Road to Paradise (18 page)

He grabbed my wrist, I yelped, sat back down. “Don’t touch me,” I whispered.

“Listen very careful to what I’m telling you,” Erv said. “She took something that belongs to me, something that’s mine, and I don’t like people taking my stuff. Tell me where she is, and then it’s not your problem anymore. You get into your yellow bird and fly away; don’t think about her, or me, or anything. Just do what you do—which is nothing. Get me? It’s so simple, and you wipe your hands clean. Trust me when I tell you, you don’t want me on your tail. Now—”

That’s the moment Gina picked to come back, all lipsticked and shiny, focusing on the man and frowning.

“He says he’s looking for his daughter who ran away,” I gabbled, struggling to my feet, not giving him a chance to interrupt. “He thinks we picked her up in Maryland.” I was shaking, staring straight at Gina, who looked at me, trash in her hands, looked him over, and said casually, “What girl?”

I wanted to kiss her.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Erv sprang out of the booth. We staggered away, clutching each other.

“Mister, I told you and told you,” I said, “we don’t know about no girl. Go talk to the police, if you want to.”

“I’m gonna follow you to your car,” he said, pointing his dirty, bitten-bloody finger at us. “I’m gonna follow you down the highway. I’m gonna stop at every station you stop, at every hotel. I know all the motel managers from here to Oakland. How do you think you gonna hide from me? Where do you think you gonna go?”

Gina pulled me by the arm. “A strange and threatening man following two girls to their car in the parking lot? You know what I’m going to do? Talk to the cops. There’s a patrol car outside. Shel, let’s go talk to the police officer.”

Together we backed away from him, then turned around and started walking. I couldn’t even allow myself a glance, a breath behind me to see if he was following us. The police officer was inside buying a cup of coffee. Gina asked if he wouldn’t mind walking us to our car because there was a strange man bothering us near the fried chicken. “What man?” the cop asked.

“Right there. Near the French fries.” We pointed, but Erv Bruggeman was gone, vanished just the way Candy had in front of those truckers, vanished as if he didn’t want the officer even briefly to see his face.

The cop walked us across the filled-up parking lot. “Nice ’Stang,” he said, smiling. “Yours?”

“Yes, thank you. A graduation present.”

“Nice, very nice. Well, be careful, you two. Don’t drive too fast. Easy to do in that one. And don’t talk to strangers.”

“Yes, thank you, we won’t, have a nice day, officer.” Carefully, sideways, I glanced in. The backseat was empty! Candy was gone. We jumped in and locked the doors.

“Start the car,” Gina said. “Quick. Start the car and peel away. Go.”

“Gina …”

“Go!”

“What about …”

“Go!”

I started the engine.

“Oh my God, Gina, what are we going to do?”

“About what?”

“About Candy.”

“Nothing.”

“But she’s there, with him! How’s she going to get out?”

“Why’d she leave the car? Not our business anymore, Sloane. She can go to the police, like we went to the police. Besides,” she added, “if he really is her dad, who are we to get in the middle of a family squabble?”

“But what if he’s not her dad?”

“Not our problem.”

“No?” I whispered.

“No,” Gina said adamantly. “Drive, Shelby.”

“Gina, I can’t just leave her. I told her I’d take her to I-80.”

“Yes, and you told
me
you wouldn’t pick up any hitchhikers. You’re not exactly as good as your word.”

But I was stuck, I couldn’t put my foot on the gas.

“That sick fuck is going to come to your car and smash your windows in, and then bash our brains in,” said Gina. “Did you see him? Can you just go?”

She appealed to fear, and it worked. Taking one last desperate look around the parking lot for sight of a spiked pink head, I reluctantly drove away. We left the rest area, got onto I-55, found our way to local Route 72, and then drove west in darkened silence.

“Shelby, do you know what the lesson of that story is?”

“No.”

“Don’t ask for someone else’s trouble. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t pick up hitchhikers. Mind your own damn business. Keep your head down. There are so many lessons, we’re going to need half a country just to sort them all out.” Gina had adopted a light tone. “It’s a good thing we got that kind of time in front of us.” She had come late into my and Erv’s discussion, she hadn’t looked into his soulless glare, hadn’t felt fear like me. Perhaps she wouldn’t have from the get-go.

