Casualties (22 page)

Breathe
, Ruth reminded herself. This command had never failed her when confronted with a snarl of competing demands. A deep breath, a list, and without fail, her next step would be clear to her. Ruth's breath turned into a gasp. How long would her body hurt like this?

She was so cold. She forced herself into a sitting position and slipped her arms into the sleeves of Casey's jacket. The smell of cigarette smoke seeped from the material, crawled up her nose. Fresh air. Now. She scrabbled for the door handle but stopped when Casey grunted and twisted in his seat.

He couldn't roll over entirely; his legs were in the way. She saw the glint of metal on his lower left leg, which was jammed in the cramped space below the steering wheel. His moneymaker. Lying there with his jaw slack, eyes closed, he looked broken, exposed, pretty much the way she felt. Ruth let go of the door handle. She inhaled again. If she took it slow the breath went around her pain,
not through it. After a few minutes, she felt an easing in her chest. She picked up the crumpled map lying between the seats and squinted at it in the half light. They were heading east, that much Casey had told her. The map they had took them to Colorado. She could not make out the print or follow the red lines that branched out from the interstate, each no wider than a hair, but there was a solid blue line heading east. That was the one they needed to follow. She'd feel better once they were moving. Ruth crossed her arms and pulled the jacket tight around her, but the cold had penetrated her bones. She wanted Robbie's denim jacket, but it was gone. “Couldn't save it,” was all Casey had told her.

Deep inside, a wail began to gather as it had the night Robbie died. She heard it, faint but getting stronger, coming for her.
Please
, she heard herself whisper into the dark car with its smell of leather, sweat, and French fries.
Please. Not now. Not here.
She rolled onto her side, away from Casey. Eyes wide open, afraid now to close them, she waited for dawn to break.

A blue and white Walmart sign flashed into view just outside Grand Junction.

“Get off, you're going to miss the exit!” Casey heard Ruth say just before she pointed a chipped nail into his line of vision.

Casey wrenched the steering wheel right and then wrenched left to avoid a Subaru. The blare of the Subaru's horn followed them as the Jaguar sailed past the Walmart exit. He heard a deep intake of breath from the passenger seat as if Ruth were getting ready to let him have it.

“Don't say anything.” Casey heard himself growl the warning. “I mean it. Don't say anything. If you say one word, I swear I'll just keep driving and you can rot in those shorts.”

“You won't get far. We need gas,” she said.

Damn, she was right. Casey saw her fold her arms as if she were holding in whatever else she wanted to say. Good. He didn't want to hear it anyway. Whenever she broke her silence it had been to tell him where to turn or to sigh in a way that irritated him even more. Years had passed since he'd been in such close quarters with
anyone, never mind a woman who could make him question his own competency simply by exhaling in a certain way.

Silence was worse. When he woke in the driver's seat earlier, he saw her shift her gaze quickly to something outside her window. He wondered if she'd been watching him sleep. Creepy. That was why he liked sleeping alone.

“There's another exit, take that and turn around,” Ruth said.

“You need one of those GPS things,” he said. “How come you don't have it?”

“Just take this exit and get going in the right direction.”

Casey gritted his teeth and did exactly that. Maybe it would lead him not just to Walmart but to a cup of hot coffee. He'd seen the sun rise two mornings in a row now. It was killing him.

“I see it, I see it,” he muttered. There was a gas station and a doughnut place right in the same parking lot as the Walmart. Things were looking up.

“You want anything?” he asked as he brought the Jag to a halt in front of one of the pumps. There was a sign in the window of the station that promised a free cup of coffee with a fill-up.

He heard the door open before he even turned off the ignition. “Coffee,” Ruth said as she clopped as quickly as she could toward the restroom. Well, that could explain at least some of her tension.

But she was still testy when he found her waiting for him and the coffee he juggled on a cardboard tray along with a raft of sugar packets and creamers.

“I don't need those. I drink it black,” she said, and sat back down in the passenger seat facing outside. She didn't even smile when he handed her the bag of biscuits he'd bought, steaming and hot, right out of the oven, just grabbed one and thrust the bag back at him. Maybe she'd feel better with a little caffeine.

