2,000 Miles to Open Road (Barefield)

by Trey R. Barker

  How could he make that promise? Who knew who the hell the guy outside the door was? Obviously, that pansy-ass voice wasn't Captain Brooks but maybe Brooks was in the building.

  And just what was this building? It had adobe walls but it felt modular, like a hotel or pre-fab housing.

  "Shhhhh. Everything will be fine. Tell me what I can do for you right now. What do you want? Something to drink? Something to eat?"

  It was then he realized his voice--shit, the very words--were Hanford's. As though Hal had channeled his brother, had called the spirit of the older, stable Turnbull son and given it to this scared woman on the floor, drool leaking from her mouth and the tang of piss on her legs.

  The first time Hal had gotten arrested, for stealing four Hot Wheels cars from a grocery store, Hanford had said that very same thing to him. Hanford had whispered and soothed and said he would do anything he could to help his little brother.

  Shawn spread her thin fingers and her eyes, washed out and tired, were lined with red After a moment, those eyes focused on Hal and Hal thought he could see just a moment of clarity slip into them.

  "Is that stink me?"

  "How about a shower?"

  When she stood, her head lolled until it came around so she could see him. "That a proposition, big boy? You gonna strip me and fuck me 'til I can't walk? Ejaculate perception and all that?"

  "No, Shawn." He guided her toward the shower and helped her out of her clothes. Finally, he got to the syringe. As delicately as he could, he pulled it out and tossed it over his shoulder toward the bed. Bruises raced up and down her torso. "Holy shit, what is all that about?"

  She looked down, smiled drunkenly, and waved a breast at him. "Tits, Captain. You're supposed to suck on them."

  Hal bit down on his anger. "I'm not the captain, Shawn. I'm Hal."

  Blinking, she nodded. "What? Oh, yeah, I know that."

  Water blasted from the shower head when Hal turned it on. After it had warmed, he moved her into it and she howled like a kicked dog when it doused her skin. Hal held her as tightly as he dared without hurting her bruises and eventually she calmed down. She turned toward the wall, the water in her face, as though she was being frisked by FTO Captain Marc Brooks and stood there for nearly an hour, mumbling about Brooks the entire time.

  Hal never left. His feet hurt, his arm sure as hell hurt, his head hurt, but he never left.

  Chick's scared to death. No wonder she smacked up. Two months, two weeks, three or four days and none of it mattered now. The Horse had dragged her off the wagon damned hard.

  And scared or not, understanding it or not, Hal was pissed. Anger came and went in waves. Why the hell had they stopped? How had they stopped? He had been driving last he remembered. He crash things up? Sure wasn't injured if he had. Where in the hell were they? Domingo told him Valentine in the dream but that had to be bullcrap.

  But most of all: how long had they been here?

  His watch said 4:30. Day or night who knew?

  "Damnit."

  "What?" She turned off the water and the sudden silence startled Hal. Shawn's deep red hair lay flat against her skull, lifeless and dead. At the same time, her skin was a healthy pink from the hot water. Holy Christ, Hal thought, she's so skinny. What should have been an alluring curve of hip was pointed and angular. What should have been a flat, or even slightly pooched, stomach was actually a hollow. And her collarbones stuck out from her shoulders like elongated tumors.

  "You been a junky for awhile."

  With a slow nod, she turned toward him. "You should have been a detective." She looked over his shoulder. "Who's the stiff?"

  "Hoping you could tell me."

  Her eyes had cleared a bit. Still lined with red but able to focus. "I think I know him." Her face creased into a frown. "But he wasn't dead." She pointed. "And I don't think he scores like that."

  The syringe Hal had tossed over his shoulder had stuck in the meat of the man's thigh.

  Hal snorted, pissed again. "Should'a seen this. The fuck are we, Shawn? And why did we stop? I've got to--"

  "Yeah, yeah, got to be somewhere. You know, I'm getting damned sick and tired of hearing about it. If you aren't going to tell me everything, then tell me nothing."

  "Ain't your concern. And don't go forgetting who jumped into whose window, ho-kay?"

  Trying to stay together, trying to focus on getting out of this place, he paced the floor, awkwardly because of the missing boot heel. Every time he turned, his gaze caught the dead man. "I was right the first time. Crack whore. Nothing but."

