The Ranger - Ace Atkins [1]
He figured nobody plans being away for that long, but when you join up at eighteen and earn your tab just before September 11th, a soldier can keep pretty damn busy. He tried to recall the last time he’d seen his mother (not caring if he ever saw his father again), and wondered about his sister who hadn’t called him in two Christmases. At home there was an ex-girlfriend who’d dumped him not long after basic and good friends he hadn’t spoken to in years.
He turned up the radio, a Johnny Cash version of a classic Western ballad. Quinn knew the song by heart but loved hearing it every time.
The old truck ran at seventy on a steady ribbon of blacktop unfolding from hill to hill, a path cut through endless forest that once had been traveled by horse and wagon, Tibbehah County being one of the most remote counties in North Mississippi.
After years of marching and maneuvers, sitting still seemed odd to him, although at rest he could fall asleep at will and wake up just as fast. The Regiment had whittled him down to a wiry, muscular frame built for speed, surprise, chaos, and violence. His hair was cut in the standard high and tight, not even an inch thick on top and shaved on the sides, making his face seem even more chiseled in the rearview mirror, sharp angles thanks to a Choctaw grandmother about a hundred years back mixed with the hard Scotch-Irish who settled the South.
The truck’s heater was cranked, and Quinn’s hand was on the wheel, sitting comfortably in a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. In the ashtray he kept a half of a dead cigar that he’d smoked about a hundred miles back with some bad coffee. The trip was only five hours, but it was a hell of a long time alone with your thoughts.
Another bend, another curve on the highway, and there was a speck in the light. He touched the brakes—finding them a lot less tight than the salesman had promised—thinking the speck was a spooked deer or a dog but then seeing it was the bare back of a woman, turning on long spindly legs and caught in his high beams.
He shanked the steering wheel to the right, the truck coming within an arm’s reach of the hair rushing across her blank face. He was in a ditch and stuck, back wheels spinning into mud.
Quinn got out and tromped over to the girl, still standing there on the double yellow line, her breath audible against the quiet of the motor and hot ticking of the engine. There were cows calling from some place across a barbed-wire fence, and a train whistled far off. A lonesome midnight moon glowed, and Quinn called to the girl, just spotting a logging truck cresting the hill. He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the shoulder, finding her face in his truck’s headlight.
“You okay?”
She nodded.
“What the hell you doing in the middle of the road?”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You didn’t hear my truck?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Shit, I about killed you.”
The girl wore cowboy boots, a miniskirt, and a sequined halter top busting at the stomach. The girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen or sixteen, was blond and light-eyed. She had tight curly hair, a small upturned nose, and was well on her way with child.
“You from here?” he asked.
She shook her head, breath clouding in the cold.
“I’d give you a ride, but—”
She said it didn’t matter and turned away, and kept walking south.
Quinn hopped back in the truck and cranked the ignition, the F-150 older than him kicking to life, and he knocked it in four-wheel drive just for the hell of it, thinking he’d never get out of that ravine. But the tires spun, and it lurched forward a foot and then five feet, and he was back on the road, following the girl. He let down his side window, slowly, and told her to get in.
She