Sorrow Road (22 page)

The Driftwood was where Carla and her high school friends had come when they were feeling bored and reckless, when they were about to climb out of their skins with discontent. The ID check was a joke. That made it perfect. She'd gotten drunk for the very first time in her life right here, when she was fifteen years old, after which Kayleigh Crocker had taken her back to Kayleigh's house. For all Carla's mom knew, she and Kayleigh were watching
American Idol
and giving each other pedicures; in reality, Carla had spent most of the night in the Crockers' bathroom, puking her guts out while Kayleigh held her hair and dabbed the back of her neck with a cool washcloth. Carla could not even think about tequila anymore without a twinge of nausea.

And here it was, same place, same compellingly disheveled mess: the Driftwood.

She parked the Kia and walked with mincing-stepped caution across the icy lot, grabbing the occasional side mirror so that she wouldn't slip. It was very cold. Cold permeated the world; it was a force unto itself, almost prehistoric in its bluntness and lack of nuance. This was a deadly, no-nonsense cold. If you miscalculated, if you were trapped outside without protection, it would kill you without a second thought. Or a first one. That gave Carla an odd solace: This cold was a reality that didn't mess around. It was direct. It couldn't be bought off or bargained with.

Somebody had thrown up right next to the front door. The stiff puddle of orangey-green vomit had frozen solid. It was, Carla decided, the ideal welcome mat for this place. She took a deep breath and reached for the wooden door handle—dark from decades of groping by other people's greasy hands—and entered.

The place was packed. She hit a headwind of darkness and swirling, raunchy smells: beer and sweat and Tommy Girl and aftershave and a sort of clinging, moldy odor that even winter could not dispel. Carla fought her way forward. She glanced around. Some people sat at the small round tables, some danced, some just stood there, trying to look cool. She didn't know a soul, which was just what she'd hoped for. She wanted to be by herself, but not in a quiet place. She wanted distraction. She wanted loud noise and a lot of pointless motion. She wanted chaos. Seething chaos—to match the seething chaos inside her. To balance herself out.

By now she was aware of another level of smell, too, suspended slightly above the alcohol and the body odor and the cologne, a smell that was harder to describe but always present in places like this: the smell of raw human need, mostly sexual but sometimes not, sometimes just the desire not to be alone.

“Hey.”

Her path was abruptly blocked by a short, portly man with a big grin and a bad toupee—it was blond, and it lapped down on either side of his face like a pair of fuzzy saddlebags. Carla had been heading to the bar, a long one that ran across the rear wall. Behind it was a tarnished mirror. A hand-lettered sign taped to the mirror read: NO SHIRT
,
NO SHOES
—
COME ON IN
,
COUSIN
!

“Excuse me,” Carla said. She tried to go around him. He stepped to the right, blocking her way again. She went left; he did, too. His grin got bigger.

“Come on,” Carla muttered. “Give me a break, mister. Okay? I just want a beer.”

“Lemme get it for you. Happy to.” He waggled his eyebrows. As noisy as it was in here, as closely packed as the crowd was, she could hear him perfectly well.

She gave him the once-over. She had to, because he would not move. He had bad skin and saggy eyes and a sackful of chins. He was ancient, Carla thought; he had to be at least fifty. He wore a tight blue sweatshirt with WVU across the front in yellow letters, and below that, in small letters: MOUNTAINEERS. He might have been wearing a belt, but it was impossible to tell because his belly flopped over the front of his jeans as if he were toting a bag of something loose and jiggly. Those jeans were so tight that Carla wondered how he moved his legs. And he wore cowboy boots.

Of course, she thought. Had to be cowboy boots. He was about as authentic a bronc buster as Garth Brooks was.

“So whaddya say?” he persisted.

“Just leave me alone, okay?”

Now he frowned. The chins wobbled, settled.

“You think you're too good for the likes of me, that it, princess?” he said. Some preliminary menace in his tone now. He belched. She smelled the last beer he'd had.

I should have known better,
Carla thought.
Coming in here alone. Jesus.

