Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“What, Turtle? What is it?” Cayenne says.

Turtle cannot quite shake her head. She moves it fractionally right, fractionally left.

“What is it, Turtle?”

“Wait here,” Turtle says.

“What?”

“Wait here.”

“Turtle, I can’t— What?” She is crying, shaking her head.

I won’t let him hurt anybody, Turtle thinks. I won’t let him go after Jacob or Cayenne to punish me. But I won’t hurt him unless I have to. She knows he has Jacob’s address. She expects that is where he will go next, to look for her. She can’t go anywhere else anyway, for fear that he will go to Jacob’s house without her. He has effectively narrowed her options down to one.

“Turtle?”

Turtle leans back into the vinyl seat. She’s exhausted. Her neck is stiffening up. Her mouth is full of blood from her cut lips. She’s having trouble swallowing. She opens her mouth to speak and blood runs out and drains down her shirt. She tries to shake her head but her neck is too tight. She kicks open the door and gets out and stands leaning against the quarter panel, kneading a muscle in her groin.

“Don’t leave,” Cayenne says. “No no no, don’t leave.”

Turtle reaches for the bandolier and finds that she’s lost it. She has four rounds in the shotgun, five in the sidesaddle, and fifteen 9mm hollow points in the Sig Sauer. She slams the door, walks across the road sliding the waxy, corrugated shotshells out of the sidesaddle and into the spring-loaded resistance of the magazine, feeling each click into place. She mounts up onto the embankment and lays herself down into the coyote brush so that she will have a clear shot through the windshield into the cab. She is on the inside of the turn. The angle is not good but she will be out of the headlights and Martin will be looking ahead and left. She expects him to hit the brakes when Grandpa’s truck comes into view. She will get one shot. Maybe two. Then she’ll unload on the wheels. She cannot prop herself on her elbow. It is bruised black. She cannot remember it hurting at all. It had felt so effortless. But now the entire arm is seizing up. She thinks, as soon as he comes around the corner, if he comes around the corner, don’t even think. Right through the windshield. If he gives you the chance, put a second into him. Her whole face aches. She can’t feel her lips. He’d backhanded her hard enough to lift her off her feet. She’d been trying to say something. She had the drop on him and she thought he would stop. She had thought he would step back, put his hands up. But he’d gone right into her. No hesitation. She looks over the shotgun’s sights, out at the empty road, shivering in the breeze. She almost died for that mistake. She had come very fucking close. Luck, she thinks. Pure luck that she started breathing again. You crush your windpipe like that, and it doesn’t necessarily open back up. That had been a near thing. People die from a hell of a lot less.

God, she wishes she had her .308. Well, she’ll just have to work with what she has. With the shotgun and a sidearm, she is more or less confined to the up close and personal. She waits, the night getting colder, the breeze wetting the grass around her, and she thinks, maybe, maybe. There are no cars. It is possible, just possible, that he has let them go. She hears a car coming. She waits. Not him, she says to herself. It’s not him, because he has cut us loose. It has been two hours, going on three. She waits, shivering. She can see Grandpa’s truck farther up the road, but she cannot see Cayenne. She hopes the girl is okay. She must be terrified, waiting in the truck alone, but she will survive that.

A green Subaru comes around the turn. The headlights hit the truck and the car slows just as they come into Turtle’s sights. Turtle looks down the shotgun at the woman behind the wheel. A child in the back is looking out at the forest. His breath mists the window, and then they’re gone.

She hurts all over. She thinks, where do you go next? What do you do next? But there is only one place she can go. Turtle lies in the grass waiting for him to come around the turn. Come on, you bastard, she thinks. He doesn’t come. After hours of waiting, she eases herself up, careful of her bruised neck, and limps back to the truck.

Cayenne has found Grandpa’s barn coat and put it on. She is lying curled on the seat, shaking all over, quivering like a dog. At first, Turtle thinks the girl is asleep, but getting in the truck, careful and doing her best not to turn her head, she can see the gleam of a sclera in the dark. Turtle puts her hand on the ignition. Maybe, she thinks. Maybe. She leans over and spits into Grandpa’s Big Gulp cup. Maybe. She turns the key.

