by Chuck Wendig
“This car?” she says, taking a finger and drawing a line in the rime of snow and ice on its hood. “Listen, Darnell. I’ve lived in the apartments just down the block for nearly a year now. And this car has been in this same spot at the back of the lot every time I pass by it. It’s a fucking Fiero, dude. It’s twenty years old. It has 150,000 miles on it, which is practically what it takes to get to the moon. I’m going to bet if I open this thing up, it’s going to smell like stale Drakkar Noir and chemical pine scent. There is probably a dead rat in the trunk. Maybe a whole nest of dead rats and rat babies.” She finishes her drawing. (Spoiler alert: it’s a penis.) “You should really be paying me to take this burden of Detroit steel off your hands.”
“That never works. The you should be paying me thing.”
“It’s going to work today, my good man.”
“Nope.”
Then he turns around and shuffles back toward the office.
“Wait!” she calls after. “Damnit, hold on. New offer.”
“Five hundred bucks and you fill out some paperwork?”
“One-hundred-eighty bucks, I fill out no paperwork–”
He groans, starts to turn back around.
“–and I tell you how and when you’re going to die.”
The McDonald’s cup rolls between the two of them, ushered forth by the wind. A few wisps of snow blow off the back of a slate gray Honda.
His voice goes low. “You threatening me?”
“I’m not capable of subtlety. If I were threatening you, you wouldn’t have to ask.” And you’d probably already have a barbecue fork sticking out of your neck. “I have a gift. A curse. A psychic voodoo superpower.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Probably. Doesn’t change my offer.”
“All right,” he says. “Let’s hear it.”
“I need to touch you.”
“I’m married.”
“Not your dick. I need to touch…” She makes a frustrated growl and bites the middle finger of her glove and pulls it off. “Just gimme your hand.”
Darnell the used car salesman stomps over and thrusts out his hand like he’s about to shake on a deal. Her warm, damp hand is small in his icy mitt–
Big hands palms-down on a cold casket, casket the color of lavender, a casket with yellow roses on top, a casket so shiny all the lights of the funeral home are caught in liquid lines pooling. Darnell is standing there, crying over the domed box of human remains, the box of a body, the box containing his wife, and the tears are stuck in the gray wirebrush beard sticking up out of his cheeks, and he gives in to great, heaving gulps – sobs that hit him like a punch to the middle, that fold him over like a bent chair, that take something out of him, that rob him suddenly of his breath, of his heartbeat, of everything–
She lets go of his hand.
She quietly returns the glove to her own.
“Well?” he asks.
And she tells him.
And he laughs.
“You don’t believe me,” she says.
“I don’t know. Maybe I do. It’s a good story, at least. And it got a couple things right. Mitzi does love her yellow roses, and just this year we picked out a pair of caskets. And damnit if they weren’t on just this side of purple, too.” He shrugs. “Plus, it’s good news. This is, what? How far in the future?”
“Thirty-three years yet.”
“That’s a pretty good run. I’m already closing in on fifty. And I don’t want to hang around when Mitzi’s dead. What a miserable life that would be, you know what I mean?”
“Besides, who’d make you sneeze corn?”
“Damn straight.” He hesitates, like he’s chewing on it. “Fine. You got your deal. I hate this little ugly-ass car anyway.” He puts out his hand again. “Gimme the money, I’ll get you your keys, and you can go to wherever it is you’re going.”
“I’m going to Florida.”
“Watch out for alligators, lady.”
“And alligator-ladies.”
“If you say so.”
She gives him the cash.
He goes and gets the keys.
NINE
RED ROCKET, RED ROCKET
The Fiero smells like stale Drakkar Noir and chemical pine scent.
Miriam drives to Florida.
INTERLUDE
YOUNG MIRIAM LEARNS TO DRIVE
Tires scream on sun-kissed asphalt. The Subaru races across the parking lot, turns sharp, and drifts like it’s a pat of butter on a melted frying pan, leaving behind a smear of rubber darker than the blacktop beneath it.
