“Says who?” growled Bear.
“Us,” said another man’s voice from the truck-stop café’s stoop. A silver-haired guy in a windbreaker, his hands open and flat along his sides.
“Bet you got iron, maybe rigged in your van for easy grab. Go for it. Float with the others, the Mekong or the Marias,” the silvertip said of the river running through trees seven miles south of town. “It’s all the same to me.”
Cowboy Shirt Guy said: “Time for you to be gone.”
Roxy scrambled toward where Paul lay crumpled in gravel, but Bear pulled her up, shoved her toward the van and Cherry’s waiting arms as he growled to the locals: “Fuck your nowhere town.”
Cherry pulled Roxy into the van, whispered: “You got no win, not here, not now.”
Roxy heard the van door slide shut on everything but where she was.
Jammers’ owner didn’t bitch when they pulled out an hour later and a gig early. Luke added that “projected lost revenue” and the repair of the white van’s sliding door to Roxy’s tab, though when they rolled out on the next circuit, the dent was still there.
On the circuit. A loop through the whole state, twenty-seven days of driving, one or two shows a stop, on the road like the sweep of a second hand around a clock, up the spine of the Rocky Mountains to where they were the night before, now headed east across the Hi-Line to go beyond Havre, into the bleak northeast corner, drop down to Glendive and Billings, then the long run west, maybe to state capital Helena with its cathedral and bureaucrats, its new wine bars and old money, of course over to haunted Butte and then back home to Bozeman, to the Payday Dollars Now yellow shack, to the trailer she shared with DezAray, to the tab Luke said he’d figure some way to let her work off.
Now here they were, back in Shelby.
Cruising past that truck-stop parking lot, a few parked cars, a pickup, nobody in sight. The road curved them onto Main Street. Bear made their machine crawl through the heart of the town to draw out Roxy’s pain. She looked across the cooler, past Cherry, saw the reflection of the white van passing across the wall of windows of the lone café, wondered if Teresa or Bev would look up from their coffee to see her glide by.
Cherry said: “You’re doing it smart, Bear. Don’t even stop to take a piss.”
Bear snapped his attention away from the old movie theater. “Hell, Roxy, now I know why you like this dump: they named that place after you!”
DezAray chirped: “Oh wow! How cool, Roxy!”
Someone whispered: “Leave it be.”
The bleached-blond big girl blinked. “What’d I say?”
From the way back came Star’s whisper: “I don’t want nothing named after me.”
Bear laughed: “No worries.” He glared at Roxy: “Your worry is to ride the circuit right.”
“Ignore them, Bear,” said Cherry. “You’re driving good for being shaky tired.”
He frowned at her in the rearview mirror.
The white van cruised past the squat green visitors’ center. Past the turn for the post office. Over a spur of railroad tracks as the highway followed the main track line and rolled the minivan toward the edge of town and the slaughterhouse turned into a bar called Jammers.
“Some gigs are worth losing,” said Cherry. “Sometimes you gotta get up and go. Speaking of go — Bear, you gonna two-hour us all the way to Havre? I could give you a break, let you pee, drive, let you—”
Bear pushed the pedal to surge past the gray skyscraper-huge grain elevator before the turnoff to the county fairgrounds. “You aren’t the one who lets.”
“I know who I am,” replied Cherry as the van rumbled up the east wall of the prairie valley. She smiled at Roxy: “You played that cool and smart.”
Roxy mumbled: “I just sat there.”
The van topped out of the valley, sun glistening off the train tracks to their left, the vast prairie rolling out before them like a golden sea to the long-gone horizon.
“Wow,” said DezAray. “Imagine getting stuck out here? Hello, Mr. Serial Killer.”
“You know what I bet?” said Cherry. “I bet the take in Bear’s belt’d probably be enough to cover Roxy’s line.”
What?
Cherry shrugged for everyone to see. “Just saying, she threw in a big chunk.”
Twenty-one bucks from last night’s stripping tips is a big chunk?
Bear flicked his eyes to the mirror to—
“Cop!”
The police cruiser pulled around the white minivan, whooshed past, and sped away until it was a black dot vanishing on the long gray highway.
“Where’d he come from?” mumbled Star.
“You’re in the way back!” said Bear. “You’re supposed to be the lookout!”
“You got mirrors.” Star stared at the ceiling of the van.
“Was that your trooper, Cherry?” asked DezAray.
“No,” she replied. “He’s got Wolf Creek Canyon patrol this month, remember?”
“I barely remember where we’re going now!” DezAray giggled.
“Don’t ever remember,” said Star.
“I’m glad I remembered to pee.” Cherry looked at Roxy: “You okay, girl?”
Like suddenly you care?
“Gotta do what we gotta do.” Cherry smiled, her lips the color of her name.
DezAray, who kept looking for the TV cameras she like totally deserved, burst into the song that Luke wouldn’t let her use in her routine, even though she did the swirl in high heels pretty good for a bleached-blond big girl and could whip off the sequined bikini top with flair as she belted out: “I GOTTA BE ME!”
“You strip so guys think they are who they wanna be,” Luke had told her. “So no gotta for you.”
But for that moment, that one April morning moment in a white van speeding east on a gray-snake, two-lane highway, DezAray was.
Blue sky arced above them.
Nothing to see out the windshield except the horizon rushing toward that glass.
Bear flipped up the turn signal. “Damn it!” His eyes glared at Cherry from the rearview mirror. “Barely a couple miles out of that shit-for-a-town and look what all your pee talk’s making me do.”
The white van glided off the highway to a graveled roadside historic attraction, a wooden sign burned black with letters about the Baker Massacre south of there at the Marias River where in 1870 the US Cavalry slaughtered 173 Blackfeet men, women, and children who were all innocent of killing one white man, the official motive for the military action. Bear stopped the van, turned off the engine.
“I gotta take a piss,” he told the four women in the van. “You know the drill.” He pushed his way out from behind the steering wheel.
Cherry watched Bear stomp around to the front of the van, said: “Pass me a Coke, would you please, Roxy?”
“Please,” came Star’s soft voice from the way back where her mind wasn’t.
Roxy felt herself open the cooler, stick her hand into its motel ice, bottles of beer and soda and energy drinks that Bear always bought before hitting the road, lift out a Coke, and hold it across the backseat toward Cherry.
Cherry said: “Perfect of you to set it up for me, Roxy — isn’t it, everybody?”
“Whatever,” said DezAray as her thumbs and eyes played Candy Crush.
From the way back came the whisper: “Everything’s so fucking perfect.”
“You know the way it always works,” said the golden-blond woman with red lips, steel eyes, and breasts she’d chosen herself. She took the bottle from Roxy, growled an imitation of their road boss: “You drain the lizard, you gotta give him a drink.” Cherry’s eyes flicked between the windshield’s view of a hulk with his back to the van and what she was doing that Roxy couldn’t see. “You know, Roxy,” she said loudly, stepping into a conversation they’d never had, “you might be right, could be lots of opportunities coming up in the company.”