Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [289]
Sure, they’ll mourn the passing of parents, a spouse, close friends.
They might suffer the depression of living a life of compromise.
Shit jobs. Marginalization. Termination. Resignation. Envy.
They’ll see wars on television—children pulled out from rubble in scorched, bullet-ridden rags, maimed and dead.
But they will not know gunning a young woman down on a tidal flat to save themselves. Won’t face the knowledge that they’re capable. How easily they’d do it. That the squalor of humanity, broadcast by grim robots on the evening news, abides also in them.
Their decency is a luxury, their violence sleeps for now, those whose monsters are car wrecks and cancer and the boredom of the suburbs, those who believe goodness is the prevailing station of our species. Their age of civilization and progress is a flicker in the dark eternity of violence.
Now light tinges the Outer Banks with a soft peach stain.
I watch a fisherman wade out into the warm surf.
Gulls are crying, Nags Head waking, that delicate hour of the morning gone as the Earth turns into the sun’s dominion, a cuticle of pink fire peeking over the edge of the sea.
# # #
I climb into bed and spoon Vi. She stirs. I stroke her yellow hair, still damp from last night’s bath, smelling faintly of that cheap motel conditioner.
"Oh, Max," she murmurs. "I want to…yeah."
She turns over. Smiling. At peace.
When her eyes open, they die.
"I was dreaming."
"It was a nice one."
"Yeah. You shaved. I like it."
She sits up, crawls to the end of the bed, and peers down at her son.
"Where’d you go this morning, Andy?"
"Down to the beach. Watched the sun come up."
"I didn’t think you were coming back. Thought that’s how you were going to do it. Just slip away, back to your paradise."
I hear the baby’s soft cry. Vi leans down, lifts him up.
"Are you hungry, little baby boy?" she coos.
Vi slides off the bed and comes to her feet, standing there in panties and undershirt, Max groping at her breasts.
"I’m ready, Andy," she says.
"Ready?"
"To go home."
# # #
I drive 64 west, over the long bridges that span the sounds of Roanoke and Croaton and the Alligator River. We rise and rise above the ocean. The flatness of the coastal plain gives way to rolling pasture and forest, the consistency of the soil turning from sand to rich red clay, those toothpick pines of the eastern swamps now crowded and lost among maple and hickory.
It feels strange to be inland. The farther from the sea we run, the Outer Banks seem more like afterimages of dreams. It would be so easy and comforting to find atonement in the remoteness and disorientation of our imprisonment. I glance at Vi, wondering if she’ll coax the last nine months and what she did on Portsmouth into donning the aura of a brutal fantasy, one more nightmare to repress.
At four o’clock, we skirt the south side of Raleigh and bore westward, across Jordan Lake, through Pittsboro, Siler City, and Ramseur. We enter the town of Lexington as the sun balances on the horizon, so blinding I can scarcely see the road.
"You hungry?" I ask, catching Vi’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
She sits in the back nursing Max.
"I could eat."
"Best barbeque joint on the planet is just ahead. How about we stop there? Besides, the car’s running hot."
"Fine. I need to change Max anyway."
I pull the Kites’ Impala into the crowded parking lot of Lexington Barbeque # 1.
We walk together, like a family, to the back of the line that snakes out of the front doors.
"Whole fuckin’ town’s here tonight," Vi says.
"Yeah, well, it’s what they call good eatin’."
The evening is muggy and clear, and the hickory-fueled fire inside the kitchen spits the sweetest-smelling smoke up the chimney and out into the cooling night, no greater tease in the world if you’re hungry.
As we inch toward the doors, I glance