“Are you gonna be—” Jay began to inquire, but she was already out the door and a few feet away, bending to look back at them through Mari’s window.
“Thanks a lot, guys,” Astrid said, smiling tightly and giving them a wave before starting away from them.
Mari looked back to Jay, and he to her, both a little stunned by the abrupt departure. Had they done something? To offend her? Anger her? Even just bore her to some state of revulsion?
“I don’t understand, Jay,” Mari said, and he seemed about to reply when his eyes tracked off Mari and out the window. She looked that way as well.
Astrid was back, crouching there, just outside the window, saying nothing, hardly even looking at them, just an awkward glance here and there. After a moment she brought her bag to her front and reached in. She pulled out the fanny pack in which Jay and Mari had all their money and held it out toward the car.
Mari took it, her face sagging in shock, her gaze hurting.
“I saw you pay for gas the last time we stopped, and I...”
Jay was leaning forward now, and a bit Mari’s way to better see the young girl.
Astrid just stood there for a moment, silent, as Mari put the pack on her lap. She had tossed it behind the seat out of habit, the same way she tossed her purse there, only this drive she had kept her purse up front to give the girl more room. She must have just forgotten about the fanny pack.
But Astrid sure hadn’t.
“I didn’t take anything. You can count it if you want.”
Mari stared at her. Just stared at her.
Astrid stood and turned, walking a few feet before stopping and facing the car again. “You know, my real name is Kay Sara,” she said, for some reason that was only apparent to her. Maybe to answer a question asked hours before. Maybe to give something she didn’t have to, to try and make up for what she’d almost done. “My mother named me after some song some old singer sang. Kay Sara Sara, or something like that. Ever hear of it?”
Jay nodded, but Mari did not move. Did not speak. All she gave the girl back was a look, her blue eyes darkened with heartache.
“I’ve heard it,” Jay said, and to that Kay Sara Libby nodded with her wet eyes shining. She looked off toward the sunset and bobbed nervously on her feet. After a moment he told her, “I hope you find a Buncha Burger.”
The girl nodded crisply, biting her lip, and she looked back to Mari one last time, and then she could stand it no more and turned away and walked off into the night.
Mari watched the girl leave, and leave them for real this time, gone.
“Mari?”
She turned, but looked out the windshield instead of at Jay.
“She brought it back,” Jay told her, seeing what she was feeling. Not knowing it, but knowing that something was there. Something he could not understand because he had not known the joy and the pain of having children, and losing them. “She didn’t take it. She couldn’t.”
“I guess it all can’t be a picture postcard along the way,” Mari said, her gaze fixed forward. “Maybe just the end.”
“Right,” Jay agreed, wondering just what kind of ‘perfect’ they’d settle for after all they’d been through.
Forty
Paging Mr. Grady
They sat in the parking lot and waited for almost an hour, giving it time. This ‘thing’ time. Time to give them whatever there was here after nineteen plus hours and exactly, as it turned out, 846 miles. But nothing came their way.
Jay bought them tacos and drinks at the stand right before them, but the change was as random as the sparkle of the stars just winking on in the darkening heavens above.
They ate in the car, and then decided to wait no more. Nothing was coming. Mari’s gut told her that, while it was the coins that convinced Jay. There was nothing more to do. They decided to check into a motel.
Not far up Plains Boulevard they found a place with a vacancy that Friday night. The Dillo In Rillo Motor Inn it was called, its sign a huge gray armadillo whose right eye winked red at the traffic every second or two. Jay parked, and crutched his way into the office, getting a room with two beds on the ground floor. The pool gate was locked at ten, the desk clerk told him, and the TV had HBO and The Nashville Network. No nudie shows, though, and Jay told him that was okay.
Mari closed up the car and gathered their things, and when Jay returned from the office they went to the room together.
