= A Night At The Western
  By Ray Nayler

It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps, the ancient bubble-head kind, between the office and the coffee-shop. The gas gauge on the Bronco had dipped below the red line, and was approaching the little yellow E on the dashboard.

We'd been driving the back roads through the valley to L.A. I had suggested taking the back roads as an interesting alternative to 101 or 5. I'd also packed the wrong map, and driven this straight country road, passing the numbered gravel tracks on either side (too lonely for names) until they had approached the forties.

There they had ended abruptly, leaving only the empty straight blacktop and the frostbit fields on either side.

I yanked the Bronco across the gravel and brought it to a stop in front of the office. A flickering neon sign shaped like a cactus announced the place as the WESTERN MOTEL. Lights were on in the office and the coffee shop. A bug light near the door buzzed blue, victimless. It was January, and there was an unseasonal freeze, a newsworthy one that plunged temperatures to near zero and turned the promise of California to a chill lie. We'd stopped talking, Nick and I, an hour ago. We both got out, our heavy barn coats barely enough to fend off the chill. The air slipped into my lungs and tried to freeze me from the inside.

"I guess we can just stay here tonight." Nick said. "I don't think we should try and drive all the way back. We can leave early, make L.A. in the morning. Couldn't be more than four or five hours away."

I nodded. I wasn't liking him much. He'd bitched me out all day in explosive intervals as we passed increasingly empty white and brown spaces in the valley. He never offered to take the wheel. I would just as soon have driven all night--the hotel was a dump, and I fully expected to see a cockroach crawling in languid circles in the sink when we entered our room. I glanced at my watch. It was 12:45.

"We can get a map here," shot Nick.

"Fuck off."

The office was a shabby little room, with handwritten notes on the walls about smoking (none in the rooms) and checkout times, and dusty posters of desert island vistas and palm trees on beaches-neither of which were anywhere near this place. There was no one behind the counter, but we could hear the TV playing in the back room. We rang the bell.

I remember the feeling that hit me when she walked out. Her face was like a painting I had seen once and stared at wondering. Nick started in on her instantly--I recognized that look; his face went a little white, and his smile came out, wolfish, charming.

"Hi."

She smiled at us. She was short, with black hair, pale skin, her face a little round. She had glasses on with thick frames that made her look young, poor, and smart all at the same time. She was pretty, but not in a California way. She was wearing a blue knee-length dress and a black faux-fur coat.

"Hi," Nick drawled. "We need a room and some gas." He leaned over the counter and nudged me in the shin (my signal). I walked out of the little office and over to the Coke machine, which stood near the IN door to the coffee shop. The freeze was showing no sign of letting up--the night was at least as cold as the night before, if not colder. My breath clouded in the air. Very far off I could hear the hollow sound of a train whistle in the frozen air. The stars were invisible behind a layer of low-lying clouds, and the moon, now clear, now obscured, was a boring ovoid 3/4 full disc in the sky. I pushed a couple quarters in the slot and leaned against the wall sipping my Coke and watching Nick in the office. I could see him still leaning across the counter, and the girl laughing up at him. Now he was taking her hand, and talking about something on her finger. A ring, I supposed. That was a good trick. I hadn't seen him do it before--maybe it was a new one. Inside the coffee shop, there was a jukebox playing at low volume, and the tinny sound of "Mammy!" filtered under the door. Interwoven with the music was another sound which I finally identified as laughter--a woman, probably heavy. A young man's voice answered her. And then another voice could be picked out, a childlike one talking very slowly and deliberately. The woman kept laughing, and her voice, high but with the full sound of weight behind it, gave me chills.

I decided I was going to get the key from Nick before I lost my room rights--I was too tired to put up with his knocking around in the middle of the night tonight.

Nick was walking out of the office toward me. He had a big shit-eating grin on his face, and he was holding up two sets of keys.

"Separate rooms," he said. 'You're in number nine. I'm in number ten. Queen sized beds. Color television. Free HBO."

"You paying?"

"Sure ... for mine."

"And half of mine." I was fishing through my pockets for a cigarette, glaring up at him.

'Fuck that."

