“Rose.” His face remains blank, not a trace of recognition in his eyes. I try adding a little more information: “Gary sent me?”
“Aw, shit.” True regret wipes away the blankness as he shakes his head, one hand coming up to tweak at the end of his mustache. “Old bastard finally died on us, huh? And you must be the dead little girlfriend. Guess you got his messages after all. Good for him. I mean, he coulda done better in the rack department, but hey, who am I to judge? The course of true love never did run smooth, and alla that shit. I guess you’d better come with me.”
“I . . . wait . . . what?” The rapid-fire delivery of so many different sentiments leaves me reeling, although I’m pretty sure that I was just insulted. “Come with you where?”
Now Carl smiles, although the regret remains, tucked around the edges. “He didn’t tell you, huh? Ain’t that just like him? Wanted to surprise his girl. Guess I can’t blame him for that after all this time. Come on, girlie. It’s not my place to say, but I’m the only one who can show you.”
I frown, but in the end, we both know that I’m going to give in. It’s not like he can hurt me, after all, and Gary sent me here. “Okay,” I say, and follow Carl out of the office, into the garage.
The garage is connected to a small junkyard—not all that surprising, really. It’s a good place for old cars to go to die. There’s even a crusher, big enough for most single-family vehicles. A car sits next to it, shrouded in a plain gray canvas.
Carl starts talking as soon as we’re outside. “I just want you ta know that this goes against everything I stand for as a mechanic,” he says, jaws still working at the gum. “But it makes sense to everything I stand for as a routewitch, so I guess I’m doin’ the right thing whether I do it or not. You better appreciate this, girlie, that’s all I have to say.”
“Appreciate what?” I ask.
Carl gives me a withering look and walks over to the shrouded car. When he yanks the cover away, I gasp. I can’t stop myself.
The unshrouded car is a cherry 1952 Ford Crestline Sunliner, painted a deep sea green that looks just as good on a car as it did, once upon a time, on a prom dress. The sunlight caresses the paint like a lover. I understand the impulse. This is a car to be courted.
“He rolled off the assembly the day you died,” says Carl, dumping the cover to one side. “Color’s a custom job. So’s the engine. There’s a piece of the car you got run off the road in worked in there, and some mandrake root—some other things, too. He’s a real special guy.”
“She’s beautiful,” I whisper. Then I pause, realizing that one of us has the pronoun wrong. “Wait—did you just call this car ‘he’?”
And then Carl fires up the crusher.
It’s hard to describe the sound of a car that’s been loved—really and truly loved—being murdered. Because that’s what this is; murder, pure and simple, metal and rubber compacted into a single contiguous piece of lifeless slag. I shriek wordless dismay and run to the crusher’s controls, like pushing the “stop” button might somehow undo what’s just been done in front of me. “You can’t do this! Why would you do this?!”
“Your boy asked me to,” Carl replies, easily fending me off. I’m too small to shove him out of the way, and anyway, the smashing sounds are getting softer; all the major structural damage is already done, and what remains is simply reducing rubble into ash. “He said you’d come if he called for you. I didn’t quite believe him, even after I heard about you stirring things up on the Lady.”
“Is this—is this some sort of punishment? He made you do this to punish me?” The sound of metal being torn continues, but the screaming is over. The car is dead, beautiful thing that it—that he—was.
To my surprise, Carl laughs. “Punish you? Punish you? You really are dense, aren’t you? Does that come with the dead thing?” He produces a set of keys from his pocket, holding them up for me to see. Sunlight glints off the keychain, the grinning cartoon face of the Buckley High School Buccaneer leering at me from somewhere not quite the past, not quite the present. “You know, he really loved you. A man would have to really love a woman to do this just to be with her.”
He tosses the keys, keychain and all, into the still-grinding teeth of the crusher. They vanish almost instantly, blending into the remains of the car. Carl turns and looks at me, expectantly.
