Three Miles Past (6 page)

An accident.

William leaned into the wall by the phone and apologized to her again. Because now he had no choice—she knew his truck, had marked how the black and gold camper shell didn’t fit the oil-field pale body. Because now she was trying to remember if it had been there the night before, or was it last week? She was probably making up a history for him, even, William: that his brother was in ICU, that he was driving up from Galveston each night just to sit by the hospital bed, struggle through the day’s paper out loud.

Like that could have saved James. Like anything could have.

In his apartment, William smiled.

Now that he had to do it, it would be easy.

He spent the rest of the afternoon wiping down his apartment, even the underside of the toilet lid, the inside of the P-trap in the kitchen, then an hour trying to fit the magnet from the mouthpiece of the phone up into the earpiece, then two minutes locking the door behind him, then dusk at a filling station, for the Chevy’s two tanks, then lining the camper shell with black RTV sealant, because he hadn’t had time for the foam kit. All that was left was answering an index card that had been posted at the animal clinic with a red tack in the shape of a heart. An index card that had been posted just for him.

The woman who answered the door was a girl. Eleven, twelve. Her eyes tracked all the way up William. His hands were already in his pocket, his sunglasses hooked into his flannel shirt.

“Hello,” he said.

The girl called behind her, for her mother.

She was even better. William looked down along the porch, steadied himself on the wall.

“Yes?” the mother said, one hand on her daughter’s shoulder, ready to pull the girl into the house, step between.

William felt his eyes heat up about this.

“The—the Lhasa,” he said, like a question.

The mother tried looking past him, for his truck, but it was down the street where some Mexicans were working a lawn.

“You’re . . ?” the mother started.

William opened his mouth, stepped back in apology.

“Just—sorry, sorry. I just . . . my daughter, I’m seeing her this weekend.”

The mother looked up to him, to his eyes.

“Her birthday,” he explained, and then it was there, the Lhasa, yapping, its tiny forepaws edging past the weather-stripping on the floor.

The mother nodded. A cordless phone in her hand. William wondered how anybody ever strangled anybody anymore.

The index card had said
free to good home
.

The mother nodded down to William’s left hand. His naked ring finger.

In return, he shrugged, squinted away, down the street, to the sound of a weed-eater or an edger.

“She looks like her,” he said finally, lifting his chin to the daughter.

The daughter shrank to her mother’s leg some.

Inside, William smiled. Outside, he shrugged again, shook his head no. Arranged his face into an outside smile too.

“I’m lying,” he said, like it had been going to come out anyway. “She’s—Kimbo. She’s not mine. My brother’s girl. Niece. I just like to . . . y’know. Pretend.”

“Maybe your brother can—” the mother started, but William closed his eyes tight, shook his head no.

“He can’t,” he said.

That part wasn’t a lie.

Two minutes later, the mother calling her husband, ‘to let him know about Vanessa,’ the dog—really just an excuse to leave the phone on, to let William
know
the phone was on—William stepped into the house, felt like he was balancing on the welcome mat. He looked back, where he’d just been, on the porch: there was no one watching.

Two fer Tuesday
, he said to himself, a thing he’d been hearing on the radio, and stepped off, onto the pale, absorbent carpet of the living room.

~

This time he parked in the second row of Visitor’s, first the other way, nosed away from the hospital, so she would just be seeing the top of the camper, the tailgate, but then realizing in a desperate rush that that’s what she’d already seen when he’d started his already-started truck last week. He backed out, turned around and reversed into the slot, scratching the tires with each gear change, then didn’t let himself drink any beer except one, and then another to hide the first, to stop his hands from shaking, and finally just three, to get it over with.

From the floorboard with all the cans, Vanessa stared at him.

He smiled down to her, patted her on the head.

Her bowl and extra collar and her favorite pink ball were in three dumpsters on three different streets. The mother and daughter had insisted William take them. The only thing he’d kept was the rhinestone leash, but then, walking away from their house, he hadn’t even used it. Instead, he’d carried Vanessa like a baby, like they wanted him to, whispering down into her left ear that he knew what she tasted like, yes he did yes he did.

Everything was falling into place. Like always.

10:30 came and went, then 10:32, then 10:35. Two hours later, it was almost 11:00. William stroked his beard down along his jaw, blinked too much, and rocked in his seat, went through the checklist again, making sure.

When she walked out all at once, looking into her purse, he straightened his right leg hard, washing the cars in his side mirrors angry red, look-at-me-I’m-the-I-10-killer-give-away red, but then knew it was now, it was now. Because once she got her cell phone open—

It was the only reason he wasn’t simply parked by her car, out in B.

