Jeremy knows who that is.
“Guy, we’ll have more of this video, more details on this story and interviews with the actual Five band members at six o’clock. For now, a GB Promotions spokesman says Stone Church will continue as planned through Sunday night.”
“Amazing video, just amazing,” says Guy.
“Cap?” asks the woman behind the counter.
Jeremy focuses on her and realizes what she’s asking. “I’ll wear it,” he answers, and then he breaks eye contact because that’s one way to stay invisible. But she’s back on her cellphone as soon as he has the bag in hand, and he walks out into the hot yellow sunlight of late afternoon and goes around to his truck. He drives away, slowly and unhurriedly, but he keeps watching all his mirrors for a flashing light.
Jeremy drives to the southeast, toward what he found yesterday afternoon when he left the Rest-A-While in search of a place to dig in. He found it when he followed a series of signs that said Houses For Sale and repeated underneath it was Casas para la venta. It is not quite four miles from the truck stop. It is on a main road past a residential area of middle-class homes with cactus gardens and red tile roofs, three different types to choose from. Many of the houses here are For Sale. Some appear to have been For Sale for a long time. It is past a stripmall with a drugstore and a Mexican takeout joint and a consignment shop and a nail parlor, but the grocery store and the video rental store are For Rent though their signs still hang in place over empty windows. It is the next turnoff on the right, within sight of the dying mall. It is built upon God’s own country, hard desert earth under a stark blue sky with cactus-stubbled foothills and gray mountains to the east. At the turnoff, there is a stand of mesquite trees and among them a rock wall with the words LaPaz Estates hammered into it with tarnished brass letters.
And beyond the turnoff and the trees and the wall are dusty streets with no names that lead to the empty driveways and bare garages of nine small houses built in the adobe style, three different types to choose from, all with red tile roofs. Beyond the nine houses, there are two more half-built and one hardly started. The streets wander a distance past wooden stakes that define the borders of their estates. Here and there are sacks of concrete and forgotten wheelbarrows and black garbage bags melting in the sun. Past the last estate where any work has been attempted, marked by piles of stones and brown cactus, the streets surrender to the desert, and that is the end of someone’s dead dream.
Dead it is. Jeremy steers toward his very own adobe-style piece of heaven, which stands back off the main road far enough to be careful. The For Sale signs are everywhere, though some have collapsed due to wind and fatigue. Open House, some of them proclaim. New Low Price, some of them plead. He has seen a coyote here this morning, trotting down the middle of his street.
No one is home in any of these houses. Jeremy figures it was a construction deal gone bad, or somebody ran out of money, or the bank stopped throwing away good cash until some of the existing LaPaz estates started selling. Whatever. Somebody’s loss, his place to dig in.
He has to go there now, and think. Figure things out. He is so close to Mexico he can smell the freedom in the breeze. He can smell the new beginnings, like the odor of onions frying in a pan. He pulls into the driveway, the ninth of nine, and he lets the truck idle as he gets out and pulls up the garage door, which normally would be opened by someone’s electronic garage door opener but that person is not coming here today and Jeremy has previously disengaged the latch.
Then he drives in and pulls the garage door shut again, and when he takes his bag of groceries into the kitchen he almost feels like calling out Honey, I’m home.
There is no kitchen yet, really. There is a white counter and some cupboards, you can tell this is supposed to be a kitchen, but there are no appliances. The new linoleum floor is protected from workmen’s dusty boots and spatters of paint by a bright blue tarp. The same sheet of blue in every room, protecting the carpets. The money must have run out suddenly, because the painting was never finished and several empty paint cans lie around.
There is something about this color that bothers him. There is something about it that makes him want to run away, and in the room where he sleeps he has taken up the blue tarp and gotten it out of there, so he can curl up on the thin sand-colored carpet with a pillow of clothes under his head and find some rest.
He thinks maybe he remembers it as the color of a body bag. He remembers seeing it on the roofs of New Orleans houses on TV. Or…maybe…something else…something…
He wants and needs and badly desires a nice powdered doughnut.
You need a car, says Gunny, whose face slides in across Jeremy’s shoulder.
It is hot in this house. The air is still, the sound of humanity absent.
A car, Gunny repeats, as if to a mentally-deficient child. Do you understand why?
Jeremy does. He’s been lucky so far, going back and forth to the truck stop. He hasn’t seen a police cruiser, and neither has one seen him. But the thing about digging in is, digging in can be a trap of your own making. He can’t get out on the highway to Mexico in his pickup truck. He can’t make it to freedom and lose himself in his future. So, yeah, he needs a car.
Gunny asks him, in that quiet and penetrating way that Gunny has, where Jeremy thinks he might find a car.
“A car dealership?” Jeremy asks, but he knows the correct answer.
Some place where cars are parked.
He takes his powdered doughnut and his bag of chips and a bottle of water into the room where he sleeps. Before he sits down in his corner he removes the .45 from his waistband and puts it on the floor at his side. Then he eats a little and drinks a little and thinks as he stares at the gun.
He is proficient with his rifle, but a pistol is a different animal. You have to be close. You can so easily miss with a pistol, unless you’re really close. He has always thought of a pistol as a defensive weapon, a rifle as offensive. That’s why he didn’t try to use his pistol on the drummer girl back in Sweetwater. Sure, he could’ve just driven up beside her and shot her, but what if she’d been quick enough to dodge a killing bullet? Then she’s got his face behind her eyes, and if she’s able to talk the police have his face too. And if somebody drives up before he can finish her off…wow, that’s messy. Well, they’ve got his face now—and how that happened he couldn’t figure out—but still, at the time he didn’t think he should risk a close encounter. Look what happened to that amateur at Stone Church. Two pistol shots, wasted.
Kind of an interesting thing, though, why somebody else would’ve wanted to take those fuckers out. Maybe he wasn’t the only one their lies had stirred up?
He can feel that Gunny has entered the room, and is standing right over there.
Jeremy eats and drinks and stares at the gun.
The rifle is a creature of dignity. To die by a long-range rifle shot is, really, a dignified death. It is the coming together of engineering, geometry, and God-given talent. But death by pistol is nasty and brutish, and way below his standards.
What he does is art.
But he knows what Gunny wants him to do.
“Do I have to kill an innocent person?” Jeremy asks, with powdered sugar on his chin.
Gunny tells him again that he needs a car.
Jeremy remembers a day when he had some downtime and he was connected through the Internet with Karen and Nick on her laptop. It was morning in Iraq and near midnight in Houston. He remembers that she had put on makeup for him, and how pretty her hair looked. He remembers that Nick had stared at him through the screen seven thousand six hundred and a few miles away and asked him one question: Daddy, when can you come home?