He stood close. “Got a cot, though. For the night.” He put one mottled hand on the windowsill. He opened his mouth. She thought he meant it as a smile. It came out a leer. She shook her head, took a glance at Serena. Let down her guard.
It happened fast. He leaned inside the truck as much as he could, the arm and his face, shouted in her ear something insane, and reached across her for the gun. Serena had both hands on its barrel, clenched it tight, and leaned as far from him as she could get. He did his best to wrench it from her, but couldn’t quite reach it. His hand pawed empty air like a claw.
Nana clenched her other hand, the one close to the window, into a fist and drove her knuckles hard into the sagging jowls of the guy’s chin with all her strength. He grunted, hacked. Lost his breath. Stepped back just long enough to give Serena time to get her trigger finger in place and raise it in his direction.
He put up his hands as if under arrest and backed a step away from the truck. “No problem,” he said.
Serena kept the gun pointed his way. “Bad move, Buster,” she said, as calm as Nana, who ached to take the weapon from her. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Nana said. She could see hate in his eyes.
“Bitch,” he said. “Just want a good time. You got to be lonely for it too.” He murmured something in a voice he must have thought was sweet and seductive and leaned toward her again.
She stared at him, dumbfounded. “What part of ‘Don’t be stupid’ don’t you understand? Back away.”
The man’s hand reached under his plaid shirt. He got his pistol out of its holster. He was slow, though, as if the thing weighed more than he expected. Serena, holding her own gun steady, setting it up with both hands the way Nana had taught her, shot him twice, once in the chest and a second time higher up in the forehead when the gun kicked.
“We got him!” she shouted. “Got him, Nana!” Without thinking she gave the weapon to her grandmother, whose ears were ringing so awful that she was deaf. “Bull’s-eye!” Serena shouted. “Bull’s-eye!”
Her eyes gleamed manic.
The guy lay twitching on the cracked concrete beside the car like a wounded deer next to the roadway, his arms splayed out on either side of him, his eyes wide, the smell of gun smoke filling the cab. Nana tried to catch her breath. Her ears rang. She was shaking, but she started up the truck. She kept it in park. Pointing the gun toward the body, now lying still in a growing mess of blood, she stepped out, leaving open the truck’s door, and kicked away his weapon. She bent down and laid a finger across the inside of one of his wrists. She still had the shakes. There was no pulse. She reached in a pocket of his plaid shirt and took back her money, stared past the pumps into the dark inside of his office.
“Nana!” Serena shouted loud enough for her to hear. It shocked away her trance. “Let’s vamoose!” It was still a game to Serena, high as a kite on adrenaline. It would be a hard night when it faded and the shakes paid a visit.
Nana grabbed the man’s gun and hopped into the truck.
She stared into the rearview mirror as she pulled into the street. Main Street was quiet. Nobody in sight. As they drove, she said anything that popped into her head. “No more gas from Goat Hollow.” She babbled nonsense. Her head felt stretched, as if her brainpan dripped oil. The tinnitus in her ears sounded like a loud bell that wouldn’t stop ringing.
Serena shivered too, the way one person’s yawn can be contagious, and smiled. “Nana,” she said, a slur in her voice as if drunk, “it had to happen sooner or later. Now I don’t have to guess what it’s like.” She smiled. “It felt good, Nana. It felt good to me. We had to do it, Nana, didn’t we? We had to do it. We had no choice!”
She said it like a squawk. Nana heard that much, at least, though she could barely make out the words through the ringing in her ears. It was an astonishing thing for a ten-year-old to say.
“It was him or us, Nana. That troll got exactly what he deserved.”
“He dealt the play,” Nana agreed, remembering a phrase from a book. “You did what you had to do. He dealt the play.” She felt the shakes coming on and thought she might have to stop driving, but she knew distance from Goat Hollow was their best friend. “I’m proud of you. Very proud.”
“Kill or be killed, Nana,” Serena said with pride. She had already regained equilibrium. It seemed impossible. Either that or she was quietly hysterical.
Was that it, then? The future? Kids with guns and sharp swords?
