3 Nowhere to Go and All Day to Get There by Gar Anthony Haywood Read Free Book Online

A Mother Always Knows
    It happened in Amarillo, Texas.
    Nothing ever happens in Amarillo, Texas, from what I understand, but leave it to Joe and Dottie Loudermilk to liven up the place. We're trouble magnets, Big Joe and I. Sometimes I think we could roll Lucille, the Airstream trailer home we've lived in ever since we retired and ran screaming from the clutches of our five grown children, out into the middle of the Mojave Desert, not another living soul around for miles, and within fifteen minutes, a full-scale riot would break out. Teenagers chucking Molotov cocktails, National Guardsmen firing tear gas canisters into a hostile crowd—the whole nine yards.
    Generally, we have to be traveling with somebody for real disaster to strike—either one of our aforementioned adult children or one of the adorably destructive grandchildren a pair of them have given us (Joe likes to call these little people Pit Bulls in Oshkosh)—but sometimes we can stumble onto a potentially catastrophic situation all by ourselves. As we did in Amarillo. True, we wouldn't have been in Amarillo if we hadn't just come from visiting our son Walter in Albuquerque, where a musical he was backing entitled Malcolm X and Mister T in the Key of G , was making its off-off-off-Broadway debut (please don't ask), but that's beside the point. What happened in Amarillo we brought upon ourselves, no familial assistance necessary.
    Joe says it happened because I had to go to the bathroom, but the truth is, we would have been in the clear if he could have mustered the willpower to wait until our next food-and-gas stop to buy himself a 3-Musketeers bar. It's a point of debate that we go around and around about every time one of us tells this story, but he really knows it was his fault. He doesn't go inside that Sunoco gas station's mini-mart at two in the morning so he can feed his face, we don't get trapped in there when Lewis Daniel Ryback decides to hold the place up. It's as simple as that.
    I came out of the bathroom and there was Joe, standing in a long line in front of the cashier, two candy bars in hand. Had he been outside in the truck where I'd left him, neither one of us would have been around to see Mr. Ryback shove a gun under the horrified cashier's nose and demand every dime in the cash register. But Joe wasn't. So we were. We were about four positions back in the line, but we could see everything perfectly. Joe said later the gun Ryback was waving around was a Smith & Wesson Model 586, a .357 somethingorother, but all I knew was that it was big, and black, and looked like it could put a hole in a bank vault at fifty paces. There were nine people in all inside the mini-mart when Ryback made his move—Ryback himself, a woman and small infant hovering at his elbow, the cashier, myself and Joe, and three others, two men and one woman, I believe it was—and the sight of that gun just seemed to suck the life out of everyone. I mean, our feet froze to the floor like flesh to dry ice.
    "Gimme the money," was all Ryback said. No real menace in his voice, just an unmistakable urgency. It was what a man always sounds like when he's reached the end of his rope.
    And Lord knows, Ryback looked to be at the end of his. He was a long-haired, rail-thin white man in a sleeveless green T-shirt and well-worn Levi's, with a narrow face in need of a shave and eyes that couldn't sit still in their sockets for longer than two seconds. The gun said he was angry, but everything else about him suggested he was merely tired, maybe as tired as any man who had ever lived.
    The cashier didn't move.
    "I said give it up," Ryback told her, pushing the barrel of his gun closer to the heavyset woman's nose but not really raising his voice. He didn't seem to have the strength to do the latter.
    I felt Big Joe stir beside me, and I put a hand on his arm, having known he'd get around to trying something foolish eventually. Before his retirement, my husband worked for the El Segundo