She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  Run, her brain told her. Get out the car and go. Mom wouldn’t want you here.

  Polly put the books and the bear into her backpack. She put her hand on the car door handle. A long moment passed. She couldn’t move because of something inside her, something battened down under the acid winds. Her dad came out of the store, a plastic bag in his hands. Polly took her hand off the door handle. She’d let the ideas whip around inside her, but outside she’d done nothing. She was from Venus.

  They drove squinting against the setting sun. He checked them into a motel in Rancho Cucamonga, on the other side of the Speedway. He stopped on the way and bought them fast food.

  The motel room smelled like burnt rubber. The sun was low-slung in the sky. It shone orange through the windows, turning her dad into a big black shape framed by light as he shut the door behind them. Polly went fast to the bathroom and peed, worried he could hear the splashes.

  She came back to find her dad emptying the sports store bag onto the table by the door. Polly fished chicken nuggets out of the fast-food bag and sat on the bed. She put the straw of her orange drink to the bear’s snout. The bear rubbed its belly with a paw like yum.

  One by one her dad laid out the things he had bought. A kid-sized metal baseball bat. A black hoodie and black sweatpants. A black ski mask. A long, wicked-looking hunting knife that seemed to hiss like a snake at Polly.

  He picked up the kiddie bat, flipped it so he held the fat end. He held the skinny end toward Polly.

  “Come on and take it,” he said. She swallowed a lump of chicken nugget, suddenly huge in her throat as she tried to get it down. She took the bat. It was cold in her hands. It made her realize she was burning up. He pulled the cushion off the chair in the corner and held it up.

  “Want you to take a swing at this,” he said. She looked back to the bear like he could save her, but of course he couldn’t.

  “Forget the bear,” her dad said, his eyes like you better not mess around. “Show me what you got.”

  She swung. It felt jerky and wrong. The bat glanced off the cushion with a dull puff. Gym-class nightmares played in her head. Memories of kids watching her with bored cruel eyes while she struggled to do a sit-up, failed to turn a cartwheel.

  “Aw, come on,” her dad said. “That’s not gonna do.”

  He got down on his knees next to her so that she could smell the salt and stink of him. Her brain threw out a handful of half-formed memories that were all knotted up in that smell. He took her elbows in his rough hands. He grabbed an ankle and pulled it to widen her stance. She lost balance, caught herself on his shoulder, moved her hand away fast.

  “Come on now,” he said. “You got to spread your base there. You got to swing your body, not your arms.”

  She swung again. The same clumsy feeling. The same puff. He shifted. He made a noise. Gym-class flashbacks intensified. She swung again. Another whiff. He tossed the pillow aside. She saw that he was angry and trying to hide it. Inside her, acid hurricanes swirled.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “When I leave, you block that door. Shove a chair underneath the knob or something. Don’t let anyone but me in.”

  He knocked twice, paused, knocked three times.

  “That’s the sign. If I don’t knock like that, don’t even let me in. If someone kicks their way in, you swing that bat at them, right in their knee. Swing hard. Swing through that son of a bitch. That should make ’em bend over a little bit. Then you swing that bat at their head hard as you can.”

  He might as well have told her to fly.

  “I can’t—”

  “I said hard as you can. Don’t hide under the bed or any of that stupid shit. People know to look under beds. Just hit them and run your ass off. You see anyone—I’m talking anyone—has a blue tattoo of a thunderbolt on their arm, you hit them and you hit them again. You don’t stop swinging till they stop moving.”

  She’d never been so aware of how much of her body was blood. She was overstuffed with it. She felt her pulse everywhere, throbs in the tips of her fingers, her heart like a boot in her chest, rushes and roars in her ears. She had so much blood there wasn’t any room for air.

  “Blue lightning. On their arm,” he said. “That means they’re bad dudes, so cracking their heads ain’t a sin. Now do what I said.”

