The Highway Kind(50)
“Think we should check on Dale?” Lester asked again.
They pulled over to the side of the Gunwaleford Road and Charlie handed Lester the oval key and he got out and opened up the trunk. Dale was lying in there amid the spare tire and some clutter. He was tied up with a hankie loosened at his mouth like a gag that no one had bothered to tighten. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he appeared to be dead.
“Oh shit, Charlie,” Lester just kept saying over and over.
Charlie got out and stood next to Lester, staring into the trunk but not saying a thing as Lester started stammering the way he always did when he got excited or scared.
After a while Charlie closed the trunk and got back in. Lester was still standing outside carrying on about Dale’s not breathing until finally Charlie yelled for him to get the fuck back in the car. Once Lester got in, Charlie pulled out slowly and carefully began driving toward Whipperwill.
Charlie had been driving drunk for over a decade without getting so much as a scratch on the car’s paint job. He had a survival instinct that made him drive more carefully the drunker he became. An innate ability to always land on his feet in whatever situation. As a kid he had started literally playing with fire and at one point nearly burned down his junior high school, but even then he was able to squeak out without actually getting caught. Then, a few years later, he figured out how to turn his pyromania into an asset, becoming the youngest guy at the Tuscumbia Volunteer Fire Department and exhibiting a fearlessness that made him a hero and earned him a grudging respect from everyone on the civil-service boards of the two-county area.
Once, when he was in his early twenties, Charlie got them to lower him down from a fire ladder on a rope into the middle of the inferno that totally destroyed a local car dealership, Chris Blake Pontiac. Just Charlie and the fire hose amid the smoke, heat, and chaos. He fought his way from the middle of hell to the sidewalk outside. The building collapsed anyway, only moments later, in fact, but Charlie’s reputation was made as a fearless motherfucker who could be counted on to do whatever crazy shit that was asked and not expect anything in return but maybe a blind eye turned from the way he’d chosen to live his life. He usually didn’t hurt anybody, or at least not in a way that would call for paperwork and questions being asked, so Charlie was all right.
Charlie was able to parlay his good graces with the local law enforcement into a sweet job running errands, mostly carrying beer and money, for the various bootleggers that were so prominent in the area. The Tennessee Valley was all dry back in those days. To buy legal beer you had to drive up to the Tennessee state line, and to get liquor you had to drive an hour each way to Savannah, Tennessee, or Minor Hill. This opened the doors for a slew of bootleggers to sell beer and liquor, at a greatly inflated price, to the general populace. Enough palms were greased with enough cash for the cops to not ask questions and as long as nothing happened that brought undo attention to the situation or required extra paperwork for the cops, no one was arrested, much less prosecuted or convicted.
Lester never finished school or got around to taking his GED but he could roll a perfect joint with one hand and never questioned Charlie’s authority over him. If Charlie was crazy, Lester was a little bit crazier. Charlie’s impulses seemed to form a straight line between where he was and where he wanted to be whereas Lester’s seemed to be based on whatever whim he thought of at any given time, sometimes likely to be inspired by something he saw in a movie or on TV. It was Charlie who first suggested robbing the Zippy Mart where Dale worked. Lester didn’t have a job or any money of his own and Charlie thought it’d be nice for Lester to pull a little more weight for once. It was Lester who thought it would be a better idea if they tied Dale up and put him in the trunk. They would take him out to Whipperwill and leave him there with enough of the take in his pocket that he wouldn’t feel compelled to turn them in.
When they pulled up to the store, only Dale’s car was in the parking lot. They could see him standing behind the counter, leaning on the cigarette rack and watching something on the TV. Lester began filling up Jimmy Ray’s tank and Charlie went inside. By the time Lester went in, Charlie was holding a bag full of money. He and Dale were both laughing about something. There was way more money than expected in the register since the day-shift lady had had a doctor’s appointment and had to leave early without doing the deposit. Dale had already been there since midafternoon and was bored and itchy so he was kinda glad to see them.
It was surprisingly easy for Charlie to talk Dale into letting them tie him up and put him in the trunk. Charlie promised to cut him in on the take and said they’d make it look convincing. Boys like Dale and Lester looked up to guys like Charlie.
They took the money, some smokes, a tank of gas, and some beef jerky and left with the lights still on and door unlocked. The Zippy Mart was out past Barton, near the Mississippi line, and probably one of the most remote convenience stores in the state. Dale had been begging his boss to have a second person work the late shift with him for ages but the asshole was too cheap to do so. A previous employee of the late shift had been shot in the head. They’d found him tied up in the office the next morning, blood all over the place. It was in all of the papers. The guy that did it was on death row but that didn’t bring anybody back. Dale figured that getting into Charlie’s trunk would be a way for him to pick up a little extra dough and maybe it would teach his boss a lesson.