She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  “Polly, you called me. I can help you. But you’ve got to tell me where you are.”

  Seconds passed. He knew not to press. He drummed on the steering wheel, come on come on come on.

  “The Scenic Heights. It’s a motel. Room 23.”

  Eureka bingo bull’s-eye.

  “Polly, I want you to know you’re going to be safe.”

  A moment of nothing but whistles. Park drove fast. The poppies a smear on the edge of his eyes.

  “Oh no.” Her voice a ragged little whisper.

  “Polly, don’t hang—”

  “Someone’s coming,” she said right before the phone went dead in Park’s ear.

  11

  POLLY

  MOUNT VERNON/THE BARSTOW FREEWAY

  Polly hung up the phone quiet as she could. Through the dark she thought she could see the doorknob flutter. Shadows rolled behind the blinds. From the other side of the door came the sound of the key scraping around the lock, hunting, the way mom and Tom would do it when they came back from bar nights. Polly put her hand on the bat, her other on the bear. The door swung open. With the outside lights behind the man he looked like nothing but a shadow.

  “Polly . . . Polly, you there?”

  The shape took a step. Her dad stumbled bad, caught himself on the table. Polly saw his red hand in a shaft of light. Red smears on the table. His pant leg was soaked. Red on black. A dark hole near the top of his thigh that yawned as he moved. Polly felt her insides flop. She wanted to run to him. She wanted to run away from him. She didn’t do either.

  They rode in a different car than before, a black thing that looked like it went fast with chips and dents all over. Sirens rose and fell in the distance. A helicopter stirred the air someplace overhead. Were they coming for them? Were they following them?

  Had she made them come?

  She’d called the help number not knowing what she wanted. She only knew this was too big for her, something she couldn’t handle. She’d called because she needed help. She knew it meant her dad would probably go back to jail, no matter what Detective Park had said. But now he was hurt, hurt bad, and looking at him bleeding made Polly feel like she stood at the edge of a cliff with her toes poking over and a wind blowing against her back.

  She couldn’t lose him, she saw that now. He was all she had and so he was all that mattered. And maybe she was all he had anymore, and maybe that meant she mattered.

  He drove sitting straight up. He kept his hoodie in his lap to keep the hole in his leg out of sight. He was so focused on driving he didn’t even look at the police car rolling past them the other way. Polly wondered if it was heading back to the motel. She pushed that thing down. There were bigger things to worry about now. Sooner things.

  “Do you know where the hospital is?” she asked.

  “Not going to a hospital,” he said.

  “Please. Please, please go to a doctor,” she said, the jagged things inside her coming out in her voice.

  “You go to a doctor with a bullet in you, the doctor has to call the cops,” he said. “That’s law. And I can’t have the cops on me. Cops get me and it’s over. For both of us.”

  The word cops wrote itself in fire across her mind, even before she made sense of the word bullet.

  “People die from bullets,” she said.

  “If I go to jail, I’ll die for sure,” he said. “The same ones who . . . the same ones who got your mom. The blue lightning guys. They’re in there waiting for me.”

  Something went over his face like a wave. Pain or something worse.

  “They hurt you?”

  “It was the one,” he said. “The one who got your mom. But I got him.”

  They came to one of the big truck stops with twenty pumps, a diner, showers, a gift shop. On one side of the lot sat a double-wide, trucker ministries stenciled down the side of it.

  Her dad pulled into a parking spot far away from the glow of the truck stop. He parked in the shadows of the overnight lot, semi trucks with dark cabs.

  “You need to go in there,” he said. “Find the first aid shelf. Get lots of gauze and bandages. Hydrogen peroxide. Disinfectant. Hand sanitizer. A pair of sweatpants if you can find some. You’re gonna fix me up.”

  She shook her head no so fierce she heard things wiggle in her skull. She couldn’t help with a bullet, not a bullet inside a person. Didn’t he know she was just a kid? Couldn’t he see she was from Venus?

