange barricades, a few chunks of concrete, and signage alerting speeders about fines doubling in work areas. A long line of cars, nearly bumper to bumper, inched forward for 1.3 miles toward the tricky turn at Mopac.

He's moving again, but a fire-engine red SUV suddenly speeds past him in the turn-lane to his right and then abruptly cuts in front of him. He slams on the brake pedal, the steering wheel cutting into his ribs. It's not a teenager in that miniature tank, he reports to himself. It's a silver-haired woman. Another new phenomenon - grandmothers driving like teenagers or bats ascending fiercely at dusk from the Stygian darkness beneath the Congress Avenue bridge.

Bats, an Austin treasure he'd heard on the nightly news, are a valuable tourist attraction. In still another effort to find a way home about a month ago, he was crossing the Congress Avenue bridge when a bat crashed into his windshield. Hardly left a mark other than a slightly bent driver's-side wiper. The wiper no longer quite clears the window any more, but still he hopes will pass the state vehicle inspection in a few months.

Resorting to the road shoulder, the silver-haired bat has leap-frogged and intimidated five more drivers, he notices when he is forced to bring his car to a sharp halt once again. Getting to the Wal-Mart today is clearly going to take more than thirty-five minutes. At least he is far from the roads closed for the 5.3K Keep Austin Weird run. He squeezes his mouth with his hand.

With Sixth Street no longer viable as a way home from his job, he had opted for Twelfth Street, far from ideal because it crosses Lamar very close to a construction site. Twelfth leads to West Lynn southward, somewhat beyond he construction point on Sixth, where heading west would then take him to the tricky turn.

Twelfth Street worked for three days before it, too, defaulted into "the road not taken." Not the Lamar intersection, where he had expected trouble eventually, but an old house under renovation near West Lynn forced a road closure. As he sat behind the wheel watching one vehicle after another slowly flagged away from the blockage, his car radio weirdly picked up the crackly voice of an unintelligible construction worker. It hadn't been in the least consoling to think of the mere $8-per-diem penalty the renovating company would be fined by the city. Remembering, he tugs a little too hard on an earlobe.

Later that particular day in his study, with a frayed city map spread on the floor, he settled on Guadalupe all the way across the Colorado River. It would be congested, he knew - its traffic signals are timed only in theory and in press releases. But within a week there was a water-main break - nobody's fault, just old buried lines taxed by droughty conditions - and so he was forced to turn west on Riverside that day and, this course proving hopeless, west on Barton Springs the following day. He had crept along Barton Springs toward a seventh change of the Lamar traffic signal.

Living alone, he thinks, has never been an issue for him, but he is feeling something peculiar, something like loneliness. Sleep often eludes him, too, as his mind maneuvers through alternate routes, real and imaginary. Whenever he does sleep, he dreams of Whitmanesque open roads, empty except for him traveling uninterrupted at a comfortable clip to nowhere in particular. This recurrent dream, he reminds himself again today, is a simple fantasy like the final scene of the first version of Blade Runner.

Fantasies notwithstanding, mornings always come early, He notices that the darkness under his eyes has only deepened. He feels clammy. The air conditioner can do only so much with Austin's pervasive humidity.

Attached to his door-knob, last Saturday, was a city notice announcing that his driveway would be obstructed when road-work commenced in weeks for an indefinite period. He crunched the flyer into a ball, its resistant card-stock hurting his hand. He could park his car around a corner, but what's the use? They'11 find it, dig around it, and force him to park farther and farther and still farther until he might as well move out of his home. Every road he'd choose would eventually be shut down. Everywhere he'd go, a city work-crew would follow.

Is this, he playfully wonders, a Capital Metro conspiracy to make him ride the bus? The bus was hardly an option. None passed near his home. The closest pick-up station for the route he needed was a few miles away. Even then, the ride on musty, bone-crunching seats took an hour, on a good day. Then from the drop-off point there was a hefty, sweaty walk to the office. He had already tried the bus for several months some time ago. It was far from suitable, and his memory could recite a bitter litany.

At least he knows they are coming now. The road by his mailbox is likely the least of their plan. He turns that over in his mind as he pulls into the crowded Wal-Mart parking lot and anticipates the hot hike across the tarmac to the store. They'll want his driveway next. Then, claiming some other underground problem needed fixing, they'll want the walkway to his door, maybe even the portico of his home. A funny thought (he admits) that does not feel funny, as he calculates how much the road tax will be on that discounted shot-gun inside the Wal-Mart.

As collected in Literary Austin, ed. Don Graham.