“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.”