High Mileage

“Inscription” by Aaron Lelito

You’d never guess Mom received disability checks the way she flung the door open and clomped through the Presto parking lot carrying a bag of circus peanuts, a block of ice, and some scratch tickets. She was forty-four now. The creases in her face ran deep as irrigation ditches and her back was a twisted mess, but she could still pull off that long-legged strut that drove those small-town men wild, especially in her electric lime heels.

The leathernecks made no attempts to hide their lustful gazes as they gassed up their rigs. “Take a picture, assholes,” she barked at them.

I reached over and popped the door open. She hunched into the car, and the shocks groaned as she sat in the driver’s seat even though she couldn’t have weighed much more than 105 at the time.

“What a piece of shit,” Coop, my older brother, said from the back.

“The Caprice Classic was the standard for luxury when it debuted,” Mom said and brushed her bleached blond hair from her face. “And speaking of pieces of shit, we’ve got one that you’re legally required to visit.”

I shook my head. I hated it when she said things like that, but it was a long drive to Topeka, and I knew better than to start running my mouth. Besides, that’s what Coop was for.

“Takes one to know one,” he said.

“Shut up, buckle up, and roll up the windows. Ethan’s gonna get the Okie AC going.”

Mom placed the ice in a rusty baking pan and plopped it on my lap. She cranked the temperature knob over to high. A hot, crackling death rattle hissed out through the air vents.

“I’ll be passed out back here if you need me,” Coop said. The rear half of the car smelled like our school janitor: body odor and booze. “Ain’t nobody gonna spot me in this junker.”

“It’s the best I could do,” Mom said.

“Sometimes your best just ain’t good enough.” Coop tapped the large bandage on his forehead and slunk down out of view.

“You still haven’t told us where or how you got this thing,” I said. Earlier that morning, Mom took off on foot with our little brother Taylor and his backpack, to drop him off with one of his “aunts.” A half hour later, she tore into the trailer court behind the wheel of that Caprice Classic, revving the engine and honking the horn, much to the audible displeasure of our neighbors.

“A lot of people in this town still owe me money, you know.”

“From what?” Coop said. “You haven’t worked in years. At least not legally.”

Mom threw the package of circus peanuts over her shoulder into the backseat. “The next time you have something to say,” she said, “suck on one of these instead.”

“I’ve got something you can suck on, all right,” Coop said.

“Just pass out already and leave us alone, jerkwad,” Mom said. She handed me a penny and half of her scratch tickets. None of them were winners. I swept the gray ticket shavings off my shorts with my hands.

“Don’t you know by now luck don’t run in this family?” Coop said.

“Luck doesn’t run in this family,” Mom said. “And you can’t win if you don’t play.”

With that we shot out of the parking lot and squealed to a stop inches from a propane tanker barreling down Main Street. The driver laid on its horn and Mom jammed the transmission into drive. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “My goddamned bad, all right?” She turned onto the highway, lit a cigarette and shouted, “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.” She turned up the radio and sang. The morning sun is rising like a red rubber ball, a song whose rampant cheeriness always made me want to kill myself.

The water tower and grain elevators of Lakin, the small high-desert shitburg which we still pronounced Lackin’, shrunk behind us. Mom made good money the first few years we lived there, after we had to get far away from her second husband, Carl. Then a couple years ago she slipped on a puddle of milk at Jack & Jill’s grocery store and cracked three of her lower vertebrae. She spent most of her life in bed since then. Her law license expired, and she took to getting by with whatever she could squeeze out of folks – from the Jack & Jill to Social Security to married men.

I drummed my fingers on my thighs. We had one court-appointed visit to our dad’s farm per year. Since last summer, I’d been listening to the jazz cassettes he gave me and practicing my scales. My father was a bit of a legendary guitar player, at least according to him, in that stretch of Kansas. I brought my trombone along, because Dad said he wanted to jam with me and I felt like I finally had the chops to hang.

But even more than that, I had Molly Stevens on my mind. My body hummed like a tuning fork at the mere thought of her. It would be a full two weeks at least until I could see her again. Coop always said you have to make girls sweat it out. He was a senior and he had done it all, so I believed him. But I was addicted to everything about Molly. The smell of her pineapple hair spray. Her body, which I’d only begun to start experiencing, or so I thought. And her attention to me.

