*
BY DEGREES, I came to some realization of where I was. The blinding light in the dream was the unshrouded back of a taillight, blazing away an inch from the lens of my glasses, which were, amazingly, still on my face.
A mechanism ka-chunked. Something spun up to speed and tremendously loud dance music boomed out of the undersides of a set of speakers do-it-yourselfed into the underside of the rear dash, not two feet away from my unprotected ears. The diaphragms pumped like heart muscles and it made sense. It was the drums and singing in my dream.
I was neither clean nor sober—my peripheral vision was crawling with zillions of imaginary creatures. I was, however, almost, sort of compos mentis, and seemed to be getting more so every second.
And, I knew things. For instance: They were taking me out to a lonely place in the desert to kneel me down and shoot me in the back of the head, execution-style. It was a fact. They were also going to shovel my guts into a nameless hole, just like all the countless other drifters they’d robbed and murdered.
And I knew something else as well: I had to jimmy the trunk-lock and throw myself out of the still moving vehicle at precisely the right instant—I’d know that when it happened. It was my one and only chance to survive.
I fished for my pocketknife but, of course, it was gone. My pockets were turned inside out. I patted myself down, searching for anything I could use. All I had was a pair of shovels and a pickaxe and a bare trunk interior. The pickaxe, however, was promising. If I could maneuver it around, I could use it to wrench the lock apart.
I was lying right on top of it: a big, awkward T—four feet of hardwood capped with three feet of drop forged steel, digging me in the back. I wriggled into the far corner and scrunched underneath, writing, twisting, squirming my way around to where I was lying flat on my back, with the pick across my chest, like the sword in a crusader’s grave.
I inserted the spike-point into the gap behind the latch. It was no more than a curved tooth in a metal bracket. One yank and I’d tear it off, guaranteed.
Mid-song, the music stopped. I lay still, not daring to breathe, fretting, worrying that I’d miss my signal when it came. I had no idea what to expect—what form it would take when it came. All I knew was, when it did, when the time was precisely right, I had to do what I had to do. It was my one and only chance.
They slowed down and that was good. It gave me a few extra moments. I took my glasses off, tucked them into my jacket pocket and buttoned it closed.
The road noise changed pitch, and the time was NOW! The thought stood out, unmistakable, impossible to miss, edged in screaming fire. I wrenched the pick-handle and popped the lock. It came apart with a bang and my little world turned to chaos—tumult and hurricane wind. The trunk-lid bobbed up and down. The brake lights went on and the car decelerated, pulling me back inside. I clambered forward, the perfect moment slipping away, and dived out into the great, dark, rushing, whirling, wide-open.
I sailed through the air in a lazy, loose-limbed somersault. The ground slid beneath me—an undifferentiated blur. I lost altitude and touched down on my buttocks, bouncing, rolling and tumbling, the world slamming me over and over. It happened so fast I can’t separate one thing from the next, but I ended up on my side, lying in a semi-fetal position on the paved shoulder of a four-lane divided highway.
The T-bird rolled to a stop a hundred yards up the road, tilted half on and half off the shoulder, brake lights beaming at a quizzical angle.
At first, nothing hurt and then, when I noticed, everything did to one degree or another. Mostly, it was my top lip. It was in its own dimension of agony and there was something clacking against my molars, in the back of my mouth. I spat it into the palm of my hand and stared. It looked like something you’d see in a joke shop, but it was my front tooth, lying in my palm, in a rosette of blood-snot. I tongued the gap where my tooth should’ve been and felt queasy, irreparably damaged.
I remembered something about soldiers back in the days before dentistry, pulling the still-fresh teeth of the battlefield dead and pushing them into the vacant holes in their own gums. I wondered if mine would re-root itself if I shoved it back in its hole. I rolled to my side, to put it in my pocket, to save that particular pleasure for later—and discovered my knee. It was like white-hot shards of glass grinding between freshly amputated stumps—more agony than even my tooth—more than I’d ever experienced. All I could do was gasp.
After a time, my knee subsided. I caught my breath and finished stowing my tooth, shoving my inside-out pocket back in. Gary and the tattooed woman were still inside the car, silhouetted against the glow of their own headlights, and it looked as if they were fighting.
