“I know . . .”
“I love you,” he said.
And she said, “I know.”
He lifted her skirt up over her waist. A moving van blew past and the wave of air rocked the car beneath her, and she felt him pushing inside, and she closed her eyes, feeling the tears on her lashes, and heard the truck’s horn blowing and dying as it moved away, and then he was up inside her, cars going by, trucks, flashes of the sun off the windshields, horns, brakes, tears, and then it was only them again, Norah and Miller Packard, banging away like jackhammers, so loud you couldn’t even think. And for a while again she felt safe.
They walked slowly along the side of the highway, turning when they saw oncoming lights, trying to catch a ride. She was wearing uncomfortable shoes and the roadside was uneven and hard to see. There were only a few feet between the road bed and the steep rocks that defined the east side of the highway. The sun had set, and the air turned cool, and she was not sure the oncoming cars could see them in the dusk. She’d left her sweater in the Jaguar, half a mile back.
They walked for another ten minutes, until it got too dark to see the ground at all, and then they stopped beside some rocks large enough to sit on and waited. He said the Highway Patrol would be by soon, that they came up and down the road all day and night, looking for accidents. She was shaking with the cold. He put his coat around her shoulders.
Later, she looked at him and saw that he was away again, thinking about something else. There was blood on the sleeve of the coat. Without saying why, he had lifted the animal off the hood before they left and laid it in the gully near the rocks, and something in the gesture moved her. She could have asked, but there might have been a practical reason, and she didn’t want to know that. She didn’t want to be disappointed.
“Are you sure the police are coming?”
“Even if nobody reported the accident,” he said, “they patrol up and down here all the time.”
“What were you thinking?” she said a little later, wanting to feel closer to him, stalled out here on the highway, while everyone else was on the way somewhere else. “When we hit the deer, I mean. When we were out of control.”
“Nothing,” he said, and then turned and kissed her and smiled. “Just keeping it on the road.” A truck full of watermelons passed them, headed north.
“What about when it was over?” she said.
He smiled again but didn’t answer.
A few minutes passed and a set of headlights threw light beams over the crest of the hill to the north, the angles changing as the car got closer to the top, and then it came into view. She saw the car was slowing, and then that it was a black Ford. It had spotlights on both sides, an oversize antenna on the trunk, meant to look like the Highway Patrol. One like it had come past and slowed while they were on the trunk of the Jaguar. A dark two-door Ford with spotlights and the antenna, a V-8 engine. She knew cars, had always liked to drive.
The Ford pulled to the side of the road and stopped. The passenger door opened and a face appeared in the door opening, a massive bald head with tiny features. Pale as the moon. “You all need some help?” the man called. He had an accent she estimated was North Florida, and sounded a little drunk.
Packard walked toward the car. She was behind him, holding on to his hand, shivering with the cold. The man in the car was smiling. “I thought I saw a wreck back there,” he said. “I’m afraid to tell you what else.”
Packard got to the open door and bent a little to look inside. The man was enormous, half-lying across the lap of a heavy girl who had lipstick on her teeth and a black brassiere beneath a white blouse. The blouse was bunched open, the buttons in the wrong holes. She might have been nineteen or twenty years old. She was smiling and holding on to a six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola with a straw in it. Even from behind Packard, the car reeked of tequila.
“We hit a deer,” Packard said.
The man sat up, and the girl tried to smooth her blouse and then saw the problem with the buttons and gave up without trying to straighten it out. She sipped at the straw instead, watching Norah. “You’re lucky nobody was hurt,” the man said. “This stretch of road . . .”
She saw there was barely room for him behind the steering wheel. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and there were crosses tattooed on both his forearms. He had fingers like a baby’s, though. Short, plump fingers. Dimples.
“At least y’all still walking and talking,” the man said. “Praise the Lord for that.” Then he pushed the back of the girl’s seat forward— she didn’t seem to mind being bent over— and gestured toward the backseat. “Hop on,” he said.
Packard held her hand while she got into the backseat, and then got in himself. The man’s neck was two rolls of fat between his head and his shoulders. The backseat smelled of dogs and humans. The girl in front slammed the door and had another sip from her straw, and the man pulled the car back onto the highway and lifted himself to look them over in the rearview mirror. A cross swung beneath it from a chain.
“Where you all from?” he said. “Hollywood?”
“I think there’s a telephone up here somewhere,” Packard said, indicating the road. “A station where we can call a garage.”
“Well,” the man said, “there is a gas station, in fact, and a diner out behind just four, five miles up the highway.” He looked into the mirror again. “But, you know, me and Cindy are going back to the big city ourselves, could give you a lift.”
“No,” Packard said, “we want to take care of the car.”
