Sure enough, he moves in again, knife raised for an overhand strike. Instead of trying to get out of the way, Bob shifts just enough so that the blade sinks into the fleshy part of his shoulder instead of his chest. He then grabs Jesse’s wrist with his free hand to stop him from pulling the knife out and at the same time stabs him in the back. Jesse lets go of his knife, jerks his arm free, and stumbles backward.
Now both of them are hurt too badly to keep circling. They glare at each other as Bob pulls Jesse’s knife from his shoulder and tosses it aside. Bob means to say something smart but can’t speak, so spits instead. In ten seconds he’ll go in for the kill. Ten seconds of healing. Nine, eight, seven. He almost groans out loud when Jesse reaches into his jacket and pulls out an ice pick. The fucker is putting up more of a fight than he expected. Four, three.
Jesse walks toward him but stops out of striking range. Bob waves his blade, and Jesse watches it like it’s a swaying snake and he’s calculating when to reach out and grab it. Bob lunges and jabs to foil any attack the man might be cooking up, and Jesse backs up a step. Bob lunges again, and again Jesse retreats.
The third time Bob tries the move, Jesse deflects his strike with a sweep of his arm and counters with a jab of his own. The tip of the ice pick barely pricks Bob’s chest, but the sting is enough to flood him with fresh anger. Strategizing on the fly, he pretends to fumble his knife, drops it, and bends to pick it up. Jesse falls for the ruse, rushing in with the pick aimed low, meaning to get him in the throat.
Bob stops him in mid-thrust by grabbing his forearm, snatches up his knife with his other hand, and stabs upward toward Jesse’s chest. The bastard clamps onto his wrist, though, before the blade finds its mark.
They wind up face-to-face, chest to chest, Bob clutching Jesse’s right arm, Jesse hanging on for dear life to his. A slapstick tango ensues as they try to knee each other in the balls, spinning round and round until their legs tangle and they topple over.
Bob lands on the shoulder Jesse stabbed, and a bolt of pain nearly blacks him out. By the time the static clears Jesse’s got the ice pick between his ribs and is probing for his heart. Bob realizes his knife is still in his hand and thrusts it into Jesse’s belly. The last thing he hears before his body finally gives out is Jesse scream.
When he comes to who knows how long later, Jesse is facedown and out cold beside him. His head whirls when he sits up, but there’s no time to waste. He grabs his knife and rolls Jesse onto his back, straddles the sonofabitch, and lays the blade against his neck. He’s two strokes into dusting him when Jesse’s eyes pop open. The ice pick, Bob thinks. Too late. Jesse shoves the pick up through the bottom of his chin, through his mouth, and into
29
JESSE USES THE ICE PICK EMBEDDED IN THE FIEND’S HEAD TO guide the body to the ground. The wound in his stomach makes him feel like he’s drunk acid, and he lies back and waits to heal more. When the worst has passed, he dusts the biker with the biker’s own knife.
He still doesn’t feel safe, though, not with the last two Fiends in the wind. He gathers all the guns he can find and carries them to the truck in a bindle made from a bedsheet, taking it slow, watching the road and listening for a motorcycle. When he gets close to the pickup he pauses to look for signs of trouble. Everything seems to be fine. Sanders is even behind the wheel. Jesse wasn’t sure he’d make it back.
He was lying in a puddle of blood when Jesse ran into the trailer, not moving. Assuming he was dead, Jesse went to the window and watched the big, dark Fiend he’d stabbed drag the blond woman he shot to safety. Sanders groaned, startling Jesse.
“Where are you hit?” Jesse asked.
“My leg,” Sanders said.
A bullet had passed through his thigh. Jesse cut a sleeve off Sanders’s shirt and tied it around the leg. It was no kind of fix, but it would get him through the next few minutes, when Jesse would need him. He groaned again as Jesse hauled him to his feet, but the leg supported his weight. Jesse had him take up a position at the window, and he crouched in the doorway.
After striking the deal with the Fiend who killed Johona allowing Sanders to go, he told Sanders, “Wait in the truck. If I’m not back by dawn, take off.”
“And your brother?” Sanders asked.
There was only one alternative. “Put him down,” Jesse replied. Edgar not being able to fend for himself, it’d be a mercy killing.