Amazingly, my glasses were still in my pocket. I fished them out—bent, but otherwise undamaged—and hooked them over my ears. Gary was cringed back against the driver’s-side door and she was crowding him, yelling, her mouth opening and closing, and it was like a silent movie. All I heard was their engine murmur and the buffeting wind, and, from behind me, something else: the sound of a vacuum-cleaner running in a neighbor’s house, three doors down, and the headlights of an oncoming car a half-mile away.
I fought past the pain, and stood—balancing on top of all that agony for the very first time. The car got nearer and the engine noise louder. My abductor’s windows went opaque, mirroring the oncoming headlights. Hot points of reflection slid over the chrome-work, and the car whooshed past—gone—traveling at a lower pitch, down the road and away.
I took my first steps as a cripple and made to run, but it wasn’t much good; my knee would not bear weight. I tried, but it hurt too much, so I hop-skip-hopped instead, scared shitless, heading back down the road, skirting the crumbling shoulder, heading in the best possible direction of rescue, if it came at all.
There were new lights on the horizon—another car. I had to flag it down. I needed them to get me the hell out of there. I hobbled as fast as my knee would allow, putting as much distance as possible between me and my abductors.
A smear of butterscotch light appeared, glazing the road surface at my feet. I turned and it was the Thunderbird’s dome light. Gary opened his door and got out, straightening to his full height, head and shoulders rising into darkness. There was something long and black in his fist and I feared the worst, and got moving, heading towards the oncoming lights.
The car door slammed and there was another, lesser slam—the trunk lid. Gary slammed it again and again, and yelled, enraged, at the top of his lungs: “Cocksucker!” The sound was diminished—lost in the immensity of space. I glanced back again and he turned on his heel, storming towards me, fists clenched, shoulders hunched, backlit by park lights. She was still inside the vehicle, a dim silhouette, turned half-around.
The oncoming car was closer, seven hundred yards away. I limped out onto the road surface, crossed the outside lane and steered a course straight down the centerline. I was going to wave my arms and yell, or jump right out in front if I had to.
Gary gained on me. I picked up the pace, doing my best to run. From too close—twenty yards away—he shouted: “Hey fucko!” His teeth were clenched. I could hear it. “You want it in the fucking back, or in your ugly fucking face?”
The car was closing fast—loud and bright and getting brighter. I waved my arms and took a step, crowding their lane. I took another step and, still, they weren’t slowing down.
Something bipped past my ear, and, in the very same instant, from behind me, there was this unbelievably loud KA-BLAM—a full-sized thunderclap. It stumbled me forward, bouncing off things, returning in echoed bits as the concussion wave whipped off into the distance. Gary was shooting a handgun and it was crazy-big—a hand-held hunting rifle.
Less than a hundred yards away, the car finally saw me and hammered the brakes. They went into a skid that slid into a spin, and, side-on, headed straight for me.
A horn sounded—a dissonant, three-tone chord—and it was a nasty, sudden surprise, another v
ehicle, already on top of us, a semi the size of a small train, headlights blazing, barreling down the outside lane. The driver hit the brakes and, once again, horns brayed—trumpets at the doom of time.
The whirling car whipped past. I felt the wind but, somehow, it never touched me. It caught on something, its tires chirped and it popped into the air, flipping end for end, tumbling, rolling and rolling and rolling.
The semi veered for the shoulder and smacked, full on, into the shock-frozen Gary. Booming sheet-metal thunder, it split him wide open like a meat piñata and bore him and his contents away into the dark.
Wheels hopping—squawking Morse code—the tractor unit skipped sideways. The trailer jack-knifed. Metal screamed and everything skewed sideways. Ponderous and slo-mo, it tipped and tipped, and slammed down—I felt it in my feet—sliding and grinding sparks, throwing rectangles of tumbling metal, inscribing a giant arc-section in the asphalt and grating to a stop a quarter-mile up the road.
Untouched, the T-bird glowed red, exactly as before, idling half on and half off the road. I headed in the opposite direction, limping—fleeing pell-mell—and stepping on something. It rolled beneath my foot, twisting my ankle, and I fell sideways onto my elbow, jarring my remaining teeth.
The dome light inside the tattooed woman’s car went on and she appeared, leaning sideways in the passenger seat. It was bright enough to show me what I’d stepped on—Gary’s pistol, lying on the asphalt a yard away.
