Last Exit

by Catie Rhodes

  I let out a pained bleat.

  Desiree pushed Tubby off me. “Carry her inside and put her on the couch.”

  He picked me up more gently than I’d have imagined him capable and mounted the steps. Ceramic dogs painted flat black with a white skeleton pattern lined the path to the front door. Hay bales scattered the porch, watched over by a scarecrow with a cloth sack head and cutout eyes. Desiree caught me looking at it and gave me a wink.

  “Samhain’s my favorite holiday of the year.” She swatted at Tubby. “You better have made enough coffee for me to drink, son.”

  “I did.” His voice went up several octaves. He sounded like a little boy defending himself to his mother. If I hadn’t been hurting so bad, I’d have laughed. Tubby carried me across the threshold of Desiree’s house the way a groom carries his bride.

  “Right here.” Desiree pointed at a worn sectional sofa.

  Tubby set me on it.

  Desiree spoke to Tubby in a brisk tone. “Get us coffee and get bacon started.”

  Tubby hurried through the room. Desiree had it tricked out for Halloween with black and orange ceramic cats everywhere. A ceramic pumpkin’s eye cutouts flickered with the light of a burning candle inside. A gourd painted to look like an owl spilled fresh orange mums. Tubby stopped to sniff the flowers.

  “Wait a minute,” Desiree said in her smoky voice.

  Tubby stopped in his tracks but didn’t turn around.

  “There’s French vanilla creamer in the fridge. Put some in my coffee.” She sat next to me and began taking off her boots. When Tubby was out of earshot, she turned to me and whispered, “Damn, he’s cute.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Tubby saved me from having to comment by bringing in our coffee. He carefully set a cup in front of each of us.

  He said to me, “Yours just has powdered creamer in it. I know what you like.”

  I nodded my thanks and forced a weak smile.

  Desiree took a sip of her coffee and glared at Tubby. “Did you start the bacon?”

  “No, but I’m fixing to.” He marched back to the kitchen.

  Desiree spoke to me in a low voice, “That little skinny butt reminds me of my first husband, God rest his sorry soul.”

  An ashtray in the shape of skull sat on the coffee table. At least Desiree smoked in the house. She lit a cigarette and offered me one.

  Once I had a little nicotine coursing through me, I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve done the wrong thing most of my life, but this is the worst. Your card reading is one step closer to coming true.”

  She stared out the window at the hills in the distance. The seconds ticked by, so many that I began to worry she was getting ready to change her mind about beating me to a pulp.

  “Fate is almost always chance mixed with choice,” she finally said. “My brother is a grown-assed man. I realized back there in the woods that I just have to accept what he’s chosen. That’s why I didn’t finish kicking your ass.”

  I watched her, waiting for hysterical tears, fierce anger, or some show of emotion. None of that came.

  “My brother knew the consequences of being with you,” she said in her smoke-fogged voice. “He always claimed to love you. Maybe one night of passion was worth whatever it cost.”

  Cold fingers worked their way down my back. I didn’t want to be the reason Wade didn’t get to grow old. There was nothing all that special about me. I wasn’t worth it. I caught Desiree watching me, a sardonic smile curving the full lips she shared with Wade.

  “You don’t believe a man like Wade would make a choice like that? You ain’t lived much yet.” She let out a rough laugh, lines spreading outward from her smile.

  “Would you make a choice like that?” I asked her.

  In this light, the gray roots of Desiree’s blonde hair showed. So did the crevice of wrinkles between the boobs her low-cut shirt showed off. But her long legs, encased in tight jeans, still looked better than many women young enough to be her daughter.

  “Naw, girl. But I’m a woman. We deal in superglue, coupons, and shitty diapers. Life beats the romance out of us a lot faster than it does men.” She took a pull on her cigarette, the cracks in her lips like crazing on porcelain, and tipped me a wink.

  I thought about what she’d said. Wade had seduced me last night knowing it would be the only time. He’d even said he didn’t care if his connection with me killed him. Did he do it out of some romantic notion of true love? Or because he didn’t want to do the work and risk the heartbreak of a real relationship? Either way, he was cheating himself. He was a great man with so much to offer the right woman.

