by Ellen Datlow
The cop car slammed past, tore a hole in the night and drove right through it, the sirens lasting only a moment longer.
When Cara was calm enough, Jensen drew back to his seat, checking Mote in the rearview.
“Clear?” he said, and when Mote nodded, Jensen turned the headlights back on.
At which point a cop car that had been speeding around the curve turned its headlights on, along with its blue and reds.
Even though he was in Park, Jensen still stood on the brakes, washing the darkness behind them red.
This cop car slowed as if expecting them to pull out in front of it, and then, maybe two hundred yards past them, its brake lights flared.
“It’s me they want,” Cara said. “I killed him. I killed both of them.”
“Shut up!” Jensen told her.
“Go go go!” Mote was saying, making everything worse.
Jensen shook his head no, but it was his job to keep everyone in the car safe, wasn’t it? He sucked his headlights back in, dropped his mom’s big Buick into Reverse, and stomped the gas, the rear tire that got the torque having to spin for two or three seconds before finding purchase.
Fifty yards back, he whipped them around again, the nose of the car sliding in the dirt, the car fishtailing when he had it back in Drive.
“We’re gonna dead-end back here, we’re gonna get stuck,” Mote said, practically in the front seat with them now.
“It comes back into town by the refinery,” Cara said blankly. “That’s where my granddad worked when he was alive.”
Jensen registered that “when he was alive” and it caught. Was it really necessary to have added that? So… what, then, did her granddad do when he wasn’t alive? Did dying not mean the same thing to people out here in the sticks?
Jensen didn’t ask.
Driving this narrow dirt road without headlights was enough to deal with.
Mote was sitting up in his open window now to look behind them from a higher vantage point, see if they were being chased down.
“Anything?” Jensen called back.
“Drive, man,” Mote told him.
Jensen accelerated.
Cara was calmer now. Like something inside her had turned off. Was this what shock was? Jensen had never seen it this up-close. What he did know was that she didn’t seem to care if they got caught or not. She kind of even wanted it, maybe.
Not tonight, he said inside, which was when… Cara didn’t so much throw up as vomit just started leaking out her mouth. Frothy beer, with veins of blood shot through it, probably from her lip.
“No, no, the window!” Jensen said, and slid them to a sideways stop.
Cara held as much of the vomit in her cupped hands as she could and Mote slithered the rest of the way out, opened her door for her so she could stumble out, fall to her hands and knees by the three-strand fence, empty the rest of her stomach.
Moving on automatic—Cara needed to see—Jensen turned the headlights on, then realized the beacon they were, switched them off just as fast.
“Watch,” he told Mote, and Mote nodded, his head on a swivel: up the road, back down the road.
Jensen slid across the seat, careful not to spill his beer, and stepped out, knelt by Cara, tried his best to hold her hair up and away. When she finally collapsed against him, shuddering, he reached back for his beer so she could wash her mouth out.
Looking over her head, over the fence, there was a house-shaped empty space where there were no stars.
Slowly, Cara became aware of it too.
She chuckled, then laughed, then stood into whatever this was.
“Of course we’re here,” she said.
“Your dad’s old house?” Mote said—the obvious thing.
It was empty, long-abandoned, it looked like.
“I hated him,” Cara said, looking around to Jensen, her eyes fierce, her hair lifting around her on the breeze.
“It’s not your fault,” Jensen told her. It was all he could think to say.
She took a drink of his beer, swished it, spit it out, and then she ran forward, slung this bottle ahead of her as well.
It disappeared almost instantly, shattering seconds later against the house.
They all watched, Jensen shaking his head no about the chance of a light coming on in there, which would mean her dad had already come home to where he’d grown up.
It was just an empty old house in the country, though. All the windows stayed dark.
“The refinery?” Jensen prompted to both of them.
Cara stared the house down a few more seconds then nodded, turned her back on it, and the three of them piled back in.
