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Now it was two years later and Angie was living with Roy, who robbed banks and killed people when he thought it was necessary. She saw plainly now that he was never going to have the kind of money it took to make her a kept woman. Hell, he’d even hinted a few times that she should get another waitress job to help out with the rent and the food. Plus, there were the people he’d killed, three that she knew of for sure. The only one that really bothered her was his wife. Killing his wife was a real personal thing, and it scared Angie. Killing his own son scared her even more.

She spent the afternoon
getting
depressed about her bikinis. School would be out in a week. Swimming pools would be opening up. Time to flaunt her body. But this year there was too much of her body to flaunt. She’d put on twenty pounds. Ripples of cellulite could be seen on the back of her thighs. She wished now Roy hadn’t talked her into getting his name tattooed on both her boobs.

At three-thirty, Jason came home. He was a skinny, sandy-haired kid with a lot of freckles and eyeglasses so thick they made you feel sorry for him. Kids like Jason always got picked on by other kids.

Something was wrong. He usually went to the refrigerator and got himself some milk and a piece of the pie Angie always kept on hand for both of them. Roy had a whiskey tooth, not a sweet tooth. Then Jason usually sat at the dining room table and watched
Batman
. But not today. He just muttered a greeting and went back to his little room and closed the door. Something really was wrong and she figured she knew what it was. She slipped a robe on over her bikini— you shouldn’t be around him, your tits hangin’ out that way, Roy said whenever she wore a bikini around the trailer—and went back to his room and knocked gently. She could never figure out what he thought of her. He was almost always polite but never more than that.

“I’m asleep,” he said.

She giggled. “If you were asleep, you couldn’t say ‘I’m asleep.’ ”

“I just don’t feel like talkin’, Angie.”

She decided to risk it. “You heard us talkin’ last night, didn’t you, Jason?”

There was a long silence. “No.”

“About your mom.”

“No.”

“About what happened to her.”

There was another long silence. “He killed her. I heard him say so.”

So Roy was right. The kid
had
heard.

She opened the door and went in. He lay on the bed. He still had his sneakers on. A Spawn comic book lay across his chest. Sunlight angled in through the dirty window on the west wall and picked out the blond highlights in his hair.

She went over and sat down next to him. The springs made a noise. She tried not to think about her weight, or how her bikinis fit her. She was definitely going on a diet. She was going to be a kept woman, and one thing a kept woman had to do was keep her body good.

She said, “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, what he did, I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“And I also wanted you to know that your daddy isn’t a bad man.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Sometimes he is. But not all the time.”

“He broke your rib, didn’t he?”

“He didn’t mean to hit me that hard. He was just drunk was all. If he’d been sober, he wouldn’t have hit me that hard.”

“They say in school that a man shouldn’t hit a woman at all.”

“Well,” she said, “you know what your daddy says about schools. That they’re run by Jews and queers and colored people.”

He stared at her. “I’m gonna turn him in.”

She got scared. “Oh, honey, don’t you
ever
say that to your daddy.” She knew that Roy was looking for an excuse, any excuse, to kill Jason. “Promise me you won’t. He’d get so mad he’d—”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. She sensed that the kid knew what she was talking about.

She said, “Is that a good comic book?”

“Not as good as Batman.”

“Then how come you don’t get Batman?”

“I already read it for this month.”

“Oh.”

She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. She’d never done that before. He was a nice kid. “You remember what I said now. You never say anything in front of your daddy about turnin’ him in. You hear me?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“You take a nap now.”

She stood up.

Her mother had once said, “You give a man plenty of starch and a good piece of meat, he’ll never complain about you
or
your cook-in’.” Angie had told this to Roy once and he’d grinned at her and pawed one of her breasts and said, “All depends on what kind of meat you’re talkin’ about.” At the time, Angie had found his remark hilarious.

There was nothing to smile about as she made the Kraft cheese and macaroni while the pork chops sizzled in the oven. He was going to kill his own son. She couldn’t get over it. His own son.

