Road to Paradise (27 page)

At the bar, we drank enthusiastically, and ate listlessly. We were the only girls in the bar, and while this made me distinctly uncomfortable, Candy seemed to revel in it. Gone was the girl from the abbey, walking quietly with her father through the pine paths and falling mute in the cloisters. She was flirty on the barstool, smiling tantalizingly at the truckers. Gina admonished her to be more careful but Candy shushed her to be quiet. At that, Gina tutted and said she was going back to the room. I got to my feet and said me, too. Shrugging, Candy barely looked up from her drink, her coquettish eyes lowered to the bar counter while a very inebriated, heavy, older man spoke close to her ear. I was almost out the door when I turned around and saw her, a young girl in a bar, verbally jousting and coming on to truckers. Torn for a moment between acting in my self-interest (mollifying Gina so she wouldn’t leave me) and Candy’s, I sighed and turned back. Gina swore, but I was already sitting down at the bar, pretending I hadn’t heard. What a funny animal man is—when faced with a choice between his own preservation and the protection of the assuredly lost, he opts to crawl back to the barstool. Peculiar and distressing as it was, I crept back to the inexplicable.

There were a few tables, a few patrons; everyone smoking; on the jukebox Fleetwood Mac was
so afraid
, probably of the
devil
woman
and then Billy was a hero. And when Billy was being a hero, I started paying attention to Candy’s new squeeze. He was young and countrified, had a nice little drawl; Candy and I enjoyed listening to him. He said yes, m’am, and hello there, miss; he was polite and young. I was wearing a baseball cap because my hair was wet and gross from the rain and had on no makeup. I felt more wretched than usual, which is saying a lot, while Candy
sparkled and smiled, her eyes made up, her tattoos hidden, looking petite and so pretty. The young Kentucky stud, whose name was Hoadley Dean, went on and on about driving on I-80 for the last four hours and hating the rain. We nodded in vigorous agreement. He asked where we were headed. Demurely Candy said Rapid City. Bat eyelashes. Ah yes. Hoadley had been there. “Yes,” Candy said. “Me, too. My aunt and niece live there. My aunt was married but her husband just died. I’m going to visit them.” She introduced me. “This is Virginia. My cousin.” She stuck out her hand to Hoadley. “I’m Ronnie. Short for Veronica.”

“Well, good to meet you, Virginia and Veronica,” said the milky-haired, spotty young man shaking our hands and smiling from behind his beer. “Don’t meet too many nice girls on the road.”

“I bet you don’t,” said Candy. “And who says we’re nice girls?” She threw back her head and twittered, he twittered back and leaned his body closer to her on the barstool. They talked about Rapid City. I had thought much of what came out of Candy’s mouth was a lie, but she talked about Rapid City as if it were not. There was a place on the map called Rapid City, South Dakota, and Candy spoke of the Fire Brewing Co. on Main Street and Wall Drug, where she said she had worked for two summers while staying with her folks. The aunt used to have this cute little car, she said, a hand-me-down rusted red Camaro, which she let Candy borrow.

“Hey,” Hoadley said, “as you were driving, you didn’t happen to see a cute little yellow Mustang on the road, did you?”

“No, why?” Candy smiled. I froze. “Should we have?”

“There’s a reward for finding a runaway in it,” he replied with a shrug. “It’s all over the CB.”

“Oh, yeah?” Candy said, perking up. “How much of a reward?”

Hoadley eyed her, his casual gaze becoming less casual. “A few bucks,” he said carefully. “Nothing major. What’s it to you, sweetheart?”

Candy circled the air with her finger, as light as if she were at a ballgame. “Just makin’ conversation, cowboy. Haven’t seen the
yellow ’Stang. But let me ask you—if we see it, how do we let you know?”

He admitted that would be difficult. “I wasn’t askin’ you to look out for it in the future. I was askin’ if you’d seen it in the past.”

“In that case, no,” she said. “We only came up from Waterloo, though. Took us forever in that rain.”

“Tell me about it. It took me longer to go the few miles north from Omaha to Sioux City than it took to drive all day ’cross Iowa.” He drank. “They wouldn’t be local, anyway. They’re on I-80. Heading west. But still, thought I’d ask, just in case. No harm in asking.”

“No harm at all,” Candy agreed.

Hoadley lowered his voice. “Reward’s five thousand bucks.”

