Billy Summers

The traffic south of Chicago is horrible, six or eight lanes in either direction, but with the Adderall on board Alice navigates through it fearlessly. West of the metro area the traffic thins out some and the towns roll by: LaSalle, Princeton, Sheffield, Annawan. Her heart beats in her chest nice and tight. She’s locked in, got the hammer down like a trucker in a country song. Every now and then her eyes flick to the rearview and to the prone shape folded into the back seat. And as they leave Davenport behind and enter the wide flat spaces of Iowa, its fields now gray and still, waiting for winter, he begins to talk. It makes no sense; it makes all the sense in the world. He’s in the dark, she thinks. He is in the dark and in pain and looking for the way out. Oh Billy, I am so, so sorry.

There’s a lot about Cathy. He tells her not to bake the cookies, to wait until Ma comes home to help her. He tells Cathy someone hurt Bob Raines and he’s going to come home mean. He says Corinne stuck up for him, the only one who did. He talks about Shan. There’s something about a shooting gallery. He talks about someone named Derek and someone named Danny. He tells these phantoms that he won’t take it easy on them just because he’s a grownup. Alice thinks he’s talking about Monopoly because he says to hurry up and shake the dice and the railroads are a good buy but the utilities aren’t. Once he shouts, making her jump and swerve. Don’t go in there, Johnny, he says, there’s a muj behind the door, throw in a flash-bang first and get him out of there. He talks about Peggy Pye, the girl from the foster home where he stayed after his mother lost custody. He says paint is the only thing holding the goddam house together. He talks about the girl he had a crush on, sometimes calling her Ronnie and sometimes calling her Robin, which Alice knows was her real name. He says something about a Mustang convertible and something about a jukebox (‘It would play all night if you hit it in just the right place, Tac, remember?’), he talks about the toe that was partly lost and the baby shoe that was entirely lost and Bucky and Alice and someone named Thérèse Raquin. He returns again and again to his sister and to the policeman who took him away to the House of Everlasting Paint. He talks about thousands of cars with their windshields shining in the sun. He says they were smashed beauty. He is unpacking his life in the back seat of this stolen car and her heart breaks.

Finally he falls silent and at first she thinks he’s gone to sleep, but the third or fourth time she looks in the rearview and sees him lying there so still with his knees pulled up she thinks he’s dead.

They’re in Nebraska now. She pulls off at the exit for Hemingford Home and onto two-lane county blacktop running straight as a string between walls of corn that’s finished for another year. The day is almost over. She goes a mile and comes to a dirt road and pulls onto it, driving in far enough to be hidden from the blacktop road. She gets out and opens the back door and is at first relieved to see him looking at her, next terrified by the thought that he’s died with his eyes open. Then he blinks.

‘Why’d we stop?’

‘I needed to stretch my legs. How are you, Billy?’

Stupid question, but what else is there to ask? Do you know who I am or do you think I’m your dead sister? Are you going to be in your right mind for awhile? And by the way, is it too late? Alice thinks she knows the answer to that one.

‘Help me sit up.’

‘I don’t know if that’s a good—’

‘Help me sit up, Alice.’

So he knows. And he’s with her, at least for now. She takes his hands and helps him sit up with his feet on an unnamed dirt road in a town called Hemingford Home. In the mountains of Colorado it will already be almost dark. Here in the flatlands the afternoon has stretched into evening even though it’s November. Here the evening redness of the west spills over corn that rustles and sighs in a light breeze. His hands are hot and his face is burning. There are fever blisters on his lips.

‘I’m pretty well done.’

‘No, Billy. No. You need to hold on. I’ll give you two of the Oxys and there are a couple of those speed pills left. I’ll drive all night.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘I can do it, Billy. I really can.’

He’s shaking his head. She’s still holding his hands. She thinks if she let go he’d flop back onto the seat and his shirt would pull up and she’d see his belly, now blackish-gray with red tendrils of infection reaching up to his chest. To his heart.

‘Listen to me now. Are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘I rescued you after those men dumped you, all right? Now I’m rescuing you again. Trying to, anyway. Bucky told me you’d follow me as long as I let you, and if I let you I’d ruin you. He was right.’

‘You didn’t ruin me, you saved me.’