Headlock

by Adam Berlin

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You have to admit, it’s pretty beautiful around here. All this space.”

  Gary wasn’t in a rush anymore. On the trip I never thought he looked at the scenery. I felt it in my throat.

  “Three days,” Gary said. “We made it across country in three days.”

  “Almost.”

  “California’s just a day trip away.”

  I went to lift Gary but he put his good hand on my shoulder to stop me.

  “You ever been to California?” he said.

  “Never.”

  “Your family never went there?”

  “We never did.”

  “I’ve never been there either. I told you. I was all packed and ready to go.”

  “You’ll go another time.”

  “Sure,” Gary said.

  He was breathing fast.

  “People just talk about driving across country in three days. We did it.”

  “Yes we did.”

  “That’s something.”

  “That is something.”

  Gary smiled.

  “Just driving.”

  “Fast,” I said.

  “Fast.”

  He fell gracefully for a four hundred pound man. His weight cushioned the fall and he collapsed one part at a time against the trunk. His lower back, his back, his shoulders, his neck, his head, his arms fell open, his eyes closed.

  I stood there. I looked at his face. There was no one around and there was still some time to do what he’d told me. Wipe down the wheel, get to the airport. Buy a ticket home. I just wanted to sit at the dinner table with my family and make small talk for a while. I put my hand in the pocket of my garage uniform and pushed the money all the way down. I opened the car door and took the camera off the dashboard. There was plenty of film left. I should have taken some more pictures of Gary during the trip. His different smiles. The best just for me.

  I heard a car slow and pull onto the breakdown lane. The car door opened and closed and I looked at her and nodded my head and looked away.

  23

  THE SIGN WELCOMED US to California. We stayed on Interstate 15, which was the route Gary and I had picked up all those days ago. I tried counting back and stopped myself.

  I remembered the joke my dad often told. A man goes to a doctor for a routine checkup. The doctor looks him over and says he has good news and bad news. The bad news is that the man will be dead in a week. The good news is that since he knows he’s going to die, he can finally do the one thing he always wanted to do. The doctor asks the man if there’s one thing he always wanted to do in his life and the man says that yes, as a matter of fact he always wanted to have a piece of Bavarian cream pie. The real thing. From Bavaria. The doctor tells him that now is his chance. The man goes home, packs a bag, says good-bye to his wife and kids and heads out. He takes a plane to Europe. He takes a train to Bavaria. He gets off at the capital of Bavaria and takes a bus to the small mountain town where they make Bavarian cream pie. He gets off the bus and starts to walk. All the time he’s getting weaker and weaker but he keeps walking and walking and finally he reaches the mountain he’s been looking for. On top of the mountain is this little bakery that makes the best Bavarian cream pie in the world. The man starts climbing the mountain. He’s getting weaker by the minute, his time is running out, but he still keeps climbing, up and up and up. Finally, he makes it to the top of the mountain and crawls into the bakery. He pulls himself up to the counter, out of breath, and tells the woman behind the counter that he’d like a piece of Bavarian cream pie. The woman shakes her head. I’m sorry, sir, she says, but that won’t be possible. What do you mean it won’t be possible, the man says. I left my family, I traveled thousands of miles, I’m on my last breath and I came all this way just to try a piece of your famous Bavarian cream pie. I understand, sir, the woman behind the counter says, but there’s one big problem. It’s Tuesday. And on Tuesdays we don’t bake Bavarian cream pie. The man takes a final breath, looks at the woman behind the counter and says, Okay, just give me a slice of apple.

  When I was a kid I’d always hoped the slice of apple pie tasted delicious for the dying man. I didn’t want the man going all that way for nothing.

  Tia’s Nova didn’t handle like a Jaguar but there were no cars on the road and I didn’t have to weave. I didn’t have to get to the airport at a specific time. I’d buy a ticket for whatever flight was leaving. The signs for Los Angeles started to increase and so did the signs for the towns that had sprung out from L.A., eastward since there was no room going west. The sun would be out soon. Christmas Eve day.

  “How are you holding up?” she said.

  “I’m awake.”

  “I can take over if you want.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  I put my hand on her leg and she took my hand and moved her thumb over it.

  “You’re not going home for the holidays?” I said.