“Gina, did we leave her in a place where a psychotic man is looking for her?”

“Have you seen the way she behaves? It’s only right that she should belong to him.”

“Oh, Gina.”

She patted my arm. “It’s gonna be fine. Cheer up. At least we’re rid of her. Hey, did you know it’s against the law to get a fish drunk in Ohio?”

I didn’t smile. “Glad we’re not in Ohio.”

“We may be. Have you looked at a map lately?” Gina pretended to think. “I hope you’re not thinking of hunting camels in Arizona. Because that’s also a no-no.”

“I’m not thinking about it right now.” I took my grip off the wheel. We were doing thirty on a local road. We had been traveling eighty on the Interstate. Now we were stopping at every light like we were back in Baltimore. The word Baltimore set me off, made me recall things. I felt so bleak. I was relieved for me, but so upset for her. My hands gripped the wheel again. “What have we done?” I whispered.

“Saved our skins,” asserted Gina. “Doesn’t that have any value?”

“But he was so freaky.”

“Exactly.” Gina nodded fulsomely. “She’s not so normal herself. Shel, are we going to be passing through Wyoming?”

“At this rate, not in my lifetime, no.”

“Well, if we are,” Gina calmly continued, “we better avoid having sex in a butcher’s shop’s meat freezer.”

Before I had a chance to chuckle, we heard a sound from the back, a strange, scratching sound. We stopped talking, and there it was again, like something thumping against the backseat. My hands clamped around the wheel. With the next thump, the seat back fell forward, and from the recesses of the dark trunk, crawled Candy.

“Oh my God,” said Gina, putting her face in her hands.

Candy climbed out, pushed the seat back to its upright position, stretched, and sat looking at us. “You’re right not to trust
him,” she said. “He’s no good.” She paused, while we remained without speech. “He is not my father.”

“Oh my God,” Gina repeated. “Is this ever going to end? Ever?”

We were stopped at a light; it turned green, I didn’t notice until an angry honk from a Greyhound bus.

“I should’ve known,” said Gina. “I suspected something was wrong with you. I should’ve known you were trouble, you with your skanky makeup and tattoos. What are we going to do with you now?”

“Who is he?” I breathed out.

“No, don’t ask,” Gina interrupted.

“What are you afraid of, Gina?”

“That she’ll tell us!”

“You don’t want to know?”

“No!” Gina turned to the back. “I’m sorry you didn’t just get out and hide someplace else. I’m sorry you’re still here, making our simple life so screwed up. I’m sorry we ever picked you up. I don’t want you in our car. I wish you’d go away. I thought so from the very beginning.”

“I know,” said Candy. “You’ve never hidden it.”

“Why didn’t you just go back with him?”

“He’s not my dad, I told you,” said Candy. “He’s the man my mother lives with.”

“Your stepfather, then?” Gina said, attempting to be acerbically clever.

“Would be if my mother was actually married to him. She isn’t.”

She was talking, she was back there, and I don’t know what Gina was thinking or feeling, but two feelings of equal weight were boxing it out inside me during these middle rounds. My whole soul wanted to sigh with despair that this day and this part of my life were not over, but at the same time I was being knocked out by relief that I didn’t abandon her in the truck stop with a man who was not her father and not her stepfather, yet needed to find her not today, not tomorrow—but yesterday.

“Is your mother really worried?”

Candy shrugged in the rearview. “I’m not entirely convinced she knows I’m gone.”

“Candy, he said you weren’t eighteen,” Gina said.

She didn’t reply.

We sat. I drove. What are we going to do now? Who asked that question? Did anyone speak? Sheepishly, Candy picked up the atlas lying in the footwell and started examining it, like she knew where we were. “Oh, look,” she said. “Shel, there’s a whole town named after you. Shelbyville. We’re going to pass it soon.”

“What are you talking about?” I whispered.

She didn’t answer.

“How old are you, Candy?”

“Don’t ask, Sloane,” said Gina.

“For once, she may be right, Sloane,” said Candy. “Don’t ask.”

“For
once
?” Gina’s voice was irksome and high.

“I’m kidding.”

“If you’re not eighteen,” I said, “perhaps he’s got a right to look for you.”

“He has no rights at all,” she said. “If he had any rights, you think he wouldn’t have gone to the cops?”

“I don’t know. What about your mom?”

