Blood Highway

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  “That’s good thinking,” Harvey said. “Turn off the ‘Open’ sign, too, hon. It’s got a switch right on top.” He beckoned Sam with a wrist. “The VCR’s in the office. Come on and we’ll grab that tape.”

  “Lead the way.”

  They went through a door between the counter and a nacho nook, Sam stowing the gun in the back of his pants, Harvey crowing about what his girlfriend would do for a pretty necklace. Me standing with a bag of gummy worms, unsure when Sam had given them to me. I went to the door, thumbed the bolt, shut off the sign. I was breathing this wild hummed allegro as they came back in. Harvey was blindfolded with a hankie. A roll of duct tape looped his wrist like a bracelet. Sam held his shoulders from behind, guiding him. “Two steps to the right. There it is—have a seat.”

  Harvey submerged behind the register. “Hey, should we tape my mouth? It’d give you a better head start.”

  Sam pulled a hank of tape free. “No, it hurts like you wouldn’t believe to pull it off. I’ll go over your sleeves so it doesn’t get any arm hair. But, don’t worry, you couldn’t get out of it if you tried.”

  “Oh jeez. You’re not kidding there, are ya?”

  Sam slapped the roll of tape onto the counter. “Now, are we cool? I can untie you and we can forget the whole idea if that’s what you want.”

  A release of air, a gasket letting off steam. Then: “Sam, you take your pretty little daughter and get on out of here. I barely saw ya.”

  Sam came around to the aisles, saw me, and stopped. “Kat, relax. Whatever you think is happening, that is not what’s happening.” He pointed at the Powerade, abandoned on the floor by the phone. “Did you drink any of that?”

  “Nnn . . . no.”

  “Yo, Harvey?” Sam called.

  “Yo.”

  “Is it cool if we grab some stuff to go?”

  “Help yourselves.”

  Sam took a shopping basket off a stack and gave it to me—“Here”—and beat it for the back room again. “Harv, you comfortable?”

  “Oh, yeah, don’t worry about me.”

  My sneaker unsealed from the sticky tile. I began to browse. Doughnuts first, the white ones. I got some of the chocolate glazed, too. There was the Powerade I didn’t drink; I screwed the cap back on and took that. I took some toiletries. Box of cleansing wipes, jar of moisturizer.

  Sam still wasn’t back. I headed for where he’d gone. There were those sexy nachos posing on the cheese dispenser.

  “Is it okay if I take some nachos?”

  “You go ahead, hon,” Harvey said. “You take a hot dog, too. On the house.”

  I went and selected a plastic container of chips. I hit the cheese button, that unnatural fluorescence coming out in a cascade.

  “Tell ya what, you’ve got a heck of a dad there. You make sure and say thank you to him for taking care of you like he does.”

  I carefully avoided looking at the bound and blindfolded Harvey as I went behind the register and took two packs of Marlboro Reds.

  Clodding steps. “Kat, you ready?” Sam steered me. The door we exited gave on the north side of the building. “Would you help me?” Sam led me by the hand.

  As we rounded the front of the store, a car came off the ramp so fast its tires jounced. It wasn’t a Corvette, wasn’t a cop car. It sped by.

  Sam squatted in front of the ice case. He took the two hundreds from the bag and a bunch of Bics. “These won’t do it. Do you want one?” He put a lighter in my hand.

  He still had the duct tape. He tore off two tiny pieces, sticking them to his jeans, and picked a pair of small rocks from the parking lot. “Gets windy here,” he said, taping a hundred dollar bill to each rock. “So they don’t blow to Winnipeg. How ’bout that?” He placed them under the ice chest and stood. He took my basket, held out his hand. “Mademoiselle.”

  My mouth was watering. All I wanted were these fucking nachos. He led me around the building’s side to a brown station wagon with Johnny Blue at the wheel. Sam opened a door, and I scooted onto the middle seat. He got in next to me.

  Johnny put the car in drive. I looked back as we left the station, sure there’d be some dead giveaway. But it was merely closed for business. Up ahead, I-94 was, too—Highway Patrol had checkpoints going east and west. We took a leisurely right and went north, toward the burger joints and humble houses. They were chaos. Police vehicles of every persuasion had the town surrounded. People were running out of the perimeter, hands on their heads. Big men in heavy gear were getting ready outside the circle, fbi and us marshal in yellow print on their bulky coats or vests. I searched for the epicenter of all this, the focus of their attention. It helped that I knew what color it was.