***

On the other side of Kalvesta, Mom rolled down the windows. The plastic bag from the ice—stamped with a cartoon polar bear sipping a tropical beverage—lay submerged in a shallow pool of orange-brown melt water. I placed the baking pan on the floorboard and Mom pinched at her leopard-print blouse.

Two cigarettes and four Oldies songs later, she pulled over on the shoulder and switched off the radio. The smell of manure hung thick over us.

“Ethan, I need to ask you a really big favor.” She took a makeup brush out of her purse and touched up her cheeks. “I need you to drive for me.”

“Seriously?”

“I need to take more medicine. I’m in some serious pain today.”

“What about Coop?”

“We can’t rely on him for anything, especially operating a motor vehicle. He’s still drunk from last night.”

 I twisted around. Coop lay sprawled across the backseat like a crash-test dummy. With a yellow-stained undershirt draped over his eyes and pearl-snap shirt wadded up underneath his head, he clutched a rolled-up Playboy in his left hand. Coop and I used to spend most of our time together, before he started skipping school and robbing cars and houses. I’d been scared shitless of him since he got back from juvey last month, stronger and angrier and more tattooed than ever.

“But I won’t even have my restricted till next year,” I said. “I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

“Listen, you’ll be in Driver’s Ed next summer. Why not get a head start with some real highway driving?”

She put her makeup brush back in her purse and applied more lipstick. She puckered her lips, rubbed a splotch of red off her nicotine-stained teeth, and turned her green eyes on me. I always had a hard time saying No to her.

“All right. But if I get busted, it’s your fault,” I said. She scooted my direction, and I crawled over her as she scooched under me.

I put my hands on the steering wheel and applied the brake. I turned the key forward, and the engine emitted a shrill grinding sound.

“It’s already running,” Mom said with a snicker. “Just put the sonofabitch in drive and go.”

I dropped the transmission and moved my foot to the gas pedal. The hood lurched up and I stomped on the brake in a fit of panic. Coop rolled over and muttered unintelligibly.

“Easy now. She may look worse for the wear, but this old lady has still got a few tricks up her sleeve.” Mom tapped her fingers on the cracked dashboard and grabbed the Oh Shit handle. She burrowed her fingernails, fire-hydrant red, into her palm. My own palms were sweating.

“Come on. Just let it rip,” Mom said. I eased into the accelerator this time and soon enough I had us shaking down the highway. I quickly looked down to check how fast I was going. The speedometer’s needle wavered between zero and twenty like a malfunctioning metronome.

“It’s busted,” Mom said. “But don’t worry. You don’t need a gauge to tell you what fifty-five feels like.” Her hands trembled as she rifled through her purse. She grew frustrated and emptied the contents on her lap: some used tissue and gum wrappers, a can of pepper spray, an x-ray of her back (just in case you didn’t believe she was a broken woman), and a half-dozen pill canisters. Her hands shook through the mess until she found the pill cannister she was after. She shook four Darvocets into her freckled hand. “Oh, and if the wheel shakes, you’re going too fast.” 

She ground the capsules with her teeth and lit a cigarette. Half of it evaporated in one long drag. The ashtray under the radio was jammed with the previous owner’s lipstick-stained butts and gray turds of ash. Mom snuffed out her cigarette on the outside of the door panel and flicked it away. The butt bounced and spun on the blacktop and gusted into the ditch. We passed a few abandoned houses and an unincorporated township, three houses and a feed co-op, an abandoned gas station, and two rotting train depots.

Mom fell asleep, and I turned off the radio. Heat droned through the windows and the sagging ceiling upholstery drummed out a surprisingly soothing rhythm. The school counselor told me I needed to make more time for myself. “Ethan Time,” he called it. At home, I would crank the box fan up to high, and make Mom and Coop—and the rest of the trailer park, all poor and loud like us—drown away.