She tried once more to go around him, moving again to her right. This time, he stuck out an arm.

“You gotta pay the toll,” he said. The big grin was back. “Wanna know what the toll is?”

No, she did not want to know. She had an idea, but it was too gross to contemplate. She was just about to ask him again to leave her be—more politely this time, hoping that maybe he had a streak of decency in him, although the signs were not promising—when another man stepped out of the sweaty jungle of people.

“Move along,” New Guy said, and not in a nice way. He was tall and sinewy, a lean streak of bad attitude. He did not look at Carla. His eyes were locked on Cowboy Boots.

“Make me.”

“I don't think you want me to do that,” New Guy said. “Do you?”

Cowboy Boots got the point. He dropped his arm. He shrugged. He started to sidle away. His last official act was to glare at Carla and utter the classic bar retort, the pride-restoring words used by every man rebuffed by any woman since the beginning of time: “Goddamned dyke.”

Carla laughed. She watched Cowboy Boots melt into the crowd. By the time she turned back, New Guy was gone. She was disappointed. She wanted to thank him. Oh, well.

Nobody else bothered her. She drank a beer while standing at the bar, letting the essence of the place seep into her while she observed it. The sheer density of all the assembled bodies made it very warm in here. At first she faced the mirror, seeing nothing, not even her own reflection—the mirror was cloudy, and the room was dark. Then she turned around, elbows against the wood, and watched the people. The tightly coiled knot inside her stomach was gradually loosening. It was partly the beer, she figured. And partly the place.

This was what she had needed. A place filled with strangers, where she would be cushioned by other people. None of them knew her, and so none of them would be likely to come up and say how disappointed they were at what she had done or not done in her life. Mission accomplished. She turned back around. The bartender pointed to her empty glass. She shook her head. No, she didn't want another.

Outside, the cold felt exceptionally good on her flushed face. She took a deep breath, appreciating the way the cold reached deep inside her chest with its icy fingers, waking her up, layer by layer. It was invigorating. She had just rounded the corner of a black Dodge Charger and was halfway to her car when she saw him: Cowboy Boots. He was leaning against a red truck at the end of the sloppy row of parked cars, lighting a cigarette.

Spotting her, he suddenly straightened up as if someone had punched him in the small of the back. He flung aside the cigarette.

“Well, well,” he called out. “Whadda we got ourselves here? Little princess don't have her prince around no more.”

In the bar he had seemed pathetic, not scary. But here in the parking lot, it was a different story. There was no one else around. The meager light from a bulb clamped to the side of the building caused the vehicles to cast crazy purple shadows across the frozen, snow-rutted ground, and amidst the crooked striping, he radiated a kind of crazy, anything-goes menace. He laughed. His laugh was low and sharp, with no amusement in it.

Carla ignored him. She kept walking.
Any minute now,
she thought,
somebody else will be coming out of the bar. A witness. He won't touch me if there's anybody else around.

No one came.

She had her keys in her right hand. She was within three feet of her car when Cowboy Boots grunted and lurched forward, pushing off against the side of the red truck. He was coming after her. Startled, Carla dropped her keys. She looked down, but the ground between the parked cars was a shadowy no-man's-land. The keys must have bounced and landed—where? She didn't know.

Her last weapon was gone.

Panic overwhelmed her. Cowboy Boots was mumbling as he barreled forward, and while she couldn't understand his words, she didn't have to: the tone was enough of a tip-off to his mood and his intentions. He might have been fat and old, but he was big, and she was small.

She would make a run for it. Yes. That was what she would do. Dark snowy fields surrounded the lot. No trees to provide cover, but the snow was deep enough to give her an advantage in a foot race: She was much lighter than he was. But if he caught up to her, the advantage would be reversed. His bulk would work in his favor.

“Hey.”

Another voice. Where had it come from? Carla's head whipped around.

It was New Guy. A cigarette was slung in his mouth, which explained why he was out here. He came at Cowboy Boots from the other end of the row.

“Help you with something?” New Guy said.

