FONTANA
Finding his ex-wife Avis this way, knife-dead in the dark on the bedroom floor next to her new man, didn’t tell Nate everything he needed to know. It was the scrim of cigarette ash on top of the beer can on the living room table that gave Nate the answer he’d been looking for. The answer to the question that echoed in his head over and over, a question that came from the ghost of his brother Nick.
Are they hunting her?
He hadn’t known when he’d left Polly at the motel and gone and broke into his Avis’s house that the ashy beer can was what he’d come to see. He thought he’d come to see Avis’s dead body, and he had, but that had only given him part of the answer he needed. It told him he was damned, that staying alive this long he’d doomed Avis and her new man. But it didn’t tell him what to do next.
Nate had never known his father—he’d fallen to death in a construction site accident when Nate was four—so his brother Nick had been the one to teach him. Not school stuff, which of course was bullshit, but instead stuff about the world, and being a man in that world. Nick taught Nate how to talk and how to fight, when lies were okay and when lies were not. He’d taught him the strongest thing you could do was take more than your share of pain. He’d dragged him to a gym when he was eleven and taught him how to take a punch, how to swallow the sting of it. He’d taken him when he was sixteen to a liquor store and given him a pistol and a mask and taught him how to rob, and how it felt good to do it, and that a job was a dishonorable thing, and that the better thing was to take what you needed when you needed it. He’d steered Nate so much that by the time Nate went to jail and was separated from his brother, he had Nick in his head to tell him what to do, and even later when Nick died, his voice in Nate’s head was strong as ever, strong enough that Nate didn’t know who he’d be without it there.
Are they hunting her?
Avis’s husband had had his skull crushed, facedown on the bed in his underwear, like they’d caught him sleeping. The bedroom where Nate found them had taped-shut windows and a white noise machine, signs of a day sleeper. Nate remembered he worked third shift at the battery factory.
They must have done him first. Avis had died fighting here on the floor, kitchen knife in hand. The way her body had been twisted, the way her face looked away from him so he could see the star tattoo on her neck, those were things Nate knew would never leave him now.
They’d been drunk, summer daytime drunk, the best kind of drunk there was, the day she got that star tattoo. They were in an electric, bruising kind of young love, the best kind of love there was. She was a waitress in a chain restaurant. He sold weed and sometimes stuck up places with his brother Nick. She said she liked that he was an outlaw, but sometimes her eyes said something different.
They’d taken his old Dodge convertible to the quick shop—Nate and Nick had robbed this very one a month earlier, and knowing that added to the thrill for the both of them—for big plastic cups of ice and Coke and a pint bottle of whiskey. They drank half the Coke too fast, getting ice cream headaches, before topping the rest off with whiskey. On the way to the tattoo parlor he’d asked her why she wanted a star, and why on her neck? She’d smiled and said it was special to her, and she’d tell him someday, and he hadn’t pushed her about it because they had time to spare because they weren’t ever going to die.
He held her hand while the tattoo guy needled the star just below where the spine plugged into the skull. He let her lie about it not hurting. Afterward, sweaty from the sun as they drove with the top down back toward Fontana, she fingered the fresh clean gauze on her neck and smiled her rocket smile and said they needed to pull over. He drove them up into the hills. They went at each other before the car came to a full stop. As Nate rocked into her, he lifted his head up in the air like triumph. He looked up and saw a condor circling overhead, watching to see if they were dead. He remembered how he’d felt her skin rubbing slick against his own and saw the animal in her eyes and thought they’d never die. Not today, not ever.
Not today, not ever, he thought, standing over her corpse. His fingers grasped useless air. He wanted to choke the world if he only could find its fucking neck.
The anger in him, though. It’s what did this in the first place. His anger at anyone who ever tried to force his hand or tell him what to do.
I should have let Chuck gut me. I could have died for my own sins back in Susanville.
I ought to go upstairs and find her new man’s guns and find out what a gun barrel tastes like.
But he couldn’t. Nate had fucked up everything in his life, starting the day he let his brother Nick take him on a stickup job, and following with almost every choice he’d made since then. He’d fucked himself from jump street. He knew that and he owned it, and he knew with Avis and her man dead because of what he’d done, he was unredeemable, and the king-hell irony of it was his death was a fair price to pay, and he’d pay it if he could, but he couldn’t just yet. Not until he knew the answer.
Are they hunting her?
And the other, darker questions.
Do you have to stay alive? Or do you have to die?
One question followed the other. The greenlight that Crazy Craig had issued naming Nate a dead man had named Avis and Polly too. He’d read it in Susanville on the eve of his release, his eyes going back to the same lines, the lines that said
he has a woman
he has a daughter
But would they really kill a girl? Even if Avis was dead, and Nate too, would these berserkers actually come gunning for a child? That’s what Nate had to know before he knew what to do next.
He knew the ashy beer can was the sign when he saw it. He knew it because he knew Avis. He knew her old man had been the kind of smoker they don’t even make anymore, the kind with yellow fingers and an ashtray in the shower. And Nate knew how Avis figured that’s where her asthma came from, and that she hated cigarettes and smoke. She’d never tolerate a smoker in the house. So when Nate found the beer can on the coffee table next to the easy chair, that’s when he knew. Whoever’d ashed in the beer can had done it after Avis was dead. And Nate knew Aryan Steel cowboys were cold-blooded, but not even one of them would have stuck around for a smoke after a double murder. Not unless they had a reason. Not unless they were waiting for something. Or someone.
he has a daughter
The beer can meant Aryan Steel were going to be true to their word. They were hunting for Polly. That was Nate’s fault, and if he could pay for it with his life he would have. But that wasn’t on the table. First he had to get Polly up to Stockton with his cousins. Then he’d turn his anger out on the world, onto Aryan Steel, and get them to lift the greenlight on her. He stood there in the dark, feeling something that was sort of like relief. The days ahead were bad, but at least now he knew what the answers were.
Are they hunting her?
Yes.
Do you have to stay alive?
Until I save this girl I’ve damned.
He left Avis and her new man where they lay. He owed her better than that, but he didn’t have a choice. He went upstairs to pack a bag for Polly and see if Avis’s new man had any guns.