“No one’s going to jail,” said Dot.
Checking the mirror, Dash edged the car cautiously up over the speed limit. “We’d better change the plates. That extra set still on the floor back there?”
Trinity felt around with the bottom of her foot. “I think I saw Zoe playing with them in the yard the other day,” she said. “Out near the fence.”
“Of course. Why did I even bother to ask? You can’t keep anything in this fucking family.”
“Whose fault is that?” said Dot.
“Maybe I just should have told him to follow the smoke, check out the fresh hole in the cemetery.”
“Why not? They’re going to think we did it anyway.”
“Oh, we know who did it all right.”
“That boy was disturbed. It was obvious from the beginning.”
“I’ll tell you who’s disturbed.”
“Meaning what?”
“You’ve got a brain, you figure it out.”
Maryse made a funny face at a black-hatted bearded man on a tractor they passed. “This is like Bonnie and Clyde.”
“What about Poly?” asked Edsel.
“Poly can take splendid care of himself, don’t you worry about that.”
“But what about Minerva?”
“Minerva never cared about us anyway. And she’s too stupid to even realize we’ve left. By tomorrow night she’ll have already found another family of saps to fill her bowl and she’ll think it’s still us.”
Edsel listened carefully, but he didn’t believe his father. He knew the goat and the cat would both die long, solitary deaths and their bones would rot unremarked and all that held his tears in check was the image of the monster in the cellar, preceding his pets into pain and darkness, burnt up good and dead.
They came through Albert at dusk, rounding the town square, the gutted and defaced jet welded to iron struts in memory of the county war dead, scattering shy dogs and surprised pedestrians and nearly colliding with a horse and buggy that appeared out of nowhere, a wild commotion of hooves and spokes, to frighten them all before vanishing again into the mirage of the rearview mirror.
“You want to meet more cops,” snapped Dot, “keep on like that.”
“Well, hell, did you catch the kid driving that thing? And the idiot sitting next to him?”
“I think you want to have an accident.”
“Of course I do and go to Rio and live off the insurance money.”
“Makes as much sense as most of your grand plans.” She stared out the window at the color draining from the world. “We shouldn’t have left the girl behind. She couldn’t have gotten far. We should have found her and taken her with us.”
“She could be anywhere by now. Besides, who’s going to take the word of a deranged fool, anyway?”
“Maybe she’ll get lost in the corn,” offered Maryse. “Plenty like that died of exposure back in the Ivey days.”
“Never should have let either one of them into the house in the first place,” said Dash. “This is what comes of assuming your grown children are mature enough to make responsible decisions.”
Trinity jammed her knee into the bulging driver’s seat. “Fuck you, too, Dad.”
At the approach to the interstate Dash brought the car to a full stop in the middle of the road.
“West,” said Dot.
“The west is crazy with lunatics and desperadoes.” He turned onto the graded ramp beneath the big white arrow pointing dramatically to CHICAGO.
All their money, $3,059.21 in cash, was locked in a steel box on the floor between Dot’s feet.
“I’ve got cramps,” Maryse announced.
“Are we there yet?” asked Trinity.
A procession of beaded light howling eastward over warm concrete. The backwash from passing semis rocked the little car, and the wind through the cracked windows buffeted their faces with fumes and grit. Words had to be screamed to be heard, so they sat mute and still like wired mannequins awaiting a collision test. The flat fields on either side fled away into the night. Nothing out there to distract you from the mad round of thought.
Edsel propped himself up between his parents, arms dangling over the seat backs. “Where are we going?”
“Ask your father,” said Dot.
“This is an adventure,” Dash explained. “And like all pioneers, we’ll know when we get there.”
“Shit,” grumbled Maryse.
“I think I’m getting carsick,” said Trinity.
Dot handed her daughter a paper bag.
Dash drove on, ear keyed to the nervous chatter of the engine, anticipating the eccentric notes, the arrhythmic prelude to inevitable breakdown. The plan he refused to divulge was simple and manifest: speed, distance. The lights of America after dark merely a constellation to sail through on a journey destined to end elsewhere. But he hated driving for all the miles he had logged. His back ached, his palms itched, the muscles across his shoulders felt like a harness.
Edsel reappeared with another question. “Dad?”
“Yes, Edsel.”
“Why didn’t we fly to where we’re going? In The Object?”
