splat chapter three

Never tempt God by saying 'Early' with reference to Atlanta traffic.

She drove off with a wave nobody saw. They were all bent over a car and Nelson was fussing at Nathan and never looked up. Somehow relieved, Suzie made for 75 North back into town. Suzie Q, Queen of the Road, happiest when she had a steering wheel in her hand.. She didn't really like staying still. Didn't like touching the ground. Loved the wind in her hair. Seeing the trees flash by. Watching the sky reinvent itself every day, all day long. She headed straight up to the entrance ramp, and joined the traffic heading to Atlanta.

Traffic was moderate, an average of 75 cars per mile in each lane, an average spacing of 70 feet. The road speed averaged 72 miles per hour. It was the usual mix of pickups, SUVs and cars, with commercial vans and trucks here and there; everybody behaving themselves. Big rigs were kind of thick on this stretch, most of them preparing to go around the Perimeter and leave the Connector to the lesser vehicles. God bless them. Professional drivers, who know how to drive, keeping out of the way of the idiots.

Then she hit her brakes suddenly because of someone crossing in front of the semi next to her and into her lane. It's a wonder truckers don't lose their shit and mete out some punishment, she thought, take out the real menaces, smite theyself some ass, like Uncle Daddy says. Like that one in the white Explorer just almost creamed her. Fucking looked like a storm trooper. Just sauntering across the road. Not only dangerous, he was damn rude.

It's a real art, driving, Suzie was thinking, and in a town like The Big 404 you got to be sharp. It's all life in the fast lane round here. Assholes these days don't learn shit when they're coming up, just how to work the pedals and steer. Now, truckers are trained right. And because they're sitting on all that momentum, they're damn careful about the way they handle their rigs. They don't do sudden anything less there's a real reason, the way it slings them around. Not like these fucking four-wheelers. It's all a trucker can do sometimes to maintain speed and stay in their lane with all the batshit drivers cutting in and out around them, and slamming on their brakes twenty feet in front of them. If they only knew the danger they put themselves in.

Suzie fumed. The rant was a combination of all the nasty things her dad and Uncle Daddy said over the years, and was embroidered to suit traffic conditions. She continued on up Seventy-Fifth Street, as her dad's trucker buddies used to call it, passed the exit to the Perimeter, and was just at the Henry Ford II exit. A stream of thick traffic merged on the right, doing seventy-five, slowing down to 68 as the flow got heavier.

She passed a billboard: 'Now Y'all Play Nice - God.' And another one: '$69 to Myrtle Beach - Fly Hooter's Air' with a blond thing in a wet t-shirt and bikini shorts with an owl flying out of her bra. Suzie hated the Hooters billboards. Choice of peanuts or a quick feel, she thought, airline extras being what they are these days. She was starting to get ansty about being at work. It was getting close to Four-thirty, her shift started at Five. They had a big banquet tonight and she need to be there on time. Good thing the traffic doesn't suck, the mused.

Ahah, a second challenge thrown out to God. Who could resist?

The thought that traffic didn't suck lasted until she approached the Connector. I-75 North became a sea of waving heat-distorted parked cars as it merged with I-85 North. Bumpercars and leapfrog. A loose average of five miles an hour and the electronic sign, for once accurate, reading 8 Miles To I-20, Travel Time 18-25 Minutes.

She got her first partial peek of Atlanta's skyline at seven miles per hour as traffic moved over a ridge, hanging on the steering wheel, steering with her chin with her chest draped over the airbag. She made it one mile to the next ridge nine and a half minutes later. And there, the first whole view of Atlanta, five miles up the road.

The city poked up out of the trees like one of those alligator yard ornaments, one wavy segment of spikes along a ridge Downtown, another one a ways over on the ridge in Midtown with several dozen cranes jutting into the sky from the back of its spine. Then another expanse of trees, and then the ridge at Buckhead and Lenox, with its several miles of distinctive skyscrapers topped by half-circles and cock heads and sails fading off into the haze. if you could see far enough, which you couldn't because of the pollution, you could see Perimeter on a ridge way off to the northeast, featuring the King and Queen buildings.

Atlanta was the Emerald City. In the middle of a forest, every direction revealed a sea of rolling greens that met the sky in a sort of purple gunge of hydrocarbons, but never mind. Green as far as the eye could see. Built on one of the last ridges of the Appalachians, which headed roughly northeast to Canada from there, the city had grown into a narrow line of sharp buildings rising above endless trees, like a giant-sized stretch of split rail fencing covered with razor wire and glinting in the sun.

The city receded behind the next ridge as the traffic moved down the hill from Lakewood. Suzie was proud of the landscaping along the roads. It's what sets Atlanta apart from other cities. Wildflowers on the verges, bushes and trees at every exit and bank, green everywhere you look. Not like northern cities, which are all gray; nothing growing, nothing planted and taken care of; only gardens of tossed-out trash stirring in the wakes of passing vehicles. Atlanta's like the forest moon of Endor.