But I was discovering there was no way I could drown out Molly. I didn’t have any friends once Coop got sent away last fall, and it was around that time Molly and I got paired up as biology lab partners. Even though she was a cheerleader, and all the guys in school had it in for her, she was no bimbo and didn’t care if she was seen with me. In fact, she seemed to relish the fact that hanging out with me pissed off the jocks and the shop boys, not to mention her parents. Molly wasn’t like the other girls out there. She was smart and well-read. And funny. When we had to dissect a cat, she chopped off its tail and stuck it under her lip. She pretended it was a moustache and did this spot-on impersonation of the principal: “You’ll be in deep weeds if I find out you’ve been sexing in the parking lot. You hear me?”

The night before we left for my dad’s, I spent the night at her house. Coop and Mom were at each other’s throat, so I had turned up the box fan and tried to make it all go away. When the banging and screaming finally let up, I peeked out. Coop’s head was bleeding. Mom had clubbed him with a tennis racket. When the cops came, we all pretended like nothing happened, and when they left, Coop tore out in his pickup. When Mom passed out, I called Molly and she told me to ride my bike over.  

That night, I told her things I’d never told anyone. That our dogs pissed and shit all over the place. That our entire herd of cats used the houseplants as litterboxes and left dead mice on the kitchen counters, sometimes even on my bed. That men came to our house at all hours of the night. That Coop would wail on me after Mom tore into him. That sometimes she locked Taylor in the bathroom for hours on end when she couldn’t cope with him. That I nailed my door shut from the inside before I went to bed each night. That I wished I knew more about my dad, but the more I found out about him the more I hated him.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

“I should’ve never told you any of this,” I said.

“No, I’m glad you told me, because I want you to hear this. You’re better than them,” she said. “Always remember that.”

“I don’t think anybody’s better than anybody else,” I said. I was mad about her saying that I was better than my family, even though I’ve always known that to be true.

“That’s part of what makes you, you.”

She stroked my hair as my head lay in her lap and I fell asleep. It was still dark when she woke me up. We heard her dad turn on the shower and getting ready for work. I wiped the drool from my face and scrambled out the window, leaving the only person I’d ever truly confided in, behind.

***

The highway cut gray through plots of soybeans and milo, wheat stubble and corn, all organized into squares and circles and rows. Pheasants strutted along in the yellow grass running in the ditches alongside the highway, and out of the CRP lands. Turkey buzzards swirled and swooped in the updrafts. I always thought that the pioneers had given up when they had settled Kansas. I could imagine them all saying, “Welp, we’ve had about enough of this shit. This place’ll do,” and unhitching their wagons. But there certainly was, and still is, an undeniable appeal to the desolate, peaceful gentleness of the grasslands, the feeling of being swallowed by the sky, and the patchwork high-plains crop patterns. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after I finally managed to block Molly and everybody else out of my mind that Coop punched my headrest and jolted me back into the bullshit.

“Why are you driving?” Coop said and then grabbed Mom’s shoulder and shook it. “Doris! Doris!”

“Huh?” she asked, opening her eyes.

“Why are you letting this little shrimp dick drive?” Coop said and punched my headrest again. I flinched and twitched, and the car swerved across the center line. “He can’t even stay in our own goddamned lane. This is fucking classic Doris right here.”

“He was doing fine until you woke up,” she said and wiped drool from her chin with the back of her hand.

“He still plays with stuffed animals, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shut up, butthead” I said. It stung because it was true. I loved my stuffed animal collection but, in that moment, I vowed to bury them in a mass grave when we got home (a promise I kept to myself). “Sit back. I can smell your hairy armpits.”

“Good one, Golden Boy,” Coop said. “You don’t even have body hair yet, and the stuff on your head ain’t nothing to be proud of either.”

“Shut your mouth,” Mom said. She started cutting my hair a few years back. I had a big red birthmark on my forehead like Gorbachev and brown moles dotted every inch of my scalp. I wouldn’t let her do the buzzcut since the time Coop came home drunk and pinned me down and took a magic marker and played connect the dots with my moles, drawing a penis.

“Man, I’ve got to take a shit,” Coop said.

“We’re not stopping till Great Bend,” Mom said.

“Aw, come on, Doris. Fuck. I’m gonna crap my pants.”

Coop wiped the sweat from his brow with his hand and sniffed his armpits. He looked out his window, scratched his scalp, and adjusted his aviator sunglasses.

“Doris, you never answered my question last night. Are you and Bob Farris an official item now? Like, going steady?”

