“I saw you back there. Then you waited.” She reached behind to snap off the light, stepped to the car’s side. “Never gets easy, does it?”
“I’ve had practice.”
“You have, but I don’t mean saying good-bye. Making choices.”
She popped the top of the cooler under her bench, handed him a beer, got one herself.
“Our eyes bounce off surfaces, we can’t see far or deep. We make choices from the pitifully little we understand about who we are, held in place by that. Then we hold our breaths fully expecting the heavens to tear open at any minute. All of us do that, Eight. Not just you.”
Again he thought about Bernie, Time you’re ten, twelve years old, it’s pretty much set in you, what you’re going to be like, what your life’s going to be.
“Comforting,” he said.
“It is, in a way. Like this.” Billie held up her beer. “It’s all a storm, Eight. But we have these bright days, these calms.”
“You were one.”
She laughed. “You bet your ass I was. Now get out of here, I’ve got work to do-once I undo what all the heads that have been under this hood before did to the poor girl.”
They picked him up just outside Mesa, a Chrysler and a BMW. He cut off and back onto I-10, jumped an exit and feeder road to head back toward Phoenix, then clipped off again and on toward Tucson. Feared for a while that he might have lost them and pulled over. Sat at roadside, the Indian casino’s electronic billboard flashing against his windshield, semis whipping by, waiting. Till there they were. When the two cars drew within easy distance he peeled out ahead, braked and wheeled his way into a 180, drove behind and spun again, came up behind them and shot past.
In the rearview mirror he watched them moving toward him. He turned the radio on. He smiled.
He drove.