At night, we pass through Montgomery and Columbia, edge out of Alabama and South Carolina and into Georgia. While the rest of the bus drifts, I creep to the front, where a sleeping man has left a backpack by his feet. I unzip, reach inside, find a wallet. I take all the cash, moving once again inside a blaze of want. We will need money to get all the way to Florida. We will need money to find my mother. These are the facts. I tuck the bills into my back pocket and return the wallet to where it came from.
At first light, the man is still asleep and I’m counting the bills in the back of the bus. I’m expecting to see tens and twenties, but these bills are hundreds, crisp and clean, the cleanest bills I’ve ever seen. I count and recount, disbelieving. The sleeping man had two thousand dollars in his wallet.
I wake Marcus up. I watch him come to life behind the mask. Two thousand dollars is enough to cause a problem. There will be consequences once the man realizes his money is gone. He will come around to all the passengers. He will take his case to the driver. He will demand to know.
When the bus docks at a rest stop in Macon, we get off. Down here the air is wet and warm. I smell gasoline. The parking lot is filled with semi trucks. The drivers are standings outside, leaning against cabs, chewing toothpicks, the brims of their baseball caps pulled low. As we pass, they turn to stare at Marcus in his mask.
We walk up to a driver in a red baseball cap and a T-shirt that says PROUD TRUCKA. His jeans are too tight around the crotch. I look at the back of his semi and wonder where he’s headed, what he might be hauling. He watches us watch him and spits a white glob on the asphalt.
“You want some company out there?” I ask.
The man stands back and looks us over.
“What’s with that mask?” he asks.
“Childhood,” we say.
“Rabbits stink,” the man says. “Rabbits can be scared to death.”
He rubs his hands together and spits again. I hear honking, the rumble of engines, as some trucks begin to pull out of the lot, back onto the open road. He jingles his keys in his hands. He tells us to get inside.
36.
“Florida!” the man says when we tell him where we’re going. Marcus is up front, rubbing one of his rabbit ears. I’m in the back, trying not to feel sick. I spread out my map of highways and follow the lines that lead south. If I puke on this man’s floor mats, I know we’ll be out of here.
“Here’s what I know about Florida,” he tells us.
His mother grew up in Nassau, the biggest city in the Bahamas. Years ago, when she was dying, she told her children that she wanted her ashes scattered in the water surrounding the island. This man and his sister drove from South Carolina to Miami with an urn strapped down in the backseat. In Florida, they planned to rent a boat, but private charters were too expensive, so instead one night they got on a party boat called Bottoms Up, bound for Nassau.
“You should have seen it,” the man says in a sleepy drawl. “People were taking Jell-O shots and dancing and glow-in-the-dark hula hooping and screaming ‘Eat my dick!’ whenever we passed another boat. And then there was my sister and me, stone-cold sober, holding this urn filled with our mother’s ashes.”
When the island was in sight, they opened the urn and let her go. A drunk bumped into them while this was going on and they dropped the urn in the ocean, which wasn’t part of the plan, but that was okay, they decided in the end. Let it go. Let it all go.
“So,” he says. “That’s my story about Florida.”
I can tell from the way he talks about his sister that she is dead too, but I don’t ask.
Next the man tells us his theory of the sickness. He thinks it’s something the government did to weed out the weak, the citizens that have been holding this nation back, the citizens they no longer wanted. To harm America in order to save it. A controlled burn, like firefighters do with forests, except of course this did not stay in control.
“Save America from what?” I ask. Earlier he shared a jar of peanuts with us. Now my mouth is dry and my fingertips are pebbled with salt.
He does not answer. My sister was not weak, I know he is thinking.
“I was standing in my yard in Greenville when I saw these planes pass over,” he tells us. “There were six of them, all military, and they were spraying something on the fields. A light, fine mist. I went inside and closed the blinds. I stuffed towels under the doors. I sealed up the cracks. When I saw those planes, I knew in my heart this sickness was something they were doing to us.”
He does not answer. He pounds his fist against his chest. The semi drifts toward a silver guard rail.
We did it to ourselves or someone did it to us: that is how all the theories break down.
A heavy rain is falling and we can’t see the road ahead or the highway signs or other cars. The windows look like they’re melting. The darkness around the headlights is immense. We have no way to monitor our situation, to know if this man is really taking us to Florida or someplace of his own design.
Later I watch Marcus sleep. His hands are folded in his lap. His head lists to the side. I can still see the boy inside him when he sleeps.
I wonder if he loves that boy or if he wants to kill him and bury him deep.
The rain keeps coming. Lightning cuts the sky. Each time it looks like an explosion. The radio is on. I listen for something more about the Hospital, but there is only talk of the weather, which has turned strange everywhere: snow in Los Angeles, tornadoes in the mountains of Vermont. Volcanic activity in New Mexico, in the Sierra Blanca. A sinkhole that swallowed an entire neighborhood in Delaware. The station changes and someone is talking about a prehistoric forest that has been discovered in a faraway country, filled with petrified trees that have been dead for thousands of years. Trees are lucky: they do not have to worry about what they leave behind. I put on the gardening gloves and lie down in the cab. It is just me and this man, alone in the night.
“No one is waiting,” I think I hear him say. The rain makes it hard to tell. It sounds like we’re stuck inside a car wash.
“What?” I say, sitting up.
“What?” he says back.