How to Disappear (16 page)

I tell her to run, but she’s frozen against the Prius, rifling through her pack, which, unless she’s got a bazooka in there, isn’t going to do us much good.

“Will you
run
?”

I dig an elbow into the gravel and push the drunk guy with my other shoulder, unbalance him, roll on top, go for a knockout punch. Blood pours out of his nose, and then there’s a knife: his knife. The blade is curved and moving fast.

I remember mine, lying useless in the trunk. This is a bloodbath of poor calculation. I go for the hand with the knife, throw my weight into getting it down and keeping it down. Because this guy can’t get up. He’s not getting to her. If he stabs me and I die, he takes her—not on my watch. His arm is bent, the blade’s six
inches from my face. My left hand versus his right arm, and every molecule of energy in every cell of every muscle in my body is pushing him down, pushing a lead oar through a river of molten lead. I’m not dying in a parking lot, not adding myself to the Manx legacy’s body count.

My endorphins open up, or maybe it’s rage, but I’ve got his hand down, still clutching his knife. I’m going for the game-changing punch when whatever she’s got in her fist sails past me, a slight fast glint, and through his arm.

He howls as she withdraws the spike, and his hand opens. I chop his face where I can break the most things—cartilage, nose, bones, skin—all to the rhythm of a blast of music from the bar.

“What the fuck?”

“Ice pick. Come on.”

I stabbed a drunk guy in a parking lot.

The ice pick slid through his forearm like a skewer spearing shish kebab.

Most of the blood came from his nose.

J was pounding him into the gravel. Smashing his face with pinpoint accuracy. J’s mouth is torn up. Two black eyes forming.

Would you, could you, can you, did you?

Yes to all of the above.

Try leading the life of a fugitive sometime. Those Sunday School questions just keep coming. Would you stab a drunk guy through the heart to save your boyfriend in a bar fight? And he’s not even my boyfriend. And we weren’t even
in
the bar.

But yes. Obviously. I would. If it had been just me, alone in the dark with a guy with a hunting knife, one of us would be dead.

Probably not me.

That guy’s lucky he jerked to the right when my arm was coming down. Because I wasn’t aiming for his arm. He’s lucky J grabbed my wrist when the ice pick was coming down the second time.

So no regrets beyond the fact that I need to barricade myself in Mrs. P’s house and marathon-watch the Home Shopping Network with her until I figure this out. Until there’s zero possibility that what we did will blow up in our faces.

J says, “How’re you doing?”

I’m crying, and there’s an ice pick in my lap.

I say, “How are you doing?”

J isn’t crying, he’s bleeding. I blot his face with my shirt, but he keeps looking at the road. Like a robot packed with lifelike spurting blood.

He pulls out of the lot as if nothing happened. Windows open, but I don’t hear anyone sounding alarms. Then there’s shouting.

At least there’s no dead guy. Probably.

I think he’s still breathing when we peel out. The J version of peeling out. Perfect driving until he thinks someone is after us. Then it’s NASCAR.

Before that, he was pounding that guy like he’s used to pounding guys. Only he’s not acting that way now.

He pulls off at an exit just east of El Molino, idles behind a gas station that’s closed for the night. Kills the lights.

I say, “Sorry.”

“She apologizes. Jesus weeps.”

“Don’t get sarcastic about Jesus! I’m just saying, I should have gotten back in the car. Duh. All right? And that was self-defense.”

“Do you want to tell that to the police, or should I?”

“You get really sarcastic when you’re upset. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

He takes several deep breaths. “You have to get rid of that ice pick.”

“I’ll clean it off and stick it in the kitchen drawer.”

“Blood doesn’t clean off.”

“I watch
CSI
, all right? First I’ll dip it in bleach,
then
I’ll use it to pry open a couple of cans and stick it in the kitchen drawer.” This feels completely unreal. Except it is real. “He wasn’t dead, right?”

J shakes his head.

I say, “Stop looking at me like that! This isn’t my fault or your fault. It’s that guy’s fault. I
hope
he’s dead.”

J gives me a worse look.

I say, “Give it up. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, cool, dead guy.’ But what do you think he was going to do with that knife? I’m not getting raped by a drunk in a pickup.”