"Pay for half of mine. I need to explain it to you? To spell it out? What?" He stood there with the keys in his hand, weighing his options. I had the cigarette in my mouth and was trying for a lighter now.

"Fine. Whatever," he said finally. "I'll have enough to pay you back after L.A."

He tossed me my keys and walked with a slow swagger back to the office. I gave him enough money for my whole room, since he was short. I knew I'd never see the half he owed me. But I'd won anyway. It was the principal of the thing that mattered. Not that he wouldn't have enough after L.A.; he'd have plenty. Plenty for the rest of his life.

I went over and took a look into the coffee shop through the smudged plate glass. They didn't look like they expected much business. There was a man in a chef's hat dancing with a heavy woman. The man looked twenty or so. His black hair came out in greasy curls from under the short order cook hat, and his eyes didn't line up right on anything, like he was looking at two things at once. He had a big white grin on his face, and he could move. He had his greasy hands on the woman's hips and they were dancing something between a twist and a lambada--and he almost made it work. But the woman ... she just stood there while he moved all over and laughed with her small lipless mouth hanging open. She had a very large pink uniform on, and I could see that her collar was sweat-yellowed even from through the window. She looked like a luckless forty or so, and her knees were being pulled down toward her calves by gravity. But maybe she'd been pretty once--when she was the man's age.

A kid sat in one of the booths, watching them. He was seventeenish, and his head was much too big for his body, so that it lolled always from one side to the other. His eyes were occluded behind glasses that told me he was near blind, but he watched them anyway, with his head lolling back and forth, and a thin line of drool hanging pendulously from his lower lip.

The man growled something at the woman, and sank his fingers into her expansive buttocks, which made her stop laughing long enough to slap at him playfully and say "Oh, sto-op!" This got the kid's attention and he started laughing too, real deep and slow like a steam train chugging up a hill. It was the laugh of a lobotomy case, and as he laughed he nodded his head up and down in time, and his mouth broke into an open-mouthed grin like a jack-o-lantern.

For some reason, the kid's laugh set the man off, and he stopped dancing. "Shaddap!" he yelled. His eyes flashed. "Shaddap, retard!" He turned to the woman. "Emma, Shut up your retard son."

She smiled over at the table. "Go put some more songs on, David." Her eyes were sad. The man watched the boy get up. You could see in his eyes he hated the kid. The woman was ashamed, but she said, sharp and low to the man "Don't you tell him to shut up. He's a good boy."

They stood there and looked at each other for a while like a couple of wrestlers across a mat. I'd had enough of their show. I went to leaning against the wall again, smoking real slow. I disliked the cook very much. I have a kid brother who spends his time in a class with other kids like him. Some of them are in wheelchairs, or have braces on their legs. My kid brother just can't learn. Kids at school push him around. Once they got him to take a bath in the big sink in the locker room, and brought in the girls and stood around and laughed. Then when he got out crying and swung at one of them, they blacked his eye and busted his lip. The cook reminded me of those kids. I was in Los Angeles when it happened. He couldn't sleep and we played checkers over the phone. I taught him to do it--you each have a board and you work out a number-letter system like chess. My brother is good at games. He won.

I sat there brooding. Pretty soon (before I'd finished my cigarette), Nick came back out with the girl from the counter with him. The lights in the office were out. He introduced us. Her name was Laura. Then he told me they had no gas at the hotel. The pumps were as old as Burns, and didn't work. His plan was to drive down the road thirty miles or so (with Laura) to the nearest all-nite station, gas up, get a map, and grab us some road food. I looked at her hand. The ring was a gold one, with a half-karat diamond. But there was no wedding band to go with it. They got in the Bronco and pulled out of the parking lot, the car tires crunching on the gravel. Jolson was no longer playing on the juke in the coffee shop; now it was a Buddy Holly & the Crickets tune: "Maybe Baby"--one I liked. I could hear the woman laugh. I guess they were dancing again. I went over to the office and looked at the lock. It was an easy one. I walked up the creaky aisle to my room.

