1
“What the hell were you thinking?” Bronwyn shouted from the backseat. She lit up a cigarette.
Josh glanced from her to Griff, who sat behind the steering wheel. It was almost as if cartoon steam came out of his ears. Griff wouldn’t turn around and face the backseat.
Tammy, however, would. “You bitch, just shut your hole. All of us were sleeping. We’re all too damn tired. And somebody stinks. Who stinks?”
Josh glanced at Ziggy, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me, dude.”
Griff pressed his face down, almost to the steering wheel.
“What happened?”
“Mister I-Can-Drive-Now fell asleep at the wheel,” Bronwyn said. She lit a cigarette and sucked back the first smoke and then spat a ghost trail of it out into the already smoky car.
Josh—still half asleep, his back soaked with sweat, feeling cranky and sore from the position he’d formed on the hump of the backseat between Bronwyn and Ziggy—realized something. “Jesus. We’re sideways.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“Didn’t anybody notice?”
“I was snoozing,” Ziggy said.
“I think we all were,” Tammy said in that little-girl voice of hers that didn’t quite go with the big boobs.
“Exactly,” Bronwyn said. “Griff included.”
“Shut your hole!” Tammy shouted. She got on her knees and swiveled around in her seat. Her face looked less like blond hose queen and more like pit bull with wig as she began listing all the ways Bronwyn sucked. “You’re like the bitch queen of the universe with your ‘I’m so sophisticated and together and I know everything and I look down on everybody’. And second, you are after Griff. Just say it. Just because he didn’t care for you anymore, just because he dumped you—”
“Correction,” Bronwyn said. “I dumped him.”
“Look, Miss Perfect Bitch, he dumped you, because you were too clingy and annoying and too much into proving everybody around you wrong. Why is that? Why is everybody else always wrong? And don’t sit there with that smug Jewish look.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know what I mean, that ‘Jewish Princess from Intellectual Hell’ look.”
“That ‘smug, Jewish look,’ ” Bronwyn repeated slowly. “As opposed to your dumbass shiksa feeb whiney anti-Semitic pigface?”
“You’re jealous. You’re jealous because I have him. Because he wants me. Just admit it. Just admit it and get over it.”
“First, admit that you’re a raging anti-Semite whose tits are bigger than her I.Q.”
“Suck my dick,” Tammy said, and then pushed at the car door, opened it, and gingerly got out of the car along the edge of the ditch. More obscenities flowed from her lips as she stomped off a ways down the road.
Bronwyn, to her credit, took it all, enveloping her face in a cloud of smoke; a mask through which she could make sour faces back at Tammy without being noticed.
“I didn’t know Tammy was anti-Semitic,” Josh said to no one.
“Also anti-semantic,” Bronwyn said. “She probably doesn’t even know what it means.”
Josh grinned, shaking his head, surveying the damage. “We gotta get the car back on the road.”
Bronwyn, ignoring him, looked out across the sky. “I hate you all. I hate this place. I wish we could just turn around and go home.”
2
“Where the hell are we?” Josh asked. He stood outside the Lincoln, and glanced from the torn and twisted map of the U.S. to the lunar landscape surrounding them.
“Don’t get mad at me!” Griff said. “It’s not my fault! I took one turn.”
“You took a turn?”
“I got tired of the highway.”
“You what?” Josh asked.
“I thought Route 66 was here somewhere. I thought that’s what the sign said.”
“Did you go south or north?”
Griff shrugged, a hapless look on his face. “Maybe north.”
“How long do you think you were driving like that?”
Griff closed his eyes, as if doing so could make him remember. Then he opened one eye. “Not sure. Maybe an hour? Maybe . . . maybe a half-hour?”
“All we have to do is turn around,” Bronwyn said calmly. “If we’re north. We just go that way.” She pointed to what she assumed was south, then, glancing at the sun, adjusted slightly.
Josh thrust his hand out. “Give me those.”
“Give you what? My smokes?”
Josh grabbed the pack of Merits from her hand. He shook it violently until a cigarette popped out. He thrust it between his lips, and wrested the Bic lighter free from her grip. He spun the wheel until the small flame came up. He lit the cigarette.
Bronwyn glared at him, and then her face seemed to calm. “They’re good for this kind of occasion,” she said. “Even if they kill you.”
“Everybody dies from something.” He took a long draw of smoke into his lungs, coughing most of it back up. “All right. We need to figure out how to get the car back on the road. There are five of us. There’s no reason in hell why we can’t all get down on the other side of that ditch and push. We can bounce it back up.”
“I’d say it would be a smarter use of daylight to go back to the highway. It can’t be that many miles back, over that ridge.” Bronwyn pointed with her cigarette. “Three of us stay here, two walk it. I don’t mind a walk. I can walk ten miles, easy. It’s not that hot. We go back and we flag someone for help. There’s gas stations and rest stops all over the place on the 10.”
“I’m boiling,” Tammy said.
“I’m not walking twelve miles,” Josh said. “Damn it.”
“Me, neither,” Griff said.
“I can do it. Ziggy?”
Ziggy shook his head. “I got bunions.” Then, he added, “I inherited them from my grampa. Third-generation bunions.”
Bronwyn looked at the others. “I’m not going alone.” Her eyes narrowed to slits as she stared at Griff.
“If we all work together,” Josh said. “We can get the car out of the ditch.”
Bronwyn looked at him with squinty eyes, her head cocked slightly to the side.
Quietly, she said, “So you really think we can get it back on the road?”
He glanced at the others, then back at Bronwyn. “Yes.”
“It looks like we’d need a tow truck. Or some other kind of way to lift it.”
Josh glanced back at the Lincoln, then at Bronwyn. He felt his heart racing, and he wasn’t sure why since he wasn’t panicked or all that worried. He felt something he hadn’t generally felt in life. Something that no one had ever demanded of him. He felt as if he knew how to handle this.
“We can see-saw it up,” he said.
“You study engineering?”
“I didn’t have to,” he said, grinning. “When I was four, I spent a lot of time on see-saws. I got the gist. Look, it’ll take hours to walk back to the highway. If we all just pitch in, we can get out of this ditch and be on the road in less than an hour. I’m sure of it. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll walk with you. No, I’ll do better than that. You can wait here and I will walk to the highway and get help.”
Her face brightened, and she nodded, slowly. “Okay. But will you do me one favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t pretend.” She reached over and plucked the lit cigarette from his mouth and dropped it to the gravel. “You can’t fake being a smoker. You can’t fake anything.”
3
Josh had been wrong.
It took the better part of two hours to get the car out of the ditch. Tammy whined, Ziggy was no real help at all, but Griff and Bronwyn both put some muscle into pushing, and when they finally got back on the road—with the sun going down a bit to the far western hills—the car made some funny rattling noises that Josh guessed originated somewhere in the rear axle.
Josh turned the Lincoln around and headed back toward what they hoped was the highway.
Instead, he found a confluence of ribbon roads, a narrow crossroads with what looked like pyramid-shaped hills in the distance and that strange cast of sulfurous light and purple shadow in the sagebrush, which meant night would seep across the desert roads within a few hours.
Without asking the others for their suggestions on which way to go, he took the road that seemed to be headed west, and soon it went from a narrow two lanes, to a wide two lanes, and he felt pretty good about his choice of roads until he heard the back left tire blow out.
But he didn’t even know about Dave Olshaker.