Wild Horses (11 page)

“No way!” said Gunther. “No. Fucking. Way.
Really?
”

Madeline found the file on apartment 2-C and slipped it out.

“Hey! Maddy!” Gunther called. “Is this true? That women can come like guys, some of them?”

Receipts, original lease, furniture inventory — she shuffled through white and pink and yellow papers. “Why are you asking me this? In more than a year, have you ever once seen me spray the headboard?”

“I’m asking because you’re a woman. You should know these things, shouldn’t you?”

“Except I’m not a lesbian. If you’ve been doing it right the last twenty-five years or so, you should’ve seen a lot more women having orgasms than I have.”

“Something like this, I thought it might’ve at least come up in conversation, is all.”

Madeline brought the file with her from the office into the hallway. Sighing, “Well, yes, if you must know. I’ve heard of it.”

“I’ve heard everything now,” Gunther told Doug. “Nothing can surprise me anymore.”

“Yeah, well, stop the presses,” Madeline said, and waved the slip of paper she’d pulled from the file folder. Doug craned his neck to see what she had, and there were no secrets between them now. Lost hope had a look all its own. You could see it at any hour in any casino.

“‘Damage deposit, forward to: Allison Willoughby, in care of Constance Wainright,’” she read from the paper, then the address. “I don’t suppose you know anybody in Yazoo City, Mississippi.”

Gunther shook his head. “Never even been in the state.”

In silence, then, their knowing glances held across the room. Doug began to squirm on the bed, T-shirt drenched in sweat and his taped arms contorted behind him as he tried to push away with legs gone boneless. Gunther’s hand hooked onto his shoulder.

“Better find a rag,” he told her, “start wiping down whatever you touched.”

She was swabbing the file cabinet when she heard the shot — a muffled pop — and a moment later a ragged choking wheeze. A cold hard knot gathered in her stomach, then broke in a gushing flood of warmth. This was the initiation, baptism of blood and fire. The suddenness and the irrevocability of it stopped her for a moment — was it what she really wanted?
Yes, if this is what it takes.
It had been a remarkably easy threshold to cross.

Gunther was cursing. She heard a steady thumping sound, like a leg in spasms; and the choking. “Hold still, hold
still
, for—” Then another quick pair of muffled shots, and silence.

They were out of the building two minutes later, and Gunther was balancing across one shoulder the three-foot-long reinforced cardboard box from the corner of Doug Powell’s room. With his hair in that stiff brush cut, he looked like a soldier carrying a crate of artillery shells.

“Stealing comic books, that’s low, even for you,” she said.

“You heard him. There’s money in these things. World’s first look at Batman. Sell these, we got plenty of operating capital to work from.”

They crossed the alley, into the parking lot two buildings away. She keyed the trunk lid of Gunther’s white land yacht of a Cadillac, and he dumped the box inside.

“What happened in that bedroom?”

He looked down at the asphalt and gravel, hands in pockets, shrugging his broad shoulders. Gunther by moonlight, evasive and — could it be? — even a bit embarrassed.

“You were right on top of him, how could you screw it up?”

“It’s not like he was sitting still for it, you know. I pushed a pillow over his face, shoved the gun into the pillow. Cuts the sound, cuts the splatter. He was kicking around, I guess is how it happened. Got the angle wrong and blew out the side of his throat.” Gunther walked in a tight circle as she began to laugh, then halted, flailing his arms. “Well
you
do it next time, then, it’s not as easy as it sounds, hitting dead center. Like trying to thread a moving needle.”

She tossed him the keys and he unlocked his door, unlocked hers by remote. He started the car and boosted the cold air.

“The pillow bit, I got that one from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Lee Van Cleef squashes a pillow over this old Mexican’s face and unloads right into him. I saw that when I was a kid and thought it was just the toughest thing.”

Madeline watched his face as Gunther steered down the alley, toward a psychedelic blur of neon and flash. Saw in his eyes the rapture of adrenaline surge, and her heart ached to realize that their wild and reckless youth was gone, gone long before they’d ever met, and there was no one to go to for justice.

“
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
?” he said. “Some great music in that movie. Now there’s something I could listen to for miles.”

She nodded, let him think she approved. Another cultural void between them, Gunther’s whole life patterned after some old movie where all they did was spit, swear, and shoot each other.

And when she checked her face in the visor mirror, tugging it back toward her ears to pull the lines out of it, she wondered if, as for vampires, the blood of the young might not renew them both somehow.

CHAPTER 6

As Allison hitchhiked her way out of Las Vegas that Friday night, she turned to see it receding behind her like a patch of glitter strewn across the desert. Lot’s wife, she remembered from hellfire Mississippi sermons, had looked at a burning Sodom and Gomorrah this way and been turned to salt. It made less sense to Allison now than ever. The sight of a disappearing Vegas filled her with such exhilaration that for now it did not matter she was just days from total financial destitution. She’d never felt more free — the fly that had chipped itself out of amber.

“You know what that place was like for me?” she said to the older woman who’d offered her the ride. The car hummed beneath them, southeast, over the Boulder Highway. To the west the rims of distant hills sawed into the blue-black night, spilling stars. “It was like trying to wear the wrong set of clothes. They fit my ex-boyfriend perfectly, but they didn’t fit me.”

“Then you have better taste in clothes than he does, dear,” the woman said. Her gray hair was smartly trimmed and layered, and in the dashboard’s glow looked the color of mercury. “It doesn’t matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, it still feels wrong, doesn’t it?”

Allison nodded. “I guess I’m lucky, though. Sometimes things can feel wrong for so long you start thinking they’re what’s right after all.” Remembering the feel of her father’s hands, charged with new expectations that she had never dreamed were a daughter’s obligation to fulfill. Mothers thought they prepared you for everything, but they didn’t.

