Future Home of the Living God(80)

I’ve turned to pudding. I’m so groggy and astonished that a couple of miles go by before I speak. I am pretty sure I’m in a dream, and I don’t want to wake from riding in this (very nice, where’d he get this?) car with a cushy interior. I don’t want to wake from the comfort of the heated leather seat, the purring engine, the world rushing by. Only the fact that Phil is driving without headlights forces me to say something.

“Uh, Phil. Headlights?”

“I know, honey. But if I was using my headlights they’d know where I was right away and could track us from the air.”

There is a half-moon, enough vague radiance to make out the road. Driving without lights we seem to float. The world to either side of the highway is black space, gray foam, the trees loom, then a building with shining black windows, then the reflective pillars of gas pumps. We turn in. Phil bumps over the curb, into the woods behind the Superpumper, pulling as far as possible into the brush. We sit in the car as the engine ticks down and cools. We are together in the night. I wake up.

“You turned me in.”

In answer, he takes off his flannel shirt, pulls his T-shirt over his head.

“Feel.”

I put my hands on his shoulders, down his back, catch my fingertips on the lumps and skin knots and terrain of scabs and scars. He puts my hand to the side of his cheek. I touch his face and hair—it is like a ball of twine has been glued in random lengths onto his scalp, underneath his hair. His voice rasps out.

“I’m like that all over, and it’s worse inside. I don’t even remember giving them your name. I thought I was a hero, but I’m not.”

He put his shirts back on, gets out, and piles brush over the back of the car. Covers the reflective taillights. I pull a blanket from the backseat and huddle underneath. When he gets back in, closing the door gently, he says he thinks we should wait in the car and make sure they don’t try breaking into the Superpumper.

“How do you know they’re coming?” I ask.

“I was with them,” he says briefly.

I mull that over. So, I’m sitting with one of Mother’s helpers. And it is my angel, Phil, who still smells the way he used to, like inevitability and ironed shirts. Though where would he get the chance to iron a shirt? Maybe he just smells slightly scorched. I can’t think clearly. It is powerful magic to be sitting next to Phil, who has survived, though he is covered with welts and scars. He is the father of my baby and I start to cry, silently, my face in my hands, the tears popping out and rolling down my fingers.

No I don’t. I sit in the heated car seat, dry-eyed, outraged. Because I was right about the reason Grandma told me her story. It was indeed a warning.

Phil. Another angel of deception. Phil. Fucking angel of wrong.

“So, Phil, are we just waiting so you can get credit for turning me in? Are you going to drag me out when they get here? Maybe you got scratched up by a flock of chickens. How do I know you’re for real?”

There’s no answer for an uncomfortable piece of time. I can feel that Phil is struggling either with my grasp of the truth or my lack of gratitude.

“I guess we wait,” he says at last.

“I guess I don’t have a choice.”

So we wait, and after a while I fall asleep. And after still more while, it is nearly morning. Phil says Eddy has opened the front door. He helps me climb stiffly out of the car and we make our way to the back of the gas station, where Eddy lets us into the storage room.

“I’m going to start things going like usual,” he says. “I got a buzzer on the door, extra loud, so you’ll hear when somebody comes in. It’s usually pretty quiet this time of day.”

He goes away and we lock the steel door from the inside.

“So can we talk?” says Phil.

“Talk your head off.”

I pull together another of my makeshift nests, this time out of a pile of tarps, back-stock sweatshirts, and Eddy’s jackets. I curl up, still swimming with exhaustion and tension, and my thoughts drift while I listen to Phil explain how he was caught, where he was taken, what they did, what he said or didn’t say. I tune in when he tells me that after he was released, he went back to my house, our house. The first time, he went back, got the guns, and brought them to Eddy. The second time, he went back because he remembered my stash of food and, to some small extent, what I’d hidden. In the cupboards, he thought. If there was liquor he could use it for trade. But this time the house wasn’t empty.

“There was a woman sleeping on the couch,” says Phil. “I knew her. Her name was Bernice and she was good at taking women into custody.”

“She’s the one who picked me up,” I say. “She’s the one who shot my roommate’s boyfriend.”

Phil peers at me.

“She was dead drunk,” he says.

I sneak a look at him. Bernice must have found a few bottles from the stash. Phil goes on talking.

“A bottle of Jameson was on the end table, drained, with one of your Songmaker grandmother’s fancy highball glasses, tipped over. Another empty bottle was at the foot of that overstuffed chaise. A carton of Marlboros was torn open beside and she’d piled her butts in your grandmother’s favorite ashtray, that heavy one you told me was made of her wedding crystal.”

“The nerve,” I say. “But you have a good memory.”