Collie jerks awake on the bus. Across the aisle, a scrawny kid with a little stack of colored paper in his lap—swing and a miss, road burn, the stench of blood on hot asphalt—gives him a funny look.
Collie’s gut takes a nosedive into his boots.
He can feel his heart pounding, pulse hammering at his Adam’s apple and behind his eyes. He’s sitting—Christ almighty, that tricky bastard, sitting—for the first time in what must be forever. Or he’s been sitting forever, the way the mild ache in his lower back and his ass suddenly begins to make itself known. His whole body feels caught between sensations, relief in being able to take a full breath getting all mixed up with the sick cramping in his gut and how the whole right side of his face fuzzes in and out like a shitty radio signal.
When he was in eighth grade he got into a fight with Davie Walker (his name is just like yours, Collie, look, you’ll be thick as thieves in no time, won’t you?). Davie had fisted Collie’s hair in one sweaty hand and slammed his head into the bathroom wall. This feels like the half-second after, the breath between the impact and the pain, just before he started flailing back with limbs that were too long for him to know what to do with.
Nothing to flail against here. There’s his jacket, draped over his lap, and there’s the cracked vinyl seat below him and the half-chemical, half-human smell issuing from God knows where, same as the one he sat with for hours before they all piled out at the dropoff. There’s Rank, mama’s boy Rank, and he folds paper pretty damn good for a dead man. The driver hasn’t stopped. He doesn’t know if there even is a driver. Outside there’s nothing but conifers and early morning sun and the Road.
Purgatory is in Maine. Go figure.
Collie buries his face in his hands. Road to Hell, good intentions, whatever the fuck. His memories of the Lakota stories his mom told him are fuzzy, murmured over bedtime when his dad was working late at the plant and couldn’t come into his and his sister Cassie’s room to sing to them as they fell asleep. He thinks he remembers something about the Spirit Road being cold. There was a river in there somewhere, and once you crossed it, you were set. It definitely didn’t involve a Greyhound or skittish white boys throwing him side-eyes when they think he’s not looking.
He hadn’t given much thought to where he might end up. Not recently, anyway—he’d had his share of late nights with his best friend Lorraine when they were teenaged and dumb, heads cloudy with pot and watery beer as they argued whether the televangelists on the radio were full of shit. The only god in Maine was the Road.
Baker had kept faithful, though. Collie peeks out from behind his fingers to do a quick scan of the bus: plenty of boys, some of them even familiar, but no Baker. Off to a better place, maybe, not tangled up with Collie, who’d killed a man, and Rank, who’d slipped trying to fight one. He wonders what the rest of them did to land them here. Tripped each other, maybe. He thinks he remembers seeing a lot of that on the Hill. It’s blurry.
Baker was nice. Wherever he’s gone, Heaven or Louisiana, Collie thinks it probably has a lot of sunshine.
For a minute there, right before Collie had pulled the trigger on himself, he’d thought he might see his dad when he got to the other side. Heaven, Hell, the Spirit World, whichever would claim him, whatever was left over after the Change when the God-fearing State began to chase boys into the arms of the Road to die noble deaths pissing themselves and screaming for their mothers. Collie used to wish for his dad as a kid, the rest of his family crowded around the folding table in the kitchen whenever he had a birthday, one second of total silence before he blew out the candle: please let Daddy come back whole. Same as any other kid whose father had an accident one day and never came home. Never told anyone, mind you, that’d ruin the wish, but he thinks his mom probably knew. She’s always had her ways.
Jesus, she probably saw him die on live television. Or maybe she didn’t. Good chance they killed the broadcast once Collie went after the soldiers. Going against the State is a bad look, but getting one over on it is worse. The feed probably cut out, and when the country tuned back in, Collie would’ve been gone.
He doesn’t know if that’s any better.
They’d sung for his dad at the wake. Collie had been eight and they’d done it twice, once in Algonquin, for Dad, and once in Lakota, for them. Mom led both times. She always had a good voice, and none of Dad’s family had followed him down from Canada, so she was the only one who knew any Algonquin, and only what he had taught her. She, Collie, and Cassie pooled what they could, tried to fill in the gaps Dad left behind to keep the memory and that part of them alive.
Collie swallows hard around the lump in his throat, against the ache there that isn’t a memory of the flash of gunpowder. However homesick he was before has nothing on the fucking abyss opening up in his chest right now.
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