Jesse waves at Sanders now as he approaches the truck, says, “You alive?”
“Barely,” Sanders says.
Jesse walks back to the camper. Edgar peers down from a bed in a nook above the cab.
“Monsieur Beaumont went crazy,” he says. “He like to have kicked that box to kindling.”
“Come up front,” Jesse says. “Everything’s settled.”
Sanders keeps drifting in and out of consciousness, so Jesse drives. Edgar rides between them. Nobody says anything on the way back to Vegas, not even Edgar. Instead of gassing about cartoons or begging to turn on the radio, he stares out the windshield, his big, knuckly hands clutching the dash. Jesse and Sanders reek of blood, gunpowder, and exhaustion. Jesse opens all the vents, flooding the cab with fresh air.
Sanders needs help walking to the room. Jesse lays him on the bed and strips off his trousers to examine his leg more closely. Through and through, as he thought: one hole in the front of the thigh, one in the back, both barely bleeding now. He’s in a lot of pain, and Jesse feels that patching him up is part of their bargain. He goes through the man’s first aid kit, but he’ll need more than what’s there to do the job right.
Edgar’s on his bed, watching television. He doesn’t look over when Jesse starts making himself presentable enough to go out.
“You want a hamburger?” Jesse asks him.
“Two Big Macs,” Edgar says. “And French fries.”
“What about you?” Jesse says to Sanders.
“I’m fine.”
Jesse walks to an all-night drugstore for peroxide and gauze and buys a few extra burgers from the McDonald’s next door in case Sanders changes his mind.
Sanders, lying in the bathtub, hisses when Jesse pours peroxide into the bullet holes and bloody froth boils out. By the time Jesse bandages the leg and gets the man back to his bed, Edgar is asleep. Sanders nibbles at a hamburger and is soon sleeping too.
Jesse stretches out on the floor with a pillow. It’s the first chance he’s had to relax in two days, but rest doesn’t come easy. Whenever he closes his eyes, a vicious montage unspools. Him stabbed and shot and stabbing and shooting, guns and knives and blood, rovers collapsing into dust. He and the Fiends fight on the mountain, he and the biker fight at the motel, and Johona dies over and over. It’s light outside before exhaustion finally shuts him down.
The first thing he hears when he wakes is laughter. The television. Edgar’s watching from bed, and Sanders is writing to his wife. The sun is down, he can feel it. He stands and stretches. Besides being parched, he’s doing okay. He drinks three glasses of water and takes a long shower, keeping his mind on the night ahead and not letting it stray into sorrow. He tells Edgar to pack his things and is surprised when he fills his grip without kicking.
He walks to the nearest casino and cases the parking lot. Spotting an old Galaxie 500, he sidles up and jams a screwdriver into the door lock. A few taps with a hammer, a hard twist, and he’s in the driver’s seat. After a bit of work on the ignition cylinder, he touches the starter wire to the battery wires, and the car comes to life.
All Edgar’s got to say when he walks back into the room is that he’s hungry again. “We’ll get something on the way,” Jesse tells him and sets about packing his own suitcase. It doesn’t take long. The shirt and jeans he’s wearing are the only clothes he’s got not covered in blood. He takes Sanders’s .45 from the bundle of guns and lays it on the table.
“You might need this,” he says to Sanders.
Sanders doesn’t respond. He looks even more miserable than usual, like he cou
ld either cry on someone’s shoulder or kill them, depending on the direction of the next breeze. Jesse’s felt the same way a thousand times but doesn’t have any sympathy to spare. He’s running along his own tightrope, keeping moving to keep from falling. He stashes his knife in his jacket, picks up the guns and his grip, and takes one last look around to make sure Edgar hasn’t forgotten anything he’ll be whining about an hour down the road. Then it’s a quick goodbye to Sanders, and he and Edgar are out the door.
Edgar’s got the mulligrubs, too, hasn’t said three words all night. Jesse points him to the Galaxie and puts their grips and the guns in the back seat. They’re going to Seattle. He’s tired of the heat, wants to see mountains, smell trees.
“What about Disneyland?” Edgar says.
“We’ll go soon,” Jesse says.
