Road to Paradise (32 page)

It took us
two hours and five minutes
to make the 33-mile journey to Interior. The rain had stopped, and the sun was setting behind the wet rocky Badlands, which were now behind us, too. The town of Interior was a gas station, closed, a produce stand, closed, a bar, open, and a mini-mart, closed. The few dilapidated trailers were peppered right on the sagebrush. We saw Floyd’s yellow trailer with the red roof right away. It was hard to miss. Candy made us wait in the car while she walked up the rickety steps and knocked on the door. With her gamine legs, slender white arms, and spiky hair, she looked small, so vulnerable standing by the metal door, knocking with one hand, holding on to the rusted railing with the other.

No one answered. She came back to the car and leaned in through my window. Her eyes were wandering. He wasn’t home, Candy said, like a truism. What did we do now?

Nothing to do, Gina announced. “Let’s go to Rapid City, rest a bit, and come back tomorrow.”

Candy shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

“We do,” I said, touching her hand, clutching my driver door.

“No.” She shook her head vehemently. “You don’t. This money is my life. Without it all the plans I’ve made are ruined. I can’t leave until I get my money. Everything I’ve worked for and planned for is with Floyd. I’m not going anywhere till I see him.”

“What about Jessica in Reno?” I said, beseechingly, cajolingly.

“She’s got a few bucks,” she cried, “but Floyd’s got twenty grand! You see the difference?”

“I do, I do. He could’ve gone on vacation.” I didn’t add,
with
your money
.

“There’s nothing to do around here,” said Gina. “If he’s not home, where is he? We know he’s not at work.”

“Maybe he found another job,” I said.

“Yes. Or,” said Gina, “he could be in Rapid City himself. It’s Friday evening, after all.”

“Saturday,” I corrected.

“Even better. He’s out clubbing. He’s a young guy? Clubbing it up.”

“Saturday night, clubbing it up before church on Sunday?” Candy was dubious.

“What’s the difference?”

Candy waved her off.

“Gina’s right about one thing, Cand,” I said. “We could wait all night.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. Wait all night.”

“No!” Gina exclaimed. “I’m not sleeping another night in the car.”

“You hardly slept last night, girlfriend,” said Candy. “You were in the Argosy with me.”

“I’m not staying all night in the middle of nowhere!”

I hated to admit it, but Gina was right. This
was
in the middle of nowhere. If I had black visions in a full parking lot in Sioux City, think what might happen here, on the edge of the Badlands, with only grassland in the other three directions, and not a light in sight, nothing but the gas station and trailers with their rusted railings. And because I’m not that kind of girl, I didn’t want to point out the obvious: that a person who would live in this kind of trailer would hardly be the type who had made twenty thousand dollars for himself, and was keeping another twenty thousand dollars safe for a friend.

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Candy, “until I speak to Floyd.” She turned away from the car. “Go if you want. Go.”

I exchanged a look with Gina, who shrugged. “Great. Let’s go.”

“Something tells me the girl don’t mean it,” I said, turning off my engine and heaving a childish sigh of pained distress.

One thing about sitting on the hood of your car while waiting for a stranger to return to his trailer to give you back the money he owes you is this: it’s scary in Interior. I thought I’d feel safer with no trucks speeding by, but the town was so isolated and the Badlands so ominous, just shadows now that the sun had gone. As the last purple light faded from the sky, an eerie quiet settled on the land, and I just knew that at the moment when the sky finally shaded from violet to black, there would be neither sight nor sound and I would long for the din of a thousand trucks hurtling along the Interstate. I
really
wanted Floyd to come home before night fell.