I groped for it, grabbing it by the barrel. It was warm like the exterior of a just-used toaster and way heavier than I would’ve expected—a firearm like what Dirty Harry would’ve used: a big-bore cannon, more than a foot long, smelling of oil and burnt candy.
I’d seen guns on TV but never actually held one. I explored it—trying things. There was the cylinder—I knew enough to know there were bullets inside. That was the trigger. I curled my finger inside the guard and, cautiously, applied pressure. The hammer came partway up and the cylinder mechanism turned a little. I let the pressure off and, spring-loaded, everything fell back into place.
There was a switch on the side. I clicked it, expecting it to be the safety, but instead, the cylinder fell open. It was full of brass—six shells. I turned the surface to the dim, distant light, and one of them had a pockmark in its center. I pulled that one out and it was the spent cartridge. I let it fall back into its chamber and tried another one. It was heavy enough to surprise me—a live round, pregnant with its full measure of lead.
I lined the spent shell up with the barrel, snapped the gun shut, and thumbed the hammer all the way back. The cylinder turned to the next bullet and locked into position.
I had five shots.
I sat in the middle of the highway and held this engine of destruction by its knurled, hardwood grip, hefting the weight of it—the gravity. I looked up and there she was under the dome light in her miraculously spared vehicle and, suddenly, I didn’t care about being scared any more. I wanted my bankcard back—that and everything else she’d taken.
I got to my feet and, when I was finally standing, I realized something: the revolver was not only cocked and loaded, but my index finger was curled around the trigger as well—an ounce of pressure, or less, away from blowing my foot off.
I let the hammer down—oh so gently—and hobbled a step towards the car. She faced forward, inert. I took another step and still no movement.
There was a whiff of fireworks and, over by the fallen semi, a stuttering, hot-pink blaze. Intense, fiery points of light seethed on the tarmac—flares. There were people moving around the wreckage, casting multiple shadows. Someone else had survived the accident. “Good for them,” I thought, smelling something under the gunpowder—bird shit, like the chicken coop in my dream.
I didn’t waste time sneaking up. I bee-lined, limping straight for the car, finger on the trigger, ready to fire away at the merest hint of anything not entirely kosher. I crossed to the shoulder and came up the passenger side. She sat stock-still the whole time, moving only once to bend at the elbow and take a drag off the cigarette she was smoking.
I stepped up and tap-tapped the window with the gun barrel. She rolled it partway down and turned, meeting my gaze with a raised eyebrow.
I pointed the gun. My voice sounded like plywood sliding over gravel. “I want my bankcard back and my car keys. That, and everything else you took.”
She laughed, genuinely amused. “I don’t have any of that.” She gestured ahead, trailing smoke. “Gary’s got it and he’s up there somewhere—or most of him, at any rate.”
I stared over the gun sights, aiming at her face. She gazed back, blasé. Her tattoo ticked and the smoke from her cigarette wove hints of Celtic pattern. I blamed it on the drugs and remembering that made me angry all over again.
I barked: “Get out of the car! Get out or I’ll shoot! I’ll aim at your leg or something, but count on it—I will do it!”
“Whoa, Tiger.” She raised her hands. “You win—okay. I’m getting out. Right now. I’m just going to reach down and open the door.”
I put both hands on the gun and settled into ‘the shooter’s stance,’ the way I’d seen people do on TV. It felt right—I didn’t care how dorky it looked. “Okay,” I said. “Open the door and get out.”
“Alright already.” She popped the handle and stepped out, hands up, straightening into shadow, cigarette in the air. She cocked her elbow and took a red-glowing drag. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “I didn’t see any of this coming.” She waved backlit lassos of smoke in the general direction of the accident. “Any of it. And generally, I see everything—so ... let me ask you...” Her tattoos wheeled a mile a minute. “What the fuck are you?”
“Don’t you remember?” I said. “I’m the all-alone guy living in his van.” I pointed with my chin, indicating the side of the road. “Go stand over there.” I aimed, putting the gun-sights on her hand—the one holding the cigarette. She sighed and went, like going to stand in the corner.
“You’ve got the knowing thing down,” she said. “That’s for sure, but this...” She waved at the accident again. “This is a whole order of magnitude different.”