The room was nothing special, just a motel room like motel rooms everywhere. Its only distinguishing feature was a set of particularly ugly bed sheets. Orange with light blue roses. Apparently, they had been designed by a lunatic who saw the entire world as a piece of color negative. I lay down on them and closed my eyes. I thought about L.A., and the old woman--the whole drive down, I had been thinking of her. She'd known what she was getting into with Nick, and I think he'd made her very happy, in some sick way. Maybe in a way he deserved to collect all her money. She didn't have to leave it to him. There was no gun to her head, just the threat, unspoken, of never seeing her "friend" again. She took care of him all along, and now being dead she'd taken care of him for the rest of his life. He'd earned it. It seemed fair. But thinking about it made me sick anyway. I used to go down sometimes with Nick and read to her, under a big old oak in the backyard. She would sit, rapt, listening to me. She said I had a sweet voice, and she looked forward to seeing me. When she died she left me all her books. It seemed fair. She should have left Nick all her lingerie, all her nightgowns. Instead she left him money.

There was a knock at the door. I looked through the spyhole and then opened it. The man standing there was thick-boned and barrel chested. He had graying hair in a buzz cut, and was wearing coveralls that said Chip over the right front pocket. His eyes were bright on me, like he knew all my secrets.

"Good evenin'. Hope I didn't wake you."

"No."

"I saw the light on. Thought I would bring you some towels." He was looking past me now, into the room. He looked as if he wanted to come in, so I stood aside and let him by. He walked to the bathroom. "We like to provide all you customers with lots of towels. Nothing like lots of towels." He seemed a little slow.

"Sure. Nothing like it. I like to dry myself off five, six times at least." He came out of the bathroom, his eyes sweeping the room. "No luggage?"

"In the car."

"Where's that?"

"My friend has it."

"Really," he stared at me for a second. I could see him thinking. Then he grinned. His teeth were tobacco stained and big. They were all square, and nearly all the same shape, like teeth you might draw when you're a little kid. "You sure he's comin' back?"

I laughed. "Pretty sure."

He laughed too. Or tried to. Then he walked past me out the door. Standing in the doorway, he turned. "If you need me, I'll be out at the garage. It's down the road a bit."

"You got gas there?"

"Nope. Nearest gas place is twenty miles or so. My garage is for repairs only. It's a quarter mile down the road."

"Working late?"

He chuckled. "Always. When your friend gets back, you tell him what I told you." He winked at me. "You tell him where I'm at." He held out a big stubbed hand and I shook it. His grip was like iron, but he didn't squeeze. He just gave me the warning. I got it.

* * *

I had it all timed. I lay back on the bed, counting out the minutes. Nick and Laura had been gone about twenty minutes. Chip would be well on his way back to his garage. The way Nick drove, he would be back from the gas station in twenty--or in an hour if he and Laura did something else. Ten or fifteen minutes would be all I needed. I looked out the window. The parking lot was silent, except for the tiny tinny sound of music from the coffee shop. I stepped out and walked slowly down the aisle toward the office. My heart was beating now, and I could hear the sounds of the bug light buzzing dully in the night.

The lock was pathetic. It took me twenty seconds or so, and I was inside. I closed the door softly behind me. The office was well enough lit that I could see the counter, and the black rectangle of the door to the back room. Back there was a small window. I unlocked it. The cash register was a big red ancient one. I pushed the button and it opened with a soft bing. I counted the cash quickly. My hands were steady, as always, but my heart beat fast. It came to $204.56. I counted out half. I never take it all. Only half. Half never put anyone out of business. I closed the register. I was folding the money over and slipping it into my pocket when I heard the footsteps coming up the walk. I ducked into the back room, positioning myself in the dark behind the door. The office door opened and footsteps sounded on the floor. The light didn't come on. I was breathing in small, silent breaths. I smelled cooking grease. There was the sound of the office phone being picked up and dialed, and Frankie's voice, not whispering, but quiet enough in the still room.

"Chip. It come in yet?"

"Yeah? You start on it?"

"Oh, dunno. She ain't here. Office is closed up."

"Yah, I got em. Found one like it parked down at the Denny's on 101."

"Yeah, blue. Sort of a dark blue. Yah."

"If I see her. But I'm leaving now. Be down in a mo."

