They both began to look, up one street from the intersection and down another, and it was odd but not unimaginable that at the same instant they saw what they did. And then each looked to the other, and it was plain that their old young friend Astrid had played the part given her quite well.
“Buncha Burger,” Jay said, looking back to the glowing front of the fast food place just up the block.
“Buncha Burger,” Mari agreed, and they headed that way.
Forty Four
A Bag From Julio
They took a booth by the window and ordered burgers and fries, and they ate and they waited as they had outside the taco stand in Amarillo. They waited, but nothing came.
Jay popped another Darvon when the pain started humming again, downing it with the last of his soda.
“It still hurts?” Mari asked.
“Like a you know what.”
She sipped from her water and paid when the check came, and she could see Jay’s face grow tired and knew what he was thinking. When the change came back on that small brown plastic tray, it was going to be heads and it was going to say, get a move on. And when would that end? she knew he was wondering, and now she was beginning to wonder the same thing as well.
The change came back and the waitress took their plates, and when they looked they could see six shiny dimes, each one of them heads.
Jay’s brow furrowed at what he saw in them.
“What is it, Jay?”
“Two numbers,” he said, and she took the folded trip record from her pocket.
“I need something to write with,” she said, but Jay reached over and put his hand on her before she could get up.
“It’s only two,” he said, and two was...different.
“Just two?” she asked, the oddity of that striking her. Time, miles, and roads. That was a minimum of three. At least it had been all along. So if now it was different then... “Jay, this could be it.”
“Maybe,” he said. Wondering. Especially if one of the numbers was what he thought it was.
“What are they, Jay?”
“Zero five hundred,” he told her, marking an early start the next day.
She nodded. “And.”
“One thousand five hundred and fifty.”
“One thousand five hundred and fifty?” she repeated. What could that be? Mileage, sure, but which way. North? South? West? East?
“Mari, how far have we come so far?”
She looked to the record she’d been keeping, then back up to him before really checking as she got it, too, and then she did verify what they both suspected it was. “One thousand five hundred and fifty miles.”
He nodded. “It’s taking us back, Mari. Back to Plainview the same way we came.”
“But why?” she asked, almost pleading, this making no sense at all. None. “Why come all this way just to go—”
“Hey, buddy.”
The man’s voice came from the booth to Jay’s back. He turned from Mari and looked that way, catching sight of long stringy hair and the top of a denim jacket. “Pardon?”
The man turned halfway where he sat to look at Jay now, showing both he and Mari a face that looked like it had been put through a combine. Half of it was a hollow gouge, scars stitching shinily up the valleys that formed its landscape. His left eye protruded severely from lids that seemed more like lips sucking it into his skull, the whole socket in which the organ was set just an irregular blue bump that looked as if it had been pasted upon his head by some haphazard creator. Half his mouth was stuck shut, grafted that way, Jay thought, and when he spoke it came from the right side like talk from the snappy gangsters of old.
“You’re late.”
“What?”
“Julio said you’d be here an hour ago, man. An hour. I’ve been sitting across at the Dairy Queen waiting for an hour, man.”
Jay almost protested further, but knew he should not. This man bore the mark. He was part of the play. “I’m sorry.”
The man looked nervously around, then back to Jay. He eyed Mari suspiciously. “Julio didn’t say nothing about no broad, man.”
“She’s okay,” Jay said. “She’s with me.”
Again the man checked his surroundings. It was clear he was uncomfortable, maybe even paranoid. As he was looking toward the waitress at the register he said, “You ready?”
For what? Jay wondered, himself quite nervous now. “Yeah. I guess so.”
The man shifted where he sat, and began to stand, and as he did one of his hands slipped over the back of the booth and dropped a paper bag on the seat next to Jay. He walked off slowly, nodding to the waitress at the register, and then left into the night.
Jay looked down at the bag, which had thudded firmly on the cushion. Something heavy was inside it, a suspicion that was confirmed when he picked it up but kept it low on his lap, out of view.
“What is it?” Mari asked.
Jay himself looked around now to make sure he wasn’t being watched, and then slowly peeled back the fold at the top of the bag and parted the sides. He stared at what it contained and said nothing.
“Jay, what is it?”
He looked up to her, his heart racing, this whole thing something very new once more. Something new, and terrifying. “It’s a gun.”
Tenth Interrogation
August 15...4:43 a.m.
“The car was ready at ten thirty,” Jay told his captor. “We put the gun in the trunk and parked on a little residential street and slept. Well, Mari slept. I couldn’t. I couldn’t think about anything but that gun, and what it meant. And what we were supposed to do with it.”
Once more, right then, there came a knock at the door.
“Come,” Mr. Wright barked, seeming annoyed at this second interruption when it appeared some end was in sight. The same man as before came in, holding a single sheet as before, and he held it in front of Mr. Wright and didn’t even bother pointing to it. And as he held it there, Jay felt the weight of the man’s gaze upon him. An almost fascinated gaze. But why would it be that?