“This is not an appropriate discussion to be having at this moment in time.”

“Oh, I see. So you’re just fucking.”

“Do I need to ground you from football this year?” Mom said. “Keep it up.”

“You wouldn’t dare. I’ll only be the starting quarterback. Might even play my way into a scholarship.”

“You couldn’t hack it at college,” Mom said. “And I wouldn’t bet on you staying out of jail the whole season. Those are some long goddamned odds.”

            “You can’t ground him from football,” I said.                      

“Mind your own business, shit stain,” Coop pelted me in the head with a circus peanut. It glanced off the ceiling and came to a rest on a stack of yellow Wendy’s napkins pinned to the dashboard with a googley-eyed pet rock.

“Goddamnit,” Mom said. “Keep it up and I’ll leave you right here on the side of the road.”

“You don’t have the balls,” Coop said. “You just got custody of me again.”      

“You hide and watch,” she said.

“Ooh. I’m shaking back here, Doris. Trembling.” Coop dredged up a thick wad of snot and spat out the window. It collided with a wall of wind and flew back in the car and splattered across the back windshield.

“Coop!” Mom yelled. “I raised you better than that.”

“That’s one theory.” Coop punched my headrest again. “Say, Mario Andretti.  What’s going on with you and Molly Stevens, huh? You two just fucking, too?” I flinched again but didn’t swerve this time.

“Ethan, you need to stay away from that Stevens girl,” Mom said. “We don’t need her dad in our business again.”

“We’re just lab partners,” I said.

“Don’t lie to me,” Mom said. “I know you’ve been calling her.”

An ambulance shot past us, headed the other direction. We all shut up, as if somebody we knew was dying inside. We passed a patch of grasshopper pumps humping oil from the dry ground and some wind turbines. Coop cleaned his fingernails with the tip of his pocketknife. Mom did her deep breathing drill and crashed again. Bob Farris. He ran the bank, and his wife recently died after “falling asleep” in her Suburban on the railroad tracks.

 Coop folded his knife and slipped it into his back pocket. He ran a palm over his spiky hair. Sweat flicked in every direction, and some struck my neck. “Pull over, will you, E.,” he said. “Please. I’m about to burst.”

“You heard Mom.”

“I tell you what, bud. If you pull over up here by this historical marker, I’ll show you something that will melt your goddamned mind.”

Coop did always have something worth seeing. I never had the stomach to boost anything myself, but whenever I held one of his stolen items, I got a huge rush. It was a window into his world, a world that I was increasingly left out of.

I pulled over at a historical marker denoting the childhood home of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. Coop pulled on his black cowboy boots. He hopped out and ran behind a row of cedars into some pastureland. Mom woke up and asked what was going on. I told her we needed a piss break.

“Be quick,” she said with a yawn.

I walked into the trees and closed my eyes and stood there with my dick out and let the wind hum over my ear drums. I wondered what my dad looked like now. Every year, something was different about him. He always looked so cool in photos, but the magic wasn’t ever there in real life. Maybe I just didn’t get him yet. I was hoping to finally learn something real about him this time around.

“Time’s up,” Mom yelled.

I yelled through the trees at Coop to see if he was ready.

“I need some toilet paper first,” he said. “I think I saw Mom put some in the trunk.”

I sprinted back to the car and told Mom I was grabbing some TP for Coop.

“Tell him to use a stick,” she said. Her right arm rested behind her head, exposing the salty white clumps of her deodorant. I reached for the keys in the ignition.

“Looking for these?” Mom jangled the missing keys.

I grabbed the stack of yellow napkins and the pet rock from the dash. I wound up like Bret Saberhagen and clanged the pet rock against a NO CAMPING OVERNIGHT sign. The metal rectangle wobbled and reverberated. A spooked jackrabbit shot out of the weeds and zigzagged across the highway, improbably dodging the wheels of a convoy of grain trucks.

***

Coop sat across two rocks he had positioned a few inches apart. His jeans hugged his ankles, and he was holding his Playboy on his lap. He slapped a fly dead on his arm and flicked the remains into the grass with his finger.

“This is the best I could do.” I held out the napkins.

“That will work, my man,” he said. “Now turn around. I don’t want you peeking at my manhood again.”