Using the top of the car as a table, Casey dumped two creamers and three sugars into his cup and stirred. He took a sip and then bit
into his biscuit. Crumbs spilled to the pavement but he didn't care. It had been a long fucking night. And now he was going shopping.

—

After several wrong turns, Ruth found her way to the aisle of women's clothing. Casey had elected to leave her to it with the warning not to go overboard. She was supposed to meet him at the checkout area in twenty minutes.

She fingered a pair of tan capri pants, looked at the price tag: eighteen dollars. Hard to go overboard here. She found a pair in size four and put them in the basket. She selected a pair of shorts, a couple of shirts, underwear. That was all Ruth needed, but she kept pushing her cart down the aisles of cheap clothes, glad to be alone for a few minutes, glad for the distractions around her.

She paused at the end of an aisle that stretched the length of the store. Signs pointed to everything from frozen food to gardening equipment. Standing there, she was reminded of the Globe, forty miles from the farm where the paper mills filled the air with the smell of rotten eggs, the place her grandparents took her and Kevin twice a year for school clothes or other necessities not available in Gershom or through the Sears catalog.

Her grandfather would steer the Bel Air with a resigned look on his face while Kevin sat in the back next to her, counting the money he'd saved up to buy some new car magazines or a fishing rod. Ruth had nothing in her hands, but she'd memorized the pages of the
Seventeen
magazine she shared with her friend Micheline. Maybe she would find the one sweater or skirt that would make her feel like those girls in those pages.

—

I said, can I help you?”

A Walmart employee materialized in front of Ruth. She had no idea how long he had been standing there. He was shorter than
she was, with a high voice and a feathery gray mustache. His hands hung uneasily at his waist and his chest was puffed up under a blue store vest like one of her grandmother's grosbeaks. His gaze traveled the length of Ruth's body before settling on her face.

“I'm looking for shoes,” Ruth said. She made herself look him straight in the eye and tried to speak with the same confidence she would if she were in Neiman's with her personal shopper. “A purse, too. Then deodorant, shampoo, and tampons.”

A walkie-talkie cackled at his side. He looked Ruth up and down again, registering the T-shirt she wore, the shorts, the men's sneakers. Maybe she didn't meet the dress code for Walmart patrons.
Homeless woman in aisle eight
, she imagined him thinking.
Check her out.
She relaxed a little when the man finally glanced away and shrugged. “Shoes are over that way and . . . lady things are over there.”

—

Casey was waiting for her at the checkout counter nearest the door. He said nothing as she emptied her selections onto the conveyor belt, but she saw him frown as the register displayed the totals. She noticed that his own basket held an atlas, a jar of peanut butter, a package of crackers, a twelve-pack of Coke, duct tape, roll-on antiperspirant, skin lotion, a carton of filterless cigarettes, and three kinds of headache pills. Ruth seized the carton of cigarettes, rattled it at him.

“We agreed, right? No smoking in the car.”

“But what I do outside the car is my own business.” Casey took the carton from her and tossed it onto the moving belt. He pointed to another box moving toward the cash register. Nicotine patches. “See? For inside.” Then they both noticed the clerk watching them as she rang up the clothes. Behind her was the grosbeak, standing with his arms folded in front of him. Ruth focused on the items moving on the belt.

“Are you sick?” she asked, nodding toward the pain relievers. Advil, Tylenol, Extra-Strength Excedrin.

“Prevention,” he said. “The way this trip is going, I'm going to need all the help I can get.”

Any other day she would have laughed out loud at the secretive way he half turned from her, peeled out eight twenty-dollar bills, and counted the change afterward. Did he think she couldn't see where he put his money? Did he think she cared? Now she just wanted him to hurry. She needed to get out of here.

Twenty minutes later, Ruth emerged a second time from the ladies' room at the gas station to find Casey waiting for her, atlas open on the top of the car. He nodded at her as she swung into the backseat with the plastic bags holding the clothes he'd given her. She tossed his sneakers in after them.

