BAD TRIP SOUTH (12 page)

“
Leave my mama alone!”

Crow must have changed his mind. Or came to his senses. Or something. Because I stood a long time with the side of my face pressed against the door, listening and I heard them talking--Crow and my mama. I couldn’t stop crying. Snot was running down over my lip and I blubbered like a stupid little kid. Hadn’t I known Crow would do it? Hadn’t I warned Mama?

I’m so glad Crow didn’t do what he was thinking of doing. I heard him say, finally, “Oh hell, I was only kidding. I’m not going to do nothing. Shit. It was a joke.”

You have to know my mama to know how really bad a thing it was Crow had threatened to do. She told me once how she’d never had real boyfriends until she met my father. How she loved him more than life itself in the beginning. I think even though she was going to leave him after our vacation trip, she still loved him and no one else. She sure didn’t love Crow; she was scared of him. Forced to have sex with him, nobody to help her, no way to stop him, while Heddy looked on... Well, it was the worst thing that might have happened. I don’t know how she did it, but Mama talked him out of it.

“
We can stop for a while if you want to.” The psychologist handed me his handkerchief. He smoked and paced and moved his hands around like he didn’t know where to put them.

No, it’s all right, I want to tell you the rest of what happened that night, I said, mopping my face dry and sitting up straight in the chair. Just thinking about that night made me cry.

Anyway, I said, they didn’t keep me in the bathroom long. The games all stopped when there was a knock on the door.

Crow was suddenly at the bathroom door, opening it and putting his finger to his lips to make sure I didn’t say anything. His face was serious again, and it was the color of ashes in a fireplace. He reached into his satchel he carried in his arms and brought out a gun.

“
It’s your friends,” Daddy said. I could see him lying tied up on the bed. I looked at the other bed for Mama. She had curled into a ball, her back to me, the cover pulled up to her neck. She was all right, but she didn’t want to talk to Crow anymore. Or anyone else.

I wanted to run to her, but Crow pushed me up against the sink and blocked my way. I really hated him. If I had been big as he was, I would have hurt him how ever I could. I never felt that way before, where I wanted to hurt someone. It made me mad Crow caused me to have those feelings. I’d promised myself I’d never be like Daddy, hurting people when I felt like it.

Daddy said again, when the knock came, “Must be your friends.” I don’t know why he kept pushing them. He couldn’t help it, I guess, especially now they’d threatened and scared Mama. Every chance he got he said stuff to them that made them mad enough to kill him. This time, though, neither of them paid him any mind. They were just too busy figuring out what to do. I could see neither of them had a clue what the knocking on the door meant.

Crow slipped from the bathroom to the motel door and stood beside it, the gun raised. He nodded his head at Heddy to stay back and say something. She called out, “Who is it?”

“
Manager. I forgot to write down your driver’s license number, ma’am.”

Heddy took a deep breath and Crow moved back from the door. He returned to the bathroom with me and closed the door part way, the light off so he could watch. Heddy got her wallet from her purse and went to unlock the door. I remember thinking she must have all kinds of false ID. She couldn’t very well show them a license under her real name.

I didn’t like being in a dark room with Crow. His pants were sagging over his skinny behind because he hadn’t taken time to put on his belt. He was fidgeting, the gun moving in rapid little jerks in his hand. I moved to where I could see out, trying not to watch how Crow was behaving.

As soon as Heddy had the safety chain off and the door open a crack, she was pushed back, the door forced in toward her. A man with a black gun with a long barrel on it came into the room and shut the door behind him. He had on tight jeans and a brown tee shirt. He looked like a college kid, kind of cute. He had blue eyes with long black lashes and he smiled pretty, even if the smile didn’t go with the scary looking gun in his hand.

Heddy said, “What the hell you think you’re doing?”

The man took in Daddy tied on one bed and Mama covered up on the other, then he looked at the bathroom door and must have seen Crow. He reached out to grab Heddy. That’s when there was a shot that made my ears ring and...and...

I don’t have to tell you how it looked, do I? You’ve seen that stuff before, haven’t you? As a policeman? When people get shot? I never thought I’d ever see real blood, see real people shot and dying.

What happened next went real fast. I could hardly keep up, trying to see what was going on. My heart was beating like crazy and I realized I was holding my breath.

The man was down and Heddy kicked away his gun. Crow came out of the bathroom, shaking his head, mumbling curses.

“
Get him untied,” Heddy said, motioning at Daddy. “We’ve got to get outta here.”

Daddy was pushing them again by saying stuff, but they acted like they didn’t even hear him. We were out of the motel room and on the road within minutes, I don’t even know how we moved that fast. I had to help Mama. She wasn’t...she wasn’t all the way buttoned up... She kept saying, “Hush, baby, hush.” even though I wasn’t saying anything.

I couldn’t stop remembering the college boy on the floor where we stepped over him. He really looked like someone who should have had books in his hand, not a gun. I thought all criminals were slimy looking. On TV and in the movies the bad guys wear dirty clothes and they look all crooked and beat up. They frown, not smile; they have scars and pimples and pockmarks. I was figuring out that bad people looked like the rest of us most of the time. That wasn’t fair. You’d never be able to tell one from the other. You’d never know when to be afraid.

The boy we left in the motel room had a hole in his belly and his hands over it. He was moaning, but not very loud. Blood came from between his fingers and dripped around them back onto his dark shirt. I couldn’t see his eyes, his face was turned to the wall and his knees were drawn up.

I thought Heddy and Crow would help him, but they wanted us out of there. Away from there. Someone would have come to investigate the sound of the gunshot. They didn’t have time to check on the man who had probably been about to shoot them anyway. That’s what they said when I asked them. That’s what they told me.

