Then Mama would say, “Don’t talk that way, Jay. You can’t help it. Things just get inside you and hurt.”
I'd look outside from the window seat in my room where I'd be all scrunched up, holding my knees, and I'd see the bad moon high in the sky above our little town and I'd know he was one of those loonies he said made mischief. And he didn't even know. Mama must have known, even when she made excuses for him. But Daddy just had no idea.
Anyway, this was daytime when Heddy said what she did and she couldn't know if there was a bad moon out or not. She just meant it was bad luck, getting in a cop's car, and hitting him with a gun. I was hoping it would be real bad luck for them.
Heddy didn't talk a lot. She drove. I think she was bothered by her mouth too, the half of it that didn't work right. She didn't like anyone looking at it when she was talking. She'd give you a mean look, a really evil look if she caught you watching her mouth when she talked. When she did that, she scared me more than Crow did. I always had to look away so she wouldn’t think I was watching her mouth.
Crow talked all the time. He talked too much. He said you couldn't say much in prison, it was too dangerous. People would get you for talking, either the guards or the cons, so you had to keep your trap shut. That's probably why he talked so much now he had escaped. He had a lot of words saved up.
It was Daddy who knew about that. The escape.
We were on the freeway again, heading west into the sun, when Daddy said, "You must have broke out of Leavenworth. If you headed east to St. Louis, why head west now?"
"You've been listening to your radio,” Crow said, uncaring.
"You won't get far going west, back toward Kansas."
"Shut up," Heddy said. "If we don't get out of this state, neither will you. It's none of your business what direction we head."
Daddy looked over his shoulder at us. He gave Crow a mean look. I sucked in my breath because his face was getting puffy and his eye was closing. He looked like some kind of monster from a really bad horror movie.
"How do you think we'll get past the roadblocks?" Daddy asked.
"What roadblocks?"
Daddy turned around and stared out the windshield. "They might put up roadblocks,” he said nonchalantly.
"He's lying,” Heddy said. "He's heard it on the radio. They've got up roadblocks, Crow. Goddamn."
Crow settled against the seat, thinking. "We need to get off the freeway. Find some little road..."
Heddy took the next exit, swerving enough that Crow leaned over on me. I pulled away and got closer to Mama. I could feel her, all trembly, scared the way she was when Daddy was bad.
We pulled into a gas station where Heddy parked in back, away from the pumps. A man was putting air in his tires from the air machine, but he didn't look at us. "We need a map,” Heddy said.
"Check where he had the gun,” Crow said.
Heddy opened the pocket compartment and rummaged in it. She pulled out a folded United States map. "Here's one."
Mama hadn't said anything since we'd gotten into the car. She said now, "I need to go to the bathroom."
"Hold it,” Heddy said. "No one's getting out of the car."
Crow dug in his leather bag and brought out a pack of Wrigley's peppermint gum. He unwrapped a piece and I watched him fold it into his mouth. I wanted to go to the bathroom too all of a sudden, but I knew there was no use saying so. Heddy really meant the stuff she said.
Heddy glanced up from the map. "Okay, we can catch 94 along the Missouri River to Jefferson City. I don't think they'll block that one."
"We should have headed across Kansas when we had the chance." Crow sounded sulky.
"You'd already be caught by now if we had. Besides, we needed...you know what we needed in St. Louis, Crow, don't start bitching."
"There was a search party in the woods near the caves, wasn't there?" Daddy asked, brightening.
"Shut up,” Heddy said again. She put the map away and got the car on the road.
Daddy knew he'd made a mistake talking about the roadblocks. If he hadn't said anything, they wouldn't have thought of it and maybe we would have been stopped somewhere on the interstate system. Now we were going down through thick forests to a curvy little two-lane highway, Heddy driving too fast.
That made Crow happy. He chewed his gum with his mouth open--really bad manners--and kept looking out the window, grinning.
Daddy just sat like a stone in the front seat, quiet and cold, moving nothing but his eyes. Mama held my hand and squeezed it so tight my bones mashed together. We all knew it was going to be a long trip. Maybe even into the night.
