Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake Roger Siebert

Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2006 Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake Roger Siebert

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

LOOKING FOR THE PERFECT BLUEBERRY PANCAKE

ROGER SIEBERT

A thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006

______Virgil Suárez Professor Directing Thesis

______James Kimbrell Committee Member

______Elizabeth Stuckey-French Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii For Victoria

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to all my professors at Florida State University, with particular thanks to Virgil Suárez, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and James Kimbrell for their work on this thesis. Virgil took a gamble by volunteering to be my major professor without having seen any of my fiction before, and all three willingly took on a thesis two or three times the normal length—while Jimmy and Elizabeth were on official sabbatical, no less. I asked a lot from Virgil, Jimmy, and Elizabeth, and they all delivered without hesitation. Thank you, too, my fellow English Department graduate students, especially Matt Hobson, Brook Steingass, and Quentin James, who read early drafts of this thesis and provided insightful comments that were key in my finding out what this story was really about. I’m grateful, too, to the staff of The Southeast Review, who, while I sat with them reading and discussing submissions, made comments (positive and negative) on others’ fiction that taught me as much about storytelling as my course work did. Thanks, too, to the Department of English, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Graduate Studies, and Florida State University in general for offering me the opportunity to study creative writing at their program, one of the nation’s finest, as well as to the First-Year Writing Program, which granted me a teaching assistantship, without which I would not have been able to accept that offer to study. And finally, thanks to all my students, who taught me through their work that, no matter how long and hard a person pursues trying to create art, that pursuit should never be taken so seriously that we forget to write stories that are just plain fun to read.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... vii Chapter 1 ...... 1 Chapter 2 ...... 6 Chapter 3 ...... 10 Chapter 4 ...... 23 Chapter 5 ...... 26 Chapter 6 ...... 29 Chapter 7 ...... 31 Chapter 8 ...... 37 Chapter 9 ...... 40 Chapter 10...... 44 Chapter 11...... 48 Chapter 12...... 63 Chapter 13...... 65 Chapter 14...... 71 Chapter 15...... 77 Chapter 16...... 82 Chapter 17...... 85 Chapter 18...... 89 Chapter 19...... 101 Chapter 20...... 103 Chapter 21...... 110 Chapter 22...... 116 Chapter 23...... 119 Chapter 24...... 127 Chapter 25...... 129

v Chapter 26...... 131 Chapter 27...... 135 Chapter 28...... 148 Chapter 29...... 151 Chapter 30...... 152 Chapter 31...... 159 Chapter 32...... 170 Chapter 33...... 176 Chapter 34...... 181 Chapter 35...... 183 Chapter 36...... 184 Chapter 37...... 190 Chapter 38...... 196 Chapter 39...... 200 Chapter 40...... 205 Chapter 41...... 208 Chapter 42...... 209 Chapter 43...... 211 Chapter 44...... 213 Chapter 45...... 216 Chapter 46...... 221 Chapter 47...... 225 Chapter 48...... 227 Chapter 49...... 229 Chapter 50...... 233 Chapter 51...... 242 Biographical Sketch...... 245

vi ABSTRACT

Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake is the fictional story of John Smith—an ex-cook depressed with the superficiality of his ninety-hour-per-week job managing a high-end cigar bar and disenchanted with what he thought would be a perfect romance—who flees Denver hoping to reach the comfort of his sister’s home and tiny café on the Gulf. He’s hit with a snowstorm in the middle of the night, and he feels sorry for and picks up Ed MacGuffin, a hitchhiking murderer on the lam who is in search of a recipe for the perfect blueberry pancake. John’s pickup breaks down in the snowstorm and leaves the two on foot, and John and Ed are thrown into a bizarre and sometimes violent trek across half the country. When they meet Sam, a moving-truck driver, and Gavin, Sam’s loader, John begins to fall in love with Sam, and Sam’s sexual ambiguity forces John to try to come to terms with himself and his pop-culture–driven expectations. All along the way, John learns about Ed, Sam, himself, and the dangers of believing anything can be perfect.

vii CHAPTER 1

At two in the morning, the snowfall thickened and swarmed so furiously in John’s headlights that every sign of anyone else in the world vanished. Other cars’ tracks in the snow vanished. I-70 itself vanished. Quarter-sized flakes attacked John and his pickup like nuclear fallout or bleached-out volcanic ash. Bits flung themselves in on him through the pickup’s cracked-open side windows. Icy crystals stuck in his hair and eyebrows, dusted his vinyl gym bag on the seat next to him, and covered the floorboard two inches thick. John’s breaths came in short gulps and burst out in clouds onto the windshield, where they froze in a thin sheen because of his broken defroster. John had wanted to leave everyone behind, to disappear, but this, he thought, was too much. Denver was done, or rather, he was done with it: the town, the job, love, everything. Now he was pointed toward his big sister’s in the Florida panhandle, and he hadn’t even let her know he was coming. He hoped he would be welcome. The top edges of John’s loafers touched his ankles stiff and cold through his dress socks. He wished he had worn wool socks, or cotton, or at least owned a pair of boots. His ankles felt naked. He wiggled his toes and stamped his left foot into the snow on the floorboard just in front of the seat. Then he switched feet on the gas pedal and stamped his right foot next to the hump over the transmission. John hoped his memory was accurate, that Pamela and Kevin had one of those perfect relationships, a sense of contentedness he could bask in and leech off of, but he was afraid that his impression had come from some simpler association, like the scents of simmering gumbo or frying bacon that always seemed to waft into their apartment from their tiny café on the ground floor, or from some fantasy John had latched onto back when he was young and quixotic enough to believe in things like true love—and unconditional welcomes. John grabbed his scraper from the snow on the passenger floorboard and shaved jagged paths in the icy condensation on the inside of his windshield. The flakes in his headlights came at his pickup and shot past the edges of the windshield like stars on the Enterprise’s main screen.

1 John checked his speedometer and found that he had somehow accelerated to nearly sixty, a blind charge in this blizzard. He let up on his accelerator until the needle crawled back to forty-five and the flakes fell back into their continuous churn rather than the shooting motion of before. Through the dark and the snow, a tiny white reflector came toward John at just above headlight height. It seemed a miracle, slow but straight and steady through the whirling mass of flakes. John tried to keep his pickup one blacktop-shoulder width to the left of the reflector’s path, because that’s where he figured the interstate had to be. The reflector slipped past on his right and disappeared, and a dozen heartbeats later, he saw a second reflector begin to follow the same path. He couldn’t remember seeing any reflectors earlier in the night, before he had needed them, but he figured they had to have been there. Still, their appearance seemed heavensent, and he thanked whoever had decided long ago that the highway should have them. Then his pickup sputtered and jerked as if some god-sized child had grabbed it and shaken it like a rattle. John slowed to forty, and his pickup ran fine. He checked his fuel gauge and watched for the little red cartoon battery, oilcan, or thermometer light, but everything seemed fine. Then, after two or three minutes, the pickup jerked again. John slowed even more, but he didn’t want to drop his speed below thirty. Someone could come barreling down on him from behind, and he might not be able to react. He checked his rearview but saw nothing except the faint but thick wall of taillight-tinted whirling flakes. He turned on his flashers, and bright amber flakes danced into and out of existence to his left and right. John scraped the inside of his windshield again and hoped his pickup would hold out, and that the road wouldn’t curve too much when no reflectors were in sight. What was on their other side? A fence? A ditch? The end of the world? All hell itself? Eastpoint was a long way away. Just after the next reflector, a figure materialized in the swirling snow, a silhouette with a thumb out and a puffy winter parka with a fur-lined hood. John couldn’t believe it: a hitchhiker, in this stuff, at this time of night. The pickup crept past the hitcher, and the flashing amber lights lit up the swaying, shivering, hunched posture, snow gathered in the folds of the hitcher’s parka and frozen in clumps in the fur lining the hood. John’s mother’s voice popped into his head: “Don’t, Johnny. He could be a serial killer.”

2 But John couldn’t leave anyone out in that storm. Besides, he thought, living in sunny Southern California, off who-knows-how-much alimony, what could she know about the viciousness of deadly, frozen, blackest-of-night storms and what they could do to one person alone? The pickup sputtered again, and John wondered what would happen if it broke down a hundred yards past the hitcher. What would the hitcher do then, after it had become obvious that John had chosen to abandon him? John thought of his parents, on opposite ends of the continent, and of Billie in Denver, and he shuddered. He veered closer to the reflectors and braked to a stop. The hitcher, red in the brake lights, ran up to the pickup. The reddened snow’s surface churned beneath the red swirl of flakes, the fur on the hitcher’s hood undulating like the mane of some blood-soaked, charging wild beast, bloody, shiny globs slinging and scattering all around. The hitcher unslung a roll of some sort, like a blanket or sleeping bag bound in a tight roll—or the torn-off hind quarter of a kudu—and tossed it in the snow in the pickup’s bed, then seized the tailgate and climbed onto the bumper, dragging the rear haunches of the pickup suddenly down. “No,” John yelled. His voice had cracked. He tapped on the back glass with his ice scraper until the hitcher’s furry mane turned toward him. John cleared his throat. “Up here. In front.” The hitcher climbed off the rear bumper and jogged around from behind, from red flakes to flashing amber flakes to the bright white dome light that blinded John when the hitcher got in. The door slammed harder than John would have done it, rattling the partially open window and shaking flakes from the armrest and dash. Then it was dark again, except for the two beams of white flakes ahead, the intermittent amber puffs to the sides, and the red speckled wall behind. The wind grumbled across the open tops of the windows, and the hitcher rasped out thick, cloudy breaths. “I’m John,” John said. Where the hitcher’s face should have been was blackness above steamy breaths. Ice caked the surrounding fur, and the tip of a ball cap jutted from the hood’s top edge. Icy air whistled through the passenger window and blew flakes across the dash and into John’s face. “Ed,” the hitcher said, faint and low.

3 “Where you heading?” John asked. “Where are you heading?” John shivered again “East. South,” he said. “All the way to the sea.” Ed turned toward the crack in the window’s top and stuck the tip of his mitten through, as if he couldn’t believe it was open. “That sounds nice,” he said. John let the pickup idle forward and then nudged the accelerator into the snow on the floorboard, until the huge flakes sped up their assault on the two of them and tried to obscure the reflectors again. John asked, “How far you going?” in a tone as if he hadn’t heard an answer the first time, as if he had added “again” at the end. Ed nodded behind them and said, “Anywhere but back there.” Then he gave three more tiny, almost imperceptible nods, like aftershocks. John pressed his lips tight and focused on the flakes and the reflectors ahead. Ed pulled the hood back from his face and past the ball cap. The motion cracked open the ice on his mittens like how the sun cracks the parched clay bed of a dried-up creek. Ed pulled off the mittens and rubbed his hands over and over. His hands seemed misshapen in some way, but John couldn’t immediately discern how. Ed’s eyes glistened as pinpoints beneath the ball cap’s bill. Puffy, pale cheeks covered with dark stubble glowed in the indirect light. The cap itself was faded plain blue, unlogoed, with dark stains of some sort speckling it, leopard-like. Ed turned toward the next reflector as it left the glow of the headlights and vanished beside them. John said, “That’s the end of the world over there.” He hadn’t meant to say it. It startled him to hear his words bounce around in the air of the cab rather than only inside his head, and it made the conceit seem silly. He squinted into the flakes. “Uh-huh,” Ed said. “In every direction. Just closer in some.” John’s breath stopped. Ed understood, or at least pretended to. John forced his held breath out and made himself inhale, exhale. Ed beat his mittens together, scattering shards of ice across the inside of the pickup. His

4 nose had a peaked arch like a hawk’s beak, and it bent to the left, as if it had healed wrong after a bad break. Ed pulled one mitten back on, his odd hands shaking. “Mind if I sleep a while?” he asked. Ed pulled his other mitten on, and John realized what was odd about the hands: Ed’s forefingers were longer than his middle ones. They angled his mittens into shapes like chef’s knives, or a shark’s pectoral fins. “Go ahead and sleep,” John said. He leaned forward and peered through the windshield and up into the seemingly limitless snow falling out of the blackness. “You might put your seat belt on, though. Could be a rough ride.” Ed did. Then he pulled his hood back over his strangely spotted cap and his unreadable black eyes, leaned into the corner the seat made against the door, and lay still, the tufts of his fur gathering more of the sticky flakes, like the fur of a saber-toothed tiger succumbing to the ice age. John glanced at Ed again and regretted already admitting to Ed that his trip was a long one. He no longer had the option of pulling over and saying, “This is as far as I go.” Why had he said, “to the sea”? Why hadn’t he said, “to Salina,” instead, or just kept his damned mouth shut? And he had quit his job, quit Billie, quit everything by just walking out. No way would anyone in Denver ever want to see him again. He couldn’t go back, but he shouldn’t be going forward—and he had yet to let Pamela know that he was coming—but there was no denying, no matter how inappropriate it all seemed, that he was fully committed, to the trip, to the storm, to Ed. Everything. Already.

5 CHAPTER 2

Before Ed had hitchhiked south to and through Denver and out its east side, he had killed an art dealer in Wyoming. It was Wednesday, two and a half days before the snow storm, while the sky was still cloudless and brilliant blue. The art dealer had shown up unannounced at Ed’s father’s ranch—or ex-ranch—just outside Laramie, wanting to see his father’s paintings. The air was still, its chill making the brown grass crunch underfoot as Ed led the woman to his father’s barn, where the paintings were. “My sympathies for your father’s passing,” she said. Ed didn’t want to talk about his father’s death, and the more Ed watched this woman trudge toward the barn, the more the whole situation pissed him off. At first he had been pleased to have company of any kind. He had seen no one for the two weeks since he’d sold the livestock. He had no truck, no neighbor within four miles, not even a television. It had been only Ed and his father’s old easy chair and a dimly lit, cold-drafted living room for night and day—not really measurable nights and days, but simply black shadows shifting to gray shifting back to black—for two weeks straight. But all this woman wanted was to see his father’s artwork, maybe buy some, and then bug out. Ed pulled his blue ball cap on more snugly (it wasn’t spotted yet), then shoved his hands into the front pockets of his Wranglers. His left hand slipped beneath the long, black sheath of his K-bar, which he kept slung on his belt on the front part of his hip instead of just behind, where most folks would hang a knife. Inside his right pocket, his fingers wrapped around his Big Red One–emblazoned Zippo lighter. The barn didn’t seem to get any closer, though they walked steadily toward it. Beyond the barn, the foothills stood silent above the gradual rise and dip of frozen pasture no longer spotted with cattle. Ed hadn’t cared about the absence of the livestock at first, but now he missed the cattle’s lowing; their steamy breaths; the pungent smell of their hides; the swat of their tails after flies in the summer; and even the grainy, high-pitched bellow and the whites on a calf’s rolling eyes as he pushed the branding iron hissing and sizzling into its hide.

6 The woman cleared her voice in a way that made her sound like a man. Her hair stood puffed in a half-foot mass of bright-orange waves, like a sculpture. She said, “Your father was a gifted man.” Every grain of her makeup stood out in the sunlight, each brush stroke of her blush apparent, the black drawings of eyebrows standing clearly above the ridges where her real eyebrows should have been. She squinted in the sun, the hairless overhangs of her crinkled brow making her eyes seem to peer from gritty limestone caves. Ed thought, “Gifted.” Sure. Thorough, at least. Got rid of every pistol before I made it home. So thorough he had to kill himself with the pickup and an overpass support column. She said, “I heard his latest ones were even bigger. Is that why they’re in the barn?” He said, “They’re in the barn because they’re paintings.” Her brows crinkled more, her eyelids blinking like blankets flapping over the cave entrances. He said, “Paintings are messy,” and he thought of the greens, blues, and browns slung and spattered on the hay, and the red like arterial blood. “Well,” she said, “the act of painting, maybe, but not the paintings themselves.” She began to breathe audibly, in little puffs like a winded prissy dog between yaps. The heels on her red cowboy boots were too tall and thin and, with each step, pushed through the dead grass and poked into the crystallized top half inch of surface dirt. The toes were pointed like fairy shoes, and the balls of her feet seemed too narrow. She wobbled and waved her open palms at the ground like she were on a tightrope. Ed said, “Why didn’t you ever show up out here when he was alive?” She stopped, panting, and despite the cold, a bead of sweat trickled from her temple’s hairline and traced a jagged path through her makeup. “I intended to,” she said. “I liked his work from the get-go, when he first brought those little drawings into Laramie years ago. No one else liked his work then. They were little, though.” She squinted toward the barn, pulling her bright red orange lips inside her mouth and sucking on them. When she finally released them, they stuck for a second, as if her lipstick were caulking. “That’s changed now,” she said and moved toward the barn again. Ed waited for her to take two steps, then followed.

7 “Ancient history,” she yelled and waved her hands in sweeping arcs at the barn. “Ten, fifteen years ago.” She smiled back at Ed, her teeth red orange with lipstick smudges. “You’re going to be a rich man, Mister MacGuffin.” Ed clenched his fists until the lighter pressed hard into his palm and the insides of his fingers. People in town had always called him Ed or Eddie, and it seemed disrespectful and presumptuous for her to call him Mister so soon after his father’s death. He said, “I’ve got all I need from selling the stock. Couldn’t work them without my father, anyway.” Ed found himself squeezing and releasing the lighter, squeezing and releasing, four times, then eight. Here it comes again, he thought, and he felt more like he were watching a scene unfold instead of participating in it. He tried to pretend that his hand was still and relaxed, tried to ignore the apparent need for his other hand to press against something, too. He hadn’t counted in fours for months now, and he wanted to believe that that part of himself was gone. He exhaled forcibly and said to the woman, “You think money’s going to make everything alright now?” She stopped and turned toward him. Ed hadn’t realized that he had pulled his left hand from his pocket, but there it was, wrapped around the hilt of his K-bar, squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, repeatedly tugging the hilt of the K-bar against its tiny leather restraining strap on the sheath. “Is that your Marine knife?” she asked. “From the Marines?” He made his hand let go and crossed his arms. “Army,” he said. “When do you go back?” “Let’s get this over with.” The barn rose in front of them, gray and dry in the sky, seeming taller than the foothills now. It seemed strange to Ed that a building screaming for paint could conceal so much of it. Ed had one drawing of his father’s in the house. It was the only piece he had ever liked, an unfinished black-and-white sketch of prairie grass growing around and through a skull beneath a scorching sun. Most artists would have put a horse or steer skull in. Ed’s father had drawn a human skull. It was the one piece Ed had imitated most as a child, the one he’d been reminded of

8 most while serving in Iraq, and the only one he ever wanted to see again. It was also one of his father’s smallest. The woman leaned forward and sped up, her heels stabbing the earth harder, her hands swinging more toward the barn with each of her steps. It seemed to Ed that her fingers were splayed more in anticipation than for balance. Ed discovered that, despite how repugnant he found this woman, he didn’t want her to leave. He discovered, too, his right hand playing with his Zippo in his pocket again, his left drawing the K-bar from its sheath, and his stride closing the distance between them, his breathing faster than his quickening pace deserved.

9 CHAPTER 3

Air rumbled in and out through the cracked windows. The flakes still fell fast and thick, but instead of out of the blackness of night, they swirled in the brightening gray of morning. John’s headlights were a feeble, sickly yellow instead of the stark white they had seemed in the night. The headlights no longer helped John see, but they might eventually allow others to see him, so he resisted the urge to turn them off. The snowfall was still too thick for John to see farther than a hundred feet, but it was better than in the darkness. The reflectors were dim in the growing light and sat atop thin metal poles, the line of poles snaking out of the grayness ahead, two or three visible at a time. The snow on the ground had deepened, but now a pair of trenches, each one double-tire wide, cut through the snow ahead of him. He had seen no other vehicles all night, which made the trenches seem timeless, like dinosaur tracks in limestone, as if what he were chasing had long since gone extinct. John pulled the outer three fingers of each hand deep inside his soaked suede gloves and curled them into partial fists against his palms. He steered with only his forefingers and thumbs and squeezed his fists tight, trying to make the numbness disappear, even if it meant the sharp, icy pain again, the pain he felt in his nose and ears and every other part of his body. Tingling would come before the pain, but he had to face both if he wasn’t going to lose part of his fingers forever. Then he pulled even his forefingers and thumbs into his fists and steered with the insides of his forearms. His coat sleeves should have gripped the wheel solidly, but the leather was so cold that it slipped on the worn-smooth wheel, and he had to press his forearms tighter against the wheel, as if he were on a weight machine at the gym squeezing out a last rep. His chest and shoulder muscles ached, and soon he would have to open his fists and shove his fingers back into the icy wet fingers of the gloves and scrape the windshield again. “What do you do?” Ed asked without budging. John started. He had begun to believe that maybe Ed had died and frozen in place. John gingerly slipped his fingers back into their places in the gloves and gripped the wheel in his palms. It was all so icy cold.

10 Ed sat up and stretched, rolling his head from side to side, his neck cracking as if snapping off floes. John cleared his throat and asked, “What do you do about what?” Ed pulled his hood back and leaned forward long enough for it to drop between his back and the seat. He rocked three more times, though the hood didn’t resettle as a result. The spots on the ball cap seemed more brown than black in the new light. It reminded John of his father’s old butcher aprons, of blood stains, though he knew no one in his right mind would wear a hat spattered with blood. “No,” Ed said. “What brings you out here? Your job.” Ed’s stubbly cheeks glistened in the grayness. From beneath the ball cap’s bill, his eyes sat black like tiny snowmen’s eyes—rabbit-scat-sized fragments of wood coal from some ancient people’s long-dead fire. John thought, “Brings”? “Pushed,” maybe. Billie and her dear old dad had pushed me out here, Billie’s manipulation, and Leopold’s paranoia and unpredictability, the way they tried to twist me into someone other than I was. “I’m a cook,” John said, and he liked the simplicity. Ed’s eyes opened wide, and he blinked and blinked, the tiny bits of coal shining intermittently in the gray light. He pulled off his mittens and rubbed his face, his long forefingers making large sweeps across his shiny flesh. “A cook,” Ed said and stared wide-eyed at John again. “Amazing. What, you going to a convention or something?” John shook his head and watched the emerging tracks and reflector poles. “I’m moving,” he said. And he thought, I should have called Pamela first, but no one calls his sister at four in the morning for the first time in over a year. I hadn’t even called her at Thanksgiving. I’d been too busy working, ninety hours a week. Damn that Leopold. If I just show up, she has to let me in, right? But two thousand miles—two days—is a long way not to call. There will be no excuse for that. John tried to push the pickup to fifty, but it yawed, and he backed off to forty-five again. The sound the snow made beneath the tires and flying into the wheel wells was like gravel, though not as sharp. It sounded like he were already pulling into the oyster-shell lot at Pamela and

11 Kevin’s café, and he tried to imagine that more clearly. Ed turned and looked through the pickup’s back window and down into the snow-draped bed. “That’s all you got,” he asked, “firewood and a cooler?” Ed’s whiskers were thick all the way down his throat and beneath his ears and met the untrimmed hairs growing down the back of his neck. Black hairs grew, too, in tiny tufts on top of and out of his ears. Ed seemed more animal than human. John’s fantasy of pulling into the café’s lot suddenly had Ed in it, too, still sitting next to him in the pickup, unshaven, wearing his oddly stained cap, with his weird repetitive gestures and his coal-black eyes, and John cringed. He said, “The wood’s for traction, or a fire if I need it. I have this bag, too.” He nodded at his gym bag between them. The snow on it had crusted. He had left so much at Billie’s. Ed stared through the windshield again and said, rumbly like a gravel slide, “Right on.” He looked back at John, unblinking. Then he shifted his pitch and volume to an eerie, robotic steadiness and said, “Where exactly you moving to?” John stared hard at the tracks in front of them, where the snow turned pale yellow in the headlights. Ed didn’t budge in John’s peripheral vision. He seemed to be holding his breath. No foggy puffs filled the space between them. John swallowed and said, “Florida.” “Coo!” Ed said with what seemed the beginning of a wolf’s howl, or a vulture arching its head back to swallow a snapped-up bit of carrion. Then he looked through the windshield again and seemed to relax. His breath clouded the air above the dash. “How far?” John chewed his lips, then said, “Panhandle, near Apalachicola.” “And I’m going to Miami.” Ed grinned and breathed heavily. “What a wonderful coincidence!” John cleared his throat. “What brings you out here?” Ed waved his knife-like mittened hand across the claustrophobically close wall of flakes and pale- yellow-speckled grayness, as if he were waving panoramically across a vast horizon. “I’m looking for the perfect blueberry pancake.” John laughed, but Ed didn’t.

12 John swallowed again and squinted into the snow. “Really.” “Yes, really. And you’re a chef. How perfect is that?” “I’m not a chef,” John said. “I’m a cook.” “Same thing—Unless you work at fast food?” Ed waited. John wished he had worked at fast food. Leopold’s was fancy, fine dining, high-end clientele showing off thousand-dollar Italian suits and buying up overpriced cigars and dry, dry martinis and Madeira and whole magnums of Dom Perignon, flashing their orthodontically straightened, bleached teeth and glistening gold Rolexes. Ed nodded sharply twice. “That’s what I thought.” He nodded twice more. “You want me to make you pancakes,” John said, watching the pair of tracks snake through the grayness. Ed said, “I want you to teach me to make my own pancakes, you know, that whole ‘give a man a fish, teach a man to fish’ thing.” John inhaled deeply. “Pancakes are easy,” he said. “Follow the directions on the box, or the bag, or whatever.” Ed shook his head three times, seemed to freeze, and then shook it once more. “No. I said I was looking for the perfect blueberry pancake, not some cheap-ass supermarket take-off.” He looked at John from beneath half-closed lids and blew out a huff. “Shame on you, John . . . What’s your last name?” “Smith,” John said. Ed laughed. He had amazingly straight, though yellow, upper teeth. His bottom teeth were brown and leaned in front of each other like pickets on a graveyard fence. “Really,” Ed said. “John Smith. You ever catch any shit checking into hotels?” “It’s on my driver’s license.” “I mean, you know, when you’re with a lady, at a hotel for an hour or two.” John glared at Ed. “I don’t know any hotels like that.” “Sure you do.” No, John thought, I don’t. But the hour-or-two relationship seems the wiser choice now. John asked, “What’s your last name, Ed?” “MacGuffin.” He nodded vigorously, too many times, and tapped his knife-like mittens flat

13 against his chest. “Ed MacGuffin, seeker of the perfect blueberry pancake.” The pickup jerked and sputtered and dragged its speed down fast. Ed grabbed the dash and his door’s armrest. “What’s that?” John said, “I don’t know.” John slowed to twenty-five, and the pickup ran smoothly again. He didn’t want to be stranded with Ed. John slowly picked their speed back up. The pickup seemed to run fine. Ed leaned over and peered at the instrument panel. “You’re about out of gas.” Ed smelled like rotting onion, and John held his breath. Ed said, “That could be it, gas sloshing around in the tank.” John waited for Ed to pull back to his side of the pickup, then breathed and shook his head. “I had a full tank the first time it did it, early this morning.” “Water, then. When it gets really cold, water condenses in the tank. You treat your gas?” “We need a station.” John peered into the snowstorm, as if he would somehow magically be able to see through the snow and make out a town far ahead. He had no idea where one might be, or where he and Ed were, exactly. He hadn’t seen a sign for miles. He became more aware of the achy cold coming in through the windows, and that seemed to press home just how isolated they were, as if the presence of a nearby station or town should have given off faint warm drafts that would have wafted in and soothed them and drawn them near. The pickup went into spasms and jerked John’s and Ed’s heads forward and back. John slowed the pickup, and the spasms stopped, but Ed jerked his head forward twice more, then paused, and then jerked forward four more times, as if not realizing that the pickup had settled down. Then Ed steadied himself, his hands still gripping the dash and armrest, his face muscles knotted and his eyes squinty, as if he were in pain. John looked at his dash again, and then the snow. “You okay?” he asked, still focusing on the snow. “Sure,” Ed said. “Never better. Hah, hah.” Ed breathed deeply four times and let go of the armrest and dash. Then he said, “You need gas.” “Well, pick out a station.”

14 “No need to get bitchy,” Ed said. “It’s not the gas.” The pickup’s engine clattered and banged again and kept banging and dragged itself down fast until it died. John pulled hard on the wheel to overcome the suddenly nonpowered steering and cut the tires through the edges of the trenches and into the unadulterated part of the snow. The pickup clambered next to a reflector pole and stopped on its own. John turned the key back and then forward. The engine clamored and jerked the pickup again and quit as soon as John let up on the key. “Stop that,” Ed said. “That’s not the gas. I think you blew your engine.” The snow gathered on top of the windshield wipers. Ed said, “Whatever it was at first was not taken care of, and then it blew your engine.” John said, “Great,” and pulled the lever for his hood. “You gotta take care of things when they first creep up, John, or they end up costing too much.” “I know that,” John said. “You don’t seem to believe it.” “There wasn’t exactly a garage back there in the middle of the blizzard in the middle of the night, and if I had stopped, I wouldn’t have gotten far enough to pick you up.” Ed smiled facetiously, showing his aberrantly straight yet yellow upper row of teeth. “I’m just saying, in general, you know, philosophically.” John opened his door and stepped out. His feet plunged into the snow, and the walls of the holes his feet made fell inward and down into his loafers around his ankles. He pulled his collar up, but the coat had no way to fasten the collar close around his neck. He walked around to the pickup’s nose, and flakes swirled around his head and beneath his collar. Ed got out, stopped even with the other front tire, and crouched below John’s line of sight. John lifted the hood and propped it open, and then Ed rose and stepped next to him. Ed had one of his mittens off and held his abnormally long forefinger out in front of John’s face. Oil coated the pad of Ed’s fingertip. “See?” he said. “You’ve blown your engine.” “It’s always leaked oil.”

15 John looked past Ed’s finger at the engine but couldn’t tell anything. It looked the same as always. “Smell it,” Ed said and held his finger beneath John’s nose. “Smells like antifreeze.” John sniffed. His nostrils hurt from the cold, and he couldn’t smell much. He thought maybe he did smell antifreeze. Ed wiped his fingertip on the underside of the hood. John couldn’t tell whether Ed’s finger was cleaner or dirtier as a result. Ed pulled his mitten back on and said, “It’s all over the snow beneath your truck. And if your antifreeze has gotten into your oil, that means your engine’s blown, or your block’s cracked, or something. Anyway, you can’t drive.” “Great,” John said again. The engine ticked as it cooled. Snowflakes drifted under the hood and vanished against the engine’s top as soon as they touched. Ed said, “You got triple A?” “No.” “You need a new engine block.” “Truck’s not worth that.” “Then we’re on LPCs.” “On what?” “Leather personnel carriers.” Ed nodded on down the pair of semi ruts and the trail of reflector poles, closed his eyes and pressed his lips together tight, then nodded three more times, exactly as the first. “Come on,” he said. “This pickup’s not doing us any good now.” John wiggled his toes. His shoes were already wet. The snow was too deep for dress shoes, his socks too thin, and his pants loose and frail. John said, “In a minute,” and walked around to the driver’s door. Ed went around the passenger side and got in, too. He watched John dig into his gym bag. John said, “I’m going to change pants.” Ed said, “Oh. You don’t want me to watch.” “No.” “Okay.”

16 Ed smiled, as if everything were a joke. Then Ed opened his door and got out. He held the door and stared at where his hand gripped it, squinting his eyes and tightening up the muscles in his face. He slightly but repeatedly twisted at the waist, moving the door only an inch or two each time, his face unchanged, and on the eighth tiny twist, he slammed the door shut. Then he faced the falling snow out past the reflector and leaned back against the pickup, his arms crossed. John opened his gym bag’s zipper and dug through the clothes and hand towel folded above his mixing bowl, iron skillet, and canned goods. The clothes were so cold they felt damp, and he realized just how few clothes he’d packed. He almost hadn’t packed at all, he had wanted to get out of Billie’s house so quickly, but he couldn’t leave his grandmother’s iron skillet or his mother’s mixing bowl or the spice jar with the minuscule tuft of saffron—expensive like gold. Then, for some reason, he had grabbed the cream of tarter, too. The skillet, bowl, and saffron, he understood; the cream of tarter baffled him. What was he going to do, whip up a meringue on the side of the road? He focused back on his clothes and decided that, instead of swapping pants, he would wear both pair at the same time. He pulled the jeans over his shoes and tried to pull them all the way on. Halfway up, the legs hung on his shoes. He pulled at the empty leg bottoms to get them back off. One came off easily, but the other stuck solid. He yanked on the stuck one, and when it gave, he banged his hand on the bottom of the steering wheel. “Damn it,” he said. He felt one of the tiny dry-skin cracks on his thumb tip ache, and he bet it had started to bleed inside the glove again. Then he felt the stickiness. He looked at Ed, expecting Ed to turn around or laugh, but Ed had walked a couple of paces off into the snow and was peeing on the base of the reflector pole, his dick in plain sight. He was leaning slightly back, as nonchalantly as if he were barbequing, his left fist on his hip, holding his parka open. A huge knife hung sheathed on Ed’s belt. The sheath was black, with black duct tape wrapped around the sheath’s point. Even the knife’s handle was black. Ed had the knife strapped not at his side or just around toward his back, but slightly in front and upside down, as if it were something he needed to whip out regularly. Ed turned and saw John watching him. He made a face mocking shock and turned so that

17 John couldn’t see his dick, but the knife was still in plain sight. John focused on getting his shoes off and tried to ignore Ed’s antics and the knife. It made him nervous that Ed had the thing, more so the strange way he carried it, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was impossible to leave Ed shrinking in his rearview now, and he certainly couldn’t take the knife or ask Ed for it. He had to hope that ignoring it might make Ed ignore it, too. John pulled his shoes off and thought of how stupid it was to try leaving them on in the first place. He put all his socks on. His feet immediately felt warmer, and he wondered why he hadn’t stopped to do that before. He pulled the jeans over his dress slacks, and the denim pressed the icy, thin wool against his skin in bunched-up wrinkles. At first, it felt like he had crammed broken icicles all down inside his pants legs, but as the wool warmed, he decided the rough press of wrinkles was far better than the loose cold fabric of before, no matter how smoothly it had touched his skin. His shoes wouldn’t go on over all the socks, so he took two pair back off and loosened his shoe laces as far as they would go, and then his shoes went on. He pulled one shoe’s side flaps over its tongue’s edges and tried to tie the lace ends, but the aglets slipped from his gloved fingers. He wished he had longer laces. He pulled his gloves off and tied the lace ends in tiny granny knots, the aglets barely clearing the knots and jutting out like thorns. The blood from his cracked thumb end made the aglets sticky, and his thumb throbbed. He ignored that and did the same with his other shoe, and he was finally able to put his gloves back on. His hands shook from the cold. He squeezed them into fists, all except the throbbing thumb, and felt the ice crystals in the fabric inside his fists. He wished he had extra gloves, too. He picked up the two pairs of socks he had taken back off his feet and pulled them over his gloves. It took longer for his hands to warm up than it had his feet or legs, but again, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of something that simple before. Ed opened the passenger door. “You done yet?” “Almost.” Ed’s parka was closed tight, his hood back on, the knife hidden again. John rolled up his hand towel lengthwise, wrapped it around his neck, and tucked the ends down inside the front of his coat. He had a spare T-shirt, too, but left it in the open bag. That might be too much once he started walking.

18 No other vehicles had come by. Nothing had come into sight at all. There was still only John and Ed, the dead pickup, the snaking lines of poles and semi tracks, and the lonesome grayness instead of a visible horizon. John turned off the pickup’s headlights, got out of the pickup, and walked around its nose to Ed’s side. Ed looked at John and nodded approvingly. “You need a hat,” Ed said and peered through the window. “Use that T-shirt.” Ed pulled his hood back half a foot, pulled off his ball cap, and handed it to John. “And this.” John froze. The top part of Ed’s forehead was a mass of jumbled hills and valleys. His hairline didn’t start until three or four inches back from where it should have, and his skin there smoothly hugged the deep jumbles in his skull, which made the mess seem oddly planned. It looked as if someone had taken a router to the top and front of Ed’s head and cut deep gouges into it and then carefully draped new baby’s skin over every gouge and upturned piece of bone. “Here,” Ed said, still holding out his ball cap, and he pulled his parka hood all the way back on. John took the ball cap, awkwardly at first in his double-socked hands, until he had worked the thumbs of his gloves around inside the socks enough to grip it. His hands looked like sock puppets biting Ed’s ball cap. They seemed to beg for colorful sewn-on buttons for eyes, each not knowing the other was trying to chow down on Ed’s ball cap, too, unaware of the stains—or maybe ravenous because of them. John half expected the cap to hold the malformed shape of Ed’s head, but its dome was smooth. The underside of the bill was worn through to the cardboard where Ed’s thumb had touched it maybe a million times. The cap’s bottom edges were black with dirt and oil, the cloth there worn smooth and shiny. The strange dark spots showed through on the underside, but not in their entirety. John told himself, Surely that’s not blood. John opened the passenger door and pulled out the T-shirt. He draped it over his head like a cloth you might use to cover the back of your neck in the desert, and he put the ball cap over that. It was easier to put the cap on knowing that it wasn’t actually touching his head, and it struck him as strange that costumes for the desert and for a blizzard resembled each other. “Okay,” John said.

19 Ed glanced into the pickup’s bed. “What you bringing with you?” John suddenly realized the permanence of leaving the pickup behind, and it made his heart beat faster. He breathed heavily, and every layer of clothes rubbed against the next for room. It seemed harder to leave the pickup than it had been to leave Billie, and he felt worth less for that. Something sour rose in John’s stomach and tasted bitter in the back of his mouth. Saliva pooled around his tongue and wet his lips, and he thought he might puke. John held on to the open passenger door, sat on the floorboard, and leaned over his knees, swallowing the saliva. Ed asked, “You okay?” “Yeah,” John said, but he didn’t feel okay. He spit into the snow and wished he had a sip of water. He felt weak. Ed reached over the side of the pickup’s bed and pulled out his rolled-up blanket. It was tied at both ends with the ends of a rope, and Ed draped the rope over his head and shoulder like a sling, hanging the roll beneath his right arm and behind him. The roll’s middle was bulky and sagged, as if stuffed with a few small but heavy belongings. Ed asked, “Do you want to carry the cooler or the bag? Or do you want to combine them somehow?” John thought about the food in the cooler, the odds and ends from Billie’s fridge. He had a carton of eggs in there, half a package of bacon, a jug of orange juice, lunch meat. Thinking of the raw bacon and the lunch meat made the bitter taste worse, and he threw up in the snow. He hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before, yet there seemed tons of vomit. It came again and again until he dry-heaved and orange chunky saliva hung in long strings from his lower lip. Bits of food wedged in the slime around his teeth. His tongue pushed them up to between his lips, and he spit them out. Ed scooped up a mittenful of snow and held it out to John. “Here,” he said. John scooped up his own handful of clean snow and shoved it inside his mouth. The cold felt refreshing, and the grainy crystals scoured the food particles from the insides of his cheeks and around his tongue and teeth. Letting the snow melt in the back of his mouth eased the bitter taste. John spit that mouthful out and shoved a fresh scoop in, swallowing as that one melted. Ed crushed his handful of snow in his mittened fist, and it crumbled to the ground.

20 “Fine,” he said. John said, “Thanks. The snow was a good idea.” John scooped up another handful and shoved it in. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. Ed asked, “What’s in the cooler?” John shook his head. “I don’t want anything that’s in there.” Ed climbed into the pickup’s bed and opened the cooler. “It’s mostly frozen,” he said. Suddenly Ed had his knife in his hand, and he stabbed and stabbed at the ice inside the cooler. Chips and half-moon-shaped cubes erupted up and out. John thought it silly that people called any ice from a tray “cubes,” no matter what the shape. Ed held the package of salami out to John. “You don’t want this? It seems okay.” “No,” John said, and he bit into another handful of snow. Ed opened the package and pulled out the stack of meat and bit into it like it were a burger, complete with buns, lettuce, tomato, cheese. He chewed only three or four times, swallowed, and took another bite. Within a minute, he had eaten the entire thing. “Your eggs have all frozen and busted,” he said. “And the juice is solid, but you’re going to need liquids.” He pried out the juice bottle and three frozen bottles of water and jumped out of the pickup. He set the bottles next to John and ate a handful of snow himself. “Gym bag it is,” he said. Ed reached past John and pulled the bag from the pickup. His knife had disappeared somehow, most likely sheathed again, but John hadn’t seen Ed put it away. “Damn!” Ed said and set the bag in the snow. “What you got in here, a pair of dumbbells?” “My iron skillet.” Ed looked at the frozen juice and water, then into the sky, which had grown lighter. The snow had eased, and John could make out the swirls of the bottoms of clouds. Ed picked up the frozen bottles and asked, “You sure you want to carry that skillet, too?” “Yes.” “You use it to make pancakes?” “It makes great pancakes.” Ed shoved the bottles into John’s bag and pulled out the skillet. He grabbed the loose end

21 of rope jutting from the knot at the back end of his bundle, stuck the rope end through the hole in the skillet’s handle, tied the rope snug, and let the skillet dangle from his bundle. The weight dragged that end of Ed’s bundle low. Ed said, “Let’s go.” From far behind the pickup, snow crunched faintly and intermittently at first, then grew louder and steady, and a pair of headlights pierced the gray. A row of five amber lights appeared above that, the three in the middle close together. An engine rumbled. Ed ran around the front of the pickup and stood with his thumb out. A semi pulling two trailers went by and spewed a cloud of snow across the pickup, John, and Ed. The rumble of the engine waned, and red tail lights and marker lights dimmed and then disappeared in the distant fog of the dying snow. Ed turned to John. “Come on. More trucks will come, and one of them is bound to see this pickup and then us and give us a ride, but we gotta be walking far enough from the pickup for a person to feel sorry for us. No one feels sorry for anyone that’s only struggled a few yards.” John wondered if, the night before, Ed had hidden a car somewhere before he had stuck his thumb out in front of John’s pickup. Ed marched down the shoulder, John’s grandmother’s iron skillet dangling behind him, shrinking and fading in the foggy grayness. John picked up his gym bag and slung it from his shoulder. He struggled with it and slipped in the snow as he jogged around the nose of the pickup. He finally caught Ed, and they walked through the snow side by side, John keeping the pitch blackness of his grandmother’s iron skillet in his peripheral vision. The grayness behind them soon swallowed up John’s pickup, and then the pinpoint flashes of its dimming hazard lights, and then even the last faint hint of their glow.

22 CHAPTER 4

John’s last morning in Denver had been Friday. The snow would catch John and his pickup at two the next morning way out around Burlington, after John’s long Friday afternoon nap in Limon, but on that morning in Denver, as the sun just began to rise, the sky was still mostly clear, the few early, wispy clouds growing far brighter and redder than the sky possibly could have on its own. On his drive home from Leopold’s, after closing up the bar and taking care of the paperwork and the deposit, John had watched the sky brighten behind the black symmetrical peaks and squares of silhouetted suburbia. The light grew deeper red and more intensely focused into a single spot on the horizon where the sun itself was about to rise. The air was dead calm under the thin streaks of cayenne-pepper-red clouds. In John’s rearview, the Rockies’ peaks already glowed yellow and white in direct sunlight, the glow bleeding downward as the sun crept closer to revealing itself to Denver itself. Sunrise had come later each day for months, and this time it hadn’t come at all by the time John pulled into the drive at Billie’s house. It surprised him that his key still worked in Billie’s door. He had used the key to lock the door only nineteen hours before, but so much had changed that he had thought, She will change the locks. Of course she will change the locks. She will throw my things onto the lawn. She will scratch out my eyes and pound my ribs into splinters when she sees me again. He climbed the stairs and tiptoed into Billie’s bedroom. She lay in bed in the faint light, light that somehow changed from brilliant red and yellow outside into something dull and gray once it had filtered around and through the drapes. Billie slept in the grayness on her right side, facing John. He froze, afraid of waking her, but he knew he needed to hurry, that she would sense his presence soon and wake up, whether he moved or not. Every second he stayed in her bedroom was a second he risked her eyes opening, those green eyes that had spellbound him in Biloxi. So much rested on the involuntary contraction of two of the tiniest muscles in her body, so small a motion that it seemed it should be insignificant, but one that could—and had in Biloxi—

23 completely alter his world. He stepped past her to the closet and pulled his gym bag from the shelf. Then he tiptoed back past her to the dresser and packed a spare T-shirt, a sweater, a pair of jeans, underwear, and socks. He wanted to pack more. He wanted to change out of his dress clothes. But he couldn’t risk that. He did pull off his ice-blue tie and his suit’s coat and hung those up and pulled out his brown leather jacket and put that on. He zipped the gym bag, and Billie rolled over, turning away from him. John stood absolutely still. He wondered if she had actually woken but was pretending to sleep, though he couldn’t imagine why she would do that. He felt as if he should shove his clothes back into the dresser and put his gym bag away, as if he should apologize, make breakfast, make up. Her blonde curly locks looked the same as they had the first time he’d seen her, on Leopold’s birthday vacation at the casino where John had worked in Biloxi, how the casino had seemed to swing around her as he walked around to her table. The distant dings of the slot machines outside the dining room had blended into a cacophony like someone playing the rims of crystal glasses by fingertip. It was a sound you heard in dreams. Then the casino had swung and swung around until her eyes were upon him, and like the light in that instant before sunrise, everything had become brightened and focused, and the next thing he knew, he had chased her all the way to Denver. John clenched his teeth and breathed heavily, watching Billie’s comforter-covered back slowly shrink and swell with her breathing. Her blonde curls were fake, of course. Locks that blonde and that curly were almost always unnatural. He wondered if she had somehow dyed her eyes, too. He turned and left the bedroom, stopping in the bathroom for his toothbrush and a hand towel, and then tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen. His smashed dishware still littered the floor, chips, chunks, and crumbles of light gray with white broken edges scattered all over the huge charcoal-colored squares, sixteen starbursts of chalky white where the pieces had hit, like some bizarre, made-up constellation on a grid of white lines. John stepped carefully through the broken stoneware, opened a cabinet door, and pulled out his grandmother’s cast-iron skillet and slid it into his bag. Then he wrapped his chef’s, filet, and paring knives in an apron and packed that. He packed his mother’s hand-thrown mixing bowl; a few cooking utensils; a bag of dried great northern beans and one of rice; a can of ready-to-eat

24 black beans; his sea salt, pepper mill, and saffron; and, for some reason, his cream of tarter. He took the camping cooler from the hall closet and loaded it from the fridge. He pulled the large bin of ice from beneath its maker in the freezer and dumped the ice rattling and banging all over the cooler’s contents. He knew Billie had to have woken from the noise of the ice, from the front door banging, or at least from his slamming the cooler down onto the bed of his pickup or the pickup’s door opening and closing. He looked up at the bedroom window and expected her to be watching him, but the window was dark and empty. She never called down and asked what he was doing or rushed out of the house crying and begging for him to stay. Nothing. That’s when he knew for certain he had made the right decision. He drove through the winding neighborhood, still ghostly quiet, and turned onto the road leading to the interstate. The sun had already risen. He had missed the sunrise itself, but its face was still red enough to stare at, and the clouds were changing to gold. Then Billie, Leopold, Denver, and the Rockies were behind him, disappearing in his rearview, but so was love, it seemed, or his hope for it, that silly chase halfway across the country that always seemed a happy ending in movies and children’s tales. Soon the sun was too bright to look at directly, and John hid it behind his visor and noticed that his muscles were achy tired. He knew he would need to sleep soon, or sleep would choose him instead and push him off the road and into a ditch or God-knows-where, but he forced himself to remain awake for a moment, two, three, to keep that fresh dreamy feeling that dawn brings, to hold it as long as he safely could before finally consigning himself to pull over, park, and curl up alone in his idling old beat-up pickup and drift off to sleep.

25 CHAPTER 5

A half dozen more semis and two cars passed John and Ed before the next exit finally emerged from the foggy snow. Though everyone had crept by cautiously enough on the snow and ice, and though that had given each driver ample opportunity to look, no one had stopped in answer to Ed’s thumb. At the top of the exit ramp, in the brighter though still ever-present snow and grayness, stood two tiny gas stations, one on either side of the overpass, and a long, low restaurant-slash-motel. John was beat. He had not slept since his nap in Limon the day before, and he and Ed had pushed on and on on a trudging, frozen trek that had felt like Ernest Shackleton’s own, and the hike up the exit ramp made John feel as if his legs and heart would give out before he ever made it to the top. But his legs and heart didn’t fail him, and John was hungry, but he figured he wouldn’t be able to take one bite without falling dead asleep, so he ignored his stomach’s weak, empty, dry rumbling and made straight for the motel’s office. He expected the red orange neon “vacancy” sign’s dark-brown “no” partner to spring to life any moment and deny him even a dingy, stale- smoke-scented room. But it didn’t. John was grateful that there was a room available, that he had enough cash for it, that Ed didn’t offer half the room’s rate or imply that he wanted to share, that this seemed like where the two of them would part. John said goodbye to Ed and silently thanked his pickup for breaking down so completely that he no longer felt obligated to stick with Ed all the way to the sea. John took his grandmother’s iron skillet from Ed and gave Ed back his spotted cap. “I’ll find myself a spot somewhere,” Ed said. John wondered if Ed meant for sleeping or for life in general, or if it was some strange reference to his ball cap. John’s mind was so groggy that each of those made sense, and nothing made sense. “Okay,” John said and went inside the room and closed the door. He dropped his gym bag to the floor next to the tiny table and chairs, set his skillet heavily

26 on the bag, plopped onto the bed fully dressed, and fell into a deep sleep. He slept for hours, and when he finally woke completely, it was night again, and he was beneath the covers. He somewhat remembered waking and undressing and crawling beneath them, but it seemed more like a dream. The ordeal with his pickup and Ed seemed a part of that dream, yet here he was in the motel. He hoped his pickup was parked outside, that this motel was on the outskirts of Topeka or Kansas City, or even better, Nashville, and that all but the motel part actually had been a dream. But he knew better. He sat up and forced his muscles to wake up, to let the buzzing leave his ears enough so that he could stand and keep his balance, and he went to the sink and tore the amazingly resilient cellophane from the tiny plastic glass and drank five glassfuls of water. Then he plopped onto the bed again, ready to sleep all through the night, but his rumbling stomach made him get dressed to see if the restaurant was an all-nighter. John opened the door to the night and found Ed lying in the breezeway between the clothes washer and a vending machine filled with toothpaste, laundry soap, toenail clippers, and the like. Ed lay rolled up in his blanket with his parka hood pulled tightly over his head and his coiled-up rope, a large square canteen, a can of ravioli, and an empty soup can between him and the brick wall. A pair of gray socks hung draped over the edge of the washer, apparently left out to dry but frozen instead, tiny, white, flaky crystals in masses across the nap of the wool. John said, “Ed, it’s cold out here.” Ed looked up. John doubted he had slept at all. “Come inside, Ed.” Ed seemed to fall asleep as soon as he crawled into bed and pulled the comforter over himself. He lay on his back like he were in a coffin, like someone had lain his body perfectly straight and draped his weird hands over his chest, his malformed head looking like a sculptor had goofed up while shaping the clay but had then decided to leave the flaw and see how it might impact the composition. Ed seemed to sleep as if he hadn’t in weeks. The room’s clock radio read 1:00 a.m. John went into the bathroom, closed and locked the door, and showered while Ed slept. By the time John finished, the mirror above the sink had thickly fogged over. John wiped it with his towel, but the bathroom’s heat and humidity made it fog back over almost instantly. So John wrapped his towel around his waist and cracked the bathroom door, then opened it fully and peeked at Ed in the darkened room. Ed still slept. He

27 didn’t seem to have budged. John went back into the bathroom and pulled the door shut. The mirror had cleared enough for him to see, so he shaved his face and the back of his neck. He grabbed his scissors and snipped off the ends of his armpit hairs, and he pulled out his tweezers and plucked the bigger, blacker, more aggressive hairs out of his ears and nose. Plucking the nose hairs was painful and made him sneeze, and his nose began to run, so he pulled off a wad of toilet paper, blew his nose into it, made sure there was no blood, and flushed the wad down the toilet. He got dressed and went to check on the restaurant, but it was closed. The wind blew fresh and bitter cold, and John wished he were back in all his clothes instead of just his jeans, T-shirt, sweater, and coat. The sky was black with gray puffed-out lower edges of low clouds. Snow trickled into the uppermost glow of the street lamps and on down onto the yellow-white circular fields beneath. It reminded John of his last night at Leopold’s, and he was relieved that he was done with that, but he wished, too, that he wasn’t. A year before, he had convinced himself that that was where he should be, and that he had finally gotten his life together, but he had lied. He had no idea where he should be. He was glad he had admitted the lie to himself, but that honesty was a lost, lonely feeling, and it made his dried-up prune of a stomach feel like it were a pile of stones instead. The weight fixed John’s soles to the sidewalk like they had been there since the start of time. He watched the flakes gather on the toes of his loafers and in the weave and mesh of his laces and slowly fill the footprints behind him until the prints had dulled and he no longer recognized them as his own.

