Cam steered into a parking lot that faced the water. Margaret went inside a restaurant and came back in her sarong-style, French-cut swimsuit, which revealed her hipbones. Tracy and Cam had undressed and Tracy was already swimming far out into the sea. She walked down the beach with her brother until they found an evocative pulse in the waves where they angled into the surf. Margaret felt drunk as soon as she went under and she couldn’t rise to the surface. Cam grabbed her wrist and pulled her into shallow water. They were both too drunk to swim and they stayed together near the shore. Tracy was still swimming far out. Cam told her, “He’s totally crazy.” She couldn’t disagree with this, and she turned on her back to float and watch the sky.
Then they waited on the beach. Having lost sight of him, Margaret was too angry to be fearful. “That fuck,” she said. “He’s really an asshole.”
“Are you certain we don’t have to get help?” Cam asked her.
“He’ll need help. Just wait.”
She pulled her knees up and hugged her legs. They watched the water. The wind lifted a few tags of froth, but the water was fairly calm. Tracy was gone. Farther down the beach a motorcycle was purring along. It was coming toward them. A girl was driving. She was wearing a chartreuse bandana knotted around her bosom. Sitting behind her was Tracy. Tracy hopped off the bike while the girl kept her hand on the throttle to keep the motor raging. Margaret said hello, but the girl had some wiring on her teeth that kept her jaw knitted tight, and she couldn’t return the greeting. She saluted Cam and Margaret, then engaged the clutch; the wheels tore into the sandy berm and the motorcycle moved through impressive whoops and twistees as she sped away.
Cam was shaking his head, smiling. Margaret couldn’t stand to watch him. Leave it to Tracy to find somebody’s soft spot. He tricked them and returned with no fear of reprisal. The girl on the motorcycle was wonderful, both skilled and dreamy. What could Margaret say about it? Cam and Tracy were laughing about the girl. Cam was impressed. The shift worried Margaret. It was better to keep them of two minds, like a train that has a locomotive in the front and one in the back. It can change direction without a roundhouse.
Before they left the beach, Margaret walked over to a pay phone to call Elizabeth. The telephone receiver was disassembled; the coin return was laddered with gloss from a spider. She had to walk farther. At the next booth, she dialed her stepmother and told her that they were going to be late. Yes, they had a swim, they were having fun. Yes, Jane was fine. The baby was big. Margaret didn’t tell Elizabeth about the affidavit. If they wanted to give themselves over to science, they would just have to do it on their own.
Elizabeth told Margaret that Darcy had reported to the police that the Duster was stolen and she wanted the thief arrested.
There was a sunset as they rode the ferry and they sat on the top deck, above the rows of cars, to watch it play itself out. The ship’s engines rumbled, stilled, rumbled again as the ferry maneuvered out into the open water. Margaret told her brother what Elizabeth had said. He was staring directly at the oblong blob of sun that touched the horizon and sent a shimmering funnel across the surface toward them. Cam didn’t blink.
“She’s responding accordingly,” Tracy said. “Tit for tat, with a little twist of revenge. It’s a passion move—”
“Shut up, faggot!” Cam told him, and he walked away, taking the ladder, hardly touching the treads. He plunged down to the bottom deck, where the Duster was parked.
When they were driving again, Margaret said, “Why don’t you just telephone Darcy and tell her to call off the cops? We’ll be home in less than an hour, and she’ll have the Duster back.”
“It’s very dramatic,” Tracy said.
Cam said, “She’s just jerking my chain. She’s a bitch to the end, that’s all.”
“We can get home without even seeing a cop,” Tracy said.
“That’s not the point,” Cam said. “I don’t care about seeing a cop.”
Margaret suggested that they stop at the highway patrol and explain their situation before a police car pulled them over. She wondered why Elizabeth didn’t explain the situation to the authorities? You know, Darcy—an emotional woman going through a divorce, that kind of thing.
Cam said, “Because Elizabeth’s cold. That’s why they’re selling their bodies.”
“They get money for their corpses?” Margaret said.
“I don’t think so,” Tracy said. “There’s transportation costs, a fee for the refrigerator truck.”
“What do you know about it?” Cam said.
“Don’t you have a hair of feeling for your folks?” Tracy said.
Margaret saw it happening. She reached for the radio, but Cam brushed her hand off the knob.
“What about your own mother?” Cam said.
“I’ve got one.” Tracy stretched his arms.
