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When we returned to the motel shortly before midnight, Sparky Rainking was waiting for us in his granddaughter’s room, watching a cable program on TV. “They seem to be reporting news from another planet, ’cause they sure aren’t talking about the earth I know.”
Neither the cable channel nor a local station had carried any mention of the shooting at the truck stop. These days, any incident involving a mere two killings failed to be violent enough to qualify as news.
Sparky had finished counting the money. In addition to the seventy-five thousand that we’d left with Butch Hammer, the duffel bag had contained another hundred and ninety thousand, mostly in hundreds, but some in twenties.
“After I counted the last, I washed my hands for ten minutes. Still don’t feel entirely clean, considering the moral degenerates who handled those bills. Then I got in the shower with Winston and used some shampoo on him. He smells like lemons. We don’t need to have him groomed in the morning, though we should get his teeth cleaned before too long.”
We told him about the Ford Explorer as he sampled the baked goods in the Christmas tin. After he interrupted us twice to say that he would marry the woman who made those treats if she ever became available, we finished our account of the events at Butch Hammer’s American Auto Repair. Then we agreed to hit the road by eight o’clock in the morning and said goodnight.
Sparky retired to his room and I to mine, and Winston wisely remained with Bridget. I don’t know what condition Sparky was in, but after a long day on the run, I felt as though my muscles were sliding off my bones and my joints were coming unhinged.
I took a shower as hot as I could tolerate, toweled off, slipped into pajamas, got into bed—and could not sleep. The quiet abraded my nerves. I knew that no monster stalked me in the dark, and yet the very silence seemed to be evidence of its stealthiness. Minute by minute, I grew increasingly, irrationally convinced that something nearby, coiled to strike, was listening to me as I listened for it.
I turned on a cable channel and lay watching infomercials for spurtles and copper-infused underwear and diarrhea remedies.
This will sound weird, but I suppose no more so than everything that I have written to this point: I didn’t know myself anymore, and I found the new me a little scary. During the course of the day, I’d become a stranger to myself, a different person from the guy who had gotten out of bed to go to work at Arizona! magazine the previous morning. The path to the future that I long envisioned had withered away in the wild woods of recent experience, and I was unable to imagine where this new path might lead. I had killed two federal agents with a car, albeit in self-defense. I was on the run. I was engaged to be married. Sort of. I could see monsters. The world had not changed; however, my understanding of it had undergone a most radical revision, which in turn revised me. I was unsettled by the thought that I was destined to become a warrior. I didn’t see myself as a warrior. I didn’t want to be a warrior. I just wanted to avoid diarrhea, enjoy the health benefits of copper-infused underwear, and have my own little kitchen with a collection of spurtles. However, the mysterious forces at work in my life might give me no choice in the matter. I might have to become a warrior or die. Of course, if I became a warrior, I would almost surely die, because the role did not suit me.
On the other hand, whatever enigmatical power had first taken control of me on the day I’d found the coin seemed to be benign. It manipulated me, yes, but first to prepare me to escape web-spinning spiders from the ISA, and then to send me literally crashing into the life of my stunning and amusing future bride. If I had changed, maybe I needed to change to adapt to the truth of the world in order to survive. And if I was in some strange power’s employ, maybe that employment would be more satisfying than writing about rotting buildings at a ghost crossroads of abandoned highways, even as thrilling as that might be. Maybe I needed to live by the old saying popular with Californians—“Go with the flow”—though that’s exactly what happens to a dead goldfish when you flush it down a toilet.
I left the TV on as a night-light, the volume low, and at last fell asleep during an infomercial for a law firm that was eager to get me the financial settlement I deserved if only I would fall down a long flight of stairs in a commercial enterprise or be so lucky as to find my car rear-ended and simultaneously T-boned by a pair of eighteen-wheelers driven by the reckless employees of a heartless trucking company.
I don’t remember dreaming, and I had no nightmares. In the morning, however, there would be a moment of terror.