by G. M. Ford
“You sure?”
“That’s the only place I ever seen it.”
Another silence settled over the morning.
“She said you seen a tower.”
“Way out at the edge of the ocean,” Randy said.
“Only one big ol’ tower anywheres in this part of the country.”
Randy looked up. They locked gazes.
“In your dream, which side is this tower on?” Junior asked finally.
“On the water side.”
Junior let go a chuckle. “Left or right, boy?”
“Right.”
“Then you got to be someplace near Cocoa Beach. Someplace out on the peninsula there. That’s for sure.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause what you’re seein’ there is the tower at the space center.” He waved a hand in the air. “You know where they send up the rockets and such. And the onliest place you can see it from, where it’s on the right and close enough to make out, is right there in the Cocoa Beach area someplace. If you was up north of the center, the tower’d be on the left.”
The door squeaked again. The sound must have meant something to the crows, who suddenly took to wing and flapped off over the brown broken ground.
Alma stepped out. She was carrying her laptop beneath her arm. She put her hand on her father’s shoulder. They shared a tender moment.
“You tell him?” she asked.
Junior nodded.
“Papa knew right away,” she announced with pride. “Soon as I told him what you said…he knew. Just like that.”
She retrieved her hand, stepped around her father, and walked down the stairs.
“Got something to show you,” she said to Randy. She opened the laptop, pushed a few buttons, and waited. “Remember that list of people with that Howard name we downloaded.”
“At the ice-cream place?”
She nodded. “Take a look at this.”
He walked over and peered at the screen. Names and addresses filled the space from top to bottom. She’d highlighted one of the notations. It read: Wesley Allen Howard. 432 Water Street, Cocoa Beach, Florida. 32932.
Randy read it three times. His body began to tingle. He began to stammer.
“Maybe it’s just a…you know…a weird coincidence or something.”
“Could be, I suppose,” Junior agreed.
“You really believe that?” Alma asked her father.
“Nope,” he said. “But I guess it’s possible.”
She looked over at Randy.
“Me neither,” Randy said.
“That makes three of us,” said Alma. She pushed another button and the computer shut down. She uncoiled the maze of wires wrapped around her arm and piled them on top of the laptop. She held them out. “Here,” she said. “Take it.”
Randy didn’t move.
“I don’t need it anymore,” she said.
“Sure you do. You need to—”
“I’m starting over, and I don’t need that thing to remind me of what a fool I was.”
“What am I gonna do with it?”
“Anything you want. You see a sign advertising wi-fi, you just pull up out in front and tune in. Nobody’ll even know you’re there.”
“I can’t…I mean…”
She didn’t give him much of a choice. She pushed the computer against his chest and let go. He caught the whole package in his arms. She stepped forward, wrapped her arms around him, and gave him a hug and a quick peck on the cheek. “Good luck,” she said. “Have a safe journey.”
“You too” was all he could manage to squeak out.
He walked over to the VW’s open window and dumped the load down into his bag on the passenger seat. When he turned back, she was at the top of the stairs.
“Danny’s gonna be right along,” she said. “I gotta jump in the shower.”
“Take care now,” Randy said as she disappeared inside. Felt like somebody was squeezing his heart. He opened his mouth to say something else…something that would keep her there on the porch, but nothing came out.
Junior gave Randy a two-fingered salute and got to his feet.
“I want to thank you for whatever part you had in bringing our girl back to us,” he said. “We wasted a lot of good years,” he said sadly. “I’m just hopin’ we can get some of it back.”
“I was just along for the ride,” Randy said.
Junior’s narrow eyes said he didn’t think so. “Thanks just the same.” He held the open door in one hand. “Careful driving, now.” He eased the door closed and disappeared inside.
Randy stood for a moment in the empty yard. Two fields over, the crows circled the cloudless sky. He got in. The little car started on the second try. He sat for a moment gazing at the house and then wheeled out of the yard, trying to kick up as little dust as possible.
