He wondered if the way his second ‘long’ had come out was suggestive.
“I understand,” she said. “I just was thinking about it. I miss it.”
Jay nodded at the white-haired man on TV warning of Armageddon and dark angels that would come upon the earth to crush righteousness and the ways of the lord. “I see.”
“Do you miss it?”
So she suspected he wasn’t getting any regularly, was she? Well, she was righter than rain on that one, he thought. Try eight years right. Miss Plastic Fantastic herself had been his last, and he barely remembered that. He’d probably been coked up, and boozed up, and all around fucked up. Funny thing about it was, he remembered the drink somewhat more than the screw, and maybe that was because that’s all Christine had been, a convenient pair of perfect legs to wrap around him whenever the urge struck. He’d never made love to Christine, nor she to him. What they’d done was probably even a little less than sex. More like rutting. Scratching an itch. God, he couldn’t even remember kissing her while in the moment.
“Jay?” Mari said again.
“I’m sorry. Do we have to talk about this?”
She shook her head slowly and flipped the tub’s stopper with her foot. The water began to gurgle away. Her left hand reached over and nudged the door so that it almost closed, and he heard her feet slap wet on the tile floor.
A few minutes later she came out in a long sleeved tee shirt and shorts, her hands working a towel over her hair. The preacher was exhorting silently, shaking his bible at the camera. Jay had finally just pressed the mute button.
“Nothing on?”
He shook his head.
Mari finished drying her hair and shook it out, bending full forward so her hair hung down, then standing straight and whipping her head back so that her damp and dark mane flung as a whole and hung down against her neck and back. She sat on the bed and looked sideways at the TV, one hand reaching up to fiddle with something bulging small and hidden by the tee, just beneath the sag of the collar.
“What’s that?” Jay asked, catching her off guard. Her hand came quickly away.
“Nothing,” she said, glancing at him and then back to the TV.
Sin
, the preacher was mouthing loudly.
SIN!
It seemed almost a command without the sound.
It looked like a necklace or something, Jay thought, the thing beneath her shirt. Maybe something special from her husband, secreted like her burnt arm had been, and still was. Something private.
And what did it matter, really? Jay decided. People were entitled to their secrets, as entitled as they were to giving them up, if so inclined. He would leave it at that.
But not something else. “Mari?”
She looked to him, hands folded and pressed tight between her bare legs. “Yeah?”
“She could have kept the money, you know.”
Mari nodded, seeming to have settled that subject a bit in her own head. “I know. In a way that might have been easier.”
Jay thought he understood. “She would have been gone.”
Again, Mari nodded. “And just some cliché. A teenage runaway stealing to stay alive. Like this...” And she thought for a moment. “Like this she seemed so lost, so unprepared for what she was doing. That makeup, that look. The way she turned into a regular kid when you got her laughing. She had this armor thing going that wasn’t going to hold up. And that hurt to realize that, because I knew she’d be getting hurt. She was a show, Jay, and she didn’t even know how to start the second act. She should have kept the money and just got on with being what she had to be out there. God knows what she’ll have to do now for food, or a place to sleep.”
Jay nodded, but he had been wrong. He hadn’t understood at all.
“She’ll make it,” he said hopefully, and Mari nodded and bounced up from the bed.
“I’m gonna get a coke from the machine down by the ice. You want something?”
“Seven Up,” he said.
Mari went to their fanny pack where it lay on the immovable dresser and took some change. Half jokingly she turned to Jay and held it up in the air. “Shall I?”
“It’ll come if it comes,” Jay said, and she left to get the drinks. He took the opportunity to ready another Darvon for the fast (he hoped) trip straight to wherever it traveled to deaden his leg. It was doing better than some hours before as he drove, but still that damn ache was thumping. He thought that the cast was doing more harm than good, giving the throb something to reverberate against as it was. And somewhere on their short jaunt across the Oklahoma panhandle he had started to think that, using Mari’s theory about the people he’d saved, he might also have a mark from this ordeal—his leg. Courtesy of her. And as she came back into the room he was going to mention it to her, but he never got the chance.