It reaches the end of the asphalt. Jumps it. Wheels in grass spinning, spitting dirt. Turfing the lawn. Then back onto the lot, hard-charging to the far side, toward the curb – it jumps the curb. The front tires leap up. Land hard. And they blow out like soap bubbles lanced by a little kid’s finger.
Pop! Pop!
The air hisses.
The car sinks.
The engine goes tink tink tink tink.
Miriam turns off the car. Then whoops with laughter.
She’s not drunk.
OK, she’s been drinking but that doesn’t mean drunk.
It’s just – she’s run away from Mother and has been gone for a couple years now and still doesn’t know how to drive. She’s almost nineteen. She’s not gonna get a license or anything, but she figures, fuck it. Maybe one day she’ll decide to stop walking or hitchhiking and will steal a proper car. Because that’s who she is, now. The runaway who thinks about stealing cars.
The runaway who sees death. Who chases it and waits for it to finish its meal. Who chooses what plunder death did not take for itself.
Next to her, Aidan laughs. At first just a little, an uncertain chuckle tickled up from the depths of his belly, but then it’s like each chuckle brings a laugh and each laugh brings a whoop and next thing they know the both of them are gasping because laughter has replaced breathing. The sheer hilarity is going to kill them and neither one of them minds.
It doesn’t really kill them, of course.
But this is Aidan’s last day on earth.
She knows it. And he knows it, too.
The laughter finally winds down – a toy whose batteries are empty of juice. And then they’re both sitting there. Silent as the gods.
In the distance, the high school sits. Also silent. Saturday doesn’t see much going on around these parts, which, she supposes, is why they’re here.
Miriam rubs her eyes. Stretches. Runs her hands through her hair – currently pink like strawberry milk. “Damn, I like driving,” she finally says.
“Glad to be your teacher,” Aidan says. His voice is – it’s not small, not exactly. But it’s quiet. A librarian’s voice, not a teacher’s voice. Which is too bad, seeing as how he’s a science teacher. And a part-time driving instructor. “Though I think you interpreted these lessons a little bit… liberally. Do not try any of this on the actual road.”
“Blech,” she says, sticking out her tongue. “Whatever, Dad.”
He has a father-like quality. She has to admit that. He’s twenty years her senior. Got kind of a hippie-hipster intellectual vibe about him. Maroon Mister Rogers sweater. Little gold-rimmed glasses. The facial hair is the twist, though: he’s got the handlebar ’stache and chin whiskers of a seasoned Wild West marshal.
He laughs a little, pulls out a joint. It’s a fat one, too – thick as his pinky, a little bit crooked. Like a leprechaun’s shillelagh. He sparks a Zippo lighter and tries to pass her the weed, but she waves him off.
“Blech again. I don’t like all the coughing. Besides, stuff tastes like a skunk’s taint.”
“You know what a skunk’s taint tastes like?” he says, given over to childish giggles.
“Funny,” she says. Then she pulls out her cigarettes and grabs her water bottle from the dashboard cup holder – a bottle that does not contain water but cheap-shit vodka. “I already have my two drugs of choice, dude.”
“Bu
t this” – he gestures with the weed, then exhales a sputtering haze – “rounds all the edges. Bottoms you out. It’s slow like honey.”
“They’re all just variations on a theme, Aidan. All different versions of stop and go. This is my brake pedal” – she holds up the vodka – “and this is my accelerator.” She shakes the cigarette pack at him. “And that’s all I ever need.”
“Sounds simple.”
“I like things simple.”
“Your life is anything but simple.”
She sighs. “You’re not wrong. But I’d rather talk about your life.”
“What about my life?”
“You’re still going to end it.”
He pauses. Thinks. Takes another hit – holds it, releases it, coughs, eyes wet. Then he nods. “I am.”
“Yeah. OK.” She chews the inside of her cheek. “I won’t tell you to do otherwise.”