Five minutes later, he found himself in beautiful downtown Thurston, Alabama.
He downshifted to third as he reached the middle of town. The empty storefronts seemed to accuse. The only two cars on Main Street were parked in front of the ice-cream parlor. He began to inch over the centerline, heading for an empty spot next to the other two cars. Black cars. Black Lincoln Town Cars. Two of them. The hair on his arms stood on end.
He braked to a halt, started forward again, and then changed his mind and turned the wheel as far as it would go to the left, cutting a tight U-turn and heading back the opposite way. He turned right on Crawford Street, drove three blocks up the hill, and turned right again, following Swezey Avenue all the way to the stop sign, where, like he figured, it T-boned into School Street.
By the time he completed the loop and stopped at the stop sign, things had heated up at the ice-cream parlor. A pair of suits were stuffing the struggling old man into the backseat of one of the Lincolns while another pair were putting out the “Closed” sign and locking the front door.
He didn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. He gave the little car full throttle. As he sped along the two-lane blacktop, he had a vision. Must have been from a movie he’d seen sometime, a movie where a guy in a white space suit somehow managed to sever his tether to the ship and went floating off into the blank darkness of space. The last shot was of his face, twisted in horror behind the plastic face shield as he pinwheeled into the void.
22
Memory rode the hot breeze, swirling bits and pieces of his past around his head like so many scraps of litter. Seemed like the farther south he drove, the more mileposts of memory he encountered. Batches of blue water covered with boats. His head swam from the effort of trying to make sense of it.
On two occasions, the crush of images had become so vivid he’d pulled off the road, easing the car onto the shoulder, where he’d closed his eyes and waited for the torrent to subside. The second time he’d fallen asleep in the driver’s seat, only to be rousted by a seriously annoyed Alabama state trooper, who admonished him about the dangers of sleeping on the side of the road, checked and rechecked his paperwork, and then grudgingly sent him on his way.
The DJ said it was 4:37 in the morning when he crossed from Alabama into Florida on the old highway just north of Monticello. He passed the green “Welcome to the Sunshine State” sign just as the sun poked its first fiery glint over the horizon. On the radio now, some guy with a rusty voice was singing about looking for the heart of Saturday night as Randy spotted the sign for the rest area, two miles ahead. Other than a quick stop for gas, he hadn’t been out of the car since he left Airhart, and needed to take a piss for the ages.
As promised, the exit road materialized from out of the darkness. He veered off the highway, took the right-hand fork, and drove toward the back of the rest area. On the far side, half a dozen truckers were cooped for the night, their orange roof lights gleaming like teeth in the darkness. On his car’s passenger side, a black Mercedes was the only vehicle in the lot. He brought the VW to a halt as far from the Mercedes as he could get and eased himself out onto the pavement.
He felt like the Tin Man, brainless and rusty at the joints. He windmilled his arms and twisted his torso back and forth as he waited for gravity to bring his legs back to life. Overhead, the carpet of stars had begun to slide beneath the dawn. The air was hot and moist. For reasons he couldn’t put his finger on, this moment seemed more right than any he could readily remember. He walked around the other side of the car and grabbed his bag. Figured he’d clean himself up a bit, maybe change his shirt while he had the chance.
His back was stiff and his kidneys ached as he made his way up the path toward the cinderblock restrooms. A trio of soft-drink dispensers were chained to the front of the building. The red-and-white display panel on the Coke machine had been bludgeoned to plastic shards. The pay telephone had been torn from the wall and reduced to rubble.
The recessed light fixtures in the overhang had attracted a menagerie of insects, some crawling upside down across the oily stains, others driven mad by instinct, flying about the lights in endless circles of futility.
As he approached the door to the men’s room, a sudden plaintive note rose above the drone and crackle of the insects. Randy took hold of the door handle; cocking his head, he listened, wondering whether the sound was in real time or something remembered…lately he was never sure…he wondered whether the urgency in the sound was his own anxiety or that of some third party.