“What?” I cross my arms and scowl at him, trying not to look as confused as I feel.
“Look in your pocket,” says Carl, and I follow his orders before I stop to think about them, uncrossing my arms and sticking my right hand into the pocket of my borrowed coat. There’s nothing there but lint and a crumpled toll receipt. “Your other pocket,” says Carl.
Blinking, I stick my hand into the pocket of my jeans . . . and find a set of car keys. I pull them out and stare at them. The light glints off the face of the Buckley Buccaneer, just like it did before Carl threw him into the crusher.
“. . . how?” I ask.
Carl, meanwhile, grins like he’s just won the lottery to end all lotteries. Clapping meaty hands against his knees, he all but shouts, “It worked! Damn if I’m not going to drink on this for the next ten years. Girl, you just saw a goddamn miracle, and I am the miracle worker.”
“Okay, I’m confused. Can you please explain what the fuck is going on here?”
“Take off the coat,” he suggests. His grin gentles, fading into something sadder and more sincere. “He really was a damn good man. I hope you deserved him.”
“I tried to,” I say, and slip out of my borrowed jacket. When a routewitch says to strip, it’s generally best to do it. The junkyard jumps a bit as the fabric hits the ground, shadows turning sharper, bits of old metal lighting up around the edges with ghostlight memories. “Now what?” I ask, and my voice is as transparent as the rest of me.
“Drop down to the ghostroads, and say hello,” says Carl. “It was nice meeting you.”
“Nice meeting you, too,” I say, still not sure whether I mean it, and let go of the daylight, falling down into the sweet dim dark of the twilight, and the ghostroads. The shadow of the junkyard remains, the parts of it that are old enough and enduring enough to have spirits of their own.
And parked in front of me, in the same place it sat when I saw it for the first time, is a cherry 1952 Ford Crestline Sunliner. Waiting.
I approach the car with something between curiosity and awe. I don’t have a heartbeat, but it still feels like my heart is frozen in my chest. The paint job has changed colors, going from the green of my dress to a soft, misty gray, like a ghost seen from the corner of your eye and gone before it quite takes form.
“Gary?” I whisper.
The car doesn’t answer, exactly—not with words, anyway. But the door is unlocked when I try the handle, and the upholstery is warm when I slide into the driver’s seat. I rest my hands against the wheel, still trying to make sense of what I’m seeing, what Gary and Carl have somehow managed to do. Here, on the ghostroads, this car is as solid a thing as I am, a ghost among ghosts.
My hand is shaking as I let go of the wheel and slide the key into the ignition. The engine rumbles to life, all but purring as it wakes, and the radio, unsurprisingly at this point, turns itself on. The sound of Bing Crosby’s voice flows into the cabin, sweet and strong and perfect, singing a song I haven’t heard in years. “You’ll never know how many dreams I’ve dreamed about you, or just how empty they all seemed without you,” he sings, and there are tears in my eyes, and I don’t bother wiping them away. “So kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It’s been a long, long time . . .”
“Oh, my God, you crazy bastard.” I lean my head back against the seat and laugh, and laugh, and wonder how many years he spent planning this: how many days he spent with the car, just sitting in the driver’s seat, letting himself sink into it. Letting himself imbue it. Cars can leave ghosts behind, when they’re loved enough, but that wasn’t what he was doing; he was trying something much stranger, and much more diff
icult.
And somehow, through some insane bend in the rules, it worked.
“I missed you so much,” I whisper, and lean forward, resting my head against the wheel. This isn’t an embrace, not really, not as such, but then, when you’re dead, you learn the art of the compromise. You learn that sometimes “almost” is the best option of them all. And maybe, if you’re very lucky, you get the chance to learn that nothing is forever—not even saying good-bye.
The radio station changes, abandoning the year I died for something a lot more recent: Journey, singing about how loving a music man ain’t always what it’s supposed to be. I’m laughing through my tears, and somehow, that’s exactly right.
