Desperation Road(45)

“I didn’t mean to have a kid,” she said. She stared at Annalee who stood in front of the vending machines trying to decide.

He started to tell her that she shouldn’t say stuff like that but she rested her head back against the glass of the back window and continued.

“Can’t feed her. Can’t give her a place to sleep. I don’t even know when it happened. Somebody just popped it in me. I was sitting around one day feeling like shit and I started throwing up and kept on until I figured it out. Then I wanted to do something but it’d get night and I couldn’t bring myself to it the next day. Even sat in the clinic a couple of times. Sat there looking at some stupid magazine. Sweating. I’d sit there ’til they called me and I’d leave out. Then it’d get night again and I finally figured I’d keep it and see what happened.”

“Night always gets me,” he said. “Makes me do stuff I shouldn’t.”

“Something about it,” she agreed.

“You in some trouble?”

She nodded and watched the child.

“I’m gonna guess it’s big trouble,” he said.

“Is there some other kind?” she said and she turned and looked at him. Her eyes seemed to be shrinking back into her head. She knew that telephone conversations were being had about her right now.

“This isn’t your gun,” he said.

“No.”

There was a crack of lightning and then thunder and the men and women around the bikes put out their cigarettes and put on their helmets and jackets. The bikes fired up and roared and snapped and each woman found her man and sat behind him. Maben looked at Annalee and the child held a drink can against one ear and a candy bar against the other. A man riding alone pulled ahead and the others followed him, the roar growing with the acceleration and then dying away as the bikes moved down the ramp and away into the night. When the bikes were gone the girl walked back toward the truck but Maben called out for her to go and sit down at a picnic table. For a minute. I got to talk to the man.

“What you supposed to do when you can’t let nobody find you?” she asked and she tossed her cigarette onto the asphalt.

“That’s a good one,” he said.

“And what you supposed to do when you got somebody you love and you know if they find you they’re gonna take that somebody away with them?”

Russell shifted in his seat. Let out a breath. “That’s a better one,” he said.

Annalee sat on top of a wooden picnic table with her legs swinging over the edge. She ate the candy bar carefully as if she were wearing her best dress.

“She’d be better off anyhow.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yeah. I know it. Didn’t know it ’til now. But I know it. Two hours ago I had some work and we had a safe place to sleep. Even if it was only gonna be a few days. Didn’t know it then. If I knew it I didn’t say it to myself. But I know it now.”

Russell lit another cigarette off the one that was dying. A car pulled into the rest area and a small boy got out of the backseat and raced toward the restrooms and his father got out and ran after him, telling him to hold it hold it.

“Maybe if you told me what was going on I could figure out a way to help,” Russell said.

“Maybe Jesus will come down from His high horse and cook us supper.”

“Maybe.”

“But probably not.”

“But maybe.”

“I did something that anybody else would’ve done and it’s over and that’s that.”

“Would you do it again?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Then stop worrying about it.”

“You and me both know it ain’t like that.”

He unloaded the bullets from the chamber and he handed the pistol back to her. He put the bullets in his shirt pocket.

“The thing is you don’t know what I can do and what I can’t. Either I can help or I cannot. That’s all there is. But you’re not gonna find out like this. Don’t seem like you got a whole lot to lose.”

The girl finished her candy bar and she hopped off the table and walked toward the truck. She looked at her feet and placed one foot in front of the other as if she were balancing on a high wire. Maben turned and looked at Russell. He was scratching at his beard.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“About six blocks from where you stuck that thing in my ear.”

“I used to live in McComb.”

“I saw you mopping at the café. You must still live there.”

“We walked into town yesterday. Or the day before.”

“Walked?”

“Walked in. Ran out. Ain’t been back in years. Since long before her.”

“What’s your name?”

She leaned over and put the pistol in the duffel bag at her feet. “All I want you to do is drive us. If you don’t want to that’s fine. We’ll call it right here. But I’d appreciate it if you could take us on farther.”

Russell nodded. Annalee made it to the truck and Maben held her drink as she climbed over her mother and sat between them.

“I’m guilty of a lot of things, but leaving you and her out here ain’t going to be one of them,” he said and he cranked the truck. “I can go on a little farther.”