I swing my body up to the front seat of the van and put my feet on the dashboard. My Doc Martens are filthy, and I wet my forefinger to rub at a particularly offensive patch. It clears a trail that makes the rest of the dust more visible and clods of dirt hit the floor. I roll the window down and release the most offensive chunks into the fresh air.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lowell says. “It’s too fucking cold out there.” He pushes his foot down hard on the gas pedal and my sweet Veronica, my name for Lowell’s 1980 Vanagon Westfalia, tries to oblige.
“Time is it?” I stretch my arms up in a casual gesture that ends abruptly when my knuckles hit the bare metal ceiling.
“You fell asleep,” Lowell says.
“I got that part. Where are we?”
He stretches out his arm to rest on my shoulder, then gives my long, dark hair a little tug that’s more affectionate than sexual. I don’t like it.
“You look good today, Emma. Better than usual,” Lowell says. “I like you. You know that? I really do.”
“Sure you do, Lowell, because I’m incredibly likable. Adored by millions. Where are we.” It’s late October and the South Dakota I fell asleep to was endlessly brown and flat, so boring it put me to sleep. It is nothing like Ray promised. He said the Badlands would be desolate and endless, the kind of unexplored place that you have to stand right up on the edge of before you’ll know if you are the kind of person who has the guts to jump.
“Why don’t we go back to sleep?” Lowell suggests with a wiggle of his eyebrows.
“Don’t be gross. And answer me. Where are we?”
“Where are we? That’s what you want to know. We’re still in South Dakota. Feels like we’ve been here our whole damn lives, doesn’t it? Piece-of-shit state.”
The van smells like the sex we had in it before I fell asleep for God knows how long. I was dreaming of my hair falling out in large chunks of scalp and silky thin threads. Just before I woke up, a man passing by said, “Why don’t you knit a blood sweater?” The dream, unlike the gnawing pain in my gut, is unfamiliar.
“Hottest girl I’ve ever been with,” Lowell says, as if he’s making a note to himself to share with his friends. “And that’s saying something.”
I’ve hated my body my whole life, but that squirrelly Emma-and-Lowell-humping scent reminds me that breasts, particularly my set of double Ds, are quite useful. That same smell has also convinced me that I hate Lowell. I’m pretty sure he’s a serial killer, and if not serial yet, he is certainly on his way to becoming one. He says he’s a tattoo artist, studying to be a contortionist, or a contortionist studying to be a tattoo artist, I can never remember which, though the former is the safest bet since he hasn’t proven to be particularly flexible. He’s headed to “snag” his kid and then on to the West Coast to try out for the Jim Rose Circus. He wants to be there by Halloween so he and his kid can meet Perry Farrell before Jane’s Addiction splits. I tell him a twenty-two-year-old-man “snagging” his kid to join a freak show to meet a band makes him a groupie. At best. He shrugs me off. Lowell is the kind of white dude who thinks tribal tattoos are a grand idea. He’s plenty tatted up—crucifixes and bleeding hearts seem to be a major theme, but he’s got a naked lady on his back with tits nearly as unrealistic as mine and the name of his kid over his heart. I try hard not to find the latter charming.
“You would have fucked me even if I was ugly, Lowell.”
“No doubt. Most eighteen-year-old girls are hot. They can’t help it.”
When I first saw Lowell walking toward Veronica, I was in Lower Michigan, having hitched my first ride on the wrong damn highway. Interstate 70 or Interstate 75. Who could tell the difference really? But then again, I was still dosed up on hospital drugs. It’s amazing what they’ll give you when they think your pain is physical, mental, inconvenient, and unfixable. Percocet, Vicodin, Lortab. In my bag, I’ve got a nearly full bottle of Vicodin snuggled in under prescriptions for the other two.
Lowell is my second hitch. Michigan was orange and red with fall when I first met him, although the trees were beginning to thin, hushing the ground with leaves not yet grown brittle. The air was already October crisp. I’ve been with him thirteen days if you count today. I found him on the outskirts of Detroit, balancing an open beer and a sandwich while trying to dig the keys out of his pocket. He said he was heading to make things right with his ex and their kid. Her family’s from South Dakota. By our third day together, Lowell admitted she ran away. “Took my kid and ran home to Mommy and Daddy just ’cause I choked her a little bit.”
