Free The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones Page B

never had more than two beers in a night, and these he spread out over hours, savoring them. Wyatt was no great drinker.
    Sam was singing along to an Alan Jackson song playing loud through his new compact disc player, a marvel of electronics so complicated looking, so full of buttons and blinking neon lights, that Wyatt thought it looked more like the panel on a spaceship than something you could purchase for two hundred bucks at the nearest Circuit City. Gene Lawson, riding shotgun, tipped back his can of beer, swallowed the dregs, and pitched the empty out the window, nailing a stop sign. “Bull’s-eye,” he said, putting his left hand up, palm open, as though requesting a high five. Wyatt, now well trained, opened the cooler and fished a can from the bottom, where the ice was packed. He put it in Gene’s hand.
    “Appreciate it,” Gene said.
    Sam gunned it through a yellow light, the truck’s transmission squealing before he could jam the gearshift into fourth. The kid didn’t know what he had, didn’t know how easily he could lose it all, daddy or no daddy. Wyatt couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever been that foolish, but maybe that was his problem. His own father haddied of a heart attack when Wyatt was seventeen and a senior in high school. Wyatt hadn’t been a good enough student to set his sights on college, so he probably would have ended up in one of the local factories anyway, but he’d missed out on those Sam-style years of partying and blowing his money and trolling the honky-tonks for pretty girls.
    “State line,” Sam called, and he and Gene touched the roof of the cab with their right hands, a gesture Wyatt didn’t understand and cared too little about to bother questioning. The thought of his couch, of Boss’s warmth under his left hand and the TV’s remote control in his right, had never been more appealing.
    “That’s our little ritual,” Gene said in the silence that followed. Gene was a few years older than Sam, old enough to drink legally, but he had a chubby boy’s face that he attempted to hide, or age, with coarse whiskers. “Say a little prayer to your angel when you get to Tennessee, ’cause you’ll probably need it. And thank the Lord for Kentucky when you drive back over.”
    Sam took another swig from his flask. “Praise the Lord!” he said stupidly.
    The boys clinked their drinks together.
    They passed Poke’s and the Salamander, and then Nancy’s was visible just around a bend in the road, glimmering in the moonlight like a half-buried relic. There was something kind of mystical about it, the metal structure pulsing like the mother ship, the security lights outside all haloed in clouds of limestone dust from the gravel parking lot. And of course Wyatt’s presence here, riding backseat with a couple of man-boys, smelling of the English Leather cologne that he usually only broke out for funerals and occasionally church, was surreal; the night had the texture of a dream. He would wonder, hoping, the next day: Was it?
    “All right, Tubs,” Sam said once they parked and shut off the car, cutting off Alan Jackson before he could finish his plea to not rock the jukebox. “We’re parked. We’re going to a bar. Might as well have you a beer while it’s free.”
    “I don’t mind waiting till we’re indoors,” Wyatt said.
    Sam leaned around the seat and popped the lid off the cooler, making the Styrofoam squeal. “Get your ass a beer, man,” Sam said. “We’re not going in until you drink one. I’m determined to see you have a good time tonight.”
    Wyatt thought about saying that he didn’t need beer to have a good time but knew how square that would be. And it wasn’t the beer he had a problem with, anyhow. But how could he tell these boys that? I’m too grown-up for all of this. I was always too grown-up for all of this. He’d come, hadn’t he? He was in it for the night, like it or not.
    “All right, Christ,” he said, pressing the tab on a Coors