CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Went on in pure silence, cutting through the black night with our yellow headlights. For an hour, then two, I saw on the clock beside the radio. Started relaxing again, giving in to the unknown of the road, feeling good just to be there with Dave.

Had the heater on full blast, so we took off coats and sweaters. Dave took off his shirt and drove with his chest all naked. Then I did it too, even the bra I wore, not that I needed to wear one now, my tits having shrunk up so much since hitting the road. So I took it off without caring if Dave saw them, for he’d seen me before, back when I’d gone in for a bath. He took a look, though, when he thought I wouldn’t see it. Dave was the only boy in the world who I’d want to sit beside without having a shirt on. Sure, he knew I wasn’t a real girl, or the kind of girl you flirt with, but I thought how I’d still like to feel his hands smoothing down the place where my breasts might be. And where I might have had a mouth instead of my chapped-up hole, my brain could taste there that Dave’s lips, though real dry, would still be soothing. Hot and not real, like getting licked by a star, fucked from afar. Nothing better than that to help a girl like me forget all about Slava O’Right.

We got sucking on our bottle of Wild Turkey. Rain came hard, and though Dave had the wipers going full, we could not see the road, just a white sweep of rainwater and the spray off tires, ours and those of rigs flying by. Threatened to dissolve us, it was such a rain. The Hidatsa, it pounded and quaked, and sometimes Dave almost lost control of the wheel and the car went sliding into the oncoming lane. Said how lucky we were to be in that car and not out there on the Ottawa River, shitting our pants someplace, trying to start a fire, cursing out to God to make the rain just stop. Made me think about Pickles, his boots hanging from the mirror during all of that crazy drive, and it made me all nervous about hitting someone out there, but then I thought that shit like that won’t happen to me twice.

Stared out at the rain, the wipers keeping time for us, ticking away like a clock, and I started talking to Dave. Said out loud what rose up from gut to chest to swimming head. “Before Slava and me killed Pickles, we were having sex in a parking lot, and some boys with bats and sticks came and the headlights got smashed in. Some bad O’Right business.”

“Sure, kid. That’s what those guys go looking for, those O’Right types.”

“But this night got Slava so mad and so drunk. We went driving. Took back roads. And there came this big old smash and we hit something, hard and fast. Struck it head on.”

Dave passed over the smoke he’d lit.

“‘Just a deer,’ Slava said.”

“You drag him along you think?” Dave asked. “His body I mean?”

“Christ, no. He went flying off. And, besides, I heard a sound that I guess was him, but when I went to find it, Slava, he held me back.”

Dave looked over, surprised. “So you could have saved him?”

“If I’d had balls, yeah, and listened to my gut and not shithead Slava.” Feet up on the dash, I raised my left toe and gave Pickles’s boots a soft nudge. They swung a bit and then spun right, left, back again, slowly, going with the Hidatsa’s flow.

“If I’d had the balls,” I said again. “And wasn’t such a girl and a pussy.”

“Christ, that asshole killed Pickles. Not you.”

“We both killed him. I know that now. Doesn’t mean I’m guilty, but it is the only truth.” Too bad Dave didn’t have any Black Flag in his tape case. No Messy Divorce either.

Drove on, Dave Bashed-up-Boat practically getting a hard-on telling me all about metal and me creaming my jeans telling him about punk and hardcore. Even said how scared I was that I was going to miss the whole thing if I didn’t get south soon. Then when the hail came on with the rain, attacking us and abusing us and blinding Dave to the road, we pulled the Hidatsa over and switched off the lights.

Sat there awhile and then I said, “Pickles, he tried to tell me about the O’Rights, see. He knew why Bellyache swore to keep me away from them.”

“And, why?”

“Well,” I said, “those bastard half-brothers, seven of them, a different mom for each, their dad Vlad, being this real ladies’ man who plowed any girl who wasn’t too fat or too Indian.”

“I heard about that too,” said Dave. “And what happened to that dad? Heard it said someone killed him off nice and quiet.”

“Yeah, Vlad O’Right went missing some years ago. Many or most in Black Dew Seat saying it had been the oldest, Van, who’d done it. Killed his dad and then taken over the racket and opened up their trade to guns and medicines and not just cigarettes and booze.”

“Bad bunch. Pickles was right to keep you away from them.”

“Yes,” I said. “Only me, I didn’t listen, so he ratted me out to Bellyache.”

