“That’s awful,” she said.
He shrugged, put his hands on his thighs. “It’s all right. It clears up. Just flares up with the heat.” He smiled. “Now you know my secret weakness. What’s yours?”
She felt herself blushing, shook her head.
He gave a little laugh. “That’s all right. I can guess what your weakness is.”
She smiled at him, liked that little secret game of flirting, not flirting, just working that line between yes and no. It wasn’t her way of mixing drinks that made her the best bartender in town, it was her way of mixing up the men, keeping them guessing. She looked away from him. “You think you know who I am?”
“Yep.” He settled back, buckled his seat belt. “Don’t you buckle up for a ride? You really ought to.”
Katy reached for her belt. “My mom made me have these installed. It’s an old truck.”
“I know,” he said. “We’d all be better off if we listened to our mommas more often.”
“Yeah,” she said. She started to press the gas, waited.
“But mommas aren’t right about everything, are they?”
“No,” she said. Her momma had never approved of any guy she’d ever dated. What did she want? For Katy to marry some professor like her dad?
He nodded, looked ahead as if they were already moving. “You got to trust me on this.” He reached out the window and motioned for the guy in the Datsun to move on.
“Trust you?” She laughed and pressed the gas and followed the car into traffic on the highway that would soon have them all heading out of town. She had a sick feeling in her stomach, knew what she was doing was dangerous. But she’d done dangerous before. Frank had pushed her into doing things way past anything like safety. And Randy, hell, Randy was nothing but a risk. But she liked to take risks, liked that jangling feeling in her belly and something sparking behind her eyes.
She told herself not to panic, just the way she told herself not to panic when her daddy played his hunting games with guns. They lived in the country, so nobody really worried about guns going off. Boys were often out shooting cans off logs, road signs, possums. Her daddy was just another one of those boys grown up. He would sit at the open window of what he called his office but was really his gunroom. He’d keep his eye on the garbage cans out back, just waiting for the scent to draw some roaming dog. He hated those dogs getting in his trash, making a mess in his yard. Then he got to where he liked to play a shooting game to keep them away. He’d call Katy in to test her. “Let’s play a little game. I can shoot that dog there or let it go. What do you want? If he gets in the garbage, it’s your job to clean it up. Or I could just shoot him. What do you say?”
Sometimes he was just testing her. He would show her sometimes that there were no bullets in the gun. He was teasing. “Let’s see how much my tough little Katy can stand.” But lots of times he did shoot. Sometimes the dog yelped and ran off. Sometimes it dropped to the ground. “If you cry, I’ll shoot.” She’d stand frozen beside him. Katy learned to chew her lip until it was bloody, but in time she learned not to make a sound.
Katy glanced at Jesse, sitting easily and looking out the window as if he were just a guy on a road trip. She told herself she’d been through much bigger dangers than this. She was a bartender, had walked to her car in the back alley hundreds of times, had talked guys out of raping her more times than she could count. The key was to make yourself human—she’d read that in a psychology class.
It had worked once when her car had broken down and she’d hitched a ride with a man who kept saying it’d be easy to rape her, leave her, and be long gone before she told. She looked him in the eye and said, “You won’t do that.” She told him she was on the way to the hospital, where her daddy was dying from a tumor in his head. She made the facts of her daddy’s suffering real in the air. And the guy believed her. He went silent and drove. He dropped her off at the hospital door and sped off before she thought to check his license plate. She was amazed. She had spun a story of her daddy’s pain to save herself when her daddy was already dead. He would have been proud of her lying like that to get to the hospital instead of ending up somewhere getting raped.
Crossing through downtown, she looked up and saw the Cape Fear River bridge. Once she crossed that bridge, she’d be in farm country. There’d be hardly anyone around. Randy would laugh at the risk she was taking. And Frank, he’d just say it was one of Katy’s new adventures. Even Billy would like the cash. But her mother would be furious.
“My mother,” she said thinking her mother could never hear about this.
“What about your mother?”
“Nothing,” she said. “My mother,” Katy said again, looking out at the suspension bridge she was about to cross. “My mother hates driving over bridges. She’s a nervous type, that’s all.”
He laughed. “And look at you. You’re not nervous at all.”
Katy headed up the ramp to the bridge over the Cape Fear River and saw the dark water swirling below. She’d heard stories of all those guys thinking they could swim the river. They got caught in the cross-currents of the river rolling out and the tidewaters of the sea rushing in. The churning force pulled them down in the river, so dark it was almost black with tannins from the vegetation that rotted on its shores. People drowned all the time in the current that whirled like a wheel. They got disoriented, couldn’t see which way was up, the water so thick and dark it sucked away all light.
As the truck surged forward, the bridge seemed to shudder, but it was her own shaking inside. Her stomach clenched, and a flash of fear shot up her spine. She saw his hands now clenched in his lap while his face looked so easy and mild. She’d seen that expression of a man about to explode: face calm, body tensed. And that look just before they grabbed a beer bottle and broke it over someone’s head. And she knew it. This was bad. This was stupid.
Slowly she reached under the seat for the little pocketknife she kept there, but all she’d ever used it for was to cut apples and cheese. She tried to slip it under her thigh to be ready. Maybe this was really bad.
Jesse saw the move, reached across, snapped up her wrist, and squeezed. The truck veered into oncoming traffic, and she pulled back into her lane. A car horn blared; the driver gave her the finger and rushed by.
He took the knife, put it in his pocket, and laughed. “What do you think you’re doing, girl? You could’ve killed us back there.”
“I’ll give you the truck,” she said.
“Really,” he said with a teasing little sound.
“You can have it. I won’t call the cops. You drive to his granny’s house. Once we get across the river, just let me out. I’ll walk home.”
He smiled. “Now, why would I make you do something like that? You’ll get home later.”
Billy would be furious. “My fiancé, he’ll be wondering where I am. He doesn’t like it when I’m late coming in.”
“Your fiancé.” He shook his head. “And what about Randy? Girl, I’m sitting in your truck and see you got Bob Marley, Lou Reed, Tom Petty, Stones, all that old rock-and-roll shit. Don’t sit there and tell me you take this fiancé shit serious.” He looked her up and down and laughed. “Damn, girl, I’m betting you got two guys on the side. Don’t you?”
She stared ahead at the highway unrolling, wished she hadn’t stopped to buy some stupid skirt for Frank and that damned underwear for Randy. Maybe if that lady had let her change in the restroom, this guy would have jumped into someone else’s car.
He was nudging her. “You get it on the side, don’t you? Don’t you?”
She gave a nod, eyes still on the