The cars were beginning to move again, past no apparent obstacles. It was all for nothing, Traffic eased up for no reason because it had stopped for no reason. A brake check is all, that's what her dad would call it. NFR, Uncle Daddy would say, No Fucking Reason. The traffic went back up to fifty-five, but it was thick, ten feet between cars, everybody speeding up together. Past University Avenue, past Turner Field, then past the exit to I-20.

Suzie saw the gold dome of the Capital on the left, and then Grady Hospital, the Auburn Curb Market, a sign reading Jesus Saves on top of a green church steeple, and then the whole of Downtown spread out as thin as a line of coke, one distinctive tall building after another parading by.

But traffic had gotten slow and pokey again going through the Grady Curve, and Suzie got to turn her attention back to the skyline, which made her heart thrill every time she saw it. The black Equitable building with its turned-down white collar top, the 191 Building with its twin towers and cascading back side, the Westin like a pokey-up penis, its glass elevator running up the outside just like a vein. Great view from the top, they've got a rotating floor, but it's got to be a clear day. The food is worthless and expensive, so just look at the scenery and ignore the menu.

She passed the Peachtree Center complex with its Rockefeller-modern prison windows. It held tens of thousands of corporate droids in a dozen blocks of interconnected beige towers linked by hamster tubes lined with shops and food courts. People went in there on Monday and never came out until Friday night, swear to God. Downtown ended with the proud blue Portman building, with skyhooks and handles and crenellations and a spike the size of the Eiffel Tower that lit up at night so you could see Atlanta from the moon.

Traffic slowed even more as the road started through the Marta curve where the subway line ran over the highway. Suzie stopped in traffic and looked up, her foot on the brake. She had always thought the Marta overpass would be a perfect spot for some good poignant graffiti having to do with the traffic. Something like, 'If you can read this you should have stayed at work until traffic died down.' No, something better.

She could have got out and walked past Crawford Long Hospital, but the cars started to move slightly as the road straightened out to cruise past Georgia Tech and the Varsity Restaurant. She drove on thru Midtown, where traffic resumed its fifteen mile-an-hour crawl as the road paralleled the west side of town, and then slowed again as millions of drivers got into position for jockeying into position to get into the correct lane before the Connector split back into two major interstates at Brookwood. All at a snail's pace, a slow motion dance of death.

Whoever designed the Connector through Atlanta had a criminal mind. How else do you explain why they joined two interstates and thrust them right through the middle of town, weaving back and forth around Peachtree Street, the main drag, cutting right through neighborhoods and making a hash out of the already convoluted surface streets? And how do you explain the split? I-85 goes northeast, and I-75 goes northwest, but at the split 75 they're on opposite sides from each other and have to cross over. If you're coming north thru Atlanta for the first time, you're going to be driving on the wrong side of eight lanes, expecting the split to veer off in a logical direction. More accidents happen at the Brookwood split because of last minute lane changes, and it's all the fault of some highway engineer on speed fifty years ago.

Suzie sped up at last as she started up the exit ramp for Tenth and Fourteenth Streets. She took the access road to Seventeenth, avoiding bottlenecks further on. Then she turned right and drove up the hill to cross over Peachtree Street.

As far as she could see down Peachtree, it was all tall buildings of glass, brick or stucco. Massive construction was going on all up and down the length of the street, cranes and boarded-up sidewalks, pedestrians everywhere, all in business clothes.

Here's where you'll see the most uncomfortable looking people in Atlanta, with ID badges around their necks, and clothes wrinkled at the hips from sitting: black, brown and gray, hot and sweaty clothes designed to keep you warm in air conditioning, released from the caves and now steaming in the sun. Suzie noticed the shoes, so tight it hurt to look at them. Those poor people all look stunned, she though. Blinded. It probably takes them all the way home to come out of that stupor. Maybe that's why rush hour traffic is so horrible, maybe they all still think they're staring at their computers instead of driving home.

Atlanta's urban segmentation is drastic. Go one block east of skyscrapers on Peachtree, and there are multi-million dollar homes built a century ago. From the mid-level balconies of the tall buildings of Peachtree, you can look down into the placid back yards of rich people and their pets. Sit on the porch of one of these palatial residences, and you can time the movement of the shadow of some skyscraper through the back yard. Suzie always found it shocking to cross from Metropolis into Pleasantville like that. She couldn't feel comfortable in either place, and it tended to make her very edgy to be hit with both worlds in the space of a block.

So she always slowed down and cruised slowly down Peachtree Circle and onto The Prado. The lawns and landscaping were mature and well-tended, the houses were set way back and up the hill away from the streets, which were as wide as Peachtree and lined with sidewalks full of pram-toting nannies and maids in uniforms, and buff, shirtless guys jogging with walk-zombies and earphones. She passed them all, vaguely ashamed of her beat up blue Doohickey with all the Mercedes and BMWs and Volvos parked along the curbs, and finally turned into the entrance of the White Magnolia Club.

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