Toola said, “You ever think of leaving here, Danny?”
“Can I put my pants on first?”
“They’re in the kitchen. Under the table, next to your boots.”
“In the kitchen, under the table. How did they — never mind.”
“What I meant is, you ever think of just hitting the road? Getting in your car and driving until you leave everyone behind and find someplace better than all this?”
I gave up looking for my cigarettes and walked to the door. Toola hadn’t moved a muscle. You never could guess what that girl might say next. But I always liked hearing her talk.
“No place is all that different,” I said. “Not in any way that counts.”
“Lord,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”
I left Toola where she was, and where she was likely to remain for as long as the sun was up, and walked outside to the porch. My patrol car was out front, surrounded by a mess of chickens, but I’d locked the doors the night before so I wasn’t too worried about them stealing it even though they moved with the nervous jitter of a money-hungry band of tweakers. It was hot already and humid, the kind of air you don’t walk in as much as swim through, and I wasn’t much looking forward to my shift, even before you considered my hangover.
Me and Toola had been visiting each other several nights a week for the last six months, and while that had its benefits it was costing me sleep, especially sleep in my own bed. That’s one of those prices you pay that looks different in the daylight than it did the night before. Which isn’t the same as saying you regret it. Toola was the kind of woman that was hard to get out of your mind.
I could still hear that combine, but I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see any other cars or houses, for that matter, only woods and soybean fields. Probably only two or three people passed by Toola’s house in a given day, but leaving my cruiser out front was sloppy. I knew Toola sold weed, and she knew I knew she sold weed, and we never talked about it. My job was to stop criminals from hurting people, and Toola never hurt anybody, was the way I figured it. Now, the sheriff, he might have seen this different. Which was why I kept my mouth shut about Toola.
I stopped at home long enough to grab a shower and a clean uniform and eat a plate of eggs and potatoes, that tired bachelor meal, one served at my place as much as three times a day. After a while on your own, you start to wonder how many men get married just to improve the menu. When I finished, I radioed dispatch to say I was going straight to patrol. Nobody cared. They never do once you earn their trust.
There’s country roads here in Ohio that you can roam for miles without seeing anything other than soybeans and field corn, copses of trees and maybe a stray barn. It’s enough to drive you crazy with loneliness or thrill you with the illusion of freedom, depending on your mood. I picked one of those roads at random and set to it. My inclination that morning was to lay low and let that hangover burn off. I pulled two people over for speeding and let them both off with a warning. I never give tickets unless I have to, even though I’m mostly convinced that anyone driving slower than me is an idiot and everyone else is a maniac.
It turned out that second driver was some distant acquaintance of my father’s, and he went on for so long at his surprise at finding me on this side of the law that I thought for a moment of giving him a ticket after all, but in the end I just stone-faced him and gave curt, unhelpful answers to his questions about my father’s current whereabouts and he drove off mad like somehow I was the jerk in all of this. There’s some people you just can’t do favors for.
It was on about noon by then, and I was thinking of heading into town for lunch when I saw them: brief black skid marks shooting off the road not far in front of me. I don’t know why exactly they caught my eye. Maybe you drive these roads enough, day after day, you notice anything new. Or maybe I saw them because that’s how it was always meant to be. Either way, I stopped my cruiser along the side of the road, got out, and looked down the hill, over the grass field and into the woods. It wouldn’t have been visible if you were driving past, singing along to Waylon or Johnny Cash, but standing where I was and looking close, you could just make out the back of a steel-gray Cadillac Eldorado sitting silent between two fat buckeye trees.
I froze for a moment. That car was as familiar to me as my own name.
I walked back to my cruiser and looked down the road both ways. Still empty. I drove down the road about a mile, then backed into a small dirt trail that led away from the road and into the field corn. Anybody that passed by and saw my cruiser would figure I was taking a snooze.
I slipped down the trail into the woods and backtracked toward the Cadillac. By the time I got there I was sweating hard and about ate up by mosquitos. The window was down, the flies were buzzing, and the smell was awful. I looked inside. One dead, gunshot, the same man I expected.
This was bad. Really bad. And not just for the usual reasons either.
I spent a few more minutes looking in and around the car, then headed back to my vehicle. But I didn’t call it in to the sheriff. I wasn’t that stupid.
My half-brother, C.T., lived outside of town in a beat-up piney-wood cabin surrounded by overgrown and dying ash trees. He was as good a place as any to start. I about wore out my knuckles knocking on his front door before he finally answered.
“What in the world?” he said, blinking in the harsh sunshine, his wet eyes shining liquor-slick.
“Too early for you?” I said, with as much false cheer as I could muster.
C.T. didn’t move from the doorway. He looked at my patrol car, then back at me. “Depends what you’re here for.”
C.T. sold weed, pills, and powder. And probably a whole lot of other illegal substances too. But he would have been reluctant to talk to me even if all he hawked were steak knives or newspaper subscriptions. Me and C.T. had never been friendly, even when we were kids.
“Why don’t you invite me in first,” I said.
“Is it gonna be that kind of conversation?”
“It might could be.”
C.T. sighed and turned and walked back inside, which was as much of an invitation as I was likely to get. However you are picturing the inside of C.T.’s house is pretty much how it looked. There were too many empty beer cans and whiskey bottles to count and enough dirty dishes laying around that I had to take a minute to clear a space on the couch to sit down.
C.T. sat across from me in a ripped and faded easy chair, sipping a two-liter bottle of orange soda. He had the kind of thick long blond hair that you knew would last forever, and he wore the casual and wrinkled clothes of someone who never punched a clock. Me, I spent all day in uniform, and though I was barely thirty, my own hair was starting to retreat in a way that told me it would disappear slowly and then all at once like clear-cut timber. One night Toola had run her hands through what still remained and told me she thought bald men were sexy. I hadn’t yet decided how I felt about that.
“What’d you spike that soda with?” I said.
“Nothing you could handle.” C.T. took another sip. “What is it you’re wanting?”
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” I said. “Thought it might be good to hear what you’ve been up to lately.”