THE EVENING WASN’T over. After Grady drove away, I spotted a black boxlike sedan parked among the cedar and pine trees bordering the gulley that wound through the campground. A heavyset man in a fedora was behind the wheel. He raised a pair of binoculars to his face.
“Don’t turn around,” I said.
“What is it?” Valerie said.
“The car we saw outside the theater is parked by the trees. A guy is looking at us through binoculars.”
“The one with the camera?” she said.
“I can’t be sure.”
“You’re talking about those hit men?” Loren said, his eyes riveted on mine.
“Just one. The guy in the car,” I said. “That’s the car we saw outside a theater with a guy in it who took our picture.”
“You’re sure it’s the car?” Loren said.
“There’s no doubt about it.”
Then the man behind the wheel made a mistake. He put down the binoculars and lit a cigarette, the flame flaring on his face. Just before he flicked away the match, he turned and looked straight at me and I saw his wide-set eyes and the coarseness in his skin, the fingers that resembled sausages.
In spite of my admonition, Loren turned around. Then he looked back at me. “That’s the guy?”
“I’d bet on it.”
“Start your heap,” he said.
“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t do it,” I said.
“Thinking makes my head hurt.”
“The cops will send you to Huntsville, Loren,” Valerie said. “If they don’t kill you first.”
“They’re not interested in fender benders,” he said.
“Fender benders?” Valerie said.
Loren walked away, spinning a key ring on his finger.
I COULD HAVE STOPPED him. I didn’t want to see him hurt or beat up by the cops or sent to a mainline prison, although I didn’t know that any of those things would happen. I guess I respected him too much to stand in his way.
But I tried. “Loren! Come on back! A lot of people inside want to talk to you! I’m going to call Biff Collie! I’m not kidding you, I know him!”
I suspect I sounded like a fool, shouting about a local disk jockey. Valerie put her hand on my arm and squeezed it. “Let him go. It’s just Loren’s way. That’s why he’s not like the others.”
My father said that those who are crucified usually seek their fate, because it is only after we murder them that we make them our light bearers. I hoped Loren wasn’t trying to find his own set of hammer and nails. He got behind the wheel of his bus and began revving the engine. With the door open, he backed in a semicircle, straightened out, aimed in the outside mirror, and floored the accelerator.
It was beautiful to watch. The bus whined in reverse across the grass, swaying and bouncing over the bumps, bearing down on the man in the boxlike sedan. At first the man seemed unable to grasp what was happening. Then his mouth opened in dismay and he recoiled backward as though a wrecking ball were swinging into his face. The impact flattened the doors and running board and front fender and tilted the car halfway over. Then the car fell back on all four tires, the front windshield bursting like crushed ice on the hood.
Loren shifted into first, straightened out, then backed the bus into the sedan again and began pushing it in bulldozer fashion over the rim of the gulley. The sedan tipped sideways and slid down the embankment in a cloud of dust and landed in the water. People began running from the building and the parking area. The driver of the sedan crawled up the opposite embankment, his shoes digging for purchase in the dirt, his fedora gone, exposing his tight gray haircut. He grabbed a tree root and pulled himself onto flat ground, then got to his feet, his suit and dress shirt streaked with mud. He was a huge man, his cheeks swollen like a chipmunk’s, his neck ringed with fat. He stood still, as though making a decision, then disappeared into the cedar and persimmon trees, sticks and dead limbs breaking in his path.
Loren jumped down from the bus and ran to my heap. He piled into the backseat. “What are you waiting for?”
I couldn’t move. Neither could Valerie.
“Fire it up,” he said. “Time to boogie.”
Valerie shook my arm. “He’s right. Let’s go, Aaron. Snap out of it.”