Flight of the Fox

by Gray Basnight

  Vince turned around in his seat. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  That shut up Pritchard for a while. Vince turned to me and said, “Where’s she working these days?”

  “She got on at the library, the children’s section.”

  “Really?” He thought that over. “She’d be good at that.”

  “She likes it a lot.”

  “I bet the twins love it.”

  “Yeah. Next best thing to her being home all the time.”

  “They like to read?”

  “They love to read,” I said.

  “Just like their dad.”

  “Nothing like their dad.”

  Vince laughed. “I read a lot at the work camp. Mysteries mostly. Mysteries and crime novels. That’s about all they had in there.”

  “Crime novels? Really?”

  “I know, you wouldn’t think they’d allow that. But you want to get bad guys to read, you don’t offer those romances or fat Russian novels.”

  I thought about that. “I guess that makes sense.”

  We made a pit stop at a Huck’s convenience store outside of Pinckneyville. The genius of Mark Twain peddling Cheetos and Coca Cola and gas. I filled up the tank and went to the restroom to make room for more coffee. When I got back to the van, Vince was behind the wheel, cracking the neck of a pint of Jim Beam and hitting on a joint. He’d picked up a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses, too, though there was no sunlight to speak of.

  “I’ll drive awhile,” he said, and lapsed into a thirty-second coughing fit. “Damn, I ain’t had anything that good in years.”

  I searched my jacket pocket. Sonofabitch. I’d left the keys in the ignition. “Didn’t I tell you no smoking in the van?” I said.

  “Cigarettes,” Vince said between coughs. “You said cigarettes.”

  “And where the hell did you get a joint? I was only gone like five minutes?”

  “Ask and you shall receive,” Vince said.

  “The Lord provides,” Pritchard said.

  Vince coughed and held out the joint. “Want a hit?”

  “No, I don’t want a hit. I want you to—”

  “Hey, don’t Bogart that joint,” Pritchard said.

  Vince passed the joint to Pritchard and kicked the engine over.

  “Vince, you’re not driving,” I said. “You’re stoned and you don’t have a license.”

  Vince adjusted the rearview mirror. “Fuck that. I did not put my life on the line in Afghanistan so I couldn’t smoke a doobie in my brother’s van. Now get in or we’re leaving your ass.” He slammed the driver’s side door and threw the van into reverse. The van backed up fifteen or twenty feet past the pumps.

  “Goddamn it, Vince,” I muttered under my breath.

  A mad look came into his eye and he giggled maniacally, the joint bobbing between his lips. Drugs, alcohol, four years in stir and traumatic brain injury were a bad combination.

  Vince jerked the van forward and almost clipped my right shoulder. Pritchard urged him on enthusiastically. He threw the van into reverse, backed up, shifted into drive, and aimed the nose right at me. I suppose he was getting a big kick out of this. A little payback for time served. I had no choice but to make a break for the convenience store. Luckily, the wheels spun on the ice and failed to get traction. Halfway to the entrance I caught sight of one of the clerks, a big-boned twenty-something gal with chopped up green hair standing by the front doors, obviously dismayed at the scene unfolding in the parking lot. I rushed inside the store and strained to catch my breath.

  “You know that guy?” she said.

  “You mean that maniac trying to kill me? Yeah, that’s my little brother. He just got out of prison like two hours ago.”

  “Looks like he’s in a hurry to go back.”

  The van pulled up to the entrance and Vince laid on the horn and took a pull from the whiskey bottle. “Time to hit the road, bro! Get your ass in gear!”

  I gazed at the clerk and shrugged and walked out the doors to my certain doom. Pritchard was now riding shotgun. “You’re in back,” he yelled through the rolled-up window.

  I cursed under my breath and climbed into the back seat.

  “Hold on to your Bibles, folks!” Vince cried and the van peeled out, tires squealing.

  Two

  The snow picked up as we pulled back onto the highway. At times it was hard to make out where the snow-covered road ended and the wintry fields began. That didn’t seem to trouble Vince; in no time the van was pushing seventy on the curvy, slick, rural two-lane, weaving in and out of traffic, blowing past Sunday drivers and big green combine harvesters and John Deere tractors on their way for winter maintenance.

