ANTELOPE VALLEY
He’d been to her house. He didn’t think she knew. But she recognized the scuff on the suitcase he’d carried out to the car that morning. The scuff had happened last summer, when her stepdad Tom had dropped it down a flight of stairs in Big Bear when they’d gone up there to look at the snow. It was her stepdad’s suitcase. That meant that her dad had been to her house, and either her mom knew she was with her dad, or . . . or something else, something her brain kept from her for now. Something big as Venus and heading her way.
They’d driven out of the Empire, gone up a hill so steep Polly’s ears popped, and then went down the other side, where there wasn’t much but alfalfa farms and fields. The land to the left of the road was covered in a thick carpet of yellow poppies. Poppies were dreaming flowers, like the kind that put Dorothy to sleep in that weird part of Wizard of Oz. Polly knew better than to wish this was a dream.
“We’re gonna see a woman named Carla. Big Carla? You remember her?”
She shook her head like no.
“She’s an old friend of me and your mom’s. Back when we had friends in common. She works at a gas station up here. Big Carla’s gonna get you up to Stockton so I can take care of some business. My cousin Zach, he’s gonna take you in. You stay there and you’ll be safe. Safe as anywhere, anyway.”
“I want to go back to Mom.”
Her dad kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. She looked at a vein on the side of his forehead. Polly didn’t know if it had always been there but she didn’t think so.
“We get you up to Stockton, with our cousins,” he said. “That’s the thing.”
She wondered what would happen if she jumped from the car. Would she skip down the side of the road like a flat stone on a lake or skid to a stop right where she landed? She looked down at a red row of nail marks on her arms. She’d tilled her arm without even noticing it. It was like the stuff that swirled inside her that she kept under so well was starting to scratch the surface. Polly knew that couldn’t happen. She couldn’t let it out, ever, or something bad would happen. That’s why she had to keep the storm inside her. She had to keep it in. She ground her teeth together. The bear kissed his paw and pressed it to the scratches. She hugged him so tight.
The gas station sat across the road from an alfalfa farm. The store had a sign above it, sunshine market, with a sunglass-wearing sun waving above the name. He pulled them into the gravel lot. He steered the car into the patch of shade laid down by a wooden tank of water held up by wooden slats.
White gravel threw up light and heat, poking Polly’s eyes on the walk to the front of the store. She stumbled against her dad, snapping back away before he could reach out to help her.
It was two seasons colder inside the store. A man with a creased cowboy hat and a cannonball gut scratched lotto tickets at the counter with a thick brown thumbnail. Two rows of junk food divided the store. In the back where the cold drinks were a young man in a trucker cap loitered looking at canned beer. He snuck a peek at Polly that made gooseflesh pop on her arms, or maybe it was just the cold air. She peeked at the man again but he’d gone back to looking at the beer.
The woman behind the counter might have been her dad’s age or ten years older. Her dad had called her Big Carla. It fit. She was big all over, from her boobs spilling out of her motorcycle T-shirt and her round arms to her round brown eyes and teased-up hair.
“Good to see you, honey,” she said to her dad. She reached over the counter for an awkward hug. Polly watched her dad take it stiffly. He didn’t like being touched any more than Polly did, she could tell.
Big Carla’s voice went up an octave as she turned back to Polly. “Hey there,” she said. “My name’s Carla. I haven’t seen you since you were a baby. Look at how you grew.”
Polly never knew what to say to stuff like that. Her eyes switched focus to the wall behind Carla. It was covered with checks, canceled stamped in red ink. deadbeats scrawled on a note card above them. She knew what a deadbeat was, but seeing it there scrawled in red ink it looked to Polly like a word for a horrible thing, a nightmare thing. All at once Polly was very sure that there was something terrible here. Terrible and unstoppable.
“You’re gonna spend the day with me,” Carla said. Her smile spread across her face like a billboard. “And after I’m done with work we’re gonna take a car trip. Does that sound like fun?”
Polly wanted to say no. But of course she didn’t.
“Oh, you’re shy, huh, hon?”
That was another one adults asked that Polly never knew what to say to.
“Go get a soda or something,” her dad said to her. “Let me talk to Carla here.”
Polly walked down the chip aisle toward the coolers in the back. She ran her fingers across the plastic bags of corn chips and pork rinds just to hear the rustle of them. The grown-ups pitched their voices low and urgent. Like what Mom and Tom would do when they didn’t want Polly to know they were arguing. She stopped halfway down the aisle, tried to listen to them talk over the haw of the air conditioner.
“This ought to cover her for a while,” her dad said. “I’ll come for her when she’s safe.”
“This dirty?”
“What money ain’t? Shit, take it. I can get more.”
“Where’s Avis, Nate?”
Polly could smell something coppery. Maybe the hot dogs spinning on their rack, but she didn’t think that’s what it was.