"Sure."

"Well ... I told the Mex to come for it in the morning. The Walmart lot."

"Seven. You think we can swing it by then?"

"Good."

He hung up the phone. I could hear him rustling around. Sweat dripped down my back. The cash register opened. A bill crumpled lightly. Then his feet went off toward the door. He shut it behind him. I waited, listening to his steps on wood, then on gravel going away. A car started up. It idled a while, and then pulled away with its fan belt squeaking like a bird in agony. The sound of it died off, going down the road in the direction of the garage, and was replaced by the sound again of the bug light and my own breathing. I slipped out the back window, closing it behind me until it latched. Out in back of the motel, a brown empty field stretched out as far as I could see, spotted and streaked with dull frost. With my eyes adjusted to the dark I could see the garage, a square blacker shape in the night, nestled in a stand of trees. A car--Frankie's, I assumed--pulled in with just its parking lights on. It was about a quarter mile away. I walked around the back of the Motel and then back up the front from the far side to my room. Nick and Laura pulled in in the Bronco just as I was putting my key in the door. I looked at my watch. It was 1:55. They hadn't been gone for more than forty-five minutes.

Nick hopped out of the car and smiled at me. "We're not more than forty miles from 5. Laura says we practically just turn around and we're there."

Laura was getting out of the passenger side. "It's just up a ways."

I was fishing for a cigarette now. My hands were shaking. My hands shake when I think too much.

"Can I talk to you alone a minute, Nick."

"Sure." He handed Laura the keys and she went inside. It looked like he had her. I walked over to the Bronco and lit my cigarette, and lit him one. I've found that people listen to you better if you give them a cigarette. I told him about Chip. Then I told him about my excursion to the office, and the telephone call. He was taking it all in stride.

"They're car thieves. Laura told me." Nick grinned his best grin. "This guy Chip and Frankie have a thing going. What they do is they steal a car and bring it to the garage. Then they steal a license plate off another car, right? Just the front one, so no one will notice it's gone. Then they repaint the car they've got, the same color as the one they got the license plate off of, and they drive it down near the border. real smart, see? The plate, if a cop checks it, isn't from a stolen car. They leave it in a parking lot near the border, and another guy drives it across and strips it down there. They make around a thousand a car, at very little risk to them. Laura told me all about it. She didn't know Chip was into this kind of crap before they got engaged, though. She wants out."

"He's twice her age."

"Yeah, and he hits her too. Real jealous guy. Thinks she sleeps around and whatever. She wants to break it off, see, but he won't let her and besides, she's got nowhere else to go."

"So..."

'I'm getting to it. The ring she's got's nice, but there's more. Check this out. She knows where he keeps his stash. He's been saving it up. Keeps it out at the garage in a wall socket. You unscrew it, and there's a bunch of envelopes down behind the wiring. Laura says ten or fifteen, all in a ziplock bag. Maybe a thousand in each. She wants us to help her take it, and split. He can't report it, can't do anything." His eyes were bright, and he was talking a mile a minute. "We can do it tonight, no sweat. He'll leave at around three or so. Frankie'll follow him in his car. They'll be gone until at least noon. A huge fuckin' window."

"He was looking for her..."

"Forget that. He don't care where she is. They had a fight. She told him to lay off her, stay away from the hotel and her or she'd leave him. And anyway, he won't suspect anything. The only way she knows about the money is she watched him putting it in once, through a window. She figures sooner or later he'd tell her. But they don't talk much, see. We can snag the money, and be well on our way before dawn."

"So you and her are ... what. Getting engaged."

"I'll drop her somewhere after L.A. That isn't important. She'll be easy enough to get rid of. Hell, maybe we'll get married." He grinned his wolf grin at me. I leaned against the truck and smoked. My hands were shaking bad. I had a bad feeling. You have to understand, I'm not much for taking money from anything but a cash drawer, and even then just half. This thing was bigger than me.

"Why not just split now? You've got enough after L.A."

"You don't." He looked at me. "You go in on this, I give you one third of the take. Enough for you to live on for a while. You can rent a cabin and read all the books you're inheriting."

