Marvel and a Wonder (27 page)

“They took it,” the deejay said. “My ex-wife’s people. From the casino. It was a couple hours ago. Then someone else came for it. I think he was from somewhere out of state. Cowboy type. That’s all I know. I ain’t got the constitution to get bound up in this kind of shit. It’s not worth it to me. I can make twice as much moving coke.”

The old man felt his breath leave him for a moment, and then, when he could speak again, he asked: “You knowed it was stolen when you turned it over to them, didn’t you?”

The deejay, whose age was nearly impossible to judge, so absolute was his ugliness, looked away. He spoke again, not answering the question: “The other people . . . they were the ones who was supposed to buy it. I don’t know what happened to it. Those assholes come from the casino and . . . honest. I got to get back to work. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused.”

The old man pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes and marched slowly past, the boy following, the noise of the rumbling, heartless music, the glimmer of the dispiriting orange and yellow lights, once again playing upon their hearing and vision.

Then the pale-blue pickup throttled back down the highway toward the casino, its muffler sounding like it was about to fall off, the boy with his hands at ten and two on the wheel. It was nearing eleven o’clock at night or so the radio read, its rounded dials flaking gray. The grandfather sat in the passenger seat, drowsy, dozing, the signs and billboards flashing past becoming distant memories: his father and mother, him walking barefoot in the corn as a boy, his stretch in boot camp, his partner Stan Mutter dying, a girl in Korea named Lola Lola—her mother a fan of the movies of Marlene Dietrich—who had a way of unbuttoning his clothes and hers with a kind of religious formality, the solemn bus ride home through Indiana, his father’s face again, Deedee in his arms, the chickens, the smell of their feathers in winter, his daughter—her laugh, her dimples, then her standing at the back door, the odd-colored boy beside her—the mare galloping along the fence line, these memories traced in the shapes and subtle outlines of roadside advertisements, one after another, a parade of all the things he had prized and then lost.

* * *

They got a red paper ticket from a valet for their truck but did not need to go very far before they saw two local police cars parked perpendicular to each other, an ambulance idling behind them, red lights flashing. They ambled toward it—the casino—an enormous white gabled building constructed to resemble an antebellum Civil War plantation. By now it had grown dark, and the red light from the ambulance made the whole world look like a dislocated nightmare. There, sitting on the curb, were two men, both dressed in Civil War regalia, one still wearing his gray cap, bruised about the eyes and mouth. A third one was lying on his back, a bullet hole in his thigh being tended to by an androgynous blonde paramedic.

Jim surveyed the wounded men, glancing up, scanning the crowd, the gawkers’ faces, the parking lot. He stepped along the circumference of where the onlookers were gathered, walking off a few yards toward a detective who was lifting a spent casing with a pair of silver tweezers. On a few more feet, there was a woman, her face a mask of both anguish and runny purplish mascara, an employee of the casino, or so her Civil War–era ball gown suggested, crying off a confession to a female police officer, who jotted it all down with pencil and pad of paper.

“He was from Texas. He had a black truck. I seen his license plates. I didn’t get the number but I saw the state. It was a man and a girl. The man, he was terrible.”

A few feet away, there was the strong odor of horseflesh, the reek of both animal urine and manure. Jim squatted the way he did to eyeball his chickens each day, taking in the familiar smell. Satisfied with what he had found, he stood, turned back to the boy, and said, “We need to go. Someone else has got her.”

* * *

The horse, stall-bound, unable to move, stamping at the sawdust-lined trailer floor, one front hoof falling like a hammer, over and over, beating out a rhythm, the sound of which went unheard, except for the girl, Rylee, handcuffed to the armrest in the pickup’s front seat, glancing over her shoulder every few minutes to see the obfuscated shape, the helpless pounding clocking there in her brain. At once, she decided she would turn the animal loose the first chance she got.

