Ragnarök

Twenty-Seven: The Continuum

Lupalito.

The town carries a white-hot radiance of color and heat. Not even the fabled palms, green as reptile scales, provide much midday shade. Reggaeton bumps from passing car speakers and open storefronts. Swimsuit-clad cyclists swerve through traffic without a care in the world, everyone bronzed like yams, wearing an everlasting sheen of perspiration.

Mason wanders the main thoroughfare, sipping his third cup of twenty-five-cent orange juice squeezed fresh right in front of him at a small bodega. He's already taken the step of ditching his clothes, replacing them with white cargo shorts and a shamrock-colored shirt advertising some Irish pub in Tampa. Both articles were bought at a resale store lodged in a strip mall not far from the bus stop.

At the Twin Cities Greyhound station, he managed to bribe a bum into fronting as his guardian, this after spending no small chunk of Selby's payoff on a yellow cab to St. Paul, which he hailed from a public phone at the same truck stop where, not long ago, he'd strapped Liza's phone to a semi-truck driven by one Bernadette Harris.

Hiking from the farmhouse to the truck stop took nearly an hour, and he ditched the Ruger in a copse of cattails along the way. That was three days ago. He'll be a wanted man by now, billed as a killer, a maniac fugitive. He only hopes Bernadette doesn't watch the nightly news. She doesn't seem like the type who would.

He slept nearly the whole way to Jacksonville, fitful yet exhausted, watching the Central Lowlands change into the Appalachian foothills change into the Southeast Coastal Plain. He disembarked with the other passengers at stretch points, eating out of vending machines, attuning to the gradual change in climate. As for anticipation, nervousness, excitement, he was too drained to feel any of those things. He felt gray and opaque, a demi-ghost riding among his fellow passengers.

In Jacksonville he caught another transit for the brief remainder of his journey. That was when the Florida landscape really opened up, the acacia and mangrove trees, swamp ferns and elephant ears, subtropical shrubs huddled amid blankets of cordgrass. This new bus puttered down A1A through a succession of beach hamlets, each resembling, in its own way, the one that would be his terminus.

He walked around Lupalito for a full hour before coming to Bernadette's address, engaging the assistance of a mailman out making the rounds in his pith helmet and high shorts. Her brother's timeshare stood on the outskirts. It was yellow and had symmetrical tulip beds under the windows. Neighbors were spaced agreeably apart in pastel, white-trimmed, two-story A-frames. They reminded Mason of Easter eggs hunkered on their evergreen beds of Astroturf. He double-checked the address written inside the cover of a Stephen King paperback, then walked up the path, adjusting his backpack, and took a deep breath before ringing the bell.

The fact that he's now wandering through town alone, sipping juice and wondering where to spend the night, is an indicator of how Bernadette received him.

The door opened. There stood a dowdy, overweight, thirty-something woman with purple streaks in her bleach-blond hair. She had on a flowy black caftan threaded with gold arabesque. A Monroe beauty mark was stamped above her lip. Her square feet were encased in thick brown leather sandals, and she wore a series of Sanskrit charms on intertwined silver bracelets. Had he been ignorant of her profession as a trucker, it wouldn't have ranked among his first fifty guesses.

"Who are you?" Her already fair complexion turning a shade paler. Evidently, she could guess the answer.

He never so much as set foot inside the house. She accused him of misleading her, making himself out to be older on the phone, manipulating and incriminating her—all true. Under no circumstance would she harbor some runaway teen. Her eyes flitted around the block, anxious that the mere sight of them talking would be enough to draw the judgment and ire of her brother's neighbors. She sent him packing, as it were, without first giving him a chance to unpack.