“I’m sorry for getting you two involved in my stupid family drama,” she said.
“Best Halloween ever,” Mote said, closing his door.
“Wouldn’t be anywhere else,” Jensen said, and dropped the car into gear.
Mote held the last two beers over the seat for them.
“Your dad’s gonna—” Jensen started, about the stolen beers, but stopped himself before “kick your ass.”
So it just hung there between them, dead.
“It’s okay,” Cara said, and cracked her beer open with the seatbelt tongue—a trick of her dad’s, Jensen knew. But still, it was pretty cool.
Her window was down, the ends of her hair stinging the side of his face, and he could have gone faster, on a straightaway like this, but he didn’t.
This is good, he was telling himself.
It was just the three of them, same as it had always been. Same as it would always be.
He switched hands on the wheel, which gave him a different angle in the rearview.
The first thing he saw was that Mote wasn’t where he’d been. He was pressed all the way to the passenger side of the car.
“What’s—?” Jensen said, adjusting the mirror to see the back seat directly behind him.
Cara’s dead little brother was sitting there.
Jensen let his foot off the gas and swayed his back in, away from this, the car’s momentum carrying them.
“C-C-Ca—” he said, and she looked over at him like she had a hundred times in geometry, like she had a hundred more times on the drag on a Friday night, like she’d been doing for all of the twelve years they’d known each other.
And then she saw the way he was crowding the steering wheel, and—slowly, as if realizing in increments—she looked from Jensen to the back seat, for whatever he was trying to get away from.
Her expression didn’t change.
“Ben,” she said, so calmly. “What are you doing out here?”
Jensen turned around enough to see Cara’s brother shrug his left shoulder like that was the wrong question, and then level his eyes on Mote.
It was the dome light coming on that told Jensen that Mote had opened his door to get away from this.
Ben had already reached across, though, had Mote by the wrist.
Mote coughed from that contact, and thin blood sheeted down over his chin.
Now Ben let him go.
Jensen, not looking ahead anymore, not keeping his passengers safe even a little, all his attention facing the wrong way, locked all four tires.
His mom’s Buick stopped across the road, the caliche dust it had been dragging swallowing the distant silhouette of the refinery Jensen had just registered—all spires and darkness against the dim glow of the city.
If they could just make it there and turn right, he knew, then they’d be home free.
Except Cara was still talking to her dead brother, sitting in the back seat.
“I should have been watching you better,” she was saying, her eyes full now, the window beside her powdery white for the moment.
Jensen leaned forward more, knew Ben was going to touch him next. When that contact came, though, it was Cara.
She was leaning across—she was kissing him softly on the cheek.
“Thank you,” she said, and then had already stepped out, was hold
ing Mote’s door open for her little brother.
Jensen saw Ben cross from one side of the rearview mirror to the other, and then both doors closed at the same time.
“Tell your mom I’m sorry,” Cara leaned down to say through the window.
She was holding Ben’s hand in hers, now. And not coughing blood. Yet.
“No, no, Cara, don’t!” Jensen said.
In reply, Cara looked back down the road, through the settling dust. “Mote,” she said, like just making him out.
Jensen looked too, and when he couldn’t see Mote, he came back to Cara.
She was already gone, fast as that.
He shot up through his window and sat on his door, looked across the top of the car, his hands leaving drag marks in the white dust coating the roof, but all around them it was only the night.
He was breathing hard, couldn’t steady his hands, his heart, and after looking for Mote and not finding him, which didn’t make sense, after sweeping the darkness with his mom’s headlights for Cara and Ben, he finally eased back into town, took that right at the refinery, its fences tall and spiky.
But that too dropped out of the rearview after another mile or two.
His mom was already asleep when he crept in. She’d turned the television off, turned all the lights of the house off.
Jensen sat on the couch where he’d started that night, and he didn't press play on An Officer and a Gentleman, and he didn't understand anything, he was pretty sure.
