She had to wipe a tear from her eye before she went inside the steak house.
“A couple of famous fellows were asking about you,” the bartender said.
“How do you define ‘famous’?”
The bartender was an ex–rodeo rider nicknamed Stub, for the finger he had pinched off when he caught it in a calf-rope at the Calgary Stampede. He was tall and had a stomach shaped like a water-filled enema bottle and hair that was as slick and black as patent leather. He wore black trousers and a long-sleeve white shirt and a black string tie and was drying champagne glasses and setting them upside down on a white towel while he talked. “They were in last night and wanted to meet you, but you were busy.”
“Stub, would you just answer the question?”
“They said they were from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”
“They’re hanging out here rather than Malibu because they like the weather in late August?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Did you give them my name?”
“I said your name was Vikki.”
“Did you give them my last name or tell them where I live?”
“I didn’t tell them where you live.”
“What are their names?”
“They left a card here. Or I think they did.” He looked behind him at two or three dozen business cards in a cardboard box under the cash register. “They liked your singing. One of them said you sounded like Mother something.”
“Maybelle?”
“What?”
“I sound like Mother Maybelle?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Stub—”
“Maybe they’ll come in tonight.”
“Don’t talk about me to anyone. No one, not for any reason. Do you understand?”
Stub shook his head and dried a glass, his back to her.
“Did you hear me?”
He sighed loudly, as though a great weight had been unfairly set on his shoulders. She wanted to hit him in the head with a plate.
Until nine-thirty P.M. she served dinners from the kitchen and drinks from the bar to tourists on their way to Big Bend and family people and lonely utility workers far from home who came in for a beer and the music. Then she took her guitar from a locked storage compartment in back and removed it from the case and tuned the strings she had put on only last week.
The Gibson had probably been manufactured over sixty years ago and was the biggest flattop the company made. It had a double-braced red spruce top and rosewood back and sides. It was known as the instrument of choice of Elvis and Emmylou or any rockabilly who loved the deep-throated warm sound of early acoustic guitars. Its sunburst finish and pearl and flower-motif inlay and dark neck and silver frets seemed to capture light and pools of shadow at the same time and, out of the contrasts, create a separate work of art.
When she made an E chord and ticked the plectrum across the strings, the reverberation through the wood was magical. She sang “You Are My Flower” and “Jimmie Brown the Newsboy” and “The Western Hobo.” But she could hardly concentrate on the words. Her gaze kept sweeping the crowd, the tables, the utility workers at the bar, a group of European bicyclists who came in sweaty and unshaved with backpacks hanging from their shoulders. Where was Pete? He was supposed to meet her at ten P.M., when the kitchen closed and she usually started cleaning tables and preparing to leave.
A man who was alone at a front table kept spinning his hat on his finger while he watched her sing; one side of his face was cut with a grin. He wore exaggerated hillbilly sideburns, cowboy boots, a print shirt that looked ironed on his tanned skin, jeans that were stretched to bursting on his thighs, and a big polished brass belt buckle with the Stars and Bars embossed on it. When she glanced at him, he gave her a wink.
Over the heads of the crowd, she saw Stub answer the phone. Then he replaced it in the cradle and said something to a drink waitress, who walked up to the bandstand and told Vikki, “Pete said to tell you not to eat dinner, he’s going to the grocery to fix y’all something.”
“He’s going to the grocery at ten o’clock?”
“They stay open till eleven. Count your blessings. My old man is watching rented porn at his mother’s house.”
Vikki laid her guitar in its case, fastened the clasps, and locked the case in the storage room. At closing time, Pete still had not shown up. She went to the bar and sat down, her feet hurting, her face stiff from smiling when she didn’t feel like it.
“Pretty fagged out?” a voice beside her said.
It was the cowboy with the Confederate belt buckle. He had not sat down but was standing close enough that she could smell the spearmint and chewing tobacco on his breath. He was holding his hat with both hands, straightening the brim, pushing a dent out of the crown, brushing a spot out of the felt. He put it on his head and took it back off, his attention focusing on Vikki. “You off?” he said.