  Our bus sat parked at Arby’s. In the last space of the lot.

  Next I searched for Blaine. I couldn’t find him, or more like I found forty of him. When I was about to quit, I found what I should have been hunting all along. The Corvette looked exactly as it had in the photo on his desk. Cherry red, boxy yet somehow sleek, it was parked askew by a playground. Two Highway Patrol cars and an unmarked sedan were nearby. The sedan was the one I’d seen catch some air coming off the ramp, though now it had a red light on its roof. I remembered how those spinning lights had made me dizzy only days ago. Now they looked like the still point of a spinning universe. And before I knew it, they were gone.

  Ten

  We drove north until we came to a set of railroad tracks. Across the ties was an intersection with another unending two-lane. We took it west. The road was fuzzed on either side by high grass, and its lack of variety made the stray rock seem exciting. Sam kept to the far side of the seat. The shopping basket was between us. I felt him reach inside, and he showed me the chocolate doughnuts. “May I?”

  I was awakening, feeling monumentally stupid. Going: No, literally they should build a monument to how stupid I was back there.

  I counted should-haves, one each for the hay bales in the fields all around us.

  “Hey,” Sam said.

  I turned to him, expectant. Excited for an opening that might lead somewhere.

  “Hey,” he said again, and pointed outside. “Hey.”

  There was nothing new. A few low terraces of rock. Those and—I got it.

  So bad. “Hey,” I said, pointing at a bale.

  “Hey.” Sam pointed, pointed. “Hay, hay.”

  Johnny moved the mirror. His brow was puzzled.

  “Hey!” Sam told him, waving merrily.

  Johnny ate a sunflower seed. It might’ve been my imagination, but I thought he did it moodily. My hands sank to my lap, laughter cut off.

  “He’s nothing to be scared of,” Sam said. “Know what he went in for? Car theft. His brother owned a chop shop in Jersey. The good cars are in Manhattan—that made it a federal charge when Johnny got caught. FBI wanted him to rat out his brother, and Johnny wouldn’t, so he got ten to fifteen, when most GTAs get a year or two.”

  I tried to sound casual. “What did you do?”

  “You just saw what I did.” Sam reached around his back, holding his other palm out to indicate how not a big deal it was when the gun reappeared. “These are never dangerous in the hands of someone who knows what he’s doing.” He snapped out the wheel or whatever—where the bullets went—and spun it. Loaded. “I don’t shoot people. That’s not who I am.”

  What was I supposed to say: Yeah, wow, nice gun, Dad?

  Sam slapped the revolver back together, put it away. He was a little shamefaced, as if he’d gone in front of the class for show-and-tell and nobody’d applauded. I did a survey of the car, trying to find a topic. The headphones and the box they sat on had a place of honor in the passenger seat. “What’s that?” I said, pointing at it.

  “That’s a police scanner.” Nothing else.

  Behind us, in the far rear seat, Colonel Sanders smiled sketchily on a plastic bag. I could smell it now—fried chicken. My craving for a tummyful nearly made me miss the for sale sign buried under the food. The back win
dshield was dusty, so there was a clean rectangle in the bottom corner where the sign had been.

  The highway’s tongue split, and we veered right. A squat building sat next to a picnic area. No other cars in the modest lot. We stopped perpendicular to the parking spots, idling. Sam got out, came around, opened my door, and played footman. “Milady.” I accepted his hand, and he leaned around me into to the backseat, snagging the KFC bag.

  I’d done plenty of rest stops. You got your indoor plumbing, you got your vending machines—and you got your pay phones. “I’m just gonna wash up.”

  Sam slapped the roof twice. “Sounds good.”

  Johnny drove off, rejoining the flow of the road. I walked toward the building’s bright door, in whose reflectiveness Sam was methodically unpacking containers, taking no interest in me whatsoever. I pulled the door open. Inside were Funyuns and Ring Dings, Coke and Pepsi. And a phone.

  Sam was removing lids, putting sporks in each tub, separating plates from napkins, making stacks. Setting the table. He could look up any second.