I laughed. It was funny, thinking of all the books in boxes waiting for me. My reward for some afternoons under an oak with an old woman.

"You could get your brother some help."

"What?" But I knew what he said.

"You could get your brother some help."

I hated him then. I believe that was the end of our friendship. That moment, looking at each other through a field of blue smoke, his eyes hungry and bright on mine, my shaking hands on my cigarette held out like a gun toward him, his eyebrow arched because he knew he had me.

'You in or out?"

I looked at him a long time before I said it. His eyes stayed the same. He owned me.

"I'm in."

He went in with Laura and I went to my room and brooded. I could hear them knocking around in there like monkeys on a tire swing. I wondered if she took her glasses off when she did it. I couldn't watch TV, couldn't read, couldn't think. I took a long hot shower, leaning my head against the wall and letting the water pour down around and run off my face. I punched the tile wall--not real punches, but enough to hurt a little. I was trapped. I knew it. Nick was always trapping me, leading me along behind him, dog-like. This was the last time. I told myself that, over and over until I believed it. I would take my cut in L.A. and leave him. I was finished. I thought about Laura, and her shock when she would walk out of a hotel room in a few weeks and see that he'd left with her money, the ring on her finger, and her pride. Nick would take it all--he'd let me have my share, maybe. But she would wake up to an empty bed and a tan-line on her finger where that ring used to be. I toweled off and shaved in the steaming room. My face in the mirror looked old. I always looked old to myself in motel-room mirrors, and my eyes reflected right back at me, dull and flat and lifeless. Mirrors are not my friends. I dressed in a brown hooded pull-over and dark blue jeans. I pulled my hiking boots on, thinking about the soft earth at the garage.

There was a knock at the door.

I checked through the spyhole. It was Nick and Laura. I opened up.

They came in and shut the door behind them. "That Chip guy slashed our tires," Nick said. "Both of the driver's side tires. He must've come up here while we were inside and done it."

"He gets this way. He probably wants to make sure you guys are still around so he can get at Nick tomorrow." She chewed at her lip. "He'n Frankie'll come back and wipe the floor with you two."

I went outside. the Bronco was leaning to the left. It was a good butchering job: the cuts were in the sidewall, long and jagged, unpatchable. He was furious when he did it: there were five or six cuts in each tire, each of them half a foot long or more. I had a spare on the back, but this made our job more complicated. I would need to find a matching tire somewhere.

"Maybe we should call this off, get a tow truck down here early, and split." Nick laughed. "No way. Laura says there's tires at the garage. We can put a new one on one of the rims there, no problem."

"It'll take too long..."

Laura's eyes were wide. She pulled at Nick's sleeve. "You see? We have to get out of here! He's crazy. He knows about us. He'll just beat you up, but ... he'll kill me."

Nick put an arm around her. "I know. Don't worry. We're leaving tonight. Just as soon as we get your money."

I liked that--how he called it her money. It was a nice touch. He really was a sick asshole. "If there's a a matching tire, I can do it," I said. "But it makes it more dangerous. If they forget something, turn around..."

Laura shook her head "They won't. They're too nervous..."

"Yeah." Nick agreed.

'If there's no matching tire..."

"Oh," shot Laura. "There will be. He does tire changes for trucks all the time. He's got just racks of them." Her cheeks were flushed. Her lipstick was dark and recently applied, her hair wet at the roots. she was holding Nick's arm. "I'm sure we can do it. We have to."

She was right. In fact, the tire slashing made leaving here more urgent. The threat of violence in the morning loomed over me. I didn't intend to get beat to a pulp for my asshole friend and his sucker of a girl. But something felt off about the whole thing. there was a feeling I had then--it was like claustrophobia. It felt like the times I used to crawl into a two-foot pipe in the ground when I was a kid. The pipe led to a large drainage tunnel underground, but you had to crawl on your stomach thirty or forty feet to get there, and you couldn't turn around--no matter what. We'd go in in groups, and I would usually go first--I was the tough one, you see. Halfway through, I always wanted to go back. But there were three or four kids behind me, and I had to crawl on, with the flashlight beam lighting the way unsteadily, and the sound of trickling water, and the pipe tight around my shoulders. I had nightmares about alligators and rats attacking me down there. But the other kids relied on me. I was magic--they said I was never afraid.