“Well?”
“We’ve come to terms. It’s copacetic,” Tracy said.
Cam couldn’t let it rest. “Now Margaret, her mother’s dead, she can’t judge the situation here—”
“Tell me about it,” Margaret said.
They were doing the speed limit one minute, then Cam was tightening the distance between cars. “Let’s try harder,” Margaret said. “Why don’t we just try to get the police on our ass.”
“I’m driving the car,” Cam said.
Tracy said, “A little too fast.”
She felt her diaphragm knit tighter, and her breath was getting too shallow. They reached ninety miles an hour. “You’re doing just what Darcy wants.”
“Sure,” Cam said, “whatever you say.”
Cam slowed the car and they went a few minutes at an easy speed. No one said anything. It was the new dark before the moon and stars. Everything was invisible, blotted out. A few strands of mist lifted off the fields and strayed over the road, swirled through the beams of their headlights. They were heading back through miles of vegetable farms. Margaret searched far ahead where the headlights thinned and it was a blank wall; then the beams reached through, washed over each distance. Cam must have seen what she was doing and he clicked off the headlamps. The dark plowed into the windshield.
Tracy leaned back into his seat. He cleared his throat to erase his alarm. “You’re crazy,” he said.
Cam cruised through the blackness for a few seconds, then flicked his high beams on again, just in time for a hare to freeze, fluttering to the left and right, then keeping still. In that halo of chaos it couldn’t escape and they felt its thud under the front wheel.
Margaret yelped and covered her face with her hands. The men were laughing and groaning. They almost seemed happy; they greeted that small death willingly.
Cam stopped the car on the side of the road. Tracy walked a few feet away from the car and urinated in the sparse weeds. Margaret could hear the stream slap the broad-bladed grasses and drill its little notch in the sand. “Might as well,” Cam said, and he got out of the car to find a place. She wondered about the two men sharing this brief intimacy. What she knew of one, she could not beg from the other. Could carnal knowledge equal a brother’s blind devotion? She watched the two men zip their pants. Tracy shifted his weight from one leg to the other to adjust the fit of his jeans, shoving them lower on his hips so he had room for himself. It reminded Margaret of a horse she had watched pawing the dirt in an indoor arena, his big velvety testicles shivering each time his hoof struck. The two men stood even in height and similar in physique, shoulder to shoulder in the dark before her. When they stood in front of the vehicle, she thought of a pair of exquisite drays, horses that must always be well matched in conformation and temperament.
As a child, she had never seen a man’s flesh without the confusing drape of his slacks, but she had one helpful document: a catalogue from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a book of reproductions from the celebrated Picasso show of 1958, which her parents had visited. She liked a painting called Boy Leading a Horse, in which a youth stood naked beside a big horse. The two walked side by side, face front. The boy’s bare foot edged the sharp hoof; the velvet nostril of the horse brushed the boy’s narrow hip. The painting made no concession to charm; the tones were terra-cotta and grey, with intense scumbling on the upper third of the canvas where the sky dissolved in the background. Margaret studied the painting, gauging the boy’s lean figure; its proximity to the weighty beast was startling. Their intimacy seemed a great, enslaved tolerance—a patient exchange of power. The power of the flesh. The boy’s genitals were like little apples; the horse’s eyes were rounder, larger.
“Are you finished?” she asked. “You two have to come back in the car while I go to the bathroom. Sit in this car while I find a place,” Margaret told them.
“She’s got a toilet phobia,” Tracy told Cam.
“There’s no toilets out here,” Cam said.
Margaret walked into the field. She couldn’t see very far in front of her and the low rows of vegetables looked strange, black-leaved, like something poisonous. There weren’t any shrubs or fences she could hide behind. “Look the other way or I can’t get started,” she told them.
She saw them turn their faces, but they were laughing. It was always the same, men thought she was making a big production. She urinated standing up, but she had to remove her panties and hold them in her hand, she had to spread her feet wide. Standing up was better than squatting. Squatting in an open field reminded her of lower beasts; aren’t all beasts approached from behind during rituals of mating? Women are the only animals with vertical cunts, she was thinking. Women’s cunts telescope upward and women have to be cajoled, coerced to lie down on their backs or on their bellies. They have to be instructed to kneel or straddle. Tracy often tugged her hips onto him, his weight and rhythm against her back. She didn’t have to think for herself; he absorbed her as he pushed into those central inches. He liked best when he didn’t have to look her in the face or reveal his pleasure to her. She allowed him that consolation.