“
You don’t stop to call an ambulance for a guy who would have shot you dead,” Crow said. “Let’s get our priorities straight, kid.”

Heddy drove too fast. The car felt like it was a rocket ship roaring down the road. She passed every car in sight while Crow talked and talked and talked. He was a tape machine, turned on to fast forward. Daddy talked some more too, but no one listened to him, like he was a turned off machine or he was speaking behind a screen or something.

I thought we were going to have a wreck, Heddy drove so fast.

And then we did.

#

ONE moment she had it under control. The next moment she had hit a deep puddle of water standing on the highway from a shower earlier in the evening, and the car was hydroplaning across the center dividing line toward an oncoming car.

Heddy screamed, over-compensated on the wheel, hit the brakes, and the Riviera fishtailed despite the new, supposedly safer brake system. The oncoming vehicle, an old Volkswagen bus, nicked the rear panel of the Riviera and both of the cars caromed off the pavement and back onto it again. Two other cars, each coming from opposite directions, slammed on brakes, but entered the maelstrom nonetheless.

For several moments the occupants of the Riviera rode a rollercoaster ride, taking jolts that threw them against the car doors, the dash, the wheel, and even the roof of the car. Heddy had both feet on the brake, had it stomped clear down to the floor, her teeth clamped shut and grinding, her mind going blank, all time telescoping into a few infinitesimal moments.

Rending metal screamed like train wheels braking on hot rails and cracking safety glass spidered, then popped. The twin air bags in the front seat exploded with a loud whooshing sound of air, covering and pressing both Heddy and Jay back into their bucket seats, burning their faces, scaring the life out of them.

Seconds later one of the two air bags in the back seat exploded into Crow’s face, knocking him sideways into the door. His head banged against the window so hard he was knocked out instantly. Emily was thrown to the floorboard and Carrie was flung across the seat lengthwise, her head landing against the inflated air bag.

Finally, after what seemed an interminable length of time, all the motion stopped and the car died.

It was a five-car pile-up. From Heddy’s vantage point it seemed to her the driver of the Volkswagen was dead. A matron with steel silver hair slumped over the steering wheel with her skull cracked on the windshield. Blood ran from the wound to cover her face.

People in the remaining three cars were in various conditions from dead (a teen male driver of an older model Mitsubishi Galant), to slightly injured (his passenger, a young girl who looked to have suffered mere bruises where the seatbelt held her in position during the crash.) In the third car, a white Chevrolet Caprice, the driver and passenger, two men, seemed shaken but unharmed. The front of their car had bumper damage and the hood was crimped, but otherwise they had come into the wreck at a slower rate of speed and had been able to avoid the worst of it.

Cars stopped, halted by the debris and carnage blocking the highway, drivers stepping out of their vehicles to lend a hand.

Heddy pushed and finally got the air bag out of her face and to the side. She put both hands against her cheeks. They felt hot to the touch and raw, as if the first layer of her skin had been peeled off. Tears blinded her until she rubbed them from her eyes.

She looked around the interior of the Riviera. Panic overrode the first adrenaline rush of fear that had taken her when she hit the water and went into the slow-motion spin.
Have to get out of the car. Cops will come soon.
Over and over, that’s all she could think,
get out, get away, hurry.

She saw Jay pawing his way from beneath the air bag and said to him, “Get out of the car and to the side of the road. Wait there. You say a fucking word to anyone, I’ll shoot Emily in the head and I mean it.”

He twisted in his seat to see his family. His face was also burned red from the impact of the exploding air bag, but he seemed not to notice it. “Em? Carrie?”

“
I’m all right, Daddy.” Emily peeked up from behind the seat. “I just bumped my head and my knees, I think.” Her voice was shaky.

“
I hurt my arm,” Carrie said, rising from where she lay across the seat, holding onto her left arm.

“
Get out of the car!” Heddy roared.

Jay fumbled for the door and unlocked it, then stumbled out.

Heddy couldn’t get her door open. She realized after a struggle that it must be crushed in. She caught a glimpse of other people in the several car lights that lit up the highway and the wrecks. It looked like a nightmare to her. She wished she was dreaming, but she knew this was for real and they were in pretty deep trouble. Someone might be dead (the driver of the Volkswagen and the kid in the Galant) and maybe someone in the cars stopping on each side of the wrecked cars had a cellular car phone and was already calling the cops.

She crawled across the center console between the front bucket seats and out Jay’s side. She hurried around the car to where Crow was. He sat with his head against the spider-cracked window, perfectly still, his eyes closed. The air bag was crumpled all around him, like a cushion an assassin had pressed down around his head. She jerked open the door and had to catch him as he fell toward her. “Crow! Wake up, get up, Crow, are you all right? Damn!”

His eyes slowly opened and then he blinked several times as if he didn’t know her. Finally he said, “We still alive?” His upper teeth must have bitten down on his lower lip because it bled a bright red stream down his chin and neck.

“
Come on, try to stand up. They’ll be cops here soon. We have to get away from here.”

He pulled himself up by holding onto the door. He surveyed the damage to the car and, with Heddy, realized that it was totaled. The front end was crushed, the driver’s door was bent in the middle, and along the side of the car were streaks of metal scraped bare. “Christ, Heddy...”

“
Let’s go.” She reached into the back seat and withdrew his leather satchel. “Here, take this, move it!”

Heddy knew she possessed the coolest head and she had no injuries beyond the facial burns, at least she couldn’t feel anything else wrong yet. It was up to her to get them out of this.