Two fer Tuesday, he said to himself, a thing he’d been hearing on the radio, and stepped off, onto the pale, absorbent carpet of the living room.
~
This time he parked in the second row of Visitor’s, first the other way, nosed away from the hospital, so she would just be seeing the top of the camper, the tailgate, but then realizing in a desperate rush that that’s what she’d already seen when he’d started his already-started truck last week. He backed out, turned around and reversed into the slot, scratching the tires with each gear change, then didn’t let himself drink any beer except one, and then another to hide the first, to stop his hands from shaking, and finally just three, to get it over with.
From the floorboard with all the cans, Vanessa stared at him.
He smiled down to her, patted her on the head.
Her bowl and extra collar and her favorite pink ball were in three dumpsters on three different streets. The mother and daughter had insisted William take them. The only thing he’d kept was the rhinestone leash, but then, walking away from their house, he hadn’t even used it. Instead, he’d carried Vanessa like a baby, like they wanted him to, whispering down into her left ear that he knew what she tasted like, yes he did yes he did.
Everything was falling into place. Like always.
10:30 came and went, then 10:32, then 10:35. Two hours later, it was almost 11:00. William stroked his beard down along his jaw, blinked too much, and rocked in his seat, went through the checklist again, making sure.
When she walked out all at once, looking into her purse, he straightened his right leg hard, washing the cars in his side mirrors angry red, look-at-me-I’m-the-I-10-killer-give-away red, but then knew it was now, it was now. Because once she got her cell phone open—
It was the only reason he wasn’t simply parked by her car, out in B.
Now, now.
He stepped from his truck, pulled Vanessa down to the end of his row, opposite the truck. Knew the rhinestones were going to give him away, that he should just—
But no: now.
This.
It was why they were alone here in the middle of the city, charmed, nobody walking in from the parking lot, nobody pushing through the exit doors.
William smiled, nodded.
She was four long steps from the crosswalk now, the phone in her hand, her finger to the call button, she was four, three steps from the crosswalk when William chocked up on the leash with his right hand, still holding the loop in his left. Like that, he could lift Vanessa, swing her, her collar already tightened then double-checked.
One time around, then two, the soft Lhasa body stiff at the end of the leash, then more slack, like a hammer throw, then he let her go into the sky, followed through with his right arm.
Five seconds, then Vanessa fell into the crosswalk Julia should have been using, for safety.
Julia stopped, the cell to her ear, ringing probably, and she looked at it, the dog, then looked up into the sky, lowered the phone.
There were maybe one thousand things that could happen now.
William knew she would accept any of them, too: a man in an almost-white truck with a black camper, pulling out of the Visitor’s lot, stopping at the small, white, twitching dog, stepping out, locking eyes with Julia, asking her without words what happened, his truck too loud so she has to take a step closer, another step, and by then she’s already started dying.
~
From a phone booth at a gas station at the Texas state line, William called to confess, to tell her everything, the caramel-colored pound attendant, that he loves her, that he was confused, that he’s sorry, that she doesn’t understand, but then he didn’t know her name. So he explained her to the pound’s night attendant, explained her too well—her nipples under her scrub shirt, how she was one of those girls who wore a tank top instead of a bra—then asked about the pregnant dog. If her puppies were running around the waiting room already, pulling all the stuffing from all the chairs. If their eyes were open yet or if they were still blind.
The attendant on the other end laughed through his nose.
“Blind,” he said, “yeah. Technically, I mean. If you count dead.”
William leaned deeper into the phone booth.
“And the—the mother?”
The attendant laughed again, said William wasn’t shitting about Charla, there, the house pointer, then laughed some more, hung up while he was doing it so that William had to picture him sitting there, alone in the pound, eyes teared up from laughing. At William.
He turned to his truck, knew suddenly in the way he knew things that he was parked too close to the trash can. That the clerk or the clerk’s manager or a homeless person or a monkey escaped from the circus was going to reach into the trash, pull out the three strips William had just cut the junk license plates into.
William shook his head no, wiped the phone down, then almost ran across the concrete to the truck, to the trashcan, pushing his arm as deep as he could into it, deep enough that he had to turn his head away, point his chin up. The clerk standing at the glass door, watching.
William raised his other hand, waved, made himself smile as if this were all some big mistake—the credit card itself, instead of the receipt, the beer bottle instead of the cap.
The clerk raised his hand back hesitantly, his face wrenched into a fake smile as well.
William left with two of the license plate strips, a cut finger wrapped in electric tape, and Julia, asleep in back, tied and gagged under the tarp, the tarp held down with toolboxes with real tools in them (Mitch’s), and a cooler with bumper stickers all over it, beer inside.
She wasn’t awake yet.
William apologized to her again, for how cold the tarp was going to be for her, naked like that. The tips of her breasts stiff against the black, woven plastic.
Drive, he told himself. Miles, miles, go go go.
Louisiana was a familiar bog of smells and alligator eyes.
