Meredith and I pressed our hands against our ears.
Timothy closed one eye and shot the gun. It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard. It was like a building had just blown up beside me. Then it happened again. And again. And again. And again. Little gold shells flipped out of the gun like coins and landed at my feet. He took five shots, and five soup cans flew off the fence like tin birds. He switched the safety back on and turned to me. I think he asked who wanted to go next, but I couldn’t hear anything except a high-pitched ringing in my ears. The world was a fire-alarm drill.
I looked over at Meredith and saw her shake her head no. My hearing came back slowly.
“I hate guns. I can’t do it,” Meredith said.
“Why would you hate guns?” Timothy asked.
“Because guns kill people,” she said.
“That’s what they’re designed to do, Meredith,” he said. “You can’t hate something for doing what it’s made to do.”
“I can if I want to,” she said. “It’s my constitutional right.” She turned away, looked up at the sky. We followed her gaze to a hawk soaring above us. Timothy turned back to Meredith and looked at her hard.
“I’ll try it,” I said. I was shocked to hear the words come out of my mouth because I hadn’t planned on saying them.
Timothy grinned at me. “That’s the spirit.” He slapped me on the shoulder then handed me the gun.
Electric neon blood coursed through my veins as I held it.
“Now, the safety’s on. And the hammer’s not cocked, but as you know, it is loaded,” Timothy said. “There are many steps you need to take before you can take a shot.”
“Okay,” I said. Every cell in my body vibrated.
“So, first you want to get into a good position, a solid shooting stance.”
I adjusted my feet and shoulders and held onto the gun as if it were a live thing that could jump out of my hands at any moment.
“That’s it, that’s it.” He adjusted my grip on the gun a little. “Now, what do you want to do?”
“Take off the safety,” I said.
“That’s right. So, take off the safety.”
I flipped the switch up. The gun seemed to grow hot in my hands. I realized my unlimited power. I could do anything. Get anything. Take anything. Say anything I wanted to anybody. I was holding a loaded gun, and the world was my cheeseburger.
“Now what?” Timothy said.
“Cock the hammer,” I said.
“That’s right. So pull it back.”
I pulled it back.
“Good, now take your time. Aim carefully. Take deep breaths and focus, then depress the trigger as you exhale.”
I had to pull the trigger hard, but when I did the gun exploded in my hand like a bomb. I don’t know what happened. It was like another Tucker crawled inside me. I shot five times in a row, and then I was screaming and yelling with the thrill of it all. I handed the gun back to Timothy and ran around in circles waving my arms in the air. I had actually hit one of the cans! I couldn’t believe it. It was a great feeling, to have shot a gun. I was glad I had done it.
“Woohoo!” I yelled and did a little dance and ran up to Meredith and hugged her.
She pushed me away. “All right, can we get out of here now?” she said.
Timothy was laughing. As we walked back to the van, I felt like I was walking on stilts. I was twelve feet tall. I was strong and big and so, so, alive.
16
The next time Timothy stopped for gas, Meredith piped up from the back of the van, “We’ll wait here.” Then she pinched me on the elbow.
“Okay,” Timothy said. “You want anything?”
“No thanks, we’re good,” Meredith said.
“Alrighty then. Be right back.”
Meredith slid the door open as she watched Timothy go into the store. “Let’s get out of here, that guy’s a fucking psycho,” she said.
“Timothy?” I said.
“Yeah, Timothy.”
“He’s all right,” I said. “He just really likes guns. He’s harmless.”
As soon as Timothy had gone around the side of the store to the bathrooms, Meredith said, “Suit yourself, I’m out of here.” She grabbed her stuff and ran. I had no choice but to follow her.
We crouched in a cluster of bushes behind the store, clutching our backpacks to our chests. Cigarette butts and pop cans littered the ground.
“Now what?” I said.
“We’ll just wait here until he goes away and then find another ride.”
“But he was going all the way to Oklahoma.”
“Who cares? He was insane. He let an eleven-year-old shoot a gun! He could’ve killed us, Tucker! He probably would have if we’d stuck around any longer.”
