“And being kidnapped?”
“That too.”
“So what are you working on now?”
“Well, since I’ve been at NRS, I’ve made two short films no one has seen except Fin the janitor.”
“Who’s that?”
“A friend. He once dressed up and pretended to be my dad for a school event. It was funny. His suit was too big.”
“So, you’re friends with the janitor?”
“Yeah, you got a problem with that?”
“No, it’s cool. As long as he’s not trying to…”
“It’s not like that.”
Not like you, I don’t say.
“Anyway, there’s only one filmmaking elective, and you have to be a senior to take it. When I do, I’m gonna make a film about a homeless guy.”
“Hmm.”
“There’s this town called Northampton near my school. It’s, like, Freakville. There’s this one guy. His name is Gary. He hosts a poetry reading every week on the street. He’s got a crazy, super-layered past. I want to do an exposé, a gritty doc, and call it There’s Something about Gary.”
Levon smiles, getting the reference.
“So, where will your art-house cinema be?”
“I’m thinking Albuquerque, New Mexico,” he says.
“Hmm. Why Albuquerque?”
“There’s one for sale there, so I’ve been researching it. New Mexico is cool. It’s sunny a lot, and it’s a big-sky kind of place. Opening the theater might be a dumb move, but in the right city it could work, and I think Albuquerque’s it.”
“I can picture it. I can see it happening.”
He gives me a dubious look until he realizes I’m serious. All of a sudden I want to make it my life mission to go to Albuquerque. I imagine him inside his trailer, counting the days until freedom, dreaming of open spaces and flickering projectors.
We pass a sign that says “Welcome to Georgia, State of Adventure.”
We both read it, then look at each other and smile. He takes one hand off the steering wheel and cups it under mine. I try to act like it’s a totally normal gesture, but my heart starts to pound. Not from being caught or chased or thrown in a trunk.
Because I’ve wanted him to do that for days.
Chapter 19
Something is different.
School seems like a dot in the distance, which it is.
An outlaw is holding my hand, and the wind is tickling my scalp. We continue to drive until I can’t take the silence anymore.
“So, why didn’t your dad try to appeal his charges?”
“He’s waiting for the money. That million would change his life.”
“That’s a long time to pay for someone else’s crime.”
“He should never have let Wade drive. But he was afraid of him.”
“He is kind of a bully. Have you met him?”
“Yeah. He’s funny, but what a major ego! He paid my dad well though and always had his back—to a fault.”
“A San Andreas fault.”
He barks out another laugh. “True.”
We stop at a rest stop and each go to our separate bathrooms. In mine, I finally look at myself full on. My eyes seem doubled and my cheeks more narrowed. My lips are bigger. The entire proportions of my face have changed, but I like it. Next to me I see a woman putting on makeup and feel a pang of sadness, knowing that it’s never going to help the ruin of her face. Next to her, a young girl in an oversize sweatshirt washes her round, pale face that seemingly has no pores. I think of myself as a kid, just like her, living through a maze of bathrooms, rest stops, green rooms, and hotel restaurants. Maybe that’s why this feels so right. I was raised on the road, and I needed to get back here, see real reminders of humanity, and plug into the raw, constantly moving world.
When I return to the car, it’s locked, and Levon’s not back yet. I sit on the hood, and a middle-aged woman approaches me with concern. I’m ready to deny knowing anything about Candy Rex or a kidnapping, but she simply asks how I’m doing.
“Fine.”
“You on a family trip?”
“You could call it that,” I say with a smile.
“We are too, but it seems like we can’t get anywhere with all these stops!”
I don’t know what to say. She stands there awkwardly, and I wonder if she’s bluffing and knows my face from TV, even with my shaved head. The kid at breakfast did. I look around the rest stop for any leering presences. Just the usual dirty truckers and potbellied fathers. The woman gives me a warm smile and heads to the bathroom as Levon walks out. I imagine we are together on a family trip, off to see the in-laws or to some posh resort. We could have fun together. We already are.
In the car, he asks, “Who was that?”
“Just a weird housewife from some RV.”
“Was she onto you?”
“A little, but nothing to worry about.”
The road stretches on, and though we glance in the rearview from time to time, it’s mostly blurred trees and Mortimer and Randolph looking at us from the dash. The sun beats down from the highest point in the sky.
I lean my head against Levon’s shoulder. After a while, my neck starts to hurt, so he lifts his arm and puts it around me. I wish once again that the road would just go on and on. This feels like the closest thing to home I’ve got.
“So why do you hate boarding school so much? The grounds looked amazing.”
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful place, and some of my teachers are really cool, and I get that I’m privileged to go there, but the other students… I’m not aligned with them socially, if that makes sense. You know, I didn’t mind growing up with a rock band. I just wish my mother hadn’t died on me. And part of me blames my father.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He’s easy to blame, I guess.”
“You know I’m not a huge fan of Wade, obviously, but maybe he had nothing to do with it.”