“Am I what?”
“You need a ride? Every foot of wind out there has got three feet of sand in it.”
Stub compressed a small white towel in his palm and dropped it on the bar in front of the cowboy. “Last call for alcohol,” he said.
“Include me out.”
“Good, because this is a family-type joint that closes early. Then Vikki helps me clean up. Then I walk her home.”
“Glad to hear it,” the cowboy said. He put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars, grinning while he did it.
Stub watched him leave, then set a cup of coffee in front of Vikki. “Those guys come back?” he asked.
“The ones who claim they’re with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?”
“You don’t believe they’re the genuine article?”
She was too tired to talk about it. She lifted her coffee cup, then replaced it in the saucer without drinking from it. “I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.
“You want me to walk you home?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for your help, Stub.”
He picked up a business card tucked under the register. “I dug this one out of the box,” he said. He set it in front of her.
She picked it up and looked at the printing across the face. “It says ‘Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.’”
“The guy wrote something on the back. I didn’t read it.”
She turned the card over in her palm. “It says he loved my singing.”
“Who?”
“Jeff Hanna. His name is right there.”
“Who’s Jeff Hanna?”
“The guy who founded the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”
She walked back to the motel. The stars had come out, and in the west, the bottom of the sky was still lit with a glow that was like a flare burning inside a green vapor. But she could take no comfort in the beauty of the stars and late-summer light on a desert plain. Each time a car or truck passed her, she unconsciously moved away from the asphalt, averting her face, her eyes searching for a sidewalk that led to a building, a driveway to a house, a swale that fronted a filling station.
Would they live this way the rest of their lives?
She unlocked her door and went inside her motel room. The air conditioner was cranked up all the way, moisture running down its side onto the rug. Pete had not returned from the grocery store, and she was exhausted and hungry and scared and incapable of thinking about the next twenty-four hours. Only Pete would choose to prepare a late and complicated dinner on the night they had to make a decision that would either confirm their status as permanent fugitives or place them in the hands of a legal system they didn’t trust.
She undressed and went into the shower and turned on the hot water. The steam rolled out of the stall in a huge cloud and fogged the mirror and glistened on the plaster walls and puffed through the partially open door into the bedroom.
When she had been a teenager, her father had always teased her about her love for stray animals. “If you’re not careful, you’ll find a fellow just like one of those cats or dogs and run off
with him,” he had said.
Who had she found?
Pete, bumbling his way into the maw of mass murderers.
As she stared at her reflection through a small hole in the fogged mirror, she was stricken with shame and guilt by her own thoughts. Today was her birthday. She had forgotten it, but Pete had not.
She was filled with unrelieved anger at herself and the intractability of their situation. For the first time in her life, she understood how people could deliberately injure and even kill themselves. Their desperation didn’t have its origins in depression. The warm tub of water was cosmetic; the quick downward movement across the forearms was born out of rage at the self.
She got into the shower and washed her hair and lathered her breasts and underarms and thighs and abdomen and buttocks and calves, holding her face so close to the hot spray that her skin turned as red as a blister. How would they take back their lives? How would they free themselves from the fear that waited for them every morning like a hungry animal? The only sanctuary they had was a motel room with a clanking air conditioner dripping rust on the rug, a bed stained with the fornications of others, and curtains they could close on a highway that led back to a rural crossroads and a mass burial ground she couldn’t bear to think about.
She propped her forehead against the stall, the jet of shower water exploding on her scalp, the steam seeping into the bedroom where the night chain on the door hung down on the jamb. She had started out the evening thinking about choices. The rain had changed the land, and the sunset had reshaped the mountains and cooled the desert. He who was the alpha and the omega made all things new, didn’t He? That was the promise, wasn’t it?
But when you were in a room that seemed to have no exit except false doors painted on the walls, how were you supposed to choose? What kind of cruel joke was that to play on anyone, much less on those who had tried to do right with their lives?