“Thanks. Anybody else would be telling me to live. To love life. To blah blah blah. You know, whatever. You know what Schopenhauer said?”
“I don’t even know who Schopenhauer is.”
“German philosopher. Atheist. Had two poodles.”
“Poodles are weird dogs.”
“They barely seem like dogs at all.”
“I know, right?”
“Anyway,” he says, “to quote him on suicide: They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice, that suicide is wrong, when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
“I think I might kill myself some day,” she says suddenly. The words just fall out of her. Like rocks out of a sack.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m young but I’m tired. I close my eyes at night and it’s just – my dreams are like a boat anchor, man. The things I see. It’s like, it’s not just the traumatic deaths – the car crashes and fires and stabbings. It’s the slow deaths. AIDS and diabetes and kidney failure and liver failure and kid’s cancer and rectal cancer and breast cancer and cancer cancer cancer. And did I mention cancer? People just lie there. Disease leaching everything out of them way I’m sucking on this cigarette. Whittling them down. A stick into splinters. And I can’t stop it. I can’t stop any of it. I have no idea how to change it for people.” She thinks of the little boy and the red balloon, and she almost tells him that story. But something stops her. As if there’s someone else out there who will hear it first.
“Suicide is fast. I’m going to use a gun.”
“I know.”
“Oh, right.”
“My first boyfriend used a gun.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
They sit there for a while. Her staring over the wheel. Him staring at the smoldering tip of the joint.
“You can have some of my stuff,” he says. “Like I promised. I have a little money. I’ll leave it in a bag in the front living room. I’d say you can stay in the house for a while – it’s not huge but before Marie left me, we had two dogs in that house and there’s a little backyard and…” He clears his throat. “But I’m going to be dead in there, and I’d do it somewhere else but I want it to be there. In that house. In our house.”
“Thanks.”
“You can have the car, too.”
“I take the car, they might think I killed you.”
“Oh.” He nods. “Good point.” Then he rolls down the window and flicks the joint outside. “Some kid will find that. Hope he enjoys it. Or sells it for a couple bucks. It’s good weed.”
“Thanks for the driving lessons, Aidan.”
“Thanks for sharing a little of my last day.”
Stop and go, she thinks.
It’s his time to stop.
Hers has not yet arrived, and so she goes.
TEN
THE SUNSHINE STATE CAN GO FUCK ITSELF
All the way she’s been listening to whatever random radio stations she can get on the dial, and it occurs to her slowly (but surely) that music basically sucks these days. Hollow, soulless pop music, shallower than a gob of jizz drying on a hot sidewalk. Even the country music sounds more like pop music – gone are the singular miseries of my wife left me, my truck broke down, all I got left is my dog and my shotgun and the blue hills of Kentucky and now it’s sugar-fed Barbies twanging on about ex-boyfriends and drinking Jack-and-Cokes and she’s pretty sure Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton are clawing out of their graves somewhere – though, wait, are the two of them even dead? Shit, she’s not sure.
Once in a while she gets a station that plays something worth a damn: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nirvana, Cowboy Junkies, Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Nine Inch Nails, Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails. It troubles her that music from the 1980s is now “oldies” music. Hard to picture a bunch of geriatrics thumping their walkers around to 99 Luftballons.
Most of the time the dial just finds static. Whispers of dead air. Crackles of voices lost in the noise.
Sometimes she thinks they’re talking to her.
“–mothers don’t love their daughters–”
“– dead people – ksssh – everywhere–”
“– fire on route 1 – St. Augustine–”
“– wicked polly–”
“– river is rising–”
“– it is what it is–”
Now she’s on this hellfire-and-brimstone station. Some preacher hollering on about depravities and Leviticus and the ho-mo-sek-shul menace, suggesting that God is so squicked out by two dudes kissing that he’s willing to once more drown the world in another hate-flood. Which, to Miriam’s mind, suggests that God doth protest too much. Maybe that’s why he booted Satan out of heaven. Maybe they were blowing each other.
She waits for lightning to strike her in her seat.
