BAD TRIP SOUTH (15 page)

Since hitting the outside mere days ago he had had sex a few times, two Miller Lites, one T-bone steak (the first day he and Heddy skipped). It wasn’t enough of the good life for someone who had been locked up in the slammer for four years,
taking orders, taking shit
. He felt like belting someone for all the years he had lost.

Those four years hadn’t been the first time they’d stolen away his freedom. He’d been in and out of various institutions since he hit the streets at the age of ten goddamn years old--Emily’s age. Life sucked. Life was about as much fun as having a pipe organ blow the strains of the
Star-Spangled Banner
up your ass.

He began jiggling around and then throwing himself into the heavy metal rock coming from the band gyrating on the television. He threw his head front and back, flailed his arms, and bounced on the balls of his feet. If this music didn’t cheer him up, he didn’t know what he’d do, but it would be something bad.

“
What’s wrong with you, Crow, you sick?” Heddy yelled. “You got to play it that loud?”

He ignored her. Ignore, ignore, I don’t know you, you bitch, he thought fiercely. I don’t know no one. I don’t need no one. I’m five seconds away from leaving this shithole with you in it.

To his surprise, Heddy came over to where he was moving like a madman and she began to dance too. She threw off the ugly curly wig and began flipping her head back and forth so that her long hair, still damp from a shower, came over her face and back again.

“
Awwwright!” He screamed. “Gyrate, baby!”

Someone banged on the door. Crow yelled, “Go fuck yourself!”

Heddy stopped abruptly and turned down the TV. “Who’s there?” She asked.

“
Could y’all turn that noise down a little? You can hear it all the way out to the road.”

Heddy must have recognized the dopey-looking motel clerk’s voice. “You heard the man. FUCK OFF!”

She whipped the volume up again and danced until they were both wet with sweat. Crow, incredibly aroused and not at all depressed anymore, got Heddy around the waist and threw her onto the empty second bed.

“
Take out the kid.”

Crow froze, for a moment thinking Heddy was telling him to kill the kid. Then he realized she meant “take the kid to the bathroom so we can fuck.” He laughed wildly and bounded off the bed. He untied Emily’s ankles and led her to the bathroom. She asked if she could sit on the toilet lid. He shrugged and let her, then closed the door. He whooped like crazy, sailed over the end of the bed where Jay and Carrie lay on their backs, bound and wordless, and landed on top of Heddy. She grunted, rolled him to the side and started working the zipper of his jeans.

He felt like a hundred million. In ones! Heddy always did that for him.

The music channel changed programs and a soft-voiced girl sang about love, lost and regained. Perfect music for the scorched souls of a pair of lovers who needed a break, Crow thought, pushing into Heddy. Just perfect, man, this warm spot, this warm spot that cured the world’s woes.

#

THE hours spent in the motel stranded were the most normal any of us had seen. We took showers and even though we didn’t have our suitcases any longer so we had no clean clothes, it was great to be under the shower head, washing out the dirt of two days on the road.

I always liked taking a bath. A shower, really. Mama was always getting onto me for standing under the warm water for over an hour, just dreaming. I couldn’t take an hour bath in the motel, but just the same I felt a whole lot better afterwards.

Then Crow brought us back some Mexican food. Tacos and burritos and chili con questo. I even ate my guacamole salad because it was green and it tasted so fresh. I don’t think anyone else ate the guacamole.

After we ate, Mama did the craziest thing. We were all untied so we could eat and close to the time we were all about finished, Mama stood up from the bed with her paper plate and walked toward the door. We all thought she was taking the plate to the trash can standing there, next to the TV, but she kept going, got her hand on the door knob, and just...sort of walked out.

She didn’t even close the door all the way behind her. She just walked out!

Heddy was up and out the door after her before Crow even got his face out of his food long enough to notice she was gone.

I called, “Mama!”

Daddy stood up and dropped his paper plate and plastic fork, he was so shocked.

Heddy came back in, leading Mama by the arm, pinching her arm I think because Mama was making a face like it hurt. Then I remembered that was the arm she’d hurt in the wreck.

I said, “You’re hurting my Mama. Let her go.”

Heddy let her go, but after she’d slammed the door shut and locked it, putting on the safety chain, she turned around and gave me a look like,
You watch it, little girl.

“
Just what the hell did you think you were doing?” Heddy asked Mama.

Crow had stopped eating finally and he said, “She must be loco. From the food, huh?”

Heddy didn’t like joking when she was mad. “You think you can just walk out of here? Is that what you think?”

Mama had not said a word and she said nothing now. Daddy asked, “Are you all right?”

She nodded, but she wouldn’t look at him.

I think maybe Mama got to a point, after all the stuff that’d happened, where she cracked a little--like an egg you’re boiling. You leave it on the burner too long and the water burns out and then the egg cracks and sticks to the pan. She hadn’t put up much protest through this whole thing, but maybe it was hurting her worse than either Daddy or me. Mama’d been through a lot and I didn’t believe she was even thinking when she went through the door.

I could smell her unhappiness and the thought she had that there was no hope. It smelled like an old sofa pillow that everyone punches and puts beneath their heads and backs. Getting worn out, getting so old it needs to be thrown out.

Heddy and Crow didn’t bother her anymore because maybe they knew she was doing harmless stuff. She wasn’t threatening them. She was just a little lost, maybe even a little crazy.

