You Believers (4 page)

She clutched her keys and took in his clothes, Polo shirt, good jeans, Nikes that looked brand-new. At least he had good clothes. And he was polite for a guy who’d jumped into her truck. She sat back. It was a risk. But it would make a great story to tell her friends. And Randy, he’d love it that she’d taken such a risk and made money doing it.

“A hundred bucks. How else you gonna make a hundred bucks so fast?”

“All right,” she said. “There and back.”

“There and back.” He laughed.

She started the engine, glanced over and saw the nod he gave the other guy, not happy but intent. She wished she could call Billy, tell him where she was. If she could call Billy, she wouldn’t go to Randy’s. If she could call Billy, she’d get rid of this guy and head straight home.

Katy backed out and pulled in behind the Datsun. Jesse cracked his knuckles and sighed. She saw the batting gloves. She mashed the brakes, kept her eyes on her hands gripping the steering wheel.

“What’s wrong?”

“Why are you wearing those gloves?”

He opened his hands. “Yeah, not exactly sexy, right?”

She nodded, watched his face for a lie. He glanced at her, embarrassed. “I’ve got this skin condition. My palms sweat, get these bumps that open up.” He gave a little shake of his head. “Not pretty, kinda like poison oak. I have to keep hydrocortisone cream on when it acts up. Keep a bandage on them. These gloves, they protect the sores.”

“That’s awful,” she said.

He shrugged, put his hands on his thighs. “It’s all right. It clears
up. Just flares up with the heat.” He smiled. “Now you know my secret weakness. What’s yours?”

She felt herself blushing, shook her head.

He gave a little laugh. “That’s all right. I can guess what your weakness is.”

She smiled at him, liked that little secret game of flirting, not flirting, just working that line between yes and no. It wasn’t her way of mixing drinks that made her the best bartender in town, it was her way of mixing up the men, keeping them guessing. She looked away from him. “You think you know who I am?”

“Yep.” He settled back, buckled his seat belt. “Don’t you buckle up for a ride? You really ought to.”

Katy reached for her belt. “My mom made me have these installed. It’s an old truck.”

“I know,” he said. “We’d all be better off if we listened to our mommas more often.”

“Yeah,” she said. She started to press the gas, waited.

“But mommas aren’t right about everything, are they?”

“No,” she said. Her momma had never approved of any guy she’d ever dated. What did she want? For Katy to marry some professor like her dad?

He nodded, looked ahead as if they were already moving. “You got to trust me on this.” He reached out the window and motioned for the guy in the Datsun to move on.

“Trust you?” She laughed and pressed the gas and followed the car into traffic on the highway that would soon have them all heading out of town. She had a sick feeling in her stomach, knew what she was doing was dangerous. But she’d done dangerous before. Frank had pushed her into doing things way past anything like safety. And Randy, hell, Randy was nothing but a risk. But she liked to take risks,
liked that jangling feeling in her belly and something sparking behind her eyes.

She told herself not to panic, just the way she told herself not to panic when her daddy played his hunting games with guns. They lived in the country, so nobody really worried about guns going off. Boys were often out shooting cans off logs, road signs, possums. Her daddy was just another one of those boys grown up. He would sit at the open window of what he called his office but was really his gunroom. He’d keep his eye on the garbage cans out back, just waiting for the scent to draw some roaming dog. He hated those dogs getting in his trash, making a mess in his yard. Then he got to where he liked to play a shooting game to keep them away. He’d call Katy in to test her. “Let’s play a little game. I can shoot that dog there or let it go. What do you want? If he gets in the garbage, it’s your job to clean it up. Or I could just shoot him. What do you say?”

Sometimes he was just testing her. He would show her sometimes that there were no bullets in the gun. He was teasing. “Let’s see how much my tough little Katy can stand.” But lots of times he did shoot. Sometimes the dog yelped and ran off. Sometimes it dropped to the ground. “If you cry, I’ll shoot.” She’d stand frozen beside him. Katy learned to chew her lip until it was bloody, but in time she learned not to make a sound.

Katy glanced at Jesse, sitting easily and looking out the window as if he were just a guy on a road trip. She told herself she’d been through much bigger dangers than this. She was a bartender, had walked to her car in the back alley hundreds of times, had talked guys out of raping her more times than she could count. The key was to make yourself human—she’d read that in a psychology class.