Candy whistled. “Wow. Nice chunk of change.”

“No kidding. I’m gettin’ married next month. Could really use it.”

“I bet. Someone must really need to find that girl.”

“Three girls.” He eyed her. “About your age.”

“I’m twenty,” said Candy. “But three? That’s a lot of runaways.”

“The other two are transporting her. I bet they have no idea it’s a felony to knowingly transport a minor across state lines.”

“Well, we’ll be on the lookout,” Candy said quickly, while I sat with a paralyzed grimace on my face. “So are the police involved, then? The FBI, if it’s an interstate thing?”

“Nah. Man who’s looking for her says it’s family business. He prefers to keep it that way.”

“I see. Though like you said, I doubt they’re this far north. But you think it’s the only yellow ’Stang on the road?”

“Probably.” He downed his beer and inched closer to Candy. “I’ve never seen one.” He settled around his barstool and hung his arm near her. “So what do you say, sweetheart?”

I tried to excuse myself, like a child who walked in on her parents and just as awkwardly. Candy said quietly, “Where’s your room?”

“Right out front,” he said, all perked up, as if he didn’t think it would be that easy.

Lowering her voice, she said, “Tell me your room number and I’ll meet you there in fifteen. I just have to tuck my cousin in.”

He grinned wide. “Bring her, too,” he said, with a double lift of his brows.

Candy smiled. “Tempting. But I don’t think she’ll go for it. A bit of a prude, you know?”

“Ask her.”

But the prude was already off her barstool, moving fast toward the door. Candy caught up with me. “We gotta go,
now
,” she said.

“Really? Oh, well, only if you think that’s a good idea.”

“Stop,” she said. “Go quick. Pack up the room.”

“What about Gina?”

“Bring her, too. No use leaving her behind. She’ll get cranky.”

“When we drive out the only exit, and his room is right at the front, you don’t think he’ll notice?”

“I don’t think he will. He’s pretty wasted. Just go back to the room, get our stuff, load up, and let me worry about him. Be ready with the car running in twenty-five minutes.”

“Twenty-five minutes, you’re joking!”

“He won’t last longer than that.”

“For goodness’ sake! I don’t mean that,” I said, impatiently. “I mean twenty-five minutes is not enough time to pack and get out.”

“Shel, just quit yakking and get packing, will ya? We have to go!”

“After you’ve finished with him,” I persisted, “you know he’ll go straight to the office and ask what kind of car the devil girls were driving.”

“Boy, you sure do worry about a lot of stuff,” Candy said, urgently prodding me along the gravel. “When he goes to ask, the office manager will tell him we were driving a brown Comet, 1973. License plate fake. Let him try to track it down.”

“Candy, you’re too much.”

“Thank you. Now do you remember what you have to do?”

“Hmm. Gina’ll go through the roof.”

“What else is new. Go. Get everything out of the room, including my stuff, and wait for me outside with the car running.”

“I know, I know.”

So back she went inside the bar to Hoadley, and I ran to the room. As predicted—though it didn’t take a Nostradamus—when Gina, who was undressed and watching TV in bed, found out that we had to leave, she went berserk. She said she wasn’t going. Absolutely
not
going. She turned up the TV, then started yelling over it. I argued back and forth with her for a few minutes, then threw up my hands and started collecting our things. I told her I was getting in that car in seven minutes, and if she wanted to get to Bakersfield she’d better move her ass.

We were both hyperventilating by the time we slammed shut the motel door and jumped inside the Shelby. “This is sick,” she hissed. “This is demented. We’ve been driving all day, it’s pouring out, we haven’t slept, we’re disgusting and unshowered, and when she says jump, you ask how high without even a blink. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with
you
?” I retorted—there was a rap of knuckles on the window. Gina slowly, theatrically, furiously, opened her door, got out, stood glaring threateningly at Candy, who pulled forward the seat and hopped in.

“Let’s go,” she said. Gina took her time. I didn’t even wait for her door to close all the way before I stepped on the gas (“What the fuck is your problem!” she yelled), and the sound of spinning tires on wet gravel was like a million nails on a million blackboards.

It resounded in my ears as I made a right and kept going. I didn’t stop. No one was out in the courtyard in the rain, where the wet Christmas lights twinkled all year round.

“Where’s Hoadley?” I breathed.

“Asleep in his room. He had a lot to drink. He was tired.”

“Did he know you left?”

