Bad Men

Harry felt the pressure building in the center of his forehead. Her voice was drilling away nicely now. If she kept this up, his head would cave in.

“I heard you. If I knew where we were, we’d be someplace else.”

“The hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that if you’d give me a damn minute’s peace, then maybe I could figure out where we are and get us where we’re meant to be instead.”

“You should have stayed on the highway.”

“I came off the highway because you said you were bored. You wanted to see some scenery.”

“There is no scenery.”

“Well, welcome to the south. The Civil War was the best thing that ever happened to this place. At least it brought in some visitors.”

“You shouldn’t have listened to me.”

“You didn’t give me much choice.”

“Don’t take that tone with me.”

“Hey, I already got a wife back home. I don’t need another one.”

“Fuck you, Harry.”

And he could hear the hurt in her voice and knew that he’d have to worm his way back into her affections if he had any hope of expanding his sexual horizons in the company of Veronica Berg. The annual convention of the Insurance Providers of America wasn’t likely to be so riveting that Harry would want to spend the entire weekend sitting in the middle of a bunch of seersuckers, nursing a hard-on. He reached in through the car window and touched her moist skin lightly with the palm of his hand. She pulled her face away from him, sending him a clear signal: if she wasn’t going to let him touch her face with his hand, then there was a pretty good chance that the rest of her skin would remain a covered mystery to him as well unless he started making up some lost ground.

“Baby, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

She dabbed at a make-believe tear with the tip of a finger. “Yeah, well, you ought to be more careful about what you say. You can be very hurtful sometimes, Harry Rylance.”

“Sorry, “he repeated. He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, trying to ignore the taste of nicotine on her breath. That was another thing: her damn smoking. If there was one thing-

“Harry, there’s someone coming!”

He looked up, and sure enough, there was a cloud of dust and fumes heading their way. He skipped away from Veronica, took the map in his hand, and waved it at the oncoming vehicle. As it drew closer and the dust cleared some, Harry could see that it was a blue Ford truck, twenty years old at least. Behind the wheel was a young man with blond hair parted on the right and hanging down over one eye. He stopped and brushed the hair back onto his head with his fingers as he looked at the older man.

Behind him, he heard Veronica purr in approval. The kid was good looking, Harry noticed, maybe a little on the pretty side because of that blond hair, but still a fine-looking young man. Harry wondered if he was turning queer, then decided that the mere fact that he was worried about turning queer probably meant that he wasn’t. Still, thought Harry, that kid better not do anything that might offend the law, because if he went to jail, his cell mate would never have to buy cigarettes again.

“You lost?” asked the kid. His voice was a little high, almost eerily so. Harry walked over to him and realized that the young man was older than he had first appeared: early twenties at most, but he had the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy waiting for something to happen below his navel.

Fucking backwoods freak, thought Harry.

“Took a wrong turn somewhere back down the road,” said Harry, which wasn’t actually an admission that he was lost but wasn’t saying that he knew where he was either. It was a man thing.

“Where you bound?”

What the fuck? Where you bound? Who talked like that?

“We’re headed for Augusta.”

“You’re a long ways from Augusta. That’s a whole ’nother state away.”

“I know that. We were planning on taking our time.”

“You on vacation?’

“Business.”

“What d’you do?”

“I sell insurance.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you sell insurance?”

Harry’s brow furrowed. This was all he needed. The kid was obviously some kind of redneck retard driving a clapped-out old Ford up and down back roads, looking for folks to bother. They hadn’t been off the plane more than two hours and already the weekend was turning to shit.

“People need insurance.”

“Why?”

“Well, suppose something happens to them. Suppose you crashed your truck, what would you do?”

“It ain’t my truck.”

Jesus.

“Okay, well suppose you crashed it anyway, and the guy whose truck it is wanted something done about it.”

“I’d fix it.”

“Suppose it was so badly damaged that it couldn’t be fixed?”

“There ain’t nothing I can’t fix.”

Harry wiped his hand across his face in frustration.

“You get hurricanes down here, right?”

“Sure.”

“What if your house blew away?”

The young man considered this, then nodded.

“If I had a house,” he said, then started the truck up again. “Follow me,” he told Harry. “I’ll take you where you need to go.”

Harry smiled in relief and trotted back to the car.

“We’re going to follow him,” he told Veronica.

“Okay with me,” she said.