I asked Candy to put on a pair of jeans. With the Horseshoe Bar right next door, I didn’t feel safe with her pale bare legs stretching out on the hood, next to me. The bar was on mute, too, as if there were furtive goings-on inside. The road, U.S. 44, stretched straight through the grassland to Rapid City. Rapid City, where there would be lights, people laughing and joking, eating. I jumped off the hood and leaned against the car. It had been a long time since Valentine, where we’d eaten real food, the sticky toffee donut at Wall Drug not counting. Funny how you could go without food for so long, and then suddenly be famished, ravenous, thinking about burgers and fries, onion rings, and pickles dripping vinegar into coleslaw. I wished I were back home, on my little couch, getting ready for a quiet evening of TV, a little “Jeopardy”, and “Dallas”, and Emma in the kitchen asking if I wanted lemon with my tea. That’s what I hankered for.

Gina didn’t seem to feel the same way I did about Interior. She
was sitting on the hood of the car, next to Candy, humming to the radio. It was playing quietly; loud seemed obnoxious here.

I got back into the car and drummed the wheel, watching Gina and Candy’s backs and butts against my window. They were chatting. How long had we waited? Only an hour, it turned out. Insufferable.

Gina and Candy suddenly announced they were going to the Horseshoe to get some food. I shook my head vehemently, bounding out of the car.

“But there’ll be food.”

“Let’s wait.”

“But we’re hungry
now
,” whined Gina.

“I’m not going into that bar.” I propped on the hood, faking casualness.

“Why not?”

“You figure it out,” I replied. What a stupid conversation. “Three girls in the middle of nowhere, going inside a bar full of drinking men who live in a place like Interior? Are you out of your mind? How do you think you’ll protect yourself there?”

“Why would we need to?” said Candy.

“Candy, you
are
out of your mind,” I said. “They’ll assault you, then kill you and throw your body in the brush over there, mine too. We won’t be found for a thousand years, not even a thought of us will remain in anyone’s head.”

“Fine, Drama Queen, stay,” said Gina, complacently unconcerned. “We’ll go. We’ll be right back. We’ll bring you something.”

I started to say, okay, do whatever you want. But I stopped. I hopped off the hood, very roughly, I almost fell. I slammed shut the open car door; the sound echoed in the prairie. “No, Gina.” I was adamant. “We either go to Rapid City, or we stay here. We’re not going inside that place.”

“You don’t have to.”

“And
you
won’t. I don’t know how to spell it out any clearer, how I can be more plain. You can’t go in there, because if you do and something happens, there’s only me out here. When they’ve
finished with you they’ll come for me, and I won’t be able to do a single thing to help either you, or myself. Now do you get it?”

That stopped Gina in her tracks. “Okay, okay. Take it easy.” She motioned to Candy. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Gina, Candy, if you two go,” I said, left with no choice, “I will get into my car and leave you. I will not stay here another minute. Now, decide what you want to do.”

Gina turned. “Don’t threaten us, Shelby.”

“I’m not threatening you. You’re not my child. I can’t tell you what to do. But this is my car, and my life, and I am going to get into my car and drive the fuck away if you set one foot in there.”

Candy diffused the situation; stepped away from Gina, toward me. “She’s right, Gina,” she said. “Let’s not be foolish.” She sprung back on the hood and lifted her hands up to the sky. “
From the
deep water, I cry to you
,” she intoned. “
Hear my prayer
.”

To escape the mugginess of my own resentment, I moved a few feet away from them, leaned against a wooden post, listening for cars on the road, milling, kicking up dust. Why couldn’t Gina see the truth of things without my having to point it out so forcefully?

Seems I couldn’t see the truth of things myself too well, either.

I cried out to God with my voice
, sang Candy.
And he gave ear to
me
. She lifted her hands again.
My hand was stretched out in the
night without ceasing. I complained and my spirit was overwhelmed. I
remembered God and was troubled. I am so troubled I can’t spea0k
…

She turned to me. “I know you’re hungry and you want to go, Shelby. Honest, you can go. I won’t be upset. But I can’t go. There’s no other time for me. There is Floyd and my money, or my life is over.”

