Free A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown Page B

would he decide where it was he was going next. To stay with his sister. To find Amy. To continue wandering. To decide to decide what he needed to decide.
    Up ahead, Henry could see, the pale blue prison bus was still parked on the highway’s shoulder, exactly where it had been before. The prisoners, though, had switched sides, as had the rifle-toting guard. Most of them were scattered across the sloping berm at the highway’s edge, slowly moving forward in unison, but three of the prisoners stood just beyond the yellow stripe on the shoulder.
    The men appeared to be staring at something on the ground or perhaps shielding their eyes from the sun as they talked. Just as Henry approached, he saw one of the men, an old black man with gray hair, step across the yellow stripe. Henry wasn’t sure what was going on. Then the old man took another step and then another and then, now, he was directly in front of Henry’s car.
    Henry did not have time to swerve or even slam his foot on the brake before the awful collision.
    Later, when it was done, he would wonder if he really had seen what he thought he remembered seeing: the old man, as soon as he was out in the road, raising his arms at his sides, raising them as if what he meant to do, in the moment before Henry’s car struck him, was fly.

Four
    IT MADE no sense to him. A man was dead, not by his hand but by his car. Not by his choice but by the man’s own choice. Even so, a man was dead, and Henry had killed him, had spilled the man’s red blood all over the black stink of the highway and across his car’s bumper and hood and windshield, the bumper and hood now smashed as if he had struck not a man’s body but a tree, the windshield cracked into a jagged puzzle. Henry lived nowhere, had nowhere to go—yet he’d been told that although it was clear he wasn’t to blame, that he bore no responsibility for what had happened, he ought to stay put awhile.
    Those were the precise words the Marimore County sheriff had used, and though he had posed it as a question, Henry had understood it was not a question. “You’ll stay put awhile, Mr. Garrett?” the sheriff had said, peering up from the papers on his cluttered desk, the late-afternoon light angling through the windows, illuminating the dust, and Henry had nodded, his hands still shaking, knuckles white as though he still gripped the steering wheel. He had never been in a sheriff’s office, had seen them only on TV and in the movies, but this one looked exactly like those, like a stage set from The Andy Griffith Show or some John Wayne Western. The wooden furniture was chipped and faded and worn. Giant hoops with large keys hung on the wall near two cells with sliding metal-bar doors. A bulletin board displayed faded posters of wanted men, their faces unshaven and their eyes glazed, and of missing children, and on a bookcase beneath a dirty window, dishes and wooden plaques were stacked haphazardly on the top two shelves while old magazines and plastic three-ring binders spilled out of the shelf below.
    When Henry looked out the dirty window, he saw a young woman and a little boy stepping out of the hardware store across the street. The young woman was carrying the boy’s stuffed animal—it looked to Henry like an elephant, like Ganesh on the lampshade at the motel, but he figured that he must be wrong, that it must be something else, a bear or dinosaur or pig or some fanciful imaginary creature. The woman was also holding a brown paper grocery bag, her purse slung over her shoulder. Henry watched as the woman awkwardly tried to shift everything to one arm so she could take hold of the boy’s hand, but the boy ran down the block ahead of her. Henry could see that the woman was shouting for the boy to wait but couldn’t hear her. He felt panicked, as though the child were in terrible danger of darting out into the street, of getting hit by a car—or maybe just of winding up lost for a few awful, frightening moments.