The Sheltering: A Novel

PART TEN����������������������������������������

PART ten 299 NOT A COP. A GODDAMN ABUSIVE rent-a-cop, Donny told Bobby. A rabble-rousing woman-abusing narc son of a bitch. The real cop came that afternoon , a deputy that pulled beneath the island at a gas station in southern Utah. The whole thing unfolded in a series of regrettable missteps: their noticing him, his noticing their notice, the sudden awareness that these two grizzled men, the rumpled clothes, the eyes red-fused and tight, were the same two he’d seen that morning on television and again on the APB he had surely read. The gas station was an old country feed-and-seed. Beef jerky and red hots. Cash or check only. Donny shot the deputy through his gray duty shirt before he could put his hand to his holster. Only his eyes had lit. His eyes had killed him. Donny started the truck and pulled onto the highway, the pistol on the seat between them. And it wasn’t that it happened so fast, Bobby thought. It was that it happened with such finality. “I want you to listen,” Donny said calmly. “I mean listen good, brother.” They rode another ten miles before he spoke again. “You gotta carry this back with you,” Donny said. “We’re not going back.” “You gotta explain things to the world.” But there was no more explaining than there was going back. There was only this final act, the trail of bodies in their wake that would terminate with their own. I can’t live through this again. They started on the pills as soon as they hit the state line. They were headed for the Grand Canyon. Donny hadn’t said it but it was clear enough—the only landscape big enough to encompass the act—and they wound slowly down Highway 89 past the Kaibab Indian Reservation toward the North Rim, Point Imperial , Point Sublime. The road was newly topped and cut through hills scratched with green scrub. The San Francisco peaks wavering on the horizon like dredged ghosts. 300 Donny eased off the gas. “Put Neil Young on,” Donny said. “Track seven.” Young began to sing Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armor . . . and Donny mumbled along. When it played through he skipped it back and played the song a second time, a third. There was nothing hurried now. It had played out. It was done. Bobby regretted the inevitable ending but he welcomed it too, so long in the offing, but now drawn near. Every second brings it a little closer, he thought, death. But that was always true, true for everyone. So why suffer it? Why complain ? He already knew what pain felt like. The only thing left was its management . He took whatever Donny gave him, washed it down with Gatorade. They were both flush with the day’s violence but cooling out too, awash on a pharmaceutical tide. It was all slowing down. It was all starting to make sense. “Just on our terms,” Donny said. “You hear what I’m saying? Every-fuckingthing has been on their terms. Our whole lives. This has to be on ours.” “I just don’t want any cameras,” Bobby said. “I don’t want him to see.” He meant his son. Donny nodded and started the song over. “That’s your terms then. That’s your last demand.” He took another pill. “We’ll have lights here in a minute.” But they didn’t, not yet. Just the big RVs and tour buses they would settle behind before slinging past, a brace of Harley Davidsons strung out over a quarter mile. Donny was chewing pills now, manic, his mouth a pale blue froth of Oxycontin and Tropical Mist Gatorade. He couldn’t stop talking. “You know what they did,” he said, “You know what they fucking did? They used you, you ever thought about that?” Bobby said nothing. They were nearing the Park gates. Ahead he could see traffic backed up, red taillights wavering. “They used you.” “No, they didn’t.” “They needed somebody to go in those caves. They needed somebody to smoke those turbaned motherfuckers out and you went, you did it.” “Slow down up here.” “Except you weren’t supposed to come back home. You were supposed to die a holy death so we could just settle it all with a parade. But then you came...