Quo Vadis, Baby |
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Her name is Ellen, and he came across her hitchhiking outside of (was it?) Phoenix... somewhere. She was probably bleeding then, but it didn’t show except he did notice she was pale and quiet when she got on the back of the bike. He had handed her the helmet and told her casually that this was Cop Repellant and put it on, please, and she had said thanks and had done so. A polite little kid, skinny and brunette and just almost beginning to bud. Maybe thirteen.
Max felt horny in a grandfatherly way toward her for a little while, but that passed as he spoke to her over their first meal together, so few words but so much denied in her calmness. Was she running away? Yes. Was it family? Some. Shouldn’t she be running toward something, not away? No.
That one almost blew him over, like a creaky tangled tree in a hurricane. An anchor of his life, a Holy Demandment he had followed, spake to him by the God of All Spaces and Places... and she’d brushed it away like bread crumbs.
And the Great GASP had been silent. This was mickle strange indeed.
In the two days since they had met, she had spoken little, which was fine by Max, who could talk enough for a poker game while playing solitaire. Children were great, they understood this world with a purity which adults could no longer summon. And one had to steer the young gently, not drag them around by the rules, heap on them all the shalts and shalt-nots until a child disappeared beneath a suit, crushed by a giant instruction manual. So he told her amusing stories, places he’d seen, people he’d known, books he had loved, and he had slipped little snippets of homily into them, garnishes that were the meat of the matter: that was a way to raise a child. He hoped his ex-wives and girlfriends had been that conscientious about his children. Probably they had. They’d all been good sexy ladies.
Ellen had been mostly silent, listening carefully – every time he looked up at her, in a diner, by the roadside, by a stream where the fish arrowed into shadows beneath the surface – she had been looking at him, sometimes with a distracting intensity.
Out on the road of course, with the roar of the motor and the air and her perched behind him with her arms belted around his waist, there was no conversation. But even there he sometimes had the feeling that she was watching the back of his leather jacket intently, as if the yellow letters there, ROADKILL, had some secret |
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