32
The cab of the truck was crowded and hot, the seat lumpy, the floor gooey with spilled coffee. Tony sat by the door. Mistie was in the teacher’s lap in the middle. The driver, Bobby “Blessing” Sanford, was at the wheel. His radio was turned on to a gospel station, and it was all Tony could do to keep from reaching over and twisting the knob to shut it off. Blessing liked to sing, and he liked to sing about Jesus.
“And he walks with me and he talks with me,” he sang, a half-note above the key on the radio, “an he tells me I am his oooown. And the joy we share as we tarry therrrrrrrre. No one has…ever…known.”
The old man took his Styrofoam coffee cup from the dash-mounted drink holder and slurped down a few swigs. He had dentures, and they popped audibly as he smacked his lips in caffeine-laced pleasure.
The organ on the radio ground out the interlude between verses. Tony looked out at the road ahead, pitch black, studded with headlights from on-coming traffic, and said, “Hey, man. Could you turn that music off? I’m not feeling so good.”
Blessing wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and said, “Listenin’ to the Lord’s music should make you feel better.”
“Yeah, well,” said Tony. She wanted to play the man’s game as long as she could, as far southwest as she could. Blessing thought Tony, the teacher, and Baby Doll were a family of Pentecostals catching a ride to a Christmas revival in San Antonio. Their car had broken down, so Tony had told him, and they were hitching as far as they could get.
Tony had spotted Blessing’s rig in Pinewood, a small town past northwest of Lake Marion. At the center of the town two roads intersected, the larger of the two an east-west stretch on which several logging and milk trucks rumbled back and forth. Tony had imagined stealing a car - she’d taught herself to hot wire when Leroy’s dad’s car wouldn’t start last June - but then the sight of Blessing’s truck parked in front of the Pinewood Bar and Grill changed her mind.
The cab was silver with a hand-painted montage of Christian symbols and scenes from the Bible. On the right side of the hood stood Adam, fig leaf intact; on the left stood Eve, fig leaf likewise tastefully in place. In between them a huge, wall-eyed snake coiled up a spindly apple tree and flashed his tongue at the woman. In a cloud over Adam, the eye of God in a triangle glared down at the couple. In a cloud over Eve, a disembodied Jesus arm was extended, complete with bloody, nailed palm. The door on the driver’s side had Jesus on the cross and Jacob on the ladder, with the name “Bobby ‘Blessing’ Sanford, Saved Soul” painted in purple bubble letters at a jaunty angle. A collection of bumper stickers lined the base of the cab. “Honk for Jesus.” “No God. No Peace. Know God. Know Peace.” “Golgotha Mini-Golf, Cave City, KY.”
Tony knew instantly how to work this one. She herded the teacher and kid across the road to the bar and grill, and instructed them to sit on the bench outside the door. There was no hesitation; they’d walked nearly five miles that afternoon, and even Tony’s feet were stinging inside the hiking boots. Tony poised herself under the corner light, which was just now humming into life in the twilight. She could see the passenger’s door from this vantage point. Jesus walking on water and a flock of angels whirling about his head like a halo of lopsided hummingbirds.
Within a half-hour, a lumpy old man with a pox-scarred face came out of the restaurant, Styrofoam coffee cup and truck keys in hand.
“Excuse me, sir,” Tony said.
The man paused at the front of the cab and turned to face Tony. “Who, me?”
“Yes, sir, sorry if I startled you. I see you’re a God-fearing man.”
The man nodded, looking uncertain. He might have been mugged in the past, Tony suspected. But three females, how bad could that be?
“Me, my mom and sister need a ride,” she said, moving away from the light and closer to the cab. “Our car broke down back up the road aways. Blew a rod. Scared us nearly to death. All that smoke.” Tony forced her lips up into a wide grin.
“That’s terrible. Thank the Lord you didn’t get hurt. Did you get hurt?”
“Oh, no sir, the Lord was watching, that’s for sure.”
“You wanting a ride to a shop for a tow?”