“And I would have too, kid.”

“But that’s how we hit him, see. He was going down the road away from Bellyache’s. Had not been there in years, but he went back because he thought it would help me. And then we killed him for it.”

“But it was the busted lights that made it different,” said Dave. “Else you wouldn’t have hit him. It’s O’Right’s fault for driving so dumb. Not yours.”

“Doesn’t feel that way.”

“So why did you go back out there? To where Pickles was on the road?”

Heard Bellyache in my ear, that raunchy secret he’d told me as I’d chewed blood and shit and grit and then had to swallow it. So sad and sick, and, really, I was going to say to Dave how Bellyache was out there too, and about the dirty red snow he made me eat and the words he made me listen to, but Dave leaned over and he kissed me. All or nothing, and I liked him doing it. My mouth full of star, the rest of me was warm and weak. And he put his hands on my chest too because my shirt was already off and so we were already halfway there. Had arms all around each other and Dave’s body was warm, especially his neck where the heat got trapped under all his long hair. Thought I had never felt better than being there in the Hidatsa with Dave, and so I was able to wring Slava from my brain, burn him out and tamp him down, live a moment for me and Dave alone.

Music was off, had for company only the pounding of the rain. We crawled into the back seat, stray traffic and lights going past but rarely, and I was glad it was mostly dark and that we had our smoky old sleeping bags to wrap around us.

Dave was slow in trying to take my pants down. So I got his open and then my own. He touched me there, soft, between my dirty legs, but wouldn’t do more than that. Tried to shove him inside me, but he pulled away, zipping up his pants.

“Let’s just kiss for now,” he said, reaching out for me again.

Pushed Dave away from me and I sat up. Crossed my arms over my chest.

“Because you just got laid,” I said. “Because of that girl back there, Al’s goddamn girlfriend.”

“Sure it’s ok to fuck strangers. Dumb girls like her. You shouldn’t want that. There’s more to it than what you know, than whatever you learned from O’Right.”

He ran his fingers down the soft inside of my arm. And when he got to my yucky hand, he held it. Then he leaned closer and pushed back my hair and he traced my lips, nose, the lids of my shut eyes, painting a picture of me with nothing but dark and touch, and under his fingertip I was calm and passive. He drew circles around my bellybutton and the tough brown bumps I had for nipples, and I slid my hands around his waist, pulling myself into his arms again, finding safety in the dry copper heat that came from his skinny boy body. Hugging a radiator, it was like.

Kissed for a long time after that. Our bodies curled close. Minds less hectic, hearts not scared.

After a while the rain stopped falling so hard. Dave said we better press on down the road. Got ourselves together, but didn’t put our shirts on, just jackets, and I took the wheel and drove until it was maybe 2 a.m., and then when Dave was asleep beside me, I pulled over onto the shoulder.

Woke up and Dave was driving. Lay there and watched the grey sky through the windows above me and then I called up to him that soon I’d have to stop and piss. Few kilometres down the highway, he pulled over and I got out and ran down into the ditch and off into the bushes, McDonald’s napkins stuffed in the pockets of my jacket, under which my chest was still naked, and I let go a torrent of thick piss and thicker shit and I knew from the smell it was that entire McDonald’s meal. Was gone for a while and when I got back the Hidatsa was empty. The old boat on top was strapped down like a carcass. Waited outside, shivering, running up and down and around the shoulder just to keep warm a bit and also to stretch my crickety back and shoulders. Dave came up out of the bushes, the ones on the other side of the highway, and he was still naked under his jacket too, and I saw that he was a bit pale and so it was likely he had also just shat out Big Mac, large fries, Cokes, and ketchup. He unlocked the car and we got back in, me saying I’d drive if he wanted and Dave saying no, he’d like to drive for a while, at least until Ottawa. Well, we passed a road sign not far on that said Ottawa was only 136 kilometres, Quebec not much more than that, and Dave and me were quiet. We didn’t want to give up the stolen Hidatsa, though we knew we really, really should.

“Maybe we should just keep it,” I said. “But drive really, really fast to get over the border.”

“And then what? No money for gas, no licences, the car’s stolen, by now reported, we’re both juvenile delinquents, and plus you stabbed a guy, not to mention the manslaughter shit you’re running from.”

