“What’s that?”
“How you came to be where you were.”
“Oh. Well.” She’d already told me that she was from Orange, Texas, right on the Louisiana border and not far from Port Arthur, where I’d grown up. She claimed to be eighteen. She’d ran off about five months ago, she said, following a boy a few years older to New Orleans.
“He was kind of a disaster. Toby. Wasn’t a worse dude I could of hitched on with. He said he knew all these people in the city could get us jobs. And made it sound like he was real connected, like. He was queer, so I thought he was telling the truth. All he ended up doing as far as work was running little packages of dope for some people around St. Roch and the Lower Ninth. Then he has this idea he’s going to like skim off some of it. Cut it, you know. Build up his own stash. This was not a good time for me. One day I don’t see him no more. He doesn’t come back to the room. I don’t know if he died or just had to run off because he’d done something. But he was gone.”
She picked her lip and stared out at the passing night with a face that quivered on the verge of haywire, like a leaf shuddering in a high wind. “Nobody ever came looking for him. I was fed up by then. But I was also almost out of money. He didn’t leave me any. I knew a girl.” She paused again and shivered a little, a spasm jerking down her spine, and she covered her mouth.
“What?”
Her face twisted up, and she began crying. She wiped her eyes and straightened her shoulders. “I knew this girl named Vonda. She was in the same hotel. She told me she worked for herself. She was, well. You know what I’m saying. I didn’t know anything about that stuff, but the way Vonda talked—it was funny. And it seemed kind of all right, because it was even listed in the phone book. Elite Escorts. Like a real business. And she told me, she said, ‘If you do something good, never do it for free.’ Isn’t that funny? It almost makes sense, huh?”
She turned to me. “You know, you remind me of somebody. A dude in one of those bands my stepdad used to like. The Almond Brothers. Some guy on the cover of the record.”
I said, “One of the owners of Elite Escorts is a guy named Stan Ptitko. You ever met him?”
“No. I think, maybe, I might of heard the name a couple times. I mean, I’m still new. Who is that?”
“He’s the guy that tried to have me killed tonight.”
“Oh.”
“You were talking about your friend. Vonda.”
“Yeah.” Her eyes brimmed and the dash lights floated in them. “Vonda was good to me. I met some other girls she knew. This happened real recent, like. I couldn’t make rent. I mean, I was kind of stuck. But—but she—” She shook her head as if denying a charge, covered her mouth.
“That was Vonda,” I said. “In the house? In the bedroom.”
She nodded her head, her small, muscled shoulders quaking.
I let her do that a while.
When she was able to talk she said, “They told us it’d be easy. Just the two of us to work this one dude. Right as he started up with Vonda, them three fellas bust in. And when they came in, Vonda was undressing—I was taking longer—and they . . . They wouldn’t let her put her clothes on. They hit that guy some, until he showed them where something was. Then they just shot him.
“But Vonda—she was naked, like. And we were both freaking out. I never seen anything like that. They. Um. They—” She shook her head again, balled a tiny fist and struck her thigh with it over and over. She had nice legs and I didn’t think she should bruise them. “They took her in the bedroom. They said—they made me sit down. They said they were, they were—” She stuttered badly as she went on. “They said I was the after-party. Oh God—I’m—oh—” She gritted her teeth and clutched her stomach like she’d been punched. “I am so, so glad you killed those fuckers, man.”
“I’m glad too.”
She rubbed her palms in her eyes. She was fine-boned, and even upset she had a rugged toughness that was pure country—a dumb, furious pride I recognized. Then I realized something.
I hadn’t thought about my cancer in a while. More than that, I felt good. Like I was some kind of hero.
Like I had saved her.
And I was also thinking about the idea of luck, and how perfectly I’d shot. How lucky I’d been that they hadn’t found the stiletto or that the trigger hadn’t flipped when they knocked me out and dragged me to the foyer.
I let Rocky cry and dig her nails into her thighs with as much privacy as the truck allowed. I put in a Roy Orbison tape.
Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink black to red and purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was hidden in those shadows.
Refinery towers burned in the night and their trail of bright gray smoke made me picture Loraine sitting on that beach in Galveston, with her head cradled on my chest, telling her about the cotton fields. I wondered what she would think about this.
I’d paid a man to find out where she was, a few years back. She’d gotten married. I still had her new name and address written down, and now and then I thought to go look her up. But it was ten years ago, and I was always too old for her.
Around Lafayette, Rocky had pulled herself together again and her disposition had veered to a kind of excitement that put me on guard. Those quick reversals of mood you saw in women had always struck me as staged, suspicious.
“Where we going now?” she asked.
“I’ll drop you off after we cross Texas. I can drop you in Orange, if you want. You can go back to your family.”
“Uh-uh. I ain’t going back there. You better just drop me off right here.”
“Somewhere else then, if not Orange. But you stay with me till Texas. Those men’ll be looking for you. They’re gonna want to find out what happened back there. You know what that means?”
The way she sank back into the seat I could tell she’d begun to understand how different things were now. “Oh.”
