The Gap Year (26 page)

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

M
artin has taken over the driving. I try to recall how long it’s been since I sat in the passenger seat while a man drove. I narrow the time frame down to A Long Time.

We’re passing through a field of what I know to be sorghum because Martin once identified this crop for me. At the edge of the field is a stretch of bare earth that has been molded into humps and hollows, crisscrossed by trails. A kid on a motocross bike bursts over a low hill and gets enough air to shimmy his back wheel before landing.

Martin slows down as we enter a small town. Most of the businesses are boarded up. “We’re almost out of gas,” he says, dropping his speed even more. He always used to do this on trips, practically crawl through small towns, reading out the names of businesses, the wisdom posted outside of churches, the funny team names being boosted on the Dairy Queen marquees. He loved cafés, diners, drugstores with lunch counters.

We pass a couple of sleek new gas stations with a dozen bays out front, but, as I knew he would, Martin heads for a battered, two-pump establishment. I always liked that he preferred the local, the homegrown.

We park next to an ancient gas pump. Martin points to the door on an outside wall of the station with
RESTROOM
painted on it. “You need to?”

“No, I’m fine.” Much as I like the local, the homegrown, when it comes to restrooms I prefer the corporate, the national.

“We’ll hit the DQ on the way out of town.” It was what we always used to do on trips. How we accommodated his thirst for the authentic and my microbladder.

He hops out, flips the lock on the pump nozzle into place so that the gas flows automatically, goes into the station, and, for one second, I think,
This is how it would have been for the past sixteen years. Someone else, not always me, would have, even occasionally, driven, pumped the gas, worried about our child
.

When he returns, Martin is carrying a white plastic shopping bag. In the car he extracts a package of pork rinds, another of CornNuts, holds them up, and asks, “Which one?”

My face wrinkles in disgust. “Martin, I hate pork rinds
and
CornNuts.” I’m glad I stop myself from adding,
You know that
, because he whips out a jumbo bag of honey roasted peanuts and crows, “Gotcha!”

I smile and take the peanuts, always my favorite of the gas station foods. “You are such a jerk.”

Martin tears the package of CornNuts open with his teeth. Their smell fills the car, takes me back to other trips. He shakes out a handful, puts a CornNuts-crammed fist to his lips, tips his head back, and taps them into his mouth.

With the first filling-cracking crunch, I wince. “How can you eat those things?” The words are out of my mouth before I realize that this is a question a girlfriend, a wife, someone concerned about the state of a man’s dental work would ask.

“Only way possible …” Martin answers, pausing to back out of the station, then slide into traffic. He nods at the shopping bag. “You mind?”

I fish out a can of the obnoxious red soda he always favored on road trips. “God, you don’t still drink those?” I hand it to him, and keep the Diet Sprite that was always my road bev.

“You’re right: It’s
red
with pork rinds,
white
with CornNuts. Pass me the Diet Sprite.”

I hug the drink to my chest and pivot away, protecting it from his joking grasp. “I don’t think so.” I fill my mouth with sweet peanuts and sweet bubbles, chew them into a carbonated mush, and watch the small town turn back into sorghum fields.

There is no DQ and Martin asks if he should turn back and find someplace with a good restroom. I tell him I can wait.

Gradually, the fields of grain are replaced by high, spindly pines that shadow the lonely road. Time rolls past so easily that Martin startles me when he says, “We’re almost there.”

We pass a tire repair shack and a barbecue joint. Farther on, I point to what appears to be an abandoned trailer park on the road ahead. Old trailers and RVs lie abandoned beneath the tall pines next to the rusting hulks of ancient cars. “Is that the place?”

Martin leans forward, squints, and reads off the hand-painted sign: “ ‘Worthy Restorations. Randy Worthy, Prop.’ Well, I guess we can eliminate any high-tech Soviet-Mafia identity-theft ring.”

“Yeah, that and probably indoor plumbing.” I wish I’d hit the restroom when I had the chance. “This is like something out of
Deliverance
.”

