“How do you know I wasn’t looking for you?” Vern asked, walking right up to him. No one had ever once accused her of being sensible. “There someplace I can get cleaned up?” she asked.
“Bathroom’s just inside,” a woman said, pointing.
Vern opened the creaky door. Sherman would have a fit to know she was at a place like this. She smiled as she pushed into the bathroom and for the first time in a year took a leak in a toilet. It really was like a throne. So high up. No squatting involved. She felt like she should be stealing people’s grain and granting pardons to all the wrong people.
The mirrors above the sinks were too scratched and dirty to make sense of her reflection, but she splashed her face and neck with water and scrubbed them with pink gel hand soap until she guessed they were clean. She soaked her hair through and gave it a shake, combing out the caked-in earth and plant matter with her fingers.
Back outside, the crowd had largely cleared, and Vern rubbed her hands along the motorcycles, admiring their size and power, their silver and black sleekness. There was nothing sleek in the woods. Everything had gnarls and knobs.
“You ride?” someone asked.
Vern turned to see a woman leaning against the building, a cigarette in her mouth. She wore high-waisted jeans that seemed too big for her, with a belt cinched tightly, a tucked-in tee. Her red hair was chopped into a bowl cut, and the strands fell into her eyes. Vern stepped closer to get a better look and saw piercings in the woman’s nose and in her ears.
“Well?” she asked.
“No,” said Vern.
The woman nodded, then flicked ash from her cigarette onto the ground. “That one’s mine,” she said, pointing. Vern walked up to her bike. Smaller and slimmer than the rest, it stood apart.
“She’s vintage, 1966. Honda Super Hawk. You like?”
Vern shrugged as she took the motorcycle in, but inside she was salivating, admiring its shape and form. The bike was a metal mare, moody and unstoppable. She could carry Vern to the other side of the world. On a bike like that, no one would ever think to stop her. You didn’t get in the way of a girl on a bike like that. “I call her Lucille. Lucy for short.”
Vern whipped her head toward the woman. “What?”
“Lucy, after Lucille Ball, you know? Cause she’s a spitfire, and I painted her red.”
“Right,” said Vern, though she didn’t know of any Lucille Ball. Vern knew only one Lucy. Her Lucy. The most important Lucy. And her last name wasn’t Ball. It was Jenkins.
“I’m Ollie, by the way,” the woman said.
“I’m—” Vern cut herself off. “You can call me V.”
Ollie dropped the butt of her cigarette onto the ground. “You want to take a ride, V?”
Vern looked up. “With you?”
“I don’t see anybody else offering.”
Vern ran her thumb over the bike. “I don’t know how,” said Vern. “And I don’t know you.” Though it wouldn’t be the first time she’d taken a ride with someone she didn’t know. After Lucy left Cainland that second and final time, Vern had thought getting in a car with a stranger was her only course to freedom. Like Lucy had said, nobody was coming for Vern. She had to put her salvation into the arms of a random passerby.
Back when she’d lived in the compound, Vern would amble to the part of the woods that butted up against the road whenever she could get away from her duties. She’d stick her thumb out to passing cars, but only once did someone stop. A patrolling police officer. He’d rolled down his window and asked her, How much?
She’d understood the kind of transaction the man was after, and the price she named was escape. Just take me as far away from here as you can.
That didn’t happen. When they were finished, he drove her to the main gates of the Blessed Acres and called Reverend Sherman. He told him he’d caught her in a man’s truck.
Vern had sat with her head bowed in the back of the police cruiser, brow furrowed in consternation.
It wasn’t being turned in that had upset her—she was used to being Cainland’s black sheep. It was that Reverend Sherman’s words about cops had proved true. He’d called policemen treacherous devils sent out to kill, punish, and enslave.
That cop had taken what he wanted from her and for no other reason than cruelty tried to expose her. If he represented the law of the land outside the Blessed Acres, then the sermons were right. Damn the outside world right to hell. What goodness could there be in a place who’d made men like that their kings?