It had worked once when her car had broken down and she’d hitched a ride with a man who kept saying it’d be easy to rape her,
leave her, and be long gone before she told. She looked him in the eye and said, “You won’t do that.” She told him she was on the way to the hospital, where her daddy was dying from a tumor in his head. She made the facts of her daddy’s suffering real in the air. And the guy believed her. He went silent and drove. He dropped her off at the hospital door and sped off before she thought to check his license plate. She was amazed. She had spun a story of her daddy’s pain to save herself when her daddy was already dead. He would have been proud of her lying like that to get to the hospital instead of ending up somewhere getting raped.

Crossing through downtown, she looked up and saw the Cape Fear River bridge. Once she crossed that bridge, she’d be in farm country. There’d be hardly anyone around. Randy would laugh at the risk she was taking. And Frank, he’d just say it was one of Katy’s new adventures. Even Billy would like the cash. But her mother would be furious.

“My mother,” she said thinking her mother could never hear about this.

“What about your mother?”

“Nothing,” she said. “My mother,” Katy said again, looking out at the suspension bridge she was about to cross. “My mother hates driving over bridges. She’s a nervous type, that’s all.”

He laughed. “And look at you. You’re not nervous at all.”

Katy headed up the ramp to the bridge over the Cape Fear River and saw the dark water swirling below. She’d heard stories of all those guys thinking they could swim the river. They got caught in the cross-currents of the river rolling out and the tidewaters of the sea rushing in. The churning force pulled them down in the river, so dark it was almost black with tannins from the vegetation that rotted on its shores. People drowned all the time in the current that whirled like
a wheel. They got disoriented, couldn’t see which way was up, the water so thick and dark it sucked away all light.

As the truck surged forward, the bridge seemed to shudder, but it was her own shaking inside. Her stomach clenched, and a flash of fear shot up her spine. She saw his hands now clenched in his lap while his face looked so easy and mild. She’d seen that expression of a man about to explode: face calm, body tensed. And that look just before they grabbed a beer bottle and broke it over someone’s head. And she knew it. This was bad. This was stupid.

Slowly she reached under the seat for the little pocketknife she kept there, but all she’d ever used it for was to cut apples and cheese. She tried to slip it under her thigh to be ready. Maybe this was really bad.

Jesse saw the move, reached across, snapped up her wrist, and squeezed. The truck veered into oncoming traffic, and she pulled back into her lane. A car horn blared; the driver gave her the finger and rushed by.

He took the knife, put it in his pocket, and laughed. “What do you think you’re doing, girl? You could’ve killed us back there.”

“I’ll give you the truck,” she said.

“Really,” he said with a teasing little sound.

“You can have it. I won’t call the cops. You drive to his granny’s house. Once we get across the river, just let me out. I’ll walk home.”

He smiled. “Now, why would I make you do something like that? You’ll get home later.”

Billy would be furious. “My fiancé, he’ll be wondering where I am. He doesn’t like it when I’m late coming in.”

“Your fiancé.” He shook his head. “And what about Randy? Girl, I’m sitting in your truck and see you got Bob Marley, Lou Reed, Tom Petty, Stones, all that old rock-and-roll shit. Don’t sit there and
tell me you take this fiancé shit serious.” He looked her up and down and laughed. “Damn, girl, I’m betting you got two guys on the side. Don’t you?”

She stared ahead at the highway unrolling, wished she hadn’t stopped to buy some stupid skirt for Frank and that damned underwear for Randy. Maybe if that lady had let her change in the restroom, this guy would have jumped into someone else’s car.

He was nudging her. “You get it on the side, don’t you? Don’t you?”

She gave a nod, eyes still on the road.

Jesse slapped her shoulder as if they were old friends. “Women. You got all the power, man. Don’t give a shit about nothing but a man between your legs. My momma, my blood momma, she was like that.”

Katy gripped the wheel harder, thought of yanking the car off the road, but there was nowhere to go. She glanced his way but couldn’t meet his eyes. “You’re not going to hurt me,” she said.

“Hell, no. You can drop me off and go see Randy.” He laughed, popped open the glove box. “Let’s see what other music you have.” He rummaged through a couple of CDs and, as if he’d known it would be there, grabbed the bag of pot. “Jackpot!”