28 CHAPTER 6

At six years old, little Edwin MacGuffin followed his neighbor’s toddler around the trailer court for an entire afternoon, pulling up her diaper every time it began to slip. At six and a half, he started running from trains. By the time he was eight, he found himself frantic if school stairwells didn’t have an even number of steps. If he climbed a set of stairs and it ended odd, he would make it even himself by creating an imaginary extra step with a huge swoop and stomp of his foot. If he turned the same direction too many consecutive times at hallway intersections or through doorways, he would pirouette in the next doorway to unwind the accumulation. Four right turns through hallways and doors without a left required one full leftward spin in the next doorway; four lefts, a rightward spin. Eventually he had to keep track of how many total lefts and rights he’d made over the course of the day, then the week, and then for eternity. It had to even out. He had to make it even out. Soon, he was spinning to counteract what he’d determined were prior erroneous spins. By age ten, he had to make forks click on dinner plates just so, glimpse himself at the edges of mirrors and polished windows exactly four times before he could leave them behind, and always, always run from trains. Ed loved the army. They were obsessive compulsive, too: no food particles whatsoever could remain on a toothbrush; clothes hanging in closets had to be fully buttoned; pushups and sit- ups were counted in fours—everything was even—left, right, left, right; no one cared if Ed buffed and buffed his boots, swishing the brush across each toe in multiples of fours, as long as they were shiny, and Ed’s were so, so shiny. Then, the day after his last breakfast of blueberry pancakes, that one Ranger Instructor in the patrol base had looked straight at Ed, seemingly peering deep into Ed’s eyes alone, and talked about people not belonging, and Ed had remembered the trains and his dead big brother Marcus and knew he couldn’t finish Ranger School. But quitting would get him an LOM—a lack-of- motivation letter—in his permanent file, and that would be worse than never having volunteered in the first place. Later that same day, Ed and his fellow Ranger-wannabes parachuted deep into the

29 mountains of northeast Georgia, and Ed saw the world laid out below him in a vast, gray-green yet distinctive scape. His chute drifted laterally above the land while everyone else’s slipped down to it. There was no sound except the flutter of his chute’s silk edges and the faint hum of air in his risers. It was a beautiful day, full of sunshine, the hills thick with green in every direction. Ed watched the other chutes shrink toward the tiny green pasture, the billowy tan bulbs looking more like a strangely smooth lichen the tinier they got, and Ed knew that he were meant for bigger things than the men drifting below. As soon as that realization had come to him, his chute slung him suddenly down toward the wooded mountainside, threw him into the trees, flung him against a huge pine trunk, broke his nose, dropped him thirty feet straight down onto the steeply sloping ground, and shattered his leg, and Ed thanked his lucky stars. After Ed had been medically dropped from Ranger School and forbidden to ever parachute again—lest he shatter what remained of his femur and shove it up through his abdomen—he had been sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, with the Big Red One and all its track vehicles instead of chutes. He also began counting fork clicks in sixteens instead of fours, and he could feel the two-fifty-sixes coming. That old panicky feeling that trains used to give him crept into even his sleep. He dreamed long, violent dreams, and his bed sheets would end up thrown on the floor in tangled masses by the time he woke. When he finally fell prey to the two hundred and fifty-sixes and couldn’t even wash his hands after a piss in less than an hour, and he felt even larger numbers tugging at him, he couldn’t take it anymore. He shoved the barrel of his pistol into his mouth and touched the muzzle against his hard palate, once, then four times, then four times four times. After the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth tap, he thought, It’ll never stop. I have to repeat even this. But I can pull the trigger only once, not two hundred and fifty-six times. And that scared the bejezus out of him, and it made him think of his dead brother Marcus, and so he rocked and tapped and counted, and on the two hundred and fifty-eighth tap, he pulled the trigger.

30 CHAPTER 7

Ed sat across the tiny table from John in the motel’s restaurant, about to dig into his plate of blueberry pancakes. Ed had unzipped his parka to his waist, slipped the parka off his shoulders, and pulled his arms from the sleeves, bunching up the bulk of the parka into a wad between his lower back and the chair’s back while leaving the parka’s waist fastened around his waist, where it hid his knife. His light-gray sweatshirt’s cuffs and neck, and the neck of his T-shirt showing from beneath the sweatshirt, were black with dirt and old body oil. No one but them and one waitress and one cook was in the restaurant. The walls’ lower halves were paneled with fake, dark wood, and covering their top halves was dingy wallpaper with a pattern of miniature flowers. The trim between the paneling and the wallpaper held a ledge with room enough for small knickknacks, though it was empty, save for a dull, fuzzy layer of dust that seemed glued in place by years of airborne grease. Here and there along the wallpapered part, tiny Western-style oil lamps sat in gimbaled wall mounts. The glass domes of some were soot- kissed, as if the restaurant had been open since before electricity, or regularly lost it. Ed peeled open plastic cubule after plastic cubule and poured their combined servings of syrup all over his pancakes. He had sent the waitress back and back again for more of the syrup cubules until he had drenched his pancakes and surrounded them with a syrupy moat. The top pancake on Ed’s plate showed three tiny dark spots that John assumed were blueberries, though they looked more like smudges from a dull charcoal pencil. John blew across his coffee and sipped it while he watched Ed. The coffee was stale and overhot and tasted horribly burnt. It left him little hope for the raw-flour-smelling splayed biscuit and gravy the waitress had set in front of him, but he picked up his fork anyway. Ed said, “These aren’t blueberry pancakes.” John said, “There are the blueberries, there.” He pointed with his fork. When Ed had ordered the pancakes, John had mentioned that he couldn’t treat Ed, and Ed had said, “I know. I have a pancake fund,” and John had thought, Strange, that a man who hitchhikes and sleeps in a blizzard has enough money to quest for pancakes.

31 Ed asked John, “Would you have made blueberry pancakes like this?” “No.” John cut a bite of gravy-covered biscuit with the edge of his fork and put the bite in his mouth. It turned his stomach. He pushed the pasty gravy around his plate with his fork and said, “This gravy tastes like greasy, wet flour.” Ed asked, “Isn’t that what gravy is?” Ed cut a short, narrow wedge out of his stack of pancakes and shoved the oversized bite into his mouth. John said, “Those are the main ingredients, but the ratios are off, and it doesn’t taste like they cooked the gravy at all. It’s like shoving a bunch of people together and calling it a family. There’s more to it than that.” Ed chewed and swallowed. “These pancakes suck, too.” John dipped his index fingertip inside one of Ed’s discarded syrup cubules and licked the spot of syrup off his fingertip. “Not real syrup,” he said, “of course.” Ed blinked, then tasted the syrup again himself. “What do you mean?” “This is high-fructose corn syrup with a bunch of chemicals. If you want a perfect pancake, the easiest thing to do first is to get real maple syrup, something from a tree.” Ed’s head rocked in three short, fast nods, his mouth slightly open. “It’s different?” he said. “Like the difference between jerking off and making love.” “Where do I get real syrup, then?” Ed asked, looking around, as if bottles of it might be lined up on the wall’s filthy trim. John said. “It’s in grocery stores and normal places like that. Look for tiny bottles with big prices. Then look for ‘real maple syrup’ on their labels, or ‘one hundred percent real maple syrup,’ something like that.” “Okay.” Ed smiled bigger than John had seen him do yet. “See? I knew it was fate.” He nodded again. “This is going to be fruitful. What do I need for the pancakes themselves?” “You mean blueberry pancakes?” “Yes.” Ed gave a half shudder, half shrug. “Of course.”

32 “For starters, blueberries.” “What else?” “Flour—or Bisquick. Bisquick would be better. Then you wouldn’t need baking powder and all that stuff, and you can just follow the directions on the box. You’ll need milk, though, and eggs.” “Okay. Eggs.” “The fresher you can get everything—and real—the better.” “Real. You mean they make fake eggs?” “Sure they do. What I mean is that everything comes in different qualities, like syrup. Get eggs that come from some sort of natural farm, where hens walk around outside and eat real grain instead of processed feed full of antibiotics and the ground-up bones and skin of their ancestors.” “They do that, feed chickens to chickens?” John nodded. “Crack open a real egg, a fresh one, and pour it next to one of those mass- produced things, and you’ll see the difference. The white will hold up better. It’ll be thicker. It’ll be more a part of the whole than that runny mess mass-produced egg whites are, and you’ll taste the difference, too.” Their waitress came back holding a half-full decanter of coffee. A strong odor of cigarette smoke emanated from her. “How are you two doing?” she asked. Ed pointed at his pancakes and asked her, “Did the chickens that laid the eggs in these pancakes eat other chickens?” She opened her mouth, then closed it, turned her lips inside, swallowed, and said, “I don’t know, mister. I surely hope not.” She turned to John and gestured with the coffee decanter. “You want a warm-up?” John smiled facetiously at her. “No. Thank you.” She pulled their ticket from her apron pocket and set it on the table in front of them. Stapled to the handwritten ticket was a thin strip of cash register paper, the top and bottom edges serrated, the strip curled slightly from where it had come off the roll in the register. John rubbed his fingertip across the numbers on the strip of paper, feeling where the paper had been impressed with the strike of the metal. The number six had struck lower than the other numbers, and it gave the print on the ticket a jagged, though personalized, look. John felt charmed

33 by the throwback and found he preferred it to Leopold’s flawless, cleanly cropped computer receipts. Even the dingy papered-and-paneled walls seemed more appealing then, though he wished they’d been scrubbed sometime in the last decade. “Well,” the waitress said, “if you need anything else, let me know.” “Just a minute,” John said. He pulled out his debit card and handed it to her. “This is for my part.” Ed reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a wadded-up ten. “Here’s mine,” he said. The waitress took the ticket, Ed’s cash, and John’s card back toward the counter and the register. Ed shoveled his pancakes in. “You’d better eat,” he said around a mouthful. “Whether you like this stuff or not, you’re going to need the energy.” John sipped his coffee and grimaced. “I’ll get something else later.” “You need fuel for walking.” “I’m not walking anywhere. I’m getting a bus ticket and waiting here, or cab fare to a bus station, or something, but I’m not walking anymore.” Ed stopped chewing and stared at John. “But we’re supposed to be a team. We’re supposed to travel together.” John set his coffee cup down and pushed it and his plate toward the center of the table. “I hope you’re successful in your quest, Ed, but I’m not going to be a part of it.” Ed swallowed. “If you really wanted me to be successful, you’d come with me. Christ.” He slapped his fork onto the table. “How am I supposed to find a perfect pancake without a chef?” “I’m not a chef, Ed. I’m just a plain old cook.” “You knew that syrup stuff. You can help me, and you’re refusing to. Look,” he said and counted off points on his fingers, “You’re a chef; we’re heading the same place—” “Not exactly the same place.” “Close enough.” Ed counted on, “And we’re both on foot, traveling the same speed and all that. I carried your fucking frying pan for miles.” The waitress came back, and John looked immediately at her so that Ed might stop his

34 tirade. Ed crossed his arms and huffed, “I don’t believe you.” “Um . . .” The waitress handed back John’s card. “This was declined.” “Declined? The ticket’s six dollars and fifty-eight cents.” She said, “It was declined, sir.” “Try it again.” “I tried three times. Do you have another card?” “That’s a debit card. I have money in the bank. It’s not like they can cut it off.” “Do you have another card, sir? Or any cash?” Ed smiled. “Call your bank, John.” John glared at Ed. “It’s Sunday.” John put his card back in his wallet, looked inside its cash pocket, and then dug into his jeans pocket. He had one dollar and twenty cents. He said to the waitress, “I paid for my room with cash. I don’t have enough left. Is there an ATM around?” Ed said, “I would have done it the other way around, put the room on credit and paid for breakfast with cash.” “It’s a debit card, Ed. Hotels will lock up hundreds from my account for weeks. It’s not the same as credit.” Ed shrugged. “Guess you’re in a pickle, huh.” He asked the waitress, “So, does he do dishes or go to jail? He’s a chef, you know. Maybe he could work on these recipes a little.” She ignored Ed and said to John, “Sir, you have to pay somehow.” She glanced at his plate and coffee cup. “Even if you haven’t partaken much.” John blinked at the word “partaken,” then asked Ed, “You think you can spot me for this? I mean, you did sleep in my room.” Ed dug out another wadded-up ten and handed it to the waitress. “Here. Take it out of that.” She left. “Thanks,” John said. “So maybe we’ll call it even?” “What do you mean, even? I just made you a loan.” “I let you sleep in my room, in a warm bed.”

35 “I didn’t ask you to let me. You invited me. You don’t have many manners, do you, John?” John thought of how Ed had yanked out his knife on the highway and stabbed and stabbed at the ice. Ed said, “Here’s what we’ll do. You make me a perfect blueberry pancake, and teach me how, and I’ll buy you your bus ticket, cab fare, or whatever it is you need to get to Florida. How about a plane ticket? That’d be fast, right? Hell, you might even get there ahead of schedule, if your pancakes are perfect on the first try.” “I’ll have money tomorrow, once I call the bank and straighten this out. I’ll pay you back then.” “No. My loan, my rules. What, are you afraid you can’t make a perfect blueberry pancake? It’s not like it’s a soufflé or anything. It’s a fucking pancake.” “I’ll call my sister, have her buy me a bus ticket.” “You still owe me six dollars and fifty-eight cents, John. Have her send that by Western Union while she’s at it, will you?” John thought about getting quarters for his dollar and calling Pamela, but he doubted a dollar twenty would be enough. He certainly didn’t want his first call in over a year to be collect. He imagined Pamela picking up the phone and hearing the phone company’s recording first, and then him explaining how he was on his way without an invitation, and how he needed her to pay for even that. It sickened him more than the pasty gravy had. He figured he could put up with Ed for one more day, until he could call his bank and straighten everything out. Then he’d just wait until Ed was asleep somewhere, and he’d disappear. Simple. “Okay, Ed,” he said. “Let’s do it your way.” Ed smiled and nodded. “Eat those biscuits and gravy. You’re going to need the fuel.”

36 CHAPTER 8

Pamela scrubbed one of her café’s booth tables. The wood was thick and the color of coffee beans, worn with scars and burnishes. She followed up with a dry bar towel, polishing until at least parts of the old wood shone here and there. The café wasn’t open yet, and morning sunlight streamed through the two end windows’ louvered blinds and cast long, bright stripes across the table. She tucked her bar towel into her apron’s waist ties, brushed aside a strand of hair that had escaped the tight bun high on her head, rested her stomach against the table’s end, and set the table with freshly wiped ketchup and mustard bottles, refilled salt and pepper shakers, small bottles of red and green Tabasco sauce, and a little porcelain boat stuffed with paper packets of sugar and artificial sweeteners. Kevin walked through the kitchen door, through the service counter’s open flap, and past the two freestanding tables, his thick salt-and-pepper curls hanging to his T-shirt’s collar, a red ball cap in his hands. He stopped behind Pamela but didn’t touch her or help her with the condiments. She asked without turning around, “You going out to check crab traps again?” “Lobster,” he said. She turned toward him. “I hate it when you check lobster traps.” “It’s good money,” he said smiling, “and your customers like them.” “You have to go so far out, and you’re gone for days.” He pulled his ball cap on so that the bill jutted out over the back of his neck. Their café’s tiny crab logo faced behind him. The cap was luscious red in the deepest parts of its seams and just under the edges of the button on the cap’s very top, faded red everywhere else. She said, “Be back by tomorrow night, before that cold front hits. That thing was a blizzard in Des Moines. It’s supposed to dump snow as far south as Dothan.” “I’ll be fine.” “Snow in Dothan, Alabama,” she said. “Are you listening to me?”

37 “If it looks bad, I’ll slide into St. George’s wind shadow and sit it out.” “Maybe we’ll shut down and I’ll go with you.” “You don’t have to do that.” She looked at him coldly. “If something happens to you, the truck and trailer will be in Apalachicola, and I’ll be here. What’ll I do then? I don’t have time to go traipsing across John Gorrie bridge to try to hunt down wherever it is you park, just so I can cater that wedding on Saturday.” “I have to go,” he said. “Traps are waiting.” “Let them wait for once.” She turned and adjusted the condiments, though they were already flush next to one another. “I’m serious about needing help.” She stopped adjusting the condiments but then wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. One rubbed the other. They clasped each other. She sighed and turned back toward him. “Catering could fill our off-season lag,” she said, “if we work together.” He didn’t budge. She said, “I don’t like you being out there alone, with that old boat, those beat-up outboards. They’re not what they used to be.” “Don’t worry. Each is strong enough if the other fails.” He never wore his wedding band working traps, and his ring finger had tanned evenly over the years. She said, “What if both quit at the same time?” “It’ll be alright. Always has.” He crossed his arms, his left hand disappearing into the crook of his right elbow. “I have to go.” “Be back by tomorrow night. And plan on sticking around on Saturday. I’ll need your help then.” “Can’t. I’m checking crab traps off Alligator Point Saturday.” He nodded to his side, as if she could magically look through the walls and zoom in on the snaking line of floats miles away in the Gulf. “What am I supposed to do for that wedding gig?” “I told you not to start catering.” He squinted through the front windows and out into the bright light of the parking lot. His pupils shrank to pinpoints, and his irises glowed gray like the Gulf before a squall.

38 He gave her a peck of a kiss, and she smiled wanly, then looked at her feet. He left through the front door, the bright light glancing in off the bleached-out shells in the lot and the already-muggy air rushing in before the door closed. Pamela watched Kevin’s silhouette pass the front windows and then the two side windows. His soles crunched on the scattered shells of long-dead oysters, and then he was gone. She sighed, looked down at the thinning stripes of sunlight, and adjusted her condiments again.

39 CHAPTER 9

In the motel room, Ed stood ready with his roll slung from his shoulder, and John repacked his gym bag. John searched the bathroom and under the bed, and then opened one of the top dresser drawers. Ed asked, “What are you looking for?” “Making sure I’m not leaving anything behind.” John opened the next drawer down, slid it shut, and opened the bottom one. Ed asked, “Did you put anything in those drawers?” “Not that I recall.” “Then why check?” “To make sure.” “—that you didn’t walk in your sleep and pull out your driver’s license and credit cards and slide them in there? Or write your social security number in magic marker in the bottom of one?” “I don’t have any credit cards.” Ed rolled his eyes, walked to the room’s door, leaned against its frame, and crossed his arms. John ignored Ed and searched the second column of drawers. Then he searched the far nightstand. Its drawer held a phone book, a small pad of unruled paper, and a pen. He went around the foot of the bed to the second nightstand. Its drawer held a bible. “Steal that bible,” Ed said from the door. “What?” Ed marched to the nightstand, his eyes glistening. He pulled the bible from the shallow drawer and held it out to John. “Steal this bible,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be something? Like cleaning your M-16 with a ‘make love, not war’ T-shirt.” Ed’s closeness made John’s skin prickle. John could smell Ed’s onioniness again.

40 John said, “I think whoever supplies those wants you to take it—and read it. Isn’t that the point?” Ed plopped the bible back into the drawer, stepped around John to right next to the bed, and yanked the bed’s comforter back, exposing the tattered, tan blanket beneath. “Take that blanket,” he said. John was glad Ed had moved farther away, but Ed’s antics made John grit his teeth. “Why would I do that?” John asked. “We’ll have to sleep in the cold before this trip is over. Mark my words.” Ed jerked his head sideways toward where his hand still gripped the comforter. “I’m serious about the blanket.” John thought about not being able to call his bank until the next morning. He wondered where he would sleep in the intervening night. Ed said, “You’re going to need a blanket.” “We can get another room tonight.” “With what?” Ed’s tone was that of an impatient parent scolding a three-year-old. “Do you have money?” Ed’s tone made John’s blood pump thickly into his chest, shoulders, and neck. Ed moved to right in front of John. Again, the rotten oniony smell. John wanted to shove Ed away or run away himself, something, anything. He couldn’t recall ever feeling that way that strongly before, not even around Leopold. John clenched his teeth and his fists. “No,” John said, “I don’t have any money, none that I can access today, anyway.” “Then we’ll have to sleep outside. Period.” Still, the tone. John was sure he would end up hitting Ed. John said, “You have money.” Ed stepped closer to John, his crooked nose only inches from John’s face. John was cornered between the nightstand and the bed and couldn’t back away. “It’s a pancake fund,” Ed said, “not a motel fund. And you’ve made a deal with me, and you’re going to keep your end of that deal, and we’ll most likely be sleeping outside tonight. So you’re going to need that blanket, or the comforter, but the comforter’s too damned bulky to carry anywhere, even though it’d be warmer.”

41 Ed’s breath smelled like a dog’s, like shit. John half expected a swarm of flies to pour out of Ed’s mouth. John held his breath and turned his head to the side, toward the bed. The blanket was thin, unbleached, and undyed and had cigarette burns. It wouldn’t cost anyone more than a few dollars to replace. Still, John thought, it’s not mine to take. But he knew Ed was right. They would most likely be sleeping outside that night, and John would need more than his clothes to keep warm. He would need more than that blanket, even. And he had made a deal with Ed. Ed leaned around until his face was in front of John’s again. Ed’s jaw muscles flexed somewhere down within his puffy cheeks, making patches of his whiskers wiggle. John turned more toward the bed and said, “Okay.” Ed walked to the foot of the bed and yanked the comforter off. It sank to the floor in front of Ed like a huge tree falling. John dragged the blanket toward himself. It hung on the far corner of the bed, so John pulled harder. It gave, but still seemed to grip the sheets, as if it were digging fingernails in. The more blanket John pulled in, the easier it came, and soon he had the entire blanket in a wad against his chest. Ed slung John’s bag onto the bed, unzipped it, and jerked the opening wide. “Put it in. We’re burning daylight.” Ed pulled out the iron skillet and stuck one end of his bundle’s rope through the hole in the handle. “No,” John said. “I’ll carry that.” Ed’s brows rose. “What, the frying pan?” “Yes.” “It’s pretty heavy, and you’ve got those water bottles.” “I’ll carry it,” John said. He took the skillet and wrapped the blanket around it, shoved the blanket-wrapped skillet into his bag, and yanked his gym bag’s zipper closed. Then he hefted the bag and slung the strap over his head and shoulder. The strap dug into his shoulder, and he knew he would ache from it soon.

42 “Let’s get out of here,” John said. “We’re burning daylight, right?” John opened the room’s door. The cold swarmed in, encircled him like a ring of bandits, and penetrated all the way to his skin within seconds. He waited for Ed to leave. John said, “Let’s go.” Ed sauntered to and through the doorway, and John followed and slammed the motel door behind them. Ed barely waited for John to turn in the key before marching off toward the ramp that led to the interstate. As John struggled to catch up, he shifted his bag’s strap farther out, onto the bony part of his shoulder. It eased the pain, but he wondered for how long. Ed stormed ahead at an amazing speed. John assumed Ed wanted him to beg for a slower pace, or to offer the skillet again, but instead, John grit his teeth, shifted his strap again, and jogged to close the distance between them while trying hard not to slip in his loafers in the snow.

43 CHAPTER 10

Back on Thursday afternoon, eighteen and a half hours before John had packed his gym bag and walked out on Billie, he had begun his work day at Leopold’s like normal. He had turned up the lights; turned on the heat; picked out one of Leopold’s two-hour compilations of Sinatra, Holiday, Armstrong, and the like; gotten his bar staff their banks; made certain that the wait staff had all shown up and were well into setting tables and prepping side stations; and gotten the new cook to sauté a skilletful of sliced garlic and carry it through the entire bar. The cook waved the sizzling skillet left and right like a priest’s censer, zigzagging a trail of dissipating garlicy steam that masked the odor of the sewer-smelling bar drains. Then, just before opening for the afternoon, Leopold had called and summoned John to his home office. John crossed the street to the four-storied brick building, straightening his ice-blue tie and brushing the sleeves of his coat as he went, and climbed the stairs to the top floor. He wound his way through the sunlit, courtyard-windowed inner hallway, across plushly carpeted, new-smelling turns of recent additions, and around to the shadowy part of the circle to Leopold’s pair of almost hidden, ancient-as-hills black metal doors. Leopold’s apartment door was closed, its two brassy dead bolts shining even in the shadows, but his office door hung wide open. John tapped a loose-fisted knuckle on the frame. Leopold didn’t acknowledge. He sat at his desk facing the door, but his head was down, and he dug through a stack of Micros register receipts. Leopold appeared like John imagined vampires did: pale, pale skin; Vandyke and eyebrows so dark they looked inked on; so tall and lanky that his back was hunched over his desk as if he were an adult squatting in a child’s furniture set; and long, thin hands with fingers and nails that looked like claws. Behind Leopold’s high-backed black-leather chair, a tall metal frame stuffed with rows of closed-circuit monitors showed black-and-white views of the insides of the bar, the side stations, the storage room, and the bright sunlight on the street out front. The frame full of monitors blocked the office’s windows and the real sun and the real view of the very same street below. Leopold had trimmed his Vandyke and shaved his head, though he hadn’t changed into his

44 starched shirt and coat yet. It was Thursday, the first day of Leopold’s weekly three-night ritualistic pressing of the flesh and buying drinks as if he were running for president. Leopold finally looked up and said, “Sit down, John.” He motioned to the tiny metal fold- up chair that sat dwarfed dead center in front of his desk as if in an interrogator’s cell. His eyes pierced harshly from beneath his thick brows and made his lanky frame seem hard instead of frail, like a wrought-iron graveyard gate. John entered the office and sat in the chair. “What’s this?” Leopold pulled out one of the Micros receipts and handed it over. John drew it from Leopold’s tinelike digits, trying not to touch his flesh, and read it. “Dinner comp,” John said. Leopold glared at John. “Why?” “Food was late, almost an hour. They were pretty upset, so I comped the meal.” “Just like that. On your own.” “It’s the same as the Petersons’ dinner last month, except you weren’t around last night, so I did exactly what you did last time.” Leopold snatched the receipt from John’s hand. “This ticket’s for thirty dollars. The Petersons’ was over a hundred.” “Yes.” John knit his brows. “And yet you feel justified in this?” “I don’t understand,” John said. “You’re willing to comp a hundred-dollar ticket but not a thirty-dollar one?” “The Petersons spend a lot of money at my place.” “They didn’t spend anything. You comped it.” “They’re good clientele. These . . .” he scrunched the receipt in his spiderlike fist “. . . are riffraff.” He crumpled the receipt up so tightly that what little fleshy color existed in Leopold’s knuckles vanished, and his hand turned as white as the receipt. He threw the pea-sized wad across the office, just missing John’s head, and said, “I don’t care if a thirty-dollar customer comes back. Keep the table available for hundred-dollar customers.” “Your policies change based on how much a person spends?”

45 Leopold glared. His face flushed red. His eyes bugged as if about to pop out. “Haven’t you figured that out by now?” he asked. “It’s all about how much they spend.” John said, “That doesn’t seem fair.” Leopold planted his elbows on the desk and buried his face in his hands, his head turning maraschino-cherry red. He dug his fingers into his scalp, pushing up rows of wrinkles as if he were a psychic surgeon trying to make it look like he were sinking his fingers deep into his brain. His shoulders stopped rising and falling, and John imagined Leopold trying to hold his breath, counting to ten to keep from losing his temper. Leopold seemed to count to twenty, then thirty. Leopold finally looked up and said, each word distinctively, “It’s a business. We’re here to make money. Even if you fill every table, if no one spends as much as others might, get rid of them. Keep the thirty-dollar riffraff out.” He screamed, “Throw them out!” “Okay.” Leopold pointed to somewhere behind John. “What are you going to do about that comp?” “I’ll pay it.” John had almost said, “I’ll pay for it,” but that would have left itself open for interpretation. Leopold could have applied that to John’s relationship with Billie, to John’s lackadaisical attitude about running Leopold’s business, or even to who John was in general. John wondered if Billie had already phoned crying to daddy about her and John’s lunch spat and if that was what this was really about—payback for upsetting daddy’s little girl. John stood, pulled a twenty and a ten from his wallet, and held them out for Leopold. Leopold took the money. His scalp faded back to pink. “Do you understand?” Leopold asked. “Yes.” John walked back out of the office, back down the four flights of stairs, back across the street, and back into the bar, forcing himself to show no emotion, keeping each of his muscles’ contractions mechanical, and keeping a fake little smile on his face, fully conscious of Leopold’s cameras. John felt like he were becoming Leopold, felt like he imagined Leopold did on his three nights of schmaltzy greetings for his bar’s biggest spenders, everything a facade. John had no idea who Leopold really was, other than the facetious part, the host Leopold

46 played to his customers, and the temperamental part, which John seemed to see more of every day. John knew there had to be more to Leopold than that, something good, something apparently only Billie saw, but John didn’t have the slightest inkling of what that could be, not even after having spent hours upon hours with Leopold each week for more than a year, and that made John’s heart sink more than the realization that he absolutely had to get away before the last vestige of anything good he felt about himself sank into oblivion, too.

47 CHAPTER 11

John and Ed walked down the shoulder of I-70 somewhere between Hays and Salina, avoiding the inner part of the shoulder because the snow had been clumped into a ridge there by the snowplows. Tiny flakes of snow still drifted down, and cars and semis slipped by fairly regularly, their tires making airy sounds on pavement dampened from the snowplows’ scattered salt (the smaller cars’ tires sounding like a mother gently shushing a baby; the semis’, like a dentist’s spit-suction hose tucked over the side of a patient’s bottom lip). The north wind blew misty tire spray and exhaust across John and Ed. The wind and John’s nose were so cold that his sinuses ached every time he inhaled, and, except for the acrid bite of exhaust, he could smell nothing. He tried inhaling through his mouth instead, but that shifted the freezing ache to deep inside his chest and made him constantly need to spit out gritty particles that had hitched rides in the tire spray. The snow still lay thick on the shoulder and made the walking strenuous, especially at Ed’s furious pace. At first, John alternated between letting his feet plow through the snow, which tired the fronts of his hips, and lifting his knees enough to sling each foot free of the snow, which tired another part of the fronts of his hips as well as his thighs. After tiring of both of those methods, John settled in behind Ed and used Ed’s tracks rather than trying to walk next to him. But then he had to copy Ed’s pace and stride exactly, and Ed’s walk was an awkward one for John and made his legs hurt in new places. And there was Ed’s speed. Ed seemed to possess an uncanny stamina, and after three mile markers, John’s leg muscles burned, and he panted and sweated in his layered clothes. None of the drivers did more than glance at Ed and John, even after John tried sticking his own thumb out along with Ed’s. John wondered whether the drivers were scared, or if they didn’t care, or if they simply didn’t want to get stuck on the snowplows’ ridge while trying to pull over. The snow stopped falling by midday and revealed a low, thin layer of dark gray clouds sliding across the sky, breaking apart into ever-shifting individual puffs. Far above that disintegrating layer, a solid field of steel-gray clouds stretched across the entire sky. Tiny ripples

48 ran across its wider, flatter parts, looking like long but thin waves flowing slower than the eye could see across upside-down lakes. The lack of falling snow also exposed the wide Kansas horizon, and John wished it hadn’t. The highway pointed toward a grain elevator, and Ed and John walked and walked, never stopping, never slowing, and yet the grain elevator seemed not one fraction of an inch closer. It seemed to be leading them, or fleeing from them. Combined with the seemingly conspiratorial lack of an offered ride, the fleeing grain elevator made the walk seem a useless endeavor, as if John and Ed had merely been stepping in place all morning. John removed the hand towel from beneath his coat collar and enjoyed the cold air touching his bare, overheated neck, though the cold still cut icy and sharp inside his sinuses, throat, and chest. Next, he peeled off his coat, draped it across his gym bag, and held it there with one hand, and he enjoyed that same cold air slipping all the way through the weave of his sweater and T-shirt and kissing his sweaty skin. It seemed bizarre to him that he should feel cold inside his chest but hot outside instead of the other way around. John’s mouth was cottony dry, and his legs and breathing were shaky from thirst. He had drunk all his juice and water early, and though he didn’t miss the weight, he wished the empty bottles were full again. Every quarter mile or so, he scooped up a handful of the cleanest snow within reach and sucked on that as he walked, and though it eased the dryness in his mouth, it did little to feed his exhausted legs or lighten the leadlike weight of his rib cage over his lungs. And no matter how white the snow seemed, it tasted like tire and dirt. The long trudge through the snow had made John wish he had followed his initial urge and beaten Ed to a pulp and then called Pamela collect and begged for forgiveness and a bus ticket. But time and a gazzillion million steps had made that urge wane until all John could think of was putting one foot in front of the other. John was beat far worse than the day before, he was hungry, and he began to get a headache. Then a semi crunched through the plowed-up ridge ahead of them, braked on the shoulder, and stopped. The brake lights stayed on, and a denim-coated arm stuck out the driver’s window and beckoned to them. The arm disappeared, and the passenger door swung open. John and Ed jogged through the snow. Once they reached the semi’s tracks on the

49 shoulder, the running became easy, and they reached the semi in no time. The trailer’s back doors were shiny and pressed in a diamond pattern, as if someone had quilted a mirror, and above the mud flaps’ chrome-trimmed bottom edges were two chrome silhouettes of seated, large-breasted women facing each other, looking more like Barbie doll silhouettes than anything human. The trailer had its own fuel tank on its belly and a refrigeration unit on its nose. The unit’s compressor raised a clattering din, the control panel on the unit’s side showing tiny red, green, and amber lights and gauges. The needle of one gauge vibrated in what seemed a self-absorbed, animated shiver. Ed reached the door first, and John heard the trucker ask Ed something. Ed told the trucker, “However far you’re going.” Then John reached the door, and the trucker said, “Forty dollars.” The cab was big, square-nosed, and shiny red, full of amber lights and chrome, with a hood ornament of a winged naked lady. Twin CB antennae thrust up and forward over the hood, as thick as John’s big toe at their bases and tapering off to tips the width of Ed’s forefinger. Tiny, wirelike ridges coiled their way up the antennae’s full lengths and made the antennae look like painted rebar. Ed said, “I didn’t think you’d charge us.” The trucker told Ed, “Well, diesel fuel ain’t cheap, boy, and you look like you might knock my mileage down a notch.” The trucker was an old man with silvery hair. He wore a blue denim overcoat with thick sheepskin inside, and he sat leaning over from the driver’s seat so that he could look down on both Ed and John. “Twenty,” Ed said, “and I’ll need to get it from an ATM when we get the chance.” “Thirty,” the trucker said, “and that’s if you have ten as a deposit right now.” The trucker’s denim coat was faded and frayed, and the sheepskin looked real. The trucker’s eyes were bloodshot, with pupils as tiny as pinpoints and irises as pale as the sky. He didn’t blink, and the scowl made his stare seem supernatural and piercing, like the eyes of a demon. Age spots mottled his puffy tanned skin. Ed dug in his pocket and said, “I’ve only got a five on me right now.” “What about him?” Ed reared his head back in a silent laugh. “He’s as poor as dirt.”

50 The trucker said, “Thirty-five, then, and give me that five now.” Ed handed it to him and climbed in. The trucker took the five, pocketed it, and stuck his hand back out to Ed. “I’m Cecil,” he said. Ed climbed into the semi, pulled off his mitten, and shook Cecil’s hand. “Ed,” he said, then pointed his long forefinger at John. “That’s John.” Ed took John’s gym bag and disappeared with it back into the semi’s sleeper. Cecil told Ed, “Don’t fuck with nothing back there. Just put your shit on the floor and sit down.” He stuck his hand out to John and said, “John?” “Yeah,” John said and shook Cecil’s hand. The hand was cold, the skin like wax paper or cheap plastic gloves. The older wrinkles were shiny, as if molded there, and the new ones, the ones that formed each time Cecil moved his hand, seemed to try to shear that plastic. John sat heavily on the passenger seat and strapped himself in. Cecil said, “Close that door, will you boy?” John did. Heat rushed from the dash vents, and the semi smelled to John like old vinyl and musty carpet, tainted with the staleness of years of cigarette smoke. It smelled like John’s grandfather’s ’78 Impala, and it made John want to open the door again or roll down the window. John hadn’t liked his grandfather much, what he could recall of him, a loud, balding old man holding long- ashed cigarettes and tumblers of diluted whiskey. The man’s presence had always made John’s mother act like a stranger, and Pamela would take John into the back of the house. For such a loud man, John’s grandfather had made the house amazingly quiet. Ed sat on the front edge of Cecil’s narrow bunk, facing forward between the two bucket seats, his roll and John’s bag on the floor on either side of him, the snow on them beginning to melt. Cecil stomped on his accelerator and pulled back onto the highway. The truck wobbled going over the snowplowed ridge but didn’t slow. Cecil quickly shifted through five gears, flipped up a small flat lever on the front of his gear shift knob, and shifted back into what should have been first, but instead, while moving through neutral, the gear made a light clack and gave a tiny kiss of air, like miniature air brakes setting, and what used to be first had apparently become sixth.

51 The semi kept accelerating, Cecil working his way through all the gear shift’s positions a second time, and they were off, speeding down the highway. A CB radio was fastened to the ceiling by a metal bracket, centered just inside the windshield. A thin bungee cord hooked to the ceiling next to and slightly in front of Cecil held, at its other end, the CB mic, dangling the mic between the bungee cord and the coiled black mic cord coming from the radio. The bumps in the road made the mic dance between the two cords. Ed pulled his parka hood back and let it drop behind him. Chunks of snow fell from the hood and landed on Cecil’s bunk, where they melted and seeped into the rumpled blanket and gray sheets. Ed pulled off his other mitten, shoved both into one parka pocket, leaned forward, and braced himself by grabbing the rubber-trimmed edges of the submarine-portal-looking opening between the cab and the sleeper. Cecil asked, “Why you boys walking in this shit?” Ed nodded toward John. “His truck broke down.” Cecil stared at John. “You a trucker?” “Pickup,” John said. Cecil looked forward again and asked, “Back there about the state line?” “I guess,” John said. “Yeah, I seen it. On the side of the road.” Ed said, almost gleefully, “That’s the one.” John said, “Maybe that was mine. Who knows?” Cecil looked at John and Ed. “You mind if I smoke?” It didn’t seem a question to John so much as a challenge, as if Cecil had actually said, “I’m going to smoke now. Just one of you sons of bitches try to stop me.” John shook his head “No,” and Ed just barely perceptively shrugged. Cecil pushed in his truck’s lighter, reached into a cubby hole above his visor, and pulled out a pack of Winstons. He shook a cigarette loose and pulled it out of the pack with his lips, then shoved the pack back into the cubby hole. The lighter popped out, and Cecil lit his cigarette, cracked his window, and looked over at John, again like a challenge. The smoke whirled mostly around the cab instead of drifting outside. They drove for more than an hour that way, with Cecil working his way through three more Winstons. John’s head throbbed worse, and Ed eventually peeled his parka off his shoulders

52 and arms, like he had in the restaurant, keeping his knife hidden. The clouds thinned and seemed like they might break up soon and finally show the sun again, but they didn’t. Snow still lay everywhere except on the roads, though it had been plowed from even the shoulders now. They passed the grain elevator and Salina and eventually Junction City, and as they went past a sign that read, “Fort Riley,” Ed stiffened and closed his eyes tight. John asked him, “You okay?” Ed opened his eyes, breathing heavily, and said, “Yeah. Just . . . Never mind.” Ed kept his eyes open then and seemed to try to relax, but one of his cheeks went into spasms that made it look as if that eye wanted to wink and Ed desperately wanted it not to. After two or three miles, Ed finally settled down, and then after another fifteen or so, they came upon another hitchhiker, a ratty-looking, thickly bearded older man. Everything about him seemed brown: his layers upon layers of clothes, his beard, his small backpack. He seemed a snowman made from muddied snow. John wondered if Cecil might stop for that hitchhiker, too, and try for another forty bucks, but Cecil didn’t. As they passed and it became apparent they weren’t going to stop, the hitchhiker leaned toward the truck and thrust his fist into the air and flipped off Cecil, John, and Ed. “Son of a bitch,” Cecil said. “That son of a fucking bitch.” Cecil turned to John and Ed. “You boys wouldn’t have done that if I’d’ve passed you up, would you?” “No,” Ed said. “We’re nice boys.” Cecil fumed for the next minute, and then they passed a sign that indicated an exit was coming up in another mile. Cecil threw his cigarette butt out the window and said, “We’re doing a flip-flop. We’re going back to that son of a bitch.” He looked at John, then Ed. “Hey, Ed—It’s Ed, right?” Ed said, “Yes.” “Reach back there and grab that jug of piss.” Ed looked left and right in the sleeper. Cecil said, “It’s the gallon milk jug.” Ed asked, “You have a napkin or something?” Cecil exaggerated rolling his eyes. “Oh, come on. It’s just piss. Whatchu think, I peed all over the damn thing, all over my truck? Just pick it up.” Cecil braked more forcibly than John would have thought safe for a big truck on a wet

53 road, and they pulled onto the exit ramp. Then Cecil stomped the accelerator to get them up to the overpass. He slowed them just enough at the stop sign, it seemed to John, to turn without jackknifing or flipping over, then crossed over the highway, turned down the westbound ramp, sped up, and merged back onto the highway going the opposite direction. Ed squatted ready between the two seats with the jug. It was filled almost to the cap with dark orangy, cloudy urine. John hoped the cloudiness had come from the urine’s mixing with the remnants of milk, or from having aged over days of accumulation. He hated to think of what must be going on inside a man who peed cloudy orange. They went by the hitchhiker again, but on the opposite side of the highway. He was still flipping people off, and Cecil sped along focused on the next exit ramp. John cringed at the idea of being pointed back toward Denver. He was relieved when Cecil finally turned them all around again and stomped the accelerator all the way to the floor. Cecil seemed to do nothing in gradations, and John thought about suggesting that he replace his brake and gas pedals with a simple toggle switch: full brake or full gas. John snickered at the thought of Cecil flipping a little switch instead of being able to stomp his cowboy boot down on each pedal as if smashing roaches or tiny people. He figured Cecil would never gain satisfaction from a little switch. Cecil would need two huge buttons on top of the dash instead, like hockey pucks, something he could pound with a fist. Cecil noticed John’s snickering and said, “Yeah, we’re going to show this son of a bitch a thing or two. Roll that window down.” John hesitated. “Roll that Goddamned window down.” John did. The cold air whipped in and around them. Ed held his ball cap down snug. “Now take that piss, and when—” “I’m not touching that.” John shook his head. “Oh, for the love of God. It’s only piss.” He glared at John, then said to Ed, “Get over there.” Ed looked at Cecil, then John. “Trade with me, John,” he said. John unbuckled his seat belt, scooted past Ed into the front edge of the sleeper, and squatted on the floor with his butt on his heels, between the blanket roll and the gym bag, avoiding Cecil’s rumpled bed sheets.

54 Cecil told Ed, “Don’t try to hit him with it. When we get up there, throw it down right in front of him, hard, so it’ll bust open at his feet and splash all over him.” John couldn’t see the road or the hitchhiker. He didn’t care. He felt like he were watching two kids playing video games, or like watching two neighborhood bullies picking on a third. He sympathized with the third bully, but not enough to risk anything to try to stop it. It seemed a sorry way for people to act, but he figured if bullies wanted to fight among themselves, they should be left to it. “Now,” Cecil said. Ed threw the jug out and down through the open window. Cecil watched his passenger side mirror. “Yeah!” He cackled at Ed. “Perfect.” Then he turned forward, his grip relaxed on the wheel, and his shoulders sank. He seemed to have just taken a huge dose of pain killer. His wax-paper fingers danced along the top edges of his oversized steering wheel. “Flip me off, will you, you piece-of-shit son of a bitch.” John thought about orange icicles forming all over the poor guy. They drove on quietly then, peacefully, for ten or fifteen minutes. Ed eventually offered John his seat back, and John took it, rolled the window back up, and securely buckled his seat belt. Cecil squeezed the wheel again, clenching his jaw and squinting, as if he were remembering something painful or had just stepped on a tack. Each time they crept up on a car or another semi, Cecil nudged his accelerator to get around it, but he never eased back off, so the truck sped up in increments until they were racing again. They drove for over thirty minutes without saying much, Cecil working his way into a new pack of cigarettes, and the heat from the vents and the smell of the smoke making John’s head hurt worse. The busier the highway got, the angrier Cecil seemed to become, and the more aggressively he drove, until they were approaching Topeka, the interstate thickening with traffic, with Cecil cursing and banging on his steering wheel, tailgating, and whipping back and forth between lanes. John wished he had kept Ed’s seat on the floor instead, out of view of what was going on. They made it through Topeka and got onto the turnpike heading for Kansas City, the

55 traffic finally thinning. They passed other vehicles again, Cecil’s shoulders tensing and his lips curling each time, and again, they slowly sped up. Cecil got behind another semi and checked his tall side mirror, then pulled his CB mic down against his lips. “Hey westbound, westbound, anyone got your ears on?” His voice took on a strained, grainy texture like a DJ’s. He sounded constipated. No one answered. Cecil said into the mic, “Heeeey, westbound, come on,” and added after letting go of the mic button, “Goddammit.” A voice blared distorted over the CB, “You got a westbound, come on.” Amazingly, Cecil turned the volume higher. “How’s it look over your shoulder? Seen any bears?” “You’re clear all the way to KC, eastbound.” The voice boomed and crackled, like a garage-sale LP played far too loud. “Ten-four,” Cecil said. “You’re clear back to that Salina town. Hammer down. You got the Hell Hound.” Cecil seemed proud of his off-rhyme, and John imagined Cecil never tiring of adding “town” to every place-name on the map. The other voice came back over the CB, less emphatic, deeper, as if final, “Have a safe journey, Hell Hound.” Cecil let the bungee cord sling the mic bouncing back into place, and John felt the truck accelerate. Ed said, “I didn’t know people still talked on CBs.” Cecil pulled out another Winston and lit it. “You folk don’t anymore. Thank God. It’s back to business now.” He peered into his side mirror. “Goddamned trucker wannabes.” “I never saw the big deal,” Ed said. Cecil glared at him, then watched forward again. “Like you’d know. You’re too young to know. You got even hair-one on your dick yet?” “Wanna see?” Ed said. Cecil jerked as if given an electric shock. “You one of those faggots or something? Don’t you pull that thing out in here. I’ll shoot it off.” Ed said, “You mean jerk it off? Is that your offer?”

56 Cecil said, “I’m dead serious,” then to himself, “Fucking faggot sons of bitches. I knew I shouldn’t have picked you up.” They came up behind a black VW Beetle in the passing lane traveling next to and at the same speed as a cream-colored SUV in the right lane. Cecil pulled to within ten feet of the Beetle’s rear bumper, and John squirmed in his seat. “Come on, little lady,” Cecil said, “some of us out here are on a schedule.” He glanced at Ed. “Jerk it off. You fucker.” John said, “If you’re in such a hurry, maybe you shouldn’t have done that flip-flop.” Cecil glared at John, then at Ed. “You boys got a lot of nerve for people being provided a courtesy.” Ed said, “It’s not a courtesy. We’re paying for it. Give me my five dollars back, and we’ll be nice.” Cecil shook his head and pulled closer to the Beetle. “You fuckers,” he said. “Everybody’s a fucker.” John watched Cecil’s winged-naked-lady hood ornament creep up on and then mask the Beetle’s license plate. Cecil peered over his hood. “Goddammit, you cunt. Speed up, slow down, or whatever, but get the fuck out of the way!” He pressed the accelerator, and the Beetle’s rear bumper disappear beneath the nose of Cecil’s hood. John’s entire body tingled and his ears buzzed. He found it hard to breathe. The Beetle disappeared beneath the nose of the truck, and then John felt a slight jar, barely perceptible. “Come on, bitch,” Cecil shouted. “Move it!” The SUV’s brake lights came on, and the SUV sank back next to and then on behind the truck’s trailer. Ed leaned forward and peered toward the hood where they used to be able to see the Beetle, but he seemed only curious. John told Cecil, “Don’t do this. Please stop.” Cecil whipped his head toward John, the red-streaked whites of his eyes showing all around his storm-cloud-gray irises and pinpoint pupils. “What?” he screamed at John. “You said what? Changed your attitude awfully fast, didn’t you, mister?”