  Stoned, wet and tired, she was still fast. Her hand came up, open palmed, and caught him dead in the cheek. "I am a lot of things, Hal, maybe a lot of bad things. But I am not a whore."

  Flame burned in his cheek. "Yeah? What are you?"

  Gritting her teeth, she dried off and started to dress. "A little buzzed. A little desperate. Maybe a little jealous."

  He blinked. "Of what?"

  "Theresa. Who is she? Wife? Girlfriend?"

  "Girlfriend. She teaches third grade in Nueva Rosita. Used to teach in Barefield before it went bad for her."

  "You must love her pretty hard. You even talk about her when you sleep. Wouldn't shut up is more like it."

  "Sleep?" He rubbed his cheek. "We been here long enough to sleep?"

  She shrugged. "Last time I checked my watch it melted. Call me Dali."

  He raised a hand to slap her again, to knock her back into the reality of here and now, but her eyes stopped him. "How long we been here?"

  "You don't scare me, Hal. You can huff and puff all you want but you aren't a bad ass, probably never been one and you'll die without being one." She sighed and began dressing. "You're a good man, Hal, just a little lost maybe."

  "Yeah, well, not as lost as I want to be." He went to the door again. Through the far wall, he heard a car pass. It wasn't going highway fast, but faster than it would in a neighborhood. "Why the hell did you stop?"

  "I didn't stop, you did. Well, not really stop so much as pass out. We were halfway in the ditch before I realized what was going on. I had to stop. We'd have been killed."

  "I was bleeding or what?" His head spinning, Hal sat heavily in the chair. Passed out? He was hurt that bad? How much would that slow him down? A tremble took hold of his bottom lip and for a wild moment he thought maybe he was twelve again and sitting and crying in the back of a policeman's car.

  "There was a pretty good amount of blood." With a sad grin, she shook her head. "If we do get stopped, the cops are going to have a field day with all the blood on the driver's side of that car."

  "Whatever. Gimme the keys."

  "Hal, look," Shawn said. "You're hurt pretty good, I don't care what the fathers did for you, I don't think--"

  "The keys, Shawn."

  "Listen to me, you've got to rest some--"

  Hal slammed a fist against the adobe wall. Pain rocketed up through his wrist and arm, into his brain, and exploded white hot. Bits of pulverized adobe fell to the hardwood. A rusted face stared out from behind the adobe.

  "What is that?" Hal asked.

  She shrugged. "Who cares what it is? Hal, you're hurt."

  "It's aluminum." Hal dug at the adobe. More of it crumpled out. "It's a trailer home wall."

  "So what?" Shawn jerked Hal's face toward her. "Yes, it's a mobile home. Five of them, actually. All put together and covered with adobe."

  Hal snorted a surprised laugh. "What?"

  "It's a church, Hal. Listen to me."

  "You said 'the fathers.'" He looked at the cross hanging on the wall. "This is really a church? Who has church in a trailer house?"

  Her hand flashed, quick and solid, struck him on the cheek a second time. "You're getting bogged down, Hal. The church is pretty much the last thing you need to worry about."

  Hal grabbed her hand to twist it behind her, to maybe rip it off and toss it on the garbage. "I don't care about all this weird shit. I just want to get outta here. Now give
me the keys and point me toward I-10 and I'll be on my way."

  She sucked her teeth. "I-10 is about 50 miles back. We're on U.S. 90."

  "Hey," a groggy voice said.

  They turned to the corpse. It sat upright, its eyes half open and covered in crust, its nose hidden behind dried snot. Blood had dried around the man's mouth and was roughly the same color as the brown slashes on the walls.

  "That cop didn't show up, did he?" The man stuttered a laugh, reached down, and popped the syringe from his calf. "Wow," he said, staring at the needle. "Welcome to the big city, I guess."

  Hal's insides sank into quicksand.

  "That's why I got off the highway," Shawn said. "I saw Brooks."

  Now Hal's insides flipped over, guts on a roller-coaster. "Son of a bitch."

  "He was behind me. I lost him in some little town where the highway split."

  "Van Horn." Hal ground his teeth together. "Damn hard to lose anybody in Van Horn. It's pretty small." He paced the room, knocked on the door. "So I pass out and while you're trying to decide what to do, you see Brooks. Then you turn off the highway, somehow lose Brooks, and stop here."