I sit up and look at him.
“I doubt it. Do you know I had a dream where I was just punching him in the stomach over and over? It was super uplifting.”
He smiles. “Candy, I’m not trying to stand up for him, believe me, but as I said before, you turned out fine.”
I try to give him a sultry look and say, “Dating material?”
“Yeah,” he says, but I’m not sure if he means for him. Does he really like the other girl, the one in the picture? Now that we’ve kissed, it’s like we’re in the foyer of a house. Will the door open to other rooms? Does he think I’m loyal to Billy Ray? Yes, I went to third base with him and the kid worships me, but he’s not boyfriend material. Sexy offspring of wrongly accused convicts are more my style, and yes, I watch too many movies.
Eventually, I ask the question we’ve been avoiding. I have to.
“So, do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know, Candy. You have to remember that whatever you did was unintentional. You were trying to protect yourself.”
He’s right, but still, I can’t stop seeing Jamal’s head, snapping back, and the terrible sound of his head hitting the rock.
“Will they charge us for murder?”
“They could, but I don’t think…”
He looks in the side mirror, then back at me.
“I don’t think he will be missed, if you know what I mean. I don’t think he had any family.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not positive, but pretty sure. He was vague about it.”
I wonder who would miss me if I died. Rena. Billy Ray. Fin. That’s about it. But maybe I can add another person to that list. The person in the cowboy hat, driving this car, steering us to some great unknown.
I fall asleep with my head against the window, and when I wake up, the sun is setting, making
the sky scream out in every shade of red, orange, and pink. Wisps of clouds behind the trees change hue even as I look at them. It reminds me how fast the world goes. Our lives, our experiences—so impermanent. I loved my mother more than anything in the world, and maybe that was because I knew she would be taken away from me. Our connection was even stronger because we had no longevity. We were fated to self-destruct. Is it the same with me and Levon?
I stick my camera out the window to catch the red sky before it fades to black.
Chapter 20
It sounds like a gun going off right next to my head and scares the living crap out of me.
“Shit.” Levon swerves into the breakdown lane. We’ve lost the right front tire.
He tells me to stay put and gets out, starts searching around the back, and then he slams the trunk closed and gets back into the driver’s seat.
“There’s a spare but no jack,” he says. “Grab your stuff. We’re gonna have to hitch.”
We stand in back of the truck, holding out our thumbs, the cars shooting past us at astronomical speeds. After a while, an eighteen-wheeler honks and slows down. Without saying anything, we run to catch up to it.
The trucker opens the door, and we climb up and in. His hair is greasy, and his two front teeth are capped in gold. He reeks of body odor.
“Got a flat?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Levon says. “Could you take us to the next town?”
“Sure, glad to help,” he says.
He starts up the truck, and we pull back into the lane. His hair is combed over, and his stomach protrudes out to the wheel. He looks like he hasn’t showered in weeks.
The radio is playing Christian rock. Something about He is the one who will save us. I grab Levon’s hand and squeeze it. No one says anything for a while, and we pass a couple exits where there were obviously towns.
“The next exit will be fine,” I tell him.
“Well, beggars can’t be choosers,” the trucker says, laughing a little to himself.
I look at Levon, who’s trying to stay cool, his other hand inside his bag. Is he gripping the gun?
The radio sings about Judgment Day. I try not to look at the trucker.
Finally, he pulls over into a rest area, parks, and says, “You two just stay put. Back in a flash.” He gets out, then clicks the automatic lock.
We try to open the doors manually but they don’t. Is this guy psycho? We look for a button to let us out.
“It has to open from inside, right?”
Then we hear it. Loud barking from the cab behind the seats. Chained to the side of the cab is a gray pit bull who apparently just woke up.
“Easy, killer,” Levon says, grabbing a half-full bag of onion rings from the dash. He takes one out and feeds it to the dog, whose eyes go soft as he eats.
“Stay here,” Levon says to me, opening the door in the back of the cab that leads to the storage part of the truck. I look at the dog, still chomping the onion ring and licking its lips.
“Candy, come here!” Levon yells.
The dog growls, then barks again, and it startles me. I grab the onion rings and give him three. After he’s done, he growls some more and lunges toward me, but there’s just enough space from the end of his leash for me to sneak back to the door behind the cab. The truck is filled with cases of beer. Levon already has the back door open and a six-pack under his arm. We jump out and make a run for it.
Soon we are in another field, this one of golden wheat. We run until we can’t run any longer, panting. We have made a path through the field and are now in the center. I can picture it from above. An ocean of yellow, two dots in the center, bent over, heaving.
We eventually catch our breath.
“They’ll never find us in here,” I say.
“As long as the trucker won’t. What the hell was he going to do, feed us to his pit bull?”
This time I kiss him, and he kisses me right back.
Chapter 21
By the time the six-pack is finished, we’ve made a bed of our clothes, and our bodies don’t know where one ends and the other begins. I keep looking up at the stars, wondering if this is all real.