The two of them shouted out whatever came to mind—a call and response that kept them high, like sports fans shouting out cheers with energy that ebbed fast, at least for Nana, until they reached the interstate. Dread traveled with her, a companion she wanted to acknowledge but didn’t. So did a fly. It buzzed in the car and couldn’t be caught.
“Shoo fly,” Serena shouted. She swatted at it and laughed maniacally. “Nana,” she said, almost unable to speak through her laughter, “what’s good for the goose” . . . her laughter came like a cascade of gelatinous oil dripping from a crankshaft every time she tried to continue. . . “Nana, what’s good for the goose is good for the baba ghanoush!” She repeated the sentence in full a dozen times, cackling with each performance. It had been made famous by two standup comics in Fargo who called themselves Frankenstein and Faust. Nana hadn’t realized Serena had ever heard the phrase, or of them. Life goes on.
There was no going back. Nana understood that. It was Serena’s first kill.
When they had sobered up, when they settled somewhere for the night, the day’s kill impossible to erase, there might be wailing, there might be the gnashing of teeth. Surely what had happened so quickly would return, a haunting, to fill her granddaughter with dark knowledge.
Or could she put it aside the ways kids do? Was that the way it was now?
Nana, though she could still hear the gunshots, smell the singe of powder in the car, was already working on the problem. A silence came between them. Nana felt inner darkness enshroud her like sticky humidity on a muggy day. It is what it is, she thought, a sentence so completely empty of meaning that it gave her comfort.
“Why can we see the moon during the day?” Serena said, back to herself. It sounded unreal. From a cold-blooded defender of womanhood to a confused child at the speed of light. “Does that mean something’s wrong with the sky? Tell me, Nana. Tell me!”
The sun was dim, the moon visible in daylight. An odd sight. A comfort.
“It’s a children’s moon,” Nana said.
Serena, relieved that there was an answer at hand, offered a puzzled look. “You mean like a naked moon?”
She had already put behind her, at least for the moment, what she had done. And the emotional consequences, Nana reminded herself, to kill a person and not reduce them in memory to nothing but scum. Just a sign of the times, maybe. We’ll talk that out later. For now, she was just grateful she could hear again. “It’s called that because in the old days kids couldn’t stay up nights to study the moon. This one, though, it’s there for all to see.” Nana’s mood lifted. “Emotions are like clouds,” she said. “If you wait them out—” She stopped speaking, catching up with herself. The fly buzzed again in the car, or was that the tinnitus after the gunshots?
Serena swatted at it. Nana opened the front windows and a cold, bracing wind blew through the compartment.
“Is it gone?” Nana said. “Did we get it?”
“A fly in the ointment,” Serena said. She giggled and couldn’t stop. “A fly! In the ointment!”
Nana buzzed up the windows and thought with an ache of Ava, her daughter, Serena’s mother, who had grown ferociously angry at what the world had become; at what men did to women, to the land, to each other. For Ava it was all savagery and anger and addiction. Butchery, treachery. Save us from sickness, Nana thought, from accidents, from addictions. Protect us from the longing we have to damage ourselves.
Her own first husband had been a drunk and child beater. Dead now. Good riddance. At least I had some time with Martin. He was a good man. Something to remember aside from the wars, the Marauders and Militias, the plagues, the rising seas, the mass migrations, the pandemics that found their way from birds to pigs to humans.
Nana felt her rage rise. All brought about by men. Her granddaughter had shot a man dead, done what had to be done. That couldn’t be taken back, but in a hundred years, who would care? Women do things too—to other women, to children, and of course to men—but it’s men who attack and attack and attack. The one who had taken Ava, who wanted Serena alive because she was worth good money if he could make her grandmother dead. Where was he? Where was Ava? Was she still in his clutches?
She drove. And remembered Martin Gonzalez. He had been a good man.
Maybe it was time to stop waiting for Ava and leave the Dakotas for good, see if Tulsa was safe like they said. Big stone buildings with Art Deco swirls on them and a police force that protects and serves, rumor had it. What a novelty that would be. She liked the sound of the word: “Tulsa.”