“You’re way too fucking sensible,” I said. “Maybe too your dad’ll lose our scent if we’re in a car and not on the water.”

“Not likely. But right now I’m more worried about the cops than the old man.”

So we decided we’d go on through past Montreal, maybe down to the border, and then hit the water and paddle on.

Dave was looking at the aeronautical chart, saying how after Montreal it didn’t seem that far anymore, getting down to New York, we just had to more or less go with the flow: the Richelieu, Lake Champlain, then the Hudson all the way down. The window was open and the cold air was blasting him full on in the face. He had his dad’s tooth out and his fingers, they were shining it up, rubbing away at the enamel. Went at it like a nervous tick.

* * *

Drove the day away. Sun was breaking through the cloud cover just in time to set down. Going east as we were, Dave and me were driving right away from the spill of that bloodletting, skywetting, menstruating sun.

Watching the dark settle in and some town’s lights come on in the distance, lining the horizon, I put on the radio and we listened to some bit of news for a total of thirty seconds before we couldn’t take anymore and had to switch it off.

“You know,” I said, “no one in the whole world knows where we are right now.”

Dave paused to light the cigarette I’d rolled for him. “At least I hope no one knows where we are right now. If anyone knew, that’d likely mean we were in some kinda trouble.”

“Some kinda deep pile of shit,” I said.

Got out the map, and with the interior light turned on I saw how close we were to the place where I’d drawn that circle and put that big black X. Dave looked over at me, said we ought now to go there and get that over with and I nodded yes. He said if I wanted to drive, I could, but I said no, that he ought to, said that I just wanted to have a think and look out the window. Maybe have a drink. So we started back down the highway, going east and south, and looking out for a turn onto a highway numbered 11 because that’s where Slava O’Right lived. In a trailer behind a motel called the U-Bet Inn, and I knew that not because Slava had told me, but from the registration he kept up front in the cab of his truck, clipped to a board where he logged all the deliveries he made and the kilometres he put on. In the truck once, all alone and waiting for him, I had memorized what it said there, knowing that I’d one day take off from Bellyache and it’d be a good idea to know the whereabouts of at least one soul in the whole of the Canadian country. When we got to Slava’s he’d be all surprised I’d found him, and so be taken way off guard, making his body and his brains easy pickings. Didn’t quite know what I was going to do to him. Him just seeing me, the shock of it all, would be a start. He’d know I’d found out what was really between us—he’d see it, if not in my face, then in those fingernails. The bad blood that ran between us so deep it was black as oil, thick as hot tar, and his eyes would pop, his jaw would drop, and I’d start with Pickles and then get on to me, and then I could say to him fuck off and goodbye and go on with Dave and not look back.

Dave turned off the stereo. He said for me to go to sleep, he’d wake me up when we got there.

“I’m OK,” I said.

Got out tobacco and papers and rolled a smoke, drank from the bottle, and swallowed deep and swallowed hard. Wanted to burn the throat because my eyes were burning and so sore, and being out there at the end of some goddamn road, well, I thought I might just give in like a baby and have a little cry.

From the glove compartment I got out Pickles’s knife, and then I took down his boots from the rearview mirror. Had a vision of me knocking on Slava’s trailer door and then him opening it up and me just saying, It wasn’t a deer, and plunking down those boots, and him just going pale and white from all the guilt of it. Distract him with the boots. Then I’d pull out the knife. Lunge, poke, grapple with him if I had to. To make him bleed and leave him alone to do it—that’s why I was out there. Looked over at Dave with my beaten eyes.

Said to Dave how I wished so bad Pickles wasn’t dead. How I wished all of that had gone some other way instead.

“We can always just go on,” Dave told me, “if you’re scared.”

“Scared, sure,” I said. “But I came too far to care about that now.”

Cool night, black but for our headlights, my head back and my boots on the dash. Closed my eyes as Dave drove on. Laces of Pickles’s boots I’d tie together and I’d carry them over the shoulder like the carcass of a fresh old kill, brought home to clean and to cook. Those boots, gripped in my fist, I’d hold them fast. They were the shortest straw, and I’d pulled it and was stuck with it and was cursed by it, my burden and my mission and my misery. But in the other fist, in the right one, would be the knife. Sharp and stained fresh from the night just before. Old Slava, when he’d come out to open the door, I’d be there and it’d be for Pickles.

