I watched the smoke and fog mingle and roll in lazy waves in and out of the orange floodlight of the gas station. All around me were junked cars parked at crazy angles, cracked windshields and fallen bumpers shining in the greasy light. Buicks and Chevys and Pontiacs, all chrome and disappointment. The dirt was speckled with pieces of broken glass. Every breath tasted like gunpowder. We were still thousands of miles from Alaska.
Trace was gone a long time, too long, and I wondered if he’d found a girl and gone off with her. That happened a lot. The last time was in Flagstaff, where he’d hooked up with a tequila-shooting girl who was wispy and tan and blonde, so good-looking that her red eyes and thick liquor-stink just made her seem game and fearless instead of sad. She told us she was from San Diego, on her way east to divinity school. At last call, I saw her lift her skirt and flash Trace her tiger-print panties, and they spent the night in her motel room. I slept in the van. “I don’t understand it,” he said the next day. “I’m a fucked-up-looking guy, but I always get the beautiful ones.” It was true. He was fucked-up-looking — short and puffy, with a half-closed eye and a nose that looked like it’d been hit with a bag of nickels — and he did always get the beautiful ones. And he always seemed genuinely surprised about it. You could tell him to shut up and enjoy his luck, but that never stopped him from wondering out loud.
While I waited for Trace, I ran through the names of the places we’d drive through next: Tehachapi, Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Lodi, Red Bluff, Redding. I’d studied the map, knew the route by heart. I wanted to see all these towns in the rearview, feel them as beats in a rhythm of places passed by, a rhythm as steady and soothing as tires thrumming over pavement joints.
When Trace came back to the van, he was carrying a baby wrapped in a threadbare beach towel. “Hey, Phil,” he said. “Look what I got.” He held it up like it was a carnival prize. The baby’s eyes were shut, but it wrinkled its little fingers open and closed, so I knew it was alive.
“Whose is that?” I said.
“Someone gave it to me.”
“Who?”
“A woman. Outside the liquor store.”
“People don’t just hand out babies,” I said.
“This one did,” he said.
“Take it back.”
“I can’t,” he said. “She drove away.”
“We have to find her,” I said. “People will think we stole it.”
Trace carried the baby as we walked along the road into town. He hummed softly and rocked it in his arms. I kicked at the loose gravel. “The mother,” I said, “was she fat?” The other morning, in the taco place, I’d seen a fat woman chew up a quesadilla and dribble it into her baby’s mouth. Like she thought they were penguins or something. It was all I could do to keep my food down, watching. I wondered if this one might be the penguin baby. I didn’t want any baby, but I especially didn’t want that one.
“No,” Trace said. “She was skinny. Like meth-skinny.”
“Even so,” I said. “We have to get rid of it.”
In the streetlight I could see the baby’s forehead and nose were bright red. The mother, whoever the hell she was, had let the kid get sunburned. Even I knew that was wrong. Still, the baby looked pretty happy. It wasn’t crying. As babies go, this one was pretty mellow.
We sat on the curb in the liquor store parking lot and waited for the mother to come back. The baby slept in Trace’s arms. People walked by and looked at us suspiciously. No one recognized the baby. After a while the store owner banged on the glass and waved us away. I pointed to the baby, trying to explain, but the guy just shook his head and kept waving.
“I knew she wouldn’t come back,” Trace said.
“We should call the cops,” I said.
“No way,” he said. “Are you crazy?”
He was right. Technically, we were fugitives.
“Let’s go to the bar,” he said. “I could use a drink.”
I didn’t have any better ideas. That’s always been a problem for me.
We started walking again. “I wonder what its name is,” Trace said.
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Either way, I’m going to call it Mo,” he said.
That wasn’t a good sign. Mo was his ex’s name, short for Maureen. He was still stuck on her, but she was back in New York, shacked up with a guy who made millions riding the bench for the Yankees. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that he could save this baby, that he was meant to save it. “We’re not keeping it,” I said.
“We could,” he said.
“We’re giving it back.” I was waiting for him to say something stupid like this baby needs us. This baby didn’t need us. We were the last thing it needed. It needed anyone but us.
That whole year we’d been riding a crest of failure. In March my girlfriend left me because I threw her shoes out the window, and Mo and Trace broke up not long after, this time for good. It had been Trace’s idea to leave New York for Colorado. “We’ll be river-rafting guides,” he’d said. “You get to help girls into their wetsuits.” We got there and the rivers were nearly dry. Not enough snow that winter, people said. So we bought the van and tried to start a painting business, but we never found any customers who’d pay. It was easy to leave when the court dates started piling up. Alaska was his idea, too, and so far all it had gotten us was stuck. Stuck in a town that wasn’t more than a crosshair of blacktop trained on the desert.
The bar was dark and narrow. Dim red light, like a darkroom. Red vinyl stools and booths. Two pool tables. A jukebox that played songs about trucks. I sat in a booth and told Trace to show the baby to the bartender. He held out his free hand for money. “Drinks,” he said. I took off my sneaker and gave him the ten I’d been keeping for an emergency. It was the last of the money for now, because Trace’s sister would only send us a little at a time. “I have my own juveniles to feed,” she’d say. But usually she came through. She’d wire it in my name because she thought her brother was irresponsible and because she liked me from when I was a kid. Trace and I had grown up together, watched our parents’ marriages blow apart at the same time, stayed close even after one strange summer when my dad was sleeping with his mom. Got closer, maybe.
The baby started to cry. Trace held up the bill and sniffed it. “For fuck’s sake, Phil,” he said. “The money stinks. You got trench foot or something.”
What did he expect? I’d been walking around in a desert for four days without any socks. We’d packed in a hurry.
My head hurt. I leaned against the wall and stretched my legs out on the seat and tried to pretend I was somewhere better.
Earlier that night, Trace and I had gone to the fireworks show, which was held at a football field that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. No goalposts, no scoreboard, just a rectangle of sandy dirt and rocks with patchy scabs of turf. Lots of families sat on blankets out on the field. High school kids sat in the bleachers, and every now and then you’d hear a bottle fall on the gravel below or roll down the metal steps. We sat up on a little hill with some people from the bar. Trace had shot pool with some of them, and they liked us because he’d told them we were outlaws. They called us Butch and Sundance.
We drank and waited. Finally Trace shouted, “When the hell is this going to start?”