57 John tried to appear calm. “You don’t have to do this.” Ed looked at John, and then sat back on the bunk. Cecil pointed his finger at John and screamed, “Are you . . .” then pointed at himself, “ . . . telling me . . . how to drive my truck?” He pounded his forefingertip onto his own chest with each of the last two words. He shoved his pointer finger toward John again, as if he could shoot lightening bolts from it. “You don’t know what driving’s all about. Nobody does anymore.” He grabbed his wheel and glared through his windshield. “These Goddamned little pissant . . . Nobody knows what driving is anymore.” Ed smiled at Cecil like a salesman. “I know what you mean, Cecil.” “Hell Hound!” “Hell Hound. I know what you mean. You’re a dying breed, man, one of a kind.” “Damn right, I am.” Cecil turned and looked at Ed, as if to see if Ed were serious or poking fun. Ed said, “Sorry about that jerk-off comment. No need to take it out on that little lady there.” “I’m not taking anything out on anyone. You boys are done with this ride soon as I teach this bitch a lesson. Lucky I don’t throw you out right now, while we’re still moving, or take you out somewhere and shoot you.” John couldn’t see the Beetle. It was hidden somewhere beneath the tiny winged lady and the truck’s huge nose. The SUV was only a tiny dot in Cecil’s side mirror by then. Cecil looked forward and stomped on his accelerator, and John felt the jar again. The Beetle reappeared in front of them, accelerating. Ed said, calm and matter-of-factly, “Why don’t we pull over and get a cup of coffee, or a beer, talk about—” “Talk! That’s all anyone does anymore is talk. We’re done talking.” Through the Beetle’s rear window, John saw the back of the driver’s head. She was a young woman, possibly a teenager, with blonde hair in a ponytail. A small black dog standing on the back seat, bracing its front paws on the seat’s back, barked and barked through the Beetle’s back window at Cecil and John and Ed, though John couldn’t hear the barks. Cecil turned forward and mashed his accelerator to the floor, but the Beetle accelerated faster. John figured it must have been doing ninety. It pulled farther away and whipped into the

58 right lane, wiggling from the speed and the shallow ruts in the road. John expected the girl to lose control any second and either slip on across the shoulder and into the snow-filled ditch or boomerang sideways back in front of Cecil’s charging truck. Cecil hollered, “Worked. Bitch is out of the way. People don’t know how to drive anymore.” He screamed at the Beetle, “Passing lane! Doesn’t that mean anything to you, bitch? Sheeeeiiiiiit, woman.” The Beetle slowed in the right lane, and Cecil gained on it in the left. The girl seemed to have regained control, though she hugged the white line at the edge of the shoulder, as if she expected the truck to try to veer over once it was next to her and run her off the road. She raised her cell phone to her ear, both her hand and the phone shaking. Her other hand seemed latched onto the wheel so tightly that she might be trying to pinch the wheel in half to make a balloon animal. Her brake lights came on. John knew she’d be able to look up at him in the next moment. He lowered his face and shielded his right cheek and eye with his hand. He wanted to mouth a “Sorry” to her, or to somehow make up for Cecil’s asinine antics, but most, he wanted to vanish. Cecil’s truck roared past her and whipped into the right lane, the tail end of his trailer snapping over like the end of a whip, barely missing the Beetle. “You,” Cecil said to John, “are walking, mister.” He whined, “Pleeeeasssse stop. Waaah. My pussy hurts.” Then he huffed. Cecil braked hard, pulled over to the shoulder, his tires skidding on the wet pavement, and stopped with his tractor and trailer slightly askew. He pulled a big yellow button on his dash, and it popped loudly and air brakes hissed. Ed stuck his arms back into his parka sleeves and zipped up his parka. Cecil turned toward John and said, “Get your shit and get out.” Then he said to Ed, “You, too, you Goddamned faggot.” Cecil looked at John again and then past him, as if something had caught his eye. “What the hell?” John turned around to see what was next to the highway that had drawn Cecil’s attention, but the snow and the distant wood line seemed empty. The trees themselves were empty: bare of leaves, bare of birds, bare of life of any kind. Cecil said, “What the fuck is she doing?” John looked in the passenger side mirror. The Beetle had stopped on the shoulder a couple

59 hundred yards behind them. Cecil turned to Ed. “Both of you get out. Now.” Ed grabbed the rope to his roll and the strap to John’s gym bag. “I’ll get that shit myself,” Cecil said. He seized Ed’s parka and tried to drag Ed from the sleeper. Ed shrugged off Cecil’s hands and, never taking his eyes off Cecil’s, draped the rope to his roll through their stares and across his shoulder and calmly adjusted the roll to his satisfaction. John opened the passenger door and climbed out of the truck. Ed followed John, but slowly, like a three-toed sloth. He stared at Cecil without blinking, his lids partially closed, the rest of his face expressionless. Ed’s look gave John the creeps. Cecil seemed to try to hurl John’s bag and coat all the way to the wood line, but the bag was too heavy and fell right into John. John grabbed at the bag in the air and, though not catching it, managed to soften its impact on the shoulder and, he hoped, keeping his mother’s bowl from breaking. His coat landed at the edge of the ditch behind him. Cecil disappeared again and then came back to the door and clambered out of the truck behind Ed, almost knocking Ed from the lowest step. Cecil locked and slammed his truck’s door and gestured ahead of the truck. “Go on,” he said. “Get the hell away from me and my truck.” He turned and marched toward the Beetle, adjusting something at his waistline within the folds of his denim and sheepskin. Then he swung his arms in huge sweeps and picked up his pace. His walk seemed exaggerated, forced, as if he were new at it. Ed dropped his roll next to John and paced after Cecil, slipping his left hand beneath the parka’s lower edge and pulling out his knife. John put on his coat and picked up his bag, but he wasn’t sure whether to rush after Ed or run the opposite direction. He thought about climbing the concrete barrier in the middle of the turnpike and escaping to the north, or even trying to disappear into the trees to the south. He didn’t like the idea of being near Ed and Cecil, or being anywhere Cecil’s truck could go, but his feet didn’t budge. Ed gained on Cecil. Cecil seemed not to notice Ed was behind him, and Cecil didn’t seem to get much closer to the Beetle. Then John realized the Beetle was backing up, keeping Cecil at a distance. John blew out a deep breath and thought, Good girl. Smart.

60 Cecil saw it, too, and pulled a huge black pistol from beneath his coat. Ed ran toward Cecil then, and the Beetle accelerated in reverse. Ed tackled Cecil from behind, and they both fell onto the wet black shoulder. Ed straddled Cecil and seemed to punch Cecil in the back, but John knew Ed had his knife in that hand. Cecil and Ed struggled on the ground for a moment, and then John saw a puff of smoke. A split second later he heard a pop like a loud firecracker, and Cecil got up and ran limping toward the truck. Ed stood and watched Cecil, the black knife hanging in Ed’s left hand, his right hand in tight against his stomach. John ran from Cecil, but after only a few yards, his legs burned with exhaustion from his two days’ walk and the weight of his bag. He knew he couldn’t keep away from Cecil along the highway, so he tried to cross the ditch but slid and fell in its bottom. He let loose of his bag and looked back. Cecil was back at his truck. John couldn’t see the pistol and figured Cecil must have slid it back inside his coat. Cecil looked at John, then looked back at Ed, who had started to run toward the truck again. John lay behind his bag, kneading the heavy vinyl to find his blanket- wrapped skillet. He turned the skillet on its side within the bag, holding it and the bag in front of his chest like a breastplate, wishing he’d had a restaurant-sized skillet instead. He wished he could simultaneously guard both his chest and his head behind the thick metal, but at the same time, he was glad he had an excuse to not take his eyes off anything. Cecil unlocked and opened the passenger door and climbed up his steps, resting briefly on the second and last steps. Blood soaked the back of his coat. Cecil sighed heavily, then climbed in the truck and closed the door. The truck’s stacks spewed smoke, and the truck jerked forward and pulled onto the highway. John turned his bag so that it was always between him and the truck, rolling it over on top of his chest and covering his head with his arms. He couldn’t see Cecil. The ditch was deep enough and the truck’s cab wide enough that the passenger door masked John’s and Cecil’s views of each other. The truck went by, and John let his arms fall to the snow at his sides. He breathed the cold air deeply, leaving his bag resting against his chest. Ed leaned over him. “You okay?” Ed’s knife was out of sight again. He tightened a red paisley-patterned bandanna around his right hand. Blood dripped from the hand and the bandanna. Blood coated the belly of his parka, too, but John couldn’t see a bullet hole anywhere in the parka’s front. John sat up and asked, “He shoot you?”

61 “In the hand.” “Are you okay?” Ed laughed while grimacing. “No. I have a hole in my hand. What makes you think I could be okay?” He tucked the last corner of the bandanna under its tightly wrapped bands. “I’ve had worse, though.” John stood up. The Beetle was still on the shoulder. Cecil’s truck was a tiny dot on the interstate’s vanishing point. Ed said, “I need whiskey or something for this thing.” “Rubbing alcohol would be better.” John brushed the snow off his jeans. Ed looked into the sky and scrunched his nose. “I hate hospital smell. Besides, whisky does two jobs.” “Did you stab Cecil?” John asked. Ed smiled and took John’s bag from him. “Oh, yeah. Next jug of piss that guy throws at someone will be red.” He set John’s bag on the shoulder and helped John out of the ditch. John said, “You were the one who threw the piss.” “Yeah. Well . . .” The Beetle crept up the shoulder toward John and Ed, its tires crunching on an occasional pebble, piece of glass, or other bit of debris, the engine humming at idle. The air seemed too calm, John thought, and the sky too light, for something so horrendous to have just happened.

62 CHAPTER 12

Kevin followed Apalachicola Bay’s main channel, shooting across the bay for nearly half an hour toward St. George and Little St. George islands. Then the channel turned ninety degrees to port and headed to East Pass without him. Kevin turned five or ten degrees to starboard instead and headed due south, straight toward a tiny mark jutting above and in front of the low line of land on the horizon. Over the next five minutes, the mark grew higher and eventually stuck thirty-six feet into the sky, taller than his boat was long. He passed that tower and homed in on the twenty-footer, the next mark leading to the cut between the islands. He could see the cut then, beyond the twenty-foot tower, the thin notch of landless Gulf between, to its right, pines and shrubbery above a beach and, to its left, houses and docks punctuating a lesser beach. He passed the twenty-foot tower and slowed as the water turned beige to port where the shoal was. Then the starboard shoal appeared, and the two shoals squeezed in closer, the one to port rising so near the surface that the water lightened to almost the bright tan of the beach. He slipped between the pilings with the number three and four markers at their tops, slowing more and staying in the narrowing path of olive water between. At the end of one of the docks were a man and a girl, fishing or hanging a baited line down for crab. They had a large bucket and a net with a long handle. The shoal to port hove in close, and Kevin stopped watching the man and child and arced his boat in a slight sweep to starboard, more toward Little St. George Island, where the government practiced bombing and missile runs. He straightened his path again after the shoal slipped back to where it was supposed to be, and then he was between the islands. The beach to starboard and the boat ramps and docks to port closed in to within half a football field of him, and he reached the narrowest part, where piled-rock walls replaced the beach, docks, and houses, and he motored through the straight, rock-lined cut. The land ended, but the rock-pile walls went on, becoming jetties instead, and then Kevin was past their ends and headed into the Gulf, the horizon ahead now broken by only the

63 last three channel markers. He swayed to port to avoid lighter-colored water, slowly arcing around until the water was dark ahead and on both sides again, and then he looked up, smiled at the empty horizon, and pushed the twin throttle handles forward. The knotmeter reached twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, and he tapped the throttles back to hold the speed there for the time being. He shot between the green can close to starboard and the red nun off to port, turning the wheel to swing his boat and the compass’ glass bubble around the slightly undulating compass card, and lined up the bubble’s rule with the card’s “195.” Then he brought the tiny Turk’s head on his wheel back to top dead center, and the boat’s deck leveled out and settled into a gentle rocking over the swells. He throttled on up to forty and left the cut and the shore far behind. The depthmeter climbed, and the water changed from the beige and olive of the cut to an umber-cobalt mix and then to eggplant purple-black. The sun sent fingerlike rays dancing into the purple, lighting up hints of cobalt and gold, colors you never see in the murkier waters close to shore. Today the breeze caressed the water in long, even swells, and the slow sway of deep water beneath the hull, the humming of the twin outboards, the rich dancing colors beneath the piercing baby blue sky made Kevin smile, beckoned to him more than he could fathom, and once he passed that final marker far off to starboard, at Cape St. George Shoal, he never glanced back at the land.

64 CHAPTER 13

The Beetle pulled close to John and Ed, and Ed waved at the girl inside. She stopped the car on the shoulder next to them and rolled her passenger window down an inch. The cream-colored SUV crept by, and Ed smiled and waved at the couple in it, too. They sped up and went on down the road. “Are you okay?” the girl in the Beetle shouted at Ed. Ed held up his tightly wrapped hand, laughed, and said under his breath to John, “Looks like you two were made for each other.” Blood coated most of the bandanna, but it had stopped dripping. He said to her, “Sure. Just a scratch.” The girl peered through the cracked passenger window. “I called the police,” she said. “Good,” Ed said and stepped closer to the car. She said, “I don’t know where they are.” “Did you give them the mile marker?” She rolled her window down another six inches. “The what?” Ed nodded, then looked east. “You from around here?” She shook her head. “Going home, from school.” “Kansas State?” he asked, but she didn’t react. He nodded east. “Just how many miles away is the next town, the closest police station?” “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess they . . .” She looked around, as if expecting the highway patrol and an ambulance to whip into sight. Other cars slowed as they went by, but none stopped. The girl asked, “Can I give you a lift? You saved my life, I guess.” “Ah,” Ed said, “I don’t think that guy was much of a shot.” He showed his bandaged hand again. “But we’ll take the ride, if you’re sure you don’t mind.” She opened the passenger door without unstrapping her seat belt. “Stay here, Hawking,” she said and pulled her little black dog close.

65 Ed said, “So you are from K State. Jayhawks.” “What?” Ed nodded at the dog. “Hawkin’.” “That makes no sense,” she said. “Hawking, as in Stephen.” Ed shrugged, looked inside the Beetle, then at his hand. “You have a plastic bag or anything? I don’t want to get blood all over your car.” “Yeah, in the trunk.” She pushed a tiny button on her key chain remote, and the hatch popped. Using his left hand, Ed lifted the hatch, reached into the trunk, and emptied a clear plastic shopping bag of its bundle of clothes. The clothes had no tags and had been folded differently than stores seemed to prefer, tighter, more efficient than showy. Ed wrapped his right hand, bandanna and all, inside the empty bag, then reached back into the trunk and pushed two more bags to the side, one of clothes and one of moderately sized boxes wrapped in colorful paper printed with Christmas trees, Santas, and holly. Ed loaded first his roll and then John’s gym bag into the trunk, slammed the hatch closed, and walked around to the passenger side of the Beetle. He folded the passenger seat forward, slid the whole seat up away from the back, and clambered onto the back seat. The back of his head hit the back window, and he whipped around scowling as if the window had reached out and bopped him on the head on purpose. “Get in, John,” he said and tapped his good hand on the passenger seat’s bent-over back. “Let’s get on out of here. No need to wait for the police.” The girl looked curiously at Ed. Ed said, “You gave them the truck’s tag number, right?” “Uh-huh.” John pushed the seat back into place. It hit Ed’s knees. “Ow,” Ed said. “Pull that seat up a little, would you, John?” He said to the girl, “The police will call you if they need you to testify or anything.” John got in, closed the door, and adjusted the seat. “That’s better,” Ed said. “Let’s get out of here.” John strapped on his seat belt. The girl checked her mirror, turned on her blinker, and pulled onto the highway.

66 The Beetle smelled new and leathery, with a hint of perfume that made John think of Christmas again. John couldn’t place the scent exactly, but it hit him with images of big Christmas tree lights, the old painted ones with scratches and chips in the paint where sparkling bright white light shone through. It was an older perfume. The girl looked at Ed in her rearview and asked, “Don’t you want an ambulance or anything?” John got a whiff of pine then, of a Christmas tree, but he couldn’t see a car air freshener anywhere. He drew a long breath in through his nose, but he couldn’t pick up the pine scent again. Ed said, “Nah. Like I said, it’s just a scratch. No big deal.” Hawking crawled in back and scrunched into a ball on the back seat as far from Ed as he could. “Okay,” the girl said to the rearview, and then to John, “Your name’s John?” He nodded. “I’m Cassandra,” she said. “Hi.” John gestured toward the back seat. “That’s Ed.” Cassandra’s hazel eyes caught even that cloudy day’s faint light like a lion’s, yet they seemed weary, like those of a lioness who’d lost cub after cub to warring males. They were forty- year-old eyes in the face of a nineteen-year-old, and John found himself drawn to her. Ed didn’t seem to notice. He opened his parka down to his waist and pulled out a folded- up sheet of paper. Using his left hand and his teeth, he unfolded the paper part way and inspected it, peering at its edges and within the folds, studying the flat parts with his eyes only inches from it. At first, John thought it was something Ed had wanted to show them, but then he figured Ed must have been making sure blood hadn’t seeped through his parka and onto the paper. The paper’s back side was plain and unruled. The parts of the paper’s front John saw were filled with dark black lines and heavy shading. John looked back at Cassandra and then through the windshield and wondered at how different his life had been only half a week earlier. He would never have imagined that quitting Leopold’s would have brought that much change that quickly. “Hey, stop!” Ed yelled. “No.” Cassandra braked but didn’t stop. She looked in her rearview at Ed.

67 “Hawking, no,” Ed said. Hawking had a corner of Ed’s paper in his mouth, and Ed was trying to get the dog to let go, pressing his injured hand down on Hawking’s back, his thumb pressed on one side of Hawking’s mouth, but Ed’s fingers didn’t seem to want to work to press on the other side of Hawking’s mouth. Cassandra said, “Leave Hawking alone.” Hawking tore a corner the size of a saucer from the drawing and scurried back to his side of the seat. “No,” Ed gasped. He grabbed at the torn paper in Hawking’s mouth, but Hawking reared his head back and swallowed the piece. Cassandra said, “Leave Hawking alone!” Ed took huge breaths, staring at his torn paper, his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide. He breathed heavier than John had ever seen him do, heavier even than when they had been running toward Cecil’s truck. “No,” Ed said again. “Hawking ate . . . Hawking ate . . .” “Hawking?” Cassandra asked. “Are you alright?” Ed snapped, “Hawking is fine!” Ed stared at his paper, then glared at Hawking. “He ate part of my father’s drawing.” “Can you get your father another one?” “It’s not for my father, it’s by him.” Ed still glared at Hawking as if talking to the dog instead of Cassandra. “And he’s dead, and it’s the only one left in the world.” Ed looked at Cassandra. “Make him spit it up.” Cassandra said, “It’s just a drawing.” Ed glared at her, his eyes boring into the back of her head and his mouth twisting. “Where’d you say you were going again, Cassandra?” Ed asked. “Home.” Ed folded his torn paper and shoved it back inside his parka. “Where’s that?” Ed’s tone seemed a bit off to John, as if Ed were interrogating Cassandra. Hawking lay down and curled into a ball.

68 Cassandra said into the rearview, “A little place near Lamar.” Ed asked, “Where’s that?” “North of Joplin.” “Where’s Joplin?” Cassandra smiled a silent little laugh. “You don’t know where Joplin is?” “No.” “In southwest Missouri. It’s kind of a famous town.” Ed shrugged. Cassandra asked John, “How far are you going? Should I drop you near Kansas City? I’m not going into the city itself, just kind of bypassing it and going south.” John said, “As near to Kansas City as you’ll get will be fine.” “No,” Ed said, “We’ll go as far as you are, to L’Amour, or wherever it is you said.” “Lamar,” she said and laughed quietly again. “You said it like the French word for love.” Ed said, “Yeah, well.” Ed’s head bumped the rear window again, and he scowled. Then he scrunched his eyes tight and slowly tapped the back of his head against the window three more times. John said, “I’m not going to Lamar.” He turned toward Ed. “I’m going through St. Louis, then Nashville, and Birmingham.” Ed said, “You were going through St. Louis. Now you’re going to Lamar. Don’t ever pass up a ride that gets you closer to your destination, John, even if it takes you a different route than you’d planned.” Ed grimaced and tapped the back of his head against the window four more times, then eight. John said, “Sounds like she’s leaving the interstate, though.” Cassandra nodded. “But rides are comfy, John. Come on. Be smarter than that. Getting as far south as we can as soon as we can is better anyway, if we’re going to be bivouacking at night.” When Ed reached sixteen taps total, he stopped, and then he breathed freely. John mumbled, “South it is, I guess.” The Beetle continued down the turnpike, Ed watching Hawking and Cassandra watching the road. The sky was still overcast and gray. Each time John put his bare palm to the passenger

69 window, the cold still ached. Outside the car, the first hints of the shadows of evening crept in. Within hours, John thought, it will be black, and even colder. The cold will cut all the way through you then, ratty motel blanket pulled over your head or not.

70 CHAPTER 14

As a cook, John had liked closing the kitchen, not just because it marked the end of the most stressful part of the day, but because once he turned out the kitchen lights and was immersed in darkness, the main bar and dining area shone through the service window in contrast. None of the bartenders, servers, or clientele up front could see John then, but he could see them, and the window framed the view like the masking at a movie screen’s edges. Even after becoming manager, John usually found an excuse to go to the kitchen after it’d closed. The night after Leopold’s berating, John settled in to watch the bar for longer than usual. Light filtered in through Leopold’s bank of front windows and silhouetted the mass of groomed heads, dark suits, overcoats, and evening gowns stuffed between the windows and the glossy black bar. It had begun to snow again, and the glow from the corner street lamps had turned the fine meandering of flakes into falling glitter, seemingly drifting free of the grasp of gravity, some whirling upward and disappearing behind the top frame of the windows as if returning to their source. Deep within the shadows of the bar, ghostlike flashes of pressed white oxfords and aprons danced behind the bar and wove with trays held high through the sea of dark coats. The dim overhead globes cast an eerie light through the swirling cigar smoke and tickled the bar mirror and seemingly endless glass shelves of amber-filled bottles, martini glasses, snifters, and tumblers and all their looking-glass twins. The customers’ details themselves began to materialize, and John recognized a few faces. He pulled the thin stack of index cards from his hip pocket. Down the left side of each card, he had written the names of Leopold’s regular customers and drawn or written simple descriptions, and next to each name, he’d written a favorite drink, favorite cigar, company and position, wife’s name, children’s names, pet peeves, you name it. The mere act of writing a name next to a description burned that name into John’s memory, so he didn’t have to refer to the cards for those, but he needed the cards for other information. John slid the cards back into his pocket, glanced at the snow, and then turned and grabbed

71 the tray of cold cuts, sliced French bread, and other finger food prepped for the last hours of the night and carried it all to the side station. He slid it in the small fridge under the Micros and heard a muffled voice outside the door. “You leaving, Dorian?” Dorian pushed the door open and smiled back at a customer. “No, mate,” he said. “I’m here all night. Just taking a break. See you in a bit, eh?” Dorian held a unique bartender trump by being Australian. He didn’t have to write down names. He simply showed off his pretty porcelain caps and Tasman Sea–blue irises and called everyone “mate.” Boom. Exotic accent, everybody’s best friend, big tips, and a shoe-in for Westword’s “Best Of” list for Denver’s favorite bartender. Dorian had been at Leopold’s perhaps as long as Leopold himself. Dorian had been an old employee even back when John had been just a cook. Dorian let the door swing closed and seemed to age fifteen years. His mouth closed, eyes dulled, and shoulders slumped, and his belly sank relaxed over his apron ties. He lit a cigarette and pulled up his sales on the Micros screen. Without looking up, Dorian said, “Could be a good night, John. Almost a grand. Twenty percent in tips . . .” Dorian saw John watching and asked in a more serious tone, “How’s it going?” “All right.” “Still living with Billie?” John shrugged. “I couldn’t do that, see my boss’s daughter. You ever hear ‘Don’t get laid where you get paid’? If you lose the job, you lose the girl, and vice versa.” John didn’t say anything. Dorian said, “I don’t want to see you get into things without knowing that stuff, is all.” John shrugged. “I’d kind of like to get rid of both right now.” Dorian looked at the tiny camera in the ceiling’s corner. “You think Leopold has a mic in here, too?” he asked. “No. I’ve seen the monitors.” “Think he’s watching now?” “Probably.”

72 Dorian stepped as close to the camera as he could, craned his neck back, and dug his index finger deep into his nose. He held the booger up to the lens and grinned proudly. “That’ll get his blood going,” he said. “Why do you do that?” John asked. “Fuck him. If he fires me, I take my clientele with me. I’ve lost too many customers now because of his paranoia.” John didn’t respond. Dorian wiped his finger on a bevnap and said, “Bloody cameras all over the place. No one wants his picture taken while he’s out cheating on his wife. Right. Put it on camera. That’ll drum up business.” Dorian snubbed out his cigarette, took a deep breath, sucked in his gut, and pushed his way back through the door. John followed him. Except for the drinks and cigars, Leopold’s clientele looked like they had just stepped out of Forbes or GQ. They were light-skinned, mostly male, and thin. Most were taller than John by a half foot or more. Their collars and cuffs were pressed, crisp, clean; their hands, manicured. Their drinks glittered with ice and the reflections of gold rings and watches and straight white teeth. Not a one seemed to sweat, despite most still wearing their overcoats. John would sometimes come across a self-built man, a junkyard dog sporting a pedigree cut, but by and far, the men in Leopold’s were celebrities, owned their own businesses, or were associate vice presidents of blah blah blah promoted ad infinitum due to their dashing good looks, sales pitches, and not much else. The women wore strapless evening gowns or revealing skirts and blouses, most without coats, despite the snow and cold, because that’s the way the men expected them to look. Women froze to death getting to Leopold’s because they couldn’t hit on the men there while wearing coats, and Leopold’s had nowhere to hang coats. You never saw a gloved, scarfed, puffy-haired blue-collar woman at Leopold’s. It was part of John’s job to make sure of that. John worked his way through the bar greeting the customers he’d looked up on his index cards. He asked how their drinks and cigars were, encouraging them to spend more. “No Opus X tonight?” John asked one regular who’d smoked one the weekend before. It was a fifty-dollar cigar. Someone’s buddy asked for a Cuban, getting smart.

73 “You don’t want a Cuban cigar these days,” John said. “You want one from pre-embargo days . . . Yes, they last that long, if they’re cared for properly . . . It’ll cost hundreds, just for one . . . No, it’s only illegal to trade after the embargo. Anything in the U.S. prior to that is fair game. Better off with Dominican. We carry a really nice one I can show you.” John walked behind the bar, grabbed the cigar display case, and mixed on the floor again, but no sale. “Ted, How’ve you been? Who’s the young lady? . . . My pleasure, ma’am . . . Here, Ted, let me light that for you . . . No, I only have my lighter . . . You’re absolutely right, Ted. That strip of cedar you have won’t mar the flavor like this lighter would’ve.” John had taught Ted that, but it was John’s job to help customers show off to young ladies, not to pull out his own strip of cedar. John relieved his doorman for a break, and the doorman wasn’t gone two minutes before the front door opened and a huge silhouette masked the streetlight and glitter. Dyed black hair puffed to the door frame and out and down. A long, thick coat with stark shoulder pads filled the doorway from side to side. The woman swayed, took one baby step, and leaned against the doorjamb for support. A crack of light showed on her opposite side. She regained her balance, blocked out the light again, and took two more baby steps. She made it to the inside half of the vestibule and out of its shadow. Her face was painted as if she were about to step beneath glaring stage lights instead of into a dimly lit bar. She knit her brows and seemed to work hard at trying to focus her tiny black eyes. Lines crinkled around her mouth as if she were working out an algebra problem. The rest of her face slept. Snowflakes stuck suspended in her hair and covered her shoulders. John tried to figure out how he was going to get rid of her. Even if all this drunk woman did was pass out, it would be trouble. She was too big for him to manhandle—womanhandle— personhandle—without embarrassment, and she was far too drunk to listen to common sense. A rocks glass fell from somewhere within her coat and out the bottom and banged flat on the floor, geysering its contents all over her feet. John wondered where she had hidden the drink, her armpit? She stopped and bent to retrieve the drink, but didn’t have room in the vestibule. She looked at John, as if just then realizing he was watching her and that she’d been found out. She mumbled something in the tone of an apology, turned, and left. The light flowed back through the

74 open doorway, and a dozen flakes slipped in just before the door swung shut. The flakes lit on the vestibule’s floor and vanished instantly, and John counted his blessings while feeling disgusted with himself. After his doorman returned from his break, John mixed with the clientele again, occasionally sneaking back to the kitchen, wanting to watch only the snow and the eerie light effects, desperately not wanting to pull out the index cards but knowing that it looked good in front of Leopold’s cameras. Once Leopold showed up, John took a break from brown-nosing, deferring that job to the master, though Leopold never seemed to kiss up. He seemed in his element, and John imagined him eventually running for mayor, or the state legislature, or the U.S. Senate. Billie never came in that night. John hadn’t expected her to, after she’d smashed his dinnerware like that. He wondered if his key would still fit by the time he closed up Leopold’s and went back home. At precisely one-thirty, long after Leopold had left for the night, Floyd had come in. Floyd had long, graying braids, burnt sienna skin, and lips that looked fuller than they were because of his prominent philtrum and the harsh creases that ran from the sides of his nose to the pushed- down corners of his mouth. Though only three and a half feet high, Floyd weighed nearly three hundred pounds. On this particular night, Floyd wore a straw fedora with a white-and-orange floral hatband and a multilayered cape made of tawny-port-red plastic so thick it looked like rubber. His cane rhythmically protruded from the folds of the cape as he worked his way up the steps and in through the vestibule. He stopped to carefully and thoroughly brush the snow from his hat and cape, then peeled off the cape, revealing an aloha shirt that matched his hatband. It looked particularly smart with his cane. John envied a man with balls to dress that way. Floyd and John exchanged nods, and Floyd draped his cape over the back of a chair by the door, climbed into its seat, and patiently eyed his watch. At exactly one-forty-five, Floyd took a deep breath and yelled a guttural yet wondrously loud “Bucka-buckow, bucka-buckow, bucka-buckow!” Everyone looked. Some grinned as if watching a stand-up act. John smiled big and put his fists to his hips. “You heard the man, ladies and gentlemen. That means, ‘Thank you for visiting Leopold’s Cigar Lounge. We appreciate your patronage, but it’s time to finish your drinks and exit through the front door.’”

75 John suspected that Floyd actually yelled, “Get the fuck out,” and John loved that. The Christmas before, John had given Floyd a small box of chocolates with a bow on top, and Floyd had said as clear as day, “Thank you, John,” and then turned and left. That was the only time John knew of when anyone had understood a word Floyd had said. By the time John had finally cleared out the last of the customers; given Floyd his ten dollars and said goodnight; closed the bar and locked the doors; printed out Friday night’s sales; checked and counted each employee’s bank; spot-checked the tables, condiments, side stations, silverware roll-ups, and bar stocks; sent all the employees home; and retired to the office upstairs and finalized the deposit bag and all the bar’s paperwork, the sky through the office windows had lightened above the waning snow, and Leopold’s office and apartment windows across the street were dark. John turned off the light but didn’t close the door. He stared into the dark and orderly office. His heart sped up, and his blood seemed to thicken and stick pounding in his jugulars. His head buzzed. He turned the lock on the open door’s knob and stared at his bar keys in his palm. It’s now or never, he thought. He closed his eyes and squeezed the keys in his fist. Then he opened his eyes, tossed the keys onto the desk, and closed the locked office door behind him. He hurried down the stairs and fled Leopold’s through the kitchen door. It swept shut behind him with the hiss of its pneumatic arm and the kiss and click of the latch. He was finally locked out, had done it himself. He turned away from the bar, still out of breath. The sky was lightening to a brilliant rose- gold mix, and the snow had stopped. John cut the first path through the new snow behind Leopold’s, past the dumpsters and the unpainted, cracked brick wall. The snow coated his pants cuffs and tumbled cold and wet inside his loafers. John looked behind himself and noticed tiny, thin fragments of crusted snow flipped upside down around his footprints. He looked at Leopold’s loading ramp, tiny deck, and outside walk-in one last time. Then he turned toward the parking lot and took childlike joy in punching each step through the snow’s almost nonexistent crystalline pane.

76 CHAPTER 15

Cassandra, Ed, Hawking, and John didn’t approach Kansas City enough to see any of the downtown buildings. They circled all that, still miles away, drove past the suburbs and malls, turned south on Highway 69—or as Cassandra called it, “sixty-nine highway”—and were soon crawling through scattered towns with stoplights. They drove through Trading Post and stopped in Fort Scott for gas and then drove on through little towns with not much more than post offices. The sky grew darker, though the thick, high clouds were so dense that John didn’t know if the sun was still above the horizon. It was deep twilight when Cassandra finally turned across Highway 69 onto a side road and pulled over on its edge. She asked, “Do you want out here, or do you want me to take you to seventy-one?” “What’s seventy-one?” Ed asked. “It’s a bigger highway, runs between Kansas City and Joplin.” “Lots of traffic?” “Oh, yes.” Ed said, “If you don’t mind.” Cassandra pulled back onto the side road, drove down it away from Highway 69, and peeked into her rearview at Ed. “Everyone’s meeting me at my grandparents’ house,” she said, “farther down seventy-one, but first I have to drop off Hawking at my house. It’s on the way. I can drop you where this road intersects with seventy-one between my house and my grandparents’ house.” Ed leaned over to his window and looked at the sky. “There anything there? At the highway?” “Yeah. A Copious Cone and a little truck stop or something, and a Wal-Mart on the other side of the highway.” Ed said, “You own your own house?” Cassandra said, “No. I mean my parents’ house.” She chewed her lips. “Look. I’d offer

77 you guys a room or something, but it’s not mine to offer, and my parents will probably stay at my grandparents’ longer than I will, and—” “No,” John said. “Thank you, though.” She said, “I’m just so tired right now.” “We don’t expect that,” John said. “You’ve already done—” “It is cold out,” Ed said. “That truck stop have rooms?” John swung around and glared at Ed. Ed glared back at John and flared his eyelids, as if he and John were conspirators. John said, “Cassandra’s already done more than enough.” He smiled at Cassandra and said to her, “We’ll be fine.” Cassandra made a right turn, drove down that road a few houses, and pulled into the drive of a single-story red-brick house with a privacy fence. She took her keys, and when she opened the driver’s door, the cold air swooped in and bit John and Ed. Cassandra got Hawking and slammed her door. The door’s seal made a dull thud, and the air lightly concussed John and Ed. Cassandra took Hawking into the back yard through a gate in the fence. “What’s gotten into you?” Ed asked, leaning forward. “What do you mean?” “That girl was ready to let us crash in her spare room, or on her couch.” “No, she wasn’t. Didn’t you hear her?” “She was right in that area of being able to be swayed, and we could have swayed her, the two of us. Especially you. You two had a little spark thing going.” John said, “I’m not going to manipulate her.” Ed plopped back into his seat in exasperation and bumped his head on the back window again. His nose crinkled. John heard a train horn in the distance, two long blasts, then a short and a long. “Damn it,” Ed said, “you . . .” Cassandra walked back to the car. Ed smiled and waved to her, then scowled at John. “Just follow my lead,” he said, “like a good little sidekick.” John leaned back in his seat and against the passenger door and smiled at Cassandra. She got in the car, letting in another cold swirl of air, and slammed her door, sending another tiny concussion through them all.

78 “Boy,” she said, “gets cold in here fast.” She restarted the engine and turned the heat all the way up. Ed said, “Yeah. Stays cold out there.” Ed stared at John, added an overacted “Brrr,” crossed his arms, and rubbed his one mittened hand and his plastic-bagged, bandanna-wrapped other hand up and down his upper arms. Cassandra ignored Ed and backed out of the drive, pulled away from the house, and soon turned back onto the road to Highway 71 and town. John stared out the window. He pulled off his glove and put his bare palm to the glass, but quickly plucked it away, kneading his fingers hard into his palm and then making a tight fist to warm the flesh back up. Ed plopped back all the way back into the seat, bending his head forward at the last minute and not banging it against the window that time, but he rocked in the seat, three more times, four, five . . . They crossed a set of railroad tracks, topped a slight rise, and drove down toward what looked like an interstate. Cars and trucks drove regularly, though not thickly, up and down it, their lights shining on the gray concrete beneath the darker gray sky. The fields and clusters of trees between the top of the hill and the highway had less snow and were more brown than what they had been back along the turnpike. Patches of brown grass jutted up through the snow next to the road, some patches tall, hard, and sienna, others short and blonde. The winding patches of forest were sparse, looking manicured, and behind the Beetle, along the top of the rise it had just come down, the sky’s darkening gray cloudiness appeared in patches through the branch-laden horizon. Ed stopped rocking and said, “Sure gets cold out there at night, doesn’t it, John.” John said, “It’s winter, Ed. Of course it gets cold.” Ed said, “Think you’ll freeze tonight with that thin old blanket of yours, John?” John said, “I doubt it,” but he didn’t look Ed in the eyes. Cassandra drove past an open field and over a tiny bridge over a dried-up creek bed and up to the Copious Cone and a gas-station-slash-convenience-store that shared one big slab parking lot right next to the highway’s off ramp and overpass. Ed said, “I’ll bet you’ll freeze plumb to death tonight, John.” John said again, this time without turning, “I doubt it.”

79 John heard Ed murmur something, but he couldn’t tell what. Then he heard Ed’s head clunk against the back window. “Fuck,” Ed said. Then John heard a fainter bump, bump, bump, pause, bump, bump, bump, bump . . . In the gravel lot behind the Copious Cone and the convenience store were parked half a dozen semis and dropped trailers. Only three trucks—a tanker, a household moving van, and a Wal-Mart truck—showed signs of having been recently driven. The tops of the rest of the trailers, sleepers, and hoods remained mostly caked with snow, as if the parking lot were a storage lot instead. The snow draping the parking lot around the Copious Cone was unbroken. Cassandra pulled into the convenience store’s lot and stopped in one of the spaces in front of the front doors. She said, “Well, thank you guys.” She looked down at her steering wheel. Ed stopped his bumping and watched her expectantly. She fumbled with her key chain and finally managed to press the little button that popped the back hatch. John took a deep breath, opened the passenger door, and said, “Thank you, Cassandra. Be careful.” He felt stupid saying the last part, after what had happened with Cecil. If anything, she was more careful than they had been. He got out, and the cold bit his ears. He wanted to get inside the store fast. He pulled his and Ed’s stuff out of the trunk, straightened up the pile of clothes Ed had tumbled from the plastic bag, and slammed the hatch closed. Ed hadn’t gotten out. John walked around to the driver’s side, and Cassandra rolled her window down a few inches. “Come on, Ed,” John said. “You can’t stay in there forever.” Ed sighed and rolled his head around, then got out of the car and slammed the passenger door. John felt a tiny burst of warm air rush out through the crack in Cassandra’s window. She ignored the slammed door and mechanically pushed the passenger seat back into place, then looked John in the eyes.

80 “I’ll see you around, okay?” she said, as if she believed the whole world consisted of only three acres and two dozen people, as if she believed it were inevitable that their paths would cross again. John wanted to believe it, too, though, and the forty-year-old part of her eyes almost tricked him into believing in things like that. “Yeah, see you around,” John said and smiled back. Ed took his roll from John and slung it from his shoulder. He adjusted it so that it covered the blood on his parka’s belly, most of which had dried and turned brown, and pressed his plastic- shopping-bag-wrapped hand against the roll. He stormed through the store’s front door, the force of the shove of his other hand making the door’s pneumatic arm hyperextend its elbow with a loud bang. Cassandra put the Beetle in gear, backed up, and drove off rolling up her window. The Beetle pulled onto the on ramp to Highway 71 and accelerated up it, the taillights looking like red eyes with lids half closed. In less than two minutes, Cassandra was gone. The air felt colder than ever, and John rushed to get inside, though he eased the door open extra carefully, as if that might compensate for the way Ed had done things.

81 CHAPTER 16

Ed had seated himself at one of three fiberboard-and-Formica tables lining the windowed wall facing the back parking lot. The ergonomically curved benches were yellow-orange; the tables, red-orange. It looked like dried-up ketchup and mustard. John wondered why anyone would choose those particular shades individually, more so why anyone would combine them that way. It turned his stomach, and it certainly didn’t make him want to buy any of their food. Ed stared through the rear windows of the store, studying the line of semis and trailers. The smell of the store was of microwaved sandwiches—that stale-bread steam that bursts from yanked-open hot plastic wrappers—and of artificially lemon-scented mop water. John sat across from Ed and asked, “What now?” “It’s your fault there even is a ‘what now.’” Ed nodded toward the lot. The tanker’s driver worked his way down one side of the truck, beating on tires with a miniature wooden baseball bat. “Now we find another ride,” Ed said, “since we don’t have a warm bed or anything.” “You ought to clean up that hand,” John said. Ed shook his head. “No. Truck first. It’s late, and my hand is not as important as our ride. At least I know how to set priorities. You fucker.” John tried to ignore Ed and looked out the window. A set of steer horns were fastened to the top of the tanker’s grill. The cab, like Cecil’s, reeked of chrome and amber lights, rows and rows of lights—along the bumper, down the fronts of the big side mirrors, on tops of chrome poles running up from the outer edges of the fenders, and even on panels jutting out next to the hood. The only reason John could see for the panels was so that the driver could have more room for lights. The driver worked his way up the truck’s opposite side, still thumping tires. He wore a black felt cowboy hat with a band of conjoined silver-looking discs, glowing eerily in the parking lot lights. His shirt was turquoise and had a huge square flap that covered the top half of his chest. One top corner of the flap hung down in what seemed to John to be a perfect Hollywood cowboy way. The man didn’t wear a coat, and

82 the only reason John could think of for the lack of a coat was so that people could see his cowboy shirt. John was surprised that the man didn’t have furry chaps or ivory-handled pistols. “Not the tanker,” John said. “My,” Ed said, “you’re being awfully assertive lately: no to a warm bed, no to a ready ride . . .” The household moving van sat at the end of the row of trucks, apparently to make room for the trailer’s big side doors, one of which had been slung open and was hooked against the side of the trailer. A small man, or woman, John couldn’t tell which, sat leaning in front of the open doorway, against the edge of the exposed trailer floor. Dark wavy hair hung from beneath a knit watch cap to well past the shoulders of a thick gray coat. The trucker’s arms were crossed, one tennis-shoed foot draped over the other. Inside, the trailer was dark, but John could make out someone moving industriously within the shadows. The tractor was ultramarine blue instead of matching the logoed trailer, with what looked like a brown wreath on the grill. The tractor had a huge sleeper, so large that it had its own windowed side door. “The movers,” John said. Ed shook his head. “They’re not going anywhere soon. Their engine’s not even running.” Ed was right. The moving van’s stacks were still, but the tanker’s continually coughed out two long streams of almost invisible exhaust that shimmered the black and dark-gray horizon, like in a dream. The turquoise cowboy driver climbed inside his cab, and Ed got up and grabbed his bundle. “He’s leaving. Come on.” “Not that one,” John said, but Ed was already going through the store’s back doors. By the time John had followed Ed into the lot, the tanker had jumped to a start and pulled out of its spot. It crossed between them and the moving van, spewing black smoke up toward the lot’s lights as it growled out each gear shift, and turned onto the road toward the highway. Then it pulled onto the ramp, still accelerating, its mass of lights aglow, and merged with the sparse traffic. “Shit,” Ed said. “And he’s going south.” The person inside the moving van’s trailer stopped working and sat, legs dangling, on the exposed floorboards next to the gray-coated trucker. He had a head full of white-gray hair, and

83 John flinched, thinking for a second that it was Cecil. But the moving-van trucker was taller and far thinner than Cecil. The white-headed trucker turned a large clawed hammer over and over in his hands while talking with the gray-coated one. The gray-coated one nodded, glanced at Ed and John, and then continued nodding to the thin old man. John said, “Come on, Ed. Let’s get back inside. I’m cold and hungry, and I have a headache.” Ed turned to the Wal-Mart truck. Its driver had gotten out and was walking toward the store. Ed met him and walked alongside. John trailed a few steps behind. Ed asked the trucker, “You wouldn’t happen to be going south, would you?” The driver looked at Ed’s plastic-bag-wrapped hand. “Nope.” “Your headquarters is in Arkansas, right?” “That’s right,” the driver said and kept walking toward the store. Ed and John followed him inside. The driver paced over to the fuel cashier, ignoring Ed. Ed sat back in his original seat and said, “So much for that.” John sat across from him and stared back through the window at the moving van. “Alright,” Ed said, “I’m going to fix this hand up a bit, see if they have any spot remover for this coat.” He grimaced and looked at his hand. “Damn that Cecil.” “How bad was it hit?” “Right through the center. I think it broke the bone to my fuck-you finger.” “You don’t act like it.” “Yeah, well, what do you expect me to do, roll around on the floor bawling my head off? What good will that do?” “You should be in a hospital.” “I already told you I don’t like hospitals.” He grimaced again. “Though I would’ve liked a warm bed and a bath. I need some whisky.” “Can I do anything for you?” Ed said, “You’ve already done enough, thank you very much.” He exhaled heavily. “Just watch my stuff, okay?” Ed got up, left his blanket roll in his seat, and disappeared within the store aisles.

84 CHAPTER 17

After locking up Leopold’s in the wee hours of Thursday morning, still a half day before Leopold’s ass-chewing and a full day before John would quit for good, John drove exhausted back home to Billie’s and took a short nap. Then he and Billie had taken his pickup to McDonald’s for breakfast and from there to shop for a new TV. Billie seemed to exaggerate shivering the entire way to the store. She rubbed her hands vigorously up and down her upper arms and made a motorboat sound with her lips while blowing out breaths through clenched teeth. The day had proved clear and bright, and it didn’t seem that cold in the pickup to John, though the wind occasionally shoved the pickup half a foot to the side, even with the quarter cord of firewood piled above the axle, and whipped in through the cracked driver’s window and slung John’s hair around. Billie tightened her hug on herself. “We should have taken my Lexus,” she said, “and just have them deliver the damn thing.” He checked his side mirror and changed lanes. “It’s not much farther.” The greasy Egg McMuffin in his gut nauseated him. Billie didn’t cook, and John hadn’t had time to cook for himself in over a year. Since Leopold had made him manager, all he had cooked at home had been fast stuff, spaghetti with Ragu, that sort of thing. He used to make his own pasta, stuff his own tortellini. He had no time to spend with Billie, either, but he figured she of all people would sympathize with his schedule, and they could see each other whenever she came into Leopold’s, and he really did like her, though in the pickup in the cold with his nausea and with her exaggerating like that, it was hard for him to remember why. They pulled into the lot and parked near the entrance. Billie reached over and brushed his hair with her hand, stroking and stroking it to try to get it to lie down flat like she liked. He checked it in his rearview. Sleep and the wind had tangled his hair so that it had peaks and valleys like pie meringue, and he was glad at that moment that it didn’t want to obey Billie’s brushing. A middle-aged couple got out of a maroon seventies conversion van next to them.

85 “God,” Billie said. “Look at that man’s overalls, and that stubble. He even has a bandanna hanging out of his pocket.” She laughed and affected a newsreel tone. “Billy Joe Jim Bob gets electricity and moves into the twentieth century.” She changed back to her normal voice. “Too bad that century’s over.” John and Billie got out of his pickup and followed the couple into the store. John looked at his own reflection in the store’s plate-glass windows. He didn’t feel like he was much different from the man with the bandanna. John never felt like a Leopold’s customer, no matter how dressed up he got. In his suits and expensive ties, he always felt fake, like he were in costume instead of simply dressed well. Inside, Billie led John into an alcove made of three walls of TVs. A news brief came on one entire bank, a follow-up story about a woman who’d burned to death in a barn up in Laramie the day before. A split second after the driver’s license photo of the man they were looking for came onto the TVs, a salesman flipped the entire bank to Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. John hadn’t been able to see what the man looked like. Billie moved in close to a big screen. “I like this one.” “It’s too expensive,” John said. “Wouldn’t it look great, though? Look at the picture’s color. Imagine a playoff game on that.” “It’s a cartoon. Don’t judge color by that.” “A screen that big would be great for our Super Bowl party this year.” Our Super Bowl party, he thought. It won’t be our party. Even if I’m still at Leopold’s then, I’ll still be working six days a week, thirteen hours a day. I sleep on Sundays, he thought— all day. He said, “We’ll get the big screen if you want.” Billie stepped back. “Is it too big?” she asked. “Would it fit under the Mardi Gras print?” He couldn’t believe she was deciding which television to buy based on where she’d hung her dollar-ninety-five poster and its forty-dollar frame. “Move the print,” he said. “I like it there.”

86 John said, “We could just move it up a little. It doesn’t have to go on another wall.” She seemed to consider that. “Get the television you want.” He nudged her toward the bigger one. “We’ll adjust.” “I like the little one.” She pressed her lips tight and nodded twice. He knew she’d lied. She wasn’t the kind of person who took risks with a home, the kinds of risks that could make it fully theirs. The nail the Mardi Gras poster hung on had already been there and painted over when she’d bought the house. He knew that because she had confessed to never having painted the place, and the nail was thick with the same paint as the wall. The nail’s head held a drop that had frozen in place maybe a decade before, a drop that had never been allowed to drip and had never been wiped. All she had done was hang something on the nail. He had been considering moving the cable outlet, and putting in a kitchen bay window so they could grow their own herbs, but she was afraid to move one tiny nail. “Get the little one,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.” He looked through the wall of windows at the store’s entrance, at the sunlight on the snow. It had been an unseasonably late first snow, one for the record books. He’d been managing—what?—fourteen, fifteen months? He felt jittery and squirmed in his loafers. Even after he woke from his late-morning nap back at home, he couldn’t shake the jitters. He rubbed his neck and flexed his hands as he walked down the stairs to help Billie with what smelled like Steak-Ums. The movement helped some, and he was finally able to write off the jitters to working too much and sleeping in short bits in the daytime and none at all at night. Billie was digging through the kitchen drawer when he walked in. She asked, “Where’s my spatula? You know, the big metal one.” “Dishwasher?” She stopped rummaging in the drawer and stared at him “I got the mixing bowl out of there. Don’t you think if my spatula had been there, too, I’d have grabbed it? Jesus.” “I’ll look for your spatula,” he said. “You get the plates and cups down, or make the coffee.” She got two cups and went to the coffee machine. She pulled out the grinder. “My coffee grinder’s about had it.” She plugged it in. “I need a new one.” He slammed the cabinet door. “The coffee grinder.” “What?”

87 “It’s the coffee grinder.” “What are you talking about?” “Everything I’ve brought into this house is now ours, but all your stuff is still yours.” “Go program the TV. I’ll find the spatula.” “Fine. I’ll be in your living room, with your new TV.” He turned on the TV and tried to figure out the remote. The weather came on, showing snow skiers on manufactured snow under a bright sun. He plopped on the sofa and heard a crash in the kitchen. Billie said something in a forced whisper. He heard a second crash. It sounded like dishware smashing on the tile floor. He muted the TV and listened to Billie’s second forced whisper. “Loves me not,” she said. A third crash. “Loves me.” A car commercial came on. The disclaimer at the screen’s bottom read, “Professional driver on closed road.” The car’s disappearance off the right edge of the screen coincided exactly with the fourth crash. “Loves me not.” It was a sixteen-piece set. John knew that if he were a man who wanted to keep Billie, he would rush into the kitchen, deny what would end up her sixteenth statement, maybe even help her smash the dishware in some passionate scene right out of the movies. He also knew that his refusal to do any of that would be the same as if he’d walked coolly into the kitchen and said, “Yes, you’re right. I guess it’s over, then.” He knew he wasn’t good enough an actor to pull off making up, so he set her remote on her couch, walked up her stairs to her bedroom, and picked out a tie for the night, something in icy blue.