“Don’t you think if she had any rights, she’d have gone to the cops?”

“Are these rhetorical questions?” Gina snapped. “Your
mother
has no rights to you?”

“Let it go, Gina,” said Candy.

I glanced in my rearview mirror at her pinched face. It was superimposed on Bruggeman’s ice face, his blank gaze telling me he was capable of anything and everything. We passed through Shelbyville. We didn’t stop. Candy said she knew of a place we could stop, and it wouldn’t be very expensive; it was near Rock Island in the Quad Cities, Iowa. We were all thirsty. Music made us thirsty and shallow, reduced everything to a parched throat and a few miles of corn fields. Don’t give up on us, baby. Boogie woogie woogie, get down, if only you believe in miracles, baby. Baby, come back.

“Candy, I’m telling you, I will not take you all the way to Paradise,” I said. “So think quick of what else I can do to help you, as long as it doesn’t include that. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Was Erv his real name?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Would you like to tell me how Erv Bruggeman found me and my car?”

“Probably Citizens Band radios. All the trucks carry them.”

“How would you know anything about CB radios?”

“Erv has had many dealings with truckers over the years,” she replied.

“What kind of dealings?”

“The shady kind. Truckers live on C-band. They can find anyone. Erv was able to locate a friend of his in New Mexico using one of those things.”

“If you’re a runaway, why doesn’t he call the police? The law’s on his side, you know,” Gina said.

Candy shook her head. “Law’s not on his side,
believe
me.”

“Well, we got us a situation,” I said. “Because my car is the most conspicuous car on the freeway. Once we get on I-80, another truck will spot me in five seconds. I’m like the sun on the horizon. Seen from all directions. They’ll give your Erv my location faster than we can stop for gas. Which, by the way, we’re going to have to do soon. I was shocked into an idiotic response the first time. I won’t be able to fake it the second.” It dawned on me. “Is
that
why you’ve been hiding out in the back?”

“You just realized this?” said Candy.

“But why would they think you got into our car?”

“Probably because of fucking Trent in the black truck,” she said. “He squealed like a pig.”

Gina, too, was beginning to comprehend a few things. She was twirling her hair, and twitching her lip in assent. “Well, clearly you can’t be traveling with us in the yellow car,” she said triumphantly. I said nothing. She might be beginning to
understand a few things, but not all things, not even the most important things.

What Gina wasn’t getting was this: if not in my yellow Shelby, bright as the sun, how
was
Candy going to travel? She couldn’t get inside a truck, and who else would take her anywhere? She looked so desperately endangered. She was like a white tiger. Any man who picked her up could be looking only for trouble; girls wouldn’t pick her up: she looked too threatening with her kohl eyes, ruby lips and blue mini-skirts.

Though
we
had picked her up.

I know Gina was hoping that it would soon stop being our problem, that somewhere between Shelbyville and Dixon, between the Illinois and Iowa fields, Candy would be gone. But even if she were, how could I convince Bruggeman, who’d catch up with me on the straight line that was the cross-country open road, that Candy wasn’t with us? I could let him search our car. Perhaps he could travel to California with us, sitting where Candy now sat, just to make sure. I felt sick. I felt nauseated. I don’t know how I continued to drive even thirty miles an hour. I kept blowing all lights.

Gina finally caught on to something. I’m not saying she caught on to much. But something became illuminated. “Sloane, why are you so glum? What are you so worried about? Look at you. You look like death.”

“
She
may not be our problem. But Erv is definitely our problem.”

In the back Candy didn’t speak. Her lips were moving, her voice inaudible.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Praying.”

“Why?”

“St. Paul told us to pray without ceasing.”

Candy might as well have blinked and turned herself into a fruit fly. Her words seemed that incongruous, like pigs having wings. After what seemed like minutes of Gina looking at me with an expression of rank befuddlement, she finally said, “I think the time for prayer has long passed.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Candy. “It’s just beginning.”

“You know what?” Gina said. “No offense, but you don’t seem like the kind of girl who prays, pardon me for saying.”

“How little you understand. I’m exactly the kind of girl who prays. You know why? Because I desperately need help.”

We were going too slow for clarity. Speed is better for thinking through difficult things, for navigating through the turns of a treacherous mind. “Okay,” I said. “Erv is looking for you. Why? Does he want you to come home?”