The random lights passed over her face, and her eyes glimmered like the muddy marsh beneath us. She chewed her lip in a scheming way.
“Then let’s go somewhere together,” she said.
“How’s that?”
She twisted sideways, a surge of animation when her legs crossed up on the seat, the skirt tugged high on lean thighs. “Look—you were just saying you’re running, now, huh? And I’m running—you just said, huh? We’re from the same parts, man. Why don’t we just run together a little while and see how it goes?”
The back of my neck grew hot and something caught in my throat, but I didn’t let on. I glanced over at her legs, her blond hair clipped above her neck and crimped into feathery locks, parted around her face, her face sharp and birdlike, with big eyes whose color I still couldn’t locate. She’d reapplied her makeup and still used too much mascara, trying to make herself look older, I guess, but the fat clumps of eyelash made her look more like a kid.
Probably she was the sort of country tail that went nuts if there wasn’t a man around.
“I’m just saying,” she said, ducking her eyes. “I’d feel a lot safer right now if I could stick with you a little while.”
I shook my head. “No way. Jesus. No. Where you think we’d go?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Somewhere on the Gulf? Somewhere with beaches? Corpus, maybe? Or what about all the way west? Huh? California.” She grinned, and it bothered me that she talked like this was a vacation.
“How much money do you have?” I asked.
She drew her face back. “Me? About zero to none
.”
“Ah,” I said.
She squared her shoulders. “You think I want your money, shitkicker? I can get my own bank just fine. I had my own money but it’s back there. In New Orleans. You didn’t ask if I needed to run by my place. You’re the one kidnapped me.” She folded her arms, scowled, tokens of that stupid, spiteful pride, mustered by hard years. “I don’t need your damn money.”
“Then you don’t need me, Rocky. You could disappear a whole lot easier if you weren’t tied to me.”
“Yeah. Disappear.” She shifted her legs and faced the windshield again. “I don’t know. I don’t really want to be alone, all right? Right now—I mean, given everything—I don’t really want to be alone. Okay?”
Red lights erupted in my rearview, crashing out the night like a gunshot or a scream. Sirens. She gasped.
“It’s all right,” I said, but my heart was about to buck out my sternum and I turned the radio off, braked, and drifted to the side of the road. She pulled her purse to her lap and clutched it with both hands.
“Don’t let them arrest us,” she said, and her voice was not soft or scared, but hard and without compromise. “Don’t you let them do it, man.”
But as I pulled to the shoulder the cop flew past us, shrieking and flashing, and it was one of the prettiest sights I ever saw, that smokey’s lights blinking smaller and smaller in the distance.
Our breathing was the only sound then. Her hands unclenched her purse and we started laughing. She had a shrill, hysterical laugh that made her mouth drop open like a trapdoor. I waited till the cop’s lights vanished and then I moved the truck onto the road.
We drove in silence awhile. “There’s no good reason for us to stick together,” I said. I didn’t really know why I brought the subject up again.
What I came to see later was that I was asking her to convince me, to give me an excuse. Like an unmade part of me saw its chance to be born.
She said, “How about, I don’t know, solidarity, man? We’re like partners in crime now.”
“Really, really different crimes.”
“Whatever.” She faced the window and folded her arms. She was done trying to talk me into it, but maybe that was only because she could tell I was easy.
I said, “Tell me why you don’t want to go to Orange.”
Her chin set out and she said, “Don’t worry about it. I got my reasons.”
“Your family still there?”
She rolled her eyes and sighed, “Some.”
“You can’t go to them?”
“We’re not close, man. All right?” She squeezed the purse to her belly and sucked her bottom lip.
“Mother and father?”
“Stepdad. What, dude, are you just going to go digging at this stuff? Come on. What do you care?”
“Take it easy. It’s just your stepfather?”
The forest swayed around the interstate and she crooked her jaw. “Look, if I talk at you because you tell me I have to, there’s no way you can know if I’m lyin’ or not, man. Anyway. So just let it all go, all right? I mean, how’d you get to New Orleans?”
I raised the radio volume and she settled back, but in my head an answer arranged itself. My own history had always seemed arbitrary to me.
I’d worked for Harper Robicheaux in Beaumont since I was seventeen. After he died in ’77, in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, Sam Gino bought into the action. Then Stan Ptitko was pulled in to run the bar. Then later there was no more Sam Gino but his people still wanted to give me work. In the city. That was the answer to how I got to New Orleans.
I thought about that. It was true, but the story didn’t feel correct. It didn’t really explain anything, did it?
I was seven when John Cady got back from Korea, and less than two years later he’d fallen off a cooling tower at the refinery and broken his neck, drunk before noon. I called him dad but as I grew older several things made it pretty obvious he was not my father—our looks, the timeline of my conception. He was always kind to me, though we didn’t know each other long. Around a year after we buried him Mary-Anne dropped off a bridge. She preferred me to call her Mary-Anne instead of Mom, which she claimed aged a woman ten years. They said she jumped, but I don’t believe the people she was with are to be trusted. Then the group home and the Beidles and the cotton fields.
