"Where?" asked Wick, sitting turning the key. Though Jacqueline had often heard the phrase, this was the first time she had so fully understood what it meant for an engine to purr. The Spyder's low rumble reminded her of nothing less than the contented rumble of a cat. However, its intensity up her spine, cycles of waves echoing in her marrow, suggested a feline used to felling wildebeests.
Wick's question, though briefly stated, canceled at least some pleasure cascading through her nerves. (Is this why greaser girls in old movies were so keen on boys with hot rods? A tuned engine absent the convenience of modernity could about cure Victorian hysteria. It was a delight the makers of modern shocks and struts damped to the point that one could forget one sat in a ton of speeding metal.)
"I'm not the driver, bud."
"You are the navigator," said Wick evenly, his foot lightly pressed to the brake, one hand rested on the gear shift as though it were the most comfortable place in the car. "You are the only one who can get us there."
"So, no road map? Or, God forbid us, a GPS?" she asked, but she understood a foregone conclusion when she heard one. "I have no idea where my father might be dying. Didn't you get a hint? Cardinal direction, at least?"
"To find you. That was all the hint I was granted or would be." He had nothing more to say on that topic, as though showing up last night and drinking some beer well exceeded inconvenience when seen in this early morning light.
She massaged the sides of her face as though that might be enough to give the answer. "How am I supposed to do it?"
"It is in your blood, your heritage; You may not realize how, but you know if you will let yourself."
Jacqueline closed her eye as though behind her lids she might see arrows. There was only the muted reflection of the chrome, its stain on her periphery. "This is going to be a long day unless you have a better idea of how to jolt my apparent navigational acumen."
Wick relaxed his grip on the steering wheel but did not release it entirely. "Where do you want to go?"
She kept her eyes shut to keep holstered the glare she wanted to fling his way. "I don't know."
He cleared his throat, looking at her dubiously. "You misunderstand me. I am not asking where you think your father is. It is plain that you do not know. I am curious where you would like to go where you have never been before. That will be our direction."
She opened her eyes, squinting from the contrast of the dark to the explosion of light from the car's shining surfaces finding her vision at once.
"Kaleidoscope," she said.
His grip on the gear shift tightened. "Is that a location?"
She smiled, something impish, as though she were about to put something over on a parent. "It's about to be. Head toward Saugerties. I can find it from there."
Jacqueline fiddled with the radio. In her experience, a road trip was only a slog without proper music, little better than the distance between one chore and the next. Even when she was the only one in the car, she had five flash drives of different genres she could plug in to best accompany the task. She had one that she had titled "Music to Sit in Traffic to," but she decided that this was asking for the gods to make her sit in traffic so they could listen to their favorite jams.
Now, she was operating under the reported possibility that there were real gods who might have a fondness for covers of "Comfortably Numb." Losing that drive under the passenger's seat when shifting to "Music for Speeding" might have been a wise, if unintentional, sacrifice. She tried to remember if she had been stuck in less or weaker traffic since, but it was hard always to predict what the roadways of the Hudson Valley would provide her. Perhaps so, but it could have been that she was looking for speedier commutes to justify her nascent theory, causation where there might only be causation.
Wick's radio was old indeed, the orange plastic needle floating over illuminated numbers, signals burbling in and out of focus with her twiddling, safe-cracker slow. She did not bother asking if he might not have something minted in the last forty years -- already, she knew that Wick was a man who fetishized antiquity, the sort who would shave with a straight razor and write with a fountain pen if possible. It was not for the pretense, not to be seen -- she couldn't imagine that Wick granted many the opportunity to observe him shaving -- but an ingrained preference honed through years. How many years did he have? She couldn't rightly tell. He could be as young as his mid-twenties in the right light, but his carriage was that of a man who has seen it all and would thank it all for leaving him to his reading and, possibly, his beer. (She didn't know his beverage of choice, which is one of those crucial things one should know about a person before committing oneself to their passenger seat. He was not a consummate soda drinker; of this, she could be almost sure.)
Jacqueline settled into a station playing music she had loved as an angsty teen, the volume set low enough that her half-hummed, half-sung recollection of the lyrics was conspicuous without Wick's lacking attempt at a duet.
"Do you know that when people sing together, their brains sync up?"
"Yes," said Wick, eyes on the road, not interested in picking up the clumsily dropped hint that she wanted him to sing with her.
Jacqueline increased the volume a notch. This might be a long day, but she could not fault his sound system for that. She continued singing for a few minutes until the DJ rudely interjected that they were listening to the classic rock station and then a commercial break.
"So, genetically, I am half-jackal? Or a quarter jackal, I suppose?" she asked as though answering in conversation that had been having.
"No," said Wick. "That is not how genes work."
"It was a joke. But I am half-god?"
"A demi-god?" He rolled this notion around in his head, his eyes narrowing a little to trace its contours. "No."
Jacqueline scoffed at this dismissal. "Why not? Aren't I as godly as Hercules?"
He stopped as a traffic light, full lips narrowing as the red took its time shifting to green. As she was about to repeat her question -- which she was prepared to do until satisfied by his answer -- he replied, "Masses of people believed in Zeus then, believed in him within the concrete reality of someone that they knew but could not touch. There could be a Heracles" -- she noted Wick's use of this Greek and not the Roman name of the hero--"who now believed in Anubis this intensely? Some Kemetics?"
"I don't see why people believing in him should bear the slightest relevance to what I am or am not."
The light turned green, but Wick did not see it, having turned to study Jacqueline in a way she actively resisted. Behind them, two cars honked in near unison. Wick pressed on the accelerator as though wishing at once to put a mile between his vehicle and theirs.
"We are the children of gods, but we are far more human. This is not to our defect."
She couldn't see how. She'd spent her life being merely human and had rubbed shoulders and less savory parts with only these. She had not known there was another option for her and doubted that a divine lineage, at least on her absent father's side, wasn't better.
"Humans precede the gods. Do not forget that."
She did not see how she could have forgotten it as this was the first time she heard it, and she did not know what it meant.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
