“Every man runs away,” the driver said. “Every man runs away sooner or later. Got it? And it’s not our fault. Got it? I ran out on my wife a year, year-and-a-half ago, but it wasn’t my fault. We lived by Lewis, had this great townhouse just a couple miles from the beach, had this little girl. Suzie. Had a dog too. All the things. All the family things. Fondue pot.”
I started sweating thinking about what he meant by had a little girl. Maybe we’d taken up with a cannibal, a kidnapper.
“But it was like providing for my wife made her mad at me. I went to work; she went to help out in the kindergarten room. Cutting out snowmen with safety scissors. Who had the harder job? Her? Or me, slaving away trying to manage a restaurant? Smelling like grease? Rude customers—I want the booth, I want my dessert comped.”
Out the passenger side window, the pylon of the bridge dropped a hundred feet into the steel blue water. Tiny boats propelled by tiny men bobbed along the surface, beneath which lurked the fish everyone wanted to haul up. We slowed at the toll booth and then zoomed off as soon as the plastic arm raised.
“Plus, she started accusing me of sleeping around,” our driver continued. “With the waitresses, with the bartenders. Those were nobodies. Got it? I love my wife. Ex-wife. I think she was saying that to cover up her fooling with the kindergarten teacher. What kind of sick coupling is that? But I couldn’t take it anymore. She kicked me out? I ran off and left her? Who can even remember? Sure, we used to be joined at the hip, me and her.”
We pulled over for gas in Virginia, and the man asked us to move to the back of the pickup so that he’d have some room to think. “Going to see her, my ex-wife,” he explained, “and I need a real good opening line. Got to figure one out.”
I didn’t mind the wind-whipped pickup bed; back there, I didn’t feel so trapped, plus, it gave me and Jay more freedom to talk.
“You think we can get there in maybe another day?” I said. “This ride you found us is killer.” I was starting to feel really good, warm on the outside from the sun and on the inside from heading off on this journey with Jay, who had obviously chosen me over Toshi as his favorite, and even if he’d done that in a way I wanted to forget, the result was the same: Jay and I were on our own adventure.
Jay fished out a candy bar from his backpack. That morning, he’d left me in the woods for what I’d considered an unreasonably long time while he snuck back into his house to gather supplies. He said, “You know that Florida is a great big state, right? Do you got your mom’s address? Anything like that?”
“I’ll look her up in the book.”
The truck flit past billboard after billboard with the same slogan—God Loves Me— all with different people featured, and all defaced in the same way.
Jay paused in munching on his candy bar as we drove through the invisible stench of cows. He said, “Your mom’s the perfect one to go to. She’ll take us in, and all the way down in Florida, they’ll have no clue about the little trouble we got into.”
“You think that Toshi told on us?”
Jay threw the candy bar wrapper out of the truck. “Something like that.” He shuddered even though the air was pretty warm, and then, pensive and still-bodied in a way I’d never seen him before, he gazed out at the trees. I figured he was finally settling into the guilt of what we’d done.
We closed in on North Carolina just before sunset. The driver pulled over and said he was going to leave us there, near to the freeway where we’d have a better chance of getting a ride. “Let me try something out on you boys,” he said, “let me test this out.” He cleared his throat. “Verna, I know our differences seem pretty big right now, but if you will please accept my sincere apology”—he held out one empty palm—“and this necklace as a token of my true feelings for you”—he held out the other empty palm—“then maybe we can get past… get past the past and move on.”
“And then you kiss her,” Jay said. “Get right in there for a kiss.”
“So it sounds okay? Pretty good, like?”
“I think you have a solid chance,” Jay said and hopped out of the pickup.
“Now what should I do if that kindergarten teacher is home?” he said.
“She lives with him?” I’d tried to stay out of it the entire ride, but now I’d blown my cover.
“Well yeah.” He shrugged. “They’re married.”
Jay shot me a look that meant I needed to shut my mouth. “You go for it, buddy,” he said. “Knock her dead.”
After the driver had pulled back onto the road, Jay told me to shoot him if he ever got like that guy, wishy-washy and tied up over a woman, and a taken woman at that. “Driving all the way to North Carolina,” Jay said, “imagine. She must have been some lay.”
Chapter 15
We tried to thumb a ride, but the only car that stopped for us was driven by a black woman, and Jay refused to get in. He waved her on.
“Don’t you think she was harmless?” I asked. Her backseat had looked clean and soft, and I felt desperate for a rest. Standing alongside the on-ramp with all those vehicles screaming past was crumpling up my nerves. “Just an old lady.”
“You don’t know what she wanted,” Jay said. “Could have wanted anything, could have taken us anywhere. It’s way suspicious that the old crow even stopped for us in the first place.”
“Why?” I couldn’t see what Jay wanted me to see: there was no way that old woman could do worse to us than the middle-aged, nervous guy rehearsing speeches for his ex-wife.
“You are such a taint; you got to think. What if she wants to enslave us? Get us back for something our ancestors we don’t even know maybe might have done to them? This is exactly what I meant when I said you need help figuring shit out. You’ll never survive if you don’t work out the possibilities. What would you do if we ran into a bear right now?”
There was no reasoning with him when he got this way. We waited. The night grew deeper, and once it was just the two bright yellow eyes of a car’s headlights coming at us through the black mist, we decided to snatch a few hours of sleep before starting off again in the morning.
“All we need is an underpass,” Jay said.
But once we found one—Jay made a pillow of his black backpack and lay with his feet pointing down the incline of the concrete, and I crouched beside him, not quite ready to relax against the filthy ground—my stomach started to loudly protest the fact that I had eaten only two candy bars and a few weeds for the entire day, and then Jay’s stomach joined mine, the chorus of grumbles echoing pitifully.
“We don’t have any money,” I said, watching a shiny black beetle scuttle among the pebbles. “How will we get food to eat if we don’t have any money? We already ate all the stuff you grabbed from your house. What if we starve out here?” All of a sudden, I longed for the easy option; if only I could be transported straight back to my neighborhood in my bedroom behind the door that could lock everyone else out. Maybe then I’d revert to being myself, to feeling okay—because running away hadn’t been the quick fix for which I’d hoped. Inside, I still felt shitty, and now I was starving, too. “Maybe it’s time to head home?” The thought that we could make all this go away excited me. “We could turn around. No one would know we’d left.”
“Going back is the dumbest idea I ever heard,” Jay said. But his voice was small, and I could tell that he was a little bit scared, too.