“No, man. I’m done with all of it.”
“You quitting?”
“I didn’t bury my own mother and here I am digging up strangers.”
Baker ducked along the row of cars until he found one with the keys in it. He eased the door open and checked the lights, the gas gauge, and the turn signals.
“Tell me if the brake lights work,” he called. “I got to hurry. They’ll be here in a minute.”
Baker searched the car, talking fast.
“I tell you about my first juvie pop? Stole a car that ran out of gas. There was a bag of dope under the seat. I’m glad they closed that file at eighteen, man. Nobody knows how stupid I used to be.”
He pulled a pair of work gloves from the backseat.
“You want these?” he said. “Too small for me.”
“This ain’t worth it.”
“What is, man?”
Baker dropped the gloves on the ground and opened the trunk.
“They got a spare and a jack,” he said. “My lucky day, right. Too bad they didn’t leave a purse.”
“You can still walk away.”
“I want to see the ocean. Let’s go, man. We can road dog it out of here.”
“No way.” Tilden used his yard voice, low and quick. “I’m never going back inside.”
“Me neither, man. I been down twice. I’ll kill everybody up before they put me back in the walls. Everybody.”
Tilden looked over the car’s roof to the wheat field in the east. He couldn’t find the seam where earth and sky blended together. The world was blurred by dusk.
“Don’t keep this rig too long,” Tilden said.
“I won’t. Radio ain’t got but AM anyhow.”
“Later, Storebought.”
Baker grinned at his nickname and drove away. Tilden left the cemetery quickly, before the funeral party returned to the lot. He knew what Baker was up to and where he was headed. He was on a run, like riding a motorcycle wide open until he crashed. The state called it recidivism, but as the old cons said, Baker was doing life on the installment plan.
Tilden crossed the road and lay on his back beside the wheat. He spread his arms. Wind blew loose dirt over his body. The ground was soft, and the air was warm. In prison he had figured out that laws were made to protect the people who made the laws. He had always thought that staying out of trouble meant following those laws, but now he knew there was more. The secret was to act like the people who wanted the laws in the first place. They didn’t even think about it. They just lived.
Tilden wondered if he’d ever find a woman, a job he liked, or a town he wanted to stay in. Above him the Milky Way made a blizzard of stars in the sky. There was not a fence or wall in sight.
Two-Eleven All Around
When she locked me out I didn’t mind that much because things were drifty from the start. She didn’t like my drinking and I did not go for her Prozac and police scanner. Her kid was a pain in the ass, too. As much as I tried to get along with him, he was already what he always would be — a sullen little punk who liked the couch.
What happened was I came home drunk and she wouldn’t let me in. She didn’t even answer the door. It was night and I thought I was doing good by coming home before the bars closed, but it didn’t matter to her. She’s from right here in Casper, and they are a tough people. She sat hunched over her police scanner, not moving an inch. You’d think she was dead but I knew what was going on. She’d got on her high horse and was riding out a sober binge on antidepressants. She did this the same way other folks went on vitamins and health food, sort of a homegrown detox. I could hear static on the scanner, a steady sound like fast water until she squelched it and strangers spoke into the house.
At one time I tried to get into it, being a scanner-head, thinking it was something we could share outside of drinking, fighting, and sex. I even memorized part of the ten-code, what cops use on the radio. I never understood why they talk in code, though. A guide to it comes with the scanner, so it’s not like they’re fooling anybody. And saying ten-four instead of okay does not exactly save time in a crucial situation. My favorite was two-eleven all around, which meant that the subject was clean, with no warrants against him in the city or county. The lucky guy was free to go.
Nothing me and her did together was right except in the boinking department. It’s not like she had a great body or nothing, just average, but it was attitude more than anything else. She’d do whatever came down the pike and not feel guilty later. Me, I’m all for kinky sex, but sometimes thinking about it is better than the doing. My best is in the afternoon, doing it regular while thinking about the weird stuff.
Funny thing about that scanner, though, it sucked her away from sex like getting religion. She’d sit froze over it for hours, patched into a world of good guys and bad guys, like a video game except they were real. You hear the dispatcher call a cruiser with an address, and after a few minutes the cop says he’s there. Then you sit and wait until the cop comes on the air with the subject’s name and checks for outstanding warrants. Weekends were busy, especially on a full moon, just like us and sex in the old days.
Every few months, she’ll go on Prozac, coffee, and the scanner, then get mad if I got hammered. It wasn’t really fair but I understood she had to take time off from drinking, because when she was on safari, you better keep bail money handy. I could tell what she’d been up to the night before by the dents on the car. One thing, though, she didn’t wake up with the regrets. She never called around to see if she did anything she should apologize for. To me, that made her a full-blown alcoholic while I was just a drunk.
The Prozac always made her lose weight. She looked great but couldn’t have an orgasm. She said it was the Prozac that did it, but since she was on it, she didn’t mind. It bothered me a lot. It got so bad I was jealous of that scanner. Jealous of men who would never touch her. Jealous of voices in the dark.
She never gave me a reason to feel that way. It was my trip, not hers, and it went right to my father. He never drank a drop. He always held a job, and he lived in the same place all his life. What he did, though, was tomcat around with a different woman every day of the week. He made me cover for him when he slipped off to see his Tuesday girlfriend. Then on Wednesday he’d go bowling out of the county. Thursday he’d see a widow in town. He lived like a rabbit mostly, and you might say I had a few moms. These days I’m as loyal as bark to a tree.
Early on I asked her how many men she’d been with before me, and let me tell you, it’s the stupidest damn thing you can ask a girlfriend. I know that, but I did it anyway. I’m the kind of guy who’ll do the stupidest damn thing at the worst time. If a guy’s got no nose, I’ll tell him he’s lucky his eyes are good, because he damn sure can’t wear glasses. Sometimes I’m surprised I ain’t got shot yet. I always figured that’s how I’d go, killed at night by a stranger. Casper is that kind of town.
She didn’t say anything for a long while. There’s a time period when you can tell that people are making up a lie, but hers stretched on so long, I knew the truth was coming. Then it hit me that she was maybe counting up, and that number was something I did not want to hear. I wanted to shift to another channel. Just squelch her answer and move to someone else’s life.
Finally she looked at me and said, “What year?”
Well, that took the wind out of my sails, like getting kicked in the grazoint. And right there was where she was at — you ask a direct question and she’d answer with a question. She’d have made a great spy. She never gave a thing up. You could ask her if it was raining and she’d say, “Outside?” then not understand why I’d fly off the handle. We mainly lived at the top of our voices, even in the sackeroo.