  My mind circled back to Tanner. This time Hannah’s voice played over the memory of leaving him on that street in Austin with his California friends. She’d said I didn’t love myself enough. The first time I’d heard those words, I had denied them with all my might. Now I wasn’t so sure. Best I could see, Wade and I both ran around trying to destroy our own lives.

  Desiree sat up and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Let me take a look at that wound.”

  I reached for my shirt.

  “Let me do it. It might hurt a little less.” She raised my shirt and pushed my jeans where she could see. She hissed through her teeth. “You’d be dead now if Tubman hadn’t brought you.”

  She let go of me and stared out the window at the hills. Her lips moved. “For everything there is a purpose…”

  “What?” I almost hated to ask. The answer might reawaken her wrath.

  She cut her eyes at me. “It’s from the Holy Bible. ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ To that, I’ll add that the fighting we do against the universe’s plans for us often takes us where we were supposed to end up in the first place.”

  The smell of bacon drifted from the kitchen. Tubby came out, took one look at us sitting on the couch, and left the room again.

  Desiree sat a few minutes longer. Finally she seemed to come to herself. “How about I get you something for your pain?”

  Without waiting for my answer, she left the room. I sat in the stillness alone, pondering her words.

  I had spent a lifetime trying to escape my fate. But it seemed every step I took forced me to accept a little more of my true nature. Desiree had expended force and energy trying to keep Wade from his fate. Yet fate, in the form of Tubby Tubman, had brought me back to Wade’s door. And he’d made a choice that doomed him so I could live to fight Oscar again.

  Right then, my life pressed on my shoulders, heavy enough to crush. It seemed a labyrinth of lost highways, one hairpin curve after another. I kept searching for the last exit to normal. More and more, I suspected it didn’t exist. This was it for me.

  Desiree bustled back into the room wearing latex gloves and holding a little aluminum tub. She sat back down and motioned me to get my clothes out of the way. Once I did, she slathered a cloudy ointment over the exposed skin.

  “This’ll sort of numb you. Let the muscles rest so they’ll keep on healing.” Finished, she capped the container and handed it to me. “This is poisonous. Don’t eat it, and wash your hands after you apply it.”

  “Thank you.” I slipped the tub in my pocket. Wonderful, sweet numbness had already begun to spread through my sore body. My vision sharpened at the edges. Whatever was in this ointment was some potent shit. I leaned back and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “No need for thanks. I think me helping you is part of what’s supposed to happen.” Her eyes clouded over again, and her brow creased with thought.

  I sank deeper into the couch. As the mystery ointment relaxed me, I started telling Desiree about my battles with fate, about the scar tissue, and finally about Oscar and the Wild Hunt.

  Tubby brought out a plate of bacon, a loaf of bread, and three plates. He made his sandwich and listened quietly. A couple of times, I caught Desiree watching him, a small smile on her face.

  When I stopped talking, she said, “That’s a lot to pr
ocess in such a short time. I do understand why you’ve struggled.” She made herself a bacon sandwich and took a bite before she spoke again. “You will have to eventually make peace with your fate. You likely won’t shed the scar tissue until you’ve truly done that.”

  “But I don’t know how.” I made my own bacon sandwich, even though I didn’t really want it.

  Desiree chewed. “It has to do with accepting what you are.”

  “But I do.” The words felt true, but I knew they must not be.

  Desiree shook her head. “You might think you have, but you haven’t yet. Even I can see that, and I barely know you. But if the Wild Hunt is after you, it might not matter anyway.”

  “Why not?” I set down my sandwich.

  “I don’t know much about the Wild Hunt. Just stories I heard growing up. In my opinion, here’s what you need to think about. Oscar Rivera has named you as the target of the hunt. The question you need to ask yourself is how to kill Oscar. That would put an end to the whole thing.” Desiree popped the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth.

  Oscar no longer had a body. He was spirit. He could possess a body, and that body could be killed, but Oscar would still survive. He could survive because his soul still lived.

  “His soul,” I muttered, picturing the way Oscar’s army was eating the souls of the people they killed for extra power.