“I thought he was okay,” I shrugged. Maybe she was right, maybe she wasn’t. There was no way of ever knowing.
We waited in the bushes for what seemed like a year. Meredith went out first to peek around the corner to check if his van was still there.
“It’s gone,” she said, waving me out.
We went into the store and got chips and sandwiches and ate our dinner on yellow milk crates behind the store. The light from the sky was beginning to fade as Meredith lit a cigarette. “I can’t believe you shot a gun,” she said.
“Not just any gun. A Beretta M9,” I said. “The official pistol of the United States Armed Forces.”
“Tough as tits,” she said, impersonating Timothy. Then we both cracked up. “Come on,” Meredith said as she stood up. “Let’s go find a ride.”
“Let me know if you get any feelings about this next one,” I said.
“Shut up,” Meredith said.
We leaned against the brick wall at the side of the store. The clouds were low and murky. I didn’t know which city we were in, but not a lot of people were coming into the gas station.
“We’d better find someone before it gets dark,” Meredith said.
Then an old black guy in a gold Buick Regal pulled up.
“How about him?” I said.
“Let’s just watch him for a minute first,” Meredith said.
He was probably a hundred years old. His movements were slow and careful as he got out of his car. He looked around, and I could tell, even from that far away, that his eyes were filled with a certain sadness.
“Okay,” Meredith said. “Let’s ask him.” We walked up to him, but not too fast. It was as though we were both afraid to startle him. Meredith cleared her throat, and he looked at her. “Um, excuse me, sir. We were wondering if you’re going west?”
He nodded.
“Would you happen to have room in your car for us?”
The man looked inside his car and then back at Meredith and me. He nodded again.
“Oh, that’s great,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
I smiled at him and he nodded. Then he put the nozzle back and went into the store to pay for his gas.
Meredith got in the front, and I got in the back. The car smelled like humbug candies and lemons. The interior was soft caramel leather. I sat behind the man and could see little tufts of grey hair poking out under his cap.
“So where are you headed?” Meredith asked as he pulled onto the freeway.
He glanced down at the map that sat on the armrest between them and pointed to a dot. Meredith leaned closer to inspect it. “Dodge City, Kansas?”
He nodded.
“All right, we’ll take it.”
The back of the Buick was as big as my bunk bed at Bright Light. I was suddenly so tired, all I could think about was stretching out across the seat and going to sleep. There was hardly any light left in the sky. Meredith yawned, then I yawned, then the man yawned. I don’t know why yawning is contagious, but it is. It’s easier to make someone yawn than to make someone laugh.
“Would it be all right if I lay down back here?” I asked the man.
He nodded with his eyes.
“Thanks,” I said.
The man didn�
�t play the radio or a cassette, and it was quiet and peaceful in the car. I watched the first few stars appear out the window. The evening star, which is not a star at all, but the planet Venus, was the last thing I saw before I conked out.
When I woke up, Meredith was sleeping stretched out on the opposite end of the backseat with her feet resting beside my face. Her socks had little purple daisies on them, and there was a hole in the heel of the left one. Her feet smelled like corn chips. I could see the rise and fall of her pumpkin-belly with each breath. We were parked in front of an old ramshackle house whose siding was falling off. There was a gigantic willow tree beside the car, and the light of the moon shone through the branches like fingers reaching down to poke us.
I got out and peed behind the Buick. Then I took a little look around. There was a mountain of old window frames piled up in the yard, but all the glass in them was missing. Beside that, there was a claw-foot bathtub with geraniums growing out of it. One of the feet on the tub was wearing a yellow rubber boot. An old wooden swing dangled from the willow tree, and I sat on it while I looked at the moon, which looked like a broken dinner plate. A breeze rustled the willow branches and wispy clouds floated in front of the moon and I got the strange feeling that I was inside somebody else’s dream.
I thought about Gina and hoped that she was okay. I hoped she would be a hundred-percent well again by the time I got back from Los Angeles. She would be mad as hell at me, but she would get over it, eventually. Maybe the two of us would even go visit Sam Malone together sometime. Maybe she would decide that it was finally time to forgive him for whatever it was he’d done.