She walked back to the car and she saw Tracy counting out something on his fingers. He was making some assertions and numbering his reasons. She felt a slight pulse high in her stomach, some kind of nausea, like when she imagined people were conspiring. When the two men huddled together like that, forgetting about her, their sudden neutrality with one another seemed too private. They seemed ready to move ahead without her.
When they were driving again, Tracy kept looking over at Cam. Margaret watched Tracy’s impatience. He was pinching a crease in his jeans with his thumb and forefinger, running his fingers down the fabric, then smoothing it out with the heel of his hand.
She watched the dark. A streetlight showed an erratic cloud of June bugs, little cigar stubs circling the glare.
Cam said, “We made our decision. We pretty much decided.”
“We did? I hate that editorial we. I can never tell who’s talking. No one takes responsibility,” she said.
“We’re driving to Chicago,” Cam told her.
“Hail Mary,” Tracy said.
“Are you following me?” Cam asked her. “We’re doing it.”
“You’re driving to Chicago? In this Duster?”
“With the three of us, we can drive straight through.”
Margaret said, “Come on—I don’t have a change of clothes. I’m dressed for the beach.”
“You’re fine.”
“I only have these flip-flops.”
Tracy said, “No, your shoes are in back.”
“Those aren’t mine,” she said. “Those are Darcy’s.”
“Try ’em,” Tracy said.
“I won’t try them.”
“We’ll get something. I have a Sears card,” Cam said.
“Terrific.”
“She’s not impressed. It’s the Sears image—it could use some work,” Tracy said.
“Maybe she can come down a level,” Cam said.
“The Arrow Collar guy? He’s not my problem,” she said. Margaret pulled her fingers through her salty hair and would say no more. Tracy said that just because her mother was dead, squared away so to speak, she shouldn’t shirk her family obligations.
“We can shut up,” Margaret said.
“Your mother is—”
“Dead,” Cam said.
“This is harassment,” Margaret said.
“You’ve never owned up to it,” Tracy said.
“Trace, please—” Why did she plead? She never sliced off the last syllable of his name unless she was whining.
Tracy told her that if they went to Chicago they could visit her mother’s grave. It’s about time. They could look it up at the town hall and find the location.
“It’s not my quest—it’s Cam’s!” Margaret said.
Cam told Tracy to shut up. He was making it worse.
Tracy explained Teilhard de Chardin’s Theoretical Axes of Happiness to Cam. He was saying, “People fall into three groups: Number one, there’s The Tired. These are the pessimists, fearmongers like Margaret, but these are even worse than Margaret. Number two, we’ve got Pleasure Seekers, hedonists, people who mate incessantly until they’re numb, people who drink without drunken relief, they tip the bottle until the last dribble is extinguished.”
“He’s revving up,” Margaret said.
“Oh really? Number three, The Enthusiasts. These people are lords of the safari, soul searchers, always ready to explore life’s junkyard down to the last double-chromed bat-wing window from an extinct Sunbeam convertible. Eureka! That’s what we should try for. We’re scavengers. Cam’s our leader.”
“This has nothing to do with finding car parts in a scrap heap. Cam’s got a lifelong grudge.”
Cam punched the radio so the news was screaming. Then it was the baseball scores, and they listened to see how the Cubs were doing. The baseball idea embroidered the issue and the men gripped it. Cam started asking about the pitching lineup. He hadn’t been following the Cubs. Tracy was chattering. He said he once had Harry Caray’s signature on a ball, right on the sweet spot where the stitches come together to frame his John Hancock. Maybe they could take in a game at Wrigley.
Margaret used to like to go to the ballparks with Cam. In Baltimore they sold miniature Oriole pennants attached to No. 2 pencils. At Phillies’ games, they purchased steaming soft pretzels—singles, or five in a paper sack. They sold a peppermint stick inserted in half of a lemon. She longed for the simple pleasure of that. Those two clean flavors, contrasting cool and sour.
“Well. I might go to Chicago so you can find Lewis, but I’m not taking any detours to cemeteries. That’s out of the question,” she told Tracy.
“Don’t slam any doors yet,” Tracy said. “Sandra’s weedy plot could use some sprucing up. Maybe we can get an azalea, do some transplanting.”