  Desiree nodded and lit another cigarette. “Wade told me that Oscar hid his soul somewhere as part of an immortality deal. That right?”

  I nodded, remembering the vision where I’d seen Oscar sacrifice a baby to seal the deal.

  “Okay then. You need to find the soul and destroy it.” Desiree squinted at me through her haze of cigarette smoke.

  But Desiree didn’t understand. I had already, accidentally, found where Oscar hid his soul. The hole where I threw the runes away. I’d given him everything he needed to beat me, all wrapped up in a nice package.

  Tubby, who understood the problem, said, “No, his soul probably ain’t there no more, but he’s just hid it somewheres else. There’s a rhyme or reason to where he hid it. We’ll find it.”

  Tubby pulled a phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. “We probably need to be heading on down the road.”

  “That’s my phone,” I yelled.

  Tubby dropped it next to me and began helping me off the couch. Desiree’s ointment must have done its job because I got up a lot easier than I’d gone down.

  Desiree stood and held open the door for us. “I would say come back again, but…fate has a way of making you end up where it wants you.” She and I exchanged a wry smile. She turned her attention to Tubby. “Bye, honey.”

  Tubby slipped her a wink, and she shut the door. The sound of the deadbolt engaging came through the door.

  10

  Tubby tried to help me into his now trashed Cutlass, but Desiree’s poisonous ointment had me feeling better by the second. I pushed his hands away.

  “I got it. Thanks.” I buckled my seatbelt with only a twinge of pain through my middle.

  Scrolling through my phone, I saw where Tubby had been answering my text messages from Hannah to Cecil and everybody in between. The messages, riddled with misspelled and non-words, had put my family in an uproar.

  One message from Cecil read, “Tubman, if you’re lying to me, I’ll have Finn scoop out your eyeballs with a sharpened spoon.”

  I began sending messages to everybody telling them that Wade had managed to heal me and Tubby and I were leaving now.

  Cecil sent a message back with more GPS coordinates and “Don’t come in here like the peckerwood mafia. This is a tourist place for nice folks.”

  I answered, “Yes, sir,” but wondered where we’d landed and what exactly Cecil was thinking. We didn’t need to be around a crowd of people right now.

  Tubby got into the car and started it.

  I lit into him. “Why were you answering my text messages? They knew it wasn’t me.”

  Tubby turned to me, blue eyes cold as winter clouds. “Because you were fucking your brains out with Goliath back there. You want everybody to know about that?”

  “No,” I muttered. “I’d like to pretend that never happened.”

  Tubby jerked the car into reverse, did a hard turnaround, and sped off Desiree’s property. He stared straight ahead as he drove, jaw clenched.

  I sat back in my seat, muscles tense with apprehension. Was this Tubby’s version of jealousy? I hoped not.

  Tubby and I had shared a brief, yet passionate, romance in our twenties. I had said goodbye to it with a sigh of relief. Years passed. Out of the blue a few months earlier, Tubby had tried to get me to go out with him. I’d refused and said I just wanted friendship. My feelings hadn’t changed. I let the radio do the talking for the next several miles.

  Tubby held his silence until we got off Ranch to Market Road 187 at Medina. He pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and twisted to glare at me.

  “What’re you gonna tell Tanner about fucking Wade?” He narrowed his eyes at me. He’d know a lie if I dared tell one.

  “Tanner’s gone. I don’t owe him any kind of explanation.” I propped my elbow on the window and put my face in my hand.

  Tubby rolled his eyes. “That’s so weak.”

  I dropped my hand and glared at him. “I’m grateful you did what it took to save my life, but it doesn’t give you a front row seat to my fucked-up shit. Okay?”

  So fast I didn’t have time to react, Tubby unbuckled his seatbelt, jammed his knee in the seat, and came at me. I pressed myself against the car door, still unable to comprehend what was happening. Tubby wrapped both arms around me and pressed his lips to mine.

  Heart hammering, I put both hands on his chest and pushed as hard as I could. But it was no use. He was stronger and not recovering from a life-threatening injury. I pressed my lips together and tried to get my knees between us, but the seatbelt hampered my movements.