88 CHAPTER 18

John had scooted to the aisle edge of the red-and-yellow booth because the air right next to the window felt twenty degrees colder than that at the other end of the table. Ed plopped back on the bench on his side of the booth and sipped from a small paper cup he’d half filled from a fifth of Old Crow. The entire belly of his parka was wet from an apparent scrubbing, though his right hand was still wrapped in Cassandra’s clear plastic shopping bag and the bloodstained bandanna. The last of the twilight had died, and the windows to the lot had become mirrors, for all practical purposes. With his good hand, Ed reached up and seized his top four front teeth and pulled them out. The teeth stayed together, attached by a silvery wire framework to a red plastic hard palate. He ran his tongue across his bare upper gum and around behind his upper lip and dropped the prosthesis into his cup of Old Crow. He swirled the cup around, took a sip, and swished the sip behind bulging, tightly closed lips, as if the whiskey were mouthwash. He swallowed audibly and exhaled an “Ah” like air brakes releasing. He saw John staring and asked, “What?” Then Ed made an airy little laugh and grinned, exposing his top gum and his real teeth far left and right of the gap. He reared his head back and opened his mouth wide. The pink flesh in the roof of Ed’s mouth was pulled together into a pinched sinkhole right in the center of what used to be his hard palate. Ed closed his mouth, smacking his lips, reached down into his paper cup, and pulled his prosthesis out, holding it so that it could drip its excess whiskey back into the cup. “What?” He asked John again. “Neber theen thomeone with no pront teeth bepore?” He snapped the prosthesis back into his mouth, licked the whiskey off, and smiled big again, showing off the straight, yellow front teeth. “Pretty, aren’t they?” he asked. He lifted the front of his ball cap and bared his mangled forehead. “You’ve seen this, right?” He snugged the cap back on and waved his hand around in front of his face. “My sinuses are all messed up, too.” He raised his plastic-bagged hand. “This

89 shit Cecil did to me is nothing.” John visualized Ed’s mouth without the teeth again, Ed’s bent nose, his churned-up skull, his ever-lengthening whiskers, and his too-long forefingers, and John thought of just how ugly Ed was. He felt embarrassed to be in public with Ed, but he also felt sorry for him, and he really wanted to help Ed, to make those pancakes for him, if he could, though he didn’t see how something so insignificant could help someone as messed up as that. John asked, “What happened?” Ed said, “It’s a long story.” “We have time.” Ed partially unzipped his parka and shook out the still-damp, unzipped halves of his coat front like someone shaking out a tent before rolling it up for the season. John saw, down at Ed’s waist inside the parka, what looked like a pistol butt. “What’s that?” John asked nodding toward it. “What?” Ed zipped his parka back up. “Was that a pistol?” “Cecil’s.” Ed turned and looked out the window, or at his own reflection in it. “You took Cecil’s pistol?” “Sure.” Ed looked back at John. “Oh, you didn’t know that. That’s why you were cowering in that ditch pissing all over yourself. You yellow bastard. Cecil didn’t have anything he could hurt you with then.” One of the truck stop’s back doors opened, and a burst of icy air rushed in, startling John. The two moving-van truckers walked in, the gray-haired trucker in front, masking John’s view of the younger one. The door swung shut behind, and the two walked toward John and Ed’s part of the truck stop. “Later,” Ed said. “We have work to do.” The older trucker’s bright white-gray hair jutted up thickly from his scalp and fell in a crashing wave away from the beginnings of a part that ran crookedly back from above one eye but disappeared suddenly into a twist of locks. His face, wrinkled and dark, seemed cut from the leather of a worn bomber jacket. His walk seemed not to match his face. He was thin but muscled, youthful somehow, and leaned forward when he walked, his arms swinging in great sweeps beneath broad, rolling shoulders, like John imagined the figures in the middle of evolution

90 drawings to move, the ones halfway between ape and man, the ones that looked as if they hid the strength of five men in arms no larger than a baseball player’s. He went past John, and John thought the way this older trucker seemed frail at a distance was deceiving as hell. The younger trucker’s black hair flowed in loose curls for two and a half feet below a wool watch cap. The black cap seemed gray next to the hair. The hair shone like the surface of cooking fudge and undulated with each of the trucker’s steps, as if breathing. This trucker’s skin was as smooth as the first one’s was creased, and lighter, caramel-colored, except for a tiny white scar that started as a spot just beneath the right eye and then ran in a thin line down about an inch. It looked like an upside-down teardrop. The eyes spellbound John. They were deep brown—chestnut—and innocent, inviting, receptive, as if everything they saw were new and wonderful. Large and graced by long lashes, the eyes seemed feminine. The face’s contours, too, were effeminate. The younger trucker walked with the air and balance of a gymnast, as if barely brushing soles to floor. As the younger trucker went by, John caught himself studying the trucker’s hips and realized he still couldn’t tell whether the person was a man or a woman. The two truckers dug into the stand-up coolers in the bright florescent light, looking through clear-cellophaned hoagies and plastic half boxes of sliced-white-bread sandwiches, and John studied the younger trucker’s thick coat. He felt ashamed looking for breasts, like when commenting on the cuteness of a stranger’s newborn and feeling as if he should be able to tell its sex from first glance, fearing he might insult the parent if he guessed wrong. Blue or pink, John thought. If it were always that simple. The younger trucker caught John staring, and John dropped his gaze to the table. The trucker’s glance had not turned to one of malice or shame. It had simply taken John in. John found himself both ashamed and elated, and he wished he knew if this was a woman that had made his chest flutter. Each of the truckers chose a sandwich, and they headed toward the cashier. John got up, almost ran to the sandwiches, and picked out a ninety-nine-cent hoagie. It showed edges of sliced beef with a faint greenish sheen, like the green in a pool of oil or the backs of the metallic-looking flies. He rushed to the cashier and stopped behind the two truckers. The older one was taller than John, the back of his neck even more creased and darker than any part of

91 his face. The younger one was almost John’s height, and John thought he smelled a fruitiness from the deep-black wavy hair. It had recently been shampooed. Ed stopped next to John with his roll slung from one shoulder and John’s gym bag slung from the other. He winked at John. “I don’t know,” he said louder than John needed. “I don’t think we’ll ever reach your poor sister now, with Cecil dumping us in the middle of nowhere like that. I hope someone can give us a ride. This doesn’t look like too busy of a place. Even if we could just get to Joplin . . .” John cringed at Ed’s poor acting and the strong smell of whiskey in his breath, but the older trucker turned and looked them over, then turned forward again. The two truckers finished paying and turned toward the door, the younger one’s eyes meeting John’s again. Ed said, “If we can just get to Joplin, there’ll be rides on south or east from there. It’s going to be a long, cold walk, though, especially with it already dark and all.” John looked down. “Don’t, Ed,” he said in a faint breath. “Please.” John put the sandwich on the cashier’s counter top, and he heard a voice like a viola say, “What happened to your hand?” The cashier’s mouth hadn’t opened. John turned. The truckers stood facing Ed. Ed held up his plastic-bag-and-bandanna- wrapped hand. John said, “He saved a girl’s life.” He looked Ed in the eyes. “And probably mine, and he got shot in the process.” The younger trucker touched Ed’s wrist and tenderly turned it. John felt a pang of jealously. The younger trucker’s lips moved, and the viola hummed again, “So you can’t use this hand at all now?” Ed said, “I’ve had worse.” The older trucker squinted. “Did y’all call the police?” His voice was deep and gravelly but lilted like Scarlet O’Hara’s. Ed shrugged. “They never showed up.” “I’m sorry,” John said. “I’m John, and this is—” “Ed MacGuffin,” Ed said. “Excuse me?” the older trucker said. “Did you say Egg McMuffin?”

92 “One oh seven,” the cashier said. “What?” John asked her. “The sandwich. One dollar and seven pennies, please.” Ed swiped the sandwich off the counter and said to the cashier, “Never mind. We’re putting this back.” Ed handed John his gym bag and took the sandwich back to the stand-up cooler. The younger trucker said, “I’m Sam, and this is Gavin.” Gavin shook John’s hand with a palm that felt like oak tree bark. Then Sam shook John’s hand and said something, but John couldn’t hear it from the tingling that rushed from Sam’s cool, slightly callused hand all the way up John’s arm and through his entire body and buzzed and thrummed in his ears. “What?” John asked. Ed was back. Sam said, “I asked if you two were going as far as Baton Rouge.” Ed said, “We’re going all the way to the sea.” “Which sea?” Sam asked. Ed shrugged and grinned. John said, “We’re going past Baton Rouge. Yes.” Sam asked John, “And you don’t have anything wrong with you?” John’s entire body cringed. It felt like every muscle had contracted and that he had shrunk and leaped back an entire yard, but no one seemed to notice that he had reacted at all. John’s neck, back, and butt muscles were still tensed up, and anxious tingles ran all up and down his spine. He asked, “What do you mean?” “Can you carry furniture?” Sam asked. “Yes. Oh, yes. No problem.” “And you’re willing to work for your ride?” “Yes.” Sam nodded toward Ed. “That one doesn’t look very able.” Then Sam looked back at John. “You’re willing to work hard enough for both of you?” “Sure. Yes.”

93 Sam said, “Come on,” and turned and walked outside, Gavin, John, and Ed following like ducklings. Once outside, Gavin gained Sam’s side, and then John and Ed did, so that the foursome walked side by side like four horsemen riding toward a showdown in a Western movie. The cold was fierce, far colder than the booth’s window glass had hinted. Ed put his mitten on, pulled his parka’s hood up, zipped the parka up tight, and tucked his injured hand beneath the opposite arm, and John put on his gloves and tried to get his coat collar to hug his neck. The light of the truck stop, the Copious Cone, and the parking lot shined down on the concrete, gravel, and trucks and straight up to the now low but still thick ceiling of clouds, so that the lot was a brilliant yellow white glow, the sky was gray black directly above, and everything beyond the truck stop’s lot was iron-skillet black, except for the occasional car or truck lights slipping up or down the highway. The concrete squished under Gavin’s and Ed’s boots and clunked under John’s loafers. Sam’s tennis shoes seemed to make no sound. Then, close to the moving van, they stepped from concrete onto the gravel part of the lot, and all four pairs of footsteps ground and crunched the gravel in the icy air like inside-your-head sounds of chewing granola. The cars on the highway swooshed coarsely, and semis harmonized deep humming with high-pitched whines, all getting louder and higher as each car or semi neared and waning as it slipped away, each accompanied at the peak of its passing with the klick-klock, klick-klock of tires rushing over seams in the overpass. Ed nodded toward the ultramarine blue tractor and said, “That’s the problem with real wreaths. They die and turn brown on you.” The woven ring of thin branches on the truck had no ribbon, no bow, no little bells or lights or fake snow. It was nothing but brown. Sam said, “That’s not a wreath. That’s a crown of thorns.” “Wrong holiday,” Ed said. The thorns were obvious to John then. They were fierce-looking, black-tipped things and jutted out in all directions from the plaited twists of narrow branches. As they passed the nose of the truck and its crown and continued toward the trailer’s big side doors, Sam said, “Keeps the focus of the season on target though. We need harsh reminders

94 these days.” Gavin opened one of the long, shallow compartments at the belly of the moving van, pulled out a beat-up wooden pallet, and, with the long, shiny claws of his hammer, tore it into a pile of boards. He stacked the wood in the center of a wide swath of grassless, hard-packed dirt just past the edge of the parking lot, pulled out a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches, and started a fire on his second try. Ed said, “We appreciate you taking us as far as Baton Rouge.” “Yes,” John said. “Thank you.” Sam swung open one of the trailer’s side doors and climbed into the darkness inside. “Don’t thank us. You’re going to work for your ride.” Sam dragged a pair of folded wooden chairs back to the open door, set their mass of legs on the ground and leaned the chairs against the side of the trailer, climbed out of the trailer, grabbed the chairs again, and set them up facing the fire. Gavin dragged three more pallets out of the bin beneath the open door and stacked them near the fire as a makeshift bench, next to the two chairs. Sam sat in the farthest chair and gestured toward the pallets. “Have a seat, Ed, John.” John sat on the pallets, and Ed stepped in front of the empty chair. “No,” Gavin told him. “That’s mine. You sit on the pallets with your friend there.” Ed shrugged and moved back to the pallets and sat down. Gavin tore up a second pallet, piled that wood near the growing fire, and sat with the other three. The light from the fire made the darkness past the edge of the lot grow palpable and menacing, like a massive cresting wave of thick tar just barely suspended next to and above them, about to smash in and down and smother them. But the fire was warm close in and cast a strong light on the foursome and the side of the truck. At first, the truck looked empty, but the firelight revealed a braced wall of plywood blocking off the rest of the van just forward of the open door and a bag of some sort and what looked like camping gear and a blanket in the corner where the plywood bulkhead met the trailer’s side walls. Ed’s plastic-bagged hand sparkled in yellows, oranges, and reds in the firelight, and Gavin’s hair glowed yellow-white. Sam said, “You never said which sea y’all are going to. Are you going as far as Jacksonville?” “No,” John said. “A small town on the other side of Apalachicola. I think Ed here’s going

95 to—Where again?” he asked Ed. “Miami?” Sam asked, “You two aren’t together?” “No,” John said. “We’re just on the same path for a while.” Sam said, “We can drop you near Apalachicola, then, after Baton Rouge.” “That would be a huge help. Thank you.” Sam said, “There’s a wonderful rest area a little this side of Tallahassee, on the hills above the Apalachicola River. You can’t see the river from there, but you can sense it. It’d be a good spot to stop, cook a good meal, rest up. Before moving on.” Sam shrugged. “If you want. There are phones there.” Ed asked, “What about me?” Sam said, “I meant you both, not just him.” “But I’m going farther than him.” “Not in this truck, you don’t.” Sam gestured toward John. “Since he’s working to pay your way.” Ed’s jaw muscles clenched into knots, and then he said, “We’ll get along just fine on our own after Baton Rouge, thank you. We’ll get out there.” Sam’s brows rose. “You don’t want a ride to Apalachicola?” John said, “Yes. I’d like that.” He pulled off his gloves, tucked them inside one of his coat pockets, and held his hands out in the warmth of the fire. “No,” Ed said, and he squinted at John. “Baton Rouge is fine. We’ll finally be warm there. We’ll take our time to Apalachicola after that.” “John?” Sam asked. Ed’s eyes focused on John and glinted with anger and firelight, but they somehow also seemed fearful, like Ed were a little boy about to be abandoned by one divorced parent at the home of the other. John turned to Sam and said, “We’ll see after Baton Rouge.” Sam and Ed stared at each other over the flames, the wind sucking the flames and the excessive part of the heat out between them through the gap in the foursome’s circle around the fire. The wood in the fire was dry and clean and smoked little, but it burned quickly. Gavin got up and added to it almost constantly, and during Gavin’s absences from the immediate half circle,

96 John watched Sam across the empty chair. The crackling of the fire masked most of the sounds of the few vehicles on the highway, but every once in a while, a car would come up or go down the road Cassandra had driven John and Ed down, and each time it was a car leaving the highway, John would wonder if it was Cassandra returning home. “Why you even need us to unload for you?” Ed asked suddenly. “We can get along without you, and you can get along without us.” Sam said, “Doctor’s orders. Gavin had a little scare with his heart, and he’s not supposed to unload or load until his own doctor in Orlando gives him a clean bill of health.” John asked, “Orlando’s home to you?” Sam said, “As much as any place can be,” and stared at the fire. Sam’s face crinkled and seemed to age five years in an instant. Then Sam smiled again, and the lines were gone. “The road’s my home. Every place and no place.” Gavin shoved one end of another board into the fire and sat down still holding the opposite end. Sam watched the end of the board catch and asked, “Are you running to or running from?” No one answered, and Gavin leaned back in his chair, feeding the board into the fire another two inches. “Who?” John asked. Sam said, “Both of you.” John said, “I’m not sure what you mean, Sam.” It thrilled him to use Sam’s name, but he felt like a thief and his voice broke on it. Sam said, “Everyone out here’s either running toward something or running away from something. Which are you?” John thought about Billie, Leopold, and Pamela. “I guess both,” he said. Sam looked back at the fire. “What are you running from?” Gavin set his end of the board on the ground, pushed it with the toe of what looked like one of Frankenstein’s monster’s boots, and fed it another inch into the fire. John thought, then said, “Myself.”

97 “What are you running to?” “Myself.” Gavin snickered. “So you’re running in circles.” “Suppose you could say that. For the last year, anyway.” Sam asked, “How about you, Ed?” Ed said, “No comment.” “Oh, come on. Think about it.” “I already know the answer. I’m just not telling you.” Gavin’s brows rose. “That’s polite.” “As polite as asking,” Ed said. “What’s your name?” As with Cassandra, Ed’s tone had shifted more to one of interrogation than curiosity. “I’m Gavin,” Gavin said impatiently. “Look, we’re all going to have to travel together a while. The least you can do is be polite.” Gavin said “polite” in three syllables, splitting the “i” in two and making the second half sound like an “e.” He seemed to add a syllable to the last word of everything he said. Ed shrugged, his eyelids half lowered in a damned-if-I-care look. John said quickly, “Ed’s running to. He’s looking for the perfect blueberry pancake.” Sam’s brows crinkled. Ed shook his head. He licked his lips and looked into the blackness out past the fire, the blackness that had swallowed up Cassandra’s house and Hawking and everywhere John and Ed had just been. “I don’t understand,” Sam said. Ed asked, “What’s Sam short for?” Sam’s lips pressed tight. “It’s not short for anything.” Gavin’s eyes darted back and forth between Sam and Ed. The fire popped and cracked and moved farther up the board toward Gavin’s foot. Sam said. “It’s just Sam. What’s Ed short for?” “Edwin.” John blinked. He hadn’t known that. Ed reached inside his parka, and John sucked in a audible breath, but Ed pulled out only his fifth of Old Crow and took a swig.

98 “So,” Ed said and wiped his mouth with the parka sleeve above his injured hand, “your parents named you Sam? Not Samantha or Samuel?” He put the fifth away. “My mother did.” “And your father didn’t object, huh?” “My father didn’t have any say in it.” Ed tapped the mittened fingers of his good hand on his thigh. The mitten made his fingers seem like Siamese quadruplets. He asked, “is it Mister Sam or Miss Sam?” Gavin said to Ed, “You’re about to lose your ride, Edwin. Is that what you want?” Again, Gavin diphthongized his last vowel: “wa-uhnt.” Though this one was less pronounced, it was fast and harsh. The fire had crept to within inches of Gavin’s foot. Ed said, “You need us to unload.” Gavin jabbed his thumb toward John and said, “We need him.” Ed raised his palms, the plastic bag shining gold in the firelight. “It’s not a big deal.” Gavin said, “If it’s not a big deal, then don’t worry about it.” “I’m not worried about anything.” Gavin leaned toward John. “Your friend there is going to get hurt worse than he is, or hurt somebody else, or both.” John said, “He’s alright. He was a soldier.” “Timothy McVeigh was a soldier.” Gavin kicked the piece of wood hard, shoving it entirely into the fire and sending an explosion of hot, glowing embers into the night sky, making Ed and Sam have to lean back to avoid them. “Well.” Ed stood up, smacking his lips. “Since you’re going to talk about me as if I’m not here, I might as well bug out for a while. You aren’t leaving here tonight, right?” Sam’s head shook “no.” “Alright,” Ed said. “Then keep dinner warm, will you, Hon?” John wasn’t sure who Ed had called Hon, or where Ed might go, other than to the truck stop to use the restroom, so he didn’t say anything, and Ed did walk toward the truck stop, but instead of going inside, Ed skirted the building and disappeared around its far edge.

99 Sam asked, “Where’d you two meet?” “Back in Colorado, or Kansas. Hard to tell.” “You know him well?” John said, “Not really, I guess.” Gavin asked, “What’s this about a blueberry pancake?” “It’s what Ed wants, and I’m supposed to make it for him.” “A blueberry pancake?” “A perfect blueberry pancake.” Gavin spit into the fire. “Nothing’s perfect.” The fire popped and hurled sparks into the night air again. An ember jumped from the fire and landed next to Gavin’s boot, and he stomped on it and ground it into the earth.

100 CHAPTER 19

Kevin anchored for the night within the shelter of St. Joseph Point. He had worked traps all afternoon and then made his way back to the shallows after dark in a light mist. In the red and green glow of his bow, Kevin fastened his anchor rode around the heavy cleat in the middle of the foredeck. Then he crouched at the very point of the bow and fastened the thick length of split rubber hose so that the rode ran smoothly through it in the roller and wouldn’t slip out or chafe. He stood and braced himself with one hand on the pulpit, though the boat’s motion was slight. The waning quarter moon wouldn’t rise until just before first light. Few stars showed themselves overhead, and the humid haziness blocked the light from the stars closer to the horizon, just above the black shadow of the peninsula that ran left and right in front of him. Between the stars above and the glistening water below, the land seemed a rift in the night. Behind him and to the left and right, the mainland glowed with light. The land seemed a thick string of Christmas lights, shimmering above their distorted twins on the bay’s surface, the St. Joseph power station lit up like a wad of lights left in a huge tangle and just plugged in that way. The station had so many lights that it looked as if it were showing off just how much power it was capable of. Buoys flashed red and green in the shoreline’s foreground. The lights of other boats coming and going in the channel flowed red, green, and white across the backdrop. Kevin scooted around his side deck sliding one hand along the lifeline and climbed down into the cockpit. He reached around into the cabin, flipped off the breaker to the side and stern lights, and flipped the one on for his anchor light. On top of its pole above his deck, the anchor light shined all around and indirectly down onto the closed lid of his massive live well in the cockpit. It had been a good haul so far. The well was thick with lobster, big ones. They would fetch a nice price. He could trade a few for fresh shrimp or fish for Pamela’s gumbo and keep a couple big ones for him and her. Dipped into melted butter, the tender white flesh would collapse

101 into a soft meaty sweetness between tongue and palate with only the tiniest of force. Kevin and Pamela had had shrimp Creole on their wedding day, feeding each other spoonful after spoonful of rice and shrimp smothered in hot, bell peppery tomato sauce and bites of soft, yeasty rolls torn off and slathered with butter. They couldn’t afford lobster then, or for years after, but now that they had lobster, plucked it almost weekly from the Gulf themselves, they had little time to feed each other, and Kevin missed the shrimp, the Creole, the unbound energy that seemed to come with beginnings. He wished he were back home with Pamela, but he knew that once there, he would only wish he were back out here again. He pressed his lips together tight and stared at the pale white lid of the well. He was damp from the day’s work, and the evening’s cool humidity shined on the well’s lid and seeped into his clothes. It sent a chill through him, and he wanted to get below and light the stove, to feel the warmth emanating from the burner and watch the blue-and-yellow flames dance to the hiss of the gas, to make a hot meal to warm his gut. “I’ve worked hard,” he said. “I deserve one now.” He reached around into the cabin and found his flashlight, opened the top of the well, and shined the light down into the water inside and the mass of spiny lobster crawling over one another, shrinking from the light, each futilely trying to get back to its hole somewhere beneath the vast black Gulf.

102 CHAPTER 20

To the west, beyond the ridge which hid Cassandra’s house, the bottom of the clouds suddenly lit up orange. The most intense part of the glow was focused on only one spot about the size of a football field. At first John thought that a stadium’s lights had been turned on and that they would soon warm up enough to shift from orange to bright white, but the field of light on the clouds fluctuated, pulsing and dancing, the clouds rolling low and heavy through the light. Then the glow grew more steady but didn’t turn bright white. Instead, tips of flames licked up above the treetops. “That’s some fire,” Gavin said. He stood and craned his neck, as if he could peer across the mile or so of still-black-as- night field and forest and zoom in over the rise and see what was burning. The tips of the tongues of fire began to churn out a thick, black, billowing column of smoke. The smoke glowed from within down low, where the flames streamed into the guts of the smoke, but that internal glow died higher up, where the column was lit only from the outside. Sam said, “Probably some poor soul who went to sleep with a space heater on.” John kept expecting the smoke and clouds to meet, but the smoke climbed and climbed and still did not touch the lowest rolls of clouds. Gavin said, “Now he’s out in the cold for good.” Sam said, “Let’s hope.” John asked Sam, “Why would you hope anyone would be out in the cold for good?” Sam turned toward John, eyebrows scrunched. “Because the alternative is that they’re dead. Don’t you think cold’s better than dead?” The top of the column of smoke veered south, dissipating as it went. It flowed the same direction as the clouds, and the clouds and the highest part of the smoke were distorted, fuzzy from the distance. The place where the two seemed they might merge was beyond the patch of light, and John couldn’t tell whether they ever became one or not. Their own fire had dwindled, and John felt the night’s cold touch him again. Gavin seemed

103 to notice at the same moment and picked up three more pieces of his busted-up pallets and laid them across the burning blackened and shrunken boards already in the fire. John imagined the stack of blackened boards as the remnants of someone’s house and thought of the belongings that would have burned within—the pictures, diplomas, and plastic trophies, the comic books and baseball mitt in a box in a closet, even birth certificates—who knows what. His own bag of belongings seemed abundant compared to that. At least, he thought, I had time to search, to pick and choose. Sam turned toward the Highway 71 overpass as if beckoned, and then John heard the faint siren. That part of the night, already lit by occasional headlights, danced with red flickers beyond the overpass, and then a fire truck with red and white flashing lights and siren blaring shot out from beneath the overpass and accelerated across the blackness of the field on Cassandra’s road, the flashing lights intermittently disappearing behind fingers of forest that reached all the way to the road. The fire truck climbed that last rise that hid what was actually burning, and then the fire truck’s flashing lights were gone. A minute later, the siren cut off, and John guessed the truck had reached the fire. Anther siren wailed from beyond Highway 71, stuttering in quick successions, and an ambulance rushed out from beneath the overpass. The ambulance, with red and blue flickering lights and alternatingly pulsating headlights, shot off, too, down the road to the fire. Immediately afterward, a red sedan with siren and red flashing lights followed. Gavin sat in his chair at the fire again. “Nothing we can do,” he said. Sam sat in the chair on the far side of Gavin, and John sat back in his spot on the stack of pallets. Their own fire had grown again, and the heat felt good. Sam said, “We’ll have to put this out soon. Once they’re done with whatever’s burning over that rise, they might pay us a visit.” Gavin grunted in a way that seemed realization as well as agreement. They sat in silence for about fifteen minutes, with Gavin tending his fire and John alternating between watching Sam and watching the distant fire’s column of smoke. The smoke shifted from black to light gray and then to almost white from what he surmised was steam from the fire truck’s streams of water. Then Ed stepped from the darkness and the forest beneath the glow in the sky, dangling

104 something from his left hand. “Hey,” Ed said. Sam whipped around toward the darkness and stared at Ed. John thought Sam seemed disappointed at Ed’s return. Ed, grinning big, sat on his part of the stack of pallets next to John. The thing he held was a carcass. His other hand was back inside its mitten instead of Cassandra’s plastic bag, though the mitten seemed extra puffy. “I caught us a rabbit,” Ed said. He held the skinned, gutted, beheaded thing high by the hind legs, the body and front legs swaying beneath. John thought something looked odd about the carcass. The front and rear legs looked the same length. The feet were gone, though, and John figured maybe Ed had cut more off the rear legs than the front. “How’d you catch a rabbit?” Gavin asked. “I chased it down, and I caught it.” “With one hand?” “Yeah,” Ed said. “I’m that good.” The carcass’s muscles looked gray nearer the tendons, even in the yellow firelight. Ed held it out to John. “You’re the cook,” he said. “Make something with this. I’m starved.” He gave it a little thrust. “Take it.” Something seemed wrong with the length of the body to John. Sam shrugged. Gavin rolled his lips inside his mouth and nodded slightly. John pocketed his gloves and took the thing. There wasn’t much meat, and it was already chilled from the night. The skin seemed to have come off easily, and the cuts where the head, feet, and tail had been were straight and smooth, as if done with a cleaver. The chest cavity was clean. It would be easy to prepare for a meal. It looked firm and healthy. Ed plopped down in his spot on the pallets, pulled out his fifth, and took a long drink. He slid the bottle back into his inside parka pocket without so much as glancing at anyone else. John looked at the carcass’s back end again. He didn’t recall rabbits’ tails needing to be cut off, but he had been a teenager the last time he had prepared a rabbit, and he couldn’t be sure.

105 He said to Ed, “I would like to have seen the guts, especially the heart and liver.” “You eat those things?” Ed asked. “To look for parasites and signs of disease. You can’t be sure with wild animals.” Ed said, “I know what I’m doing with game. This thing’s healthy. Just cook it.” John said, “We’ll need to spread some of these hot coals out.” He looked at Sam. “You have any butter? And a way to wash my hands, or do I need to go back into the truck stop?” Sam said, “Come on,” and led John to the passenger door of the truck’s cab. Sam pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked the door, then swung it open and climbed inside. The opened door had made the dome light turn on and lit up a cream interior. The bucket seats were light-brown suede, and each had a complex contraption beneath that surrounded a huge, thick-black-rubber air bag. Sam disappeared into the sleeper and turned on a light inside. John wondered why Sam hadn’t simply gone in through the sleeper’s own door. John wanted to see the tiny space where Sam lived and slept. A living space that small would have to be rife with Sam’s essence. John wondered if he somehow exuded that desire so much that Sam had sensed it and had gone in through the other door out of fear. John grabbed the icy railing next to the doorway with his free hand, and he climbed the first two steps to follow Sam. A set of shelves were molded into the sleeper’s body immediately behind the driver’s seat, just inside the sleeper. One shelf held a dozen or so books, and John tried to read their spines as he climbed the next step. He could tell one was a bible, and he slid his one clean hand up the railing and took the last step. His next step would be inside the cab. The railing was so cold on his hand that he’d have to let go soon. The sleeper light went out and Sam reappeared, a gallon jug of clear water in one hand, a rose-colored plastic bar-soap case in the other. John froze, except for his heavy breathing. Sam asked, “You need the butter now?” “No,” John said. “Later.” Sam said, “You don’t have to come in here to wash up,” and, looking at the carcass, “You didn’t put that thing in here, did you?” “No,” John said, shaking his head. “Get on down, then” Sam said, “carefully.” John climbed down, and Sam followed, locking and closing the door. The cab’s dome

106 light went out, and the night around John seemed darker than before. It took half a minute next to the truck to readjust to the night, bright over where Gavin and Ed still sat, and still bright far off where the fire truck and ambulance had gone, but dark next the truck. With his clean hand, John dug for his mother’s mixing bowl in his gym bag next to the truck, struggling one-handed with the bag’s zipper and then trying to avoid the apron full of knives. Finally successful, he carried the bowl and the carcass back to the stack of pallets next to the fire and set the bowl on the spot where he’d been sitting. “Let’s rinse this rabbit off,” he said to Sam. John took the carcass toward the forest where Ed had emerged, but stopped just at the edge of the reach of the firelight. Sam brought the water over and trickled the water over John’s hands and the carcass. John rubbed the carcass’s flesh. The water felt warm compared to the night air, but any time John’s hands left the tiny stream for more than a couple seconds, his hands turned icy cold, and he shoved them back beneath it. He felt small patches of grit give way from the carcass’s flesh, where Ed must have had it on the ground while he cleaned it. It was grit John hadn’t seen, but it was obvious by feel. John caught the stream of water inside the chest cavity, too, and rubbed it out well, the water running out through the neck hole. John turned the carcass the other way, holding it by its front legs instead, and rubbed it down outside and in again. Satisfied, John carried it back to the fire and laid it in his bowl. The carcass seemed large compared to the bowl, and John had to curl the stiffening body to make it fit. Ed asked, “You’re going to cook it in a bowl? Seems like a spit or that frying pan would work better.” “I’m not done yet,” John said. He asked Sam, “Could I wash my hands now?” Sam and John went to the firelight’s edge again, and Sam held the water jug while John scrubbed his hands with the soap beneath the trickling stream. John’s skin flushed, and he felt warm, despite the cold. He wished he’d led Sam even farther into the darkness, less in Gavin’s and Ed’s sights. John worried about being silhouetted to Gavin and Ed by the distant fire-lit sky, though he didn’t think he would have done anything more than clean the carcass and wash his hands, but scrubbing his hands beneath the pour of Sam’s water seemed intensely intimate. He suddenly wanted to do that in complete privacy.

107 Sam asked, “Done yet?” Sam’s voice was almost silent, the viola again. John knew that Gavin and Ed couldn’t hear them, and that made John’s skin flush even more. He tingled all over and tried to catch his breath. “Let me rinse,” John said in a near whisper. “You’re going to use the whole jug.” Then let me use the whole jug, John thought. Give me a million jugs. John watched the water level drop in the jug, and he glanced up at Sam’s face. Sam’s eyes sparkled from the firelight, and John saw Sam’s brows and lids rise as Sam glanced from the stream of water into John’s face. The tiny scar glowed. John knew it was ludicrous to keep rinsing. He didn’t want to seem too much a fool. “Okay,” John said. “That’s enough.” Sam slung the long dark hair back, raised the jug, and took a swig of what water remained. “Ah,” Sam breathed in satisfaction. Then Sam held the jug out to John. “Might as well finish what’s left.” John was more greedy for where Sam’s lips had touched than he was thirsty, and he cared less about Sam’s sex than ever. John took the jug and, with quivering lips, put it to his mouth and drank until the jug was empty. Sam took the jug back, crushed it between arm and belly, and snapped the cap back on. John wished the jug hadn’t emptied so quickly now. He wanted to trade swigs back and forth with Sam for hours. “I’ll need more,” John said, “after I prep the rabbit.” Sam said, “I have more.” Sam led John back into the firelight, and John caught himself rolling his lips inside his mouth. “What?” Ed asked John when he saw the grin. John shook his head. “I’m just . . . hungry. Starved.” “Well then, get to cooking, man.” John brought his filet knife from his bag. One by one, he bent the carcass’s legs back, cut into the surrounding flesh, and popped the joints free of the body. Then he cut the meat from the leg bones and laid each piece of flesh into the bottom of the bowl and the bared leg bones on top

108 of that. He cut the flesh from the chest, back, and hips of the body, always keeping the bones on top, and then finally held the bony torso and leg bones out to Ed. “Get rid of these, will you Ed?” Ed pulled the mitten from his good hand, took the pile from John, grasping the legs next to the torso with his one hand, and then, taking two steps like a javelin thrower, hurled the bones out into the night toward the glow of the fire on the horizon. John said, “I could have done that. I meant for you to take it up to the trash at the truck stop or something.” “Hey, it’s gone.” Ed wiped his hand on his pants leg and put his mitten back on. “Some coyote or stray dog will enjoy that.” John cubed the meat in the bowl and then wiped the sides of the knife on the bowl’s lip. “I’m ready to wash my hands again,” he said to Sam, “and this knife.” Sam got a fresh jug of water from the truck, led John to the same spot, and trickled the water over John’s hands again. Sam asked as John scrubbed, “Why’d you wash your hands the first time, if you were just going to touch the rabbit again?” “I had to get my knife out of my bag, and I didn’t want to contaminate everything.” John finished scrubbing the knife, rinsed it, and tentatively slid it into one of his coat pockets next to his glove. Sam said, “I could have gotten your knife for you.” John scrubbed his hands with the soap and said, “I knew where it was, and which one I needed, and we were out here anyway.” Sam nodded, and John cleaned beneath the fingernails of one hand with the forefinger- and thumbnail of the other, then switched hands. He scrubbed with soap again, and then rinsed. When he finished, Sam held the jug out to him. John took a drink and handed the jug back to Sam. He could see only half of Sam’s face, the side nearest the fire, and he saw Sam’s cheek on that side rise and crinkle from a grin, and then Sam raised the jug and swigged from it. When Sam was done, John reached out for the jug again. “One more,” he said, and he and Sam passed the jug back and forth until John was about to burst with water.

109 CHAPTER 21

Sam climbed into the brightly lit truck’s cab with the jug and its sloshing remains of water that John had been too full to finish and disappeared into the sleeper. John called after Sam, “Get the butter now, would you?” He heard nothing from inside the cab. John asked, “It’s real butter, isn’t it? Not margarine?” “That’s right,” Sam’s voice came from inside the sleeper, and then Sam reappeared in the cab’s open doorway without the water but with a stick of butter in its wax-paper wrapping. “Real butter, with all its cholesterol and fat, all that dangerous stuff.” “Maybe dangerous,” John said, “but real.” Sam climbed out of the cab. “Leave that door open for a minute, will you, Sam?” In the light from the cab, John dug into his gym bag and pulled out his iron skillet, the longer of his two wooden spoons, his jar of salt, and his pepper mill. “Okay,” he said. Sam closed the door, and Gavin’s fire became the primary source of light again. The light from the fire on the horizon had waned until it was far less discernable than the cold white glow of the truck stop, even less so against the warm yellow light of Gavin’s fire, and as John and Sam walked back toward Gavin’s fire, the glow on the horizon disappeared. John wasn’t certain whether that fire near Cassandra’s had been put out for good or if it just seemed like it had from within the glow of Gavin’s fire. John set the salt canister and the pepper mill onto the pallet next to the bowl of cubed meat, and he put the blade end of the spoon into the bowl, the handle sticking out well past the bowl’s lip. John took a board from Gavin’s pile and spread hot coals into a bed at his and Ed’s edge of the fire. He laid the board across the fire and then set the skillet on the bed of coals, wiggling it to level the coals beneath. Gavin said, “You know, we have a hibachi you can use.”

110 John considered that and then said, “Don’t need it.” “I have a Dutch oven, too. Big one. In case you need it.” “Thanks.” John looked at the cubed meat and then his skillet. “The skillet will be fine. If we had potatoes or something, too, we’d need it.” He said to Sam, “I’m ready for your butter now.” Sam handed John the stick of butter, standing next to him afterward. John hovered his other hand within the skillet to test the heat rising from its bottom. The bottom had turned shiny with the oils from its seasoned decades of use. John was suddenly hit with the aroma of Steak- Ums, and that last afternoon with Billie thrust itself onto him and around him as if he were actually back in her kitchen, his heart racing with the fear that none of the last two days had happened and that those moments with Sam in the woods with the water jugs had been only a dream. Then, just as suddenly, he was back by the fire, still hovering his hand over the empty skillet and holding the stick of butter. Sam asked, “Are you going to use the whole stick?” John panted. “What?” “Are you going to use all that butter?” “Oh. No.” John pulled his hand away from the skillet. He drew his knife from his coat pocket, peeled open the waxy, butter-slick paper, and cut off a third of the softening stick above the skillet. The butter plopped into the skillet and hissed and bubbled and spread its way out toward the edges. The smell of sizzling butter masked that of the Steak-Ums. John wanted the Steak-Ums gone for good, so he quickly rewrapped the remaining butter and handed it to Sam, grabbed the bowl of cubed meat, and spooned it into the skillet. The meat crackled and hissed, and then the sounds died as the meat tried to suck the heat from the skillet. The cubes and the butter slowly renewed their sizzling and strengthened the rising waft of steamy oiliness, and John inhaled it greedily. There was no hint of Steak-Ums now, and he breathed easier. He set the bowl back on the pallet, glancing at Sam heading back to the truck to put the remaining butter away, and used the spoon to shove the cubes around in the skillet to keep them from sticking and to let the butter coat them evenly. The butter turned brown at the spots where the bubbling was most intense. John worried about burning the butter and ruining the flavor for everyone.

111 He rushed back to his bag near the truck and grabbed his hand towel. Sam had just climbed back out of the cab and closed the door. John stared into Sam’s eyes in the half dark. Sam smiled, and John smiled back and then rushed back to the fire. He folded his hand towel in half and half again, grabbed the skillet’s handle with it, and lifted the skillet from the coals. Ed shifted closer to the fire, the skillet, and John, and John felt Ed’s eyes on him. He sensed a darkening of Ed’s mood, something John figured he had picked up from the sound of Ed’s breathing slowing or the way Ed’s torso swelled and shrank in John’s peripheral vision. He wasn’t sure. Sam returned to the fire and paused by John’s side, but John didn’t look at Sam this time. John, through the corner of his eye, watched Sam slowly return to the seat past Gavin and around the other side of the fire, but still John didn’t look at Sam directly. He could feel Ed’s scrutiny too powerfully. Ed said, “That’s what I’m talking about.” John jiggled the skillet horizontally, and the cubes of meat, browned in some spots, still translucent pink in others, scooted and rolled in the melted, brown butter. He set the skillet back onto the coals, sprinkled in pinch of salt, and dusted it all with pepper. Ed leaned closer, inhaled a huge whiff, and smiled broadly. “Oh, yeah,” Ed said. “That’s satisfying as hell.” On the surface, Ed seemed content, but John still sensed that dark mood, that feel that he had gotten from Ed back in the motel room while Ed leaned against the door frame with his arms crossed, just before he had begun goading John. John wanted to look at Sam, to share smiles again, to share sips from the water jug, to share a single plate of this caramelized meat, but he didn’t dare look with Ed so close. The smell of the butter and cooking cubes seemed a tactile thing to John, a shape of some sort that fit perfectly into a wanting void where the back of his sinuses met his soft palate, some spot that had been empty for a long time, and John could imagine a bite-sized piece melting in his mouth already. It seemed putting that first bite into his mouth would be like prying the cork from a bottle of pinot that he had coddled in a basement for years and inhaling that first whiff of tannin and sugars, or like drying that last knife or sauté pan in Leopold’s kitchen and giving the counter tops a final wipe down and switching off the lights and turning to watch the crowd.

112 John knew his body needed protein and that that had to be why he craved that meat so much, but the knowledge took second seat to his rumbling stomach and the saliva pooling inside his mouth. He pushed the meat around with the wooden spoon, and the meat sizzled anew. The cut edges were finally dark brown, and none of the pink remained. The butter had reduced into a wonderfully caramelized glaze, and the meat was shiny brown. John swallowed the saliva and rolled his lips inside his mouth and thought, No, not second seat. Knowledge takes about the hundredth, the ten thousandth seat to something so primal, so sensuous as satisfying real hunger. He finally forced himself to glance up at Sam. Sam watched him and the skillet, those huge deerlike eyes glistening in the firelight, and John felt hungrier than he had in his entire life. Ed said, “That finished yet?” He leaned in close to skillet again, blocking John’s view of Sam. “It looks finished to me.” John lifted the skillet from the fire. He cringed at the thought of Ed digging into the skillet over and over with some utensil he’d wrapped his mouth all around. John said, keeping his gaze on the skillet, “We need plates or something.” He heard Sam say, “I’ve got some,” and then, in his peripheral vision, caught Sam heading back to the truck. Ed said, “Stir that some, John. Don’t let it burn.” John did. The sizzling had waned and was almost inaudible. Ed said, “Too bad that frying pan holds heat so long.” “No,” John said. “That’s good.” Ed leaned back and away from John. “Just give me Teflon any old day, or my mom’s old aluminum pot. That’s fine, and cheap, and light.” John said, “Part of what you cook with gets into your food, Ed. Teflon can’t be good for you, and aluminum’s horrid stuff to put into your body.” “Yeah, well, Teflon should just slide right through, right? Like shit through a goose. I’m fine with that.” Sam came back with four hard-plastic plates and four plastic forks. “Will this work?” Sam asked. John said, “Sure,” elated with an excuse to look at Sam again.

113 Gavin reached over and took a plate and a fork. Then Ed did, and Sam held two plates. John held the skillet over the plates one by one and scraped roughly one quarter of the cubes onto each. He set the skillet and wooden spoon on the pallet’s edge farthest from the fire and took his plate from Sam. Ed shoved his plastic fork into one of his parka pockets, pulled a metal tablespoon from the same pocket, and shoveled the meat into his mouth two and three cubes at a time, barely chewing between each spoonful, swallowing the stuff almost whole. He finished his plate and laughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and laughed again. Gavin asked, “What’s so funny, Edwin?” “Oh, nothing.” Ed still grinned wide. “It’s just really good to eat that. Satisfying.” Then Ed leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his good palm, a silly smile on his face, and watched everyone else eat. He seemed giddy with the scene. John chewed each cube individually at first, while they were still warm, but the night, even with his plate that close to the fire, sucked the warmth from the meat within minutes, and John finished his last four cubes in pairs. They were cool in his mouth, but still the butter, and the oils in the meat, did satisfy his hunger in a way that he figured not much else would. He stole another glance at Sam. Sam was watching him. “Well,” Ed said—John turned away from Sam—“I’m ready for some shut-eye.” Ed glared at Sam. “What time you leaving in the morning?” “When we’re ready.” Ed asked, “What time will that be?” Gavin said, “When we’re ready.” John said, “We’ll be right here, right, Ed?” “We can’t sleep in the parking lot, John.” Sam said, looking at Ed, “I’d offer you a spot in the trailer with Gavin, but we don’t know you well enough yet. No offense or anything.” Then Sam looked in John’s eyes again, apologetically, John thought, and Sam’s gaze dropped to the fire. John dropped his gaze, too, and said, “No problem.” Then he turned to Ed. “We’ll camp just inside the woods.” Ed said, “You just follow me, John. I already got a spot picked out.”

114 John nodded at the skillet and the bowl on the pallet. “I have to clean all this up first. Sam, can I use your water and soap again?” Ed said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, John, just take it inside the truck stop.” Sam stared at the fire and said nothing. Gavin gave a slight nod. The horizon toward the woods lit up bright from the fire near Cassandra’s again, and John imagined the firefighters struggling with hot ashes spreading through the woods or across grassy lots, maybe leaping from house to house all the way through a neighborhood.

115 CHAPTER 22

On the previous Wednesday—a garbage day at Billie’s—one full day before John and Billie’s trip to buy a television and their subsequent fight, John dragged Billie’s two garbage bins out to the curb just after dawn. Then he sat on the front porch with a bowl of raisin bran and an afghan and watched the sun continue to rise, bleeding its bright orange white glow into more and more of the neighborhood’s recesses. Billie was still asleep, and John hadn’t wound down enough yet from work to go lie next to her in bed. The cold numbed the tip of his nose and made his fingers ache. The year’s first snow hadn’t come yet. It was aberrantly late, though the cold itself had come time and again over the previous months, each wave more bitter and longer-lasting than the one before. The Gulf had failed this year to send enough moisture far enough or consistently enough to meet the arctic highs, as if the Gulf had lost track of where John had gone. John’s fingers had cracked and bled at the corners of his nails and across the backs of his knuckles. His lips had dried to the point that smiling split them and frequently left him sucking on blood. The taste of blood soured the raisin bran in his mouth as if the factory had mixed the bran flakes with old pennies instead of raisins. John had tried lotions and lip balms, usually Billie’s, but he couldn’t seem to use enough of the stuff to heal the cuts, or even to ease the bleeding enough to allow him to smile or touch anything, at work or at home. He looked as if he’d been in a play fight that had turned a hint too real. Leopold’s customers never seemed to get tiny mars like John’s. He wondered whether the customers who did just stayed home, or if there were some secret balm or simple precaution that no Denver native had revealed to John yet, or if perhaps arctic air was gentler with you the more it got to know you. John still felt jittery not having a screen between himself and the yard, as if a swarm of mosquitoes would converge on him any second. He knew no mosquito could survive this cold, but he hadn’t smothered that instinct yet, just like he still surveyed the ground around his feet for fire-ant beds every time he crossed a yard or, especially, stopped on grass anywhere.

116 In Denver in winter, the sun seemed so far away. In Biloxi, the sun had felt as if it were just within the outer fringes of the atmosphere. Some people hated that heat, the humidity, but John’s year in Denver felt as if he had stepped out of a lifelong warm bath and onto a cold metal floor in a walk-in freezer full of hanging, long-dead slabs of meat, that the bath water had gone icy, too, and that it would do no good to get back into the bath, that it would in fact do more harm than good. A garbage truck backed its way out of the opposite side street, beep-, beep-, beeping as it did, and a man dressed in layers of coat, hooded sweatshirt, coveralls, and who knew what else grabbed both of Billie’s garbage bins and dragged them to the waiting truck. John thought, Now that’s a job. That’s someone doing some good. Everyone makes garbage, and no one wants it around, so a garbage man—Is that what they’re still called?—he does important work. Okay, so maybe there are lots of folks who could do that. You need to be willing to work hard, of course, and you need a strong back, and a strong nose, but it’s important work. John set his empty cereal bowl on the painted porch floorboards next to his chair. The spoon settled deeper into the bowl with a grainy scrape and two light metallic clanks. John couldn’t remember the previous year with anything but work. He had moved in with Billie by June but hadn’t cut the grass over the summer, or carved a pumpkin for Halloween, or anything. To save time, he used the dry cleaners instead of her washer, dryer, and ironing board. It was like the year hadn’t really existed, other than working for Leopold, like one very long work day with exhausting, joint-aching coffee breaks with stale coffee, and quitting time seemed nowhere near. He said, “My job’s useless,” and thought, I brown-nose alcoholic big shots, politicians, Broncos players, big-time lawyers and doctors—anyone who wants his ass kissed. Grab any old car salesman from any lot in town and shove him in my place and teach him liquor inventories and scotch and cigar bullshit, and he’ll be just as good as me, probably better. It’s all fake. That’s the irony. My suits and knowledge of liquor and tobacco create illusory significance, whereas that garbage man’s filth creates illusory insignificance, but our true values are the reverse. If that dirty, hardworking, possibly undereducated man shuffling black plastic bins around with those coarse gloves stained with all our thrown-out crap vanished, you’d notice. You bet your sweet ass you’d notice. If I vanished, the world wouldn’t miss a beat.

117 The garbage man rolled Billie’s empty bins back to her curb, and he strode toward the next set of bins down Billie’s road, sunlight highlighting the back of his sweatshirt’s hood and the thick, dark, utilitarian coat. John wondered if he could do work like that, if the garbage man’s gloves were filled with bloodstains from cracking fingers that he had to ignore to do his work, or if maybe the work itself made him sweat enough beneath those layers to push the moisture his skin needed up from the inside, if he had a warm hearth at home, a family perhaps that he cared more about than silk ties and fifty-dollar cigars and seventy-five-year-old single-malt scotches. John felt a fool, and he shivered, and the tips of his fingers ached touching absolutely nothing.

