“That’s not true, Sutter. You have so many options.”
“No, I don’t. I saw it in a dream. The same dream over and over. It’s me and Ricky playing this game we used to play in junior high with a neighborhood dog, a big black Doberman. Only in the dream, we don’t make friends with him the way we did in junior high. Not hardly. No, he opens his huge slobbering maw and swallows Ricky in one bite, and then it’s just me with the dog growling and snapping, chasing me down the drainage ditch until I run into this concrete wall. There’s no escape. And then I wake up. It’s too brutal for my subconscious to face. It’s the season of the dog, all right, only this time it’s a mean season. But that’s how life is. Just like that. You’re just running and running with a wall in front of you and a big black dog snapping at your ass.”
She lays her hand on my thigh. “It just seems that way right now. You have to remember to have hope.”
“Hope? Are you kidding? That’s one thing I’ve learned for sure—hope is absolutely unnecessary. What there is instead of it, I haven’t found out yet. Until then, this drinking will just have to do.”
I take a swallow of whisky and Seven but it goes down stale. Nothing helps. I’m a black spot on the chest X-ray of the universe.
Aimee’s like, “You know, your dad probably just got hung up having to do something for Mrs. Gates. She seemed like she had some kind of mental problems. I’m sure he really wanted to come back and hang out with us. If it wasn’t for her, we’d probably be spending the night with him.”
“Yeah, right. And if he hadn’t cheated on my mom and run out on me and Holly, then we’d still be a family, and everything would be cozy, and I’d be president of my Sunday school class, and you and I’d ride silver stallions to Pluto.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Maybe I should feel bad for going all sarcastic on her, but there’s no room inside for feeling any worse.
Finally, she’s like, “I know it looks bad right now, but parents are just people. They don’t always know what to do. That doesn’t mean they don’t love you.”
“I don’t need any psychoanalysis from you, Dr. Freud, Jr.”
That doesn’t faze her. “And even if they didn’t, that doesn’t mean you just give up. You know? It’s like you have to make love work where you can. Like with me, because I do love you. You don’t even have to question that. I do.”
“Come on, Aimee, you sound like a soap opera. You don’t love me. You may want to tell yourself that, but this isn’t love. It’s more like you’re all drunk and feeling grateful. You’re just happy someone came along and showed some interest in you as more than a sex doll for a night.”
She leans away and crosses her arms. “Don’t say that, Sutter. Don’t try to mess us up by saying mean things.”
But I’m on a roll. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? There aren’t any Commander Amanda Gallicos. There aren’t any Bright Planets out there. No one’s coming with the inner prosperity. All we have is the great Holy Trinity of the atomic vampires—the sex god, the money god, and the power god. The god of the beautiful soul starved to death a long time ago.”
She uncrosses her arms. “But we can change that.”
I shake my head. “It’s too big to change. It’s too heavy and all sharp-cornered and shit.”
“No, it’s not. It just seems that way right now because you’re afraid, but everyone’s afraid.”
I stare at her, hard. “Afraid? Afraid of what? I’m not afraid of a damn thing. I’m the guy that jumped off a thousand-foot-tall bridge.”
“You know what I mean. You’re—hey, watch out!”
“Huh?”
“You’re swerving into the other lane!”
Chapter 62
Again, a horn blares over my shoulder, only this time it’s the pissed-off blast from a tractor-trailer rig. I crank the wheel back to the right, but the road’s slick from all the rain, and we hydroplane hard. The Mitsubishi fishtails crazily down the highway, first one way, then the other. The truck rumbles next to us—a gas tanker—so close that it looks like for sure we’ll lurch back and slide right under the belly of it. With no seat belt on, Aimee’s busy struggling to squeeze into the floorboard, and a newspaper headline flashes through my mind: DUMBASS KILLS SELF IN FIERY AUTO CRASH; ROBS GIRLFRIEND OF SHINING FUTURE.
The tank looks like it’s about two inches away. We’re just about to slam into its ribs when the car fishtails back the other way. Now it’s only concrete abutments we have to worry about. There’s one just ahead to the right, but we only scrape it before I finally regain control and wrestle us to a stop in the high soggy grass.
Aimee peers up from the floorboard, her eyes wide, her bottom lip quivering.
All I can get out is, “Jesus Christ!”
“It’s okay,” she says. “Are you all right?”
I can’t believe it. The girl should be slapping me in the face. “No, I’m not all right,” I tell her. “Can’t you see that? I’m far from all right. I’m a one hundred percent flaming screwup!”
She crawls up from the floorboard and throws her arms around me. “I’m just so glad no one was hurt.”
“Are you kidding?” I peel her arms away. “I nearly killed you and you want to hug me? You need to get as far away from me as you can.”
“No, I don’t,” she says, crying. “I just want to hold onto you and make sure you’re okay.”