“I’m scared.”
“C’mon. I’ve seen you waking up in the dawn.”
“Do you still have the magic sand?”
“I do. Right here.” I grabbed up the palmful from where it lay on a T-shirt in the back seat.
We sat at the top of the jungle gym, and she sprinkled the sand down onto the playground. For a brief moment I felt as if the structure was crumbling. I looked over at Audrey. She smiled through wet eyes, scattering the magic sand as if it were pieces of her escaping from a hiding place.
“Can I have the picture you drew of me?”
“Of course.”
Beyond her, sniffing along a hedge, I saw the black dog that came and went through my dreams. She turned and backtracked, then found the scent she was following and ducked through a gap in the bushes that I hadn’t noticed before.
Strange wrinkle.
“I’m going to go see my baby, but I’m not going to stay. I want to go to California with you. Is that all right?”
Company sounded good.
“Sure, cool. I’ll wait here.” I sat staring at the hole in the hedge, looking for the dog to return, but I felt she was on the other side of the bushes, in her own dream, watching and waiting for me.
The rumble, buzzing, and stink of Anaconda Steel pervaded the neighborhood. At dusk, an orange glow lit the windows, making the houses nearest the mill look to be on fire.
Anaconda. So Doctor Steel, reptilian rust tongue, what’s next?
After the sun had set, I saw Audrey running down the hill. She looked frantic as I caught up to her at the car.
“What’s up, Audrey?”
Her eyes were a scrambled mess, flicking to different parts of my body. She squeezed at her tits with both hands. “You’re different, Deets. I know you can make me feel better. Let’s go somewhere and make me feel better. Better than all the times before. Kiss me where I hurt.”
I realized she wasn’t wearing the wool pants I had bought her. I didn’t voluntarily bid it, but the memory of her lifting her dress in Bellevue and in the VW didn’t waste any time interfering with my thoughts.
“Where are your new pants? You’ll freeze in that car.”
“I threw them away.” She turned and pointed. “Up there.”
I could see them hanging on a tree limb, a faint orange aura around them.
Oh, man, can I deal with this craziness all the way to California?
I retrieved the pants, we climbed into the car, and I started the engine.
She was restless, kept telling me she wanted to feel better, pointing to places where she thought we could stop. She pushed her seat back, unbuttoned her coat and announced she wasn’t wearing underwear, sounding as desperate as in the basement at Bellevue. She slowly rotated her hand under her dress. I kept thinking of the horror she had been through while fighting back the temptation to help her with her fingers. I grew and stayed hard despite the protests I tried to rally against touching her. My head was buzzing and my mouth thirsting as she moaned and masturbated next to me.
I couldn’t resist. It took another twenty minutes of battling my conscience, but I convinced myself that I really was the one who would finally make her feel better. I would finish the healing of the previous night. It would be perfect, and she’d be happy.
I pulled into a rest stop and guided her to a secluded picnic bench where I fucked her as she bent over the wooden table.
Afterwards, she cried. And with the side of her face laying against the pine, she said, “I thought you were different. I thought you would never do those things to me again. I’m always left alone afterwards.”
My heart was a burned out husk. I had failed her, myself, Teresa.
What’s wrong with me? Wasn’t it just yesterday that Teresa had cried after making love with me?
I thought of wandering off into the woods and looking for some mountain to climb—higher and higher until I found another dream to gaze at the stars from.
I didn’t know how to help Audrey. I didn’t know how to help myself. My magic sand was gone.
Chapter 12
In the morning, I realized we were driving east on the turnpike. The wrong direction. Man, what a mess. Distracted and confused, somewhere near Somerset I figured what-the-hell and turned south.
“Hey, we’ll take the mountain route.”
“A vacation.”
“Why rush it? Where are we going anyway?”
“Let’s take a family drive, like in the olden days.” She rolled down the window, stuck her head out, and let the cold air blast her face.
We wandered on back roads, crossed a covered bridge, climbed over a farmer’s fence to walk among some cows.