Forty-five minutes later, the three of them ate dinner. As always, Jason said grace to himself the way his mom had taught him. While he did this, Roy made a face and rolled his eyes. Little sissy sonofabitch, he’d drunkenly said to Jason one night, sayin’ grace like that.

Roy said, “Guess what I found today?”

Angie said, “What?”

“I was talkin’ to the boy.”

“Oh,” Angie said, irritated with his tone of voice. “Pardon me for living.”

She got up from the table and carried her dishes to the sink.

“Guess what I found today?” Roy said to Jason.

“What?”

“A real great spot for fishin’.”

“Oh.”

“For you and me. I always wanted to teach you how to fish.”

“I thought you
hated
to fish,” Jason said.

“Not anymore. I love fishin’, don’t I, babe?”

“Yeah,” Angie said from the sink, where she was cleaning off her plate. “He loves fishin’.”

Angie knew immediately that Roy had figured out how to kill the kid. He hated fishing, and even more he hated do anything with the kid.

After supper, Jason went into his room. Most kids would be out playing in the warm spring night. Not Jason. He had a little twelve-inch TV in there and he had a lot of X-Files novels, too. He was well set up.

While she was doing the dishes, and Roy was sitting at the table nursing a Hamms from the bottle and watching some skin on the Playboy Channel, she said, “You’re gonna do it.”

“Yes, I am.”

“He’s your own flesh and blood.”

He came over and pressed against her. He had a hard-on. Seems he always had a hard-on. She didn’t have no complaints in that department. He groped her and kissed her neck and said, “We’re free kind of people, Angie. Free. And with the kid along, we’ll never be free. Especially with what he knows about us. One phone call from him and we’ll be in the slammer.”

“But he’s your own son.”

Jason’s door opened. He went to the john. Roy said, “You let me take care of it.”

Twenty minutes later, Roy and Jason, they left. She couldn’t think of any way to stop them without coming right out and warning Jason about what was going on.

She paced. She paced and gunned whiskey from a Smurfs glass. She was so agitated her heart felt like thunder in her chest and every few minutes her right arm jerked grotesquely.

And then she remembered the gun. She didn’t even know what kind of gun it was. One of her lawyer friends had given it to her once when one of her old boyfriends was hassling her. She’d shot it a few times. She knew how to use it. She kept it in the bureau underneath the crotchless panties Roy had bought her, his joke always being that he’d personally eaten the crotch out of them.

She got the gun and she went after them. Her only thought was the river. About half a mile on the other side of some hardwoods was a cliff and below it fast water that ran to a dam near Cedar Rapids. One time they’d been walking and Roy said it was a perfect place to throw a body. His cellmate, a lifer Roy had a lot of respect for, had said that while bodies did occasionally wash up right away, there was a better chance they’d give you a five-, six-day head start from the law.

The dying day was indigo in the sky, indigo and salmon pink and mauve spreading like a stain beneath a few northeasterly thunderheads and a biting wind that tasted of rain. Rainstorms always scared her. When she was little, she’d always hidden in the closet, her two older sisters laughing at her, scaredy-pants, scaredy-pants. But she didn’t care. She’d hidden anyway.

The way she found them, they were sitting on a picnic table near the cliff, father and son, just talking. Darkness was slowly making them grainy, and soon would make them invisible.

Roy said, “What the hell you doing here?”

“She can be here if she wants to,” Jason said.

She smiled. The kid liked her and that made her feel good.

“I guess I need to go to the bathroom,” Jason said.

He walked over to the hardwoods and disappeared.

“I was afraid you already did something to him,” Angie said.

He looked at her. Shrugged. “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

“He’s your own flesh and blood.”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess that’s it. I started to do it a couple times but I couldn’t go through with it. I mean, it’s not like shootin’ a stranger or anything.”

“Let’s go back.”

He shook his head. “Oh, no. You go back alone.”

“But if you can’t do it, why you want to stay out here?”

“I didn’t say I
can’t
do it. I just said it’s harder than I thought it was. It’s just gonna take me a little time is all. Now, you get that sweet ass of yours back home and wait for me. We’ll be pullin’ out tonight.”

