Interstate Read online

  He gets a job and about three months later is on his way to work when he sees two men getting out of a light blue minivan with no windows except in front, both looking from almost a block away like those guys in the white van: same ages it seems, sunglasses though he can’t see from here if they’re dark, and as he gets closer to them just their faces and smiles and the driver’s big bulky forehead seem the same. He drives past slowly, they’re talking on the sidewalk, smile a big conniving-together smile and slap their right hands in the air like he’s seen athletes do after a real good play and then go opposite ways on the sidewalk he sees in his right side mirror and then in the rearview when he turns it to show more of the right and though they don’t have mustaches and have on baseball-type caps instead of fedora-style hats, they’re the ones all right, no mistake of it. He doesn’t know what to do, slowing down to almost a crawl: get one somehow and best yet the guy who killed his kid and through him the police can get the other one soon, but he doesn’t know if he’s revved up enough to do what he thinks he could have easily done or at least made an attempt to on the Interstate when he was cruising for them and which with his bumping their van he almost did. “Fuck it, the bastards,” he says, “they killed my kid—you fucking guys did and you’re both going to get it in the head,” and makes a sharp U, no cars are coming either way, which he didn’t think to look for when he made that U, cuts across the street and the driver, one nearest and heading in his direction, stops and looks at his car, and he climbs the sidewalk and starts for him with his foot now all the way down on the gas and the driver yells “Hey, what the shit—Luke!” and quickly looks around where to run it seems but he hits him, driver going over the front of the car and landing in the street and he starts for who he supposes is Luke who’s running across the street darting back looks at him, through the rearview and right side mirror sees the driver on both knees shaking himself off, front and Luke’s on the other sidewalk running away from him with no looks back now and he drives off the sidewalk, doesn’t know if he should get on Luke’s sidewalk or stay in the street alongside him till he has a clear shot at him with the car, gets on, nobody else is there and gets to about twenty feet of him with the gas pedal all the way down when Luke jumps over the front of a parked car, foot clips the hood and he tumbles to the street, he cuts into the street second he’s past the car in front of the jumped car, stops hard, looks back and sees the driver hobbling back to their van, and looking through his back window, Luke getting up slowly and holding his elbow, doesn’t know whether to turn around and head straight for Luke or back up on him hard, knocking him down, and then turn around and drive over him, “Luke, over here,” driver shouts by the van and Luke starts to run to it, almost falls and then limps to it and he shoots forward, stops, angles the car so it’s diagonally across from Luke and backs up fast as he can and Luke lunges but he jerks the steering wheel that way and hits him. Luke goes down, driver’s fumbling inside his pants pockets probably for car keys, Luke’s pushing himself up with his arms and he shoots forward, backs up and goes over some part of him he feels from the bump, goes forward so over probably the same part though just wanted to get where he could see him, thinks “Yes? no? screw him, he killed my kid and if he gets up he’ll probably try to kill me,” and backs over him with both the back and front wheels now till, and doesn’t know why he didn’t think of this before, he’s in front of Luke who’s flat out and face down and maybe dead and he screams “Killer, killer,” and floors the gas pedal and goes over him making sure not to hit his head, then makes a U, driver’s on the sidewalk looking as if he’s unlocking the passenger door, doesn’t know whether to drive up on it and hit him or just ram the van from the street, stopping it from going and maybe hurting the man, or just pull up and jump out and grab him and pound him to the ground. People have come out of some of the ranch houses, workers are standing right outside the one-story computer-graphics place, the