  Tubby drew back as though stung. “So Wade’s good enough, but I’m not?”

  Of all the times for this crap. Couldn’t Tubby wait until a time when I hadn’t almost died and had my heart broken twice in two days? Obviously not.

  My first impulse was to put my arms around Tubby, to hug him and comfort him. He was one of my oldest friends. Despite how ridiculous he came off, he was an intelligent, complex man. He just sucked at actual relationships. But I didn’t dare touch him, not right in the middle of his play for me.

  I said as gently as I could, “You and I tried this, remember?”

  “I’ve grown up since then.” He hovered over me, face pleading. “I want you back in my life.”

  “We can’t.” There were a thousand reasons, all of them good.

  “At least let me kiss you. If there’s nothing…” He shrugged, bow-shaped lips crimping into a smile.

  I shook my head. There’d be something. I didn’t have to let him kiss me to know that. Tubby and I had had enough chemistry to blow the world into an unrecognizable mess.

  “If you let me do this, I’ll never ask again.” He ran one finger slowly over the chill bumps on my arm.

  I thought about Tubby never asking again, never hinting again, never flirting with me again. His attention had made me feel good at the worst times in my life. A lightbulb went on in my head. I had used Tubby to feel better about my disappointments in life. It was time for me to let him go.

  Could I do this? Show Tubby he didn’t want me but still keep him as my friend? Probably not both. But he deserved more than he’d ever have with me.

  I unbuckled my seatbelt, pushed myself off the seat, and straddled Tubby, staring into his blue eyes. I put my mouth over his but made it about as sexy as using tissue to blot off lipstick. Tubby, never one to give up, put his hand behind my neck and deepened the kiss.

  He stopped abruptly, laughed in my face, and gave me a light shove. “Get off me.”

  I did what he said and sat on my side of the car, hand on the door ha
ndle in case he lost his mind again. Tubby wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and threw his head back to let out a string of mad cackles. He glanced at me and laughed some more.

  “That was awful,” he yelled.

  I started to laugh too, mostly out of relief. Now he could let this go.

  He came toward me, smiling and normal, and wrapped his arms around me.

  “I love you, friend,” he whispered in my ear.

  “I love you too.” I squeezed him tighter.

  Tubby let go, scooted into the driver’s seat, and started the car. He got us back on the road.

  “You seriously wish it hadn’t happened with Wade?” He turned off the radio.

  I relaxed then, let out the breath I’d been holding. “Seriously. I’m in love with Tanner. He probably won’t ever come back. But if he does, he’ll see it as a betrayal.”

  “Baby, I hate to say it, but if he cut off his phone, he ain’t coming back.” He cut a guilty glance at me, one that told me he’d tried to call Tanner to let him know I was hurt bad and learned the same thing I had last night.

  “It’ll be whatever it’s going to be.” My voice trembled.

  Tubby put his hand on my leg and squeezed, probably the only comfort he could offer. “I had an idea for finding Oscar’s soul.”

  He was changing the subject. Thank goodness. My romantic life sucked. I wanted to quit thinking about it.

  “Tell me.” I took out my cigarettes, lit two, and pressed one between Tubby’s lips.

  “Find out about Oscar’s history. He might’ve hidden it in one of his old haunts.” He dragged on the cigarette and exhaled through his nose in twin jets of blue smoke.

  “Not a bad idea.” I thought back. “The first time I met Oscar, last February, I found an entry about him in a book. It didn’t say much other than… Hold on. I’ve got it here in my phone.”

  “What would we do without those things?” Tubby laughed.

  I took out my phone and searched through the notes I’d kept when I worked more often for Griffin Reed and Mysti Whitebyrd. “Here it is.”

  I read aloud from my phone’s screen. “‘A more interesting case of obsession is that of Oscar E. Rivera, a native of Houston, Texas. Rivera enjoyed success leading séances for the Houston rich but became obsessed with an ancient immortality rite he discovered. Rivera took on the name Lord of Babylon and left Houston in 1870 seeking an underground river he believed would connect him to the underworld. He never returned.’”