Niagara Motel (12 page)

“Hi,” Meredith said.

“Come on, we're going to have some fun,” he said. “I'm going to teach you kids how to shoot.” He held a plastic bag full of soup cans and a blue duffel bag. He extended one hand to Meredith. She hesitated, then took it and stepped out of the van. Then I got out too, and we followed Timothy over the ditch and down a little trail into the woods.

Meredith and I shot each other looks of doubt and terror every few yards. My knees were shaking so much I was afraid I'd fall down. But I knew that running would be a bad idea, and I didn't know what else to do.
Don't panic. Don't panic. Don't panic
, I told myself.

“She's pregnant,” I said, pointing at Meredith.

“Oh,” Timothy stopped and turned around. He eyed Meredith up and down. “Congratulations,” he said.

“Thanks,” she muttered.

Timothy nodded and turned around and kept marching us through the woods. I could hear little birds and squirrels skittering under the brush, and I wondered if they would be among the last sounds I ever heard. Finally, we came to a clearing. Timothy put the duffel bag down and told us to wait, then ran to set up the soup cans
on an old stone fence about fifty feet away.

“Do you have any
feelings
about him?” I said to Meredith.

She glared at me. “I'm scared too,” she said. “But I think it'll be okay.”

“You
think?
What if it's not?”

“Then it's too late anyways,” she said.

Timothy ran back to us, grinning. “Ready?” he said as he unzipped the duffel and took out a handgun. It was black and humongous and, I realized, loaded.

“I don't know,” Meredith said. “Isn't this kind of dangerous?”

“The only thing more dangerous than having a gun is not having a gun,” he said. “Now this here is a Beretta M9 semi-automatic. This is the official pistol of the United States Army. You know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because it's tough as tits, that's why,” he said. “This little beast can survive temperatures from minus forty to a hundred and forty. You can bash it with a brick, drop it in the ocean, bury it in the sand—or snow, if you're in Canada.” He laughed. “Don't hurt it one bit. Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'.”

I nodded.

“Want to hold it?”

I shook my head.

“Come on!” he said. “Won't hurt you. Safety's on.” He held it out to me.

I hesitated.

“Come
on
.”

I took it. It was heavy and huge in my hands. My hands were sweaty, and my heart boinged around in my chest like a super-bounce. I looked up at Timothy, and he was smiling down at me. I held the gun out for him to take back.

“I'll take the first shot,” he said. “Watch what I do.”

“Okay,” I said.

“First, I take the safety off. This is the safety. See, on, off.” He flicked a little black switch up and down.

“Okay.”

“Then, with the safety off, you can cock the hammer back. This is the hammer.”

“Hammer. Got it,” I said.

“Now, I'm going to hold it with two hands. Are you right or left handed?”

“Right,” I said.

“That's fine,” Timothy said. “Okay. That's all there is to it. Now I'm ready to shoot. Oh, cover your ears.”

Meredith and I pressed our hands against our ears.

Timothy closed one eye and shot the gun. It was the loudest sound I'd ever heard. It was like a building had just blown up beside me. Then it happened again. And again. And again. And again. Little gold shells flipped out of the gun like coins and landed at my feet. He took five shots, and five soup cans flew off the fence like tin birds. He switched the safety back on and turned to me. I think he asked who wanted to go next, but I couldn't hear anything except a high-pitched ringing in my ears. The world was a fire-alarm drill.

I looked over at Meredith and saw her shake her head no. My hearing came back slowly.

“I hate guns. I can't do it,” Meredith said.

“Why would you hate guns?” Timothy asked.

“Because guns kill people,” she said.

“That's what they're designed to do, Meredith,” he said. “You can't hate something for doing what it's made to do.”

“I can if I want to,” she said. “It's my constitutional right.” She turned away, looked up at the sky. We followed her gaze to
a hawk soaring above us. Timothy turned back to Meredith and looked at her hard.

“I'll try it,” I said. I was shocked to hear the words come out of my mouth because I hadn't planned on saying them.

Timothy grinned at me. “That's the spirit.” He slapped me on the shoulder then handed me the gun.

Electric neon blood coursed through my veins as I held it.

“Now, the safety's on. And the hammer's not cocked, but as you know, it
is
loaded,” Timothy said. “There are many steps you need to take before you can take a shot.”