118 CHAPTER 23

In the lantern light, Gavin spread a heavy blanket across one back corner of the trailer’s wooden floor. A netted hammock hung empty above him. He untied the cords on a sleeping bag and unrolled that on top of the blanket, and a pillow poofed up from the middle of the roll. Ed asked Gavin, “Why don’t you sleep in that hammock?” Gavin said, “I lie in the hammock when we’re on the move.” He fluffed the pillow, opened the lip of the sleeping bag, and set the pillow at its head. “This is for solid sleeping, not napping.” John studied Sam’s face in the lantern light. Beyond Sam in the half light, the dark edge of the woods seemed menacing. The fire still burned, though low, and lit the other half of Sam’s face. Ed picked up John’s gym bag from next to the trailer and shoved it into John’s chest and let go. John fumbled and almost dropped the bag. Ed grabbed his roll and slung it from his shoulder. “Come on, John.” John slung his bag’s strap across his shoulder, and Gavin sat at the edge of the trailer. “Don’t go too far,” Gavin said. “Something’s liable to eat you.” Ed shook his head and led John away from the bright, warm fire, Sam and Gavin, and the gravel lot and into the trees. They walked, without pausing, through the spot where John and Sam had washed the meat and John’s hands and had shared the jugs of water, and then past the area where John figured the bones had landed. John expected any second to step on or accidentally kick the empty rib cage, but John and Ed soon walked farther than the bones could have flown, and the darkness and the cold enveloped them until it was almost complete. The glow ahead from the fire over the hill toward Cassandra’s and the direct light behind of Gavin and Sam’s fire going out at the truck stop silhouetted, all around, dead-looking twists of bare limbs intertangling toward the black sky. Eerily, both fires were quenched simultaneously, and after the cold white light of the truck stop itself had slipped farther from view, the woods were simply dark. The cold crisped John’s leather coat into uselessness and seeped through the weave of his sweater and T-shirt, and he looked forward to wrapping the motel’s threadbare

119 blanket tightly around himself as many times as it would allow. Ed kept going and going. “Ed,” John said, but Ed seemed not to hear. “Ed! Ed plunged through the undergrowth. John had to leave at least five or six feet between him and Ed, because Ed just pushed his way past small branches and let them sling back and smack and sting John all up and down his body. It was so dark that, if it hadn’t been for the slinging brush, John wouldn’t have known where Ed was at all. John screamed, “Ed!” and stopped. “I’m going back.” Then John no longer heard Ed’s stomp and push through the undergrowth. There was only a palpable, aching silence. He couldn’t even hear the semis’ tires on the highway anymore, but his ears seemed to ache to hear something, anything, and soon he began to hear a hissing white noise that he knew didn’t exist at all. Ed reemerged from the darkness. He had made no sound, not even the slightest crunch in the snow or on the dampened and then frozen dead leaves that should have ground like thin glass beneath Ed’s boot soles. His face had simply materialized right in front of John’s, like a gator rising from the depths of a murky pool. Ed said, “You don’t have to yell. I’m right here, and we’re just going right over there.” He nodded slightly over his shoulder. John said, “Six more steps is all you get.” “Twelve,” Ed said. “Sixteen. Give me sixteen.” John swallowed. “But if we’re not in a good camping spot by then, I go back.” Ed looked around in the dark, as if he could see sixteen steps in every direction. John doubted that, even if it were light, the undergrowth would have allowed that. But Ed gave a quick nod toward the darkness ahead of them and to their right, and off he went, taking comically huge steps and sweeping up every inch that he could. John kept thinking about those few private moments with Sam and of Sam’s deep brown eyes during their stolen glances, and a spot inside John burned steadily warm and kept even the cold of this night at bay just inside his flesh. The night did bite his skin and his limbs and made him shiver, but that warm spot inside made him believe that it was impossible to freeze completely, that the cold could seep only so far, and that any damage it could do to him now would be laughably superficial.

120 He worried that Sam might be a man. John didn’t want to fall too deeply for Sam until he knew, but he wanted, too, to be able to say, without hesitation, that it didn’t matter. The idea of having sex with a man wasn’t very erotic for him, but he didn’t know whether that was a natural reservation or if he had simply been programmed that way. He hoped it was natural, because it would be a shame, he thought, not to be able to accept love because of programming. Ed led John on down and crossed, after fourteen steps, what seemed to John in the dark to be an extension of the dry creek bed they had driven over earlier in the evening. On the other side of the creek bed, finally, and thankfully hidden from the wind, Ed stopped. John told himself, This world’s against my quitting my job and leaving the safety of a paycheck and a warm house. It’s against my not caring about how many things I own or how much those things cost or whether that cost impresses others. No, he thought, it’s not the world that’s against this. The world is indifferent. It’s the people—or at least, too many of them—who are against it. “We’ll camp here,” Ed said. He pulled off his roll and plopped it onto the snow and frozen grass beneath a large willow tree. The snow was thinner there, only an inch or two, and the branches were numerous and low- hanging. The leaves had fallen, but the willow had so many fine branches that the mesh of limbs created an illusion of leafiness. John ducked into the space beneath the willow and dropped his gym bag next to the trunk. Cut it out, John, he thought. Cut out all that damned thinking. Thinking makes that warm spot in your chest go away, and you need that warm spot tonight. He was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and his head began to hurt again. He was still hungry, too. That little bit of meat hadn’t been enough for four. He plopped next to his gym bag and rested against the willow’s trunk, wanting to eat again, wanting to lie down, wanting to be near Sam. Ed unrolled his blanket and sat on that, next to his large green canteen, his Ziploc bag of gray socks, his can of Ravioli, and a rolled-up Wal-Mart bag. John asked, “What’s in the bag?” “Gauze, medical tape, peroxide, Scotch tape, Superglue.” “Superglue?” “To keep this bullet hole closed.”

121 John said, “I thought only cooks knew that trick.” Ed sniggered. “Do a lot of people shoot cooks?” “For cuts,” John said. “When you first learn to cook in restaurants, you cut yourself lots.” “That’s a comforting thought: amateur cooks bleeding all over your food.” “I’m still hungry,” John said. “You?” Ed nodded and pulled a key chain out of his pocket that had nothing on it but one house key and a small, black rectangle of metal. The piece of metal had a tiny, hinged, fin-shaped piece attached just above a notch. Ed fitted the thing to his Ravioli can’s top and awkwardly, slowly opened the can with his left hand. John asked, “Can I help you with that?” Ed took a break from opening the can and asked, “You ever use a pee-thirty-eight before?” “No.” “Don’t worry about it, then.” Ed stopped the P-38 with an inch left to go and simply bent the lid open. “Give me your can of beans,” he said. John did, and Ed opened that the same way and put the tiny can opener and its key ring back into his pocket. Ed handed John his opened can of beans, pulled the plastic fork from his parka pocket, and held it out to John. John took it and said, “Let’s build a fire.” “No. Those firemen and cops are still around. We don’t need that. Eat your beans.” John scooped a bite into his mouth, and he wondered at Ed’s mentioning cops. John hadn’t seen any police going toward the fire. He was too hungry to worry long, and though he wished the beans were warm, they satisfied his grumbling stomach. When John finished the can, he sank back against the trunk of the willow and watched Ed finish his cold Ravioli. John wished he had another bottle of water. Having eaten an entire can of beans with no water made the ache in his head worse. John thought about the way Ed had reemerged from the woods without a sound, and he asked, “Why aren’t you a soldier anymore, Ed?”

122 Ed shrugged. “Technically I still am, but Christ, who wants to be a tread head?” “A what?” “Tracks. APCs. IFVs. I was supposed to be a Ranger, or Special Forces. “There I was,” he said, “all camouflaged up, with every piece of equipment I owned tied to me with five-fifty cord, sitting in a patrol base, and this Ranger instructor says, ‘Some of you just weren’t meant to be here. It’s not your lot in life. It doesn’t mean you’re no good, just that you weren’t meant to be here.’ The whole time he was saying this, he was looking straight at me. Maybe if I had gotten pissed and worked harder, I would have proved him wrong. But I didn’t. I felt like he was right.” Ed scraped his tablespoon inside his Ravioli can, pulled out the last of the sauce, and gulped it down. “Hell, he probably did it to everyone, just to see who’d quit. I proved him right, in one moment of weakness.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t supposed to be here, out in these freezing-ass woods in the great state of Misery.” Ed’s head bent down, sweeping back and forth. Because John could see Ed only as mostly a silhouette, Ed’s head seemed to shrink to just a nub. Ed thrust his hands up on either side and added to the otherworldliness of the silhouette, the shadow’s strange mittened hands that looked like sharks’ fins circling a nub of an island. Then Ed’s normal silhouette was back, as if some fairy-tale princess had kissed him and morphed him back into a human being. John asked, “Just why are you out here?” Ed exhaled heavily. Then he came over unfolding a piece of paper. He handed it to John and snicked his lighter to life. The light was blinding. It danced bright yellow across the surrounding trunks and lit up the willow’s limbs and, far above, the bottoms of a vault of branches thrust clasping overhead by the surrounding trees. The lit-up part of the woods seemed to John like a miniature cathedral. It was Ed’s father’s drawing. The corner Hawking had pulled off and swallowed was back in place, a mesh of Scotch tape holding the masticated, tooth-hole-riddled section together. The yellow light seemed to fit the subject, but the creases from the folds seemed anomalous, too straight for the subject. John said, “It’s okay.” Ed snorted. “Just ‘okay’? It’s amazing.” “Ed, when did you get the corner of this drawing back? I thought Hawking ate it.”

123 Ed glanced at John, then back at the paper. “I got it back,” he said. “I can see. But when?” “When . . .” Ed said. “Hawking hacked it up. Don’t you remember that?” “No.” The lighter snapped out, and John was swallowed up in even more of a complete blackness than before. He heard Ed plop back on his blanket, the soft crunch of snow and brittle frozen dead leaves muffled beneath the tightly woven wool. Ed said, “It was when you wouldn’t turn around in that car. You remember? You kept staring ahead and saying, ‘No way will we be cold out here, little girlie. Just drop us off and go on your way and don’t pay us no nevermind.’ You don’t remember that?” John began to see the twisted tree limbs overhead again, and the hints of Ed’s silhouette. “I never said that, Ed.” Ed said, “Sure you did, in spirit. You betrayed me, man—betrayed us, the team. John could see the top edges of Ed’s arms again, Ed tucking the drawing back inside his parka. John said, “There really is no ‘us,’ Ed, other than that pancake deal, and I will hold up my part of that bargain, am upholding it.” Ed sighed. “You know, you and me are out here in the frozen woods together, alone. Anything can happen. We have to depend on each other. Don’t you get that? If you stop watching my back, someone could sneak up and slit my throat. Something could come up while I’m sleeping and take a big bite out of me. Same thing could happen to you. You deny the team, and who knows what might happen while you sleep.” A chill ran up John’s back and made the skin on his scalp prickle. “You’ve gotten off the subject, Ed. When did you get the corner of that drawing back? Hawking swallowed it, and he never hacked it up. I’m not deaf, and that car was deadly quiet.” Ed hackled at the now mostly charcoal-black cathedral dome. “Yeah,” he said. “Deadly. You’re funny, John.” John said nothing. Ed said, “That corner of my father’s drawing—the only thing left of him in this world, mind you—was in that little doggie’s stomach, and then it just popped out into my hand.” He

124 snapped his fingers. “Like that. Except, it was quieter than that. You couldn’t hear it.” Then John saw it. He saw Ed cutting into Hawking’s stomach in his mind, and he saw the carcass in his mother’s bowl at the campfire at the same time. John knew Ed’s absence from the truck stop and the appearance of that fire over the hill had happened at the same time for a reason. He hated to think of what Ed did to poor little Hawking. The idea of Cassandra coming home and finding Hawking dead and cut-up churned his stomach. “Ed,” he said. “Ed . . .” “What?” “We ate Hawking?” Ed laughed long and loud. “Oh, boy, John.” The elbows of his silhouette poked out, as if Ed were wiping his eyes. “That’s funny, John.” “Ed . . .” “This drawing is all I have left of my father.” John said, “If I were you, Ed, I’d worry more about your own integrity than some half- assed drawing.” Ed said, “Well, you’re not me. Don’t worry about me. And you’re in no position to criticize this drawing unless you can do better, you son of a bitch. Go to sleep, John. Lie down and go to beddie-bye.” John swallowed. “I’ll pull first watch.” “Fine,” Ed said and wrapped himself in his army blanket. “But no wandering off to that weirdo thing’s truck, okay?” He lied down and curled halfway into a fetal position, his eyes closed. “You have an obligation to me.” “Don’t worry about that,” John said. Ed lied still and quiet. John didn’t like having enjoyed eating Hawking at the time, but he was glad the body hadn’t been there for Cassandra to find once she had gotten home. John hoped Ed hadn’t cleaned and dressed Hawking and cut open his stomach in her back yard. Ed’s leg kicked out once, twice, then two more times. His leg drew back into its former position. Soon, Ed sighed in long, heavy breaths, like small waves swishing ashore, and John decided he would stay awake as long as he could, and never wake Ed.

125 John draped the ratty motel blanket around his shoulders, and, within half an hour, the beans in his belly and the fatigue from the long day dragged his eyelids down, and his head, and eventually every part of his body, as if he had turned into a discarded marionette, and he was soon lying beneath the willow fast asleep.

126 CHAPTER 24

She swam nude in the night in a crystal-clear pond the temperature of an Indian summer day. John swam far beneath her, and though he wore no goggles or mask, he could clearly see her silhouette against the shimmering, shifting facets of tiny, intermingling ripples. Beneath and to all sides of John was complete blackness, though he knew this pond bore nothing to fear—not even nibbling minnows. John’s lungs and ears didn’t ache, though his swim from one side of his love to the other seemed to take three, five, ten minutes and seemed at a depth of a couple dozen feet (it was, incidentally, the same depth as the camera’s lens beneath the swimmer in the opening scene of Jaws), and though he continually looked up, he couldn’t feel the burn of water rushing into his sinuses. He couldn’t even feel the water’s dampness. Then he and his love were out of the water and lying on the shore, but whether on soft, short grass or a blanket, he couldn’t tell. The air was that same Indian summer neutral, neither cool nor warm. She gazed smiling up at him, the ends of her wet blonde hair having settled to the ground on the blanket (of grass?) all around, the light of the night (from wherever it came—the moon, the stars, who knows?) glistening in her eyes (though the entire scene seemed black and white, John somehow knew her eyes were green). The faint band of freckles showed across her nose and on both cheeks, not freckly enough to be Tomboyish, but enough to prove she wore no makeup. He was soaked, too, but not one drop of pond water fell from the ends of his hair or the tip of his nose into her face. Nothing made her blink. He had no idea how the two of them had gotten to the pond, where their clothes were, which pond it was, where other people might be, or where the light came from. Dreams never cover those things. In dreams, dried-up dead grass never clings itching to wet skin, no one ever burps or farts or has to blow water stinging out of his sinuses, or accidentally drools into his lover’s armpit, and armpits have never not been shaved for five days because she hadn’t expected this night either. No one tracks algae or even one granule of sand anywhere, though we live on a huge ball of rock and sand and seed. No one second-guesses the other’s intent or worries about STDs, and when an

127 opportunity for skinny-dipping arrives, it’s never—no, never—her period. But her hair was always blonde, her eyes always green, the freckles always just visible enough to look sexy, her silhouette always the way TV and movie screens love them. And that’s the way Billie had seemed when John had first seen her in that casino in Biloxi (well, she was clothed, but the green eyes, the blonde hair, the freckles—all that), and he had known since he had first had those dreams that the girl in them was his one and only, that all he had to do was wait long enough for her to enter his life. He had known that as surely as he had known that he would grow to be at least six feet (though he never did). It had crossed his mind that maybe the dreams had been the product of puberty and pop culture, but he had thrust that idea away like cold lima bean baby food and had chosen instead to believe in the dream. Indian summers are just so wonderful. She swam nude in the night in a crystal-clear pond the temperature of an Indian summer day . . .

128 CHAPTER 25

John woke shivering in complete blackness. The frigid cold, seeping through the weave of the motel blanket, felt like a living thing again, digging for him, sinking long hard claws into him and squeezing the life from him, his body’s warmth oozing out between its fingers and dissipating into nothingness in the night. John sat up breathing heavily and pulled the blanket from his head. The fog of his breath burst from him in huge puffs and vanished in the night. His head throbbed less but was still achy, and snow still covered the ground. A bright, nearly quarter moon, fractured by the mesh of bare limbs, hung in a star-speckled sky back toward the truck stop and Sam and Gavin. Ed was gone, though his canteen and Ziploc baggie of socks and the Wal-Mart bag were still on his blanket. The trail of footprints in the snow John and Ed had made the night before had become darker with Ed’s second set of prints, leading away. John heard a train’s horn back toward Cassandra’s, and he figured an earlier blast must have been what had woken him. He pulled the blanket snug up against his neck and glanced at the moon. He debated going to find Ed. Then he debated just going as far as Sam’s truck and begging Sam to leave now, without Ed, and forgetting the stupid deal with Ed and his pancake. The more John thought about his and Ed’s trek together, the more ridiculous it seemed. John wasn’t sure what to do. The moon was amazingly bright for the sliver that it was. The snow seemed glowing white beneath, almost like in daylight. John could clearly see not only the lit-up part of the moon, but also the shadowy remainder. Despite the tree-limb-obscured view, the moon was clearer than John had ever seen it. On the moon’s darker part, black seas stretched across vast gray shadows, and on the lit crescent, a single point glowed brighter than any other part of the night, brighter even than the snow. John could see the moon’s entirety so well that it felt wrong calling it a quarter moon. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, fascinated by how undark the dark side really was. He felt he were seeing the moon for the first time. It wasn’t a crescent moon at all. It was a full moon, but simply

129 mostly in shadow. But even that was misleading, he realized. It was really a sphere, not a disc, so even claiming that it was mostly in shadow was a lie. Barring the rare eerily red lunar eclipse, the moon was always half shadow and half light. There were only shifts in how much of each half he was permitted to see. But on this night, the moon was half shadow and half light and showed three quarters of that shadow and only a sliver of its light to the earth, but John was grateful for that one sliver, because it was clear and bright and lit up his night like day. John pulled the motel blanket back over his head, lied down, and slipped into a chilled but peaceful sleep.

130 CHAPTER 26

When Leopold had called John to his table at the casino in Biloxi where John worked— actually, Leopold had said, “Send me the person responsible for this gumbo”—John had worked his way around Leopold’s table from behind, listening to the adjacent room’s cacophony of slot machine dings and slowly taking Billie in. He couldn’t believe that Billie seemed so familiar, and so gorgeous. Every step he took brought one more fraction of her face into view, and every fraction seemed more familiar and more downright gorgeous than the one before, until John stood in front of their table, his cook’s apron splattered with spots of olive oil from sautéing, tiny sprinklets of tomato sauce from pouring, damp smears from wiping, and so on, waiting to be berated by that pale, bald, cigar- puffing man with every Vandyke whisker, every thread exactly in place, as if someone had airbrushed him into Cigar Aficionado or People. Leopold’s cerulean and teal striped silk tie shone in the dim light. His watch winked in glints from beneath his cuff—a cuff with subtle gold-edged ebony cufflinks, cuffs and links that didn’t look corny or seem like they felt out of place like the ones on John’s senior-prom tux had. The woman with Leopold was so much younger than Leopold and so good looking that John figured she could be nothing other than a gold-digging whore. “Did you make this gumbo?” Leopold asked John. “Yes.” “It’s the best gumbo I’ve ever had.” John hadn’t expected that. He swallowed. “Thank you,” he said. “How’d you do this?” Leopold asked. No emotion. Simple inquiry. John shrugged. “Pretty complex.” “Is it a house recipe?” John laughed, “No.” “It’s your recipe?”

131 “Not really a recipe. Good gumbo doesn’t follow a strict recipe.” “Tell me how you made this.” Leopold puffed at his cigar, his lips making damp little vacuous pops. “That might take a while.” Leopold shrugged. “I’ve got time today.” “Okay,” John said. “You need bacon drippings for the roux.” “I knew you started with a roux.” Billie asked, “A roo? As in kangaroo?” Leopold snapped his head her direction while keeping his eyes on John and said, “Shut up.” John considered defending her, but that didn’t seem worth his job at that point. He nodded his head toward the kitchen. “They didn’t even use a roux here before. They made soup and called it gumbo.” Leopold said, “Go on.” “Use half bacon drippings and half olive oil for the roux, and cook the roux slowly.” He said to Billie, “a roux is cooked oil and flour. That’s all,” and then to Leopold, “Use an iron skillet, and cook it until it’s the color of chocolate. That takes hours, unless you want to risk burning it, and you can’t burn your roux. Nothing will cover up burned roux. To even try is a waste of time and good ingredients.” Leopold blinked slowly. “What kind of chocolate? They vary in color.” John smiled. “That’s a great question. Dark chocolate, sixty percent cocao or so, like an old penny.” “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Leopold said. Billie said, “I like milk chocolate best. And white chocolate. So creamy.” Leopold made his slow blink again. “And?” he asked John. “Get good smoked andouille sausage. You have to taste it to see if it’s good. Don’t take anyone’s word for it. That’s important.” “Define good for me.” “First you have to understand that heat does not equal flavor. You can add all the pepper seed you want later for fire. Focus on the sausage’s flavor first. Andouille is pork, so think about

132 really good pork when you taste it. The hint of smokiness is important, too. Cheap andouille looks and tastes like hot dogs. Don’t go anywhere near that.” “Okay.” Leopold smiled and blew a dragonlike puff through his nose. “Got it.” “Fresh seafood’s key, too, and fresh veggies, the whole spice rack. How you flavor a gumbo depends on how each ingredient tastes for that particular pot. You can’t have a recipe, only a list of ingredients to adjust from.” “I own a restaurant,” Leopold said. “My customers expect consistency. How do you ensure consistency with vague guidelines like that?” “Have the same cook make it each time. Work toward the same general realm of flavor each time, but adjust based on the ingredients. You have to make your own chicken stock. Canned stock is too stale. You’ve got to have a cook who cares more about a good stock than whether every hour he works is on the clock. You know what I mean?” “And okra? Some people don’t like okra.” “How can you have gumbo without okra? If people like a dish, they should shut up about how it’s made.” “That’s a hell of an attitude.” Billie said, “Daddy, don’t.” And that’s all John heard. His mind played that over and over: “Daddy,” “Daddy,” . . . So she’s not a whore, he thought. He looked at her hands on the table. No ring. Great God, he thought. And somehow, over the next few minutes, while he rambled on about his gumbo, Leopold handed John a business card, and Billie smiled, and her eyes glistened, and John knew for fact that he had seen her somewhere before. He felt he knew every tiny, subtle freckle across her nose and cheeks. Leopold said, “If you’re ever in Denver,” and something about a job, and something about gumbo, and then “Billie.” Leopold smiled and said something ending in “my daughter Billie.” John shook her hand, a hand as soft and smooth and comfortable as water the temperature of an Indian summer day. Two weeks later, two weeks of not being able to get Billie out of his mind or the feel of

133 her hand out of his, of telling himself that an owner who appreciated a good cook could bring satisfaction like no other job, John walked out on his job in Biloxi, packed his piece-of-shit pickup, and drove two days to Denver.

134 CHAPTER 27

John woke again, this time to the crunch of footsteps in the snow. He pulled the motel blanket from his head and sat up. His aching muscles shook and made him pant with fatigue, and his head throbbed again. In the painfully bright light of a clear dawn, Ed walked toward him holding two bulging plastic Wal-Mart bags from his one good hand. The uneven distribution of weight made Ed wobble as he walked, like Igor. The air was bitter cold. The snow was shallow and trampled on beneath the willow; the dried-up creek bed, lined with hard sienna clay with limestone jutting through at turns; and the trees, more dense and tangled with twisting limbs than they had seemed during the night. The sun, searing orange just above the horizon, pierced in slivers through the trees. The moon’s crescent sat high above the trees’ tops, its dark part now nearly the exact blue of the sky and almost impossible to distinguish. The bright crescent had slipped to pale and faint. John tried to guess how long it had been since he had last been awake. It had to have been hours. Tiny, black husks appeared in spatters of ones, twos, and threes along some of the trees’ limbs and stood out starkly silhouetted against the sky. They were pecans, the husks peeled back and dried, the pecans exposed and ready for the taking. Ed stopped at the edge of the willow and set the bags in the snow. He flexed and shook out his now-empty good hand, the opening and closing mitten seeming like a shark’s fin again. John asked, “Where have you been?” “Wal-Mart.” “Again?” Ed pointed his elbow toward the rising sun. “I got pancake ingredients.” John thought about Ed walking Wal-Mart’s aisles for hours, enjoying the heat. For such an adamant outdoorsman, Ed seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in Wal-Mart, and John wondered why Ed had not woken him or asked him to go. John decided not to push it. What he wanted most was pain killer and heat—however he could get it—and food.

135 John pulled the feeble motel blanket tighter around his shoulders and said, “My head’s killing me. You didn’t by any chance get any Motrin or anything, did you?” Ed suddenly had his knife out and stomped toward John. John ducked back and sideways and fell weakly in the snow, tangled in the blanket. He jerked one arm free and thrust it up between him and Ed and gasped, “No.” But Ed stopped at the tree and not John. He looked at John curiously, then grabbed and chopped at the willow’s switch-like limbs. He hacked off four, picked at their cut edges with his knife, and peeled long strips of bark away, accumulating the bark strips loosely in the bulkier of his mittened hands, the bandaged one, and dropping the bared switches one by one onto the snow. John pushed himself back up with his free hand and cinched the blanket tight again. Ed put his knife away, grabbed the bundle of thin bark strips with his good hand, and held the bundle out to John. “Here,” he said. “Chew these.” “What’s that supposed to do?” John asked. “It’s aspirin.” Ed’s voice had taken on his scolding tone again. “You didn’t know that? I thought you were Mister ‘Eat Everything in Its Natural State.’” Ed thrust the fistful of bark strips toward John again. “Take it.” “I’m not putting that in my mouth. God knows what’s on it: pesticides, bird crap . . .” Ed picked up John’s discarded bean can from the previous night and scrubbed it out with snow. Then he rubbed the bark with snow, wadded it up, shoved it in the can, and packed fresh snow on top of it. He said, “Boiling this will kill anything you’re afraid of. We’ll make a tea out of it.” “Why don’t we just go back to Wal-Mart?” Ed set the can on the snow beneath the willow and stripped one bag down from around a bag of charcoal. “We’re done with Wal-Mart,” he said, “and that truck stop and that weirdo no-man, no- woman thing. We don’t need them to get to Florida, and I’m not buying pancake ingredients for four.” “But we made a deal with them. Sam’s counting on us to—” “You made a deal with me. Try keeping that one first.” “The two aren’t incompatible.”

136 “What two?” “The two deals.” Ed pursed his lips, opened the bag of charcoal, cleared a spot of snow, and poured the briquettes into a pile in the cleared spot. John said, “Aspirin upsets my stomach. I need Motrin or Tylenol or something like that.” Ed pulled the mitten off his good hand, reached in his pants pocket, and pulled out his Zippo. “Bottled aspirin upsets your stomach,” he said. “Willow bark won’t.” “We should go back to the truck stop.” “They’ll wait. It’s early.” Ed flicked open the Zippo with a metallic snick. John said, “I thought you said we couldn’t have a fire.” “That was last night, in the dark. The enemy can see a fire for miles at night,” he said, “and night is prime time for an attack.” “Enemy? We’re hitchhikers, Ed. We’re not at war with anyone.” Ed said, “Yes, we are hitchhikers. But make no mistake; we are at war, too. Everybody’s always at war with someone or something. Otherwise, you’re dead.” He clicked his lighter’s flint wheel, and the flame licked the air. The flame was larger than John had expected. John said, “I don’t believe that. A person can be at peace and still be alive.” Ed’s Zippo hand and the tongue of fire stalled, poised over the briquettes. “Name one,” he said. “The Dalai Lama, Jesus, Gandhi.” “Why did they travel? Why did people kill them?” Ed’s hands waved in half shrugs with each question, his bandaged hand thickly padded with the mitten, the other holding the flame. John said, “No one killed the Dalai Lama.” “Well, there was more than one, right? Going way back? Someone must have killed at least a couple of them. The point is that you need aspirin, and we both need breakfast, and if we’d had a fire last night, the fire department or cops would’ve shown up, and we really didn’t need a fire last night, but we do now.” He touched the pile of briquettes here and there with the flame.

137 John said, “I needed a fire last night.” “No, you didn’t. None of your fingers or toes are frostbit, and you didn’t die. You knew you wouldn’t freeze back when we were in that car with that girl.” “Cassandra.” “Yeah. Her.” The fire grew quickly, and the surrounding snow sizzled and turned glossy wet on top. Ed snapped his lighter closed, shoved it back into his pocket, and plopped Indian-style in front of the fire. He pulled off his other mitten and stuck his hands toward the fire palm-out, like he were one of Gladys Knight’s pips, except with abnormal forefingers and a huge white bandage. John smelled burning lighter fluid and was suddenly back at a childhood barbeque. His father smiled, the sun shined, Pamela sat at the redwood-stained picnic table swinging her legs beneath one of the benches in great arcs to some song on the radio. John’s mother opened the patio door with a swoosh and stepped outside with a tray of pastel-colored Tupperware glasses filled to the rims with iced Coke. She kept one foot in front of the cracked-open patio door to keep Bandit inside, and then closed off Bandit and the air-conditioning with the coarse sounding sliding door and the muffled, clunky kiss of metal against the felty insulating strip. Bandit stood on his tiny hind legs and scratched and dug at the patio door’s glass and yipped his little black head off, the yips faint through the double panes of glass and beneath the blare of the radio. John’s father flipped huge slabs of rib-eye on the grill with a massive, two-pronged fork. The steaks sizzled. Their drippings hissed and sent up billows of smoke. John greedily inhaled the lighter-fluid smell and tried to hear what song was on the radio. “You gonna make pancakes or sleep again?” Ed asked. Pamela’s song faded into the ruffle of the innumerable willow limbs, and John opened his eyes. The fire was still high, the briquettes’ edges just beginning to turn gray white. Ed had placed the bean can full of willow bark and snow right up next to the fire, and the can’s paper had caught and was burning all the way around. The snow inside the can melted and sank from view. Once the paper had burned away, Ed added more snow. John asked, “Don’t you want a ride south? We’ve got a ride all the way to Florida. I thought you said to never turn down a ride.” “I said we shouldn’t turn down that one girl’s ride.” “Cassandra. Why can’t you remember her name?”

138 “Maybe I don’t want to.” “What’s wrong with riding with Sam and Gavin?” “Let’s eat first. I didn’t buy enough ingredients for four.” Ed’s nose crinkled. “I brought them rabbit last night. I’m not going to provide every meal for them. Besides, they’re probably still sleeping.” Ed wiped his nose with the back of his good hand. “If you want to get back to that truck stop, make pancakes.” He pushed the other Wal-Mart bag toward John. “Hell, if you do it right, you won’t need that truck stop or those truckers.” John said, “It’s too soon to make pancakes. You want to cook on the even heat of coals, not the first flash of flames.” “Fine. Wait.” Ed seemed to consider the empty Ravioli can for a second, then picked it up, scrubbed it out, and set it, empty, next to the bean can. The Ravioli can’s paper caught and burned, and the can sizzled and hissed with evaporating snow and burning tomato sauce. John squeezed his hands into fists inside his gloves, trying to warm them. The cuts at the tips of his fingers didn’t hurt as much. He didn’t know whether they were healing or if he’d simply become numb to the pain. He scooted closer to the fire and held his hands out like Ed’s, though he left his gloves on. The heat surged through him like he had crawled hands-first into a hot bath. His back was still icy cold, but his hands, and then his face, and then his chest and knees, all warmed up. Ed added more snow to the bean can, and as that snow melted, the water level inside the can rose to where John could see it. Ed pushed the second Wal-Mart bag with his foot this time, getting it closer to John. “Here’s where carrying that damn frying pan pays off,” he said. John dragged the bag close and pulled out a box of Bisquick, an entire carton of eggs, a small bottle of liquid vegetable oil, a can of blueberry pie filling, a half gallon of two-percent milk, three more cans of Ravioli and two of soup, and a small bottle of real maple syrup. “There’s plenty stuff here for four,” John said. Ed said, “Not if it’s going to last more than one meal.” “We can get more ingredients later.” “What’s this ‘we’ crap? You got money?” John didn’t want to start that argument again. Instead, he focused on getting the pancakes

139 out of the way as quickly as possible so he could get back to the truck stop. “You bought real maple syrup?” Ed said, “You told me to.” “Well, for eventually, yes, but . . . your pancake fund is big enough for that kind of spending?” “The syrup’s important, isn’t it?” John said, “I wish you would have told me you were going to Wal-Mart. I could use a few things.” “What do you think I am, your sugar daddy?” “I’m going to need more water. I’m already dehydrated, and those two bottles you bought me yesterday are bone dry.” “We’ll refill those before we move out.” Ed pulled his folded red paisley bandanna from his hip pocket and used it as a potholder to pull each can from the fire and set it in the snow in front of himself. “I thought that bandanna was covered with blood.” Ed smiled like he were on a TV ad. “Spot remover.” His upper teeth seemed even more yellow against the snowy backdrop. Ed unfolded the bandanna, draped it over the empty Ravioli can, and pushed a well into its center in the open end of the can. He put his mittens on, picked up both cans, and poured the willow tea from the bean can, through the bandana like a filter, into the Ravioli can. Bits of bark and burnt paper collected in the bandana, the wadded-up strips of willow bark sticking wedged in the bean can. John asked, “Did you rinse that bandanna well?” “Whaddaya want me to do, suck on it to prove it to you? “No.” John swallowed and looked at the can of blueberries with heavy syrup, the two- percent milk. “I’ll do the best I can with this. They’re not fresh blueberries.” Ed said, “Then you buy the ingredients for the next ones.” “I don’t have any money, as you always seem so happy to point out.” “Use my money, but you shop.” He handed John the steaming Ravioli can. “Here.” John took the can from Ed. Its heat surged through his gloves and into his palms. It felt fantastic.

140 John said, “The next pancakes? You’ve written these off as not good enough before I’ve even mixed the batter?” The tea smelled bitter and chalky. John was amazed at how much it smelled like aspirin. Ed said, “Don’t expect to get anything perfect the first time.” “Then why don’t we go back to the truck stop and make pancakes for four? I mean, if we’re going to trash these ingredients afterward, anyway, we might as well—” “No. My money, my ingredients, my decisions.” Ed shook his head. “Drink your aspirin and make my pancakes.” Ed poured canteen water onto his wadded up bandanna, scrubbed it against itself, and wrung it out. Then he opened it and shook it like a flag in the wind and carefully folded it. The bandanna looked clean to John. He sipped the tea and immediately spit the caustic stuff out. Droplets hissed in the fire. “God, this is bitter,” he said. For an instant, he thought the bitterness had come from Ed’s blood, and he had half expected the fire to flare from the droplets rather than shrink from them as if Ed’s blood were gasoline or nitroglycerin. John’s mouth felt cottony, especially beneath his tongue and at its very back. The insides of his cheeks seemed to seize the sides of his tongue. “Drink it,” Ed said. “It’s worse than that restaurant’s coffee yesterday.” “Well, I’m not a cook. You are.” “That’s right, a cook, not a chef.” John sipped the tea. It wasn’t so bad on the second sip, once he knew what to expect. He sipped more, and it seemed to help his head instantly. His stomach handled it fine. John said, “What we ought to do is make pecan pancakes instead.” He nodded toward the nearest pecan-riddled tree. “There’ve got to be pecans all over the place just beneath this snow. We could even go back to that truck stop for a banana. It had a shelf of fruit, I think. How do fresh banana-pecan pancakes sound?” Ed said, “I don’t want banana-pecan pancakes. I want blueberry pancakes.” Ed’s tone sounded like Leopold’s. John said, more quietly, “I’m just saying that, since these blueberries are canned, and since

141 we have fresh pecans right here next to us, and that—” “Blueberry!” Ed screamed. “Not pecan! Not banana, not Goddamned strawberry or apple or whatever the fuck you want. I don’t care how fresh anything is. I want blueberry, and you’re going to make blueberry, because it’s my money, and it’s my choice.” He rolled his eyes. “Jesus H. fucking Christ.” “Okay. Blueberry,” John said. He glanced up at the tree limbs almost bursting with fresh nuts. “We’ll give this can of blueberries a shot, then, with its old soggy berries, thick with artificially flavored, blue-dyed high-fructose corn syrup, factory-sealed tin can, and all. That ought to be good.” Ed glared at him. “Don’t give me no more shit.” “Fine. But then we get to that truck stop and our ride. We can look for fresh blueberries for the next try at pancakes, for lunch, maybe, even though we probably won’t have much luck, because blueberries are out of season.” “No,” Ed said. “Breakfast only. One day, one try.” John sucked down huge swigs of the tea. The warmth surged through him in pulsating waves. “That seems kind of silly,” he said. “I mean, if you’re trying to come up with a recipe for the perfect blueberry pancake, you should try as often as you can.” “One try per day. That’s it.” Ed tugged his parka’s hood closer around the edges of his face. “It has to be in the morning.” John said, “Okay. But we go back to that truck stop.” Ed stiffened and squinted at John. Ed’s lips pressed tight and thin. John gulped the tea and set the can down. Then he pulled his gym bag close and dug through it for his skillet, the spatula, and his mixing bowl. He scooted closer to the dying flames and the glow of the coals. He had Ed open the can of blueberry pie filling, and John cracked two eggs into the bowl, broke the yolks and beat them, and mixed Bisquick into them. The syrup was thick and wanted to cling to the blueberries and go wherever they went. John dragged the bottom of the spoon across the can’s lip to scrape off as much syrup as he could, spooned the blueberries into the mix, and stirred the batter loosely. The blue and white streaked together liked swirled rye bread. He mixed until the colors had blended almost

142 homogeneously, but not quite. John set his skillet on top of the hot coals and wiggled it. Ed asked, “What about the milk?” “Let’s wait and see how liquidy the blueberries’ syrup makes the mix.” “Your batter is too thick.” “Who’s the cook here, Ed, you or me?” Ed exhaled audibly. “It’s too thick.” “It’s not in the skillet yet. Sugar is a liquid ingredient.” John picked up a handful of snow and let it fall in clumps between his gloved fingers. “Even water’s thick out here.” Ed frowned, then asked, “You’re not going to mix that better? There are still clumps of white in there.” “You don’t overmix pancake batter. It’s like cornbread. It’s better if you don’t stir it to death.” John thought about corn muffins with tiny clumps of unmixed batter, a lump of corn meal here, an extra boost of sugar there. He thought about the blemishes and stains of real food and how much he liked that and how much Ed seemed to think that everything was better beaten and beaten until it was all exactly the same. Homogeneously smooth cornbread or perfectly white, perfectly fluffy rice had always seemed an aberration to John, artificial. He liked to use leftover stock to make rice, to cook vegetables in the same pan that he had browned sausage in, to let flavors mix spontaneously. The food at Leopold’s had always been “perfect,” every bite the same. John had hated that, and he had hated their clientele’s expectation for it. John told Ed, “If you want really tough pancakes, then yes, beat them silly.” “Hah! Like a kid.” John stared at Ed. All he could think to say was, “I’m the cook. Let me do my job.” John could smell the heated-up oily seasoned coating of the skillet. He pulled off one glove and waved his bare palm just above the skillet’s cooking surface. The hot iron radiated warmth into his palm and fingers. The seasoning’s odor held a faint hint of butter and the previous night’s meat, and John thought of Hawking and wished he’d scrubbed the skillet better. John knew the first pancake would pick up that flavor, but he hoped it would disappear from the skillet by the second batch. John didn’t want any of these pancakes. The first pancake of a batch was always a little off, anyway.

143 John poured a cookie-sized pool of oil into the skillet. It thinned and spread in a self- adhering mesh, like water on a car’s waxed hood. Another train horn blew in two short, distant blasts toward Cassandra’s, and Ed looked through the trees toward the sound. John spooned one pancake’s worth of batter into the center of the skillet. The batter sizzled and bubbled in the oil and sank from a lump into a thick disk as it heated. The deeper blueberries emerged as tiny domes as the blue batter fell into place around them. John tried to pick up the skillet, but the handle was too hot, even for his gloved hand, so he pulled his hand towel from his bag and used it as a pot holder again. He tilted the skillet and ran the oil all around the edges of the pancake. Then he set the skillet back on the bed of hot coals. The pancake’s edges turned from glossy blue to dull, and John could smell the sugar and the oil cooking. Saliva pooled around his front teeth, and he swallowed and sucked his lips dry. His stomach grumbled. “When I was a kid,” Ed said, still staring off to where the train horn had sounded, “I used to run from trains.” Bubbles grew first at one edge of the pancake, and then closer toward the middle, but not as quickly at the opposite edge. John slid the skillet to try to center it more over the apparent hot spot. He set his towel in his lap and studied Ed. “What do you mean?” John asked. Ed shook his head and pursed his bottom lip. He leaned close over the skillet and peered sideways at the pancake, as if he could see beneath it, then sat up again. “Long before my mother died and my father bought his ranch,” he said, “we lived in this trailer court way out in the boonies in Wyoming, next to this set of tracks, and every time I heard or saw a train coming, I had to get up from the sandbox and run inside. I had to get inside the trailer and close the door before the train passed the first fence post of the trailer court. I can’t tell you how hard my heart would beat, or how hard I’d be breathing.” John flipped the pancake, its cooked side full of brown undulating lines forming a mesh relief over light blue patches and almost black blueberries. Ed leaned back. “Ah.” “Why trains?” John asked. “I don’t know.” Ed shrugged. “It wasn’t that I was afraid of getting hit or anything. I

144 mean, there was a fence, and even if there hadn’t been, I knew better than to get on train tracks, and I knew that trains stayed on their tracks—usually.” He snickered. “But I thought that horrible things would happen to me and my family if I didn’t make it inside in time. That rumbling, vibrating thing would just . . . I don’t know. My whole body would tremble. My skin got to tingling all over. I got panicky, you know?” John pulled the pancake from the skillet, and Ed snatched it from the spatula. “First one’s mine,” he said and took a bite. “It’s got a bit of the meat from . . . The first one’s—” “Dis idn’ it,” Ed said through his mouthful. Tase like bread.” He stared at the bitten edge and swallowed. “It’s not perfect, not anywhere near perfect.” He bit off another huge piece. John smelled the air above the skillet. He waved the air toward himself with his hand. The hint of Hawking’s flesh was gone. Ed shoved the last of the first pancake into his mouth, chewed only four times, and gulped it down. John poured another dab of oil in the skillet, rolled the oil around in tiny sizzling waves, and set the skillet back onto the coals. He scooped three more clumps of blue batter in. The batter seemed too heavy, too slow to bubble. It was liquid enough; it just didn’t behave like it should. It needed fat from milk, ideally from buttermilk, and that meant that even what little of the blueberries’ syrup had gotten in was too much. “Look,” John said, “I don’t think your expectations are realistic. You were apparently raised on soda pop and candy bars. If sugar’s all you want, then just buy a five-pound bag and have at it.” He huffed. “The first thing you need to do is relearn taste.” Ed said, “I don’t need anyone to tell to me what taste is.” “I don’t mean social taste,” John said. “I mean taste as in taste buds, your sense of smell, those things. Your tongue picks up sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and meaty, but all you seem to want is the sweet part—and the meaty part, with that so-called rabbit.” John shook his head. “You’re letting the biggest parts of your sense of taste go to waste. You should try to enjoy variety.” Ed said, “I know what pancakes I want, and these aren’t them.” The edges of the pancakes closer to the center of the skillet dried and bubbled faster than the outer edges, and John flipped each so that its rawer side ended up closer to the center of the skillet for the second half of their cooking. Their tops were brown near the outer edges of the

145 skillet and pale, pasty blue in the center. John glared at Ed. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I need: all-purpose flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, salt, whole-wheat flour—stone ground, if possible—rolled oats, good eggs, fresh buttermilk, and real blueberries—not from a can, not frozen, not anything but picked off a bush and set in a store. They’ll probably have to be from New Zealand or Australia or somewhere, so they’ll be expensive, but they absolutely must be fresh. And keep this veggie oil handy. Got that?” Ed worked the pancake bits from around his gums with his tongue, then swallowed. He said, “What was all that Bisquick shit you told me at that restaurant, then?” “We hadn’t made our deal then. I told you how you could make pancakes easiest and best. Then you just went off and bought the stuff without consulting me. And you expect gourmet pancakes from that?” “You should have given me a frago as soon as the situation changed.” “A what?” “Frag order. A fucking update, man. The situation changes, you change the op order.” He squinted at the skillet. “You’ll have to flip those back over a little. They’re raw on top.” “You never flip a pancake more than once. They’ll cook through okay now that those parts are in the center. It’s hot there.” John took a long, slow breath. “Did anything bad ever happen from the trains?” “Oh. Yeah. My big brother Marcus got killed—not by a train. He got hit by a car on the highway on the other side of the trailer court. He was on his paper route. Rolled-up newspapers were everywhere. But I blamed it on the trains, of course.” “How old was he?” “ten.” “How old were you?” “Seven.” “You have any other siblings?” “No. Are those things done or what?” John wiggled the skillet back and forth in tiny jerks. The pancakes slid freely inside. He lifted the edge of one with the spatula. “Yeah. They’re done,” John said. “How’d your parents die?”

146 Ed tensed up. He sat straighter, his shoulders squared. He focused solely on the pancakes, never meeting John’s eyes, even after John watched Ed’s face for what seemed an eternity. Without looking at John, Ed shook his head. “Time to eat,” he said. Ed grabbed the jar of syrup and exaggerated twisting the top off, his eyes aglow like a B-movie actor’s. “You joining in?” he asked. Ed snatched another pancake from John’s spatula, poured syrup over the half of its top he wasn’t holding, and bit a huge chunk off. John asked, “How’d your parents die, Ed?” Ed took another bite and said, “These are a little wet inside.” He kept his eyes on his pancake. “That’s the blueberries’ syrup. It’ll be better when we use fresh blueberries. Then I can use buttermilk, too.” He wished he didn’t feel sorry for Ed. “We’ll find another store, a real grocery store, and I’ll make some better ones tomorrow.” John scooped out more batter and watched the blobs sink and turn into disks and bubble. He just then realized that there was not one cloud in the sky. He had not connected seeing the moon and the sun earlier with the disappearance of the clouds. The air was still bitter cold, but they were in the wake of the storm now. The worst was over. He leaned over and flipped the pancakes, listening to the hiss and sizzle. He could smell the hot oil, the blueberries, and the pastiness of the still-raw batter.

147 CHAPTER 28

After alternating piling snow over the coals and stirring the mess around until the snow had stopped melting and let itself be packed tight and hard like earth over a grave, Ed led John from their campsite beneath the willow and back toward the truck stop. They crossed the dry creek bed and followed their previous trail, now four sets of overlapping footprints in the snow— three of which were Ed’s. They came to a Y in the trail, each fork with two sets of prints, and Ed took the right fork. John felt as if they were veering too far right, but he hadn’t been the one leading in the dark the previous night, and Ed had traversed this patch of woods three times compared to John’s one, so John followed Ed. Then John noticed that the two sets of prints they were following pointed in opposite directions, the toes of one set pointing ahead and the toes of the other set pointing back toward their campsite. John saw first one print where he could clearly see the imprint of the knobs of Ed’s soles, and then another. Neither set of prints were the smooth, pointed imprints of John’s loafers. “Where are we going?” John asked. Ed looked back, then forward again. “Back to seventy-one,” he said. “To the truck stop?” Ed sped up. “To Wal-Mart.” “You said we were done with Wal-Mart.” “I changed my mind. We need pancake ingredients for tomorrow. I can’t seem to get it right, even after you tell me what to get.” Ed squinted at John. “Though you never mentioned buttermilk before this morning.” John figured Wal-Mart would have an ATM. He thought that maybe he would just pay Ed the money he owed and be done with it. Then he could do whatever he wanted: get a bus ticket, call Pamela, or go back to Sam. John said, “Maybe we should stop by the truck stop first, let Gavin and Sam know what

148 we’re doing, so they don’t leave without us.” “They can wait,” Ed said. “This is important.” “So is our ride.” The woods ahead seemed better lit, larger patches of sunlight in the snow. A road ran left and right ahead, but no cars traveled down it. John thought at first that it was Highway 71, but as they drew nearer, he saw that the road was a smaller one, that it was the road running between Highway 71 and Cassandra’s house. Ed’s two sets of tracks veered left and led to the road at an angle. Ed and John followed the tracks out of the woods and then married and ran next to the road. Other tracks that looked like Ed’s ran up and down the edge of the road, as far as John could see in both directions. He knew for fact then that they had eaten Hawking, and he hated Ed. The Highway 71 overpass stood out ahead in a stark, dark silhouette beneath the morning sun. John said, “Buttermilk will go bad by tomorrow morning. We should just get fresh ingredients then.” Ed stopped and turned toward John. “Go bad? It’s fifteen degrees.” The last finger of the woods still stretched between them and the truck stop. The next twenty paces would bring the truck stop into view, and the next hundred would take them past it and beneath the overpass. Wal-Mart was visible through the overpass’s tunnel ahead. John said, “But we’ll be in a truck.” “Truck, car, foot, whatever. We’ll keep the buttermilk in the trunk or something.” “What if it freezes?” Ed turned and marched on toward Wal-Mart. “Come on,” he said, and he glanced back to make sure John followed. “If it goes bad, we’ll get more tomorrow, but we’re getting everything we need now, while it’s available, and you’re coming with me to make sure I get the right stuff this time.” The truck stop went slowly by on their left, Sam and Gavin’s moving van in plain sight. The remnants of the fire from the previous night were dead. The truck’s stacks were still. John had always thought semis idled when truckers were in them overnight. Ed never looked at the truck stop, even when he turned his head to make sure John was still following him, and soon the truck stop was masked by the concrete and snow of the hill of

149 the overpass, and Wal-Mart loomed ahead.

150 CHAPTER 29

Sam looked up from the open bible and out through the passenger window. Two people walked down the side road toward Highway 71. One had a roll; the other, a large bag hanging from a shoulder strap. It was John and Ed. Sam milked the maroon silk ribbon out from the bible’s headband, draped it flush through the open pages’ gutter, and closed the bible, watching John and Ed walk past the highway’s on ramp and toward the gap beneath the overpass. Sam wondered why they hadn’t come back to the truck instead. They had a ride, if they really wanted it. John seemed to want to accept Sam’s offer. Sam hoped he did, more than just because they needed help unloading. They could always hire a lumper or two—their original plan. But Sam didn’t like the idea of Ed in the truck. If they come back, Sam thought, Ed can ride in the trailer. There’s room left in the trailer on this run, and Gavin likes to ride back there most times anyway. Gavin can keep an eye on Ed alright. I feel okay about John being up here, in the passenger seat. Not in the sleeper, though. John and Ed disappeared beneath the overpass, and Sam thought, Why can’t Ed go on down his own road sooner instead of later? That would solve a lot. After watching the empty spot beneath the overpass for another minute, Sam opened the bible at the ribbon again, but not one verse seemed familiar. It were as if it’d been weeks rather than only seconds since Sam had last read those passages.

