gonna sink like a stone. The duck, on the other hand, she can go and live in the chicken yard, all right, but is she gonna be happy there?” He sat back with a fat sense of satisfaction, figuring he’d made his point about as well as anybody could make one. “Now, I ask you, can you think of anything in this world sadder than a duck who’s never going to see a pond again?” He couldn’t understand why his mama was just sitting there laughing.
“Oh, Jimmy Joe-” she chuckled, reaching over to pat him on the knee “-you know, I think you read too much.” She paused to wipe her eyes, then gave a deep, amused sigh. “Son, I don’t know how to tell you this, but people aren’t chickens or ducks. People can live anywhere, adapt to anything, if they want to. Depends on their priorities, what they want out of life, what’s important to them.” She paused again, this time to let the seriousness in her voice settle in around them, and then continued, “And the only way you’re ever going to find that out about a person is to ask.”
Jimmy Joe stared at the floor and said nothing. He was suddenly aware of how tired he was. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother’s lapdog slippers slide off the coffee table as she stood and gathered up her antacid glass. He felt a lump settle into his throat as she leaned down to kiss him.
“I’m just so glad you’re home safe and sound, son,” she said huskily. She gave his shoulder a squeeze and shuffled off toward the kitchen. In the doorway she paused and turned. “You know,” she said. And he thought, Uh- oh. He knew that sly tone of voice. “J.J.’s still got a week’s vacation left. Why don’t the two of you go on down to Florida, spend some time together? I’ll bet Pensacola Beach’d be pretty nice this time of year.”
He cleared his throat and waved his hand and tried his best not to sound like he was making excuses. “Ah, well…you know I sorta promised J.J. I’d take him to Six Flags. It’s open just for the holidays. And then I got to service my truck…get ready to make another run out to California…”
“Son,” his mama said sternly, “I never raised you to be a coward.”
Chapter 14
I-40-Oklahoma
The way Jimmy Joe saw it, it wasn’t a case of being a coward. There was a difference between being a coward and being sensible. And he didn’t think he was being stubborn and muleheaded, which his sister Jessie accused him of, either. What he was, he told himself, was patient. Patient and sensible.
All he needed was time. Time to forget. Time to forget everything that had happened to him out there in that Panhandle blizzard, and all but the haziest memories of a selfish and uppity redhead from California and her tiny pink scrap of a baby girl.
If only, he thought, she hadn’t gone and named her Amy.
Still, he was sure it was just a matter of keeping busy and letting enough time go by so that the memories would start to fade. So he wouldn’t keep thinking he heard Mirabella’s voice talking to him above the highway hum and the growl of a big diesel engine. So he wouldn’t keep waking up alone in his hand-carved walnut bed remembering the way her body had felt in his arms. Then, if he could get those memories out of his head, maybe the feelings that went with them would go, too-the aching sense of longing, and loss.
The problem was, it didn’t seem to be working. Instead, it seemed the more time that went by, the more vivid the memories got. And the stronger the feelings. Sometimes he would tiptoe downstairs in the dead of night and plug the interview tapes into the VCR and run them over and over until his eyes smarted; the feel of her skin, wet and slick against his cheek, the smell of her hair, the salt taste of her sweat vivid in his mind, and every nerve in his body feeling as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper.
He couldn’t even remember anymore how he’d felt about her back then, when he’d been handcuffed and hog- tied by the knowledge that she was a pregnant woman, a woman in labor, and almost certainly someone else’s woman besides. All he knew was the way he’d come to feel about her since; the way he felt about her now, which was a way he hadn’t felt in so long he was astounded to discover he still could.
The last time he’d felt like that he’d been-oh, about sixteen, grappling and groping with Patti in the back of his oldest brother’s car, unable to think about anything in the world but how good her breasts felt in his hand, and how if he didn’t get himself inside her he was going to blow apart into a million pieces. She’d been a virgin, too. They both had been-he, too randy and dumb to know that she’d lied to him about the bruises he’d found on her body, or that because of them there were blacker ones on her soul, and that he was about to make the biggest mistake of his life.
That was what those kinds of feelings did to a man, he thought. Made him forget everything he’d been taught about what was right and what was wrong, everything he knew about common sense, everything he believed in. He might have had some kind of excuse back then, being just sixteen. But he wasn’t sixteen anymore. He was a grown man with a child of his own, and a future to make for him. And no matter what his mama had told him, going after something just because it would make
No. Marybell had been
The week after J.J.’s Christmas vacation ended, Jimmy Joe hit the road again. It was a pretty good trip-a long one, which was okay with him-another load of textiles headed for L.A., after which he was supposed to go out to San Pedro to pick up a bunch of electronics components just come in off a boat from Taiwan and run them up to Boise. He planned it so he would take the southern route out and the northern route back, and that way avoid 1-40 and the Texas Panhandle altogether.
But when he called in from Boise, his broker told him there was a load of designer-label beer down in Denver, if he wanted it, headed for Fort Worth, so he wouldn’t have to deadhead it all the way home. He couldn’t very well pass up an opportunity like that, could he? So much for well-laid plans.
The weather was downright balmy for January as he dropped down out of Denver and headed into New Mexico. He hit a little rain in Albuquerque, but none of the frozen stuff. In fact he couldn’t see any traces at all left of the blizzard that had paralyzed the whole midsection of the country just a few short weeks ago.
Butterflies began to stir in his belly when he rolled past the Santa Rosa truck stop where Mirabella had spent the night in his sleeper, and he remembered how he’d rubbed her back and fed her chicken soup, and that they’d argued about Walt Disney movies.
From there, with the road dry and dusty, it was only two hours to the rest stop east of Adrian. It seemed incredible to him now, rolling along with his tires singing and the radio placidly droning on about the whereabouts of any bears in the vicinity, to recall that the last time he’d driven through there it had been in a single-file convoy creeping along at no more than walking speed.
The pounding of his heart didn’t ease up after he passed the rest stop, either. Still to come was Vega, and Riggs’s gas station where he’d left the keys to Mirabella’s car. He wondered if she’d picked it up yet, or if it was still there, waiting for her.
He wasn’t going to pull off and see. He’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t. But suddenly there was old Route 66 and the sign that said Riggs’s RoadSide Service, and the next thing he knew the Kenworth was heading up the exit ramp, and he was turning left onto the overpass, all the while cussing himself and calling himself several kinds of fool.
Riggs was tickled to death to see him; had to tell him all about how he’d seen Jimmy Joe on TV, and how he’d become something of a hero himself around those parts, and asked half-jokingly for his autograph. He took Jimmy Joe out to his garage and showed him the Lexus, all washed and polished and covered up with a nylon tarp to keep the dust off.
