“Oh, Jerry!”
He tapped the brakes, cut left, cut back across an oncoming pickup, the driver’s face shocked.
“Cheated me,” he yelled. Tapped the brakes. They slid through a four-way stop, jerked left. Accelerated past shabby apartments screened by vivid forsythia. On the main highway, he slowed, turned south.
“Jerry, what happened?”
He said, “I made them remember me.”
His eyes were white stones.
Five miles down the road, rolling west at thirty-five miles an hour through streets lined endlessly with small houses. Each had its own yard, its own driveway, its own bush. He yawned, as dull-headed as if he had slept. A black child in a red cap waved at them.
“I was so scared,” she told him. “You looked so funny.”
“How’d I look funny?”
“You just did.”
He gulped beer from a can. “You’re OK, Lu Ann. You’re nuts, but you’re OK. I think you’re fine, you know that?”
“You scared me.”
She looked like no one he had ever seen before. The lumpy face shone with tear smears. The big teeth, the loose dull hair belonged to a stranger. Only her voice was familiar, stumbling, hesitating, the voice of a confused child.
“... please don’t say that. It’s what Daddy said.”
“What?” he asked her.
“He looked at me. He looked at Momma. He said...” The thin voice faltered and shook, unsteady with shame. “Said, ‘You take that dumbnut brat with you, too.’ He said that. My daddy. ‘Take your ugly brat with you.’ He’s in Saint Louis now. I won’t forget him saying that.”
His empty beer can clattered behind the seat. “Open me another one.”
“Am I ugly?”
“You?”
“Yes, am I ugly?”
“Shoot,” he said, “where’s that beer?”
“You don’t have to say I’m pretty. I know I’m not pretty. I know what pretty is, like on television, all shiny like there’s sun on them.”
“You’re all right,” he said, sucking beer.
“But he didn’t ought to say that. Was your daddy nice?”
At last, Jerry said, “He played him some games with us.”
“What like?”
“Held up his two fists all closed together. Says, ‘Which hand’s the candy in, kid?’ So you guessed. You guess wrong — bamo! He fetch you one up the side of the head.”
“That’s awful.”
“Never was any candy. Not in either hand. He tells me, ‘Don’t expect nothing cause that’s what you’re going to get.’ ” He clattered the empty can into the rear. “That’s right, too. You better know it. Both hands empty, all the time.”
“That’s terrible.”
Her face disgusted him. It was brainless, narrow, and brown, shapeless, the teeth ledged in a loose pale mouth. Now, at last, he remembered her name. “Give me one of them beers, Sue Ann.”
Twenty miles west of Huntsville the highway intersected I-65 South. Between ploughed fields a broad concrete strip undulated beneath a filmy white sky. The Toyota began to eat miles.
“Now we’re going down to Florida,” he said.
“Yea, Florida.” She leaned toward him, fingers closing over his right arm, a disagreeable soft pressure. “You glad you’re taking me to Florida, Jerry?”
“Oh, God, yes.”
“I’m sorry they cheated you.”
“Took that air conditioner in and they say, ‘Why this looks like you stole it, we’re gonna call the police.’ Said, ‘You better leave that old air conditioner here, we’ll call the police.’ ”
“You showed them.”
“I showed them good. I messed them up good.” In his mind the old man screamed as the pale highway flowed toward them. “You bet I did.”
“You didn’t hurt them?”
“Damn right I did.”
“You shouldn’t do that, Jerry. That isn’t right.”
“OK for them to hurt me, though,” he said, stiff-voiced.
“No, no. I mean...” She struggled with the soft stuff of her mind. “It’s in the Bible. Don’t be mean, that’s what it says.”
“Your tongue’s sure bubbling.”
“Well, you shouldn’t. I don’t think people are really mean. Like my daddy. He just yells. When he’s drunk, he’s sweet.”
He burst into laughter. “You’re somebody, you sure are, Sue Ann.”
She pulled back from him. “Now don’t you laugh at me.”
“Listen,” he said, “nobody’s got candy in their hands. You just remember that.”
“I’d give you some candy.”
“I guess you’d try, wouldn’t you?”
“You know I would.”
Under their wheels, the road down Alabama pulsed like a concrete heart.
“This thing’s a gas hog,” he said. “We better pull her in and fill up.”
They pulled off the highway and wound through a complicated series of small roads to a combination filling station, restaurant, and general store, spreading out under a bright orange roof. He gave her five dollars and she went inside, among the strange voices, and bought crackers, two large coffees, and four comic books with shiny girls wet-faced on the glowing covers. As she came out, he hurried up to her, white-faced and tight-lipped as if he had just smelled hell.
“You come on here.”
They drove around back of the restaurant and parked by a big square trash container. “That damn Dandy,” he said. “Look here.”
Two bullet holes punched the light blue metal, one above the license plate, the other over a taillight. Impact had dimpled the metal and the edges showed raw and clean. There was a strong smell of gasoline.
He said savagely, “Just creased the tank. Put a big old crack in it. It’s been slopping out gas all this time.”
She goggled at him, making inconsequential sounds.
“That Dandy fellow. I didn’t even hear him shooting.”
“Can... can we fix it?”
“Shoot. Can’t run along showing bullet holes. Turn on the lights at night, maybe blow the whole back out of her.”
Fingers crept over her teeth. “Who’s Dandy?” she asked faintly.
“Might tape it. Probably work right loose. Tank’ll hold maybe four gallon. But shoot — I’m not going to drive all over Florida sticking gas in this sucker every hour.”
“Can’t we go to Florida?”
“Will you shut up?”
“Please don’t be mad, Jerry.”
“Don’t you start whining. Give me a hand.”
They unloaded the trunk, piling reeking cardboard boxes by the side of the car. Under the floor mat shone a pungent skin of gasoline.
“Better not chance it,” he said at last. “Give her a spark, she’ll flare up like the sun in a sack.”
As they stared into the trunk, a dirty station wagon rolled past behind them, packed to the windows with staring children and luggage.
“I gotta get me another car,” Jerry said. Briefly his long arms beat at his sides, a furious sudden violence.
In their inconspicuous place behind the road stop, they waited in a numb paralysis of time, the journey compromised. From out front engines sounded, voices rose, and doors slammed and reslammed, a purposeful outcry of activity emphasizing their inactivity and isolation. Limp in the Toyota, Sue Ann fingered through a comic book. Alone by the dumpster, Jerry fidgeted, a wolf watching empty plains, glancing impatiently off toward the main parking area.
After a long time, a black Lincoln, arrogantly polished, rolled past with three people inside. It was followed by a red Ford with a young woman driving.
“Hey, can you give me a hand?” he called.
She drove slowly by, not looking around. He snarled after her and waited. After another ten minutes, a truck full of ropes eased past.