62

The truck was yellow.

It had black mudguards with golden reflectors, and each rubber flap was emblazoned with the shiny silhouette of a female form. A red sign on the truck said, in tall letters: FLAMMABLE.

The Alfa shrugged to one side as Rick stepped on the brakes. The force flung us from side to side. Rick let us slide all the way behind the truck, and then he jerked the wheel, driving with one hand, the other hand supporting his head, running through his hair, his posture casual, appearing to take only slight interest in what was happening.

The Alfa slid sideways. There was the smell of rubber, and the taste of diesel in the air.

I braced myself. I could hit Rick, I thought. I reasoned it through. I could take this fist and stun him. Maybe I could grab the gearshift and—or pull on the parking brake.

Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks. Rick can drive. Look at him there, looking perfectly calm. He probably drives like this all the time when he’s alone. He’s always surviving accidents. This is just another—I stopped my thoughts.

I was about to think: another accident.

When the course of the car was steady Rick forced it even faster, slipping from lane to lane around cars, managing to pick up speed.

As he spoke his eyes were straight ahead, watching the road. “I ran across Anna Wick in L.A. at a party. She told me that Blake and DeVere planned to keep you from winning the Pacific International prize. I knew exactly what I should do. There was never any question. You know what the real irony is? Blake was getting ready to shoot himself. I basically stayed around and made sure he did it.”

I tried to tell myself I wasn’t really hearing any of this.

“DeVere was not at all ready to die,” said Rick. “He tried to fight back. Threw a punch or two, tough-guy punches that missed by a mile. I’m like you, Strater. I’m in shape. He never had a chance.”

Another joke, I tried to think. Another one of Rick’s bad jokes.

He knew what I was thinking. “Can you really blame me? I was sick of the way those small people have their way. Little, ambitious people, and the rest of us are helpless. I did it because I wanted to help you.”

Just a few minutes before I had accused him of helping to murder my father. That was somehow different. That was hypothetical, so archetypal as to be beyond emotion, plausible only because of the confusion I had been feeling.

Rick couldn’t kill anyone. Surely he was lying.

Tears glistened on his cheek in the light from the headlights flashing by.

But his voice was steady. “The police were about to figure it out. Childress is so afraid of doing anything at all. But he knows by now. You were so easy to deceive. You deserved a break, but I was afraid that once you got what you wanted you would feel that your world was disintegrating. Because that’s what happens. You win and you lose all at the same time.”

“You don’t have to drive like this.”

“I tried to help, but I knew what you were like. How did I know? How did I know what it was like to be you, Strater?”

I considered wrenching the door open. My hand was on the door handle. We had to be going well over one hundred miles per hour, the store fronts of Pacifica past us, the restaurants of Rockaway Beach past us, too, the distant lights of buildings multicolored streaks.

“It’s in the blood,” said Rick. “We’re a family of mutations, creatures that really shouldn’t be allowed to live.”

Okay, I thought. Okay, it looks bad, but there’s a way out. Always a way out.

The ocean was out there, surf pale in the darkness. A beach flashed by. Then we were high above the beach. There was a blur of guardrails. The shoulder of the road was the edge of a cliff. We were one hundred feet above the ocean.

I decided to keep talking. “We were good people. We made things happen. Politics. Art. People admired us,” I continued, feeling myself, in a crazy way, involved in one of our adolescent debates. I felt lucid and giddy. Why not argue family history at a speed like this? It made as much sense as anything.

“We were better than the other people, weren’t we?” cried Rick over the noise of the engine.

“Maybe we were.”

“I’m as sick as you are,” he said, his voice so low that I was certain I had not heard him correctly.

“You’re just a little mixed up,” I said. “Everything is going to be fine.” I was shouting the words over the keen of the engine.

Slow down.

The car left the road from time to time, leaping from a minor promontory, rebounding from the crest of the road. The highway was now a two-lane. Rocky embankment scorched past us in the dark. This section of road, called the Devil’s Slide, was irregular, constantly washed by landslides.

Rick was laughing. Weeping and laughing.

How can he see?

We were on the wrong side of the road. An outcropping of rock flashed before us. Rick avoided it, all but a feathered edge of it. The car slammed to one side, and nearly spun all the way around.

I could think only: We’re going to go off.

Off the cliff.

But we didn’t. Rick had the car on the road again, and back at peak speed. Against my better judgment, I jacked the door open. I sensed more than saw the streaking black asphalt. It was inches away from me. It had a smell, damp and mineral.

The highway roared. It would kill me. I slammed the door. The door bounced open again. I worked the door shut, and then wished that there was something to hang on to as the car leaped and rocked.

Rick raised his voice so I could hear. “I was tired of seeing good people suffer. I was even going to let Nona die. I was going to smother her with a pillow. Besides, everyone associated with us should be destroyed, Stratton. Everyone.”

He sensed my reaction. “I changed my mind. So I didn’t do it. Don’t be upset.”

“You didn’t kill Father, either. I don’t know what made me think it.”

“But I did. And you must have guessed why.”

I tried to say no, but my voice was soundless.

“You thought Father was a god. But he used me, Stratton. Played with me and made me play with him, for years. I hated him. Didn’t you know? Couldn’t you guess? Maybe your exaggerated respect for him was your way of covering it up, hiding it from yourself.”

I could not stand to hear my brother suffering so.

“What are you saying?”

“Sexually, Strater. Father abused me.”

There’s got to be something to say. Don’t sit there like this.

“It wasn’t right,” he said, his voice broken. “That’s all I wanted, Strater. Fairness. Justice. Haven’t you ever wondered how such terrible things can happen?”

Maybe I said it out loud, and maybe I nearly shrieked it in every organ of my body: I’m going to jump out of the car even if it kills me.

“This is the way to do it. Finish it all off. Isn’t it wonderful, Strater? You have to admit it’s wonderful! Do you know something? I’m proud of what I did because we put up with so much and I showed them. I don’t care what you think, Strater, I did what had to be done.”

I reached for the handbrake and Rick’s grip stopped me.

The car was no longer on the road. At first I believed that we had touched off of a high point in the road, but then I registered what had happened.

We were in the air.

The sportscar lofted upward for awhile, carried by its own momentum, describing an arc up into the drizzle. It swept upward for what seemed like a long time, while the sight of the dashboard ahead of me was imprinted on my consciousness.

It was blond wood, varnished, and delicately grained. In one place the varnish was flawed, leaving a little pucker, an acne scar. My hands went out to this dashboard to steady myself.

There was a tickling vibration as the engine raced, full-throttle, and the tires spun against emptiness. I felt my weight shift sickeningly. I had that unmistakable sensation: The car was turning over. There was a sound, a banshee howl that I understood, vaguely, was my own voice.

Rick was beside me, silent, both hands on the wheel.