Free State Of Dodge

by Javan Bonds

  Gesturing to the deceased man, Jackson asked, “Did you…”

  He let his question trail off as he turned his head to face Redstone, who offered, “Nah, she did.” He swung his head back to indicate he was referring to Lacey; the last two words were silently mouthed.

  Continuing in a low tone, Redstone asked with a phantom of a smile, “How do you feel about shooting and possibly killing two people out there?” Before Jackson could respond, he saw Redstone light up with another question. “And why were you coming down Gant Street, anyway?”

  If Jackson had been going straight home, he would have been on the opposite side of the store, on the highway, and stopping at the red light rather than turning down the road between the pharmacy and the bank, which would have eventually led him to the south side of the gas station. Jackson knew Redstone had easily deduced this and was seriously curious as to why Jackson had gone that direction and probably saved at least two lives.

  Jackson seemed as if he were going to tell Redstone he could see into the future, which Redstone was beginning to suspect, and then he genuinely stated, “Well, I went to Daddy’s pawnshop to buy this gun, and when I was leaving, I figured I would pick up a Dr. Pepper and just took one of the back roads so I wouldn’t have to deal with the damn red light. To answer your other question, I really don’t feel too bad about it, ’cause I knew what they were about to do, and I don’t think they are dead. But we should probably call for an ambulance soon, or they are going to bleed out in the parking lot!”

  Jackson knew that Redstone didn’t need the obvious pointed out to him but thought it was hilarious, as this was a time when nothing should have been funny. Every time something so blindingly obvious was offered to Redstone, he would let out an exaggerated laugh that consisted of blowing out his cheeks in a fake effort to contain his explosion of laughter, snorts, and a few deep chuckles that ended in loud gasps of air. After his laughing fit, Redstone held up a hand in a gesture of “stay here; I’ll be back” as he sprinted to the door. Jackson assumed he was going to make a call on his car radio, and he hoped today would convince him to wear a shoulder radio, but he wasn’t putting too much stock in that.

  Fearing that she felt they had forgotten her, he spun to see that Lacey had not moved and was holding the same blank stare. He bent to one knee and tried to think of some way to comfort her. Redstone reentered the door, his gaze immediately dropping to the body that lay beside him and not even glancing in their direction, and he said loudly, “Bobbi Jo already called ’em, and they’re fixin’ to be here.”

  On cue the sound of wailing sirens began to grow louder, and Jackson helped Lacey to her feet as Redstone moved to the back of the store. As Jackson walked the shaking, silent girl closer to the front, Redstone reemerged and walked to the counter, placed two items by the register, and waited with his hands in his pockets.

  When Jackson had Lacey almost through the door, he looked over his shoulder and asked in an irritated tone, “What the hell are you doing?”

  With a look of innocence, Redstone replied, “I’m waiting to check out.”

  Jackson had Lacey through the door now, still holding her shoulder, and looked back with disgust. “Man, she’s in shock!”

  Acting as though the past few minutes had not happened, Redstone shot back, “I came up here to get some cigarillos and a Mountain Dew.”He acted as if he didn’t understand what the holdup was.

  Jackson finally said with regret, “Just put some money on the damn counter and move!”

  Redstone complied, casually walked out the broken door behind them and then to his car, and placed his drink and smokes inside. Jackson knew that Redstone wasn’t so ignorant that he could not see that this situation required more sensitivity. But he knew that Redstone would do anything, regardless of what was going on around him, to get a laugh from someone else, and this time it had not happened as he had planned. As Redstone walked from the store and to his car, Jackson could see the defeat on his face but knew there would be plenty of time to make jokes at inopportune moments later.

  Jackson stood at the corner of the sidewalk, arm around Lacey’s shoulders, as Redstone prodded and kicked the two injured men, making sure they were still alive, and argued with the handcuffed biker. As Jackson stood silently with the blank Lacey watching, the flashing sirens of the ambulance grew closer, and most of the argument was drowned out by the increasing wailing.

  Between blares he heard the man say something unintelligible, and then he picked up Redstone’s reply: “I don’t give a shit; you’re still going to jail! You had a sawed-off shotgun, and that is—” Redstone’s voice was overpowered by the sirens, and Jackson was thankful, as Redstone was probably going to lecture the man on every state and federal law he had broken.

  By now the ambulance had ignored the red light and was passing between the gas pumps and coming to rest a few feet away. Jackson led Lacey slowly to meet the paramedics, who were already making their way to them, and explained what had transpired and that they would probably need at least one more ambulance and a coroner. As one EMT approached to lead Lacey into the ambulance, she had to be pulled away from Jackson; she opened her mouth as if to protest but made no audible sound. Jackson watched her with sympathetic eyes until she was out of sight behind the vehicle, and he told the remaining paramedic to speak to Redstone about what they should do now. After a few minutes of standing around and doing nothing while the officials took care of business, Jackson headed to his truck, unsure of where he should go.

  Redstone turned as he heard the truck crank, jogged over to the driver’s side, leaned his arms onto the open window, and asked, “Where you goin’, man?”

  “I don’t really know, but I wasn’t much use out there, so I figured…” Jackson let his sentence trail off, hoping Redstone would finish it for him.

