A couple of minutes later, Roy found himself in a stand of tall loblolly pines. The ground underneath them was carpeted with dry, brown needles. He couldn’t recall exactly how long he had been traveling, maybe three days. He hadn’t had much luck with rides, and he had walked until his feet were raw with blisters. Though he didn’t think he could take another step, he didn’t want to stop moving either. He wondered if the animals had gotten to Theodore yet. Then he saw that the woman was taking her clothes off, and that confused him. He looked around for the car he’d been riding in and saw the fat man pointing a pistol at him. There was a black camera hanging from his neck by a cord, an unlit cigar stuck between his thick lips. Maybe he was dreaming, Roy thought, but, damn, it seemed so real. He could smell the sap seeping from the trees in the heat. He saw the woman get down on a red plaid blanket, like the kind people might use for a picnic, and then the man said something that woke him up. “What?” Roy asked.
“I said I’m giving you a good thing here,” Carl repeated. “She likes lanky ol’ studs like you.”
“What’s going on here, mister?” Roy said.
Carl heaved a sigh. “Jesus Christ, man, pay attention. Like I said, you’re gonna fuck my wife, and I’m going to take some pictures, that’s all.”
“Your wife?” Roy said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Here I thought you was a good feller.”
“Just shut up and get that welfare suit off,” Carl said.
Looking over at Sandy, Roy held his hands out. “Lady,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I promised myself when Theodore died that I was gonna live right from now on, and I intend to stick to that.”
“Oh, come on, sweetie,” Sandy said. “We’ll just take a few pictures and then the big dumb bastard will leave us alone.”
“Woman, look at me. I been run through the ringer. Hell, I don’t even know half the places I been. Do you really want these hands touching you?”
“You sonofabitch, you’re going to do what I say,” Carl said.
Roy shook his head. “No, mister. The last woman I was with was a bird, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. Theodore was afraid of her, so I didn’t let on, but Priscilla, she really was a flamingo.”
Carl laughed and threw his cigar down. Jesus Christ, what a mess. “Okay, looks like we got us a fruitcake.”
Sandy stood up and started pulling her clothes back on. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.
Just as Roy turned and watched her start to walk toward the car sitting out by the road, he felt the barrel of the gun press against the side of his head. “Don’t even think about running,” Carl told him.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Roy said. “My runnin’ days are over with.” He raised his eyes and searched out a small patch of blue sky visible through the dense, green branches of the pines. A white wisp of a cloud drifted by. That’s what dying will be like, he told himself. Just floating up in the air. Nothing bad about that. He smiled a little. “I don’t reckon you’re gonna let me back in the car, are you?”
“You got that right,” Carl said. He started to squeeze the trigger.
“Just one thing,” Roy said, his voice filled with urgency.
“What’s that?”
“Her name’s Lenora.”
“Who the fuck you talking about?”
“My little girl,” Roy said.
IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE, but the crazy bastard in the dirty suit was carrying almost a hundred dollars in his pocket. They ate barbecue and coleslaw at a pig shack in a colored section of Knoxville, and that night they stayed in a Holiday Inn in Johnson City, Tennessee. As usual, Sandy took her sweet time the next morning. By the time she announced that she was ready to go, Carl was sinking into a foul mood. Except for the photos of the boy in Kentucky, most of the others he had taken this time out were slop. Nothing had turned out right. He had sat up all night dwelling on it in a chair by the third-floor window, looking down on the parking lot and rolling a dog dick cigar between his fingers until it fell apart. He kept considering signs, maybe something he had missed. But nothing stood out, except for Sandy’s mostly piss-poor attitude and the ex-con who got away. He swore he’d never hunt in the South again.
They entered southern West Virginia around noon. “Look, we still got the rest of today,” he said. “If there’s any fucking way possible, I want to shoot another roll of film before we get home, something good.” They had pulled into a rest stop so he could check the oil in the car.
“Go ahead,” Sandy said. “There’s all kinds of pictures out there.” She pointed out the window. “See, there’s a bluebird just landed in that tree.”
“Funny,” he said. “You know what I mean.”
She put the car into gear. “I don’t care what you do, Carl, but I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”
“Good enough,” he said.
Over the next four or five hours, they didn’t come across a single hitchhiker. The closer they got to Ohio, the more agitated Carl became. He kept telling Sandy to slow down, made her stop and stretch her legs and drink coffee a couple of times just to keep his hopes alive a little while longer. By the time they drove through Charleston and headed toward Point Pleasant, he was filled with disappointment and doubt. Maybe the ex-con really was a sign. If so, Carl thought, it could mean only one thing: they should quit while they were ahead. That’s what he was thinking, as they approached the long line of traffic waiting to go over the silver metal bridge that would take them into Ohio. Then he saw the handsome, dark-haired boy with the gym bag standing on the walkway seven or eight car lengths up ahead. He leaned forward, breathed in the car exhaust and the stink from the river. The traffic moved a few feet, then stopped again. Somebody behind them in the line honked his horn. The boy turned and looked back toward the end of the line, his eyes squinting in the sun.
“Do you see that?” Carl said.
“But what about your fucking rules? Shit, we’re heading back into Ohio.”
Carl kept his eyes on the boy, prayed that nobody offered him a ride before they got close enough to pick him up. “Let’s just see where’s he’s going. Hell, that can’t hurt nothing, can it?”
Sandy took off her sunglasses, gave the boy a closer look. She knew Carl well enough to know that it wasn’t going to stop with just giving him a ride, but from what she could see, he was maybe nicer than anything they’d ever come across before. And there certainly hadn’t been any angels this trip. “I guess not,” she said.
“But I need you to do some talking, okay? Give him that smile of yours, make him want it. I hate to point it out, but you been dropping the ball this trip. I can’t do it alone.”
“Sure, Carl,” she said. “Anything you say. Hell, I’ll offer to suck him off as soon as he plops his ass down in the backseat. That ought to do it.”
“Jesus, you got a filthy mouth on you.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “But I just want to get this over with.”
IT SEEMED THAT THERE MUST BE a wreck up ahead, as slow as the traffic was moving. Arvin had just made up his mind to walk across the bridge when the car pulled up and the fat man asked him if he needed a ride. After selling the Bel Air, he’d walked out to the highway and caught a lift through Charleston with a fertilizer salesman — rumpled white shirt, gravy-stained tie, the stink of last night’s alcohol seeping from his big pores — on his way to a feed and seed convention in Indianapolis. The salesman let him off on Route 35 at Nitro; and a few minutes later, he got another ride with a colored family in a pickup truck that took him to the edge of Point Pleasant. He sat in the back with a dozen baskets of tomatoes and green beans. The black man pointed the way to the bridge, and Arvin began walking. He could smell the Ohio River several blocks before he saw its greasy, blue-gray surface. A clock on a bank said 5:47. He could hardly believe that a person could travel so fast with just his thumb.
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