Читать книгу All the Beautiful Sinners - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 9

The Indian. He’d got the Impala the old way—just led it away from its dirt lot in Kearney, Nebraska. It was where the mechanic put vehicles that still had outstanding bills. Nobody would miss it from there for weeks, and when they did, the mechanic would say the owner had an extra key, drove it away one night, stole it, and the owner would say that the mechanic chopped it after hours, sold it onto Rosebud or Pine Ridge. Nobody would look for the actual car, though, except the insurance company that finally got stuck with it, and that would be after all the claims got filed, the police reports filled out, and still, it would just be a thing of principle. Because nobody really wanted it. Except him.

He took it because it was Chevrolet, and he knew GM ignition systems. He led the Impala out to an oily streetlight. It took him eight minutes to get it started. That was too long, he knew—unacceptable—but he kept blacking out, and his hands were shaking, or his eyes, or the world itself.

He sat in the driver’s seat and idled down a half block, lights off, the sole of his sneaker skimming the surface of the road. His other car was there. It was a Thunderbird, from when they’d been long and heavy. It hadn’t been his first choice. But the trunk. He could have kept eight children in there, then curled up beside them, pulled the lid down.

He backed the Impala up to the Thunderbird—already facing the other way—and once he’d worked both trunk lids open, they were a roof for him. He held the two bodies close when he moved them, and for too long, touching their dry cheeks with the inner skin of his lips, whispering where they could hear.

The Thunderbird he left idling, to make sure somebody would take it, even if just for a little while.

At the first gas station, the first strong lights, he checked under the Impala’s hood. The mechanic had put a new fan clutch on it. He should have put a water pump too, while he’d been in there. But it was free. He cleaned the windows, wiped down the handle of the squeegee, then turned the speakers on the back dash upside down, to fill the trunk with music. For the children.

The car was blue, the vinyl top in ribbons.

He loved it.

He thumbed the tape in from the bag he had. They were all the same album, all taken from the same rack set near the front door of one of the drugstores he’d hit. They’d had the rollgate down over the pharmacy window, though, meaning no phenobarb, no Dilantin, so he’d had to make do with over-the-counter sleep aids. They were almost enough to keep the seizures down, inside him, so that he was only convulsing under the skin.

He drove, and tried not to think.

Nebraska at night was too black, though. Twice he slept; once he skated the chrome bumper of the Impala along a concrete holding wall. He didn’t hear it until miles later, when Lincoln was finally spitting him out into a tangle of single-lane construction. It became 77 after a while. And a state police was behind him now, just pacing. Like the trooper knew, was calling the Impala in right now, rousing he mechanic from bed.

Around Beatrice, he slipped into residential and back out again in a part of town he’d never seen. Like he’d stepped through into a story. A story with no troopers. It was the best kind. He lifted a set of Nebraska plates from the bathroom wall of a breakfast place, where they were decoration, then watched the blue lid of his trunk as he screwed the two bolts into the rear bumper. There were flies at the keyhole. He drove slow through the rest of town, letting them keep up, the flies, but then they pushed him where he didn’t want to go, where he was always going: the firehouse.

He shook his head no, no, wanted to swallow his tongue on purpose, to hold the lighter to his chest, to do anything but be here. It was like a church he had to go to though, park at, stare into. The firehouse.

He held the wheel with both hands and stared hard at the windshield, just the windshield, and then there was a hand on his shoulder. It was later already. There was saliva dry on his chin now, the kind that had been foamy, spit up from deep inside. Medicinal. His first thought was of the flies, then the children. Then the hand.

It was a fireman.

They were all out washing their big red truck.

“You okay, buddy?” he asked.

Buddy.

He stared.

“I’m not Buddy,” he said.

The fireman stared back at him. He was wearing rubber pants with the reflective stripe down the side, the big boots, the helmet, against the distant fire of the sun. Just a white T-shirt, though, the kind you buy folded in a plastic bag. And not any gloves.

It was the no-gloves that did it. The hands, the hand, held out to him.

