He likes that thought. Setting those homes on fire. The crackle, the smoke, the pretty embers. But those homes don’t even exist yet, so he can hardly set them on fire. He settles for giving the lady behind the counter a nasty look and hunkers down with his corn dogs.
The Stop and Go has five little booths inside it, and the man eats lunch here almost every day. It’s the kind of gas station/convenience store/diner combo he grew up with, feels comfortable inside. The Stop and Go even has the benefit of being surrounded on three sides by a rundown farm. The muddy pastures hold a strange assortment of livestock collected by an old kook of a man. Emu, alpacas, pigs from Vietnam. Farms, even weird ones, make sense to the man.
The big downside is that the Stop and Go is the only gas station for miles. He’s had to learn to ignore the electronic dings as the people come in to pay for their gas, buy their candy bars and their sodas. He keeps his head down and his focus on his corn dogs and his Coca-Cola.
But then a voice reaches through his protective bubble.
“I want it. I want it, Daddy.” Her father mumbles something the man doesn’t hear, but he hears her reply. “I said I want it.”
That voice slices through his defenses, into his ears, down deep into his brain.
More male mumbling and then: “But I love the Dukes of Hazzard!”
Somehow, he knows. He knows before he raises his head what she looks like. He knows how rotten she is. How spoiled and evil and terrible. He knows what she’s going to spend the rest of her life doing, how she is going to treat her children. He knows all of this, and he knows he is not wrong.
He looks up, and she is precisely as he expected. Tiny little body wearing daisy dukes cut so her ass cheeks show. Fourteen if she’s lucky, but the kind who already has an eighteen-year-old boyfriend. Her red hair is parted down the middle and put into two cute little pigtails. God, how he wants to rip those pigtails straight out of her head.
She’s putting on a Dukes of Hazzard baseball cap. Her father looks downtrodden, weak, destroyed. A neutered man. Once upon a time someone told the man to blame the fathers in such situations, but he never bought into that idea. It’s not the father’s fault. It’s her fault and no doubt the mother’s fault too. The mother isn’t around, but the man knows she is just like her daughter.
The girl shifts the ball cap to a jaunty angle. She looks into the small mirror next to the sunglasses and lets her mouth hang open a little, trying to look sexy. She is disturbingly successful. Pleased by the results, she whips the hat off her head and hands it to her dad. “Buy it,” she says.
Slump-shouldered, the father takes the ball cap to the counter.
“Ooh! Look!” squeals the girl, pointing out the back door of the Stop and Go to the countryside beyond. “There’s a llama!” The girl skips away from her father. “I’m going to go pet the llama!”
“I’ll be in the car,” he says.
The man gets up from his corn dogs and his drink. He doesn’t finish them or even bother to throw them away. He doesn’t even wait until the father leaves the building.
The man wants to create that feeling of his brain being popped into place, and he believes he knows how he can make it happen. He’s thought a lot about it and then, without warning, she came into his life to tell him it was time to try. Time to find out if he’s right. He’s not the least bit worried about any of the particulars. Just as he knew what the girl looked like before he laid eyes on her, he knows all of this will go smoothly. All he has to do is let his brain pop into place.
For three whole days it was beautiful. Everything stayed aligned; everything was free and perfect and the way it should be. Now it’s something else. His brain is sliding back into its original position, the cockeyed place where it sits wrong, like bone-on-bone arthritis.
He’s washing blood and dirt off his hands in a cold mountain creek. A dirty shovel lies beside him. It was more difficult than he had anticipated, digging underneath the cabin. So little room to maneuver. If he ever had to do it again, he would make a good-size hole in the floor. That way he could stand up and dig. It is a nice idea, but it fills him with unease as he envisions it.
At no point in the process was he afraid. That was good; he felt proud of that. But now that it is all over, uncomfortable feelings start to bubble up. There aren’t many good people in the world. The girl wasn’t good; he knew that much. But what if her grandfather is good? What if he suffers because of this? The man doesn’t like thinking about it, and yet the little thoughts of “what if” keep rising to the surface.
By the time he gets into his red truck to go home, his stomach seems to be sitting somewhere around his feet. This is a high price to pay for three good days. A very high price to pay.
CHAPTER TEN