She had a coke in one hand, his Seven Up in another, and she was looking at him in a funny sort of way.
“What is it?”
“Uh, the change in the machine...I think it’s for you.”
Ninth Interrogation
August 15...4:19 a.m.
“It was for me,” Jay told Mr. Wright. “Six heads just waiting for me.”
Mr. Wright puzzled visibly at something. “I thought you said she took change to the drink machine.”
“She did,” Jay confirmed, smiling a little.
“So why did she get change back?”
Now Jay just smiled, and Mr. Wright opened his notepad and wrote something down. Jay went on as he did.
“That change sent us three hundred and seventeen miles west up Interstate Forty at eight fifty one the next morning to where county road number six joined up with it. We stayed in something I can only describe as an adobe motel hell. We ate Twinkies and made deviled ham sandwiches from stuff we bought in Albuquerque at a stop for gas. The next morning Mari dropped the fanny pack while we were leaving and eight heads showed themselves. That afternoon at three we left Correo, New Mexico, and drove seventy nine miles further on Interstate Forty into the San Mateo Mountains. The grade was hell on the car. It took three hours to get that far.”
“What was there?”
“Edge of the world,” Jay said. “The continental divide. We parked at a turnout and watched the sun go down, and we ate some more junk food and sipped sodas, and we bundled up that night and slept in the car.”
“Comfortable?”
Jay shook his head. “I took three of those pills and I was still in a world of hurt. I just bit down and tried to sleep.”
“Did you?”
“I think I finally drifted off about three. I’m not sure. Whatever time it was I didn’t get to sleep very long.”
“Why?”
“Someone came knocking.”
Forty One
Rousted
The sharp tapping on the window jarred Jay from a shallow, uncomfortable sleep just past six thirty on a damn chilly Monday morning at this smaller version of the top of the world. Frost dusted off from the inside of the driver’s window as he rolled his body flat beneath the steering wheel and brought the seatback up, each tap causing a bit more of the frozen condensation to puff off the obscured glass. Jay breathed and gathered the blanket around his shoulders, a cloud of white rushing past his lips and to the windshield, where a thin film of ice crackled as the warm breath hit it. The tap came again, something hard against the glass, he thought, and finally he cranked the window down just a crack.
A State Policeman stared down at Jay through the crack, standing just behind the front door a bit.
“Good morning, officer,” Jay said, but the officer only made a little rolling motion with his hand—the same way Astrid had when first coming to the car—and Jay obliged by cranking it down all the way. The cold morning rushed in in a gust and woke Mari.
“Jay? Damn, why’d it get so—”
“You folks know it’s illegal to camp overnight at an interstate wayside?”
Mari woke quickly now at the strange, authoritative voice, and looked past Jay to see the officer bending to look in at them. Two slabs of dark, mirrored glass obscured his eyes.
“Camp? Oh, officer, we weren’t—” But Jay didn’t get to explain any more than that.
“Could you both put your hands out in the open and keep ‘em there,” he requested, though the way his hand curled ‘round the butt of the pistol on his hip made it very clear he was not asking. He was instructing.
They obliged quickly, Jay grabbing the icy steering wheel that stung his palms, and Mari sitting awkwardly up without raising the seatback and putting her hands on the dash.
“As I said, camping at an interstate wayside is a violation of the law, and it appears to me that you’ve been here overnight, which constitutes camping, sir.”
Jay nodded. “I just meant that we didn’t plan on this. We got tired.” It was a lie, but better that than the truth and a quick trip to some mental ward. “And we couldn’t go on. It was bad planning on our part.”
“You have Jersey plates. Where you headed?”
“California,” Mari answered past Jay.
The officer looked into the back seat, shining his light there though the sun was already up. Then he looked back to Jay, or in his direction, because where the man’s eyes were aimed was a reflective mystery. “Any drugs in this car?”
As he was about to shake his head, Jay realized that, well, there were. “Yes, officer. Prescription painkillers for my leg.”
The officer’s flashlight tracked the gray dimness beneath the dash to where Jay’s legs were. His cast poked free of the blankets and practically glowed under the beam.
