‘I don’t understand.’
‘Ten bucks for ten milligram tablets, eighty for eighty milligrams – the greenies. If he tries to jack you up to double that …’ Billy shifts in his seat and grimaces. ‘Tell him to take a hike. Speed for you. Adderall is good, Provigil maybe even better. Got it?’
Alice nods. ‘I need to go inside and pee first. I’m pretty nervous.’
Billy nods and closes his eyes. ‘Lock up, right? I’m in no shape to fight off a carjacker.’
She pees, picks up some snacks and drinks in the store, then goes out and starts walking around the trucks out back. Someone wolf-whistles after her. She ignores it. She’s looking for a turned-down visor with something green on it, or a ribbon blowing from a doorhandle. What she finds, just as she’s about to give up, is a rumbling Peterbilt with a green Jesus stuck to the dashboard. She’s scared, thinks the man behind the wheel will probably either laugh at her or give her a you’re crazy look, but Billy is in pain and she’ll do anything for him.
She steps up and knocks. The window rolls down. It’s a Scandahoovian-looking dude with straw-blond hair and a big old jelly-belly. His eyes are ice blue. He looks at her with no expression. ‘If you’re looking for help, honey, call Triple-A.’
She tells him about the back spasms and the long drive and says she can pay if it’s not too much.
‘How do I know you’re not a cop?’
The question is so unexpected she laughs, and that’s the convincer. They dicker. She ends up parting with five hundred of the eight hundred dollars for ten ten-milligram Oxys, one eighty （what Billy called a greenie）， and a dozen orange Adderall tabs. She’s pretty sure he jacked her up most righteously, but Alice doesn’t care. She runs back to the Mitsubishi with a smile. Part of it is relief. Part of it is a sense of accomplishment: her first drug deal. Maybe she really is turning outlaw.
Billy’s dozing with his head back and his chin pointing at the windshield. His face has thinned out. Some of the stubble on his cheeks is gray. He opens his eyes when she knocks on the window and leans over to unlock the doors, wincing as he does it. He has to push on the steering wheel to get straight in his seat again and she thinks he won’t be able to drive them two miles, let alone across New York and New Jersey in heavy traffic.
‘Did you score?’ he asks as she slides in behind the wheel.
She opens the handkerchief into which she folded the pills. He looks and says it’s good, she did well. It makes her happy.
‘Did you have to show the gun?’
She shakes her head.
‘Didn’t think you would.’ He takes the greenie. ‘I’ll save the rest for later.’
‘Won’t that knock you out?’
‘No. People who use it to get high get sleepy. I’m not using it for that.’
‘Will you actually be able to drive? Because I can try—’
‘Give me ten minutes, then we’ll see.’
It’s fifteen. Then he opens the passenger door and says, ‘Switch places with me.’
He walks around the car without limping too much and gets behind the wheel without wincing at all. ‘Johnny Capps was right, the stuff is magic. Of course that’s what makes it so dangerous.’
‘You’re okay?’
‘Good to go,’ Billy says. ‘For awhile, anyway.’
He swings out of the back lot where the big trucks sleep and merges smoothly onto the LIE, slotting neatly behind a pickup hauling a boat trailer and ahead of a dump truck. Alice thinks she would have hesitated for minutes with exit traffic backing up behind her, honking like crazy, and when she finally pulled out she would have gotten slammed from behind. Soon they’re up to sixty-five, Billy moving in and out of slower traffic with no hesitation. She waits for the drug to start messing with his timing. It doesn’t happen.
‘Get some news on the radio,’ he says. ‘Try 1010 WINS on the AM.’
She finds WINS. There’s a story about a pipeline leak in North Dakota, a plane crash in Texas, and a school shooting in Santa Clara. There’s nothing about the murder of a media mogul at his estate on Montauk Point.
‘That’s good,’ Billy says. ‘We need all the running room we can get.’
Outlaws for sure, she thinks.
By the time the New York skyline is on the horizon, he’s sweating again, but his driving remains firm and confident. They take the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey. With Alice calling out directions from her GPS, Billy gets to 1-80. He doesn’t make it all the way to the Pennsylvania state line but pulls off at a tiny rest area in Netcong Borough.