Reaching into her hobo bag, she pulled out a postcard. It was getting hard to see, but it was a picture of a band of green light over a night sky. “A postcard!” said Gina. “Excellent.”

“It’s a postcard from Paradise,” said Candy. “A few years ago, Paradise, which
is not
near the North Pole, got Northern lights streaking across the sky. Apparently a unique phenomenon in that part of the world. Hence the postcard.”

“So you’re going to Paradise,” I said slowly, “to catch some Northern lights?”

“Foolish,” said Candy. “Turn the postcard over.”

On the back of the card, beside the address, were two words in sloppy teenage print.

Mike died
.

That’s what it said, and that’s all it said. Gina and I twisted our mouths, glanced at each other, squinted our eyes. “Is this
your
Mike?” I finally asked.

She nodded. “Let me tell you a story of three boys,” said Candy. Floyd was nowhere in sight. Not a single car had passed through Interior in an hour. “Three boys went out partying and drinking on a Saturday night.”

“Much like tonight.”

“No, not at all like tonight. On this particular Saturday night, the three boys were joyriding, and there is no joy tonight. One of them was a security officer at a local bank, one of them had a gun, one of them was fifteen years old. They were playing around, but they’d been drinking, and driving; the gun was playfully pointed, they hit a bump, the gun went off. No one meant for it to go off, but it did just the same, and hit one of the boys in the neck. They stopped the car, the bleeding boy fell out onto the sidewalk.” Candy was spinning the postcard in her hands. “You know neck wounds.”

“We don’t know neck wounds,” I said quietly. We were all leaning against the hot Mustang.

“There’s a
lot
of blood. It looked pretty hopeless. And the boy who shot him was so distressed, so horrified at what he’d done, that he turned the gun on himself.”

Gasping, we said nothing.

“The wounded boy on the sidewalk,” said Candy, “lived. Got a scar in his neck. Will talk funny for the rest of his life, but lived. The fifteen-year-old wasn’t harmed.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “The boy who turned the gun on himself was your Mike?”

“The boy who turned the gun on himself was my Mike.”

“And his friend?”

“They weren’t friends. They were brothers. All three of them.”

We were quiet for a long while. The last purple streaks on the western horizon darkened finally to black while we struggled to find something to say.

“Are you going to the funeral?” asked Gina. “Because you’re taking your time, if you are.”

“I’m not going to the funeral,” replied Candy. “Mike’s parents would have me arrested if I ever came near them.”

“They hate you?”

“Like the plague. They thought he was too good for the likes of me.”

You were trouble, I wanted to say. You are trouble.

“Well, if he’s dead, and they don’t want to see you, why are you risking your life going to Paradise?”

“Because Mike was the father of my baby girl.”

“You have a
baby
?” gasped Gina. “But you’re only seventeen!”

“What, not old enough?” Candy said ruefully, pulling a small envelope from her Mary Poppins bag and handing it to us.

Plenty old, I thought, old like a wizened woman. But still a child, too. I turned on the dashboard light, to see the small card, written in the neat scrawl of a child.

“I had her five years ago when I was almost thirteen,” Candy said, taking the card from my hands. “That was the whole problem. I got to my mom’s, met Erv, met Mike, and got pregnant straight out of the gate, so to speak. Wham. Before anything else. So, what could I do? I had the baby, and she lived with him. I visited her all the time, but then they moved.” Candy spat on the ground. “She was two. They took her, took her deliberately away from me, pretending it was for work or some shit, and moved to that
god-forsaken hole in the ground, Paradise. Mike didn’t want to go, but what could he do? He was just a kid himself. He hated them for it, hated that place like I can’t tell you. Whenever I talked to him, he’d tell me he was counting the days until he was out of school and could get a job, move away. He said it was like prison, like hell on earth.” Candy made a stricken noise. “Mike was the only decent one in that whole family. We were both saving money so we could take our baby and be together. But now that he’s dead, I’ll be damned before I leave her another day with those blood-sucking sons of bitches.”