Justin Cronin - The Passage

Amy, honey, Mama’s going to go inside with this nice man for a minute, okay? You just look at your picture book, honey .

He was polite enough, going about his business, calling her baby and such, and before he left he put fifty dollars on the nightstand-enough for Jeanette to buy a room for the night for her and Amy.

But others weren’t as nice.

During the night, she’d lock Amy in the room with the TV on to make some noise and walk out to the highway in front of the motel and just kind of stand there, and it didn’t take long. Somebody would stop, always a man, and once they’d worked things out, she’d take him back to the motel. Before she let the man inside she’d go into the room by herself and carry Amy to the bathroom, where she’d made a bed for her in the tub out of some extra blankets and pillows.

Amy was six. She was quiet, barely talked most of the time, but she’d taught herself to read some, from looking at the same books over and over, and could do her numbers. One time they were watching Wheel of Fortune , and when the time came for the woman to spend the money she’d won, the little girl knew just what she could buy, that she couldn’t afford the vacation to Cancún but could have the living room set with enough money left over for the his-and-her golf clubs. Jeanette thought it was probably smart of Amy to figure this out, maybe more than smart, and she guessed she should probably be in school, but Jeanette didn’t know where there were any schools around there. It was all auto-body-repair and pawn shops and motels like the one they lived in, the SuperSix. The owner was a man who looked a lot like Elvis Presley, not the handsome young one but the old fat one with the sweaty hair and chunky gold glasses that made his eyes look like fish swimming in a tank, and he wore a satin jacket with a lightning bolt down the back, just like Elvis had. Mostly he just sat at his desk behind the counter, playing solitaire and smoking a little cigar with a plastic tip. Jeanette paid him in cash each week for the room and if she threw in an extra fifty he didn’t bother her any. One day he asked her if she had anything for protection, if maybe she wanted to buy a gun from him. She said sure, how much, and he told her another hundred. He showed her a rusty-looking little revolver, a.22, and when she put it in her hand right there in the office it didn’t seem like much at all, let alone something that could shoot a person. But it was small enough to fit in the purse she carried out to the highway and she didn’t think it would be a bad thing to have around. - Careful where you point that , the manager said, and Jeanette said, Okay, if you’re afraid of it, it must work. You sold yourself a gun .

And she was glad she had it. Just knowing it was in her purse made her realize she’d been afraid before and now wasn’t, or at least not so much. The gun was like a secret, the secret of who she was, like she was carrying the last bit of herself in her purse. The other Jeanette, the one who stood on the highway in her stretchy top and skirt, who cocked her hip and smiled and said, What you want, baby? There something I can help you with tonight? -that Jeanette was a made-up person, like a woman in a story she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the end of.

The man who picked her up the night it happened wasn’t the one she would have thought. The bad ones you could usually tell right off, and sometimes she said no thanks and just kept walking. But this one looked nice, a college boy she guessed, or at least young enough to go to college, and nicely dressed, wearing crisp khaki pants and one of those shirts with the little man on the horse swinging the hammer. He looked like someone going on a date, which made her laugh to herself when she got into the car, a big Ford Expo with a rack on the top for a bike or something else.

But then a funny thing happened. He wouldn’t drive to the motel. Some men wanted her to do them right there, in the car, not even bothering to pull over, but when she started in on this, thinking that was what he wanted, he pushed her gently away. He wanted to take her out, he said. She asked, What do you mean, out?

– Someplace nice , he explained. Wouldn’t you rather go someplace nice? I’ll pay you more than whatever you usually get .

She thought about Amy sleeping back in the room and guessed it wouldn’t make much difference, one way or the other. As long as it ain’t more than an hour , she said. Then you got to take me back .

But it was more than an hour, a lot more; by the time they got where they were going, Jeanette was afraid. He pulled up to a house with a big sign over the porch showing three shapes that looked almost like letters but not quite, and Jeanette knew what it was: a fraternity. Some place a bunch of rich boys lived and got drunk on their daddy’s money, pretending to go to school to become doctors and lawyers.

– You’ll like my friends , he said. Come on, I want you to meet them .

– I ain’t going in there , she said. You take me back now .

He paused, both hands on the wheel, and when she saw his face and what was in his eyes, the slow mad hunger, he suddenly didn’t look like such a nice boy anymore.

– That , he said, is not an option. I’d have to say that’s not on the menu just now .

– The hell it ain’t .

She threw the door of the truck open and made to walk away, never mind she didn’t know where she was, but then he was out too, and he grabbed her by the arm. It was pretty clear now what was waiting inside the house, what he wanted, how everything was going to shape up. It was her fault for not understanding this before-long before, maybe as far back as the Box on the day Bill Reynolds had come in. She realized the boy was afraid, too-that somebody was making him do this, the friends inside the house, or it felt like it to him, anyway. But she didn’t care. He got behind her and tried to get his arm around her neck to lock her with his elbow, and she hit him, hard, where it counted, with the back of her fist, which made him yell, calling her bitch and whore and all the rest, and strike her across the face. She lost her balance and fell backward, and then he was on top of her, his legs astride her waist like a jockey riding a horse, slapping and hitting, trying to pin her arms. Once he did this it would all be over. He probably wouldn’t care if she was conscious or not, she thought, when he did it; none of them would. She reached into her purse where it lay on the grass. Her life was so strange to her it didn’t seem like it was even her own anymore, if it had ever been hers to begin with. But everything made sense to a gun. A gun knew what it was, and she felt the cool metal of the revolver slide into her palm, like it wanted to be there. Her mind said, Don’t think, Jeanette , and she pushed the barrel against the side of the boy’s head, feeling the skin and bone where it pressed against him, figuring that was close enough she couldn’t miss, and then she pulled the trigger.

It took her the rest of the night to get home. After the boy had fallen off her, she’d run as fast as she could to the biggest road she could see, a wide boulevard glowing under streetlights, just in time to grab a bus. She didn’t know if there was blood on her clothes or what, but the driver hardly looked at her as he explained how to get back to the airport, and she sat in the back where no one could see. In any case, the bus was almost empty. She had no idea where she was; the bus inched along through neighborhoods of houses and stores, all dark, past a big church and then signs for the zoo, and finally entered downtown, where she stood in a Plexiglas shelter, shivering in the damp, and waited for a second bus. She’d lost her watch somehow and didn’t know the time. Maybe it had come off somehow when they were fighting and the police could use it as a clue. But it was just a Timex she’d bought at Walgreens, and she thought it couldn’t tell them much. The gun was what would do it; she’d tossed it on the lawn, or so she remembered. Her hand was still a little numb from the force of it going off in her fist, the bones chiming like a tuning fork that wouldn’t stop.