  "Pretty much." She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "God, I'm scared. That's why I scored. I've been trying to quit but this scares me, Hal. Scares me bad. If you could have seen his face you would have scored, too."

  "He here?" the guy asked. "'Cause I got… a warrant or something. Drugs…whatever."

  "Gimme the keys," Hal said.

  "I don't know where they are." She shrugged. "I was stoned, Hal. I think the fathers have them."

  The man on the bed squirmed. "Something's poking me."

  "What about the key to the room?" Hal pointed at the door.

  "I don't know, Hal."

  The man on the bed dug something from beneath his ass. "This yours?"

  A room key on a wooden dowel.

  Hal grabbed it, unlocked the door, and headed down the hall. "I'm getting out of here. Shit. I'm not even sure where 90 will take me. It's an east-west, I think."

  She shrugged. "The signs said Alpine, Del Rio, Uvalde, and then San Antonio."

  Del Rio? Hal stopped short. Del Rio was about forty miles from Nueva Rosita. Del Rio was where he and Theresa had gone looking for a dance and a movie before he left.

  Suddenly Huntsville was a million miles away. Suddenly Huntsville was less clear, less obviously where he wanted to go. She was close, maybe close enough to hear if he listened well enough. Huntsville was still better than 700 miles away.

  No, he thought as he strode down the hall toward a room marked 'chapel.' Huntsville, then Barefield. Fix this, then find the rest of your life.

  "Hal? Where are you going?" Shawn was a few steps behind him, trying to keep up.

  "Hey?" the corpse called. "What up?"

  "We'll be back," Shawn lied. "There's another hit…uh…under the bed. You can have it, we'll be back before you know it."

  "Right on." Without another word, the man disappeared back inside the room.

  "You're not going to leave me here, are you?"

  Hal ignored her. If he stopped to answer her, his anger might overwhelm him. He kept moving toward the chapel. Finally he reached the door and shoved through.

  The room was full of priests. Twenty, maybe twenty-five of them. Maybe more.

  They stood dead still and they were all bloody.

  752 Miles (Still)

  Hal had seen a crime scene photo once. Hell, he'd seen lots of them, courtesy of Hanford, but this one in particular struck him and stayed with him. It had been taken in a room at a low-rent motel outside of Garden City near Barefield. Beige and lime green; walls, curtains, bedspread, even the fucking telephone. Everything was beige and lime green. The very definition of hip at one point.

  One night, a man had killed another man.

  The beating had started with fists and moved on to a lamp. After the lamp had broken, the killer had grabbed a second until it, too, broke. Then a leg snapped off a cheap chair and finally, the toilet seat. What Hal remembered, and sometimes saw in his dreams, even more than the sheer amount of blood, was the story of the blood. Not in globs or brushstrokes, but in spatters and flings, each one fat and round at one end and strung out like a junkie at the other. Every spatter told a different story. Each direction, each angle, was something different. This angle showed the victim had been standing, that one showed the man had been on his knees, the next proved he'd been slumped.

  In the crime scene photo, the man was still--left inside a bathtub full of red water--with his eyes open. Yes, he was dead, but it was almost as if he were still because it was a picture. It was as if he could have gotten up and walked out whenever the photographer was finished.

  The priests were bloody with eyes open. They wore brown robes belted at their waists but opened and slung down off their shoulders to reveal their chests and backs. What skin was visible was as pale as wedding lace. Most of their heads were bare, as were their feet. A couple wore earrings, a couple others had nipple piercings. All had tattoos, usually some version of a cross.

  'Member those lines in the pic, Hal? How it was obvious when the killer was swinging the lamp or toilet seat and the blood was coming off the end in perfect, straight lines? Damn same thing on these walls and ceiling. Just as directed, just as straight. The lines--ain't no way they weren't blood--were mostly on the ceiling. Hundreds and hundreds of rusty brown stains. Some faded by age, some more recent.

  Some still glistened.

  "Holy Mary Mother of fucking God." Paralysis swept through Hal, kept him frozen at the chapel's door.

