Chapter 36

 

The drive was in silence until we got a few miles away and my brain began the processing of what had happened, and I pounded at the steering wheel and cursed, muttering, “Fuck!” like a chant or a prayer, over and over. When I was done, I was breathing hard and my eyes watered and my body shook. Woody told me to pull over, and I found a dead spot along the interstate. I puked, heaving everything until I expected organs to fall out. Woody sat on the guardrail and smoked while the hazard lights blinked with a steady rhythm, and the occasional vehicle whipped by us in the darkness at eighty miles an hour.

Woody drove from that point on and didn’t ask if I wanted anything when he saw the Denny’s sign, taking the exit and pulling into a space. By then I had stopped shaking and had settled into a fine and steady self-loathing.

The Denny’s was attached to an all-night truck stop, with eighteen-wheelers parked in back, and the drivers filling up the inside of the restaurant. If I had to guess, Woody and I were the only ones there not driving a big wig, not on speed, and not looking to hook up with one of the girls loitering toward the rear of the parking lot. Those girls smoked and eyed each truck that rolled in with the anticipation of escape or at least an easy fifty bucks.

They gave us a booth with a scenic view of the gas pumps. Our waitress had hair the color of cotton candy, with racing stripes of rouge along her cheeks and blue eyeshadow like an azure-colored sunrise above her eyes.

“You boys are traveling awfully late,” she said, popping at a piece of gum.

“There’s no rest for the wicked,” Woody said.

“I guess not.” She looked at me for a second. “Honey, you feeling okay?”

I must have looked as awful as I felt, which was somewhere between hammered shit and unhammered shit, because let’s face it, shit is shit, regardless of the hammering.

“He’s tired,” Woody said. “That’s all.”

She blew a bubble and let it pop. “This hour of night, everyone’s tired. But it looks like you got blood on you.”

I glanced down at my shirt cuff. There were flecks of red, dried and crusted. From Diego.

I rolled up my sleeves. Sure, I was spreading DNA evidence around, but I didn’t need to sit there and be reminded I was wearing some kid’s remains.

“It’s nothing,” I said. Doubtful this was the first time someone had strolled through here wearing blood. Wouldn’t be the last, either.

Woody ordered eggs, sausage, and hash browns. I said I’d just be having coffee. The smell in the joint knotted my stomach into almost a fist, wanting to work its way through my skin Alien-style, and I doubled the effort to keep whatever minor sense of composure I had.

The waitress filled our coffee cups. Woody threw his arms over the back of the chair, this lean shape relaxed and serene.

“It never bothers you, does it?” I said.

He slouched forward and reached for his coffee. “What?”

“If you have to ask ‘what,’ then obviously the answer is no.”

“I’m guessing you’re talking about the bar.”

“No, Woody, I’m talking about how they ended The Sopranos. What else could I be talking about?”

“Assume nothing in life, Henry.”

A steady drumbeat of pain pulsed in my head. I wanted to vomit again, but the tank was empty, and my body would be doing nothing but going through the motions by then, straining to find something to expel. It was the only thing I could do, the only response I seemed able to muster. There was no rewind button, no going back to before I killed someone, or before I watched a stupid kid die for no good goddamn reason whatsoever.

The waitress brought Woody’s food. The grease glistened on the plate, and the smell bound my guts even further. Woody smashed the eggs to a pulp, the soft yolks running like rivers across the plate, and he shoveled a bite onto his fork before spearing a piece of sausage onto the end and eating.

I belched up enough bile to fill a bucket and pushed it back down.

Woody squeezed ketchup onto his hash browns. “Do you want it to get easier? The things that happened tonight? Would you like it to get to the point where it doesn’t bother you anymore?”

“No, because I’m not sure how you reach that. How’s that a goal in life?”

“It’s not. It’s what happens when you go to the same job every day and you do the same goddamn thing every day. First day on a job, that job’s a miracle. You can’t believe the wonder of that job, or you get to do this incredible thing. Doesn’t matter what that thing is, if it’s flying airplanes or shining shoes or digging a tunnel to China. But eventually, every job becomes nothing more than another day, doing the same goddamn thing you did the day before, and what you’re going to do the day after. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing to make that dollar. Me, for a lot of years, those dollars came through doing things people didn’t want to think about needing done, and they were willing to shell out for the privilege of making sure those deeds got done, and they didn’t have to know what went behind it. People pay a premium for the idea of keeping their hands clean. Dirty deeds are not done dirt cheap—I don’t care what the song says.

