The Haters (13 page)

But the Jeep also pulled over. It glided into the shoulder in front of us and came to a stop, too, about a hundred feet away.

Its brake lights winked out.

We sat in silence and stared at it.

It also just sat there in silence.

We were somewhere in Alabama at that point.

Corey was the first to speak.

COREY: so

ASH:

WES:

COREY: now what

WES: maybe if we suddenly pull away and really floor it

COREY: no

WES: we can outrun them long enough to get to an exit and lose them maybe

COREY: we're not outrunning anyone. we can barely do sixty-five

WES: well maybe if we jump the median

COREY: nope

WES: and go the other way maybe they're not crazy enough to follow us

COREY: this car is not jumping any medians. it would beach itself like a whale

WES: also they probably
are
that crazy

COREY: yeah they're fucking psychos. look at them sitting there

WES: maybe if we just wait here for long enough they'll leave?

COREY: wes what if they try ramming us

WES: fuck

COREY: or start shooting or something

WES: fuck fuck fuck

COREY: i think we should try to drive into the forest

WES: yeah maybe

ASH: guys.

As soon as she spoke, it was clear again that we were us, and she was her, and those were two separate things.

“They don't have guns,” she said. “They don't have shit. They're just fucking with us.”

She waited a moment and then said, “So let's fuck with them.” She said it in the tone of voice you might use to order the ice cream that you always get at the ice cream place you always go to.

She opened the door.

“Ash, wait,” I said, but she ignored me completely.

“Pop the trunk,” she told Corey.

He didn't do anything.

“Do it,” she said, and he did, and she got out and walked around back and we heard her rummaging around in the trunk.

No shots were fired from the Jeep. No one got out of the Jeep. The Jeep continued to do nothing at all, and I found myself thinking, what if there is no one
in
the Jeep.

“Fucking come on,” we heard Ash whisper, audibly rooting around under the amps.

No. That was crazy and stupid. There were definitely people in the Jeep. And they were definitely hostile. And they had definitely decided that they were not done with us.

Maybe they were on meth. Or acid. Or in a cult. Probably all of those. Because why else would you behave in this psychotic and terrible way.

We heard Ash give a kind of grunt of satisfaction. The trunk
slammed. She walked around to my side. She rapped on the window. I rolled it down. She was holding a lug wrench.

“Wes,” she said.

I stared at her.

“Come on,” she said.

I didn't move.

“Corey stays in case he has to move the car. But you have to come with me.”

I nodded. But I still didn't move.

“Corey, leave the engine running,” she said, and she started walking, and I managed to shut up my own thoughts long enough to open the door and jump out of the car and start walking.

It wasn't quite as hot out on the shoulder. But the air was still thick and sticky on your skin. The Jeep somehow looked farther away. The ground was generously littered with food wrappers and plastic bags and empty cigarette packs and soda cans and broken beer bottles.

“Pick up one of those broken beer bottles,” said Ash.

I nodded and tried to walk over to the closest beer bottle like this was a thing I did all the time. I picked it up. It was a Budweiser and it was wet to the touch.

“No,” said Ash. “Like
broken
broken. Like that one.”

She nodded to another Budweiser bottle that was missing the bottom part, and I picked it up by the neck, and squeezed it, and we started walking toward the Jeep.

Pretty soon it became clear to me that the part I was squeezing was also broken, and there was a jagged edge cutting into the fat
part of my hand. But it was too late to say anything or do anything about it.

It was a long walk toward that Jeep. It was like you could feel the sun breathing on you. Ash spun the lug wrench a couple of times in her hand like a tennis racquet.

“What is this bottle for exactly,” I said.

“Slashing their tires,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“I mean for self-defense, too,” she said.

There was not a part of my body that wasn't slick with sweat. But the wetness on the inside of my hand felt stickier somehow.
That is just blood
, my brain tried to reassure me.
There is nothing to worry about. That is just the blood that is leaking out of a wound in your hand
.