151 CHAPTER 30

It annoyed John that the Super Wal-Mart people looked at him and Ed as if they were derelicts. Yes, John and Ed carried their homes with them, like snails or hermit crabs, and yes, even with the freezing cold John and Ed had walked through, they had sweated and raised odors that most people wash off and cover up at least daily, a kind of sweat that many people try never to raise. John suspected he smelled like campfire and Cecil’s cigarettes, too. But neither John nor Ed carried a cardboard sign that said anything, and John had a home, sort of. He was between homes. It wasn’t as if he were permanently outdoors, or begging for help. Just three days before, he had been manager of one of Denver’s most prestigious bars. The jumped-to conclusions that John saw in people’s eyes turned his annoyance to anger. But John wasn’t at Wal-Mart to convince people of anything. He was there to check his bank account, to pick out pancake ingredients for Ed, and maybe—hopefully—to hurry back to Sam and Gavin and his ride south. John had seen two pay phones hanging on one wall within Wal-Mart’s conference room– sized vestibule, and John kept thinking that he really should call Pamela, collect or not, at least to let her know he was coming. He kept thinking, too, about finding out if this town had a Greyhound station. But calling collect still bothered him, and he’d have to leave Sam behind if he were going to catch a bus. Ed kept glancing at John, as if he expected John to attempt to escape, and John thought, Yeah, right, I’m going to shove Ed into a display of Harry Potter books and run for my life past the blue-vested, white-haired greeter, maybe hide behind the row of newspaper stands and Apartment Finder racks out front. In the warm air, John noticed Ed’s smell again, though the onioniness seemed to have weakened. That worried John, because he knew the most likely reason he didn’t smell much of that part of Ed’s foulness anymore was because he himself had begun to smell oniony, too. The heat felt great, but John’s legs ached and grew weak as they warmed, as if they had forgotten yesterday’s fatigue and pain during the numbness of the night. He felt the push of a

152 blister between his little toe and the next one, and hot spots on the balls of his feet where more blisters were about to form. The backs of his heels were raw where the tops of the backs of his loafers had rubbed him even through his three layers of socks. His socks felt filthy, looser and thinner, and his loafers seemed to have stretched out. He thought, I should rotate my socks when I get a chance, put the innermost pair outside the other two now. I should wash them all soon. The ATM was near the entrance, by the optician’s cul-de-sac, three walls of eyeglasses staring at everyone who came near. Ed hadn’t gone near the ATM, or even noticed it, as far as John could tell. John didn’t know whether Ed would object to John’s checking his account. Probably he would, but who was Ed to stop John? It wasn’t as if Ed was John’s father, or a police officer escorting a prisoner or anything. The only obligation John had to Ed was his word on that silly pancake, and the more John hung around in Wal-Mart, around normal people going about normal everyday business, the more that pancake deal seemed inane. Ed seemed to revel in the strange reprimanding sort of civil inattention people gave them. As soon as Ed and John reached the produce section, Ed walked right up to a gray-haired woman, nearly brushing her coat sleeve, he was so close, and asked her too loudly, “You seen any fresh blueberries?” The woman swallowed audibly, said, “No,” and immediately pushed her cart over the floor mats and shiny rubber tiles, over a tiny piece of wilted lettuce and past a flake of onion skin that seemed to animate itself and flee from her cart’s wheel just in time to avoid being crushed. She disappeared around an end cap stuffed with fruitcakes. Ed shrugged and grinned at John. “No blueberries,” he said. John swallowed, too, but he didn’t have a cart, and he didn’t go scooting away. John did not stare at anyone. He did not approach anyone. He never even once put a fist on his hip or crossed his arms or did anything that might hint at anything other than deference. But some people still frowned, giving their noses the slightest scrunch and their eyes a hint of a squint, and the produce Super Wal-Mart associate began to hover nearby, maybe thinking that John planned to fill his gym bag full of hothouse tomatoes or carrots with the stalks still on. John looked at the ATM again and decided to give it a try. Ed didn’t follow him until John rounded the magazines and books, and even then, Ed didn’t follow very determinedly. He simply wandered over, much like he had done to the gray-haired woman in the produce section.

153 John pulled out his wallet and then his debit card and slid it into the machine’s slot. He waited for the machine to “retrieve” his “personal settings,” selected “English,” and entered his PIN. John wondered what his “personal settings” could possibly be if they didn’t include something as basic as the only language he’d ever known. John sensed Ed’s stopping immediately behind him, and he wondered how he had known that without turning around. He didn’t want to believe in magic of any sort anymore, even sixth sense. He wanted to analyze what had just happened, to see what magic was really made of. He recalled the lighting coming over his shoulder darkening ever so slightly when Ed had approached, recalled that sounds had become just barely muffled from that quarter, that his nostrils had picked up the faintest hint of Ed’s oniony smell, that bit of onioniness that was still stronger than John’s own. All the clues were so subtle that John knew he would not have noticed them had he not made a conscious effort at it. He felt justified in his hunch that sixth sense was really nothing more than subtler aspects of the other five senses, that there really was no human instinct at all, or magic of any kind. The ATM’s screen darkened as it changed graphics. John saw Ed’s reflection just above and behind his own, and John smiled at how right he’d been. He’d even known which shoulder Ed was looking over. “Well?” Ed said, right next to John’s ear, his breath brushing the side of John’s neck. John read the screen. “I have two-sixty in my account.” “Two hundred and sixty dollars isn’t bad.” Though Ed had said more, his breath touched John less. His volume had dropped, the tone darker somehow, less hopeful. “Why didn’t your card work at that restaurant, then?” “Not two hundred and sixty dollars,” John said, “two dollars and sixty cents.” “Really?” Ed said, and John felt Ed’s breath more that time, like the final exhalation of a power lifter who’d just finished a difficult press. Then John remembered the tiny version of his debit card in the desk drawer, next to Billie’s spare keys to God-knows-what and her paper clips and thumb tacks—though Billie never used paper and didn’t have a bulletin board that John knew of. The image of the card just popped into John’s head out of nowhere. “The little key chain debit card,” John said to himself. “Billie must have withdrawn everything.”

154 John could see the circular little hole in the miniature card’s bottom left corner, still laminated over and reflecting the desk lamp’s light. He had never had a reason to puncture the hole’s lamination or to put the thing on his key chain. “Who’s Billie?” Ed asked. “Why would he do that?” John hadn’t realized that he had never mentioned Billie to Ed. He wondered why had he never told Ed about the person his instincts had told him was going to be his one great love, the person his instincts couldn’t have been more wrong about. “Billie’s a she, my ex-girlfriend.” “Ohhhh,” Ed said with that rising, then falling, drawn-out now-I-understand pitch. “You left her a debit card,” he said. “That was stupid.” John wished he had studied her presence at that casino like he had Ed’s presence just now. Maybe he would have seen the trickery his senses were up to then, too, could have dissected what he had so quickly attributed to something beyond physical perception. He felt deceived. He had forgotten that pond dream for years, and then it had tricked him. He had tricked himself. Ed asked, “Doesn’t she need a PIN for that?” “I told it to her once, so she could make a deposit for me.” John hit the Cancel button, and the ATM stuck his card out like a tongue. Ed said over the ATM’s constant beeping, “This Billie’s got one hell of a memory. She should be a scientist or a spy or something.” “My PIN spells ‘cash.’” John yanked his card from the ATM, muting its annoying beeping. “Ah. Well, now I know it, too,” Ed said. “That’s not very bright.” “You’re welcome to it, and the whole two dollars and sixty cents.” John bent his debit card in half and dropped it in the trash. “Look, man,” Ed said, “two dollars and sixty cents is two dollars and sixty cents. Don’t waste anything.” John glared at Ed. “You’re a fine one to say that, with pecans all over the place, more than we could ever eat or carry, and you’re fixated on sugar-soaked blueberries in a can.” Ed said, “If you bring up those pecans one more time, I’m going to . . .” Ed looked around, at all the people or the lighting, the produce section—John couldn’t tell.

155 John asked, “You’re going to what? You’re going to pull out Cecil’s pistol and shoot me?” “Calm down,” Ed said. “Be quiet.” “Suppose I tell the security guard that you’re packing.” Ed scoffed a phlegmatic growl and looked around. “Security guards are a joke. He’d probably piss those way-too-big pants.” Ed stared at John. “We had a deal.” “I’m calling my sister.” Ed leaned close and said again, “We had a deal.” “The deal’s over. I’m done.” Ed’s lips pursed. His breaths came and went in tiny huffs through his nostrils, the sides of his nostrils flaring and then almost closing in quick successions. His left hand searched his parka in front of his hip and, with the parka still zipped, latched onto the cloth over the knife’s hilt or the pistol’s grip, John couldn’t tell which. Ed’s grip squeezed and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed. John didn’t think Ed would do anything in the middle of Wal-Mart, but still, Ed was almost hyperventilating, and John took one full step back, right into the ATM. John said, “Sorry, Ed, but this whole situation stinks, and I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.” “Call her,” Ed said. John walked toward the entrance and the pay phone, keeping an eye on Ed as he went. Ed followed him. The Super Wal-Mart associate that tailed them now was one in a red vest instead of blue. The produce associate had gone back to his department. John stopped at the pay phone, picked up the receiver, briskly wiped the two little discs full of holes on his pants leg until he felt comfortable putting them to his ear and mouth, and dialed 0. Ed watched him, and the red-vested Super Wal-Mart associate watched them both. The white-haired greeter kept rolling carts to incoming customers but watched the entire entourage as he did so. The gray-haired woman Ed had semiassaulted in the produce department walked toward the whole group on her way from the registers to the doors and stopped in her tracks when she saw Ed. The muscles in her face worked like she were grinding wheat between her molars. A voice on the phone said, “Operator.”

156 “Hi,” John said into the receiver. “I need to make a collect call.” The phone switched to a recording, and John dialed Pamela’s number and then told the recording, “John.” He couldn’t believe he was doing this. He couldn’t believe Ed wouldn’t leave. No one would leave. No one but the greeter moved, and that was only to continue shuffling new shoppers and their convoy of carts around the gray-haired woman. After four rings, a recording said, “Your party is not answering. Please try again later,” and John heard a dial tone again. John thought, Four rings? That’s all I get, after all this? Four lousy rings? He hung up, and Ed smiled, but no one but John could see the smile. John thought, I could just sit down and dial again in five minutes, or an hour, or half a day, but I can’t call too late. Pamela and Kevin will be busy with prep work, and then lunch, and then dinner, and then cleaning everything up, and sleeping the few hours restaurant work allows, and then prepping all over again. But then John wondered, What if they’re not in at all? What if they’re on vacation or something, or have sold the café and moved, if the number is now someone else’s? John wondered if Ed would stand there the entire time, if the Wal-Mart associate would, if the greeter would. John didn’t want to be alone with Ed again. Ed would drag John off into the woods and kill him, and no one would find his body for years. He knew it. He imagined a badly distorted clay mockup of his face on television, with his chin and cheekbones too prominent, with no lines around his mouth, and the only name they would have to change would be his last one, from Smith to Doe. And then add a number. Finally, the gray-haired woman turned and walked through the doors as if something had changed and she were satisfied, as if she had won some huge battle, though nothing had changed. The greeter watched his customers more and Ed and John less, and the red-vested associate crossed his arms and let his shoulders relax. For some reason, everyone seemed to think that everything was suddenly all better. John wanted to scream, Nothing’s changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Doesn’t anyone see that? “Look,” Ed said finally, “do what you need to, but I’m going back into Wal-Mart and finding blueberries that aren’t in a can, and I’m refilling my canteen, and maybe taking a shit in

157 that nice clean bathroom of theirs. You decide if you want to be someone who breaks his word, or if maybe you want to be someone with some sort of worth. I don’t care if you’re here or not when I get back. I’m heading on down that road. Follow me if you want. Make pancakes if you want. At least you’ll be useful to someone. Otherwise, you might as well stand here and rot next to that phone.” Ed turned and strutted back inside. The red-vested associate glanced back and forth between Ed and John, as if unsure of which one to keep in sight, and then trotted after Ed. His instincts are right, John thought. I think. I hope. Pamela didn’t answer on the second try. John took a break from the phone and filled his bottles at the water fountain near the bathrooms, then tried the phone a third time. Still, no answer. Maybe there is magic, John thought. Maybe Pamela isn’t supposed to answer. John turned and walked away from the Wal-Mart and Ed and straight for the overpass and the truck stop on its other side. He had almost made it out from beneath the overpass’s other side by the time Ed, panting and wheezing, came trotting up next to him. Ed’s blanket roll bulged more than ever, like a python that had swallowed a wild pig. “I . . .” Ed panted. “. . . guess I can . . . put up with you for a while yet.” He pointed his shark-fin-shaped mitten at John. “But you make pancakes . . . That’s the deal, whether you want that bus ticket anymore . . . or not.” John turned and walked toward the truck stop, sensing Ed’s presence behind him. He was annoyed with the whole pancake thing. All he cared about now was getting to Pamela’s, and making sure that the moving van didn’t leave without him, and maybe trying to figure out what exactly had happened between him and Sam the night before.

158 CHAPTER 31

Gavin climbed into the hammock and got comfortable on his back, his feet crossed, his hands clasped behind his head and his elbows out to the sides, but with his head canted to the side so that he could watch Ed. The hammock’s netting reached up past Gavin’s body on both sides so that he looked through its mesh at Ed. It looked like Gavin were wrapped up for shipping himself. Ed crawled into the trailer, too, but John stayed outside next to Sam. Sam had put Ed’s pancake ingredients up in the cab, in the tiny curtained cupboard and the tiny fridge, but Ed had kept his roll with him. He laid it on the floor next to the forward two- by-four-and-plywood bulkhead catty-cornered from Gavin’s hammock and sat on the floor leaning against the bulkhead. Sam closed and latched the doors, and Ed, Gavin, and the few piles of their belongings were engulfed in complete darkness. Inside, not a crack of light showed anywhere, not even from around the doors. Then light pierced the darkness. Gavin drew his hand back from the electric lantern hanging from a shiny hook in one of the two-by-fours and returned his arm to its earlier position. After the complete darkness, the little light cast by the lantern seemed bright. The shadows it left were stark. A huge section of the trailer behind Gavin was lost in his shadow, except for dim highlights on the mass in that corner that was the folded wooden chairs and Gavin’s rolled-up bedding and pillow. Gavin’s clothes held a diamond-shaped crosshatch of hammock-string shadows on their brighter stretches, and deep, dark shadows ran behind his clothes’ long wrinkles. Gavin’s hammer hung behind him on the plywood wall, within his reach, on a pair of nails bent upward like hooks. Its silvery head gleamed brighter than even the highlights of his gray white hair. Gavin’s eyes glistened, unblinking, watching Ed, who sat starkly lit with a tiny pool of that oily blackness of earlier surviving right behind him. The truck started and vibrated the trailer floor. Ed said, “Isn’t it illegal to carry people inside a moving trailer?” “Not if they have a way out.”

159 Ed looked at the closed doors, nothing now but large, dull-metal panels edged with a rubber seal. “I don’t see any handle.” “I can always get out.” The truck jerked forward and swung Gavin in the hammock. Ed said, “Is there another door?” “We can’t get to it, but believe me, if it came to it, I could get out.” “As long as all that stuff back there doesn’t come barreling down on our asses in an accident.” Gavin laughed faint and guttural. “I packed it. You trying to insult me?” “No. I just figured it might be tough to pack a car or a piano well enough for it not to come crashing through a little plywood in the event we go from seventy to zero in two seconds.” “Sam’s been driving eight years. Nine hundred thousand miles. Never even close to an accident. And I been packing and moving stuff for thirty. Never had a load shift yet.” “Years or miles?” “What?” “You’ve been packing for thirty years or thirty miles?” Gavin turned his face toward the ceiling and laughed long and loud. He finally stopped laughing and said, “Thirty miles? You crack me up.” “You didn’t specify, is all.” Gavin stared back at Ed through the hammock’s mesh of lines. “What you think, we loaded this stuff up in Nevada?” He said it like “Nuh-vay-da.” “Las Vegas?” “No. Nevada, Missouri.” Nuh-vay-da Mah-zur-uh. “Thirty miles back. Isn’t that the direction you just come from?” “We came from Great Scott, or something like that.” Ed snickered. “You don’t know as much as you pretend to.” “You’re the one who wanted a ride. Quit complaining. If we smash into something or roll off a bridge, just stick behind me. I’ll lead you outa this trailer, okay? You’re like a scared little boy, aren’t you?” Ed glared at Gavin. He chewed the inside of his lip and exhaled hard once. Then he breathed hard three more times.

160 Gavin said, “You seem to take jests pretty personal. Taking everything that serious can lead to trouble, you know?” “Maybe you shouldn’t joke about things like that. That can lead to trouble, too.” Gavin blew out a deep breath, annoyed. Ed adjusted his roll so that it padded the small of his back and allowed him to lean back as if in an easy chair. He pulled out his father’s drawing, unfolded it, and studied it. Gavin asked, “What’s that, a treasure map?” Ed kept his eyes on the drawing. “I never thought of it that way before, but I guess it could be.” “Let me see.” Ed glanced at Gavin. Gavin seemed serious. “Okay,” Ed said. He crossed the short distance and held the drawing out. “What do you think?” Gavin rolled fully onto his back in the hammock and held the drawing up so that it caught the lantern light. “A skull is a treasure map?” he asked. “We’ll all get there eventually.” “Sure, but ‘treasure’?” Gavin studied the rest of the drawing. He thumbed the web of Scotch tape that held the corner together and onto the main part of the drawing. “What happened here?” he asked. “Looks like your dog tried to eat your homework.” Ed swallowed. “Tried. Got it back, though. What do you think of the drawing?” “Looks skillful enough, but I wouldn’t buy it.” Ed’s lips rolled inside his mouth. He squinted at Gavin. Gavin looked back at Ed. “But I’m no artist, right? I don’t know about those things.” “That’s right. You don’t,” Ed said and took the drawing. “This is a masterpiece.” “Well, I’d keep it away from dogs, then.” Gavin clasped his hands behind his head again. “Don’t go messing with any of these braces or anything.” He pointed randomly at the wood and shadows. “I’m going to get some shut eye. You mess with anything, and I’ll have to kick your ass.”

161 “Sure. You do that, old man, weak heart and all.” Ed folded the drawing up again, pressing the taped part flat between the other parts of the fold. He tucked the drawing back into his parka and lay down with his head and upper shoulders on his blanket roll. He snugged down his ball cap and folded his arms across his chest. Gavin reached out and turned off the lantern, and Ed lay and waited.

* * *

The semi crawled along a little two-lane highway that climbed a long hill in northwest Arkansas, the semi slowing due to the incline, the growling engine winding down from the strain. Sam released the accelerator, popped the shift lever out of gear, revved the engine in one quick burp, and shifted into a lower gear, all in less than a second. Just inside the sleeper, a small mesh net hung from the ceiling, stuffed full of apples, oranges, a head of garlic, and a half loaf of whole- wheat bread, the net and all its contents swaying from the shifts in the truck’s momentum. They drove through a sparse town of seemingly haphazardly placed buildings, most of which looked like small houses but with business signs out front. Stretches of thick woods stood anywhere the buildings didn’t. A drop-off hung on one side of the road, then swapped to the other, the buildings and woods cropping up on whichever side the drop-off wasn’t, the almost junglelike land continuing to rise behind the buildings. And still the road rose. John asked, “You don’t use your clutch?” Sam said, “Don’t have to. You get the RPMs of the engine to match the RPMs of the gear you want, and the two fit together perfectly.” The incline grew steeper; the road’s turns, sharper. Whenever the road twisted right, Sam kept the driver’s side of the tractor close to the yellow center line, and the trailer followed almost off the right edge of the road. Whenever the road twisted left, Sam kept John’s side of the tractor one inch from the line at the road’s edge and the drop-off, and John imagined the trailer’s other side tracking on the yellow center line. Cars going the opposite direction whipped past. The engine whined low again, and again in less than a second, Sam released the accelerator, popped the shift lever out of gear, burped the engine, and slid the lever into the next- lower gear. They kept climbing the hill, left, right, left, right, Sam dropping gears, steering smoothly with only fingertips on the wheel.

162 “Rather than pitting the engine against the road,” Sam said, “you put them in sync. Then you don’t need a clutch. Each gear turns differently based on your road speed.” “You have it all memorized?” “You do it enough, it becomes instinct. You don’t have to look at the speedometer or tach. I can tell by ear, and by timing.” Sam dropped another gear, this time also flipping down the little lever on front of the gear knob, which made the light thock and tiny, high-pitched kiss of air John had gotten to know in Cecil’s truck. John asked, “Why not just use the clutch?” “They wear out too fast, as many times as trucks shift gears. Besides, floating gears is faster and gets better mileage. Better for the clutch, better for my fuel costs, better for the environment. And it’s a nice feeling knowing that your timing’s so good that you don’t need a clutch.” Sam turned one hand in the air like a Buddhist demonstrating breathing techniques. “It’s proactive, yet passive. A nice balance.” John liked the grace of Sam’s arm and hand twirling in the air. He imagined Sam dancing, and the thought was almost more than he could bear. He wondered what kinds of music Sam liked. The truck had a CD player, but John couldn’t see any CDs anywhere. A black band of mesh lined the underside of Sam’s raised windshield visor, and John imagined the band’s hidden top side stuffed with CDs. Perhaps Sam had other CDs stored elsewhere. Sam dropped another gear. John said, “Cooking’s like that, knowing just how much olive oil to pour into a sauté pan, when it’s warm enough to sweat garlic, if that’s what you want, and knowing when it’s hot enough to sauté instead, if that’s what you want. I always knew when roasting red peppers or Roma tomatoes were done in the oven, too, never needed a timer. It was like a buzzer went off in my head.” Talking about food made John’s stomach growl. He hadn’t eaten any pancakes, hadn’t eaten anything since the can of beans the night before. He wanted another hot meal, something satisfying. They topped the hill, and the semi sped up. Sam’s fingertips touched the front face of the shift lever, thumb sticking out like a tea-sipping old lady’s pinky. Sam let off the accelerator, pulled the shifter into neutral, let the engine’s RPMs fall for half a second, and slid the shifter into

163 the next higher gear with a gentle rearward push, no revving, no popping of gears. The downhill gear shifts were quiet and gentle, and the truck accelerated smoothly. Soon they were at the bottom of the last hill in that stretch, and Sam, John, and the truck left the woods and the drop-offs behind. The road straightened out across a flatter section of land thick with beaten-down brown stalks, remnants of some harvested crop. Snow lined only the shadowy recesses on the northern faces of the plowed furrows in the fields; in the nooks and crannies at the bases of fence posts and the occasional bare tree; and on the northern slopes of sporadic fills in the ditches, around the gaping ditch-pipe ends beneath the mouths of farm roads that connected with the highway. A more significant town showed itself on the horizon, at the next wood line. Sam said, “I think more people would consider cooking an art than would truck driving.” “Not me, not after my last truck ride.” Sam slipped the shift lever into the next gear and leveled off their speed on the straightaway. “Bad, huh?” John looked beneath the gently swinging tiny hammock of fruit and into the sleeper. Everything seemed orderly, clean. The bunk was tightly made. Sam had a microwave, a tiny television, a small open closet full of clothes on hangers. John looked at the shelf of books again. One of the spines read, “Louis L’Amour,” something about Sackett; another, The Great Gatsby; a third, Romeo and Juliet. The bible stood out tall and thick with gold-embossed lettering. John didn’t have to angle his head to read that one. John wanted one of Sam’s oranges, or just a slice of bread. He could see himself peeling the orange and folding it back in half and the mist of sticky juice scattering in the morning sunlight. John asked, “You mind me asking you a personal question, Sam?” “Depends on the question.” “Are you and Gavin . . .” Sam looked at John with feigned innocence. “Are we what?” John clenched his jaws and looked at the approaching town. Then he turned back. Sam was watching the road again. John said, “Do you . . .” “Gavin and I are not lovers, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

164 Sam seemed disappointed. John chewed his lip. “You’re not wearing a ring, so . . .” Sam turned, eyes peering from beneath lowered, thin brows in mocked sultriness. “Are you making a pass at me, John?” “No.” John stared straight ahead. Sam began down-shifting for the reduced speed limit of the town’s outer limits. John wondered why he hadn’t answered “Yes.” He wondered what he might have just turned away from. He felt a huge tightness in his chest, like a balloon had inflated deep inside and was about to burst. The balloon’s top edge pressed against the bottom of John’s throat and made him swallow and swallow. It made breathing hard. John couldn’t keep his eyes off Sam. The thought of holding Sam tight excited John so that his ears buzzed like cicadas and the muscles up the back of his neck and head tightened until they pulled his ears up and back in one half of a wiggle. The skin back there tingled, and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. It felt like they were waving, crawling animatedly, as if brought to life by some medieval enchanter. John felt drawn to Sam and held back at the same time, and he didn’t know which was the honest pull, the one from his heart, and which was fake, from his head, but each pull seemed infinitely strong and imprisoned him between them so absolutely in check, so paralyzed and at the same time achingly jittery, that he felt he were being rent to shreds, and he almost cried. All he could seem to find the strength to do was ask, “What kind of music do you like?” Sam swallowed and said, “Any that touches my soul.” John wondered how he could back up and start over, how he could get Sam to ask again whether John were making a pass, how he could forget the resistance he felt and just let loose with his feelings. John asked, “You don’t like one type over another?” “There are no real boundaries between types. So much falls between.” Sam stared at John. “All that matters is the soul of the music.” Sam turned back to the road. “People who categorize anything push it toward falsehood. Don’t you think?” John swallowed again. The balloon in his chest filled more. His tingling scalp pulled his ears up again. “Of course,” John said, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. He wanted to say something

165 as true as Sam had, but he had that damned overinflated balloon to work around, and all his lungs and lips seemed able to squeeze out around it was “Do you dance?” “We should listen to music,” Sam said. And John thought, What a fix I’m in now. He nodded vigorously, and he found himself dry-mouthed with anticipation. He couldn’t keep his mouth closed, he was breathing so hard. Sam reached up, pulled the visor down just shy of where John would have been able to see its top, slid a CD out of one of the pockets, and stuck its edge into the player. The player turned itself on, plucked the CD from Sam’s hand, and slowly drew it all the way in.

* * *

Ed’s eyes never adjusted to the darkness in the trailer to where he could see anything. He had never seen such complete blackness, not at night in his and Marcus’s room in the trailer court listening to trains while Marcus slept; not in Ranger School, on moonless night patrols deep down at the bottoms of draws at the bottoms of overgrown tangled, leafy thickets beneath thickly overgrown canopies of eighty-foot-thick upper terraces; not even after he had rocked, rocked, rocked, and pulled that trigger. Ed heard occasional creaks, what he figured was Gavin’s hammock swaying from its two big metal hooks in the thicker parts of the wood. The creaks coincided with the truck’s shifts in gears, with the shifts in the momentum baffled by the weight and size of the truck itself. Ed kept waiting to see something, anything, but he never did, so he imagined the truck’s interior instead. In his mind, he saw Gavin hanging in the hammock exactly where and how Ed had last seen him. Ed imagined the exact distance, that distance he had already crossed twice and could imagine himself crossing easily again. He stood and almost lost his balance. The floor was sloped, the truck climbing a hill. Ed tested his footing in the dark, a black so complete that, two minutes after he had stabilized his stance, he began to doubt that his feet even rested on the floor. Then the truck dropped another gear, the blackness ahead of him creaked again, and he felt the floor try to shift beneath him. Once the truck’s rhythm settled again, Ed took one baby step, quickly but carefully setting his boot sole to the wooden floor to keep his balance while trying not to press too much weight

166 down too suddenly. If his weight made the floor creak, Gavin would know. Ed could sense the floor when he stepped. It was standing still that disoriented him. What if Gavin’s faking it? Ed thought. What if he’s really awake? Ed leaned his weight on his forward foot. The floor didn’t creak. He waited to hear the hammock’s strain on its hooks again. The truck shifted gears, Ed spread his arms to keep his balance, and the hammock creaked again. Was it the wood creaking at the pull of the hooks’ toothy threads, or was it the hammock itself pulling cords into tighter twists? Both? No. It was one creak, not several. Doesn’t matter, Ed thought. He took another step and felt the floor solidly beneath his sole. He imagined the hammock as it had looked just before Gavin had turned out the light, the mesh netting reaching up around Gavin on both sides. Ed could grab the netting above Gavin, close the mesh in over him. Gavin wouldn’t be able to get his arms out then, couldn’t reach his hammer or Ed. One hand to clasp the hammock shut, and one to find his throat. No, Ed thought. Too iffy. Too time-consuming. Should just grab his throat with both hands and strangle the fuck out of him fast. He nodded to himself and took another step. Ed visualized himself standing at the head of the hammock, of Gavin struggling and falling mostly from the hammock while his head tangled up in it, locked inside by Ed’s hands. It had to look like a heart attack—or aneurysm, stroke, whatever, but no bleeding holes. If Gavin didn’t tangle himself in the hammock struggling, Ed would tangle his head in it afterward and let him hang there, to excuse any neck bruises. By the time anyone did an autopsy, Ed figured, he would have John far away. Ed kept took a step closer. The truck shifted gears again, and Ed heard the next creak. An empty hammock wouldn’t creak like that. Did Gavin have his hammer already with him? Were his arms folded beneath his head? Was Gavin’s night vision better than Ed’s? No, Ed thought. No human could possibly see in blackness that complete. Ed stepped again. He was almost within arm’s reach. He knew it. He raised his hands toward the hammock. He would have to move quickly, violently. He tried to spread his bandaged hand’s fingers and thumb wide, but they didn’t move. Every muscle in his hand quaked. He could feel how weak his fingers were, how the strength of

167 each muscle betrayed him and fled from the pain. Damn it. He had to will them into being strong. Why wouldn’t they obey? Rebellious damned muscles and bones. His fingers and thumb barely moved before shuddering again. It was no use. He wouldn’t be able to use both hands, and one wouldn’t be enough. Gavin wasn’t that art dealer, or Cassandra, or Hawking. Gavin would stare you right in the eyes. That art dealer had turned away. Cassandra had looked at her feet and her kitchen’s linoleum floor. Even Hawking had dropped his gaze. But when Gavin turned his eyes, it was like Hannibal pulling back to draw the Romans in and envelop them at Cannae, or like the Greeks crawling into that platoon-sized belly of their wooden horse. This one would turn and fight instead of panicking and trying to get away. The truck leveled off then, and the hammock creaked right in front of Ed. Ed could hear Gavin breathing deeply. He could feel the heat from Gavin’s body. He could smell the sweat, the old-man smell—denture adhesive; that was the smell. The breaths sounded like those of sleep, but Ed couldn’t be sure enough for only one hand. What if he missed Gavin’s throat on the first lunge? No, he thought. Wait. There will be another chance, more of a sure thing, after enough whiskey to deaden this hand into obedience. Watch Gavin long enough to figure out his decoys and feints, and get more whiskey. The truck sloped nose-down then, and Ed crept back to his side of the compartment. The downhill gear shifts were so gentle that nothing upset Ed’s balance on his way back to his spot, and Gavin’s hammock no longer creaked. Ed stopped shy of where he visualized his roll next to the wall. He reached his right boot’s toe out to where he thought his roll lay, and viola, his boot touched the roll almost at the exact spot where he’d expected. He could have done Gavin, ruse or no ruse. He knew he had the distance figured out. He could smell Gavin’s denture adhesive, for crying out loud. Why had he stopped? Ed thought then maybe he was a scared little boy, and he caught himself tapping his boot against his roll a fourth time, a fifth, a sixth. He counted to sixteen, stopped his foot, swallowed, turned, and sat down against the roll in a plop. He had wanted a seventeenth tap. His boot toe had ached for that, had almost gone on and tapped a seventeenth time on its own. Saliva pooled in Ed’s mouth, and his right leg felt jittery. He let it kick out into the dark, felt and heard the heel thump on the floor, and he kicked again,

168 and thumped, and thumped, and thumped, and then he heard a single violin’s melody from up in the cab, a tune more tumultuous that any violin string seemed capable of bearing.

169 CHAPTER 32

Ed saw red orange and realized that his lids were closed, that he had fallen asleep. He opened his eyes. Gavin had turned the lantern on and was lying on his side in the hammock watching Ed. The truck had stopped, and the engine was no longer running. That was stupid, Ed thought. Weak. He heard and felt one of the cab doors slam shut, then the other. “What’s going on?” Ed asked. “We’ve stopped.” “No shit.” Gavin said flatly, “Truck stop. We’re fueling up.” He looked at his watch. “Lunch, too, I’d guess.” Ed heard the latch to the big side doors rattle and clunk, and one of the doors swung open wide. Blinding light blasted in, and Ed felt like a vampire that had been thrust into searing, consuming daylight. He peered between squinting lids, in the shadow of his outstretched hand. John stood with Sam outside the truck. Sam’s watch cap was gone now. Sam said, “Anyone want to get out before I park?” A fairly wide one-story building stood three car lengths away. Ed heard liquid pouring into a hollow metallic container, a faint dinging. He smelled diesel, and suddenly he was back at Fort Riley fueling a Bradley, right next to the sand-painted armor. He smelled his own starchy, heavy- canvas fatigues mixed with the odor of diesel, and he could swear he felt dog tags in the hollow of his chest and the beaded chain pulling a hair on the back of his neck. Then he was back in the truck at the truck stop again, and he shivered. “I’m taking a piss,” he said and climbed out. Gavin squatted at the edge of the trailer’s doorway until his butt touched his ankles and then half jumped, half stepped out in a way that looked like a gurney unfolding its legs while being pulled from an ambulance. The sky was crisp blue, without even a wisp of a cloud, and the air was cold, but not

170 nearly as cold as Missouri had been. The only paved areas were one swath immediately along the front of the truck stop’s building and a pad around the unsheltered fuel pumps. The parking lot beyond that was gravel and dirt. The woods beyond even that, far away, were a sudden, thick wall of tall pines, oak, and a few bare trees too far away to identify. Ed did see the peeling bark of a pair of Sycamores. The interstate was higher than the truck stop, spanning two manmade hills at either end. Bright green grass grew newly cut, thick, and complete all the way from the interstate’s shoulder to the service road at the edge of the truck stop’s lot. Only patches of snow lay in the deepest shadows here and there. The sun, almost immediately overhead, lit up the exposed grass like the carefully manicured lawn of Irwin Army Hospital. Ed shivered again. The sun felt good in the crisp air, but Ed wanted to get inside and away from the smell of diesel and all that grass that looked like his hospital’s.

* * *

They parked with the tail end of the trailer butted up against the wood line and its shadowy tendrils of snow, the truck’s nose pointing toward the truck stop’s building half a football field away. Sam had left enough room between the door side of the trailer and the next truck’s trailer to allow the large side doors to swing all the way open and for them to set up the two folding wooden chairs in a half circle facing the open trailer. The sun shined down into the space between the trailers. John sat on the floor of the trailer’s opening, his feet dangling above sparse gravel being overtaken by grass—or perhaps grass that had been spread with a first assault of gravel. Gavin sat in one of the wooden chairs, and Ed sat in the other. Sam climbed out of the cab holding a half-bulging brown paper bag by its twine handles. Sam stared for a second at Ed in the folding chair and then sat on the trailer’s floor’s edge next to John and set the paper bag between them. One by one, Sam pulled out four sandwiches, each half- wrapped in a paper towel, and handed three of them out. Gavin said, “Thanks, Sam.” Ed took a huge bite from his and swallowed almost without chewing. “Yeah, thanks,” John said. Edges of thinly sliced turkey jutted from between slices of whole wheat bread. It was real

171 breast meat, almost white and with clearly visible crosscut striations of muscle tissue. Sam took a bite and chewed. While swallowing, Sam pulled a Christmas card–sized receipt out of one pocket and held it out to John. “Here’s a shower ticket, if you want it.” John took the receipt. It was large but printed on flimsy white paper with a yellow duplicate attached beneath by a pair of perforated strips for a tooth-fed printer. Sam said, “Bring that to the fuel cashier’s desk and ask for a shower. They’ll give you a towel and a little bar of soap and a key to one of their showers.” “I smell that bad, huh?” Sam snickered. “No. But you’ve been on the road a while, right? I just figured you might want a shower.” Sam glanced at Ed. “Ed can have the next one.” John asked, “It’s, like, a separate room?” “With a shower stall and a sink with a mirror and all that, and a toilet.” Sam nodded toward the building. “This truck stop’s showers are pretty clean.” John bit into his own sandwich, fresh tomato gushing and lettuce crunching. The turkey was smoked. He tasted sharp cheddar. Juice from the breast meat and the tomato pooled around his teeth, and he swallowed that while still chewing the solid part of the bite. The juices ran down the full length of his tongue and made him hungrier, and he quickly swallowed and took a second bite. Ed took a fourth bite of his sandwich, still swallowing almost without chewing, and said, “We could share that shower ticket, John.” John shook his head. “I’m not showering with you, Ed.” Ed’s eyes rolled. “I don’t mean at the same time, man. You shower, then give me the key, that sort of thing.” Sam said, “You’re not supposed to do that, but there didn’t seem to be a line or anything.” Ed nodded firmly once, took a fifth huge bite of his sandwich, and then turned to Gavin, “What’d you do before loading trucks, Gavin? You’re pretty old, and you said you’ve only done this thirty years. What job did you have the thirty years before that?” “Hah!” Gavin reared his head back, then looked at Ed, still shaking with laughter. “I’m not that old.”

172 “What’d you do? Were you a soldier? You seem like a soldier type.” “That’s even funnier,” Gavin said. “I was a janitor.” Ed blinked. His face was otherwise expressionless. Gavin said, “I didn’t shoot people. I cleaned up their shit. I worked nights, emptying bathroom-stall used-tampon canisters, restocking toilet paper, scrubbing splatters from people’s popped zits off mirrors, mopping up spilled coffee in break rooms, stuff like that.” John nodded. Gavin said, “I had a manager one time who changed my title to ‘custodial engineer,’ but I was still a janitor.” He took another bite and chewed slowly, one dozen, then two dozen times. “If that manager had really wanted to give my self-esteem a boost,” he said after swallowing, “he’d have given me a raise, or just said that I did a good job, you know, that I was the best janitor he’d ever seen—only if it was true, of course. But he just renamed me ‘custodial engineer’ and patted himself on the back. Maybe he thought he was a hell of a manager for that.” Sam said, “A janitor by any other name is still the person who cleans up other people’s shit.” Sam’s hand rested on the trailer floor next to John. “Literally,” Gavin said, “and a thief by any other name is still a low-life son of a bitch. He called himself a manager, but all he managed to do was put himself out of business—put us out of business. He embezzled from himself. How crazy is that?” Sam said, “Just a sign in the window.” Gavin said, “No last paycheck, no apology, no nothing.” Ed said, “Well, it was his company, right? You didn’t invest anything in it.” “You mean other than my life?” Gavin shook his head and took another bite from his sandwich. He chewed and chewed and then swallowed and said, “But it turned out for the best. Sam here pays me well. And Sam says I’m a good loader.” “And you are,” Sam said. “Thank you, Sam.” Gavin nodded. “And Sam won’t drive in a way that’ll kill me in my sleep. I got a daughter that’s going to college at University of Florida. She counts on me making decent money, and she needs me alive for a while yet.” John set his hand on the trailer floor next to Sam’s, less than an inch from it. Ed held up what remained of his sandwich, only two bites now—or one Ed-sized bite. “Is

173 this Miracle Whip?” he asked. “Mayo,” Sam said. “I like Miracle Whip better.” “Don’t finish it, then.” Ed smirked, then knit his brows and said to John, “We could do a wash, too, while we’re in that truck stop. There were washers and dryers in there.” John liked the idea of Ed finally getting clean. Sam nodded. Ed said to John, “You’ve got spare clothes, right? You shower and put those on, then we start a wash. I’ll hand the last of my stuff out to you—put the truck stop’s towel in there, too— then you hand my stuff and the towel back when they’re good and dry. I’ll just hang out in the shower till they’re done.” “Okay,” John said. Ed stared coldly at Sam, packed the last of his sandwich into his mouth, and asked Gavin while Ed chewed his two or three times, “You godda college-age dauder?” “Uh-huh.” Ed swallowed and asked, “You have her when you was fifty?” He took another huge bite. “I didn’t have her,” Gavin said. “My wife did.” “Your wife leave you?” Gavin stopped chewing. “Dead now, God rest her soul.” He made the sign of the cross. “Saw her little girl graduate high school, though.” He chewed again. John raised his pinky, hovered it over Sam’s. It would take only a tiny motion now, and their hands would be touching. Ed and Gavin didn’t seem to notice. Ed asked Gavin, “What do you expect in return for paying your daughter’s college bills? You want her to support you in your old age? Let me correct myself: your really, really ancient age?” Gavin stared hard at Ed. Gavin’s jaw muscles clenched, and his mesh of tanned wrinkles rolled like a scurry of fresh ripples across huge ocean swells from a faraway storm. On top of them, gray whiskers undulated in the sharp sunlight. John looked at Sam then, but he couldn’t see a single whisker. Gavin said, “I don’t expect anything from my daughter except for her to be who she is. I

174 love my daughter. I do for her because it makes me happy to see her happy, but I suppose you wouldn’t understand that.” Ed said, “I’d retire if I was you, use that money to buy a little place and relax.” “And do what, watch the grass grow? I’m relaxed now, doing my job. I like my job.” Ed said, “You’re not doing anything but getting a free ride on a medical profile.” “A what?” “You’re a sucker,” Ed said, “throwing away your money like that.” Sam stared hard at Ed, Sam’s cheeks knotting up and lips pressing thinly together. The scowl made Sam’s chin, cheekbones, and lips seem harder, more masculine than John liked. John took his hand from next to Sam’s and put it back on his sandwich. Gavin rolled his lips inside his mouth and sucked on them. Then he asked Ed, “Anyone ever do anything for you just because? Anyone care for you that much?” Ed’s lids lowered to the tops of his pupils, which had dilated and consumed his irises, turning his eyes black. He seemed not to breathe while he stared at Gavin. Ed said, “ You think you can psychoanalyze me, but you’re a truck loader, remember? Not a psychiatrist, not a doctor, not a philosopher.” “I’m a human being,” Gavin said. “One who thinks he knows everything just because he’s been around longer than most. Age don’t make you smart, old man. It just means you been lucky.” Ed sniggered. “Up to now.”

175 CHAPTER 33

John stood in front of the three washing machines. He was clean-shaven, freshly scrubbed, his hair still wet and slicked down, standing bare-ankled in his dress shoes and wearing his dress slacks and his sweater with no shirt. He chose the cleanest washer and stuffed the truck stop’s towel and his own hand towel, T-shirt, dress shirt, jeans, underwear, and all his socks inside. Ed held the key and said, “I’m trusting you, now. Once I hand my stuff out to you, no running off and leaving me naked at the truck stop.” “Of course,” John said. Ed pointed the key at John like a forefinger. “I’ll have my coat and blanket in the shower room with me. If I have to, I’ll chase you down wearing just those.” Ed’s whiskers were thick, looking more like the beginnings of a beard than simply whiskers. John imagined Ed’s hair growing like the sprouts on a time-lapsed ad for a Chia Pet. “No problem,” John said. Ed looked around and made sure no one was watching, then hunched up the front of his parka, pulled out Cecil’s pistol, and slid it into one of the two biggest of his parka pockets. The tip of the pistol’s barrel stick out of the pocket, and Ed tried to drape the pocket flap over that, but even it wouldn’t cover the very end completely. He hunched up his parka front again and unfastened his belt. He pulled the belt off with his left hand while holding his knife and sheath against the front of his hip with his bandaged hand’s wrist. He draped the belt over his shoulder, glanced over that same shoulder, and pulled his knife, sheath and all, from beneath the parka and slid it into the other largest parka pocket. The hilt stuck out the knife’s pocket farther than the barrel did the pistol’s. Ed rolled up his belt and shoved it into the pocket with the knife, keeping his hand inside the pocket an extra second and then pulling out the bandanna by a corner, unfolding it as it came, poofing it into view like a magician’s handkerchief. Ed shook the bandanna out and set it on the closed washer lid next to the washer John had loaded. Then Ed peeled his parka off and rolled it up around the knife and pistol.

176 Ed’s sweatshirt was splotched with stains the same color as those on his ball cap. The shirt’s stains, though, were larger. One huge, dark, solid stain spread all the way across his belly and up close to his left shoulder. John asked, “Is that blood?” Ed peered down at the front of his sweatshirt. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. That’s from the rabbit.” “That’s a lot of blood for a little doggie.” “I said, ‘rabbit.’” “Yeah,” John said. Ed chortled exaggeratingly, his brows rising too high, lids flaring open too far, eyes rolling just a split second too long. “I think every drop in that rabbit squirted on me, you know? There must be not one drop out there on the ground.” “You had your coat off when you murdered him?” “Once I finally got around to killing and cleaning it, I did, yeah. I’d worked up quite a sweat chasing it. You know, out there in those wide open fields and woods and all.” Ed checked his rolled-up parka, sliding his left hand into the very axis of the roll. John imagined him gripping the knife’s hilt or the pistol, checking to make sure he could whip one out in a split second if he wanted. John said, “You’re going to wash that sweatshirt in there with all my clothes?” “Oh, sure. I’ll put spot remover on it.” Ed pulled off first his ball cap and then his sweatshirt. The blood from his sweatshirt had seeped through to his dirt- and sweat-stained T-shirt. A fainter version of the sweatshirt’s stain pattern covered the T-shirt, the spots darker brown in places where the blood had drenched the sweatshirt, lighter rusty brown in spots where blood had merely brushed it. Between the blood that had soaked through and the blackened-with-dirt sweat stains, Ed’s white T-shirt looked tie- died charcoal, umber, and rust. Ed smelled horrible, like those bar drains at Leopold’s, or a dead animal. John swallowed and readjusted his clothes in the bottom of the washer. His hand didn’t seem able to let go. “Don’t worry,” Ed said, plopped his sweatshirt in a ball next to his bandanna on the other washer lid, and put his ball cap back on. “Sure, this rabbit blood will swish around with your

177 clothes, but nothing will stick. I use lots of spot remover.” “You have the spot remover now?” “I’ll go get it.” “You sure go through the spot remover. Maybe you ought to buy it by the case.” Ed laughed sarcastically, his head canted, his eyes squinting, his top teeth bared in a snarling fake smile. He shoved his bandanna into a front jeans pocket, clenched his parka tight against the side of his waist, and turned and walked back down the washer hallway toward the convenience store part of the building. John studied Ed’s sweatshirt without touching it. He tried to imagine all that blood inside Hawking’s veins. Even if that animal they had eaten hadn’t been Hawking, even if it had been the biggest jackrabbit John could imagine, all that blood didn’t make sense. Even John’s father’s butcher aprons hadn’t caught that much blood. Though, John thought, dad never actually killed the animals. They had stopped bleeding long before he’d gotten his hands on them. John recalled a scene from The Discovery Channel, a close-up of a Maasai shooting an arrow’s tip into a cow’s jugular from only inches away, of the arrow bouncing back like it had gently tapped a rubber ball instead, and of the cow’s blood gushing out through the cut like a stream from a water fountain. That’s what that stain looks like, John thought. That’s the kind of blood that would do that. Then Ed was back with a half-gallon of spot remover with a wide screw-off lid instead of a squirt spout or a plastic scrubber top thick with tiny cilialike fingers. It was a container meant for refilling smaller bottles. Ed shoved his rolled-up parka onto the closed washer’s top, twisted the spot remover’s top off, poured huge globs onto his sweatshirt, and scrubbed it in using the folds of the shirt itself. John didn’t want to leave his clothes in the washer. Either the blood would seep in, or the excessive spot remover would damage the material. John wondered why everything seemed to happen to Ed in extremes. He never had one tiny spot that would need only one dab of remover. Ed’s life seemed to unravel in a cliffhanger sort of way, or Macbeth-extreme. But I have no money, he thought. And my clothes are filthy. And now that I’m clean, I can’t stand their smell. I’ll get to Pamela’s soon and won’t need a sweater there, right? Maybe

178 Kevin will loan me something, a pair of baggy, island-vacation kind of wrinkly shorts, a bleached- out thread-worn shirt, something tropical-beach glaringly white and comfy. Maybe I don’t need to do a wash at all. Ed shoved his gel-soaked sweatshirt into the washer, pulled off his ball cap, rubbed spot remover into it and dropped it into the washer. He folded his bandanna catty-corner, like a neckerchief, draped it over the top of his head, and tied the corners in back, like he were a pirate or a biker. The bandanna wrinkled, loosely conforming to the ridges and valleys in his forehead, but if John hadn’t already known the shape of Ed’s head, he wouldn’t have guessed it from the wrinkles. Ed peeled off his T-shirt next, blobbed cleaner onto it, and scrubbed it the same way he had the sweatshirt. Ed’s chest, back, and upper arms were pasty pale and covered with wide patches of black hair. His rotting oniony smell hit John in a new wave. John held his breath, and he knew how horribly inept commercial washers were, that indiscernible parts of Ed and the blood would seep into his own clothes by the time the wash finished, regardless of how much the detergent’s “brisk-breeze” artificial scents might try to mask what was about to happen. Ed picked up his roll from the floor and his rolled-up parka and headed toward the shower-room doors. “Come on,” he said. John followed him, and Ed unlocked and opened the door. “Okay,” Ed said. “Wait here, and I’ll hand the rest of my stuff out to you.

* * *

Ed hadn’t finished by the time the washer was done, so John shoved his own clothes, still wet, into his gym bag; put Ed’s stuff into a dryer and started it; carried his gym bag out of the truck stop; walked as fast as he could—wanting to sprint—back to Sam’s truck; and, half out of breath, told Sam, “Ed’s decided to stay on his own . . . We should go now.” Sam blinked. “He doesn’t want a ride?” “He hates us all.” “I could see that. I just—” “Just go, Sam, please. Now.”

179 Sam said, “Okay,” shut Gavin and the chairs in the trailer again, started the truck, and pulled out of the lot, turned onto the ramp heading south, and soon accelerated through eight gears to highway speed. John didn’t see any sign of Ed in the passenger side mirror, and he sighed and sank back into the comfortable padding of the seat.

