Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  She turned around to check on the Mennonites, who’d taken off their brimmed hats and fake sideburns and were looking out the window at a teenage boy standing on the train platform in dirt-smudged coveralls, holding a sign reading ALISON CRANE.

  //

  “I’m Allie.”

  The boy with the sign bowed slightly, then tossed the cardboard placard onto the train tracks. “Welcome to Wicklow.” He appeared to be about sixteen, with messy hair and a copper bullet casing hanging from a leather necklace. “Victor couldn’t make it,” he explained. “So I’m supposed to take you to the grave.”

  Allie looked down at her shoes, lifting one to glance at the bottom.

  “It’s me you’re smelling,” the boy said. “We got a fertilizer delivery this morning. I didn’t have time to change. Victor’s been real distracted lately, so we’re all pulling extra weight.” He then led the way to a green pickup with a large plastic drum in the truck bed half full of an amber liquid.

  Inside the truck, taped to the dashboard, was a page torn from a field guide with sketches of male and female oak slayer beetles. Allie recognized them from home, the shiny gray bugs whose boreholes bled a rusty brown discharge.

  A month earlier, a trimming service had cut down the oak from the front yard of Allie’s childhood home. In the wake of Sonia’s death, her parents had sold the house and moved into a retirement community near the Wisconsin border. The new owners immediately painted the house yellow and removed the sickly tree. Allie had wanted to cry watching the oak being brought down, but the twins were in the car with her and the tears weren’t coming anyway. “Girls,” she’d simply said as the crane lowered a massive limb onto the driveway, “your aunt and I used to swing from that branch right there.”

  “Did you say something?” the boy asked.

  Allie motioned to the beetle pictures on the dashboard. “They’ve already killed most of our oak trees. Are they here too?”

  The boy nodded as he drove. “But Victor’s fighting them.”

  The depressed little town, as it tumbled by the passenger window, reminded Allie not of Sonia at all but of a more generic sadness she imagined all people from nice suburbs must feel when passing through such small places on the brink. It was like looking into a cave and seeing one’s ancient forebears, hairy and heavy of brow.

  The boy paused at a traffic signal at the center of town. There was a motel on one side, a pharmacy on the other.

  “Planned Parenthood,” the boy said, jutting his chin at the building on the far side of the intersection. “My stepmom says all the pregnant college girls from Middle-Western go there.”

  “My sister went there,” Allie said. “To Middle-Western, I mean.” She looked at the clinic, which had a bright blue-tiled roof like a pancake house. “Is Victor going to meet me at the cemetery?”

  “Don’t know,” said the boy. “Victor doesn’t tell me much. I’ve only been working for him for a few months.”

  The light turned and the truck lurched forward, the amber liquid sloshing in the drum behind them.

  “Can I ask,” said Allie, “why you work at a cemetery?”

  “There isn’t much other work around here. In Triton there is, but you have to be twenty-one to work at the riverboat.” His face grew more solemn. “Plus, Victor pays me extra to stay late and keep people from jumping the fence.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do they do when they get in?”

  “You’ll see in a minute.” The boy pulled the truck through a wrought-iron gate bearing the sign OAK HILL CEMETERY, across a small parking lot and onto a narrow gravel lane heading up a wide slope full of large gravestones, statues, and mausoleums. Near a ten-foot obelisk, the boy jumped on the brake and hopped out to pick up a dead bird and toss it into the back of the truck. They continued down into a lower, shadier pasture with smaller markers, where he stopped again and led the way across the grass to a modest brown headstone supporting a can of Old Style. The boy scrambled ahead to snatch the beer can off the stone, and then to retrieve a smaller bit of trash from the grass at the base of the marker.

  “What’s this?” Allie asked.

  “They always sneak in on Saturday nights,” the boy complained. “This was actually kind of a light trashing.” He motioned to a spot of charred turf. “Last weekend someone burned an effigy.”

  “This grave belongs to someone named Janice Page,” said Allie.