  “Polly,” he said again. “I can’t, not without you. You understand?”

  He shifted over onto his hip to reach his back pocket. She heard his teeth grind, watched muscles in his face twitch. She saw his hand fish for his wallet. She made a decision. She let herself speak.

  “No,” Polly said, louder than she meant. Her dad looked to her.

  “You’ll get blood on it,” Polly said. “Let me.”

  “Smart girl,” he said. He nodded at his back pocket like go ahead then. She plucked out the wallet and opened it. She pulled out a twenty.

  “Take another,” he said. “Just in case.”

  When she had, she stuck the wallet in the console. She opened the door. The overhead light came on. She saw her dad pale and sweat-slicked. He squinted against the sudden light.

  The plastic bags bounced against Polly’s legs as she walked back from the store slow and calm, the way her dad had driven. She looked up to see a night full of stars. Most of the time in the Empire the stars were hidden. They were out far enough for hundreds of stars. Polly knew they were millions of miles away, so far away they might be dead already and the light was just the past catching up with Earth. Polly wondered if there really were other planets out there where everything was like it was here, but a little different. She wondered if there was any world at all where she came out okay.

  When she opened the car door the overhead light came on. Her dad’s face had turned into fishbelly and his eyes were closed.

  “Daddy?”

  His head turned slow. His eyes peeled back like it was work to do it.

  “Haven’t heard you call me that since you was little.”

  “I got the stuff.” She held up the plastic bag.

  “This ain’t going to work,” he said. He opened his hands like look around.

  She looked in the backseat. It was small, the way the backseats of fast cars often were. There was no way she and her dad could fit back there.

  “We got to go back to the motel,” he said. She saw flashes of policemen in the dark with eyes like wolves under their blue hats. She pushed the thought down. She scanned the parking lot. She saw the trucker church.

  “How about there?” she asked.

  She thought he’d tell her no, he was the boss, but he didn’t. He nodded and said okay. Polly felt something shift between them, that maybe she was a little bigger in his eyes. And maybe, to tell it true, he was a little smaller in hers. But still huge.

  The door to the double-wide was thin sheet metal, sinners welcome stenciled across it in fading paint. Polly got out and walked up the metal steps to the trailer’s door.

  “Shit,” her dad said. “I’m gonna have to jimmy it.”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said.

  She tried the door. It came open.

  “Tom told me about them once. They leave them open,” she said, “so people can pray in them whenever.”

  Polly turned on the light. Wood paneling, a podium, three rows of chairs. Shag carpet. A framed picture of the friendly kind of Jesus hung over the altar.

  Her dad came up the stairs. He laid himself out next to the altar, using one of the chairs to help himself down. He unbuckled his jeans.

  “My shoes,” he said. Polly didn’t move.

  “Polly,” he said again. She went to his feet and unlaced his sneakers. First she pulled the shoe off his left leg, the unhurt one. She yanked his right shoe. His leg shuddered. She saw his throat muscles do funny things. She felt her throat muscles do funny things too. She fumbled with the shoe for a better grip. A
sound came out of her dad’s throat that made her let go. The shoe stayed on.

  “Goddamn it,” her dad said. “Don’t worry about me. Just one clean yank.”

  A memory from deep down, from when memories were new, bubbled up to the top of her head. A loose tooth in her mouth, twisting in its socket, her first impermanence. His rough fingers in her mouth, a count to three and a dull snap of pain that reached up into her skull. The tooth in his hand. Red-tipped. How he’d shown it to her and smiled.

  “Brave girl,” he’d said as he pressed her skull-fresh tooth into her palm. Where had that memory been living? When had she ever been brave?

  She dug her fingers into the mouth of the shoe like he’d once done with her head. She yanked hard. She fell back with the shoe in her hands. His sock poked out his pant leg, soaked plum almost to the toe. She looked up at him. He had a weird smile on his face.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Good girl.”

  She felt something like time overlapping itself, him standing there with her baby tooth in his hand, her standing here now with his bloody sneaker in hers. That same weird smile on his face both times.

