“Something happened, Mama …”
“Oh, dear God …,” she said, and took her eyes away from the scratches on his cheek and saw the mess, the spilled contents of his bureau and, on top of it, his white shirt with dark stains, the deep, ugly sheen. She couldn’t help but touch it, her fingers electric against the damp, and she flinched. “Oh, dear God …”
He was a blur of motion, hurrying over to the suitcase, gathering the black bank bag and shoving it inside, snapping the thing shut. She followed him out helplessly, incredulously, as he made his way to the kitchen, pulling the cabinets open and yanking down bread, boxed crackers, a jar of peanut butter, a tin of canned meat. In a flash, he spied the keys to her sedan hanging by a hook near the door and grabbed them before she could stop him.
“Dan … what on earth happened?”
“Listen, Mama,” he said, stuffing the keys into his pocket. He became calm once again, the tone in his voice suggesting he was not going to repeat himself. “You listen to me, now. I’m not telling you where I’m going. And I’m not going to tell you what I did.” His voice quivered and broke. “You know what I did.”
She thought of her brother, after all that time in a prison up-state, and the way he took a cigarette in his mouth and blew out the smoke.
“What did you do, Dan?”
“Listen to me! The police are going to come around here soon enough. So I’m not telling you anything. You don’t know anything, so they can’t call you a liar.” He patted his pocket, as if to assure himself the keys were there, then reached under the sink for a paper bag and gathered the food.
“Dan, you can’t do this …”
“Mama …,” he said sternly. “I took the cash from the office and I’m sorry about that. But you get rid of that truck. Okay? Take it up into the mountains and burn it or push it into the river. Just get rid of it.”
“I won’t do any such thing,” she said, with a firm voice, a glimmer of defiance, the same tone she had used when speaking to Frederick those years ago in this very kitchen, when he threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop pestering him about his late hours. Frederick had looked at her with a stare as thin and deadly as a razor.
“You do what you want,” Dan said. He gathered the food and the suitcase and butted his way to the front door, unstoppable, and she wanted to reach out to him, remembering how her mother had reached out to her brother to embrace him when he came back.
To her surprise, Dan put his things down and hugged her. He held her hard and she allowed him to. She closed her eyes against the half-moons on his cheek, their ugly certainties, and willed everything to stop, to stay as it was.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I am.” He gathered the suitcase and the paper bag of food and bounded out to the parking lot. She ran out to the porch, almost following him down in her bare feet. She watched his dark form fumble with the keys, heard the click of the door as he unlocked the sedan. The night was still, no cars on the highway, no sound at all, the entire city asleep, and her car roared to life, startling her. The inevitability startled her, the coming change. The motor gunned and the lights, weak willed and scant, dimmed as Dan put the car into reverse and wheeled right out of the parking lot. Just like that. Just like Frederick, whom she had not witnessed leaving, only finding an envelope on the kitchen table announcing his departure. The envelope held the deeds to the motel and the house and a bit of cash, but otherwise no indication about where he had gone. But the dark silhouette in the sedan tonight was not Frederick — it was Dan, making a hurried right turn onto the highway, heading south, the red taillights disappearing, the rumble of the engine receding, and Arlene on the front porch alone and looking at the dark.
Dan’s black Ford pickup stared at her, parked lengthwise, its one visible headlight a wary eye. It sat there like a still but breathing animal. The truck spooked her, a dark hulk in the empty space of their parking lot, and Arlene had to step away from the door, a foolish fear of the truck somehow turning on and idling there. It reminded her of falling asleep in front of the television set and waking up to static that unnerved her, filled her with a shaky dread as she rose from the armchair and moved toward the set, deeper toward the source of her irrational fear, just to turn the thing off.
Sooner or later an officer would indeed come and park his patrol car in front of her house, stepping out with questions. The truck sat out there with the inevitable answers. She wondered what was in it, why Dan wanted her to dispose of it. She pictured herself driving it east of Bakersfield, on any of the roads that headed out on big, easy asphalt, then meandered into swerving, near-single-lane passages that hardly anybody traveled. Not this time of year, with fog and sometimes even snow in those hills if a cold front came in hard. Those were summer roads, roads for fishing spots along the creek, bass and trout making their way down the Sierra, picked off all along the way until only the lowly catfish survived. The hills blazed with dry grass but by winter went green again and even muddy, the tree trunks rich with moss. Hardly anybody went up there, just the locals who knew the roads. No guardrails to stop a vehicle from plummeting down into the ravines that grew deeper and deeper as the hills gradually turned into mountain.
She could see herself doing it.
She could see herself driving the truck up there, the hairpin turns of those roads. Far up there. Ten miles, maybe, of that kind of driving, then pulling over and turning off the engine. And then what? A box of matches and a jug of gasoline? Would the truck explode? She could see it, the truck blooming in flame, consumed. Would anybody hear it, the echo of the blast, somebody looking east and seeing an odd orange glow over there in the mountains way before dawn? The orange tip of her brother’s cigarette glowed when he puffed, its blaze a signal that he didn’t want to talk anymore, just listen. Would the truck burn itself out, or would the flames leap over to the grass, the damp winter containing it? What then, with a ten-mile walk back to town? How long would that take, especially in this cold, her hands huddled around her elbows, her feet against the asphalt in thin shoes? The little girl in her childhood picture book walked all that way. But how impossible! Five miles, then? Three? Just far enough away from the eastern edge of Bakersfield, at the beginning of the hill slopes, far enough away to slip the truck into neutral and steer it over the side of a ravine, out of sight of the road.
For what? It was nothing she had done. She had no lies to conceal. She knew where Dan was headed. Only south. And that was logical. Over to Los Angeles to hide in that enormous city. Over to San Diego. To Tijuana and everything she’d heard about its teeming, ugly life.
She didn’t even know what he’d done, really.
The truck stared back at her, and she stood on the porch for a long moment, the way she had stood in the early morning hallway of her house when her brother had returned. She had been waiting for answers back then. Right in front of her, the truck held them. She went back into the house to wrap herself tight in a housecoat, and she slipped on a pair of Keds. She walked down the porch stairs, the truck beckoning like a faithful star. Her eyes fixed on the cab, its interior too dark for her to see inside. What was she expecting, the body of the dead girl? Arlene chided herself for being so afraid, never having been so, after all these years near the highway, so far away from town, having grown up in the countryside. Darkness was just not being able to see. Nothing came out of it. She had stared at darkness throughout her childhood summers as she’d gone to sleep, the strange noises outside nothing but small animals foraging for food. Yet here she was, approaching the truck with so much timidity that she felt foolish.