  “You’d think getting murdered would be insult enough,” the boy said. “By a serial killer no less.”

  “This isn’t the right grave.”

  The boy looked at the bit of garbage in his hand, at what appeared to be a condom wrapper. “Victor said to take you to the grave.”

  “With capital letters.”

  “What?”

  “Sonia Lowery Senn,” Allie said. “Can you please take me to her grave?”

  “Senn? Like Victor Senn?”

  “Yes. Can you take me to Victor’s wife’s grave?”

  The boy looked at the condom wrapper again, then back up at Allie. “I didn’t know Victor had a wife.”

  //

  Near the administration building they got out to peruse a big directory of plots.

  “I’m really sorry,” the boy kept saying. “I just assumed that the grave meant the grave. But Jesus, I didn’t know Victor’s wife died. A year ago? Today?”

  “She was my younger sister.”

  “No wonder he was acting so weird this morning.”

  “It’s not listed here,” said Allie. “How can that be?”

  “I’ve never actually seen anyone update this thing,” the boy admitted. “What about the burial? Weren’t you here for that?”

  Allie turned and looked up the long green slope dotted with headstones and hundred-year-old trees. “It was a bit of a blur.”

  The boy looked up the slope too. His eyes narrowed, and he stalked off to lift something—a dead robin—out of the grass beneath an angel statue.

  “Why are there so many dead birds lying around?” Allie asked.

  The boy tossed the robin into the truck bed. “Let me take you somewhere while I figure this out.”

  //

  Motel Wicklow might’ve felt more homey and nostalgic—with its wood paneling and tube TV, as if drawn unchanged from Allie’s childhood memories of family road trips—had it not apparently staged so many desperate lives. The smoked drapes, flecks of vomit on the underside of the toilet seat, a burned spoon in the waste bin. Residue of self-destructive crime.

  Allie suddenly wanted to go jogging, but she hadn’t brought any clothes for it, or any clothes at all that she wasn’t already wearing. Lying on the moth-eaten bedcover listening to the distant commotion of Wicklow, she felt as if she were herself a criminal, or about to become one. Already on the run from her family, in a room rented by the hour, she would do something terrible soon, something wild and unforgivable. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine what it would be, but instead of the future, the tragic past approached—We’re entitled to a girls’ night out, Sonia. Outside, the myriad sounds of Wicklow converged into the singular redundant clanking of a tool striking iron, and she could hear again Mr. Bello fixing the playroom radiator. She could smell the pizza that Andrew and the kids were going to eat. She could hear her sister hedging on the other end of the line—I’m waylaid, Al. I’m hurrying. Allie had glanced at her watch. Well, hurry faster, she’d said. But Sonia never arrived. And then the night was over and the year had passed and there was only the clanking of a metal cup on jail bars, the killer hunched on a cot in his university sweatshirt with Allie in the top bunk, the two of them locked away together, rapping off the seconds of their tenured guilt, killers and victims both, until the clanking traded its metallic chime for the duller knock of knuckle on wood, and she was awake again in a motel room in Wicklow.

  //

  “Victor?” she said, opening the door. “Victor, God, you look like shit.”<
br />
  He wore the same kind of coveralls as the boy with the bullet necklace, a bandolier of mud smeared across the torso, tobacco in his cheek, forehead jeweled with sweat. Not quite a full year since she’d seen him last, but he’d lost a decade to his grief. His thick hair had grown gray and frazzled, his eyes gaunt and staring, like some withering former alpha male excommunicated from the pack. He invited himself into one of the chairs by the window.

  “Sorry about the mix-up,” he said. “It’s not Gunner’s fault.”

  Allie took the chair opposite. “Gunner?”

  He tongued his tobacco from one cheek to the other. “What are you doing here, Allie?”

  “Not sure,” she said, looking around the room. “I think I may be leaving my husband or something.”

  Victor rolled his eyes. “Does Andrew know that?”

  “I just thought of it this minute,” she said. “It’s this anniversary. My mind isn’t right. But he drinks these kale shakes and—”

  “Kale?”

