“Nobody can interrupt us out here,” she whispered, and snapped the turn signal lever up to indicate a lane change. “Nobody knows where we are.” The right tires were rumbling on the shoulder, and Plumtree’s leg flexed as she pressed the brake pedal. “There’s no phone here, so nobody can say we should have taken the time to call anyone.”
“You’re a big girl,” Cochran agreed dizzily. “You don’t have to call your mother and let her know where you are.”
“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded sad; then she had whipped her right hand up so hard that it struck the head liner and nearly broke his elbow. Her foot slammed onto the gas pedal, and the back tires screeched and burned rubber as she steered the bucking old Ford back out into the slow lane.
“Fog, take it easy!” Cochran yelled, clasping his elbow.
She hit the brake hard enough to throw him forward against the padded black dashboard. He could hear his dropped beer can rolling on the floor.
“I will drive this car straight into a wall if you try to touch me, Omar!” Plumtree said loudly. “In arousing ways! Jesus will not blame me—He will take me into His bosom, and throw you into the fires of Gehenna! You know I will, and you know He will!”
“Fine!” Cochran gasped. “Drive normal! What’s the matter with you, Janis?”
She straightened the wheel, and though the engine was coughing again she quickly accelerated the car to a steady twenty miles an hour, glancing harriedly from the road to the rear-view mirror and back. “I’m sorry, Scant!” she said. “I must have dozed off! God, I might have got us killed! Okay, fog still, okay. Did I hit anything? God, my arms are shaking! Are you all right?”
“Well you nearly broke my arm,” he said, harshly. “Jesus, girl!” He could see that there had been at least one personality shift, and that the erotic moment was long gone. “No, you didn’t hit anything.” He leaned down and yanked a fresh beer out of the box. The floorboard carpeting was marshy under the soles of his tennis shoes, and the hot air was fetid with the smell of the spilled beer. “Who’s Omar?”‘
“That’s my lather’s name! Be careful now, Scant, I don’t want to lose time with you—but—was he here?”
“No,” Cochran said. Thank God, he added mentally. He popped the tab on the beer can. “Another woman—did I…? Do you, uh, recall putting your hand on my leg??
“Oh, God, Tiffany” she said ruefulry “That would be Tiffany. I bet. She made a pass at you, right? And you thought it was me! Poor Scant!”
He had been panting, but now began to relax. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said cautiously, “if it was you.”
“It will be, Scant, I promise you, soon, and not in the back of an old car, either.” She patted at the seat around her legs. “Did she eat my Slim Jim? God, that woke me up, at least—I could feel that I was slipping in and out, back there. I guess Tiffany was slipping out and in.”
Her guileless last couple of lines were echoing in his head, and he tilted up his fresh can of beer for a distancing, objectivity-inducing mouthful.
“If you get sleepy again,” he said, “just pull over. You can catch a nap on the front seat, and I’ll do the same in the trunk.”
“Did Cody get a key to the trunk?”
He sighed. “I was kidding. And no, she didn’t—she hot-wired the car somehow.”
“She is mechanically inclined,” Plumtree allowed, diligently watching the road. Her mouth was working, and she rolled down the window; cold night air blew into the car and twitched Cochran’s sweaty hair. “My mouth’s full of Tiffany’s spit,” Plumtree said, her voice frailer with the open window beyond her. “Could I have the mouthwash?”
Cochran passed it to her, and again she swished a sip of the sharp-smelling stuff and spat it out the window. He was glad when she rolled the window up again, though the sudden scents of diesel exhaust and spicy clay and the dry-white-wine smell of the fog had been a relief from the warm-beer fumes.
“You okay to drive?” he asked.
“Oh, sure. I kind of did catch a nap there, I guess, while she was on. Besides, you’re a little—you’re more than point-oh-eight blood alcohol, I’d guess.”
“Technically, I suppose, yeah,” he said. “We’d better,” Cochran went on steadily, “take the 280, to the city, rather than follow the 101 all the way up. We can stop at my house, and I can pick up some clothes and money.” And think all this over, soberly, he thought. And check the phone messages, and take in the mail. And clip the holstered .357 onto the back of my belt, if I decide we should indeed go on and meet the others.
“Tell me when to turn,” Plumtree said.
“Oh, it won’t be for hours yet.”
“Won’t it…bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?”
Cochran took a long drag on his cigarette. “I suppose so. Sure it will. Gotta be done, though. Faced.”
Plumtree shivered. “It must be scary, not having anyone you can turn the wheel over to, in bad situations.”
Cochran smiled bleakly. “I never—”
Both of them jumped when for an instant a big brown owl swooped into the flickering headlight glow and then disappeared over the roof.
Cochran forced a laugh, embarrassed to have been so startled but pleased that he had not dropped his cigarette. “I wonder what owls think of this highway of light running through the middle of their mountains.”
“They’re hoping for a crash, a fire that’ll drive the mice and rabbits out of hiding.”
After a moment, he said, “A plausible answer, Cody, but I was talking to Janis.”
She exhaled as if trying to whistle. “Listerine! Who else was on?”
“Somebody called Tiffany. And then—”
“You pig.” She rocked on the seat and then brushed the fingers of one hand from the buttons of her blouse to the fly of her jeans. “What did you two do with me?”
“Nothing.” He tried to say it as though he had resisted Tiffany’s advances. This was a disorienting basis for conversation, and it occurred to him that it might be difficult to manage any intimacy even with Janis, without Cody objecting and interfering in humiliating ways. “Anyway, she was interrupted by somebody else, a woman who cussed me out—called me Omar.” He wondered how much Cody might have sobered up in the time she was gone, and he half-hoped something he said might drive her away and let Janis back on.
“Follow the Queen, you were playing,” said Plumtree. “You must have mentioned our…female parent, right? She comes up sometimes when somebody even just mentions her, and always when somebody asks for her. You ever play Follow the Queen?”
“The poker game? Sure—seven-card stud, where the next card dealt face up, after a face up queen, is wild.”
“Wild, right—that is, it’s whatever you declare it to be. And when our parent-of-the-fair-sex is up, the next girl is whoever you ask for. Who did you ask for? Not me, Mom doesn’t do the mouthwash bit.”
“I guess I called for Janis.”
“Not Tiffany? That was noble of you. Of course you didn’t understand the rules yet. Do you swear you two didn’t do anything with me?”
Cochran realized, to his surprise, that he didn’t want to swear to a lie. “I swear there was no kiss,” he said, “and not a button was undone or a zipper unzipped.”
“Oh, you pig. I bet you groped me. I bet you were ready to go all-in on that flop.”