I sat in the swing until I got tired again, then I got back in the car and tried to lie down without bumping Meredith too much. She groaned, but she didn’t wake up. I heard an owl hoot nearby and figured that he must be watching over us.
When I woke up, I thought the sky was on fire. But it was only the sunrise. It was the most beautiful one I had ever seen. I woke Meredith up to see it.
“Wow,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s a house here.”
“But we weren’t invited in, right?”
I shrugged.
“We should go,” she said.
“Okay.”
Meredith wrote a note that said THANK YOU! to our driver on the back of a gas receipt we found in the cup-holder. She drew a little heart where the dot in the exclamation point should’ve been and left it on his seat. We got our stuff out of the car and started to walk west. We walked for a long time, and no cars passed us. Meredith scrunched up her face and put her hands under her belly like she was carrying a bowling ball. We heard a rooster crowing and some birds chattering, but other than that, it was pretty quiet. When we got into the town, it was like we had stepped back in time. All of the buildings were old saloon-style like the kind you see in western movies.
“What is this place?” Meredith said.
“I don’t know, but I think I like it.”
“Me too,” she said.
“I feel like I should be riding a horse.”
“Definitely. You should be. Where can we find some horses around here?” she looked around, shielding her eyes from the sun. “I want a Palomino.”
“Any pal of yours is a Palomino,” I said.
Meredith laughed and punched me in the shoulder, but not hard.
I stopped to peer in the window as we passed The Gunfighters Wax Museum.
“This place is almost as weird as Niagara Falls,” Meredith said.
Before long, we came to a sign that pointed one way to the I-70 and the opposite way to town. “What should we do?” I said.
“Well, Tucker, I think we should get the heck out of Dodge.”
I laughed and so did she as we walked along the road out of town under the wide, red sky.
17
We had to walk for about two hours before a car stopped for us. It was a blue Toyota Tercel. The lady inside was middle-aged, maybe twenty-nine, thirty. She had messy black hair and a jean jacket that had things written on it in black permanent marker.
“Want a ride?” she called out her window.
“Yeah!” I said. I got in the front and Meredith got in the back. There was a laundry basket heaped high with clothes in the backseat. The car smelled like a million cigarettes had been smoked in it.
“I’m Stacey,” she said and shook my hand. “That there’s Camden.”
I looked back and was surprised to see a little kid sitting in the basket under the pile of laundry. He was probably three or four. He was scrawny and his hair was the colour of sand.
“Where’re y’all headed?” Stacey asked as she began to drive.
“Hollywood,” I said.
“Wow, gonna be movie stars, are ya? We like movies, don’t we, Camden?”
“Yup,” he said, nodding hard.
“We’re going to find my father, actually,” I said.
“Oh wow. That’s cool,” she said.
“Where are you going?” Meredith asked.
“Oh, we’re just going over to my mama’s. She lives in Garden City. It’s about an hour from here.”
“Grandma has a TV,” Camden said.
“That’s right,” said Stacey. “My ex took everything when he left us. Washer-dryer, television, VCR, stereo, took the frigging dishes and cutlery, too. Imagine leaving your own kid without any plates to eat off of.”
“Sounds like a loser,” Meredith said.
“Oh, he is! He’s a big fat loser.”
“Daddy’s not fat,” Camden said.
“He will be one day, sweetie,” said Stacey as she changed lanes. “Sorry, I just have to stop for gas here.”
“No problem,” Meredith said.
Stacey pulled into a Mobil and got out to pump the gas. I watched her in my side mirror as she leaned down next to the nozzle and took deep breaths, inhaling the wavy fumes.
“Meredith,” I said through my teeth.
Meredith turned to look out her window at Stacey. “Oh, Jesus,” she said.
“Jesus loves me!” Camden said. “Know how I know?”
“No,” Meredith said.
“Because the bible tells me so!”
Meredith nodded and said, “That’s good.”
