JESSE USES THE ICE PICK EMBEDDED IN THE FIEND’S HEAD TO guide the body to the ground. The wound in his stomach makes him feel like he’s drunk acid, and he lies back and waits to heal more. When the worst has passed, he dusts the biker with the biker’s own knife.
He still doesn’t feel safe, though, not with the last two Fiends in the wind. He gathers all the guns he can find and carries them to the truck in a bindle made from a bedsheet, taking it slow, watching the road and listening for a motorcycle. When he gets close to the pickup he pauses to look for signs of trouble. Everything seems to be fine. Sanders is even behind the wheel. Jesse wasn’t sure he’d make it back.
He was lying in a puddle of blood when Jesse ran into the trailer, not moving. Assuming he was dead, Jesse went to the window and watched the big, dark Fiend he’d stabbed drag the blond woman he shot to safety. Sanders groaned, startling Jesse.
“Where are you hit?” Jesse asked.
“My leg,” Sanders said.
A bullet had passed through his thigh. Jesse cut a sleeve off Sanders’s shirt and tied it around the leg. It was no kind of fix, but it would get him through the next few minutes, when Jesse would need him. He groaned again as Jesse hauled him to his feet, but the leg supported his weight. Jesse had him take up a position at the window, and he crouched in the doorway.
After striking the deal with the Fiend who killed Johona allowing Sanders to go, he told Sanders, “Wait in the truck. If I’m not back by dawn, take off.”
“And your brother?” Sanders asked.
There was only one alternative. “Put him down,” Jesse replied. Edgar not being able to fend for himself, it’d be a mercy killing.
Jesse waves at Sanders now as he approaches the truck, says, “You alive?”
“Barely,” Sanders says.
Jesse walks back to the camper. Edgar peers down from a bed in a nook above the cab.
“Monsieur Beaumont went crazy,” he says. “He like to have kicked that box to kindling.”
“Come up front,” Jesse says. “Everything’s settled.”
Sanders keeps drifting in and out of consciousness, so Jesse drives. Edgar rides between them. Nobody says anything on the way back to Vegas, not even Edgar. Instead of gassing about cartoons or begging to turn on the radio, he stares out the windshield, his big, knuckly hands clutching the dash. Jesse and Sanders reek of blood, gunpowder, and exhaustion. Jesse opens all the vents, flooding the cab with fresh air.
Sanders needs help walking to the room. Jesse lays him on the bed and strips off his trousers to examine his leg more closely. Through and through, as he thought: one hole in the front of the thigh, one in the back, both barely bleeding now. He’s in a lot of pain, and Jesse feels that patching him up is part of their bargain. He goes through the man’s first aid kit, but he’ll need more than what’s there to do the job right.
Edgar’s on his bed, watching television. He doesn’t look over when Jesse starts making himself presentable enough to go out.
“You want a hamburger?” Jesse asks him.
“Two Big Macs,” Edgar says. “And French fries.”
“What about you?” Jesse says to Sanders.
“I’m fine.”
Jesse walks to an all-night drugstore for peroxide and gauze and buys a few extra burgers from the McDonald’s next door in case Sanders changes his mind.
Sanders, lying in the bathtub, hisses when Jesse pours peroxide into the bullet holes and bloody froth boils out. By the time Jesse bandages the leg and gets the man back to his bed, Edgar is asleep. Sanders nibbles at a hamburger and is soon sleeping too.
Jesse stretches out on the floor with a pillow. It’s the first chance he’s had to relax in two days, but rest doesn’t come easy. Whenever he closes his eyes, a vicious montage unspools. Him stabbed and shot and stabbing and shooting, guns and knives and blood, rovers collapsing into dust. He and the Fiends fight on the mountain, he and the biker fight at the motel, and Johona dies over and over. It’s light outside before exhaustion finally shuts him down.
The first thing he hears when he wakes is laughter. The television. Edgar’s watching from bed, and Sanders is writing to his wife. The sun is down, he can feel it. He stands and stretches. Besides being parched, he’s doing okay. He drinks three glasses of water and takes a long shower, keeping his mind on the night ahead and not letting it stray into sorrow. He tells Edgar to pack his things and is surprised when he fills his grip without kicking.
He walks to the nearest casino and cases the parking lot. Spotting an old Galaxie 500, he sidles up and jams a screwdriver into the door lock. A few taps with a hammer, a hard twist, and he’s in the driver’s seat. After a bit of work on the ignition cylinder, he touches the starter wire to the battery wires, and the car comes to life.
All Edgar’s got to say when he walks back into the room is that he’s hungry again. “We’ll get something on the way,” Jesse tells him and sets about packing his own suitcase. It doesn’t take long. The shirt and jeans he’s wearing are the only clothes he’s got not covered in blood. He takes Sanders’s .45 from the bundle of guns and lays it on the table.