William held the wheel with both hands, accidentally looked up to a cab-over passing him slow in the left lane, and knew for an instant it was his father, straightened his back into the seat for the coolness of the wine cooler bottle, whooshing by.
When it never came, the truck driver just nodded, pulled ahead in a way that William knew he had read the last number called on Julia’s cell phone. It was open on the seat beside him, its small screen glowing green, a beacon.
William made himself slow down to sixty, spit the taste of adrenaline out the window. He turned the radio up.
The last person he’d seen in Texas, the last person who could identify him, had been a paramedic pushing an empty gurney across the Emergency lane, from one red curb to another. William had stopped, and the paramedic had raised his fingers on the aluminum tubing, in thanks.
“No problem,” William said, both in the Emergency lane and in Louisiana, then nodded back instead of waving, because her hair had still been in his fingers, from pulling her into the cab, slamming her face into the dashboard three times fast.
All she had left behind was one shoe, but he’d backed up, leaned down for it, then pulled away, no headlights.
~
Three miles past a rest stop—always three miles, because by then the truckers would be into their tall gears, be making too much time to stop—three miles past a rest stop, he finally climbed back through the sliding rear window he’d fed her through in Houston.
The radio was still on, the old, nasal country William hated drifting in from the cab.
But Julia.
He lay down beside her, the tarp still between them. Used his finger to find her mouth then pushed the very tip of his knife through the tarp and through the duct tape stretched across her lower face.
She was awake. Just a small hole in a piece of black plastic.
William said her name and she didn’t say anything back.
The tape across her lower face was parallel to the tape across her forehead, keeping the back of her head to t
he bed of the truck. William had pushed her bangs out of the way as much as he could.
He came on her stomach and she never felt it.
Julia.
If he did everything right this time, she might last four days, maybe even five. Six was the record but he knew better than to go longer, that they would get a power over him then.
“You’re a nurse,” he told her, instead of everything else.
She moved. It was maybe a nod.
William nodded with her, cut a hole over her left eye but messed up, had to do the right instead.
He held the green display of the cell phone up to the hole, at all the distances between two inches and a foot.
“Who’s Robert?” he asked, using the same voice he’d used to tell her she was a nurse.
Robert was from her message log. Robert Mendes.
Julia moved again but this time it was no, a plea with the length of her body.
William smiled, laid back beside her, staring at the roof of the camper shell, and told her to look at all the fiberglass threads, how they made a cocoon, how that meant that the two of them were moths, about to lift up into the hot air over I-10, and then he put the mask he’d bought at the store over the shape of her face, straddled her hips, cut a hole over the tip of one breast, and fed.
~
Two days later William took her down to see the water, the ocean. Because sunsets on the Gulf are romantic.
He carried her from the bed of the truck to the busted sand, to the line of darkness that meant it was wet, and even took the new tape off her mouth. There was no one for miles. He watched her watch the light on the water. She was shivering. There was nothing he could do for the fever. Once he’d tried, feeding a girl named Roberta aspirin at regular intervals, but it thinned her blood so much that she bled out on the second day, and then kept bleeding, long after her heart wasn’t even pushing the blood anymore.
But Julia.
William smiled. His knees were up on either side of her, his arms around them, hands clasped between his knees.
They were still in Louisiana. William had decided that the first night: that she was going to be a Louisiana girl. That she would be more comfortable there—the humidity, the green. It would be like Houston for her. They weren’t calling him anything there yet. Last year in Florida, in one paper he’d been the I-10 Killer, and in another, on the same day, he was Ponce de Leon. He’d looked it up in a public library in Jacksonville that afternoon: Ponce de Leon, traveling along what would become the interstate, looking for the fountain of youth.
For four days at a time anyway. Six if the girl was strong enough.
In the dying sun, William saw that Julia’s wounds were healing. Something about the melanin of dark girls, probably. Her foot was in the sand, though. Deeper than the sun could reach. And she wasn’t going anywhere with that foot. The one time she tried, slumping sideways away from him, he had to hit her with the back of his hand, was already catching her fast enough that the tips of her hair just left ghost lines in the sand.
So she wouldn’t choke, he cradled her head in his lap, stroked her hair away from her face, along his leg, the weight of it on his thigh no more than a shadow.
It wasn’t too late to take her to a hospital. Or to call 911 from a payphone, leave her there. Or sit her down at the bus stop, her silver little phone blinking Robert Mendes.
William closed his eyes, swallowed. In her breast closest to him there was a hole. It was leaking. Not blood, but something thicker, more clear. William smeared it around the edge of the hole, then, half on accident, slipped his finger in to the second knuckle, saw his brother James for a flash and clamped his eyes shut against that, curled his finger deep enough in Julia’s breast that she straightened out, standing on her heels and the back of her head.
William opened his mouth to tell her to stop this, to keep James and his chickenwire chest out of this sunset, that she didn’t even know about it, or about their dad poking his finger into it too hard, and the way her head nodded forward on her neck, he knew she understood. She was telling him it was all right, that it had always been all right.
