Somehow, incredibly, he manages to return a smile to me. It tears his lip right open and the blood flows, making him now a meat-faced scarecrow with a vivid red chin cleft.
“I thought we killed him already,” Da says.
“Na,” I say. “It was on our to-do list, but we’ve been busy.”
“Come on, take it,” Jarrod says, jangling the keys at me. “I just filled it yesterday. Subarus are brilliant on mileage, so you can go real far on what you have.”
“Subarus suck,” Da says. “Never catch me in one of them.”
I laugh.
“Thing is, Jarrod, man, they know the car now. You showed Lucy, remember?”
“I wish we had more time with Lucy. I hadn’t seen her in ages.”
I do not understand Jarrod at all. It’s not the drug use and the cracks-of-society nature of his relationship to civilization or any of that. That stuff you can work out, in a clinical enough way.
I don’t understand the relentlessness of his heart.
“Listen, Jarrod, I am really, really sorry. For what I did up there. I am shocked, myself, that I reacted like that. I swear to you I never do that.”
He pinches his lip together like a clamp before he smiles. “For somebody who never does that, you’re kind of good at it.”
I laugh, but I blush at the same time. I am ashamed.
“Ha,” Da says, looking sharp, lucid, and sly.
“Ha, what?” I say.
“Ha,” he says, pointing at me.
I am driving. Da insisted on front seat, Jarrod is fine with the back. North is where I am headed, because it just seems to me that from here, north is where all the nothing is.
“It’s kind of pointless at this point, I’m afraid,” I say.
“What?” Jarrod says.
“Driving anywhere. I mean, I don’t know where to go, they are bound to catch us within hours, and even if this were a muscle car, we’d never be able to get away from anybody who really wanted to catch us.”
“Nobody wants to catch you two, so don’t flatter yourselves,” Da says. The in/out nature of his condition is far more like streetlights than ever before. He is with us and gone again just that quickly. “You’ve never done anything.”
It is a statement both reassuring and cutting.
Not to mention inaccurate.
“I may have done a few things,” Jarrod says modestly.
I sigh. “Do I want to know these things, Jarrod?”
“You might not.”
“Okay, then. Anyway, Da, we all agree you are the grand prize. But I am not looking forward to facing people at this point either. I just need… a little time and space to work out just what is the right thing.”
“Ha,” Da says.
“Ha, again?”
“‘Right thing.’ Phrase always makes me go ha.”
“I might know a place,” Jarrod says.
“I thought you were out of places?” I say.
“No, I said I was out of guys. But I know a place where you go to find a guy, who might know a guy…”
“At this point, men, that sounds like our kind of place,” I say.
Because they know our vehicle, we are traveling rural roads all the way. The place Jarrod described would have taken another three or four hours if we took the main highway, but the way we have to snake through the region will take at least two times that, possibly three. The radio crackles in and out, usually coming up with one form of hillbilly music or heavy metal, and if you didn’t know better you’d think we were one very alternative family off for a little backwoods vacation with the happy-clappy youngster in the back singing along to the tunes with his own made-up lyrics all the way. Suddenly he pipes up, “Oh, and did I tell you, Dan-o, you were wrong. When I went back to the college, those guys had
So, as it sinks in that I am tooling the byways at the helm of what is now almost certainly an officially reported stolen car, transporting a fugitive secret-spilling spook of an old man, we cheerfully add to the gumbo the fact that we are carrying consignments from two distinctly different classes of controlled substances. Three if you count the prescription medications that we purchased with no prescriptions. And they probably will count that, so, three.
“Congratulations, Jarrod.” What else is there to say, really?
My Da cannot read my mind, though sometimes it does appear that way. He can, however, still read signs of a situation as well as anyone anywhere.
“You have to lose him, you know,” he says icily.
“What?” I look at him, the road, him again.
“Watch the road.”
“No. I mean I got the road. We’re not losing him.”
If talking about Jarrod in highly worrying terms registers with him at all, he is not highly worried about it. He is even singing “Jolene” along with Dolly Parton, though he appears to believe it’s “Moline.”
“Lose him, Young Man. He is useless, and probably going to compound everybody’s problems with that damn dope of his.”
I grip the wheel hard and stare straight ahead. “No.”
It starts to rain a little. It starts to rain sheets.
“You’ve come this far. You have come a long way now. You know what it means, to do what needs doing. Ask yourself again, right now and all the time forever, “When what needs to be done needs to be done,
I look at Jarrod’s battered and weathered and childlike mess of a face in the rearview, the watery wide eyes looking now out the windows at the endlessly passing same tree. At school he could be your show-and-tell if your topic was
“When what needs to be done needs to be done, I can do it, Da.”
“That’s my boy.”
“But I will decide what needs to be done. And Jarrod stays with us.”
My grandfather’s eyes go mental with more horror than when he saw his dead wife in my sister. Then the wide eyes narrow, a bit, and a bit, until it resembles more disappointment and distaste. Like he’s looking at a half-built structure already falling apart from shoddy workmanship.
“That boy,” he says, pointing flagrantly at the passenger in back, “is going to be your downfall.”
“Am I?” Jarrod says with majestically poor timing. I give him a quick quadro-shush.
I do not reply to Da, just continue on the long, winding, watery road to our destination.
12
Who are you when nobody is watching? Da asked me.
Is there ever nobody watching? I asked.
Good answer, he said.
13
