Take Me There (7 page)

Besides a couple hours’ sleep in Kingman and our lunch stop in Flagstaff, I’ve been driving twelve straight hours.

“We ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Wade says, looking at the trail of cars standing still on I-40. “We should stop and eat.”

“It’s only five thirty.”

“Ain’t nothin’ but little cow towns between here and Amarillo.” He points at the map.

I merge into the right lane and creep at a snail’s pace toward the exit for Rio Grande Boulevard, hoping this will make him happy so he’ll stop sulking.

“Order a burrito for me and a hamburger for Baby Face while I take her out to stretch her legs,” I say as I park in front of a Mexican restaurant called Little Anita’s. At least I have a wallet full of money. I cashed my paycheck at the end of the month and still have most of the cash on me.

I take Baby Face out of the car, and she pees by some bushes in the parking lot. I put her back in the Mustang and go to a
pay phone outside, pulling my map of Texas out of my back pocket. My hand shakes as I punch in the numbers under the name, Levida Dawson, written on the map, not sure what I will say when and if she answers. Don’t even know if the number is still good.

“Hello,” says a gravelly voice on the other end of the line.

“Hello.”

“Who is this?” the voice demands. I’m pretty sure it’s my grandmother, but she sounds like a man. A very angry one.

“I’m looking for Levida Dawson.”

“What do you want?” The voice becomes shrill, and I’m sure it’s a woman now.

What do I say, that I’m her long-lost grandson? “I’m trying to find D.J. Dawson.”

“Are you a reporter? I told you people a hundred times, I got nothin’ to say. Why can’t you leave me alone?” She slams the receiver down so hard, the sound cracks through my ear all the way to my brain.

In the restaurant I find Wade sitting at a table with two plates covered in red chile sauce next to a hamburger in a Styrofoam box. “Did you talk to your grandma?” he asks.

“Yeah. She was so excited to hear we’re coming, she was nearly speechless.” I slip into the booth and take a bite out of a chile-smothered burrito that instantly sets my mouth on fire. I drain my glass of water and then grab the honey container and start squirting the stuff into my mouth. “Damn, what do they put in this stuff—battery acid?”

Wade smiles in amusement as I start drinking his water. “It’s red chile. I asked for the hot stuff.”

“Great.”

Once I get past the first bite, the rest isn’t so bad, though I worry what it will do to my insides later. As the food settles, an overwhelming exhaustion comes over me.

“Want to drive?” I ask Wade when we get out to the car.

“Sure,” he says in surprise, and I toss him the keys.

“Stick to the speed limit and no detours.”

“No detours.”

Traffic on I-40 has thinned out a little, but not much. Wade weaves in and out of cars like a madman, and I know there is no hope of me sleeping until we get out on the open road. A nervous energy rises up in me, the kind that comes when you really need to sleep but you’re so strung out on adrenaline you can’t even close your eyes. The need to
do
something, anything, is overwhelming. Plus, the chile is starting to work its way through my gut.

I want to tell Wade to pull over and let me drive, but we’re in the far left lane by this time and traffic has come to a halt again. That’s when I think of the leather journal, sitting on the backseat next to Baby Face. I reach back and get it, open it up, and look at the first word scrawled there in my own hand: Jess.

I wrote it above the last poem Miss Lane put in my notebook. I think about what she said about keeping things inside. Think about the day I have just endured. Not even twenty-four hours have passed since our encounter with Eight Ball, and already we’re two states away, our lives changed forever. I need to put the words on paper. I don’t know why. I’m not sure how. Don’t even know where to start. With Eight Ball, with Jess, with the road?

I think about how scared I was last night in the desert. The
most frightened I’ve ever been. I figure I’ve got nothing to lose, and so I turn to a clean page and write:

I know my words are an embarrassing jumble, but I feel better putting them on paper. Besides, what does it matter? No one will ever read them anyway.

