by Vicki Grove
“Then Tommy got suddenly quiet just as dawn was breaking. When the strong light of day finally reached into that trench, I gritted my teeth and hoisted myself up and saw Tommy’s body, lying there mangled and dusty, and kneeling beside him was . . . was . . .”
He stopped for so long that I finally clutched his shoulder and leaned over to search his face. He looked at me, or looked right through me, with an expression impossible to describe. He was seeing something from the past, or from the future, or maybe both. Seeing it with fear or longing. Fear and longing, combined?
“Who was kneeling beside Tommy, Bud?” I asked in a whisper.
He didn’t answer at first, then he whispered, “It was . . . her. You know. Her.”
Bud closed his eyes and I jerked my jacket from my backpack and was folding it into a sort of lumpy pillow for his neck when a huge wave of dizziness rolled through me. For a second or two I assumed it was that candy bar, but then I had the weird sensation of things spinning completely out of my control, of time and space going haywire.
A metallic creaking started up somewhere outside the car. I stuck my head out the window to figure out where it was coming from and saw a huge green sign hanging over the highway and rocking in a sudden gust of wind. Had it even been there before?
In large, glistening reflective letters it read Arrowhead Stadium, take next exit.
The wind stopped as quickly as it had come up. Even the tiniest sunflowers along the highway quit dancing and froze. But that sign still bucked and twisted like a bronco in the still air. I watched it and felt my insides grow slowly cold in the same way they did when I woke at night and listened, helplessly, to Trey’s chattering rock.
Whether you understand them or not, messages are messages. We hadn’t gotten off the highway in this spot, under this particular sign, by simple accident. Take next exit. It was like someone “up there” was using a green tablet provided by the Highway Department to give me a command, or possibly just a very strong suggestion. Either way, in spite of my being messed up and Bud being sick and our being so far away from home already and neither of us having any business driving in the first place, who was I to argue? Enormous signs don’t flop around in the air all on their own and for no reason.
“Hey, Bud?” I heard myself whisper. “If . . . if you want to see the Chiefs play, why not, since we’re here at the turnoff to the stadium. You’re buying the hot dogs, though, right? That was the deal you gave me last Sunday.”
Bud’s eyes popped open and he straightened in his seat and clapped. “Yeah, kid, now you’re talking! Get this buggy moving or we’ll miss the kickoff!”
I started the car, took the exit, and zigged, white-knuckled and nauseated, through city traffic. The other drivers seemed willing to get out of my way, and we got tickets easily enough at the stadium gate, probably because the team had been slumping. Or maybe as a reward from the crazy universe for Bud’s equally crazy thirty-year fandom.
Whatever, the Chiefs broke a six-game losing streak with a squeaker over the Raiders that evening. Bud was justifiably cocky, taking all the credit, slapping all the other wildly ecstatic fans on the back as we made our way to the parking lot.
We found the car easily, huge and unique as it was, and I managed to maneuver it out of the worst of the stadium traffic without slamming into anything. Again, that was probably because everybody got out of my way. I was pretty terrified driving in the dusk. It seemed even chancier than broad daylight had been, like any number of things could come at you from the shadows, trucks and motorcycles and so forth. Only the adrenaline rush from the three hot dogs and two large sodas I’d gulped kept me steady enough to successfully backtrack so that eventually the Highway 71 sign loomed like a great and welcome gift out of the twilit fog just ahead of us.
I let out a long, shaky breath. “Okay, Bud, we made it!” We were still a good three hours from home, but the trickiest part was done. Once we were on 71, I’d become part of the herd of cars rushing straight south, no complications. “We oughta stop pretty soon and give Janet a call or she’ll be—”
“Watchit, watchit, watchit!” Bud suddenly yelled. “Right there, right there! You’re about to miss your exit! Turn, boy, turn!”