We were about halfway to the Jeep at that point. It was clean and undented. It had no bumper stickers anywhere. The license plate was 5KAK924. It continued to be impossible to tell who was in the Jeep.

Then its brake lights turned on.

We heard the engine start, and we saw it begin to roll away from us. I yelled something involuntarily. We broke into a run. The Jeep picked up speed. I was screaming. Trucks were whooshing past us. A ridiculous number of them like the same one on loop. Somewhere behind us Corey was honking the horn. I was sprinting and roaring my lungs out. I was outrunning Ash and almost keeping pace with the Jeep, and I could feel a little train of blood crawling up my arm, and I squeezed the bottle a little
harder and felt nothing at all and took a couple of skip steps and hurled the bottle as hard as I could. The bottle was in the air for not a long time and it was clear that it wasn't going to make it all the way. It landed in the grass next to the shoulder about ten feet short of the Jeep with a distant little
thump
. The Jeep bucked and hit a higher gear and slid out onto the highway, and I thought,
it doesn't matter, I'll just keep running, and sooner or later I'll catch it, and then they're fucked
.

Back in the Accord, my hand was bleeding a lot, so we tied one of the washcloths around it and decided to get off the highway and look for a town with a CVS. Also somewhere to play a show. We were feeling like we were more equipped than ever to play a dominant and masterful show. We knew this made us idiots. But we didn't care.

WES: OW FUCK

COREY: what is there still glass in your hand or something

WES: NO IT'S THIS STUPID SCORPION UPHOLSTERY

Actually though there was still a bunch of glass in my hand.

17.
YEAH THERE WERE SHARDS OF GLASS IN THERE STILL

In a lot of ways, Ash was the least girl-like girl that either of us had ever met. She had memorized multiple Angus Young solos and was completely indifferent to the cleanliness status of her own hair. It was impossible to imagine her, for example, Instagramming herself in a bathroom.

But the blood coming out of my hand brought out a relatively girl-like side of Ash.

“Fuck,” she said. “I feel like this is my fault.” She was holding my hand and arm and kind of running her finger over the wound.

“It's all good,” I said.
I would literally cut myself with dirty highway glass every day if it led to this
, I somehow prevented myself from saying.

“There's definitely some glass in there still,” she said, pulling the cut apart a little bit.

“Uuuuunnnnnnnnnn,” I said.

“Does that hurt?”

“Nnn.”

“Sorry.”

“No. Do it again. Because that shit does not hurt at all.”

“YUP,” barked Corey like a dog.

It was near sunset when we finally found a CVS. It was in Fargo, Alabama, and it was pretty busy. Fargo seemed to be mostly black. Definitely everyone in the CVS was black. So we got some attention when we walked in there. Although it may have been less about us being the only nonblack people in the CVS and more about the bloody washcloth tied around my hand. We had cleaned up my arm a little outside a gas station with bottled water, but I still looked like an extra from
The Hunger Games
.

Also we smelled terrible. So that was probably getting us some attention, too. We collectively smelled like Jennifer Lawrence's armpit.

We rounded up some medical supplies kind of at random—gauze, rubbing alcohol, silicone scar sheets, a three-pound bag of Mike and Ikes—and were waiting in line when the guy in front of us turned and said, “Buying all that for your hand?”

He was a tall, fortyish, stripey-polo-shirted guy with a brisk conversational manner.

“Uhhhh,” I said.

“Do you need medical attention on that hand,” he asked, this time less conversationally and more like a high school vice principal who is dealing with that one kid that he has to deal with all the time.

“Oh,” I said. “This hand? No. I don't think so. But thanks.”

The guy just raised his eyebrows, like, are you sure.

“He needs medical attention on his
dick
,” suggested Corey.

A silence fell over all of us.

The guy stared at Corey with a total lack of facial expression.

Corey responded by inspecting various parts of the floor, fidgeting, and softly humming a goat noise.

This went on for a longer time than you would think possible.

“You know, he probably does need his hand looked at,” said Ash eventually.

The guy nodded, still staring at Corey. “Charlize,” he called. “Boy needs your help.” Then he went to the cashier and bought cigarettes and we never saw him again.

