I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  We ended up at Georgia’s. We ordered lamb shawarma and Moroccan fish, and we drank even more. We looked through a photo album of our life together and grew mawkish. Nothing had changed in the house except my cluttered office. Now my books were in a storage unit on Lantana, and the office had been converted into what Georgia called a meditation room. Mats and cushions on the floor, potted plants in every corner, candles on the windowsills, Japanese prints on the walls, and a hand-of-Buddha indoor water fountain on the coffee table, burbling away. Eventually, Georgia cut Marty loose and found the man she would marry, Tripp Morris, and had two kids of her own. Georgia and I were like DeFonda and Abrel and should never have been together to begin with. She was Beatles; I was Stones.

  TWO WOMEN OF MY casual acquaintance, Desirée and Baby, were sitting at a shaded table on the Wayside patio enjoying their highballs and a blunt. Baby had her shoes off and her feet up on a chair. Desirée wore a hairnet.

  Baby held up the blunt and said, “Kind bud, Wylie.”

  Desirée said, “Hawaiian black.”

  I thanked them for their thoughtfulness, walked into the bar, ordered a Bloody Mary, and asked Zeke, the bartender, what was up with the eye patch. He said it helped with his double vision. “The headaches are a bitch.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Six, seven weeks.”

  “This is serious.”

  “No shit.” He stuck a celery stalk in my drink on the second try and slid the glass to my hand.

  “You need to see a doctor.”

  “Or two.” He smiled and held up his hands. “No dinero.”

  I told him I was calling a doctor friend to make an appointment. “Won’t cost you.”

  While I was on hold, Baby and Desirée came in and sat at the bar. Baby handed Zeke a plastic sack full of meat ends from the Italian market where she worked, and he poured them each a Dewar’s and water.

  I explained to Zeke that Dr. Chao was a holistic ophthalmologist and would probably talk with him about his diet and his supplements, so he might want to keep the meat ends a secret. I told Walter to send me the bill, but he probably wouldn’t—he’d be so fascinated with the mystery of Zeke’s vision that he’d consider it a privilege to have a go at him.

  Patience walked in and gave me a kiss. I ordered another Bloody Mary, and we went to a table. She slid her hand over mine and squeezed. We toasted our reunion. I said, “When are you coming to visit?”

  “Soon, I hope.”

  An orbiculate fellow wearing a VIRGINITY ROCKS! T-shirt and carrying a tub of fried chicken from Chicken Lickin’ (It’s So Clucking Good!) under his arm, walked in, put the tub on the bar, pulled up a stool, and asked Zeke to turn on the bowling channel. He ordered a pitcher of beer.

  Zeke said, “Don’t you have high cholesterol, Warren?”

  “If you call six forty-seven high.”

  “How the hell are you even standing?”

  “In fact, I’m sitting.” Warren pulled a drumstick from the tub, held it up, and admired its succulence.

  And that’s when my cell phone played “Abracadabra.” I answered. Bay had some distressing news. My grainy face was all over the Vegas TV newscasts. My young friend Ruby, whose real name, at least for now, was Misty Roses, had gone to the police with a story of her rape by an anonymous-looking man she met on the street. That much we knew.

  I said, “Anonymous hurts.”

  Bay said that surveillance videos of me and Misty on the boulevard were the lead story on every channel. The authorities had trouble getting my name at first because I’d been fortunate enough to have paid for the pizza and room in cash, but it had been only a matter of time before someone in our neighborhood or the Crisis Center recognized me and called the cops. And, in fact, as soon as he saw the story, Gene Woodling did call the police. He gave them my name and said I could not have done what the girl they were calling Misty, but whose real name was Audrey Blick, said I had done. I was a straight shooter, one of the good guys.

  “This is ludicrous, Bay. They’ll ask the hotel clerk, and he’ll tell them I left her there.”

  “Unless he’s been persuaded otherwise.”

  “They won’t find my DNA on her.” Then I remembered. “Well, I did shake her hand. Why would she do this?”

  “Maybe someone wants to fuck with you.”

  “Cops?”

  “No, but someone else who put them on your trail.”

  I told Bay that I was sure the girl had recognized Blythe from the photo.