lawn sign says, between two ranch houses and which the van’s parked near, cars have stopped at both ends of the street, driver’s got the door open and is getting into the van and he rams into it from the street, is thrown forward but head doesn’t hit anything and windshield doesn’t crack and he flops back into his seat, driver’s thrown down on the seat or floor somewhere or is looking for something there, “Gun, get him before he gets it,” he thinks and jumps out of the car and runs around the van, driver’s on his back on the seat with his eyes closed and opens them on him and he thinks “The kid’s bat, left it where?” and pulls the driver out by his legs, driver shoots his hand back to protect his head but it bumps on the sidewalk and the driver yells “Oh shit” and looks in great pain, he gets down and grabs the driver’s head, hands flinch from the blood in back of it but he says “No, fuck it,” and grabs it again and hard and driver screams and he says “You remember me, right?” and the driver says “Hey, wha?” his eyes rolling and he says “Hey, hey, you remember me, don’t you?” and the driver says “Hey, I’m hurt, don’t, no more,” and he says “But you remember me, you and your pal do, or he did, right?—open my window, roll it down, stick a gun in my face, aim it in back, shoot who the hell you want to, me and one of my dead little kiddies, right, right?” and the driver says “What? I swear. What pal? I haven’t got one. I didn’t do anything. What do you mean?” and he says “On the Interstate here—white minivan—don’t you remember me bumping it?—where’s your mustache and fedora?” and the driver says “What fedora? Fedora, what’s that?” and he says “This fedora, this fedora, my daughter,” and bangs the driver’s head against the car several times and people yell “Stop…Don’t…Enough…Someone!” and he lifts the head high and bangs it against the ground and again and hands grab him from behind and he tries shaking them off while banging the head and someone gets him in a neck lock and yanks him back while he drags the driver’s head with him till someone pries his fingers off one by one and he lets go with the last fingers and someone catches the driver’s head just before it hits the ground and they still pull him back and he says “All right, okay, I’ve stopped, you’ve stopped me, I’ll be good now and stick around for the police,” and they let him go and he sits a few feet away on the curb and wipes the blood off him on his pants and shirt and just looks down at his feet.

  “Jesus, did you do them,” a man says, crouching beside him, “what was it, like you said?” and he nods and the man says “One in the street’s dead, I don’t know if you know, fucking face crushed, and other’s—” and he says “Didn’t mean to run over his face, in fact I intended—” and the man says “Well, your aim was bad, but the other looks almost finished too—cops and medics are on the way,” and he says “They deserved it, hope the alive one dies,” and the man says “Listen, for some advice, don’t go blabbing that, say it was self-defense, defense,” and he says “It wasn’t and at this point I’m not going to start bullshitting,” and the man says “Then say nothing, put your hands over your face like you’re sad, look disturbed, even, and wait for your lawyer or one given you but don’t sell yourself away and ten more years for it,” and he says “I’ll answer what they ask and if they don’t buy it, fine, I’ll swing,” and the man says “That’s what you think now, but I’ve been inside, babe, and later when you’re there you’ll hate every extra day for not doing what I say, but okay, I’m only trying to help, and lots of luck,” and the man stands and he stands and hugs him.

  Police and medics come, driver’s treated on the street and taken away in an ambulance, guy’s put in a bag and left there in a special medical van with the back doors open while the police ask him what happened though say he doesn’t have to answer or can wait till he has a lawyer and he says “I was getting back at them, if I didn’t nothing ever would have happened to them, like finding them, except by accident, it’s all written down somewhere what they did to my kid that day on the Interstate, you’ll see they’ll fit the descriptions I gave minus the mustaches and there’ll be nothing about their height for I never saw them out of their van till t
oday.”