It was clean, and quiet, and the air conditioner hummed pleasantly as it fed cool air into the room. Jay showered first, taking care with his cast, and then Mari slipped into the tub, leaving the door open a crack so they could talk as she soaked and Jay stared at the television.
Right around nine thirty she asked a question that Jay at first misunderstood.
“How long has it been for you?” Mari asked from the bathroom. Jay could just see her head, lolled back against the top rim of the tub.
“Eight years,” he said, thinking on it quickly. “I mean, I’ve caught a glimpse of it here and there, but it’s been that long since I really sat down and watched.”
Her head tipped left toward him. “Huh?”
“I haven’t watched a whole show in eight years,” he said again, spelling it out more clearly this time.
“No,” she said, laughing. “Sex. How long has it been since you’ve had sex?” She chuckled some more. “Leave it to a man to mix the two up.”
“What makes you ask about that?” he inquired, wondering if she could see the color of his cheeks from in there.
“A man, a woman, a motel room,” she said, as if checking off ingredients. “It’s only natural.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, and tried to concentrate on some dance show on a network called TNN—that Nashville thing, must be—but that got hard because the girls’ skirts kept flying up as their partners twirled them, or as they twirled all alone in long lines.
“So, how long has it been?”
A woman, a man, motel room, he thought. Maybe that was an equally good reason to not get into the subject. Not that he wanted her, although she was attractive, and he guessed the converse was also a point to accept, that he also didn’t not want her. She was pretty like Carrie had been pretty, only afraid to show it. Glancing at her now, seeing just her head, and the smooth line of her shoulders, and even that one damaged arm as it hung over the tub’s edge, he could tell she was beautiful. Delicate features, like some fine doll, thick hair that shined and shimmered and looked just as good pulled back in that scrunchy thing she sometimes wore as spread free all upon her shoulders. She didn’t have to try to look good, he finally decided it was, because her...allure came from more than what one saw. It came also from what one didn’t see. No unnecessary accouterments, no flashy jewelry, no push up bra. He hadn’t known her when she wasn’t like she was now, but he felt fairly certain that she was not all that different in what she was then. Less damaged, of course, in so many ways, but no less real.
“Jay?” she asked after waiting for a reply long enough.
“What? Sorry.”
She wrung water from the washcloth onto her neck and chest and said, “You don’t have to answer that. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he said, and changed the channel to a local bible thumper show and left it there with the sound turned low. “I just haven’t talked about that in a long, long time.”
He wondered if the way his second ‘long’ had come out was suggestive.
“I understand,” she said. “I just was thinking about it. I miss it.”
Jay nodded at the white-haired man on TV warning of Armageddon and dark angels that would come upon the earth to crush righteousness and the ways of the lord. “I see.”
“Do you miss it?”
So she suspected he wasn’t getting any regularly, was she? Well, she was righter than rain on that one, he thought. Try eight years right. Miss Plastic Fantastic herself had been his last, and he barely remembered that. He’d probably been coked up, and b
oozed up, and all around fucked up. Funny thing about it was, he remembered the drink somewhat more than the screw, and maybe that was because that’s all Christine had been, a convenient pair of perfect legs to wrap around him whenever the urge struck. He’d never made love to Christine, nor she to him. What they’d done was probably even a little less than sex. More like rutting. Scratching an itch. God, he couldn’t even remember kissing her while in the moment.
“Jay?” Mari said again.
“I’m sorry. Do we have to talk about this?”
She shook her head slowly and flipped the tub’s stopper with her foot. The water began to gurgle away. Her left hand reached over and nudged the door so that it almost closed, and he heard her feet slap wet on the tile floor.
A few minutes later she came out in a long sleeved tee shirt and shorts, her hands working a towel over her hair. The preacher was exhorting silently, shaking his bible at the camera. Jay had finally just pressed the mute button.
“Nothing on?”
He shook his head.
