“Aren’t you hungry?” Mari asked him as he stared at the food. Hell, she could eat for both of them, she was sure.
“No, I am,” Jay said, taking a few fries at first, putting his worries away for the moment to get some food into his body. A body that had subsisted on water and Darvon for over twenty four hours now. Yes, there were questions still, but he was hungry, damn hungry he realized when the taste of the fries hit him, and he dove into the meal.
* * *
Ten minutes later, their plates cleaned of all but the smallest crumbs (Jay had even pecked the bun’s wayward sesame seeds from his plate with the moistened tip of his finger), Chloe was back at there table with the check. Jay’s eyes ballooned. He didn’t have a cent on him. All the money from his can collecting the day before was still in the hospital bag with his tattered jeans.
He looked to Mari. “I don’t...”
She reached into her pocket. It was she who had dragged him here, after all. Her hand came out with a pair of bills, a five and another five which she laid atop the check as she smiled sweet-sweet-sweetly at the rude and sour face of their waitress, who left shaking her head.
“Is she always like this?” Mari asked.
“I never notice,” Jay answered, and he hadn’t. Usually in here he avoided looking at anything. Lest that anything be a gathering of tails. But now, did he have to worry about that anymore?
“Do you feel better?” Mari asked him. “About all of this?”
Jay thought for a minute, his face belying the fact that, if he did, there was something still not sitting right with him. “If it’s true, and I do think that you’re right, that I didn’t kill anyone after all, then I can’t settle myself with why it would end now. Did senseless death decide to take a holiday?”
Now Mari’s expression changed, cooling a bit. She had been so enamored of the beauty of her discovery that what remained in its wake had not occurred to her. “I didn’t think about that.”
“You said something about there having to be more to this. Maybe there is still more.”
“What, though?” Mari asked, looking away from Jay for a moment as Chloe the sourpuss brought her her change. She reached for it, ready to leave just a nickel for a tip (a too generous tip at that, she thought), when Jay’s hand wrapped suddenly around her wrist. Her eyes snapped back to him and saw that his face had tensed, all the muscles about it edged at some readiness, and his tired green eyes were gaping at the...
...at the change.
She looked and saw it, too.
The nickel she’d planned to leave Chloe as a tip, it was a head. As were the nine coins that lay with it.
Thirty Five
Mile Marker One
“Jay,” Mari began warily, “the really, really insane thing is happening.”
“I know,” he said, letting go of her wrist and gathering the coins into his fist. He held it up a bit and let them all fall.
Mari sucked a fast breath when she saw that the nine coins, the three quarters, one dime, one nickel, and four pennies, had come up heads again when they settled after the fall. “Jay...”
“There is more,” Jay said softly to the coins, his voice almost a whisper. More.
She looked to him, fearful, their moments of pleasant revelations swept away by the coins, by what they could mean. “Heads are good, right, Jay? Heads don’t mean...”
“No,” he said, his voice very even as he stared at the—
70
The number zapped him as it came, a small shudder zipping through his body.
27
But the second one did not, appearing in his knowing as gently as the moon coming from behind a cloud. His attention had been got already.
“Jay?” Mari could see it, see something on his face, in his eyes. In the way his whole body had jumped there a second ago. “Jay, what...are you seeing something? It’s not bad, is it?”
56
Another number came.
287
And another.
40
And...
846
0001
...more.
Jay shook his head, mildly stunned by what had come. By the number of numbers. How many numbers had come? Six? No, seven. Seven numbers that he could still see. Still see, yes, but how long could he remember them?
“Mari, do you have something to write with?”
She instinctively patted her pockets, though nothing of the sort useful for what he was requesting was there. She needed a pen, or a pencil, and something to write on. Something like...
She scooted fast out of the booth and ran to the counter where the waitress stood with her back to the room. “Hey!”
Chloe turned around, surprised.
“Give me your pen.”
“My pen?” Chloe reacted, glancing down at the Bic clipped to her apron. “Now why would I give you my heyyy!”
Mari had already tired of the incensed refusal that had begun and would surely drag on, so she simply reached over the counter and snatched the pen for herself. “Back in a jiff, love.” She blew Chloe a loveless kiss and hurried back to the booth.
“Okay, Jay. What?”
“You have something to write on?”
Noooo, but... She looked around, hearing dear old Chloe complaining to the cook about some bitchy little customer with that crazy guy, and decided one of the throwaway menus tucked behind the salt and pepper shakers would do. “Got it. What am I writing?”
“Seventy.”
“Seventy,” she repeated. A number. It was a number. He had said something about seeing numbers. Her mileage, her age, and he saw them when heads came up. And with these heads there was another—
“Twenty seven.”
“Twenty seven,” she wrote, thinking more than just one, obviously.
“Fifty six.”
“Fifty s—”
“Two eighty se—”
“Slow down,” she told him, and finished writing 56 on the back of the menu, right next to the beverage prices and the warning that the management would not be held responsible for lost or stolen articles. “Okay, two eighty what?”
He went through the rest, 287, 40, 846, and the strangest one, 0001. Mari wrote them all, and when she was done she looked to him. “Any more?”