A few weeks before, Coop caught me looking through a crack in his bedroom door while he masturbated. He paid me twenty dollars not to tell Mom, and I never did.

I turned round and faced away from him. Coop grunted a few times. Then I heard his studded belt jangle and his zipper go up.

“All right, let’s go, dick licker,” he said. “And do you think you could drive a little faster? I’m roasting back there.”

“You think you can lay off me?”

“Sorry. I was just pissed off. You shouldn’t be driving. You know that, right?” I nodded. “I mean, you are doing OK. I feel safer with you driving than with her.”

“You mean that?”

“Of course I do,” he said and turned around.

“Coop, you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“You promised.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Well, you have to swear on grandma’s tits you won’t tell anybody.”

“I can keep a secret as good as anybody.”

“I mean it, Ethan. You hear me?”

“I swear.”

He reached into his front pocket and unfolded a piece of transparent black paper with a blobby image on it. A sonogram. The fetus lay on its back with its feet folded up and an arm extended up to its mouth, like it was drinking a beer.  

“What? Who in the hell did you knock up?”

“Oh, no. It’s not mine.”

“Whose is it?”

“I’ll give you one good guess.”

“Shit,” I said. “Holy fucking shit.”

“Remember, you can’t tell anyone. I mean it.”

 ***

Mom studied us as we approached the car. “I’m sensing some sort of brotherly collusion,” she said. “What are you hiding?”

“Nothing,” Coop said. Mom turned her gaze to me.

“No collusion here,” I said, trying not to let the sonogram etch itself on my face.

“Let’s get a fucking move on,” she said. “And listen, I don’t want any more shit. Do you hear me, Coop?”

“Yeah, Doris. I copy. I left all my shit out there in that yonder field.”

***

Thirty miles from Great Bend, Mom was snoring again. We needed gas, at least according to the gauge. Clouds floated big and white and puffy on the horizon, but I couldn’t see anything in them but baby parts: little hands and fingers and toes, noses and cheeks, elbows and tummies and baby butt cheeks.

“Can you change the radio?” Coop said. “This oldies shit is annoying as all hell.”

“That’s the only station we get out here besides country,” I said. “And I’m not listening to that crap.”

“I suppose I’ll just have to entertain myself, then.” Coop spat a half-chewed circus peanut into his hand and threw it into Mom’s hair. He did this a few more times until she woke up. I couldn’t keep my laughter locked down. It sprayed out between my pursed lips, as did Coop’s.

“What’s so fucking funny?” she said. “Huh?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Coop just told me a joke.”

She bent forward to look for her cigarette pouch and a circus peanut dangled down into her eyes as her hair fell forward.

“Pull over,” she screamed, patting and plucking at her hair. “Now.”           

I stopped the car on the shoulder, next to a NO PASSING sign, all bright yellow and shaped like a tomahawk.

“Get out of the car, Coop.”

“Finally,” Coop said.

“You can’t just leave him here,” I said.

“You wanna bet?”

“But Dad will be pissed if Coop doesn’t come.”

“Is that right? I’d say that’s damn near laughable. Ethan, honey, let me tell you something about your father,” Mom said.

“I know. He’s a lazy bum with no real musical talent. A worthless human being who would fuck a hole in the wall. A legend only in his own mind.”

“No. Something you don’t already know. Actually, maybe I should let Cooper tell you. Coop, tell your baby brother what your father did when you got in all your trouble last year.”

Coop didn’t say anything, just got out of the car.

“I know it had nothing to do with Dad,” I said. “Judge Stevens made Coop a deal that kept him out of the pen.”

“That’s one version of events. But here’s another. I convinced Stevens to let Coop try a change of scenery. He wasn’t even gonna make him go to juvey. But when we called up to Topeka and asked your dad if Coop could go stay with him, you want to know what your father said to that idea?”

“No.”

“Fat fucking chance,” she said.         

I looked back at Coop. He shrugged. “She ain’t lying.”

            I didn’t want to believe it, but for once Mom and Coop both agreed on something.

“Is that why you guys got divorced?” I said. “He never wanted us?”

“No,” Coop said. “Mom couldn’t keep her legs shut.”

 “You worthless shit!” Mom screamed. “Get out of my sight!”

