by Billie Letts
“No, Lutie. Don’t do this!”
“What’s wrong, little boy?” she taunted. “You scared?”
“You know this is stupid,” he said, but by then she’d brought the Pontiac to a stop and the man, carrying a metal toolbox, was trotting toward them.
He was tall and powerfully built, his frame too large for the cheap leather jacket straining across his chest. He had a shock of curly black hair, and even though it was raining, he was wearing sunglasses.
When he reached the car, Lutie rolled down her window and smiled. “Looks like you’ve got a problem.”
“Yeah. How about a ride?”
Without waiting for a response, he opened the door and slid into the passenger seat behind her.
“My name’s Michael,” he said as he took off the shades and caught Lutie studying him in her rearview mirror.
He was in his late thirties, years older than she’d first thought. And there was something about his eyes that made her uncomfortable.
“I’m Lutie,” she said as she pulled back onto the highway.
“And who are you?” He jabbed a finger into the back of Fate’s head. “You her boyfriend?”
Fate didn’t answer, didn’t turn, just sat rigidly facing front.
“My brother,” Lutie said.
“Where you two going?” he asked.
“Las Vegas.”
“Hey, what a break. That’s where I’m headed. I’ll ride along with you.”
“What about your car?”
“Hell, that’s not mine, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a junker like that, I drive a Jag, so does Jodie Foster, I used to go out with her, did you see Silence of the Lambs, man, I loved that dude who skinned those girls alive.” He spoke in machine-gun bursts, his words ricocheting from one thought to another. “See, there’s some things you gotta know about hitching, little tricks like keepin’ your shirttail tucked in your pants, let your shoulders droop like you’re not expectin’ anyone to stop for your ass, better luck when it’s raining, or finding yourself a stalled car, broke down or wrecked, it don’t matter, then you stand beside it and look real pitiful, you want me to drive?”
“No, uh . . .”
“Why, you think I’d crash this tanker into a slab of concrete, throw you through the windshield, cut off your head, hell, I used to drive race cars, beat Richard Petty out down in Florida in ’96, felt kind of bad about takin’ the title away from him ’cause Rich’s one of my best buds, but he can’t win ’em all, that’s the way I look at it , so I—”
“What race was that?” Fate asked. “The one in Florida?”
“Ain’t but one race that counts down there, the Daytona.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Lutie saw Fate begin to flip pages in his fact book.
“I got out of the racing game after I smashed up on the eighth lap of the Indy, lost a kidney, ruptured spleen, both lungs punctured, broken back, right leg snapped in two at the knee, they said I’d never walk again, they kept pumpin’ blood into me, stopped breathing twice during surgery, let me tell you, once you look death in the face, nothin’s ever the same again ’cause—”
“The ’96 Daytona 500 was won by Dale Jarrett,” Fate said. “You told us your name’s Michael.”
“Like you know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Michael said, raising his voice in anger. “I have the goddamned trophy and they don’t hand those out to losers.”
“Then why isn’t your name here?” Fate held up his book.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s called a book.”
Suddenly furious, Michael pushed himself to the edge of the seat and yelled into Fate’s ear. “You’re a smartass kid, ain’t you, one of those faggy little nerds who—”
Lutie said, “He’s just—”
“And why’s a split-tail like you draggin’ her faggy little brother along with her to Vegas, huh?”
When Lutie didn’t respond, Michael poked her in the shoulder with his index finger. “Huh, why is that?”
“Our dad works in one of the casinos,” she said.
And as quickly as his anger had ignited, it burned itself out. “They won’t let me gamble in Vegas anymore,” he said as he settled back in his seat. “Caught me counting cards at the Golden Nugget few years back, now I even get close to a casino, they call out security, but that don’t bother me none ’cause I got other reasons to be there now, important reasons.”
When neither Lutie nor Fate asked about his “reasons,” he answered the question he had anticipated. “I’m meeting Céline Dion, Wayne Newton, couple other clients of mine.”