B
Y
F
RIDAY MORNING I WAS WOUND UP LIKE A SPRING IN
the backseat of a new car. Everybody at the garage was in a crappy mood, or maybe it just seemed that way. After Jess brought her Beemer in for that tune-up, I didn’t expect to see her again. No reason our paths should ever cross. Even so, every time a car pulled up to the shop, I stopped what I was doing to see if it might be her.

“Expecting somebody?” Kip said after I’d looked outside for the fiftieth time that day.

“Your mama …” I started to say more, but then thought better of it.

After lunch I finished replacing the muffler on a Hummer, and Gomez asked Wade to move it out to the parking lot until the owner came for it. Wade hopped inside the massive SUV and proceeded to back over a Jag waiting for a brake job.

“You know what that’s gonna cost me?” Gomez screamed as Wade stared in horror at the mangled front end of the Jaguar.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“You’re supposed to be making me money, not costing me a fortune in body work!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Give me one good reason I don’t fire you right now!”

“I’m real sorry.” Wade’s face turned bright red, and his entire body started to shake.

“What am I going to do with you?”

“I dunno.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, just sit over there out of the way and try not to destroy anything else until I decide what to do.”

I followed Gomez to his office behind the front lobby. “I’ll fix the Jag on my own time,” I offered.

“It needs a whole new front end. We don’t do body work,” Gomez said, sitting behind his desk and rubbing his hands through his thick peppered hair.

“You can take it out of my paycheck. Whatever it costs. Please, just give Wade another chance.”

“Why are you doing this? You’re not the one who ran over the car. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t run him off.”

“Wade got beat up real bad in juvie. He was in a coma for three days.”

“Holy Mother.”

“He’s never been the same since. His coordination is messed up, and he gets double vision.”

“Why didn’t somebody tell me?”

“Wade doesn’t like people to know. He doesn’t remember how it happened, and it makes him nervous to talk about it.”

I pictured the way Wade had looked when I’d run back to the shower room with the guard, sprawled out on the tile in a pool of his own blood, and I prayed Gomez didn’t ask me more,
because then I would have to explain how it was me they had been after and how I had run.

The old man picked up a photograph sitting on his desk, a picture of his youngest son, who had been killed in a drive-by.

“Maybe I could try Wade at the front desk.”

“Thank you!” I said, jumping to my feet and pumping Gomez’s hand in gratitude. “You won’t regret this.”

When I walked out of the office, I was surprised to see Wade standing outside at the corner in front of the shop, smoking a cigarette. The traffic light turned green, and he started walking. I ran outside after him and caught up with him on the other side of the street.

“Hey, where you goin’?”

“Nowhere.” He kept walking without looking up.

“You can’t just leave work.”

“Why not? Gomez is gonna can me anyway.”

“No, he’s not. I just talked to him. He’s gonna put you at the front desk.”

Wade stopped suddenly, a cold and hard look in his eyes that I’d never seen there before. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing,” I lied, but Wade wasn’t buying it.

“Stay out of my business,” he screamed, and then he took off down the street.

I had to run to keep up with him. “Wade, don’t do this. You need this job.”

“No,
you
need this job,” he said. “Now that you’re trying to play Mr. Johnny-Be-Good.” He spun around to face me. “Don’t go out drinkin’, Wade. You know it’s a violation of our probation, Wade. Can’t keep any weed around the house no more, Wade. What happens if we get caught? Can’t be seen with the
gang. Gotta keep our noses clean. Well, I’ll tell you somethin’, I’m sick and tired of tryin’ to keep my nose clean. If you’re what guys turn into when they go straight, I’d rather stay crooked.”

His words hit me like a punch in the face. I knew I’d been holding my act together pretty tight, but I didn’t think it showed. “Wade, come on, don’t say shit like that.”

A Honda Civic drifted around the corner and then skidded to a stop next to us. The window slid down to reveal Two Tone sitting in the passenger seat. The driver was an associate of the BSB.

“Got the stuff?” asked Wade.