#
"HELL, Crow, they've got a CD player in this thing. Can you feature it?"
Crow scooted up to look over the seat then sat back again. "Play something."
Heddy looked over at Jay. "Where's your CDs?"
"We don't have any. We just got the car last week."
"God damn it. That's what I was afraid of. You could have bought some Doors stuff or the Eagles or something. Shit."
"Just turn on the radio, Baby." Crow slipped his hand into the leather bag he kept on his lap and took out a foil packet. He unfolded it carefully and jiggled around the little dirty looking crystals there. Then he pulled out a straw cut in half and snorted the crystals up one nostril and then the other. He felt the little girl watching him. Her gaze made his neck prickle.
"You want a hit, kid?" He held out the foil packet toward her and laughed. She withdrew toward her mother like an octopus pulling in its tentacles.
Carrie said, "Leave her alone."
"Leave her alone,” Crow mimicked. "Leave my baby alone. Like that kid ain't seen this shit in the schoolyard. Don’t get on that high and mighty horse with me."
“Just leave her alone.”
He stared at her hard until she turned to the window.
Heddy kept scanning radio stations. Light and dark whipped across the interior of the car as they drove down curving roads bounded on both sides with tall green trees. They weren't pines, that's all he knew. The trunks were thick and scaly as the backs of fabled dragons and the canopies were lush with blankets of leaves in mint, emerald, and forest green.
Crow closed his eyes on the blinking light floating over him and let the rush come. It slipped up his diaphragm into his chest until his heart was stomping like a flamenco dancer.
Best thing about Leavenworth was the drugs. You could get anything and everything if you had something of value to exchange. Hell, you could get champagne and caviar if you could pay to get it inside. He wouldn't tell Heddy his big bargaining power rode below his belt. She'd call him a queer, but that's because she didn't know what it was like inside. There were a few real queers, sure, but most of them were like Crow--selling all they had to sell and that was the flesh. In other worlds you lived other lives. Behind the walls, you grabbed your balls. No shit, Sherlock.
When he first got put in Leavenworth, a big nigger, black as midnight and wild as a train off its tracks, came to him and said, “You toss my salad, I’ll protect you from the others.” Tossing a salad didn’t sound too bad to him, but that was before he knew it meant getting down and licking out the guy’s asshole until he got off his rocks. The Mod Squad, what the big nigger called himself, stuffed it with strawberry jelly from the breakfast tray and told Crow to lick till he saw stars. So Crow spread the cheeks, shut his eyes and licked for all he was worth. What was he going to do, kill the motherfucker, him weighing two-forty and Crow barely busting scale at one-thirty?
If Heddy knew he’d sucked ass, she’d never kiss him again. Hell, he wasn’t sure he’d blame her either. But that’s how he survived prison life, tossing salads, eating bungholes, staying alive, man, drawing breath the best way he knew how.
Four years. Four interminably long years punctuated by night sweats and the horror of the endless routine of the days.
He had tried stuff in prison he wouldn't have gone near on the street. He knew outside the street p
unks and even some of the middleclass dopes were getting deep into heroin. He’d tried that too, but it made him so damn groggy he couldn’t even make mealtime, couldn’t finish sentences when he tried to talk, and he slept so deeply he thought he’d died. Finally, he'd settled on crank--crystal meth--as a preferred choice because it really shook him out of his skin. He didn't want to get sedated or sick or horny. He wanted to fly away, baby. Turn into pure color and rock and roll to pure sound waves. He wanted to jitter and jangle like a wind chime in a hurricane. Goddamn right!
He saw everything clearly, moved like there was a train connected to his ass that pushed him into the future.
One out of ten times he might have the shakes so bad he couldn’t tie his own shoes. It was nearly worth it. If he got too jazzed, too spaced, he went to Mod Squad and got him to keep an eye on him so the Keys didn’t haul him down to isolation or the prison infirmary.