  The two have records, now wanted for this and that in other states, police photos showing them with mustaches, he refuses to hire a lawyer so is assigned one, his daughter can’t be a witness for him since she can’t even say what age around or color the men were that first time on the Interstate and thought there were three or four of them in the van, he’s convicted and given ten to twelve years for killing an unarmed man and permanently damaging the brain of another, judge says at sentencing “If you had shown one iota of remorse or expressed some understanding of the wrong you’ve done I would have sentenced you to a few years or less, given what you’ve gone through over your daughter’s death and that you’ve never been charged with a serious crime before and the men you attacked had a history of felonious activity and were wanted for robbery and murder though not of your child and who now ironically can’t be tried for these other crimes since one is dead and the other will be a vegetable for life, but what you’ve done, sir, and how you’ve acted since sends the wrong message to others similarly victimized and bereft who might want to take barbarous revenge the way you did and then the streets would even be more menacing than they are today, so I must conclude that you’re nearly as dangerous and perhaps even as ruthless as the men you call without proof your daughter’s brutalizers,” and he says “You could think that, I’m not going to take issue with you, though nobody’s going to convince me I didn’t get the right guys, but personally I feel a hell of a lot better for what I did, and to me, though it’ll be a long time before I can enjoy them, the streets have to be a little safer now, and for sure the Interstate is, not with me off them but those guys, even if that’s not at all why I did it.”

  Some prisoners say they admire him for what he did for his kid and proof’s in the eye and those guys deserved it, but most others say he shouldn’t have gone so far as to try and kill them, for look what he lost: wife, other kid and his freedom, and also he couldn’t have been sure it was them after almost a year and maybe he still didn’t get the right men who might even be in this prison wanting to kill him before he finds out his mistake and tries to get them and besides, you want someone killed you get a pro to do it but you don’t try it yourself in what always for an amateur turns out to be a sloppy job or total bungle, like with his braining for life that poor slob, and where you usually end up dead yourself or in prison for years if not gassed by the state for having killed some innocent bystander or the wrong guy or even the right one. He usually says he had no time or money to hire a hit man, not that he ever would have for he didn’t want anyone doing it except himself because only he had a reason to and money for killing no matter how much someone would pay can never be a reason, and some say “For ten thou?…for twenty?…for fifty then?…you telling me you wouldn’t knock off someone you don’t know for a half million if you knew it was fairly easy?” and then if that’s the case he should have let the matter go and got on with his life and if he saw them by accident like on the road then he just should have told the cops where it was and leave it at that and at most hope for the best and if it was in some place where the guys were still there, then where, but to keep his body completely out of it.

  His wife visits him a few months after he’s in, though he wrote and spoke to her answering machine plenty of times to come, without hearing anything back, and she says she’d like a divorce and hopes he won’t try to stop it and he says he doesn’t want one, of course, but he put her through such misery like leaving her stranded and almost broke and with their oldest child, besides the even worse misery by far she had over losing Julie while at the same time seeing him go nuts in his own misery and over finding those guys, that anything she wants he’ll give, every single dime in the bank and whatever assets and possessions they still might have and things like that and any arrangements she wants to make with him over Margo he’ll sign, though he hopes she’ll bring the kid to him here or have someone do it a few times a year, and she remarries a short while later and has a daughter who in a few years is the age Julie was when that guy killed her.

