Made in the U.S.A. (3 page)
“Floy said Daddy was a drunk.”
“That’s because he walked out on her. She’s been pissed at him ever since.”
“Maybe she loved him.”
“Floy? Hell, the only thing she loved about him was his paycheck. And she damn sure didn’t love us. Always bitching because he ran off and left us for her to take care of. Said she knew he wouldn’t come back for us like he promised.”
“Well, he didn’t.”
Two miles past the café, Lutie turned onto the county road that led to Floy’s place, a house trailer on a nearly treeless acre, land owned more by the bank than by Floy.
Lutie overshot the driveway by a couple of feet, the Pontiac coming to a stop with the two front tires on a scrawny bed of petunias.
“Come on,” she said as she switched off the engine. “I got a lot to do, and you’re gonna have to help me.”
Lutie already had the car door open and one foot on the ground when Fate said, “Help you with what?”
She hesitated for a moment, then eased back into the driver’s seat and turned to face her brother.
“Pack,” she said.
“Where we going?”
“Fate, do you have any idea of the mess we’re in here?”
He shook his head.
“Well, we’re . . . Listen. You know why I told that policeman we had an aunt who lives with us?”
“No.”
“’Cause if I told him we didn’t have no one but Floy, he’d have those welfare people out here in a flash and we’d get stuck in a foster home. And believe me, that’s worse than living with Floy. It’s even worse than jail.”
At the word
jail
, Fate’s eyes widened in alarm.
“I’m telling you the truth,” Lutie said. “A girl in my class, Peggy Bellamy, she’s in a foster home. Now, the people that took her, they got kids of their own, and they treat them just fine. But Peggy, she’s like a slave to them. They slap her around, make her clean their toilets, feed her slop. That’s not gonna happen to me.”
“Me neither.”
“Well, that’s the thing. See, I’m going to Las Vegas to find Daddy. But I can’t take you.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause when that policeman comes, I need you to tell him that me and Aunt Julia went to Rapid City to see Floy’s sister, to tell her Floy died. He’ll probably figure it out later, but by the time he does, I’ll be hundreds of miles away.”
“But what about me? I’ll have to go to a foster home and eat slop and—”
“No. I been thinking about that. You can go stay with Floy’s friend, the one she goes to bingo with. She don’t have kids and she’ll—”
“Miss Jacobs? No way, Lutie! She’s about a hundred years old and she smells like mothballs and her hands shake and her dog hates me and—”
“You won’t be there long. Soon’s I find Daddy, we’ll come back and get you.”
“You don’t even know where he is. After Floy got that letter, she tried to call him about a hundred times and all the operators said the same thing. He didn’t have a phone.”
“Yeah, but we have his address.”
“Floy wrote to him there, but all her letters got returned.”
“Look, Fate, I don’t have time for this. For all I know that policeman might be calling the hospital right now, and if he finds out—”
“What are you gonna do when you get caught in a storm, huh? A storm with lightning and thunder?”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“You’ve never been able to deal with it before. And what’ll happen if you have car trouble or if someone with a gun—”
“I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
“You’re only fifteen.”
“So what.”
“Well, if you’re so old, why can’t you take care of me?”
“’Cause I can’t, that’s why,” she said as she slid out of the car and headed for the trailer.
Following her, Fate said, “Please. Take me with you.”
“Fate, I already told you—”
“You’re the only one I got, Lutie. There ain’t no one else.”
Lutie turned then, angry enough to take a swing at him. Instead, she saw what she didn’t want to see. A boy whose small, thin body was already bowed by loss . . . the brother whose face already bore the look of defeat and whose eyes, filling now with tears, had already seen too much disappointment.
“Well, hell.” She tromped up three rickety steps before she said, “Come on. Let’s get packed.”
Lutie’s history had taught her to avoid attachments . . . to people, to places, to almost everything. So packing for her was easy. She quickly crammed clothes, shoes, and cosmetics into black garbage bags and stuffed them in the trunk of the car.
She made few concessions to sentimentality.