“Nope.” Candy stuck her hand clutching a wad of twenties in between the seats. “But did give us a little money for our trouble.” She chuckled.

“It’s all so funny to you,” Gina hissed, with unsuppressed hatred. “My whole life since we met you has been one unending nightmare.”

“Melleray was a nightmare?” I asked.

“Shut up! Yes, everything’s been a nightmare! You and your pretend indifference to what you’re doing to us. Sloane, why is she still in our car? Just pull over on the side of the road and open the door. What are you worried about? Clearly she’s going to be fine, better than you and me, who are being dragged out of an infested bed at midnight. How long is she going to be with us? Let her out right now!”

I didn’t answer. It was raining. It was night. My mind, my heart was closed to it. I couldn’t even entertain it as a hypothetical option. I knew Gina wasn’t serious, I knew she knew I’d never do it. “Come on, Gina, stop. Be reasonable.” But this made Gina only more heated up. “No, of course not. Why would you?” I was having a hard time concentrating on driving.

“Don’t you understand?” she said to Candy. “You are not my friend. I’m sorry, but I don’t care what happens to you. I just want to get to California, to my boyfriend, and never think about you again. That’s what I want. So don’t try to appeal to my better nature, don’t try to tell me to help out my fellow man. I can’t help myself! I have less than zero interest in helping you.”

Candy said nothing.

“Look what’s happening, and all because you’re in our car! God, I’m so sick and tired of this!”

I gripped the wheel harder. I couldn’t see the slick road for the rain. I was driving real slow, thinking that whether or not Candy was in our car, it was obvious that cowboys like Hoadley were everywhere, even on U.S. 20, looking to score five thousand bucks, off me, off Gina, off my Shelby.

“Let me tell you something,” Gina continued. “You are not normal. This isn’t normal. In a normal world, this doesn’t happen. Mothers stay with their children. Mothers don’t throw their children out.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? And who says my mother threw me out?”

“Girls, please.” I was trying so hard to see the road, to not hear them.

“She didn’t stay with you, though.”

“So that’s
my
fault?”

“I don’t know. It’s somebody’s fault, isn’t it, Candy?”

“Gina,” I said. “My mother didn’t stay with me, either.”

“You’re both screwed up!” Gina cried. “You know perfectly well, Sloane, that there are screwed up things in you, and I’m not blaming your mother, I’m just saying it’s weird, and maybe this is why you do the things you do, but all I know is that in
my
world, mothers stay with their kids.”

“And the kids become normal like you,” said Candy.

Gina shrugged angrily. “No comment. Just saying. Just pointing things out.”

“Stop, okay,” I said. “I can’t concentrate.”

Nothing would stop Gina. “This is what I get for picking up a Jesus freak. It’s punishment. Oh yes! I used to attend a Jehovah’s youth group. Before the activities began, we usually sang hymns or some shit. We’d sing, and then pray for hours. That’s when I lost my faith. And look at you—proof positive—all your praying did
you
no good, as I suspected all along. Oh, they used to pray for all those who hadn’t seen the light yet, who weren’t Christian. They wept! They felt sorry for three billion people who hadn’t opened their hearts to Jesus. Like you do for me. You feel sorry for me. And yet do you see me jumping into strangers’ cars and turning their life upside down? No. I know my fucking place. Do you? You look down on me and Shelby because we’re not like you.”

“I don’t look down on Shelby,” interjected Candy.

“Fuck you!” Gina was incensed. “The Nazis felt the same way about the Jews. Except with killing and stuff. You are one of the most condescending unpleasant people I’ve ever met. Everybody else but you are headed to the rings of hell, the Chinese, the
Muslims, the Buddhists, everybody else is wrong and you’re right, and yet, you’re the one fucking up my life, and I’ve never done anybody any harm. You think you’re so pure.”

“Is that what I think?” said Candy. “You obviously haven’t listened to a word I said.”

“No! Because I don’t give a shit! Ah, but you know what, that’s right. You tell me what a good Christian you are …”

“Never once said that. I love Christ, but I’m a terrible sinner.”

“That’s right! You do reprehensible things, and still manage to come on all high and mighty. I don’t do anything bad, but don’t act like that. See how it works? I don’t swoon at the mention of Christ or hurt other people. I’m not a hypocrite, pretending all the things I want to do are dirty and inhuman. Give me a break. Fuck you for trying to convert me.”