  Four priests were bent over and naked. They beat themselves with a short leather whip. The others watched and somberly danced. Arms moved in unison, even those not holding whips, not striking and tearing open flesh. Fifteen arms, twenty, maybe more, moving slowly up and quickly down, then slowly up again and down with a snap.

  The priests chanted. A deep rumble, like continual far-away thunder or the rumble of Barefield's Friday night high school football games.

  "What in hell is this?" Shawn crowded behind him, pressing against his backside. Her breath had stopped.

  The whips deposited the men's blood on the ceiling and on the men around them, great slashes reminiscent of the motel room. But it all made noise, too. Above the chanting, an after-sound of leather striking flesh: the tiny taps of blood drops on the adobe ceiling. Thousands of quiet finger snaps, beatniks loving a poem of blood.

  "Betch'a didn't think you'd see something like this, huh?" A priest stood behind them, draped in a bad movie prop brown robe. A Silver Surfer comic book poked out of a badly sewn pocket. "I heard you guys earlier, thought you might be doing your own bloodletting." The man's eyes wandered over Hal's wound, over the bruises from the tracks on Shawn's arm. "We do have bandages."

  "Probably go through a few boxes," Hal said

  The man grinned. "A few."

  "What is all that?" Shawn asked.

  "Penance for our sins."

  "Sin a lot do you?" Hal asked. "Wild parties with cheap women and homemade brew? You guys run around with lampshades on your heads, giving beads to women who show you their tits?"

  The man's eyebrows rose. "Haven't been to a party like that in a while. Got one in mind?"

  Hal gaped. "Uh…no, not really. Actually…uh…Father, I'm--"

  "Bob," the man said.

  "Bob? As in Father Bob? Whatever."

  "And it's not penance for individual sin, it's for collective sin."

  "Collecting, huh? Better you than me."

  The man cracked a quick, tiny grin. Gently, he directed Hal and Shawn back down the hallway toward the room they'd come from. His touch was light on their shoulders. "Don't be so shocked, Halford. Lots of people worship in lots of ways. Even in that room, we've got all kinds of people. We have a professor from MIT who comes out every few months to clean his soul. We've got a woman who's a reporter in Amarillo and who comes here to, as she says, 'Beat her
editor out of her skin.' Couple of other guys who are gun freaks. One used to be a school resource cop in Illinois and one used to be a banger with the Gangster Disciples in L.A. They get along great here. We built a range for them out back." Bob shrugged. "Everybody's gotta get closer to God."

  "You're like the Philippines, Father Bob," Shawn said.

  Bob winced. "That's the general idea, but with the nails they use, I'd consider them a bit more extreme."

  "Yeah," Hal said. "They're the freaks, I guess."

  "Shut up, Hal," Shawn said.

  "Listen, Bob, we've got to get outta here. Now. I've got somewhere to be."

  "Don't we all?" Bob nodded thoughtfully.

  "Right, everybody's got some place to be, everybody's got original sin and blah blah blah. That's all fine and good but could I have the keys to the car we came in?"

  Bob's eyes were brown, dull as dirt. They moved back and forth between Shawn and Hal. "You mean the one stolen from Arizona?"

  "What are you--" Hal's hands clenched to fists. "What are you talking about?"

  He pulled a couple of driver's licenses from his pocket. "Hers says Reno and her insurance card says she drove a 1995 Monte Carlo." He smiled at Hal. "Texas. Oklahoma. Utah. Colorado. Looks like you've been around." He shuffled through the papers. "Barefield. Austin. Dallas. Ponca City. Salt Lake City. Denver."

  "Yeah, yeah, what's your point?" Hal asked.

  With a bony finger, Bob pointed out a window darkened with black shoe polish. "I don't know cars very well, but what you guys drove up in doesn't look like a Monte Carlo to me."

  Shawn swallowed. "I bought a new car, Father Bob. I haven't gotten the insurance changed over yet."

  "Really," Bob said. "Then I wonder why the Nevada State Police have that car listed as stolen on their website."

  Hal grabbed for his licenses and glared at the priest. "You call them?"

  "Whatever you do is whatever you do."

  Shawn took her license and insurance card. "But you had to check, didn't you?"

  "Like to know who I'm dealing with. Look, I don't know what's going on with you guys, but you're free to stay here as long as you want. Eat, drink--sorry, we ran out of the wild party homebrew--sleep, whatever."