The Highway Kind(30)

Was this what he’d been checking in the saddlebag? A gift for a child? Then Kirwan squeezed the doll, felt the unyielding lump inside.

He turned it over, lifted the cloth flap of the poncho. Stitches ran up the back of the doll, thick ones, a darker color than the material. He tucked the flashlight under his arm again, pulled at the stitches until they were loose. The back of the doll came apart at the seam, revealing more tissue paper packed around a metal cigar tube. He unscrewed the top of the tube and pulled out a tightly rolled plastic bag. He poked a finger in, teased out part of the clear bag. Inside was a thick off-white powder, caked and compressed.

He pushed it back into the tube, screwed on the top. He put the tube in his pants pocket and tossed the doll out into the water.

He picked up the holstered gun, walked back up the slope to the Volvo, the road still empty in both directions. The yellow light blinked in the distance. The Volvo’s hazards clicked, insects flittering in the headlights. A breeze came through, moved the sugarcane on the other side of the road.

He opened the Volvo’s tailgate, pushed aside the sample boxes to get at the spare-tire compartment. He lifted the panel, pried up the spare, and put the tube and gun under it, then let the tire drop back into place. He closed the panel, shut the tailgate.

Back behind the wheel, he put away the flashlight, shut the glove box, gave a last look at the cell phone.

He reversed onto the road, swung a U-turn, headed back the way he’d come. He was calm inside, centered, for the first time that night. At the intersection, he turned the radio back on.

After a while, he began to feel sleepy again, a pleasant drifting. He looked at his watch. If he kept going, he could push through to New Smyrna by three thirty or so, find a motel, get five or six hours’ sleep before the meeting. It would be enough. Maybe he’d ask Lois out to dinner that night, divorce or no.

He had two free days after that. He could stay down there, figure out what exactly was in that tube, what it might be worth. There didn’t seem to be much of it, whatever it was. Maybe it was just a sample for some larger deal to be made later.

Rain began to spot the windshield, thick heavy drops. He turned on the wipers. They thumped slowly, and on their second arc, he saw that the chip in the windshield was gone. He touched a thumb to where it had been. Nothing there now, the glass unblemished. One less thing to take care of, at least.

He was humming along to the music by the time he reached the on-ramp for 95. What had happened had happened. There was no going back. Not now, not ever. The road and the night were his.





WHAT YOU WERE FIGHTING FOR


by James Sallis

I WAS TEN the year he showed up in Waycross. It was uncommonly dry that year, I remember, even for us, no rain for weeks, grass gone brown and crisp as bacon, birds gathering at shallow pools of water out back of the garage where Mister Lonnie, a trustee from the jail, washed cars. And where he let me help, all the while talking about growing up in the shacks down in Niggertown, bringing up four kids on what he made doing whatever piecemeal work he could find, rabbit stew and fried squirrel back when he was a kid himself.

I’d gone round front to fetch some rags we’d left drying on the waste bin out there and saw him pull in. Cars like that—provided you knew what to look for, and I knew, even then—didn’t show up in those parts. Some rare soul had taken Mr. Whitebread’s sweet-tempered tabby and turned it to mountain lion. The driver got out. He left the door open, engine not so much idling as taking deep, slow breaths, and stood in the shadow of the water tower looking around.

I grew up in the shade of that tower myself. There wasn’t any water in it anymore, not for a long time, it was as baked and broiled as the desert that stretched all around us. A few painted-on letters, an A, part of a Y, an R, remained of the town’s name.

I could see Daddy inside, in the window over the workbench. Didn’t take long before the door screeched in its frame and he came out. “Help you?” Daddy said. The two of them shook hands.

The man glanced my way and smiled.

“You get on back to your business, boy,” Daddy told me. I walked around the side of the garage to where I wouldn’t be seen.

“She’s not handling or sounding dead on. And the timing’s a hair off. Think you could have a look?”

“Glad to. Strictly cash and carry, though. That a problem?”

“Never.”

“I’ll open the bay, you pull ’er in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Garrulous as ever, I see.”

I went on around back, wondering about that last remark. Not too long after, Mister Lonnie finished up and headed home to his cell. They never locked it, and he had it all comfy in there, a bedspread from Woolworth’s, pictures torn from magazines on the wall. You live in a box, he said, it might as well be a nice box. I went inside to the office, which was really just a corner with cinder blocks stacked up to make a wall along one side. Daddy’s desk looked like it had been used for artillery practice. The chair did its best to throw you every time you shifted in it.

I was supposed to be studying but what I was doing was reading a book called The Killer Inside Me for the third or fourth time. I’d snitched it out of a car Daddy worked on, where it had slipped down between the seats.

Everyone assumed I’d follow in my father’s footsteps, work at the tire factory, maybe, or with luck and a long stubborn climb uphill become, like he had, a mechanic. No one called kids special back in those days. We got called lots of things, but special wasn’t among them. This was before I found out why normal things were so hard for me, why I always had to push when others didn’t.