Driving Blind

JT’s sitting at a dark corner table in Carla’s and raises his arm to look at his wrist and make a point on my running late. The watch’s illumination lights the stubble on his face in a tight glow, and the house band starts into another one of those guitar-driven jams that never seem to go out of style. Timmy’s younger sister shakes her hips at the mike and smiles at me as I pass. I give her a nod, and think there’s another talented girl who’ll have to settle for whatever she can get. I motion to Carla for a beer and sit down across from JT.

The same thought that’s been playing through my head all day comes to me again and this time I give it voice. “I’ve never done anything illegal.” I push back the bill of my hat.

Carla picks that moment to deliver my beer. Her eyes widen. “What’s that, Sheriff?” She smirks because it’s still clever to address me in the manner of my new job title, and I wave her away. Discretion goes with her job. I can’t imagine all she’s heard and let go over the years.

JT blows smoke at me as if in warning which in this circumstance feels right. My father used to say “Your house: your rules,” and Carla’s Bar is, so to speak, definitely JT’s house. He smiles unamused, a smile that reminds me of mortar missing from a block wall. He has a large, flat face, with eyes black but sharp. He glances at the bar and starts laying out his pitch, a low risk job, a buyer he’s got lined up who’s also in for providing the semi to haul the tractors JT wants to steal. His mouth forms words and I have to force myself to concentrate. I ask him to repeat certain things. He smokes, eyes narrowing. At one point he seems confused like he can’t figure me, and I catch a glimpse of the picked-on boy he’d been, waiting for some punch line to get delivered at his expense. As a kid, he’d been mouthy in the manner of the rejected and outnumbered, those who fake not caring as a way of fighting back. Eventually though he learned to be quiet.

My friend Timmy believes that JT really doesn’t care. “That’s what makes him dangerous,” he whispered once to me back when I supervised them both at the plant where we all worked. I don’t know if I agree, but I watch myself around JT. I’ve been to his house, seen him with his family. His wife and kids all wear the same careful expression, like they don’t want to move across a room too loud or too fast. At the same time, I’ve never seen him in a real fight, or even heard him make a threat to anyone. Before the plant closed, he chauffeured me to work for two months after my car died. While I was saving to get the beater fixed, he never once gave me shit. Never even asked for a dollar.

He nods at the seat beside me. “What’s in the bag?”

His tone is conversational but I give him a look that says the topic’s none of his business. Inside is Jamie’s Mole. My son’s favorite thing in the world since he was five, a stuffed animal like from Wind in the Willows, which yesterday in a distracted state I grazed with the mower and damn near decapitated. I picked it up from Gwen’s Stuffed Animal Hospital on a last errand before coming into Carla’s, too late to have taken the thing to the car, but now I’m wishing I would’ve. I don’t want JT knowing any more details about my family than anyone knows from the fact of us all growing up together. I don’t even want Jamie’s name in his mouth.

JT shrugs. “I’m not doing this if you’re out. Call my guy, get yourself comfortable, and if you’re in, pick me up out back at ten. You don’t show, it’s no go, and no hard feelings.” He slides a scrap of paper across the table and I push it into my back pocket.

The band stops playing to go for a smoke, Timmy’s sister hopping down from the stage. She’s a few years younger, in her middle-twenties, but she’s rail thin and her eyes can take on a sunken look when she stops smiling. She runs into her brother coming in the front door. Timmy grabs her wrist and whispers into her face. She jerks her arm free, her nose wrinkled.

The door bounces closed after her. Timmy pauses, squinting, waiting for his bar eyes. He stands like he’s lost while traffic peels around him, then shuffles toward the counter. Though he’s my age, he walks like an old man, slowly, like his back is always stiff.

When Carla sees him coming she shakes her head and turns away. Everybody’s just waiting for Timmy to stumble in front of a passing semi or something. I’m sure Carla doesn’t want to be the last in line to have served him when the inevitable worst happens, and not just because of the liability. She’s a decent person.