Now,
now
.

He stepped from his truck, pulled Vanessa down to the end of his row, opposite the truck. Knew the rhinestones were going to give him away, that he should just—

But no:
now
.

This.

It was why they were alone here in the middle of the city, charmed, nobody walking in from the parking lot, nobody pushing through the exit doors.

William smiled, nodded.

She was four long steps from the crosswalk now, the phone in her hand, her finger to the call button, she was four, three steps from the crosswalk when William chocked up on the leash with his right hand, still holding the loop in his left. Like that, he could lift Vanessa, swing her, her collar already tightened then double-checked.

One time around, then two, the soft Lhasa body stiff at the end of the leash, then more slack, like a hammer throw, then he let her go into the sky, followed through with his right arm.

Five seconds, then Vanessa fell into the crosswalk Julia should have been using, for safety.

Julia stopped, the cell to her ear, ringing probably, and she looked at it, the dog, then looked up into the sky, lowered the phone.

There were maybe one thousand things that could happen now.

William knew she would accept any of them, too: a man in an almost-white truck with a black camper, pulling out of the Visitor’s lot, stopping at the small, white, twitching dog, stepping out, locking eyes with Julia, asking her without words what happened, his truck too loud so she has to take a step closer, another step, and by then she’s already started dying.

~

From a phone booth at a gas station at the Texas state line, William called to confess, to tell her everything, the caramel-colored pound attendant, that he loves her, that he was confused, that he’s sorry, that she doesn’t
understand
, but then he didn’t know her name. So he explained her to the pound’s night attendant, explained her too well—her nipples under her scrub shirt, how she was one of those girls who wore a tank top instead of a bra—then asked about the pregnant dog. If her puppies were running around the waiting room already, pulling all the stuffing from all the chairs. If their eyes were open yet or if they were still blind.

The attendant on the other end laughed through his nose.

“Blind,” he said, “yeah. Technically, I mean. If you count dead.”

William leaned deeper into the phone booth.

“And the—the mother?”

The attendant laughed again, said William wasn’t shitting about Charla, there, the house
pointer
, then laughed some more, hung up while he was doing it so that William had to picture him sitting there, alone in the pound, eyes teared up from laughing. At William.

He turned to his truck, knew suddenly in the way he knew things that he was parked too close to the trash can. That the clerk or the clerk’s manager or a homeless person or a monkey escaped from the circus was going to reach into the trash, pull out the three strips William had just cut the junk license plates into.

William shook his head no, wiped the phone down, then almost ran across the concrete to the truck, to the trashcan, pushing his arm as deep as he could into it, deep enough that he had to turn his head away, point his chin up. The clerk standing at the glass door, watching.

William raised his other hand, waved, made himself smile as if this were all some big mistake—the credit card itself, instead of the receipt, the beer bottle instead of the cap.

The clerk raised his hand back hesitantly, his face wrenched into a fake smile as well.

William left with two of the license plate strips, a cut finger wrapped in electric tape, and Julia, asleep in back, tied and gagged under the tarp, the tarp held down with toolboxes with real tools in them (Mitch’s), and a cooler with bumper stickers all over it, beer inside.

She wasn’t awake yet.

William apologized to her again, for how cold the tarp was going to be for her, naked like that. The tips of her breasts stiff against the black, woven plastic.

Drive, he told himself. Miles, miles, go go go.

Louisiana was a familiar bog of smells and alligator eyes.

William held the wheel with both hands, accidentally looked up to a cab-over passing him slow in the left lane, and knew for an instant it was his father, straightened his back into the seat for the coolness of the wine cooler bottle, whooshing by.

When it never came, the truck driver just nodded, pulled ahead in a way that William knew he had read the last number called on Julia’s cell phone. It was open on the seat beside him, its small screen glowing green, a beacon.

William made himself slow down to sixty, spit the taste of adrenaline out the window. He turned the radio up.

The last person he’d seen in Texas, the last person who could identify him, had been a paramedic pushing an empty gurney across the Emergency lane, from one red curb to another. William had stopped, and the paramedic had raised his fingers on the aluminum tubing, in thanks.

“No problem,” William said, both in the Emergency lane and in Louisiana, then nodded back instead of waving, because her hair had still been in his fingers, from pulling her into the cab, slamming her face into the dashboard three times fast.

All she had left behind was one shoe, but he’d backed up, leaned down for it, then pulled away, no headlights.

~

Three miles past a rest stop—always three miles, because by then the truckers would be into their tall gears, be making too much time to stop—three miles past a rest stop, he finally climbed back through the sliding rear window he’d fed her through in Houston.