Martin bumps off the highway onto a dirt road and stops for a moment. The high-pitched shriek of metal being cut reaches us. Martin considers the sound and the piles of car frames and comes up with “Chop shop?”

He’s joking, but in a way that shows that his antennae are tuned to the same frequencies of danger and menace as mine.

We follow the saw’s whine back to a large portable building with big barn doors at either end. Parked outside are half a dozen old Airstream trailers in various stages of repair. One is finished and shines in the sun, polished to a blinding glare.

“Well,” Martin says as he parks. “We know now what Randy Worthy, Prop., restores.”

“Please, sweet Jesus, do not tell me that that lunkhead jock got our daughter to spend her college money on a roach coach.”

Again. “Our” daughter
.

The sliding doors at either end of the workshop are open. Where stalls would have been are stacks of quilted metal siding, small tires, stainless-steel sinks, slabs of foam, propane tanks. Some of the parts are gleaming new; most are crusted with rust and grease. Empty liter bottles of Mountain Dew perch everywhere. Presiding over this empire of debris is a wiry guy wearing a khaki shirt with the sleeves ripped off to reveal stringy, tattooed biceps. He’s hunched over, intent upon slicing a thick metal rod. A carrot-colored beard divided into two braids pokes out like a snake’s tongue from beneath his welder’s mask. As he cuts the rod in two, bits of metal and sparks flash from the teeth of the grinder in his hand and ricochet off the helmet with its gun turret of an eye shield. ZZ Top—“Lawd, take me downtown! I’m just looking for some tush!”—plays over the screech.

I think two thoughts:
Outlaw biker
and
Leave. Leave now
. I grab Martin’s arm to tug him away; it’s time to get law enforcement involved.

But Martin is already yelling, “Yo! Hey, Randy! Hello!” and ambling into the guy’s limited field of vision. I’m glad Martin’s wearing jeans. No telling what might happen if this guy were to see a suit.

“Mr. Worthy! Sir! Sir!” He waves his arm and steps closer. The guy still doesn’t hear him and bends forward to finish the cut. His shirt presses against the waistband of his work pants and a distinct hump appears close to the base of his spine.

“A gun!” I yell at Martin, but my warning is lost in the shriek of the blade. I point, drawing Martin’s attention to the hump, and back away, waving frantically for Martin to do the same. He doesn’t. He nods, gives me a stay-calm hand bounce, and keeps moving forward. It seems that the alpha-dog intimidation tactics are not just bluff. Sometime in the last sixteen years, Martin has become a badass.

The guy finally sees him and, in one fluid sequence, stops the grinder, flips the mask away from his face, and grabs for the gun in his waistband.

Martin extends his hands out in a wide I-come-in-peace gesture, and chuckles. “Whoa, dude. Hey, Randy, dude, sorry.” His words echo in the sudden silence.

The guy’s eyes dart from me to Martin several times. They dart a lot. Too much. I combine that with his twitchy, emaciated state and add another entry to his résumé:
meth head
.

Next must have also helped Martin become a shape-shifter, because he sounds completely relaxed, like this stranger’s oldest friend playing a prank on him when he chuckles. “My bad, Randy. Didn’t mean to startle you. I’d never walk into a man’s workshop unannounced like this, except I don’t have a number for you.”

If we get out of here alive, I am definitely calling the police. This person could not be in Aubrey’s world unless she is in serious, serious danger. Similar to the serious, serious danger I feel that Martin and I are now in. As with Coach Hines, though, Martin is able to play Randy so perfectly that the guy takes his hand from the gun and eases into whatever permanently wary state passes for his version of relaxed.

“You here to pick up the …” Randy points out toward another portable building. “The little Bambi? I guess you didn’t get my message? That Hensley Arrow hitch didn’t come in. They promised me. Swore up and down. I know I said I’d have it done today, but—”

“No, that’s cool. We’re just fans of your work. Really like what you did for a buddy of mine.”

“Yeah.” He tenses back up. “Who’d that be?”

“Tyler. Tyler Moldenhauer?”

“You know Bronk?”

Bronk
?