I split my attention between her and the car. Its interior was scrupulously clean with nothing in the glove box or ashtray. The only item was her little purse lying on the seat. I twisted the keys out of the ignition, dropped them into my pocket and grabbed it. “What’s in here?” I asked, lifting it. “Is my bankcard in here?”
“I told you,” she said, blowing smoke. It smelled of hookahs and spice. “Gary’s got it. He’s got everything.”
I kept the gun on her and went around to the front of the car.
“So...” she continued. “How is it that you’re able to change things?”
I ignored her and dumped the contents of her purse onto the hood. There was her Hundred-and-first Airborne lighter, her weird cigarettes and a two-inch thick roll of bills. I shoved the cigarettes into my breast pocket and everything else into the pockets of my jeans.
“I bet you’re a lucid dreamer,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
I turned. “A what?”
She sighed and talked down to me like a Special Ed Teacher. “When you dream, in your dream, you know you’re dreaming, so you can do whatever you like—fly or walk through walls, or whatever. You change things and that knowledge—the awareness that you’re dreaming—enables you to do so.”
I thought about it. “Yeah. So?”
“It doesn’t just stop there.” She put her hands on her hips. “I bet you always got whatever you wanted—that things just fell in your lap. Every time you focused your attention, it bore fruit.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’ve never lacked for anything, or been hungry, or seriously hurt. And, if you ever needed help—if the situation ever got serious—then, the grand scheme of cause and effect conspired just to save you. You’ve always been lucky—so much so that you don’t even recognize it—and you’ve b
een that way every single day since birth.”
“Shut up!” I said.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“No. My marriage fucked up.”
“No. That’s bullshit. You wanted it to happen or it never would’ve. Face it. You’ve led a charmed life—you’re just too wrapped up in your own little life to see it.” She inhaled another fragrant drag and her tattoo ticked beneath her skin.
I tongued the gap where my tooth used to be and thought differently. And then, in my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of something small, white and moving fast. I turned, bringing the gun around, and it was a farm chicken. Semi-airborne, it flapped its wings and touched down a few yards from the T-bird’s front bumper. It deked—spotlit by headlights, kicking up a plume of illuminated dust and veering off the highway, disappearing into the darkness.
I remembered the semi—the trailer slamming down and striking sparks—and realized that it must’ve been a livestock truck: chickens stacked in crates. It was the right size and shape, and the memory-picture of it coming apart matched with tumbling crates. It made sense. And, it fit with my dream—not that that meant anything.
“Tell you what,” I said, raising the gun and pulling the hammer back. It locked into position and I aimed, finger on the trigger. “I want something so let’s see if it falls in my lap. I want my stuff back—all of it—and you’re going to help me get it.”
“You don’t need my help.” She shrugged. “All you have to do is go through Gary’s pockets and that’s perfectly okay. He won’t mind.”
“I’m not that stupid—you’re coming with me.”
“Really,” she laughed, flicking her cigarette end into the dark. “You could’ve fooled me.”
I waved the gun. “Get moving.”
She rolled her eyes, huffed and sauntered into the headlight beams. I followed, ankle flaring, knee grating bone-against-bone, exercising my right to bear arms—a humongous handgun. I eased the hammer down and kept my finger straight, away from the trigger. I didn’t want it going off by accident.
A car showed up. It braked to a stop twenty yards from the flares and then another one. People got out—silhouettes against the jittering pink light.
“I could scream,” she said. “This is America. Some cowboy’ll ride to the rescue for sure. They’ll shoot you in your tracks—a fuck-up with a gun threatening a pretty lady.”
“But you won’t,” I said.
“Just like you won’t shoot me—I know it.”
“Enough with that knowing shit—you know fuck-all.”
“Oh yeah? Well try this on for size. In about a minute, three chickens are going to run right between us. You’re going to be expecting them and, because I warned you, you’re going to shoot to keep it from happening, but all three are going to run right between us, just the same.”
More cars showed up. People milled around, gawking, and then, exactly like she said, out of the dark, three chickens ran straight for us. I raised the gun and, blindly, pulled the trigger. There was an explosion. A yard-long tongue of flame licked out the front and sheets of fire flared out the sides. My arm bucked up to vertical and the left-most chicken disintegrated in a splash of liquefied poultry. One fled off into the desert and the other one hightailed it back to the fallen semi. None—exactly zero—ran right between us.