  I got all fetal in the back seat and closed my eyes and asked baby Jesus to please send a state trooper angel to pull us over before we wrapped around a tree.

  As usual, baby Jesus wanted no part of me.

  Vince rolled down the window and spat and left the window halfway down. “So what’d I miss?” he yelled over the roar of the highway.

  I lifted my head. “What?”

  “The past four years. Anything exciting happen?”

  I thought about that. It was strange: four years had passed and not a whole hell of a lot had happened. I mean, I’d opened tens of thousands of bottles of Budweiser, poured countless whiskey and Cokes, washed untold dishes, mowed and remowed the lawn, taken the kids to a hundred ball practices, wasted a few thousand hours staring at the television. Just the mundane, everyday stuff of life. Other than that, not much had happened, except we’d all gotten older and deeper in debt. He probably had a lot more interesting time on the inside.

  Of course, I wasn’t about to say that.

  The only noteworthy thing I could think of was five months ago our evil bastard of a stepdad died. Finally. Roy Gladson was Pop’s cousin, only a hundred times more of a bastard than Pop ever was. By the time he married our mother, Roy was down to half a lung, one kidney, and a liver that looked like a dried-up meatloaf, and yet somehow the sonofabitch managed to hang on another eight years—out of spite, no doubt.

  Roy owned a landfill on the outskirts of town, land that had been strip mined by Massie Coal till it looked like Hiroshima the day after the Japanese surrender. Roy came home every evening reeking like the mouth of hell. If Sara, our mother, complained about the stench, he’d say, “That’s the smell of money, doll. The money that’s keeping you and your brats housed and fed.”

  I told Vince that Roy was dead.

  “Yeah, Sara told me,” he said. “One of the happiest days of her life. She should’ve poisoned the sonofabitch years ago.” He paused. “What was it he died of? A stroke?”

  “Think so. Took her five hours to call nine-one-one. Told Chad she was taking a nap. Chad was like, yeah right. She never takes naps in the afternoon.”

  Vince grinned from ear to ear. “Good for her. I hope the sonofabitch suffered.” After a moment, he said, “Sara inherit his dump?”

  “It’s still in probate. His daughter—the one in Florida—is trying to get it.”

  “Figures. Who’s running it now?”

  “No one. It’s been closed since Roy died.”

  Vince shook his head. “Did he leave Sara anything?”

  “The house. You talk about a dump.”

  Vince nodded. “She still hoarding shit?”

  “She’s gotten worse. Boxes piled to the ceiling. And she’s getting so fat she can’t fit between the stacks anymore. It’s like she’s trapped in there. Every month or two I have to go over and widen the corridors so she can get to the bathroom or the refrigerator. But God forbid I should throw anything out. You never know when you might need a newspaper from August of 2003.”

  Pritchard snorted and Vince turned and shot him a dark look. Then he turned back to me. “What about the Cadillac?”

  “They sold it to pay doctor bills. Years ago.”

  Vince and
I shared a look at this, then he turned to Pritchard. “Roy had this sweet red Cadillac DeVille convertible. Mint condition. He only took it out of the garage once a year. Memorial Day weekend.”

  Pritchard stared out the window. “Who the fuck cares?”

  I could totally understand that sentiment. Who the fuck did care? I slipped off my jacket and rolled it up and laid it under my head for a pillow. Out the window I watched a stand of roadside timber roll past and the snow flurries tumble by in a cold ivory blur.

  “What do you hear from Pop?” Vince said.

  “Last I heard was the cancer had…” I paused. “What’s the word?”

  “Spread?”

  “I was thinking of the technical term. Starts with an M, I think.”

  “Spread works.”

  “Anyway, it’s everywhere, lungs, pancreas, liver, you name it. He could go anytime.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he’s going to die in prison right?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “If not, he’s going to crap out in your trailer. He ain’t staying with us.”

  Vince thought about that. “But they’re going to bury him, right? Or cremate him? They ain’t going to ship us the corpse and make us pay for all that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. They’ll probably cremate him and send us a box of ashes along with a bill.”

