With the question she stood. Russell sat on the bridge rail and waited to see if she would answer.
She could see him there in the truck bed. Lying flat like she had asked him to. Lying still like she had asked him to. Young and strong and darkskinned from long summer days. She could see him there waiting for her. Waiting like she had asked him to once they had begun to feel one another under the full moon. Wait, she had said. Lay down. Sure it was what she wanted to do but unsure about the best way to go about it. She had told him to lay down and don’t look. Maben looked toward the grass at the end of the bridge. Where she had stood and taken off her shorts and T-shirt and bra and flip-flops and set them in a pile on the ground. Certain that if she were to go back to him this way she wouldn’t turn back. That she would do what she wanted to do and what he wanted to do. She stared at that spot at the end of the bridge where she had taken off her clothes, remembering how she had looked at herself in the moonlight and assured herself in the moonlight. Naked and young and that beautiful boy lying in the back of the truck waiting for her. She could see herself standing there and she wanted to see herself coming toward the truck. Wanted to see herself climb on top of the boy. Wanted to see the boy’s hands on her hips and across her back and shoulders and down her legs. Wanted to see what they were going to do but it had all ended with her standing naked in that spot, interrupted by the hum of an approaching car and the glow of headlights that had appeared over the hill, headlights that came on fast and exposed themselves in two bright bursts before she had time to call out to Jason. Before she had time to pick up her clothes and the car had never slowed down. What she saw now as she stared at the spot at the edge of the bridge was a young girl terrified and ducking with the roar of the crash and she looked back across to the other side of the bridge where his suntanned body disappeared into the dark.
“Maben?” Russell asked.
“I just wasn’t in it,” she said. Her eyes still in the trees. “That’s all. Don’t remember why.”
He wanted to push her. To get the real answer. But he didn’t. He wanted to make a crack about what the hell was she doing with one of them Tisdale boys anyway. But he didn’t. Recognized in her look that she had said all that she was able to say. She then opened the truck door and sat down and she told him to take her to the lake. The gun will sink in the lake.
He put the truck in gear and they drove on. The fields were showing signs of drying out, being fed with only scattered rain instead of a soaking storm. A kid sat on a four-wheeler at the edge of the road and checked the mailbox though it was Sunday. More graffiti on bridge rails and on the road itself. Once they were back in town he told Maben to stick the gun under the seat and he stopped to use a pay phone at a gas station. He called his father and told him they would be back after dark. Feed Annalee. Mitchell said she wanted to try to fish if that was all right. He hung up the phone and he went in and bought beer and then they spent the afternoon riding and drinking, riding along roads and passing houses that triggered memories for each of them, things they thought they had forgotten. When they got hungry they bought chicken in a drive-through. Russell bought more beer and they rode around until it finally got dark and then they drove on out to the lake.
He had not set out for redemption. Not once thought about it in the years and months and weeks and days that led up to the moment he would be free. But he seemed to have stumbled upon its possibility in the thin cheeks of the woman and the sunburned scalp of the child and he kept saying and kept thinking that he had paid and paid some more and he was free and clear but there was something uncomfortable in his gut now that made that sentiment feel less and less like a conclusion. As they rode he set his mind on what he knew. His mother was gone and Sarah was gone. His dad had a different life and the town had taken on a different life. He was sitting next to someone he had no business sitting next to but here they were. He only thought about the things that he knew. The concrete. What he could put his hands on. And the things that he could put his hands on needed someone to put out those hands. To hold out those hands and pull. He thought again about the preacher and how the conversation had only enhanced his confusion about the here and now and the later on but as they drove on and the day became the night he began to understand that his concern lay with right now. His concern was with the woman and the child and what they had gotten themselves into and his role in it all and what the hell else am I waiting on and it was then that any doubts he harbored about helping her were carried away with the evening wind coming in the rolled-down windows.
Do what you want to do and don’t look back, he told himself.
Like everybody else.
37