180 CHAPTER 34

Ed peeked through the cracked shower room door, the towel wrapped around his waist, and didn’t see anyone. One dryer ran noisily, its gravelly bearings squealing twice on each rotation—a long and a short squeal; long, short . . . long, short—in the rhythm of a heartbeat, the harsh hum of the motor seeming to clear its throat in a “Hmmmm, Hmmmm, Hmmmm . . .” that paired up perfectly with the squeals, one hum per full heartbeat. After the humid wash of the shower room, the dry heat of the laundry area smelled acrid, like the beginnings of an electrical fire. Ed waited, figuring John had gone to the restroom or something. Ed didn’t think John was the type to abandon anyone, but then Ed remembered John’s leaving him at Wal-Mart, and Ed’s own breathing increased to faster than that of the dryer. His heartbeat sped up like he were seven again and a train were barreling down on his trailer court and Marcus was riding his bicycle down the thin edge of the highway between trailer courts, that half-full canvas bag of papers slung from his shoulder. Ed never thought to holler John’s name because calling out for anyone had never once worked in his life after Marcus had died on that sunny, cool day—a day amazingly like today, a day amazingly like the day he had first woken back up after trying to kill himself. Ed sucked in two diaphragm-aching lungfulls, holding each in turn for a full two seconds to blast his blood with oxygen, and forced his heart to calm. He clenched his molars hard, set his jaw and tightened every muscle in his face, and said, “Fuck you.” He threw down his towel and marched out to the dryer with nothing on but the fresh bandage around his right hand. It almost glowed, it was so white. Fuck everyone, Ed thought. Fuck all your make-believe relationships. He didn’t expect that dryer to hold his clothes. He expected to have to steal someone else’s—wanted to, actually. But when he yanked open the door and killed the dryer’s heartbeat and saw that they were, in fact, his clothes inside, he sighed, his muscles all relaxed, and he felt guilty for having walked out into the hallway naked like that. He didn’t look toward the store or

181 care if anyone saw him, figuring they’d be more focused on his forehead than his ass anyway. He pulled on his still-damp ball cap and snugged that over his head, then put on his underwear, jeans, and T-shirt. He closed the dryer door and restarted the humming and squealing to finish drying the rest of his clothes. He walked barefoot back to the shower room and closed himself inside while he put on his belt, K-bar, and parka, tucked Cecil’s pistol inside his belt, and grabbed his roll and boots. He studied himself in the mirror. His cap’s bill sat crooked above his face, the cardboard in it warped from the wash, his nose bent. All that, combined with his sudden cleanliness, gave Ed the conceit that he looked like a turn-of-the-century boxer between fights, showered and waiting, being photographed for that same bent look, looking forward to the next big match up, and it seemed apt to him. He shoved the towel and key into the laundry’s trash can, hoping even a little trouble for Sam would be something, and after the dryer stopped, he pulled out his socks and piled them on top of the adjacent closed washer. He held each sock up in turn, scrutinized the lay of the toe, and smoothed it out into one of three stacks on the washer’s lid: right-toed, left-toed, and ambiguous. He had nearly two dozen pair, and each of the three stacks was a different height, the center one the smallest. He paired up the socks from the outer two stacks, rolling each pair into a tight little bundle the size and shape of a Twinkie. Then he studied those from the center stack more closely, tried to guess which were more right-toed and which left-, and paired them up as best as he could. He couldn’t stand ambiguously toed socks. As he stuffed all the rolled-up socks inside his Ziplock baggies, a man walked up to the next washer with a plastic shopping bag full of clothes and cheerily asked Ed, “How ya doin?” “Fine,” Ed said and shot the man a harsh smile from beneath squinty eyes. He rolled up his sweatshirt and Ziplock-baggied socks into his blanket and cinched the rope at either end. The man loaded his clothes into another washer and said, “Oh, fine, fine. Thank you. Gorgeous day out, isn’t it?” He shook his head and sighed. “Boy, Christmas sure comes around faster every year.” He chuckled. “Just goes to show . . .” Ed walked away.

182 CHAPTER 35

Kevin dropped the lobster trap back over the side of his boat and fed the line out. Thin, high clouds had draped the sky, sun, and moon with light gray. The boat rolled sloppily on big swells rolling in from the north, their surfaces smooth from the deceptive calm. No land was in sight anywhere. “The wind will come soon,” Kevin said. The barometer’s needle had dropped all night and all morning, accelerating into the afternoon. “One more line of traps,” he said, “then back toward home.” He tossed that trap’s float over and searched the swells for the next. His mouth tasted bitter.

183 CHAPTER 36

After the two-lane highway through Arkansas’ foothills, I-49 through Louisiana was a smooth, steady ride, and the farther John got from Ed, the more at ease he felt. Between Shreveport and Alexandria, very little traffic used I-49, though the highway remained four lanes with limited-access on and off ramps, wide shoulders, and a median like a large, mowed back yard. Now the woods on either side of the highway were almost completely pine. The tall, straight trunks started well back from the interstate on both sides and stood like the teeth of a dog brush between its gummy base and the dense mat of fur at the tooth ends. At times, the trunks even seemed as uniform, lining up in straight rows that made John wonder whether the forest had been planted by hand, if the original old-growth forest had been harvested a generation before and a faux forest put down in its place. Sam still used the heat instead of switching to vent or air, so John assumed it was still cold outside despite the complete lack of snow. John could remember both warm and cool childhood Christmases in Biloxi, and one cold one. More times than not, he had worn shorts as a child, even on Christmas day. But there had been one Christmas when it had snowed, though it didn’t stick. The flakes vanished as soon as they struck the earth, as if they were merely passing through this dimension from one gateway up in the clouds to another flush with the tips of the grass blades—except for the thin white line the snow left along the very base of each house’s north wall. John’s world had captured the unworldly stuff there, but only for the morning. He knew it wouldn’t last long. John scraped up the entirety of one house’s snow and made a snowball to throw at Pamela, but she didn’t come outside, and his snowball began to melt in his hands. Icy water coated his fingers and seeped between and around to their bottoms and drip, drip, dripped to the grass. The snowball was imperfect, anyway, course and discolored with sand and grass seed. John threw it right smack into the middle of their front door with a sharp thud. Eight seconds later, his mother opened the door, as if expecting a visitor. She saw John standing at the street edge of their

184 yard, his hands dripping wet, and then the quickly melting clods of snow on their stoop, and she quietly closed the door. John wondered if he wouldn’t have been so quick to make a snowball if they had had more snow. Maybe his first instinct then would have been to make a snowman or an angel. John pressed his palm against the cab’s passenger window. The glass felt cool but not cold, not as cold as the Beetle’s window had felt, and not nearly as cold as his childhood’s one snowball. He kept his hand on the glass for almost a full minute, and it never got so cold that he felt uncomfortable holding it there. It was nice. He wished he could smell the pine again. “Sam,” he said and pulled his hand from the window, “could we roll the windows down?” Sam looked at him, and then the heater controls. The temperature selector knob rested beneath a thinner part of the red line, where it ran above the beginnings of the very tip of the point of the long, thin blue wedge that came from the opposite side. The knob had been at the extreme red end that morning. Sam watched the mostly empty, almost-straight-as-an-arrow road again. “It’s still cold outside,” Sam said. “Tomorrow, maybe.” “Could we at least flip the source knob from recirculate to outside air?” Sam slid that knob from above a U-shaped arrow inside a simple graphic of a cab toward a straight arrow coming through the graphic of a cab. Sam stopped the knob in the middle, though, on the half-half mixture. Sam asked, “How’s that?” “Okay,” John said. John tried to smell pine in the air from the vents, and he thought he detected a whiff, but he wasn’t sure. John glanced into the sleeper again and asked, “Have you read all those books, Sam?” Sam said, “There aren’t all that many there.” “But you’ve read them?” “Yes.” “Even the bible. You’ve read it in its entirety?” “Yes.” “Are you religious?” Sam’s lips curled in on themselves, and Sam looked dead ahead, eyes narrowing.

185 Sam said, “Not like most people would interpret that word, I think.” “Like what, then?” Sam hesitated, then said, “My dad is a preacher.” “So you grew up religious.” Sam stared at only the road. “No. My dad wasn’t around.” “He traveled?” Sam chortled. “Yeah. One way.” “In what sort of way?” Sam glanced at John quickly, suspiciously. “No,” Sam said, looking back at the highway. “He abandoned my mom and me, never came back.” John thought about what he’d done to Ed and stared at his hands. Sam’s lips curled in on one another again. “As a kid, I read the bible to try to get to know him, and later I read simply to find justification for what he’d done.” The truck went beneath an overpass, and they shot through the shadow and back out into the sun in the time it takes a television or a movie screen to switch scenes. Sam said, “But nothing in the bible gives anyone any excuse to abandon his family, even a child like me. Everything says to do the opposite.” John thought, But Ed’s . . . different, and then John thought of his parents. It seemed to him that he should have thought of them before Ed instead of after. Why after? Because they had abandoned him? What had they done, really, simply fallen out of love, or out of infatuation? Maybe they still loved each other but just couldn’t stand to live in the same house anymore. That’s all they’d done. At least they had tried to explain it to him and Pamela, and the truth was that they had tried to stay in touch with him. John was the one who had cut them off, not the other way around. Sam swallowed and said, “I was lucky, really. My mom . . . um. My mom . . .” Sam sighed and looked at John for a second, then looked back at the road and said, “My mom wouldn’t let them cut on me. The doctors told her what they wanted to do instead of just doing it. And when she said, ‘No. Don’t you dare cut on my little baby,’ my dad couldn’t handle it. He said, ‘Hasta la vista, baby,’ or something like that, and walked out. I don’t know the ‘couldn’t handle it’ part for sure. I’m assuming that, but the facts are there, the before and after. It must be cause and effect,

186 right?” John said, “I don’t know,” and thought, Maybe there is no cause and effect. Maybe things don’t happen for any reason at all. But he didn’t believe himself. Sam said, “My mom loves me for who I am, not for who she thinks I should be. She trusts God to know what He’s doing more than my dad seems to trust Him.” Sam’s head shook. “He ran away. You know what I mean?” Sam snickered. “Trying to run away from himself, really.” John looked at his hands again. Sam said, “I’ve read about parents who say, ‘Yeah, okay, cut away.’ They claim they do that out of love. They say they’re worried about their kids getting teased in gym class. So cutting on their little babies is the answer. But that’s not unconditional love, John. Unconditional means you don’t say, ‘I love you, except for that one thing . . .’” Sam glared at John. “You get that?” “Yes, I do.” Sam stared back through the windshield. “Well, you’re one out of about three hundred million, then.” John thought, No I’m not. Sam snickered at John, and then watched the road, smiling broadly, open-mouthed. Sam’s teeth were bright white in the sunlight, though not quite straight. “And so I learned about the bible but not my dad. I learned about me but not my dad. I learned about my mom but not my dad. Other than that one really bad part of him.” Sam exhaled hard, shoulders slumping. “I would have liked to have known something good about him, though, just one thing.” “Have you asked your mother about him? Does she say anything good about him?” “She talks about the early times. Sometimes she’ll talk about how in love they are, a young couple, you know. Sometimes she curses him as if he’d just walked out yesterday.” “So you did get to find out something, right? Something good?” “I tracked him down, a few years back. I never confronted him. But I found him, online. Then I looked him up in the phone book, when I was in his new home town. I drove past his church, three times over three years, and once past his house. He has a new family now.” “Why don’t you reach out to him, then?” “Oh, come on, John, do you really think he wants me showing up on his doorstep? Me? You think his new wife and children will hug me and welcome me? I doubt they’ve ever even

187 heard my mom’s name.” Sam huffed a heavy sigh. “My third time past his church, on Father’s Day, the marquee on the lawn said, ‘Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.’” “Maybe that means he feels bad about what he’s done. Maybe he just needs a little push to do what’s right.” Sam said, “If he wanted to be in touch, he’d have been in touch. We lived at his old address for years.” John hoped his father’s address was still the same, his mother’s. Would they still be in touch with each other? Pamela would have their numbers. Surely. John asked, “Where’s your mom now?” “She’s in Orlando. I stop and see her whenever me and Gavin are in the area. She’s sweet, my best friend.” John said, “That’s nice.” “Sometimes,” Sam said. “She has Alzheimer’s.” Sam glanced at John. Sam’s eyes seemed blank, expressionless. John didn’t know whether Sam was angry, sad, suspicious, or what. Sam looked back at the road. “Isn’t that something? My dad’s the one who wants to forget his past, and my mom’s the one who loses hers. The son of a bitch. I hate him.” Sam swallowed and kept watching the road. “No. I’m not supposed to hate him. I’m supposed to hate what he did, but not him.” John twisted his hands in his lap. Sam said, “The next time I opened my bible, I read just because I liked it, the old stories and stuff, Jesus’s teachings.” John glanced back at Sam. “Do you believe in all the old rules, Leviticus and all that?” “We ate a rabbit, didn’t we? That’s against those rules. The Old Testament makes God out to be pretty human, don’t you think? Vindictive, jealous, quick to anger, showing favoritism—you know, the chosen people and all that. Even God admits it. Part of the first commandment is ‘I am a jealous God.’ I like Jesus’s God better, a God of unconditional love, of forgiveness.” “It’s the same God.” “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth doesn’t jive very well with turn the other cheek,

188 now, does it?” John’s heart raced. He didn’t know why. A bitter taste seeped onto the back of this tongue and the insides of his cheeks. He felt like Ed was still with him, still goading him. He suddenly wanted a drink of water. Sam asked, “What do you do if someone strikes you so hard in the cheek that he knocks out one of your teeth? How do you obey both Leviticus and Luke then?” John said, “Doesn’t sound much like you’ve turned the other cheek when it comes to your father.” Sam’s head and eyes snapped viciously toward John. “So you’ve always turned the other cheek?” John turned away. “No.” Almost never, he admitted. Sam stared back at the road and hit a pair of buttons on the driver’s door panel. Both windows swooshed down and vanished within the doors. Air rushed in and whipped John’s skin and hair cold and sharp, like sleet. Sam’s face was obscured behind great whirls of whipping dark hair. Sam’s head stayed hard and fast, stonily focused on the road, though John couldn’t see how Sam could still see anything. The air was as cold as that one day when it had snowed in Biloxi.

189 CHAPTER 37

They were just beyond Alexandria, still within its outskirts, really, when from somewhere inside Sam’s cab, John heard the Green Acres theme song in electronic dings. Sam had rolled the windows back up long before Alexandria, and they had ridden in silence for what had seemed to John like years. Sam pulled a cell phone from the cubby hole in the driver’s door, glanced at its front, let it keep dinging, and then set it back in the cubby hole. The song finally stopped. “I need to pull over,” Sam said. “That’s my Baton Rouge delivery, probably wondering where we are.” “You’re supposed to be there now?” John asked. “No, but they’re a little anal. Young family. Few belongings. I’d be worried, too, I guess.” John nodded. Sam pulled off at the next off ramp with a truck stop and parked, and Sam, Gavin, and John went inside. The truck stop’s double glass doors swung shut and sealed out the sounds of the highway and the still-occasional buffeting icy breeze, and Sam opened the cell phone and started pushing buttons. Next to Sam, Gavin browsed through the paperback carousel, rotating it another quarter turn every minute and a half or so, the carousel’s ancient, worn base squealing its hesitance each time. John stood and watched the sunlit lot through the huge panes of glass up front. It reminded him of his and Billie’s trip to buy a television, and he suddenly felt more right about leaving Denver than ever. The truck stop smelled of vinyl logbook covers and the paper and ink of new atlases and the stale cardboard of convenience store grocery packaging. It was a mostly foreign smell to John, but it felt more normal to him than standing in that cul-de-sac of televisions with the snow falling outside and with Billie arguing with him about moving that tiny painted-over nail. He felt more like himself here than there, even if he didn’t feel completely himself yet. He thought, What was it that had been on all those televisions before the cartoon?

190 Something about a murder? Then he noticed that one of the cars driving south on the highway slowed and pulled to a stop on the shoulder just south of the overpass. It looked like the car’s driver had meant to take the exit but had accidentally shot past it. But then the passenger door opened, someone got out and pulled something from the back seat, and the car drove off. John stepped closer to the huge windows. The person from the car half ran, half slid down the grass embankment at the edge of the highway, crossed the on ramp, and disappeared behind the trees growing between the on ramp and the truck stop. John’s heart stopped. He thought for certain that the person was wearing a gray parka and that the thing pulled from the back seat was a rolled-up blanket, but at that distance, it was impossible to tell. John stepped right up next to the glass and played what he’d just seen over in his mind again. He thought, It’s possible, but he also wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him. A car did stop, and someone did get out and go down the embankment, over the on ramp, and into the woods. His eyes had definitely seen that. But he wasn’t sure whether he’d really seen the parka and the rolled-up blanket or if it had just been anxious imagination, like a Rorschach. He had, after all, just been thinking of a murder. He wondered if he would see Ed everywhere now. Sam’s truck didn’t seem at first to particularly stand out from the middle of the row of trucks parked in the lot. The logo on the trailer’s side was common enough. But the pairing of an unlogoed ultramarine tractor with it was not. The crown of thorns on the grill was not. All that was in plain sight of the highway, and if Ed had been riding in a car up there, he would have been able to recognize Sam’s truck, demand that the driver stop, and be dropped off right about where that car had dropped off whoever it was that it had. The trees the person had disappeared behind, or into, led almost right up to the back of the row of trucks. A shallow ditch and a barbed-wire fence was all that stood between the tree line and all the lined-up back doors of all the trailers. John scoffed. A moat and a wall with manned parapets wouldn’t keep Ed out. John imagined Ed jogging through the trees toward the lot, and John felt as if some carnivorous beast had clamped its jaws onto his windpipe. John went back to the carousel and Sam and Gavin. “Sam,” he said. Sam turned away, head bowing and shaking, waving one hand dismissively, still listening

191 to the phone. “Sam,” John said again. Sam asked into the phone. “There’s a sign for Perkins Road on the interstate, right?” John turned to Gavin and said, “Gavin, we have to leave.” Gavin blinked and turned back to the carousel. “Soon enough.” John imagined Ed stomping on the lowest strand of barbed wire, pulling up on the next one, crouching and first tossing his roll through the gap he’d made, and then stepping through himself. “Come on,” John said and walked toward the front doors. Gavin twisted the carousel another quarter turn. Squeal, then nothing. John went outside of the building but stayed next to it, so that he could still see Sam and Gavin through one of the huge front panes but could also see the highway and the row of trucks more clearly. Sam’s truck’s sleeper and trailer were mostly masked by the next closest truck. That truck’s sleeper and trailer were mostly masked by the next, et cetera, et cetera. Somewhere behind them all, John knew, Ed scanned all the pairs of trailer doors. John imagined Ed’s eyes locking on the moving company’s logo. Too late, John thought. He’s there. He’s had time to do anything now, and John backed into the eave’s narrow shadow and watched, expecting Ed to emerge from the row of trucks and march steadily right toward him any minute now. Ed didn’t, but John stayed in the shadow of the eave anyway, for what seemed like ten minutes before Sam and Gavin finally came out of the truck stop. Sam asked John, “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” John’s mouth was dry. “You seem in a hurry to get down the road.” “Yes,” John said. Sam said, “Well, let’s go.” Sam and Gavin stepped off the curb and walked toward the row of trucks, and John stayed in the eave’s shadow. Sam stopped and turned. “Aren’t you coming?” “Yeah,” John said again.

192 He breathed deeply. He imagined Ed watching them from the shadows between two of the trucks, and he didn’t want to step into the sunlight, but he knew he had to in order to get to the truck and get out of there and away from Ed, so he followed Sam and Gavin into the blinding daylight, off the curb, and into the lot. At first he stayed behind Sam as they walked, his shoulders and head scrunched forward in a half crouch. Then he felt like a coward for that, and he moved out next to Sam and spread his arms slightly, palms forward, like a skydiver picking up speed, and he leaned his head up and back and breathed in long, smooth breaths. He knew he could easily be walking in Ed’s gunsights right that moment, and his heart beat faster because of voluntarily exposing his heart like that, but still, what he had at first thought had been a brave gesture now felt cheap, like Mel Gibson screaming “Freedom!” in the face of rubber knives and hooks, and the lack of a soundtrack and a makeup artist made the idea of John’s most-likely-imaginary nemesis seem even more absurd. He slumped his shoulders again, and he felt like a fool all the way until Sam had half circled the semi in a pretrip inspection, stopped behind the trailer, squinted, and said, “What the hell?” Gavin stood at the big side door he had just unlatched and pulled open by inches. “What?” Sam kept looking at the trailer’s back doors, and Gavin and John walked down the shadowy space between the trucks and joined Sam out at the lip of the ditch. In the dirt layer covering the back doors, someone had rubbed, in clean, half-foot-wide swaths, a huge pair of overlapping Vs, one upright and one upside-down. The upright V ran in straight lines from the top left corner of the back of the trailer down to the bottom middle and back up to the top right corner, and the upside-down V ran from each bottom corner up to the top middle. One of the four taillights was missing its plastic red cover. The clear bulb sat unprotected in its chromed plastic cave. “What the hell?” Sam said again. “What happened to my light?” The bottom of the ditch behind them was damp, tiny pools scattered throughout the grass in its bottom. The barbed wire ran crookedly, pulled loose from the posts in several spots. Ed could have come through any one of them. “How’d they reach way up there?” Sam asked. “Had to be leaning down from on top of the trailer or something.” John imagined Ed hanging over scrubbing with his ditch-water-soaked bandanna.

193 Sam ran two fingers along one of the cleaned swaths. John said, “Maybe we should check the top of the trailer. Whoever it is could still be up there.” Gavin scoffed. “Good luck staying there on the highway. If anyone’s idiotic enough to get up there and stay up there, he deserves what he gets.” “‘Wash me,’” Sam said. “If you draw a horizontal line through it halfway up,” Sam swept a karate-chop-like hand sideways across the doors, “it’s a W above an M. ‘Wash me.’ That’s all it is.” Gavin asked, “You sure the light cover wasn’t gone before?” John blurted out, “What if it’s Ed?” “Ed?” Sam asked. “We left Ed on the outskirts of Shreveport.” “What if he followed us? What if he wants to keep following us, even at night.” “He’s on foot,” Sam said. “Besides, he’s the one who decided to leave us, not the other way around.” John shrugged. Gavin asked, “And why would he want to keep following us if he’s already caught us?” John said, “It’s too out in the open here. Too many people around. We’re all together still.” Gavin snorted, “Hmph.” He glared at John. “You’re paranoid. Or guilty. What’d you do?” John swallowed and moistened his lips. “You’re glad he’s not with us anymore, right?” Sam shrugged. “Sure.” “And you?” John asked Gavin. Gavin shrugged. “Yeah.” He wiped the dirt around the bottom half of the overlapping Vs until the drawing was just a big W with its bottom points dipped nebulously into a smeared, blurry horizon. “Even if it was Ed, so what?” Sam said, “Let’s just go.” Gavin walked back up between the trailers and toward his waiting, open trailer door. Sam followed, sealed Gavin inside, and then climbed into the cab. John stopped at the passenger door and watched the lot, bright in the sunlight, and then turned and studied the shadowy recesses between the trunks of the trees in the wood line. The truck’s engine revved to life with a growling, smoky snarl rolling from the stacks.

194 John opened his door and clambered up and inside and closed the door. He peered into the trees all the way until they had driven out of the lot and onto the on ramp. He peered particularly closely at the woods along the on ramp, hoping he’d see some other bum, maybe the old, bearded, completely brown man Ed and Cecil had drenched in piss, crouching next to a campfire deep inside the woods, but all there was was the trees, the shadowy undergrowth within, and the shoulder of the road speeding up to a blur again. There was no Ed anywhere, but John still couldn’t shake him from everywhere.

195 CHAPTER 38

The storm slammed down on Kevin. The combination of the clouds and dusk had snuffed out all the world’s lights in only seconds. Rain gushed at forty-five degrees in almost complete blackness now, and the waves had turned viciously steep and taller than even Kevin’s boat was long, their tops blowing off in foamy lines that looked like lines of rolling clouds. Kevin ran straight into the waves toward St. George Island, his windshield wipers beating like mad, his boat feeling like a toy remote-control pickup trying to climb out of a storm gully. “I’m a lucky man,” he said. A wall of foamy spray and dark water pounded against his windshield, stalling the wipers from sheer weight alone. The wipers slugged back to life, and water rushed over and around the narrow upper deck and ran in heavy sheets back to the stern and out the rear scuppers. One in every three waves hit him with so much water that the side decks and scuppers couldn’t handle it all, and it poured over the coaming and onto the deck all around and over his feet. The bilge pump thrummed constantly. Through the rain ahead, and sometimes from beneath a surge of solid water, his bow light’s faint red and green glow shined at the very point of his bow. He thought, This wind could have been blowing from another direction, but St. George Island is dead upwind. That’s lucky as hell. He kept the boat pointed into the waves and said again, “I’m a lucky man.” Then an explosion like the big bang itself blasted all through his body and shook him like a mad parent trying to quiet his child, and a searing bright white blast of light engulfed him. The flash and the boom left him deaf and blind, but he gradually felt, first, the wheel still in his hands and, then, the press of the deck heeling to port beneath his feet. He saw a heavy line of sea foam just out of reach, then more lines of foam farther out, and then he felt his boat sliding nose-first down the back wall of a wave, but this time there was no shine of bow lights. He saw the white fiberglass edges and forward deck of his boat dig into the base of the next wave, and he felt the wheel try to wrench itself out of his hands and push through his chest, and still there were no bow lights. The knotmeter and log, the GPS, the depth gauge,

196 the compass were all black. Kevin realized he couldn’t hear the motors or the hum of the bilge pump. He didn’t believe his ears at first. He thought that maybe he was still deaf from the lightening blast, but he heard the roar and rumble of the waves and the wail of the wind. It had all quit: his lights, the engine, the bilge pump, everything. His boat was suddenly thrust abeam in the waves, and it rolled violently from side to side. The next wave, or the next, could easily roll it and Kevin on over and upside down and sink them. For an instant, he visualized himself sinking lifeless through the blackness, and the lobsters alighting on the sand and scurrying off in a long, thin line back to their homes. He poked two fingertips, fast and hard, four, five times against each instrument. Nothing. He tore open his companionway hatch, reached around, and flipped the breakers off and on, off and on, but his instruments remained dark. He left the breakers on and held on as the boat finished turning its bow downwind. A wave broke over the stern and sent dark water rushing below through his open companionway. Kevin closed the hatch and listened for the bilge pump, hoping, to no avail. He still had the manual pump, but he had to get the motors going first, to gain forward motion and control. He needed at least one to work. He pulled the throttles upright and pushed the ignition button, but he heard only the crash of waves, the whistle of the wind, the knock from below of some floating thing hitting some other thing in the sloshing water in the cabin. He turned the key off, then on, and tried again. Neither motor did anything. Another wave crashed over and around the twin outboards and rolled the boat hard to the side. Solid water smashed against the closed companionway hatch and cabin bulkhead, but this water churned around Kevin’s legs instead of rushing en masse below. Still, tiny whirlpools showed where the water found gaps in the hatch’s frame and threshold. The boat slowly righted itself, and Kevin held on and tried to keep from slipping in the water or letting it pull his legs from beneath him. He clambered back to the motors, pulled one cover off, found the cord, and yanked and yanked. The motor started. He put the cover back on and removed the second motor’s cover. He yanked on that cord five times, then five more, but the motor wouldn’t start.

197 “Only one. Okay, then,” he said. A wave crashed over the motors, slammed him in the face, and ripped the cover from his hands. He had no idea where it went. He fought his way forward, slipped in another boarding wave, grabbed the wheel, and pulled himself up. He braced his feet wide and pushed the left throttle forward. The motor growled louder in the howl of the wind, and the boat came around, first rolling steeply to port as it fell abeam of the waves again, and then back to its more-normal forward-and- back pitch as it climbed first up the face of the next wave, and then down its back like a sled ride. “Yes,” Kevin said. “Yes.” Lightening flashed again, behind him, but still close. The blast came quick and loud and shuddered the boat. “Jesus,” Kevin said. He gave his one motor full throttle, and the boat’s motion settled again, the water gurgling out through the scuppers. He felt his wheel for the Turk’s head in the dark, and kept it just to port to counteract the off-center push of just the one outboard. He opened the companionway hatch, reached around the bulkhead, and pulled out his flashlight. It still worked. Water sloshed around below at least two feet above the sole. His settee cushions, thermos, and other paraphernalia floated like sargassum. He shoved the hatch closed again and shined the light on his compass. It was smashed. “What the hell?” He looked around for what could have done it, but there was nothing big enough or heavy enough on deck. “The motor cover,” he said. “The damned motor cover.” He looked for it, but it had gone over. “Serves the thing right.” He steered the boat dead into the waves and peered through the rain-mottled windshield, the wipers were frozen in the angle they were at when the lightening had struck. Kevin hoped the wind wouldn’t shift, that he could count on St. George remaining dead upwind, against the waves, and that the rain would let up before he got there. “It’ll calm before I get there,” he said. “It has to calm. The island will create wind shadows on my side, and I’ll know when I’m getting close because it will calm.” But he knew, too, that huge waves would be sweeping across Cape St. George Shoal in this wind, peaking and crashing in a tumbling roil, and if he was too far west, he’d end up in the middle of that.

198 He imagined Pamela waiting futilely for a dead man. He wanted her to know for fact that he loved her. He couldn’t remember the last time either of them had said those words. He hated the idea of her sitting alone in that darkened café wondering if he had really loved her right up until his death, if he had even thought of her in these last moments, but he hated most the idea that she might regret not having said those words either, wondering if he had known that she had loved him right up to the end, too. He thought, Of course I know you love me, you silly woman. Please don’t worry about that when I’m gone. “But I’m a lucky man,” he told himself again. “Just head straight into this mess, Kevin, and everything will be alright. You can tell her all that yourself then.” He hoped he would be able to hear or see that roiling mess over the shoal from far enough away and skirt it and use it to find the calmer stuff and the land that would shield him from the waves. He could drop anchor there, and manually pump his bilge dry, and sleep, and try to figure out if he had what he needed on board to fix what that blast had broken, and, with hope, make his way home. He turned off his flashlight and blinked, trying to adjust his eyes. He couldn’t see even one light on the water.

199 CHAPTER 39

It was night when they finally stopped again. This truck stop was smaller than the last, down a side road from and—John was glad—out of sight of I-49. John smelled water, the humidity in the air, and he felt a hint of warmer wafts in the coolness. They were deep down in Louisiana then, near the Gulf, and the warmth was struggling to restake its claim after having to give way to that vicious cold front. Mounted on top of the restaurant’s roof were brightly painted signs with flashing colored incandescent bulbs and piercing neon tubes boasting the most generous slot machines within a hundred miles. Two dozen cars were snuggled up next to the building and filled that part of the lot. A half dozen semis mostly filled the tiny lot’s outer edges. Across the two-lane highway, overflow parking swallowed the bottom third of a tiny convenience store. The music of an accordion, a fiddle, and a throbbing bass pulsated through the window- scarce walls of the restaurant and reverberated all through the night air. The air smelled sweet, of blossoms, though John couldn’t tell what kind. It wasn’t honeysuckle or magnolia. It was far too late in the year for those. He didn’t see blossoms anywhere in the lit-up parts of the lot, not in the restaurant’s trim landscaping, not on the surface—a wall, really—of the dense greenery at the edge of the dirt-and-grass parking lot. The farthest reaches of the dim lights kissed Spanish moss hanging from the oaks like hundreds of tiny silk ladies’ kerchiefs and lit up the pine trunks like columns to an enormous, encircling vine-entangled portico. He half expected to see garlands of blossoms wrapped around the trunks. The damp ground gave beneath John’s feet like a stiff sponge. The grass was still mostly green, though trampled down on top all the way to the thick wall of trees. John guessed it had been the now-absent snow or ice that had done that. It could have been only rain, but it would have had to have been recent rain, and hard. Still, there was a bite in the air, too, an occasional waft of that Colorado blizzard, like an icy eddy that hits you while you swim in only slightly cool water. Sam had said that I-10 was right down the road, and that made John think of Biloxi again.

200 He didn’t care to go there, though he knew they would have to go past. Going there would seem too much morbid fascination rather than reminiscence. The Biloxi of his childhood was gone: his parents were gone, Pamela was gone, and now even their entire neighborhood was gone. He remembered two Biloxis, the one of his childhood, of trips to the beach and picnics and seagulls, and the one of his adolescence, when the casinos had invaded and stolen the beach from them, all the glittery lights and towering concrete that had thrust themselves into the view of the Gulf, disrupting the humid breeze, twisting the air so that it could no longer flow unhindered to the people themselves. The Biloxi lighthouse seemed smaller with the casinos down the coast, the view of Deer Island less primal. And then, in the one summer John had been away, Katrina had come. In her wrath, she had swept entire neighborhoods from the earth. From Denver, on the news, John had seen his childhood home—or the intersection near where it used to be. Everything had been leveled and scattered across a grid of streets. His home was gone. His entire past was gone. And all in his absence. He’d felt like a traitor. But the Biloxi lighthouse survived, standing amidst the debris, still peering out to Deer Island over once-again-calm waters. It was a link for John, a single, frail thread that still connected him to his childhood, that made his memories, his family, seem more than mere fantasy. The lighthouse was real, and therefore his childhood had been, and therefore he still was. That lighthouse was undeniable, inextinguishable proof. Once, he and a third-grade friend had tried to swim to Deer Island—What was his name? The swim had seemed so adventurous, like it had leapt off the pages of Huckleberry Finn. They had stood on the beach and looked out over the Gulf at Deer Island and imagined that there were no people, no buildings, that it was a time of simple survival, and the most they had feared had been the limits of their own muscles’ endurance, and then they had walked into the water and begun swimming. As simple as that. The third-grade conceit of a cityless coast seemed a portentous premonition now, and John felt guilty for having had the fantasy. What was the friend’s name? He was the one with dark hair. Was he still alive now? Or had Katrina taken him, too? Gavin and Sam and then John went into the restaurant. Directly ahead, beneath a backlit yellowed plastic menu board, was a deli-counter-slash-bar. Lining the wall next to the left was a single row of slot machines dinging and flashing, only a few stools taken. John had seen people

201 piss their pants on slot machine stools, people afraid that taking even a restroom break might allow some casual passerby to pull that lever that one magical time that bestows a lifetime’s wealth in three or four seconds, that pull that those people who had so meticulously played the machines for so long just absolutely knew should be theirs, the fear of losing their American dreams to some passerby far greater even than the fear of no one winning at all. The noise of the dings grated John’s insides and nauseated him. John tried to ignore the slot machines and focused on the deli-bar and on the dining area and dance hall off to the right, looking as if it could be well out of earshot of the slot machines, especially with how vigorously the fiddler and the accordion player seemed to launch into the music, and the bass player’s throaty Acadian. The band played in front of the far right wall, at the good-luck end of the horseshoe of tables around the worn wooden dance floor. Couples danced in a strong sea of sways and twirls. They seemed oblivious to the ding, ding, ding of the slot machines behind John. Gavin bought a sandwich full of salami at the deli-bar, and John watched Sam study the yellowed menu board studded with tiny red orange letters and numbers, no two letters or numbers looking as if they had come from the same font. “Muffuletta,” Sam said and bought one of the sandwiches, too. John wanted a plate of red beans and rice, and cornbread, but he had no money, still, and he didn’t want to beg Sam for it, so John followed them to a table and sat across from Sam, the dance floor right next to them both, no chair on the table’s dance-floor side. John wasn’t hungry anymore, not for beans, anyway. He watched Sam eat the muffuletta and watched Sam watch the dance floor and the band and nod to the music. Sam smiled and seemed to become part of the music, and then the song ended and a waltz began, and Sam’s nod slid right from the beat of one kind of music into another, this time swaying, John thought, longingly. Would you like to dance? John asked Sam in his mind. He could say it, he thought. He could do it. Would Sam want to? What might Gavin do? Would you like to dance? John said in his mind again, that time squeezing his vocal cords while exhaling in a tight stream, like putting a thumb over most of the end of a garden hose to squirt water farther. His vocal cords had made no sound, but the illusion of sound had joined the words in his mind. Would you like to dance? He tongued the words and hissed his vocal cords

202 and then made a grunt as if clearing his throat. Sam turned to John, still smiling, still swaying. The waltz went on, something about belle, something about bonne. The fiddle wailed. Couples danced close. The song would end soon. They good songs always seemed to end so soon. Would you like to dance? That time John’s lips moved, his tongue worked, his breath hissed in a whisper. He sucked in three fast breaths afterward to catch up to the hordes of air his body suddenly seemed to need. “What?” Sam asked him. “Would you like to dance?” It was faint. Had Sam heard him? He cleared his throat. “Would . . . Would . . .” He couldn’t breathe. Sam stood, still smiling, set down the sandwich, and held a hand out to John. Sam swayed to the waltz. John took Sam’s hand. John couldn’t believe he had done that, but there his hand was, in Sam’s for the first time since their handshake back in Lamar. Sam’s hand was cool, smaller than John remembered, and soft, but with that hint of calluses he did remember. Sam led John to the dance floor. The fiddle and the shadows made everything otherworldly, like a dream. John felt as if he were out of his body, watching. Then Sam stopped and turned, and John slid his other hand around Sam’s waist, and John was back in his body. He couldn’t catch his breath. His heart pounded so loudly that he couldn’t hear the fiddle. He sensed a rhythm, whether from the music, or from the thrumming of the many feet shuffling in time across the floor, he didn’t know. It was Sam. The rhythm came from Sam, and they were moving across the floor with the flow of couples like part of a deep, fast river, and John slid his arm on around Sam’s waist, his chest pressing against Sam’s, and he held Sam tight, and the small of Sam’s back seemed to fit John’s arm perfectly. John closed his eyes and let Sam’s hair caress the side of his face. They were tightly together then, swaying, dancing, moving as one, John’s temples throbbing with his heart’s beat, his lungs not able to catch up. John thought that Sam must have felt his panting, had to sense his shuddering breath. And then Sam’s other arm was around John, both arms around him, Sam’s hand on the back of John’s neck, Sam’s fingertips caressing swirls that sent tingling shivers all through John’s body. John slid his other arm around Sam, and it all fit. Everything fit. And he squeezed Sam tight, and squeezed, and they moved together, and then the edges of John’s eyelids were damp, and his eyelashes, and the dampness spread into Sam’s

203 hair. John felt Sam’s breath warm and moist against his cheek and the side of his neck, Sam’s breath where John’s blood pulsed so thickly so close to the surface, Sam’s lips so close to the blood rushing from John’s heart, and John pressed closer to that part of Sam, greedy for it, wanting to go where Sam’s breaths had been, to get as close to the source as he could. John hoped the song wouldn’t end, and the fiddle and accordion played and played, and the bass player sang, La vie est belle, la vie est bonne, and then, for John, there was the music, and the rhythm, and him and Sam, and nothing else.

204 CHAPTER 40

After entering the night again, the smell of sweet blossoms hitting John afresh, surrounded by the portico of pine trunks and the oaks draped with Spanish moss, in the humid wash of the still-cool but distinctively Southern-wetlands feel of the air, John, Sam, and Gavin stopped at the fender of Sam’s truck, the sounds of the band now muffled into a soft dreaminess. Gavin mentioned in an oddly embarrassed way how tired he was, said goodnight, climbed into the trailer, and pulled the trailer door to behind him. Lantern light spilled out from the pulled-to door in a thin band. John heard faint, dull clunks like empty boots being dropped and coarse swishes like a blanket or sleeping bag being dragged across the trailer’s plywood floor. Sam said, “You can sleep in the trailer, too, if you want,” looked at John, and said lightly, “or in the cab.” John swallowed. The band of light from the trailer went out, and the trailer was still. Only the music, and an almost indiscernible hiss of insects from the wood line, stayed the silence. “Okay,” John said. “Okay, the trailer, or okay, the cab?” John’s fingertips buzzed. He could no longer feel his legs or his feet. “Cab,” he said, and he didn’t believe he had said that. Sam smiled and led John into the sleeper through its own big side door and closed the door behind them. The faint parking lot light shone in through the door’s window and through the sunroof’s cover, which had been slid open by just a crack. Sam opened the sleeper’s side vents, and the cool, humid air seeped in and throughout the sleeper. The soft skin of the back of Sam’s hand brushed John’s cheek. Sam said, “Short whiskers hurt,” and flipped the hand so that the slight calluses caressed John’s unshaven cheek like fine sandpaper on balsa. “Sorry,” John said. “Don’t be.”

205 Sam leaned close and kissed John, and John pulled Sam tight and kissed back. Sam smelled humid, salty, and sweet, like the air, and John broke his lips away and drew long, deep breaths in through his nose and kissed the base of Sam’s neck. It seemed to John that this had all happened before, the dreaminess of the music and the humid air, the press of Sam against him, the swell of ribs and the warmth of Sam’s flesh, the beat of Sam’s heart, Sam’s scent, this entire night had happened before. This very scene had played itself out for decades, for eons, and John was both remembering it and experiencing it at the same time. John’s hands seemed to move on their own and tugged at the bottom of Sam’s sweater exactly as they had for thousands of years. They pulled the sweater and the T-shirt up until Sam’s T-shirt untucked and John’s knuckles brushed and then pressed into the uncannily familiar soft, warm flesh of Sam’s midriff. Sam’s hands crossed, gripped the T-shirt and sweater where John did, and pulled the T-shirt and sweater up and mostly off. The T-shirt’s neck hung on Sam’s chin and ears at first, the thin white cloth covering Sam’s face and hair. Sam’s smooth, bared chest, tiny breasts, and hard nipples heaved in great breaths. John raised his hands to run them up Sam’s entire chest but stopped when he saw Sam’s unshaved armpits. John asked, “You don’t shave your armpits?” Sam said through the T-shirt, “No. You shave yours?” Then the T-shirt’s neck jerked free over Sam’s face and splayed hair wildly out and down, and Sam said through the shifting, flowing dark waves, “I don’t cut any of my hair.” Sam’s face finally emerged again. “Who am I to try to improve on God’s work?” Sam unfastened John’s top shirt button, and then the next and the next until John’s shirt fell back and off, and Sam’s chest was bare and warm against John’s, and Sam’s belt buckle clinked on the sleeper floor, and John’s did, and Sam’s hands slid down the outsides of John’s arms and rested in John’s hands. Sam stepped back until touching the bed, sat, and pulled John closer. Sam’s shoulder sank toward its rising hip, and then the other shoulder mirrored that. Sam bent forward, cloth whispered against skin, and the span of Sam’s back was bare and smooth all the way from tumbling hair back to the mattress. Sam sat straight up again and slung a hand sideways, and a flash of white darted across the sleeper.

206 Sam said, “Why don’t you look at me?” John eyes closed, then opened, still focused on Sam’s eyes. “I am.” “I mean my body.” Sam plopped back and lay on the bed, arms draped overhead and back, stretching across the mattress, Sam’s fingertips brushing the sleeper’s wall. “Look at me,” Sam said. John did, and he pulled off his own briefs, slipped into bed, and ran his quaking palms up the full length of Sam’s caramel smooth stomach, up ribs and across the tiny breasts and the hairy armpits and up Sam’s outstretched arms. Sam’s armpits effused a sourness so slight that it tantalized John, and he moved on top of Sam, sensing again that this had all happened before, that it was supposed to happen for eternity. Sam sighed heavily and said, “Stop. Wait. Over there.” Sam pointed at the tiny curtained cupboard. “There are condoms in there.” John sat up and reached into the cupboard, past Ed’s baking soda, baking powder, and Bisquick, until he found the tiny and age-worn but already-opened box.

207 CHAPTER 41

The entire horizon was dark, except for one tiny intermittent green light. Up until then, Kevin had fought monster waves, huge, dark beasts with foamy tufts, breaking right on top of him. The wind and the rain had only grown. He was drenched with salt water, and cold. It stung his sinuses. Now that he saw that one light, he turned toward it. To avoid taking the waves directly on his beam and capsizing, he zigzagged, plowing into them at an angle, and then taking them on his quarter. Kevin knew that once he wove his way nearer the light, he would be able to separate its own blinking pattern, if it were indeed blinking, from the way the waves made it wink into and out of existence. If it turned out to be a ship, he could hail them and orient himself off its course, maybe relay a message. If it turned out instead to be a channel marker, it would lead him to other markers and he could count the seconds between their flashes and then find them on his chart. Either way, he would finally know where he was and where he needed to go. His muscles relaxed and he breathed easier. He knew that that one tiny intermittent light would ultimately lead him home, and he imagined Pamela holding it up, like a lantern, swinging it back and forth to draw his eye. The waves no longer seemed like monsters then, only waves.

208 CHAPTER 42

Ed ate his pancakes, though he hadn’t ordered blueberry. He knew they would be subpar. Even the plain ones had turned out dry and doughy. Ed concluded that no one was capable of putting together a decent pancake, except maybe John, and he refused to. Nothing seemed to match those pancakes from Ranger School, those ones those few mornings between starving in the woods at Darby and starving in the woods at Dahlonega, right before he had parachuted into the mountains and broken his nose and his leg, when everything still seemed on the verge of turning wonderful, back when his father and his ranch were still waiting for him, back when Ed still firmly believed that he not only would earn that black-and-gold tab but would also be named his Ranger class’s honor graduate, that great things waited for him as an almost superhuman soldier killing for all that was right in the world. Then that Ranger instructor in that patrol base had peered right into Ed’s soul, hadn’t liked what he’d seen, and had singled Ed out for expulsion. Everything was over then. If only he could go back and do it right, he thought. Ed hadn’t had the guts to kill John. Ed had held John right in his sights at that truck stop outside of Alexandria, had stood in the shadows between those trucks and had cocked the pistol and stared down the barrel at John’s chest, and then John had spread his arms and stuck out his chin, like “Go ahead. I know you’re there.” The fucker, Ed thought. Ed’s hand had shaken then. He’d lost his aim, and he’d uncocked the pistol and slipped back farther into the shadows and then around the tail ends of two other trucks and into a different shadowy gap. Ed shoveled in a bite of pancakes, pressed his elbow against the pistol butt through his parka, and thought, That fucking Cecil. Had to have a single-action, something that has to be manually cocked for each shot. The pistol seemed a hundred years old, the bluing shiny at the pistol’s edges, the rifling worn almost flat just inside the muzzle. Ed had no idea how many rounds the thing had seen. He didn’t even know if the pistol could have hit John from that distance. Ed figured he might have

209 had better luck throwing rocks. And why, in God’s name, Ed thought, if it’s so damned slow and inaccurate, does it have to be such a noisemaker? Why couldn’t Cecil have had a Saturday night special, something with tiny bullets that never break the sound barrier, or better yet, a .22 short revolver, something you can also tape a plastic Coke bottle or a shampoo bottle onto to muffle the explosion of the powder? No, Cecil had to have a hundred-year-old single-action .357 magnum with an eight-inch barrel. To a good marksman, Ed thought, someone who chooses his moments, caliber makes little difference, and a long barrel gets in the way. I could still tape a plastic bottle onto the thing, but with that much powder, the long barrel, and the sonic booms, the noise would draw attention. Like at Cassandra’s. Couldn’t use it there, either. What good is a pistol you can never use? About as good as a chef who won’t cook. Except, Ed thought, shoveling his pasty pancakes in, grimacing with every bite, I know where you’re going, and you have to stop and unload before you get there. I’ll pass by your lying ass then, you Goddamned mother-fucking fucker.

210 CHAPTER 43

The semi crossed the Mississippi toward the Baton Rouge side of the I-10 bridge, and from the height of his seat in the semi, John had an expansive view over the railing and down and across the wide, muddy waters flowing fast beneath. The surface of the water seemed calm at first, but close scrutiny revealed subtle, flat eddies roiling the surface as if an infinitely large school of huge beasts swam hard and fast just beneath. John looked as straight down as he could and saw churning wakes streaming from beneath the bridge as if the concrete supports were a fleet of whaling ships charging upriver at full speed. This was the river that kept a huge swath of the Gulf murky and had made John’s childhood beach water the color of tea—looming, dark, and mysterious—but also bursting with shrimp, blue crab, flounder, sea life of all kinds. The Mississippi Sound itself seemed like a gumbo, after you had mixed a dark roux with homemade broth but before you had added all the other ingredients, before you had thickened it further with the slow cooking that disintegrates vegetables and turns the innards of okra into a faint facsimile of gelatin, before you had added the pork and chicken and fish and shrimp and cooked it still more and then poured it over steaming rice and taken that first warm, spicy, salty, sweet, meaty spoonful that made all the work that went into it worthwhile. John said, “You know gumbo is the Bantu word for okra?” “What?” “Gumbo means okra. It’s African. And gumbo filé powder is the ground leaves of the sassafras tree. The Choctaws showed it to the settlers.” “Huh.” John said, “Gumbo’s a mixture from all over the world. Every pot’s different. Every bite’s different.” “Uh-huh,” Sam said. “In the restaurant business, inconsistency is a bad thing, but gumbo is a pleasant uncertainty, tantalizing if you can accept its inconsistency as just a part of what it is.”

211 “Help me look for this exit, will you John? That family’s waiting for their furniture.” “Okay.” John asked, “Have you ever tried gumbo, Sam?” “Sure.” “Really good gumbo?” “I don’t know.” “You’d know if you had. You need to let me make you gumbo sometime.” “Okay. When?” “I don’t know. After I get to my sister’s. But it’ll take days to make.” “So I’ll have to come back.” “Yes.” “You want me coming back around after this trip?” “Yes. Absolutely yes.” Sam asked, “You want your sister to meet me? Your parents?” John hadn’t thought of that before, but he did want that. He had never felt that way about Billie. In fact, he would have been embarrassed, in the end, to have brought Billie home. “Yes,” he said, “and I want to meet your mother, Sam. She sounds like a strong person.” “She won’t understand who you are. Doesn’t know me sometimes.” “I know,” he said, “but I’d still like to meet her, just to be in the presence of someone that heroic,” and he hoped, Maybe some of it will rub off.