“Yeah,” said Trinity. “Where are The Occupants when you really need ’em?”
“It’s a big universe,” said Dot.
“But we’re supposedly these personal friends of theirs, they use our sister for a goddamn telephone, for Christ’s sakes. We’re talking some kind of priorities here.”
“It’s not time,” said Dash.
“By whose clock?”
“We’re not their only concern,” said Dot. “Perhaps at the moment there are more important affairs to tend to.”
“Like what?”
“Shit,” said Maryse.
A hundred miles and one state line later, after everyone in the car except sleeping Mignon and drugged Zoe had complained at least twice, Dash pulled off into the light-hollowed, bug-choked space of an all-night Exxon station. As he managed the pump, Trinity and Maryse squeezed out of the car and raced laughing toward the restroom.
“Thank God!” Trinity exclaimed, slamming and bolting the heavy metal door behind them. She opened her mouth and pretended to scream once, twice, shaking her head vigorously, trying to temporarily free herself of the family loa. Scratched into the walls were primitive depictions of the male tube in assorted dimensions and clever attitudes along with names and initials and jagged hearts and misspelled jokes. The air reeked of disinfectant and stale urine. A full roll of sodden toilet paper lay capsized in an iridescent puddle of suspicious content beside the lidless stool. “I’ve passed out in worse,” said Trinity. She examined her makeup in the tarnished mirror. “Mother is going orbital. It’s in her voice.” She could see Maryse in reflection over her shoulder, watching the brush scattering powder across her cheek. Then Maryse’s thin beige lips began to move: “Well, I don’t know myself how much longer I can go on impersonating a sack of laundry in that impossible car.”
“We should have left last week when we were talking about it.” The lipstick appeared to be drawing blood.
“We should have left last year.” Maryse spread paper towels over the grimy floor, settled Mignon on his back, and began changing his diaper. “Do you think he did it?”
“No, not really, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t.”
“I know, it’s hard to be sure about anything that goes on in this funny family.”
“They’re all insane.” With her tube of Magnetic Red, Trinity printed in neat letters across the glass: HELP! WE’VE BEEN ABDUCTED BY ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE!
Outside in the flickering glare of the harsh gas station light, skin tone reduced to a cadaverous hue, Dallas leaned arrogantly against the front fender of the truck, a sweaty beer can hanging casually from one hand. He took a swallow and smirked at them. “You two look like a couple of goddamn tourists.”
Maryse gave him the finger.
Trinity opened the car door and before she could close it again Zoe was out qui
ck as a cat, scampering without a backward glance over the oil stains and on toward the darkness of the road. Dot shouted her daughter’s name. Dash dropped the gas nozzle and sprinted out after her. She was fast and surprisingly difficult to catch, zigzagging with athletic dexterity across the concrete apron into the first lane of traffic where a matched set of round lights burning white and pupilless came bobbing down the hill at terrific speed, air brakes begun too late their pneumatic hiss, when Trinity seized an arm and yanked as tons of shrieking metal roared by, horn blasting, unintelligible cries flung from the cab window, scraps of aural litter. Dot bore down in fury upon her daughter struggling still to escape Trinity’s grasp. “She’s impossible,” Trinity remarked, sadly aware of the bleak insignificance of those stale words. For answer Dot pulled down Zoe’s ragged panties and, in full view of the elderly occupants of a Dodge Dart with Georgia plates looking on in affected middle-class horror, spanked those raw bony cheeks until Dash stepped forward, restrained her arm. The attendant stood in the office door, slapping the wooden dowel with attached restroom key softly against his palm like a billy club.
From the dark interior of the VW erupted a threatening series of gagging noises.
“Let’s go,” Trinity urged. “The fumes are making Edsel sick.”
Dash got in and gunned the engine, curved screeching out into the night. “Well,” he shouted, “we’ll certainly be remembered here. Nothing like a nice quiet getaway to cover your tracks.” In seconds he had rejoined the flow on the interstate and even at double digits over the speed limit a steady show of impatient vehicles passed contemptuously on the left.
“If you have a plan,” Dot declared, attempting to contain on her lap the squirming body of her youngest, who was punching at the radio buttons, chopping the mellow strains of “Heartland After Dark” into disconnected bits remarkably similar to the famous sound of Vic and the Vectors, “I think that this would be an appropriate time to share it with the rest of us mortals.”
