Marrow (35 page)

A WEEK LATER
, I drive to the Bone to pick up Judah and deliver him back to SeaTac airport.

“How was it?” I ask as we cruise onto the highway. The air is warm, and my hair is whipping around my face.

“Good. I’m ready to come back.”

“Great,” I say. But it’s not great. Judah going back to the Bone feels like a bad omen. If the Bone can call him back, what can it do to me?

“You don’t mean that,” he says. “You hate that I’m going back.”

“Yeah.”

We don’t say much after that, but when we cross the water into Seattle, he asks me something that makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

“Did you do something bad? Is that why you don’t want to go back?”

“Why would you say that?” I narrowly miss hitting a car and swerve back into my lane. I press my foot against the accelerator.

“When I asked you about it in California, you ran. Didn’t even say goodbye.”

“There’s more than one reason I did that,” I say, thinking about Erin/Eryn/Eren.

“Margo, tell me what you did … also, you’re going really fast.”

I change lanes, then change again. I can see the tension in his upper body. I cut off a semi and the driver blares his horn.

“I killed Vola Fields and Lyndee Anthony. I killed a man in an alley who was trying to rape a girl.” I hesitate for a moment before I add, “And then I tried to kill Leroy Ashley.”

He’s quiet for a long time. Traffic gathers along my exit. I slow down, but I want to keep driving, keep going fast.

“Who is Leroy Ashley?”

“A rapist,” I say.

“But, you haven’t killed him yet?”

I glance at him, and he’s looking at me.

“No.”

I see the relief.

“How do you know?”

“How do I know what, Judah?” I flick the hair out of my eyes, annoyed at his questions.

“That he’s a rapist!”

“It’s a long story,” I say. “But, I know.”

He’s rubbing his jawline, looking out the window then back to me. If he had working legs, I wonder if he’d already have asked to be let out of the car.

“Why, Margo? Why didn’t you go to the police?”

I laugh. “Are you kidding? After what happened with Lyndee? Judah, why are you even saying this to me?”

“Why did you have to kill them? You could’ve…” He’s focusing on the women, not Leroy. Maybe because I haven’t killed him yet.

“What? Sat them down and had a nice little chat with them about what they did?”

“Maybe … it seems more reasonable than taking someone’s life.”

I think about this. Possibly for the first time.
Why
did
I have to kill them?

“I had no proof,” I say. “The police wouldn’t have done anything. I believe in swift justice.”

He slams his fist on the dash, and then keeps it clenched as he speaks to me through his teeth. “You are not the law. You do not get to administer your own brand of justice on humankind. How could you be so stupid?”

“Stupid?” I sound distant when I say it. My tongue is fat with the confessions I’ve just made. I never considered what I did to be stupid. I never considered what I did. I just … did what my body told me to do. I moved like a person who has cut ties with her mind and was relying on the guidance of some deeper force. A possession of sorts.

“Maybe…” I say. And even to me, my voice sounds noncommittal. Judah stirs at my words. Becomes angrier. His irises boil around his pupils, making him look like a cartoon version of himself. Eyes never lie. Not the emotions we convince ourselves to experience, or we convince others we are experiencing—the real ones. You can listen to words, or you can listen to a person’s eyes.

“Why are you so angry with me? You left me.”

But he’s not listening anymore. He’s putting things together.

“That’s why you were in the hospital,” he says. “You almost got yourself killed.”

“Go on,” I say. “Rail me with how stupid I am. How I should have told the police, left the punishment of criminals to the infallible law. But you and I both know how it really is. We lived in a world where children were not protected from their parents. Where you can hurt someone because someone once hurt you.”

It’s all true to my own ears. They lived in a form of ignorant hubris—Vola and Lyndee. At least Leroy knew what he was doing. He was looking to be caught. Even if he didn’t know it.

