If Pete had not taken a job from men no one in his right mind would trust. If Pete had only had faith in what the two of them could do together if they tried.
The man with the orange beard wore a denim shirt scissored off at the armpits. His upper arms were meaty and sunburned, and one arm had a blue anchor tattooed inside a circle of red and blue stars. He twisted the cap off a beer bottle and toasted Vikki with it before he drank. He removed the bottle from his mouth and lifted up his shirt with two fingers and blotted his lips. “Little breezy in that car of yours, isn’t it?” he said.
“I’ve got your license number. I’m going to leave it inside with my boss,” she said.
“You got no problem with me,” he replied, smiling.
She headed for the front door of the diner, an empty coffee thermos hooked through one finger.
“Come have a drink with us,” he said at her back.
Junior was behind the cash register when she came in, his face as lined and woebegone as a prune, his sideburns razor-etched and flared on his cheeks. He was talking to the driver of the Nissan. “My delivery man didn’t come today, so I’m down on my milk. Sorry, but I cain’t sell you none.”
“Where’s the next store?” the driver of the Nissan said. His hair was scalped on the sides and long and combed straight back on top.
“Back in town,” Junior said.
“It’s closed. It’s after eleven.”
“Why didn’t you buy it before closing time?”
“We had a carton in the ice chest at the Super 8. But it must have spoiled. Mister, my baby girl is three months old. What am I going to do?”
Junior blew out his breath. He went into the kitchen and returned with a half-gallon carton of whole milk and set it on the counter.
“How much is it?” the driver of the Nissan asked.
“Two bucks.”
The driver of the Nissan put a single bill on the glass countertop and began counting pennies, nickels, and dimes on top of it. He exhausted the coins in one pocket and began searching in the other.
“Forget it,” Junior said.
“I got to pay you for it.”
“You a Christian?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put it in the plate.”
“God bless you, sir.”
Junior nodded, his mouth a tight line. He watched the man go out the door into the lot, then turned his attention to Vikki. “Next,” he said.
“I’m sorry to quit on you without notice. I know you’ve got your hands full,” she said.
“It’s that boy, isn’t it?”
“I need my money, Junior.”
He glanced at some penciled numbers on a scrap of paper by the register. “You got a hundred and eighty-three dollars and four cents coming. You’re gonna have to take a check, though. I need it for the IRS and four other agencies I pay on your behalf.”
“Can’t you stop acting like a shit?”
He raised his eyebrows, then exhaled out his nose. He shoved a receipt book toward her and opened the cash register. “I saw that guy with the beard trying to come on to you out there,” he said as he counted out her money.
“You know him?”
“No.”
“He’s probably drunk.” She started to say something else. She looked over her shoulder. She could see the Trans Am next to the nightclub. The two men were not in it and not in the parking lot, either.
Junior handed her the bills and silver he had counted out of the drawer and added ten dollars to it. “You had that coming out of the tip jar. Take care of yourself, kid.”
She lifted her thermos. “You mind?”
“Why ask me?”
She went behind the counter and opened the coffee spigot above her thermos and filled it with scalding coffee. She closed and opened her eyes, suddenly realizing how tired she was.
She used the restroom and went back outside. The man with the orange beard was sitting in the passenger seat of his vehicle, eating Mexican food from a Styrofoam container with a small plastic fork, the car door hanging open, his feet on the gravel. The driver of the vehicle was nowhere in sight, but the engine was running, a clutch of keys vibrating in the ignition.
“I was on a destroyer escort in Fort Lauderdale three days ago,” the man with the orange beard said. “I’ve been around the world four times backward. That means I’ve been around the world eight times. What do you think of that? You ever been around the world?”
“I have,” Junior said from the door of the diner. “Want to tell me about your travels? I was middleweight champion of the Pacific fleet. You a tomato can?”
“A what?”
“A bleeder. Keep bothering my waitress like that and see what happens.”
Vikki got into her vehicle and turned around in the lot but had to wait for an eighteen-wheeler to get past before she could drive back onto the highway. In her rearview mirror, she saw the man in the top hat come out of the nightclub and get in the Trans Am. He wore jeans and suspenders and a white T-shirt, and his torso was too long for his legs. The man with the beard closed his car door and tossed the Styrofoam container and the uneaten food out the window.
Vikki pressed the accelerator to the floor, the safe electric glow of the truck stop and diner disappearing behind her. A newspaper flew off the asphalt like a bird with giant wings and whipped through the front window and wrapped itself on the crown of the passenger seat before spinning in a vortex inside the car. She slapped the tangle of pages down with one hand and tried to see who was behind her. There were several sets of headlights in her rearview mirror now, and she couldn’t tell if any of them belonged to the man with the orange beard.
A truck passed her, then an open convertible with a teenage girl sitting on top of the backseat, her arms outspread in the wind, her chin lifted, her blouse flattening on her breasts, as though the stars and the bloom of the desert and the warm nocturnal loveliness of the moment had been created especially for her.
When Vikki rounded the next curve, the headlights of the vehicle behind her reflected off a hillside and she clearly saw the Trans Am, riding low and sleek on good tires, the engine powerful and loud and steady. She mashed on the gas, but her vehicle did not accelerate. Instead, the pistons misfired, and a balloon of black oil smoke exploded out of the exhaust pipe. She felt as though she were in a bad dream in which she knew she had to run from an enemy but her legs were knee-deep in mud.
What a fool she had been. Why hadn’t she confronted the two men in front of Junior and dealt with them in front of the diner, even called the cops if she had to?
She flipped open her cell phone on her thigh, trying with her thumb to punch in the diner’s number. Up ahead, she saw the Nissan parked on the side of the road, the hatch open, the father of the three-month-old baby girl on his knees, pushing a jack under the rear bumper.
She slowed and pulled in behind him. He stared up into her high beams, his face white, distorted, his eyes watering, his narrow head and long nose and greased hair like those of a man who was out of sync with his own era, a man for whom loss was a given and ineptitude a way of life. She left the parking lights on and cut the engine.
The Trans Am streaked past her, the bearded passenger giving her a double thumbs-up, his friend in the top hat bent hard over the wheel.
But the driver of the Nissan was concentrated on Vikki, still looking up at her, blinking, his eyes straining in the darkness. “Who are you?” he said.
“I saw you at the diner. You needed milk for your little girl. Are you all right?”
She was standing directly over him. He had spread a handkerchief on the gravel to kneel on but had not taken off his coat. He had just placed the jack under the rear of the car frame, but neither of the back tires appeared to be flat.
“I think I got a bubble in my tire. I could hear it slapping. They do that sometimes when they’re fixing to blow,” he said. He got to his feet, brushing at one knee. “Problem is, I forgot I don’t have a spare.” Because of the grease in his hair, it looked wet-combed and shiny on his collar, as though he had just emerged from a fresh shower. There were soft lumps in his facial skin, similar in size to the bites of horseflies. He glanced over his shoulder at the empty road. In the distance, a pair of high beams bounced off a hillside into the sky. “We’re at the Super 8 in town. My wife probably thinks I got kidnapped. My sister’s husband has a shoe store in Del Rio. I’m supposed to go to work for him day after tomorrow.”