The lights over the stage are dim and the jukebox clicks and whirs. Patsy Cline starts singing and I look down at my hands and listen, but Timmy spots me anyway.

JT finishes off his whiskey. “We can’t have him around.”

I swear there’s something about JT’s face that never changes. Like some fundamental expression has hardened under his bones. “Bar talk’s nothing,” I tell him.

JT leans back, and I can’t think of the last time I’ve seen him in good light.

Timmy performs a few scuffling dance steps to close the distance to our table, smiling his best. He pats JT’s shoulder. “Hey then, JT, Harry.”

JT shrugs Timmy’s hand away.

Timmy seems to wake up. “Hey then, that’s all right, that’s no problem.” He stuffs his hands into his pockets and stands there grinning.

I’ll die before I ever look like him. I know the power of rejection and feel bad for the thought but say, “Take off, Timmy.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Take off, or I’ll run you in for public intoxication.”

Timmy picks up on the tension and his eyes get some life to them. He slips a quick glance at JT, who’s holding his cigarette as if to study the glow of hot embers. Timmy slouches in my direction and steadies himself with his hands on the table. “You guys got something going, Harry?” His damp whisper carries on breath that’s rummy-sweet. “Cut me in, let me work for it. You know I’m –”

He yelps and jumps back, cradling his hand. JT drops his butt in the ashtray.

Timmy flinches and blinks, holding his hand to his chest inside his open jacket.

“Sorry about that,” JT says to Timmy. He slides from the booth and bends down and puts his arm around my shoulders. His white shirt is rumpled and I can smell his sweat. “Get rid of him.” His breath in my ear is hot.

He ambles to the bar, waves at Carla for another whiskey. Dale Neeley’s perched on a stool and JT pinches the back of Dale’s neck in his large hand, says something and Dale laughs.

Timmy stands looking after him, his face pale, wearing a denim jacket that looks two sizes too big. He was our running back in high school. He used to run over opposing players, turning back into the field to make contact instead of running out of bounds.

“That was stupid,” I say.

He sits down and shoots me a look of accusation. “Son of a bitch assaulted me.”

“It was an accident. You’re a mess.”

“You want to run someone in, you should run that son of a bitch in.”

I stand, drop a five on the table in front of him.

Timmy stares at the crumpled bill.

I touch his shoulder. “Have a good one, Timmy.”

In the car, I roll down the windows, take the back way home. It’s not a short cut exactly but more like my cut, a route that can sometimes elicit good feelings. Knowing something so well, even just old back roads, is something to be good at. I could make every turn on these roads by muscle memory, could practically take the curves blindfolded.

I turn off my lights and listen to the gravel crunch. Pass the tree, still scarred, where back in ’04 Timmy’s brother Kevin wrapped his car like tin foil doing at least 85, if the volunteers could be believed. They said Kevin kept screaming for Timmy to get his feet out of his face, though Timmy wasn’t even there and in point of fact Kevin was alone in the car. That was maybe a week after the plant started cutting back. Kevin had been one of the first let go. Then Timmy in the next wave, about a month after Kevin’s funeral, if that. Timmy started drinking when his wife left and never stopped, like drinking himself to death was a choice he made.

If you grow up in a place and stay long enough your mind gets filled up with tragic stories even the trees insist on reminding you of.

The grass near the turn-off to the house is like the ground everywhere around town. Dry, dry, and dry. Here and there the earth is charred black from brush fires that kept the volunteers jumping through August. In Michigan, we say that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute, but this summer was different. By way of rain, not a drop. Day after day after day.

I pull into the driveway and step out of the car. A rectangle of light filters out through the filmy kitchen curtains, spreading to the toes of my work boots. I can see Marie’s familiar cross-legged posture, sitting at the table. Since high school she’s sat like that on chairs, Indian-style. She’s got the calculator and the taxes out again, maybe thinking if she adds the numbers up one more time they’ll come out in our favor. I deposited her last unemployment check this afternoon, and though I parlayed my small town popularity into getting myself elected Sheriff, the job doesn’t pay but thirty-eight a year, and it’s a true thing to say that our household mathematics are not adding up.