  Bay told me not to fly. As soon as my name turned up on a flight manifest, I’d be scooped up. Better to walk into the Vegas Metro Police Department with my lawyer than be caught by surprise. My lawyer’s name was Meyer Cohen, Bay told me, a crackerjack attorney but a mediocre poker player who owed Bay a favor. “Open Mike’s going to pick you up at six A.M. It’s a thirty-eight-and-a-half-hour drive, give or take. See you Thursday.”

  I let Patience know the developing complications and the disappointing but necessary travel plans. Our reunion would be short-lived. She asked about Venise, and I told her about the overeating and the emotional outburst. I’d called Venise’s heart specialist, Dr. Wasgatt, while I was still at the hospital, but he couldn’t tell me anything: the HIPAA rules and all. He did give me the number of the Obesity Clinic at Florida International University. He said to think of it as a last chance and then he said he didn’t say that. I called and got Venise a bed in their thirty-day inpatient holistic bariatric clinic. I called Oliver and left the info on his voice mail. “Don’t let her tantrum her way out of this, Oliver.”

  I lay in bed with a copy of Travel + Leisure unfolded on my chest while Patience showered. I told myself not to worry. They couldn’t prove I did something in one place while I was busy in another.

  Whenever I have to wake up early I have trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep. I drift off to dreamland only to resurface reluctantly minutes later, and in this restless way I seldom reach the third act of my dreams. I felt someone shaking my leg, and I opened my eyes, and Patience said, “Wake up. Mike’s downstairs.”

  “He’s early.”

  “He brought coffee and doughnuts.”

  “I guess I fell asleep before you came to bed.”

  “And you were talking in your sleep.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said you put Venise on ice so she wouldn’t spoil.”

  “Damn! I’d better call Venise.”

  “I’ll pay her a visit after work.”

  6

  “I’VE DONE SOME bad things in my life,” I heard Mike tell Patience as I walked into the kitchen. “But I’ve learned to accept myself, warts and all. This is who I am.” He spooned honey onto his strawberry-frosted doughnut and licked the spoon.

  Patience said, “You’ve got yourself one righteous sweet tooth there, Michael Lynch.”

  I poured myself a coffee and sat down.

  Mike said, “I’ve stopped holding on to my unworthiness.”

  I reached for a cinnamon doughnut and asked Mike if he was quoting Thich Nhat Hanh.

  “Goldie Hawn,” he said. “I just go with the flow, you could say.”

  “Like a dead fish,” I said.

  “Resistance only creates sorrow,” he said.

  “Like a fallen leaf in the current,” Patience said.

  Mike said, “Are you ready to do this, Coyote?”

  “I am.”

  “Back to the belly of the beast.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “We all have.”

  “I’ve got a lawyer. An alibi.”

  “And yet the cops are on your trail.”

  “You’re not being very comforting.”

  He asked me for my cell phone and took a flip phone from his pocket and slid it to me. “I got you a burner. Leave your cell here. Cops can get your call activity from the cell. Every call you’ve ever made, your contact lists, voice mails, photos, videos, messages, apps,
your passwords, your geolocation points—all without a warrant.” He handed the cell phone to Patience. “Patience can bring it when she visits.”

  I said, “Pretty soon we’ll need IT support to get lost.”

  Mike said, “I’ve got my GPS locked into your Vegas address. I’ve got a cooler full of Italian sandwiches from Stranieri’s Market, a thermos of coffee with cream, a case of Red Bull, a six-pack of beer, a first-aid kit, and I filled the car with gas.” He put down his doughnut and wiped his mouth with the napkin. “We’ll want to evacuate our bowels and bladders before hitting the road. I plan on making good time.”

  MIKE HAD RENTED a gleaming graphite-blue Nissan Rogue. Patience said, “You really did fill your car up with gas.” She opened the back door and I peeked inside. The cargo space was crammed with five-gallon plastic gas cans.

  Mike said, “Eighteen cans. You’re looking at ninety gallons of high-test right there.”

  I said, “We have gas stations in America.”

  “They can’t beat my price.” He explained that the Rogue got thirty-three miles to the gallon, had a twenty-two gallon tank, and we had 2,259 miles to go, give or take. Eighty gallons should do it. “We have more than enough.”