“You might need this,” he says to Sanders.
Sanders doesn’t respond. He looks even more miserable than usual, like he could either cry on someone’s shoulder or kill them, depending on the direction of the next breeze. Jesse’s felt the same way a thousand times but doesn’t have any sympathy to spare. He’s running along his own tightrope, keeping moving to keep from falling. He stashes his knife in his jacket, picks up the guns and his grip, and takes one last look around to make sure Edgar hasn’t forgotten anything he’ll be whining about an hour down the road. Then it’s a quick goodbye to Sanders, and he and Edgar are out the door.
Edgar’s got the mulligrubs, too, hasn’t said three words all night. Jesse points him to the Galaxie and puts their grips and the guns in the back seat. They’re going to Seattle. He’s tired of the heat, wants to see mountains, smell trees.
“What about Disneyland?” Edgar says.
“We’ll go soon,” Jesse says.
Edgar snickers. “You’re a liar, and the truth ain’t in you,” he says.
They stop at A&W for supper. Edgar tells the carhop she’s pretty and asks for his own tray. The girl brings one out and hangs it from his window. The food livens him up. He guzzles his root beer, burps, and licks at the foam on his upper lip. He’s messing with his fries in a way Jesse’s scolded him for in the past, rolling each in ketchup, dirtying his fingers, before popping it into his mouth. Jesse ignores it this time. He’ll never forgive him for what he said about Johona, but he also can’t see riding him too hard after what he’s been through.
A Little League game is in its fifth inning on a baseball diamond next to the drive-in. A kid hits a fly into left field, the thwack of the bat on the ball not reaching Jesse’s ears until the boy’s already running for first. The fielder gapes at the sky and punches his glove. The ball goes to him like it was meant to, seeming to slow almost to stopping as it drops into his mitt.
“I’m gonna get me a motorcycle,” Edgar says.
“No, you’re not,” Jesse says.
“I’m gonna ride with the Fiends. They’re tougher than you.”
“You sure about that?”
“I seen them fight.”
“So how come they’re all dead, and I’m still here?”
Edgar drops a fry into his puddle of ketchup and flips it with the tip of his finger. “I’ll start my own gang then,” he says.
“What’ll you call it?”
“The Pirates.”
Jesse goes to piss before they hit the road. The car is running when he gets back, Edgar behind the wheel.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jesse says.
“Touch the one wire to the two,” Edgar says. “I remember.”
“You don’t mess with the car without my permission. You know that.”
“Can I have permission to drive?”
“Get back on your side.”
Edgar acts like it takes everything in him to slide across the seat.
They head north. Jesse figures they can make it to Wells, or even Jackpot, before having to stop for daylight. An hour into the drive, Edgar, who’s been sulking, turns on the radio. Jesse shuts it off.
“Please, sir, may I play the radio, sir?” Edgar says. His resentment at having to ask is obvious, even behind the funny voice he uses.
“You may,” Jesse says, rewarding him for following the rules.
Traffic is sparse on the highway. When they meet another vehicle, it’s usually a big rig, some as festooned with colored lights as Christmas trees. Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome” comes on the radio. After the first verse about the whippoorwill being too blue to fly and the moon hiding behind a cloud to cry, Jesse changes the station. The only way he’ll get through the next few nights is to keep one step ahead of grief.
The Galaxie blows a tire an hour past Ely. Jesse manhandles the car to the shoulder, kills the engine, and lucks out when he finds a flashlight in the glove box. His luck continues when he pops the trunk with his screwdriver and there’s a jack and a spare.
“Give me a hand,” he calls to Edgar, still in the car.
It’s the left rear tire that failed. Edgar holds the light while Jesse loosens the nuts with a lug wrench and jacks up the car. Jesse’s sweating as he pulls off the ruined tire and slips on the spare, has to dry his hands on his pant legs before replacing and finger-snugging the nuts. Edgar can’t stand still. The flashlight beam keeps jumping around.
“Quit fidgeting,” Jesse snaps.
He lowers the car, tightens the nuts, and carries the jack to the trunk. The engine starts, and he slams the trunk shut and, through the rear window, sees Edgar in the driver’s seat again.
“Goddammit!” he yells.
Edgar puts the car in reverse and hits the gas. The back bumper shatters Jesse’s left knee. He falls to the ground, and the Galaxie crushes his right ankle as it rolls on top of him. The car stops then, but Jesse’s stomach is against the muffler. The hot steel sears his flesh. That’s what finally starts him screaming.
He’s still screaming when Edgar shifts into drive and takes off. His shirt catches on the bumper, and he’s dragged out into the road before the fabric tears and he skids to a stop. The Galaxie speeds away, its taillights visible long after the sound of the engine has faded.