Inside the kitchen, the smell of grilled onions makes my stomach tighten and my mouth water. Marie must’ve cooked the rest of the hamburger steaks, which makes me think I’ll have to hit the grocery in the morning, putting my mind on the twelve dollars in my wallet and on our scrawny savings. I lean against the counter and wait for her to acknowledge my entrance, the dim overhead light glossing the straight dark hair that runs down her back.

“We could lose the house.” Her voice is tired and she says this like the idea is newly come to her. We both need aspects of our financial reality spoken aloud every so often.

On the counter the radio’s playing the Cuban music she likes. There’s so much percussion that the speaker’s black paper cone expands like a trumpet player’s cheeks. I turn the volume down. “I talked to Molenkopf today. He’s pushing us to do that variable re-fi. We can roll the closing costs back into the loan, he says.”

I kiss the top of her head and hang my hat on the back of her chair.

“And when the balloon payment comes due, what then?”

We agree on the point so I don’t say anything. Nothing changes for people like us, but I don’t share the thought. Marie has enough pessimism of her own without me doubling down on it. “We’re running thin, as options go.” I rub her tight shoulders.

She puts down her pen. “We got options.” She catches my eye. “Want to do a meditation with me?”

Sometimes I sit at the table and let her play one of the tapes she picked up from the monastery’s art fair booth. We’ve always gone to the art fair, but that booth’s lately become her favorite. It’s as if finding a spiritual outlet of the non-Christian variation gave her permission to scratch a nagging itch.

“I don’t feel like it, to be honest.” Tonight the notion of letting go of my desires feels less like an escape then like being taunted. Not only am I unable to pay the mortgage but I’m spiritually shallow to boot.

Marie stacks the papers neat in front of her and sits quiet for a moment. “I finally got him to bed.”

“I’ll look in on him.” I head for Jamie’s bedroom, just off the kitchen.

She shakes her head, pulling a red rubber band from her wrist and gathering her hair up behind her, then letting it fall back again as if changing her mind. “He’s probably still awake. He can’t sleep without that damn Mole.”

People in this town are honest by and large, but I put the odds of that bag still sitting in the bar as long. I let go of Jamie’s doorknob and run my hand through my hair, gritty with back road dust. “He doesn’t need it.”

“I just said he can’t sleep without it. I don’t know who you discount more with shit like that, me or him.” She snaps the rubber band back onto her wrist.

“He’s seven.” I say this sharply.

The way Marie gets quiet sometimes is worse than a full-on fight. She squares her shoulders and pushes away from the table.

I know I’m wrong but I prefer this wrong to others, and leave the issue wedged between us as a kind of buffer.

Jamie lies in bed, the sheet tangled around one leg, and when he sees me he shuts his eyes. I kneel next to him and whisper, “If you want we’ll get you another one.” I put my hand on his chest.

He rolls away from me like a tiny rejection. “No, thanks. I don’t need it.”

I let my hand remain on the bed next to his body, small, in blue and white pajamas, faded and too tight. I would do about anything. I know this about myself, that I’m capable of doing about anything.

The understanding wells up in me, and everything I’ve lost or stand to lose is a part of it.
Marie is at the kitchen counter, leaning on her hands and looking out the window at the darkness. There’s nothing to see. I avoid her eyes and pour us coffee, hold out a cup for her.

She sets the cup on the counter, and she’s already softened. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. There’s a tiny empty hole where an earring should be, a pink dot. Her ears are pale like her face, which isn’t pale exactly, but more like chalk, a color that on her is beautiful in how it puts all the attention on the grey of her eyes. And on her mouth which standing there I feel like touching with my thumb. She was the most beautiful girl in town when we were in high school, and nothing’s changed.

“The thing with JT is set for tonight,” I tell her.

