“No,” he said, and motioned so that she looked his way. “The number is time. Twenty four hour time. Military time.”
Her brow scrunched down. What was he talking about?
“My father told me about it when I was little. He was in the army. You know, oh-one-hundred is one a.m., but thirteen-hundred is one p.m.” He waited, and saw some recognition come to her as her forehead flattened and those blue eyes lit up. “Thirteen-thirteen would be one-thirteen in the afternoon. Get it?”
“I get it,” she said, nodding. She had heard this somewhere, too, in a movie or something. Was it Top Gun, or A Few Good Men, or what? The military guys talked like that when telling time. Oh-two-fifty this, and sixteen-twenty-something that. Yes, she did remember. Understand, not really (why couldn’t they just say ‘two fifty in the morning’ made no sense to her), but she remembered. “Yeah. Time.”
“Zero-zero-zero-one,” Jay said to her. “That’s one minute past midnight. The first minute of a new day.”
“Right.” They had all the numbers now, what they all meant! “Right!”
She threw her arms around his neck, hugging him without thinking that he was still basically a stranger. But she didn’t care. They had figured it out! The numbers! They knew what each number meant!
But...
...but not what they all meant. Together.
Mari pulled back from Jay, who seemed a bit stunned by her unexpected embrace. She, though, was simply perplexed once again. He could see that plainly in those perfect blue eyes.
“One minute after midnight, an eight hundred and forty six mile route to where two roads meet Amarillo, Texas,” Mari said, as if reciting evidence in the most baffling of cases. She cinched her sleeves down and crossed her arms. “What does it mean?”
Jay looked at her, and that look was all that it took. That look and all that had happened since she had come. The hit, the letters, the bottle, the coins, and now what they had—or what they had been given. Directions. Directions and more, because there was reason for everything. Even the smallest thing, like a moment. A moment which seemed very clearly now to be a time of departure.
“It means we’re going somewhere,” he told her, and the confusion in her eyes melted away until she was nodding slowly to what he had said.
Eighth Interrogation
August 15...3:48 a.m.
A knock at the door to the small white room stopped Jay right there.
“Come,” Mr. Wright said, sounding the part of a drill sergeant telling an underling to, ‘yes, get on in here, but make it fast’.
The door opened inward, the same door through which Jay had been ‘squired’ to this latest part of the extraordinary thing that his life had become, and in came a man in plaid shirt and casual olive chinos, brown loafers on his feet, looking as if he had been called away from his family dinner to complete some task. He gave Jay a glance, then went to Mr. Wright and held a single sheet of paper out to him, directing his attention to a particular spot.
“No, no,” Mr. Wright said, irritated. He pointed to a different part of the paper. “That’s the one. Look there.”
The man nodded and headed back to the door, giving Jay another quick look before closing it behind.
“Who was he?” Jay asked. “Was that paper about me?”
Mr. Wright settled back where he sat and laced his fingers beneath his chin. “So you were going to Amarillo?”
No answer, Jay thought. Though the man’s demeanor toward him had changed, it was still quite plain who was asking and who was answering the questions. “Not really. Amarillo just happened to be where those two roads met and the miles ran out.”
“And you left at midnight, huh?”
“One minute after,” Jay said, making that correction. Because for everything there was a reason, even that one minute.
“And she just went along with all this? After knowing you, what, a day?”
“Like minds,” Jay said. “Something had touched both of us. Brought us together. Sent us on our way.”
“Two halves of the equation,” Mr. Wright offered, and Jay nodded. “You developed that kind of trust that fast, did you?”
“I think we did.”
The man nodded against his knuckles, but not in affirmation. “Then why didn’t you tell her about Sign Guy? All you said was that someone gave you a gift.”
Jay shifted in his chair. “I didn’t want to talk about him. He was in the past. He’d just given me the gift—I was the one that twisted it all around. Made it different things.”
“You believed that?”
