The Night Parade by Ronald Malfi
For Maddie and Hayden.
Big smiles, Little Spoons.
“Five seconds; and what’s happened in the wide world?”
—GEORGE SEFERIS, “Slowly You Spoke”
1
David Arlen’s daughter woke up ten miles outside Fredericksburg. She had begun to stir just as the lights of the city receded in the Oldsmobile’s rearview mirror, intermittently whining and sobbing in her sleep from the backseat. But now she sat up, almost too abruptly, and the image of her eclipsing the distant city lights in the rearview mirror caused David’s heart to jump. It was as if he’d forgotten she was back there.
“Where are we?” She sounded hoarse.
He raked a set of fingers down the left side of his face and neck, feeling the fresh stubble there. He wondered if he should grow a beard. Maybe dye his hair. “I’m not sure. Heading south right now.”
“I want my mom.”
He had no response for that. He wanted her, too.
“Where are we?” she insisted.
“Please,” he said, shaking his head and briefly closing his eyes.
“I want to sit up front with you,” she said.
“Not just yet.”
“Why?”
“Just sit back. Please. Try to go back to sleep.”
“I’m not tired anymore.”
“Please, Ellie,” he said.
She sat back, her silhouette sinking below the rearview mirror. The lights of Fredericksburg were gone now, obscured by black trees along the sloping road and the heavy drapery of night.
David glanced at the Oldsmobile’s dashboard clock. It was just after midnight. He tried to do the math and figure out how long he’d been awake, but found even the simplest brain work next to impossible. Two days? Longer? In his exhaustion, even his vision threatened mutiny: The sodium lamps that flanked the shoulder of the highway occasionally blurred into smeary arcs of colorless light.
For what seemed like the millionth time since they’d hit the road, he took mental inventory of the items he’d managed to squirrel away in the trunk: extra clothes, some food, approximately six hundred dollars in cash, some books and board games to keep Ellie’s mind off the whole thing. There was a handgun and two boxes of ammo back there, too, in a stolen pink suitcase. He’d never fired a gun in his life. When he had come across it in Burt Langstrom’s bedroom, he’d felt the world tilt slightly and time seemed to freeze. The weapon had seemed unreal. Until that moment, it had never occurred to him that he might need a weapon, a firearm. But there it had been, like a sign from God, and its mere presence was enough to drive home the gravity of their situation. He’d picked it up, surprised to find that much of it was made of plastic—he had always just assumed handguns were cast from iron or steel or something—and for some reason that made it seem all the more deadly. Quiet and unassuming, like a sleek black snake weaving through a flower bed. And for the first time he had wondered, Could I kill a person? If it comes down to it, could I do it? Could I point this thing at someone, pull the trigger, bring them down?
Now, gripping the steering wheel of the Olds with both hands, he thought of what was at stake and imagined that he could.
When he motored past a police cruiser tucked along a dirt passage between the trees just beyond the shoulder, he swore under his breath, then stared at the speedometer. He was cruising at just below seventy miles per hour. What was the speed limit on this particular stretch of highway? He racked his brain but couldn’t remember the last time he’d spotted a speed limit sign. Goddamn careless. His eyes flicked back up to the rearview mirror. Holding his breath, he waited to see if the cruiser would pull out onto the highway in pursuit. Any second, those headlights would blink on, growing in size as the cruiser drew closer until the rack lights came alive and doused the world in alternating blue and red flashers.
But the cop car never slid out onto the highway.
It wasn’t until a good ten minutes later that he allowed himself to relax. With any luck, they weren’t even looking for him yet.
“I’m hungry.”
Her voice startled him. He had assumed she had fallen back asleep. But she sounded clear, lucid.
“Can’t it wait?” he asked her.
“Wait for what?”
That was a good question. He had no answer for her. No plan. Not yet, anyway.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve got some food in the trunk. Let me pull over and I’ll get some out for you.”
“Food in the trunk,” she said. It wasn’t a question, though he could tell by her tone that she was marveling over the peculiarity of it all.
David’s eyes kept skirting to the shoulder of the road. With the exception of the police car, they hadn’t passed another vehicle in over fifteen minutes. Desolate. Nonetheless, he wondered if he’d draw more attention to himself parked along the shoulder rifling through his trunk than if he just went to a rest stop where they could blend in more easily. What if the cop had decided to follow him after all, and happened to drive up as he stood rifling through the Oldsmobile’s trunk? A stolen Oldsmobile.
Prior to tonight, and if he’d ever given the matter any serious consideration, he would have said that there were certain things you did when you were on the run: You headed out at night, avoided large cities while sticking to secondary roads, and, to paraphrase Chuck Berry, simply kept on motorvatin’ over the hill. But now that he was in the thick of it, he second-guessed each move, finding the flaws in every single decision, the weaknesses in every plan. It was all cracks in a dam. Heading out at night meant you had the cover of darkness beneath which you could travel . . . but it also meant there were less people on the roads, and fewer souls among which you could hide. You attracted eyes; those eyes watched you. That held true for the secondary roads, too; it unnerved him that he hadn’t seen any other vehicles for the past fifteen or twenty minutes or so. The odds that he would get pulled over out here were greatly increased. A bored cop might decide to pull him over for lack of anything better to do. For all he knew, the goddamn Olds might even have a taillight out. Had he cut through all the major cities, he could lose himself among the crowd.