After a moment Mr. Wright took the paper from the man’s hand and studied it, slowly, with great care, as if in awe of some great revelation of the universe—the unified field theory completed, or even the explanation of how the bumble bee took flight. And when he seemed to have finished he looked to Jay, for a long time just looked at him, and then up to the man who had brought him this document. “Are we sure about this? It’s been checked? I mean, checked?”
“It has,” the man said, never taking his eyes from Jay.
Mr. Wright folded the paper in half and slipped it into the file, then said to his underling, “Unhook him.”
The man came around the small table and stood over Jay, who hadn’t connected what was being said. “Your hands.”
Jay brought them up, and watched, bewildered, as the man took a small key from his pocket and removed the handcuffs.
“Thank you,” Mr. Wright said to the man, who left with the open cuffs jangling in his grip.
Jay rubbed each wrist, massaging the gouges pressed into the tender flesh. He was no longer bound. But what did that mean? Was he free to go? Or free to continue?
This man had been hard, and this man had tested him, but he also had listened. And listened to it all. Almost all.
“Do you want to hear the rest?” Jay asked.
“If you’ll tell me,” Mr. Wright replied, and that was just what Jay did.
Part Three
The Sign
Forty Five
Home Stretch
They took turns driving, and only stopped for food, and gas, and when nature called. The Honda was still the Honda, top speed of fifty, maybe fifty five in the cool night hours, but the mechanic in Skipjack seemed to have taken care of whatever the car’s ailment was. The only true problem besides speed was a headlight, the left one, which had apparently gone out—maybe in the short off road nightmare Jay had taken them on—and which got them pulled over in Texas by the High
way Patrol. The officer warned them of the defect, and accepted their assurance that they would have it fixed as soon as they returned home. He didn’t order them from the vehicle, didn’t ask for a license from Jay, who was driving, and never knew that there was a gun in a paper sack in the trunk.
Spooky, Mari might have termed that encounter, but ‘spooky’ didn’t seem to cut it anymore. Things were beyond that, now. With a gun in the trunk and orders back to Plainview, a feeling of imminence had set upon both of them. They hardly talked, but as they putted back across Kansas just before noon on Thursday, nearing Topeka with Mari at the wheel, she up and tossed a question at her companion of the past week.
“Jay?”
He was gazing out the window, taking in the sights of the farms that would soon give way to the buildings of the state’s capital, and he was trying to recall how it had looked when he was a boy. His home, a place not unlike this, wide and open and busy, but unhurried. And he had left that. He had chosen to leave that, to go to the big city, a place where he had made his fortune and seen both his dreams and his nightmares come true. A place where all of this may have started, and it puzzled him now why he had ever gone there in the first place, and he found it very interesting the next moment when Mari went ahead and asked what she was going to ask.
“Where did you get your gift?”
He looked away from the green and gold prairie to Mari. He hadn’t told her more before, that first night when making his confession, just saying that it had been given to him, though he could have explained it all. Maybe he hadn’t because he feared then it would make him seem just that little bit more crazy, enough to drive her away. And maybe it would have; he would never know. He simply had glossed over it, and she hadn’t asked. But now she was. Well, she had bared her scars, so he could bare his.
“I gave a bum some change,” he began, and talked all the way through Topeka and almost to the Missouri border. When he was finished, Mari smiled at the road ahead for a long time.
“When you were a kid, did you believe in magic?” she asked just across the Kansas River as they entered Missouri after a nearly a week away.
“Sometimes. I had one of those magic sets that guy sold on TV. Do you remember those?”
She nodded, reminiscing nostalgically. “I remember.”
“It didn’t work,” Jay told her. “But I kept trying. I spilled more milk in that newspaper cone than I probably ever drank.”
Mari snickered. It was good to laugh, especially now. Their destination was ticking closer, mile by mile, and who knew if they’d feel like expressing joy at that point. The gun in the trunk didn’t point to such a resolution at all, she thought.
But for now, until that other moment came, they had this. They could talk. And even feel happy.
“I never thought I’d believe in magic when I grew up,” she told him.
“You can’t call this magic,” Jay said. “You can’t call it anything. It just is.” He straightened quickly in his seat, adjusting his leg and biting through the pain. The Darvon was gone, but it had left the hurt behind. The best he could do was not think about it. The endless fields and thoughts of Wisconsin had been distraction enough, but now he needed more. Talk. Just some talk. “Tell me something.”
“What?” Mari asked.
“Anything. Just tell me something. Something happy.”
Something happy. That was a tall order, she thought. The happiest times in the last six months had been in this car with the man who was asking. Strange times, sure, but often happy as well. Did he want to hear about that? Noooo. So she went back, aiming farther than the time where her life had stopped and then started so darkly again, but to her amazement her recollection did not reach so far before those terrible moments. Barely an hour in fact. But still it was a happy time.
“You know, my husband, he could debate about the stupidest things.” She sniffed a laugh and shook her head slowly at the traffic heading out of Missouri’s half of Kansas City. “On the plane, you know, before...”