Where the tip of Nevada stabbed down like the point of a dagger, they crossed the river into Arizona, south of the curving wall of Hoover Dam. They drove southeast into desolation’s dusty heart, while night deepened and the moon crested overhead, full and round and bright as a silver dollar.

They parted company at Kingman, her ride’s path now veering southwest toward Yucca. The older woman offered her a room for the night, breakfast in the morning for a fresh start. Tempting, but Allison declined; sleep in Yucca, and tomorrow she would have to backtrack. As well, she’d been gone but a few hours, the urge to keep moving like the deep marrow itch of a healing bone. The woman smiled sadly, with a final wish of good luck, then continued on her solitary way.

Allison set up temporary camp in the booth of a truck stop, the suitcase and duffel forming a protective wall as she drank her coffee and listened to the night. Outside, travelers rolled up to the gas pumps, stood blearily as they fed their machines, then paid and journeyed on with replenished junk food stashes. Beyond, highways met in confluence as white lights drew closer, and red lights vanished into the distance. She pulled her attention back inside, to the table of the empty booth ahead of her. Plump flies buzzed in from other tables, other windows, circled, lighted, left again. Same story, smaller scale.

The waitress who filled and refilled her mug was a bedraggled-looking teenager, hair pulled and clipped to one side to shield an angry cluster of acne on her forehead. Allison put in a word with her that she could use a ride — anybody here continuing on toward Phoenix? The girl said she’d check while on her rounds, reporting back in as though taking bids, something more alive about her now than ten minutes ago. Flattered, perhaps, to be entrusted with something more than coffee, omelets, pie.

Barstow and Flagstaff, somebody else going toward Vegas — the destinations were pushpins on a map, and all wrong. She got a refill of coffee and settled in to wait awhile longer.

The waitress had her linked up after another half hour, and Allison had already noticed the man pulling in, four big doors and Utah plates. Sandy-haired, with glasses. Maybe a Mormon — he had that suited, well-scrubbed look that she associated with the door-to-door Brigham Young brigade. The waitress pointed him out as he sat at the counter, finishing a tuna melt that he ate with knife and fork instead of fingers. When the waitress relayed he was going to Phoenix, he turned on his stool and nodded their way.

“He’s not been giving out tracts, has he?” Allison asked.

“Not yet. But whenever they do that it’s in place of a tip, usually. Like, thanks a lot.”

The man offered to carry her bags but she declined, lugging them herself to his wide backseat. He was only a few years older than she, yet seemed older still, by choice, reservedly polite and stiff in the spine. As they stood in the cool desert night, neon buzzed and names were swapped, Allison for Marshall J. Dillon, and she couldn’t help but grin. He wanted to know if it was really that amusing.

“Were your parents big fans of
Gunsmoke
?” she asked.

“My parents never watched TV.” She felt chastised by the way he said it, like a reproachful parent himself. “Marshall was my uncle’s name. Most people are tactful enough not to bring this up when we’re introduced.”

I can see why now,
she thought, and apologized as he unlocked her door. “I met a John Wayne once, and he didn’t seem to mind the inevitable. He seemed flattered.”

Dillon was quiet as he drove, preferring to listen to some talk radio show. It sounded very conservative, callers and host frothing at the mouth about the enemies of decency. All the usual suspects. Their cure for everything was so simple: Both father and mother in the home equated with stability, crucial to the balance that the callers sought to restore across a land gone wrong.

Allison’s gaze lingered on the car phone, and she felt like making her own plea over the airwaves:
Tell me what it was I did wrong, to make him come up those creaking stairs so many nights.
They could have peeled back the shingles, the polite Mississippi veneer, and looked inside that house, and they’d have seen all the right pieces to their puzzle.
So you tell me whose fault that was. Mine? And mine again when he decided that the way it began wasn’t enough anymore, and he had to start bringing—

She heard the radio show abruptly cut off, and there came the click of the tape deck as it automatically reversed from one side to the other, then the show resumed after a few dead moments. On tape. Dillon was listening to this on tape.

He opened up after a while, growing friendlier with neutral small talk. She learned that he was a sporting goods salesman with a four-state territory. He spoke of how team sports built strong character in young men. Dillon asked what she did.

“I’ve worked mostly in day care centers the past few years.”

“Is that right.” He seemed intrigued. “Then we’re in the same business, really. Developing young minds and bodies. Although it’s my opinion that day care’s no substitute for a stable home.”

“Hey,” she said flatly, “what is?”

“I’d never turn my three over to day care. No offense.”

“None taken.” Allison biting back the urge to ask why, if his children’s home life was really that important, he’d taken a job that sent him out on the road.

Route 93 unfurled beneath them, mile after desolate mile, past moonlit boulders the size of mountains. Their path had been cut through by wind and rain and dynamite. In the shadow of these hulks and spires, civilization was sparse. She could count the towns on one hand so far, sprouting in the flat clefts where the earth leveled out enough for a few streets, some foundations, a church, a saloon.

Another lay just ahead, heralded by a sign: Coyote Ridge, population 423. Another blink-and-you-miss-it small town, one exit and a dusting of lights in the near distance, and then it was all behind them in another five heartbeats.

“Do you always dress like that?” Dillon asked.

Allison frowned, startled. She’d changed back in the truck stop bathroom, today’s earlier sundress too cool for the desert night. Jeans now, and a midriff top, both comfortably snug; the faded old denim jacket lay across her lap. She held it tighter.

“No,” she said, as if this were any of his business, “but the petticoats and bonnet don’t travel as well.”

“It sends a message. You should be careful of a thing like that.” She could feel his hard stare in the night.