The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [94]
Sitting at the stoplight, having fled his home and his job and his family in a panic, Wayne wondered what he had been thinking, chasing after a girl like Canada Gold, who was frequently, at least to his eyes, the best-looking girl in the room.
He followed the teenagers another mile down the strip and watched them turn into the large, empty parking lot of a chain grocery store. Sitting on the hoods of half a dozen old cars were all the kids Wayne knew from his own high school days—the gearheads and the bad girls and the bored girls—stuck in a town built to entertain people older than they were. One kid was changing his oil. Another, who had a mustache and a muscle shirt, was waving a broken radio antenna, chasing a giggling ponytailed girl around an old green Impala.
Wayne parked a nonthreatening distance away, across thirty or so faded diagonal parking lines. He grabbed the entire contents of the glove compartment and stepped out of the car. He opened the trunk to see if it contained anything useful or incriminating. A baseball cap and glove and bat from a softball game several months ago. “You have to change everything,” Peter had said. “If you always eat Arby’s, stop eating Arby’s. If you don’t have a beard, grow one. If you have a beard, shave it. If you never wear hats, start wearing them.”
He put on the cap but ignored the bat, which could be useful but also menacing. Then he backed away from his beloved Mustang, driver’s door open, car running. When he knew the kids were watching, he threw up his hands and backed away slowly, into the darkness, under the overpass, toward the highway.
32
BOBBY’S FINGERS were cramped into talons and it felt like the seat of the ancient copper-colored Caprice with the muni plates had grown a malicious knuckle just to press it into his back. He’d started a cigarette south of Madison Street, finally admitting to himself that he’d never really quit in the first place. Cigarettes and he just needed a little time away from each other and now he discovered that making up with them was one of the most intensely pleasurable things he had ever done. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the enabler of his habit pull on her niche-brand Camel from a hot-pink pack, and as her smoke kissed his in the air between them he wondered if any decision concerning this evening’s sleeping arrangements had already been made in her head.
“Sorry about the car.”
“Yeah, it is kind of coppy,” she said, picking up the mouthpiece to the nonfunctioning old radio that a force-employed mechanic hadn’t yet uninstalled from the dash. The car had no air-conditioning and the wet night air was north of eighty degrees. He could feel the sweat pooling uncomfortably between his back and the vinyl seat.
“My ex-wife has my truck. Her car needs brakes and she has to get the kids to school and practice and lessons. Of course she has it for only ten minutes before she calls to complain that the battery light is going on and off.”
Della made it right with a smile.
They were headed to see this Burning Patrick guy play up in Lakeview. Bobby wore blue jeans and a tight blue golf shirt that properly displayed the topography of an upper body he had forged in the gym with a dabble of protein supplements. Bobby liked to take the streets, even though there was probably a quicker route from downtown on the Kennedy or Lake Shore Drive. Highways were for troopers. Streets were for cops.
Bobby liked being alone with her and he was in no hurry to get to the bar. He tapped the brakes at yellow lights instead of gunning through them. As a result, he and Della were more than an hour late and trapped at an endless red on Halsted when the lights went out with a long sigh, the blackout traveling north block by block—Armitage, Dickens, Webster,