Woke up when the cigarette lighter popped. Smelled it, metal and red-hot. We were stopped. Lights were off, and in the dark I followed the ember of the lighter and was able to make out Dave’s face.

“We here now? This Slava’s?” Sat up and groped for the boots, hand to the belt to feel the safety of my knife there. Asked Dave where the goddamn flashlight was. Said I’d need it to find my way from the road to Slava’s trailer. Popped the glove compartment because I remembered seeing one stashed inside. Grabbed it, then went for the door. Opening it, the interior light came on.

“I won’t be long,” I said. Took a big breath of air, tasting the tang of our bodies.

“Shut the fucking door,” Dave whispered at me through the dark.

Did what he told me. “Fuck, what for? Where are we?”

Dave was quiet. He smoked. A car went by and in its flash of light I saw we were on Highway 19 now, and I knew that meant we had gone well beyond Slava O’Right’s.

“We lost?”

He had the tooth out, was rubbing it, urgent and scared.

“Dave, what the fuck are you up to?”

“He was out there, kid.”

Swallowed deep. “The old man?”

“Right by the turn-off to O’Right’s.”

“So you just kept going?” Shouted that.

Dave didn’t say anything.

“You could have dropped me off at least. I’ve got balls and I got my own business and you just kept on driving, and now where the fuck are we?”

“You don’t get it, kid. You didn’t see it. I mean, he has a car now. Was pulled over, standing out by the road. Bastard was waving as we went past.”

“OK. So now go back.”

Dave shook his head. “I’m just not ready to fight him, kid. Don’t you see that?”

“No, I don’t see that, Dave. I thought you had balls.”

Dave shook his head, and his voice became a yell. “I’m already beat up. Don’t want to go through another shit-kicking like that. Not now.”

“So when?” Called Dave an asshole and a coward. Punched him in the arm. Then in the side of the head, hitting the ear beneath his hair. Started yelling, hating the sound of my voice. High, like a girl. “You’re both full of shit. You and the old man, fucking me up the whole way to New York. He just keeps on bluffing and you fall for it, Indian shithead.”

Cold in the car, but I was really sweating. Sick in the heart, sickness bubbling to the surface of my dirty skin.

We were silent. A car came up behind us, its high beams exploding in the rearview mirror, meltdown for our tender, swollen eyes. Winced and a cut on my face opened up, started bleeding. The car slowed as it passed, then rushed on.

“Next time it’ll be the goddamn cops,” Dave said. He rolled down the window a crack. Cigarette smoke was exchanged for icy air.

“I have to go back, Dave,” I said. Lit a cigarette.

Looked over at Dave. He was hunched up, right boot up on the dash, smoking, shaking his head.

“Well, I won’t let you.”

“Fuck you, Dave.” And I spat a thick gob at him, and it hit him on the shoulder and just stuck. Reaching over him, I took a hold of the keys in the ignition.

Dave straightened up. Cigarette got tossed out the window. He wiped the spit off his shoulder, nice and calm, smeared it on the door. Then his hand covered the fucked-up, sore and nail-less fist that was closed over the keys. Squeezed down on it like pure goddamn torture.

Eyes filled up with water. My neck, it disappeared into my shoulders. Inside mitt and inside skin, all those little bitty hand bones had gone soft, and I thought I heard them cracking.

“I stole this car too,” I spat through my bloody, blubbery lips. “It’s not just yours to decide what we do.”

“You’re acting like a retard. Like a stupid girl.”

Snaked up, writhing in my seat, my free left mitt tried at prying open the vice of Dave’s grip.

Dave was trying not to yell, and me, I was trying not to scream.

Finally, Dave eased off and took his hand away.

Slowly, I straightened up. Cradling my hand like it was a baby, I started peeling the mitt off, but it was sticking to the opened-up scabs and it hurt too much, so I stopped. Dave, he was sitting back in his seat, looking out at all that black.

The windshield and the rearview were equally blank and depthless, like sludge, like thick, drowning water. It made me lost, no way to map it, the touchless sprawl of deep, goddamn night. Sitting there, my eyes tried to find a point to fix on, to hold me steady. Front and back and side to side, all was night and quiet and I had no air to breathe, so I started gulping and choking, strangling myself with wanting to get the fuck out.

So I grabbed my pack from the back and Pickles’s boots from where they were again hanging, and I got myself out of that car and ran into the night, back toward Slava O’Right’s.