He worked his fingers into his pocket for whatever bottle was there, swallowed a handful of pills dry. His throat bled from it, and he swallowed that too.

“I’m okay,” he told the fireman, making his fingers into a careful okay, then pulled away, the fireman standing there behind him, watching him.

At Silver Lake, just outside Topeka—how had he got so off course?—there was another cop, a city one. He flashed his lights once in the Impala’s rearview then turned around. Like it was a game. Like they were all playing with him. He could feel the miles accumulating inside him, a hard black knot.

He took to the small roads to hide it, to keep it down, skirted Topeka and headed back southwest on 335 until it became just normal 35, and then he closed his eyes and stayed exactly on 35 until Texas. The Impala heaved from ditch to ditch, drunk with sleep. He turned the stereo up.

At the big truck stop in Weatherford, he ran pink soap between his fingers, massaged it in. He was humming the song from the tape, content just to wash his cuticles, the hollow space on the backside of his wrist. But then a truck driver approached him in the mirror, his boots heavy like a fireman’s, and time dilated around them, the instant blooming open, and he ran out past all the slowed-down people, down the snack aisle, shielding himself from the candy, then past the register girl with the sharp teeth, and finally to the car, but just the passenger side. Because the glove box was open now. Had opened itself. Maybe that’s where the flies had all gone, or been hiding.

He walked past the car like it wasn’t his, like he could trick it, then crept up again, on the driver’s side. The same. He settled into the seat. In the cardboard back of the glove compartment were two things: a black comb, with the teeth getting thinner and thinner towards the end, like piano keys sound, and a set of keys tagged WHITE. They fit the door and the ignition and the trunk. He wired the ignition back in for them—because it looked good to have keys, especially with out-of-state plates—and screwed the backrest of the backseat in all the way too, because he could just use the key on the trunk lid now, not have to go in the back way anymore.

It took forty-two minutes to get it all done, and then the on-ramp for 20 was right in front of him. He took it, flew across the flat land, to 87 heading north.

South of Plainview, though, he saw the sign—Nazareth—and then the fireman rising up from the yellow stripes in his rearview. He was chasing him, his footfalls heavy enough to send great clumps of asphalt up into the night, where they became birds.

“I’m White,” he said into the mirror. “You don’t know me.”

Maybe it would work.

He had found him before, though.

But Castro County. It was historical, where it had all started.

He walked through its stores, looking for something. He wasn’t sure what. Just looking. It was almost familiar. He smiled at the girl with the normal teeth as he lifted the chocolate bar. Not that he would eat it, of course. Do that to his teeth, his gums. He just wanted her to see him take it, was all. Because then she wouldn’t see the bottle of Nyquil tucked into his rear pocket, upside down.

She smiled back.

“You kin to that deputy?” she asked.

He narrowed his eyes at her, started to tell her she didn’t know him, that he was White, but then walked out the front door instead. The children were waiting for him in the car. Just staring.

“Soon,” he told them, and closed it again, and then on the way out of town he passed a border patrol going the other way, and watched in his rearview for the sick-green car to turn around, follow him. Call the helicopters in and describe him on their radio. He slowed down for it to catch him. Out at the church, one of them finally did. It was a sheriff car. He smiled. This had been coming for four states now—all the cops gathering in his rearview, finally balling themselves up into one fat one, with heavy hands.

On his shirt, the brass plaque on his shirt pocket: Gentry.

“Got some ID?” he said, because he somehow couldn’t hear the children through the metal, chanting A-mos, A-mos, A-mos.

It was his first time to kill in two years.

He pulled the trigger again after the cop was dead, just to dance him around, and the shadow he threw dying like that had coattails, a helmet, and this was so right.

Pulling away, he leaned down to his side mirror, to see his teeth.

They were all there. He was Amos again, Amos Pease.

He smiled, turned the radio up with both hands, the right dragging the left across the dials, the handcuff chain glinting between. By Oklahoma his front passenger side tire was throwing sparks. He could see it reflected in the shiny sides of cars he passed at night. He liked it.