“Oh, Mother,” groaned Trinity from in back.
“The plan,” Dash repeated as if speaking to a small child, “is to place as many jurisdictions between us and a pile of suspiciously inert remains as quickly as possible.”
“Is that it?”
“What did I say? It’s an adventure.”
“Drop me off at the next rest area.”
“Afraid not. No one gets out until the end.”
“Look at Dallas!” shouted Edsel, pointing behind at the flat grille of the truck charging down upon them to within inches of the Bug’s gasping tail pipes, high beams in the mirror blinding Dash’s eyes, the interior gone suddenly all black and white, art deco cutouts twisting across the illuminated leatherette, the rear bumper tapped gently three times before the truck paused, the space between the vehicles holding steady for one long moment, then Dallas and his machine seemed to slide rapidly backward like something seen in a reverse zoom lens.
Dash glared into the mirror, nostrils twitching. He spat out curses and extravagant threats everyone had heard before.
“He drives just like you taught him,” Dot commented.
“There’s a baby in this car,” Maryse reminded her fellow travelers.
“Oh, shut up,” pleaded Dot.
“Hey,” said Dash, “he’s already done it once, the ice is broken and chopped into cubes, so maybe he figures he may as well go on ahead and do the rest of us, too. Penalty can’t be any worse, and who knows—he might just plain like it.”
“Yes, that’s what you would think.”
“Like what?” asked Edsel.
“Tell you this, sports fans, he tries a stunt like that again and we’ll see who does who.” He slapped Zoe’s hands away from the radio knobs and turned up the news: killerkickbackfaminescareinflationtornado.
“Must we?” moaned Maryse in her best suffering-child plaint.
“I’m tired,” Trinity declared. “I want to lie down.”
Edsel leaned eagerly forward. “Can we stay at a motel? Can we? Can we, please?”
“One with a pool,” added Trinity.
“Too expensive,” said Dash, his eye beginning to blink in time with the canted beam of their one good headlight joggling along in front at an angle too steep to expose much road surface. “Look for a campsite.”
“That’s a laugh. There aren’t even any trees.”
“Part of the plan, no doubt,” mumbled Dot.
“It’s too dark to put up the tent.”
“We’ll use the flashlights.”
“What flashlights?”
“A hot bath would sure help these cramps,” whined Maryse.
“We don’t even have any food,” complained Edsel.
“All right, all right. We’ll stay in a room this one night only. A cheap one.”
There followed a contentious hour of disappointment and futile appeal, the big friendly beckoning lights of a dozen Holiday Inns and Quality Courts falling away one after the other into distant darkness as Dash drove on, searching for what no one knew. He found it at last beneath a pink-and-green face carved into the night, the pulsing head of a neon Indian presiding over a twitching sign announcing LINCOLN MOTOR LODGE, the promise of low rates in the fact they weren’t even in Illinois yet. The rooms were small and dank as monastery cells with a lingering canine aroma, the beds lumpy concavities of little comfort, but lapping at their door was a patio-sized pool of blue water seasoned with enough chlorine to sting the eye and bleach facial hair. Dot stripped Zoe to her gray skin and locked her in the shower stall under a warm needling spray whose tranquilizing effect usually lasted for a merciful hour or two. Dash switched on the antique television set, two channels, two colors (purple and green): tanks in the Mideast, riots in Asia, bombs on Wall Street, Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Dinner was a bag of burgers from the McDonald’s across the road. “I hope they have Weightlesse wherever we’re going,” said Maryse. “I’m down to a dozen cans.”
During the night the air conditioning failed, and by morning everyone was spread out on the fusty carpet like victims of a hotel fire seeking the last pockets of available air. Awakened at dawn by a revivified Zoe rattling the doorknob as if sheer noise and fury could free the lock, they staggered about gritty, surly, without any sensation of having actually been asleep. Even Maryse had no dreams to report. In the parking lot, while reloading the car, Dash passed out brochures to departing guests: Facts You Should Know About Etheria.
An hour later, tired and hungry, they crossed the Mississippi in a thin gray mist that speckled the window glass and lay dark and sleek on the paving of the road. “Father of Waters,” Dash announced grandly.
“It’s dirty and smelly,” commented Edsel.