She giggled when I yelled, “Pan, you here?”
I placed a small winter flower in her hair and touched her lips with my finger.
She giggled some more.
Maybe she just needed some kindness.
Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina. I bought a tent and sleeping bags. The nights were cold, and we meandered southwards, towards the warmer sun. But still those nights were terrible. Sometimes Audrey huddled far away from me, expressing fears of what I might do to her. Other nights, she crawled up next to me, pulling me into her like we were desperados still escaping from Bellevue. I couldn’t bring myself to approach her on my own but fell captive to her psychosis and fucking her. It was either a long night watching her twitch defensively at my slightest movement or quick sex punctuated by her pleadings to never stop while I indulged myself between her spread legs. My inability to soothe her with words or unravel her sexual confusion filled the tent.
“Make me feel good where it hurts.”
The air between us felt damaged. Sometimes we would lay in the dark, and she would babble incoherently about being raped by me. I gave up trying to convince her otherwise. Most every night she would wake me and ask to smell my breath.
“Never fuck me when you’re drunk again. Not with this angel.”
One night in a Shenandoah pasture, fragmented with delusions, she accused me of ripping her open so much she bled all over the living room couch. In the middle of her tirade, she called me “Daddy” and said, “Our baby’s a freak because you hurt me. You hurt her the minute she was conceived.”
I opened the tent flap and stepped outside. Christ, what am I doing? I should take her back to Bellevue. Audrey’s really screwed up. Half the time she thinks I’m her rapist father. I’m really wrecking this girl. We didn’t even use a rubber last night. I can’t make her feel better like she says I can.
And I’m not feeling better about anything.
Why aren’t I camping here with Teresa instead? It doesn’t make sense to be with this poor nut. How can I spend another night with her?
I spit up into the grass as if a wave of hollow, corrupt urges were spilling forth. I needed to rid myself of the disease that gripped me. In the back of my mind, I had always been unwilling to commit to traveling across the country with Audrey—sticking to wandering the East Coast, fucking her while I could, and ready to drop her off back in Pittsburgh or the front door of Bellevue.
A flicker of blue light caught my eye. The Shadow Creature stood, surrounded by trees, like it had outside my parents’ house. The blue light ran across its hands.
“Maybe you should love her.”
“I’m trying.”
“No, love her, don’t try.”
“But I don’t, not in the way I....uh.... need.” I turned away, gazed upwards. At the stars. Anywhere.
“Maybe you have your needs mixed up too. It’s not easy stepping into other’s dreams. You know that.”
“And what about me? What about Teresa?”
“I didn’t say whose dream you’re in tonight.”
I lit a cigarette, peered into the darkest parts of the tree line. The blacke
st black was gone, a blue light from the moon covered the valley floor.
I wondered if the Shadow Creature left a hole wherever it moved. And what filled that non-space back in.
How do you fill an emptiness like the nights Audrey and I suffered through?
I ducked back into the tent. “Audrey, I want to tell you a story.”
“I haven’t heard a bedtime story in years.” She grabbed my arm. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I get so confused.”
“Well, okay, that’s all right. Try not to get hung up on it. Right now, tuck yourself in. Want a Pepsi?”
“Yeah, and a cigarette. Is this story true?”
“I don’t know anymore, but I believe it because it happened to me.”
And I told her how I had found a magical formula, and how gods and strange creatures and others who knew about this formula helped or hindered me. I told her of Doctor Steel, Monster Alley, and Santa Pigeon’s building; of Betsy and Hank, and the miracle of the pandas; how my protector and friend Johnny had died; and that my trek through the jungle had been guided by a jaguar. I spoke of Teresa and the mountain that had lived in her soul and the drunken night of wrestling with her father.
“So you found her father?”
“Yes.”
“What would you do if you found my dad?”
“Man, I don’t know, Audrey. Stay away from him.”
“That’s what I try to do all the time.”