“No, thank you. The car’s a goner. Not worth fixing. But we’re heading to Texas, if you’re going anywhere near there.”
“Texas!” The man’s face opened up and, at last, he smiled. “That’s a far piece, child. I always liked Texas, myself. What’s in Texas?”
“Holiness Christmas revival.”
“I thought Holiness didn’t celebrate Christmas.”
“That’s Witnesses, sir.”
“Mmm. You’re right. I’m a Primitive Baptist, myself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m heading up to Columbia, then getting on 20 to Atlanta, down 85 and then 65 to Mobile. Far as I go, I’m afraid.”
Tony moved a few steps closer, sizing him up. He had no money on him, except for change from his coffee. But maybe there was a stash in the truck. One big mistake she’d made was letting the car go down in the lake with the teacher’s cash card. “Do you have room for three extra folks? We don’t take up much room. We’ll squeeze up real tight. We’ll be real quiet, too, if you like.”
Bobby “Blessing” Sanford looked cautious again, until Tony opened her raincoat and showed him the “WWJD” sweatshirt. Then he nodded and said, “Hop in, sisters. Happy to help out.”
As Blessing clambered into the driver’s seat, Tony hurried to the bench and directed the teacher and Baby Doll to the passenger door. “Get in,” she told them in a whisper. “Don’t say a fucking word unless I tell you to.”
She reached up over Jesus’ ecstatic, smug, “I-can-walk-on-water-and-you-can’t” face and yanked the door open. The teacher went in first, then the kid. Tony climbed in last and shoved the kid onto the teacher’s lap.
Blessing started up the engine then frowned at the teacher. “Ma’am, your daughter says ya’ll weren’t hurt in that blow out, but you look right banged up.”
“Oh,” said Tony, shifting her butt around, trying to find a spot on the cushion that didn’t feel like a spring was ready to chew through the vinyl, “well, a little banged up but I meant nothing serious. Like brain damage or broken bones or anything. Right, Mom?”
The teacher blinked slowly, and Tony said, “Right, Mom?” and touched her pocket where the gun was, and the teacher saw it because she nodded and said quietly, “Yes.”
“My,” said Blessing. “Want me to pray for you, ma’am?”
“Yeah,” said Tony, “but can we do it on the road?”
She scratched at the itch on her scalp then folded her hands primly in her lap. And smiled. Damn, did she smile. It pissed her off, hard as she had to smile to get the old geezer to steer his rig out to the road.
“Sure thing,” said Blessing. Gears grated, the cab jerked, and a plastic cross hanging from the rearview swung back and struck Baby Doll in the forehead. She looked at it as if she’d never seen such a thing.
Once straightened out and at a decent clip on the highway, Blessing said, “Let us pray! Dear Lord! Put your hands on this woman and heal them wounds on her face! Help this family get to Texas safely and soundly.”
“Thank you…,” said Tony.
“And bring your angels to watch over them and keep them. And the cherubim and the seraphim! All those heavenly bodies what work for you, Lord! Glory, hallelujah.”
“Glory,” said Tony.
“In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ we pray, He who shed His blood for the salvation of the world!”
Shut up!
“Amen.”
“Thank you, sir.”
They rode in silence for a short distance, then Blessing turned on the radio and spun the dial past everything tolerable to a religious station.
Tony grit her teeth to keep her mind off Blessing and his off-tune renditions of every church tune that God’s disc jockey felt moved to play.
She thought about Burton. He lived in Lamesa, though she wasn’t sure where. The birthday card had a post office address. Of course, ranchers would have hired hands go into town for their mail. They couldn’t take chances that their mail would sit by a roadside in a box where gangs of local kids could drive by and steal it and then shoot the box up with a bb gun.
She thought about Leroy and his bb gun. What was Leroy doing now? Was he arrested? Was Little Joe? Mrs. Martin would have called the cops as soon as she could get her act together. Two, three minutes, tops. The police would arrive for the statement five minutes later. Was that enough time for the Hot Heads to escape in the Chevelle? Would Mrs. Martin be clear-headed enough to know what she was supposed to tell the cops?