I saw Veronica and immediately thought: “home.” My father loved Volkswagens of all makes and models, and I pegged Veronica for the early ’80s variety—before water-cooled engines—as soon as I saw her round, sealed-beam headlights. Unfortunately for me, the first thing I thought when I saw Lowell was “victim.” The second thing I thought, as I got close enough to smell the cheap, watery beer, was “Daddy.” I know I’m dealing with some sick Freudian shit, but my father was the best kind of alcoholic, jolly and accommodating. Plus, Lowell was hot, my age, and I needed a ride. What else was I to do? I didn’t even wait for him to get his door unlocked before I cozied up to him, my eyes wide and helpless, my hands reaching out for a slug of his beer.
Earlier today, I realized I’ve been wrong. He is not at all like my dad. His ex did not misunderstand him or turn his kid against him. She fled. In the Lowell saga, she is the survivor. The one to root for. Lowell, on the other hand, is a man on the verge in the most unsympathetic of ways. An angry drunk. Prone to declarations of love, self-hate, and violence.
This morning, when I woke up with my right hand handcuffed to his left, none of it seemed funny or quirky or implausible anymore. More fucked-up and aggressive than sloppily endearing. The sex I offered got me out of the handcuffs but not out of his van, which is okay, since I’ve already decided Veronica is mine. Fuck Lowell. He doesn’t deserve her. I study him now while he drives, not worrying what he thinks of my stare. He is handsome; I have to give him that. Built, probably over six feet. His arms and legs are toned but not bulky. His hair hangs just below his chin when he leaves it down, and he has a scruff on his face that he grooms every morning, spending a half hour each day to make it look like he’s spent no time on it at all.
“We both know you love me for my personality,” I say.
“Maybe I do,” he says. “Maybe I do.”
We’re driving up, up, up on a road that curls and weaves over unpredictable terrain. There are spots where it’s clear the state has tried to blow away the mountain, smooth out the rock and land so the highway can settle in: flat, wide, and undisturbed. It’s also clear that at some point the land won the battle and the construction workers went for their last coffee break never to return. They’ve put so much effort into taming a skinny stretch of road that no one wants to drive on. The places where they succeeded in blasting away at the granite shine wet, wounding the mountain temporarily. The open expanse of rock is moist with its own gradual healing. I imagine the way it will curve out over the road, how it will rumble ever so quietly until thousands of years pass and the road is buried, swallowed up by a swoop of dirt, moss, and tree roots digging deep to hold it all together. I close my eyes to hear the soft whistling push of those roots against the underside of the asphalt.
I’ve known today was the day since I woke up in the dark with my wrist cuffed to his, and yet it still makes my stomach hurt. My belly, from the button down, is marked up ugly and red, laced like a boot. The pain has been growing behind my scar in spite of the pills, but I’ve decided to stop taking the Vicodin. To be drug free for the first time in several years. The decision alone makes me feel sweaty, but I want to be sober when I see the Badlands for the first time.
“You can let me out anytime,” I say.
“I’m not letting you out in the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s hardly nowhere. We’re here in it, aren’t we? It must be somewhere.” I never should have taken a nap, but as it turns out, waking up in the middle of the night to realize you’ve misjudged a situation so terribly that you’ve gotten yourself properly abducted keeps you awake. This is the day I ditch Lowell.
“Look at you.”
I look down at my lap.
“You’re still trying to rub the blanket mark off your cheek. It’s nearly six p.m., we’re in South Dakota, the Black Hills, to be more specific, and it started to snow about five miles back. This is the icy center of nowhere.”
“The Black Hills?” I ask. It’s farther than I wanted to go. “I want out soon, Lowell. At the next gas station or fruit stand or corn palace or whatever. Ride’s over.”
He laughs at me like I’ve just said the stupidest thing in the world.
“Okay, fine. I’ll pull over, but first you get in the back.”
“What for?”
“You know what for. You owe me.”
I should have guessed this was coming. And maybe I did. Maybe I set the whole thing up to play out this way. Maybe I knew he’d turn territorial or even violent and it would make what I planned to do all along seem justified. Maybe.
“Have you ever been to the Badlands, Lowell?” I ask without looking at him.
“Nope. Just drove past it and I gotta tell ya, it didn’t look like much.”
“How does someone visit South Dakota and not want to go to the Badlands? Let’s turn back. You can visit it with me.” I’m gathering all my anger for him, putting it in a ball that is filling up where my insides used to be, but I don’t need him to know that yet.
“If it were up to me, I’d never have set foot in this state. My ex thought her family would protect her. Dumb bitch. She should have stayed in Michigan with me.”