Still no response from the front seat.
“I design jewelry for celebrities, Princess Diana loved my work, I had supper with her the day before she got killed, she was a sweetheart, recommended my work to some of the bigwigs in London—Boy George, Ringo, what’s her name—the Mary Poppins gal.”
Lutie and Fate exchanged a glance, but Michael didn’t notice as he fiddled with the lock on the toolbox he balanced on his lap. When he finally opened the box, he was careful to shield the contents in case Fate got curious and turned to see what was inside.
“Now my designs are everywhere, keeps me so busy I don’t have as much time as I need in my studio, the average person like you two has got no idea of what creative energy is.” He leaned across the front seat and dangled a cheap gold chain in Lutie’s face. “Made this for Donald Trump’s fiancée, he wanted something simple, you like it?”
Before she could say anything, he draped the chain around her neck.
“Feels good, don’t it, nothin’ like the feel of gold against your skin, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s . . . nice.”
“Nice? What do you mean, nice?” he snarled, beginning to lose control again. “I don’t make ‘nice’ jewelry, you can buy ‘nice’ in Wal-Mart.” He pulled the chain tighter. “This is quality, twenty-four karat, unique design.”
“Yes. It’s . . . fabulous,” Lutie said as he twisted the last bit of slack from the chain.
“You goddamn right it’s fabulous, I was gonna give it to you, but you don’t deserve it.”
He gave the chain one hard jerk, causing it to bite into Lutie’s flesh, then yanked it off and tossed it back into the toolbox.
Lutie rubbed at her throat where a fiery red welt began to rise.
“You all hungry?” Michael asked while he rummaged in the toolbox. “Huh, you want something to eat?”
“Yeah,” Lutie said. “Why don’t we stop for a pizza?”
“No!” Michael leaned forward again, holding a bruised apple in one hand . . . and in the other, a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
“I just thought . . . well, we might find a Domino’s or Pizza Hut.”
“That’s a lie. What you thought was that you’d run off and leave me at some shitty fast-food joint.”
He leaned close to Lutie, his face two inches from her ear as he tapped the knife blade on her shoulder. “But that ain’t gonna happen, is it?”
Lutie shook her head.
“So, let’s share this apple.”
He cut off a slice and handed it to Lutie, then offered one to Fate.
“I don’t want any,” Fate said.
“What, you think it’s poisoned, that what you think? Hey, let me tell you something, if I kill you, it won’t be with poison.” He threw the apple on the floor, then put the tip of the knife to Fate’s ear. “I’ll do it with this.”
Fate tried to lean away from the knife, but Michael grabbed a handful of his hair.
“But you know what you need more than killing? A haircut.” Then, with a vicious swipe, Michael chopped off a hunk of Fate’s hair.
“Stop it!” Lutie screamed.
Laughing, Michael slumped back in his seat.
Lutie’s hands were shaking so badly, she could hardly hold on to the wheel. Moments later, when she looked in the mirror, Michael was grinning at her.
“When we drive out of this rain, we’ll pull off on one of these county roads and get out and take ourselves a little walk, that’s what we need, some exercise and fresh air, we’ll all feel . . . Hey! Why are you slowing down?”
He sat up then and saw what Lutie and Fate saw. Traffic up ahead was slowing, and as the Pontiac crested a hill, they could see a long line of stopped vehicles and the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances.
“What the hell is going on?” Michael said.
In a single-line lane, ten, fifteen vehicles ahead of them, policemen were walking from one car to the next, speaking to drivers, working their way toward the Pontiac.
Then Michael went into motion. He slammed the lid of the toolbox and was halfway out the door before he said, “You say anything about me to that cop, they come after me, I’ll tell them you’re a couple of runaways in a stolen car.” He ran across the median, darted across the road and down the steep slope of a culvert, then disappeared into scrub brush on the other side.
Lutie and Fate sat in stunned silence as the policeman made his way to their car.