Charlize turned out to be a woman getting a prescription filled at the pharmacist's counter. She was tiny and sixtyish looking, and she had her hair in a purple flower-patterned Russian-peasant-type babushka. Up close we saw that her arms were criss-crossed with what looked like decades-old burn marks.

She made no secret of being not amped at having to deal with us.

“You can't just go to urgent care?” she muttered, unwrapping the washcloth.

“We're in kind of a rush,” said Ash.

“Also they're closed,” said Corey.

“Corey,” said Ash.

Charlize just shook her head impatiently. “Hand me that alcohol, please, and go fetch some cloth pads,” she told Ash, and fished a tweezers out of her purse, and sterilized it, and pretty soon she was just straight-up performing surgery on my hand in the middle of CVS with a bunch of increasingly enthusiastic spectators.

“Where are you children from,” she muttered to us.

“New York,” said Ash. “Pittsburgh,” I said at the same time.

“Around here,” said Corey.

“Corey,” said Ash again.

I was too busy focusing on not thrashing around and sobbing uncontrollably to investigate Charlize's medical credentials. But Ash asked her if she was a doctor.

“Nurse,” she said. “Retired.”

“Why'd you retire so young,” said Corey.

She raised her eyebrows but didn't look up at him. “How young do you think I am,” she said.

You could hear Corey trying to think again.

“Thirty . . .” he said, “four.”

She clearly was incapable of coming up with a verbal response that expressed how dumb she thought this was. So instead she shook her head and made a little coughing noise of derision.

“Three. Thirty-three.”

“Not twenty-three?” she said, with no smile at all.

Then she pulled out the last and biggest chunk of glass, something loosened up in my hand, and what felt like a pint of my own blood just sort of plopped out of there onto the linoleum, and almost everyone else started shrieking and panicking and a couple of spectators actually passed out, and in general it was just chaos.

Not too long afterward, we were out on the street and my right hand was wrapped up super tight, and Ash and Corey were peering around into the distance trying to figure out whether we wanted to stay in town or not.

“This seems like the direction hotels and bars and stuff would be in,” said Ash.

“I don't think we're gonna find anything, though,” said Corey.

“Well, let's at least look,” said Ash.

“We're gonna waste like an hour, though, just driving around and not finding anything.”

“How could that possibly be more of a waste than getting back on the highway.”

“The highway's got signs for Motel 6 and stuff.”

“Yeah, but then we'd end up staying at Motel 6.”

“Yeah. That would be tight.”

I saw Charlize about half a block away, lighting a cigarette and kind of eyeing us.

“No,” said Ash. “That would not be tight. That would suck a bag of dicks.”

“Motel 6 is badass. It's not even named after a word. It's named after a
number
, because they give no shits.”

“Six
is
a word, and Motel 6 is where you go if you've been evicted from your home and you need a place to do the meth that you just stole from the corpse of a prostitute.”

“You don't know anything about Motel 6. You just embarrassed yourself with how little you know about Motel 6.”

“Where are you children trying to go,” called Charlize.

Somehow no one could figure out how to answer as she walked back over to us.

“Are your parents traveling with you?” she said.

“We're a band,” I said. “So we're pretty much on tour right now.”

“We
are
on tour,” clarified Corey.

“No teachers?” she pressed. “No adults?”

“I'm twenty-one,” Ash told her.

Charlize gazed at Ash for a very long time.

“And they're nineteen,” Ash added.

Charlize nodded, slowly.

“Where's your next show, if I may ask,” she asked us.

“We're figuring it out,” said Corey.

“We don't really have one,” I said.

“
Right
,” exhaled Charlize, like a teacher who had finally gotten us to explain what a cosine was. “Right. That was my sense. I am about to make an offer to you. Are you ready? You're listening? The offer is of a place to sleep, and some food to eat. Now. This offer is one time only. No hard feelings if you turn it down. But. The offer will not be renewed. So consider it carefully, take a moment to confer amongst yourselves, and—”