Blacktop Wasteland(75)

“No, you don’t understand. We had the van and then him and some fella he had with him turned on me and my brother. He shot at us and took off with the van,” Ronnie said. There was a heavy quietness that carried a weight through the cellular network. It seemed to make the phone cumbersome.

“Where you at, boy?” Lazy said. He spoke with a deep deliberate articulation.

“Me? I’m about forty-five minutes from my place. He left one of the vehicles we used behind. I guess that was lucky for us,” Ronnie said. A line of cars passed him like he was standing still. He checked the speedometer. He was doing 70. The van was rattling like a washing machine full of bricks.

“Alright. You get to your place, you stay put. We gonna come out there. See if we can figure out where this old boy done run off to,” Lazy said.

The line went dead.

“Why’d you tell them we were going home?” Reggie said.

“To buy us some time.”

“We gotta go home eventually.”

“No, we don’t. We going to see your girlfriend out at Wonderland. I got a guy who can sell this shit, I just can’t run up on him without calling first. We just need a few more hours,” Ronnie said.

“She don’t particularly care for you,” Reggie said.

“I don’t give a fuck. As long as she don’t eat me, we be alright,” Ronnie said.



* * *



Lazy put the phone down on his desk. Billy finished with a customer in the front of the store, then walked into the back office.

“Rock and Roll says that boy Beauregard took off with the truck,” Lazy said.

“How you want to handle this?” Billy asked.

Lazy pulled out a pipe and filled it with a pungent wad of apple-flavored tobacco. “Call the boys you got watching they places. When Ronnie and his brother show up, bring ’em back here. Get Beauregard’s people too. If he did run off with the van, he gonna try to warn his wife. We get her back here, he’ll bring us the van. If he got it,” Lazy said.

“If he got it? “Billy said.

Lazy lit his pipe and took a deep drag. “He might done run off with it. But he struck me as smarter than that. He also might be lying face down in a ditch and that Sessions boy might have it. Either way, we gonna figure it out. We might have to roast a few marshmallows over them, but we’ll figure it out,” Lazy said as he exhaled a bluish plume of smoke.





TWENTY-SEVEN



Beauregard pulled into the rest stop with the Jeep hidden inside a cloud.

Steam was pouring from under the hood and enveloping the entire vehicle. He had just crossed the state line back into Virginia. The clock on the radio said it was nine in the morning. The needle on the temperature gauge was so far in the red, it needed to file for bankruptcy. Beauregard parked the Jeep and killed the engine. He checked the rearview mirror before he got out of the car. The cramped single-wide he’d broken into had a surprisingly well-stocked medicine cabinet. Large and small bandages, peroxide, rubbing alcohol and some aspirin. The long-sleeve black shirt he had taken was too big for him and the pants were too long, but they would do for now. The Jeep had been a gamble from the start. A rust-covered relic with a severe oil leak and two bald tires in the front. It looked like a leftover prop from some apocalyptic movie.

Still, it had made it all the way to Sussex before it started giving up the ghost. Beauregard got out and popped the hood. More steam swirled around his head. The sickeningly sweet smell of antifreeze filled his nose. Beauregard waved away the steam. On the side of the radiator, he saw a plume of steam coming from a pin-sized hole. Beauregard looked around the rest stop. It was one of the larger ones on the interstate. A line of picnic benches sat under some huge oak trees. A brick building housed the bathrooms, snack machines and an information desk. Beauregard headed for the picnic tables.

The first three were bare. Nothing on the tables and nothing on the ground under them. It was just his luck to pull up to a rest stop with a fastidious cleaning crew. The fourth table was occupied by an Asian family eating their breakfast. Beauregard tried to put on a smile when he approached them.

“Excuse me.”

The father appraised him with a wary stare.

“I hate to bother you, but do you folks happen to have some pepper?”

The father conferred with the mother silently. The looks they exchanged seemed to acknowledge that pepper was not a deadly weapon that could be used against them. The two children, a boy and a girl, both under ten, reached into their fast food bags and pulled out several pepper packets. The mother gathered them up and handed them to Beauregard.

“Are you eating breakfast too?” the little girl asked.

Beauregard smiled. “No, my car is running hot because the radiator is leaking. Some pepper will fix the hole for a little while,” he said. She nodded her head as if she discussed emergency car repair every day.

“What happened to your face?” the boy asked. His mother shushed him.

“An accident,” Beauregard said. He stuffed the pepper packets in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said. He headed back to the Jeep. Halfway there he stopped and turned around. “Say, you folks don’t have a phone, do you?”



* * *



Kia was pouring milk for Darren’s cereal when she heard the knocking at the door. Javon was still in bed. He’d been up all night drawing while she and Darren had watched a marathon of animated movies. She finished pouring the milk and slid Darren his bowl.