  His ex-sister-in-law brings Margo to see him in prison about once a year once the girl turns twelve and then when she’s eighteen she visits him on her own because she wants to or knows how much he wants her to and feels sorry for him and is just responding to his begging letters for her to come for she’s all he has he says in them, all he ever will and just a few hours with her makes the next few months till her next visit so much better for him, and it’s usually uncomfortable between them for the two hours she’s there—they could have more time but he can tell by her fidgeting and face that those two hours are a little more than she can tolerate—and they don’t talk to each other much and he mostly stares at her not looking or looking at everything but him and says when he says anything, and then it often becomes a sort of running-mouth thing, how nice she looks and bigger and even prettier she’s getting, all things he knows daddies, or “fathers” now because she’s of that age, are almost supposed to be saying but with her it’s altogether true, and mature she’s sounding and also mature in lots of other good ways and how nice her clothes are or how they’re the perfect choice for her looks and physique and the weather today and how it’s not so bad in here, she didn’t ask but he’ll give her his semiannual report anyway if she doesn’t mind, the other prisoners still leave him alone for the most part for they know it’s what he wants after all he went through, and how much it means to him that she’s here sitting opposite him, he can hardly believe it after wishing for it so much the last three months and he apologizes if coming here was a lot of trouble and cost her more than she could afford or stopped her from doing something or being with someone she wanted to be with or do much more, it’s okay though, he was a kid once, or a young man he should say if he’s going to get their age comparisons right, so he understands and he won’t ever forget that she comes here pretty regularly, that she comes here at all, even, and he knows it’s not the greatest place to see one’s dad and he appreciates the effort she made in coming here but he said that, and at least once every time she’s there he suddenly starts bawling, first sniveling, then trying to hold it back, then flat-out crying or bawling but over nothing he later tells her, just happy to see her and he hopes his crying doesn’t stop her from coming to see him more and she swears it doesn’t but inside he thinks he’s also bawling because he’s thinking all he’s missed not living with her the last eight years, nine years, ten and when he sees her he sees Julie for they looked almost like twins when they were kids except for the three-year age difference and he figures this is probably close to what Julie would have looked like if she hadn’t died, or seeing her he thinks of Julie and what happened to her that day and what she looked like dead in the shot-up car, bullet hole in her chest just below her neck, expression, once he picked her arms off her face, no, that’s not it, the hole was some other place, in her neck and it was car glass in her cheek and chest, why was she up? why wasn’t she down? he’d told them both to be so why couldn’t she have listened to him as Margo did? didn’t he yell loud enough? wasn’t there enough anger and power and force and alarm in his voice to scare them to stay down? and a minute or two before when he was driving side by side with the van and looked quickly in the rearview to see if they were okay and before that when they started out on the car trip, on their way back from a weekend in New York, wife staying with her folks two more days and then returning by train, talking during the start of the ride which rest stop they’d stop at if they didn’t have to stop before that for one of them to pee, and then when they decided, which eating place there, Bob’s Big Boy or Roy Rogers or Sabarro he thinks the Italian place was called or maybe a combo of all three? and one of the last times Margo saw him in prison and when they were silent a long while with her looking at anything but him she says, something she’s always wanted to say but never had the heart or courage to or whatever it takes she says, she wishes he hadn’t gone after those men so drivenly, and that’s no joke, like her mother and she told
him not to years and years ago, although okay she was just a kid then so he’d hardly listen to her but to his own wife? for what good did it do even if he’d killed both of them and they were the real men and almost more important and she’s surprised he wasn’t thinking this then, what good was he as a father after that when she really needed one, not just for the year or two after the shock of her losing Julie and all that blood and stuff but through her entire growing up, and even now he’s not there the few times she could still use him for advice and bouncing off her views or just being there for her, with or without her mother, or driving her where she needs to be before she gets her own car, or whatever real biological fathers are supposed to be good for and do for their children besides the money she could really use for college and which her mother’s husband doesn’t have or if he does he’s not going to part with so easily since he has his own biological kids with her mother and his first wife to support and he says “Money, what can I tell you?—I don’t get paid a whole lot here and they don’t have any college tuition plan for the children of their workers, but as for the rest—moral support and all—I’m here for you, I’m here, where else am I?