“This traffic’s not gonna be going anywhere for another hour, maybe longer. Follow the car in front of you, drive slow along the shoulder, and we’ll have you out of here soon as we can.”
Lutie said, “Thank you,” but the policeman had already moved on.
“You okay?” she asked Fate, who was looking into the backseat.
“Yeah. But our quarters are gone.”
Lutie pulled into the rest stop shortly after midnight and parked in a row taken up mostly by eighteen-wheelers and RVs. She wasn’t happy about spending the night in the car, but she’d busted Floy’s last twenty-dollar bill to pay for gas, and they still had hundreds of miles to cover.
Fate had hardly spoken since he’d discovered the hitchhiker had stolen their quarters. Lutie didn’t know if he was mad about the money, his muddy book, or the nearly bald spot at the top of his head. And she didn’t ask.
She found two afghans in the trunk of the car, products of one of Floy’s yard sale runs. Fate had covered himself with one in the backseat, and Lutie had used the other to pad the console that divided the bucket seats in the front, but she could still feel the edges of it digging into her back as she fought to find a comfortable position.
Fate had started snoring only minutes after he settled, but she could do no more than reach the edge of sleep before she would be pulled back by the rumble of a big rig pulling in, or the sound of the wind rattling the pines that ringed the parking lot, or the smell of onions that came from the crushed McDonald’s carton in the floorboard of the car.
Down to their last few dollars, she and Fate had shared a hot dog, the only meal they’d had all day, and her stomach was feeling the pinch.
But it was more than noise and hunger keeping her awake.
She knew, of course, that the chance of Michael showing up was next to nothing. She imagined that he was still in Wyoming, more than three hundred miles away. Still, she feared that if she looked in her rearview mirror, she would see his eyes staring back at her, like some scene from a slasher movie.
CHAPTER SIX
LUTIE WOKE UP near dawn when something thumped against the side of the car. She thought at first she had imagined the sound, but then she heard voices.
She raised herself to one elbow and peeked cautiously through the windshield to see a burly woman with magenta hair sitting on the front bumper, a bald man wedged between her fleshy thighs.
While the man worked his hands beneath the woman’s short denim skirt, she unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it open, exposing one heavy, drooping breast. As the man bent and fastened his lips to her nipple, she laughed and, turning her head, caught Lutie staring. Then, looking right into the girl’s eyes, she winked, as though she were sharing a joke.
Ducking down quickly, Lutie flattened herself against the seat, ignoring the console punishing her back as the car began to rock. A regular rhythm at first, then faster and faster, until, finally, the man made a sound like an animal yelping in pain.
Moments later, the woman slid off the car and Lutie listened as footsteps and voices faded in the distance. Still, she waited, not daring to move until she heard the engine of an eighteen-wheeler start up, and when it rumbled past, she sat up in time to see the bald man behind the wheel.
She needed to go to the bathroom but put it off until her bladder just wouldn’t wait any longer. She got out of the car as quietly as possible and crossed the grassy strip to the public toilet. It was empty when she entered, but minutes later when she came out of her stall, the woman with magenta hair was at the sink washing her hands.
She glanced at Lutie in the mirror. “Cheap bastard stiffed me out of five bucks,” she said. “Take my advice, honey. Always get your money up front.” Then she wheeled and walked out.
When Lutie got back to the car, Fate was still asleep, but when she fired up the Pontiac, he roused and sat up.
“Thought we’d get an early start,” she said.
Fate only shrugged.
An hour later, Lutie stopped at a Get-N-Go, where she pumped exactly five gallons of gas into the near empty tank of the Pontiac. Inside, she picked up two cartons of chocolate milk and a package of powdered doughnuts. She had to pay for the milk because the cartons were too large to conceal in her purse, but the doughnuts fit just fine.
She left the station with sixty-two cents and a plan to ration the breakfast, but her plan evaporated five minutes later, and so did the milk and doughnuts.