Coop kicked the door shut so hard it walloped my chest. Mom winced.

“My back,” she whimpered. “My fucking back.”

“Maybe you can get a little extra something on your next disability check,” Coop said. He clapped his hands, turned around and lit a cigarette. He held it in his mouth while he wrapped a red bandana around his forehead.

A pickup headed the other direction slowed down, and the driver peered over at us. Coop gave him a thumbs-up and Mom waved while I hid my face low.

Mom turned to me. “Get Coop’s backpack from the trunk.”

I walked behind the car and burnt my knuckle on the hot metal lock when I inserted the key. Coop got a good laugh out of that.

“Shut up, dumbass,” I said. “It’s not funny. None of this funny.” Coop grabbed his backpack from the trunk.

“If you can’t laugh at it, what can you do,” Coop said, as he slung his pack over his shoulders.

“Come on,” I said. “Just say you’re sorry and get back in the car.”

“No way. Fuck that bitch.”

“But I don’t want you to go away again.”

“I’ll see you at Dad’s one way or another, cock breath,” he said and punched me on the shoulder. “Court’s orders.” He winked and took off along the shoulder. I pulled my black trombone case out of the trunk and flung it into the middle of the goddamned prairie.

“Ethan, go get that,” Mom said. “That us an awful lot of money you just threw out in the middle of that field.”

I slammed the trunk lid shut and got back in my seat.

“I’ve always hated that fucking thing,” I said and started the car.

***

The farther we drove away from Coop, the more I got to worrying about him, and the angrier I got with Mom.

“This is just stupid,” I finally said. “You’re always so stubborn.”

“I’m afraid you got a stubborn streak on both sides of your family tree.”

“Did you really cheat on Dad?”

She squinted into a field of broken-down cars and trucks, next to a derelict house. The longer I waited for a reply, the more I regretted asking in the first place.

“I had enough of his screwing around, so I evened the score. I don’t know if I’d call that cheating, exactly.”      

“So you’ve always been a whore.”

Mom raised her hand.

“Do it,” I said. “I know you want to.”

She balled her hands and pummeled the dashboard with her fists. She shrieked, no words, just an explosion of noise, until she went hoarse and started coughing. She lit a cigarette as we entered Great Bend and rubbed her hands until she stopped convulsing.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said with a sputter, while dabbing a used Kleenex at her eyes. “I get so worked up about Coop. I’ve tried everything with him. I don’t want to lose you like I did him. The thought of that scares me to death.”

A gasoline fire raged through my body. Coop was God knows where. Dad could eat a raw dick. And somehow I was all Mom really seemed to have. And she was going to add another life to this mess.

I pulled into the first gas station I saw, a Conoco.

“Here’s some money, pookie,” Mom said. “Get me a Diet Pepsi and some Sprees and whatever you want.”

I bought a Diet Pepsi and some Sprees and a phone card. I went outside to the payphone and dialed Molly’s number. She’d know what to do. Judge Stevens answered.

“Ah, if it isn’t Ethan. Listen, Molly and I had a talk about your little visit the other night. You’re not welcome here at our house, ever again. You are not to call here looking for her. Ever again. Our family doesn’t want anything to do with your family. Ever again.”

 He hung up, and I threw the receiver at the phone box and kicked over a trash can.

“What was that all about?” Mom asked me.

“None of your goddamned business,” I said as I got back in the driver’s seat. I switched on the engine and turned us around, back toward where we had left Coop. Mom grabbed my arm and plunged her fingernails into my bicep.

“Coop doesn’t care about you,” she said.

She let go of my arm and went for the steering wheel. I slapped her hand away and snatched her by the wrist and squeezed. I was ready to crush every bone inside her, but she let out a pathetic whimper. Her bones felt light and hollow and brittle in my grip, like little birds’ legs. I had to let up. She sobbed like a weed-eater and rolled her wrist out in little circles.

“When were you going to tell me?” I said.

“Tell you what?”

“That you’re pregnant.”

Mom bit down on her trembling lower lip.

“Goddamn that Coop,” she finally said. “I never should have told him.” She wiped her nose and cheeks with a tissue and blew her nose. “I didn’t think you needed to know.”