* * *

A motel room near the interstate was forty dollars for two beds. They stepped from the cab of the pickup, then entered the darkened room suspiciously, the layout green and beige, the fixtures gold, the curtains, bedspreads, and wallpapers not having been replaced since sometime in the late seventies. The grandfather dragged the CB set inside with him, placing it on the nightstand, between the two narrow beds. He searched for an outlet, gave up, then asked for the boy’s help. Quentin found the socket but was unable to plug the device in, then the grandfather fumbled with the plug, both of them leaning over the outlet, finally getting it plugged in, the low, static hum of transcontinental conversations coming and going. The old man, sitting on the bed, picked up the microphone, switching from channel 19 to 10, then back to 17, from north to south, east to west, trying once again.

“Break 17 for a radio check. This is Old Rooster, anyone got their ears on?”

“Ten-four. This is Bluebeard. Over.”

“What’s your twenty?”

“I-40, heading north, driving empty. What’s yours?”

“I-75, near Lexington, over in Kentucky. Anyone get a line on that horse trailer heading south, pulled by a pickup with Texas plates? Still waiting to hear anything. Over.”

“No sir. But keeping my eyes out. Over.”

“Much obliged. Over and out.”

The grandfather set the microphone down and stared at the device for a moment before slipping off his boots. He rolled on his side, the channel buzzing with unfamiliar chatter. The boy, not yet tired or more tired than he’d ever been in his life, paced back and forth about the room, peeking through the curtains, inspecting the gray tile bathroom, opening and closing the bureau drawers, paging through the miniature green-sleeved Gideon’s Bible, searching out the part about the white horse, somehow finding it near the back of the hardbound volume, Revelation 19:11–14:

I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war. His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many crowns; and He has a name written on Him which no one knows except Himself. He is clothed in a garment sprinkled with blood, and His name is called The Word of God.

The boy closed the dusty book and slid it back in the drawer, glancing over to see if his grandfather was already asleep.

“Gramps?”

“—”

“Gramps? Sir?”

“Hm.”

“Do you think we did something?”

“—”

“Do you think we did something wrong?”

“—”

“Did we do something wrong, Grandpa? Should we have not raced her?”

“—”

“Grandpa?”

“—”

“I think that’s why the horse got taken. I think we’re being punished for something. I just don’t know what it is.”

“—”

“Grandpa?”

“—”

“Are you asleep?”

“—”

“Jim?” Quentin turned over, held his breath, and heard the belabored, unsteady respiration of the old man across from him. Then the boy sighed, itched his nose, and climbed from the bed.

He sat down in front of the antique-looking television set and switched it on with the volume low. Like always, there was nothing on, even though there was cable; he lingered for a few moments over the adults-only channel, trying to gauge whether the fuzzed-out limbs on the snowy screen belonged to a man or woman. He flashed past that image, tried once more, decided on some cartoons, then changed his mind, landing on a news update about the O.J. Simpson trial. The LA police detective was once again on the witness stand, and the jury was listening to further excerpts from some audiotapes he had made. There was the smooth white face, blotchy on the old color set, listening to his own words echoing there in the courtroom.

“. . .
all these niggers in LA city government, and all of ’em should be lined up against a wall and fuckin’ shot.”

Though the word
fuckin’
had been bleeped out for the television audience, it was still fairly obvious what the detective had said. The grandfather was now snoring loudly. Quentin glanced back at him, the fuzzy green bedspread slowly rising and falling, rising and falling, his breaths like the creaking bellows of some ship adrift at sea.

The white face of the police detective floated there on the TV for a moment longer, like a prisoner who had been decapitated, before the boy switched the television off, the room going completely dark. In the shadows, the boy laid on top of the starchy sheets and wondered where the mare was now, what it was feeling, if it had been allowed to run today, or if, like him, it was more afraid of the day lying ahead than any of the others that had passed.

_________________

At midnight the stars assembled in the sky. Edging ever closer to the gleam of Nashville’s skyline, its silver-blue bridges and stunted skyscrapers, these lone shapes twinned in the surface of the Cumberland River. Friday night becoming Saturday morning. Already past Somerset, already past Nancy, past Glasgow, past Bowling Green, past the Tennessee state line, then the town of White House, the horse in its metal stall, eyes blinking rapidly; the road flickering past, the muffled roar of speeding traffic, appearing and then disappearing. The driver of the black pickup, Rick West, marked the hours along I-65 by the infrequency of other towns ahead and behind, yawning, eyes failing, then having failed, jerking themselves open just in time, coming up on I-40 and the town of Goodlettsville, then the familiar northern border of Nashville, its blue-white lights like from a dream—the dream having ended abruptly a good four or five years before. Beside him, the girl snored, face flushed against the passenger-side window, hands folded before her like a cherub. Taking the next exit, the black pickup departed from the expressway, the lumbering trailer echoing loudly as they slowed to a stop in the loose gravel of a motel’s parking lot.
Skylight
, the sign read, flashing with red and blue light.