“Pullin’ out?”

They could see Jason coming back toward them.

“Yeah,” Roy said in a whispering voice, “school’ll be askin’ questions, him not around anymore. Better off pullin’ out tonight.”

Jason walked up. “Dad tell you there’s twenty-pound fish in that river?”

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s what he said.”

“Angie’s got to get back home. She’s makin’ us a surprise.”

“A surprise?” Jason said, excited. “What kinda surprise?”

“Well, if she tells ya, it won’t be much of a surprise, will it?”

Jason grinned. “No, I guess not.”

“You head home, babe,” Roy said. “We’ll be up’n a while.”

She wanted to argue but you didn’t argue with Roy. You didn’t argue and win, anyway. And you got bruises and bumps and breaks for
not
winning.

“Guess I better go,” she said.

“I can’t wait to see the surprise,” Jason said.

She went back but she didn’t go home. She stood inside the hardwoods, inside the shadows, inside the night, and watched them.

He couldn’t do it. That’s what she was hoping. That when it came right down to it, he just couldn’t do it. She said a couple of prayers.

But he did it. Pulled the gun out, grabbed Jason by the shoulder and started dragging him across the grassy space between picnic table and cliff.

All this was instinct: her running, her screaming. Roy looked real pissed when he saw her. He got distracted from the kid and the kid tried wrestling himself away, swinging his arms wild, trying to kick, trying to bite.

Roy didn’t have any warning about her gun. She got up close to him and jerked it out of the back pocket of her Levi’s and killed him point-blank. Three bullets in the side of the head.

He went over on his side and shit his pants before he hit the ground. The smell was awful.

The weird thing was how the kid reacted. You’d think he’d be grateful that she’d killed the sonofabitch. But he knelt next to Roy and wailed and rocked back and forth and held a dead cold white hand in his hand and then wailed some more. Maybe, she thought, maybe it was because his mom was dead, too. Maybe losin’ both your folks, maybe it was too much to handle, even if your own flesh-and-blood dad
had
tried to kill you.

She dragged Roy over and pushed him off the cliff into the river. The stars were on the water tonight and the choppy waves glistened.

She dragged the boy away. He fought at first, biting, kicking, wrestling, and all. She let him have a good hard slap, though, and that settled him down. He kept cryin’ but he did what she told him. “How you doin’?”

“All right.”

“You hungry?”

“Sort of, I guess.”

“You’ll like Colorado. Wait till you see the mountains.”

“You didn’t have to kill him.”

“He was gonna kill
you”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. They were nearing the Nebraska border. The land was getting flatter. Cows, crying with prairie sorrow, tossed in their earthen beds, while nightbirds collected chorus-like in the trees, making the leafy branches thrum with their song. It was nice with the windows rolled down and all the summery Midwest roaring in your ears.

Sixty-three miles before they hit the border, just after ten o’clock, they found the Empire Motel, one of those 1950s jobs with the office in the middle and eight stucco-sided rooms fanned out on either side.

Angie rented a room and bought a bunch of candy and potato chips from the vending machine. She rented a sci-fi video from the manager for Jason.

She got him into the shower and then into bed and played the movie for him. He didn’t last long. He was asleep in no time. She turned out the lights and got into bed herself. She was tired. Or thought she was, anyway. But she couldn’t sleep. She lay there and thought about Roy and about when she was a little girl and about being a kept woman. It had to happen for her someday. It just had to. Then she remembered what she’d looked like in those bikinis. God, she really had to go on a diet.

She lay like this for an hour. Then she heard car doors opening and male laughter. She decided to go peek out the window. Two nice-looking, nicely dressed guys were carrying a suitcase apiece into a room two doors away. They were driving this just-huge new Lincoln. Sight of them made her agitated. She wanted a drink and to hear some music. Maybe dance a little. And laugh. She needed a good laugh.

Fifteen minutes later, she was fixed up pretty good, white tank top and red short-shorts, the ones where her cheeks were exposed to erotic perfection, her hair all done up nice, and enough perfume so that she smelled really good.