“Replaced our sticks with Tasers.”
“Tase him, then.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Won’t fit through the bars.”
“I’ll pull over.”
We veered off onto a dirt path and then Ray got out. “Stand up,” he barked at me. A wild boar was watching us from the woods. It had come to protect me, but Ray would tase it too. Stay back, I begged it in my head, and Ray lifted the Taser and at the last moment, as I shook, he said, “Just kidding.”
Things got better. We drove to a cockfight and busted it up, then went to another and won some cash. There was a guy the cop told us was Dolly Parton’s brother. He smoked with us and Ray said, “Where’s your big tits,” and when he got mad Ray pulled the Taser out and tased him. We took off. The cop got to talking about Dolly and her songs. He said she’d written more songs than anyone in history, thousands upon thousands of them. “I admire that,” he said. “Me, I’ve written ten, maybe twelve songs.”
I said, “I bet she’d be having fun if she was here with us.”
I got scared they’d tase me again, but they laughed and the cop started singing. That was around when she got in and rode along with us for a bit. She’d done this deal with the governor called Imagination Library, where poor kids get free books. It was on some billboards we were passing, and Ray’s kids had read some of those books. Why she was in the car, she’d found out Ray’d stole them from her. I thought to warn him but I looked up and the next light was for her road, Dolly Parton Parkway. The cop thought his own fingers were the ones that hit the signal, and I froze and next thing we’re at Dale’s, but if I tell you we watched Dale screw his girl and took his cash and pistol-whipped him, you won’t see how I sat frozen while that bitch stared through me, steering us toward hell. She wanted to show me what happens in hell when you give AIDS to your wife. She had it from her husband, and that’s what her songs were about. She wouldn’t kill us just yet cause it would all be there waiting, come time.
I woke up alone with a note by the bed that said, “Call your mom.” I drove to my ma’s and let myself in to find her at her table, writing. “Knock knock,” I said.
“Hi,” she told me without looking up.
“You copying a recipe?”
“Where’s Lisa?”
“Is it your brownies?”
“Who’s Ray?”
“He’s my blood brother.”
I could see she wasn’t meaning to bake brownies. There were some medical instruments lying around — a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, a roll of gauze — along with several pill bottles, like she was intending to put Ray out of business.
“Lisa called here not fifteen minutes ago.”
“So then you know where she is already.”
“She told me she was at Krystal.”
I can’t explain. It was like all women were inside her right then, cussing at me for not wanting them hard enough. I got to feeling she was a cop. I said, “If you’re so naïve, why’d you have that heart attack?” I knew I just needed a hit, so I headed back to Ray’s, but no one was home.
For the first time I went down to the basement and turned the knob. There he was in a chair, wearing a shirt and nothing else, waiting.
It took me a second to react. I jumped and hit my head on the low ceiling.
“Remember when you told me you’d break my arm?” he said.
I shook my head, stammering sorry.
“How would you do it?”
“I know you don’t want me down here.”
“Tell you what, go buy some whiskey. Here’s twenty bucks.”
I stumbled over myself running back upstairs. I knew he’d call his buddies, which was too much to bear. I sped fast through the holler. I ran over a dog and decided it belonged to a boy who told his dad my license plate, so now I’d have to go back the long way while Ray screwed the whole state.
The clerk was a lady I hadn’t seen before, with icy eyes the color of blue Kool-Aid. “Back for more?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Run out?”
She was nodding at me, her curls bobbing along with her nods. “Of what?”
“George Dickel?” she said, and I thought, maybe I’ve got a twin, maybe Ray’s doing him right now and drinking his Dickel.
“I’m an only child.”
“I’m the youngest of ten.”
As she stared through me, I felt more fear than any soldier at war, but she rang me up and let me go. On the way home, the long way, I passed the black-toothed billboard girl and tried to count my teeth with my tongue but I lost count. I recalled finding Lisa on the phone with her friend, giggling about me. She thought Ray was part of her plan but the joke was on her, because I was in love, and I decided then to help Ray get his kids back.
I carried the bottle in and presented it. “Look,” Ray said, gesturing out the window behind me.
I turned and saw the pine woods across the road. “You mad about the basement?”
He shook his head. “While you were gone,” he said, “I realized I hate you.”
I figured Ray was joking, so I laughed.
“That’s what a pussy you are. I say I hate you, and you laugh.”
I set the whiskey down and asked what was going on.
“I got you fucked up and fucked your marriage up and never used a rubber and your ma won’t talk to you, but you keep on liking me.”
“So I should hate you?”
“So I should hate you?” he mimicked in the high voice of a pussy.
“What is it you want me to do?”
Ray shook his head. “Nothing. Stay here. I’m gonna go find my wife.”
He walked out. “Stop,” I called out, tearing up, and he pointed at my face and said, “There’s the problem with you.”
After that, things changed. I started wishing to lose my teeth out of plain spite. I looked around for the billboard girl and found her in Knoxville. Her name was April, and she took me to see some folks. There was a dude that hot-wired cars, who drove me to the Atlanta bathhouse. He left after a few days, but I stayed on. Your body needs dreams, but you can get them while you’re awake. Every few days I bought something to eat from a machine. One day I got sick with fever chills, then I got better. When I finally went outside, two weeks had passed, because that was how long my car had been impounded. The bill was twelve hundred dollars, which meant it was totaled. I walked to Big Lots, found a truck, and hot-wired it, which was the start of not being a pussy. I got on I-75 South. The sun was rising as I reached Miami. I looked in the rearview and saw how the weeks of fasting had sculpted my face, which led me to meet some folks. We drank rum in pools and sang “Auld Lang Syne” and one day I froze up and realized it had never gotten cold.
“It don’t,” said Vince, the silver-haired guy I’d been hanging with, but there’d been others, too; now suddenly we were alone.
“What month is it?”
“March,” he said.
“I had a birthday.”
“Well, happy birthday.” A grin stretched out from either side of his cigar. I asked if he’d seen my phone. “They turned it off,” he said, “remember?”
I felt uneasy as he handed me his. Outside on a deck facing the canal I called the only number I could remember. It rang twice before I got an error message. If I wanted, it said, I could hang up and try again.
“City and state?” the 411 machine said.
I had to grip the railing to keep from tumbling into the water. “Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dr. Lighter.”
They connected me automatically. Each ring was a shock to my chest but I kept holding on. “Doctor’s office,” my wife said.
I spoke her name and she said, “You’re alive.”
“Where’s my ma?”
“We tried to find you.”
“Lisa, come on.”