  He picked up the bag and went into the bathroom. Outside the night had come. The door to it sat four steps from Polly. She did not move toward it. He came out wearing the black sweats and hoodie. The ski mask was in one pocket. The knife was in the other.

  “And you stay in this room,” he said. “I’m for real. This is life and death, you hear me?”

  Fear like drowning came over Polly.

  “Don’t go,” she said. Letting the words out almost let out all the things storming in her. The things she swallowed back made a hard lump in her throat.

  “Shit,” he said, “I know you’re scared. I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you not to be scared. There’s things going on, hard things. I got my reasons for doing this the way I’m doing. But I’m gonna make it okay. I’m gonna—”

  And then he stood there like maybe he was going to say something else, or maybe come to her, hold her and hug her like he hadn’t in years, but he didn’t. He just stood there looking at the floor.

  “Please.” She wanted to scream it but it came out a rasp.

  “Don’t stop swinging,” he said, and then he left.

  Polly stood in the dark. Every sound in the night bounced off her like she had bat sonar. She walked to the door and put her hand on the knob. She closed her eyes. In her head she saw faceless men wearing blue lightning tattoos and teeth like yellow saw blades.

  I can’t run. I can’t.

  She turned away from the door. She picked up the baseball bat and placed it in the bed next to her. She rolled on her side. She held the bear in her arms. The bear petted her arm with one grubby paw like there there, there there. It made her feel better. It didn’t matter the bear wasn’t real. It only mattered that he was true.

  3

  NATE

  FONTANA

  Finding his ex-wife Avis this way, knife-dead in the dark on the bedroom floor next to her new man, didn’t tell Nate everything he needed to know. It was the scrim of cigarette ash on top of the beer can on the living room table that gave Nate the answer he’d been looking for. The answer to the question that echoed in his head over and over, a question that came from the ghost of his brother Nick.

  Are they hunting her?

  He hadn’t known when he’d left Polly at the motel and gone and broke into his Avis’s house that the ashy beer can was what he’d come to see. He thought he’d come to see Avis’s dead body, and he had, but that had only given him part of the answer he needed. It told him he was damned, that staying alive this long he’d doomed Avis and her new man. But it didn’t tell him what to do next.

  Nate had never known his father—he’d fallen to death in a construction site accident when Nate was four—so his brother Nick had been the one to teach him. Not school stuff, which of course was bullshit, but instead stuff about the world, and being a man in that world. Nick taught Nate how to talk and how to fight, when lies were okay and when lies were not. He’d taught him the strongest thing you could do was take more than your share of pain. He’d dragged him to a gym when he was eleven and taught him how to take a punch, how to swallow the sting of it. He’d taken him when he was sixteen to a liquor store and given him a pistol and a mask and taught him how to rob, and how it felt good to do it, and that a job was a dishonorable thing, and that the better thing was to take what you needed when you needed it. He’d steered Nate so much that by the time Nate went to jail and was separated from his brother, he had Nick in his head to tell him what to do, and even later when Nick died, his voice in Nate’s head was strong as ever, strong enough that Nate didn’t know who he’d be without it there.

  Are they hunting her?

  Avis’s husband had had his skull cr
ushed, facedown on the bed in his underwear, like they’d caught him sleeping. The bedroom where Nate found them had taped-shut windows and a white noise machine, signs of a day sleeper. Nate remembered he worked third shift at the battery factory.

  They must have done him first. Avis had died fighting here on the floor, kitchen knife in hand. The way her body had been twisted, the way her face looked away from him so he could see the star tattoo on her neck, those were things Nate knew would never leave him now.

  They’d been drunk, summer daytime drunk, the best kind of drunk there was, the day she got that star tattoo. They were in an electric, bruising kind of young love, the best kind of love there was. She was a waitress in a chain restaurant. He sold weed and sometimes stuck up places with his brother Nick. She said she liked that he was an outlaw, but sometimes her eyes said something different.