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and kept her head pressed so hard against the shower wall that she thought her skin would split.
PETE STEERED HIS basket to the deli counter and dropped a rotisserie chicken, a carton of potato salad, and a carton of coleslaw inside. Then he lifted a six-pack of ice-cold Dr Pepper out of the cooler and a half-gallon of frozen yogurt from the freezer and headed for the bakery. He picked up an angel food cake and found a loaf of French bread that was still soft. The baker was working late and was cleaning up behind the pastry counter. Pete asked her to scroll “Happy Birthday, Vikki” on his cake.
“Special girl, huh?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, ain’t none better,” he replied.
He paid up front and, with a grocery bag in each arm, began the one-mile walk toward the motel. The sun’s afterglow had finally died on the horizon, and he could see the evening star bright and twinkling above a rock ridge that looked carved from decaying bone. The wind had stopped completely, and under an overhang of trees, he thought he could smell an autumnal odor like gas and chrysanthemums in the air. An eighteen-wheeler passed him, its brakes hissing, a backwash of heat and diesel fumes enveloping him. He veered away from the road’s edge, walking now on an uneven surface, gravel breaking under his feet, his coned-up Mexican straw hat bobbing on his head. Up ahead, under a chinaberry tree, was a shut-down Sno-Ball stand, a cluster of bright red cherries painted on a wood sign above its shuttered serving counter. In the distance, when a vehicle approached from the west, he could dimly see the abandoned drive-in theater and the weed-grown miniature-golf course and the silhouettes of the Cadillac car bodies buried nose-down in the hardpan. Vikki must be at the motel by now, he thought. Waiting for him, worrying, maybe secretly regretting she had ever hooked up with him.
He thought the word “Vikki,” so it became a sound in his head rather than a word. He thought it in a way that turned the word into a heart with blood pumping in it and curly hair and strangely colored recessed eyes and breath that was sweet and skin that smelled as fresh as flowers opening in the morning. She was smart and pretty and brave and talented and took no credit for any of it. If he had money, they could go to Canada. He had heard about Lake Louise and the blue Canadian Rockies and places where you could still cowboy for a living and drive a hundred miles without seeing a man-built structure. Vikki talked all the time about Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and the music of the Great American West and the promise the land had held for the generation that came out of the 1940s. Montana, British Columbia, Wyoming, the Cascades in Washington, what did it matter? Those were the places for a new beginning. He had to turn things around and make it up to Vikki for what he had done. He had to separate himself from the nine murdered Asian women and girls who lived in his dreams. Didn’t all dead people grow weary and eventually go toward a white light and leave the world to its illusions?
If it cost him his life, he had to make these things happen.
He shifted the sack that was cupped in his right forearm so he wouldn’t bruise the cake inside. Behind him, he heard the tires of a diesel-powered vehicle pulling off the asphalt onto the gravel.
“Pete, want a ride?” the driver of the pickup said. He was grinning. A felt hat with a wilted brim hung on the gun rack behind him. He wore a print shirt that was as taut on his torso as his sun-browned skin.
“I don’t have far to go,” Pete replied, not recognizing the driver.
“I work with Vikki. She said y’all are cooking up a meal tonight. Special occasion?”
“Something like that,” Pete said, still walking, looking straight ahead.
“That sack looks like it’s fixing to split.” The driver was steering with one hand, keeping his pickup on the road’s shoulder, tapping the brake to keep the idle from accelerating his vehicle past Pete.
“Don’t remember me? That’s ’cause I’m in the kitchen. Bending over the sink most of the time.”
“Don’t need a lift. Got it covered. Thanks.”
“Suit yourself. I hope Vikki feels better,” the driver said. He started to pull back on the asphalt, craning out the window to see if the lane was clear, his shoulders hunched up over the wheel.
“Hang on. What’s wrong with Vikki?” Pete said.