“Well, of course I need to know. And I need to know whose it is.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters. It matters more than anything in the world right now. How the hell are we going to take care of a baby on top of everything else? I hope it was Bob Farris, because at least he has some money.”

            “Can we please discuss this later? It doesn’t matter whose it was. I repeat: It does not matter whose it was. Emphasis on was. Understand? It. Does. Not. Matter. Whose. It. WAS.” 

***

Coop lay shirtless in the grass with his head propped on his backpack as he blew smoke rings at the sky. His feet were resting on top of my trombone case. I pulled over and honked the car horn. He looked over, unsurprised. His cheeks were red and sweaty, his spiky hair wet and flattened. He stood and picked up his backpack and my trombone, waited for a few semis to pass, and jogged across the highway.

Coop, I’m sorry,” Mom said as he ripped the back door open, flung in his backpack and my trombone, and plopped down in the backseat. “I love you two boys more than anything. You both know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” Coop said.

“We know. We know,” I said.

Just then a highway patrol car pulled up behind us with the lights switched on.

“Shit, it’s a trooper,” Mom said. “Turn off the car and let me do the talking.”

I killed the engine and an officer with a flat-brimmed hat and round aviator sunglasses walked over. He bent his penguin-shaped body over and peered into my window. I could feel him searching my face, estimating my age.

“Good afternoon. I’m Officer Horndadae with the Kansas State Highway Patrol,” he said. “How are you all doing?”

“We’re fine, officer,” Mom said, and Coop and I nodded our heads. He gave Coop a long, hard look.

“Can I see your license, please, young man?”

“Ethan, show the officer your license, please,” Mom said. I reached into my back pocket knowing there was no wallet there. Then I began to scan the floorboard and the seats.

“Crap. I must have left it at home,” I said.

“He just got his restricted,” Mom said.

“Mm-hmm,” he said and clicked his tongue. “Well, the reason I stopped is because we had a report of a hitchhiker right at this mile marker here. He matches this guy’s description.” He motioned back at Coop with his thumb.

“We just pulled over to switch drivers and have a pee,” Mom said. “We haven’t seen any hitchhikers.”

“Great Bend is just up the road. You couldn’t wait a few more minutes?”

“Say, are you Randy Horndadae’s brother, by any chance?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m his older brother.”

“You must be Dave, then. I don’t think I’ve ever met you.” She leaned over my lap, and the tips of her breasts grazed the tops of my thighs. “I know your brother Daryl, too. And Randy and I go way back. I’m Doris Grace.”

“You don’t say.”

“Officer Horndadae, would you mind discussing this situation away from the children?”

“Sure, ma’am,” he said. Mom popped a piece of gum in her mouth. I watched in the side mirror as they walked to his squad car and leaned up against it.

“We’re fucked,” I said.

“Just let Mom do her thing,” Coop said.

“She’s not pregnant anymore,” I said.

“You told her? Goddamnit! You swore, Ethan. You swore.”

“You knew she lost it?”

“I knew she ain’t having it.”

Behind us, Mom rested her hand on the officer’s shoulder. She threw her head back and giggled. He snorted and slapped his thigh and stomped the asphalt with his boot. Mom got her x-ray out of her purse and held it up into the sunlight. He shook his head. They chatted and laughed some more, and then Mom waved to the officer and he got back into his car.

“I have to drive now, sweetie,” she said and opened the door.

I slid over into the passenger seat and Mom got behind the wheel. Officer Horndadae turned on his lights and sped off. Mom checked her lipstick and jostled her hair.

“Did he know I didn’t have a license?” I said.

“Of course he knew,” Coop said.

“When will you two learn to stop underestimating your mother?” Mom put the cap on her lipstick and tucked it into her purse. She drove the speed limit until we got on the other side of Great Bend. Then she started speeding and switched on the radio. I scratched the back of my head with my middle finger. Coop chuckled and punched my head rest, and we started making really good time.

Casey DW Jones grew up on the high desert plains of southwestern Kansas. He graduated from the University of Kansas and holds an MFA from Hamline University, where he served as a fiction editor for Water-Stone Review. Casey is the founding editor of Casino Literary Magazine, and his fiction has recently appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal and New Limestone Review. He currently resides in Minneapolis with his wife, two daughters, and adorably vicious dog.