looked over the list of names. Three in particular stood out.
Grady Larkin.
Luis and Christine Guzman.
For the first time, I found myself thinking about John Fredrickson’s family. The newspaper said he left behind a wife, two children. A family had been shattered. My heart felt weak, knowing these lives were damaged forever because of me. Despite my innocence, nothing could fill that family’s void.
Everything hit me like a punch to the gut and suddenly I felt nauseous. I bent over, hands on my knees, heaving. Amanda, ever courageous, rubbed my back.
“Henry? Henry? You okay?”
I shooed her away with a wave and resumed heaving. When my stomach’s spin cycle stopped, I stood up and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
I gathered myself, still panting, hands trembling. Amanda looked me over as I clenched and unclenched my fists. She seemed to know what I was thinking.
“Yeah, I just…” My voice trailed off. I looked into her eyes, warm and sorrowful, as if sharing my misery would help lighten the load. “It just doesn’t seem real.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“I mean, I have a home and a family I haven’t even spoken to since everything happened. My mother, she’d be devastated.”
“What about your father?”
I shook my head.
“He won’t care. This would just confirm his assumption that I was born to fail.”
“Well, then it’s up to you to prove him wrong.” I nodded. Years ago I’d made the choice to distance myself from my parents. Accomplishing that goal brought a sense of both pride and regret. And now I couldn’t turn to them even if I wanted to.
“Now come on,” Amanda said. “We have work to do.”
She took my arm and we headed toward the highway. I’d walked ten miles before, but never with a definite purpose or destination. Cold nights, breath streaming in front of me, nowhere to go but to be lost in the woods of my own thoughts. Back home, when I couldn’t take things anymore, when the rotten stench of beer and sweat literally forced me out of the house, walking was a cure from my father’s passive aggressive anger. I waited years for him to explode, to release all his hatred in a viscous torrent, but instead it wafted out like a leaky gas main, making me woozy and sick for years, poisoning me slowly.
One of my favorite analogies is the frog and the pot of water. I used it on sources that were reluctant to speak. It helped them understand the severity of their situation.
If you put a frog in a boiling pot of water, he’ll sense the heat and immediately jump out of the scalding liquid. But if you put a frog in a cold pot of water then slowly raise the temperature, the frog will boil alive. He becomes accustomed to the gradual temperature change, right until it kills him.
The lesson is that people stay in terrible situations simply because they’ve gotten used to them. The water around them is so scalding and hurtful but they don’t know any better because it’s happened in such small increments. Thankfully I was able to leave my own pot before it was too late.
We started off down the interstate, walking side by side, halfway between the surge of speeding vehicles and the protection of the tree line. I didn’t realize it until the third or fourth mile, but my leg was really starting to hurt. Not the kind of ache from a cramped muscle or even a deep bruise. No, this was beneath the skin. Nausea swept through me, but I fought it off.
Soon buildings began to appear on the horizon, rising above the endless span of highway. The humidity dried up, the sweat once pouring from my body now drying, causing my shirt to stick to my skin. Peeling it off caused an icky sensation, like hearing the wet sound of a bandage ripped from a fresh cut. Amanda seemed to notice this, and leered at me whenever I pried the sleeves loose from my biceps.
“This is the first time I’ve ever said this,” I said, “but I could really go for a good shopping spree right about now.”
Amanda laughed, but there was weariness in it. Still, I had to admire her being able to keep a sense of humor under the circumstances.
“If we get out of this, I’ll take you to Barneys. You’ll fall in love with their suits.” She playfully tugged at the waist-band of my pants.
“Forget suits, I’d drop twenty on a crappy Fruit of the Loom right about now.”
“I bet Mr. Fruit of the Loom would be flattered to hear that.”
As we walked, time seemed to go into a strange sort of wind tunnel, everyone speeding past us. We were running on fumes, the colors all blurring together, like life was a record going at 33 ^1/3 . Amanda was beginning to walk sluggishly, dragging her heels, her shoulders slouching.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Just a little tired,” she said. “Haven’t slept in like thirty-six hours.”
Same as me, I thought. But I had reasons to keep going.
Amanda wasn’t fighting for her survival, she was fighting for a man she’d met a day and a half ago. We needed a place to rest, even if it was just for a little while.
One hour and three more miles later, according to my body’s-likely faulty-pedometer, we saw a sign for gas, food and lodging, and an arrow veering off the freeway. I looked at Amanda, who shrugged, as if to leave the decision to stop entirely up to me.
“We should rest,” I said. She slowed down, seemingly mulling over this idea.
“If you insist.”
We followed exit 42 until we reached an intersection. Half a dozen fast-food joints populated either side of the highway, competing for layover dollars from families on the go. A Motel 3 lay about a half mile down the road, the roof a muddy red. A large neon light proclaimed that, yes, they did have vacancies and at least the V in TV. If the laws of division were correct, a Motel 3 would be half as good as Motel 6. And right they were. It resembled a two-story slab of pancake-colored timeshares, the paint looking like it hadn’t received a second coat since before Sherwin married Williams.
We entered the motel, where an elderly man with a crescent moon of gray hair was resting his eyes at the reception desk. I rang the bell. The man stirred, picked his head up and wiped the drool from his mouth.
“What?” he said, his voice irritated, like a cranky teenager woken from a nap.
“Hi, uh, we’d like a room.”
He grimaced, then reached beneath the counter for a water bottle with an inch of viscous black liquid at the bottom. He raised it to his mouth and spit chewing tobacco into the lip. Whatever missed the bottle dripped down the side like an insect’s number two.
“Minimum’s one night. None of that ‘we need fifteen minutes for a quickie’ bullcrap. You want that you best go a mile down the road to the Sleep ’N’ Snuggle Inn, fifteen bucks an hour at that slop house.”
“Then we’ll take a room for one night,” I said.
“Don’t you be bull crappin’ me,” he spat. “If you plan on stayin’ more than three nights I need a down payment. Too many peoples coming in here staying and don’t paying.”
“Just one night,” I repeated. “Honest. And we’ll even pay that up front.”
“Well, all right then.”
He reached under the counter and pulled up a gigantic logbook, its yellowed pages more like remnants of Talmudic scripture than loose-leaf. He turned it around to face us, and motioned to a pen attached to a chain. Not a dinky chain of metal balls like they have at banks, but a full damn chain. If this is how he protected writing implements, I wondered how he tethered his pets.
“Need your name-both of ’em-and John Hancocks.”
“No problem. Can we pay in cash?”
“This is still America, right? Haven’t gone all to plastic yet.”
“Far as I know,” Amanda said.
I took the pen and logbook and began to scrawl. B-O-B W-O-O-D.
Before I could finish, Amanda jabbed me in the ribs.
S-O-N, I wrote. Bob Woodson. Stupid name.