A chill works through me. When I first met him and he was still wooing me, he made it sound like he still loved his ex. Like they would work it out if he could just get to her. A few days ago we stopped at a Kmart and I waited while he picked out T-shirts with rainbow necklines. He bought lace-trimmed socks, a packet of little-girl underwear, and a Snow White toothbrush. I didn’t think on it. He called them presents and I accepted that. It wasn’t my business. Now I understand that the clothes, this van, the handcuffs, the gun I found hidden in the spare-tire well, are all supplies.
“The Badlands weren’t interesting enough to pull you out of that dream you were having about forty-five minutes ago. You were twitching. Pretty funny, actually.” Lowell snorts.
He does not deserve this van. He’s letting it fall apart. The upholstery on the ceiling is mostly missing, and what isn’t hangs down torn and loose around the sides. He’s given the outside a new paint job—a baby-poop-brown color—but hasn’t bothered to deal with the rust all around the seams. He’s covered the front seats with India import blankets because he’s lazy. If it were my dad’s, if it were mine, I’d fix it up right. My dad could fix any car or bike or truck or van, as long as it was made before 1990. He owned his own garage, and I used to spend days there watching him work. My mom made me go to school more often than not, but when I was sad, Dad’d pull rank and say, “Little Wing, you’re working with me at the shop today.”
“Map says we’re almost to Sturgis. You’ll love my kid. I bet you’ll be a natural with her,” he says, and for the first time, I realize that I am a part of his plan.
“I’m not interested in meeting your kid, Lowell. I need to get to the Badlands.” Anger throbs in my voice. He hears it, but he isn’t scared. He should be scared.
“For someone who hitched a ride, you sound pretty put out.” He puts his hand on my thigh, and his fingers spider crawl their way up toward my hip. “Get in the back.”
“Fuck you,” I say.
“What’s one more good time to you anyway?”
“Lowell, I want out. I haven’t got time to mess with you.”
“Just get in the back,” he says, and swerves. It’s a big enough move to make me grab for the door handle.
He’s laughing at me. He’s glad he can scare me.
“You think I’m gonna crash? I’d never hurt my baby.” He pats Veronica on the dashboard. The pat makes me angrier than his hand on my thigh. This is mine, I think. My body. My moment. My Veronica.
I crawl into the back, stumbling as he makes Veronica hit a bump.
The tiny sink is overflowing with unwashed dishes. I wipe my hand across the Formica countertop. Poor baby. I’ll fix you up.
The van is still moving along as fast as ever.
I found Lowell’s gun a long time ago. He’s not a genius at hiding things. But now that I think of it, I didn’t find the handcuffs until they were on me. That scares me a little.
I pull back the carpet and ease up the panel that hides the spare wheel. The gun is cold in my hand. I put it in the right pocket of my leather jacket and climb back into the front seat.
All around us the land reaches up toward a starry sky. The world outside is full of thick green pine trees. Remnants of a recent snow sit pristine and white on the boughs high above the ground.
“Pull over, now.”
The van does not slow down. Lowell keeps his gaze straight ahead.
“I mean it, Lowell.”
Still no response.
“Pull the fuck over, Lowell.”
I’ve been trying to get to the Badlands for months. I’ve been so close for the past week that I can feel the grit of the land gathering between my teeth.
Ahead the road curves up again. I reach into my pocket, fumble out the gun, almost dropping it, before I hold it to Lowell’s cheek.
“You should watch yourself,” he says, not even flinching. His eyes stay on the road. “Not everyone is as nice as me.”
“You’re a fucker, Lowell.”
“You going to shoot me? Is that your plan?”
“Yes, that’s my plan. I’m going to shoot you and take your van.”
“You ever shot anyone before, Emma? It’s nasty. Brains and bits and white chunks you won’t know what to do with.”
“You’ve never shot anyone. Don’t pretend you have,” I say, but I’m not confident about this anymore. Not at all.
“You think you can steal my van? What a joke. You’re all used up. Don’t even have all your parts. That scar on your belly is ugly as hell. No one is gonna want a woman who ain’t even got her woman parts.”
I take a deep breath. If I’d stayed in the hospital and let the doctor remove the stitches, I might not have such a scar.
I take the gun away from his jaw and swing it at his temple, but I miss and hit above his cheekbone with a thud.
“Owww!” he says, and the van slows.
He is reaching across my body and opening up my door before I understand his intention. Next, he’s shoving me, and I’m slipping out into the cold like an idiot.
I float free until the shock of the earth crashes into my hip and shoulder. The ache of it sliding beneath me is sobering. My anklebone hits the grass and gravel at the side of the road and bounces off the frozen earth, sending vibrations up my leg. A fierce pain rips into the palm of my left hand. I hold on tight to the gun, but it clanks out of my fingers as I skid to a halt. I lie still for a second before I can think what to do next. The gun is at least a foot away.