“Busted it recently, did you?”
Jay nodded, trying to keep a pleasant face on. “It’s still clean. I figure another week and I’ll have to put a coat of paint on it.”
The officer’s head bobbed a bit in agreement, then he said, “Could you step out of the car for a minute. Just you sir.”
The urge to ask why was strong, but Jay fought it back. He would do what was requested, and get this over with, and get on the way. Away from here, from this cold place where his leg was aching and a cop was hassling them. From where the damn
coins
had brought them, bit by aggravating bit. Why couldn’t it just be over and done with?
Here, go here, do this, okay, thanks, mission accomplished. Thank you. Here’s your life back.
But no. No, it wasn’t like that at all. Wasn’t turning out like that in any way. They were being pushed along, pushed along, teased and tricked along long stretches of American road toward God only knew what. Or when!
“Sir?” the officer prompted, and Jay got himself out of the car, Mari watching worriedly from her seat.
Jay hopped mostly on his right foot as the officer directed him to the back of the car and told him to put his hands flat on the trunk and spread his legs as best he could, with the cast and all. As it was the mere act of putting that hunk of plaster to the cold ground sent a hot spear up his leg.
“I just want to satisfy myself that you aren’t carrying any contraband, sir,” the officer said as he patted Jay down and reached into pockets where bulges drew his attention. He first pulled the bottle of Darvon from the breast pocket of Jay’s jacket, examining it closely. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Jay Marcus Grady.”
The officer set the bottle on the trunk deck and reached into the front pocket of Jay’s chinos. Next to the bottle he dropped what he’d removed, a meager handful of change. Change Jay had received in Albuquerque for the junk food, and had not put in the fanny pack for some reason.
Or maybe for this specific reason, he suspected, as he saw the five coins showing heads to the bluing sky, and in them saw numbers.
The officer’s hands came off of him, and he told Jay he could turn around and stand however was comfortable, with the cast and all.
“I hope you understand my caution, sir,” the officer said.
“I do,” Jay told him, but the numbers were flashing in his head, almost monopolizing his thoughts.
“We get people coming through here, come up to the top of the world to get high on contraband substances, and, well, we’ve got to stay on top of that. But I can tell you’re not under any influence, except maybe of the cold, and the long drive, so you best get in the car and get your heater cranked up and head on to sunny California.” The officer smiled a real smile right then and removed his glasses, and revealed a deep purple scar that looped around his left eye, the pupil of which was cast off at a slight and unnatural angle. “I hear it’s nice out there.”
“Me too,” Jay agreed, then gathered his change and his pills and hopped back to the car.
When he was inside and had the window rolled up, Mari seemed surprised. “Aren’t I driving?”
“Huh? What?”
“He’s letting you drive without a license?”
“He didn’t ask for one,” Jay told her.
“But every cop, that’s the first thing that they—”
He saw the knowing swell in her gaze, and he nodded. “He has a mark.”
“I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“No,” Jay said. “You ready to write?”
Write? He had said ‘write’? “You got something?”
“When he checked my pockets. There was change in one that I forgot about.”
Mari dug the paper on which she’d been keeping their directions and mileage tally from the pocket of her pants. For a while it had stayed on the legal pad, but she’d started to worry that if they picked up another hitchhiker, well, the person might get nosy and might ask and that would be a fun little dance to do, wouldn’t it? So she’d put it away, and now she unfolded the few sheets on one leg of her jeans, and took the pencil from its hole in the dash and wrote what Jay told her. When he got to the time she looked quick to her watch.
“Zero six thirty eight, Jay. That’s in like ten seconds.”
The cop behind them beeped, and Jay stabbed the key fast into the ignition and turned it. The old motor turned, and turned, and tried, and tried, and coughed a few times before getting its breath and starting to pulse. Sickly, to be sure, but running it was. Jay shifted into gear and rolled the window down once more to look back before entering the road, as the sideview was frosted over. He thumped the rime from it, and steered onto the interstate. Behind them the cop made a tight U and headed back toward Albuquerque.