She wears that flinty look she uses to stop up her emotions. “Don’t do it on my account.” Marie was the one who in a weak moment talked me into considering working with JT. She dated him before she and I started up and knows him different than I do. I trust that. When I don’t say anything she pushes the chair under the table and re-straightens the tax forms. “Be careful. JT’s okay, but he can be awful practical at times.”

I take her meaning. Practicality is normally a good thing but maybe not so much on illegal jobs when harder calculations might need to be made. “Listen. I don’t want you to answer the phone tonight. Make sure Jamie stays in his room. If anything goes wrong, the story’s we were here watching TV.”

She nods, but I can see her thinking. She walks with purpose into the bedroom from where I hear her drag a chair across the floor to the closet. She’s shuffling boxes, probably on the top shelf, then her bare feet meet the wood floor as she hops down from the chair. The metallic click of her father’s old .38 carries to me as she checks the chamber.

She carries the gun casually in her hand. For a moment I can see her father in her clear as day. “Here we go,” I say.

“You can’t take yours. And you know JT’s got one.” Her voice can get sharp and commanding.

“Yeah, he’s got one.”

She holds the gun out and stares me down until I open my hand. She places the .38 on my palm but I don’t close my fingers. “Say for the sake of argument I was willing to shoot someone over a tractor. Which I’m not about to. How long you think it would take to trace a bullet from your father’s gun back to this house?”

“My daddy was a lot of things. Stupid wasn’t one of them.”

She has that right. My father-in-law was a man who frightened other men, me included, and I don’t think it’s disrespectful to say that I slept better after he was dead and buried. But I do know what she means. I turn the .38 over and see the serial numbers are filed away. I put the gun in my pocket. “I’m not loading it.”

“Not much use then, is it?” She’s a non-violent person but she lives here in this place with the rest of us. She isn’t going to push the point, though, I can tell.

I fill my thermos with coffee. Like I’m going to work. “I’m taking the beater.”

“I didn’t figure you’d take the cruiser. You have to go now?” She moves close to rest her cheek against my chest.

I’d like nothing more than to hold Marie, go to bed and sleep until Jamie wakes us up, burrowing in between us, then grill some bacon, and sit around the table listening to a talk on loving kindness. I give her a long squeeze and kiss her head. “JT’s waiting.”
I pull into the parking lot between the bar and the railroad tracks, and JT climbs in as soon as I stop.

He sniffs and scowls. “You drunk?”

“Seriously?” You spill one on the carpet and the smell becomes part of the interior for life. “Roll down the window.”

“You know how to get down there?”

I nod. “Straight shot.” JT’s buyer is in for providing the semi we’ll use to haul the tractors to him, but he lives way down in Gary.

We don’t say two more words. The dim clock on my dash reads after midnight when we pull into a rest stop outside Gary, next to the semi waiting for us, and I idle while JT gets the truck fired up. He pulls out slow, and I set in to follow him back to Hillsdale.

I find a good night driving rhythm after a half hour or so freed from JT’s presence. I like my old beater, a 1970 Dodge Coronet with plenty of spot rust but a good soul. It’s hard to beat a Hemi in my experience. The engine’s rumble pleases the ear and something deeper. Like the way an old song at the right time can make me feel things are possible for the two or three minutes the music plays.

It hits me that this job is something I’m enjoying. The realization becomes an immediate secret, something I don’t have to share or apologize for. Something I don’t have to meditate on, or let go of, while a taped voice intones that we are all one. I’m driving and it’s just me. I’m remembering riding the team bus before a football game, back in school. Our town always the poorest, our field rutted and brown. But people cared if we won. They went all out, followed the bus in long lines of cars, honking their horns all the way back home and putting up signs saying thank you to the team in their store windows. Most didn’t know much about the game. But when we won, the victory said in a way that couldn’t be argued with that we weren’t inferior, that even though the other teams’ downtowns weren’t half-boarded up, we had bested them, at least on that night. The highway hums under my wheels. An insight comes to me that this job is only a different kind of team to be on. With bigger stakes, for sure, but I’m still on the same side for the same basic reason.