He felt the music from an old Aretha Franklin's blues tune smoothly boring through the back of the leather seat where his head rested. It entered the tangle of his long black hair, sinuously twining between the individual shafts, snaking over the pimply skin of his skull, and then SHA-ZAM! It was in his head, lazily stirring the brain cells into soup, alphabet music soup.
Heddy's voice echoed from a canyon. "You have to do that shit when I'm driving? Crow?"
He couldn't tell her how much her question amused him. He had to do this shit, yes, he did, he had to. When she drove or when she didn't, when the sun shined and when the sky poured, when the earth turned and when it decided to stop. Didn't she know any damn thing? Besides, he didn't want to hear any prissy lectures from a woman who sipped Jim Beam like it was soda water. She stayed half-crocked from morning till night. You couldn't tell unless you got right up in her face and smelled it on her breath. Heddy held her liquor better than any man he’d ever known. Of course, Heddy was a lush, no doubt about it, but did he bug her about it? Fuck no.
He heard whispers and opened his eyes to just a slit. He saw the little girl next to him, whispering to her mother. He reached out one impossibly long arm that ended in a ham-like hand that was much too large to belong to him, and patted her on the top of the head. Good kid, good kid, don't do anything rash, kid, or I have to hurt you.
She couldn't hear his thoughts, of course. And if she could, she'd never make them out from the streams of pale violet and stark red colors that wove like ribbons around, over, and between the tumbling words...Good...kid...Good... kid...bam, she-zam, thank you, ma’am, ain’t this a lovely world?
#
I guess I have to tell you the truth. There is something funny about how I know what grown ups are thinking. I said it's just from looking in their eyes, but I’m afraid that’s a little story, like a white lie. It's more than that--how I hear thoughts.
Like in the car that first day. After Crow sucked the drug up his nose, I got all confused listening into his thoughts. I don't know how to explain it...
It's like the radio. You know how you're listening to the radio, maybe it’s a ballgame? Then some static comes over the station and another station bleeds into it and you hear a song or some commercial for toothpaste or something? That's how it is. I'd never even told my Mama about it until Crow and Heddy took us off. I guess I have to tell you because that's how some of the things happened the way they did.
Mr. Hawkins sat forward in his seat and leaned on the desk. He blew smoke at the ceiling before saying, "We've had to use psychics before."
You believe in them, I asked him?
"Oh, I don't know. They've helped out a time or two."
Well, I don't know what a psychic is, I said. I thought they told fortunes in booths at the fair and I can’t tell fortunes. All I know is I get static. Sometimes the static's like thoughts, but I'm not thinking them. So they must come from other people. I never thought much about it because I've always had static in my head, even when I was a baby, as far back as I can remember.
I never told anyone before. I’ve been afraid to. I know other people can’t do this. They'd think I'm crazy or bad moon loony and I don't think I am. I figure maybe it comes from God or something, a way to help protect me maybe. I don’t know really. I might know when I’m grown and understand these things better.
Anyway, after Crow took the drug, I started getting his thoughts all jumbled, mixed up with bright colors and long drawn out music sounds that sounded like guitars holding a note a long time. I knew about how he got drugs in prison and how Heddy wasn't any better, she drank whiskey, kept a pint bottle in her purse, and she took it like medicine. She was a lush, he thought, but it didn’t bother him.
That's when I slid next to Mama and tried to tell her in a whisper that we were in really bad trouble now. It would have been awful enough if Crow and Heddy were using us and the car to get away and they might let us go soon. But when I found out how much time they spent dreaming inside their heads with drugs and whiskey, I knew we might be stuck with them. They needed help. They couldn't do it without someone to lean on. They weren’t getting away with Crow’s escape all on their own, they weren’t strong enough.
I don’t think even Crow and Heddy understood how weak they were without us around. It was like once we were with them, our fear fed them. Not to mention that if they ran into law trouble how better off they were with a policeman and his family for hostages. Cops will do anything for another cop, anything. They knew that. It wasn’t unlucky at all, them running into us, the way Heddy said at first. They knew it was lucky, really. We were like solid gold to them.