“Sure,” Jay said, listening intently now as she began to share, and share something he had no inkling would come forth. He was thinking he might hear stories of her high school prom or the like, not a vignette from the short while before her world was torn asunder.
But then again, if there was a good moment then, wouldn’t that be one likely imprinted with the greatest force in the treasure chest of memory?
“Well, they were showing a Three Stooges episode on the flight, and you know how at the end of things like that, whether it’s a movie or a TV show, or whatever, they put the little copyright thing, and the year. Well, Charles would always go off on that. Just rant and rave and demand some sort of explanation from whoever happened to be around right then—usually me—why they had to use Roman numerals.”
Jay chuckled at the silliness of it. “Why did that make him nuts?”
“He’d say, ‘Why don’t they just use numbers, regular old numbers, or did we get taken over by Rome or something?’ It was hilarious to see him like that, because there was no cooling him off. He wouldn’t have been happy until the United Nations abolished every I, V, X, C, and whatever else there was in favor of ‘real numbers’, as he put it.”
“L and M, too, I suppose.”
“L is, what, a hundred?” she asked.
“L is fifty,” Jay told her.
“Charles hated L and M, too. M is five, right?”
“No, M is a thousand. You’re thinking of V.”
“Right. Well, Charles hated them all. I bet if he could have he would have volunteered to erase every Roman numeral from every movie ever shot and write in his ‘real numbers’.”
“Mari,” Jay said, and waited for her to look his way. “You were married to a nut.”
“Tell me about it.” Her cheeks puffed and her eyes brightened at the brake lights ahead. “He was a good nut, though.”
To Jay it sounded like he had been. A good and lucky nut to have been with this woman.
“Your turn,” Mari said. “Tell me something.”
“Something happy?”
“No, change of subject.” She bit her lip and tried to think of one, like a child might when conjuring road games during a long trip. “One wish.”
“One wish,” Jay repeated. “One wish what?”
“You get one wish—what do you wish for?”
“Ten more miles an hour out of this car,” he answered, and Mari chuckled.
“No, seriously. One wish. Just one. What would you use that one wish for?”
She was serious, he realized. She really wanted to know. Well, she had shared, and shared freely, so it was only right that he did. And he didn’t even have to think more than a second to know what his wish would be.
“To know why my parents had to die.”
The remnants of happiness drained from Mari’s face and she glanced at Jay. “You don’t know how they died?”
“No, I know that. They died in a car crash. I’d like to know why.”
She looked back to the traffic ahead. “Are you sure there is a ‘why’?”
He shrugged mildly. “For the longest time I believed that it was because they found themselves poor, and that being poor put them at that intersection at the wrong time. But now... I think that was probably an easy excuse to make.”
“What if it was just ‘because’,” Mari proposed.
“At least I’d know,” Jay said, and right then Mari had to brake hard as traffic slowed quick up ahead, the city not all the way gone yet. The sudden motion caught him off guard, and his cast slid forward on the worn floorboard carpet and jammed against the firewall. He yelped in pain.
“Jay, I’m sorry!” Mari said, reaching over as she steered with the traffic that was moving again.
“Not your fault,” he said, and curled up toward the door, pulling all of his body that wasn’t pure hurt right then into a ball. He closed his eyes and listened to the road buzz by below them.
“Why don’t you
nap, Jay. It’s only a couple hours ‘til we’re back. I can take it the rest of the way.” She glanced at him. “Jay?”
But he was already gone, asleep or passed out from the pain, she didn’t know. And she didn’t think it mattered.
But it did, because as they arrived in Plainview those two hours later, just after five in the evening, and as she turned onto Wells Road and then onto Todd, she did not notice—nor would it likely have mattered to her if she had—the upturned five gallon bucket sitting near the curb out front of the barber shop at the intersection of those two strips of blacktop.
Forty Six
Something Old, Something New, Something Dead With Eyes Of Blue
Mari actually had to wake Jay, nudging him hard after they had pulled up in front of the building. She carried most of their things upstairs, but Jay insisted on handling the bag with the gun. When he got it inside he took it out and saw that it was loaded.
“Can I take a bath in that thing?” Mari asked, looking uncertainly at the lopsided tub.
“It works,” he told her. “Some parts just get more water than others.”
She shrugged an ‘okay’ and got clean clothes from her big suitcase, which she’d lugged up to the room rather than leave it in her car, an almost unconscious act she realized once it was laying at the foot of the bed. Like she was staying, or something.
Then again, she’d wondered after that, where was there she had to be once this was done?
Whatever ‘done’ meant.
She went into the bathroom and closed the door almost all the way once again, leaving just that fine line of radiance up the jamb. Jay went to the window and pulled the shade halfway down, and as a week’s worth of stale, heated air scratched at his skin he momentarily considered putting his fist through the lower pane as he had through the Honda’s window on the tracks, except this old wavy glass would surely lay his arm open and make such a red mess that he’d be glad to be dead. But dead he couldn’t be. Dead he didn’t want to be. He looked longingly at the bathroom door and listened to the water run, and Mari hum.
The Donzerly Light Page 33