“Feel better now?”

She looked at him through her new sunglasses, brown tortoiseshell goggles that covered her face from cheekbone to eyebrow, and nodded. Her hair was damp; she'd scrubbed, brushed, washed, and deodorized as best as she could in the restroom sink before putting on clean underwear, pants, and the sleeveless white shirt she'd bought. Lightweight canvas shoes replaced Casey's old sneakers. She still did not look like her old self, but she would not attract instant judgment. She could hide in these clothes.

Casey pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. “It's just after seven o'clock. Four hours to Denver, then another four or so to Ogallala.”

“Where?”

“Nebraska. The place we'll pick up Eighty east.”

“You haven't said where we're going.”

He looked at her without answering for a moment. Then he shrugged. “New Jersey.”

That would take at least a few days. Plenty of time to figure things out. She watched him reach down to rub what must have been his
stump. Two nicotine patches clung to the inside of his forearm. His face looked washed out in the glare of the early-morning sun and a wince creased the corners of his eyes. He had to be tired. She was. Sooner or later he'd give in. She might as well rest while she could.

“Okay,” she said. “Let's get going.”

By the time they reached the outskirts of Denver, the sun was blazing and so was the skin of Casey's stump. This was the longest he'd ever gone without taking off the faker for a while. He leaned forward in his seat and rubbed around the top of the socket through his jeans. He glanced at the dashboard.

“Let's take a break,” he said.

He saw Ruth glance at the atlas spread open on her knees. “I thought you wanted to make it to Ogallala by tonight.”

“We'll make it all right.”

“Well, you're driving. I guess we do whatever you want.”

It was the most she'd said since they left Grand Junction. He'd learned a few things, though. Ruth had two speeds: on or off. When she wasn't sleeping or staring straight ahead of her, she was squirming in her seat, tapping the door handle, and checking the fucking map every time they passed a road sign.

And she hated Springsteen, quintessential driving music. She'd reached over and just hit the button in the middle of “Thunder Road” and kept poking until she found some soft jazz. No way was
he going to listen to that shit and he told her so. The news was on now, nice and low, a public radio station. At least the voices took the place of the conversation that was not happening in the car. He needed something to keep him awake.

“What should we talk about, Ruth?”

“What is there to talk about?”

“We're going to be spending the next few days together. Seems as though we ought to talk about something.” He waved his hand at the radio. “I'm going to be sick of these people before too long.”

“That's not my problem,” she said irritably.

“That's a good place to start. What exactly is your problem?”

Silence. He glanced toward the passenger seat and saw her freeze in midtap.

“I've got some theories, you want to hear them?”

“No.” She turned and started to stare out the window. He resolved to make her turn and face him.

“It's a guy.”

She continued to fix her eyes on whatever was so fascinating outside. “Just drive,” he heard her say. “That's all you can handle right now.”

“You don't like my driving?”

Ruth sniffed.

“I've got it. You don't like it that I am driving at all since this is, technically, your car.”

Her head whipped around. “Technically?”

Casey shrugged and grinned. “Okay, your car.” At least now he had her attention.

“So, theory number one. Your old man was messing around on you and you decided to show him a thing or two, only you got in over your head.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Ruth's nostrils flare. She shook her head and looked away again.

“Maybe you were messing with another guy, and your old man kicked you out.”

Ruth flicked the back of her hand in his direction as though she were swatting the idea away. He was beginning to enjoy himself for the first time on this trip.

“What's so unreasonable about that?” he said. “I bet that was it. And your boyfriend was younger. I always liked older women. All my girlfriends are about your age.”

Ruth turned to look at him again. She pulled her giant sunglasses down her nose and peered over the tops.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirty-six, ten years younger than you if your license wasn't lying.” He felt her stare and glanced out the corner of his eye. “What?”

“Nothing. I thought you were older.”