The van screeches to a stop and the door opens with a creak and then slams shut.
A second wave of pain hits me. It hits every part of me, like I’ve dropped my body into a bucket of ice water and I gasp for air, suck it in, and then hold it tight. All that air and pain burning my lungs. For one strange moment, I think maybe if I stay perfectly still Lowell won’t be able to see me, but the sight of his boots only a few feet from me brings me back.
“Get up,” he says.
He can’t see my face.
“You dead?” he asks with a short laugh.
I don’t answer.
“Shit,” he says, less confident this time. His boots inch toward my face. I keep waiting for him to pick up the gun. To circle around me and grab it up, but he’s still too stupid to know he’s in danger.
He gets closer and closer as gravel sifts out from under his feet. I listen and watch, aware of the slow, deliberate movement of his arm through the air as it comes toward my shoulder. The static between his body and mine grows. Just before his fingers brush the naked skin at the back of my neck, I lunge, wrapping my free hand around his wrist and digging my nails in deep. I use his weight to pull myself to my feet. He yelps. I bring my knee to his crotch. He cries out before falling. I step to the right and reach down, scrape fingers through gravel to get the gun in my hand and then I’m off.
There is only an instant of pain before I’m running full speed. Running fast and blind through the trees, gun in my hand, branches lashing at my face, the air too crisp to get a clean breath.
“Come back here!” His voice echoes after me. I keep running, stumbling over scrub, my arms brushing tree trunks. “People die out here!” he shouts, and suddenly he is the good guy.
I stop running once I am far enough into the forest to be hidden. Veronica’s headlights shine in the distance. Her interior light goes on, and I know he is rooting around, looking for something to harm me with.
For one terrifying instant, I let myself feel the insanity of my situation. I’m so fucking sick of myself. My weak side bubbles, percolates brown like coffee. I push it down, hold in the pitiful why me? I wrap my fingers in my tangled hair and pull. A hint of red comes away with my fingertips. Blood Sweater flashes through my mind as if it’s the title of a book of poetry or on a movie poster.
Behind me is darkness. In front of me are Lowell and my Veronica, her headlights still shining into the night. I thread through the trees to come out of the woods in front of the van.
At the edge of the dark, dark wood, I put the gun in my pocket. I step into the middle of the road.
I move right into the beam of the headlights, and Veronica is not fifteen feet away from me. Lowell, back in the driver’s seat, turns on the brights. He did not expect me to present myself—a normal girl would stay hidden—and this is part of why he likes me in the first place. I do not flinch. I do not squint. I am not normal. I lower my arms and wait. He could decide to put his foot on the gas, run me over. But he won’t. He will see me. He’ll think that I need him and this’ll make him feel strong, violent. This will be his undoing.
The driver’s-side door opens and his boot hits the ground.
“Lowell, please don’t leave me here.” I sound so sincere.
He says nothing. His boot doesn’t move.
“I won’t make it out of here alone. I’m scared, Lowell. Please. I made a mistake.”
I can’t see his face. The headlights are blinding. I want to blink, but I force my eyes to stay open. They begin to water and I encourage them, spilling tears down my cheeks so that Lowell will see I am weak.
“Radio says there’s a storm coming,” he says. “A big one.”
“Help me,” I whisper.
“Say you’re sorry,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” I’ve said it too fast. I should have paused. Struggled a little with the admission. He is quiet for a long time.
“You are not sorry and you are not scared,” he says.
I rub my cheeks with the back of my hand.
“I know you, Emma Powers. I know who you are.”
I have not told him my last name. In fact, I’ve told him next to nothing real about me.
“You should read a fucking paper. Turn on the news. Buy a milk carton.”
My hand is in my pocket finding the gun.
“I know you, and your brother, Raymond Powers,” he says from behind Veronica’s door. “I know they are trying to find you in relation to his death. I could have called you in a hundred times but I didn’t. I’m your goddamn hero. You need me.”
“I didn’t ask you to be my hero.”
“You asked for a ride. You let me pay your way.” He pauses. “You care about me.”
“I don’t give a shit about you, Lowell. Step away from the van. I’m taking it.”
“I get the impression that you fucked him too. Did you? Your brother? That’s some nasty shit.”
“He was my stepbrother and it’s not your business.”
