“I don’t know, Danny. Just go. Just keep driving.”
“What?”
“Keep fucking driving. Just keep driving, keep driving . . .” Mike repeats himself and keeps on repeating himself.
I want to dive out of the car and run away and keep running. But I don’t. I listen to Mike. I drive. Pull off the shoulder and onto the highway. I keep driving, and try not to look into the rearview.
——
Overcast. The clouds are low and getting lower. North on I-91 and Mike sits in the middle of the back seat, filling my rearview. He watches himself. Making sure he’s still there, maybe. I’m watching him too, him holding Henry’s sawed-off shotgun. Every few minutes his hands get to shaking. The gunmetal vibrates in his hands.
I’ve tried slowing down, pulling off the road or into seemingly empty rest areas, but Mike won’t have it. He threatens to shoot me in the head if I stop. Says that I have to keep driving. Keep going. I keep going, more because I’m scared, and don’t know what else to do. I know Mike won’t shoot me, would never shoot me. Still.
“Hey, Mike.”
“Still here.”
“Need to think about this. Back at the pawnshop. Did that old guy shoot Henry?”
“It happened so fast. He jumped up with that gun pointed at us and . . . I can’t remember, Danny.”
“Did he shoot Greg, too?”
Mike shakes his head, and it turns into a shrug of the shoulders, and that turns into his hands shaking all over again.
I don’t ask Mike if he thinks what happened to Greg happened to Henry. I don’t ask Mike about the three gunshots I heard. I don’t ask Mike if he thinks what happened to Greg will happen to him. I know Mike’s answer to the questions. And I know mine.
We cross the border, into Vermont. Things feel kind of funny in the car. The air all wrong. Too light. Or too heavy.
Mike says, “Remember that one summer your grandma let me come up to the lake house?”
“What? Yeah, of course I remember. Grandma never called to run it by your mom and you didn’t tell your mom you were going and by the time we got back the cops had put up posters on half the telephone poles in Wormtown.”
Mike breathes through his nose. Almost sounds like a laugh. He says, “That was the first time I’d ever been in Vermont. This is my second.” I watch Mike talking in the rearview mirror. Maybe if I focus hard enough on watching him, he won’t disappear.
“You need to get out more often.”
“Henry or Greg ever go up?”
“Fuck, no. Greg would’ve burnt the place down just trying to make toast. Just you, man. And Grandma didn’t know about Henry.”
“She knew. She told me we shouldn’t be spending time with a stranger in the neighborhood that much older than us. She told me it wasn’t right.”
“When did she tell you that?”
“At the lake house. It was the only time she talked to me the whole week up there.” Mike laughs for real this time. “I loved it up there, Danny. I really did. But man, it was really weird too. Your grandmother would cook us meals and make our beds, but I remember her not talking much at all and spending most of the week by herself, smoking her Lucky Strikes on the dock, going for walks by herself, leaving us alone.”
I say, “She did the same shit back home.” Grandma fed us but would kick me and Joe out of the apartment until it got dark out, and Joe would usually go off on his own, not let me come with him. If it was raining or something and we couldn’t go out, she’d stay in her room with a book or her little black-and-white TV. Away from us.
“I’m not feeling right, Danny.” Mike rubs a forearm across his forehead. Doesn’t let go of the gun. His voice sounds smaller, farther away, coming from another room.
“We’re almost there, Mike.” I say it without thinking. I don’t know what to do.
“I know your grandma ignored us all at your home. But it was different up there, all by ourselves, away from the city and everything. Up there, I really noticed it. I got up earlier than you and your brother a couple of mornings and spied on her. She’d just stare into the mountains or into nowhere, really. It was like we weren’t even there, Danny. I’m getting fucking worried; maybe we were never there. Oh shit, Danny, I don’t feel right.”
“I’m pulling over, Mike. You relax. Keep talking to me.” We’re only ten miles from the exit, not that it matters. I slowly pull over onto the shoulder and I want to believe that if we just get out of the car, then we’ll be okay; he’ll be okay. But there were three shots.
Mike’s eyes are closed and he’s concentrating hard on something. Brow folding in on itself, upper lip shaking like an earthquake. He says, “Don’t know how she could ignore you and Joe fighting the way you did. You fought over everything. Made me feel really, I don’t know, uncomfortable. That probably sounds messed up coming from me. But, I don’t know, man, it just didn’t feel right. Wanted to kick both your heads in by the end of the vacation.”
“Wish you were here, send us a postcard, right? Mike, listen, the car is stopped. We’re going to get out. Just walk around. Get some fresh air, all right?” I say, then I lie to him: “It’ll help.”
“What was the name of the card game you guys always played?”
“Cribbage. Joe always tried cheating me on the counts.”
“Nah, you were just too dumb to count the points right and Joe would call you on it and . . .” Mike stops talking and slow fades out.
I scream his name and he comes back. He looks like Greg did. Bleeding from everywhere. There’s a dime-sized hole in his forehead, and it’s growing. He opens his mouth but can’t speak.
I call his name, not that his name works anymore, right? I ask him if he’s still with me. I ask him to say something.
Mike whimpers like a goddamn dog that just had his leg stepped on, and he slides across the back seat, out the door and onto the shoulder of the highway, carrying the shotgun.
I get out, sprint around the front of the car, my own ears ringing, but not because of the cuff in the head he gave me forever ago. Mike stumbles, turns around aimlessly, his feet lost in a circle. His eyes are rolled back in his head. He puts the barrels of the sawed-off in his mouth. He pulls the trigger and disappears. He disappears and pulls the trigger. Which came first? Fuck if I know, but there’s nothing left of him but a fog of blood, and the shotgun drops to the pavement after hovering in the air for an impossible second.
——
Earlier, after telling Greg and Mike my getaway plan, I was more than a little worried that I wouldn’t remember how to get to the lake house. But I remember. Every turn.
I’m not feeling so great. Don’t know if it’s because I watched Greg and Mike (and goddamn Henry, I saw him flicker in the rearview, in the dark too, you betcha) and I only think I’m feeling what they were feeling. Joe always said I was nothing but a follower. Fucking Joe.
So there’s that, and now I’m thinking about the shots I heard. Did I hear three? Or was it four? The first two came in a quick burst, one right after the other, piggybacking. Then a pause. Then a third. But it could’ve been three shots in that quick burst. And how long was that pause? I really can’t remember now.
I drive down the long dirt road. I’m the only one out here. Within sight of both lake and house there’s a small chainlink fence across the road. I plow through it and park next to the house. The white shingles have gone green with mold. The roof is missing tiles and tar and is sunken in parts. The screened porch is missing its screens. If a house falls apart in the woods and nobody’s there, will anyone miss it?
This is where I spent so many quiet and solitary summer weeks with Grandma and Joe, but not really with them. Joe painted, and she smoked and walked. This place here, this is where I learned to hate them.
In Wormtown, it was different. I had Mike and Henry. I kept busy and didn’t have time to think about how fucked up it all was. I miss Mike. Really miss him already, like he’s been gone for years instead of minutes.