“How d’ya know Bronk?”

“Football.”

“Oh. You a coach?”

“Well, assistant.”

“Yeah?”

“Just wondering where we can find him.”

Randy’s twitchy eyes narrow. He steps back a bit, the better to keep both of us under surveillance. “If you don’t know where he is, then you haven’t seen what I did for him, have you now, cuz they just picked it up.”

“When?”

“This morning. Look, I do not know where Bronk come up with that money. That is not my responsibility. Knowing his people, though …”

His people
?

“Coulda been anywhere. But I do not know, and furthermore, I do not care. That was a custom job, and custom jobs don’t come with any ninety-day warranty. I got a strict no-refund policy on custom. He knew that. That was made clear up front.”

“No, no, hell, no, man.” Martin eases into the full cracker. “We ain’t lookin’ to recover. Not from you. We just need to locate Bronk. Talk to him.”

“You the coach he was living with?”

Martin nods.

“Look, I sympathize. I dealt with his people way back to before whenever they all got run off, but this is not my responsibility. Once a customer takes delivery—”

“No, we get that, bro. We’re just, you know—”

“Was there a girl with him?” I demand brusquely. I’ve had it with the jovial folksiness.

“Ma’am, you’re gonna have to step back and take all this up with Bronk. And I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. Now. You’re trespassing.” He flips the visor of his helmet back down to signal that the conversation is over. It clangs into place, covering his face, he switches the grinder on, and sparks shoot out as it slices into the metal rod.

He knows where my daughter is, and he’s not going to tell me? I don’t think so
.

I stride up to Randy and yell into his caged face, “Where did they go?”

Randy straightens up. The grinder in his hand is one inch from my belly. His finger is tense on the trigger. He wouldn’t need the gun. If he let his finger on the grinder “slip,” it would slice effortlessly through my abdominal artery.

Every muscle fiber in a body that looks to have been trained in biker bars and prison yards twitches. He releases the triggers, flips the visor back, orders Martin, “Get your woman out my face.”

Martin steps forward, reaching for me. “Cam, I—”

“That’s close enough.”

Martin freezes.

Randy presses the blade of the grinder against my stomach.

“Randy, man. Let’s put the grinder down, man.”

I stare into the slit in the helmet, into Randy’s eyes. The thin wisp of foggy color circling his dilated pupil disappears in a total eclipse as he stares back. I look into empty blackness for one, two, three seconds, then yank the entire helmet off his head. My face is close enough to his to smell the robot odor of metal, grease, and speed that is feeding on his muscles and teeth. “Either tell me where my daughter is or kill me.”

“Crazy bitch.” He drops the grinder. “I don’t know.”

“What’s your best guess?”

“Fuck am I supposed to know? You are trespassing and need to get the hell off my property.”

“Where? Come on, Randy. I’m just a mom looking for my kid. That’s all.”

As he studies me, I see that Randy is not a meth addict; he’s a skinny guy with bad teeth and a twitchy temperament made worse by drinking too much Mountain Dew. “Honest to God, lady, I don’t know. But if I was to guess, I’d say where all them do the food trailer mod go.”

“Where’s that, Randy?”

“Sycamore Heights.”

DECEMBER 11, 2009

A
ubrey, what’s wrong?”

“Drive, OK? Just drive.”

The truck fishtails on the dark ice as Tyler swings it around. He steers into the skid and the truck straightens out. Within minutes we are on the highway.

“You OK? Is it your mom? We should go back. Talk to her. Maybe if she met me, she’d like me. Moms like me. They always do.”

“Tyler, what’s wrong? You sound strange.”

The light from the tall poles overhead strobes across Tyler’s face. A gash, black in the shadowed light, splits his lower lip. “What happened?”

He touches his lip. “This, yeah, sorry, I sound even more like a drooling idiot than usual.”

“No, no …” I reach out. Tyler takes my hand, kisses the palm, pressing my hand against his lips until they leave a smear of blood there.

“I made it. I survived. It’s over. For the rest of my life, I never have to go onto a field again where every behemoth out there has permission to do shit like this to me.” He touches the cut on his lip.