Inside, the motel lobby was dark, as bleak as an all-night pawnshop, the overhead fluorescent lights flickering on and off, making Rick squint his way to the counter. A young Pakistani clerk—seventeen or eighteen years old at most—was busy playing an arcade game in the corner of the lobby. He seemed startled by Rick’s appearance. The clerk nodded without a word and then hurried through a wood-paneled door marked
Employees Only
, reappearing behind a plane of bulletproof plexiglass on the other side of the counter. Behind the glass, he began to mime instructions to Rick. Yawning, Rick signed the register, using the company credit card—which old man Bolan always agreed to pay, though only after a lengthy interrogation. The blue key fob was dropped through the slot in the plastic shield. Rick tipped his hat to the clerk and marched back to the truck, unlocking the silver handcuffs, waking the girl, the girl rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand, cursing him in her sleep. He walked behind her down the outdoor corridor to a wood-paneled room, the girl collapsing onto one of the single beds, which was covered with a wheat-colored floral bedspread. Rick stood there for a moment, eyeing the layout, then ambled into the bathroom to be sure there were no windows, no ways to sneak out, then gestured to the girl, who wordlessly cursed him again, yawned, and then stumbled into the john. The sound of water running, rushing, the girl gargling, the faucet screaming like a murder victim. The girl stumbled back out, face clean, eyes closed, collapsing onto the bed once more. Rick eyed the bed frame, striding over, and slipped the jaw of the cuff through the metal frame, attaching the other end as gently as he could to the girl’s left wrist. The girl did not even struggle, did not even make a sound, just pulled the white pillow over her head, kicking off her shoes, each one landing on the beige carpet with a thump. Rick stood there, feeling as if he was still in the cab of the pickup, the road flying before him, the world still moving. He suffered an alarming sense of vertigo as he leaned over to slip off his boots, fighting against the cowhide, losing one sock in the process, falling forward onto his own bed, too tired to move.

The girl was soon snoring, the snore also a kind of condemnation. Lying there, removing his shirt, the cracks in the ceiling branched above him like the blue and red highways he had traveled over the last two days. It was hard not to think of old man Bolan lying in bed, surrounded by nurses, nightstand lined with orange vials and trays of pills, not sleeping, never sleeping, lying in his magnanimous four-poster, perched up by half a dozen pillows, call button in hand, imploring Rick to sneak him a glass of scotch or a piece of “that black girl’s chocolate cake,” summoning him to sit at the bedside simply to avoid having to face those creeping, timeless hours past midnight on his own. Rick stared up at those endless lines and cracks and saw in them the indefatigable features of his bedsick employer and also the fractures of his own future, for when the old man finally did die—turning back to East Texas dust—Rick was certain he’d be cut loose. He was just a glorified ranch hand, and he knew that Bolan’s son Dwight, a fancy entertainment lawyer and Rylee’s father, had no love for him. As soon as the old man kicked and the land went to the heirs, Rick would be set to drifting once again. He closed his eyes but the sound of the highway rumbling nearby rang loud in his ears; suddenly he found he was too restless to sleep.

He pulled on his shirt, stood in the dark to be sure the girl was asleep—leaning over to check the silver handcuffs—then slipped open the motel room door and stumbled outside. He put on his boots in the corridor, straightening his bushy brown hair with his fingers, and brushed his teeth with his finger. He found a payphone at the end of the corridor and deposited a quarter and a dime, punching in a local number he was certain would no longer be in service. When it began to ring, his heart snagged in his chest. The voice answering after five or six rings was softer than it once was, groggy with sleep.