I sit up, wipe my eyes, and put my hands back on the wheel. Gary’s engine is still purring, a sweet bass line beneath the radio’s crooning. “All right, you crazy bastard,” I say. “Let’s drive.”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
She turns around, all suspicion and wariness, those big doe eyes of hers shadowed with the fear that I’m here to make fun of her, to join the list of boys who’ve thought that “poor” means the same thing as “easy.” “Sure,” she says, and clutches her books a little tighter.
“Do you have . . . I mean, I was wondering . . . would you like to go to the Spring Hop with me?”
She studies my face like it’s an exam question, fear fading in the face of pure amazement. When she realizes I mean it . . . I think I’d do almost anything to make her give me that look again. How did I let this wait so long?
“I would love to,” she says, and it’s 1950, and we’re going to live forever, and I’m going to marry her someday.
Just you wait and see.
A wise man told me once that love—true love—never dies. It’s just that sometimes, we can’t see it clearly. Sometimes, it goes to sleep for a little while. As Gary and I blaze down the ghostroads, a gray streak in the twilight that never ends . . . for the first time, I think I can believe that he was right.
2015
Thunder Road
THERE’S ONE THING every journey—and every story—has in common. Then again, stories and journeys are the same thing, aren’t they? Every one of them begins somewhere, trembling and frightened, like a green-clad ghost-girl who doesn’t even realize yet that she’s left her body in the burning wreck behind her. Every one of them moves onward from that point, little ghosts growing up to become full-fledged urban legends, letting their legs and their longings carry them from one side of the American ghostroads to the other. Every one of them gets more complicated as it goes, harder to predict, harder to understand unless you’ve been there since the very beginning.
Every one of them eventually ends. Whether you want them to or not.
Sometimes we’re excited, eager, yammering “Are we there yet?” and demanding that the driver hit the gas a little harder, begging the storyteller to feed us the hints and tastes of what’s to come a little faster. Sometimes we’re reluctant, like children on the way to see an adult they already know they don’t like visiting; we drag our feet, we whimper and cajole, we do everything we can to stretch things out a little farther. Whichever way we go, we know there’s no real point to it; we know that we can’t change anything. Journeys end. Stories end. Everything ends.
The only thing you can do when the ending looms is roll down the windows, let the wind blow back your hair, and drive your hell-bent, hell-bound ass to where it needs to go. Everything ends. So suck it up and face it with a little dignity already.
Gary’s engine hums contentedly as we blast down the ghostroads, his radio playing a succession of Top 40 Billboard Hits from the year that I died. Maybe we’re in the honeymoon period right now, both of us trying to be worthy of the other, but I honestly don’t give a crap. I spent more than sixty years dead without him, and he spent just as much time living without me. If we want to be sappy and stupidly in love for a little while, that’s our business.
I do have to wonder whether Gary really understands what he’s managed to get himself into. Having a car is wonderful, but it doesn’t change my nature. I’m still a hitcher, still have that need for flesh and contact worked deep into the ghosts of my bones. Eventually, I’ll have to drop from the twilight into the daylight, find someone who smells like ashes and empty rooms, and convince him to give me a ride to where he thinks I need to go. I can skip the joyrides, the embodiments just for the sake of cadging a cheeseburger or kissing a stranger, but there are always going to be times when the living world calls me and I have to go. It’s what I am. I can’t change it, and I don’t think I would even if I knew how. The girl who was willing to change everything about herself for love died a long time ago. I still look like her, sweet sixteen forever, but let’s face it: I grew up.
Then again, maybe Gary did some growing up, too. He did get old, after all, which usually requires a certain measure of maturity, and he did figure out how to get his soul re-smelted into something that could stay with me. I don’t know whether turning yourself into your first girlfriend’s car is romantic or creepy, but since we’re both dead, I also don’t know whether the distinction between those things actually matters.
