Friday Never Leaving

Author:[email protected]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2013-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

PART II

DUST

Thoughts become words,

words become deeds,

deeds become habits,

habits become character,

and your character becomes your destiny.

CHAPTER TWENTY carrie told me later that it took Malik under an hour to steal the car and switch the plates. They were waiting a few streets away, engine running—it was a Toyota troop carrier with big steel racks on top. It had obviously been off-road—sweeping arcs of mud, dried to a dusty crust, were sprayed up the sides and someone had written wish my wife was this dirty with their finger in the film obscuring the rear window. A caged trailer was hooked to the back, stacked full with stuff. Inside the car it reeked of diesel and cigarettes.

When I got in, Carrie screamed, “Road trip!” then chattered on like nothing much had happened, filling in the blanks since I’d left without pausing for breath.

Bree reached over the seat and brushed the back of her hand across my cheek. Silence gave me a slow, sad smile and clapped his hands. The two gestures didn’t go together and gave me no clue how he was really feeling. “Found her,” Arden said. “Don’t say I never give you anything.” She winked at Silence.

She tried on a Keep on truckin’ cap that she found in the glove box, then pulled it off and sniffed it. Disgusted, she lobbed it out the window and did the same with a few CDs that didn’t meet with her approval. She took off the crucifix necklace I stole for her and hung it from the rearview mirror.

Malik had tied down as many sleeping bags as would fit and they’d crammed the rest into the space in the back. All the other gear sat on our laps or under our feet.

Silence hung his head and picked at his fingernails. I tried to catch his eye but he wasn’t looking. We sat four across on the back seat: me, Darcy, Silence, and Carrie. Three in the front: AiAi straddling the gearshift, Malik driving and Arden in the passenger seat. Joe and Bree hid in the back, lying low.

The first hour was quiet and tense as Malik drove too slowly and too carefully out of the city. When we hit the open road, Arden wound one window down just a crack. We were doing 75 miles an hour and the air throbbed through the opening, giving me an earache. I pressed a hand to my ear to relieve the pressure.

As if she could read my mind, Carrie opened her window to create a passage of air.

Darcy’s leg was pressed hard against mine and I tried to move away, but there was nowhere to go.

Arden put on a CD that she found stuffed in the overhead compartment. She turned the volume up loud and sang tunelessly.

It was a song I hadn’t heard for a long time. Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Vivienne had loved it—the Jeff Buckley version—and I couldn’t hear it without imagining a tortured man walking into a river to end it all. She’d joked that he was a long-lost relative of ours.

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