  I said, “We’ll have to drive with the windows open.”

  Patience said, “What price is that?”

  Mike said, “I’ve got an associate in security at the tank farm over at the port who was willing to look the other way in exchange for future services rendered.”

  Patience clapped her hands. “Okay, then. I’ve heard enough. Good luck, boys.” She kissed me goodbye and waved to us as we backed out of her driveway. Mike grazed the mailbox and said, “No harm, no foul.”

  The overwhelming smell of the gasoline was already assaulting my sinuses. Could a throbbing headache be far behind? I leaned my head out the window and sucked in the relatively fresh air.

  “Satellite radio,” Mike said. “Watch this.” He powered the radio on and told it to go to The Richie Mulhearn Show, which turned out to be a sports talk show. Richie’s guest prattled on about parity in the Association. And then followed fifteen minutes of commercials for erectile dysfunction medications and personal injury attorneys. We merged with the turnpike north, and I asked Mike what the other smell was.

  “My new scent.” He held out his wrist for me to sniff. “Kon-Kwest. They call the fragrance animalic. It drives the female of the species wild.”

  “What species?” I sneezed. “I think I may pass out.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “What if we get stopped?” I said. “What happens? All this fuel can’t be legal.”

  “We won’t get stopped.”

  On the radio, Richie launched into an unprovoked rant about women who were ruining sports with their ridiculous emotions and their stupid opinions. Women, Richie said, had turned professional sports into a world of sissies. I looked at Mike. “Really, Mike. We have to listen to this?”

  Mike told the radio to call his bookie. And then he put $500 on the Heat in tonight’s game. When we got back to Richie, he was talking about restraining orders and pepper spray and cock teasing, and he said he didn’t care what the pussies calling in had to say. He told them to talk to Oprah. He was right, he said. He was very right.

  Mike took out a cigarette and lit it.

  I said, “What the hell, Mike? You trying to kill us?”

  “I’m nowhere near the gas.”

  “It’s the fumes that burn, not the liquid.”

  “I did not know that.” He held his cigarette outside the window and the wind blew sparks to the backseat. “I’ll be careful.”

  We stopped on 75. I bought some oranges at the roadside fruit stand while Mike refueled the tank and tossed the spent cans into the Dumpster. He smoked a cigarette before we hit the road. I thanked him for his courtesy. He said the courtesy would last forty minutes. I asked him when the car was due back at Enterprise.

  “It’s a disposable.”

  “A what?”

  “A burner. It’s rented a to guy named Paul, D. for David, Reed, from Richardson, Texas, SS number 465-97-1224, who does not actually exist in our world as we know it. Mike showed me Paul’s Texas driver’s license with Mike’s photo on it. Mike opened a second Red Bull and drank it in one swallow. “Time’s a-wasting, amigo.”

  I WOKE IN A FOG. “What the hell is that?”

  “The battleship Alabama.”

  “Are we at war?”

  Mike swerved to avoid an armadillo, but the armadillo jumped up into the car’s grille. Mike made the sign of the cross and asked me to grab him a sandwich from the cooler. We ate as we drove through Mobile. He asked me if I had noticed anything about all the perky weather girls on the news-at-noon shows in Miami. He told me they were all pregnant. All at once. “What do you suppose is going on?”

  On the radio a pair of apoplectic dopes were screaming about a referee’s missed call that cost the Mavericks a win, and they weren’t surprised when irate fans started sending threatening e-mails to the ref’s family.

  We checked into the Ville Platte Night’s Inn at eight-fifteen, and when I say we, I mean Paul Reed. No lifeguard on duty, no water in the pool. No soda in the vending machine. Mike had driven every mile of the way. I’d taken four naps totaling three hours of blessed sleep and relief from the nightmare of sports talk radio. Never was so much said by so many about so little. We’d passed dozens of state troopers, and I held my breath to still my heart at every pass. We’d seen the aftermath of three accidents, one of which was magnificent. A man driving a Ford F-150 pickup, towing a twenty-eight-foot travel trailer and towing a pop-up camper behind that, managed a three-vehicle pileup all on his own when one vehicle in his convoy jackknifed. The resulting triangular wreckage blocked all eastbound traffic on I-10 from Gulfport to the Louisiana state line.

