What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [57]
Dan’s black Ford pickup stared at her, parked lengthwise, its one visible headlight a wary eye. It sat there like a still but breathing animal. The truck spooked her, a dark hulk in the empty space of their parking lot, and Arlene had to step away from the door, a foolish fear of the truck somehow turning on and idling there. It reminded her of falling asleep in front of the television set and waking up to static that unnerved her, filled her with a shaky dread as she rose from the armchair and moved toward the set, deeper toward the source of her irrational fear, just to turn the thing off.
Sooner or later an officer would indeed come and park his patrol car in front of her house, stepping out with questions. The truck sat out there with the inevitable answers. She wondered what was in it, why Dan wanted her to dispose of it. She pictured herself driving it east of Bakersfield, on any of the roads that headed out on big, easy asphalt, then meandered into swerving, near-single-lane passages that hardly anybody traveled. Not this time of year, with fog and sometimes even snow in those hills if a cold front came in hard. Those were summer roads, roads for fishing spots along the creek, bass and trout making their way down the Sierra, picked off all along the way until only the lowly catfish survived. The hills blazed with dry grass but by winter went green again and even muddy, the tree trunks rich with moss. Hardly anybody went up there, just the locals who knew the roads. No guardrails to stop a vehicle from plummeting down into the ravines that grew deeper and deeper as the hills gradually turned into mountain.
She could see herself doing it.
She could see herself driving the truck up there, the hairpin turns of those roads. Far up there. Ten miles, maybe, of that kind of driving, then pulling over and turning off the engine. And then what? A box of matches and a jug of gasoline? Would the truck explode? She could see it, the truck blooming in flame, consumed. Would anybody hear it, the echo of the blast, somebody looking east and seeing an odd orange glow over there in the mountains way before dawn? The orange tip of her brother’s cigarette glowed when he puffed, its blaze a signal that he didn’t want to talk anymore, just listen. Would the truck burn itself out, or would the flames leap over to the grass, the damp winter containing it? What then, with a ten-mile walk back to town? How long would that take, especially in this cold, her hands huddled around her elbows, her feet against the asphalt in thin shoes? The little girl in her childhood picture book walked all that way. But how impossible! Five miles, then? Three? Just far enough away from the eastern edge of Bakersfield, at the beginning of the hill slopes, far enough away to slip the truck into neutral and steer it over the side of a ravine, out of sight of the road.
For what? It was nothing she had done. She had no lies to conceal. She knew where Dan was headed. Only south. And that was logical. Over to Los Angeles to hide in that enormous city. Over to San Diego. To Tijuana and everything she’d heard about its teeming, ugly life.
She didn’t even know what he’d done, really.
The truck stared back at her, and she stood on the porch for a long moment, the way she had stood in the early morning hallway of her house when her brother had returned. She had been waiting for answers back then. Right in front of her, the truck held them. She went back into the house to wrap herself tight in a housecoat, and she slipped on a pair of Keds. She walked down the porch stairs, the truck beckoning like a