Two Tone smiled and held up a baggie filled with pot.

“Wade, don’t do this,” I said, but even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I felt the desperate need for a joint. Felt the edge that had been growing sharper inside of me. Knew a toke would smooth down my jagged borders. Took a deep breath and imagined calmness filling my lungs.

“Eight Ball’s got a party goin’ on down at the Krazy Eights Klub. Want in?” Two Tone asked.

“Wade, don’t be an idiot,” I said, coming back to myself.

“But I am an idiot,” he said, pointing to the scar on his forehead where the guys in juvie had bashed his head against the bathroom mirror and knocked him unconscious. “That’s what you told Gomez, ain’t it? Let Wade the idiot sit at the front desk and answer phones. Maybe he won’t drop ’em.” Wade turned to Two Tone. “I’m in,” he said. As he got into the backseat of the Honda Civic, Two Tone flashed me a smile that said he had won this round.

Wade rolled down the back window, looked at me, and said, “I’m not like you.”

Then he closed the window and the Civic sped away.

I WAKE UP COVERED IN SWEAT AND SHAKING FROM THE
same old dream.

A room with blue curtains and a cuckoo clock that keeps ticking louder and louder like a bomb, until a screaming bird explodes through the door and I wake up.

Why is it that a stupid clock scares the shit out of me?

I look around and try to get my bearings.

It’s dark. I’m in the passenger seat of the Mustang. Baby Face is asleep in the back. I remember we’re on the run.

Look around for Wade, but he’s nowhere to be seen.

Highway is nowhere in sight.

I wonder if Eight Ball has found us, killed Wade, and is somewhere outside, waiting for me.

My eyes adjust to the darkness of the place, and I see moonlight reflecting on water; a shadowy figure sits on the edge of a rock fence, reading a sign by the flame of a Bic lighter. I get out of the car and approach cautiously.

“Wade?”

“Pretty, ain’t it?” he says, flicking off the flame.

“Where are we?” I try to hide the rage I feel bubbling up in my throat as I wonder where in the hell he has brought us.

“Santa Rosa. The Blue Hole. Sign says Billy the Kid used to stop here to clean up before goin’ into town.”

“I said not to take any detours.”

“I needed a smoke,” he says, pulling a pack of Kools out of his shirt pocket and lighting up. “Why are you in such a hellfire hurry to get to Texas, anyway?”

“I gotta see my father.”

“He’s locked up. Ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Wade … ,” I say with a sigh, but then I don’t finish. How can I explain that after eleven years in prison my father finally
is
going somewhere, and that if I don’t hurry it will be too late?

“Give me the keys,” I demand. “I’ll drive the rest of the way.”

“Fine,” says Wade, throwing them at me, crushing his cigarette on the stone fence and stomping off to the car.

“We’ll go to the Grand Canyon on our way back home,” I promise him when I get back into the car. “We’ll stay all day.”

“We ain’t ever goin’ back home,” he tells me. “And you know it.”

BOXES

We built walls of cardboard

thinking they would keep us safe.

And they did.

Until the flames

came.

I
T WAS A HOT
F
RIDAY NIGHT IN
S
OUTHERN
C
ALIFORNIA
, and everybody I knew was getting stoned or drunk. I got into the Mustang with Baby Face, and we drove down Rosecrans from Downey to Compton to Manhattan Beach and then went south to Hermosa Avenue. As soon as I left one town, I was in another, each one a totally different world, as if an invisible box surrounded its edges, keeping everybody in their proper place.

Most of the time.

The rich stayed rich. The poor stayed poor. The troublemakers stayed in trouble.

I wondered what my father was doing. Pictured him sitting in a cell. Wondered if he ever tried to turn his life around or if he knew that once you start down the wrong path, there’s no going back.

I knew it was a stupid, crazy thing to do, but I started cruising Hermosa Avenue looking for Jess, no plan of what I’d say if I found her. No idea how I’d explain being in her neighborhood.