Lancaster, California appeared more quickly than she anticipated.
Time turned into something fibrous. Hours tumbled into freewheeling freeway rhythms, mysterious and impossible for her to measure.
She knew she needed to calm down. To ignore the whine and whoosh of strange syncopations that set their own clock.
A good night’s sleep would help. So would a few nights off the road. She could return to it fresh after a quiet stretch to study her list, settle on a plan and stop those bastards.
There were seven of them on her list. In the interest of focus, she now wanted to trim them down to three. Each man more hideous than the next, scarring and charring and poisoning the land.
She didn’t feel like driving anymore and she didn’t want to stop to eat in Lancaster, California. The town disgusted her. Too many black memories. She would speed past them all, dim memories like uninvited guests, disrespectful and insistent.
She hadn’t spoken much with the snowboarder, still slumped in the shotgun seat.
She asked the snowboarder if he was hungry. Nothing imaginable, he told her, could top a tomahawk. A well-marbled, dry aged steak.
She smiled. It was the first time he had seen her smile since they accidentally tore the flimsy motel shower door off its loose hinges that morning.
The 1963 Studebaker Avanti cut down from Lancaster toward Quartz Hill, California.
She told him there were only two places in California you could find a decent steak. One was Jocko’s in Nipomo and the other was the Broken Bit Steakhouse in Quartz Hill.
What she didn’t tell him was how a few months back in Lancaster, California a man she thought she loved sliced up her soul.
She’d seen it coming and planned to get out first. But he turned on her faster than expected. He blew up so hard, fences fell down and posts splintered. She felt rusty barbwire whipped up by gray desert wind wrapped around her.
But that was all pretty much behind her now, months ago, miles ago.