—I’m not any ghost, and I write you almost every day, you’re the only one I do, so in that respect you have more communication with me, and even more if you’d answer a letter every now and then, than maybe most girls your age do with their dads who are all out to work half the day and then bring it home with them and things like that—just not interested, lots of them, or only interested in the things they’re not—but maybe you don’t even read half my letters, which’d be all right, being I send so many,” and she says “I do too, but not always so carefully, for I’ve a lot to do for school to earn future college money you won’t be able to give, and let’s face it, Daddy, you sometimes say the same thing in them or fairly close or repeat yourself in different ways where it becomes too repeatinglike and sort of boring if I can say—after a while there’s not a lot to write about in prison, which I long ago figured out but I guess is what this place is supposed to be for—to make you wish you didn’t do what you did to get yourself in here and to make you also want to jump back into the non-crimelike world once you get out where you can have something new to do and talk about and for gosh sake never to go back in again because of all the sameness and bad food and sleeping and no privacy and your horrible toilets and all the TVs on around you and dumb conversations and no summer vacations as you’ve joked a hundred times and that music the other prisoners play that you hate and I’m sure no women and even some fear of the other men,” and he says “True, although it could be I haven’t told you everything, though none of what I didn’t say would make me want to stay, but I also call you whenever I can and am able to afford it and you can call me at the prescribed hours when you like too but unfortunately not collect, they don’t have that advantage here either, or even from your mom’s phone, why not?—I handed all we had and owned over to her without a gripe when we split up, not that there was much, I admit, or that I regret a single nickel of it, though a little house with a big mortgage is still something if a few years’ interest on it have been paid off and the market hasn’t dropped, so maybe the least she could do for both of us—and then if it makes you feel better it should make her too, right?—is let you call me from her phone now and then, or just tell her to tally all the calls you make to me and their cost—why didn’t I think of this a thousand years ago?—and when I get out and really working, or even with the little dough I make a day here, I’ll pay her back with regular bank interest whatever that now is, but anyway, none of those I realize are the same as my being there for you on the outside when you need me and it never can be turned around to be made good, but what else did you want to tell me?—you said there was something,” and she says “You’re not going to like this,” and he says “Just say, nothing about yourself can make me angry,” and she says “Sad, though, that’s what I’m afraid,” and he says “If you’re sick, but I mean on your last leg or just very bad, then that of course,” and she says “Soon as I graduate in June I’m going to Seattle or some West Coast place where young people go, to look for work and room with girls I’ll get from the ads and hopefully get residency status there so I can go to college cheap, so to be honest I’ll be coming here even less than I have and today can easily be the last time for a while, I’m sorry, Daddy,” and he says “Well, that wasn’t too bad, I’m already recovering because I know it’s what you want and should be good for you if it’s safe, and also, since I’m out of here in less than two years, it won’t be too long a stretch between seeing you if you don’t come again but tell me where you are. Now as for what you both said not to do with those guys who killed Julie, long as we’re talking straight, going after them so one-mindedly and blindly you can say, I shouldn’t have if only because it broke up what could have been considered a fairly good marriage till then, though just losing Julie could have done that, everything because of it thrown out of whack, but it also separated me from you and then permanently when she left, though if she had stayed who knows by then when I saw those guys if I wouldn’t have been over it, so to speak, so wouldn’t have run over them and banged the alive guy’s head on the street, but truth is, and thanks for calling me Daddy—you never say that, not in ten years, so maybe it’s like, well, your final visit, sort of a planned keepsake for me—but I doubt I would’ve been that over it when I saw them, even in a killer-animal way, so would’ve done, even if your mom hadn’t left me, what I did and been given even more years because with you both not gone the judge could have said ‘Hey, he still had his family there, so his wife didn’t leave him because she thought he was crazy and he wasn’t crazy in addition because she left him and took their only other child, so he even shouldn’t more have done what he did,’ or something—I can’t put words into a judge’s mouth, they’re of another breed and their legalese is way past me. The other truth is I’m still glad what I did to those guys, the worst of the two for all time erased, for nobody in the world deserved it more but maybe Nazi butchers of a thousand kids in one day or the Japanese in World War Two with Chinese babies on their bayonets if that story wasn’t just made up to get us to hate and kill the Japanese even more, and I lots of times wish, even sometimes for that driver-of-the-van’s sake, though that feeling of good for him doesn’t last long, because he could have told the gun guy to stop, you know—he could have shouted in the van ‘Stop, there’re kids in there, stop!’—that I’d finished him off too even if it would’ve no doubt given me a longer term, or maybe I don’t wish that for I’ve probably done all the time here, plus the two years to go, I can just about take.”