They drive north through Mendocino. Then through Caspar. Fort Bragg. Empty parking lots flash by, dark buildings. They wait at a streetlight with no other cars in sight. Then head on north. The green digital clock blinks 00:00 but it must be almost morning. The dunes encroach on the winding dark road, just visible through stands of eucalyptus. The bluffs fall away beneath and they cross the Ten Mile Bridge, the estuary below dark and weed choked, with the posts of rotting piers extending from the reedy shores and the great, wallowing gloss of the river. Then Turtle and Cayenne are past the bridge and they follow a newly poured tarmac road along redwood clapboard houses with decorative walls of stacked shale, concrete driveways unmarked by tire tracks, small gardens of rockroses and weeping pines mulched with freshly cut woodchips.

They make a turn and almost run over a girl in a ruched red dress. She is riding on the back of a tuxedoed boy, her dress hitched up, the boy struggling to crawl with a beer in one hand. They’re squinting against the headlights. Cayenne and Turtle wait in silence as the girl, laughing so hard she can barely move, struggles up off the boy’s back and falls to the pavement. She is holding her high heels in one hand and she waves the shoes at them in apology. Cayenne and Turtle wait. A boy in a baggy, bell-bottom white tuxedo runs out of the bushes, pursued by a goose. He stops to help the fallen girl and the goose spreads her wings and hisses. The boy hauls the girl to her feet and struggles off to the side of the road, the goose following. Turtle looks once at Cayenne, and then she takes her foot off the brake and the truck pulls away from the teenagers.

The road unwinds ahead of them, the headlights slicing across the high, golden, breeze-riffled grass. They round a bend and Jacob’s house comes into view, close to fifteen cars in the driveway. Turtle turns off the headlights and eases down the drive. A tall redheaded girl in a tiara is standing on the deck with her hands on the balustrade, looking out over the parked cars. Her silver sash reads HOMECOMING . A thin stub of cigarette is fitted between two fingers. What the hell, Turtle thinks. What the hell? Whatever it is, it seems to be winding down.

Turtle parks behind a big van covered in bumper stickers that read REPUBLICANS FOR VOLDEMORT, MY OTHER CAR IS A MAGIC MUSHROOM, and GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE/GAPING HOLES IN VITAL ORGANS KILL PEOPLE. High schoolers are sleeping inside. She kicks the parking brake on, shuts the truck off. Cayenne hunches forward, the barn coat pulled around her shoulders, sucking her thumb, looking up over the dash at the redheaded girl. Turtle opens the door, drops one leg out. Some muscle in her groin has tightened up. She waits there, getting her breath back from the pain, then drops out and stands leaning against the truck, kneading her hip joint with her knuckles. She walks with difficulty around the hood of the truck to Cayenne’s door and opens it and sets the shotgun on the hood and puts her hands under the girl’s armpits and swings her out and picks up the shotgun and leads the girl by the hand past the line of cars, rusted Subarus and Volvos, the western moon bending off-white and crater-pocked across the black windows. Just inside, the colorless shadows of sleepers. The redhead watches them come up onto the deck. Turtle opens the double doors onto an entrance hall. On the wall, two portraits of weathered men with gnarled beards, one holding a Civil War–era rifle and the other holding a double-barreled shotgun. The caption reads EEL RIVER INDIAN HUNTERS . Their eyes are glazed. A couple leans against the wall, necking, the girl in a giant, green dinosaur onesie. Across the floor, boots and dress shoes, tennis shoes, heels. They go through the T intersection into the hallway lined with its floor-to-ceiling glass case of Pomo baskets. A fan of light comes through the half-open door ahead of them. They can see the walls lined with books, a glimpse of white carpeting, the red silk puddle of a dress on the floor. Turtle eases the door open with the shotgun and they step into the living room. In the middle, a half-dozen high schoolers are playing Monopoly. Brett is among them, lying on the floor in a brown corduroy suit with leather elbow patches. The other boys are in borrowed suits, the girls in dresses. Money is scattered on the floor and stuck under the edges of the board. Picture windows look onto the wraparound deck and the hot tub, where two naked girls sit at the candled edge, their dresses draped on the deck railing, their ballet slippers side by side, their pale spines arching, ridges of their scapulae moving with their arms. In a corner of the room, a grand piano, and on top of the piano, a pair of red pumps and a red clutch.