“Okay,” I said. Every cell in my body vibrated.

“So, first you want to get into a good position, a solid shooting stance.”

I adjusted my feet and shoulders and held onto the gun as if it were a live thing that could jump out of my hands at any moment.

“That's it, that's it.” He adjusted my grip on the gun a little. “Now, what do you want to do?”

“Take off the safety,” I said.

“That's right. So, take off the safety.”

I flipped the switch up. The gun seemed to grow hot in my hands. I realized my unlimited power. I could do anything. Get anything. Take anything. Say anything I wanted to anybody. I was holding a loaded gun, and the world was my cheeseburger.

“Now what?” Timothy said.

“Cock the hammer,” I said.

“That's right. So pull it back.”

I pulled it back.

“Good, now take your time. Aim carefully. Take deep breaths and focus, then depress the trigger as you exhale.”

I had to pull the trigger hard, but when I did the gun exploded in my hand like a bomb. I don't know what happened. It was like another
Tucker crawled inside me. I shot five times in a row, and then I was screaming and yelling with the thrill of it all. I handed the gun back to Timothy and ran around in circles waving my arms in the air. I had actually hit one of the cans! I couldn't believe it. It was a great feeling, to have shot a gun. I was glad I had done it.

“Woohoo!” I yelled and did a little dance and ran up to Meredith and hugged her.

She pushed me away. “All right, can we get out of here now?” she said.

Timothy was laughing. As we walked back to the van, I felt like I was walking on stilts. I was twelve feet tall. I was strong and big and so, so, alive.

16

The next time Timothy stopped for gas, Meredith piped up from the back of the van, “We'll wait here.” Then she pinched me on the elbow.

“Okay,” Timothy said. “You want anything?”

“No thanks, we're good,” Meredith said.

“Alrighty then. Be right back.”

Meredith slid the door open as she watched Timothy go into the store. “Let's get out of here, that guy's a fucking psycho,” she said.

“Timothy?” I said.

“Yeah,
Timothy
.”

“He's all right,” I said. “He just really likes guns. He's harmless.”

As soon as Timothy had gone around the side of the store to the bathrooms, Meredith said, “Suit yourself, I'm out of here.” She grabbed her stuff and ran. I had no choice but to follow her.

We crouched in a cluster of bushes behind the store, clutching our backpacks to our chests. Cigarette butts and pop cans littered the ground.

“Now what?” I said.

“We'll just wait here until he goes away and then find another ride.”

“But he was going all the way to Oklahoma.”

“Who cares? He was insane. He let an eleven-year-old shoot a gun! He could've killed us, Tucker! He probably
would
have if we'd stuck around any longer.”

“I thought he was okay,” I shrugged. Maybe she was right, maybe she wasn't. There was no way of ever knowing.

We waited in the bushes for what seemed like a year. Meredith went out first to peek around the corner to check if his van was still there.

“It's gone,” she said, waving me out.

We went into the store and got chips and sandwiches and ate our dinner on yellow milk crates behind the store. The light from the sky was beginning to fade as Meredith lit a cigarette. “I can't believe you shot a gun,” she said.

“Not just any gun. A Beretta M9,” I said. “The official pistol of the United States Armed Forces.”

“Tough as tits,” she said, impersonating Timothy. Then we both cracked up. “Come on,” Meredith said as she stood up. “Let's go find a ride.”

“Let me know if you get any
feelings
about this next one,” I said.

“Shut up,” Meredith said.

We leaned against the brick wall at the side of the store. The clouds were low and murky. I didn't know which city we were in, but not a lot of people were coming into the gas station.

“We'd better find someone before it gets dark,” Meredith said.

Then an old black guy in a gold Buick Regal pulled up.

“How about him?” I said.

“Let's just watch him for a minute first,” Meredith said.

He was probably a hundred years old. His movements were slow and careful as he got out of his car. He looked around, and I could tell, even from that far away, that his eyes were filled with a certain sadness.

“Okay,” Meredith said. “Let's ask him.” We walked up to him, but not too fast. It was as though we were both afraid to startle him. Meredith cleared her throat, and he looked at her. “Um, excuse me, sir. We were wondering if you're going west?”

He nodded.

“Would you happen to have room in your car for us?”

The man looked inside his car and then back at Meredith and me. He nodded again.