He pulled open the door and stepped inside. A pair of figures struggled in the center of the floor. On top was a guy in his late thirties. His faded Red Sox baseball cap had fallen from his head and lay among the wadded paper towels littering the floor. His freckled pate was surrounded by a fringe of stringy hair. He had one knee on top of the other figure, pinning him to the floor while he whaled away with his free hand, smacking the writhing figure about the head and shoulders. “You little bastard,” he grunted as he swung his fist. “I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass, you hear me?” When he swung and missed another couple of times, he grabbed the collar of the smaller man’s jacket and pulled him up to his knees, where he could get a better angle on his punches. That’s when he noticed Randy standing in the doorway.
“You know what’s good for you, my man, you’ll get the fuck out of here,” he said.
“I need to take a leak,” Randy answered.
The guy let go of the collar and straightened up. As the loose jacket fell back into place, Randy could see now that the figure on the floor was a boy, mixed race, maybe nine or ten, bad chili-bowl haircut, deep olive skin, big brown eyes wide with terror.
Two things were immediately clear to Randy. One was that if anything were to get between himself and the urinals, he surely was going to piss all over himself. Two was the certainty there was no way he was leaving the kid with this lunatic when he left.
The minute his antagonist stepped toward Randy, the kid went scuttling across the floor like a cockroach with a meth jones, trying to put as much distance between himself and his attacker as could be managed in a ten-by-ten room. Randy watched as the kid crawled under the side of the nearest stall. He heard the snap of the lock and then watched the kid’s feet vanish from view.
Red Sox straightened his shoulders and puffed out his chest. “You hear me, asshole?”
“I heard you,” Randy said. “But like I said, man, I really gotta take a leak.” He stepped around the guy and made his way over to the urinals, where he set the bag on the floor, hoping he could delay the inevitable for long enough to take care of business.
No such luck. Before he could even reach for his zipper, the guy punched him in the back of the head, sending Randy staggering forward, bouncing his skull off the wall, nearly shutting off his lights altogether, leaving Randy with intermittent strobe-light vision and just enough wherewithal to slip the next punch. Nearly blind, his head threatening to detonate, he lurched forward and threw his arms around the guy.
They stood, locked in their feral embrace, staring into each other’s bulging eyes for a long second before the guy drew back his head and butted him in the face. Randy’s ears began to roar like a blast furnace. He got a forearm in between their faces and pushed his elbow into the guy’s throat. The guy danced backward with the rhythmic surety of a boxer and then lowered his head and charged, driving his shoulder into Randy’s midsection, throwing him off balance and then forcing his quarry down onto the filthy floor.
On his knees now, Randy pawed at his own face, as if any laying on of hands would somehow end the roaring in his ears and restore his shattered vision. Red Sox grabbed him by the hair and forced his face down into the urinal, then slipped his arm across Randy’s throat. Caught between a powerful biceps and a bony forearm, Randy’s throat was nearly closed. They struggled together, red-faced and shaking from the exertion, until, after what seemed like ages, Randy’s oxygen-deprived muscles started to run out of gas and his neck began to bow, ratcheting downward a millimeter at a time until the tip of Randy’s nose brushed the round deodorizer at the bottom of the bowl, gathering within him an adrenaline-fueled surge of revulsion sufficient to explode him upward with enough force to pull his face completely clear of the smelly receptacle.
Not for long. Red Sox quickly parlayed the chokehold into a half-nelson, bending Randy forward again, pushing his face down into the urinal. Randy gulped a rancid breath, reached behind himself, and grabbed the guy’s ankle and pulled as hard as he was able. He felt the pressure on his neck lessen as the guy struggled to retain his balance. He pulled again and this time threw his weight backward, breaking the grip on his neck and sending his antagonist reeling across the room.