And I knew that the exit to 71 south was still most of a mile down the road. I’d just read that on the sign, so I knew it! Yet when someone like Bud is screaming in your ear, you just have time to think how awful it’d be if you did miss your exit. You don’t have time to think about arguing or even to think about what you’re doing, you just, basically, have time to picture missing your exit like Bud is screaming that you’re about to do and then in the half second left, you, well, react.
I swung the wheel to the right and squealed off the highway and onto the exit ramp. I didn’t even have time to signal and the guy right behind me laid on his horn.
When we were halfway down that long ramp, I could see another one of those green signs posted above the road we were merging onto. Highway 71 North to Omaha.
We were heading in the totally wrong direction, going toward Nebraska, not Oklahoma, and who knew how or where I’d be able to get turned around to go back?
“Watchit, watchit, watchit!” Bud yelled again.
I whipped my attention from that sign back to the ramp we were sailing down, and instantly my heart convulsed into a tight ball of panic. There was someone in the middle of the road, right straight ahead of us!
I hit the brake so hard that the Olds sashayed left and right and shrieked and groaned and finally came to a rocking stop mere feet from what turned out to be a small girl in red cowboy boots with a black motorcycle jacket tied by the arms around her waist.
She was calmly sitting on a huge green backpack with her left ankle propped on her right knee, jiggling her left boot as though she was bored or something! The wind was spiking her short, choppy blue hair and she began chewing her right thumbnail as she stared back at me through the dirty windshield. She looked to be about fifteen, maybe sixteen. Or she could have been older, just small-boned and scrappy.
I couldn’t read her expression, but it was definitely weird. It was like she had no expression, just looked at me with a blank face, this when she had nearly become roadkill, nearly been smashed as flat as some nocturnal beast without the sense to get out of the way of a huge piece of unstoppable machinery.
I couldn’t breathe and my hands were rubber on the wheel. “Bud . . . I . . . I didn’t even see her!” I fought down a couple more gulps of air and added, “She . . . she wasn’t sitting there two seconds before, I swear it! And then she just . . . she just . . . was.”
My hands were cramping and my knees felt loose.
“Things loom up fast on the highway, son,” Bud whispered, then he actually chuckled. By the eerie green light of the instrument panel I could make out the strangest goofy smile on his normally granite face.
X
Steam burst from under the hood and the blue-haired girl just sat casually jiggling her foot and staring at me through that thick haze, still with that blank look on her doll-like pale face. Right about then I figured out she wasn’t blinking. That was what made her expression seem so strange. She never, ever blinked!
She finally stood and stretched, gave a yank to the frayed cuffs of her jacket to pull it tighter around her waist, then shouldered her pack and sauntered slowly toward the car, casually wiping her wet thumb on the short strip of black fabric that passed for her skirt.
“She must be hitching, Bud, probably trying to get a ride to Omaha. Soon as I find a place to turn around, we’ll be going the opposite direction she wants to go.”
I began rolling down my window to tell her that same thing. Bud reached across and clutched my shoulder, really gave it some grip.
“Don’t ever leave a lady stranded on the highway, son,” he said, softly but sternly.
“But Bud . . .” That’s as far as I got before I was interrupted by the noise of highway traffic as the back door jerked open and the strange
girl and her posse of damp night shadows all slipped into the Oldsmobile with us.
Things instantly went murky. I mean, sure, it had been dusky before, but it hadn’t yet gone authentically dark. The air had contained enough light for me to clearly see Bud sitting there with his knees wide apart and his arms crossed. The green glow from the instrument panel had turned the hairs on his arms to a green fuzz, but his outline beneath that fuzz had been plenty solid.
Suddenly, though, when she got in, everything got less distinct and seemed sort of smudged together so you didn’t know where one thing stopped and another thing began. My hands seemed to be growing from the steering wheel. Bud seemed to be melting into the seat. That sort of thing.
I straightened the rearview mirror and watched her yank her overloaded pack in after her like a reluctant pet, then she slammed the door and everything in back was lost to my sight except for her huge, luminous eyes. They seemed to float back there, disembodied.