  I went into the ladies’ room. There was a row of sinks and another of stalls. The light was disturbing. Most of the fluorescents had burned out, so midmorning snuck through a line of high windows, making the room inappropriately intimate. Part of me just wanted to lie down. I was starving, and the last decent night’s sleep I’d gotten was at Blaine’s. Every one of those forty-some hours since was bagged under my eyes, growth rings on a really old tree.

  A giggle came bubbling from the stalls.

  I jumped. “Hello?”

  Same giggle, youthful soprano. Someone else shushed. Tight acoustics rebounded the sounds. I ambled down the row of toilets, hesitating when the very last stall hinted movement. I saw a pale, skinny arm and went the rest of the way, curious.

  The girls were college-age. The one on the left had a beer bottle by the neck, holding the base at me as if it were jagged and broken, deadly. But she’d forgotten to break it. She had light-brown curls in tight, wild springs and freckles on her nose. She was in serious contention for the least threatening human I’d ever seen. “Gimme your wallet,” she said.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Oh.” The bottle fell and rolled with a scraping noise on the cement floor. It bumped into many, many others. “Never mind.”

  The other girl giggled. A stud sparkled in her nostril. Her crop top showed a flat stomach, and her cutoffs barely covered her ass. Her legs were even longer than mine. She had to be freezing. “Who did that to your hair?” she said.

  “I did.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Could you, like”—Curly seemed to search for the right words—“screw off? This is a private party.”

  The idea of prevailing upon them for help surged into my mind, but I knew it was ridiculous. “Stay here, okay?”

  In the vending area again, with the archaic pay phone, I went through the mental motions of what I’d be screaming at me to do if I were watching all this instead of living it: pick it up, dial 911, let the receiver hang, hope for the best.

  Sam squinted in, holding a drumstick. The sun on the door had been blinding when I’d first come in. Could he see?

  As I walked into pleasant midforties, a breeze brushed my hair to a side. Sam held out a clean plate. I took it, began filling it to the point that it needed my whole hand underneath or it’d collapse.

  “When did they change the gravy?” he said.

  “Couple years ago. And they got rid of their fries. Total crime. They went great with the gravy.”

  “I miss the lumps.”

  I nodded at him emphatically. He’d made one of those everything sandwiches, where you pile the meat and the sides inside the biscuit, and every bite you take dribbles everywhere. We were stuffed in five minutes. There was a lot left. I matched lids to bowls, to keep bugs out and warmth in. “Driver’s coming back?”

  “He is,” Sam said, “but Johnny doesn’t eat much, just sunflower seeds. His stomach bothers him. I tell him it’s the chain-smoking. He tells me he smokes to settle his stomach.” Sam moved to sit on the table, putting his feet on the bench. His back went straight and tall. “I’m proud of you, you know. Most girls would be having hysterics. I knew you weren’t most girls, but all the same, I’m impressed. You’re levelheaded enough to appreciate that I’m not a threat. I’m grateful for that, more than I can say.”

  “Is this cool with you?” I showed him my cigarettes.

  “No, but it’s a little late for me to disapprove.” Sam took the lighter from my fingers, clicked it, and held the flame out for me.

  I blew my exhale away from him. “Back there, with Harvey—that’s really all you did?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You got eighteen years for that?”

  “No, I got twenty-five to forty. But I did it a lot. Too much.” Sam turned in either direction, spiraling his back, popping it. He heard my mute question and sighed. “One hundred fifty-seven robberies in twelve states.”

  I laughed, very kinda.

  “I know, I know,” Sam said. “You have to understand it was a different time. We were young. We were invincible. We were high.”

  I laughed, loudly this time—and this one was pure, this one was begging for mercy. I had to get up. I tossed my plate in the trash. “Blaine told me—”

  “Blaine’s your policeman?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sure he did. I’m sure he told you plenty.” Sam steepled his fingers, squinted at the road. “I’ve made god-awful mistakes, honey. I can’t deny that. But sometimes our mistakes are like rabbits. They mate; they make lots and lots of other mistakes without our help. I trusted the wrong people. And Kat? That is the gaffe that keeps on giving. That can destroy your entire life, especially if you’re the last man standing when the smoke clears. It’s the survivor’s privilege to take the blame, just as it’s the betrayer’s prerogative how they want to frame the fairy tale, as long as they betray completely—and your mother did.”