“Just call me Morticia,” I say, hitting the gas a little harder. The radio dial spins without any help from me, and as the theme from The Addams Family blasts through the cabin, I swear it’s undercut by the sound of my first, last, and only boyfriend, laughing.
We pull into the parking lot of the Last Dance as the eternally twilit sky is fading into another false gloaming, taunting the dead with the thought that, someday, the sun might actually rise. There are whole cults devoted to measuring the gloamings, like every little scrap of light has meaning. Personally, I think it just happens because whoever or whatever is in charge of the ghostroads likes fucking with us.
“I’m going to go talk to Emma,” I say, getting out of the car and tucking the keys into my pocket. They feel solid there, almost as real as a coat. I’ve already experimented with changing my clothes, remolding myself to suit my environment. No matter what I do or how I change, the keys travel with me, sometimes in a pocket, sometimes on an elastic band strapped to my wrist, sometimes tucked into the front of my bra. Again, romantic, and marginally creepy.
Gary flashes his headlights once, which I interpret as a gesture of understanding. I mean, I have to interpret it as something, and “Sure, Rose, go take care of your business” is as good an interpretation as any. He doesn’t turn himself back on or go all Christine in order to stop me, and so I walk across the parking lot, hearing the gravel crunch beneath my feet. The Last Dance is pretty damn real, no matter what level you’re standing on.
I’m almost to the door when the sign flickers, neon shadows shifting from green and gold to a bloody sunrise red. I stop where I am, feeling like the world stops with me. For a moment, everything is frozen in the gloaming, silent except for the soft, insectile buzzing of the neon sign illuminating our night that never ends. I take a step back, tilting my head upward, and look.
Last Chance Diner says the sign, in that familiar looping cursive. The letters blaze crimson, almost violent in the way they split the darkness. Last chance. Everybody out. The tattoo on my back is abruptly burning like a brand, until it feels like it should set my clothes on fire, burn them right off me, spontaneous after-death combustion.
I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, but I do know one thing: whatever this is, there’s not a chance in hell that it’s good.
“Emma?” There’s no one visible in the dining room, which is subtly changed, shifted ever so slightly away from the place where I’ve spent so many hours over the last sixty years. I couldn’t tell you what the changes were if you held a gun to my head—which would probably be a waste of time anyway—but I can tell you that the upholstery is ripped in the wrong places, and the scuffs on the counter spell out a new set of unreadable runes. The jukebox in the corner croons softly to itself, some generic love song from the 1970s. It doesn’t matter
which one. “Emma, are you here?”
She doesn’t answer me. I didn’t really expect her to.
My steps are cautious as I make my way across the unfamiliar floor, watching all the while for signs of a trap. I’ve always known about the Last Chance. Hell, Emma sells postcards with pictures of the place, and the tacky legend “I made the right call at the Last Chance!” That doesn’t mean I’ve ever been here . . . or that I ever wanted to visit.
The Last Chance is the place you go when everything goes wrong.
Once again, I’m almost to the door, this time the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen, when something changes. The air suddenly tastes like ashes and empty rooms, like lilies and the sour tears of a hundred weeping parents who can’t understand how something like this could happen to their precious little high school football star. I stagger, catching myself on the edge of the counter before my knees can quite finish buckling under me, and fight the almost irresistible urge to puke.
That’s another thing I never thought would happen in the afterlife. If there was any real justice in the world, being dead would mean freedom from tossing your goddamn cookies.
It’s while I’m hanging there, keeping myself on my feet solely by clinging to the counter, that I realize what’s so terribly wrong. Because Emma’s apron is lying on the floor, where I never would have seen it if I hadn’t been overwhelmed by the taste of someone close to me preparing to die . . . and there’s blood on the white lace edging. I’m pretty sure she didn’t decide to play with raw hamburger for fun. I’m not normally called to the death of cows.
The taste of ashes keeps getting stronger as I force myself to straighten up, using the counter’s edge to all but pull myself along. The kitchen door swings open under my hand.
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