Sweet and Vicious by David Schickler

Author:David Schickler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780440242321
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Monsters

Just off the highway near Cactus Flat, South Dakota, Grace is running wind sprints on the shoulder. It’s our fifth morning together, sunny again and warmer than it’s been. I’m sitting on the tailgate, not moving, not anxious, just watching my wife and a world of creamy stone. I’ve got my suitcase beside me, but there’s no need to open it and behold the Planets, because the Badlands around me are trippy enough. The terrain looks like a cave with the ceiling ripped off. There are crags and bumps and hills of rock, all the color of dirty salt, and they stretch to the horizon. It’s barren and still, and even with Grace a quarter mile off, I can hear her panting. It’s a steady, living sound, like a pulse, and the sky’s giant blue, and this could be the surface of the moon, except then we’d be floating, Grace and I.

I dipped the truck off the 90 last night and we slept here on the roadside, on Route 240. Grace has never seen South Dakota and I wanted her to wake to something dazzling. Watching her now—she’s rubbernecking, kicking up dust—I figure I’m falling in love, not just with her but with wherever we’re going, which is who knows where. The San Juan Islands, maybe, or Banff. Or to that palace in Sri Lanka, the place we can buy if we keep just one diamond.

“Hey.” Grace walks up to the tailgate, spent and heaving. Back in Blue Earth, she used the ATM card that’s been funding our danger to buy the sweats and running shoes she’s wearing.

“Hey,” I say.

She kisses my chin, and I hug her close, smelling her hair, blinking up at the sun. We hold each other, look at the day.

“Let’s tell the truth,” says Grace.

“Say again?”

“It’s such an amazing morning, we should each tell the other the truth about something.”

“All right,” I say. “You first.”

Grace mops her temples with her sleeve. “Well, the truth is, I miss my mother. I wish she could’ve been at our wedding.”

“If I remember right, we eloped.”

“I’m just saying, if I’d called her, I wonder if she’d’ve come. Driven to us.”

My arms are locked around her waist. She leans back, pets my jaws, which have a stubborn, five-day beard.

“My daddy . . .” says Grace. “He was a trucker, and he did that once, before I was born. Called my mother out onto the road, I mean. He phoned her from Topeka. Said he had a migraine so bad he was blind in one eye and could she come tend him.”

“Did she?”

“Yep. But when she got to Kansas, no migraine. It was a ploy. My father was at the Tip-Top Truck Stop, where some good old boys were throwing a summer clambake in the meadow out back, and Daddy wanted to treat Regina to a shindig. When she pulled up in the station wagon, he was drunk as a monk. He’d been dancing for hours, there was some garage band playing, and Regina slapped his rascal face.

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