“Then I did,” Jay said.
“So why not tell her?”
“She didn’t ask.”
“I see,” Mr. Wright said, nodding again. “Did she ever?”
“Eventually.”
“But more came before that.”
Jay nodded. “A whole lot more.”
Mr. Wright drew a deep breath and bellied up to the table again. “Okay, then. Let’s move it along. Move it along.”
Jay smiled at his captor’s choice of words. “You sound like her.”
“Mari?”
“Yes. We’d gone back to my place from the Grill, and we packed some of my things, and then she sat down in the chair and I laid down on the bed and, well, I guess we hadn’t gotten enough sleep. Or enough good sleep. My nap at the library turned out not to be very restful.”
“So you nodded off, did you?”
“Out like two lights,” Jay told him. “I woke up to her shaking me, telling me to get up, and that we had to ‘move it along...
Thirty Six
Zero Minute
...move it along, Jay. C’mon.”
His eyes were open, but she was shaking him so strongly that it took longer than usual to focus. “I’m awake. I’m awake.”
Mari let go and ran into the bathroom. She closed the door until just a crack of light stood straight up the jamb. He heard the hard toilet seat come down, and as he sat up and swung his legs over the bed’s edge the soft sprinkling sound of her doing her thing trilled out with the light. He tried not to listen and pushed himself up out of bed, preferring not to use the cumbersome crutches in the sparse confines of his room. What time was it? They had fallen asleep, drifted off like logs on calm waters, neither knowing the other was out, he suspected, since he had no memory of any talk of setting the wind-up alarm clock ticking quietly on the bed table. It had been light the last he could remember, but now the world beyond the stacked panes of wavy glass was yellow on black, the streetlight down the block casting its sallow beam upon the dark night. He looked finally to the clock—11:48. Thirteen minutes to zero hour. Or would it be zero minute? Jay wondered. Or simply their minute. The minute given to them by the heads.
He moved around the bed to the closet as the toilet paper roll spun beyond the door, and the gush of water spilling into the bowl a few seconds later and the faucet running a few after that signaled that Mari was done. From the floor near the closet he picked up the clear plastic sack that the hospital had so conveniently given him, as for the immediate future—a future whose limits he hadn’t a clue about—it would be his traveling bag. Mari had taken his jeans and the change from it, rinsed it, and packed for him an old pair of khaki trousers, some socks and underwear, one pair of shorts, two tee-shirts and one sweatshirt, and tossed in his deodorant stick for good measure. Holding it now, Jay thought the bloated container looked ready to burst his wardrobe for the near future all over the floor. The rubber band round its neck was hanging on for dear life.
“You ready?” Mari asked as she came out of the bathroom, her hair pulled back in that scrunchy thing once again. In her hand she held the roll of toilet paper, more than half full. She noticed Jay staring at it. “Experience from the road—go into any public restroom prepared. The alternative is not pretty.”
Jay grimaced. “I see.”
She held it out to him. “You need to do anything before we go?”
“No, I’m
fine.” He opened the closet and took his jacket from its hanger, slinging it over his shoulder before coming back around the bed to the table beside it. His bottle of pain pills was there, and he popped the top and swallowed just one with a sip of the water left over from his last dosing, when just returned from the grill. More than five hours, it was, and his leg wasn’t too awful bad. Into its own sort of groan, it felt like, some low rhythmic throb aching aloud beneath the plaster cast. Not bad at all, he thought, and closed off the bottle and slipped it into the pocket of the jeans he’d changed into before laying innocently down much earlier. Not sleeping attire, to be sure, but then he hadn’t intended on dozing off. Hadn’t six hours at the library been enough? Apparently not, it was now clear.
“We have sixty three dollars and twenty nine cents from you,” Mari said, zipping the fanny pack she’d retrieved from the car before their unplanned nap. “And a hundred and sixteen dollars even from me...plus anything that’s in my ashtray. That should be enough.”