"Fine. But what about Frankie's woman and that kid?"

Laura looked at me hard. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, where are they going to be?"

Laura dismissed them with a wave of her hand. "They'll be in the cafe. The kid cooks at night. Besides, he's retarded. And Emma doesn't know anything about what goes on here. Frankie doesn't tell her shit." Her eyes looked hard into mine. "You chicken?"

"No, just covering my ass. Anyway, fuck you two. I'll see you at three-thirty. You come get me after their car goes by. A while after. Until then, fuck off." I walked back to my room and shut the door between us. I waited until I could hear them in their room again. then I walked over and opened the door quietly. I walked down the aisle. The office was dark still. Tinny music came from under the door. The air was full of invisible frost, and every breath was full of ice. The clouds had come in, obscuring the sky completely now, thick and dark. I peeked through the window of the coffee-shop. The woman, Emma, was siting up at the counter going over some papers. The kid was sweeping and mumbling to himself, shaking his head from side to side. Emma looked up at him. The kid stopped mumbling and smiled at her, real sly-like. She shook her head and went back to her papers. He went back to sweeping and mumbling. I walked back around to the rear of the motel. Now the fields were choked with frost. It looked like it had snowed lightly. I could see the garage. There was a dim light on. I walked through the field, my boots crunching the frost. My barn coat and sweatshirt did little against the cold. The walk took a little over ten minutes.

The garage was just a low building in some trees, with a gravel driveway. It was back off the road fifty feet or so. Frankie's rust-heap sat on its balding tires in the drive. I could hear them talking inside. The window on my side had been painted over, but there was a small scratched-away part in the lower right pane. I looked in.

Frankie was sitting on one of the work benches next to a black box--a homemade police scanner. He was listening to it crackle and pop, and fiddling with the antennae. Chip was taking masking tape and paper off the car, which had a nice fresh coat of paint on it now--dark blue, with a factory-looking clear coat on top. He looked over at Frankie. "Getting anything on that?"

Frankie grinned. "Some guy beating his wife in town. He holed up in his house with a gun when the cops showed up. They got him surrounded now. Waitin' to go in and shoot the dumb son-of-a-bitch. Wife's going to the hospital."

Chip nodded. "Keep 'em busy."

"Yep."

The lights in the garage were fluorescent, and they shone greenly down on the two of them. Frankie looked at Chip. "Your Laura mad at you again?" Chip shrugged. "She thinks she should do whatever she wants. She runs off any chance she gets, fools around with the customers, closes the damn office in the middle of the night, tells me to go fuck myself."

Chip got in the car and started it up.

"She's at that age," Frankie said. "She wants to get outta here."

"I dunno. Wish I had a son instead. Let's go." He started the car up.

Frankie shut off the lights and opened the door.

A thick feeling of dread came over me then, so that I could hardly breathe. Thoughts crashed around in my head. I stood rigid against the wall behind the garage, listening to Frankie's car start up and pull away, followed by the stolen car. I counted out five minutes after they had left, and looked at my watch. It was 3:15. My hands were shaking so much I had to hold my wrist steady to read it.

It took me less than a minute to pry open the window. The wall socket was easy.

I ran back through the fields, my boots crunching the frost that lay like glittering glass on the furrows. Back at the motel I looked in the coffee-shop window. The woman, Emma, still sat at the counter going over some papers. The boy was nowhere to be seen--back in the kitchen, I guessed. I walked silently up the aisle and slipped into my room. I could still hear them next door going at it. I put all the money in the inside pocket of my barn coat. Then I sat on the bed and waited.

They came for me at around 3:40. Nick grinned in at me. "Let's do it!" Laura was standing behind him, not looking at me, some sort of smile on her face. I got in the Bronco and drove it slowly down the road, the wheels almost crunching the pavement through the thin rubber. They walked. I had to drive incredibly slowly to keep from mashing the rims. I took the money out and hid it under the front seat. I thought about Laura. She was smart enough to put one over on Nick--an old one, even: please help me, my jealous boyfriend is so meeeeeaan. It almost made me like her-except I was terrified of her.