It’s after two when we stop, a hundred yards from the equipment yard, and I see why JT targeted this particular farm. The tractors out here are a good mile from the farmhouse, guarded only by a fence and some chains. Ahead, JT kills his lights. I finish the coffee in my cup and screw it back down on the thermos before I coast up to the yard to scout. Any tired that I’d been feeling turns off like a switch.

Everything looks quiet and I roll down my window and signal JT to roll up. The semi’s tires on the gravel echo off the trees and the side of the farmhouse, and I have to remind myself that nerves and darkness can turn up sound like an amplifier. Can throw a certain kind of man off his center, so far off that he’ll do things wholly unlike himself.

From the back of my car comes a stifled cough, and I freeze. My eyes glue to the rear view mirror and I know nothing good can be coming.

JT has backed to the gate. He climbs from the cab and looks in my direction. I wonder if he can see me, and I make myself twist around.

Timmy’s on the floor behind the passenger seat, trying to make himself small.

Relief and fury come so fast on top of one another I’m not sure which is which. “What the fuck are you doing?”

He smiles like a bad but charming kid reaching for something he’s not supposed to have. “I knew you had something on, Harry.”

He starts to sit up and I push him down. “What the fuck?”

He stares at me. “I figure you got to let me in now. I mean, Harry?”

He starts to get up again and I push him down but this time the gun’s in my hand and bangs him on the bridge of his nose.

He covers his face. “Jesus, that hurt.” He holds up a hand like a shield and looks at the blood in his other hand.

Outside, JT has the back of the semi open, the ramps pulled out, and he’s looking in our direction.

I look dead into Timmy. “You stay right there.”

“On the floor?”

“Yes.” I almost shout. “On the goddamn floor.”

JT’s coming toward the car, picking up steam. Timmy’s eyes catch mine.

“Stay out of sight.” There’s panic in my voice.

“Yeah, okay.”

I about jump from the car and JT’s right on top of me.

“What the fuck?” he hisses.

I hold up the bolt cutters I’d pulled from the garage, and he follows me back to the fence, tension radiating from him like a fever. I cut the chain, working mostly by feel in the kind of dark I’ve experienced only in the country with thick clouds covering the night sky. The air smells heavy like an impending storm, an almost-nostalgic odor, so long absent as it’s been, and a humid breeze passes over my neck. Trucks rumble on the highway miles away, background noise into which the sound of driving two tractors into the semi’s trailer can blend, theoretically. That’s one hundred and thirty grand per, brand new, and we’ll get a little more than half that from our man in Gary.

We’re ready to move again inside of twenty minutes. JT climbs into the truck and pulls away. Other than Timmy, the job was very clean.

Timmy’s sitting in the front seat. He tentatively raises a pint in a toast. “I knew you had something on.” He nods and takes a drink. In the dark I can’t be sure, but I imagine an edge to his voice, a challenge behind his eyes.

I turn the ignition but the engine’s already on and the starter makes a grinding scream. I throw the car into gear. Rocks and gravel jump when I pull away and sweat rises through the pores of my scalp under my hat.

Timmy laughs at me and shakes his head like he can’t believe he finally got something right. “I knew it. I was bringing you something from the bar – I saw you in the kitchen with Marie. Hid in your back seat. If you had a dome light you might have seen me.” He reaches into the back and retrieves the rumpled brown paper bag with Mole. He smiles like he’s won something.

JT’s driving slow still with no lights. I almost rear-end him. When I hit my breaks my tires screech, the back end fishtailing enough to make my stomach bunch.

As kids Timmy and I used to drive the back roads, lights off. We thought driving blind was something new that we’d invented. Sometimes Marie was wedged between us, charging the air with sex, raising the stakes.

Back then we were testing ourselves against the unexpected. Behind JT, all I want to see are the things that I know are there.