Edgar snickers. “You’re a liar, and the truth ain’t in you,” he says.
They stop at A&W for supper. Edgar tells the carhop she’s pretty and asks for his own tray. The girl brings one out and hangs it from his window. The food livens him up. He guzzles his root beer, burps, and licks at the foam on his upper lip. He’s messing with his fries in a way Jesse’s scolded him for in the past, rolling each in ketchup, dirtying his fingers, before popping it into his mouth. Jesse ignores it this time. He’ll never forgive him for what he said about Johona, but he also can’t see riding him too hard after what he’s been through.
A Little League game is in its fifth inning on a baseball diamond next to the drive-in. A kid hits a fly into left field, the thwack of the bat on the ball not reaching Jesse’s ears until the boy’s already running for first. The fielder gapes at the sky and punches his glove. The ball goes to him like it was meant to, seeming to slow almost to stopping as it drops into his mitt.
“I’m gonna get me a motorcycle,” Edgar says.
“No, you’re not,” Jesse says.
“I’m gonna ride with the Fiends. They’re tougher than you.”
“You sure about that?”
“I seen them fight.”
“So how come they’re all dead, and I’m still here?”
Edgar drops a fry into his puddle of ketchup and flips it with the tip of his finger. “I’ll start my own gang then,” he says.
“What’ll you call it?”
“The Pirates.”
Jesse goes to piss before they hit the road. The car is running when he gets back, Edgar behind the wheel.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jesse says.
“Touch the one wire to the two,” Edgar says. “I remember.”
“You don’t mess with the car without my permission. You know that.”
“Can I have permission to drive?”
“Get back on your side.”
Edgar acts like it takes everything in him to slide across the seat.
They head north. Jesse figures they can make it to Wells, or even Jackpot, before having to stop for daylight. An hour into the drive, Edgar, who’s been sulking, turns on the radio. Jesse shuts it off.
“Please, sir, may I play the radio, sir?” Edgar says. His resentment at having to ask is obvious, even behind the funny voice he uses.
“You may,” Jesse says, rewarding him for following the rules.
Traffic is sparse on the highway. When they meet another vehicle, it’s usually a big rig, some as festooned with colored lights as Christmas trees. Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome” comes on the radio. After the first verse about the whippoorwill being too blue to fly and the moon hiding behind a cloud to cry, Jesse changes the station. The only way he’ll get through the next few nights is to keep one step ahead of grief.
The Galaxie blows a tire an hour past Ely. Jesse manhandles the car to the shoulder, kills the engine, and lucks out when he finds a flashlight in the glove box. His luck continues when he pops the trunk with his screwdriver and there’s a jack and a spare.
“Give me a hand,” he calls to Edgar, still in the car.
It’s the left rear tire that failed. Edgar holds the light while Jesse loosens the nuts with a lug wrench and jacks up the car. Jesse’s sweating as he pulls off the ruined tire and slips on the spare, has to dry his hands on his pant legs before replacing and finger-snugging the nuts. Edgar can’t stand still. The flashlight beam keeps jumping around.
“Quit fidgeting,” Jesse snaps.
He lowers the car, tightens the nuts, and carries the jack to the trunk. The engine starts, and he slams the trunk shut and, through the rear window, sees Edgar in the driver’s seat again.
“Goddammit!” he yells.
Edgar puts the car in reverse and hits the gas. The back bumper shatters Jesse’s left knee. He falls to the ground, and the Galaxie crushes his right ankle as it rolls on top of him. The car stops then, but Jesse’s stomach is against the muffler. The hot steel sears his flesh. That’s what finally starts him screaming.
He’s still screaming when Edgar shifts into drive and takes off. His shirt catches on the bumper, and he’s dragged out into the road before the fabric tears and he skids to a stop. The Galaxie speeds away, its taillights visible long after the sound of the engine has faded.
30
THE LITTLE DEVIL STARTS IN AS SOON AS JESSE SPRINGS ME FROM the camper after he and Mr. Sanders come back from the red arrow motel. He don’t care nothing about you, he says. He killed Abby. He tried to kill you. You can’t trust him. He keeps spitting poison until I fall asleep in Mr. Sanders’s room. Ruins my hamburgers ruins my French fries.
