Caught inside a long leafy tunnel of trees lining both sides of the winding road mile after mile, and though the foliage shone with new colors, the repeated patterns of the forest had a soporific effect. Erica tried to doze, but she was too nervous, made skittish by his story. Well after midnight he burst into the room, clutching two bags of food, his face flushed and dotted with perspiration, and as he wolfed down the sandwiches and sucked up the melted shake, he told her about Barry and Carl, the pistol, the tears, and the bag of money—the whole story, laughing when he relayed the cook's words of warning. “Don't go down that road,” he mimicked the deep voice. Each time she looked over at him behind the wheel, she replayed the scene and his unhinged excitement. On scant sleep, he woke her early in the morning, jittery with adrenaline, anxious to be on the road again. His passion, which had so excited her during their half year together, threatened to boil over. The gun in the glove compartment ticked like a hidden bomb.
The sudden snap of violence and Wiley's enthusiasm made her wonder what might have happened the night of their escape had her father heard them. Daddy stumbles sleepily into the hallway, his hair disheveled and chin unshaven, fatigue etched around his eyes and across his brow. Trapped in half-consciousness, he cannot speak as he puzzles over the sight of the boy in his house at that hour and the backpack strapped to her shoulders. Gun in hand, the barrel like an elongated finger, Wiley slowly intones the speech he had rehearsed. She's coming with me, don't try to stop us. Daddy reaches out for her. Like the time at the shore when she was five or six and wandered out into the sea with him. Pummeled by the surf, she held out her hands to be rescued, and her father made the same gesture, arms outstretched, fingers grasping as desperately as the man's in that old movie, and he repeats it on the stairway in her imagination. He stretches but cannot reach and shouts no! Wiley fires the gun, malice in his heart mirrored in his eyes. In slow motion, the bullet corkscrews through the air, at its tip a tiny demonic face winks with every revolution, striking her father in the breast pocket of his sky-blue pajamas from just the Christmas before, and the cherry-red stain spreads like a sunrise as he hurtles away from her. In the driver's seat, Wiley was singing along to the radio, oblivious to her thoughts. For a moment, Erica wondered if he had in fact shot those two men at the hamburger joint, and if murder was the reason they took off before dawn, if Carl and Barry were dead in the meat locker.
A flock of ducks crossed the sky, and Wiley pointed out how they circled to approach a landing. He slowed the Duster, calculating where the birds had found water, and pulled over to the side of the road. Behind a screen of pines, a small lake rippled. From beneath his bucket seat, he grabbed the bag of money and his pistol. “Come with me.” The lakeshore was dotted with a few fat mallards—hens brown to blend in with the fading vegetation, the males ostentatious in their formal suits and iridescent green heads—waddling to the safety of a depression in the grass, complaining of the interlopers with every step. Wiley led her to the edge and plopped the night deposit bag to the peaty ground, and then he pulled out the pistol from his waistband.
“What are you doing with that gun?”
The shot rang out, and all the ducks took flight in a cacophonous panic, quacking and beating their wings. At the ground by his feet, a wound in the earth seeped water. The recoil from the shot forced his arm to a ninety-degree angle, and Erica traced the path from his shoulder to the barrel. A wisp of smoke curled from the gun and dissipated. “Are you crazy?” she hissed. “What if someone hears us?”
“It's locked,” he said. “And no knife will cut through that mesh cloth. I wish I'd asked them for the keys.” Rocking back on his heels, he let his arm drop to his side and listened. All was quiet save the gentle scrape of a few falling leaves and the waves lapping against the grass, and the ducks circled farther out on the lake, bright orange feet sluicing as they settled on the surface. He angled his gun again, closed one eye, and tried to determine the proper vector.
“Get closer,” she said. “It's not like that bag is going to shoot back.”