We got into the garage easy--she had a key. I found a couple of matching tires off the rack and went to work on the rims while they stood outside keeping an eye out for trouble, and I could hear them talking low out there but not what they were saying. The air was cold in the garage, like a huge icebox--it seemed even colder than the outside, and my chapped hands had trouble with everything--jacking up the car, getting the slashed tires off their rims and putting the new tires on the rims and on the car. But eventually I got them on, and tightened up the lugs and found a machine-pump to fill them with. With the pump on, I couldn't hear Nick come up from behind me. He leaned over and said, practically in my ear. "Done?"

I didn't jump, just nodded, but my heart beat crazily in its cage. "Almost. Just need to fill them."

"Time to do it then."

"Do what?"

I turned. The blow caught me on the side of the head and sent me into the racks of tools against the wall. The world exploded in brilliant reds and greens, and I watched from a mile away as the ceiling moved in circles and my brain seemed to thud outside of my head onto the floor somewhere. I thought it wouldn't be safe there, and I should pick it up--but I couldn't move, I just spun in place like a top. There was a window of light in blue starry haze. I could hear them talking. Nick came into the window and floated over me. He said something. And then he kicked my brain where I guessed it was on the floor and I went out.

I was lying on the floor near the door of the garage when I woke up. From where I lay, I could see under the car and past it to the rest of the garage. Nick and Laura were crouched down by the wall socket, which looked about a thousand miles away. One of my eyes seemed gone, but I moved my hand up and touched it, and it was there-just stuck shut with drying blood. There was a roaring in my ears, like a wave crashing and crashing, never stopping. Slowly I identified the different parts of my body--I felt like I was forty feet tall, two inches wide, and made completely from glass. But slowly I began to move, and I managed to get onto my knees without vomiting. Blood was running down the side of my face, and I felt above my eye where I had been cut. The cut was a furrow about four inches long. I tried not to cough. Nick and Laura were not a thousand miles away any more--they were about ten feet in front of me, partially hidden from view by the front left corner of the car. The car's tires were filled now. It was ready to go.

Nick slapped Laura, and she fell back. "Where's the fucking MONEY?? Where?"

Laura scrambled to her feet. "It was there. I swear it was. I checked it just today. It was THERE!" She was frantic and backing away from him. I pulled a wrench from the wall--a good heavy torque wrench, the kind with the steel handle and the bar that moves from side to side to indicate pound/feet of pressure instead of a meter. I leaned heavy against the driver's side door of the car and watched my blood drip on the pavement. My chest felt smashed in, and I imagined my ribs were collapsed. They had not noticed me. Laura smiled sweetly at Nick. "Please. It was there. I wouldn't lie to you. It was there today."

I knew what she would say before she said it. My hands were tight around the wrench. But the wrench seemed too heavy for me to swing. My heart was crashing in my brittle glass body.

"It must have been your friend..."

Nick grinned. "You stupid bitch. He would never. It was you. I'll fucking kill you." He reached out for her, caught her as she tried to turn and run, and threw her to the ground by the neckline of her dress. He raised his foot over her head. "Stupid fucking whore." And then there was the sound of shattering glass and a roar and his face exploded and he fell jerking on the ground, flopping like a fish, his face gone, blood in arcs like fountains coming from the red wash of nothing where his face had been. Laura was on the ground on her stomach looking at him, screaming. I looked over at the painted-over window. A smoking shotgun barrel slid out of a broken pane like a metal snake. Laura was backing up crabwise, still screaming. I was making a low grunting moaning sound, and Nick's foot twitched and jumped, like it was trying to run away, leave the dead rest of him behind.

I grabbed Laura with a bloody hand and pushed her into the passenger seat of the Bronco, through the driver's side door. Then I started it up and backed out through the garage door, splintering the wood, ramming my foot down on the pedal. The tires skidded on the loose gravel and we spun sideways off the driveway down into a gully full of half-frozen mud and tree litter, the tires spinning uselessly there; I had not locked the front hubs, of course, not planning to do any off-road driving, and for one stupid second I sat there laughing at the irony, the big knobby tires spinning and spinning. Then the driver's side window spiderwebbed and I threw myself down, feeling the death-wind where the shot had gone by.