Jay picked up the change again and dropped it. The nine coins scattered randomly, heads, tails, just ninety four cents laying on the table.
“It’s not heads anymore,” Mari said.
“We got what we’re supposed to have,” Jay explained. “Their job is done.”
Mari looked down at the numbers scrawled on the back of the paper menu. “This is all new to me, Jay. Would you mind telling me what we got?”
“We got numbers.”
“I see,” she said, nodding, scanning what had been ‘gotten’. “What do they mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said, now uncomfortable in that state of ignorance. The last time he hadn’t known what the coins meant he was just about killed. And now, with these seven numbers, what was the thing they were pointing to?
“Am I supposed to go out and hit some more people?” Mari asked him, a bit of gallows humor to cut the mood. She clicked the pen shut and held it up in the air. A few seconds later she felt it snatched away without ever seeing Chloe approach.
“They mean something,” Jay said. “They always mean something.”
“Almost any something,” she said, taking a good long gander at the numbers. “I mean, I’ve seen more numbers in the past four months than...” Her eyes came up to Jay, blue and shrewd, like the quiet pulse of a firework’s light just before its thunder struck.
“What?” Jay pressed, after her keen silence lingered on.
“It can’t be that simple,” she said, to him, to herself, to nothing and no one in particular, just a pronouncement of wonder to be taken as it was. “Can it?”
“Can what?”
“Come on,” she said, and slid quick out of the booth, that energy show
ing again.
“Come where?”
She took his crutches from behind the booth and held them ready for him. “C’mon, c’mon. I’ll show you! I’ll show you! Hurry!”
He did, and she had him on his feet and the awkward crutches stuck under his arms as fast as a mother might when hurrying her hobbled child off to school. They made it to the big glass door before Mari stopped and turned back, leaving Jay half in the day’s ebbing heat and half in the air conditioned cool as she returned to the booth. There she scooped up all but a nickel of the change and scooted back to Jay, leading him outside and to her car at the curb.
* * *
She made him stand near the hood, leaning forward on the old crutches that forced a right side list to his posture, and wait as she moved clothes and some blankets and his box of letters around in the back seat until she had what she was searching for.
“Here!” she announced excitedly, showing him the flat and haggard road atlas before splaying it out on the blotched roof of her Honda.
Jay moved close to see just what she was doing.
“I mean, it is so simple,” she said, flipping through the dog-eared pages until she had the place of their presence. She pointed at a spot. “Right here, here we are.”
The tip of her index finger covered the hills south of Plainview. “Okay. So?”
“You haven’t done much driving, have you?” she commented more than asked, her finger moving on the atlas’s page now, along the roving thick lines and thin lines of black and gray and blue and red and green. “Well let me tell you, I’ve done more driving in the past four months than I care to remember. This little atlas, it became like my bible. And one thing I learned out on the road is that everywhere you look there are numbers, and I further learned that every road it seemed had its own.”
“Its own number,” Jay said, connecting it now.
“Look.” She laid the menu to the side of the page, obliterating St. Louis and all of Illinois. “The first number you told me was seventy. Right up here...” Her finger traced back and forth along a thick green line running east/west. “That’s Interstate Seventy. And I’ll bet,” she began, her eyes scanning the page, “that if we follow it out we’ll see a twenty seven.”
“How do you know the numbers are in order?” Jay asked.
“How do you know they’re not?” she countered, her eyes sweeping east on I 70 until the menu blocked her view. “Let’s check this way.” She reached for the menu, but Jay stopped her, putting his hand upon it, keeping it in place. “What?”
He shook his head, and his gaze deepened with a far off look about it. “No. Leave it there. Everything happens for a reason. Go west.”
After a moment she nodded and began tracing the slim length of I 70 as it tracked across the state, then she turned the page and followed it into Kansas, across the Sunflower State until almost its straightedge border with Colorado, and there her finger stopped and she said, looking wondrously up at Jay, “You were right.”
He bent a little closer and looked. Her finger was on the intersection of I 70 and State Route 27 at Goodland, Kansas.
“This is weird,” Mari said.
Jay snorted at her comment. “Now it’s weird?”
She smiled, then turned back to the atlas, a new dilemma rising. SR 27 went both north and south. “Now which way?”
He shrugged. “Your turn.”
She followed the route north, but it seemed to die at the town of Haigler just across the border into Nebraska, no connection with a 56 along the way. So south it had to be, her finger retracing its way until it was zooming across miles and miles of Kansas prairie as put to paper. Almost out of the Sunflower State once more, and then she found it, US 56, just past Elkhart, Kansas, where the grassland became Oklahoma. “Got it.”
Jay looked, seeing that US 56 slanted both south and west, or east and north, one way to New Mexico, the other back through Kansas. But just a inch or so distant on the map—maybe forty or fifty miles as a real crow would fly over real earth—there was the number 287, just short of a place in Oklahoma called Boise City. “There,” he said, his own emotions building at this thing that seemed a quest in miniature, the mystical numbers steering their attention somewhere. “See?”