Then Stacey took an empty Gatorade bottle out of her purse. She put a little bit of gas in it, then put the nozzle back on the hook and had a big whiff out of the bottle. She saw that Meredith and I were watching her, and a dark blush spread over her face. She screwed on the lid of the bottle and shoved it in her purse, then ran into the store to pay. When she got back in the car, she threw us each a glass bottle of Coke, Camden too. She looked sheepish. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “It’s just, since Ted left and everything, I’ve been a real mess.” Stacey’s eyes were the colour of peacock’s necks. “It’s stupid, I know. It just … it helps. You know?”
Meredith nodded and helped Camden open his bottle of Coke.
When we got to Stacey’s mom’s house, her mom’s boyfriend, Hal, was about to leave. He said he’d give us a ride to the highway. Hal drove a green Ford Ranger. He had longish white hair and a white moustache. He was skinny but looked strong. I wondered if my hair would ever turn white like Hal’s and I decided that it would be okay if it did.
As we were rolling out of Garden City, a little sparrow flew smack into the windshield and startled us all. Hal shook his head and turned on the wipers, smearing blood across the glass. Meredith put one hand over her belly and closed her eyes. No one said much for the rest of the drive. We listened to the country station. All of the songs were sad. Gina says she doesn’t like country for that reason. Most of the songs are so, so sad. But I like it okay, when I’m in the right mood.
Hal let us out where the 81 intersects with the 54. “You’ll be all right here,” he said. “Town’s just a quarter mile that way if you need anything.”
“Okay, thanks for the ride,” I said.
Meredith waved.
“Adios,” Hal said and drove away.
We stood at the side of the road. Meredith smoked a cigarette. I kicked rocks. No cars passed. There was nothing to see for thousands of miles but fields and sky and a never-ending strip of cracked pavement. Watching white wisps of cirrus clouds move across the Kansas sky makes your heart ache. I don’t know why.
Meredith took a hairbrush out of her backpack and started to brush her hair right there on the side of the road. Then she took out a little mirror and her eye makeup and put that on. I watched her pull down her bottom eyelid and it sicked me out. I don’t know how girls can jab a pencil practically right into their eyeball to put makeup on. I could never be a girl.
After what seemed like a hundred hours, a little black Geo Metro came by. The driver was around twenty and had spiky black hair. When Meredith leaned in the window to talk to him, I could see that he was wearing makeup. Even his nails were painted black. And he was wearing black lipstick. His nose was pierced, but not like Meredith’s, it was pierced between the two nostrils, like a bull. Meredith talked to him for a minute then stepped back from the car to talk to me. “Do you want to go with him?”
“Not really,” I whispered. “He looks weird.”
“It’s just a fashion,” Meredith said, lowering her voice. “It’s called goth.”
“It’s weird,” I said.
“Sometimes weird looking people are the most normal, and the normal looking people are the weirdest,” Meredith said.
“Then how are you supposed to know who actually is weird?”
She shrugged. “You just have to trust your feelings, I guess.”
“I don’t have any feelings,” I said.
“You have feelings, Tucker.”
“Yeah, but not about people.”
“Sure you do.”
“I don’t know if I do,” I shrugged.
“Well, this is the first car we’ve seen in over an hour so I think we should go with him.”
“Okay,” I said. “But if he chops us up in little pieces, I’m blaming you.”
Meredith rolled her eyes and opened the passenger door, and I got in the back.
“I’m Chris,” he said, shaking our hands. Meredith smiled at him and I wondered if she had a big crush on him already like she’d had on Lyle. Maybe goth was something beautiful. It was hard to tell. Chris wore a necklace that looked like a dog collar. It was black with big silver spikes. If you leaned in to hug him, you’d get a spike jammed in your throat. So I guess he didn’t want anybody to hug him. Or maybe he wished he was a dog instead of a man, which probably a lot of people do. He ate gummy worms out of a plastic bag that he held between his legs. He offered Meredith and me some, and we both took a handful. We didn’t say too much for the rest of the trip because I guess part of being goth is that you don’t talk a lot.
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