  Mike kicked off his loafers, collapsed onto his bed, and fell asleep fully dressed. My own body was still vibrating from the rhythm of the road. I sipped a glass of cognac to take the edge off. The image of my imminent arrest in Vegas had me jittery and semi-alert. The motel room wasn’t helping my mood. The faucet on the sink was installed at a ridiculous angle; the security chain door lock was missing the button-link that attached it to the track mounted to the wall. On the toilet lid in the bathroom I found a yellowed nap sack “for disposal of sanitary napkins” with a drawing on it of a vase with a sprig of blue flowers, a visual motif repeated in the framed art—screwed into the bathroom wall as if a woebegone traveler might want to steal it—a painting of a brown vase laden with large pink blossoms. The orange paint from a recent renovation dripped down the bathroom wall and over some of the tan tile. And I thought maybe I deserved to linger in this squalor.

  I turned on the TV and imagined myself on the screen doing the perp walk from the squad car to the courthouse the way this guy in Opelousas who’d allegedly murdered his wife was doing. The perky weather girl on Channel 4 was pregnant. I caught myself nodding off, but I was unable to stay under, until I seduced myself with the idea that I was already asleep and none of this hellacious odyssey was happening, and then, unburdened of the truth, I drifted off to slumberland.

  I woke up in my not-so-comfy chair with a sore back. The TV was off and Mike was gone, but he’d left his clothes in a pile on the floor. I shaved, showered, dressed, packed my overnight bag, gathered Mike’s clothes, and headed out to the parking lot, where I saw Mike filling the Rogue’s gas tank.

  “You forgot these,” I said.

  “I left them.”

  “Why?”

  “The stores are full of that shit. I don’t need to be schlepping soiled clothes around with me. Just not very classy, my friend.”

  He had used a room towel to wipe away the armadillo residue from the front bumper. He stuffed the towel, the clothes, and the empty cans into the trash receptacle. We bought leaden doughnuts and washy coffee at a drive-thru called Sinkers, but not before I had hurried into Evangeline Drugs and bo
ught Mike an electronic cigarette. I gave it to him and said, “Humor me.”

  I almost had a heart attack somewhere in West Texas. I’d finally been lulled into tranquillity by the passing landscapes and the soothing music of tires on concrete. We were cruising along at eighty-five or ninety, keeping pace with the sparse traffic. Mike was drinking a beer, eating a sandwich, and listening to a baseball game when we heard a siren and felt, as much as we saw, the flashing lights from the cruiser behind us. Where the hell had that guy come from? Mike told me to relax and to let him do the talking, but if I had to say something, I was to call him Paul. Got it? Just as Mike eased the car to the shoulder, the trooper blew by and nabbed the car ahead of us. I breathed again. Mike said, “We are some lucky bastards, Coyote.”

  I FOUND OUT about our substantial arsenal in Moriarty, New Mexico. We’d stopped at a gas station/convenience store and parked on the side by the Dumpster. I noticed an apartment upstairs over the store. An open window, lacy curtains fluttering in the soft evening breeze.

  Mike said. “Go in and get us ten lotto tickets while I top off the tank. We’re on a lucky streak.”

  “We are?”

  “On fire.”

  I gathered food wrappers, tissues, napkins, empty cans, and empty bottles from the car and tossed them into the Dumpster. Mike grabbed a gas can from the wayback and lit up an actual cigarette. He raised his eyebrows and gave me a look like a defiant adolescent would, like, I can smoke if I want to. I headed for the store. I saw a young woman sitting in the apartment window, dandling a baby on her lap, and watching me. I smiled and nodded. I wondered what she was thinking about one more stranger passing through her life, and I tried to imagine her existence upstairs and imagined it noisy, cramped, and drab.

  I bought ten Powerball quick picks. The ginger-haired clerk asked me where we were headed. I told him Vegas and asked him if he lived upstairs.

  He did. “Short commute.”

  “That your wife and baby in the window?”

  “I’m just the baby’s daddy. Not one to be tied down, you know.”

  “Where you going?”