“You got to tell me something first,” she said.
“What?” the girl answered.
“When that woman put our clothes away what’d she say when she found the gun?”
“I don’t know.”
“You got to think. Were you sitting there?”
“Yes’m.”
“Then think. What’d she say?”
The child put her finger to her chin and looked out the windshield. She bent her mouth.
“She said what the hell.”
“And what else?”
“Nothing. She asked where we got it and I said it was my momma’s. But I ain’t never seen it before.”
“You told her that?”
“I said I ain’t never seen it before.”
“Then what?”
“Then she took it and went on. She looked funny.”
Russell listened. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that something had come upon them that they hadn’t been expecting. The woman had the look of someone who might have been used to it but there was concern in her voice. He had heard the sound from men who knew what tomorrow would bring and knew there was nothing they could do about it.
They came upon a rest area and Russell pulled off without asking and Maben didn’t oppose. White streetlights lit the parking lot. A brick building of restrooms to the right. A pavilion and picnic tables to the left. A woman walked her dog in the grass around the pavilion and a group of motorcycles were parked in front of the restrooms and men and women in leather stood around the bikes smoking. Vending machines lined against the wall of the bathroom building and above the vending machines a round clock that read 10:05.
Russell parked close to the bikes. Killed the engine. Touched the cut on his forehead.
“I’m hungry,” the child said.
Maben opened her door and got out and the child climbed down after her. Maben gave her two dollars and told her to go get something. Then she sat back down in the truck with her leg swinging out.
Russell picked up the pistol and turned it in his hands. “This is a nice piece,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to have a kid,” she said. She stared at Annalee who stood in front of the vending machines trying to decide.
He started to tell her that she shouldn’t say stuff like that but she rested her head back against the glass of the back window and continued.
“Can’t feed her. Can’t give her a place to sleep. I don’t even know when it happened. Somebody just popped it in me. I was sitting around one day feeling like shit and I started throwing up and kept on until I figured it out. Then I wanted to do something but it’d get night and I couldn’t bring myself to it the next day. Even sat in the clinic a couple of times. Sat there looking at some stupid magazine. Sweating. I’d sit there ’til they called me and I’d leave out. Then it’d get night again and I finally figured I’d keep it and see what happened.”
“Night always gets me,” he said. “Makes me do stuff I shouldn’t.”
“Something about it,” she agreed.
“You in some trouble?”
She nodded and watched the child.
“I’m gonna guess it’s big trouble,” he said.
“Is there some other kind?” she said and she turned and looked at him. Her eyes seemed to be shrinking back into her head. She knew that telephone conversations were being had about her right now.
“This isn’t your gun,” he said.
“No.”
There was a crack of lightning and then thunder and the men and women around the bikes put out their cigarettes and put on their helmets and jackets. The bikes fired up and roared and snapped and each woman found her man and sat behind him. Maben looked at Annalee and the child held a drink can against one ear and a candy bar against the other. A man riding alone pulled ahead and the others followed him, the roar growing with the acceleration and then dying away as the bikes moved down the ramp and away into the night. When the bikes were gone the girl walked back toward the truck but Maben called out for her to go and sit down at a picnic table. For a minute. I got to talk to the man.
“What you supposed to do when you can’t let nobody find you?” she asked and she tossed her cigarette onto the asphalt.
“That’s a good one,” he said.
“And what you supposed to do when you got somebody you love and you know if they find you they’re gonna take that somebody away with them?”
Russell shifted in his seat. Let out a breath. “That’s a better one,” he said.
Annalee sat on top of a wooden picnic table with her legs swinging over the edge. She ate the candy bar carefully as if she were wearing her best dress.
“She’d be better off anyhow.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah. I know it. Didn’t know it ’til now. But I know it. Two hours ago I had some work and we had a safe place to sleep. Even if it was only gonna be a few days. Didn’t know it then. If I knew it I didn’t say it to myself. But I know it now.”