Devoted(10)
The cashier looks at the window, toward the pumps, maybe hoping another customer will drive in. Nothing is moving out there except a cloud shadow that slides a measure of darkness along the highway.
The old guy’s tension, his unexpressed fear, excites Shacket. “Do you have a core belief?” he asks as he takes a candy bar from a display on the counter.
Shacket himself once had core beliefs, a sense of limits. He’s sure of it. He just can’t remember what those limits were.
“What do you mean?” the old man asks.
“Well, like, do you believe in God?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“You do?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is God?” Shacket asks, stripping the wrapper off the candy bar and letting it fall to the floor.
The old guy meets his eyes again. “Where is God?”
“I’m just wondering where you think He is.”
“God is everywhere.”
“Is He over there by the cooler with the beer and soda pop?”
The cashier says nothing.
Shacket takes a bite of the candy bar, chews it twice, and then spits the sticky lump on the counter. “This thing tastes like shit. It’s a decade past the expiration date. What’s your God think of you selling shit like this? Doesn’t He notice? Where is He? Is God maybe back there by the potato chips and Doritos?”
The cashier looks down at the credit card processor. “I run your card, it’s electronic, over the phone is how it works. The number and name, they’re out there at Visa already, the purchase.”
He’s telling Shacket that if something mortal happens here, there’s proof that Nathan Palmer stopped for gas around the time that it all went down.
But of course Shacket is not Nathan Palmer.
The angry buzzing in his head grows angrier. He needs to do something to stop the buzzing. He knows what he needs to do.
He takes another bite of the candy bar and chews once and spits it on the counter. “Is God over there by the magazines? You have some dirty magazines over there, don’t you? Some skin magazines?”
A tremor has arisen at one corner of the fat old guy’s mouth, which further excites Shacket.
Yet the trembling reminds him of his grandfather, a kind man, who had a tremor. Something that might be pity for the cashier overcomes him. It passes quickly.
“You’re not much of a conversationalist, are you? You say it’s a beautiful morning, then you have nowhere to go after that.”
Shacket throws the remainder of the candy bar at the old man, and it sticks to the white T-shirt.
Shacket isn’t Nathan Palmer, but he needs to use the Palmer driver’s license and credit card for a while yet. If he’d paid cash, he could do what he needs to do to stop the buzzing.
“You’re a lucky sonofabitch, aren’t you?”
The old man does not reply.
“I said, you’re a lucky sonofabitch, aren’t you?”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Not that you’ve noticed? Well, then, you’re as stupid as you are lucky. You’re a lucky sonofabitch. It’s your lucky day, gramps. I’m going to walk out of here and let you go on breathing. You call the sheriff about this, you know what’s going to happen?”
“I’m not callin’ nobody.”
“Some cop pulls me over, he better kill me quick. ’Cause if he doesn’t, I’ll kill him, then come back here and shove a pistol up your fat ass.”
“I’m not callin’ nobody,” the old man repeats.
Shacket walks out to the Dodge Demon. Under the driver’s seat, snugged in a belt holster, is a Heckler & Koch Compact .38. He needs all of his willpower not to retrieve it, return to the store, and empty the magazine into the old man.
On the road again, past the jerkwater called Warm Springs, heading toward Tonopah on federal highway 6, Shacket accelerates to 120 miles per hour, then 130, the Dodge roaring, gobbling blacktop. He’s agitated, excited, electrified, and he needs the speed to work off his agitation, to calm himself.
Ever since Springville, Utah, something has been happening to his mind. For his entire life, there’s been a Dorian Purcell to whom he has had to answer, a Purcell by one name or another, from whom he has taken shit when it is shoveled at him. Well, no longer. He is free at last. He’s in control of his life. No one is the boss of him anymore. Something is happening to his mind, and he loves it.
Thirty-five miles from Warm Springs, about ten miles short of Tonopah, the buzzing in his head stops, and he is able to slow down.
The state line is maybe ninety miles away. He will soon be in California. On his way to lovely Megan.
He is hungry. Nothing had tasted good at dinner the previous evening. He had skipped breakfast. The candy bar really had tasted like shit. He is exceedingly hungry. Ravenous. He’ll stop to eat as soon as he’s in California. He doesn’t know what he wants to eat; nothing he can think of makes his mouth water; he’ll figure it out when he gets there.
The highway rises into the White Mountains and Inyo National Forest, the wastelands falling away behind him, the past falling away with them, the past and all restraints.
11
When the mortician came to collect the body, Kipp at last got off Dorothy’s bed.