As I walk out of the room I hear Matt behind me telling the guy, “You’re going to have to pay for that lamp, Sammy.”
“Where is Lucy?” I ask Da.
He shrugs. “I think she left in the commotion.”
“Luce?” I call.
“Feel the difference?” he says, almost warmly.
I go running after her.
“It had to be done,” Da says as I run. “It had to be done, and you done it, Young Man.”
I catch up with her a hundred yards up the street, almost to her car. I put my arm around her shoulders and walk with her.
“So, have you enjoyed your big day out up here? Be planning another holiday here sometime soon? I never noticed before, but you’re kind of a trouble magnet, you know that?”
She shoves my arm away and practically out of its socket. “This place is a bucket of pus,” she snaps. “You guys should buy a house here, settle down, run for city council.”
“Hey,” I protest, “I was just up there defending your virtue.”
“My virtue does not need you. And anyway, I don’t know what you were doing, but you weren’t doing that, that’s for sure. Being your grandfather’s perverse, violent sock puppet, that’s what it looked like to me.”
She presses the button on her key ring and her car beep-beeps at us.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “It is so much more than that. It is so much more.”
She acts as if I am not even talking. She gets into the car, starts it up, revs the engine a lot more than necessary. She rolls down the window.
“I do hope you come back from this trip, Danny. I’d really love to see you again.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She sighs. “Don’t get in front of my car. Violence runs in families, you know. And I’m in the mood.”
I laugh. I jump out as she pulls from the curb.
She guns it, clips me at the hip, spinning me around and leaving me bouncing on the pavement.
11
“Valhalla.”
That is Da’s answer when I ask him where he wants to go. If he has any thoughts about where to go next, because time is the thing we have the least of, of all the things we have very little of.
Like money, strength, friends, or family support. Very little of all that, but even less of time.
“Valhalla, Da? Isn’t that in New York state?”
He smiles, like I have said something profoundly stupid.
Matt has come and gone, again. Wished us all the best, again. Said to come back, again, anytime. He wasn’t bothered by the acts of not-so-random violence going on in his tidy little cells, as there is no one on this earth with the flaps to challenge his power of unflappability.
He did, however, take just about all of my money.
“All of it?” I asked as he counted my meager stash. “Can I maybe write you a check?” I asked.
“Can I write you this?” he asked, pulling out of his pocket one of those leather covered lead deals for industrial-strength head-cracking.
“Maybe you should just post a ‘no checks accepted’ sign?”
“Nothing says ‘I mean it’ like a blackjack, though.”
Even saying that, he sounded friendly.
“I’m going to have to get one of those,” I said.
“I’m your man,” he said. “Once you have money, of course.”
So Da and I hit the street with nothing. Less than nothing, even. We are standing in this place in the clothes we wore yesterday, the only clothes we have. No phones, one wallet, mine, which serves no purpose now other than to add four ounces of artificial flesh to my bony self. A few days of medication, which is already showing signs of doing the patient little good. And the certainty that failure of a more severe kind is speeding up the highway toward us as we speak.
I get a nudge. I turn.
“Ugh, jeez, Jarrod, wash your face, at least.”
He is standing there on the sidewalk looking like a scarecrow made from strips of veal, 8-ball eyes, and lips torn off a blobfish.
“Here,” he says, holding out his car keys.
“What?”
“I screwed you up. I ruined everything. You were doing fine. You were going to win, and I blew it. Now look at you, you both look like crap, you’re out on the street and the end is near.”
“Hey, Mr. Sunshine,” I say, smiling at him.
Somehow, incredibly, he manages to return a smile to me. It tears his lip right open and the blood flows, making him now a meat-faced scarecrow with a vivid red chin cleft.
“I thought we killed him already,” Da says.
“Na,” I say. “It was on our to-do list, but we’ve been busy.”
“Come on, take it,” Jarrod says, jangling the keys at me. “I just filled it yesterday. Subarus are brilliant on mileage, so you can go real far on what you have.”
“Subarus suck,” Da says. “Never catch me in one of them.”
I laugh.
“Thing is, Jarrod, man, they know the car now. You showed Lucy, remember?”
“I wish we had more time with Lucy. I hadn’t seen her in ages.”
I do not understand Jarrod at all. It’s not the drug use and the cracks-of-society nature of his relationship to civilization or any of that. That stuff you can work out, in a clinical enough way.
I don’t understand the relentlessness of his heart.
“Listen, Jarrod, I am really, really sorry. For what I did up there. I am shocked, myself, that I reacted like that. I swear to you I never do that.”
He pinches his lip together like a clamp before he smiles. “For somebody who never does that, you’re kind of good at it.”
I laugh, but I blush at the same time. I am ashamed.
“Ha,” Da says, looking sharp, lucid, and sly.
“Ha, what?” I say.
“Ha,” he says, pointing at me.
I am driving. Da insisted on front seat, Jarrod is fine with the back. North is where I am headed, because it just seems to me that from here, north is where all the nothing is.
“It’s kind of pointless at this point, I’m afraid,” I say.
“What?” Jarrod says.
“Driving anywhere. I mean, I don’t know where to go, they are bound to catch us within hours, and even if this were a muscle car, we’d never be able to get away from anybody who really wanted to catch us.”
“Nobody wants to catch you two, so don’t flatter yourselves,” Da says. The in/out nature of his condition is far more like streetlights than ever before. He is with us and gone again just that quickly. “You’ve never done anything.”
It is a statement both reassuring and cutting.
Not to mention inaccurate.
“I may have done a few things,” Jarrod says modestly.
I sigh. “Do I want to know these things, Jarrod?”
“You might not.”
“Okay, then. Anyway, Da, we all agree you are the grand prize. But I am not looking forward to facing people at this point either. I just need… a little time and space to work out just what is the right thing.”
“Ha,” Da says.
“Ha, again?”
“‘Right thing.’ Phrase always makes me go ha.”
“I might know a place,” Jarrod says.
“I thought you were out of places?” I say.
“No, I said I was out of guys. But I know a place where you go to find a guy, who might know a guy…”
“At this point, men, that sounds like our kind of place,” I say.
Because they know our vehicle, we are traveling rural roads all the way. The place Jarrod described would have taken another three or four hours if we took the main highway, but the way we have to snake through the region will take at least two times that, possibly three. The radio crackles in and out, usually coming up with one form of hillbilly music or heavy metal, and if you didn’t know better you’d think we were one very alternative family off for a little backwoods vacation with the happy-clappy youngster in the back singing along to the tunes with his own made-up lyrics all the way. Suddenly he pipes up, “Oh, and did I tell you, Dan-o, you were wrong. When I went back to the college, those guys had not found the secret hiding place for my stash. Cool, or what?”