“To Amarillo, sure,” Jay said, and reached for his crutches.
“You don’t think it’s going to end there?” she asked, coming up to him with the fanny pack and the roll of TP in hand.
“Mari, I don’t know if there is an end to this, and even if there is, I’m not sure I’d know what it looks like.”
She looked at him firmly, reassuringly, and said very wisely, “It won’t look like heads or tails, is what I think.”
After a second’s consideration of that Jay nodded. “You may be right. But what about you? What’s at the end of this for you? What makes things right for you?”
She didn’t even have to think on that, the answer formed months ago in the infancy of her travels. “Some purpose, some reason. For me living more than for my family dying. If I can get to Amarillo, or anyplace past that, and know that I lived for a reason, a good and true reason, then I can go on.”
That was a tall order, Jay thought. He wondered if the coins would, or even could, deliver. If not, then this woman with the bluest eyes he’d ever known had been dragged in the cruelest ways into something she might not be ready for. He hoped it was not that. He hoped that for this thing there would be a reason, that good and true reason she was looking for. God, he hoped for that with all that he was.
Mari looked past him to the clock. “Eight minutes. Should we synchronize watches?”
It sounded like something out of a bad war movie, where the commandoes were just about to blow up Gestapo headquarters. But, Jay had to admit, it did make sense. If this journey they were about to set out on required a precise starting time, then that pointed to ‘time’ being important. Why that was, he was fairly certain they would find out. He held his left arm out and twisted it to put his wrist by her right, their watches aside each other, both of the old but familiar clock face type, with hour and minute and second hands moving at their individual paces. Except...
“Jay, do you see that?”
“Yes,” he said, his left arm against her right, their watches touching, hour and minute and even second hands already in sync. In perfect sync, the slender second hands ticking in precise, exact rhythm with one another.
“Spooky,” Mari commented, and pulled her hand away, cinching her sleeve down again.
“I guess it’s supposed to be us,” Jay said, tucking his bag o’clothes under his left arm now.
“I guess so,” Mari agreed.
Jay looked back at his room, in a way that made Mari believe he was thinking he might not be back there again, but it was not that at all. This was just a place, and he had nothing here, just three bags of bottles that hadn’t yet been cashed in. It was just a waypoint on a longer, sporadic journey, he realized. Not a place he had run to, but that had beckoned him. So that ‘one minute past midnight’ could happen.
“Would you turn off the light?” he asked Mari, and she did, and then they left, she helping him down the steps as the door to his room clicked shut behind.
* * *
They put Jay’s things in back and stood on the sidewalk and stared at each other, the dilemma obvious to both of them. Who was going to drive?
“I’ll take first shift,” Jay said, holding out his hand for the keys.
“You’ve got a broken leg,” Mari reminded him.
“Left leg,” Jay countered. “It’s an automatic.”
“How long has it been since you’ve driven?”
“Over eight years, but the gas is still on the right and brake is still on the left, isn’t it?”
“Do you have a license?”
“You’re worried about legalities?”
She considered that, but still shook her head. “No. I can drive us.”
“Those directions we have don’t hint at anything approaching a stop until Amarillo, so my guess is we’re supposed to go straight through. Eight hundred and forty six miles, Mari. I don’t think the point of this trip is for one of us to kill both of us because they got tired and drove into a ditch.”
She considered that, too, but this time acquiesced. Partly. “I’ll take the first shift.”
“We switch in a few hours, though, okay?”
“Okay.” She opened the door for him and stowed his crutches across the clothes and blankets and other necessities of the road, then waited for him to find a comfortable position in the semi-loose right front seat. Once he was in she hurried around and got behind the wheel, checking her watch. Two minutes to go. Time enough for one last thing, she thought, and twisted her body to reach to the back seat and fish something from Jay’s box of letters. When she was facing the wheel again she had a yellow legal pad and a pencil in hand.