Mari finished drying her hair and shook it out, bending full forward so her hair hung down, then standing straight and whipping her head back so that her damp and dark mane flung as a whole and hung down against her neck and back. She sat on the bed and looked sideways at the TV, one hand reaching up to fiddle with something bulging small and hidden by the tee, just beneath the sag of the collar.
“What’s that?” Jay asked, catching her off guard. Her hand came quickly away.
“Nothing,” she said, glancing at him and then back to the TV. Sin, the preacher was mouthing loudly. SIN! It seemed almost a command without the sound.
It looked like a necklace or something, Jay thought, the thing beneath her shirt. Maybe something special from her husband, secreted like her burnt arm had been, and still was. Something private.
And what did it matter, really? Jay decided. People were entitled to their secrets, as entitled as they were to giving them up, if so inclined. He would leave it at that.
But not something else. “Mari?”
She looked to him, hands folded and pressed tight between her bare legs. “Yeah?”
“She could have kept the money, you know.”
Mari nodded, seeming to have settled that subject a bit in her own head. “I know. In a way that might have been easier.”
Jay thought he understood. “She would have been gone.”
Again, Mari nodded. “And just some cliché. A teenage runaway stealing to stay alive. Like this...” And she thought for a moment. “Like this she seemed so lost, so unprepared for what she was doing. That makeup, that look. The way she turned into a regular kid when you got her laughing. She had this armor thing going that wasn’t going to hold up. And that hurt to realize that, because I knew she’d be getting hurt. She was a show, Jay, and she didn’t even know how to start the second act. She should have kept the money and just got on with being what she had to be out there. God knows what she’ll have to do now for food, or a place to sleep.”
Jay nodded, but he had been wrong. He hadn’t understood at all.
“She’ll make it,” he said hopefully, and Mari nodded and bounced up from the bed.
“I’m gonna get a coke from the machine down by the ice. You want something?”
“Seven Up,” he said.
Mari went to their fanny pack where it lay on the immovable dresser and took some change. Half jokingly she turned to Jay and held it up in the air. “Shall I?”
“It’ll come if it comes,” Jay said, and she left to get the drinks. He took the opportunity to ready another Darvon for the fast (he hoped) trip straight to wherever it traveled to deaden his leg. It was doing better than some hours before as he drove, but still that damn ache was thumping. He thought that the cast was doing more harm than good, giving the throb something to reverberate against as it was. And somewhere on their short jaunt across the Oklahoma panhandle he had started to think that, using Mari’s theory about the people he’d saved, he might also have a mark from this ordeal—his leg. Courtesy of her. And as she came back into the room he was going to mention it to her, but he never got the chance.
She had a coke in one hand, his Seven Up in another, and she was looking at him in a funny sort of way.
“What is it?”
“Uh, the change in the machine...I think it’s for you.”
Ninth Interrogation
August 15...4:19 a.m.
“It was for me,” Jay told Mr. Wright. “Six heads just waiting for me.”
Mr. Wright puzzled visibly at something. “I thought you said she took change to the drink machine.”
“She did,” Jay confirmed, smiling a little.
“So why did she get change back?”
Now Jay just smiled, and Mr. Wright opened his notepad and wrote something down. Jay went on as he did.
“That change sent us three hundred and seventeen miles west up Interstate Forty at eight fifty one the next morning to where county road number six joined up with it. We stayed in something I can only describe as an adobe motel hell. We ate Twinkies and made deviled ham sandwiches from stuff we bought in Albuquerque at a stop for gas. The next morning Mari dropped the fanny pack while we were leaving and eight heads showed themselves. That afternoon at three we left Correo, New Mexico, and drove seventy nine miles further on Interstate Forty into the San Mateo Mountains. The grade was hell on the car. It took three hours to get that far.”
“What was there?”
“Edge of the world,” Jay said. “The continental divide. We parked at a turnout and watched the sun go down, and we ate some more junk food and sipped sodas, and we bundled up that night and slept in the car.”
“Comfortable?”