Margaret did sometimes picture Sandra’s grave. She had read a magazine article about an exhumation. The article stated that the atrophied uterus was typically the last and final organ of the human body to decompose. The muscular womb was tough and stringy; it condensed into a hard knot and could be found intact years after burial. Margaret imagined her mother’s bones, the ivory cradle of the pelvis, and centered there—a tiny amber fossil—the shrunken pocket in which she was started and from which she was expelled.
Tracy knew when her thoughts veered, and he pushed her shoulder until she was settled against him. They were driving into Wilmington and argued about the Duster.
“Isn’t it risky going around the city in this car?” Margaret said.
“I’ve got to pick up some cash at the office,” Cam said.
“What cash are you talking about?”
“Who are you, Officer Krupke?” Cam said.
Tracy said, “Petty cash at the apartments?”
“Bingo.”
“That’s crazy,” Margaret said. “I’ve got money at the house.”
“I’m not dealing with Elizabeth at this point in time.”
Cam parked the Duster in the tenants’ parking lot and went into the office. Margaret got out of the car and sat on the hood, but it was too hot. Tracy saw the swimming pool and started over.
He was peeling his pants down, and then she saw his white shirt on the cement beside his jeans. He stepped down the ladder and lowered himself into the water without disturbing the surface. He disappeared. She waited beside the Duster, listening to the hood contract as the engine cooled. When she didn’t hear any splashing, she wondered if maybe Tracy hit his head on something. When she walked over, he was floating on his back, pretty as you please. He looked quite evocative, his whole trunk exposed to the air, naked.
“Get out,” she said. She hated standing there in the same spot where Cam had confessed his worries to her.
Tracy told her the water was perfect.
She saw the tilt of his hips, how his pelvis rose on the swell of water as he drifted supine. His body absorbed and reflected her thoughts. She wriggled out of her tank top and held it by the spaghetti straps; she was having second thoughts. Then she pushed her shorts down. She tested the water, brushing her foot back and forth. She climbed down and stayed by the gutter as he swam up behind her. She gripped the tile ledge. “Don’t get my hair wet,” she said.
“Jesus.”
“It’s too deep here,” she said.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
“I’m sinking,” she said.
“No, I have you, shut up. For once, shut up.”
She felt a strong jet from the filter vent, a velvety pressure against her legs. Tracy buoyed her, nipped the bony pebbles at the base of her neck, and she felt her cunt pulse and contract. He moved her the way he wanted and finding her profuse silk, he praised her.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Why do you always do this?”
“Only when you’re around,” he told her.
Margaret noticed the slow pull of a searchlight over the city. Perhaps it was a new car dealership or another discount drugstore opening. The funnel turned and fell, then rolled around again. She liked its regularity; it grounded her in her weightlessness, helped to trigger her orgasm. Then Tracy held her shoulders and pushed her under. He leaned all his weight upon her and she sank. Her descent was smooth, dreamlike, and at first she didn’t question which direction Tracy had steered her. When her feet touched the cement bottom, she twisted and pumped her legs, but he kept her down. She shook her head side to side. Huge bubbles escaped from her mouth, blurred pillows of air shooting upward, then two lines of tiny silver BBs. When Tracy let her rise, she was choking; the purified water burned her throat and sinuses.
Cam stepped forward to the pool’s edge. How long he had been waiting, she didn’t know. “Nice,” he said. “People can look out their windows and see everything.”
“He was trying to drown me!” She was coughing.
Cam looked directly into Margaret’s eyes, avoiding Tracy altogether. He seemed more curious about her immodesty than her complaint against Tracy. Maybe Cam could have used a swim. It might have been good if they could reach some equal ground. Nudity can do that. Margaret started up the chrome ladder. Her nose was running, stinging from the chlorine.
“Wait a minute,” Cam told her. He walked back to the office and came back with a towel. He handed it to Margaret.
She pulled herself out of the water and pinched the towel under her arms, leaving her back to the air. She felt her brother’s eyes move over her hips. She finished with the towel and handed it to Tracy. Tracy wadded the towel and buffed his arms and legs. He didn’t try to cover himself up.
“Why don’t you just lead a parade,” Cam said. He didn’t look away as they pulled their clothes on. Cam took them into the small office. There was a vinyl sofa with some blankets folded at one end. A pillow with a dirty slip was crammed on a bookshelf.
“Is this where you’re sleeping these days?” she asked him.
“That’s right,” Cam told her, “home sweet home.”