212 CHAPTER 44

Kevin walked into the kitchen still soaking wet, his hair swept roughly but snugly back by hand, his cap clasped in his fists at his abdomen. The gray morning light filtered in through the kitchen’s one window, the window high up near the ceiling. The sky was thickly overcast, and rain pattered against the panes. The kitchen was humid and smelled yeasty. Pamela chopped onion on a poly cutting board on the metal prep table in the kitchen’s center. She inhaled heavily and said without looking up, “I heard you pull in. You get good lobsters?” On one side of her were a half dozen onions, each with its point end already cut off and its outermost layer peeled away. The onions glistened dully under the ceiling’s big center light. On the board was a half onion, flat side down, parallel cuts already running from the root end up to the end where the point used to be. On Pamela’s other side was a big clear glass bowl with one and a half onion’s worth of chopped cubes the size of a Risk game’s pieces. “Okay,” he said and took one step closer. “Pickup filled back up with gas?” She still didn’t look up. She kept her chef’s knife’s point end pressed to the board on Kevin’s side of the cutting board and cut cross-slices through the half onion with a sawing, sliding motion that made the knife go shwit, shwit, shwit against the board. Each slice freed an entire army of cubes. She cut harder and faster and said, “Trailer unhooked?” She reached the root end of the onion and slid the end off the table and into a garbage can. “Yes,” he said and stepped to within two paces of her. “Boat’s at the shop.” She stopped and looked up, expressionless, then picked up the board and, with the back edge of her knife against it, scraped the pile of cubes into the bowl. She smacked the flat back edge of her knife hard onto the board, and every cube that had stuck to the blade leapt from its surface and scurried down into the bowl. “What happened?” she asked and clunked the board back onto the table. She grabbed

213 another onion and chopped it in half. “How much will it cost?” “I don’t know,” he said. She cut lengthwise slices into one of the onion halves, stopping just shy of the root so that, though cut through, the half onion stayed together. She said, “You don’t know what happened, or you don’t know how much it will cost?” and started the shwitting crosscuts again. “I don’t know how much it will cost.” The proofer timer beeped in high-pitched patters faster than the raindrops striking the window. Pamela rinsed her hands and took the hand towel to the proofer, hit the proofer’s timer button, slung open the door, and pulled out a large stainless bowl. Steam poured into the kitchen, dissipated, and vanished. Kevin felt a fresh wave of humidity seconds after he could no longer see it. The window fogged with condensation. Pamela pulled a huge mass of whole-wheat dough out of the bowl and plopped it onto the metal table’s other end. Kevin was now three paces away without having budged. “Great,” she said and punched the dough down. Kevin said, “We won’t fix it if it costs too much.” She drew a plastic-handled scraper from a basket on the shelf beneath the table and chopped a tight grid into and through the dough. With each chop, the scraper struck the table with a sharp metallic pop. She finished her grid and slung the scraper clattering onto the table beyond the dough. “Just how much will be too much to you?” He took the two steps to her end of the table and said, “Whatever we think together.” She stopped and looked at him. His irises barely showed, his pupils large and glistening. The fog on the windows faded, the gray morning light shining in anew, the highlights in Kevin’s pupils brightening. She sighed and wrung her hands on her apron. “Are you okay?” “Fine, now,” he said. “You’re soaking wet. You should go change, maybe take a hot shower.” “Okay,” he said. Pamela watched him climb the steps to their home, chewed her lips, and sighed again.

214 Then she began rolling each tiny square of dough within her hands, letting the base of the dough just touch the table’s surface, gently cupping her palms and fingers so that the proofed dough’s corners and cut edges smoothed out and the dough turned into a nearly perfect sphere. She was still amazed, after all those years of making bread, at just how elastic fermentation could make even gritty whole-wheat dough.

215 CHAPTER 45

When John had first walked into Leopold’s bar in Denver, Leopold had grinned wide but closed-mouthed at him. “You decided to come,” Leopold said. “Yeah.” “Ballsy. With the flat of the palm of his entire hand, Leopold stroked his Vandyke three times, his thumb running down one cheek and his fingers the other. “Go see Victor,” he said, “my manager. He’s doing inventory in the walk-in out back.” John walked through the side station, the kitchen, and the kitchen’s back door; across the sunlit but freezing back dock; and into the walk-in, dim, moist, and cool, but far warmer than the air outside. Victor was smoking a cigarette, leaning against one of a half dozen untapped kegs against the cooler’s wall. A clipboard and pen lay on another of the untapped kegs. John said, “I’m a new cook. I guess you’re supposed to give me the run-down on my job.” Victor dropped his cigarette butt to the metal walk-in’s floor next to two already-flattened ones and put it out with the toe of his black wing tip. On the dull-gray metal ceiling of the walk-in, two light bulbs, one clear and one soft-white, shone down on the horseshoe of kegs on damp wooden pallets against the three nondoored cooler walls. Yellowed plastic hoses as thick as John’s pinky ran from a pair of CO2 cylinders into a bank of gauges and regulators, split, and ran like tentacles to the dozen or so tapped kegs. Black hoses shiny with a greasy or waxy film ran out from the same and joined together through a hole stuffed with insulation in the cooler’s side, and led, John figured, to the taps behind the bar. Victor nodded. “The new cook. Now that you’re here, Eric’s history. Don’t worry,” he said when he saw John’s face, “he hasn’t even shown up yet today. Won’t be a surprise to him.” Victor pulled out his open pack of cigarettes, shook one out, seemed to think about it, and pushed it back in.

216 “Come on,” he said. “Dinner prep work’s waiting.” Victor pushed himself away from the keg, picked up the clipboard and pen, and opened the cooler door. Bright sunlight and freezing air poured in. John squinted in the bright vertical band of light that fell onto two clear plastic bins in the walk-in. One bin was filled with peeled, sliced potatoes in water; the other, layered with soaked bar towels and oysters. John asked, “What about the butts?” “Leave them,” Victor said. “I’m quitting soon, anyway. Leopold will know it’s me, not you.” “That’s not what I was concerned about.” “I know. I didn’t mean to imply that.” John shivered and cinched up his coat collar. “Come on,” Victor said. John tugged his collar up as far as he could get it over his neck, hunched over with his arms tight against his torso, and followed Victor back out of the cooler, across the dock, and into the kitchen door. Victor turned on one of the stove burners and warmed his hands. John asked, “Why are you quitting?” “Shh,” Victor said and glanced at the kitchen’s tiny camera. He peered through the service window and into the main part of the still-closed bar, said, “Come on,” and led John to a back corner of the kitchen, behind the camera. “Look,” Victor said and turned his back to the camera, even though it was looking the other way. “I know Leopold can’t hear us, but I wouldn’t put it past him to be able to read lips. He’d probably learn how just so he could stand in corners at cocktail parties and try to figure out who all’s talking about him.” Victor shifted and rested against the shelves of huge tin cans of tomato sauce, jalapenos, and olives. “I’m going to Lithuania, soon as my passport comes in. Going to travel a bit. I don’t like who I’m becoming here.” “You mean ‘here’ as in America?” “No. ‘Here’ as in Leopold’s.” He straightened up, led John back into the kitchen, and asked, “How much experience do you have as a cook?” “My whole life.” “You’ll be both cook and dishwasher here. You know how to use that machine?” John glanced at it. “Only two buttons. Simple enough.”

217 Victor scrunched his lips. John said, “I’ve used much bigger and more complex dishwashing machines than that.” “Fair enough. We rent it and pay by the load, so make sure it’s fully loaded before turning it on each time. If all you need is one sauté pan, wash it by hand, okay?” “Okay.” “First thing you do each day is check all your sixth and third pans in the fridge. Prep anything you’re low on. We’re low on roasted red peppers right now, so you’ll want to roast a few before dinner. You’ll need that for the humus. Check your condiments, too, like the humus hot sauce. We make all our own sauces, so you’ll need to check everything. Recipes are in that binder there. You don’t want to run out of cocktail sauce or anything in the middle of a Friday night. The only way to bring down Leopold’s wrath more than wasting this stuff is not having enough. Okay?” “Okay.” Victor pointed at the bulletin board. “Stock levels by day of the week are listed there. Don’t shuck oysters until the last thing. You saw them in the cooler.” John nodded. Victor said, “You want them as fresh as if they just came out of the ocean. Leopold loves oysters and will almost always try one just to see. You’ve shucked oysters before, right?” “Yeah.” “Now, if you have free time, don’t just hang out. For example, Leopold really loves his hood grease-free. If you ever want to make brownie points, be polishing up that hood when he’s in his office watching his cameras, which is most the time.” Brownie points had not been John’s goal when Leopold had shown up again later in the day, but John had been wiping down the stove top anyway and had glanced through the service window when Victor, behind the front bar, had greeted Leopold walking in through the vestibule, and John saw Leopold heading for the side station that led to the kitchen. Leopold hadn’t noticed John noticing him, so John simply moved his hand and its washrag from the stove up to the hood and had been meticulously scrubbing the hood when Leopold walked into the kitchen thirty seconds later. Leopold stopped, blinked, and smiled. “Good man,” he said and patted John on the shoulder.

218 Then he left through the back door. John heard the cooler latch open, and the kitchen’s door finished swinging shut. Victor grinned mischievously at John through the service window and shook his head. “Oh, boy,” he said. John shrugged. Likewise, John had learned all of Leopold’s surveillance points early on. Leopold loved to lean against the wall in the shadows across the street in front of his bar and watch his employees for hours, or he’d watch the loading dock from inside his car in the parking lot down the alley behind the bar. Then there were the cameras. It was simple: whenever you potentially stepped into Leopold’s view, be drying a sauté pan or organizing menus or checking off items on a worksheet on a clipboard, and never, never look directly at the cameras. The day after Leopold had announced that Victor would be leaving them, John had found a twenty-dollar bill in the middle of the kitchen floor. It had been folded twice but had unraveled partially, like some discarded origami figure. John picked it up and tacked it to the prep chart bulletin board. Forty-five minutes later, Leopold walked into the kitchen. “What’s this?” Leopold asked, fingering the twenty like how the legs of a starving spider probe a fly struggling in its web. “I found it on the floor.” “Then it’s yours.” “It’s not mine.” “You found it lying around. Why not keep it?” John stopped scraping seeds from the split Roma tomatoes and wiped his hands on a towel. “Someone will be worried over that. It could have blown in from the side station, and someone’s bank will be short, or someone could have dropped it while digging in a pocket or something.” “Couldn’t you use twenty bucks?” “Sure, but it’s not mine.” “It’s mine,” Leopold said and yanked it off corkboard, tearing it in the process. He shoved it in his pocket. John said, “Someone could be worrying over that.” Leopold walked to within a foot of John and grinned, his eyes closing halfway, like a

219 purring cat’s. “Don’t you think it’s worth twenty dollars to know who’s working for you?” he asked. “I’ve owned this bar for thirteen years, and you and Victor are the only ones who’ve never just shoved it in your own pockets.” He nodded proudly and left. The next day, Leopold handed John a huge ring of keys and announced to everyone that this was their new manager, that Victor would be training him over the next week, and to treat him as if he were Leopold himself. John had held the keys out to Leopold after, in private, and told Leopold, “But I’ve never managed anything before,” and Leopold had refused the keys and said, “I can teach anyone to manage a bar. I have no idea how to teach honesty.” Then he had turned his back and walked away.

220 CHAPTER 46

John’s muscles were tired. Unloading the boxes and furniture in Baton Rouge—doing actual physical work—had felt good at first, but then the day had grown hot, and the embrace of the morning’s cool humidity had turned into a midday strangling squeeze, and the top edges of the backs of John’s loafers had rubbed his Achilles tendons afresh. John had left sweat marks from his arms and the wet gut of his T-shirt on each box he’d carried inside the house, and the boxes had left a stale, dusty smell all over him. After finally cooling off in the cab back on the road, he had changed T-shirts, so that part of him felt fresh, but his muscles still all felt depleted, and his heels still hurt, and he felt both completely beaten and satisfyingly spent. It was late afternoon now, they were crossing Mississippi, and Sam and John both rode quietly. Pine trees along I-10 were stripped, bent, and broken. Some billboards were still only posts with roughly shorn tops jutting out of the ground. Occasional lots of generic white trailers punctuated the broken landscape. They didn’t go into Biloxi itself. You couldn’t see the town from I-10, even with the forests broken like that, but signs and place names popped up along the interstate that thrust John’s mother’s or father’s voice, or Pamela’s or childhood friends’, into his ears as if they were sitting right next to him. He saw the sign for Bay Saint Louis and suddenly heard his mother’s voice saying the name and saw her smiling and telling some childhood story about her and her cousins’ exploits, her eyes shining. He saw the exit for Highway 49 to Gulfport and Hattiesburg and remembered being a boy scout ushering a Southern Miss. game. After kickoff, he and two other scouts, the dark humid late-summer air around them like a thick wool blanket, like a fourth companion, had watched the cheerleaders and argued over who would get which. Then they had explored to the very top and end of the stadium, thumped huge owlet moths on the heads to stun them, and dropped them over the edge and watched them spiral down and hit bottom on concrete that had seemed miles below. He saw town names that no one, if not from the area, would know how to pronounce, Pass Christian with the stress on the last syllable, Gautier with the soft “t” like a cross between a

221 “ch” and a “sh” and its silent “r,” Escatawpa’s “p” sounding like a “b,” and even Biloxi itself, with its “ux” instead of the “ox” so many seemed to use. And all along the way were huge, new billboards brandishing casinos’ claims of generous slots and huge jackpots. The billboards spawned no luscious scents, no caresses of humid nights, no voices, no images of smiling, glittering eyes. They churned up only memories of Leopold and Billie and bland gumbo like soup and the continual, deafening ding of slot machines and a windowless interior like a space station. The memories of his job there might as well have been of any old Wal-Mart or McDonald’s in the middle of the night anywhere in the world. John was glad to finally get that out of the way, to slip past the sandhill crane reserve and Pascagoula and the state line. He thrilled in Mobile at dipping beneath the water through I-10’s tunnel, where Sam clicked on the headlights for two minutes, and then popping up and out the other side and being done with Biloxi, and crossing Mobile Bay and finally, finally seeing the Gulf again. The bay was, from I-10, really more of a salt marsh, and the water was a calm, umber– pale-blue mix and didn’t look like big water without its waves, but the sunlight glittered on what ripples and wavelets were there, and there was that one fine line on the horizon where the sky kissed the water, a narrow band of landless water that John knew went on and on over the curve of the earth and out of the bay and past the tip of Dauphin Island and on out into the Gulf and didn’t hit land until Mexico, and even then there was the Yucatan Channel and the whole wide Caribbean. With just the right squint of the eye and tilt of the head, the water could go on forever. John breathed a sigh of relief. Sam asked, “You okay?” John said, “Yes,” and remembered having asked Ed the same thing when Cecil had driven past Fort Riley and Ed’s face had tightened into knots and virtually convulsed. But John felt at peace now, and he doubted Ed did. John felt lucky being able to release the tension Biloxi had brought him, of being able to cast it off and leave it behind like a heavy, itchy coat in June and being able to breathe freely again. John figured maybe Ed needed a tunnel like the one he had just gone through, a view of something like the Gulf and the sky, some series of things that lent themselves so well to becoming a gateway bordering on infinity. But there was still Sam. John felt relieved to be so close to Pamela, but he wasn’t sure what to do with Sam now. Did his feelings for Sam mean, at least, that he was over Billie, too?

222 Did it mean he could believe in fairy tales again? He knew better, that there was no such thing. He and Billie had said, “I love you,” plenty. He had started it, after only three months of seeing her. But he had never really felt it, and he suspected that she hadn’t, either. He had said it because he had felt like it was about the time in their relationship where he should say it, because he thought she expected it and he feared losing her if he didn’t say it. After all, if he didn’t fall in love with her, that would mean his entire trip to Denver had been a waste, and it was just too romantic a notion, too classic a lover’s move, not to be love. He wanted never to say those words again without feeling them, and despite how strong his feelings were for Sam, they weren’t the fairy tale kind of feelings. He expected never to be giddy like that again, to be swept away as if by a riptide. Would what he felt for Sam be enough? It was real, anyway. Sam asked, “Which town exactly are you going to?” John’s upper back and the back of his neck tightened up, and the seat felt as if it were stinging him, like jellyfish. John looked at his hands. “Eastpoint, just outside Apalachicola.” They were near Pensacola then, were already in Florida, but Eastpoint was still two hundred and fifty miles away. John breathed a sigh of relief at that. Sam said, “We should cook those beans of yours tonight.” John said, “We ought to get a small piece of ham, then, something real, with a crosscut of bone and ribbons of fat still in.” “Bone and fat, huh?” “It’ll flavor beans a lot better than those fake, water-based hams.” “You’re like some sort of anti–food-processing terrorist, aren’t you.” “I hate all that processed crap. Let me figure out what I want on my own. You know?” John gritted his teeth, and the muscles around his mouth contracted until his lips were tiny and hard like a peach pit. Why do I have to fight to keep from crying? he thought. It’s just a damned piece of ham. They turned off I-10 toward Pensacola and stopped at one promising shopping center, then another, Sam insistent on the parking lot being real concrete instead of blacktop (“A semi can dent blacktop in the south like a wagon in a sandbox,” Sam had said), until they found slice of ham with the bone and fat still in.

223 In the store, Gavin also loaded the hand basket with a replacement loaf of whole-grain bread, two sweet Vidalia onions, and three Idaho potatoes. “For those beans,” Gavin said. “Put a peeled potato in while they cook. Takes the gas out.” John said, “Ginger does that. It’s good for the stomach. Ginger snaps or ginger ale is good for motion sickness, too.” “Huh,” Gavin said, and he broke off a rounded chunk of ginger root, smelled the broken end, and put that in the basket, too. And then they were off again, heading through the last vestiges of Pensacola along I-10, sections of housing with blue tarps still tacked to their roofs, but whether from Ivan or Dennis or Katrina, John had no idea. It seemed impossible to keep a permanent anything anymore.

224 CHAPTER 47

Sam was right. The rest area was beautiful. It was twilight, the sky and thick woods shadowy. Trees towered all around, live oaks with branches stretching out as big around as entire trunks, massive pine and pignut hickory, all draped with moss and dripping with bare vines John assumed were kudzu. The winter had stripped a few of the trees bare, but most still held their leaves, and the shiny, deep, scallion green of magnolias more than compensated for their few bare neighbors. They parked in a spot away from the rest area’s building, as close to the freshly cut grass, picnic tables, and primordial wood line as they could. Gavin opened the side box, pulled out the hibachi and the cast-iron Dutch oven, and set the hibachi on the concrete at the edge of the lot, near the closest picnic table. He and John worked out the strategy for both cornbread and beans, and then Gavin poured a huge pile of briquettes in the hibachi. John mixed cornbread batter, oiled the bottom of the Dutch oven, and poured the batter in. Gavin scooped out and held a shovelful of glowing coals while John forced the hibachi grill right down on the other coals, set the oven on top of that, and then put the oven’s lid on, and Gavin shoveled the coals on the oven’s lid. The outer lips of the lid rose like a city wall all around the hot coals, and the lid’s handle stuck out of the center of the coals like the St. Louis arch. Twenty minutes later, Gavin used an iron hook to lift the lid from the oven. He held the lid suspended and swaying lightly from the hook while John used a large spatula to pry, lift, and slide the cornbread out of the oven in one wide, flat piece, like a flying saucer, set it on a plate, and then set the plate onto the picnic table to cool. The smell of the fresh, hot cornbread made John ache to slather butter all over it, tear off chunks, and shove them, butter dripping, into his mouth, but he knew that would spoil his appetite for the beans, and he wanted to enjoy them both as much as he knew his hunger would make him. Gavin said, “I didn’t think about what I was going to do with this lid while you cook the beans’ ingredients.”

225 John got his iron skillet out and set that on the pavement, and Gavin balanced the lid on it. John, stomach grumbling, poured fresh oil into the oven, added flour, and turned that steadily so the flour wouldn’t burn, until they had a blonde roux. He dumped in finely chopped garlic and onion, and they sizzled and sent steam roiling up out of the oven, and again, John’s stomach growled. The smell of steaming garlic and onion always energized him, like the rush of ozone before a storm. John stirred while Gavin trickled the water in. John stirred the roux after each slight addition, making sure no lumps formed, and once they had a much runnier paste, John had Gavin added the remaining water, the beans, the chopped-up ham, the ham bone slice, sea salt, freshly ground pepper, and minced fresh ginger. Then John put the lid on again and tried to resist the wide golden slab of cornbread. Night had completely fallen, and though it was the pit of winter, insects raised a buzz like a white-hot hiss, and John had to watch the oven closely because he wouldn’t be able to tell that hiss from the one of boiling-over water dripping onto the hibachi’s coals. Having some task that required his constant attention like that made it easier for him to resist the cornbread. After the beans had softened, John added rice right into the beans and let that cook for half an hour, and he spooned rice and beans out together into Sam’s bowls, and they ate in hungry silence, John dipping his slice of cornbread right in his beans. After, Sam spooned the leftover beans and rice into a smaller pot, one that would fit inside the truck’s minifridge, then poured water all over the coals and stretched and looked at the stars. “I’m beat,” Sam said. “Long day tomorrow.” “Yeah,” John said, but he didn’t want to think about that. He wanted to enjoy what time they had.

226 CHAPTER 48

The brown, bearded hitchhiker peed all over John. “Hah, hah,” the hitchhiker said. “That’s funny.” John lay on the ground, or on a bed, or something. He couldn’t move, and the hitchhiker stood above John peeing and peeing. The hitchhiker laughed again and said, “That’s fucking hilarious. What a hoot!” He seemed to have an endless stream of piss. Then it was no longer the hitchhiker, but was Floyd, and instead of peeing on John, Floyd leaned over John and slapped him. “Gettup,” Floyd said, his burnt sienna skin shining beneath the straw fedora and floral hatband. “Gettup.” Floyd slapped John harder, pulled down on the rim of what had become a straw cowboy hat, but still with the floral hatband, and reared up to his full three and half feet, made a tight fist above his head, scrunched up his face until the lines and his lips looked like the ridges in a walnut’s shell, and then slammed his fist down hard into the middle of John’s face. Behind Floyd was a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette with puffy hair full of dandruff. The heavy black coat had huge dandruff flakes all over the shoulders, and tiny, shiny, beady eyes glowered from within the silhouette. “Geddup,” Floyd screamed and then punched John again, a roundhouse this time. John’s front teeth flew out, and blood spattered on Floyd’s aloha shirt. Floyd sighed as if he were disappointed in John for that. Floyd punched John again, mechanically, without a hint of anger, and this time it sounded like he said, “Giddyup.” Then Floyd reached forward with his first two fingers and his thumb, like an eagle’s claw, and grabbed John’s nose and mouth, Floyd’s thumb digging inside John’s bloody mouth and up into his hard palate, Floyd’s fingers sinking in through the top of John’s nose and into his sinuses somehow, and Floyd squeezed and pulled. John found it harder and harder to breathe. His face

227 felt like Floyd were twisting it into Ed’s.

228 CHAPTER 49

John woke and sucked in breath after breath of the cool air. It was the first hint of daylight, and the rest area’s faint lamplight shone in through the sleeper door’s window and through the tiny gap in the almost completely closed sunroof. Through the windshield, the top edges of the forest behind the parking lot lamp was almost black, just a hint of morning grayness. Sam lay sleeping next to John, one hand on John’s chest, rising and falling to John’s finally calming breaths. One of Sam’s knees was draped over John’s thigh. The thin sheet covered them both in the cool, humid air, the comforter bunched up at their feet. John ran his tongue along his upper teeth. All were still there, all still healthy. His nose and sinuses seemed fine. He shook off the strange dream. It’s nothing, he thought. Guilt. That’s all, guilt at what I used to be, not what I am now. But he didn’t believe himself. Sam smelled of the sweat of the previous day’s unloading, a more pervasive scent than that of their first night together, starker, but it wasn’t a stale odor yet, and it made John want to be even closer to Sam. He bent his head down until his nose touched Sam’s shoulder. He wanted to drag his teeth across Sam’s shoulder in a light bite, but he didn’t want to wake Sam. He leaned his head back onto the pillow again and whispered, “Why can’t there be more time? I need more time.” Sam stirred. John lay quiet then and breathed deeply and slowly, like he were asleep, and Sam settled again without waking. John watched the partially open sunroof, the window in the sleeper’s door, the tiny, perfectly aligned holes that were the sleeper’s vent. The light breeze that wafted through the sleeper’s vents smelled more like morning than night—dewy instead of musty. John heard a mockingbird, then the hum of a car pulling into the rest area and stopping, then the mockingbird alone again for five minutes, and then the car restarting and the hum of it pulling away.

229 By then, the outline of the top of the wood line had become distinguishable against the slightly lighter sky. The woods themselves were still a single black mass. Sam’s hand still lay on John’s chest. John closed his eyes and wanted to sleep again, to dream something else, something with Sam in it. He felt the truck move, as if Gavin were climbing out of the trailer. For some reason, John visualized Floyd crawling into the trailer instead of Gavin climbing out. John knew there was wasn’t much time left, and he closed his eyes and tried to memorize Sam’s scent and the exact feel of Sam’s hand. Sam stirred and woke, and John caught himself watching Sam with what he knew was a worrisome look. He tried to stop looking, or at least change his look, and he ended up grinning facetiously and then staring at the sunroof again, but before he realized it, he would be watching with his worrisome look again. Sam asked, “What’s wrong?” John looked at the sunroof again and closed his eyes. Sam sat up, the sheet slipping down and baring Sam from the waist up. “Something’s wrong,” Sam said. “What is it?” John sat up, too. “I don’t want you to leave me, Sam.” “In Eastpoint?” “No. I mean in general.” “You mean you want to go to Jacksonville? Or you want me to stay here?” “Either. Both. I don’t know.” Sam said, “I have to earn a living.” “I know.” Sam asked, “What do you want, to settle in Orlando with me? Get married? Make payments on an SUV and a McMansion in the suburbs and have our two and a half kids and our half of a pet dog, or whatever the statistics are?” “I don’t want that,” John said. “I don’t think I’ll ever want any of that.” “You don’t even know if I can have kids, or can even marry you.” John asked, “Why wouldn’t you be able to?” “I’ve never tried.” “Never tried to get married?” “Never tried to have kids.”

230 “I mean, why wouldn’t you be able to marry me?” Sam’s brows scrunched together. “Why would you want to marry me, John? We met three days ago—two and a half. We don’t really know each other.” Sam’s hands twisted the sheet into knots. “Do you have any idea what you’d get into? I don’t take stuff like this lightly.” John breathed as if he were rushing up an endless flight of stairs. Sam said, “I don’t know if I want to marry you. It’s way too soon.” “Of course it is. Two and a half days isn’t enough.” Sam said, “And don’t say you love me. Not after two and a half days. Don’t you dare say that.” “You don’t know how happy I am to hear you say that.” Sam laughed. “Okay, then. I don’t love you, either.” John said. “But I’m really infatuated with you.” “‘Really’ as in truly or ‘really’ as in very?” “Both.” “Then say it twice.” “I’m really really in infatuation with you.” “Unconditionally?” “Yes,” John said, “I’m really really unconditionally in infatuation with you, Sam.” “Okay.” Sam nodded, teeth clenched and cheek muscles knotting. “Okay. I’m really really unconditionally in infatuation with you, too. We’ll see about the rest.” The trailer moved again, and Sam scooted over to the sleeper vent facing the woods and peered through the tiny holes, the sheet slipping down and then covering only Sam’s calves and feet. John reached out and brushed his fingertips across Sam’s shoulder blade, ran them down the deepening draw down Sam’s spine, and lighted them across one cheek of Sam’s butt and down the back of Sam’s thigh. John got out of bed and went into the cab. He pulled Sam’s visor down and glanced through the CDs stored there. “Come back here,” Sam said from the bed and picked up the box of condoms. “I’m in the mood for music.” From John’s height now, he could no longer see the sky, and the night was still black through the windshield and door windows. The windows were so dark, they looked like someone

231 had brushed them with a heavy gouache. The encroaching morning was betrayed by only a slight blue gray glow diffusing itself throughout the cab. In the faint light, John picked out a CD, slid the CD into the player, and forwarded to a song he’d seen listed on the label. An acoustic guitar thrummed, and Ed’s face appeared in the windshield. Ed reared his arm back and smashed the butt of his pistol against the windshield twice. Each of the two bangs made John jump, and he felt the shockwave surge into his feet through the floor and spread up through his entire body, exploding like crashing waves against the upper back part of his skull. Two starbursts of cracks glittered in the glass. Ed pointed the pistol directly at John. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out now, or I’ll shoot you both right through this window.” John glanced back at Sam, who still sat on the bed but had pulled the sheet up to cover chest, groin, knees. John felt the truck move again, and then the passenger window shattered inward with a loud popping noise like a shot. Glass sprayed in, and tiny blue white trapezoidal glass crystals landed like heaps of diamonds on the passenger seat and scattered all across the floor around and on top of John’s bare feet. John wondered if he’d been shot, but he couldn’t see a hole in his chest anywhere. Ed’s pistol barrel stuck in through the gap where the window used to be. No smoke curled from its barrel. John wondered if smoke really curled from pistol barrels after they’d been fired, or if that was just a Hollywood gimmick. Ed reached in and unlocked the door, then pulled the door open and swung himself and the pistol around so that he could keep them both clearly in his sight. Ed reeked of whiskey. He shifted the pistol into his bandaged hand and, with his good hand, pulled the CB mic from its bracket and yanked on it like it were the handle on a lawnmower starter cord. The CB’s cord popped and then dangled from the CB. Short loose wires jutted from its end where the mic used to be. Ed tossed the mic over his shoulder and out into the gray morning and switched the pistol back to his good hand. “Get dressed,” Ed told John. “I don’t want pubic hair in my pancakes.”

232 CHAPTER 50

The morning sky’s faint grayness had grown to a medium one, though the woods all around the rest area were still deep black just inside the outermost row of trunks, as if the blackness were a massive creature crouched everywhere within the expanse of woods, shrinking back little by little from the encroaching daylight. John plopped a heavy rag onto one of the picnic tables and wiped up a huge swath of the dew, wrung out the rag over the grass, and wiped up another huge swath. In the first spot John had wiped, Sam set the two plastic grocery bags of ingredients Ed had made them, at gunpoint, load up from the truck’s fridge and cupboard. John kept alternatingly wiping and wringing until he had wiped off the entire table and both benches. At one end of the table, he had to step around his gym bag and the bag of charcoal briquettes Ed had also made him bring to the table. Ed stayed just out of arm’s reach of both John and Sam, training the pistol on whoever had most recently moved, which was almost always John. Sam glanced at the half-open trailer door. It was open wider than Gavin had left it the night before. The opening was wide enough now for a person to step through. John had been wondering about Gavin, too, but he wished Sam would stop looking there. If Ed hadn’t already been in the trailer, Sam’s glances would give Ed the idea. John tried to keep moving. He hefted his gym bag and set it heavily on one end of one of the benches. Ed thrust the muzzle of his pistol more toward John and then swung it in little waves. “Step away from the table,” Ed said. John did. Ed, still holding the pistol on John and Sam, pulled John’s knives from the bag and slung them one at a time off toward the wood line saying, “Don’t need knives to make pancakes.” John saw something else in the grass out near where Ed had hurled the knives, something small and silvery shiny. Then he saw the short wooden handle, and the small silvery part took on the shape of a hammer’s head and claws.

233 Sam saw it too, gasped “Gavin,” and ran toward the trailer door. Ed laughed and moved back to his original spot, where he could watch everyone and everything most easily. He swung the pistol barrel in little waves again, this time from John toward the table. “Back to work,” he said. Sam disappeared in the darkness inside the trailer. “Back to work,” Ed said to John more forcefully. John walked to the edge of the parking lot and dumped the hibachi’s ashes from the previous night into a smokey pile in the crook of the curb. He brushed the belly of the hibachi with his hand, stalling, hoping to be near the truck when Sam reemerged in case Sam and Gavin could figure out a way to surprise Ed. Then he wondered where he could do the most good if they did so, near them or next to Ed. Ed said, “Come on, now. You don’t need the thing supply-room clean.” John carried the hibachi back to the table and, continually glancing back and the trailer between tasks, set the hibachi on the end of the table opposite the two grocery bags, filled its belly with fresh charcoal briquettes, struck a match, and lit the briquettes. First, the scent of sulfur hit John; then, that of the lighter-fluid-infused briquettes. One of Sam’s feet pushed the trailer door and swung it more fully open. The morning light spilled onto the trailer floor and onto Sam helping Gavin out of the trailer, one of Gavin’s arms wrapped tightly over Sam’s shoulders, Gavin barely putting any weight on his feet. The gray sky had donned a hint of coral by then, and the spreading light revealed the blood all over Gavin’s bare feet and pooled on the trailer floor behind him. John ran over and helped Sam get Gavin out of the trailer and carry him toward the grass near the picnic table. Gavin’s feet dangled from his ankles as loosely as Christmas tree ornaments, and John tried, unsuccessfully, to keep Gavin’s toes from grating against the concrete of the parking lot. Once they were in the grass, John asked Sam, “You got him?” “Yeah.” John rushed to his gym bag and pulled out the ratty motel blanket. He shook the blanket open, draped it across the grass, and ran back to help Sam carry Gavin to it. The entire time, Ed snickered and gleefully lolled his head around.

234 Gavin breathed in short, heavy waves and grunted each time one of his feet bounced into a different position. John and Sam lay Gavin on the blanket. Gavin’s Achilles tendons had been cut clean through and had disappeared up inside the backs of his lower legs, somewhere up beyond the cuffs of his pants legs. His feet, ankles, and cuffs were coated in blood dark and sticky with coagulation. Fresh, bright-red trickles oozed from the gaping wounds at the backs of his ankles. Sam glared at Ed. “You bastard.” Ed shrugged. “I couldn’t have him running off anywhere while I took care of you two, now could I?” Ed waved the pistol at them. “Get away from him now. Thank you for bringing him out here.” John and Sam stepped away from the blanket. Ed said, “Be grateful. He could be dead. But alive, he’s another level of coercion for John here.” He scratched his nose with his bandaged hand. “Now, if both of you don’t do exactly as I say—especially you, John—I’ll kill Gavin. Then if you don’t do what I say, I’ll kill Sam. You,” Ed pointed his muzzle at Sam, “move that truck so that it blocks us off from the rest of the rest area, before anyone else pulls in here. Park it right up along the curb there.” Sam didn’t move. “Now,” Ed said and aimed the pistol at Gavin’s chest. “And no funny stuff.” Sam returned to the truck, closed the trailer door, climbed in the cab, and started the engine. Ed asked John, “You think you have enough incentive now to make a perfect pancake?” Gavin lay back and asked in an extra-gravelly voice, “Why couldn’t you just want money or sex like everyone else?” Gavin’s turning “else” into two syllables in his familiar lilt made John breathe easier. He was glad to hear Gavin’s voice. Gavin rolled onto his back, stared at the sky, and blinked slowly. The sky’s coral color had lightened to orange pink. The shadows in the woods had shrunk back another twenty yards. Sam finished parking the truck, its passenger side facing the picnic table, and came back to the picnic table. “Good,” Ed said and looked at John. “Cook. Make the best damned blueberry pancakes in the world.”

235 John asked skeptically, “And you’ll let us go, huh?” “Yes. You like the old agreement better now? Pancakes for a bus ticket?” John and Sam just stared at Ed. Gavin kept looking at the sky. Ed said, “Now it’s cook for your life. Don’t get so nervous that you fuck it up, okay?” Still no one else said anything. “Go,” Ed said as if starting a race. From his bag, John pulled his mother’s bowl, his grandmother’s iron skillet, one of the wooden spoons, and a fork. He dug through the grocery bag and pulled out the ventilated plastic bin of blueberries. He asked Sam, “Could you rinse these?” Then he asked Ed, “Can Sam help?” Ed shrugged. “Suits me. But no leaving where I can see, except into the truck if you need something from inside. And if the driver’s door or window opens even a tiny bit, I kill Gavin.” Sam said, “I need water, though. The rest area has—” “Use one of your big jugs of water, or did you and John suck it all down while you were in L’Amour?” He laughed. “I was going to buy more this morning,” Sam said. “Use whatever you have in there, or just don’t rinse them. Or rinse them with milk.” Sam climbed into the cab, returned with a half-liter plastic bottle a third full, and rinsed the blueberries sparingly. John scooped oats and whole-grain and all-purpose flours in the bowl, then added baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Ed asked, “You put salt in? They’re supposed to be sweet, not salty.” John said, “It’s only half a teaspoon for a double batch. Salt brings out the other flavors.” “I don’t believe you.” “That doesn’t change anything.” John mixed the dry ingredients. “I need another bowl, for the liquid ingredients, and you’ll need a plate.” “‘We,’” Ed said. “There’s enough here for everybody.” He smiled. “I’m feeling generous today.” “We’ll need plates, then,” John said, “plural.” Ed said, “Don’t tell me. Tell that thing,” and pointed his muzzle at Sam. Gavin said, still staring at the sky, “Y’all go ahead. I don’t feel much like eating right

236 now.” Sam went to the semi and came back with a cereal bowl and four plates. John put one cup of the blueberries in the bowl and mashed them with the fork. At first, the blueberries resisted and wanted to jump out of the bowl and onto the table, but John guarded the edge of the bowl with his other hand. Then the blueberries gave in, and their innards oozed out thick and opaque. Ed craned his neck and peered into the bowl without coming any closer. “They’re white inside,” he said. John said, “The blue comes from the skin.” The blueberry skins, flattened, thin, and wrinkly, mixed with the pulp and tore into parts. The blue from the skin stained the pulp light blue at first, like the sky directly overhead was quickly becoming, then a medium purplish blue, like John imagined the deepest parts of the ocean. Once John had the pulp mostly deep blue and the consistency of yogurt, with most of the skins broken into tiny specks, he broke the eggs in on them, poured the buttermilk, and stirred until the bulk of the mixture was creamy pale blue. Then he poured that into the dry mixture and stirred with large, folding strokes. Ed said, “It’s still not blue enough.” John said, “Don’t worry about that.” He poured the other cup and a half of rinsed blueberries into the mixture and folded it over and over itself. Teeny tiny bubbles formed and popped from the baking soda. Sam took a swig from the water bottle and offered it to John. John shook his head and set the grill on the hibachi and the skillet on that. Ed said, “Maybe we should use food coloring after all.” John said, “Too late for that.” “What if I want food coloring?” “Fine. Sam will drive down the road and get some right now. We’ll just hang out here, you and me, Ed.” Ed said, “I’ll just use my imagination, then.” Gavin chortled, still slowly blinking at the growing brightness in the sky. Gavin’s face was as pale as the buttermilk. The sun, huge and deep orange and still dull behind the morning haze, peeked over the

237 trees. The trees’ tops cut off the very bottom edge of the sun in a jagged line, and the haze turned the part of the sun they could see into yellow, yellow orange, and orange layers like a parfait. The haze made the sun easy—even enjoyable—to look at. “Cook some,” Ed said, never looking at the sun. John said, “Have to wait for the skillet to heat up.” “Should have put it on sooner.” John nodded at the bowl of batter. “Have to wait for the oats to soak up some of the moisture, anyway. Most things worthwhile take time, Ed.” Ed switched the pistol to his injured hand and, with his good hand, picked up the cereal bowl, now only streaked with what looked like blue yogurt. He backed back up to his original spot and licked the bowl clean, slowly, like a cat bathing itself. John said, “There were raw eggs in there.” Ed shrugged. John dribbled a tablespoon of oil onto the skillet. It thinned and spread quickly. John lifted the skillet using his folded towel and shook and turned the skillet so that the oil spread. He set the skillet back on the hibachi and spooned an egg-sized scoop of batter into the middle of the skillet. The hole he’d scooped into the batter in the bowl remained at first, with severed half bubbles showing. It slowly filled in, and the scoop in the skillet sank just as slowly, stopping once half an inch thick. Ed said, “Stop making an experimental one first and just cook the damned things.” “If you know so well what to do, you cook them.” The edges of the pancake lost their glisten and then formed little bubbles that broke. John lifted one edge with the spatula and flipped the pancake over. Golden brown lines ran in relief across a pale blue-beige background. Whole blueberries appeared black, imbedded flush in the surface. One oozed shiny, then bubbled. Then another did, and a third. Ed said, “That looks like them. That’s blue enough.” John watched the very edges of the pancake until they cooked dry. He let it cook after that, and then checked its underside, pulled it out, and set it on a plate. Ed said, “Pour some syrup on that plate, next to the pancake.” John did. Ed picked up the pancake and sopped both sides of it in the syrup so that only the part his

238 forefinger and thumb touched was syrup-free. While Ed was near, John thought about clubbing Ed with the iron skillet. John wondered if he could pull it off, or if Ed would just block it with his arm or something and then shoot Gavin. John wondered just how well Ed could handle the pistol with his hurt hand. The skillet was a lot of weight to get moving like that. There was no way to do that without giving all kinds of clues: changing his grip, shifting his weight, the initial slowness of the swing. John wanted to believe that maybe Ed really would let them go. Ed moved back to his original spot and turned the pancake up and back down so that the syrup didn’t drip but instead ran one way and then the other and then circled around. John poured more oil into the skillet, swirled it around, and spooned in three more scoops of batter. Ed bit one quarter of the pancake off. “That’s good,” he said and took another bite. “Pretty close, but it should be sweeter. I warned you about the salt.” “Sop up more syrup, then,” John said. Ed finished off the pancake, licked his fingertips, and said, “That might even be better than the ones I had in Ranger School.” John flipped the pancakes in the skillet. “I thought you said those had been perfect. How do you beat perfection?” “I guess I was wrong about them,” Ed said. “Write down this recipe for me.” Sam slapped one thigh as if trying to trap something there, Sam’s eyes widening and showing the whites all around both irises. Then the Green Acres jingle dinged in electronic beeps from beneath Sam’s hand. Ed asked, “What is that?” Sam swallowed and pulled out the cell phone. Green Acres dinged again. Ed’s brows rose. “You’re kidding me.” Sam opened the phone and answered, “Hello?” Ed shook his head and worked his lips tightly like he were about to spit out something bitter. He pointed the pistol at Gavin and watched Sam. “Yes,” Sam said and turned toward the parking lot.

239 Sam took two casual steps toward the semi and stopped exactly between Ed’s pistol and Gavin, then turned and faced Ed, staring straight into Ed’s eyes. Sam said into the phone, “In the grass at the edge of the parking lot, on the other side of the moving truck.” “Fine,” Ed said and raised the pistol at Sam’s chest and cocked it. John grabbed the skillet with both hands and charged Ed, swinging it like he were in an Olympic hammer throw. He slammed the skillet’s edge into the side of Ed’s head at the same moment that Ed fired the pistol. The shot missed Sam, and pancakes and Ed landed in the freshly cut, damp, green grass without a sound other than the ringing in John’s ears from the blast of the shot. The skillet burned John’s palms, but Ed still held the pistol and tried to get to his feet. John raised the skillet high over his and Ed’s heads, and Ed, with bits of grass clinging to and falling from his face, raised the pistol at John and cocked it. John slammed the skillet down, the pistol blasted, and John fell onto his back, feeling like someone had punched him hard in the chest. He rolled over and tried to raise the skillet again, but it was no longer in his hands, though his palms still burned as if it were. Ed lay on his back gurgling, his ball cap in the grass a foot from him. Ed’s forehead’s ridges and valleys seemed less prominent. Ed gagged and coughed, and blood sprayed up and out of his mouth like a spurt from an aerosol can. Droplets landed all over John. Ed groaned, “Marcus,” and then gurgled again. His chest heaved in spasms, and blood burst in a bubbling pool out of his mouth and down his chin and cheeks. John dragged himself up onto all fours and then felt someone lifting him from beneath his armpits. He still heard nothing but ringing and, somehow, Ed’s gurgling. Ed kept jerking in spasms, the pool of blood in his mouth bubbling. A pink froth oozed from his deformed nostrils and swayed like sea foam in an onshore breeze. One of Ed’s pupils had dilated and consumed that eye’s entire iris; the other pupil was a pinpoint in the morning light. Then John felt as if a large glob of phlegm had leapt down his windpipe and made him cough. His chest still felt punched, and a sharper pain came to life within the duller one. John coughed again and hacked out a gurgle of blood. Sympathy bleeding, he thought. Then he thought that didn’t make sense. He heard a slurping noise, and realized it was coming from his chest. “Come on,” Sam said and kept holding John and pulling him away from Ed. “Come on.”

240 “Make it stop,” John said and coughed again. “Turn him over.” Then two beige-and-umber–uniformed deputies jogged past Sam and John and pinned Ed’s arms to the grass. A man in a white-and-red uniform took one of John’s arms, he and Sam led John toward all the flashing lights and laid him on a gurney, and then John was inside an ambulance. The paramedic put a clear mask over John’s nose and mouth, pulled the elastic band around to the back of John’s head, tugged its ends snug, and with a pair of oddly bent scissors with a large set of handles and teeny tiny blades, cut open the front of John’s sweater and T-shirt, slowly, methodically, but steadily. John coughed again, and the paramedic held John’s sweater and T-shirt away from John’s chest as he cut. John’s sweater was coated with blood, and he kept thinking, Where’d all that blood come from? That’s way more than Ed spit on me, more than I coughed up. Where’d it all come from? The paramedic turned John on his side. John kept hearing the sucking noises that got louder with each of his breaths, and he thought, Please let me live. Please let me call my parents again. Just long enough to do that, please.

241 CHAPTER 51

John stirred the roux for another of Pamela’s catering gigs. The roux had turned a deep chocolate brown, and John kept the heat on it, continually stirring. The skillet was Pamela’s huge cast-iron one, and deep. The wooden spoon dug thick swirls into the roux, cutting channels all the way to the skillet’s bottom. Hints of clear grease tried to separate itself from the pasty thickness and seep into the channels, but by the time the edges of each channel had turned shiny, before any grease could pool, John’s spoon had cut another path through and made the roux start the whole seeping process over again. The kitchen smelled of the cooking grease and flour, of onion and bacon. Pamela and Kevin were still upstairs, John assumed asleep, and the sun had just risen and cast an orange trapezoid, a distorted facsimile of the kitchen window, high on the wall next to him. John had spent two weeks at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, Sam by his side at first, and then Pamela. He had called his parents, had insisted to Pamela that she let him call them first and not the other way around, and she had let him, instinctively—Her instincts always seemed so good, he thought. Then he’d spent two more weeks recuperating upstairs here at Pamela and Kevin’s. Their father had even come and visited. John gazed at the bright trapezoid on the wall, crisscrossed with the shadowy grid of the window’s glazed sashes and muntins. The trapezoid had already shifted downward, was gliding toward him and turning brighter and more yellow than orange. It would be bright white by the time it reached him. The gumbo would be simmering by then. John opened his left hand wide, stretching the new skin on his palm, then swapped hands on the spoon and stretched open his right. The burns had healed, but the new skin was still tight and shiny. It was still hypersensitive, especially to the heat rising from Pamela’s big skillet and the roux, but the new skin had come in fast and healthy. Even the cracks the cold, dry air in Colorado had split into the tips of his fingers had healed. On the phone the night before, Sam had promised to stop by on their way out of Orlando, on the way to Arizona, Lake Havasu City. Over the phone, Sam had sounded excited, too.

242 The window hung open just a tad, and the salty, dewy air drifted in through the screen and all around John and then went up and out through the stove’s hood. Something about the air in the kitchen made the dew seem to press deep inside him, seemed to make him feel as if he had just stepped out of the ocean, seemed to match the temperature and salinity of his blood so exactly that it made him feel a part of it, as if his skin were more a whimsically drawn line than a fleshy barrier, a separation between him and the world that could have been anywhere, or nowhere. On the stainless table in the center of the kitchen was a huge clear glass bowl filled with minced garlic and chopped onion, bell pepper, and celery. A chef’s knife lay on the white poly cutting board next to the bowl. Next to that was sliced-up smoked andouille sausage in a pile. In the fridge was a plastic-wrap-covered glass bowl of cleaned, deveined shrimp and a bowl of cubed grouper. Next to John was a crowded congregation of spices: Old Bay, crab boil, Tabasco, Worcestershire, three kinds of ground pepper, virtually every spice from Pamela’s shelves. John wondered, Why isn’t garlic part of the Cajun holy trinity, too? Seems like garlic goes into everything Cajun or Creole. Maybe it’s implied, like, “Of course it gets garlic. No one should have to ask. Just accept it and cook.” Ed’s bullet had gone right between John’s heart and left pulmonary vein, piercing his lung. It was a fully jacketed bullet and had splintered the back of his fourth rib on its way out. He had metal braces, pins, and screws in there now. “If you’d been hit even a tiny bit differently,” the doctor had told him, “a fraction of an inch left or right, or if it’d been a hollow point, you’d likely be dead, almost died on the operating table anyway.” So although every vital thing inside John had been badly shocked and bruised, even though they’d had to cut part of him out, John had lived, and though he was still weak and still continued to heal, his heart was finally safe again. Ed had died at the rest area, drowned in his own blood with the deputies on top of him. John kept wondering if he could have helped Ed. John didn’t figure there was much he could have done to save Cassandra, and there was no way he could have prevented that woman’s death in Wyoming, so John wouldn’t have been able to prevent Ed’s going to prison or death row, whichever the case would have been, but maybe he could have had an impact on who Ed was at the end, on what kind of person they would have sent to death row. Ed’s last word had been “Marcus.” John couldn’t get that sound out of his head. Ed hadn’t said it as if Marcus were greeting Ed from the afterlife or anything nutty like that. He’d said it as if Ed were still seven, as if Edwin’s and Marcus’s parents had put them to bed in the

243 trailer, turned out the lights, and gone to bed themselves, and in the quiet of the tiny room, across the six feet of darkness between their beds, or maybe from the bottom bunk to the top, Ed had said, “Marcus.” Marcus would say, “Yeah. What, Edwin?” “I’m afraid, Marcus.” “Don’t be. I’ll take care of you. Go to sleep, Edwin. I’ll always take care of you.” That’s what that one word had sounded like to John, and he couldn’t shake that feeling, no matter how many times he told himself that everything other than that last word could be only his imagination. There was something about the way Ed had told that part of his story. John brought the huge glass bowl from the table and scraped the cut vegetables into the roux. The vegetables sizzled and crackled and sent steam up toward the hood in graceful swirls. He folded the roux over and over the vegetables and wished he had cut the celery into smaller cubes now. He wished he’d taken more care. Near the hood, beneath the light of the window and mixing with the damp saltiness from outside, the swirls of steam from the vegetables and the roux spun together and disappeared. John felt, through the wooden spoon, the celery, onion, and bell pepper softening and smelled the tantalizing combination of the vegetables and garlic. The celery will turn out okay, he thought. It will soften and be fine after the long simmer. Have to focus now on not burning the roux, especially at this late stage. He leaned over the skillet, inhaled greedily, and thought, This’ll be a good gumbo, maybe the best I’ve ever made. He looked forward to mixing the roux with the broth, to adding the sausage and seafood and adjusting the spices, to seeing how Sam would react to that first steaming spoonful.

244 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Roger Siebert grew up an Air Force brat, ending up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for his junior high and high school years, and has since lived primarily in Oklahoma, Florida, and Missouri. In 2002, he earned a BA in English, with distinction and department honors, at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. In the twenty-two years between graduating from high school and earning his bachelor’s degree, Roger worked as a burger joint cook, a janitor, a waiter, a restaurant and bar manager, a movie theater manager, a U.S. Army infantryman, a deli clerk, a doughnut shop clerk, a library clerk, a cross-country truck driver, a sailing instructor, a fitness instructor, and a salesman. He has attended several writing workshops, including the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Fiction Workshop, for which he won a tuition waver. His fiction has appeared in Writers’ Journal; his poetry, in yelLow muStard and The Human Factor; and his nonfiction, in The Southeast Review. He currently works as a book editor in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife, Victoria, and their cat, Clover.

245