  “It’s a vegetable.”

  “This is Andrew we’re talking about.”

  “And he reads these stupid self-help books.”

  Victor smirked. “You’re not leaving Andrew. You’re just pitying yourself.”

  “You don’t know what I’m going through.”

  “Sure I do,” he said. “Same as me. You’re completely fucked in the head.”

  Allie looked out across the street at the pharmacy. “I told her to hurry up.”

  “Told who?”

  “On the night,” she said. “We were supposed to go to that concert, remember, and I told Sonia to hurry up. She was driving fast because of me.”

  “She got killed by a drunk driver, Allie.”

  “How are you so cool about all this?”

  “Because I already talked myself off the ledge this morning,” he said. “This is the good part of my day. This is the part after I’ve decided not to drive off a cliff.”

  “Don’t joke about that, Victor.”

  “I’m not joking, Allie. On the way to work every morning, I pass an old quarry with cliffs all around it. The guardrail isn’t much to speak of. It would be a quick way to go.” He looked away, his eyes softening as he watched the traffic go past. “But then I make it past the one really sharp curve, and I’m still on the road, so I end up going to work. Dig a few graves, bury a few bodies, then off to happy hour with June.”

  “June?”

  “Don’t say it like that,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you think I’m screwing her.”

  “Are you screwing her?”

  “No, I was just saying . . .” He sleeved off his forehead. “It was a figure of speech.”

  Allie straightened her posture. “So who is June then?”

  He eyed her, apparently trying to discern whether to validate her new tone with a response. “June runs the cemetery office in my continuing psychological absence.”

  “And is that June’s phrase for your being”—she touched her chin—“ ‘fucked in the head’?”

  “It’s actually my therapist’s.”

  “Oh, good for you,” she said, slipping back into the tone he didn’t like.

  “It’s not really therapy. It’s just a neighbor of mine who happens to be a therapist.”

  “Well, either way, Andrew would approve. He’s been after me to see someone too. But he’s been after me to do a million things.” She reached into her purse and took out So You’re Grieving, Now What?, used it to fan her face, then threw it onto the table. “But I don’t do anything these days. I don’t even run anymore. I mean I want to take a run, and sometimes I even get my shoes on, but then, I don’t know, I just don’t do it.”

  “Psychological absence,” said Victor.

  Allie nodded. “I’m calling it a life of refusal. I’m thinking of joining up with the Mennonites.” She looked out the window at the pharmacy across the street. “I think it would make a nice distraction.”

  Victor pulled the self-help book off the table and thumbed through the pages, stopping at the bookmark. “Would you like to see something?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “My number one distraction,” he said.

  “Screwing June?”

  “Better than that.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the war I’m waging,” he said. “Come on.”

  //

  As darkness began to descend on Oak Hill Cemetery, Victor keyed in through the big iron gate. They wound their way up a wide slope of gravestones, the drum of amber liquid in the truck bed sloshing behind them. The male and female beetle pictures fluttered beneath the air vents as if whispering to one another.

  Victor tapped the brake, dodging a mound of feathers in the middle of the drive.

  “What’s with all the dead animals?” Allie asked.

  Victor drew a small metal box from beneath his seat. It had a single red button on top with two wires trailing into the crevice between his seat and the console. “The birds,” he said. “Yeah. Sometimes they get themselves caught in the chemistry.”

  They crested the hill and he pulled over. She followed him out of the truck to the base of a massive tree. “Northern red oak,” he announced. “This right here is the biggest oak tree in the entire county.” Victor opened the blade of a pocketknife, stripped off a chunk of bark, sniffed it, and handed it to Allie. “Smell that?”

  It smelled like bark.

