Lenny and I took the low road out of Erie. Once we passed the city limits Lenny opened the glove box and pulled out a pint of Beam and we passed it back and forth until we drained the color from it. We smoked cigarettes and we took our time. There was nowhere we needed to be and no real hurry to get there. The farther away from the lake we drove the more confusing the roads became, two lane highways that cut through pastures and around dairy farms and circled in every direction and sometimes back into themselves. Even if you’d lived there all your life, you could get lost. We passed Summit and Waterford and Mill Village, towns so small they were easy to miss. Every now and then we passed a one pump gas station, or a farmhouse or grain silo set back from the highway, or an isolated brick building advertising deer processing. Other than that there was nothing, just the fields and the horizon and the road that connected them.
“We should head out to Wattsburg,” Lenny said, “to my sister’s place. We’ll be safe there until Ear-Dick wakes up.”
I nodded and Lenny used an emergency pull off to start a U-turn. He knew the back roads better than I did and fifteen minutes later we were rocking slightly over the long gravel driveway that led to Tiffany’s house.
A thin cut of woods shielded the house from view and when we emerged from it the front yard spread before us. It was different than the last time I was there; now it was filled with every type of lawn ornament and decoration imaginable. Tiny working windmills, gazing balls, a granite fountain continuously filled by a peeing cherub, lawn jockeys, wheelbarrows and giant tires full of flowers, along with countless other figures, covered nearly every available inch of grass. It was as though the sky opened and shat a great mass of junk into her front yard. Among these decorations were children, two or three live children, who seemed to note our arrival with cautious interest, peeking out at us from their camouflaged vantages. Tiffany stood next to the wide porch. In one hand she held a cigarette and in the other the hand of a small girl wearing only a diaper. When she saw us pull up she started to walk over, still holding the little girl’s hand as she dodged the obstacles in her way. She was moving fast and the little girl kept falling down. The first few times Tiffany hoisted her back to her feet but finally she abandoned the effort and left her lying on her stomach next to a tiny ceramic gnome.
“Where have you been?” Tiffany screamed as she approached the truck. Lenny cringed. She was a big woman, tall and curvy and loud. She was wearing a white blouse and a pair of gray sweatpants with Mickey Mouse ears stitched onto the pockets. Among the clutter of the yard, two little boys stumbled upon one another and began to fight with plastic swords. One had a curly mess of red hair and the other a blond crew cut that made him appear bald. They looked nothing alike.
When Tiffany reached the open window of the truck she was breathing hard. “I’ve been calling your cell all day,” she said. Her big fat face seemed to take up the whole window.
“Hey,” I said, but she ignored me. Across the yard the red-haired boy knocked down the blond one and stripped him of his weapon. The boy on the ground seemed to beg for mercy, but the red-haired boy kicked him in the stomach instead.
“Fire inspector called here looking for you,” Tiffany said.
“What’d he want?” Lenny said.
“To tell you how the fire got started, retard.”
Lenny cringed again.
“He traced it to the stovetop. Apparently someone left the burner going when he went to the bar. Wonder who that could’ve been?” Tiffany’s thin colorless lips formed a faint smile, as though she found some pleasure in this sudden turn of events. At that moment, I hated her.
“You,” she said, “burnt down Mom and Dad’s house.” She raised her finger and pointed it right in Lenny’s face. “You,” she repeated. There was a finality in her voice that scared me, like a judge sentencing a prisoner.
“I hardly ever use the stove,” Lenny said, as though this completely absolved him. “It couldn’t have been me.”
“Hardly’s got nothing to do with it. They found a greasy pan on the stove and everything. What’d you do, get drunk and try and make something?” Lenny’s good eye flashed with some sort of recognition. “Now you’ve really done it.” Across the yard, the red-haired boy kicked his brother again and this time the boy cried out in pain. Tiffany turned around. “Enough,” she yelled. “Leave your brother alone.” She gave Lenny one more disgusted look and then moved toward the screaming child.
Lenny put the truck in drive and hit the gas. He spun the wheel hard and the back tires sprayed dirt. Tiffany’s curses filled the cab even after we pulled out onto Route 8.
Lenny was driving scary fast. I reached over and grabbed at my seatbelt, but there wasn’t one so I just held on. Cornfields and pastures flew past in a green blur. My window was down and the noise the truck made as it cut through the air was deafening. Lenny’s knuckles were white on the wheel. The veins in his neck bulged and seemed to pulse. The needle on the speedometer crept past eighty.
“I don’t care what she says. It wasn’t me.”
Outside the light was beginning to fail, throwing shadows across the road that looked like oil stains. A hazy purple hue covered everything. I thought about Ear-Dick, bloody and unconscious, wedged in the bed of the truck. I knew that by waiting, we were making decisions that could not be undone. I thought about my father, how he never approved of Lenny, how happy he was when I left for school. Lenny was concentrating hard on the road, half blind and stone-faced. A line of stratus clouds stretched beyond the windshield like a second horizon, a thin violet bruise below the setting sun. The fields rolled away in low swells toward distant tree lines. We passed a dirt service road and an abandoned gas well set back from the highway, and I realized that I had no idea where we were, that this was a place I had never been to. All I knew was that we were far from home, that even if we turned around right then, the trip back would be long.
Lenny lifted his hand and hit the steering wheel once, hard. “I can’t believe she said it was me.” His voice sounded desperate, as though he was pleading. The landscape continued to reveal itself: tilled earth, green fields, a flock of starlings peppering the sky, all of it unfamiliar, the world humming with newness. We’d come too far to do anything but keep going.
I waited until Lenny returned my stare. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I said. “Consider the source.”
After a moment, he began to nod. “That’s right,” he said. “What does she know? She’s been jealous ever since Mom and Dad gave me the house.” He eased his foot off the accelerator.
“Exactly,” I said.
Lenny loosened his grip on the wheel, lowered himself in his seat. “I just wish things would look up,” he said. “I wish for that a lot.”
“I do too,” I said, “but remember, it’s always darkest before the dawn.”
We continued on like that for a long time, the highway disappearing beneath us as we passed through towns named Cutting and Corry and Spartansburg. Dusk gave way to nighttime. We didn’t talk anymore. We just drove silently with the radio off, not thinking of our pasts or our futures, or the boy in the back of the truck and how he might come to factor into them. We just kept driving, listening to the wind as it rushed over the hood of the truck. Now and again, it came across the highway, pulling us toward the center line or else toward the ditch at the edge of the field. Lenny tightened his grip on the wheel and did his best to keep us steady, but we both knew there was only so much you could do, that at any moment that wind could sweep you off the road, or else the earth could open up and swallow you whole, that in the end it was all beyond our control, and in this we found comfort.