  As expected, he did. “You might as well just go on back to the house. We’ll be busy with this for a while, so there ain’t no need in goin’ over to the station. I’ll call you either tonight or in the mornin’.”

  Jackson knew this couldn’t be by the book, but his friend was just doing him a favor. The past thirty minutes had taken days, and Jackson knew the relief on his face was visible, as he wanted nothing more than to go home and rest.

  As Jackson listened, Redstone said, “Hey, man, you probably saved my life back there, and I just wanted to say…”

  Jackson knew that Redstone wasn’t the emotional type, so he knew he wasn’t going to cry. But Redstone didn’t need to say anything. He would have done the same thing if the tables were turned, so Jackson interrupted with a flash of his hand and said, “You remember that time we found a lighter in the ditch, and you caught Old Man Nixon’s hay bale on fire, and I took credit for it? I got my ass beat, and now you owe me again.”

  A smile grew across Jackson’s face as he spoke, and he could see Redstone’s nostalgic grin and his eyes slipping into the faraway memory.

  During their sixth summer, they had clothes pinned playing cards onto their bicycles spokes to create a mock-motorcycle sound everywhere they went, and after they had been riding up and down the road in front of their houses all day, they came across a battered, green plastic cigarette lighter lying beside the road. Redstone claimed that all bikers carried lighters because they were cool. Before the end of the day, they wandered into (the now-deceased) Old Man Nixon’s field, where Redstone was going to make a cigarette by taking a piece of straw from a hay bale and lighting the end of it. He somehow caught the entire bale on fire. Before anyone noticed the flames, Redstone explained to Jackson how he would be excessively beaten and never get to come outside again. Jackson didn’t enjoy being punished either, but his parents had always seemed understanding, and Redstone eventually persuaded him to take the blame for the fire.

  As Redstone was trying to recall the events of the day after the fire, one of the paramedics pulled him back from his trip down memory lane.

  “Officer Stone?”

  It seemed as
if he had woken Redstone from a dream as the cop pleadingly asked, “What?”

  The paramedic obviously did not notice he had bothered him and said, with no sign of indignation, “The two wounded are stabilized but are waiting for another ambulance, and the young woman is being treated. How should we handle the other two?”

  Redstone pointed to the broken door of the gas station and nodded to the handcuffed man leaning against the raiders’ truck as he said, “Well, that dude is dead. There ain’t no fixin that, and there ain’t nothing wrong with him. So I reckon I’ll stick him in my car.”

  The paramedic seemed satisfied that he had completed his job and moved to the back of the ambulance to check on his partner and Lacey.

  Redstone looked to his left and took a step in that direction as Jackson asked in disbelief, “So…I can just go home?”

  Without even turning his head, Redstone replied, “Yeah. And you should probably ask that girl out. She’s hot.”

  Jackson looked taken aback and said, “She’s in shock, man. Besides, I barely know her.” For Jackson’s entire life, he had had a timid unease around women and always seemed afraid to ask a girl on a date. He knew he wasn’t bad looking and had never had a problem getting a girl in bed with him, but he had never been in a committed relationship.

  Some of his neighbors probably thought he was gay because his buddies came by his house almost every day. But he wasn’t, and he had just as many women coming by—just not normally during the day, and he never kept the same girlfriend for more than a couple of months.

  Redstone smirked as he said, “That’s what a date is for—to get to know her. Hell, I’d do it, but I got kids and shit. Plus, my wife would find out. I better go make things look good before they send somebody else. I’ll call you later, man.” The sound of a distant siren caused Redstone to realize he needed to take some kind of action. He shook Jackson’s hand, moved back from the truck, and turned toward the motorcycles.

  Jackson barely got out “all right, I’ll see ya, man” before Redstone had started walking away. Jackson figured there wasn’t anything else for him to do there, so he put it in reverse and turned around until he was almost facing the opposite direction, left the parking lot, and came out to the traffic light, which was red. He didn’t even think about running the red light this time, with a parking lot full of people to his left, so he glanced at his mirrors as he patiently waited. Behind him to the right, he noticed Bobbi Jo standing on the small cement porch of the town hall, obviously preparing to make her way across the road and to the gas station; she always wanted to be in the middle of everything. Behind him at the Texaco, he could see one of the paramedics guiding Lacey into the rear of the ambulance. He couldn’t see Redstone around the corner of the store, but he knew he was probably threatening to mace the uninjured biker as he shoved him into his truck. Now Jackson was just hoping the light would change before those reinforcements arrived, so he could just get out of there before he got involved anymore than he already was. Miraculously, the light changed to green as he caught a glimpse of blue lights on the horizon to his right. He gassed it and began the short trip home. Boy, did he have a story to tell Mama.

  CHAPTER 4

  July 5

  UPON REACHING THE gate to the driveway extending to his and his parents’ homes, Jackson performed the habitual task of stopping to exit his vehicle; opening the iron gate; reentering his vehicle to drive through and stop, leaving enough space for the open gate to close again; and stepping out of his truck once more to close and lock the gate behind him. When this task was complete and he had returned to his truck, he began to travel down the long chert path to his house.