Margaret saw his name embossed on a brass plate that was glued to a wedge of wood. This was something Darcy ordered for him. It looked stupid. “Is this where you work,” Margaret asked him, “and sleep?”
“I’m never in here, I’m down at the new condos or running around somewhere. I don’t sit here.”
“You’re not taking that money, are you?”
“It’s just a loan.”
“I’ve got some money at the house.”
“We’re not going back to the house,” Cam said.
Margaret said, “But whose money is that?”
“It’s petty cash, money for plumbers or electricians, if something went out in the middle of the night and I had to get it taken care of.”
“Oh, emergency money,” Tracy said. He smiled.
“That’s right,” Cam said. The men seemed to understand one another.
“We might have an emergency,” Tracy said.
“Correct. Like Tracy here, he had a clog and got his pipes flushed, right? How much is that? A couple hundred?” He unfolded some bills and pushed the cash at Margaret.
Margaret made a face, rolled her eyes. It was an involuntary reaction; she hated to roll her eyes. Hated the way it felt.
“Look,” she said, “do you even know where this guy lives when we get to Chicago?”
Cam told her the address, the apartment number, the zip code. He recited the telephone number.
“You’ve talked to him on the phone?”
“No. I’ve dialed it. He picks it up like he expects to hear from the president. Then I terminate the call. Slip it back in the cradle, nice and easy.”
“You just hang up?” Margaret said.
“He answers the same every time—like he’s taking reservations.”
“Maybe he just has telephone manners,” Margaret said.
“What are you going to say to him; what do you want to say?” Tracy asked.
“I don’t have to say shit. I’m in a position of power.” He tapped the cash against the desk so the bills were even, and he put the money in his wallet. They walked back toward the car. Margaret saw a blue light twirling toward them on the street, but it was just a tow truck. It was a tow truck pulling another tow truck. The sight was strangely compelling, as if it mirrored some aspect of their situation.
They started off without a change of clothes, without anything. Cam said he’d get toothbrushes for everyone. Margaret passed her tongue over her front teeth. She said, “A toothbrush is the least of my problems. I’m freezing. My clothes are damp.”
“You’re hair’s wet,” Tracy told her.
“Forty-eight hours, that’s all,” Cam told her. “We can buy something tomorrow. You can go to Marshall Field’s and get Levi’s.”
“I can’t wear jeans until I wash them a couple times,” she said. “They’ll be too stiff and I hate the smell of the sizing.”
“What’s wrong with your shorts?” Tracy said, smiling.
She tried to shush him.
“Do you want some Kleenex?” Tracy said.
Cam said to Tracy, “You’re some lewd son of a bitch, you know that?”
“I’m just relaxed about it, the erotic impulse. It’s human,” Tracy said. “I’d say you’re wearing your strap a bit tight. Do you always give movie ratings to every routine situation?”
Margaret tried to imagine riding a thousand miles wedged in between the two men. It was crazy, but she didn’t decline to go on their journey. If two worlds converged, making one perverse expansion, what was her responsibility? Was she central? Its magnet? The feeling was heady. The Duster hardly gripped the pavement, skating forward in airy surges. The car seemed to cruise with the globe as it plunged in rotation, rolling into the dark.
They were riding up the Philadelphia Pike, a narrow antique four-lane that connected Wilmington with Chester, Pennsylvania.
“I used to come up here with Richard,” Margaret said. “He took me on sales trips, into Philadelphia, to U.S. Steel, to the refineries at Marcus Hook and to the Scott paper plant. I watched them cut giant tubes of toilet paper into four-inch rolls—”
“No kidding? Toilet tissue?” Tracy said. “Welcome to the world of Freud.”
“Why must you take my simple memories and dice them up into some kind of psycho salad. Will you let me alone!” Margaret said. She tried to remember the names of the drinking establishments as they passed the roadside bars, the familiar saloons displaying tipped neon cocktail glasses over their doors, one after the other. Coming home from the plants, her father had usually stopped for a drink somewhere. He might try to buy her a Shirley Temple, but the cherry repelled her.
