The Passenger (2 page)

“Marion?
Marion Lane
?”

It was the woman’s turn to stare now.

“I’ll be good-goddamned! It’s
Janet
, right? Janet... wait, don’t tell
me. Don’t tell me. I can’t
believe
this . .. hold on a minute ...
Harris
!
Janet Harris!”

“Close. Morris.” She smiled.

“Morris! You lived ... ?”

“Plainfield Street.”

“That’s right, Plainfield Street! Up
where the money was. Hell, where the money
still
is. God! I mean, look at you! Jesus, what’s it been?”

“Since high school? A long time. A very
long time.”

“No, really ... I guess it’s got to be,
what...?” “Seventeen years.”

She laughed. “Oh my god. Seventeen years.
Seventeen goddamn
years
! You know
how
long
that is? Hell, we were only
what?
eighteen
when we graduated? I
mean, that’s half a lifetime ago!” She laughed again. “Damn! I think I need a
drink,” she said. “Maybe a
few
drinks.”

She gave Janet’s leg beneath the skirt a
light slap. “Hey, it’s good to see you!”

“Good to see you too. You don’t know how
good. That guy was starting to scare me.”

“Forget the bastard. Someday he’ll pick
up the wrong lady, know what I mean? Where we headed?”

“You know Ellsworth Road? Just outside of
town? I’m living over there now.”

“Sure I do. No problem.”

She watched the road ahead wash away
beneath their wheels. The pause between them was only momentary but still a
little awkward. She really hadn’t known Marion well in high school. They’d
traveled in wholly different circles. Janet was definitely college-bound.
Marion hadn’t been. She wondered whether or not she’d ultimately made it there
anyway but decided that at least for now it would be wrong to ask.

“Listen. There really is half a bottle in
there.” She
pointed to the glove
compartment. “That jerk give you the willies? Open it up and have a hit or two.
Good for the nerves.”

“No, thanks.”

“Go on.”

“Honestly. I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, really.”

“Well, dig it out for me then, okay?” She
laughed again. “Seventeen years! Jesus!”

She really didn’t want to. Not only was
it against the law but it was dangerous as hell. She’d seen the results of
drinking and driving plenty of times. Enough to know what a fundamentally
stupid thing it was to do. But Marion was saving her ass here, for all she knew
in more ways than one. And she hadn’t smelled any liquor on her breath thus far
so this one might well be her first. It was still illegal but she guessed it
was safe enough so long as she kept it down to one or two. She pressed the
button to the glove compartment and watched the door fall open and the light
come on inside.

She saw the flat pint bottle of Kentucky
Bourbon. And behind it the .22 revolver.

* * *

When Ray Short leaned back in his chair
and neatly lifted the wallet from the baggy jeans of the passing Saturday Night
Cowboy, Emil Rothert was almost finished with his fifth beer and just drunk
enough not to be seriously pissed at him for waving it around the table like
some kind of goddamn trophy, smiling, looking for Emil’s approval, and Billy’s
too, he guessed. Even though the barman could have seen him or any one of the
five guys sitting at the bar or the four in back by
the pool tables. Not seriously pissed but
still pissed.

He had to give him his due, though. Ray
was good with his hands.

“Put that goddamn thing away,” he said.

“Yeah. Jeez, Ray, you want to get us
comprehended
? ”

Rothert sighed and shook his head.
Sometimes Billy amused him and sometimes not. Sometimes he thought Billy Ripper
was a spaceman only just learning how to appear human.

Ray’s smile faded. “You guys are no damn
fun at all.”

“We’re drunk, Ray. What do you want from
us?”

He finished his beer.

“I’ll have another, though. You’re buying.”

Rothert watched him walk to the bar.
Sitting to his left was a guy in a rumpled gray suit drinking what looked like
whiskey neat. The guy was facing straight ahead into the rows of bottles but he
still hoped Ray had sense enough not to pay out of the stolen wallet.

“Three more,” he heard him say to the
bartender, and then the bartender said something back that must have been
three more what?
because Ray said
beers
and then the bartender must have
asked him
what kind of beers
? because
Ray turned around with a look of annoyed confusion just as the girl walked in.
He saw her register on Ray’s face—
one
helluva looker
—and he turned and she was a looker all right and too young
he thought to be walking into a place like this alone, probably underage in
fact, long blond hair and cutoffs and tank top straining across her tits. Yet
here she was, alone, moving past his table toward the back like she owned the
joint.

Willie Nelson stopped singing “Blue
Hawaii” and the
place went silent so that he
could hear the bartender and Ray.

“. . . we got Bud, we got Schlitz, we got
Miller,
we
got Miller
Lite
.
We got Heineken, Heineken
lite
, we got Coors. We got
Tuborg
, Becks and I can piss in this bottle for you if any
of this don’t interest you.”

“Huh?” Ray still had his eye on the girl.

“Forget it.”

The bartender started to move away and
Ray finally got it together.

“Buds. Make it Buds.”

‘Three Buds.”

And then it was Elvis singing “Blue
Hawaii” good god as the bartender opened the beers and put them on the bar and
sure enough, Ray pulled out the stolen wallet and started counting out the
bills. I got me a reckless fool on one side of me, Emil thought, and a complete
fool on the other.

Ray handed them their beers and sat.

“See that?”

“I’m still seeing it,” Emil said.

“I think you should go over,” said Billy.
“Buy her a drink. Talk to her. I think she looks like someone who’d appreciate
to talk to you.”