“Never you mind.”
“Nate—”
“You don’t want to be any deeper in this thing than you are right now,” he said. “Don’t ask me questions you don’t want the answer to.”
“All right,” Carla said.
“I got things to do and I can’t have a girl with me when I do them,” he said. “Now you said you’d take her to Stockton—”
“I’ll take her,” Carla said. “Damn you, Nate, I’ll take her. But just settle down a minute. Let me get you some food or something.”
Polly tried to get her machine-gun pulse under control. Tried to remember how to breathe. The something inside her that she was trying not to feel, it was growing, growing bigger even than her, and she looked over to the hot dogs with their skin split from overcooking and she felt like she was going to split open like that.
Don’t ask me questions you don’t want the answer to.
The man in the trucker hat reached out to close the cooler door. The sleeve of his T-shirt rode up. It showed off a tattoo on his shoulder, a blue zigzag like cartoon lightning.
Blue lightning.
The man walked past her and out the door, no beer or anything in his hands. He got into his car and started it, but didn’t leave. He got on his phone instead.
She went to her dad and reached out to touch him. Her hand stopped just short of his arm but he saw her anyway.
“Girl, thought I told you to leave us be.”
She touched her bicep and said, “Blue lightning. On his arm. You said—”
It happened so fast. Polly followed her dad’s eyes to Carla. Carla’s smile slid off her face. Carla bolted. Her dad grabbed Carla by the hair. The cowboy with the scratcher tickets said, “What the fuck?” He ran out the door. His scratchers floated to the floor behind him. Time must have been doing weird stuff, because Polly could follow every flutter and flip of the tickets as they headed for the floor. Her dad said, “Goddamn it.” He pulled the pistol out of his pocket. He said, “Who’d you tell?” He put the gun to Carla’s head.
“Oh god, don’t kill me,” Carla said.
Polly’s body ran without her telling it. The slap of her feet on the floor rocketed up her legs as she moved as fast as she could for the outside.
“Polly—” he yelled after her.
She hit the door bear first. Sun blindness squeezed her eyes closed. The man with the tattoo came out of nowhere.
“Hey there, sugar.”
Polly saw a glitter in his hand. Her brain screamed knife. Her muscles locked up on each other. The wind hissed in her ears. The light from the blade flashed. It danced, like how a cobra danced.
A strong arm scooped her up from behind. Her father’s smell filled her nose. He held her in one arm. He pointed his pistol at the man with the other.
Polly felt wet warmth in her pants. Behind the man with the knife, cars rolled past same as always. On the other side of the road poppies swayed in the breeze like the world hadn’t just shattered into a million pieces. Like somehow the world still made any kind of sense at all.
“Drop it,” her dad said.
The man raised his hands, dropped the knife onto the gravel.
“Kick it,” her dad said, and the man kicked the knife out of reach.
“Got a message for the Steel,” her dad said. “You tell them to stop coming.”
“Heard we got your woman already,” the man said.
Polly felt her dad’s legs give way a bit, felt him tighten the squeeze on her.
“That’s one for one,” her dad said. “You tell them we’re even. Tell them to let it be.”
“You think you can turn this around?” the man asked. “Hell, you’re already dead. You’re a goddamn zombie walking.”
The man pointed at Polly.
“You and her both.”
For a second they all just hung in space as the rumble of faraway thunder on a clear day filled the air. Her dad cocked his head toward the sound.
“You call in cavalry?” he asked.
The guy smiled like damn right.
“We won’t be here when they get here,” her dad said. “You tell ’em they’ll lose more than they’ll win.”
“You’re the one with the gun, hoss,” the man said. “But you got the whole world after you. Can’t kill the world.”
Her dad never turned his back on the man as he walked them back to the car. Polly kept her eyes on the smiling man until her dad shoved her into the car and she had to scramble to the passenger seat before he crushed her.
They drove out heading back the way they came. The roar of clear-sky thunder grew louder. Four men on motorcycles came the other way, their skin dirty with ink and scars, black leather on their backs. Polly turned as they passed, saw their back patches, a bearded one-eyed man, the words odin’s bastards.
Polly came back to herself enough to notice the damp patch at her crotch. She should have felt shame, she knew that, but that other thing, the thing she’d been stuffing down, was the only thing left in her anymore.
Her brain looped the man’s voice. Heard we got your woman already. The voice mixed with everything else in her head. Her brain put it all together. It did not let her hide from what she already knew.
“Did you kill my mom?” somebody inside her asked out loud.
“No,” her dad said.
“She’s dead, though,” somebody inside her said.
The look he gave her was the only answer she needed, but he said it anyway.
“Yeah. Polly, I’m sorry—”
The thing inside her came out in a war cry. She grabbed the door handle. She popped it open. She looked out at the speed-blurred gravel. She jumped.