  “I might. I didn’t make any promises. I could drive up to Bishop and surprise everyone.”

  “My family expected me home days ago.”

  “They must be worried.”

  “They’re used to worrying about me.”

  Dawn started in the rearview mirror. It was always getting lighter behind us. It was the opposite of coming to America for my grandfather. Promises ahead, not behind. In some ways that was easier. Even if he hadn’t come purely. Maybe no one came purely.

  “I killed him.”

  “He was trying to kill your cousin.”

  “But I killed him.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror. The few clouds were outlined in hard edges. I looked at the road and waited and looked back in the rearview mirror, remembering how the light had been and comparing it to how the light was to see if I could tell the difference.

  “When I was in school I picked up a copy of The Iliad because our coach always read from it. Most of the great battles ended in death. What I did wasn’t great at all. I killed him and I don’t feel anything. It’s like someone else did it. Only it was me.”

  “It’s not like you went after an innocent victim.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  The sun started to rise. A top slice before the road turned and the sun was out of view and when I saw it again it was all the way up. I adjusted the side mirror so I wouldn’t get the glare.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  I looked at her and she smiled and I looked back at the road.

  “We could drive to New York. It’s a great city.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “It’s so big you can get lost there.”

  “I’m already a little lost. That’s why I moved to Vegas.”

  Tia’s thumb stopped moving across my hand and then started again.

  “I don’t think my car would make it,” she said. “It’s not ready for such a long trip.”

  I pretended I was driving east and Tia was next to me. It would be night and the highway would be quiet and it would be just us in the car. I would look over at her, see that she was sleeping, that she was okay, put my hand through her hair to let her know I was with her even as she slept. It was a nice daydream. She wasn’t ready to take a drive. Taking a drive was a place between killing time and moving ahead. The destination did not matter, driving across and not to, but if the time was not right it would end with lines like the movie line Gary told me many miles ago from Easy Rider. We blew it. For me the drive had come at the perfect time. He had come at the perfect time. I had been ready, uniform and all.

  It was light but there still weren’t many cars on the highway. We passed a lone bus. It looked like a city bus, smaller than the giant charters that shuttled people in and out of Las Vegas.

  “We should stop and ask directions to the airport,” Tia said.

  “Gary never needed a map. He could sense where things were.”

  “Did he teach you?”

  “Not th
at.”

  There was an exit sign for a gas station. I pulled off the highway and onto smaller roads. A pickup truck and a car were parked in the lot but there was no one at any of the pumps. The attached convenience store was lit up and I could see a man standing behind the cash register and another man facing the soda cooler. I got out of the car, unscrewed the gas cap, put in the nozzle, pressed it down. Nothing came out. I rubbed my eyes. I looked at the pump and read that I had to pay first. I walked into the store and handed the cashier a twenty.

  “What number?” he said.

  “Whatever that pump is.”

  “What number? There are three pumps there.”

  “And one car.”

  “I don’t care how many cars are there. I need to know the pump number.”

  “Regular unleaded. Whatever pump that is.”

  “That’s pump number two for future reference. Count it. Pump number two.”

  “Give me the twenty.”

  “I’ll give you your change after you fill up.”

  I grabbed his hand.

  I stopped.

  “If you knew me you wouldn’t do this,” I said.

  I looked at the man. I was talking to him. I was talking to me. My eyes had hundreds of matches behind them and too many ugly fights and now my eyes had more. I had killed a man. I looked at the man with my eyes and he didn’t say anything. I let go. I tilted my head to the left. I tilted my head to the right. Balance.

  I walked out of the store. The sun was out. Tia sat in the car watching me. I put the nozzle back in the pump. I put the twenty back in my pocket. I felt the glasses. I put the sunglasses on. Plastic frames. Blue lenses. I looked past the lot and past the road and past everything and up at the sky that looked too blue in the blue colored rose colored glasses. I took the glasses off and threw them as far as I could and watched them skid to a stop on the pavement.

  I got back in the car.

  “They’re out of gas,” I said.

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “We’ll find another place down the road.”

  “We’re almost there anyway.”

  “Almost. Let’s drive.”

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  ©2000 by Adam Berlin. All rights reserved.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

  eISBN 9781565127487