Page 5 of Biker's Property

Anyone can reachtheir breaking point. Even weak little Joslin. Because that’s always what I was to the people in my life, in my church – to the man in this house. The smallest of my cousins thanks to my Filipina mother, standing at a 4’11” and never able to keep any weight on so my physique always made me look either boyish or childish. Just because I have small features doesn’t make me less of a woman.

“Seth,”I say to him, making sure I choose my last words to this man with extreme care. “I hope you burn in hell.”

Then I calmly get up fromthe table and run to the master bedroom like the dead man sitting in gravy is chasing after me. I prepared for this moment for over a year. It’s only a few days away from a full moon, making it the perfect time to enact my crazy ass plan – one that I’m sure will work. If the Mexicans can do it, so can I.

It’s simple.Seth and I live in a one-story ranch house in Dripping Springs, Arizona. If I try to run to Phoenix or Tucson, it will be obvious and I’ll still be in Arizona, the place where I committed the crime. He’ll hunt me down, or someone in the church will and either way, it’s too close to my mother and everyone from my past. It would be too easy for someone to run into me and for word to travel back to Dripping Springs.

The closest, biggest, and most appealing city to our north is Denver, to the northeast. But again, I worry that anyone who knows me from my hometown would have a good chance of guessing where I might end up. Plus, if anyone from the church comes after me, like Seth’s brother or his new friends… I’ll be screwed.

After hours of listening toTrue Crime, I come up with the crazy plan to cross the desert to get there. Denver is still on the menu, but if they can’t track me on the highway, they’ll assume I died or escaped somewhere Southwest, probably even to Mexico. Abusive men are selfish, and it helps if you’re ever trying to escape one to remember that you know them better than they know you. Don’t let them fool you.

I saved my own money that Seth couldn’t track from getting cash back at the grocery store for the past eighteen months and bought the only four-wheel drive I could afford with what I had. I bought it from a discreet black woman named Nadira, who used to go to my church but left when Pastor Woolstenhume broke away from the main church. She still lives in town and she’s still a Christian, which she reminded me of when she sold me the four-wheel drive.

I have tanks of gas in the back and parked the Jeep at an abandoned parking lot a half mile across town that nobody goes to because there aren’t even enough folks out here to rebel and infest the place with needles and trash.

Hiding my getaway bag from Seth was harder than hiding the Jeep. I didn’t do much to hide the old black duffel bag from a mission trip we took together when I was twenty-one, but I kept having dreams he would open it and ask about the money, my identification, or my clothes. Of course, he never asked. The good thing about men like Seth, theonlygood thing is that a lot of the time they’re so wrapped up in themselves that as long as you’re good at pretending when they’re around, you can get away with planning an escape.

I takemy duffel bag and leave the house in the heat. I don’t worry about anyone seeing me because again, our town is so small and our ranch house so isolated, that I can stay off the main road and just by virtue of the time of day and where I walk, no one will be out here.

This country can feel so damn empty sometimes that it’s hard to believe what people say about Denver. Or the pictures I see. Raised out in Arizona, it’s all I know aside from a few mission trips to Albuquerque, Benson, Arizona and then Sanford.

And it’s not like mission trips give you a sense of the place since it’s mostly manual labor, prayer, andoccasionallygetting to do something fun like telling kids Bible stories. Pastor Woolstenhume loves organizing mission trips but I can’t figure outwhywe go to places that are so damn close to our church. I think he doesn’t like people getting too far.

When I seethe Jeep in the distance, I almost can’t believe it’s still there. I keep expecting something to go horribly wrong. That’s how you train your mind to work when you’re in an abusive situation. It’s calledhypervigilance.But so far… everything has worked and my heightened state of fear seems pointless.

Still, that adrenaline surge is unconscious. I can’t help myself. I run to the Jeep as fast as possible, my backpack smacking into my back and reminding me of being the smallest kid in kindergarten, racing to keep up with the much larger white kids. I’m lucky I learned to drive in high school before I got married, because I doubt Seth would have allowed me to learn. My dad taught me before he died. He used to promise that he would take me out on his Harley too, but that washowhe died, so there’s no way in hell my mom was ever letting my ass get near a motorcycle after that.

Ever since his funeral, it was pretty much just church and home.

Throwingmy stuff in the back of the Jeep, I briefly check on my supplies and then I start the engine and the old-school GPS before peeling out of the parking lot heading North towards Denver across the route I hand-traced across the desert. I tried to be smart about it, and I think I have enough supplies to survive, but crossing the desert alone in a Jeep is a goddamn risk.

Once I get out of the parking lot, my adrenaline kicks into high gear. The dusty ass road looks like a rich shade of ochre. And I swear, the Southwestern sky never looked so good. I wish I could say that I feltcompletelygood about the adrenaline coursing through my veins but right on the back of that pure joy is terror.What if it didn’t work?

I swore his heart stopped before I left but… what if I was wrong?

I pushthe worry out of my head.

He’s dead.I dosed him with enough to kill a man twice his size.

Freedom should feel good,not like I’m on the run from a monster hot on my heels. It’s freedom, right? This is what America is all about. I’ll contact my mom when I get confirmation that Seth is six-feet under and I’m not a suspect in his death. Which I will be.

I push the Jeep up to 55 and then 60. I have to find the entryway to the desert most folks take to go off-roading for fun. From there, I just have to keep going off the marked out trails and into the heat — the path I marked on my map. I can tell from the terrain map that the four-wheel drive can handle all the elevation out there, but it’s not like I’ve had any practice.

I thought having the top down on the Jeep would make it easier to save on gas, but the heat already threatens to make this journey harder than I expected. No air conditioning will be a pain in the ass, but I have to be smart. I have enough gas in the old cartons to fill up twice, which should get me to Utah where I can fill up at a real gas station before heading to Denver. There’s quite a jump between Dripping Springs and Moab or wherever I’ll end up. No one will think to look for me there.

The GPS works fine as I continue for a few more miles and my nerves gradually calm down as I reach the road leading to the desert. Once I get ten miles away from our town and turn off into the wild unknown with four wheel drive turned on, I feel like I really am free.

Free to reinvent myself.Free to be something other than a white man’s victim.

I might start goingby something completely different. Like Joss. I don’t know. That sounds more like a skater and there is nothing about me that’s like a skater at all. The more I drive, the more it feels like the sun exists solely to cook me alive. I have enough water to make it to Utah, but I can’t go guzzling it back like a preschool teacher with a Stanley cup.

Two hours and there’s nothing. If it weren’t for the GPS reassuring me that I’m going the right way, I would be completely paranoid about getting lost. There’s nothing, not even a damn cactus in any direction. It’s so damn hot…

Before I getto the part of the desert where I’ll truly be out on my ass, I have to pass near Pinal Peak and then drive through Globe, Arizona, a small mining town with an access pass to the desert I have to cross to get to Utah. There’s no traffic out near Pinal Peak and the whole road seems empty, so I keep moving at a steady clip on the way to Globe, Arizona.

I pass through the mining town without incident. It’s the last place I’ll have to drive through that will potentially have any civilization before I get to Utah, so I don’t feel particularly afraid. By now, no one will have found Seth and my mother hasn’t called my cell phone, which is a good sign. I plan on ditching that thing somewhere in the desert where there’s no service. I can survive with my GPS and start fresh with a burner phone in Denver.

There are no incidents in Globe, but there’s a literal Nazi flag hanging outside one of the bars, which I find a little weird. A few confederate flags — not too unusual around here — hang outside some of the homes. But I don’t think anything of it. Racists are going to do what they’re going to do and I never saw the point of getting too bothered about it.