by Roy Scranton
“We can’t stop” I tole him “there’s about a hunnerd cops after us and we gotta keep goin.”
“I can’t keep on” he said. “I’m too sleepy.”
“Well, you gotta” I said.
“Maybe I could if we did some kissing” he said. “That’d keep me going for another couple hours.”
“I tole you, you already got yours for today.”
“You think I did that old lady?” he ast.
“I can’t imagine what else you’s doing up there so long.”
“Hell I did,” he says. “I ain’t gone poke some old lady. C’mon, darling. Let’s just make some love and I’ll keep driving all night.”
“Fine” I tole him, and I let him kiss me and I milked him off into some ol napkins, cuz with all we had goin on I din’t need no babies on top of it. So then he drove on another five or ten minutes then pulled over and said “I’m just too tired,” and I cursed him for being a lazy dog and a liar and a dirty sumbitch, but he just went to sleep and so did I.
In the morning fore we left Nebraska we stopped and got some more gas and candy bars for breakfast and nine bottles of Pepsi-Cola. It was a beautiful blue day showin all the promise of a dead world waitin to be reborn, and as we crossed the border into Wyomin with the sun lookin down on us I thought we surely would make it across and everthing was possible, but then I saw the mountains and it was the first time I seed em ever, all dark and high against the edge of the prairie and my heart dropped cuz I thought there weren’t no way and I was sad and angry cuz I knowed they was after us, we heard all about us on the radio and Charlie says they knowed what kinda car we had, he says we gotta switch cars, so we stops at this Buick and then Charlie goes up and tells the guy open the door but he won’t do it so Charlie done pull out his gun and shot him musta been ten times and then another man drives up and he gets out and Charlie points the gun at him but he grabs it then him and Charlie start rasslin and that’s when the deputy drives up and I see my chance and run up to his car and say “Take me to the police” and he says “Get in the car” so I did and tells him how Charlie killed a man there and he asks me who that is and I just look at him all funny like don’t you know? “That there’s Charlie Starkweather.”
Suzie put her pen down and closed the notebook. Abelard lay sleeping on the bed. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, closed the drapes, then got up to brush her teeth. She had a lot of driving to do to in the morning, through the pass over the mountains, and the forecast called for strange weather.
Maybe tomorrow she’d start over. Maybe tomorrow he’d let her go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m consistently delighted and grateful that I get to work with Mark Doten, and I appreciate to no end his help on this unusual book. Most of all, I appreciate the willingness he and Soho Press continue to show for publishing and supporting innovative work. I’m not only grateful to them for giving my own work a home, but proud to be part of their larger effort.
Deep thanks to Patrick Blanchfield, Travis Just, Hilary Plum, Sharon Mesmer, Jake Siegel, and Martin Woessner for reading versions or pieces of this book and talking with me about them.
The inspirations and influences that provoked and inflected this novel are too numerous to list, but a few of the most important ones can and should be named: Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967); Tom Waits’s Bone Machine (1992); Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993); Dave Lapham’s Stray Bullets series (1995–present); the work of Irish composer Jennifer Walshe (especially XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! [2003] and Motel Abandon [2005]); Object Collection’s opera Problem Radical(s) (2009); Professor Tamsen Wolff’s course on the twentieth-century American musical, for which I was lucky enough to be a teaching assistant while at Princeton; the music of Tyrants; and Daniel Fish’s revisionist 2015 production of Oklahoma! Similarly, detailing all the books, films, songs, and disjecta membra folded into this novel as research, discursive texture, and raw material for collage would be a thankless and tedious task, but a handful of the most important sources should be cited, including William Allen, Starkweather: Inside the Mind of a Teenage Killer, Clerisy Press, 2004; Ninette Beaver, B. K. Ripley, and Patrick Trese, Caril, Lipincott, 1974; Jeff O’Donnell, Starkweather: A Story of Mass Murder on the Great Plains, J&L Lee, 1993; Julia Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review, 119:5 (December 1, 2014), 1587–1607; and Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok,” from Leaves of Grass, 1881.
I would also like to offer my gratitude to the Lannan Foundation and the University of Notre Dame for their material support in making this work possible.
At last, for Sara, my first, best reader, my perennial road-trip companion, my life and breath, and for Reyzl, who has made the old roads new and strange again, who brightens the gloomy horizon with joy—thank you.