He hadn't thought about what he looked like for years. Older. Beat up, she meant. Damaged goods. Fuck. What would Emily see when she looked at him? Suddenly he was tired, bone tired. He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it off his forehead, trying to push the fatigue back with it. Time to change the subject.

“Okay, I've got it. Your boy toy was messing around on you. You killed him and you've got him in the trunk.”

“Shut up,” she growled. He saw her hands clench.

“Relax, Ruth, I was just kidding.”

“I said, shut up.”

“Okay, okay.”

She reached past him and turned up the volume on the radio. The noise drove all curiosity about Ruth Nolan out of Casey's head. Screw her. He would get off at the next exit, whether she liked it or not. He hoped it was soon.

—

Ruth jammed her finger on the volume button of the radio. “Christ, it's loud enough. Just leave it alone,” he said.

Ruth ignored him.

“Listen, I'm sorry. It's none of my business who you are or what
you're up to. I promise I won't ask again, okay? Just stop hitting that button.” He reached toward the controls, but when Ruth heard a familiar name coming from the speakers, she pushed his hand away and turned up the volume even more.

“RyCom needs to be held accountable. We will hold the company and the insurers accountable,” said a man. Ruth didn't recognize the voice.

“Turn that down, for Christ's sake,” Casey said.

“Wait.” Ruth pushed his hand away again when the reporter began to speak. “That was James Breen, attorney for Families of the Forgotten, a group representing the families of independent contractors who have died in Iraq or Afghanistan since the war began.”

“Poor bastards,” Casey said.

Ruth did not take her eyes off the radio. The lawyer was speaking again.

“RyCom Systems lied to the contractors about the dangers of the jobs. They exposed contractors to unnecessary danger. Now those same contractors are coming home disabled or dead and the company is letting them and their families twist.”

The newscaster's voice returned. “Although RyCom executives declined to be interviewed, COO Gordon Olson issued a statement today in response. ‘We stand by our commitment to those who have served our country by helping us staff the rebuilding and security initiatives so vital to the war on terror. In the days to come, it will be clear to all that we and our insurers are fulfilling our obligations both legally and morally to each of those who have suffered injury or loss in the course of their work for us.'”

“Crap. All of it. You can tell from the way he talks,” Casey said. “He's got no use for those people unless they're out there making him money.”

Hatred for Gordon Olson flooded Ruth. Robbie was nothing to him but a liability—and an excuse to get rid of her.

Then she remembered Terri handing her the flash drive. It must
be here in the car; she'd never taken it out of her computer bag after dropping it in there the night Robbie died. She recalled, too, the warning in Gordon's voice when he'd told her,
What is best for the company is also best for you
. The thought of what might be on the tiny drive worked its way into Ruth's conscience like a splinter.

“Assholes like him make me sick.” Casey was still talking, ranting now, all signs of fatigue gone.

Ruth reached again for the radio. She needed something to drown out Casey's words, the echo of Gordon Olson's words, and all thoughts of the contractors. She couldn't help them. She could barely help herself right now.

A rap song came on; it sounded familiar. Was it the same one Robbie had on his phone? Ruth didn't remember. She'd hated it so much she hadn't paid attention to anything but the beep that followed. Now she wanted to know. Had the words meant anything to him?

“You like this shit?” Casey was asking.

Ruth's curiosity about the lyrics fell away. The music took her back to her kitchen, where she was dialing Robbie's number again and again, getting angrier and angrier when he didn't pick up. She was lying on the bed in the guest room, expecting to see him any minute. Then she was standing in her front hall with the deputy and the chaplain and the Marine captain surrounding her, telling her that Robbie was dead.

—

C'mon, Ruth. You've got to eat something.”

Casey thrust a grilled chicken sandwich through the open passenger door, but Ruth just kept staring at her lap, where her hands were locked together. He could see her knuckles whiten every time she clenched her fingers.

She'd been like this since twenty miles back. Suddenly there was no squirming. No grabbing the map. She did not seem to notice
when he turned the radio off, just sat there with her head against the window, eyes shut tight, like a kid trying not to cry.