Jay shook his head. “I took three of those pills and I was still in a world of hurt. I just bit down and tried to sleep.”
“Did you?”
“I think I finally drifted off about three. I’m not sure. Whatever time it was I didn’t get to sleep very long.”
“Why?”
“Someone came knocking.”
Forty One
Rousted
The sharp tapping on the window jarred Jay from a shallow, uncomfortable sleep just past six thirty on a damn chilly Monday morning at this smaller version of the top of the world. Frost dusted off from the inside of the driver’s window as he rolled his body flat beneath the steering wheel and brought the seatback up, each tap causing a bit more of the frozen condensation to puff off the obscured glass. Jay breathed and gathered the blanket around his shoulders, a cloud of white rushing past his lips and to the windshield, where a thin film of ice crackled as the warm breath hit it. The tap came again, something hard against the glass, he thought, and finally he cranked the window down just a crack.
A State Policeman stared down at Jay through the crack, standing just behind the front door a bit.
“Good morning, officer,” Jay said, but the officer only made a little rolling motion with his hand—the same way Astrid had when first coming to the car—and Jay obliged by cranking it down all the way. The cold morning rushed in in a gust and woke Mari.
“Jay? Damn, why’d it get so—”
“You folks know it’s illegal to camp overnight at an interstate wayside?”
Mari woke quickly now at the strange, authoritative voice, and looked past Jay to see the officer bending to look in at them. Two slabs of dark, mirrored glass obscured his eyes.
“Camp? Oh, officer, we weren’t—” But Jay didn’t get to explain any more than that.
“Could you both put your hands out in the open and keep ‘em there,” he requested, though the way his hand curled ‘round the butt of the pistol on his hip made it very clear he was not asking. He was instructing.
They obliged quickly, Jay grabbing the icy steering wheel that stung his palms, and Mari sitting awkwardly up without raising the seatback and putting her hands on the dash.
“As I said, camping at an interstate wayside is a violatio
n of the law, and it appears to me that you’ve been here overnight, which constitutes camping, sir.”
Jay nodded. “I just meant that we didn’t plan on this. We got tired.” It was a lie, but better that than the truth and a quick trip to some mental ward. “And we couldn’t go on. It was bad planning on our part.”
“You have Jersey plates. Where you headed?”
“California,” Mari answered past Jay.
The officer looked into the back seat, shining his light there though the sun was already up. Then he looked back to Jay, or in his direction, because where the man’s eyes were aimed was a reflective mystery. “Any drugs in this car?”
As he was about to shake his head, Jay realized that, well, there were. “Yes, officer. Prescription painkillers for my leg.”
The officer’s flashlight tracked the gray dimness beneath the dash to where Jay’s legs were. His cast poked free of the blankets and practically glowed under the beam.
“Busted it recently, did you?”
Jay nodded, trying to keep a pleasant face on. “It’s still clean. I figure another week and I’ll have to put a coat of paint on it.”
The officer’s head bobbed a bit in agreement, then he said, “Could you step out of the car for a minute. Just you sir.”
The urge to ask why was strong, but Jay fought it back. He would do what was requested, and get this over with, and get on the way. Away from here, from this cold place where his leg was aching and a cop was hassling them. From where the damn coins had brought them, bit by aggravating bit. Why couldn’t it just be over and done with? Here, go here, do this, okay, thanks, mission accomplished. Thank you. Here’s your life back. But no. No, it wasn’t like that at all. Wasn’t turning out like that in any way. They were being pushed along, pushed along, teased and tricked along long stretches of American road toward God only knew what. Or when!
“Sir?” the officer prompted, and Jay got himself out of the car, Mari watching worriedly from her seat.
Jay hopped mostly on his right foot as the officer directed him to the back of the car and told him to put his hands flat on the trunk and spread his legs as best he could, with the cast and all. As it was the mere act of putting that hunk of plaster to the cold ground sent a hot spear up his leg.
The Donzerly Light Page 31