I sat next to her on the bed and held her hand. She said, “I love you, Emily.”

I said, “I love you too, Mama.”

Crow said, “Oh give me a break with this love shit.”

He was tying Daddy’s hands again now that we were through eating.

The rest of the day was spent trying not to get on one another’s nerves. The room was small, shabby, dark enough we had to keep the lamps on. Crow asked Daddy about the town where we live in North Carolina. At first Daddy didn’t want to talk to him, but Heddy started asking him questions too and soon he was having a talk with them. Not like they were old friends, not like that, but he stopped sounding so angry after a little while.

“
I’ve been a cop since I was twenty,” he said.

“
So, hey, what’s it like busting the bad guys?” Heddy asked.

Daddy gave her a close look to see if she was baiting him. He said, “I just do my job.”

“
You think Crow ought to have wound up in Leavenworth for self-defense?”

Daddy laughed a little.

“
What’s so funny? She asked you a question.” Crow had his back up, scowling like a bald-headed monkey waiting for a researcher to come with the needle.

“
They all call it self-defense. What’d you do again, stab a guy in the stomach with a pool cue?”

“
He pulled a knife on me first, said I was cheating.”

“
Were you?”

“
What the hell difference it make, man? He had no call to pull the knife.”

“
I’m no judge,” Daddy said, deliberately sidestepping the question.

“
Well, you don’t know nothing. You ever been broke? No place to stay the night?”

“
I’m just about always broke.”

“
Right!” Crow barked out his disbelief. “You drive a Riviera and you’re always broke. Right.”

“
After I make the payment, yeah, I am.”

“
It ain’t the same, man. You don’t know what it’s like needing a meal. A crust of bread! You’d steal too if you were hungry.”

“
I’m sure I would. That why you took the money from the lab house? You were hungry?”

Crow narrowed his eyes. “What makes you so smart? How come you don’t think I’ll just pistol whip you to death one of these times you smart off like that?”

“
You practically rape my wife, you terrify my daughter, you steal my car, you use me, and I’m going to be afraid of you? What else do I have to look forward to in the catalogue of terror tactics you have up your sleeve? After a while a person gets used to the way things stand, he gets immune. Or didn’t you discover that yourself while in prison?”

“
What’s that supposed to mean? What’re you getting at, man?”

“
Don’t talk to him, Crow.” Heddy had drifted away from the two men and sat down in the desk chair. She’d been drinking from her bottle of whiskey, staring at the wall as if she could see a funny movie there. Half her mouth, the half that worked, smiled like she was having a great dream.

Mama lay down after a while and I still sat near, holding her hand. I’d done that before. When Daddy was mad at her she often took to the bed and I sat with her, hoping she’d say something, anything, so I’d know she was going to be all right.

Just before dark Crow started acting weird, turning up some music on the TV real loud and dancing around like nobody I’ve ever seen dance. Then Heddy started dancing with him and, afterward, they got in the bed together. I had to sit in the bathroom and Crow let me sit on the toilet lid to wait. It was more comfortable than sitting on the floor. Not as cold, either.

I guess it’s fair to say I don’t like staying in bathrooms longer than I have to. Not since being around those two.

#

NO one stopped to take a room where we were staying. It wasn’t exactly an inviting kind of stopover place. Finally, too anxious to stay off the road any longer, Heddy said we’d try to get the car started again. After Crow fiddled with something under the hood, it started. He hee-hawed like a madman.

We were on our way again. It looked like Heddy would drive into the night so she could get farther south.

The worn out Ford Escort got us into the state of Texas before it died the next morning, shuddering and screaming like some kind of cat being skinned alive. Heddy pulled it over to the side of the road and we all just sat in the car, waiting.

It was the hottest time of day and we were all tired out, sleeping just a little through the night. The Escort rocked on its tires as cars whooshed past it. We were on Highway 83 South somewhere outside the town of Paducah, Texas in the upper panhandle where a big blue sky hung overhead, cloudless, and heat shimmered in violet waves off the pavement.

I looked at the back of Heddy’s head and then at the back of my daddy’s head. I looked over at Crow. He sat quietly with his hands in his lap, staring at the back of Heddy’s head too.

Were we just going to sit there with sweat crawling down our backs, alongside the road all day, I wondered?

The windows were down and the sounds of the passing cars filled our ears. Whoosh. Whoosh. I studied the drifts of wildflowers growing in the weeds that covered the ditch next to the road--Indian Paintbrush, bluebonnets, and wild sunflowers nodding on tall stems that swayed every time a car passed.

After a long while Heddy moved. She leaned forward in the seat and tried the ignition. The starter on the car whined. She kept trying. Finally the car caught life and suddenly Crow let out a whoop that made me jump.

“
Goddamn, I thought we were done for this time!”

Heddy pumped the gas to keep the car going, but it coughed smoke and still shuddered like it was sick. She said, “It might get us to the next town. That’s all it’s got to do.”

She put on her turn signal and watched for a break in the traffic on the inside lane before pulling out slowly. Cars had to go around us. We couldn’t have been traveling faster than thirty miles an hour all the way to the next little place that was called Guthrie, Texas. The car lurched and growled and smoked. I caught myself wishing it would make it. I didn’t know what Heddy might do if it broke down there on the highway where a cop car might stop to check on us.