Sarah and I sat on a pew and I told her about the statues and the stages of the cross and the mosaic of Jesus on the cross. I told her how I used to have to go to mass every Sunday with my family and how the priest would go up to the altar and tell stories about Jesus and about God and Adam and Eve.

Sarah and I never actually enacted a marriage ceremony. We just talked. After about fifteen minutes I was all talked out and I suggested that we leave.

“Does that mean that we’re married now?”

“Sure honey.” I said to appease her.

As we left the church Sarah was beaming with joy at having equaled my relationship with Catherine. That night Sarah became upset when I told her that she could not sleep in my bed.

“But we’re married now. I want to sleep with you like mommy does.” She pouted her bottom lip while genuine tears began to trickle down her cheeks.

“No honey. You have to go to school tomorrow. You have to sleep in your own bed.”

“Why can’t mommy sleep in my bed?” “Because I’m the mommy, and mommies sleep with daddies.” Catherine intervened, having grown impatient with my attempt at reasoning. “Now get into your bed young lady.” Looking at me now with a frown of disgust Catherine said, “I told you not to do the marriage thing with her. It’s going to screw her up in the head!”

Sarah sulked away in disappointment. She thought that once we were married that she would be, at the very least, Catherine’s peer; a Mormon wife perhaps? So I was in fact as guilty for leading Sarah to an act that must have seemed to her logical and necessary. How could I hold such an act of love against her?

8

We approached Louisville Kentucky as the sun was falling fast below the landscape of tobacco fields and barbed-wired cow pastures. The pungent odor of freshly produced fertilizer filled my nostrils. We needed gas and the darkness in my spirit from speculating about Sarah’s tainted soul and the deed she may have done caused me to tingle with fear, my phobia having infected my nerves at the prospect of darkness without shelter. I pulled into the flickering neon labeled Louisville Motel, an obscure one-story hovel of white-washed cinderblock, single-paned checker-board windows and a tin roof patched with tar so many times that there was more exposed tar than tin. A second neon sign the size of a clipboard flashed ‘VACA_CY’ the flickering

‘N’, refusing to fully illuminate. There were two vehicles parked outside of the building: a faded blue mini pickup truck which sat outside a room at the northern-most end of the building and a silver full-size late model SUV which guarded the entrance to the office.

The young girl behind the front desk had piercings in her eyebrow, nose and exposed naval. She sat behind a maple-stained and varnished plywood topped jewelry case. Her rump rested on an uncomfortable looking metal folding chair while she played a hand-held video game. Her hair was brown short and straight. She was not excessively heavy but she wore no braw and her large chest pushed sidelong against her plain white t-shirt (cut short just below her breasts) making her look so. She didn’t bother to look up from her video game.

“Need a room?” She said with a surprisingly northern accent.

“Yes.”

“Single or double bed?” “Twin?”

“How many nights?” “One.”

“Sixty dollars,” She closed her video game, a pink plastic box about the size of a makeup compact, and stood up. She opened a frayed and faded lime-green signature log and pointed to a line. “Sign here; and I need to see your driver’s license.”

“I lost it.” I said almost too quickly, having anticipated her request.

She looked up at me suspiciously,

“Well do you have any other ID?” She sassily shook her head.

“No, my wallet was stolen. All I have is cash.”

“I’ll need your license plate number from your car then.” She said with a sigh.

I peered through the window past the neon sign and then wrote the number from what I assumed to be her SUV on the form and handed the girl sixty dollars. From there I drove to a gas station-convenience store combination less than a mile further down the road. The sun was still a complete sphere above the horizon but it was pressed to the tree- tops and I estimated that we had no more than one-half hour before dark. Sarah stood on the end of the shopping cart while I deposited a pair of scissors, a box of auburn and a box of black hair-dye, a child’s baseball cap and shirt with the Louisville Mud-Hens logo, a pair of low powered reading glasses, a bag of corn- chips, two cans of cola and a pouch of beef- jerky.

At the counter a teenaged girl with brown hair, a blue smock and an innocent looking freckled face crowned with a long pointed nose and thick eyebrows smiled as she scanned our purchases including the nineteen gallons of gasoline. I paid in cash and I stepped toward the front exit when I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I turned and looked to find a dark skinned black-bearded Arab man holding up a faxed photograph in his free hand. He looked down at Sarah and back up at me.

“Amber Alert.” He said with a stern look. “It is you, this man!”

I looked at the picture and sure enough it was a picture of Sarah and me. There was no denying it. I wondered what my good friend

Tommy Sullivan would have done in that situation. Strange to think of a childhood friend at that moment, I’ll admit, but Tommy was my protector as a child and the only thing I could think to do was to try to imitate him. He was as tough as nails and I wished at that moment that I could have invoked his spirit but instead I was resigned to act as I thought he might act. I smiled at the man and removed his hand from my shoulder with the gentleness of a kitten and I looked down at Sarah and said, “Honey can you wait for me in the car.” I watched as Sarah obediently walked out to the car toting the plastic sack of items we had just bought and climbed into the passenger seat. I turned back to the bearded gentleman whose hand I still held and I twisted his arm behind his back, slowly spinning him around, the power of desperate adrenaline coursing through my capillaries and I reached into the man’s back pants pocket and I removed his wallet. Pulling his body close enough for my lips to touch his ear I whispered to him “If you do anything at all to fuck-up my day I will come to your house and I will kill your family!” I wrenched his arm a little tighter until I heard him grunt, “I have your wallet and I now know where you live!” and then I released his arm and exited through the front door as though I were in no hurry at all.

I climbed into the car and I saw a flash and a loud echoing-clap, as if a firecracker had been detonated inside a metal drum, and a dull metallic thud, as of a rivet being driven into a steel girder, and I turned to find the bearded man standing in front of the glass doors aiming a pistol at me.

I found, in that moment, that my bodily fluids were gathering and swirling like a toilet that had just been flushed. I clenched my butt cheeks together to hold back the impending conflagration as I dropped the gear-shift into reverse and pressed the accelerator to the floor. I heard the same succession of sounds, clap- thud, twice more. The Mustang fishtailed as the torque of the tires caught up with the friction of the pavement and the engine’s cylinders fired in greater succession than the bullets of the revolver that pursued us.

“Daddy…it hurts.” I heard Sarah say as if from far away.

“Not now baby. In just a minute I’ll look at it.” Though Sarah was holding her head I thoughtlessly dismissed her words.

An Amber alert? She was my own daughter! Or had Uncle Henry come forward and claimed possession of her? Or was it just an excuse, an exploitation of the Amber alert program, the police were using to find me? They obviously knew that I posed no threat to my own daughter. I was mad as hell; my blood was pumping like water through a sprinkler head. My mind was racing. I had wanted to make some kind of splash in Louisville but I had not anticipated bullets and alerts and police. I suddenly heard multiple sirens whining like a host of babies in a hospital nursery somewhere off in the distance. I couldn’t tell if I was heading toward them or away from them. Up ahead in the fast fading light of dusk I saw the dumpy little motel I had just checked into. I shut off my headlights and killed the engine and coasted into the parking lot and around to the rear of the building where I let the car glide to a stop between a heap of rusted metal drums and a patch of woods. It was growing dark outside and I could barely see through the windows in the shadow of the building.