“Nice work.” Dana flicks the cigarette into the lot.
He tweaks some wires and the robot starts lurching in Dana’s direction. It squeaks and sighs. A suction cup slips forward. It’s working! She can’t believe it. She stands up and begins to applaud. She feels proud of her brother for building something. For finding a way to escape his circumstances.
The robot takes one full step before toppling to the ground. The eyes pop off and slide under a car. The head gets dented. Pinky rights it and adjusts the wires, but he can’t bring it back to life. Dana stops clapping. She sits down on the sidewalk.
He carries the robot over to her. “Do you want to hold it?”
“Sure.” She holds it away from herself. It’s surprisingly light.
“On TV people build robots that can talk.” Pinky licks his lips.
“It probably takes a lot of practice,” she says.
An old woman with flame-red hair shuffles past and disappears into a motel room. Above them Dana hears slamming doors.
“I don’t want to leave,” Pinky says. “I want to stay here and keep practicing.”
“You want to stay in Galesburg?”
Pinky tells her that whenever they leave a place, he worries they won’t make it to the next town. He worries the car will break down and no one will give them a ride and they’ll starve to death or get heatstroke or something equally horrible. He’s breathless. His eyes are glassy. She pictures his rabbit heart pulsing under his ribs. Probably leaving him in Galesburg would be the best thing for him, though she knows she could never do such a thing. She was the one who took him away from the farm and now she has to live with the consequences.
She gives the robot back to him. She doesn’t tell him that if they die, it won’t be from starving to death in their car. Instead she says everything is going to be fine, just like she used to in Elijah. No one is going to die. Soon he’ll have all the time in the world to build a new robot.
“Does this one have a name?” she asks.
“Donald.” He squeezes the robot’s metal stomach and asks Dana what she thought their father was building in the barn.
Dana shrugs. She’s never given much thought to what he was doing. She just remembers looking out her window and seeing him trudge into the mouth of the barn at dawn and not emerging until after dark. His skin would be caked in dust, straw caught in his hair. But mainly she had been preoccupied with figuring out how to live her own life, with how to spend her time. Dana wonders if her father is still working on his project in the barn, whatever it was. She imagines going back to Elijah one day and finding him a shrunken old man, and feels an ache shoot through her chest.
“I snuck in there once and watched him.” Pinky describes pliers and cords and strips of metal. He talks about smelling smoke and seeing tiny silver sparks. “I think he was building a robot. I think that’s what he wanted to do.”
Dana looks at her brother and feels woozy. She never should have taken him along. It was a game at first, but now it’s something much more serious and he is becoming an attachment she doesn’t need.
“You know what they say in the movies?” she asks him.
“What?”
“They say you have to be cool.” She can see a man in a ponytail delivering the line, but can’t remember which movie it’s from.
“Okay.” He’s staring at the ground. She can tell she’s not getting through.
“Say it to me.”
He keeps hugging the robot. In his arms it looks like a heap of trash. It’s only recently occurred to Dana that some people might call what she did — taking her brother away from their parents — kidnapping.
“Be cool,” he tells her without looking up.
“You got it,” she says.
4.
Dana was questioned by the police only once. It didn’t have anything to do with the Gorillas. Rather, she was a witness to a hit-and-run. This was two months ago, in Jefferson City. She had just walked out of a bank the Gorillas were casing and was waiting to cross the street. A car ran a red light and struck a girl on a bicycle. The girl was dead by the time the ambulance came. Dana could remember the twisted handlebars and the crushed bell. She could remember the peculiar angle of the girl’s torso and her open eyes. Her lips were parted. Her teeth were straight and white. She was still wearing her helmet. She looked like a life-size doll someone had left in the street. Pedestrians gathered. The police were called. Dana tried to slip away, but someone identified her as a witness and she was taken down to the station. She got to ride up front with the officer. She wondered what Cora or Jackie would think if they saw her, if they would think she had turned on them.
At the station, the officer brought her a cup of coffee. He was handsome, with his broad shoulders and gelled hair. So this is the lair of the enemy, Dana thought as they settled into an interrogation room. She held the warm foam cup with both hands. If only this officer knew what she had done, what she was going to do, she would not be answering questions over coffee. There would be handcuffs and threats. She figured that one day he would see her face on the news and feel like a dolt.
He asked her the usual questions: what she’d seen, if the light had been red, if she’d gotten a look at the driver, if she remembered the license plate. She answered honestly. She hadn’t seen anything but the collision itself, hadn’t taken in anything but the shock of the crash. She didn’t mention that she hadn’t been paying closer attention because she’d been busy imprinting the interior of the bank onto her brain.
“Do you need someone to identify the body?” Dana asked. She surprised herself with the question.
“You knew her?” The office frowned. He pulled in his chin and a little roll of fat appeared.
He had mentioned the girl was a college student. Dana muttered something about being classmates and seeing her around campus. She didn’t know what had come over her. She had never seen a dead body before and up until then, that was A-okay. But she had been gripped by an urge she could not recognize or understand, only follow.
“Her parents are coming in from Chicago,” the officer said. “We could save them the grief.”
Dana sighed. Didn’t he know there was no saving anyone any grief?
They took an elevator down to the morgue and passed through a cool, shadowed hallway. They stopped in front of a dark window. Dana could hear music coming through the glass. It was faint. A Michael Jackson song. For a moment, she imagined the medical examiner moonwalking around the autopsy room. The officer asked if she was ready. She nodded. A light came on.
The girl was lying on a coroner’s table. She was naked, which alarmed Dana. It didn’t seem right for her to be uncovered; someone had been careless. Her breasts were small and her knees seemed too big for her body. Her eyes were closed. Her hair looked wet and sleek. The blood had been cleaned away. Dana wondered where her bicycle helmet was. She couldn’t believe this was the same girl she’d seen sprawled out on the street. It looked like her body had been replaced by a fake. How could these parents from Chicago identify their daughter with any kind of certainty? Maybe that was what happened when you died, Dana thought. Your real body went one place and a replica was provided for the rituals. And if that were true, where did the real bodies go? Someplace nice? Probably not.
“So is it her?” the officer said.
“What?” Dana turned from the window.
“Is she your classmate? Do you know her name?”
“It’s not her,” Dana said.
“What do you mean it’s not her?” The officer frowned again. He was getting less attractive by the minute.
“I made a mistake,” she said.
“Who makes that kind of mistake?” For the first time she noticed the gun holstered to his hip.