One was Mr. PawPaw, a fourteen-year-old teddy bear made by her mother but disabled long ago when a puppy called Fizz chewed off and swallowed one of his eyes and the lobe of one ear. But now, despite his impairments, Mr. PawPaw would ride to Las Vegas on the dash of the Pontiac.
Her only other emotional ties fit into a floral hatbox secreted away in the back of the trunk, a hatbox filled with mementos from her gymnastic competitions: leotards carefully folded; medals and trophies wrapped in tissue paper; articles clipped from the
Rapid City Journal
; and photographs of Lutie and her teammates celebrating their victories.
The day Coach Stebens told her she’d been declared ineligible, Lutie had taken the box with its contents into the backyard, where she intended to burn it. Burn every damn bit of it in a ceremony of revenge.
But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t destroy the evidence that the girl in the emerald green leotard with a gold medal suspended from a ribbon around her neck was the same girl who lived on the wrong side of town in a shabby trailer with a three-hundred-pound woman who came to all the events no matter how much the girl begged her not to; a father, the town drunk, who’d disappeared long ago; and a brother—the weirdest boy in school, and the smartest, too.
No, this girl needed proof, the “you can see it” and “you can touch it” kind of proof. Proof that she had been
somebody
. Even though her fame had been short-lived, she was the skinny, flat-chested girl who had completed a perfect back handspring, a flawless stepout, and an excellent dismount from the balance beam; then, clutching Mr. PawPaw, she waited for her score to be tallied—9.8; 9.9; 10; 9.9; 10. Two hundred spectators stomping in the bleachers, clapping, shouting her name: “Lu-tie, Lu-tie, Lu-tie . . .”
She could still hear it all, see it all. Live it again, but only for a few moments before Fate crowded in beside her with a bag of his plaid shirts and corduroy pants, which she squeezed into the trunk. He cared nothing about clothes, but even with Lutie pushing him to hurry, he agonized over his other possessions, wanting to leave nothing behind. He eventually settled on an encyclopedia, a dictionary, his
National Geographic
s, a collection of
Farmers’ Almanac
sdating back to 1991,
The Book of Facts
,
Who Knew?
, and his
Trivial Pursuit
game.
Rejecting Lutie’s demands, he wouldn’t let her put these treasured belongings in the trunk; instead, he placed them in the backseat where he could reach them.
Finally, they set to work putting their funds together—money from Floy’s billfold and the bingo stash she kept in her jewelry box, grocery money hidden in the sugar bowl, change from beneath the cushions of the couch, a few dollars from Fate’s Christmas bank, and the cash Lutie had been saving for her Wonderbra.
Their total take was $112.47, and that, according to Fate, would hardly stretch all the way to Las Vegas. But just as Lutie started to back out of the driveway, he remembered the change in the coffee can under the kitchen sink, a cache of almost $40, all in quarters, which Floy had been squirreling away for an operation to have her stomach stapled.
Fate came out of the trailer handling his find like the Holy Grail and made a special place for the coffee can in the backseat next to his books.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess I’m ready.”
“Then we’re out of here.”
With the Pontiac gaining speed, Fate watched as the trailer grew smaller in the distance.
“I never seen a dead person, Lutie.”
“Well, you’re lucky.”
“What about her funeral? There’ll be a funeral, but we won’t be there.”
“Her sister will have to manage without us.”
“Still, it doesn’t seem right.”
“Fate. Floy’s gone. No sense in looking back now.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, but he kept his eyes on the last place they’d called home until it was finally lost in the darkening night.
B
Y THE TIME
they crossed the state line, one hundred and seven miles from where they’d started, Lutie was convinced that driver’s ed would have been a waste of her time. In just two hours she’d learned to keep the car inside the white lines of the right lane, discovered that the Pontiac was equipped with a turn signal, and mastered the intricacies of the horn.
Unfortunately for the drivers coming toward her, she had not learned how to dim the lights.
They made their first stop at a Texaco station, where a full tank of gas, two quarts of oil, a road atlas, beef jerky, and Gummi Bears made a sizable dent in their traveling money.
When the beef jerky and Gummi Bears ran out, Lutie pulled into a McDonald’s.
Fate said they should get their order to go, reasoning that the more miles they put between them and home, the better. But Lutie thought the redheaded boy who worked behind the counter was cute, so they were eating inside.