Tony’s mind circled back around to Whitey. His expression as he stood in the middle of the pile of shit that had been the Exxon convenience store, holding the revolver that wasn’t supposed to have any bullets in it. She must have left one bullet in the chamber last time she’d shot groundhogs behind Rainbow Lane. She hadn’t checked inside. Stupid. Whitey was the one who had shot the gasoline man.
What was that like, a dead man down your barrel? Was it like watching a white car bobbing in lake water while two people screamed inside? One way no. The gun was fast and the lake was slow. But Tony’s skin had broken out in little bumps as she’d watched. Tony had imagined the teacher tying to kick her way to freedom, trying to hold her breath and sucking in water over and over again. She had counted to see how long she, herself, could hold her breath. It wasn’t very long, but maybe the teacher had better lungs. The woman didn’t smoke or anything, Tony didn’t think. She might smell like Mam in some ways but not like smoking.
How long until the teacher would have drowned?
Tony had gotten to forty-two holding her breath. She’d stood on the slope by the lake and took another breath as the car up-ended and the front began to dive. This time she got to forty-seven. She could hear the screams of the teacher and then the muffled prayer of the kid. The kid’s voice was higher in pitch and more piercing to Tony’s ear. And, well, sad.
That had shocked Tony the most. The sadness of the prayer. It wasn’t so much the words as the sound of the words. Tony had heard a sound like that long ago. Not a dying groundhog. Not a tortured cat. Something else.
Someone else long ago, though she didn’t recall when, or who.
It was the prayer that had changed Tony’s mind. She’d rolled the windows down to let the water fill up the car more quickly so the drowning would be faster. At least that was what she’d thought she’d done it for. But then, the open windows where what allowed her to open the car doors at the last moment. Water inside, water outside. She’d learned about that in driver’s education at the middle school on one of the days she had attended. Once a car fills with water, the pressure is equalized and the doors will open.
Back in Pippins, the Hot Heads were either basking in the glow of an armed robbery well-done, or had been arrested and were sitting in the jail in Emporia waiting to see what would happen to them. Armed robbery and murder. In Virginia that meant a charge of capital murder. A capital murder conviction meant the death penalty. What was the age somebody could fry or get poisoned over at the prison in Jarratt? It was less than eighteen, she knew that much. A boy who’d killed a car dealer up in Richmond had been seventeen at the time and they’d strapped him down and shot his veins full of acid.
Whitey was, what, sixteen? Or was he fifteen? Tony couldn’t quite remember. But maybe old enough to execute. Leroy, Little Joe, and Buddy were accomplices. They could get the death penalty, too, especially Leroy who was the oldest of them all. They would have squealed on Tony if they’d been arrested, too.
“…how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” sang Blessing at the wheel. Lights from an approaching car swept over his features, etching them with glow and shadow, making him look at once like Jesus and then Satan himself. “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I seeeeeeee.”
They might just tell the police I was the one shot the gasoline man, thought Tony. The gun was my dad’s. My prints are all over it. They could say I killed him then ran off for doing it.
The plan had been to stir up trouble and make a name for the mysterious gang of Pippins outlaws. So what had happened?
Tony was going to make a phone call to Pippins as soon as she could. The only phone number she knew by heart was Leroy’s. He would tell her what had gone down. If he was still at home.
“When we’ve been there ten-thousand years, bright shining as the sun,” sang Blessing, “we’ve no less days to sing his praise as when we first begun.” The organ accompaniment on the radio swelled, ebbed, flourished, went silent.
Tony felt sleep tug at her eyes like an insistent hand pulling on a window shade. She touched the pistol through her coat pocket, caressed it. Truck driving. That would be a good job. She would be sixteen soon, and could get her permit. She could drive for Burton’s ranch. She could haul hay. Straw. Feed. She could haul cows sometimes, stupid, obedient and mindless cows. Maybe even a bull on occasion. Now that would be good. That would be a challenge.
That would be good.
She slept.