I could see her face whenever one of us dragged on a cigarette—wide-eyed with my stories of Pan, mushrooms, and the portal in Monster Valley; a twinkle of a smile with the adventures of Monkey Man, Fish Man, and Nando. I told her that an ancient soul that watched over people in pain had come to help her.
“Does Teresa know all these amazing things?”
“Everything up to the red-eyed creeps bugging us on the turnpike.”
“I’m glad you love her. I’m glad you shared a story that only someone you love knows.”
Chapter 13
The next morning, I set the VW in low gear and chugged up the mountainous back roads into West Virginia.
After turning onto a main highway, we were rolling down a mountain at high speed, building momentum for the next climb upwards, when I saw the monster tail fins of the black Cadillac ahead of us.
“Uh, oh. Audrey, get that map out again.”
I swung onto a dirt road, crossed over a wooden bridge with no railings, and bumped through a small town. A trio of bulbous-headed, stubby-handed boys watched us drive by, their somewhat asymmetric eyes dancing with excitement. With grand smiles, they pointed and waved at us.
“Did you see them? They looked like spacemen.” Audrey was innocently astonished. “Is this place real?”
“Man, it’s West Virginia. Happens a lot with inbreeding. Incest can cause it.”
“You mean like my dad and me.”
“Yeah. Brothers and sisters, cousins, fathers and daughters. A lot of these mountain families have been marrying each other since time began.”
“I never knew. I thought I was the only one in the world who had a baby with her father.” There was a strange click in her voice, a swallowed cry. “My baby sort of looks like them.”
“I, uh, didn’t know.”
“It’s fine. Maybe we should’ve brought my baby, Vicki, with us. I could be her mother.”
That’s new. I never heard her say anything like that before. Maybe something is healing within her.
We climbed the unpaved road, passed a few wooden shacks, then slipped down an icy incline where the only reason I could control the car was because ruts and potholes broke up the slick surface. I cheered when we were deposited onto a stretch of asphalt.
“I’m turning left. I think that’s west. Keep your eyes peeled for any road signs.”
Audrey had the map on her lap, directing me to navigate down obscure, lonely roads, follow along rivers, struggle over snow-threatened mountains, and race down chilly, shadowed valleys.
I saw no sign of the Cadillac.
It was late afternoon when we crested a hill and looked onto a river valley with a town nestled on our side of the waterway.
“Let me see that map. Where are we?”
Audrey pointed out our location on the folded paper in her lap.
“What? This is the map you used?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s Virginia. We’re in West Virginia.”
We both burst into a well-needed laugh.
The town was on the Ohio River. We filled up on gas and ate at a diner, then joined rush hour traffic.
“We’ll take the bridge into Ohio, then head north and rethink our plans.” I laughed. “Use the New Jersey map.”
She slapped me playfully with whatever map she had in her hand.
I was jockeying the Bug into a lane just before the bridge when a truck cut in front of me.
“Asshole.”
Audrey gasped. “Look, it’s that big Cadillac again.”
“What? Where?”
“On the bridge. About halfway across.”
“Man, I can’t see it.” I was boxed in by two eighteen-wheelers and had to follow the flow of traffic turning onto the span across the water. “I can’t get out of this lane. When we get to the other side, we’re going to have to watch ourselves.”
We never made it over together. Just past the middle of the crossing, a fast-moving blur ripped open our passenger door. A large, red-eyed, Filomena-family, male demon gave Audrey no time to scream as he snatched her by the throat, then pulled her from the car. I slammed on my brakes. Suddenly the truck in front of me rocked violently and swerved into the oncoming lanes. A car skidded, smashing up against, then hurtling over the bridge railing. The roadway was buckling and bouncing. The sky was falling. A thick chain came crashing through the VW’s windshield, obliterating the glass, its six-inch metal links crippling the steering wheel, then snapping across my left arm. A crackling boom blew my eardrums apart. The concrete to my left split straight down the middle of the bridge, and about a dozen thick iron rods burst through the opening. A shower of football-sized chunks of cement demolished the front of my car. The Bug slid sideways, downwards. Down, down where? The truck behind me disappeared.