But the driver was ignoring him, waiting for a church bus to pass.
“Hey, pull over,” Pete said, walking faster, the bottom of one bag starting to break under the weight of the damp six-pack of Dr Pepper. Then the bottom caved, cascading the six-pack and a box of cereal and a quart of milk and a container of blueberries onto the gravel.
The driver of the pickup pulled his vehicle back onto the safety of the shoulder, leaning forward, waiting for Pete to speak again.
“Vikki’s sick?” Pete said.
“She was holding her stomach and looking kind of queasy. There’s a nasty kind of flu going around. It gives you the red scours for about a day or so.”
“Park up yonder,” Pete said. “It’ll take me a minute.”
The driver didn’t try to conceal his vexation. He looked at the face of his watch and pulled into darkness under the chinaberry tree and cut his lights, waiting for Pete to pick up his groceries from the roadside and carry them to the bed of the truck. The driver did not get out of his vehicle or offer to help. Pete made one trip, then returned to pick up the bag that had not broken. The back window of the truck was black under the tree’s overhang, the hood ticking with heat. The driver sat with his arm propped casually on his window, rolling a matchstick on his teeth.
Pete walked to the passenger side and got in. A pair of handcuffs hung from the rearview mirror.
“Them are just plastic,” the driver said. He grinned again, his pleasant mood back in place. He wore a brass buckle on his belt that was embossed with the Stars and Bars and was burnished the color of browned butter. “You got a knife?”
“What for?”
“This floor rug keeps tangling in my accelerator. It like to got me killed up the road.”
Pete worked his Swiss Army knife out of his jeans and opened the long blade and
handed it to the driver. The driver started sawing at a piece of loose carpet with it. “Strap yourself in. The latch is right there on your left. You got to dig for it.”
“How about we get on it?”
“State law says you got to be buckled up. I tend to be conscious of the law. I did a postgraduate study in cotton-picking ’cause I wasn’t, know what I mean?” The driver saw the expression in Pete’s face. “Ninety days on the P farm for nonsupport. Not necessarily anything I’d brag to John Dillinger about.”
Pete stretched the safety belt across his chest and pushed the metal tongue into the latch and heard it snap firmly into place. But the belt felt too tight. He pushed against it, trying to adjust its length.
The driver tossed the piece of sawed fabric out the window and folded the knife blade back into the handle with his palm. “My niece was wearing it. Hang on. We ain’t got far to go,” he said. He took the gearshift out of park and dropped it into drive.
“Give me my knife.”
“Just a second, man.”
Pete pressed the release button on the latch, but nothing happened. “What’s the deal?” he said.
“Deal?”
“The belt is stuck.”
“I got my hands full, buddy,” the driver replied.
“Who are you?”
“Give it a break, will you? I got a situation here. Do you believe this asshole?”
An SUV had pulled off the road beyond the Sno-Ball stand and was now backing up.
“What the fuck?” the driver of the pickup said.
The SUV was accelerating, its bumper headed toward the pickup, the tires swerving through the gravel. The driver of the pickup dropped his gearshift into reverse and mashed on the accelerator, but it was too late. The trailer hitch on the SUV plowed into the truck’s grille, the steel ball on the hitch and the triangular steel mount plunging deep into the radiator’s mesh, ripping the fan blades from their shaft, jolting the pickup’s body sideways.
Pete jerked at the safety belt, but it was locked solid, and he realized he’d been had. But the events taking place around him were even more incongruous. The driver of the SUV had cut his lights and leaped onto the gravel, holding an object close to his thigh so it could not be seen from the road. The man moved hurriedly to the driver’s door of the pickup, jerked it open, and, in one motion, thrust himself inside and grabbed the driver by the throat with one hand and, with the other, jammed a blue-black .38 snub-nose revolver into the driver’s mouth. He fitted his thumb over the knurled surface of the hammer and cocked it back. “I’ll blow your brains all over the dashboard, T-Bone. You’ve seen me do it,” he said.
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