Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [4]
“Yeah, but you’d miss me too much.”
He was being sarcastic, but I would miss him if he left.
We burned the rest of the daylight getting to Ritzville. Once we stopped for gas and Odd offered to take over, but I wasn’t feeling at all tired. Anyway, it was easier for me to drive than just to sit. We used the facilities at the gas station and he crawled into the back and fell right to sleep, to one of his “Driving-in-the-lonely-night” tapes.
He snored, softly at first, a comforting sound to me, really. It reminded me of Connors, when we used to sleep in the same bed, and of Nelson, when he lived at home and I would check on him. But as Odd’s sleep deepened his snores became unsettled, harsh, jagged. A leg kicked out. Both of his arms shot out and folded over his head like a protective cowl, and then his breathing just stopped. I youkst the rearview mirror for a better look. Hell, he wasn’t breathing. He was thirty-two, -three, how could he just stop breathing? I was about to pull to the side of the road and administer CPR, when his lips puffed out with spent air and he started breathing again. “You never knew,” he said in his sleep, as though talking over fences to someone two backyards away. “It’s time.”
I killed the music and drove on, keeping one eye on the road, one eye on him. He slept like that, repeating the pattern. I began to count slowly whenever he stopped breathing…one, two, three…nine, ten…fifteen, sixteen…and then a violent puff of air.
He went on like that ‘til we made Moses Lake, where they interned the Japanese-Americans during World War Two.
“Odd? Odd? Odd?”
I kept calling his name, softly, until he awoke.
“Odd, do you know you do stuff in your sleep?”
“I do?”
“Big time. You kick out your legs and throw back your arms. Worst of all, you hold your breath. Woi Yesus, how does anybody sleep with you?”
As good-looking as he was, the question was rhetorical.
“I don’t sleep too well.”
“That’s an understatement, if I just got a sample.”
“Everybody’s got something,” he said.
“Ain’t you tired during the day?”
“Sometimes. But my judgment’s clear.”
“No one said it wasn’t. Don’t get all defensive.”
“I’m just saying I can do my job.”
“I know that. But you could do with a medical check-up on the sleeping thing. You could pay for it yourself, so there’s no insurance record.”
“I’m fine, don’t worry about me.”
“Okay, deal. You don’t worry about me neither.”
“Why would I worry about you?”
“Just don’t.”
We hit a hatch of boonda bugs, which smeared the windshield opaque. The window washer couldn’t keep up with it, so I pulled to the side and waited them out. To clean the windshield I had to sacrifice half a bottle of my Calistoga Springs water. I always have a bottle of water at my side because I need continual irrigation or I will spontaneously combust. I drank the other half, and we went to opposite sides of the road and watered the weeds.
No way was I going to turn over the wheel. By now I was tired, but at least I was awake. We got back into the car and motored on.
“You didn’t have any ‘Taking-a-piss-by-the-side-of-the-road-music’?” I said.
“I’ll look for some.”
We passed the long misery that lay between Moses Lake and Ellensburg in silence. I went into the right side of my brain, or is it the left? I’m never sure. Anyway, that side where whatever happens has no reason. I had some imaginary glimpses of Nelson aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, standing inspection on the flight deck in his dress blues.
“This Houser guy, did he have a record?” Odd said, breaking the silence and my reverie.
“No. Just a victim of love, or something.”
“Do you think he knew he was doing something wrong? I mean, do you think it bothered him?”
I thought he was legally sane, that was enough for me. Not for Odd.
“Wouldn’t he know that in the end it would hurt them both, that it would end in pain and sorrowful stuff?”
A stiff prick has no conscience, I reminded him.
Rather than laugh, as most guys would, he only seemed to think