“Why?” I said.
“Because,” he said, “I think I want to give myself up.”
“Well, maybe you can give yourself up to me. But why would you want to do that?”
“Because,” he said, “I think I killed some folks.”
I looked back down the road to where the dust was settling. “Back there?” I said.
He looked over his shoulder very slowly and nodded. “Yup, back there.” The wind went high again and the dust was thick.
“How long ago?” I said.
He closed his eyes. “Some time during the last few weeks.”
“Folks?” I said. “Killed? How many?”
He opened his eyes and his eyelashes quivered. “Four, no, five. Yeah, five people, dead now. Good riddance. Do I give myself up to you?”
I hesitated because something was wrong. “This is too easy. You’ve got to say more.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know how to tell you, but I’ve been driving this road for a long time. Gotta be years.”
Years, I thought. That’s how I felt too, that he’d been driving for years.
“And then what?” I said.
“These people sort of got in the way. One of them looked like my pa and the other looked like my ma when she was very young and the third one looked like my brother, but he’s long dead. I used to have another brother and sister, and they were there too. It was so damned strange.”
“Five people?” I said. And my mind went back to the days behind and the five people I’d found on the road between Kansas City and Oklahoma. “Five?”
He nodded. “That’s it.”
“Well,” I said, “what had they done? Why would you want to kill them?”
“They was just on the road,” he said. “I don’t know how they got there, but the way they dressed and the way they looked, I knew something was wrong and I had to stop and fix each one, make them drop forever. I just had to do it.” He looked at his hands on the steering wheel, which were clenched tight.
“Hitchhikers?” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said. “Something worse. Hitchhikers are okay, they’re going somewhere. But these folks, they were just poachers I guess. Claim jumpers, criminals, robbers of some sort. It’s hard to say.” He looked back down the road again where the dust was beginning to stir up just a bit.
“Do you ever come out of church Sunday noon, feeling clean, like you had another chance for who knows what, and you stand there, reborn, with folks happy unto joy, as the preacher says, and then in the midst of noon folks from across town drive up in their dark suits and undertake you, I mean undertake your happiness with their demon smiles, and you stand there with your folks and feel the joy just melt away like a spring thaw and when they see they’ve undertook your joy they drive away in their own kind of sinful undertaking of happiness?”
The driver stopped, added up the sums inside his eyelids, and at last let his breath out. “Ain’t that a sort of, I don’t know, kind of—” He searched and found the word. “Blasphemy?”
I waited, thought, and said, “That’s the word.”
“We weren’t doing nothing, just standing there, fresh out of the revival, and they just came by and undertook us.”
“Blasphemy,” I said.
“I was only ten, but that was the first time in my life I wanted to grab a hoe and rake their smiles. And you stand there, feeling naked. They’ve stolen your Sunday best. Don’t you think I got a right to just say give back, hand over, I’ll take that coat, shuck off those pants and the hat too, yeah, the hat?”
“Five people,” I said. “An older man, a woman, a younger man, and two kids. That sounds familiar.”
“Then you know what I’m saying. They were wearing those clothes. It’s funny, the clothes they were wearing, it looked like they had been through the Dust Bowl, stayed there a long time, and maybe lived out in the open and slept at night with the wind blowing and their clothes getting full of dust and their faces sort of getting thin and I looked at each one and I said to the older man, ‘You’re not my pa.’ And the old man couldn’t answer. I looked at the woman and said, ‘You’re not my ma,’ and she didn’t answer either. And I looked at my brother and my other younger brother and sister and said, ‘I don’t know any of you. You look right, but you feel wrong. What are you doing on this road?’ Well, they didn’t say anything. They was kind of, I don’t know, ashamed maybe, but they wouldn’t get out of the way. They were standing in front of the car, and I knew if I didn’t do something they wouldn’t let me go on to Oklahoma City. So you know what I did?”
“Put a stop to them,” I said.