“What’s that?” Jay asked, inquiring not about the pad but the writing, masses of tight, fast scribbles, upon its front page.
“I made some notes,” Mari said, flipping that page back, and the next one, and on and on, until she reached a clean sheet. “At the library I wrote down all I could find out about the things in your letters. My own little research project.” She looked to Jay. “It was funny. Remember Paul? Well, I asked him if I could have a few sheets of paper, and he brought me three whole pads. And a box of pencils. Can you believe that?”
Jay grunted. “So what are you doing with it?”
“A new project,” she said, then squinted at the odometer to record their starting mileage, 25,572, and the moment they would depart. Then she stuffed the pad between the front seats and put the pencil in a hole in the dash where the knob for the A/C had been. “Keeps it handy,” she told Jay, then put her key in the ignition and started the car. Or started the car sputtering, as it were. Sputtering and coughing, the old motor surging and finally settling into a loud, spastic beat, sounding afflicted with some human respiratory condition almost. “It’s better when it gets moving. It doesn’t like sitting still.”
Jay checked the time. “Fifteen seconds.”
Mari put her foot on the brake and shifted to D, flipping her headlights on as an afterthought. “Say when.”
The seconds receded, ten, then five, then two, and then one. “Now.”
Her foot came off the brake and eased down on the gas, the aging Honda stuttering away from the curb, a dark cloud of exhaust tinged to brown by the yellowy streetlight unfolding behind it. At the end of Jay’s block, where Todd Street and Groveland Way met in an intersection controlled by four flashing red lights, Mari slowed but did not stop, and made a U turn to head back toward Wells Road, which would take them to Traction Avenue, and then to Route 87 out to the interstate. They passed Jay’s home, just a room above a shoe store that had died with the Red Menace, and he did not look at it at all. He only looked ahead, because that was where the tomorrows were.
“Oh, I guess I should mention something,” Mari said as she turned onto Wells, slowing even less at that flashing red.
“What?”
She grimaced unsurely. “It really only does fifty.”
“Miles per hour?” Jay asked, taken aback. They were going to be on intersta
tes, for Christ’s sake. With trucks doing maybe seventy, or more.
“Sometimes even fifty five if the road’s really flat and it’s not too hot or cold,” Mari added. “On the downhill it does great.”
“Wonderful,” Jay said.
She flashed him a cheesy, overdone smile. “See, I knew you’d see it my way.”
They drove on, and were putting west down Interstate 70 just twenty minutes later.
Thirty Seven
Less Than Random Acts Of Kindness
They had putted past Kansas City and almost to Topeka when a white gush of steam began venting from under the Honda’s hood near three in the morning.
“Damn,” Mari swore, quietly, but loud enough that it roused Jay, who had dozed off an hour before.
“What is it?” he asked, waking to the sight of white clouds hissing past the windows. He straightened himself and looked across to the instrument cluster, knuckling the sleep from his eyes. The temperature needle was climbing fast. “Mari...”
“I know, I know,” she said, slowing and steering the car toward the shoulder just past the Y where a small road merged with the Interstate. Litter and gravel and roadside debris churned up by the Honda clicked off its fenders until it finally came to a stop, a haze of steam billowing around it now. Mari turned off the engine and turned on the hazards, and then she gave the steering wheel an angry thump with the side of her fist. “Dammit!”
Jay was surprised by her outburst, and watched her get out of the car and stand to its front staring at the foggy mess jetting from under the hood. She seemed ready to cry, he was certain.
Then, though, she was not looking at the car anymore, and was instead looking over the roof of the Honda to something beyond it as a white glow grew on her face. She wiped her eyes as Jay turned halfway in his seat and saw what had stolen her attention. A car was coming up the small road that merged with the interstate, and even past the harsh beam of its headlights he could tell that it was slowing and that its four-way flashers had come on. It glided to a stop a few lengths behind the Honda, and Jay got out as Mari came to his door.
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