The next day wouldn’t help.
The fireman hadn’t just pulled Cara’s dad from that welding truck the train had smashed into. Cara and Mote had been there as well, it turned out.
Jensen’s mom hugged him when he couldn’t stop trying to tell her that that’s not how it was, that Mote fell out the back door of the car, that he was never in Cara’s dad’s stupid truck.
“You took the car out?” Jensen’s mom asked.
“And Ben was there, only it wasn’t Ben, it was Cara’s dad when he was a kid, they looked just the same!” Jensen insisted.
“Ben?” Jensen’s mom said, holding him out at arm’s length. “Dear—Ben’s been dead for months, he couldn’t have—”
Jensen didn’t go to school for the rest of the week, and didn’t go to the funerals either, and nothing made sense anymore, but after a few years he was able to tamp it down enough that it didn’t rise behind him every day, anyway.
He got a job, then he got another job, then he hired on somewhere with benefits and business trips, and then he washed up in a hotel bar, a trivia game all around him, and then there he was sitting in front of An Officer and a Gentleman again.
And then he wasn’t.
He was two blocks away from the hotel already, and then a mile, and then, just past where the industrial district of this town petered out, there was a shape out in the darkness where there were no stars.
Jensen stood there and watched it to be sure it was what he was already sure it was: the refinery. Not looming, just distant. What it being there again meant, he knew, was that he was, somehow, still pulled over on the side of Refinery Road that night. He hadn’t so much walked out past the city limits of this town his work had delivered him to, he’d… he’d walked into a memory. No—more than that. The past. He’d found a fissure, a seam, a door left open, and slipped through. Maybe because, in his heart, he’d never really left.
“Hey,” Jensen said aloud to this moment, this night, this part of the road, and tilted the bottle of beer up ahead of him, in greeting— the bottle of beer he hadn’t walked away from the hotel with, but that was the least of the wrong things happening.
A quarter mile behind him, along the ribbon of blacktop he’d drifted away from, a police cruiser flew past, its blue and red lights strobing the yellow grass and trees and fence line.
“Hello,” Jensen said to this officer, lifting his beer that way as well.
When he looked back to the grass swaying in the slight breeze, he could taste the scorched brakes of his mother’s Buick on the air— acrid and oily, but kind of good, too, the kind of pain you sort of like a little, at least at first.
The kind of pain you need, when you know something was your fault.
He was supposed to have kept his passengers safe, wasn’t he?
He nodded to his mom that yes, yes, that had been his main and only job.
And he hadn’t done it.
So he’d had to go out into the world alone, without his two best friends in the world.
But now he could go back, couldn’t he?
That’s what this was: a do-over.
He took a long drink of his beer—it was warm, flat—and then, his bottle dangling by his leg, he slouched down through the ditch and up into the pasture. It was the only place that felt right anymore. Without the silhouette of the refinery stabbing up through the horizon, never any closer no matter how fast he drove, how desperately he ran, he felt he might just fall up into the sky, never stop.
Standing knee-high in the swaying grass about twenty yards out were two shadows he knew.
First the girl lifted her beer to him in greeting, and then the guy, like he was embarrassed to be out here, doing this, and Jensen was smiling now, smiling and swishing faster through the grass, his own bottle falling behind him, his own blood coating his chin now, but that’s just because you can’t go back alive, but you can remember what it was like to punch through the darkness in a great heavy car, your headlights off, everyone you care about there with you, and so what if by the end of that road you’re sitting in the cab of a welding truck, the world bright white from a train’s lone headlight, its air horn screaming loud enough to split the night in two?
The man who just woke behind the steering wheel of that welding truck is struggling to get his door open, is panicked because he thought he was alone, and because the train is almost here, but the three of you packed in beside him are just serene, are just watching up those rails, holding each other’s hands, because this is how forever happens.
It’s going to be wonderful.
It always has been.
