Highway 231, I think

There’s an RV heading south at 3 in the morning, and I’m in it.  In fact, I’m driving.  A student of mine is in the passenger’s seat and her designated job is to keep me awake as we careen from Montgomery to Pensacola on this two-lane rural road.
The blackness is a blackness I know: clear-cut groves of pine trees, soybean fields.  Matchbox houses at awkward angels to this snaking tongue of a highway.  Our last stop was a strip-mall parking lot, four states away, where we made dinner, played with trinkets we’d collected, and discussed famous stories of the road.  The other teacher and seven other students are now asleep and my driving cradles whatever expectations they have of morning. What road I can see seems lit from within.
To stay awake, I tell Jenny about my hometown.  Sand dunes hide missiles pointed toward Cuba.  Whole houses, remnants of back-to-back hurricanes, remain washed into the Gulf.  I recall fighter pilots whose faces I can see as they buzz the beach on crowded July days.  I tell her about the children on Sundays who, wearing long sleeves on street corners, hold signs foretelling eternal  damnation.  I tell her about the fiancé from high school who proposed to me in a mall, a story we will later laugh about on a playground in Louisiana.
Now, I know, we are nowhere.  I know enough about the road to know it is nothing in itself but a story and I caution myself against the thoughts in my head.  What if I fall asleep and crash this RV?  What if we careen off the road into a ditch?  What if a semi comes barreling across the yellow line into the nose of this cab?  I haven’t learned yet the kindness of the road because we are weeks away from the Mojave where, at 11 PM, we’ll discover a blown-out tire at a gas station  minutes before a mechanic pulls up and offers to replace it for free.

This too is true: One of us will dream of suicide, one of us will teach in Germany, one of us will drop out of high school, one of us will marry a lawyer.

For now, I convince myself that the phantom headlights suddenly turning from the ditch into the side of our cab is another runaway fantasy. And years later, at a desk or stopped in traffic, I’ll wonder what’s become of those travelers, I’ll wonder where the last pin on the map stuck and whether they ever made it out of that deep night, that long road.