A sickeningly sweet smell wafted up to us. Bud’s head flopped back against the yellowed white vinyl that protected the top of the seat and staggered snores started coming from his direction.
“Uh, listen,” I told her reflection, trying to sound no-nonsense. “You need a different ride. We’ll be getting off at the next exit to head south, to Oklahoma.”
She scooted up to perch on the edge of her seat with her face only nine or ten inches from my shoulder. She blew a huge grape bubble, broke it and peeled the edges off her nose, sucked the whole mess back into her mouth, then gave the whole rank gob a couple of openmouthed smacks before taking it out and planting it behind her ear.
“Got a light?” she asked.
She was holding a bent cigarette between her thumb and index finger. I just sat there and watched as my hand dug Trey’s green Bic lighter from my jeans pocket and handed it back to her.
She snatched it and held it up between us. “Six!” she announced cheerfully, bouncing on her seat like a child. She clicked Trey’s lighter one, two, three, four, five times. Whoosh! On the sixth, it lit. I could feel its heat on the rim of my ear.
“Fire is so darn hot, isn’t it?” She giggled, then snorted, then giggled again, holding that flame even closer to my flesh.
I ducked left. “Hey!” The rim of my ear felt scorched.
I thrust my hand over my shoulder for the lighter, hoping all the while that my fingers weren’t trembling. It was time she quit horsing around with her sickening gum and her nasty cigs and just got herself and her pack out of Bud’s car.
“You’re no fun,” she pouted, finally lighting up. She snapped the Bic closed and threw it onto my palm, then shoved hard with her boots against my seat to jettison herself backward. In the rearview mirror I saw those backseat shadows gathering close around her like long-lost children. Soon she was again nothing but unblinking, glowing eyes with a moving orange dot below them that was the burning tip of her cigarette.
“You’re not going with us,” I told her again. I was trying to make that an angry order, but the words came out of me in something nearing a whimper.
She gave a bored sigh. “Oh, don’t be silly, of course I am. I’ll drive, but you’re a quart low on oil so you might as well go ahead and merge while I enjoy my cig. Half a mile on there’s an exit. Take it and turn right and there’ll be a gas station at the top of the hill. In the parking lot you’ll see an old Jeep Cherokee with a swan hood ornament and a ladder on top. Pull up at the empty pump behind it.”
My head suddenly felt like it was being crushed in a vise. I gripped the wheel, then watched myself reach to turn the key. My foot was numb as a lifeless club as I gave Bud’s car several big gulps of gas and we lurched the rest of the way down the ramp.
I didn’t know or care if other cars were coming in my lane as I merged.
And the next thing I remember is pulling into a place called Tom’s Snatch and Grab.
Bud sort of woke up when I stopped the car behind this massive old Jeep. Still in a half-daze, I read one of its many bumper stickers. DIRT-LOVING TREE HUGGERS!
“Whatzit? Where we at, huh?” Bud asked.
The hitchhiker girl unlatched her door and used her boots to push it wide. “We desperately need a quart of oil, Bud, and guess what? They’ve got banana Popsicles at this place! The kind that break in the middle!” She took off for the convenience store, zigzagging around the cars and gas pumps that crowded the busy parking lot.
“I think she hypnotized me or something and, like, made me drive here,” I muttered, rubbing my neck. “Bud, she called you by name. You don’t . . . you don’t know her, do you? I mean, you couldn’t know her, that’s insane.”
“Yeah, well,” Bud more or less answered in this dreamy way. “Better pop the hood.”
I turned to him, frowning. “No, Bud, we absolutely need to leave her here! There’s plenty of traffic at this place for her to catch a ride, and we’ve gotta get home.”
She rapped on the window behind my head. “Pop the hood!” she yelled.
My heart nearly exploded with the shock of that. There was no way she could be back out here with that oil already, but there she was, pulling a big green plastic Quaker State container from inside her jacket as she skipped like a child to the front of the car.
“Heh, heh,” Bud laughed in that soft, un-Bud-like way.