“I'm sorry,” he wanted to say. There was something about her, sitting there, one hand hanging on to the other, that got to him. He knew pain when he saw it. It was why he had bought her food she did not ask for and why he was standing here, hoping she'd take it.

“If you take the sandwich, I'll let you drive,” he said, urging the sandwich on her a second time. He knew she wanted the car back. He was hot and tired, there was a pain behind his eyes he hadn't felt for years, and his stump was acting up. He was ready to take a chance on her.

When she glanced up, he thought he could see her eyebrows lift behind the lenses of her sunglasses. He waited. Slowly, she lifted her hand and took the sandwich.

“There you go. I've got a Coke for you too.” Ruth swiveled until she could stretch her legs out the passenger door. She picked at the foil wrapped around the sandwich.

“Thatta girl.”

She aimed her sunglasses straight at him. “You know, there's no need to treat me like a child.”

For some reason, the sharpness in her voice made him feel better. Casey grabbed the bag of food off the car roof and started rooting around in it for his burger.

—

Good. She would drive. She wanted to grip the steering wheel and fly forward, not sit trapped in the passenger seat where grief could find her. She swallowed her impatience to get going with a sip of lukewarm Coke.

Casey leaned over and dug his fingers through his jeans, rubbing the skin below his knee. His face was paler than before and he was rubbing his leg again.

“What's wrong? You keep rubbing your leg.”

“Nothing that taking it off for a while won't fix.”

He took his canvas bag from the backseat and limped toward the restroom of the McDonald's. “I'll be a little while.”

Ruth got out of the car and watched him limp away with a growing sense of embarrassment and shame. Here she was, glad to be given a chance to drive her own car. A man, not such a bad one maybe, but one she barely knew, was deciding everything from food to the route they would take. Sooner or later he'd want his money and she already wanted more control. She wasn't a prisoner. All she needed was her credit cards, access to her bank account.

Ruth dug her phone out of the cheap canvas purse she'd bought at Walmart. Twenty-seven unheard messages on her voice mail. Thirty unread texts. As she looked at the screen, a text from Terri popped up.
Are you okay? Where are you? Call me.
Seconds later, one from Neal appeared.
Call me if you can read this.

The longer you wait, the harder it will be.
Her grandmother's voice rose from the well of childhood and suddenly Ruth felt her there, saw Big Ruth peering at her through whatever crazy glasses she wore now, right down to Ruth's soul, waiting, trusting Ruth to do the right thing, even now when Ruth had failed and failed to do so many things right. Somewhere in those voice mails, she'd find messages from Big Ruth and Kevin. Terri or Neal would have called the farm looking for her.

Ruth pulled up Terri's cell phone number and dialed. She'd be at the office now, and not as likely to answer her cell. Ruth looked over her shoulder to see if Casey was coming, but there was no sign of him. “Terri, it's me, Ruth,” she said after she heard the beep. “I just decided to get away for a little while. I'm very sorry for just leaving without saying anything. I'll be in touch soon. Will you let Neal know I'll call him? And if you would, let my family know I'm okay? I'll call them too. Soon.” There. That covered the important things. No, wait. “Ter, I need a favor. Would you please cancel my credit cards? All of them, the bank card too. My wallet was stolen.” Shit, her license was gone too. This was going to be a mess. She
didn't want to think about it now. She just wanted to get moving. “I'll explain later. Can you make the calls? Cell service is iffy around here, and . . .” She was talking too much again. “Anyway, thanks. I'll call you with where to send the new ones. Soon. Thanks, Ter.”

Ruth hung up and turned her phone off. She didn't want to hear it ring, as it most surely would as soon as Terri picked up the message. She needed to move now. Where was Casey?

Just then he appeared in the doorway leading to the restrooms. He seemed to be inching toward her. His shorts flapped against his pale right thigh and the combination of skin, plastic, and metal that was his left leg. The shank running from the straps to a black sneaker flashed in the midday sun with every step.

“I'm back,” he said when he finally reached her.

She took the keys from his outstretched hand. “Okay,” she said. “Now it's my turn to drive.”