Cowboy Boots sized him up. New Guy was slender, but he was wiry, and wiriness can possess the strength of steel. Cowboy Boots seemed to understand this.

“Don't need no help from the likes of you.”

“In that case,” New Guy said, “why don't you get the hell out of here? Like, right now?”

Cowboys Boots offered up a sneer. “Shit, mister, she's all yours. I'd check her for crabs, though. Looks pretty skanky to me.” He laughed a manufactured laugh and left. His mutterings blended with the scrape and chop of his heels against the stiff mini-drifts of snow.

Carla looked at New Guy. She didn't know what to say. “Thanks” seemed lame. And it occurred to her, as she searched for a proper way to acknowledge his help, that at no point in his two exchanges with Cowboy Boots had New Guy's voice risen above a conversational tone, or acquired even the beginning of an angry edge. There was a gentleness about him, almost a courtliness, that Carla could not quite fathom; it wasn't weakness—his presence alone had intimidated Cowboy Boots—but it also wasn't the sort of dumb machismo that generally won the day in these parts. She decided that she would not be surprised to find out that he was from somewhere else.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

He was older than she'd thought. Maybe even older than Cowboy Boots. He wore a thick plaid parka, cargo pants, work boots. He had a hard, angular face that had once been handsome. She liked a memory of lost handsomeness, she decided, even better than the kind that was still there. His hair was hidden under a watch cap.

“You really helped me out,” she said. She had to say it, lame or not: “Thanks.”

“No problem.” When he drew on the cigarette, his cheeks caved in. The red tip of the cigarette glowed. She could not take her eyes off it. He blew out the smoke, lifting his chin as he did so.

She waited for him to say something else. A wisecrack, maybe, about Cowboy Boots. A funny insult. A joke. Hell—she'd settle for anything.

She was freezing her ass off. Why was she still standing here?

Because there was something compelling about this man. Something very different from the men she'd known. A kind of quiet integrity or calm strength or—whatever. She could not put her finger on it.

“Guys like that,” she said, “give dive bars a bad name.”

He smiled. Okay, so he had a sense of humor.

But then he ruined everything. He peered at her and said, “You're kind of young to be hanging out in bars, aren't you? Dive or otherwise?”

“Yeah, right,” she said. She was disappointed. Crap. Was
everybody
a narc these days? She'd make him pay. “Thanks, Grandpa. Thanks a lot. Appreciate you looking out for me. Oh—isn't it past your bedtime?”

“Forget it.” He flipped the cigarette into the snow. “See you around.”

“Wait.” She did not want him to go. She really,
really
did not want him to go.

What was she doing? What was she playing at? She had a boyfriend, right? Greg Balcerzak. Well, a sort-of boyfriend. Things weren't all that great. The night before he left for Paraguay, they'd made love, or tried to. It was awkward, and bad. Well, had it ever been good? She and Greg didn't work. Was it really that, though? Or was it the fact that every time she tried to talk to him about what had happened to her four years ago in Acker's Gap he just said, “Thank God you're out of there now,” or asked her if she'd been in love with Lonnie Prince, which wasn't the point. Of anything. Not even close.

“What is it?” New Guy said.

“It's pretty cold out here.”

“Can't argue the point.”

She had spotted her keys on a snow mound next to her left front tire. She bent down and retrieved them. When she stood back up again, she took a deep breath. She felt like she was on a high dive, her toes curled around the front edge of the board. She was spreading out her arms on either side of her body. Looking way, way down at a blue expanse of pure possibility.

“Want to sit in my car and, like, talk?” she said. “Just for a couple of minutes?”

A beat. “Okay.”

She put out her hand. “Carla Elkins.”

“Travis Womack.”

She started the engine to get the heat going. The first thing he told her was his age. She'd been right; he was old. Forty-eight.
Jesus,
she told herself.
That's not just old. That's
old
.

Older even than her mom. But—okay.

They were several minutes into their conversation when Travis made a confession: He had feared her motives when she asked him to chat in her car. He fully expected her to try to buy or sell drugs. “And I was going to tell you,” he said, “not to be an idiot.”