The moonlight that slammed into the Mississippi and shot back up again, turning everything silver, plunged into utter darkness on the other side. There was barely an outhouse, let alone a building suitable for sleeping. Billy was quiet as we weaved down narrow roads and through trees crowding close over the car.
He could tell I was pissed—pissed about being stranded without a bed in the middle of the night—pissed about not taking time to make a better plan—pissed about coming on this whole damn trip.
“Maybe there will be a hotel in the next town,” he tried once.
I shut him down with a glare.
There was no hotel. There wasn’t one in the sleepy river town of East Cape Girardeau and there wasn’t one in the even sleepier towns after that. We were traveling a smaller, darker path now, and the sleepiest place of all was inside my head. I had to close my eyes, even if it was just for a minute. Finding a hotel wasn’t even an option anymore. I just had to stop moving.
Long stretches of forest rose up on either side of the road between towns, the thick trees broken up here and there by a dirt or gravel road. I hit the brakes at the next one I saw and turned into it.
Billy grabbed the dash to brace himself against the sudden motion. “Where are you going?”
“To sleep.”
He cowered a little at the edge in my voice.
I only went as far down the bumpy road as my heavy eyelids would allow, then pulled the car into a grassy area right off the side. A little more tree cover would have been nice, but anything was better than crashing into a tree, which was the only other option at this point. My eyes were closing before I’d even turned off the car.
“We’re sleeping here?” Billy asked.
“Yep.”
“Cool. It’s like camping.”
“Sure.”
It wasn’t like any camping trip I’d ever been on, but at least he wasn’t complaining. I opened my eyes in the dark as a realization struck me: I’d never been camping at all.
We pushed our seats back and zipped up our jackets against the cold.
“Hey, Billy?” I asked quietly.
“Yeah?” He yawned.
“Did your dad take you camping?”
“Yeah, one time. We saw pine trees and mountains and fish and spiders and—”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah, my dad is cool.”
Billy rolled over in his seat to look at me through the dark. “Maybe he’ll take us both camping after we find him.”
I rolled, too, so Billy and I were face-to-face across the car. “You think so?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
We didn’t need to whisper in this empty stretch of forest out of sight of the main road, but something about the stillness of the car, the thickness of the dark, kept our voices low.
My eyelids had just slipped down again when Billy said, softer than ever, “Hey, Dane?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t remember your dad at all?”
“Not at all,” I said sleepily, keeping my eyes closed.
“Then who hit you?”
“What are you talking about?” I grumbled. I was ready for more dreams, less chatter. “Nobody hits me.”
“Maybe you just don’t remember getting hit,” Billy said.
I opened my eyes and saw Billy staring at me.
“Hit by who? What the hell?”
Billy’s voice was quiet and matter-of-fact. “Mom says people hit because they got hit first.”
I fought the sleep that kept threatening to pull me under and tried to focus on what Billy was saying. “You think I hit because I got—why is your mom even—” I gave my head a little jerk, to shake the bedtime fog out of my brain. It cleared, revealing a terrible thought. “Wait, what?” I opened my eyes wider. “Billy D., does your mom hit you?”
“Not my mom,” he whispered.
The last of the sleep went up in flames—flames sparked by a ball of fire growing in my chest. I sat straight up in my seat.
No. No no no no no. He is not saying what I think he’s saying. I tried to keep my voice steady, but it was shaking.
“Your dad?”
Billy nodded, still curled up on his side. “Mom says Dad hit because his dad hit him, and his dad hit him.”
“Stop.” I held out a hand to Billy, then ran it through my hair. This wasn’t happening.
“Fuck,” I said. It was barely a whisper—more like a breath.
“You didn’t get hit?” Billy asked.
“No.”
“Then why do you—”
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING?” I exploded.
Billy jumped back, pressing his body against the car door. “Why are you yelling?”
I shifted around in the seat, wishing I had room to pace. I curled my hands over the steering wheel and realized my palms were itching—no, not just itching—they were on fire. I was burning up with rage from the inside out.
I tried to point my fury in one direction, but it kept bouncing back and forth between Billy’s dad and Billy himself. Five seconds ago we were talking about Billy’s dad taking us camping. Now we were talking about him using Billy as a punching bag.
Questions spun around my brain. How often? How hard? Why? I tried to picture someone who could hit a face like Billy D.’s—especially if he was your own kid, but all I kept seeing were monsters. The fire was moving past my palms, spreading into my fingers, and up my arms. I was looking around for something to punch when a disturbing thought hit me: I wonder if Billy’s dad got the itch before he hit.
All the questions in my head were eclipsed by just one, so I asked it again, softer this time.
“Billy D., what are we doing?”
“We’re going to find my dad.”
“But he hit you.”
Billy sank down in his seat and curled back into a ball. “Not all the time.”
“But more than once?”
“Just when he couldn’t help it—like when I acted wrong or when he tried to show me how to do something, and I messed it up.”
“But that’s not fair. You’re … you’re different, so—”
“Dad says I’m not different. He says I’m like everybody else. I should be able to do stuff and know stuff like everybody else. He doesn’t treat me different.”
“No, he treats you worse.”
“It’s not his fault.”
“I swear to God, Billy D., if you say it’s your fault, I will drive us back to Columbia right fucking now.”
Billy stayed quiet. He knew I meant it. He could already see my brain working—calculating how long it would take us to get home in the morning, whether I was awake enough now to just leave that very minute.
“You promised,” Billy whispered.
I looked down at him rolled up in the seat and thought how much he looked like a little kid—not a teenager and nearly a man, like me.
“I promised to take you to your dad, not take you to get a beating.”
“He doesn’t beat me up,” Billy said. “He just hits sometimes. He doesn’t mean to. He always says sorry, and it makes him really sad.” Billy paused, stifling a yawn. When he spoke again his eyes were closed and his voice low. “It makes me sad, too.”
“Then why do you want to find him so bad?” I asked.
“Because,” Billy mumbled, his words full of sleep. “He’s my dad.”
A second later he was snoring.
My own chest rose and fell in time with Billy’s. I was gasping in deep, ragged breaths, on the verge of some kind of attack. I had risked getting expelled for this? Not a dream dad but a nightmare.
I guessed it was around 1:00 a.m. If I raced all the way home without stopping, I could get back in four hours. If I wanted to get to my first class on time and avoid expulsion, that meant I’d have to be back on the road by 4:00 a.m. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket to set an alarm, then remembered we’d shut our phones off. I couldn’t risk turning it on and giving Mom a way to reach me. As ready as I was to head home, I wasn’t ready to deal with the wrath of Mom yet. I had to pray the cramped sleeping quarters would be enough to wake me up in three hours.
I knew that was wishful thinking, but there was no other choice. Sleep was pulling me back down into the seat. I watched Billy breathing in and out until my eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer. When they closed, I could still see his face there painted behind my eyelids—innocent and trusting and forgiving—just like he’d been with me. Billy saw a friend where others just saw a thug. And he saw a father where others would have seen a monster. I fell asleep with the uneasy feeling that, to Billy, I looked a lot like the man who showed him how to build a campfire with one hand and knocked him around with the other—that Billy had gone searching for his dad and found the next closest thing.