The girls smile at each other, eyes shining, and face forward again.
A swarm of bright insects dive into the headlights and burst their translucent guts on the glass. Not bugs, Caroline realizes—it’s some kind of weather, thick and whitish, but not snow. Sleet. The pavement, gray and salty-white for so many miles, begins to darken, to glisten.
Audrey eases up on the gas. “I don’t like the looks of this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t feel too great driving your car in this stuff.”
“Audrey, let me remind you: Caroline from Georgia, Audrey from Minnesota. Grandpa Sven probably had you driving the snowplow when you were just a wee lad.”
“I don’t have a Grandpa Sven.”
“Plus this car has four-wheel drive.”
“Is it on?”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“But it’s your car, Caroline. You have a feel for it.”
“Audrey, we’re like an hour away, aren’t we?”
This is true: they are an hour, in good conditions, from Audrey’s father’s house, where they will say hello to the man, brush their teeth and fall like dead women into Audrey’s bed. But after eleven hours on the road, the last hour will be the longest and cruelest, whatever the weather, and finally it’s the girls’ bladders that make the call—oh man, that coffee drink went straight through them—and they take the next exit, only to discover that the nearest gas station is two miles from the highway, but by now the idea of a bathroom has such a grip on them that they take the two miles anyway, a hilly and curvy two-laner that feeds them down into a valley and onto a narrow trestle bridge with a rusted and bullet-pocked sign that may have once named the river they can see below, wisps of snow moving snakelike across a black face of ice, or perhaps the sign issued a warning about the narrowness of the bridge or its tendency to freeze before the road. In any case, once across the bridge they rise out of the valley again, steeply, and travel another half mile through a gray, disheartening slush before they at last reach a remote station—a dubious, sickly lit shoebox of a building, blurry after so long on the road… Christ, is it even open?
It is, thank God.
BABY WHEREVER U R, whatever u r doing, I will b there. Just tell me.
Caroline thumbs in a reply, stares at it, then wipes it out and drops the phone back into her bag.
The sleet ticks and ticks against the glass. She cranks up the heat and directs it onto the windshield and lets the wipers loose for two crusty swipes. Maybe ought to get out and go at the glass with that scraper she bought when the ice storm hit last week. Inside the gas station, on the other side of fogged glass, sits the big gal with her big pink Midwestern face, pencil in her fist, solving her puzzles. Giving the girls a good long look when they came in. Hardly room to turn around in there between the counter and the racks, let alone steal any of her dusty old crap, The ladies’ is around the side of the building, girls, here’s the key, thin, cheap key attached by a short hoop of what looks like dried possum gut to a wooden souvenir backscratcher from Phoenix, Arizona, of all places, and blackened from handling, black grime under weirdly realistic fingernails, and that’s what you give people to take into your nasty-even-for-a-gas-station ladies’ room?
Two other vehicles are parked at the station, Caroline observes, neither here for gas, or else finished with gas and moved off to the side of the building, opposite to the bathroom side. One a low-squatting wagon with a driver’s door of a completely different color and the windshield blinded over in sleet; the other an old two-tone pickup like her papaw’s down in Georgia… Papaw forever headfirst into its open hood, Hand me the five-eighths now, Sweetpea…
Caroline tapping the wheel with her nails and looking for Audrey to appear in the yellow light again, give the big gal back her backscratcher and get her ass back to the car. The falling ice ticking away on one side of the windshield and hot air blowing on the other and the thin streams of water finding their way down the curve of glass and Come on, Audrey, Jesus… and suddenly Caroline goes cold all over, her heart jolting as if something live has bounded in front of her, and she looks again at the pickup truck. The windshield catches the yellow light of the station, the glass recently wipered and still too warm for the sleet to build its white shell as it has on the wagon.
And she looks again at the building, the large single window: the big gal sitting there as before, unquestionable owner of the sleeted-over wagon. All alone in there.
“Shit,” says Caroline, and she’s out of the car and moving fast through the sleet and she can hear them even before she rounds the corner,
“…there now, that’s better. See there, Bud? We’re all gonna be friends here.”
The one talking has got his hand on Audrey’s face, and Caroline registers in that first glance how dark the fingers look against her friend’s pale face, as if they’ve been dipped in paint, or oil—white hand but dark fingers—and how light her friend’s eyes are, even in that shadowed space. Audrey’s hair is a dark mess, tossed by some roughness, and the man has got a knee between her legs and has pinned one of her arms against the wall but her free hand hangs at her side, as if by some terrible gravity—has he broken her arm? The man’s face is scratched and bleeding. Both men wear cheap high-crowned caps with curved bills and meaningless logos. Jeans and canvas jackets. Leather workboots, as common as old tires. The door to the ladies’ hangs open, gapped, does not shut on its own, she knows, nor lock convincingly from the inside, and there’s the foul stink of that room but also the stink of beer and cigarettes coming off the two men. And all of this in the instant before they see her—before Audrey sees her and they see Audrey seeing her.
The one nearest to Caroline, the one standing back and watching, just has time to lock his eyes on what she’s holding up to him before the canister hisses its load into his face and he screams and flails backwards, clawing at his eyes—trips over his own boots and falls rolling on the concrete as if on fire. Misty discharge clouds the air, the intensely bitter smell and taste of pepper, and Caroline’s own eyes begin to burn. The other man—he is not a man, she sees, but hardly more than a boy, twenty if that, both of them—the boy lets go of Audrey to fling up his forearms, impressive reflexes, and the spray wets his sleeves—“Don’t you fucking mace me, cunt”—and he wheels and turns his back just as Caroline lets go another round. With her free hand she grabs Audrey by the coat sleeve and pulls her away from the door, away from the bitter haze, and Audrey in turn pulls at Caroline, but to no effect. Caroline isn’t going anywhere.
“What did you say?” she says. She holds the canister head-high, aimed, but he keeps his face buried in his arms, his back to her. She blinks and blinks, the cold night spangling with the burn of the pepper, but she doesn’t move.
“What did you say?” she says again.
The boy just standing there, hunchbacked over his own face. The other boy squirming on his back on the concrete, blubbering about being blinded, Jesus Christ, you fucking blinded me, the wooden backscratcher near his head, strange thing lying there, like a doll’s arm torn from its doll.
“I said don’t you fucking mace me, you fucking cunt bitch,” says the standing boy.
“Caroline, let’s go.” Audrey is pulling at her. Pulling at her.
“Why don’t you turn around and say that to my face, you slackjawed muppetfucker?”
“Put that shit down and I’ll do more than that.”