She reached for his hand. “That’s my fiancé’s.”

“Right,” he said. “The bad shit we got always belongs to someone else.” He found the papers, started rolling. “I’d say we could use a little something to relax,” he said. “I knew you were into this. Smelled it the minute I got in your truck.” He reached in her purse, took her lighter, and lit up.

She felt a tear slip down her face, wiped it with the back of her hand.

“Ah, don’t worry, girl. It’s not what you think. We’ve just got a little thing to do here.”

She heard the hissing sound when he inhaled. She squeezed the
steering wheel as they descended from the bridge. Back on solid ground she felt she’d left the world she knew behind. It was happening. Her mother had warned her: “You only think you’re in control, Katy. With every little reckless thing you do . . .” Katy couldn’t remember the rest of the warning. But somewhere inside she’d always known something like this would happen one day. She was Dorothy suddenly lifted by a furious wind spinning her to a terrifying new place where good really did battle evil, where a rebellious girl’s only desire was to go home.

When Katy was a girl, she believed in Oz. The first time she saw the movie, she was five years old. On the overstuffed green sofa she leaned into her daddy’s side, ate popcorn, and sipped Coke. She sat transfixed when the black tornado rolled across the prairie and snatched up Dorothy’s house, sent it spinning in a world flying by with cows mooing, chickens flapping, the mean old lady furiously pedaling her bicycle as if anyone could really outrun a storm.

During the commercial she asked her daddy if a tornado really could lift her off to another land. “Most definitely,” he said.

She asked, “Do we have tornadoes in Tennessee?”

“Sometimes,” he said, “but you don’t have to worry about that. Our house is made of brick. Remember the wolf? He huffed and puffed and couldn’t blow the brick house down.”

Katy glanced at the man beside her, now looking at the CDs she kept between the seats.

“Cool; this old truck’s got a player.”

“I had it installed. This was my daddy’s truck.”

But he wasn’t listening. “You got lots of Marley.” He turned on the accent. “You like da ganja, lady. I got good ganja for you.” He held the joint out to her.

“I don’t want any pot,” she said. “I just want to get home.”

He was studying a CD cover. “Yeah, Bob Marley, he’s cool. Black
folks, white folks, all kinds of folks dig Bob.” He tossed the CD to the floor and looked out the window. She realized Randy’s shirt was down on the floor. But she didn’t say anything. He was watching her every move, and when he caught her eye, he just grinned. “You believe that Rasta shit ’bout Haile Selassie? I’ve got these black friends I do some dealing with. They talk about Selassie like he was some kind of a god.”

She’d heard that. Most people didn’t know about the Haile Selassie connection. Most thought Rasta was just a smoke-dope-grow-dreadlocks kind of thing. “I’m not sure they think he’s a god,” Katy said. “More like a messenger, I think. But don’t real Rastas see a little bit of God in everything?”

Jesse laughed, his shoulders rocking as he watched the land go by. “Yeah, a messenger. I’m a messenger. Them Rasta dudes get high enough, I bet they see a little bit of God in me.” He turned, gave her that soft grin she’d seen when he’d first slipped into her truck. “What I mean is, we can all be messengers. We all got something the world needs to hear.”

“Yes,” she said, looking at the clock. She’d be home by dinnertime.
Positive
, she thought,
think positive
.
The Lord didn’t give us a spirit of fear, but one of power and love and soundness of mind
. It was scripture. Her mother kept it framed by her bedside table. Nice calligraphy, with a rose drawn in one corner. It was a pretty thing to wake up to, Katy guessed.

She thought of Dorothy, closing her eyes, petting little Toto, whispering,
There’s no place like home
. Yes, positive. They would take her truck and leave her, and she’d find her way to Randy’s house. He was always trying to get her to do reckless things, like take a plane to Vegas with him, Cancun. He lived the good life, all right. He called her a coward, teased her about being a good wife, said if she really had the nerve she liked to think she did, she’d say to hell
with the good-wife thing. Maybe this guy jumping in her truck and asking her to take him out by Lake Waccamaw was a sign that Lake Waccamaw was where she was supposed to be. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy was dangerous. Anyone could be dangerous. She glanced at him, tried to sound casual. “How about we stop somewhere for a six-pack? I could use a cold beer. Make it like a road trip.”