When I tried to tell Mama in some way she'd understand me, Crow reached out his hand and patted me on the head the way you pat dogs. I heard him say, "Good kid, good kid."
But that's not all. He was thinking, I don’t want to hurt you, just be a good kid.
He didn't want me to tell Mama what I knew. I even knew about the nasty stuff, the sex stuff he did behind bars so he could keep from being knifed or hit over the head when he was sleeping in his bunk. He used the word “nigger” in his head, a word my Mama told me never ever to say. Anytime I hear someone use that word it makes me want to scrunch up my shoulders and find a corner to go hide in, ashamed I can be in the same room with someone who calls a black person that word. It makes me want to say the same thing my Mama told me. “Skin color is an accident. If you’d been born black would you want white people calling you a name like that? Would you?”
But I knew Crow had been calling them that a long time, probably all his life. He didn’t know any better, no one had taught him anything.
I looked at him next to me with his eyes closed and his head against the seat and I knew if I said much about what I knew was in his head to Mama, he'd get really mad. He would hurt me. I'd have to keep most of my thoughts--and Crow’s thoughts--to myself. If I talked about it, he'd know.
See, they were both ready to hurt us, but Crow was the one who scared me the most in the beginning. Later, it would be Heddy. It’s like the longer we were with them, the truer we could see them, the more we knew about the danger we were in.
He'd seen people hurt in prison and he'd done some of that hurting. He'd been put in Leavenworth for trying to kill a man with a pool stick. He'd gotten mad over a bet and broke the stick over the other man's head, then stuck the broken end into the man's stomach. He pulled it out and started kicking the man in the head. He'd have killed him if some other men hadn't pulled him off.
I know this because during the time we were with them, he bragged about it to my Dad. My daddy just shook his head and ground his teeth.
“You’re nothing but a gutter punk,” Daddy said.
“Yeah, like you never busted a guy over the head, you freaking pig liar asshole. I guess you’d like me better if I was one of those psycho killers that jerk off over dead bodies and eat their livers with onions on the side.”
Daddy said, “If you think you’re better, you’re sadly mistaken.”
“What I’m thinking I’m mistaken about is n
ot throwing your ass out of this car while Heddy’s doing eighty miles an hour.” Then Crow laughed to beat the band until Heddy told him to shut up, sit back, and get a grip.
Since escaping, Crow and Heddy had robbed a gas station outside of St. Louis. Crow didn't like the way the gas station attendant looked at Heddy, like he was about to make fun of how half her mouth didn’t work right, so he shot him three times.
They hadn't said that on the radio yet because they didn't know it had been Crow. This was something I knew when Crow took the drug. He started sort of reliving it. Playing it over in his head, all of it running fast like a movie going crazy, and I got the static from him.
"That's pretty odd you know about that,” Hawkins said, lighting a new cigarette. "It's true, too. The killer was Craig Walker. The man you call Crow. Missouri State police got a make on the car that was identified as being at the scene of the crime. It matched the car they left in the woods near the Long Horn Caverns."
So you believe me, I guess, I said.
It was hard knowing things and not able to tell my mother or father. Daddy already knew they were really dangerous. He knew all about bad people so they weren't fooling him any. But Mama only knows a little about people like Crow and Heddy. She didn't know how easy it would be for Crow to pull out the gun and kill us for nothing, for looking at him funny or pushing him too far or saying something that bothered him. I was trying to warn her, but I couldn't.
The whole car used to smell like a new car. Even when we drove up to the caverns, it still smelled like new leather and carpet and vinyl. But after Crow and Heddy were in the car, it smelled like putrid stuff...old food standing in a refrigerator that’s stopped working. Curdled yogurt and green slimy vegetables and meat that’s turned gray.
"Mama, roll down the window,” I said.
"You're not rolling down the windows,” Heddy said, looking at me over her shoulder with a big frown plastered on her face. “I’ll turn up the air if you’re hot.”
BAD TRIP SOUTH Page 3