“That was the general idea. That’s what I was stopping! That isn’t what I do for fun.”

“I know. I’m not an idiot. You totally saved me.”

“What are you doing with an ice pick?” He sounds like the vice principal of a reform school. My reform school.

“Ladies’ self-defense. I’m not getting dragged off and praying for my life. I’m poking a hole in his eye.”

“Poke! That was a
poke
? I had him close to unconscious.”

“Like you’re upset I helped you clobber him?”

“You don’t
clobber
people with ice picks.”

“Fine!
Gouge. Eviscerate. Dismember.
And if you have to know, I think you did great, but he was a giant crackhead. I was going for his heart.”

“You can’t do that!”

“If it was him or you? Why not? You deserve to live, and he deserved to die—what’s wrong with that?”

“I already had him on the ground.”

“You saved me and then I helped save you. Can we please figure out what to do next?”

He’s quiet. It looks like he fell asleep with his eyes open. “I take you home and you change how you look while I get rid of the car.”

“I know the drill.” He has no idea how well I know the drill. If we broke into this Chevron’s padlocked restroom, I could come out looking different in no time flat. “What about you? You’re going to have black eyes and, wait a minute—”

I reach over and push on the bridge of his nose.

“Stop!” He’s all but yelling at me.

“Noses have a
very
small window to get pushed back into shape. Do you want to hit an ER, or do you want to let me touch it?”

“You know this how?”

“Brawling boyfriend and YouTube.”

He sighs.

I say, “You’ll look kind of normal in maybe a week.” This is highly optimistic, but I don’t want him any more freaked out. If cops are out looking for a bruised white guy, he’d better call in sick. “I could do makeup for you.”

J looks miserable. I’ve come up with a Boy Scout who doesn’t like to brawl. Even though he’s good at it. Even though he saved me.

I say, “He was coming at me. Not that I think going to the police would be the best idea. But if they believed the truth, they’d hang a medal on you.”

He puts his arm around my shoulders and kisses my head with his split lip. Romantic. No, really. His arm feels heavy and warm. The fact that it just beat the crap out of some armed guy who was going to hurt me isn’t lost on me.

I hug him back. “Lucky for you, I was loaded for bear.”

“Lucky for us, you missed his heart.”

“Lucky for
him
.”

Before he drops me off, he leans across and kisses me again. It’s a there’s-no-tomorrow, soldier-off-to-fight-intergalactic-war, train-leaving-the-station-in-the-rain-and-everybody’s-crying kiss.

He says, “I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.”

“You won’t recognize me.”

“I’ll recognize you fine. And I’m sorry. This was my fault.”

“I told you, it was
his
fault.”

“It was
stupid
. I shouldn’t have let you get out of the car.”

“You’re not in charge of me! You don’t let me do things and not let me do things and push me around! Who do you think you are?”

“The ass who took you to the scene of the crime and
committed
the crime.”

“So we shouldn’t have gone there. I get it. You shouldn’t have picked it, and I should have said, ‘What the hell?’ and we shouldn’t have opened our doors. But after that, it was totally
him
. He got what he deserved. That makes it self-defense. That makes it
fine
.”

I had him down, and she stabbed him through the arm. There wasn’t a qualm, not a shred of hesitation. I had him on the ground, I had his knife arm secured. For all practical purposes, she was saved. It was over. Then she stabbed him.

Maybe she couldn’t tell it was done.

He was big and more than drunk. He could have been dusted. Don likes to sample any mind-altering thing anyone hands him. I’ve seen him try to walk through walls when someone gave him PCP.

I’m the one who beat the drunk guy to a bloody pulp, not her, all but sitting on the guy, whaling on him without brakes.

Maybe she’s right, and he was going to drag her off and rape her. Maybe he would have carved me up, and I wouldn’t have been alive to hear that her body turned up half naked in a field in Crothers.

Either way, I did the job. And then she stabbed him. Damn. She’s who I should have known she was all along, but I wasn’t expecting to see her in action.

