“I don’t watch movies much.”
“Well, you’re missin’ out. I grew up on the TV set. I might as well, wasn’t nothing else to do. My Mama and I used to watch it together, late at night. She’d come stay in my room and we’d watch TV. That was when my stepdaddy was drunk and wanted to hit her. She said I was named after a movie she liked about a girl named Gidget. You know it?”
Bill shook his head.
“Reckon you don’t know who James Dean is, there’s a damn good chance you aren’t gonna know about a movie called Gidget. Anyway, she said she and my Daddy saw it on TV once, and she said something about it made her feel romantic, and they made love and I was conceived. They had to get married on account of me. Daddy said my Mama was a bitch from hell and I was her little bitch. He always said that, like we weren’t human.”
“What happened to him? Your Daddy?”
“He stuck his head out a car window and got hit by a signpost. Mama was drivin’. She said she didn’t even know he’d gotten hit. He rolled down his window and stuck his head out and she said she heard a whack, and he just sat back down in the car with his head turned, and she didn’t think nothing of it. Talked to him for five miles she said, before she realized he wasn’t answering any of her questions and he smelled like shit. See, when he got hit he crapped himself. It wasn’t his fault, it’s just your muscles and your bowels let go when you get killed sudden like.”
“Why in hell was he stickin’ his head out of a car window?”
“Mama said he always did that. Like a dog. He thought it was funny. But she was drivin’ too close to the side that day and that sign got him. I finally ended up seeing that movie.”
“What movie?”
“ Gidget. I finally saw it, and it sucked. Wasn’t nothin’ in there would make me want to fuck anybody. Not just seein’ the movie, anyway. I figure what Mom did was fuck through the movie and she just noticed it was on and remembered the name of it. Had to be like that, ’cause there isn’t anything hot about that movie. Not to me anyway. Some people can get turned on by all manner of things. But I was named after the girl in there. Her movie name anyway. Gidget.”
Bill thought he ought to leave well enough alone, but he couldn’t help himself. “You wasn’t talkin’ to me before, why are you friendly now?”
“You aren’t as scary-lookin’. I see enough freaks in this carnival, I don’t want to have to make friends with ’em. I set out to be a model, not a freak show owner’s wife.”
“What happened to the modelin’?”
“Too much tits and ass and not enough legs and neck.”
“I don’t know that’s so bad.”
“Yeah?”
“Looks all right.”
“All right. Hell, you’d cut off one of your feet if you thought you was gonna get your thang in me. I may not know much, but I know men.”
“You know so much, you don’t like freaks so much, how come you’re married to one?”
“You’re not nice. I thought maybe you was nice ’cause you looked nice, but you aren’t. And now that I can see better in the light, you don’t look that much like James Dean anyway.”
She tried to appear mad but Bill didn’t think she was all that upset. She went back to the bedroom and shut the door.
Bill felt as if he’d been run over by a truck. He sucked in the air. It was full of her perfume, and she hadn’t been wearing any. She was right, he’d cut off his goddamn foot.
Twenty
Bill drove on, thinking about Gidget. By midday it was starting to get dark. The air was heavy and the clouds looked like swollen bladders. Zippers of lightning pulled their flies above the pines, exposing hot light.
Then Bill saw a remarkable thing. In the distance, down the flat stretch of highway, there was a patch darker than anywhere else. It looked as if one of the clouds had set down on the ground, and it was smooth and round and rolling toward him, like a bowling ball.
When the cloud hit it was solid with wind and rain. The strike made the motor home slide and the steering wheel was useless. The home rattled and rocked and Bill heard Gidget yell and hit the wall in the bedroom.
The motor home went way right off the road, between two scrubby pine trees. It dipped in a ditch, came out of it because the other side was lower. It went up and out and along the grass and mounted a concrete offshoot, just missed a metal picnic table, then managed to hit something else.
By the time Bill got it together he realized he was situated under a cluster of large oak trees in a roadside park. The front of the vehicle had gone off the concrete and hit a sign with a historical marker on it.
He left the motor running and turned on the windshield wipers. The motor home was shaking violently. A bolt of lightning hit one of the oaks and knocked a limb about the size of a telephone pole loose and slammed it on the ground in front of the motor home. There was another limb sticking off the larger limb, and it brushed over the front and touched the roof, dripping leaves onto the windshield.
Gidget came stumbling from the bedroom cussing. “You sonofabitch,” she said. “Can’t you drive?”
“Not in this,” Bill said. He put the motor home in gear and eased back in his seat and watched the storm through the windshield and the gaps in the leaves draped over it. Outside, debris in the form of leaves, dirt, limbs, and rubbish was being tossed about in the manner a dryer tosses clothes.
“Good God,” Gidget said. “We in a tornado?”
“We got hit by what looked like a ball of black wind. I reckon we’re on the edge of a tornado.”
Lightning cracked its whip and the interior of the motor home was charged with electricity. Bill felt his nose hairs wiggle.
“God almighty,” Gidget said. She took the passenger’s seat, watching the storm, shivering. There was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in the little tray on the dash, and she took them and held them in her lap, then nervously returned them.
Bill was looking out the side window, through some trees and down a dip of land toward the highway. There was a whipping sound and he saw something pop yellow light, then the light was flicking toward him. He realized it was a high-line wire that had snapped free and been thrown up high over the trees. It dropped across an oak limb and fell like a fishing line tipped with an electric eel. The end of the line popped and fizzled and writhed and danced on the cement near the motor home.
Gidget screamed and jumped out of her seat and onto Bill’s lap. She hugged him around the neck. He found his hand had come up under her pajama top and was resting on the smooth skin at the small of her back. The flesh there was warm and damp with sweat. She looked at him and swallowed. Her eyes were big, the pupils swollen. She held him tighter. She looked at the popping high-line wire.
“That scared me.”
“It didn’t do me no good neither.”
“Maybe you ought to cut off the windshield wipers. Not like we’re goin’ nowhere, and it could get hung up with some of those leaves.”
Easing forward, careful to hold Gidget on his knee, Bill shut off the windshield wipers. Without their beating sound it was quiet inside the motor home. Outside was the wind, the rain, and the sputtering high-line wire.
“We could have been killed, had that wire hit the motor home,” she said.
“I reckon.”
“We’d have been electrocuted, wouldn’t we?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this thing’s insulated enough.”
“No, we’d have been killed. We aren’t that far from death right now. That wind turned, it could throw that wire on us.”
“I’ll try to back out from under this limb.”
Gidget didn’t move so he could try it. “Death is all around us. It always is, you know?”