She looked at me from the floor. "I never wanted to hurt you. It was Nick. He said... said you would try and cheat us and..."

I just looked at her and she stopped.

The silence that followed seemed hours long. The engine idled quietly. Our breathing mingled rhythms, and tiny bits of glass settled, tinkling. Very far off, a train was passing in the night, its whistle long and lonely as we lay there just breathing, waiting. Our eyes met in the shadows, and she mouthed "What now?"

"Lauuraaa?" The voice was heavy, thick and slow, worried and uncomprehending. "Lauuuraaaa!"

I knew it was the retarded kid. I thought of that pumpkin head out in the dark, lolling from side to side over the smoking shotgun. "Lauuuraaa. I cut them tires like you said. But he... why he was hitting you?

Whaaaaaaaiiiii?" The last word built to an anguished yowling scream. "Why you wanna leave meeeeeeeee?"

Laura's face was white as she opened the car door slowly and stepped to the ground. "David?"

I lay on my belly in my blood and locked up-my mind raced as shaky as my hands, my face pressed against the floor of the Bronco, all of it coming together for me in bursts--the desperate girl, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, the lies, the gullible boy willing to do anything for her. Maybe her mother's ring, maybe one stolen from a motel room. The rage building in the boy as she twists and twists him, the promise of freedom in a wall socket hidden down among the wires. Long nights in the office waiting for dawn and nothing. They talked out in the night, her voice reassuring soft and his sobs and sniffings much like a four year-old child's.

"It's okay."

"Killed him. They'll take me and put me in the place now. In the place."

""No. No they won't."

"He hit you. Why he make me do it?"

"Shhhh. Daddy won't tell. He can't. He can't have the police here, he won't make you go to the place."

"You stay here."

"No. I have to go."

"You stay!"

I peeked out through the windshield. She stood in front of him, her hand on his shoulder. The gun was at his side, but it started up. "You stay!" I slid over to the other side of the car and out the door, stepping quietly down to the ground.

'You stay!"

Now around the corner of the car I could see him raising the gun slowly and her backing away. I reached into the car and got out the torque wrench, moving quietly, every breath a stab in the side where Nick had kicked me.

"Staaaaaay." He was advancing on her slowly now, the gun raised as they walked toward the car. "Staaaaaaaayyyyyy!" His huge head lolled from side to side.

And then I ran out, my head down, tackling his midsection. The breath came out of him in a whuff and we smashed to the ground, the gun rolling away. I scrambled backwards off him. He lay in the dirt whuffling for air.

"Owwwwwwwwwww." His head thrashed slowly from side to side. "Owwwwwwwwwwwww." He tried to right himself. Lunging forward, I hit him above the temple with the wrench and he was quiet then, his breathing slow and labored. I got slowly up. Laura stood behind me, her face white and silent, beautiful now when it had only been pretty before, standing still as Lot's wife. I had to put her hands on David so we could drag him into the garage and lay him near Nick and Nick's spreading pool of blood. I took Nick's wallet. Then I took the gun up and lay it near the boy.

We got the Bronco out of the ditch with her at the wheel and me pushing, and this action seemed to make her forget what was in the garage and she began  to talk, asking me where we would go and then crying a little as we drove away and I put an arm around her, crying also and shaking, not knowing what else to do. I gave her half the money and then I told her I had to pick up a friend's books and then we could go anywhere she wanted. She took the engagement ring off like it burned her and threw it out the window.


RAY NAYLER was born in Quebec and raised in California. He has had short stories published in many magazines, from The Berkeley Fiction Review to The Edge. Ray Nayler resides in Toronto, Canada and Santa Cruz, California. He has stories upcoming in Ellery Queen's Mystery magazine, Hardboiled, Plots With Guns, as well as Crimewave in the UK. He recently completed a suspense novel set in Toronto. In addition to writing, he paints and plays the double bass.  Ray may be contacted at like_the_rabbit@hotmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2000 Ray Nayler