I groped under the dashboard and found the latch, and the hood came unhooked with a clank. She was just propping it open as I jumped from the car to take over the job, but as I reached the front, the big hood slammed down again with such righteous force that if I’d had another second to lean forward, it would surely have beheaded me.
How could she possibly have added that oil so quick? She’d had, what? Five seconds?
“Hey, get back in the car!” she yelled, wiping her hands on my sleeve as she zipped past me. She tossed the empty oil container into a trash barrel over by the gas pumps, a twenty-foot swish any of the Lakers would have envied. Then she slipped through the door I’d left open and slid beneath the wheel, and I heard the big engine thrum to life.
A guy burst from the store and began angrily jabbing the air with both index fingers. “Somebody stop that car!” he yelled. “She’s a thief! Somebody get the license number of that big Olds while I call the police!”
The crazy hitchhiker girl gave a wicked giggle and gunned it. Luckily she’d left the back door open, and I had one split second to dive into the backseat as she swerved around the big Jeep, which, sure enough, had a swan hood ornament. Silver lettering on its front door read Truehart Organic Farm and the people inside gave us some goofy smiles and flashed us the peace sign as we sailed past.
The girl began driving at warp speed and head-banging to some Slipknot she’d summoned up on the radio while Bud held a banana Popsicle against the dashboard, karate-chopping it. When it broke, he held one half over his shoulder, offering it to me.
“That’s thoughtful of you, Bud,” I heard the crazy hitchhiker yell above her music. “But he doesn’t want a taste of your Popsicle. I can tell from the vibe he’s sending out that what he wants is a taste of oblivion.”
Had I heard those crazy sentences right? I was suddenly breathless and disoriented. I felt myself listing to the side until my head came to rest on the crazy hitchhiker’s backpack. It smelled like that grape bubble gum. But beneath that sickening sweetness, it smelled like old beat-up canvas, like my camping tent, the one Steve and Zero and Trey and I sometimes took to the lake on weekends when Zero’s uncle lent us his boat.
I slid down, down, down into a memory as deep, dark, and chilly as the water at Thunderbird Lake on any October weekend. The four of us were in the boat, racing the wind with the throttle wide open. The motor was too loud to hear anything anybody tried to yell to the others, but we were all whooping and hollering and yelling things to each other anyway. We couldn’t keep our mouths shut once the boat was going full throttle like that, couldn’t keep from yelling out nothing in particular, couldn’t keep from shrieking and
laughing, even though our teeth ached with the icy wind and our open mouths kept filling with fish-smelling lake spray.
Zero and Steve were in the two bucket seats up front. Steve was at the wheel, and he kept doubling us back and spinning the boat in tight circles so that the hull whapped hard and rhythmically over the waves we’d just made, bouncing us around like a bucking horse. It was a favorite in Zero’s list of boat thrills, and his hyena laugh was shrill enough to cut through the noise of the motor and float on the wet wind. At one point a massive wave smacked us a good one and we were completely drenched—hair, T-shirts, jeans, and bare feet. We thought that was hilariously funny and slapped each other on the backs.
I nuzzled farther into that old canvas smell and felt happy. The memory or dream went on and on like that, just like the hours had gone on and on those afternoons we’d had the boat and the freedom of a lake made empty by water too cold for normal people.
“This is great!” Trey yelled across to me. He was sitting on the floor of the boat, there in the back. I was sitting across from him, also on the floor, leaning against the side of the boat with my arms spread along the top rim. I could read Trey’s lips, even with his red hair blowing across his face. “Let’s do this forever, Tucker, my man!”
I nodded hard and smiled like a lunatic. My face was stretched from grinning, from all that water hitting it, from yelling and yelling nothing that was important enough for you to wonder if it was heard, which it never, ever was.
The sun gradually trailed through the sky without our noticing until we were all shivering pretty bad, which made us reluctantly realize that night was edging in.
“Any of y’all wanta ski today?” Steve yelled back to us. “Trey? Tuck? It’s getting colder, guys. We better ski if we’re goin’ to.”