  “Oak slayers,” he hissed. “Those little fuckers can smell an old tree like this from a hundred miles away.” He was staring intensely at the trunk now, his shoulders lifting and falling. The darkness was gathering fast. “They mate for life, you know. They fall in love and then they pick a tree and chew their way into the heartwood. And then they just shack up and eat, and their larvae eat. For years this goes on, multiplying and eating. They never even leave the tree, some of them. They’re so safe in there, deep inside the bigger trees especially, that the woodpeckers can’t even get to them. Until it’s completely empty inside.” Victor looked up into the darkening sky. He appeared to Allie, standing there in his dirty coveralls with the darkness folding around him, like a convict on the run, desperate and dangerous.

  Back in the truck, they sat in silence. Victor put the keys in the ignition, but didn’t turn the engine on. He put his hands in his lap.

  “I noticed you’re not wearing your wedding ring anymore,” she said quietly.

  He set his chin on the steering wheel, scanning the sky.

  “What are we doing now?” she asked.

  “We’re waiting,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For total darkness.”

  Allie cupped her hands against the window. The silhouette of a bat swung across the slightly less dark sky. “Total darkness,” she agreed. “It does feel that way sometimes, like we’re just waiting for the end.”

  “No,” he said, thumbing back toward the drum in the truck’s bed. “The pesticide. It’s sort of a gray-market kind of thing. Developed the recipe myself. I only distribute it under cover of darkness.” He turned the key. The beetle pictures began whispering beneath the vents again. “While I drive,” he said, setting the wired box on her thigh, “you count to tens. At every ten, push that button.” He reached across and dropped his fist on the button and Allie could hear a hissing sound. Beyond the rear window, a plume of yellow mist drifted off the back end of the drum, turning red in the brake lights.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  He threw the truck into gear and guided it out from under the great oak.

  Allie turned to watch the yellow cloud swirl and eddy in their wake. “Seriously, what is that stuff?”

  “Go on, try it,” he said, reaching across to nudge the metal box on her thigh. “Conventional grief management it ain’t, but it just feels good to waste those little fuckers.”

  Allie put the metal box into the cup holder.

  “Suit
yourself.” Victor pulled up along the crest of the hill and down a wide grassy lane between rows of headstones, a grim poise ossifying his face. He punched the button again. Behind them another plume burst from the drum in a powered stream, then churned downward, settling in a low stationary cloud. Back and forth across the slope, every ten seconds he reached down to press the button himself, until finally they were out on the street again, zipping down the dark roads of Wicklow, the metal box back up under the seat.

  //

  “I don’t understand,” said Andrew, his voice meek with concern as it came through the old phone in her motel room. “Then when are you coming home?” Perhaps he sensed it too, the precriminal vibe his wife was giving off. He’d been to Wicklow before, after all. A place with some country charm in daylight, but with a despondent kind of nightlife that Andrew once described as a “hobo jubilee.” Years ago, they’d eaten dinner at Sonia and Victor’s house to celebrate the acquisition of the cemetery, before going out to a bar near Oak Hill. A dark, wet-smelling dive like a basement exhumed to ground level.

  “I’ll come home tomorrow,” Allie said, turning the rings on her finger. “I haven’t seen it yet. Seen her. There was this kid named Gunner, with a bullet around his neck, and he took me to the wrong grave, and after that I fell asleep, and then the day was over.”

  “Allie,” Andrew asked, “are you drunk?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “I’m thinking of going to the bar across the street, or the pharmacy, for some wine maybe. But everything in the window is in jugs. You know, with the round handles? It’s worse than before, this place. Like they only have stuff to outfit the goners. Nothing but jug wine and condoms and charred spoons.”

  “Spoons?” he said.

  Allie stood up off the bed and glanced into the waste bin to see the blackened piece of metal. In her life she’d never seen a thing like that and here she was so casually remarking on it. When she eventually returned home to the big house her husband had bought for her she would snap out of this dream and say—her own voice meek with concern—“Oh my God, Andrew, there was a heroin spoon in my room!” And then Andrew would mention a news item he’d seen about the growing epidemic, and they’d be together again, sharing similar thoughts, in their Tower Hill home where the wine bottles lived in cellars and the spoons were all silver.