Randy stood still, gulping air. Adrenaline had cleared his vision. His head throbbed to the beat of his heart. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve just as the guy came at him again, on the run, like a linebacker trying to drive him through the wall.
Randy timed the rush and brought his knee up at precisely the right moment. The crack of his knee meeting the guy’s chin ricocheted around the room like a whiplash; the click of his teeth coming together served as an echo.
The guy’s legs gave. He was still trying to bear-hug Randy around the waist as the rest of him headed south. Randy pushed him off and stepped over to the side.
“Hey, man,” he started, “…no reason we got to…”
The guy was sitting on the floor with his tongue hanging out, leaning back against the wall next to the trash can and then…he was reaching inside his jacket for something…something black and…
Randy took a long step across the floor and kicked Red Sox as hard as he could, catching him a little farther beneath the chin than he’d intended, driving his lower teeth into his tongue and slamming his head back against the wall with a hollow thud.
And then, except for his own labored breathing, the room was silent.
Until Red Sox began to blow bubbles in the thick blood running from his mouth and down over his chin, pip, pip, pip, with every ragged breath.
From the look of it, the guy had very nearly bitten his tongue in half. Randy didn’t bother to check further. Instead he walked over to the nearest stall and kicked open the door. The kid was standing on the toilet with his fist raised to defend himself.
“You better come with me,” Randy said.
“Leave me be,” the kid said.
“Okay,” Randy said. “But you probably better not be here when…”—he gestured toward the floor—“when this guy wakes up.”
Took the kid a minute to make sense of it. He jumped down from his perch, pushed his way past Randy, and approached the unconscious man on the floor the way the wary would approach a sleeping rhino. Satisfied that Red Sox wasn’t going to be jumping to his feet anytime soon, the kid hauled off and kicked the guy in the chest. He was winding up for another field goal attempt when Randy pulled him away.
“Nah,” Randy said. “That’s not right.”
The kid jerked himself loose. “Don’t be talking to me about right, motherfucker. You don’t know a goddamn thing about…”—he threw a hand at
the unconscious man—“that motherfucker there…” He was starting to cry.
“Like I said, kid, you probably better come with me.” He didn’t wait for the kid to say anything but instead turned and walked away over to the urinals, where he unzipped himself and began doing what he’d come in there for in the first place.
The kid was buffeted between his fears. “How’d I know you ain’t some fucking pervert…ten miles down the fuckin’ road gonna want a blow job…some kinky shit like that.”
“Not my style, kid.”
“My name ain’t kid, motherfucker.”
“What is it, then?”
“Acey.”
“Nobody’s named Acey.” Randy finished up, patted everything back into place, and turned toward the kid. “Well?”
“My mama named me Achilles,” the kid said. He rolled his eyes upward. “Now, what kinda crazy crack ho gonna name a kid a thing like that? See some dumb-ass movie on TV and name a kid some dumb-ass name like Achilles. Bitch out of her mind.”
Randy washed his hands in the sink, then washed his face. Twice.
“Everybody call me Acey.”
Randy dried himself with a stiff brown paper towel.
“Okay, Acey. I’m thinkin’ we better get out of here.”
Acey looked down at the floor again. He shook his head. “Dog. I’m telling ya, we don’t want this crazy bastard following us. You maya got lucky wid him one time, but it ain’t gonna happen twice.”
Randy retrieved his bag and started for the door. “Take his car keys. Take his cell phone. That’ll slow him down some.” He stopped. “Matter of fact, take everything.” The kid was patting him down as Randy stepped outside.
The sun was a bloody welt on the horizon. The jagged silhouettes of palm trees darkened the flaming vista here and there as Randy stepped around the corner of the building and headed back to the car. One pace and he turned on his heel, stepping back out of sight, just as the kid came bouncing out the door.
Randy stuck out his arm and stopped the kid’s forward motion. He pressed his index finger against his lips. “Cops outside,” he said. “We’re going to take the Mercedes. Like we’ve known each other for years.”