It does not.
She cackles.
She finishes off her Red Bull and throws it in the back. It clanks against the other energy drink cans. Those things taste like cough syrup that’s been fermenting in the mouth of a dead goat, but shit, they work.
Eventually, her bladder is like a yippy terrier that wants to go out. And the Fiero – which she has named Red Rocket – hungers for gas.
She steps out of the car at a rickety podunk gas station not far from Daytona Beach, and as soon as she does, the heat hits her. It’s like a hug from a hot jogger. Sticky. Heavy heaving bosoms. All-encompassing. A hot blanket of flesh on flesh. Gone is the rush of air conditioning from the car and already she feels the sweat beading on her brow. Ew, gods, yuck.
This is winter? Thirty seconds in she already feels like a swamp.
Florida: America’s hot, moist land-wang.
Everything’s bright. She fumbles on the dash for a pair of sunglasses and quickly throws them on. She feels like a vampire dragged out into the sun for the first time. How long will it be before she bursts into flames, burns down like one of her cigarettes? A char-shaped statue of Miriam Black.
She hurries into the gas station – a round-cheeked Cuban dude watches her with some fascination, like he’s seeing Nosferatu shy away from the judging rays of the Day God – and darts into the bathroom.
Into the stall. Rusty door closed. Someone has peed on the seat, which always astounds her. Men are basically orangutans in good clothes, so she gets that they ook and flail and get piss everywhere. But women? Shouldn’t the ladies be better than this? Why is there pee on the toilet seat? Hoverers, she thinks. That’s what it is. They hover over the seat like a UFO over a cornfield, trying to avoid the last woman’s pee – also a hoverer, in a grim urine-soaked cycle – and then pssshhh. Splash. Spray. Lady-whiz everywhere. The cycle continues.
Miriam does the civilized thing – a rarity for her but in bathrooms she apparently reverts and becomes a member of the human species – and wads up toilet paper around her hands to make gloves. She cleans the seat. Scowling and cursing the whole time. Then she sits. And she pees.
In here it’s dark and it’s cool, at least
.
Outside the stall, the bathroom door opens.
Someone else comes in.
Footsteps echoing. Little splashes as they step through water.
Then: clang.
Something drops. Metal on metal. A loud sound, a jarring sound – it gives Miriam’s heart a stun-gun jolt. A scrape. A splash.
She peers under the door.
The bent and bitten edge of a red snow shovel drags along the floor. A pair of muddy boots walks it along.
Miriam’s sweat goes cold.
No no no, not here, not now.
The footsteps approach. Slapping against the soaked floor.
Miriam feels her pulse in her neck: a rabbit’s pulse, thumping against the inside of her skin like a hard finger flicking. Her throat feels tight.
The boots stop just outside the stall.
Snow slides off their tops. Plop, plop. Melting on the tile.
Red runnels of blood crawl toward Miriam’s feet.
A twinge of something inside her: an infant’s fist twisting her guts. Then the woman outside her door drops something:
A purple paisley handkerchief.
The blood runs to it. Soaks through to it.
Fear transforms. A spitting rain into a booming thundercloud. It’s anger now, jagged and defiant, a piece of broken glass chewed in the mouth – and Miriam roars, kicks out with her own black boot–
The door swings open. It slams against the other door.
Nobody’s there. No woman with a red shovel. No boots. No snow, no blood, no gangbanger’s handkerchief.
Miriam sighs. Massages the heels of her hands into her eyes, pressing hard, running them in circles. In the blue-black behind her eyes, fireworks explode and blur and fade – no sound, just silent flashes of light from her pressing hard on her own eyes.
“At least you have both eyes,” comes a voice. Louis. Not-Louis.
The Trespasser, more like it.
She opens her eyes. A vulture sits on the lip of the sink in front of the stall. Bowing its featherless match-tip head. Beak clacking as it speaks.
“You’re the key,” the bird says, “but what’s the lock?”
“What?”
“Or are you the lock and someone else is the key?”