I want to execute my plan, and this time I am not acting on impulse. I will not make mistakes. I am, I think with little mortification, an evolving killer. We are at the airport. I help him out of the Jeep and into his chair. When I bend down to say goodbye, he’s teary-eyed.

“Why does it have to be like this, Margo?” he asks.

I kiss him on the forehead. “Baby, I’m crazy.”

I watch as the attendant pushes him away. He doesn’t look back at me, and I think this is a good thing. Maybe it’s over for good between us. I feel proud. Like maybe I am in control of my life, and I can walk away from Judah when I need to. Dr. Elgin thought he was bad for me. Someone I needed in order to cope with the bad things in my life. But, it isn’t true anymore. I am in control of my own life. I don’t need Judah. I just like that he is there. I dial her number as soon as I get home.

“I saw Judah,” I say. “He didn’t understand.” She asks me if I’ve been taking my medicine, then tells me to come in to see her right away.

Leroy thinks he’s won. Most men think they are born with a gold medal growing in their nut sack.
Winner winner chicken dinner!
That’s what Howard thought when he stole that little coffin from the eating house. I’m not done with Howard yet, and I’m not done with Leroy. Leroy Ashley doesn’t know I survived my little ordeal, and with stronger resolution. He’s run from me, but I will find him. If he knew my anger, he’d be preparing. Perhaps he’d buy a gun, or lay off the vodka cocktails he drank every morning for breakfast. He’d take a close look at the burn marks on his body and remember that his skin popped and crackled like bacon when I held my lighter to his flesh. I don’t need to watch him this time. I don’t need to spend hours planning. I know exactly what I’m going to do to him. An eye for an eye. And not for myself. I won’t take revenge for a thing that was done to me, but for each of the girls whose lives he ruined. Because you can’t just do that—knowingly ruin people’s lives. Something will eventually come for you.

THE FOLLOWING SPRING
I get my CDL, enroll in a three-week training course, and take a job with a trucking company called Dahl Transport. It’s a desperate measure, one to keep myself out of the eyes of the law and spread myself so thinly across America that I wont be able to hunt humans. I am one of three women who drive rigs for Larry Dahl, and, by anyone’s standards, the most attractive. The men outnumber us twenty-to-one. Linda Eubanks, Dodo Philbrooks, and, of course me.

Linda and Dodo are what the company calls old-schoolers. They wear their rigs just as well as they do their ‘Fuck you, you fucking fuck’ T-shirts. Linda still has a mullet—gray at the roots and bright red the rest of the way down. She lumbers into a room on barrel-sized thighs, her hacking laughter always preceding her. Her counterpart, and sometimes nemesis, Dodo, is the opposite. All bones and wrinkles, her face looks like an old piece of leather with too much hot pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Dodo always smells like she’s been rolling around in an ashtray. When she’s angry, she throws things around and calls everyone a pansy bitch. I am the youngest hire in the company in twenty years, and the only reason I got the job was because I served Mr. Dahl coffee at the diner and asked him to make me a big, bad trucker. At first he laughed, but when I stayed glued to the spot, staring at him with the half empty coffee pot in my hand, he’d handed me his personal card and told me to come into his office.

I’d made an appointment to see him, and the following week I’d walked to his office on Madison, dressed in ripped blue jeans, my steel-toed boots, and a T-shirt that said: “Born to be a trucker.” Before I’d left my apartment, I’d tied a blue bandana around my head. It gave me the air of toughness. Mr. Dahl’s receptionist had looked me over like I had maggots dripping from my nose. But I knew a little bit about the shrewd Larry Dahl. He was an avid lover of the theater, a Star Wars groupie, and every spring he attended Comic Con, where if you scrolled back far enough on his personal Twitter page, you could see pictures of him dressed up as Obi Wan Kenobi. His fleet of trailers was painted bright colors, works of art according to their owner. Mr. Dahl was a flamboyant artist and nerd, and I was going to give him a show if it would get me the job.

When I walked into his office, he stood to greet me, laughing loudly at my ensemble and pausing to take a picture of me with his iPhone.

