Jane reached in the Ford’s open door and grabbed the crowbar.
Then he did it. He swung that belt at Momma, so it made a wide, whooshing arc, slowed-down, like he was pitching side-armed, slapping her skin with a crack, releasing her scream.
His face was lit up, his arm muscles popping like a cartoon bully.
She knew he wasn’t finished.
Momma looked straight at Jane and yelled, “Come on!”
“Come on” wasn’t enough to make her do what she did next. It was something new inside her own head that did it. Not a voice exactly, but a force, a great surge, a sparking, an ignition—a loud, crackling static—shocking her to action.
She swung the crowbar the way Daddy taught her to swing a bat, loose in her hands, stepping into it, aiming for his shoulder, connecting, maybe with his shoulder, maybe higher.
He fell in stages to his knees, his bloody hands and then his face to the dirt.
She felt a horrible amazement, like she’d chopped down a tree.
She dropped the crowbar and looked at Momma, thinking, Oh my God.
The inside of her head was quiet again.
Then she thought, Is this it? Is this the something?
She was washed with shame at thinking that now.
“We ain’t got much time,” Momma said. “Let’s get rid of him.”
Not get him to a doctor to fix him up, when his breath was so ragged Jane was sure it would stop. Momma’d moved to next steps.
“Take him up Jiboom, to I Street, down 99.” She waved her arm toward the Golden State Highway, half the north-south double barrier, along with the Southern Pacific tracks, separating them from the nice people. “Go south of Galt. Leave him on the shoulder. We’ll say he’s gone for a gig.”
Her idea was so complete.
“Let’s go, before the sheriff gets here.”
He’d be coming for Jane and Daddy, the criminals in this situation.
Momma got a rope from the car and tied his hands in back. She was good at knots. She grabbed a quilt from the pile and spread it next to Daddy—“C’mon!”
Uno lay behind them, his chest rising irregularly, each breath a plea—Save me.
Jane had to choose right then, so she did. She chose Momma.
She bent with her to roll Daddy onto the quilt, grabbing its short end so they could drag him to the car. She knew the system. They’d done this before, getting Daddy, passed out, from where he shouldn’t be to where he was supposed to be. Still, he was heavy and Momma was huge and they struggled. They had to stop and rest repeatedly, laying the blanket down in the dirt, watching it rise and fall with his breath, and then picking it up again.
When they got to the Ford, Momma unwrapped him and told Jane to sit him up, reach under his armpits, and grab his wrists, which she did. Momma crossed his ankles and put both legs over her shoulder, dangling over her belly. “One, two, three,” she said, and they stood and lifted him at once into the back seat, their joined breath making the car’s air thick. They draped him over Jane’s hope chest, an Arkie Boys chorus loud on the radio—“This game, ain’t for losin’. I’m fix-in’ to win the next hand.”
Momma got out and pointed at the wheel, panting.
“You’re coming with me, right?” Jane asked.
Momma rolled her fist on the side of her belly. “I’ll handle things here. You go on.”
SHE’D only ever driven a car for an hour, two years before, when she was fifteen, when they still had the Studebaker, Daddy narrating instructions the whole way. He didn’t repeat that driving lesson after she ran off the road into a tree stump outside Marysville, requiring a week’s labor to fix the front end. He said she drove like a girl, like he forgot what she was. She could kill him this night just by putting him in the back seat of a car she was driving. But she got into the driver’s seat and laid her hands on the wheel.
Momma came around to her window and passed her the bloody crowbar.
“In case he wakes up,” she said.
Jane dropped it on the floorboard. She wasn’t going to use it again.
She closed her eyes and then opened them before doing what Daddy said back then—“Pull back on the emergency brake, Jujee. Now push the spark control all the way up, all the way. Pull the hand throttle halfway down. That’s it. Now turn the gas valve open. Turn the choke control valve full clockwise, wait! Now back off a quarter turn. Okay, turn the ignition switch on. Push in the clutch and put the transmission in neutral. Now pull the choke control out. Almost there. Turn the engine over three revolutions—choke in on the third.”
The engine started.
“Push the throttle lever up and the left lever all the way down. Push the accelerator pedal. Now turn the choke control.”
A hot breeze blew through the window, sprinkling ragweed pollen on the front seat, making Jane cough.
She backed up in a jerk, stalling.
She started over, did it all again, finally turning Uno’s car around, off the levee, onto Jiboom, to I Street, to the two-lane highway, gripping hard when a truck passed, headlights shining on roadside trees, branches reaching overhead to grab at each other, Daddy’s gargly breath behind her.
“Thirty miles. Pull him out of the car. Untie his hands. Drive home.” She whispered it over and over as she drove past vinegar-smelling canneries, tomato fields, ripe, tangy cattle, orchard stumps like headstones. “Thirty miles. Pull him out of the car. Untie his hands. Drive home.”
When they were nearly to Galt, his face rose up into the rearview mirror like a ghost, causing her to jump. The car swerved off the road onto gravel before she could straighten it out again, back onto the asphalt. Her ribs ached with fear.
“Stop the car. I gotta throw up.” His voice was rough and slurry, the ends of his words chopped off.
Should she? No. She couldn’t stop.
“Go ahead, Daddy. It’s okay.”
He doubled over, gagging onto the floorboard.
“Stop the car,” he repeated, craning to wipe his mouth on the seat back. “I’ll drive.”
“I’ll stop soon.”
“Come on! I don’t blame you, what happened back there.”
Was that true? Did he blame her?
In the rearview she saw the blood all over his neck and face and shoulders. Under the blood, his skin was chalk white. Looked like he was missing a tooth on the bottom.
She felt something strong but didn’t know what to call it.
“You was acting on instinct. I know. But we gotta get back there now. ’Fore Uno steals everything’.”
His eyes looked loose, like each one saw something different.
“I don’t think we’d better.”
“Girl, I got this. I’m in my right mind now. I can fix things up. Your momma shouldn’ta put this on your shoulders.”
Everything was always on her shoulders.
“Let’s get back, fix it up.”
His whole face looked wrong, his flexing jaw muscles, his flaring nostrils. A melted mask of a face.
The skin near Jane’s ear pulsed. “I don’t think so.”
“Whassat?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
He waited before answering. “You talking like that to your daddy?”
He wasn’t acting like a daddy. What kind of family would they be if she took him back? She couldn’t fake that hard now.