I wait to blend into the morning’s highway traffic and ditch the car in San Jose. I pull off the license plates, wipe it down, and leave the keys under the seat. Then I buy an old Chevy with a
FOR SALE
sign in the window and a price that says it’s scrap. I look under the hood—Gerhard built a car from a kit while Calvin and I, age thirteen and in awe, stood there and handed him the parts—and it’s better than expected. I claim I’m going to the bank, walk around for twenty minutes, come back and slap some Manx cash into the owner’s hand.

My beard is neatly trimmed. My hair has some crap in it that old guys use to cover graying temples, turning it the color of rotted-out rust. My face is plastered with the stuff Nicolette ran back out to the car and gave me, for people with nasty scars. I don’t see how girls can stand makeup. It feels like I’ve rubbed my face with scented crankcase oil.

I try to convince myself that this is the classic all-American boy’s tale: boy meets bear; boy vanquishes bear; boy saves a princess in a tank top. I liked winning, even with the complicating factor of the princess stabbing the bear.

I’ve spent my life not beating guys who were begging for it, all the while being trained to go for it. But I just kept punching. If she hadn’t stabbed him, I might have kept going until he stopped breathing.

After driving around for a couple of hours, trying to calm down, my cell phone vibrating continuously, I pull over to talk to Don.

He’s pissed, as usual, but I don’t have the patience for it.

I say, “I hit a glitch. I had to deal with it.”

“A
glitch
? Isn’t that when ladies are late because they couldn’t pick what dress to wear? You have trouble picking your dress?”

“Fuck off. I had trouble ditching a car.”

“What did you do with my car?” I enjoy him knowing that, in some ways, locked up in there, he’s helpless. I focus on that and not on worrying what he’ll say when he finds out his car’s been abandoned in the desert for a while.

“You want me to do this? I can’t drive a red shitmobile with no muffler.”

“You decide to do something, you get my permission!”

“Will you listen? I got in a fight. I had to lose a car.” I’m thinking this is something Don could relate to, but I’m thinking wrong.

“
You
got in a fight? What, the checker at Rite Aid overcharged you for gum so you bitch-slapped the bitch?”

“It was a drunk guy in a parking lot.”

“Shit. Were you drunk?”

“No.”

“Figures. Anyone see you?”

“Besides the guy? Maybe. I don’t think so.”

“Straight-A moron, aren’t you? Did I tell you to get in a fight or did I tell you to get your hands on her?”

Maybe I am a straight-A moron, but I’m not letting him do this.

“Answer me!”

I don’t. But the playground rule that if you ignore the bully, eventually he’ll forget what he was taunting you about and go away doesn’t apply to Don.

“Do you have her or don’t you? And the answer better be yes.”

There’s no answer from me for maybe a second too long.

“Jesus,” he says. “You found her and you took her drinking, didn’t you? You found her, and you’re playing with her.”

“No!”

“What’s wrong with you? Fuck her after you off her—just finish this thing!”

“What kind of perverted shit is that? What’s wrong with
you
?”

“You don’t have the balls for this, do you? You’re gonna take her to the movies and ask her to prom.”

“No!”

“Where are you keeping her?”

“I told you, I don’t have her!” Even to myself, I sound like a liar. “Nobody wants this over more than I do.”

There are a couple of minutes of listening to Don’s uneven breathing and static. Finally he says, “You need to get your butt back up here.”

“No.”

“Jackass,” Don says. “This is real. Bad things are going to happen. Get in my car and get back up here and convince me to believe you.”

“I told you, the shitmobile is history.”

In a voice I remember from childhood, from when he was
cornered with no way out, short of scratching a hole under his feet with his toenails, he says, “You need to be here. Right now. If these guys don’t think I have you under control, Mom’s the carrot and the stick. You’re disposable, and so am I.
Get back here.
”

I want it not to be true. I want this to be Don offering up the same self-serving lies he tells regularly without blinking. I want this to be his effort to manipulate me like the little bitch he says I am. But I believe him, or close to enough to tell Nicolette a fairy tale to keep her at Mrs. Podolski’s while I drive to Nevada.

I believe him, and I need him to know that so he won’t do some angry, stupid thing to show me how serious he is, and get us all killed.