I wake up thinking about Abby. When I recall what happened to her I feel like crying. I feel like taking a knife to Jesse and dusting him. Do it! the Little Devil whispers. I turn on The Brady Bunch to drown him out. Mr. Sanders is writing in his book. He says, Do you have to play it so loud? He’d best watch himself or I’ll off him too.
Soon as Jesse gets up he tells me to pack my bag we’re moving on. Stacking the little I have left in my grip steams me even more. There’s my cards but I want my checkers. There’s my dinosaurs but I want my sword.
We’re going to Seattle. They got Brakeman Bill there and JP Patches and Gertrude. The new car Jesse stole is a Galaxie. A galaxy is stars you need a telescope to see. I looked at the moon with a telescope. There’s a face on it. Sometimes the moon’s out during the day. What you call a Judas moon. Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Jesse betrayed me for a piece of ass.
A&W ain’t gonna make up for that. Every time I look at Jesse I get mad all over again. He goes to pee and I slide over and start the car. Drive off, the Little Devil says, get away. Jesse comes back before I make up my mind. He yells at me in front of the waitress girl.
When we get going he makes me ask permission to turn on the radio. I do but ain’t ever gonna again. The Little Devil keeps talking over the music about revenge. The car swerves and Jesse says it’s a blowout. He tells me to come help him change the tire. I want to tell him to fuck himself but I’m scared. I remember him choking me. I remember fighting to breathe and not getting air and fighting to breathe and almost swallowing my tongue and fighting to breathe and forgetting how.
I’m shaking such I can’t hold the flashlight still. Jesse yells at me and the Little Devil’s yelling too. If a dog bites once he’ll bite twice, he says. Careful he don’t brain you with that wrench. I can’t think straight with all the noise in my head. When Jesse goes to put the jack in the trunk I walk up and get in the driver seat. That’s when the Little Devil takes over. It’s him who touches the one wire to the two to spark the engine. It’s him who puts the Galaxie in R and gives it gas. It’s him who runs Jesse over and drives off. Don’t look back, he says, keep your eyes on the road.
I don’t think about nothing but driving. I ain’t never done it alone before. You got to do all the concentrating yourself. You got to steer and work the gas and watch what’s coming all at the same time. The Little Devil goes back in his hole. Got nothing more to say.
I stop at the first motel I come to. Jesse’s wallet’s in t
he glove box and there’s money in it. The lights are out in the motel office. I knock on the door and ring the bell. A Chinaman answers grumbling about it’s late. I tell him I had a flat tire. He comes back with a key and says there’s no hot water in the room but it’s the only one he’s got on account of there’s a highway crew staying there. I say cold water’ll be fine.
The room’s on the second floor. I get my grip and Jesse’s out of the car and carry them up. I take the guns too. The room smells sour and there’s a bug in the sink. The television goes on but no channels come in. I get my cards out and deal two hands for Crazy Eights. It’s no fun playing myself.
I open Jesse’s grip and look through it. His shaving kit the photo book and them sunglasses Johona give him. I hear him telling me to leave his gear be. I hear me saying, Why? You ain’t got nothing anybody’d want to steal.
I stick his wallet in one pocket and one of the pistols in the other and go out on the walkway. The parking lot is full of pickup trucks. Past them is the highway and a truck stop all lit up on the other side. Alamo it’s called. Davy Crockett king of the wild frontier got killed at the Alamo. I draw the pistol and point it at the gas pumps. You close one eye to aim. Pow. I pretend this time but if Jesse finds me I’ll shoot him for real. I’ll practice till I can knock a bean can off a fence post till I can hit a silver dollar throwed in the air. ’Cause I’m sure he’ll dust me if he gets the chance. He ain’t never believed me about the Little Devil.
I cross to the truck stop. They got every kind of potato chips in the store there every kind of candy every kind of soda pop. There’s hula girls for your dashboard fishing poles and tackle and Wile E. Coyote belt buckles. They even got CB radios.
I pick one up and ask how much. The cash register man says, Seventy-five dollars plus tax. Does it work? I say. We wouldn’t be selling it if it didn’t, he says. Jesse’s wallet is fat with twenty-dollar bills. I hand the man four to make eighty. He gives me back one and some change.
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