forward again into the trees, leaning forward to look through the hole smashed through the cracked windshield.
He drove as far as he could away from the rutted track and into the woods, maneuvering around trees and over stumps and rocks that crunched against the undercarriage, occasionally stopping to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes. Finally he got out and went around wiping down surfaces in the car with the gray blanket from the trunk. He took the flask out of his pocket and stuffed one end of the blanket into the gas tank and dumped some of the schnapps onto it. He dumped the rest over the bodies, stinking of shit and meat already starting to turn in the heat.
Christ, when things happened they moved fast. Both events, the farm house and now in the woods with the bikers’it was like they were over before they began. Before he could make rational decisions or some kind of plan. Standing there looking at two dead men in a wrecked car, he tried to think how long it had all taken. Three minutes, five? He played things over and over in his head, but all he got was a kind of faulty instant replay that came out different every time.
In the movies they showed gunplay in slow motion, but that wasn’t it, really. It was more like everything was speeded up except you. Everyone was moving fast, coming at you with deliberation and purpose, and you couldn’t finish a thought or get ready for the next thing. He thought maybe it was like being in a hurricane or a tornado, something fast and out of control.
He flicked the lighter he had taken from the biker and lit up the blanket and walked away through the trees. When he reached the drive again, Manny was waiting with a bag over his shoulder and the other one in his hands. He was looking down the rutted trail toward the house and chewing on his lip. His face was stained with dirt cut by lines of sweat from his hairline, and there were bits of broken glass on his shirt and in his hair. Ray turned and looked into the woods, but he couldn’t see the SUV anymore.
“Did it catch?”
“I don’t know. It did or it didn’t and either way we got to go.”
“You have keys?”
Ray held up the set of keys he took off the biker and jangled them. Somewhere nearby was another car. There was a distant smell of smoke, and somewhere the dog started up again, a remote, impotent sound of rage. Ray thought that if there was a God, that was his voice, just a distant complaint that didn’t make anything come out any different.
Flies buzzed, and a fat black bee made a machinelike rumble as it passed by his head. He stumbled down the drive toward the road and thought about the flies in the bathroom and the man he had just killed, his head open in the dirt. He realized this was what he had been waiting for his whole life. All of the beatings he took, every night his father had lunged at his mother or stood at the bottom of the stairs smacking a leather belt into his hand. All the times in Juvie when some hulking lump of shit smacked him down or some guard in a county jail popped him across the knuckles with a stick because he could, because Ray was inside a cage and the guard was outside and he just fucking could. Ray had taken it and stored it up like a battery, all of it, every fucking thing. All for this day, when it would come pouring out of his heart and into his hands. It was something electric, something that gave off an ozone smell and made him dizzy and blind, like being electrocuted by crossed wires in his own brain.
THEY HEADED NORTH again in a black van they found parked in the woods near the end of the drive.
When they got in, Manny handed Ray a cell phone. “I took it off the little guy.”
Ray thumbed through the memory, looking at calls that had come in and gone out and stored numbers. One of these, Ray thought, was probably the guy in the Charger.
They stopped at a pharmacy in Malvern, and Ray stayed in the car while Manny went in and bought a bunch of bottled water, alcohol, and Band- Aids. Ray looked at the cut on his forehead, glued over with dried blood and bits of grass and dirt. When Manny came back they drove to a remote corner of a shopping center parking lot, and Ray sat on the edge of the seat, pouring water over the cut to get the dried blood and dirt off and then dabbing at it with the alcohol. Cleaned up, it wasn’t that bad. Deep, but not wide. He put a Band- Aid on and smoothed it down clumsily, looking into the side mirror. With his hair pushed forward it was pretty much invisible. Manny had torn his jeans and had a scrape on one elbow where the shirt was ripped away. Ray dabbed at it with alcohol, and Manny made a fist and swore. He kept touching the tender place on his rib cage and pulling his shirt back to look at the welt.
The cell phone rang. They both looked at it on the seat for a minute, then Ray picked it up and held it a few inches from his face.
“Yeah,” he said, trying to sound indistinct.
“What happened? You said you were going to call or come back in an hour.” The voice was different than the young guy in the Charger. The voice on the phone was another New En glan-der, but he sounded older and rougher- edged than the young guy from the car at the farm house.
Ray moved the phone away from his mouth again to talk, trying out an imitation of the accent. “I’m all turned around out here. How do I get back there?”
“Did they show up?”
“No, but we can’t stay here.”
“Well, the man here needs his money. You come back here and get cleaned up, you’re going right back out to work, got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Tell the truth, I don’t know where the good Christ I am down here either.” There was a hoarse laugh, a sound like someone gargling stones. “Let me ask Scott.” Scawt. There was shouting and calls for Scott and music in the background. A bar, maybe, or a party going on. He heard the older guy saying that the knuckleheads were lost and needed directions back, and then the noise of the phone being passed around, and then the Voice. The guy from the Charger.
“Which one is this?” Ray was about to speak when he heard the question answered at the other end of the line. It’s Eldon, the older guy said, and called him Knucklehead One.
“Eldon?”
“Yeah,” Ray said, trying to keep it quiet.
“Can you find 202?”
“Yeah.”
“Just come up 202 to 422, keep going north.” Nahth. Ray was making mental notes in case he was called on to say more. The young guy gave them directions to a place in the woods between Kulpsville and Lansdale. A place with a long driveway, probably another farm house meth lab.
“Got it, knucklehead?” said the Voice, and laughed.
“Fuck off. Later.” He hung up.
MANNY DROPPED RAY off at his apartment. He showered, put his clothes in a plastic bag and threw them away, and then opened the new things he had bought himself at Wal- Mart. He was still alert, unsure, kept jumping up at every slammed door on the street and looking out the window at the traffic. He looked around and realized he’d have to stop coming back here, find some other place to be. When he looked at the clock he realized it was almost seven, and he sat on his bed in his underwear and thought for a minute if it was smart to put everything on hold while he went to meet Michelle. Thinking of her name knocked it over in his mind, and he quickly got dressed. He pulled the dirty Band- Aid off his head and put on a smaller one, a round dot that was almost covered by his hair.
Outside, the sky ran from bright blue in the east to dark clouds and flashes of lightning in the west, but he couldn’t tell if things were going to get better or worse. Going north toward Doyle -stown he felt weirdly relaxed again, his guard down, as if it were possible to take a time- out from his game and just be a normal human being. He put the radio on and found a station playing a Matt Pond PA song, upbeat music that reminded him of old Moody Blues. The wind picked up, trying to pull the car out his hands and rolling leaves and bits of paper across 611.
It was almost seven twenty when he reached the little coffee shop. He stood outside and watched her through the glass, sitting at a small table, reading a newspaper with a mug of coffee in front of her. The shop was tiny, just a few tables, a counter with ice cream. It looked cool and quiet, and he wanted to go inside, but he just stood and watched her. He could see the lines by her eyes. What could he have been thinking, coming here? Maybe it was just that she looked a little like Marletta. Some quality in her face. The same honey- colored skin, familiar