  They’d taken his old Dodge convertible to the quick shop—Nate and Nick had robbed this very one a month earlier, and knowing that added to the thrill for the both of them—for big plastic cups of ice and Coke and a pint bottle of whiskey. They drank half the Coke too fast, getting ice cream headaches, before topping the rest off with whiskey. On the way to the tattoo parlor he’d asked her why she wanted a star, and why on her neck? She’d smiled and said it was special to her, and she’d tell him someday, and he hadn’t pushed her about it because they had time to spare because they weren’t ever going to die.

  He held her hand while the tattoo guy needled the star just below where the spine plugged into the skull. He let her lie about it not hurting. Afterward, sweaty from the sun as they drove with the top down back toward Fontana, she fingered the fresh clean gauze on her neck and smiled her rocket smile and said they needed to pull over. He drove them up into the hills. They went at each other before the car came to a full stop. As Nate rocked into her, he lifted his head up in the air like triumph. He looked up and saw a condor circling overhead, watching to see if they were dead. He remembered how he’d felt her skin rubbing slick against his own and saw the animal in her eyes and thought they’d never die. Not today, not ever.

  Not today, not ever, he thought, standing over her corpse. His fingers grasped useless air. He wanted to choke the world if he only could find its fucking neck.

  The anger in him, though. It’s what did this in the first place. His anger at anyone who ever tried to force his hand or tell him what to do.

  I should have let Chuck gut me. I could have died for my own sins back in Susanville.

  I ought to go upstairs and find her new man’s guns and find out what a gun barrel tastes like.

  But he couldn’t. Nate had fucked up everything in his life, starting the day he let his brother Nick take him on a stickup job, and following with almost every choice he’d made since then. He’d fucked himself from jump street. He knew that and he owned it, and he knew with Avis and her man dead because of what he’d done, he was unredeemable, and the king-hell irony of it was his death was a fair price to pay, and he’d pay it if he could, but he couldn’t just yet. Not until he knew the answer.

  Are they hunting her?

  And the other, darker questions.

  Do you have to stay alive? Or do you have to die?

  One question followed the other. The greenlight that Crazy Craig had issued naming Nate a dead man had named Avis and Polly too. He’d read it in Susanville on the eve of his release, his eyes going back to the same lines, the lines that said

  he has a woman

  he has a daughter

  But would they really kill a girl? Even if Avis was dead, and Nate too, would these berserkers actually come gunning for a child? That’s what Nate had to know before he knew what to do next.

  He knew the ashy beer can was the sign when he saw it. He knew it because he knew Avis. He knew her old man had been the kind of smoker they don’t even make anymore, the kind with yellow fingers and an ashtray in the shower. And Nate knew how Avis figured that’s where her asthma came from, and that she hated cigarettes and smoke. She’d never tolerate a smoker in the house. So when Nate found the beer can on the coffee table next to the easy chair, that’s when he knew. Whoever’d ashed in the beer can had done it after Avis was dead. And Nate knew Aryan Steel cowboys were cold-blooded, but not even one of them would have stuck around for a smoke after a double murder. Not unless they had a reason. Not unless they were waiting for something. Or someone.

  he has a daughter

  The beer can meant Aryan Steel were going to be true to their word. They were hunting for Polly. That was Nate’s fault, and if he could pay for it with his life he would have. But that wasn’t on the table. First he had to get Polly up to Stockton with his cousins. Then he’d turn his anger out on the world, onto Aryan Steel, and get them to lift the greenlight on her. He stood there in the dark, feeling something that was sort of like relief. The days ahead were bad, but at least now he knew what the answers were.

  Are they hunting her?

  Yes.

  Do you have to stay alive?

  Until I save this girl I’ve damned.

  He left Avis and her new man where they lay. He owed her better than that, but he didn’t have a choice. He went upstairs to pack a bag for Polly and see if Avis’s new man had any guns.