At the White Horse Tavern, Richard argued with the bartender. Margaret loved the ornaments she saw, and Richard wanted to buy the heavy china horse heads, the handles on the taps. The bartender got the manager and the manager declined Richard’s offer. Nothing could go. Not even at that price. “The decorations are fixtures, as essential as the refrigeration,” the man said. Her father saw something else. He reached up to the well-stocked shelf and pulled a trinket from the neck of a brand of scotch; it was a small plastic horse on a loop of string. Richard handed this to Margaret. Margaret started to tell Cam about the souvenir, it might add a gram weight to the scales, on Richard’s behalf, but Tracy could twist the detail. Tracy might say it was another example of Margaret’s “equine obsession,” so she kept quiet.
Cam had to stop for some gasoline and he found a twenty-four-hour Texaco place where a girl sat in a Plexiglas booth. The girl was reading a book, underlining several sentences with a yellow outlining pen. She was going overboard with the marker, Margaret thought: what’s the point if you underline every word? The girl didn’t seem too interested in the Duster and Cam parked in front of the pumps. He told Tracy to go talk to the girl just in case.
Tracy was pleased by this idea, by his new partnership with Cam. He told Margaret to be cool, be like Bonnie to Cam’s Clyde. “You have the hair for it,” he said, “the blond hair. Just like Faye Dunaway.” Margaret watched Tracy go over to the girl and start a conversation. The girl was encased in Plexiglas and Margaret couldn’t hear what she answered, but Tracy was asking about White Tower hamburger stands. He was talking about the architecture of those restaurants compared to the golden-arches concept. Then the tank was filled and Cam paid the money. They drove away from the gas station and Cam pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car. He went in back and unscrewed the tiny light bulb over the license plate. He tossed it into a vacant lot. Margaret heard the bulb pop. Cam looked satisfied and he got back into the car.
“Is this a joke?” she asked him. “I mean, if the police were looking for the Duster, wouldn’t they have nabbed us by now? We were all over Wilmington, they didn’t do anything about it.”
“As time ticks by, they have to take us seriously,” Cam said.
“Oh, you mean after so many hours, they say, that car isn’t coming home?” Tracy said.
“True,” Cam said, “and, by now you can be sure Darcy’s been on the horn giving them hell. By this time, it’s in the hands of the troopers.”
“Troopers?” Margaret said. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
Tracy said, “State troopers. It goes out over a computer network. They type it on a CRT, a description of the Duster, of us, of our wicked intentions.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“Look,” Tracy said, “Clyde has a lot on his mind, so be a good Bonnie.”
Cam said, “What?”
“You know. Bonnie and Clyde? Don’t you think Margaret looks like Faye. Faye Don’-go-away.”
“That actress?” Cam said.
“Faye Don’-go-away. She’s a dream. All washed-out-looking with a dark mouth. Yes. She looks almost dead, but her lips are burning. She devours somebody in an instant. Eats you up. You’re in heaven.”
Cam liked the description. He was smiling, watching the road, picturing something.
They reached the Pennsylvania Turnpike at around midnight. They would use the turnpike until they crossed over to Interstate 80, and that would take them the whole way. It would be good to get out of the tri-state area, Cam was saying. Margaret agreed. She was happy to lose the landscape; a familiar landscape evokes so much.
“We’re tired already,” she told them.
“We’re fine,” Cam told her.
“I’ve got my second wind,” Tracy said.
“I bet you do,” Cam said.
Margaret recognized Cam’s “poor me” tone of voice. Cam almost looked like Richard used to look on one of the family’s long trips. It was a mask of fatigue after driving a long way with all of them. The Scenic Route can often become a kind of hell. The winding roads, the small rise and descent from low, inconsequential hills, corresponded with the flux of Elizabeth’s complaints, the children’s sonorous then deafening inquiries.
Then they saw their first police car acting funny. Tracy shifted his legs and Margaret sat up straight. There had not been too many cruisers, and each had passed them without notice. This fellow was going along in tandem as he talked on his radio. The trooper adjusted his speed according to the Duster’s, which gave Margaret a queasy feeling like running beside a mirror in a fun house or sliding backward and forward on ice.
“Act regular,” Cam said.
“Don’t look,” Tracy said.
Margaret looked down at her lap.
“You’re looking down, don’t look down! Look natural.” Cam talked with his teeth clamped.
Just as suddenly, the cruiser moved away, accelerated, and disappeared into the dark ahead of them.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Margaret didn’t want any more of it. The next moment she was laughing in ragged bursts.