  He knew that his mother was watching through a window. Even without the motion-sensing alarm his father had placed on the gatepost and the several hundred yards of distance between their house and the road, both of his parents seem to be able to always hear any vehicle that approached the property. Jackson mused on how these driveway alarms, placed at every gate, had made it extremely difficult for him to sneak out as a teenager. He would have to sneak out of a window, make his way across fields using only moonlight as a guide, and jump the fence somewhere in the woods to be certain he would not activate one of the motion-detecting floodlights his father had randomly secured along the fence line closest to the road. Now he found it funny that he and his friends had thought it was so cool to sneak around and drink a few beers.

  Coming to a turn in the single-lane chert drive, he pulled the wheel to the left without making a full stop, and his tires glided inches off of the official driveway onto a dirt patch caused by his customarily doing this every day. Since he had been sixteen, his mother had threatened to scatter nails in the grass to teach him how to drive and “stop ruining my yard.” For all of Jackson’s life, his mother had been as much of a homemaker as possible. She was a transcriptionist for a local doctor, bringing the dictations home with her; kept an immaculate garden; was proficient at pressure canning; and had even taken care of the two chicken houses formerly on the property while Jeff was working during the day. Originally there had been three long, narrow chicken houses standing where Jackson’s house was now and continuing in a row, side by side, with about ten yards between each, with the cascade ending where the old chicken house/shop was located. Sometime during the early ’90s, two of the structures had been leveled and replaced with newer, more advanced buildings, and chicken houses were a fixture in Jackson’s life until about six years ago, when the two newer ones were struck by lightning and burned down but left the shop completely unscathed. Though it had been a horrible event at the time, maybe it was for the best because Jackson liked the position of his house.

  The old chicken house was almost directly in front of Jackson’s parents’ house. It blocked the view of the road from certain windows, and the silhouetted footprints of the destroyed buildings were still visible on the ground when the view was not obscured by rows of planted corn. Almost every acre that wasn’t fenced-in pastureland was used for growing some type of vegetable crop.

  Jackson drove down the single lane that passed his parents’ house and drove directly toward the strip of driveway that he considered his. His parents’ house did not face the road but faced the driveway, to the west. The driveway was once a dirt road that cut through the land, but it had become nothing more than a driveway decades before Jackson’s birth, when the simple wooden bridge that crossed over the small creek was washed away. If one knew what to look for, the remains of the bridge were still visible, and even though it would be impossible to squeeze a vehicle between all the trees in the woods that had grown since the road became unusable, hints of the old road were still visible in certain places.

  Even though the house had only two windows on the side nearest Jackson, he always knew his mother would be standing at one and watching him intently. When he was two years old, Denise became pregnant for the second and last time. After months of planning for and finally finding out that they were having a boy, Denise began having complications with her pregnancy and Jeff was forced to take her to a hospital. Within a week they discovered a problem, which caused a miscarriage, and Denise had been told she would never be able to have a baby again. Jackson was so young at the time that he could not remember many of the details now, but he did recall that his parents were sad for months. There never was a little brother, and he knew, almost thirty years later, that it was still a raw subject. And although he was always curious as to the cause of the miscarriage, he left it undiscussed. So because he was the only child she could ever have, she had always kept an eye on him, and he understood why he was “Mama’s baby.”

  ◆◆◆

  The voyage home had seemed to take forever, but Jackson finally backed his truck into the garage, shut the hydraulic door, and jogged up the basement stairs, heading to his room so he could collapse on the bed. But as he entered his bedroom, he heard a soft chime from his still-charging phone, alerting him that he had a voicemail. Deciding it might be i
mportant after the morning’s events, he picked up the phone; flipped it open; pressed one to call his voicemail, simultaneously pressing the button for the speaker-phone; and turned to sit on the edge of his unmade bed.

  His phone went through its normal and irritating speech about having “one new message,” and he was hoping it was going to be a short one as the recording finally started playing. He instantly knew, before the first word had ended, that it was his mother, and he also knew from experience that he should let it play and call her back, or she would be at his door within the next fifteen minutes, asking why he had not gotten back to her. “Jackson, I noticed the fake bullet-hole stickers on your truck, and I think it looks a bit trashy. You probably forgot your phone again, so call me when you get this. I love you.”

  He almost laughed aloud at the thought of his mother believing the bullet holes in his passenger door were stickers, but he knew she would notice something like that and comment on it. Until now he had not had a phone to report the morning’s events to his family and most likely would have forgotten to do so had it not been for this message. So he figured now was as good a time as any to fill his mother in; she would probably call everyone else in the phone book too. He tried to keep the conversation short, first letting her know he was all right and then stating the holes in his truck were not stickers. And with a confused gasp from her, he tried to testify the entire morning to her as best he could. After a lot more talking than he wished for, he persuaded her to give him an hour or two of rest, and then he would be over—even though he knew she would probably be waiting by his door when he woke—to explain everything to her in greater detail. When he eventually got her off the phone and snapped it closed, he was overjoyed to be immersed in silence. Without bothering to remove his shirt or even pull his boots off, he crashed onto the pillow on his double bed and didn’t even remember his head hitting it.