Mari nodded agreement, her finger marking the intersection of US 56 and US 287. She turned the page and repositioned her mark on the junction, and again the direction question arose—Colorado to the north, or Texas to the south. But it was a question that did not go long unanswered, because enough of the bordering states to the south and west were visible that a fat green line not far to the south in the Lone Star State caught her eye. “Interstate Forty,” she said, and her finger sailed over a corner of the wide Texas landscape down to Amarillo, where US 287 met up with the mighty I 40, cutting west and east across the page. “See it.”
“Right,” Jay confirmed, and put his own touch to the spot now, hopping still closer on his right leg and keeping that side’s crutch wedged in the crook of his arm. “And on to eight forty six.”
“Eight forty six,” Mari repeated. “East or west?”
“I don’t know. Try west. We could have just come south to get anywhere east.”
She looked sideways at him. “You sure it works that way?”
“I don’t know how it works. This is as new to me as you.” And he thought, ‘two halves of an equation’, her plus him. He had the numbers, she recognized what they were. And at the end of where they were pointing, was that the equation’s answer?
“Okay,” Mari said, and traced out along I 40, checking each intersecting route, highway, road, river, stream, flipping several pages over until the Interstate terminated in the desert near Barstow, California. “Well, it’s not west. “ So back to Amarillo it was, then out of Texas and across Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and into Tennessee. When her finger reached Nashville she stopped, shaking her head at the map. “This doesn’t seem right.”
“No eight forty six?”
“No, and it’s like all the way back past Missouri.” She tapped her finger on the home of the Grand Ole Opry, thinking, something not sitting right about the number either. “And there’s another thing—have you ever seen a road numbered that high?”
“A few,” Jay said. There was a county road 999 not far from where he’d grown up, and every once in a while some high school kids would go flip its sign upside down just to freak people out. And others, he could vaguely remember. But she was mostly right, it was an awful high number. Almost out of sync with the others. And then, of course, there was still that zero-zero-zero-one, which no way was a road. They still had to deal with that.
“I can’t remember seeing one that high,” she told him.
“So you think it’s not a road?”
She thought for a moment, then nodded, agreeing with her gut. “I think it’s not a road.”
Jay turned the pages back to their last point of reference, where the 287 and the 40 met in the heart of Amarillo. “Something in Amarillo?”
Mari stared at the map, at the roads and highways and interstates lacing a web of colors across the page. She focused finally on Amarillo, looking for a number on the map near it. Maybe a road that didn’t intersect I 40, or a hill elevation, or something, but there was nothing like that, just those damn little red numbers between each mileage tick......
“Mileage,” she said aloud, her head snapping toward Jay. “It’s the mileage! The mileage of the route on the map! Look!”
He saw the small red numbers, but they accounted for only the mileage between points on the map. “How do you know?”
“It has to be!” Mari said excitedly, then bent and pushed half of her body through the open passenger window of her car and reached into the back to take something from Jay’s box. When she was standing again she had a pencil in hand. “Watch!”
She hunched over the map, working her way backward from the spot where US 287 and I 40 came together, tallying the mileage ticks up every fifty miles or so and notin
g them on the back of the menu. Back through Oklahoma, and Kansas, and into Missouri she counted, stopping on I 70 just north of Plainview. She combined all the small totals, and frowned at the result. She bit her lip, her gaze shifting off the map and to the hood of her car, and there it came to her. Just like the mileage on her car when Jay first made her tell him, something didn’t add up. There it had been too much, because she had driven since hitting him. Here it was too little, because Plainview was not on the interstate. “How far from here to I Forty?”
“From Plainview?” Jay thought on that. He actually knew it, having asked a trucker once how far a walk up Route 87 it would be, because he had thought that collecting cans and bottles along that stretch of highway might be fruitful. As it was the walk was prohibitively long. Fifteen miles the trucker had told him. Fifteen on the dot. And that was what he told Mari.
She smiled, doing the simple math in her head before putting it onto the now completely scribbled-upon menu, which she showed proudly to Jay. “Eight hundred and forty six! I told you!”
So it was eight hundred and forty six miles from Plainview to the junction of US 287 and I 40. What did that mean? What did that mean to them? Was the answer in the last number, the oddest of the lot? 0001?
“Now this last one,” Mari said, as if reading his thoughts. But she could not do that. Only some bum who’d given him this gift-turned-curse-turned-something could read minds. That and more. “Zero-zero-zero-one?” She looked to him. “That’s no road.”
“It’s not mileage, either,” he told her.
“It doesn’t even sound like anything,” she observed. “Why would you have three zeroes in front of a one? What’s that?”
What indeed? Jay wondered, he and the other half of this crazy equation stumped. Zero zero zero one. Four numbers that were one number. But what kind of number? Well, what kind of numbers were there? Start there. Thee were roads-check. There were miles-check. Odometer readings-check. Ages-check. Years-check. Money-check. Time-check. Temperature-check. Radio frequen—
Time.
“It’s time,” Jay said.
“Time for what?” Mari asked, her eyes glued to that one number noted on the menu that still eluded them.
The Donzerly Light Page 27