“Oh, that's great,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

I smiled at him and he nodded. Then he put the nozzle back and went into the store to pay for his gas.

Meredith got in the front, and I got in the back. The car smelled like humbug candies and lemons. The interior was soft caramel leather. I sat behind the man and could see little tufts of grey hair poking out under his cap.

“So where are you headed?” Meredith asked as he pulled onto the freeway.

He glanced down at the map that sat on the armrest between them and pointed to a dot. Meredith leaned closer to inspect it. “Dodge City, Kansas?”

He nodded.

“All right, we'll take it.”

The back of the Buick was as big as my bunk bed at Bright Light. I was suddenly so tired, all I could think about was stretching out across the seat and going to sleep. There was hardly any light left in the sky. Meredith yawned, then I yawned, then the man yawned. I don't know why yawning is contagious, but it is. It's easier to make someone yawn than to make someone laugh.

“Would it be all right if I lay down back here?” I asked the man.

He nodded with his eyes.

“Thanks,” I said.

The man didn't play the radio or a cassette, and it was quiet and peaceful in the car. I watched the first few stars appear out the window. The evening star, which is not a star at all, but the planet Venus, was the last thing I saw before I conked out.

When I woke up, Meredith was sleeping stretched out on the opposite end of the backseat with her feet resting beside my face. Her
socks had little purple daisies on them, and there was a hole in the heel of the left one. Her feet smelled like corn chips. I could see the rise and fall of her pumpkin-belly with each breath. We were parked in front of an old ramshackle house whose siding was falling off. There was a gigantic willow tree beside the car, and the light of the moon shone through the branches like fingers reaching down to poke us.

I got out and peed behind the Buick. Then I took a little look around. There was a mountain of old window frames piled up in the yard, but all the glass in them was missing. Beside that, there was a claw-foot bathtub with geraniums growing out of it. One of the feet on the tub was wearing a yellow rubber boot. An old wooden swing dangled from the willow tree, and I sat on it while I looked at the moon, which looked like a broken dinner plate. A breeze rustled the willow branches and wispy clouds floated in front of the moon and I got the strange feeling that I was inside somebody else's dream.

I thought about Gina and hoped that she was okay. I hoped she would be a hundred-percent well again by the time I got back from Los Angeles. She would be mad as hell at me, but she would get over it, eventually. Maybe the two of us would even go visit Sam Malone together sometime. Maybe she would decide that it was finally time to forgive him for whatever it was he'd done.

I sat in the swing until I got tired again, then I got back in the car and tried to lie down without bumping Meredith too much. She groaned, but she didn't wake up. I heard an owl hoot nearby and figured that he must be watching over us.

When I woke up, I thought the sky was on fire. But it was only
the sunrise. It was the most beautiful one I had ever seen. I woke Meredith up to see it.

“Wow,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Where are we?”

“I don't know,” I said. “There's a house here.”

“But we weren't invited in, right?”

I shrugged.

“We should go,” she said.

“Okay.”

Meredith wrote a note that said
THANK YOU!
to our driver on the back of a gas receipt we found in the cup-holder. She drew a little heart where the dot in the exclamation point should've been and left it on his seat. We got our stuff out of the car and started to walk west. We walked for a long time, and no cars passed us. Meredith scrunched up her face and put her hands under her belly like she was carrying a bowling ball. We heard a rooster crowing and some birds chattering, but other than that, it was pretty quiet. When we got into the town, it was like we had stepped back in time. All of the buildings were old saloon-style like the kind you see in western movies.

“What
is
this place?” Meredith said.

“I don't know, but I think I like it.”

“Me too,” she said.

“I feel like I should be riding a horse.”

“Definitely. You should be. Where can we find some horses around here?” she looked around, shielding her eyes from the sun. “I want a Palomino.”

“Any pal of yours is a Palomino,” I said.

Meredith laughed and punched me in the shoulder, but not hard.

I stopped to peer in the window as we passed The Gunfighters Wax Museum.

“This place is almost as weird as Niagara Falls,” Meredith said.

Before long, we came to a sign that pointed one way to the I-70
and the opposite way to town. “What should we do?” I said.

“Well, Tucker, I think we should get the heck out of Dodge.”

I laughed and so did she as we walked along the road out of town under the wide, red sky.