Cam looked up at the car ceiling and rotated his head on the back of his neck, rubbing out the tension. Margaret tried to check her amusement and she pulled at her hair, pinching a clump and tugging her fingers down the strands to the end. Her hair felt strange, perhaps it was the chlorine; the strands no longer seemed to possess the ordinary properties of human hair. She pulled the rearview mirror down to study her face. Her hair looked metallic, brittle, like lamé thread. It had a strange luster as if artificially lighted by an unnameable source. “Jesus! My hair is turning green,” she told Cam.
“It smells like Clorox,” Tracy said.
“Can you please? I’m sort of busy here,” Cam said, watching the highway. He told them not to get comfortable. The cruiser was probably up ahead checking the tag and they were going to be nabbed pronto.
“What should we do?” Margaret bit her lip to keep from laughing. She saw that Cam was serious. It was really between him and Darcy. It was something intimate; he was sparring with an absentee opponent.
Cam took the next exit off the turnpike. “Fucking mounties,” he said.
“Yes,” Tracy said, “they can be quite dogmatic. Inflexible. They wouldn’t understand the nuances of your situation. They’ve never seen it face to face, Darcy’s death rays. You’re being persecuted for every little wrong since you got hitched, right? This is the coal in your threadbare stocking. She’s dumping everything on you in one big, official zing.”
Cam looked at Margaret for assistance. “Tell him to put a gag on it, will you?” Cam said.
“You tell him.”
“Tell me,” Tracy said.
“I’m serious. Stop analyzing my private affairs.”
“Since when are they so private? Here we are, riding in this stolen vehicle with you. I’d say we were pretty tight.”
“I’d say you were a queer if I didn’t see you nailing my sister.”
“Did you learn the first thing about it?” Tracy said.
Margaret pulled her chin in as the two men bickered. They were talking about her. It was both vile and flattering. She hated it when her vanity took over. Then the car lurched, bounced hard, the shocks jangled. Margaret screamed. The asphalt ended and they careened off a ledge where the pavement stopped. The road stretched ahead just dust and gravel. A sign said PAVEMENT ENDS, but it wasn’t properly placed. It was after the fact.
“The sign’s been moved,” Tracy said.
Margaret said, “That’s sick.” Cam turned a circle and steered around a gully to get back on the road.
Tracy said, “The perpetrator might be in the woods watching us right now.” The landscape was dark, wooded. Anything was possible.
Margaret said, “If we’re going to make all these mistakes, I don’t want to keep going. You said we’d go straight through on the highway like normal people. I don’t want to go winding all over the place like this.”
“Look at that map,” Cam told her. “You said you would be navigator, so navigate.”
He flicked on the overhead light and she unfolded a map of the Eastern United States. She rubbed her finger over the paper. She liked the sensation; the paper was smooth, slightly furred.
“We’re here, we want to go there.” A bold circle signified Chicago, a cloud of green designated the general metropolitan area. If they were going to avoid I-76, they would have to take some secondary roads, two-lane roads.
“Head-ons,” Tracy said, “most of your head-on collisions happen on these country two-lanes. Then there’s always deer to consider.”
“Can’t we just drive on the highway?” Margaret said. “It’s not like we really stole this car. It’s not like the time when we pinched that Dodge Monaco. This is your fucking wife’s car!”
“Exactly,” Cam said. “She’s telling me loud and clear it’s hers.” He rubbed his shave. It was a full day’s worth of growth by now. Tracy touched his own face, started scratching it. Margaret couldn’t help smiling.
Cam kept adjusting his mirrors and gunning the engine desperado-style, and it reminded her of the episode with the stolen Dodge. When they were teenagers, they took a five-finger-discount on a shiny Monaco and drove it around for the afternoon before crashing it up.
It just happened to be Mother’s Day.
Margaret and Cam often went driving with Cam’s friend Wayne in his old Chrysler. Cam was impressed by Wayne’s girl, Colleen. Her hair flashed moment-to-moment like sheet lightning. Margaret’s hair was regular blond, but Colleen’s was electric, white and glossy as a doll’s hair. She was studious in her bleaching habits. She used a brand called Midnight Sun, like a Nordic halo, a brittle spill that shivered each time she moved her head. She separated a few strands and tugged an icy point to suck between her teeth.
They were riding in and out of the developments, screeching around the tiny cul-de-sacs. Sometimes they got out of the car to measure the length of “patch” they put down on the asphalt and to touch their fingertips against the hot smear. The radio and the hot wind off the asphalt had drugged Margaret into submission. She didn’t note the exact moment when it was no longer talk and they put it into motion. Wayne was driving slowly up the street and Cam was leaning far out of the car window the way dogs ride. They were searching for a vehicle with keys left in the ignition.
