You go, “Books?”
“Books.” She snorts, half out of amusement, half to shoot a line off your fist and up her left nostril. “Screenplays!” She shouts it at the dome light for some reason. “You know — movies.”
“Tell him the one about the psycho saint guy,” your father says. “That would put my ass in the seat.” Your father winks at you in the rearview, like he’s driving the two of you to the prom. “Go ahead. Tell him.”
“Okay, okay.” She turns on the seat to face you, and your knees touch, and you think of Gwen, a look she gave you once, nothing special, just looking back at you as she stood at the front door, asking if you’d seen her keys. A forgettable moment if ever there was one but you spent four years in prison remembering it.
“…so at his canonization,” Mandy is saying, “something, like, happens? And his spirit comes back and goes into the body of this priest. But, like, the priest? He has a brain tumor. He doesn’t know it or nothing, but he does, and it’s fucking up his, um—”
“Brain?” you try.
“Thoughts,” Mandy says. “So he gets this saint in him and that does it, because like even though the guy was a saint, his spirit has become evil because his soul is gone. So this priest? He spends the rest of the movie trying to kill the pope.”
“Why?”
“Just listen,” your father says. “It gets good.”
You look out the window. A car sits empty along the shoulder. It’s beige and someone has painted gold wings on the sides, fanning out from the front bumper and across the doors, and a sign is affixed to the roof with some words on it, but you’ve passed it by the time you think to wonder what it says.
“See, there’s this secret group that works for the Vatican? They’re like a, like a…”
“A hit squad,” your father says.
“Exactly,” Mandy says and presses her finger to your nose. “And the lead guy, the, like, head agent? He’s the hero. He lost his wife and daughter in a terrorist attack on the Vatican a few years back, so he’s a little fucked up, but—”
You say, “Terrorists attacked the Vatican?”
“Huh?”
You look at her, waiting. She has a small face, eyes too close to her nose.
“In the movie,” Mandy says. “Not in real life.”
“Oh. I just, you know, four years inside, you assume you miss a couple of headlines, but…”
“Right.” Her face dark and squally now. “Can I finish?”
“I’m just saying,” you say and snort another line off your fist, “even the guys on death row would have heard about that one.”
“Just go with it,” your father says. “It’s not like real life.”
You look out the window, see a guy in a chicken suit carrying a can of gas in the breakdown lane, think how real life isn’t like real life. Probably more like this poor dumb bastard running out of gas in a car with wings painted on it. Wondering how the hell he ever got here. Wondering who he’d pissed off in that previous real life.
Your father has rented two rooms at an Econo Lodge so you and Mandy can have some privacy, but you send Mandy home after she twice interrupts the blow job she’s giving you to pontificate on the merits of Michael Bay films.
You sit in the blue-wash flicker of ESPN and eat peanuts from a plastic sleeve you got out of a vending machine and drink plastic cupfuls of Jim Beam from a bottle your father presented when you reached the parking lot. You think of the time you’ve lost and how nice it is to sit alone on a double bed and watch TV, and you think of Gwen, can taste her tongue for just a moment, and you think about the road that’s led you here to this motel room on this night after forty-seven months in prison and how a lot of people would say it was a twisted road, a weird one, filled with curves, but you just think of it as a road like any other. You drive down it on faith or because you have no other choice and you find out what it’s like by the driving of it, find out what the end looks like only by reaching it.
Late the next morning, your father wakes you, tells you he drove Mandy home and you’ve got things to do, people to see.
Here’s what you know about your father above all else — people have a way of vanishing in his company.
He’s a professional thief, consummate con man, expert in his field, and yet there’s something far beyond professionalism at his core, something unreasonably arbitrary. Something he keeps within himself like a story he heard once, laughed at maybe, yet swore never to repeat.
“She was with you last night?” you say.
“You didn’t want her. Somebody had to prop her ego back up. Poor girl like that.”
“But you drove her home,” you say.
“I’m speaking Czech?”
You hold his eyes for a bit. They’re big and bland, with the heartless innocence of a newborn’s. Nothing moves in them, nothing breathes, and after a while you say, “Let me take a shower.”
“Fuck the shower,” he says. “Throw on a baseball cap and let’s get.”
You take the shower anyway, just to feel it, another of those things you would have realized you’d miss if you’d given it any thought ahead of time, standing under the spray, no one near you, all the hot water you want for as long as you want it, shampoo that doesn’t smell like factory smoke.
Drying your hair and brushing your teeth, you can hear the old man flicking through channels, never pausing on one for more than thirty seconds: Home Shopping Network — zap. Springer — zap. Oprah — zap. Soap opera voices; soap opera music — zap. Monster truck show — pause. Commercial — zap, zap, zap.
You come back into the room, steam trailing you, and pick your jeans up off the bed, put them on.
The old man says, “Afraid you’d drowned. Worried I’d have to take a plunger to the drain, suck you back up.”
You say, “Where we going?”
“Take a drive,” your father says with a small shrug, flicks past a cartoon.
“Last time you said that, I got shot twice.”
Your father looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes big and soft like a six-year-old’s. “Wasn’t the car that shot you, was it?”
You go out to Gwen’s place, but she isn’t there anymore, a couple of black kids playing in the front yard, black mother coming out on the porch to look at the strange car idling in front of her house.
“You didn’t leave it here?” your father says.
“Not that I recall.”
“Think.”
“I’m thinking.”
“So you didn’t?”
“I told you — not that I recall.”
“So you’re sure.”
“Pretty much.”
“You had a bullet in your head.”
“Two.”
“I thought one glanced off.”
You say, “Two bullets hit your fucking head, old man, you don’t get hung up on the particulars.”
“That how it works?” Your father pulls away from the curb as the woman comes down the steps.
The first shot came through the back window, and Gentleman Pete flinched big-time, jammed the wheel to the right and drove the car straight into the highway exit barrier, air bags exploding, water barrels exploding, something in the back of your head exploding, glass pebbles filling your shirt, Gwen going, “What happened? Jesus. What happened?”
You pulled her with you out the back door — Gwen, your Gwen — and you crossed the exit ramp and ran into the woods and the second shot hit you there but you kept going, not sure how, not sure why, the blood pouring down your face, your head on fire, burning so bright and so hard that not even the rain could cool it off.