“So when it becomes your job, you get used to it. You get used to watching someone die. I’m not sad in the least those two fuckers from the Long Riders are dead, because I can promise you somewhere in the realm of life, them buying it didn’t come close to evening out the score for shit they’ve done before tonight. That giant motherfucker hanging with Barlow, I got no judgment on him. The kid, that’s a fucking shame, but what could you do, Henry? That kid was going to go and make bad decisions no matter what you did. You making yourself miserable won’t change any of that.”

“What good is it to do this shit if I can’t keep the people from dying who shouldn’t be dead?”

Woody took another bite of his egg and sausage goulash. “What’s it matter? Used to be, you fought harder to stay out of this shit than you did to get involved. What’s different with one stupid kid?”

“Might be because eventually I’m going to need to explain to the family of that stupid kid that he died in the dumbest of possible ways, surrounded by morons and idiots, when that very thing didn’t need to happen. When he should have been home playing video games and jerking off to porn and thinking about all the impossible things he’d do with his life. And now, none of that’ll happen. Instead, he gets left behind on the floor of a shitty bar, and all him dying did was help make sure the asshole who dragged him into all of this got away.”

“The kid wasn’t dragged. No one forced him to be there. He made a choice. It was a terrible choice, but it was a choice. Whatever else he died with tonight, you let that kid die knowing he made his decisions himself. Everyone should get that.”

“Get what?”

“The knowledge they went out on the terms and conditions they dictated. My old man was ninety when he died. He’d had two heart attacks and had beat lung cancer. Had to give up smoking twenty years prior. Buried my mother fifteen years earlier. Watched everyone he knew around him vanish. But not him. Him, tenacious and stubborn asshole that he was, he wouldn’t die. So one day he got up, showered and shaved and put on his best suit, took his gun out of his sock drawer, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

“Jesus Christ, Woody.”

Woody pushed a piece of buttered toast across his plate, mopping up the remnants of yolk and sausage grease, and popped the mess into his mouth, washing it down with a long gulp of coffee. “It was his own terms and conditions, Henry. That’s how everyone should get to exit the room. That kid may not have wanted to die that way, but when you put yourself in a situation, you have to understand that might be the situation someone finds your body in. You think anyone wants to have an aneurysm when they’re at a gang bang? Hell no. But I’ll guarantee you it’s happened, and that has to get explained to someone eventually.” He reached his arms out across the back of the chair. “Why didn’t you kill her?”

“Sunshine?”

“If that’s what she was calling herself. She sure as fuck would have killed you.”

“She didn’t have a gun. Cops were going to get her anyway.”

“You think she’d have cared if you didn’t have a gun? She already killed five people.”

“Doesn’t make it right.”

Woody didn’t say anything. When the waitress came by to refill our coffee and brought the check, he handed her a pair of twenties and told her to keep the change. Her smile was a wattage that would have lit up a windowless room at midnight. I didn’t suspect the night shift got big tips. She offered to get us to-go cups of coffee. Woody accepted.

Through the window I watched as an eighteen-wheeler pulled into one of the big pumps. The driver climbed out of the cab. He was a burly guy who looked like a barrel drum with limbs. As he pumped diesel, a skinny chick in booty shorts seemed to appear from nowhere, like the late-night mist had created her.

The girl’s stick-thin legs couldn’t fill out the shorts, and her crop top showed us an expanse of soft white stomach, the lights over the pumps catching her navel ring and making it sparkle. The trucker smiled at her as she made her way toward him, and she weaved her body through the night air, twisting a length of dirty-blonde hair around her finger. He reached out for her, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her closer to him. Her body stiffened at the initial touch, and then as quickly, she relaxed, as if remembering instructions about who she needed to be. Someone other than herself. Whomever this man wanted her to be.

“Goddamn shame, isn’t it?” the waitress said. She set our to-go cups on the table and watched through the glass with Woody and me.

“It like this all night?” I said.

“All day, all night,” she said. “Little girls like her. Women older’n me who should know better but they do it anyway. Lot of ’em on drugs. Police come and clean ’em out, but there’s always new ones.”

“Guess you can’t save the whole world,” Woody said.

“Tough to save someone who don’t want saved.” The waitress sounded tired and unsurprised. You became immune to all this if you gave it enough time. Like Woody. It became nothing more than another day at the office.

The trucker finished filling up his rig and replaced the nozzle at the pump. He and the young girl talked another second or two, his hand moving down until it rested firmly on her backside, before he released his hold on her. He swatted her on the ass and walked around to the other side of the truck cab while she climbed into the passenger side. The big diesel engine chugged to life and the semi rumbled off, trailing out of the truck stop lights and vanishing into the darkness.