“South fucking America if we can get that far,” I said.
A pinch of time zipped by. “Turn it around,” she said.
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“I mean it! You turn this thing right around!”
“Fuck you going on about?”
“I’m serious!” She reached out with her left foot and stomped on the brake, nearly swerving me into a parked Camry. “I’m not running out on my friends.”
She kind of hiccupped over the word friends, but kept her gaze firm and determined.
“Your friends? You talking about the Munsters back there?”
Her eyes flicked away.
“Oh, okay. You’re talking about those twenty thousand friends. This ain’t about twenty thousand dollars no more, Leeli. This here’s about twenty-to-life.”
“I don’t care!”
“You’ll care when those lifer bitches with the tattooed mustaches start wanting to get cozy.”
She opened the door, planted one foot on the asphalt. “I’m not staying ’less you go back for Ava and them.”
“Those motherfuckers gonna get us killed! They almost got us killed!”
“Way I see it, you didn’t act such a fool with that preacher, Carl wouldn’t never done nothing!”
I put my eyes out the windshield. A lost balloon was sailing off into the blue—it vanished as it crossed the sun. “Damn it, Leeli! Get your ass back in here!”
She slid down from the seat and stood in the glare, defiant as a dog off its chain.
I gunned the engine. “I’m leaving!”
She slammed the door shut.
“Something wrong with those people,” I said. “Man’s shot in the face and it don’t even phase him? Fuck is that? This ain’t nothing we should be messing with.”
She took off walking. Her round little butt looked real tasty in those shorts.
“Aw, Leeli! Come on back here, girl!”
I’m not a complete fool. I understand it’s all about pussy, but pussy must be a sickness with me, otherwise I cannot explain why I let myself get pulled back into a situation I knew was a dead loser. A psychiatrist might say I was hunting for just such a situation, but if Leeli had been one of the reverend’s old gals, I wouldn’t have wasted a second before putting her in the rear view. I admit self-destruction is the way of my life. The way of every life, maybe. But the style Leeli brought to her walk-off scene, switching her hips and arching her back and giving a sad, pouty look over her shoulder, psychology wasn’t that huge a factor.
I told her to drive and funneled Ava, Carl, and Squire into the rear of the van, then climbed in behind the passenger seat so I could keep an eye on everybody. Squire was by the doors, legs kicked out, his head wobbling like he was listening to private music. Ava was next to the wheel hub, comforting Carl, who rested his good cheek on her shoulder.
“Get east,” I said to Leeli. “Use the interstate and keep it under the limit.”
Ava asked, “Where we going?” It was loud in the van and she had to shout it.
“Friend of mine’s place in South Daytona!”
She thought about this and nodded gloomily.
“Wanna tell me what’s going on?” I pointed to Squire and then Carl.
She shook her head. Not now! She shifted to accommodate Carl’s weight and said, “I’d like my gun back!”
“I like maple sugar on my oatmeal,” I told her. “But sometimes I gotta do without!”
The sun was bouncing along just above the palm tops like a dragged bait, and the light was growing orangey, and a brown shadow gathered in the rear of the van. It was all calming somehow, the shadow and the rattling, droning speed. I felt submerged in it, a man sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, unmindful of trouble in the air, and I worked the ride into a movie, not a big spectacular with sinister terrorist plots or world-shattering disasters, but a movie from back when stars used to play in crummy little stories about nobodies on their way to damnation. Creedence and Lynard Skynard for the soundtrack. My daddy’s kind of songs, but I liked them all the same. I found one cigarette left in my crumpled pack and lit up. It didn’t taste a thing like movie smoke must taste, clean and savory, a working man’s reward, but my exhales hazed the air so it looked old-fashioned and yellowy brown, 1970s air, air with some character, and I sat fingering the gun, trying to put my mind onto a future different from the sort promised by the movie I was in, but thinking mainly about the manager, what a strange thing it was for a man to come halfway around the world from a place where they had monkeys and elephants and shit to go with their nuclear bombs just to catch a bullet in a HoJos and die staring up at track lighting and styrofoam ceiling tile.
Rickey Wirgman, who I’d called my friend, was more of a brother fuck-up and former criminal associate, like a cousin you don’t have much use for but deal with on occasion. His grandfather had left him some property on the edge of the marshlands near South Daytona, a collection of weathered frame buildings alongside a stretch of open water that grandpa, if not for a crack habit and some harsh words spoken to a fellow inmate in the Volusia County Jail that caused his history to take a sudden tragic turn, might have developed into a full-blown financial disaster. A fishing camp had been his thought. In the years since he’d inherited, Rickey had run a contest to see what would fall apart the fastest, himself or the roof he slept under. He sold off pieces of the land to survive and recreated with the finest dope and the nastiest hookers. The sheds and cabins were rotting away, but the marsh was pretty in the twilight. Black watercourses meandering through tall green grasses, here and there a tiny humped island thick with palms going to silhouettes in the soft gray light, and pelicans crossing in black flapping strings against a streak of rose along the horizon, like a caption in a cool language. Exotic-looking. A Discovery Channel place. The grass was tamped down around the relics of the fishing camp. Seemed like some huge, heavy thing had made an emergency landing, maybe a big jetliner bellying in, and the survivors had squatted where they’d been spilled until death had swallowed them too, and now their shelters were decaying. Scattered around in the higher grass behind the cabins were beat-up refrigerators and washing machines and stoves. They got you thinking it wasn’t a plane had crashed, but one of those bird dinosaurs, and its teeth had busted from its mouth or it had laid a number of curious square white eggs before passing.
We hid the van behind a shed and straggled toward the main lodge. Lodge was a hundred dollar name for a structure that was the house equivalent of a crooked old beekeeper who had stroked out in his sleep while wearing his hat and veil. Window shadows for eyes and a gnawed-off nose opening into a screen porch and boards the color of cigarette ash and a slumped partial second story with tattery shingle tiles drooping off the roof edge. There were no lights. Frogs bleeped out in the marsh, like electric raindrops, and skeeters would cover your arm unless you kept swiping them off.
“Nobody’s home,” Leeli said in an exhausted tone.
“Maybe. It don’t matter.” The porch stair creaked and bowed to my step. The billowed-out screens were rusted through in patches, torn loose from the railing. “Just pick out some rooms,” I said. “I’ll see if anybody’s here.”
I left the others to creep around and scare the spiders and explored some. You couldn’t find a grayer place, you searched in a cemetery. Every square inch and object had run out of time and stopped being what it once was. Phantom things that resembled tables and chairs and rugs and pictures on the walls and the walls themselves were just ghosts made of dust and habit and a gray smothery smell. The kitchen sink was gray and so were the stains on it. Peels of linoleum curled up from the floor like eucalyptus bark. The only bit of color I noticed was three custom car magazines poking from beneath an empty bookcase. Rickey’s version of the redneck dream.