I glance over at Timmy and my fingers graze the .38 in my pocket and I jerk my hand away, two thoughts squealing through my head like they’re drag racing – I’m sorry the gun isn’t loaded and I’m glad it’s empty. “I really wish you hadn’t done this.”

“I really wish you would have cut me in.” Timmy throws his empty out the window and breaks out another pint from his jacket pocket. When he hands me the bottle his hand is shaking. I open my window all the way, preferring the dust to the cornered feeling that I’m getting. The sweat-soaked band of my hat cools in the breeze. I take a big one and keep the bottle.

“I don’t want much, Harry. Just enough to hold me till my next check.”

“You don’t get it. JT might just kill you. And me with you.” The careful faces of JT’s family swim into my mind. Like anybody he’s capable of anything. He is not carrying an unloaded weapon, of that I’m certain.

JT turns on his lights and speeds up, so I know we’re almost at the state line.

“Get in the back,” I tell Timmy, who’s slouched against the door. At a flashlight signal from up the road JT slows and stops, then flashes his running lights and climbs out of the cab, leaving the semi for his man to drive on to Gary. He starts back to my car. I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my hand.

“I could just go, Harry.” Timmy sounds scared, understanding maybe finally sinking in.

“Go where? Just get in the back.” I take another drag on the rum, a long one, wanting to be drunk and knowing this little pint will never do the job.

Timmy scrambles into the back as JT climbs in. JT looks at Timmy and then stares at me hard.

I shrug like what are you going to do, and back up until I lose sight of the semi around a bend. Then I hit the lights and drive.

JT’s hand is in his coat and his jaw is clenching and unclenching. “How many ways you figure to split this, Harry?”

I check Timmy in the mirror. His nose is bloomed red, already good and swollen. He rocks, arms crossed over his stomach. I hand the rum back to him. “I’ll handle it out of my end.”

“That’s a guaranteed fact.” JT angles his shoulders to keep both Timmy and me in his line of sight.

As the miles pass in silence I grow clear on an important point. Timmy can never be trusted. He’ll brag to someone. He’ll extort me for money after blowing through whatever I give him. I pass the old plant entrance, then the plant. We near the gravel pit where we used to drink beer and drag sleds around in the snow behind pickup trucks. Nothing but fields of corn between us and the state prison a couple of miles away.

I pull into the quarry and kill the lights. “We need to work this out.”

JT’s hand hasn’t left his coat. He doesn’t trust anyone, but he’s always treated me different. I was the rare boy in his growing up who didn’t try to add to his problems and that stands as a kind of friendship for him. His greasy hair lies close to his head. If I didn’t know better I’d even say he looks sad. He says, “You know what the smart thing to do is here.”

A cold gust pinwheels in my chest. I reach into the back. “Give me the bottle.”

Timmy hands the pint over and I tip the rum back. JT tenses when I pass it to him. “Easy goes it, Harry.” He takes the bottle and drinks.

I slowly place both my hands on the wheel. I am at a true and frightening crossroads. “I know what you’re saying.”

Timmy has gone all rabbitty in the back seat, rocking and shifting his weight. “I can just go, Harry. I can walk home from here, easy.”

My stomach chills at the way JT cuts his eyes at Timmy. “You’re going nowhere,” he says.

Timmy starts moaning, low, almost inaudible.

I turn to JT, deliberate and slow. The moisture has left my mouth. “I don’t think I can do this.”

JT stares at me. Finally his posture slackens some and he sighs. “Not sure I can, either.”

I hold my hand out and JT passes me the bottle. “I have a different thought but it’s not worth much if you don’t see things the same way.”

“I’m listening,” he says.

“We can’t trust him. Not like he is. We know that.”

Timmy seems to sense a reprieve and leans his head into the front. “You can trust me, Harry. Come on, you know me.”

I hold up a hand. “Seriously, shut up. Let us talk this out.” I turn back to JT. “I only see one other thing to do here. What if we were to dry him out?”