I have this image of Ray that won’t leave me. It’s this moment somewhere in the mix of the first years of knowing him when we fell asleep in his bed. Both of us kids not yet turned fourteen. I woke up first and there he was next to me. His eyes shut. His lips parted.
“I’m a bad person. I know that. But you’re … you’re fucked up,” Lowell says.
“Get away from the van, Lowell.”
“No,” he says. “They say you’re sick. Like you might need care or something.”
“You can get the shit you need out of the van and let me go,” I say, and bring the gun out of my pocket. I don’t point it at him yet, but I hold it at my side away from my body so he can see it. “Turn off the headlights, Lowell.”
He moves then. First leaning into the van to turn off the headlights and then putting two boots on the ground. The absence of the light leaves us in complete darkness. My eyes are slow to adjust, and I can’t tell if he has a weapon.
“I’ll shoot you in the foot.” I take aim at the space below the shape that must be the door.
“You can’t possibly hit my foot. You don’t know how to shoot.”
He’s right, but the dark woods are making me feel brave. Veronica is waiting to be saved.
I pull the trigger and am surprised by the kickback and how the noise slices into my brain. I stumble, but Lowell’s boots remain firmly on the ground. The bullet has disappeared into the dark.
Lowell slams Veronica’s door shut, but the sound of it is low and distant under the ringing of the gunshot still in my ears, my jaw.
“You have to keep your eyes open when you shoot,” he says.
“I’ll do better next time,” I say.
He steps toward me.
“You’re shaking,” he says. He takes another step in my direction. “I’ll make you stop.”
His offer is real so I shoot again but see no impact and so I shoot again. This time he sinks. Drops backward and stays there. I’ve hit him. It makes me giddy. I did it. I fucking shot you, Lowell.
I walk up beside him and am proud of myself, my face is flushed, my arms strong.
“Lowell?” I’m standing over him. His eyes are clenched shut, his jaw tight. I look for blood. I expect him to gush—blood and curse words rolling forth—but he is strangely silent, as if he is holding it all in, blood and breath and screams, but then he lets go and the moan is long and bubbly. The blood is pooling around the switchblade he’s dropped next to his thigh. I kick the knife away from us and watch it skid under Veronica.
“You fucking shot me.”
“Looks like your leg. That’s survivable. Do you know how to make a tourniquet?”
“Jesus,” he says, but he’s awkwardly taking off his belt even as he’s saying it. He wraps it around his leg near his groin and pulls it tight.
“You’ll have the knife back when I pull away.”
I reach for Veronica’s door handle.
He leans forward and grabs my ankle, pulls, and I lose my balance. The gun hits the pavement and my head hits the van. I’m on the ground looking up at the starry sky before the world goes black.
When I open my eyes, a dark shape circles overhead. Something come to swoop me up. Lowell’s body is under my legs. I’ve landed half on top of him. Not much time has passed. Minutes? Seconds? We are lying on the asphalt in the dark. Veronica’s interior light is the only illumination. Lowell’s tourniquet is now in place and there is blood on my clothes. I roll off of him.
My head aches but I focus on standing and gaining distance from Lowell.
“You’ll die out here,” he says. “Snow’s coming. A blizzard. I can smell it. You don’t have any idea what you’re up against.”
I open the back of the van and pull out some blankets for Lowell. Some energy bars. A bottle of water. My head is thudding.
“You shot me,” he says when I return. He’s breathing hard now. The pain is getting to him. “Good for you. I didn’t think you could.”
“I could and I did. I’ll get to a gas station and call 911. They’ll be out here in a few hours. Maybe we’ll both live through the night.”
“I’ll tell them who you are and where you’re going.”
“You do that,” I say. The Badlands are close, and what Lowell doesn’t understand is that once I’m there I’ve reached my goal. What happens after that doesn’t matter.
“You don’t know anything about these hills,” he says. And he’s both right and wrong. Ray taught me a lot about them. I know, for example, that they are a small and isolated mountain range with such extensive tree coverage that they look black from a distance. The Lakota Sioux believed that if seen from above, these hills would look exactly like the human heart.
“I’ll find a pay phone as soon as I can,” I say.
The gun is where I dropped it so I grab it and shove it back in my pocket. I hop inside the van and pull the door shut.
“Emma!” Lowell begins to scream, and it is genuine this time. Terrified. “At least leave me some drugs.”
I crack the window enough to say, “I’ll send help.”
“You can’t let me die out here. I have a daughter.”
“You’ll be fine,” I say, and start the engine. It’s the exact line Ray and I used to say to each other when life got to be too much. The last time I said it was just before I let him die.