Boys Life

going fifty miles an hour.
    “Jump,” Donny said, and he grinned. “Go on, I dare ya!”
    Her fingers loosened. They let go.
    “I’ll get the law on you! I swear it!”
    “Sure you will.” His grin widened. “The law don’t have time for trash like you.”
    “You’re drunk and out of your mind!” She glanced back at me. “What’re you doin’ draggin’ a kid around with you for?”
    “Family business. You just shut up and look pretty.”
    “Damn you to hell,” she spat at him, but he just laughed.
    The Chevy crossed the gargoyle bridge again. We passed Rocket. A crow was perched on the handlebars, trying to pry the pie box open. The indignity of it! Donny tore through Zephyr at sixty miles an hour, blowing dead leaves in our wake. He burst out on the other side and hit Route Sixteen, and we raced across the hills toward Union Town.
    “Kidnappin’!” Lainie was still raging. “That’s what it is! They can kill you for that!”
    “I don’t give a shit. I got you. That’s what I want.”
    “I don’t want you!”
    His hand grabbed her chin and squeezed. The Chevy swerved across the road, and I gasped as I saw the woods reaching for us. Then Donny veered us back onto pavement again with a jerk of his arm. We were straddling the centerline. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever say that, or you’ll be real sorry.”
    “I’m just shakin’!” She tried to pull loose, but his wiry fingers tightened.
    “I don’t wanna hurt you, baby. God knows I don’t.” His fingers released her, but their marks stayed on her skin.
    “I ain’t your baby! I told you a long time ago, I don’t want nothin’ to do with you or them damn brothers of yours!”
    “You take our money, don’t you? High and mighty for a damned punchboard, ain’t you?”
    “I’m a professional,” she said with a measure of pride. “I don’t love you, don’t you get it? I don’t even like you! Only one man I ever loved, and he’s with Jesus.”
    “Jesus.” He mocked her voice. “That bastard’s rottin’ in hell.” His eyes flickered to the rearview mirror. I saw them narrow. “What the fuck?” he whispered.
    I looked back. A car was behind us, gaining rapidly.
    It was a black car. Black as a panther.
    “No.” Donny shook his head. “Oh, no. I cain’t be that wasted!”
    Lainie looked back, too, her lower lip swollen. “What is it?”
    “That car. See it?”
    “What car?”
    Her deep brown eyes registered nothing. I saw it, though. Clear as light. And Donny did, too. I could tell by the way he was letting the Chevy drift all over the road. The black car was speeding after us. In another moment I could make out the flames painted on the hood. I could see the faint shape of the driver through the slanted windshield. He seemed to be crouched forward, eager to catch us.
    “Hell’s bells!” Donny’s knuckles whitened around the furry wheel. “I’m goin’ off my rocker!”
    “You just now figurin’ that one out? Kidnappin’ me is bad enough, but your ass is gonna be in a crack for shootin’ Miss Grace! What if you’d killed her?”
    “Shut up.” Little beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. His eyes kept ticking back and forth from the rearview mirror to the winding road ahead. The black car was lost for a few seconds behind a curve, and then I saw Midnight Mona slide around it and come out of a shadow, barreling after us. The sun was dull on the black paint and the tinted windshield. The Chevy was on the high side of seventy; Midnight Mona had to be doing near ninety.
    “There’s where it happened!” Lainie pointed at a place off the roadside, the wind whipping the hair around her strained and lonely face. “That’s where my baby got killed!”
    She was pointing at a place that might’ve just looked like weeds and thick underbrush, except two dead and blackened trees stood side by side, their trunks cut by deep and ugly gashes. The limbs of the trees were interlocked, as if embracing each other even in death.
    I looked at her blond hair, and I remembered it.
    Hers was the head I had seen resting on the shoulder of Little Stevie Cauley, a long time ago in the Spinnin’ Wheel’s parking lot.
    “Look out!” Lainie suddenly screamed, and she grabbed for the wheel as a tractor-trailer truck roared over a hill in front of us, its grille filling Big Dick’s windshield like a mouthful of silver teeth. Donny had been watching Midnight Mona grow in the rearview mirror, and he shouted