She stared, eyes wide, shaken to the core. I felt bad about the chicken but I I’d be lying if I said her reaction wasn’t satisfying. She backed off a step, tattoo spinning a notch or two faster.
People were shouting over by the flares. They’d heard the shot. I almost ran away —it was a near thing—but I had absolutely no other choice. My one and only option was to see the situation though to the bitter end. She knew my name and the city I lived in, and my Personal Identification Number. If I left her my bankcard, she’d ruin me. And there was no telling what else she might do. And, besides that, her and her henchman were going to kill me—foiled or not, that was their intention. They were going to kneel me down in a lonely place and slaughter me like the Easter piglet. I was no more to her than her latest victim and that pissed me off. I aimed the gun at her face, dead center, and said: “Get my stuff.”
“Give me a cigarette first,” she said, chin up. “Light one up and give it to me. You can keep the lighter and the money, and what’s left of the pack. Let’s say you’ve earned it.”
I thought about it. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give you one—sure.” I groped my rear pocket and, amazingly, felt the crinkle of cellophane. My Marlboros were still there. I still had them. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll put it on the ground where you can pick it up, but then we go. That’s the deal.”
Her lip twitched halfway to a smile. “Alright,” she said. “Deal.”
I pulled my mangled pack out and, when she saw it, she looked crestfallen. I wormed my finger into the opening and there was one left, maybe intact enough to smoke, maybe not. I shook the filter tip out, grasped it between my lips and slid the wrapper off. It pointed up, curled to the contour of my butt cheek.
I tossed the pack, fished out her Zippo and got it burning, touching the flame to the tip. It crackled, dry as hamster shavings. I took a drag to establish the cherry and knelt, leaving it smoldering on the road surface.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I wanted one of my cigarettes.”
“It’s the only one you’re going to get. The deal was a cigarette. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll leave it—thanks. I wanted one of mine. That was the deal. Not some stogie you pulled out of your ass.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
She laughed out loud. “Is that what your Boy Scout leader used to say—a stiff one up your little bum-hole is worth two in the bush?”
“Fuck off. Get moving.”
“You can’t make me.” She took a step towards vanishing into the desert.
I shouted, “Stop!” but she kept going, leaving me no other option. I fired the gun again, aiming to miss, and the little finger of her left hand vanished in a spritz of tissue. She stumbled to a halt, gaping open-mouthed at the spurting stump.
“You fucker!” she cried out, astonished. “You shot me!”
“I had to. You gave me no choice.”
She glared at me, eyes blazing, wounded hand squirting.
I shouldn’t have, but I actually felt bad about what I’d done. It was shock, more than anything—I’d never shot anybody before. I untucked my shirt and tore it up the buttons, ripping out a strip about three inches wide, all the way to my collar. “Here,” I said, “Wrap your hand.” I tossed it but the wind hit it and it fell in a heap at my feet, going nowhere.
“Fuck you,” she said. “I don’t need your help.” She cradled her spurting hand. It percolated blood—once, twice—and then the bleeding stopped. She lowered it to her side and clenched her teeth, working the muscle in her jaw.
“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
“You get it over with.”
I shoved my shirt-scrap into my pocket. “No,” I said. “You and me. I’m sorry about your hand, but I promise—I will shoot you again if I have to. I’ll take your whole arm off.” I waved the gun. “Move.”
Grinding her teeth, murderously resentful, she turned on her heel and marched ahead. There were more cars and a larger crowd around the flares. It sounded like a town meeting—a big brouhaha—everyone upset about the gunfire. I hoped they were all too busy debating the issue to come and investigate.
“Head off the road,” I said. “Walk in the dark.”
She went down the embankment, stepping into shadow. It rose up her body and I could tell by her body language, she hated it—every moment. I took some satisfaction in that. Gunshot victim or not, she was awfully hard to feel sorry for. Her and her road-kill boyfriend were going to shovel my guts into a nameless hole, that was their intention, an
d I was just one of thousands. In light of that, as far as I was concerned, she deserved every horrible thing that happened to her—that and a whole lot worse besides. I felt more pity for the chicken I’d killed.
We skirted the crowd, crunching through road-crush, and, up ahead, at the bottom of the slope, there was a small circle of people. They had flashlights, pointed down, aimed into the center.
We’d found Gary.
Left-handed Luck Page 4