I can almost see JT imagining himself in the different possible futures this decision could create. The car is dead quiet. Timmy seems to be holding his breath and I notice that I am as well and force a quiet breath out.

JT says, “You’re making a bet. That’s it’s the booze that’s the problem.”

“That’s the nut of it.”

“Not sure I believe that.”

I wait. He’ll come to the decision on his own or he won’t.

“You think he’ll be able to stay sober?”

I turn to Timmy. “What about it?”

JT flicks the switch on the broken dome light. When it doesn’t respond he takes a thin flashlight from his pocket and aims it in Timmy’s face.

Timmy shields his eyes. “I want to.” He grits his teeth like he’s riding out a surge of emotion. “I want to.”

A patch of hair missed from shaving stands out on JT’s neck, a tiny dried clot of blood clinging next to it. I imagine him at his home before all this started, restless and full of nerves. “Washington Way?” There’s a hard determination in his eyes as he clicks off the flashlight.

“It’s that or the wet wing at County. Timmy, if you’re with us on this then we’re driving you to Washington Way right now and you’re checking in.”

“Tonight?”

“And when you get out the three of us are planting that little half acre of yours with fall crops. In or out, right now.”

In the dark of the car I can barely see him nod. He slumps in the back seat.

One part of me thinks what else is he going to do, but it’s a relief at least that he doesn’t have some kind of death wish.

By the time we near the Center the rain is coming down pretty good. I wonder if Marie is up, if Jamie is awake, if they’re listening to the rain pound on our tin roof.

As one of our tradeoffs Marie and I once watched a documentary about giant swarms of fat Australian bush flies that can come on the Aborigines like living dust storms, crawling up their noses and into their ears and eyes. On the couch we both squirmed, but the men in the film just went quiet and let it happen like I’m doing now.

“Park around back,” JT says.

I park a block over near an alley running along the back of Washington Way. Timmy waits like for his next instruction and that unsettles me. My wipers, on slow pulse, clear water from the windshield every couple of seconds, and I watch them sweep past five times before JT gives me an unreadable look and pushes out of the car.

He opens Timmy’s door and together they trudge through the storm, toward the darkness of the alleyway, JT’s large hand clasped tight on the back of Timmy’s neck.

I wait in the dark for JT to get Timmy checked in. We’ve given Timmy a hand up and something to aim for, though part of me thinks a man is what he is, that there’s a point in a life when it’s too late to take any turns, you’ve passed the last exit ramp and you’re stuck going where you’re going. The waiting gives me time to think up and wrestle down about a dozen different fears. JT left his pack of Lucky’s on the seat and though I haven’t smoked in years I pull one out and light up. I crack the window even though the rain is still coming down hard.

The first light of day is seeping through the clouds and the streetlight up on the corner flickers off.

JT jerks the passenger door open and I hope he doesn’t notice how I startle. He’s soaked through and his hand’s shaking like he’s cold when he pulls a cigarette from the pack. He takes a few tries to light up. I lift the one I bummed. “Hope you don’t mind.”

He shakes his head.

“You get him checked in okay?”

He looks at me in surprise, then takes a long drag on his smoke. “Didn’t go in with him.”

I look into the darkness of that alley and have to check an urge to go to the admissions desk myself, make sure Timmy’s actually there, beginning his stint. But JT was right to stay clear. For the same reasons I parked out of sight over here to start with. I slip the gearshift into drive and roll away slow and quiet.

I drop JT off, then take the back roads home.

The rain’s stopped and the smell of damp soil fills the heavy air. Light filters through the trees. I can see my immediate path without my headlights, but darkness still packs the road farther on.

I park the beater behind the house, out near the old barn, and when I step out of the car Marie’s already standing in the back doorway, in her robe, her hair sticking up crazy. When we make eye contact her hand goes to her mouth and I get a cold rock in my gut and my legs feel shaky. I tell myself that whatever happens next we’re here safe together in this moment. The morning sun’s up and already warm on my back.