The streets were deserted; they could smell the charcoal going in the backyards of the split-level houses. Acres of houses with no variance but for the decals on the mailboxes and the tiny footprints and signatures that ruined the new sidewalks. Their plan seemed highly feasible, even sensible in its way. A simple task necessitated by a complex mood resulting from a series of emotional outbursts in public places with their parents, until they reached their target consciousness.
Wayne inched up to a car, a ruby-red Monaco with a vinyl roof. Keys dangled from the steering column, caught the light, glittered. Margaret had a strange tickle in her throat, like the sharp threads of an artichoke.
Cam got out of the Chrysler and touched his toes. He stretched his arms over his head like it was seventh inning, then he got behind the wheel of the Monaco. The early cicadas were piercing the quiet in short ugly spasms that killed the whine of the flywheel as Cam started the engine. Cam rolled it away from the curb and the Chrysler followed. They left Wayne’s car in Westside Terrace and tumbled into the red car. Margaret sat up in front with Cam. Wayne nestled in back with Colleen; he was already pulling her neckline down over her shoulders. Cam floored the gas pedal so that the car shivered in place for a few seconds before flying forward. He circled the block to examine the patch, a couple thick black smears, variegated like snakeskin against the new white concrete.
Cam drove them everywhere around the city. The Monaco was a rental car, the key chain said WE TRY HARDER. There wasn’t anything personal in it. It was fresh, vacuumed, the vinyl seats smelled strong. It accelerated harsh but fast, it flew.
“We try harder,” Cam said, accelerating to beat a light. When Cam passed a cherry top or if he recognized an unmarked cruiser, he slowed the car. He sank in his seat and bounced up and down, twisting the wheel back and forth like a hick farmer driving an old tractor. He was baiting the police, but they didn’t seem to notice. His steering was becoming more and more exaggerated and frantic. Margaret began to feel weightless, anchored by a fragile string like one of those Chinese paper flowers unfurling in a glass of water. Her friends were grinding their hips together in the backseat, but Cam didn’t seem disgusted. Colleen was immersed in it, her hair looked bad, it looked spent, colorless as fishing line. She held on to the boy, pulling his collar, pressing his face with little sucking kisses. Margaret thought, It’s got nothing to do with me and Cam. Then the cruiser was abreast of them. The officer lifted the brim of his hat and tugged it down again. It was a tolerant warning, and he allowed them a moment to consider it before he turned on the siren and the light started circling.
Cam said, “I see him. I see him.” Cam accelerated in a straight line up the highway. He was cutting a path right through the moving traffic, making his own getaway lane right up the middle. Cam nosed between cars and the traffic veered to the left and right to avoid them. It was a reverse wake, a terrible seam ripping upward. Margaret could hear the sirens, several of them, but they seemed distant. Suddenly the windshield went dark, like an air raid curtain, but it was just an underpass and the light came back. Margaret tried to speak. Words clattered through her like small geometric pieces, sharp, lodging in her throat and lungs.
“One hundred, one hundred five.” Cam was reading the speedometer. Margaret couldn’t believe he wasn’t watching the road. His fear looked like a form of pleasure, a chilly, high-altitude intoxication. He kept reading the speedometer as it inched up. He looked as if he had suddenly found his purpose and accepted what it meant, its toil and labor, its rewards.
Colleen was leaning over the front seat, screaming for Cam to slow down. The intersection flashed, appeared and dissolved in an instant. They were hit once in the right front and immediately they were hit in back on the opposite side. The car whipped in a full circle, skated left, was clipped a third time, and its front axle flew off. The hood of the car curled through the windshield, glass sloshed in like a wave of rhinestone buttons. Then nothing. Stillness. Colleen fell between them. She was asleep with her eyes open. The girl whispered, but she wasn’t using words; a sudsy vermilion spray surfaced on her lips. She had bitten through her tongue.
They were taken to Wilmington General; everyone needed some stitches. Colleen was in surgery, but the others were placed in jail to wait for the appropriate signatures. That summer, they had one day in family court. It was decided that Margaret would meet with a probation officer in the basement of the Wilmington courthouse for a full year, twice a week after school. Cam went straight to boot camp at the crest of a record heat wave.