  Brave girl.

  She warmed to her work. She got the first aid stuff ready while he got himself out of his jeans. When she turned back to him he’d wrapped himself in the blanket from the back of the car. Only his bare bloody leg stuck out. She made herself look at it. The wound on the side of his leg gaped. It looked like a crater of skin, a center of meat weeping red.

  Her stomach went sour. Her hands shook too bad to unscrew the lid to the hydrogen peroxide.

  “Breathe,” he said. “Close your eyes. Breathe deep. In through the nose,” he said. “Out through the mouth. Loud enough that I can hear it.”

  She did it. In, out. In, out. She opened her eyes. She looked down at her hands. They still shook. But less. She unscrewed the bottle. She hunched next to his leg. She put her left hand on his leg. He was hot to the touch.

  She poured hydrogen peroxide into the wound. It fizzed pink. It made her think of grapefruit soda. Part of her wanted to laugh and laugh and never stop. She let it pass through her. She breathed like he’d taught her.

  “What about the bullet?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t we have to get it out?”

  “Naw,” he said. “It’s done all the bad it’s going to do. We’re just gonna leave it be.”

  She took a bottle of hand sanitizer and squirted it onto her hands.

  “Your mom ever make you go to church?” he asked, maybe just because the silence was broken now.

  She followed his eyes to the picture of Jesus. She shook her head like no.

  “In first grade one time, Ms. Groger had us do a drawing of our family at Christmastime. I didn’t want to do it. I just didn’t want to. So I told her I was Jewish.”

  She spread some disinfectant goo from a tube onto her fingertips.

  “You did what now?”

  She dabbed her finger onto the hole in his leg, so gently.

  “Told her I was Jewish. Said we didn’t celebrate Christmas. So I wouldn’t have to do the stupid drawing.”

  She spread disinfectant on a gauze pad.

  She pressed it into the wound. His fists balled up in the folds of the blanket.

  “So she didn’t make me do the drawing. But what she did was she called Mom.”

  Polly swallowed something sharp before going on.

  “She called Mom, and she told Mom what happened, and she said, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t know you were Jewish,’ and Mom said ‘Well, hell, neither did I!’”

  “Sounds like her all right,” her dad said.

  Polly missed her again fresh, fresh as the hole in his leg. But she smiled at the memory, and the crying wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t finish the story.

  “So what she did was, she said if I wanted to be Jewish I could be, and she took me to that temple over in Ontario. And it was kind of cool, they had this real old book and they read from it, but for real it was as boring as regular church. So I decided I wasn’t Jewish and I wasn’t anything. And Mom said that it was good I tried.”

  She ran her tongue over her tooth, the one that had grown in the place of the one he’d yanked. Some things get replaced, she thought, and some things never will. She put a bandage over the gauze and started wrapping it. After a while the tears stopped.

  “Make it tighter,” he said. She did it again. She taped the bandage to itself and sat back. She shook the numb feeling out of her fingertips.

  “Is it okay?” Polly asked. He leaned forward and looked at her work.

  “That’ll do,” he said. He took her by the arm and squeezed it. “That’ll do just fine.”

  They sat there like that for a little while, and it was quiet for Polly, even on the inside.

  12

  NATE

  THE BARSTOW FREEWAY

  Nick had taught him about bullet wounds a long time ago. Yanking bullets out was movie bullshit. You’d do more damage pulling it out than leaving it alone. Nick told him a story he’d heard in lockup, about three stickup artists in L.A. One caught a bullet in the shoulder and was bleeding bad, like heading-for-death bad. They didn’t want to take him to a hospital with a gunshot wound in him, so what they did was set a badass pit bull on the man’s shoulder. The dog chewed the bullet wound to hamburger and they took him to the hospital as the victim of a dog attack. Moral of the story, Nick said, was don’t get shot.