Breathing too hard, his eyes wet, William forced another finger into that hole, and then his hand, the skin stretching to swallow him, and then he flexed his fingers inside the warm wet insides of her breast so that his knuckles were like little dome-headed puppies waking up in there, their eyes not even open yet.
William’s other hand dealt with himself, urgently.
They were the only two people in the world.
When it was over and done with, he arranged Julia’s hair all in a line, like it had been combed. Her head eased over into his lap again, some muscle in her neck drawing tight. And William wasn’t crying. He thinned his lips so anybody could see that he wasn’t crying.
He looked out to the water again, his fingers still in Julia’s hair.
“You like dogs?” he asked her, and when her head moved again, that one stubborn muscle giving up, he smiled, told her good, that was good. Maybe he would have to get her a dog, then. A big one.
3.
The mask he made her wear when she was under the tarp was Little Bo Peep, only he’d pulled the hair away from it, so it was just those baby-fat cheeks, the red Shirley Temple lips he kept having to lipstick over. It was hard, though, getting the lipstick straight, not smearing it on the porcelain skin, and no matter how long he let it dry, it still made his mouth look like he’d just eaten a cherry lollipop.
Julia was in her third day.
After he’d told her about James on accident, and after she’d figured out that she was in a Gentleman Jim camper, he’d had to reach in through the tear duct of her bad eye with a coat hanger, pull everything he’d told her out, swallow it back down.
She was a doll, now.
Then it was her fourth day. The cab of the truck was rolling with Weimeraner-Pit puppies. They had been in a box by a vegetable stand. William had paid eight dollars for each of them, eighty-eight dollars in all. This was before the coat hanger, when he was sure Julia was going to live months and months, and happily ever after. When it made sense to buy the dogs young, wait for them to grow.
Now he was going to have to get an extra dog just to hide them in. Like the unborn. Maybe he could even sew their eyes shut again, or superglue them, or—
William shook his head no. That he was never going to do this again. That it was wrong. That Julia didn’t count because she was an accident, a victim of his weakness.
But then he remembered James and his friends, catching farm dogs and starving them down for three or four days, then putting them in the cotton trailer with a fat little cottontail. Watching that cottontail run around and around the trailer and finally climb the wire fence, making the kind of sounds a rabbit only ever makes once.
It was too complicated for Julia to ever understand. For any of them to.
Going back to the rabbit days after, after the dog had caught her and didn’t know what to do with her. Going back to her and the boy that was standing there, watching through the fence. Maggots roiling out of the carcass, the boy smiling, saying they were babies, that she was having babies, that he was going to catch one, keep it.
William nodded, veered off the road, corrected the right amount.
The rabbit babies. It was funny. Maggots, worms, like the blind white things wriggling in the puppies’ shit now.
William kept the windows up to punish himself, teach himself a lesson. Tried to drink a beer but gagged on it, spit up onto his chest. Called out to Julia through the sliding glass, no answer.
The sign on the side of the road said to yield.
William backed up to it, threw beer cans at it until his floorboard was empty.
Above him, the clouds were musty, motionless. His headlights giving him a shadow with a head shaped like the yield sign, like he was an alien.
He turned them off, backed into the trees, and tried to get the smallest of the puppies to feed from a slit in the plastic
he cut over Julia’s good breast, then held its mouth there until his arm was trembling. Until his whole body was.
Beside her still was the coat hanger, black from the lighter he’d held all along it, to clean it. Because she was a nurse: hygiene would be important to her.
William nestled into the plastic alongside her, kept his eyes open until the fifth day.
~
At a gas station, the truck parked by the propane tanks, locked and double-locked, William shaved earlier than he ever had before, saw himself in the mirror so clean. A different person. A new one.
He cupped his chin in his hand, tilting his head left then right.
On the door by the clerk—already—was a black and white photocopy of Julia. Julia Mendes.
William pretended it wasn’t there.
For six hours now he had been thinking about the boy and the rabbit, the boy saying how he was going to keep one.
William kept saying it to himself like that, trying it on: I’m going to keep one.
Not Julia, it was too late for her. But the Weimeraner-Pit puppies. One of them. A boy one. He would ride shotgun with William, guard the truck for him when he couldn’t be with it.
William didn’t know how he hadn’t thought of it years before.
He walked the two aisles of the store for canned dog food, or beef stew, but it was just oil and paper plates and chips.
“Where is it?” he asked the clerk.
“What?”
“Dog stuff.”
The clerk smiled, shook his head no.
“For a puppy, I mean,” William said, tapping himself on the side of the head to remember better. “Puppy food.”
The man studied William now.
“Like milk, you mean?” he said.
William brought the largest puppy in to show. The clerk took it over the counter, holding it expertly, in a way that made William immediately know he was going to trust this clerk forever.
The clerk turned his attention to the pup, held it up to his face and put his nose to the sharp little mouth.
Three Miles Past Page 4