Wiley Cash - This Dark Road to Mercy

“Look back here,” Wade said. “Back behind us.” He pointed to a huge mountain on the other side of the parking lot that you could just barely see through the clouds. A red-and-white antenna tower sat up on top of it. “That’s Mount Pisgah,” he said, looking up at it with his hands cupped around his eyes even though the sun wasn’t hardly out yet. He dropped his hands and looked over at me. “You know where that name comes from?”

“No,” I said.

“From the Bible,” he said. “God told Moses to climb to the top of Mount Pisgah so that he could finally see the Promised Land.” He looked back over at the mountain. “It wasn’t this mountain-that one was out in the desert somewhere-but that’s where the name comes from.”

“Did you make that up?”

“No,” he said.

“Then how’d you know it?”

“What?” he said. “You think I can’t know things just because I know them?” He stood there looking at me like I’d hurt his feelings, and then he smiled and pulled a brochure out of his back pocket and showed it to me. “I got this at the rest stop last night,” he said. “I needed a little bedtime reading.” He opened it and spread it out on the hood of the car. “The early explorers who found this mountain climbed to the top of it and thought they’d found the Promised Land when they saw what waited for them on the other side. Those guys were heading west, just like us.”

“Where are we going exactly?” I asked.

“St. Louis,” he said. “I thought y’all wanted to see some baseball.”

“After that.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Oklahoma? Texas? California?” His eyes got bigger as he listed the names. “We could keep going clear on to the Pacific Ocean if we wanted to.”

“Then what?” I asked. “We can’t live in this car forever.”

“I don’t know,” Wade said again. “I guess that’s why they call it an adventure.”

Ruby opened the car door and climbed out. Wade’s other sweatshirt was wrapped around her shoulders. She looked around the parking lot at all the mountains and the fog; she’d never even been to Crowders Mountain like I had, and I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Mount Pisgah,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because we’re looking for the Promised Land,” Wade said, folding up the brochure and sliding it into his back pocket. He winked at me. “And we’re almost there.”

The next couple days passed by like blurry dreams of riding in the car on back roads and getting lost late at night in places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Cookeville, Tennessee, where no stores or restaurants were ever open and there was never any place to use the bathroom. Wade had told us it would take about fifteen hours to drive from Charleston to St. Louis, but we were in the car a lot longer than that. It began to feel like we were just driving in circles, and it seemed like there were times when Wade had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do once we got there. We went long stretches without talking, me and Ruby looking out the windows and Wade trying to tune in baseball games on the radio to see where McGwire and Sosa were in the home-run race. It seemed like Wade hadn’t hardly closed his eyes since we’d left Myrtle Beach, and while he drove he told us long stories about playing for the Rangers and throwing batting practice to Sosa: how Sammy couldn’t hit any of his pitches except his fastball; how, back then, Sammy was just a skinny little Dominican kid who didn’t even speak English. The stories and the radio games all ran together, and before long I started picturing Sammy Sosa as a poor, skinny teenager in a Cubs uniform catching McGwire’s pop-ups out in the outfield.

By Saturday night, McGwire had hit sixty home runs to Sosa’s fifty-eight, which meant that McGwire only needed one more to tie Maris’s record. Saturday’s game was in Cincinnati, and Wade said there was no way McGwire would tie the record there; he said that was the kind of thing a ballplayer wanted to do on his home field, and he had no doubt that McGwire would wait on the record until him and Sosa were both in St. Louis on Monday, and he promised us that we’d all be there to see it.

Wade didn’t have tickets to Monday’s game, but he told us he had a feeling they wouldn’t be too hard to come by. The radio had been saying that just one ticket might cost as much as $1,000, so I knew Wade’s hope for a ticket had more to do with the money he had hidden in that black bag than any kind of luck or know-how he pretended to have.

Late Monday morning we drove into St. Louis. Just as we were crossing a river, Wade slowed down and pointed at something on the other side of the bridge. “See that right there?” he asked. It was a huge white half circle that looked to be sitting in a field off to our right. “That’s the St. Louis Arch.” He looked at us in the rearview mirror. “They call it the ‘Gateway to the West.’ ”

Ruby moved over to my side of the backseat to see it better. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a sculpture, kind of,” Wade said. “And it’s a monument too.”

“How’s it a gateway?” I asked.

“That’s just symbolism,” he said. “Like a metaphor or an analogy. You know what that means?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“It means when something stands for something else. That arch stands for the gateway to the West. Like the old-time settlers, we’ve left everything behind in the East and we’ve crossed the mountains, and now we’re pointing our horses west.” The car was quiet, and the three of us sat there looking at the Arch as it got closer and closer, and before I knew it we’d driven right past it.

“Like Oregon Trail,” Ruby said.

“What?” Wade asked.

“Oregon Trail,” I said. “It’s a game you play on the computer.”

“I want to go see it,” Ruby said, turning and climbing up on her knees to look out the back window at the Arch.

“We will,” Wade said. “Maybe tomorrow. But today we’re here to see a baseball game. Tomorrow, we head west.”

Brady Weller

Before leaving town on Sunday morning I’d gone by the Fish House to get the $2,000 Roc owed me. He must’ve known I was on the way over to see him because he was sitting on an overturned trash can and smoking a Black & Mild outside the kitchen door when I pulled up.

“Damn, son,” he said when I got out of the car. “Don’t you know we don’t open for lunch until eleven on Sundays? I know your ass isn’t on the way to church.”

“I thought I’d come by here and collect my money so I’d have something to drop in the offering plate,” I said, taking his hand and fumbling through another awkward handshake.

“Sammy and McGwire mono y mono tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “You sure you don’t want to let that two thousand steep in the pot?”

“No way,” I said. “Not the way my luck’s been going.”

He laughed, jumped up off the trash can, and pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket, counting out twenty one-hundred-dollar bills and handing them to me. I folded the bills and tucked them into my breast pocket. Roc stuffed what was left of the wad back into his jeans.

“I can’t believe you carry that kind of cash,” I said.

He smiled. “Come on, man,” he said, lifting up his shirt to reveal a compact 9mm tucked into the waistband of his jeans. “Everybody knows the Fish House is the safest place to work in town.”

“Yeah, I see that,” I said. “Before I take off, you mind if I run another name past you?”

“Hey.” He spread his arms like he was about to give me a hug. “That’s what I’m here for, baby: to share my wealth of knowledge with my community.”