He’d watched the cop cruise by and laughed. Ann’s wrist was reddened after he let it go. She’d slid away from him as far as she could while he started the Camaro, salt worn and more the straw color of piss than the canary yellow it had once been. The ocean air ate away at everything she’d thought, including some people’s minds. She hated the hoarse sound of the engine when he revved it, how he always loved to leave behind a patch of burning rubber as if he was some kind of badass and not a bottom-feeding drug dealer. She could see that he was worried. His face was a sheen of sweat and he stank like fertilizer and it made Ann gag. She’d had to lower her window for some air. I won’t have to fake being sick, I’ll be sick.
“You’ve got to hold it just a little longer, Ann. We need to get on the freeway before that cop comes around again.”
“He’s not coming back. You say that every time.”
“I swear I could almost read what he was thinking when he went past. Couldn’t you?”
“No, Duane.”
“I guess we’ll find out little girl. But I still think there’s something in his gut that isn’t sitting right and I bet you he’s trying to come up with a reason to pop my trunk.”
“He’s gone,” Ann said. “He doesn’t care …”
Duane drove fast when he thought he was being followed, which was usually most of the time. Closer to Traitor Bay he knew the cops and they mostly left him alone. But Portland was always too big for Duane. He felt exposed, couldn’t maintain his 360- degree vision without a couple bumps up the nose to keep him alert. Lately the stuff had started to show its side effects. It made him think he was clairvoyant.
Sometimes they’d meet people in an all night restaurant or a bowling alley and Duane wouldn’t make her stay in the car. If he was trying to impress, he’d make a show of spoiling her-of buying her all the chocolate shakes or fries she wanted or handing over money for arcade games without complaining. To Duane Ann’s face blindness made her the perfect partner in crime. He took comfort in the fact that if the police ever made Ann stare at a book of mug shots they wouldn’t have much luck.
Before James and Ann moved back from Portland, Duane had sold the house and was living out of a cheap motel along 101 with an addict girlfriend who would one day sell him out. Ann was living with her aunt and helping with the store, trying to bring some stability back to her life. She didn’t have much to do with Duane but it still hadn’t stopped him from coming by the store to try and talk to her. The town was growing weary of him too. He owed a lot of people money and the interest was costing him in teeth.
Despite Ann’s warnings, James began hanging around with Duane and his girlfriend Traci, mostly because he didn’t have many friends left in Traitor Bay and Duane always had plenty of pot to share. Traci was well known by the Traitor police for disorderly conduct but was never charged. They usually drove her back to the motel or called Duane to pick her up. Sheriff Dawkins warned Duane that he didn’t want to see her doing it anymore so on the nights that he went to Portland he made sure he left her heavily sedated.
One afternoon James talked Ann into going trout fishing with him and Duane far up Traitor River. Ann agreed so long as she could drive her own car. She didn’t trust Duane on the hairpin mountain roads, never knew if he’d be too buzzed to drive safely. She could tell she’d hurt Duane’s feelings but he’d said nothing. James rode with her and for several miles they followed the yellow Camaro on roads leading away from the river and cut past empty cow pastures and old barns being torn apart by blackberry vine. Where the sagging barbed wire fences ended the county land began-crisscrossed with forest roads knifed down to the clay substratum that recorded a tapestry of deer and tire tracks. Duane smoked his tires at this point and roared on ahead, passed a camper trailer with two dogs gnashing their teeth and disappeared around a sharp bend in the road where the rocky shoulder was marked by wooden crosses and kitschy shrines of plastic flowers and deflated balloons.
The river reappeared again at the bottom of a steep embankment, narrow now and shimmering like silver coins flowing from an upended sack. Light penetrating through rifts in the thick canopy showed pale green water braided with pearl foam. After the road climbed higher and leveled out, the river spread open again and moved slower. On a treeless acre they saw a cedar shingled building sitting near the edge of the bank, a cloud of wood smoke curling between the vehicles parked in the graveled lot. Two pickup trucks sat with drying crusts of mud, a tan Cadillac with mildew-blackened roof rot they knew belonged to an ex-minister who’d fallen on hard times. Duane’s Camaro was parked there too, fishing rods poking out the backseat window.
Ann had immediately pulled onto the next shoulder and stopped.
“Shit. I didn’t agree to this …”
“It’s going to be okay,” James said. “A couple drinks first isn’t going to hurt nobody.”
“I didn’t want to go fishing with that fool in the first place. I was only trying to be nice. Thought I’d surprise Kate with some rainbows for dinner.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on him. We’ve all got our problems to deal with.”
“Well I’m glad to see the two of you have grown so close. Maybe he’ll give you a job as his lookout and you’ll actually get paid.”
“I know it was wrong what he did back then. But I think he’s really sorry about it. I know he wants to patch things up with you.”
“Give me a break. Duane is a classic narcissist. In his world we’re nothing but paper cutouts and you know it.”
When they’d walked in he was already holding court. A double shot of Cuervo glittered in front of him while he sucked at a Marlboro. His captive audience pretended to be attentive, on the off chance that Duane was flush and would soon be buying drinks for the privilege. What they didn’t know was that Duane was expecting them to spot him a few. The bartender, a big sullen man whom Ann had seen walking his dog on the beach while she was running, took little effort to hide his wariness. Well informed of his customer’s sketchy behavior, he’d seemed readied at first to punish Duane for the slightest infraction. But it was Sunday night and the bar was dead, would be until ladies night on Tuesday-not that there were a lot of women willing to make the trip out here. So long as he pays his tab, let the guy bullshit as much as he wants.
When it didn’t look like Duane was going to stop drinking, Ann and James left for a well known fishing hole less than a mile away. They’d still managed to catch some plump hatchery trout before it got too dark. Not a lot of flavor, but if you dusted them with enough salt and fried them in butter you could eat them with their crunchy skins on.
Duane had showed up close to sunset, chain smoking and shaky, his right eye swollen shut and a bleeding incisor hanging askew. He’d apologized for not coming with them to fish, but business was business and you couldn’t pass it up when it dared to fall into your lap. As he’d leaned against the Camaro for support he told them he was going to be late for some appointments in Portland if he didn’t leave soon. There’d be no time to go back to the motel to check on Traci and he’d asked Ann if she and James would mind checking on her, it would really help him out. He’d tried to give her some money to go out somewhere nice for dinner and she’d pushed his hand away.
It was after ten when they found Traci running barefoot down the middle of 101, hysterical and soaked to the bone. Somehow they’d talked her into getting into Ann’s car and they’d driven her back to the motel and on the way she’d told them where Duane hid his money, how she’d followed him around the back of his mother’s house to the wooden tool shed where he kept it stashed in empty varnish cans. When they got her back in bed James had rolled her a joint to calm her down, hoping she would fall asleep. But Traci kept talking non-stop as if she were in a trance, telling them secrets about how Duane would sometimes cooperate with the police when he got caught, give up names so he wouldn’t serve any time.
They’d first waited a week to see if Traci would remember what she’d said to them, if she’d told Duane about it-and yet she could only recall running barefoot down 101, how a few cars had slowed next to her and asked if she needed help and when she’d peered inside she’d seen that the cars were packed with the very demons whom she’d heard trolled highways in search of souls. When James arranged to met Duane to buy some pot for a