  “Let them try to collect from me.”

  Pritchard shook his head. “I can’t believe the way you two disrespect your own father.”

  Vince hit the brakes. The van spun out and jerked to a stop in the middle of the highway. “Listen, pal,” Vince hissed, “you don’t like our company I can drop your ass off right here and you can walk back to Galesville.”

  “Galesburg.”

  “Whatever.”

  I sat up and peered out the back window. A tractor trailer was barreling down on us. Fast.

  “Vince,” I said. “That semi behind us. It ain’t stopping.”

  “I see him,” Vince said. He righted the van and we were once again underway.

  Another five seconds and we would’ve been road kill.

  After a moment something funny occurred to Vince and he let out a short laugh. “Hey Pritchard, why don’t you tell Denis what you were in for.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “The Galesburg Kid robbed a Pizza Hut.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Make off with a lot of dough?”

  “Ha, ha, never heard that one before,” Pritchard muttered. He turned and stared moodily out the window. He removed a pack of Winstons and a lighter from his coat pocket and started to light a cigarette.

  Vince slapped the cigarette out of his mouth. “Hey, my brother said no smoking in the van!”

  Pritchard gave him a murderous look. I thought for sure that this was it, one of them was going to die. “You know, I killed a man once,” Pritchard said menacingly, his eyes narrowed to slits.

  For a moment no one said anything, then Vince laughed sharply and turned to me. “If I robbed a Pizza Hut I sure as hell wouldn’t be bragging about it. But Pritchard couldn’t keep his pie hole shut.” He waited a beat. “Get it—pie hole?”

  “I got it.”

  Pritchard glared out the window. “I know the sonofabitch who ratted me out,” he said. “First thing I do when I get home is put that fucker down.”

  “That where you’re from?” I said.

  “Why else would I be going there?”

  “Sounds like a craphole,” Vince said.

  “Home of Chuck Walgreen,” Pritchard said with pride.

  “Who the hell’s Chuck Walgreen?” Vince said.

  Pritchard rolled his eyes. “Jeez, what a bunch of rubes.”

  “Well, who is he?”

  “Founder of Walgreens?”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing,” I said. “All he did was drive five or six thousand mom-and-pop drug stores out of business.”

  Vince sneered. “And I did not put my life on the line in Afghanistan so some Galesburg asshole could lay waste to America’s downtowns.”

  “That’s capitalism, motherfuckers,” Pritchard said. “You don’t like it, go back to Russia.”

  I sighed and stretched out in the back seat, trying to ignore their inane chatter as the van fishtailed down Route 13. Vince’s manic episode seemed to have passed and he was keeping close to the speed limit now. A sense of hopefulness ignited inside me, the hope I wouldn’t die in some horrible smash up on the highway after all. As we approached a curve, we passed a Prius that had slid off the road, its nose pointing upward from the ditch like a sinking ocean liner. “Take that, liberal scum,” Vince said.

  Later, Pritchard’s head slumped on his chest and he emitted the occasional bear-like snore. Every so often he’d cry out in his sleep: “Get off me!” Vince chuckled and turned on the radio to a classic country station out of St. Louis, but he kept the volume low so as not to awaken Pritchard. We both preferred him in an unconscious state.

  I started to say something to Vince, something important, but he cut me off.

  “So how come you didn’t come see me the past eight months? You too busy?”

  My sphincter tightened, but I’d been prepared for this. “I’m sorry, man. Things have been crazy with the twins. Every weekend there’s been some out-of-town basketball game or volleyball game or something. You know how it is with kids.”

  “Actually I don’t.”

  “Well, you can imagine.”

  “Yeah,” he said. His tone was empty, hollow. I couldn’t tell if that placated him or not. “You got the birthday cards with the pictures the twins made, didn’t you?”

  Vince nodded. “I got them.” He was silent a moment, then he muttered, “You might’ve at least kept up the newspaper subscription.”

  I’d forgotten about that. I’d let the subscription to the Belleville Daily American lapse. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” I said.

  “Forget it.”

  He was silent. He was pissed. Who could blame him?

  I was a thoughtless prick. No one knew that better than me.

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