  4

  POLLY

  ANTELOPE VALLEY

  He’d been to her house. He didn’t think she knew. But she recognized the scuff on the suitcase he’d carried out to the car that morning. The scuff had happened last summer, when her stepdad Tom had dropped it down a flight of stairs in Big Bear when they’d gone up there to look at the snow. It was her stepdad’s suitcase. That meant that her dad had been to her house, and either her mom knew she was with her dad, or . . . or something else, something her brain kept from her for now. Something big as Venus and heading her way.

  They’d driven out of the Empire, gone up a hill so steep Polly’s ears popped, and then went down the other side, where there wasn’t much but alfalfa farms and fields. The land to the left of the road was covered in a thick carpet of yellow poppies. Poppies were dreaming flowers, like the kind that put Dorothy to sleep in that weird part of Wizard of Oz. Polly knew better than to wish this was a dream.

  “We’re gonna see a woman named Carla. Big Carla? You remember her?”

  She shook her head like no.

  “She’s an old friend of me and your mom’s. Back when we had friends in common. She works at a gas station up here. Big Carla’s gonna get you up to Stockton so I can take care of some business. My cousin Zach, he’s gonna take you in. You stay there and you’ll be safe. Safe as anywhere, anyway.”

  “I want to go back to Mom.”

  Her dad kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. She looked at a vein on the side of his forehead. Polly didn’t know if it had always been there but she didn’t think so.

  “We get you up to Stockton, with our cousins,” he said. “That’s the thing.”

  She wondered what would happen if she jumped from the car. Would she skip down the side of the road like a flat stone on a lake or skid to a stop right where she landed? She looked down at a red row of nail marks on her arms. She’d tilled her arm without even noticing it. It was like the stuff that swirled inside her that she kept under so well was starting to scratch the surface. Polly knew that couldn’t happen. She couldn’t let it out, ever, or something bad would happen. That’s why she had to keep the storm inside her. She had to keep it in. She ground her teeth together. The bear kissed his paw and pressed it to the scratches. She hugged him so tight.

  The gas station sat across the road from an alfalfa farm. The store had a sign above it, sunshine market, with a sunglass-wearing sun waving above the name. He pulled them into the gravel lot. He steered the car into the patch of shade laid down by a wooden tank of water held up by wooden slats.

  White gravel threw up light and heat, poking Polly’s eyes on the walk to the front of the store. She stumbled against her dad, snapping back away before he could
reach out to help her.

  It was two seasons colder inside the store. A man with a creased cowboy hat and a cannonball gut scratched lotto tickets at the counter with a thick brown thumbnail. Two rows of junk food divided the store. In the back where the cold drinks were a young man in a trucker cap loitered looking at canned beer. He snuck a peek at Polly that made gooseflesh pop on her arms, or maybe it was just the cold air. She peeked at the man again but he’d gone back to looking at the beer.

  The woman behind the counter might have been her dad’s age or ten years older. Her dad had called her Big Carla. It fit. She was big all over, from her boobs spilling out of her motorcycle T-shirt and her round arms to her round brown eyes and teased-up hair.

  “Good to see you, honey,” she said to her dad. She reached over the counter for an awkward hug. Polly watched her dad take it stiffly. He didn’t like being touched any more than Polly did, she could tell.

  Big Carla’s voice went up an octave as she turned back to Polly. “Hey there,” she said. “My name’s Carla. I haven’t seen you since you were a baby. Look at how you grew.”

  Polly never knew what to say to stuff like that. Her eyes switched focus to the wall behind Carla. It was covered with checks, canceled stamped in red ink. deadbeats scrawled on a note card above them. She knew what a deadbeat was, but seeing it there scrawled in red ink it looked to Polly like a word for a horrible thing, a nightmare thing. All at once Polly was very sure that there was something terrible here. Terrible and unstoppable.

  “You’re gonna spend the day with me,” Carla said. Her smile spread across her face like a billboard. “And after I’m done with work we’re gonna take a car trip. Does that sound like fun?”