39
ROY FINISHED PICKING ORANGES THAT DAY around five o’clock and collected his pay, which was thirteen dollars. He went to the store at the intersection and bought half a pound of pickle loaf and half a pound of cheese and a loaf of rye bread and two packs of Chesterfields and three fifths of White Port. It was nice getting paid every day. He felt like a rich man walking back to the spot where he and Theodore were camping. The boss was the best one he’d ever had, and Roy had been picking steady for three weeks. The man had told him today that there was maybe only another four or five days of work left. Theodore would be glad to hear that. He wanted to get back to the ocean awful bad. They had put away almost a hundred dollars in the last month, more money than they had had in a long, long time. Their plan was to buy some decent clothes and start preaching again. Roy thought they could find a couple of suits at the Goodwill for maybe ten or twelve bucks. Theodore couldn’t play the guitar like he used to, but they could get along all right.
Roy crossed a drainage ditch and headed for their campsite under a small stand of stunted magnolia trees. He saw Theodore asleep on the ground next to his wheelchair, his guitar lying beside him. Roy shook his head and pulled out one of the bottles of wine and a pack of the smokes. He sat down on a stump and took a drink before he lit a cigarette. He had killed half the fifth before he finally noticed that the cripple’s face was crawling with ants. Rushing to his side, Roy rolled him over on his back. “Theodore? Hey, come on, buddy, wake up,” Roy pleaded, shaking him and slapping at the bugs. “Theodore?”
As soon as he tried to lift the man, Roy knew that he was dead, but he still struggled for fifteen minutes to get him back up in the wheelchair. He began pushing him through the sandy soil toward the highway, but went only a few feet before he stopped. The authorities would ask a lot of questions, he thought, as he watched a fancy car pass by in the distance. He looked around at the campsite. Maybe it would be better just to stay here. Theodore loved the ocean, but he liked the shade, too. And this grove of trees was as much a home as anything they’d had since their days with Bradford Amusements.
Roy sat down on the ground beside the wheelchair. They had done a lot of bad things over the years, and he spent the next several hours praying for the cripple’s soul. He hoped someone would do the same for him when it came his time. Around sundown, he finally got up and fixed himself a sandwich. He ate part of it and tossed the rest in the weeds. Halfway through another cigarette, it dawned on him that he didn’t have to run anymore. He could go back home now, turn himself in. They could do whatever they wanted to, as long as he got to see Lenora one more time. Theodore had never been able to understand that, how Roy could miss somebody he didn’t really know. It was true that he could barely recall what his little girl’s face had looked like, but even so, he had wondered a thousand times how her life had turned out. By the time he finished the smoke, he was already rehearsing some words he would say to her.
That night, he got drunk with his old friend one last time. He built a fire and talked to Theodore like he was still alive, told the same stories over again, the ones about Flapjack, and the Flamingo Lady, and the Zit-Eater, and all those other lost souls they had run into on the road. Several times he caught himself waiting on Theodore to laugh or add something that he’d forgotten. After a few hours, there were no more tales to tell, and Roy felt lonelier than he had ever felt in his life. “Hell of a long way from Coal Creek, ain’t it, boy?” was the last thing he said before he lay down on his blanket.
He woke right before dawn. He wet a rag with some water from the gallon jug they always kept tied to the back of the wheelchair. He wiped the grime off Theodore’s face and combed his hair, pressed his eyes shut with his thumb. There was a splash of wine left in the last bottle and he set it in the cripple’s lap, placed his ragged straw hat on his head. Then Roy wrapped his few belongings in a blanket and stood with his hand on the dead man’s shoulder. He closed his eyes and said a few more words. He realized that he would never preach again, but that was all right. He’d never been much good at it anyway. Most people just wanted to hear the cripple play. “I wish you was going with me, Theodore,” Roy said. By the time he managed to catch a ride, he was already two miles down the road.
40
THANK GOD, JULY WAS COMING TO AN END. Carl could hardly wait to get out on the road again. He hauled the two jars filled with Sandy’s tips to the bank and turned it into paper money, then spent the next few days leading up to the vacation buying supplies—two new outfits and some frilly underwear from JC Penney for Sandy, a gallon of motor oil, spare spark plugs, a hacksaw he found on sale and bought on a whim, fifty feet of rope, a set of road maps of the southern states from the AAA office, two cartons of Salem, and a dozen dog dicks. By the time he finished shopping and had a mechanic put a set of brake pads on the car, they were down to $134, but that would take them far. Hell, he thought, as he sat at the kitchen table and counted again, they could live like kings for a week on this much money. He recalled the summer two years ago, when they had left Meade with $40. It was potted meat and stale chips and siphoned gas and sleeping in the sweltering car the whole way, but they had managed to stay out sixteen days with the money they scrounged off the models. Compared to that, they were in fine shape this time.
Still, there was something bothering him. He’d been looking through his photos one evening, trying to get pumped up for the hunt, when he came across one of Sandy holding on to last summer’s army boy. He’d been vaguely aware that she hadn’t acted quite the same since he had killed that one, like he had taken something precious from her that night. But in the picture he held in his hand was a look of disgust and disappointment in her face that he hadn’t noticed before. As he sat there staring at it, he began to wish that he’d never bought her that gun. There was also the business with the waitress at the White Cow. Sandy had started asking him where he went in the evenings while she was at work, and though she had never come right out and accused him of anything, he was beginning to wonder if she might have heard something. The waitress didn’t act as friendly as she used to, either. He was probably just being paranoid, but it was hard enough handling the models without having to worry about the bait turning on him, too. The next day, he paid a visit to the hardware store in Central Center. That night after she went to bed, he unloaded her pistol—she’d started carrying it in her purse—and replaced the hollow points with blanks. The more he thought about it, the less he could imagine a situation in which she would have to fire it anyway.
One of the last things he did in preparation for the trip was make a new print of his favorite photograph. He folded it and put it in his wallet. Sandy didn’t know, but he always carried a copy when they went back out. It was a picture of her cradling the head of a model in her lap, one they had worked with on their first hunt, the summer after they killed the sex fiend in Colorado. It wasn’t one of his best, but it was good for someone who was still learning. It reminded Carl of one of those paintings of Mary with the baby Jesus, the way Sandy was looking down at the model with a sweet, innocent look on her face, a look that he’d been able to catch a couple of times that first year or two, but then was gone forever. And the boy? The way he remembered it, they had gone five days without a single hitcher. They were broke and arguing with each other, Sandy wanting to go home and him insisting that they keep on. Then they came around a bend on some potholed two-lane just below Chicago and there he was with his thumb out, like a gift straight out of heaven. He was a big cutup, that boy, full of fun and dumb jokes, and if Carl peered hard enough at the picture, he could still see that orneriness in his face. And every time he looked at it, he was also reminded that he could never find another girl to work with who would be as good as Sandy.