Макс Коллинз - Road to Paradise

She flashed him a surprised look. “Really? Why?”

“Money won’t go as far there as in Mexico, but we’ll fit in better, be an easier... transition. You can go to college up there, pursue your theater. I can find work.”

Her eyes, on the road again, tensed; she was thinking.

Some while later, they’d run out of forest, in fact run out of Arizona — this was New Mexico now — and he was driving again, when she said, with quiet bitterness, “Canada, huh?”

“Hmmm? Yeah. Canada.”

“Kinda funny, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“That’s where Mike’d be. If I’d had my way, anyway.”

She looked out the window, and he could see her reflection in it — she was crying again, chin crinkled; she dried her eyes with the knuckles of a fist.

They had supper at a diner in Gallup, New Mexico, and outside Albuquerque found a motel not unlike the Solona, arriving about ten o’clock. Very little conversation preceded bedtime, although they did watch Johnny Carson (which jarred Michael, remembering the last time he’d heard Ed McMahon summon the host with “Hiiii-yo!”). Neither laughed at anything, though they did smile occasionally.

The following morning, with Michael behind the wheel, the rolling plains of New Mexico encouraged boredom so severe that the daughter actually initiated a conversation.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

He let out a laugh. “What, and take me away from this fascinating scenery?”

She smiled politely, then said, “Who were your real parents? What did you mean when you said that you’d... sat where I sat? Was your mother... my real grandmother, was she... murdered, too?”

He’d forgotten he’d blurted that to her, at the prom; and her words punched him in the belly. He glanced at her, his mouth open but no words finding their way out.

“And your father, not Gran’pa Satariano, but your real father, who he was has something to do with why you got in with those... those Mafia people... doesn’t it?”

He was still searching for words.

She went on, “Hey, I know you provided for us well and everything, and we had really nice lives, really great lives, till, uh... recently. But why’d you choose that road to go down? Or did it choose you?”

He glanced at her, hard. “You really... really want to know all this?”

“I would, yes.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Daddy — it’s a long drive.”

“I’m not much for talking, sweetie.”

“Hmmm. Must’ve been some other father lecturing me and Mike all those years.”

He grinned a little. “All right. Only... if you get bored, or tired of it or anything... just say so, okay?”

She did not get bored.

For almost two hours, until his throat was as dry as New Mexico itself, he told her, the words tumbling out, the story of the Michael O’Sullivan family in Rock Island, Illinois. How his father worked for John Looney, the patriarch of the Irish mob in the Tri-Cities, and how Mr. Looney had been wonderful to the O’Sullivans. How he and his brother, Peter, wondered exactly what their father did for Mr. Looney, and how Michael had stowed away in the back of a Ford and wound up witnessing a murder committed by Mr. Looney’s crazy son, Connor, and also saw a machine-gun massacre, with Michael O’Sullivan — his father, her grandfather — wielding the tommy.

And how John Looney’s son, Connor, had killed Peter — thinking the younger boy was murder-witness Michael — and his mother, Annie.

That had been one of a handful of times the girl interrupted: “Annie...? My real grandmother was named Annie? I was named for her?”

“Yes.”

“But Mom never lived in Rock Island or anything...”

“No, I didn’t meet your mother till I was in DeKalb, a year or so later. But she knew everything about me, including that I’d lost my mother. It was her idea to name you, more or less, after your late grandmother.”

Anna smirked. “But I couldn’t ever know, right?”

“You know now.”

She blew air out, shook her head, said, “So what happened after my grandmother was murdered? What did your dad do ?”

And so he told his daughter about the eventful road trip he and his father had taken in 1931 — how he’d been an underage getaway driver. This, and various exploits he related, earned a number of exclamations from Anna, all pretty much the same: “Wicked” or sometimes “Wicked cool” or the ultimate, “Wicked awesome.”

She was appropriately somber, however, when he came to the end of his tale — the death of his father at the hands of an assassin in a farmhouse outside Perdition.

“And you ... you killed the guy?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you, anyway?”

“Twelve.”

“That is out there. That is way the fuck out there.”

“Anna...”

“Oh, the kid getaway driver wanted in six states thinks his daughter’s language is too salty? Sorry!”

She had him, and he laughed.

“And what’s...” She did a silly impression of cornball Paul Harvey from the radio. “...the rest of the story?”

“Why don’t we save that for later. I’m getting hoarse from all this. Aren’t you hungry yet?”

In a roadhouse-type diner outside Amarillo, Texas, they sat in a booth by a window and shared one order of Texas fried steak the size of a hubcap, with country swing on the jukebox that wasn’t half-bad.

“You and your father... my grandfather ... were you kind of, like — famous?”

“In a way.”

“I think I saw an old movie about you on TV.”

“There were a couple, actually.”

“Who played you?”

“Jimmy Lydon in the ’40s one. Bobby Driscoll in the ’50s.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Well, your grandfather fared better — Alan Ladd and Robert Mitchum.”

“Cool!”

He promised her the second half of the story on tomorrow’s drive, and let her tool the Caddy across the rest of the Texas panhandle.

In Oklahoma, the red earth and the rolling plains sparking memories, he said, “We traveled through here, your grandfather and I. No turnpikes, then.”

“Like in that movie — Bonnie and Clyde ?”

“Right.”

Then, as they left 40 and headed north on 35, he found himself telling her about the time he caught scarlet fever, and he and his father had to stay put in one place for a while, and how bounty hunters had caught up to them, and how they’d gotten away. Over supper in Wichita, he told her about the shoot-out in the country church, and when they stopped for the night, at a motel outside Kansas City, shared with her the time his father had robbed a police station of the week’s bag money — right here in K. C., the very town they were staying in!

In the dark, after The Tonight Show , she said, “Daddy? Is it terrible that we... had kind of a good time, today?”

“I don’t think so, sweetheart.”

“Mom... Gary... Your life with Mom is over... and mine with Gary never really got... got started; and we’re laughing and talking and eating and... are we evil?”

“No. We’re just... I don’t know.”

“Dealing with it?”

“In our way, yes.”

This was the first night she hadn’t cried herself to sleep, and Michael felt more alive than he had since losing Pat. He and his daughter were closer now; they’d always been close, but finally she knew him. Knew who he was. Knew who he’d been.

And didn’t hate him for it.

That day, they angled up 35 through Nebraska — “Great,” Anna said, “Oklahoma again, minus the interesting red dirt” — into Iowa, which seemed rich and green and varied, compared to what they’d endured. They shared the driving evenly, and he told her “the rest of the story.”