Before we fall asleep, Levon says, “Candy, there’s something really important I have to tell you.”
What could be more important than what he just told me with his body?
“If Jamal’s dead, you can’t carry that burden. Like I told you, it wasn’t your fault. It was my fault. I was the one who got you into this mess.”
“Well, it’s a beautiful mess,” I say, drifting.
I dream that I’m at a kitchen table with my mother, my father, and Levon. We are eating dinner and laughing like everything is normal. My mother is drawing a picture of my father, who is wearing a suit. Then the table becomes a boat and we are sailing in rough waters, my father at the helm and my mother standing on the bow. Levon dives in and swims away; then the water evaporates and we are stuck in a desert. My father holds a bottle of water and drinks it all himself. It starts to get really windy, and we are all swept up into the sky. I am holding my mother’s hand, but her grip slowly loosens.
I wake to the piercing song of the swallows.
The beer cans are scattered around us.
Levon is crushing each one and putting them into his bag. We slowly gather up our makeshift bed and follow our path back to the rest area. The trucker is long gone. Levon gets some coffee out of the machine, and I get peanuts. We sit on a bench and wait until a woman drives up in a beat-up Subaru. Her wrists are lined with bangles, and she’s wearing a tie-dyed scarf around her head. She smiles at us as she goes inside. On her way out, she stops to take us in.
“Do you kids need help?” she asks.
“Is it that obvious?” I say, and she lets out a high-pitched, birdlike laugh.
“We need a jack,” Levon says.
“Oh, I had one of those but I divorced him,” the lady says, proud of her joke. Then her face goes serious. “I’ve got the other kind of jack too.”
We get into her Subaru, hoping she doesn’t have a pit bull and sociopathic tendencies. She takes us to our truck, which is miraculously still on the side of the highway, with no ticket or anything. While Levon changes the tire, I sneak looks at his muscled arms. The bangle lady, who calls herself Isis, talks to me about her three dogs named Ketchup, Mustard, and Pickle. “Pickle’s the bad boy,” she says, “naturally.”
When Levon finishes, Isis hugs us both, like we’re the ones who did her a favor.
The next few hours pass without a word. We drive. We both know that after last night, yet another part of the game has changed. There’s warmth running through my body that I can’t explain. We stare at the road ahead, check the mirrors behind, and keep breathing.
Pretty soon we’re in a city. Heated, sultry air swells up in waves off the sidewalk. People mingle in the pockets of shadow between the streetlights. Cars blast hip-hop, screen doors slam, street vendors sell ice cream and tacos.
“Welcome to North Miami, home of the American dream,” Levon says with his half smile. A few miles later, he pulls into the trailer park where I assume he lives. There are four trailers on each side, most with abandoned flower boxes and overturned tricycles. The ninth space at the end is just a plot of tar, as if whatever was there burned to the ground.
He shows me into his trailer, which is worse than I could’ve imagined. It’s basically one big room with a wall for the bedroom that doesn’t go up to the ceiling. All of a sudden, I feel guilty that even my dorm room is ten times nicer than this.
Levon shows me the bedroom and a picture of our fathers together, taken some years ago. I remember Wade’s white sunglasses that he always used to wear.
“Wow,” is all I can say.
In the corner, Levon boots up his dad’s antiquated PC.
“Top of the line,
huh?” Levon says.
“It’s high speed, which is all that really matters.”
I google Duke Bryant, Levon’s dad’s name, and the case comes up—the prosecutor, the detective, and everything. Since there are no pens, I get out my handheld and film the screen that has all the info.
Levon goes to the bathroom, and I log on to my new account to see if Billy Ray wrote back. He has.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: omg
Candy Cane—
I was wicked happy to see your email. I went by your grandma’s place, but she wasn’t there. I left her some dark chocolates. Attached is an MP3 but it’s rough—don’t judge! Please come home for Christmas.
Love,
Billy Ray
I listen to the song, and even out of Levon’s dad’s dinky computer speakers, it’s pretty good. Billy Ray is singing softer than he did in the band, and his voice cracks a little but in a good way. He thrums a hypnotic rhythm on an acoustic guitar and sings:
If there’s a house on a hill
in the shade of a tree,
that’s where you’ll find me.
That’s where I’ll be.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: omg
Billy—
Cool song. Please check on her again. And how did you know she likes dark chocolate?
Candy Cane
PS I hope you have a girlfriend.
I kill the screen just as Levon comes back; then he checks his own email. We end up sitting on the couch, staring at the leaks from the ceiling that look like tears on a wall that’s seen too much sadness. I never cried much for my mother or for my lack of a father, but I can feel my head get heavy, and I lean it on Levon’s shoulder. He takes me into his arms, and then everything goes quiet. It hits me right there that it never matters where you are or even what you’ve done.
Stealing Candy Page 10
