25
Hattie’s Quik-N-Go
Wesley and I shuffled into our travel clothes at dawn and trudged to the twenty-four-hour diner at the edge of town for breakfast before getting on the road.
After cleaning away any and all evidence of blood in the motel room, I’d stuffed our ruined undergarments into the paper grocery sacks left from last night’s desserts. We packed them at the very bottom of Wesley’s trunk. I would burn them in the basement furnace once we got back home.
The bell on the lintel rattled as Wesley opened the door, escorting me into the little truck stop. We sat heavily in a two-top vinyl booth, made tired smiles at our waitress as she poured us two mugs of burnt coffee, and said nothing to each other as she bustled off.
We must have looked like twice-churned shit. Nobody was saying anything sideways about it.
I leaned down to sip from the lip of my mug. Wesley reached across the table and added exactly the amount of sugar I liked. I shot him a wan smile, picked up the cloudy spoon, and shined it on the side of my skirt before stirring.
Wesley ordered a breakfast platter with his eggs scrambled. I ordered plain toast. Neither of us touched much of the food, pushing it to and fro as we stared through the plates.
“Would you ever want to do it again?”
I looked up at Wesley’s question over the edge of my sunglasses—Kill someone?
Wesley’s eyebrows twitched, barely recoiling. “No…Sharing.”
“Oh.” I prodded the corner of one stiff slice of bread. “Sure. It was fun. Until it wasn’t. You know.”
“Good. Not—good that he…you know. But good. Me, too. Maybe someone else. At some point.” Wesley looked up at me, his eyes bruised by fatigue. “If you can. I mean…you know.”
I took another slug of coffee and nodded distantly. I didn’t much feel like talking.
Another long stretch of silence; Wesley took a single bite of his eggs, regarded one of the measly breakfast sausages, and sat back in his seat. He stared through the spotty tabletop. “So what’s the plan, Jack?”
The angle of the sunlight coming through the window illuminated the edges of his eyes, dull and hollow. Neither of us blinked.
“We live,” I said.
Wesley considered that for a moment. He slurped from his cup, regarded it mutely, and pushed it aside.
“Are you going to try sleeping on the way back?” he asked.
“Try,” I said. “Operative word.”
Wesley grunted in agreement. “Chap has sleeping pills. Might ask for one.”
“I’ll bet there’s a fucking pharmacy in the glove compartment of any one of those vans if you ask nicely.” I stood up to make for the ladies’ room and dropped a kiss on Wesley’s head as I passed his side of the booth.
Wesley stood up and collected his hat. Both our plates sat almost entirely untouched. “I’ll pay. Meet me at the counter.”
I used the toilet, washed my hands, and did my best to wake up the edges of my face in the mirror. I froze as I reached instinctively for the medicine compact.
I looked at what was left of it—two or three more doses at most. Nothing remained of Haas’s work but the bruises under my skin and these scant fingers of powder. The prickling taste for it, that sudden and inconvenient wanting, the same thing that had made me turn toward Haas in the first place, itched at the back of my head.
I turned back to the toilet and scraped the powder out into the bowl. It floated miserably on the surface, crumbling slowly into the rust-rimed water as I watched it drown.
I tugged the old pull-chain flusher and let it spiral away, gone with the shit.
Kline checked his watch and squinted through his yellow shades at the motel breezeway.
“Taking his sweet fucking time, isn’t he?” he groused.
Beside me, Wesley was practically humming with fear. I squeezed his hand and tucked it into the pocket of my skirt. He glanced at me, brief and nervy, and pulled his hand back to cross his arms tightly under his elbows.
We were packed into the vans, ready to leave, and waiting on Haas outside his room.
“I say we go without him,” one of the drivers called from the leading van. He had his elbow propped on the rolled-down window, a cigarette between his fingers. “Burning daylight, Vaughn.”
A muddled chorus of assent went up among the company, antsy and ready to get back to the city.
“We’ll give him another ten,” Kline said, toeing meanly at a pebble on the ground, “and then I’m getting that big motherfucker at the desk to give us his key.”
Wesley heaved a tight sigh and went to bum a cigarette from Chap. I caught my reflection in the window beside me as he moved off, but I knew I probably looked a piece: exhausted, frayed—just like the rest of us, and lucky I could simply pin it on a hangover.
Not a word to anyone, I had said last night from our desperate huddle in one bed. Like it never even happened. Alright?
Like it never happened, he hummed, running his fingers gently, gently, gently through my wet hair.
Ten minutes crawled past. A shard of unshakable anxiety lodged in my gut told me everyone could tell that I had done something horrible just by looking.
But I hadn’t made the first strike. I had been hurt in small ways for many long years, and Haas’s blow to my armor against such common violence had birthed a hideous creature made desperate from the snares of past transgressions.
His death was on his own shoulders.
Kline and several other drivers took turns hammering on Haas’s door. Good thing we had been the only guests at the motel—this racket would have woken the dead.
Shit.
I froze, my fingernails gnawing fresh and hungry into the inside of my forearm. I swallowed. Smoothing my skirt, I glanced subtly over each shoulder.
Kline came out from the front kiosk brandishing a key. He muttered to himself the whole way back to room six, going on about balls on a spit and shoving bolts of fabric in orifices, and wrenched open the latch. My heart, squeezed tight in my mouth, had quit its beating.
“The fucking idiot’s packed,” Kline cried from past the doorway, “so where the hell’d he get off to!”
I blinked quickly, drawing a belated breath in through my nose.
Kline stalked back out, waving a page of motel letterhead crumpled in his fist. “Slippery cocksucker went to Mexico and left all his shit behind. Goddamn it.”
Haggard, furious, Kline looked at his watch. It was forty minutes past when we were supposed to have left.
“Let’s go,” he announced, his voice rocky and afraid, and hustled to the caravan with his short, clipped stride. He gestured blindly at the vans. “Sunny, with me; south. Rest of you to the city, we’ll catch back up in Newark. Goddamn it.”
Wesley did not meet my eyes as he helped me up into our seat. The engine turned over with a heavy, trundling growl. Our driver heaved the door shut, and then we were off.
Hunched up in the back corner, Wesley brooded out the window and gently refused to make conversation. I stared out at the sun still low against the mountains—the boundlessness of a nothing-place, where I had been so reduced to my barest being that the animal within me was finally given the chance to run free.
I imagined it as a separate creature sprinting loose and four-legged, streaking through the desert along the side of the road and howling, howling, howling, into the endless blue of the watchful sky.
There was no room for it to follow me home, but I could not unlearn what I had become here. That, at least, I knew.