His father took two strides forward, his father the giant with his hands like catcher’s mitts, and he was livid. “That’s rum on your breath. You’re drunk. And Jesus knows what else.”
He just shrugged, but it was afternoon and afternoons were never good and here went the wheel, spinning, spinning.
“Now you get your ass in there and pack up your crap”—stinking breath, hostile breath—“and you can come to our house tonight, both of you, or you can go to her house, I don’t really care—”
“Yeah,” he was saying in that other voice, the one that was like vinegar up your nose, “and you can go fuck yourself too. Big hero. Why don’t you just kill me too—wouldn’t that be easier? Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t it?”
Then his father shoved him, hard, didn’t hit him but shoved him, and he was a rock because he hardly felt it and didn’t even take a step back but when his own arms jerked out and he was doing the shoving they were like two pistons pulled right up out of the engine block and his father reeled, his father stepped back, but then his father came at him again and it was ugly, he was ugly, as ugly as Potts, and maybe his mother got into it too, trying to separate them, her voice gone up into the high register till it was like an air-raid siren, and that really was all she wrote, finally and absolutely, because his father was in the dirt now and his mother too and he was gone, rifle, backpack, knife in its sheath, up over the wall and into the high weeds and gone, pure gone.
20.
LATE, BLACK DARK, THE frogs doing their thing along the creek and the crickets in the high grass, no other sound but the whisper of his boots. He circled the place twice to make sure there was nobody around and it wasn’t till the second recon that he noticed her car there because he wasn’t expecting it and the shadows were like loam and the loam was piled up till it was buried, absolutely. What did he feel about that? He felt a quickening, not the wheel now, though it was humming along, all right, but in his blood, in his cock. Her car. Her car was there though it should have been gone by now and her with it. He was in cover, crouching, and if he itched, he was going to take care of that because he was going to go into that house whether his father liked it or not—or Art Tolleson the alien or whoever—and he was going to get the calamine lotion he’d come for earlier and, more importantly, he was going to go down behind the couch Art Tolleson was inheriting as part and parcel of the deal and extract the sweet pickle relish jar with the six hundred dollars in it and then they’d see just how independent he was. He lifted the night-vision goggles to his face and took a good long look at the car and there she was, her head lolling back and no doubt the Rasta dog there too on the floor someplace or the seat beside her and what was she thinking, what was she doing? It made his skin prickle to think of the answer, made his cock hard: she was waiting for him.
The Rasta dog let out with a whole boiling cauldron of yips, snarls, barks and high-throated yowls the minute he touched his hand to the car door and here was her face, dumb with sleep and pale as the underside of her feet, fixed in the gap where the scrolling-down window slipped into the doorframe. She called him by name, his old name, the one he’d rejected, but he didn’t care, not now, and he didn’t bother to correct her. Then she asked if he’d had anything to eat, but he didn’t answer. He said, “I want to get in the house. He didn’t change the locks again, did he?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice sticky, like taffy. “I don’t think so.”
“Because I’ll smash every fucking window in the place . . .”
Stickier still: “What do you need, baby?”
“Calamine.”
“I’ve got it here with me in the car. Come on, get in. We’ll go up to my place—just for tonight. Or longer. However long you want. It’s okay. It is.”
He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”
It took her about six weeks, fumbling around with her purse and her suitcase and all the bags of groceries and crap, the dog whining and stinking and breathing out his meat-eating breath and her turning on the dome light, which was so wrong and so untactical and so just plain idiotic he couldn’t have even begun to explain it to her, but there it was, the plastic bottle cool and round in the palm of his hand and their skin touching like two flames as she handed it over.