“Why do you want to drive a truck?” he asked, after he settled down behind his desk. “Why no college? Fashion school? Career waitressing?”

I pulled a face at all three of his suggestions.

“Because I like to do things that women shouldn’t be doing.”

“It’s a lifestyle, Margo. One that affects your family and friends. Don’t you have anyone to stick around for?”

I think of Judah, then shake my head. “No, no one.”

Mr. Dahl sat back, stroking his chin. It was a baby’s ass chin—not even the slightest bit of stubble there. “I see,” he said.

I took that as my cue to convince him. “Mr. Dahl. I am not like other girls. I don’t desire for silly, frivolous things. I like to drive. I like to see things. I like to be alone. I’m tough. You won’t have to worry about me. I handle high stress like I was born for it.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“My dad was a trucker,” I lied. “He died before I was born. It’s a profession I respect and believe in.”

The gavel of decision was struck. Mr. Dahl offered me a job, saying they’d train me themselves. I left his office with my new hire package clutched under my arm, marveling at my good fortune. I’d have to keep convincing him, of course. He’d be watching me carefully, making sure I had what it took to keep in time with the boys. But I didn’t care. I’d found that I was perfectly adaptable and good at most things I tried.

I got my first rig nine weeks after my training began. It was a Detroit Diesel DD15—beautiful and powerful. The smell of newness lingered around the cab when I climbed in for the first time. I was not as large or commanding as Dodo Philbrooks or Linda Eubanks, but I wasn’t a small, frail girl either. I fit in with these people the same way an ostrich fit in with the rest of the birds: classified as, but slightly off. And so began my new life as a trucker.

I’ve found Leroy Ashley. Tracked him down to a small beach house in the Florida Keys. I had to call his favorite lingerie catalog, a small company based out of Raleigh, North Carolina that specialized in crotch-less panties. At first I called pretending to be his wife, calling to confirm that they had the catalog shipped to my new address.

“Can you tell me what the new address is?” the girl said. “And I’ll let you know if it’s what we have on file.”

“No,” I snapped. “I already made this call, and you people messed up. You tell me what you have so I can see how incompetent your people are.”

“Ma’am…” she said.

“Look, I say. I lied. My boyfriend broke up with me and took our dog. I’m not sure where he is, but I need to find her. This was the only thing I could think to do.” I wasn’t sure why she believed my lie, or chose to have pity on me, but I hung up the phone with Leroy’s address scribbled on the back of an old power bill. A larger company would never have released that type of information. I lucked out.

I haven’t spoken to Judah since the day I left him at the airport. He’s tried to call, but I’m not ready. His e-mails say that he’s moved back to the Bone and has taken a teaching job at my old middle school. I think about Mo having him as a teacher one day, and I smile.

Mr. Dahl calls me into his office one day and asks if I want to take a job driving a truck of spearmint oil to North Miami Beach.

“It’s not your usual route,” he says. “But Sack is having that Lasik surgery on his eyes and can’t do this trip.”

I pretend to be put out, and then reluctantly agree when he offers me time and a half.
Score-score!
As I pass through the long stretch of Everglades called Alligator Alley, I wonder what is going through Leroy’s mind. Did he really think I wouldn’t find him? That I’d let it go? I laugh out loud and turn up my music. Taylor Swift, man; gotta love her.

Leroy is much the same. His hair, his diet, his job. His smug fucking face. I admire his moving across the country to get away from whatever trouble I could bring. It took dedication.

He must have Pine-Sol’d the shit out of his new house, the OCD beast. The morning after I drop off my load, I enter Leroy’s house much the same way as I did the last time. Everything is set up similarly, except he finally bought a new kitchen table. I like it; it’s black. I find his porn stash under the bed and page through the magazines while I wait. He has a gun in his bedroom, hidden behind the air conditioning grate. This is for me. I’m honored. I play with it for a while before I get bored and go look for a snack.