Maryse read to them fantastic tales of horror and inspiration out of her Frontier Log, documenting the great westward trek of the previous century. “Hah,” Dash snorted, “what a bunch of fools.” Lunch they assembled on unsteady laps from packaged meat, bread, a jar of mustard purchased at a corner grocery store in a small town exactly like the one they had fled through—was it only yesterday? Off to the north the sky was decomposing into an ugly yellow nebula that seemed to be tracking their progress, bitter wastes of stricken cities lying vast and unseen and foully gravid.
By afternoon hardly a word was exchanged. Dash kept the name of their destination, if there was one, to himself. Trinity and Maryse dozed fitfully upright against the backseat, awakening occasionally for brief glimpses of land and horizon so similar in aspect the sense of movement, of distances successfully traversed, seemed merely an illusion. Lulled into limp acquiescence by the rocking of the car, Zoe sprawled across her mother’s legs, glazed eyes turned up toward the windshield and the nameless and gentle wonder of the clouds. Edsel deployed armies of little men among the denim folds of his jeans where a momentous battle was being waged. If the grays won, he would go; if the blues, he would stay. It shouldn’t be that difficult to find his real mother and father, they were down the road somewhere in Ohio, sce
ne of the original mix-up a long time ago.
Back in the truck Dallas was bored. He closed on the family car, ran for more than a mile less than a foot off the rear bumper, daring contact and whatever lurid punishment his dithering father could have had in mind when warning him last night in the motel room of the wages of recklessness both behind the wheel and without. He let his foot ride back on the accelerator pedal, and the VW seemed to soar away until it was little more than a blue smudge on the long white concrete. If he wished, he could turn off onto any one of these exits to nowhere, he could disappear, he could return. The world was a labyrinth of tunnels to worlds beyond numbering. There was a sufficient beer supply stashed under the seat. The headphones held his skull in their tender grip, the cave of his body reverberant with the cries, the thuds, the moans, the bangs of joyful sound. At his back the wounded sun dragged its stain across the whitewashed sky and out of sight beneath the uncertain flooring of this derelict planet.
Signaling, the VW turned away off the interstate, the truck trailing dutifully behind close as a shadow but strange and distorted as if the product of light cast upon some other fugitive object. The signs they followed were cut to resemble log pyramids with painted lettering of a rustic hewn quality. The yellow arrows led miles down a crumbling road to a secluded park of dry grass and clustering trees—The Happy Valley Campgrounds.
Maryse immediately claimed exclusive rights to the backseat. “Mignon and I are not sleeping on this icky ground.”
“No?” inquired Dash. “And what would Mother Ivey say?”
“She wouldn’t have said anything. She’d have stayed in the car. With the doors locked.”
“They got a toilet here?” asked Trinity.
Dallas approached, headphones looped casually about his neck. “This where we draw the wagons in a circle?”
Dash studied his son with the cold eye of a stranger. His voice was quiet and painstakingly slow. “Get the tent out of the truck.”
Since all were required to pitch in—“pretend you’re at a barn raising,” suggested Dash—it took twice as long as it might have to pick the spot, arrange the poles, pound the stakes, set the ropes. The canvas, after years of faithful service up and down the busy Believe It Or Not circuit, was sieved, seamed, torn, and patched, and once erect with the lantern glowing inside, the weathered material took on the mottled transparent look of aged skin. Home. The darkening wilderness around them already beginning to seem familiar. Trinity and Maryse wandered off together down a narrow winding path carpeted with wood chips. Dallas slipped away, unnoticed, not a word to anyone. Zoe was tethered to a sturdy tree. Dash unfolded a lawn chair and reclined, fresh drink in hand, watching the last light pour down the western sky like sand through a funnel. After a while the stars began to peek out shyly, one at a time, like the diminutive buds of a rare and delicate plant, but blossoming then in such numbers as to mock calculation, and soon the body of night was studded with the icy glint of their fabulous light. He watched the ancient patterns emerge into place, the Bear, the Dog, the Ram, the Whale, heaven’s menagerie, creatures of fire and void and timeless terror. You could see too the Milky Way, a twisting strand of tissue stuck carelessly to that dark dome. “Hey, come out here a second,” called Dash to his wife, who was sitting on the edge of a cot inside the tent, rubbing her temples with short, vicious motions. She continued on without pause.
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