“Then I’m supposed to turn around and shake that asshole’s hand? After he head-butts me behind the ref’s back? When I’ve got my helmet off? I’m supposed to pretend it’s a game?”

His tone of thorough disgust even more than his words makes me realize “You don’t like football.”

“I fucking hate fucking football. You know they got linemen in high school now weigh over three hundred pounds? That’s like getting hit by Sasquatch. There are guys out there paralyzed from taking hits like that.”

“You … you hate football? Why have you been playing all these years?”

“I didn’t always hate it. At first I loved it. Then it turned into what I had to do to get out of where I was. It turned into a job. A job I was good at. I was good at being Ty-Mo. But I am done.”

The oncoming headlights cut his profile out of the darkness. The lights flash past, but he keeps his eyes on me as he says, “So it’s over. No more football. No more football hero. Are you still …?”

He doesn’t finish. Instead, he pulls off into the breakdown lane, stops the truck, faces me. The cars coming up from behind splash waves of light across our faces, then leave us in darkness. When I kiss him his blood tastes metallic, like new pennies. I kiss his cheek, his jaw, the unhurt part of his lower lip.

I put my mouth on his neck, my tongue at the hollow beneath it. His breath funnels along my face, my neck. He kisses me so hard that the metallic taste fills my mouth. I think of all the fat books I used to read about a girl in love with a vampire. How she drove him into a frenzy. But I am the one driven into frenzy.

He pulls away. “Whoa. Whoa. Time-out. I promised myself it would not be like this.”

“No, Tyler. It’s all right.” I reach for his face, a moon going behind the clouds.

“Don’t, A.J. Don’t let me mess this up. You have to know what you’re getting into first.”

“I know. I know everything I need to know.”

“No, you don’t.” He starts the engine, drives for several minutes before he says, “Call your mom. Tell her you’re fine, but you won’t be home tonight. Tell her that your football-hero boyfriend is going to show you who he really is.”

Boyfriend
.

My mom implodes and orders me to come home immediately or she will call the police and have them bring me home.

I imagine the spinning blue lights of a cop car ricocheting around the cab of the truck. Tyler and me standing by the side of the road, a highway patrolman with a flashlight beaming a cone of light onto my driver’s license. I imagine the life I’ve known ending. I imagine all that, then I tell my mom in a loud, peppy voice for Tyler to hear, “Yeah, that’s fine. See you later then.”

Mom starts crying and begs me, “Please, Aubrey, please don’t make me call the police, because I will. If you force me to do this, I will.”

I say, “Yeah, Mom, love you too. Bye.”

As I turn my phone off, I feel like Hester Prynne going into the wild, dark forest with Reverend Dimmesdale, throwing away everything for love. Love. I haven’t let myself even think that word until now.

I love Tyler Moldenhauer.

I loved Tyler Moldenhauer from the second I woke up in his arms. I would have loved him even if he’d never spoken to me again. I just never would have admitted it. Maybe at some twentieth high school reunion, if he’d gotten fat and bald, I would have gotten up the courage to tell him, “I know you don’t remember me. Aubrey? Aubrey Lightsey? The girl who threw up on you? Pink Puke? Anyway, I had the biggest crush on you all those years ago.” Maybe he’d be flattered. Maybe we’d laugh. Maybe he’d remember me. Maybe he wouldn’t.

Still, without really understanding why he’d chosen me, fearing he’ll be reabsorbed into his golden kingdom at any second, knowing that my heart is going to be broken and I am a complete idiot, I admit that I love Tyler Moldenhauer, and my DNA twists—all its helixes, double and single—around this rewriting of my essential code.

“What did your mom say? Should we go back?”

“It’s fine.” I slide over next to him. He puts his arm around me and I nestle there. “Don’t go back.”

As we drive into the night, the headlights of the oncoming cars flash on and off across our faces like a time-lapse film of the sun rising and setting every few seconds, as if time is speeding up so fast that when this one night is over, years, decades, centuries will have passed.