Fate had stuck with the silent treatment all morning, but after he checked the map and did the math, he said, “We’re not going to make it,” the longest string of words he’d put together in the past fourteen hours.
“Sure we are,” Lutie said.
“Look. We’re getting right around twenty-two miles to the gallon, so five gallons will take us approximately a hundred and ten miles. And as near as I can figure, we’re two hundred miles from Las Vegas. No way we can make it.”
“Fate, why do you always look on the dark side of everything?”
“I’m just telling you.”
“Well, if we need more gas, we’ll get it.”
“How?”
“Haven’t figured that out yet. But I’ll take care of it.”
And she did.
Just before they crossed the Nevada line, with the car running on little more than encouragement, Lutie pulled into an Amoco station in Enterprise, Utah, and pumped ten dollars’ worth of gas.
At the counter inside the station, she put on a very convincing show of having lost the twenty-dollar bill with which she intended to pay. With her voice trembling and tears streaming, she went through her pockets and purse again and again, each time coming up empty. Then, breaking into sobs, she offered to sweep up, take out trash, and clean the toilet—work she had no intention of doing, work she’d never done before.
The clerk, a tiny gray-haired woman wearing a hearing aid, was so moved by the performance that she gave Lutie a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke and the gentle admonition to be careful with her money.
“Great,” Fate said as Lutie returned to the car, where he had witnessed her little drama. “You’re a car thief, an unlicensed driver, a shoplifter. You’ve lied to the police, and now you’re a con artist.”
“You do what you have to do, Fate.” She twisted the cap off the plastic Coke bottle. “That’s what Floy always said.”
“Yeah. And you always took Floy’s advice, didn’t you?”
“No. But I think it’s time to start.”
“Look, Lutie.” Fate pointed first to one side of the street, then the other. All the tension and misgivings he’d been feeling for the past three days were dulled by the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip. “A pyramid! Did you see that?”
Lutie braked suddenly for two girls crossing against the traffic in the middle of the block. Then she got squeezed out of her lane by a taxi that almost clipped her fender as it zi
pped in front of her.
But she was too excited to feel nervous. She had brought them all the way from Spearfish, South Dakota, to this place that was more than she had ever imagined. Flashing neon. Blue waterfalls. Golden gods. Buildings taller than any she’d ever seen. Marquees with the names of stars she’d watched for years. And people—hundreds and hundreds of people jamming the sidewalks. Women carrying bags from Gucci and Prada, men wearing silk shirts, their arms encircling the waists of exotic beauties. College boys drinking from bottles of beer, girls strutting in short leather skirts and flashy heels.
She had arrived in the real world, the world she’d been waiting for.
It didn’t matter then that she and her brother were hungry and broke. Didn’t matter that they hadn’t bathed in days or that they’d had nothing to call home but an old Pontiac. They had made it to Las Vegas, the most glamorous place on earth, the place where her life would finally begin.
“The Eiffel Tower!”
“That’s Paris. I saw pictures of it in a magazine.”
“Maybe that’s where Daddy works. We could go in there and find out.”
“Fate, look at all these casinos. It’s stupid to think we can guess which one he works at.”
“Well, I thought—”
“You just want to go up the Eiffel Tower.”
“But—”
“We’re going to Daddy’s apartment first. If he’s at work, we’ll find out where.”
“And let’s go in and just walk right up and wait till he sees us. He’ll be surprised, won’t he?”
“Get that letter out for me.”
Fate dug out the letter from the glove compartment and handed it to her. She glanced at the address, then at the next red light, she rolled down her window and yelled to the driver of a UPS truck pulled up beside her.
“Hey, can you tell me how to get to 105 Bonneville?”
“Yeah. Hang a right at the next corner. Keep going for seven or eight blocks. That’ll put you at Sixth and Bonneville.”
Lutie didn’t have any trouble following his directions, but when she turned down Bonneville, she felt as though she’d made a mistake.
The street was a hodgepodge of pawnshops, shabby hotels, liquor stores, casinos, and bars.