  If it didn’t kill you straightaway, and you didn’t bleed out, the worst thing about a bullet in you was the things it carried with it. A bullet, hot from the barrel, was cleaned by the fire that launched it, but when it hits you, it gathers up bits of your clothes, your skin, and sucks them inside you, along for the ride. If the bullet or the bleeding didn’t kill you, it was those little bits of jeans and skin that you had to worry about. They led to infection. But the girl had cleaned the wound well. All he could do was watch for the purple to spread, and worry about what to do about it when it did.

  Nate checked the sweatpants the girl had bought him as he limped across the truck stop lot. No blood spots. There was pain and he limped pretty bad, but that couldn’t be helped. At least the bullet had missed the bone.

  In the truck stop he bought a pint of whiskey and a stack of beach towels. He found Polly waiting for him at the car. They laid the towels over the bloody car seats. Nate broke the seal on the bottle and had a long drink. It burned clean inside him. Like a bullet from the barrel. He chased it with bottled water. He realized he was parched. He drained it dry. When it was empty he crunched the plastic bottle in his hand. The crunch of it shook him. It coughed up gunshot replays in his head.

  He’d had Magic in his hands when Magic got hold of the pistol. The flash and bang from the barrel turned the world psychedelic. Darklights blossomed in Nate’s eyes. High whines in his ears. Nate got his hand on the barrel. Ignored the hot metal burning his hands. He twisted the barrel. He felt Magic’s finger bones snap in the trigger guard. He pulled the gun out of Magic’s twisted fingers. He reared back. He got a fastball grip on the pistol. He dented the iron cross on the side of Magic’s skull. He did it again. The man’s eyes went null. Nate put the barrel in between Magic’s slack lips. He saw a condor in a clear blue sky. He pulled the trigger. Magic laid a fan of slop on the rug behind him.

  The corpse summoned a moment of clarity for Nate. How dumb it had all been. How close he’d come to losing it all, dooming Polly. The corpse solved nothing. Polly was still in danger. So was Nate. Crazy Craig had a dozen killers just like Magic. Aryan Steel had killers anywhere he could think to run. He’d risked everything for the ghost of his brother.

  He lay back on the dead man’s legs. He looked up at the ceiling, tried to catch his breath. The world went soft at the edges, like Magic’s choke had finally started working. Nate felt something warm, wet on his leg. That’s how he realized he’d been shot.


  “Are you okay?”

  The girl’s words brought him back. He nodded. He leaned forward to key the ignition. A wave of pain came over him, knocking him back into the car seat.

  “Goddamn,” he said. He wrestled with the pain until he got a hold of it, held it down.

  Polly moved the bear so it looked like he was climbing his seat. The bear cocked his head so it looked at Nate. Placed a paw on his forehead, checking for a temperature. The bear looked back to Polly and nodded. She caught Nate looking at her. She looked at him like he might reach out and smack her.

  “I know he’s not real,” she said. “You know I know, right?”

  “I do now,” he said.

  He held out his fist to the bear. The bear reached out with his paw and gave him a fist bump. He thought he might have got a smile out of Polly but he didn’t. Nate sank back into his seat. The whiskey took hold of him. He knew if he drank much more he might have a hard time making it back to the motel. He needed sleep. Needed to have nothing at all for as many hours as life could give him.

  “Think I’m good to go back,” Nate said. “You ready?”

  “The motel?” Her face made Nate think of rabbits when the owls screech.

  “One more night,” he said. “Then we’re moving on.”

  “Yeah,” Polly said. The way she said it made him look at her. But her face was pressed against the window and he couldn’t see whatever it was that made him look.

  13

  POLLY

  FONTANA/MOUNT VERNON

  Polly and her dad rolled past the auto track. That put them minutes away from the motel. She wished she could reach back in time to stop herself from calling for help. She pressed her face against the window. The cool of it let her know she was burning.

  “We’ll sleep late,” he said. “Then we’ll go to L.A. in the morning.”

  He put a hand on the top of her head, rough fingers against her scalp. A wave of acid crested at the back of her throat.