“I’m thinking about it.” He drank from
the bottle.

Billy smiled. It wasn’t a nice thing to
see.

“I’ve always liked a girl like that.
Y’know
? Somebody who can exist themselves to a function
where they can manipulate.”

Emil and Ray just looked at him.

Emil thought that sometimes this boy just
plain scared him.

* * *

The pint bottle rested between Marion’s
legs and she’d only had two sips, but Janet still wished she’d put the thing
away. She was driving slowly though, and carefully. She had no real reason to
complain.

“Your parents still live in town?” Marion
asked her. “No. Florida. My dad retired, sold the house. My mother says she’s a
golf widow now. Yours?”

“Passed away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It’s okay. They were never much
with us anyhow. So who do you still see? Anybody?”

“Nobody. I used to call Lydia Hill once
in a while.” “Lydia Hill?”

“Tall? Blond? Always wore long-sleeved
white cotton blouses and minis? You know, the kind with the button-on
suspenders.”

Marion laughed. “Sure, I remember them.
Ran along the sides of your boobs and made ’em look bigger. And I remember
Lydia Hill too, I think. Wasn’t she a cheerleader or something? Prom committee
or something?” “Lydia? No, she was more debating team. We both were.”

She drank from the bottle. “You were
popular though. You weren’t just some damn egghead.”

Janet shrugged and smiled. “I guess.”

“Sure you were. You dated that guy Wilder
for a while, and Kenny
Whatsisname
, big Irish
preppie. What was his name?”

“Coughlin.”

“Coughlin. Kenny Coughlin. Right. Real
sonovabitch
that guy was to me. You know
that?”

“No. I didn’t even know you’d gone out
with him.”
Kenny and Marion?
Before
or after us? she wondered. Kenny was about as straight arrow as they come.

“See, you and me didn’t hang out with the
same crowd. Guys I hung with, they expected you to put out, and maybe at first
you didn’t and maybe later you did. And that was
seriously
fucked because as soon as you did their friends would
know, so from then on you pretty much always did, and by the time a guy like
Kenny comes along your cunt’s Grand Central Station and everybody knows it. So
what’s Kenny do? He comes on like he’s going to save me. You believe that?”

Marion drank again.
Not good
, she thought. It was starting to worry her. That and the
fact that she was accelerating now, just a bit over the speed limit. But the
woman would be in trouble if some cop pulled her over.

Then she thought,
what cop
? We’re out here in the middle of nowhere.

“At least with one of those other guys
it’s right out front, know what I mean? At least he doesn’t do the
movie-and-dinner routine so he can excuse his own sorry butt for wanting to
screw you in the backseat later on. And then never
calling
you again. At least with those other guys, they call again.
Kenny Coughlin. What a bastard.”

She’s using the
present
tense, Janet thought. Like she’s still there. Back in high
school. She knew that some of them got stuck in time—she’d seen it before. The
same old town, the same jobs, the same old friends growing older. Some simply
got trapped there and it looked as though probably Marion was one of them. She
was starting to get very unhappy about the whole conversation and it didn’t
help at all when Marion pounded at the steering wheel.

“Who the
fuck
is Kenny Coughlin not to call me?”

She watched her take a deep breath and
hold it and expel it slowly, and then she seemed to calm again.

“I mean, you
dated
that guy?”

Janet nodded.

“How’d he treat you?”

“Okay I guess. It didn’t last that long,
not really.”

In her look Janet seemed to read a barely
concealed hostility. And not toward Kenny, but inexplicably, toward
her
. As though this whole business with
Kenny Coughlin were somehow Janet’s fault. And she held that look too
long—considering she was the one doing the driving. And then she reached
suddenly for the glove compartment and Janet couldn’t help it, she jumped.

She glanced down and saw the gun in there
and then she saw her slide the bottle in and slam it shut.

Her heart was pounding. She wondered if
Marion had noticed the overreaction.

For
a moment I thought. . . my god. . .

But no, Marion had done the right
thing—not the crazy thing. She’d put away the bottle. And maybe it was the
bottle that had been talking all along. Maybe there was nothing to worry about
here at all.

“Not too long, huh?” she said. “Well,
good. Good for you. Myself, I could have killed the little prick.”

She laughed. “Don’t mind me,” she said.
“I was always too serious.
Y’know
?”

* * *

Emil watched the girl take her beer back
into the poolroom, stand and watch one of the games. From what he could see
the game wasn’t much. The players were just a couple of skinny kids in their
twenties who thought that if you didn’t hit the fucker hard you didn’t hit
good. He got more interested when he saw her reach into the
pocket of her cutoffs and pull out a
quarter and set it down by the left comer pocket.

The girl was a player. Or wanted to be.

He was surprised the bartender hadn’t
carded her. She was just a kid.

“How’s your game these days, Bill?” he
said.

“Oh, imperative, Emil. Imperative.”

“Fine.”

* * *

“So I guess you got married, huh?”

“No,” Janet said.

They were about twenty minutes from home
now. Still in farmland, all gentle rolling hills and dark two- lane blacktop.
They’d be coming up at a Kaltzas’s service station soon though, in about ten
minutes or so. She wondered if she should tell Marion to stop there instead of
taking her home. It was probably a good idea. If Dean was on, he’d give her a
lift the rest of the way, drop her off and then go deal with her car. Dean had
a massive crush on her that she didn’t exactly discourage. It helped if your
local service-station guy happened to like you.