  He said “your mother” like he was spitting acid.

  “I made terrible mistakes, but I have paid for them. I paid for mine, hers, everybody’s. I have earned the right to move on.” Sam struck a particularly casual pose, like that teacher who insists you call him by his first name. “I can’t undo what’s already done. What I can do, and what I’ve risked my neck to do, is to offer you the chance to get to know me. That’s why I came to Minneapolis. No other reason. And I want this crystal clear: you are not here against your will.” Sam let that sink in.

  “Okay,” I said, after a pause. “What’s—like, what’s the plan?”

  “We’re lighting out for the West.” He opened his arms, embracing all of eastern Montana. “We’ll do some treasure hunting in Cali, then retire to Mexico. Haciendas, siestas, margaritas. And you, my dear, are free to come with us however far you care to. Tonight, we’re bunking at a cabin in the mountains. A good friend of mine owns it. He called the caretaker—it’s all set up for us, plenty of rooms. There’s even a guesthouse. I figured I’d let you have that, give you your space. If you’d like.”

  Sam tipped the chicken bucket and poked around. I was listening closely for what lay beneath this at-homeness, his laid-back detailing of a life of crime followed by an invitation to the daughter he’d never met to join him on a renegade road trip. Other than his tone when talking about Mom, he’d sounded so at peace and balanced and reasonable.

  Sam brought out a wing. I watched three of his demure little nibbles before blurting, “Can I go for a walk?”

  He frowned at me, like: Of course.

  “Of course,” he said.

  I had some trouble finding my balance. I couldn’t shake the feeling he’d shoot me in the back, but I went, moving on a kind of cloud, toward the rest stop and then around it, to the ladies’ room side. Here were the high windows. I heard a high giggle.

  I was high. I’d reached the level of tired where tired had d
rugged me. But I had to assess some options.

  Go with him to Mexico?

  Mexico, Sam? You’ve got the FBI and US Marshals and Highway Patrol on your tail, but we keep hopping cars and sticking to back roads and you think that’s enough to get us several thousand miles? Are you fucking cracked? It’s a sweet invitation, but I’m afraid I have to decline.

  Trust that he really had changed? The file Blaine had on Sam was a chronicle of incidents from almost two decades ago. Ancient history. Rehabilitation worked sometimes. Criminals went straight. Sure, Sam had robbed Harvey, except it was more like Sam had “robbed” Harvey, and that seemed less a red flag than—I don’t know—a pale-peach flag.

  So, fine—Sam was still inclined to petty theft.

  But so was I.

  Scary looks aside, he was kind of a doof. I’d been anxious in the convenience store, but that was with Blaine in my ear again, insinuating that Sam was a psychopathic mastermind who was going to eat my liver with fava beans and nice Chianti. When in fact, Sam’s master plan pretty much sucked.

  Which led me to another fact: the police would catch us.

  We had the scanner. Johnny Blue respected speed limits. Outside of those factors, the continuance of our road trip hinged on luck. And when our luck ran out, I could play shell-shocked victim. If our luck held, I could exit stage left when I’d had enough bad puns and junk food.

  Remembering the photo in my pocket, I took it out and unfolded it. God, Sam looked different—it didn’t seem possible a person could transform so drastically. What must the rest of them look like now? The fat guy got skinny. The dude in the dress wore a suit to the office, and the girls pressing kisses to his cheeks had mom haircuts.

  I put the photo away and went around to the building’s other side. Harmony would never tell me where she grew up. Whether she had brothers, sisters, a dog, a bike. She’d brush it off with, “Let’s focus on today,” and she’d distract me with a snack or an outing, park me in front of the TV. Now I wanted answers.

  Coming around the corner, though, I saw that the girl with curly hair was sitting in my spot, telling Sam: “A lot of vegetarians have a tendency to preach to people, and I’m not like that. I just have to live by my values. And I believe animals have souls.” She scooped about a backhoe’s worth of coleslaw from the tub. She was straddling the bench, her back to the leggy girl, who was chomping into a thigh with the commitment of a jaguar.