The Door in the Fence
Jeffrey Ford
THERE was an old couple who lived behind us when I was a kid—Rolly and Rita. They had the place on the other side of our back fence. Whereas most of the suburban yards were a quarter acre, treeless grass rectangle, their lot was bigger than usual and covered with trees. Rolly was a short, stout guy with a block head and three days’ white beard. He wore glasses and his face was usually red with a distinct line of sweat on the brow. In retrospect, he looked like Hemingway from the tenth dimension. His wife, Rita, was a quiet woman in a drab housedress with an apron over it. Her dark hair hadn’t yet started to go white and a faint mustache adorned either end of her upper lip. She never said much to us when we were young. Rolly was the one with the personality, of sorts.
He built a doorway in our back fence so we kids could go over to his yard when we wanted to ride on the giant, homemade lawn glider. It was like a chariot, swinging through the breeze, and although this was about sixty years ago, I still remember the sense of freedom. The other item Rolly had that drew us through the fence was a small cannon. When I say the cannon was small, I mean the size of a toy truck. It did pack a boom and a wallop, though. Sometimes, depending on what time of day, whether Rolly was drunk or not (he kept a bottle of Chivas Regal in the well shed), we could talk him into shooting it off.
On Saturday afternoons when my father was out in the back, cutting the grass or raking leaves, he would go through the fence into Rolly’s yard. He’d meet up with the old man in the well shed and they’d bullshit and drink Chivas. One time I accompanied him on his visit, and I got a seat between them, right in front of the stonework encircling the open well. Rolly told me to look into it. He said no one knew how deep it went. He instructed my father to hold me while I peered in. “It’ll draw you to its heart,” he said. I leaned over the stones, put my head beneath the bucket attached to the windl
ass. Instead of it being uniformly pitch, the view was more psychedelic, as in it glowed in patches along the walls of the well like the black light posters my brother and I had. “There’s lights,” I said.
“It’s some kind of lichen or mold,” Rolly said. “That well has been here a long time. The house is a hundred and fifty years old. I imagine the well, in one form or another, would have to be a lot older.”
“Do you drink from it?” my father asked.
“Are you kidding? This is my water, right here.” He dashed off what was left in his glass. My father followed suit, and then they poured a couple more.
I met Rolly when I was about five, and he went the way of all Rollys when I was around ten. I recall him showing us his photos from WW2 and photos of his dog, Mumps. I don’t think I went to the funeral. My parents probably did. As far as I remember, it was like Rolly was there and then he wasn’t. The cannon was probably still there unless they buried it with him. The glider was also still there, but we no longer went through the fence. Someone had nailed the door shut from the other side. We were sure it was Rita, who didn’t want us playing in her yard. With that, a whole episode of my life fell away and drifted off. Once in a rare while, usually in winter, I’d look down through the empty tree branches into their yard from our upstairs bathroom window. No matter how many times I did, I never saw a single footprint in the snow. I’d watch the glider swing back and forth, empty, and it would bring to mind the sound of the cannon going off in some distant other country of my memory.
At the end of the following summer, I was in the car with my mother, and we were driving back from the grocery store, when a bike pulled out of one of the side streets right in front of our car. My mother hit the brakes hard, and she dropped her cigarette into her lap. Retrieving it, she said, “Could you possibly…” which was one of her stock lines for any kind of bullshit life threw at her. I was in the back seat and, pre-seatbelts for kids, I’d smashed my face into the headrest of the seat in front of me. As I was rubbing my forehead, I looked out the front windshield and noticed the bike rider was more familiar close up. I tapped my mother on the shoulder and pointed. “It’s Rita,” she said, and we watched in silence and followed as she pedaled up the street, her white mumu flowing. She’d lost the apron, but gained a pair of green moccasins and a pair of knee-length white athletic socks. Just before we pulled into the driveway, Rita lifted her legs in front of her and rested them on the top of the handlebars. My mother tooted the horn in appreciation of the stunt.