She soon lost interest in her food, opting instead to go for the redhead’s attention. She started pulling makeup from her purse, littering the table with lipstick, blush, mascara, and eyeliner, but Fate was too engrossed in the atlas to notice.
“You got a pen?” he asked.
“No, but I’ll get you one,” she said, thrilled to have an excuse to return to the counter.
Fate ate the last of his fries, then absently began to eat Lutie’s while he flipped through pages of maps.
When she slid back into the booth, she said, “His name’s Jason and he’s a senior.”
“Where’s the pen?”
“Here.”
Fate grabbed a napkin and began writing while Lutie went back to work on her face.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ve got this figured out. We’re about nine hundred miles from Las Vegas. Now, you paid almost twenty dollars to fill up the car, so—”
“Do I care?” She shot a smile at the redhead.
“Listen. If the Pontiac gets twenty miles to the gallon and gas costs a dollar twenty-nine, then—”
“Fate, that sounds like one of those stupid questions they ask on stupid tests at school.” In a singsong voice she said, “If a train is traveling eighty miles an hour from New York to Chicago and you have three apples that weigh ten ounces each, how many can you eat before you get to Miami?”
“If a train is going from New York to Chicago, it’s not going to Miami.”
“Whatever.”
“Lutie, we’ve got about a hundred and fifty dollars. That’s all. And we’re gonna spend at least eighty of it on gas. If we eat six times, and stay in a motel—”
“Fate, sometimes you sound like an old man.”
“What if we have car trouble? What if—”
“Uh-oh.” Lutie feigned a sudden interest in her cold hamburger. “Don’t turn around,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“Because a highway patrolman just walked in.”
“You think he’s looking for us?”
“Shh.”
Lutie watched as the patrolman walked to the counter and spoke to the redheaded Jason.
“There’s probably a warrant out for our arrest,” Fate said.
“Fate, this isn’t television.”
“Yeah, but it happens. That policeman at Wal-Mart, he probably wrote down the license tag number of Floy’s car. They do that, you know, when someone acts suspicious.”
“We didn’t act suspicious.”
“Well, maybe not at the Wal-Mart. But by now he most likely knows you lied, and when he found out you took Floy’s car, he probably called the highway patrol so they’d be on the lookout.”
When the patrolman headed for the toilets, Lutie said, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
She raked her cosmetics into her purse while Fate grabbed the last of their food, and they ran to the car.
“Hurry, Lutie. Take off before he gets out of the bathroom.”
“Fate, we don’t know that he’s looking for us. He probably just stopped to get something to eat.”
But the more she thought about it, the more she figured there might be some truth to what Fate said.
Lutie had planned to stay at a Holiday Inn, but encountering the law had convinced her they should get off the highway in case the police really were looking for them, so they ended up at a place called the Cozy Up Motel. But it was hardly cozy.
Their room, cramped and airless, was lit by a forty-watt bulb in the lamp between their beds, and a fluorescent light in the bathroom blinked and made a hissing sound. The sheets were pocked with cigarette burns, the tub held one dead roach and one live one, and the carpet was sticky and stained with something that looked a lot like blood.
The billboard on the highway claimed that the Cozy Up was “loaded with amenities,” but the amenities seemed limited to running water and dingy towels.
Still, the room was cheap, and the manager, a hairy man wearing plaid pajamas, hadn’t seemed at all curious about two kids checking in at two o’clock in the morning. He was in too big a hurry to get back to bed.
After Lutie took a shower, she wanted to watch TV, but all they could get was a rerun of
Matlock
and a documentary on the Civil War, so she turned off the set and they both went to bed.
Ten minutes later, they heard a car door slam and Fate got up to peek out the window.
“Who is it?” Lutie whispered.
“A man going into the room next door.”
“You think he’s a policeman?”
“No. Looks more like a serial killer. One of those guys who strangles girls and cuts up their bodies.”
“Stop it!”
After Fate settled down again, they heard the toilet flush in the adjoining room.
“He’s probably getting rid of body parts. Fingers and toes and—”
“Dammit, Fate. Don’t you say another word.”