And now I was dying and everything that had ever happened to me was starting to seem hazily important.
Lake Charles transpired after three hours on the road, and the lights beyond the trees grew brighter.
She sat up. “Where are we stopping tonight? How far are we going?”
“I haven’t decided. My main thing was to get out of there. It’s looking like we got away.”
“I think maybe so.”
“I was thinking, it might take a while for them to find out what happened, to figure it out. But when they do—what? It’s not like the cops have our info. They couldn’t give us to the law without screwing themselves. This guy, Stan Ptitko. People know who he is. He doesn’t want this noise.”
“Okay.”
“So if we keep low and keep getting farther away . . . Yeah. We’ll probably get away.”
She nodded. “I mean, though, are we driving to New Mexico or Nevada or what?”
“I don’t know.” Neither of us acted like we noticed that I didn’t argue about her sticking around.
“You know, if you cut your hair and shaved your beard I bet no one would recognize you.”
“I’m aware.”
“I kind of want a drink.”
“I kind of want several. Like a pitcher of single malt.”
She faced me and laid her knees on the seat. “It’s starting to feel like I never needed a drink as bad in my life as I do now.”
“Well, you’re young yet.”
Her eyebrows played in a mischievous, slutty way, too much so. It was a thin mask, because she also looked tired and stunned and close to ruin, and like she was fighting it all by jigging those eyebrows.
The tape had run out and the tires hummed on the pavement. We were almost out of the city and nearing Sulphur, where the long shoreline of refineries looked like Chicago at night. I thought about a couple places I knew in Lake Charles. “You got ID?” I said.
She nodded.
It was slightly unreal, a little dreamlike, as the pavement descended and the trees peeled away onto the bright yellow streetlights of the main drag, Prien Lake Road.
I found a place I’d been to years before called John’s Barn. Kind of small, it had a low ceiling and three pool tables, stuffed with fat women and angry men drinking Miller Lite and waiting for a fight. Lake Charles was one of the easiest places to get your ass kicked on the Gulf Coast. And any place south of here was a white-trash terror camp.
We drove around the gravel parking lot and I put the truck in the shadows under some trees in back. Smoke flowed over the women’s tall, stiff curls like fog around icebergs. The national and confederate flags hung along a back wall above a picture of Ronnie Reagan and his heroic hair. I caught Waylon playing on the juke and laughter and friendly voices chattered around, so it looked okay.
A few people gave us looks, as she was young enough to be my daughter. But maybe she was, for all they knew. The bartender wore the collar of his shirt turned up, and he’d torn off the sleeves. He looked between her ID and her face about ten times.
I ordered a bottle of Bud and a shot of JW.
Rocky stood on her tiptoes and tapped her fingers at the bar. “You got grapefruit juice?” The guy nodded. His mustache was thin and sickly looking, his hair flat and parted like an accountant’s. “What kind?” she asked. “Yellow or pink?”
He reached into a cooler and lifted a tiny can. “Yellow.”
“Cool,” she said. “Let me get a double salty dog, extra salt.” It was the kind of order that can earn you ill will in a place like that, but I saw she had a high-beam smile she could throw out, the kind that could break a scowl. I didn’t much care for
the way he smiled back at her, though.
Everyone at the counter had stopped talking to look at us. They were all drinking Bud or Miller and probably took offense at the hint of pretension in our order. Only a few tables stood in the center of the place and they were all taken, so we went and leaned against a rail along the wall in back.
We finished our drinks in maybe five minutes.
She said, “Four or five more of those and I might be okay.”
“Tell me about it.”
She slid me her empty glass. “Could you spot me? Just for tonight.”
I nodded. But as I walked to the bar to pay for the next round old instincts were already raising my hackles. The first and most useful rule of prison is that you do your own time, not somebody else’s.
Everybody watched me order, and the bartender didn’t make the salty dog with the same cheerful demeanor. When I returned two boys stood by Rocky, leaning on pool sticks and grinning dumbly while she gave them that easy smile and twisted an ankle.
I set the drinks on the rail.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks. This is Curtis and David.”
They were both skinny and rawboned, both wore ball caps low over the flat, narrow faces and small, close-set eyes I’ve always associated with bayou-country inbreeding. I nodded, acknowledged the bitter awareness that flickered across their faces.
“They work at the plants in Sulphur,” she said. “Curtis rides in rodeo.”
“Yeah,” said one, holding out his hand for a shake. “What’re y’all doing around here?”
I shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.” Then I turned my back on them. I could see by Rocky’s face that they were still behind me and I looked over my shoulder.
“Hey,” the one said, “y’all want to play some pool?”
“No thanks.” I turned around. “You boys beat it.”
Their chests puffed and eyes slanted to stab wounds. They looked between them and back to me with tiny cold stares, dumb and black as a fish’s. I’d known dudes like this my whole life, country morons stuck in a state of permanent resentment. They abuse small animals, grow up to beat their kids with belts and wreck their trucks driving drunk, find Jesus at forty and start going to church and using prostitutes.
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