It’s the bridge. The bridge is collapsing. Where’s Audrey? That demon thing is attacking.
The car was rammed from the passenger side by a large, silver-blue metal beam. My grasp tightened onto the remains of the steering wheel as it bumped loosely against my knee, its column all ripped wires and broken rods. Uselessly, I jammed the brake pedal to the floor. Something under the car shuddered and clunked, and the small rear hood flipped open as the road behind me fell away. The car’s front end lifted. The frail, beaten machine slid backwards over a rough edge of a widening hole and went into free fall.
A section of concrete road and metal framework—it must have been forty feet long—was collapsing under, around, and above me. Then, again, one of those odd things that happen in my life, happened. The crumpled wreck I was in hit the side panel of a large truck at the exact moment a three-inch-thick metal rod pierced through the Bug’s roof, slashed through the back seat, and ripped a hole in the floor behind where I still managed to be seated. The car spun rapidly in a ragged circle. A grinding sound tore my soul apart. The Beetle was pinned to the truck by the huge iron arrow.
I could hear the truck’s engine gunning as it slid on its side down the ravaged chunk of roadway. A large cartoon smiling pig wearing a chef’s hat kept flashing in and out of view. Ballard’s Pork Products.
The truck took the brunt of the final drop into the river.
Suddenly water was in the car. I clambered through the wreckage towards an opening that looked big enough for me to squeeze through. It was the passenger door window. No, it was a tiny ragged space where the door had once been.
Ballard’s truck rotated, swirling in the current. So did the Bug, turning slowly on the spit of iron.
“Audrey.” I screamed for her. “Audrey, oh god.”
I climbed onto the truck, gripping twists of metal to keep my balance. A broken tangle of bridge debris slammed into my refuge, whipping by me in a deadly maelstrom of water. There was a creaking, then a shudder under my feet. My mind fed me information I needed to consider—I was shivering on a rapidly sinking truck; the water was cold, very cold; the shores looked too far away.
A behemoth of a black car with dragon-size dorsal wings moved fast along the river road on the Ohio side. It braked momentarily, and the rocket taillights glared red, as if mimicking the eyes of its occupants.
There was blood everywhere around me. Dark crimson streaked my pants, jacket, hands. I pulled a half-inch long sliver of glass from my lower lip.
My best hope was to swim to the wreckage of the bridge.
Where was the driver of the truck?
I slid across Ballard’s cartoon pig to the truck’s cabin and yanked at the door handle. It didn’t budge. Bumping against the cracked window glass, a man with a ten-inch spike rammed into his forehead floated in a mess of paper cups, black-brown water, and cigarette butts.
Dead. Thanks for saving my life with your truck. God bless you, but I gotta move now.
I leaped away from the doomed hulk and began to flail against the current.
When I was about forty feet from the entanglement of the metal and cement and broken roadway, I couldn’t lift my left arm to stroke the water. My chest felt paralyzed, I couldn’t tell if my legs were kicking anymore. The water tasted of fuel.
Where was Audrey?
My eyes went blurry. My good arm floundered desperately in the direction of the twisted wreckage. The current was too strong, the remnants of the bridge unreachable.
Facing oblivion, I wriggled my numbed right hand, hopefully in the pattern of my magic symbol, begging it would save Audrey and myself, but my head went under, then my fingers.
The river took me.
Not knowing if I was dead or alive, a vague notion of being dragged ashore by small, naked green things with bulging eyes formed in my head. Don’t ask me to clarify my time underwater. I don’t recall any of it. But I became cognizant of my surroundings with my face laying in mud while I sucked in air and spat out putrid liquid. I was wet and cold. With my one eye that seemed to be working, I focused on a green and brown foot with webbed toes directly in front of me. It was slim at the ankle and broadened out to a wide flipper.
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 8