“Well, I don’t blame you for that,” the man said. “That looks like an expensive automobile.” He smiled in the mirror with tiny, even teeth. “Besides, I know my appearance scares the ladies.” The girl in the front seat giggled and had another sip from her straw. Packard sat still, and she saw a certain look come over his face, and the car drove up the highway. “Lord knows,” the man said, “sometime I look in the mirror, I even scare myself.”
She touched Packard’s leg, not wanting him to forget she was there.
“The fact is,” the man in the front seat said, “I’m rather gentle.” And the girl up there snorted and then coughed, because she was drinking when he said that, and some of the drink came out of her nose. She wiped it with her sleeve. He moved a little and found Norah in the mirror. “Where did y’all say you were from?” he asked.
A few minutes passed, and they came around a long curve in the road and saw the gas station. “A lot of people presume that a man’s oversized, that makes him slow,” the man said. “In both senses of the word.” He was looking at her in the mirror again.
“That’s the station there,” Packard said.
“Why don’t we just go up the highway here a little bit,” the man said, “see what we can see. You all ain’t in a hurry, are you?” It was quiet a few seconds, and then the man said, “You know, this highway is like my hobby. You never know what you gone run across here at night. You might see a wreck; you might see the bodies lying in the trees.”
The car went around another long turn, and in the darkness of the backseat she felt him move slightly, slightly shift his position.
The man said, “There’s a little dirt road up ahead here where the teenagers go to park. We go up there sometimes with the spotlight, scare them to death.” He laughed, as if he were remembering frightened teenagers, and then tapped the brakes and slowed for the turn. A new smell came back to them from the front; the odor was damp with excitement. “Yessir. Let’s all just drive up this here a little ways, see what we can see. That all right with everybody?”
The car turned off the highway and onto the dirt road. It dropped into a swale and the back axle scraped against the ground. The man slowed down and turned off his headlights. They drove a little farther, until they were hidden from the highway, and then he stopped. He put one of his stubby, massive arms across the seat back and smiled at them, showing them his teeth, and then, as she watched, he cupped his hand beneath his mouth and spit them out. The whole upper plate.
“A lot of people, they have an accident in their panties now,” he said, looking directly at her. “That’s what Cindy likes, when they lose control.”
She slugged him playfully on the arm, embarrassed. “Carl,” she said.
The man was breathing harder, through his mouth. His gums shined in the dark. “Here’s a surprise for everybody,” he said to Norah. “Cindy here’s developed a certain preference for the female figure. . . .”
For a moment there was no sound except the man’s breathing, and then she heard Packard, sounding like he was interested in that too. He said, “You wonder how something like that could happen.” The man went very still, as if that remark had hurt his feelings. It made the girl angry.
“Shake him a little bit, Carl,” the girl said. “See how funny it is then.”
Packard turned to the girl. “Isn’t there a little voice in your head yet, sweetheart, telling you something here isn’t right?”
“You wait and see,” she said. “You just wait till Carl comes over the seat, see what voice you’re hearing.”
And in that same moment, the man did start over the seat back. His arms were short and thick and pushed in opposing strokes as he wedged his body into the back. It was like watching a turtle. When he’d got about halfway over, he reached for Packard with his dimpled fingers.
“Cover your ears,” Packard said, very matter of fact, and she did, without asking why, as if this kind of thing happened all the time. The gun came out just as the man got his hands on Packard’s collar. He let himself be pulled forward but turned his head away before the man could butt him, and laid his cheek against the side of Carl’s bald head for a moment, as if they were dancing, and then he put the gun beside the man’s far ear and pulled the trigger.
For a moment she thought he’d killed him too. The flash lit up the car; she felt the concussion of the air against her face and it felt wet, like blood. The man grabbed himself violently and jerked sideways and back. The girl began to scream and then to cry. Packard sat farther up in the seat, looking at her, then at him, and then up at the roof, where there was a hole about the size of a dime, and the cotton lining around it was singed and smoking. He patted at the spot with the back of his hand, putting out the fire. The girl was holding her ears and looking at Carl and crying. Norah guessed it wouldn’t be the same between them now.
“Carl?” Packard said, and when the man didn’t move, Packard tapped him in the head with the barrel. Not a soft tap. “Carl?” He came up slowly, steadying himself against the dashboard, looking at his hands to see where he was shot. Packard saw the man couldn’t hear well and so he raised his voice and spoke slowly. “We’ll just go to the gas station now.”
The girl lay against the door, crying bitterly all the way there.
They ate dinner in a small, dimly lit diner behind the Sinclair station while they waited for the tow truck. Barbecued chicken sandwiches and potato salad and beer. The waitress had a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and there were stains on her blouse; it looked like she was leaking milk. They were the only customers in the place.
“It’s not safe around you, is it?” she said.
He said, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
