Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  “Where are you?” Billy asks.

  “In Wicklow. Can you do something about this?”

  “Hartley’s right,” Billy says. “No cops. Cops are worthless at a time like—”

  “Billy . . .”

  “Bring him to me.”

  “Who?”

  “The crazy guy,” Billy says. “I’m parked on the north side of the cemetery in Wicklow, just glide past me and, I don’t know, I’ll do something.”

  “This is insane, Billy. I’m calling the police. Neelish says this isn’t up to us. He says I should call the police.”

  “That doesn’t sound very entrepreneurial.”

  “I’m calling the police. We haven’t done anything wrong.” Other voices in her car rise up and then the call ends.

  Billy carries the hunk of cement over to his Dodge. He sits on the fender. His phone vibrates again.

  “Okay,” says Kate. “I’m saying okay.”

  “All you’ve got to do is cruise past my car and I’ll . . .” Billy pauses to think what he’ll actually do. “I’ll interrupt the pursuit.”

  Kate sighs. “Glennis says we’re two minutes away. Are you ready for this?”

  “I was born ready, Kate.”

  “Billy . . .”

  “I’m ready, I’m ready.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Just cruise by.” He weighs the football-size hunk of cement in his hand, crouches behind the front end of his car. The street is quiet. There aren’t even any birds chirping. He listens to Kate explain to the others in the car that he has some sort of plan. There’s commentary in the background from Hartley’s stepfather that Billy can’t quite make out beyond the man’s doubtful tone. Then he hears Hartley murmuring assurances. Then Glennis’s voice says, “Okay, okay, turn right here. Turn left I mean, oh Jesus—” Billy pockets his phone. He hears the engines approaching. His mind clears. He eyes the distant storm clouds. The flood is coming, he thinks, be unflappable. The seconds drag. A tendon winds tight inside his throwing shoulder. Kate’s white Camry pulls past. Familiar faces blur by—the Indian man in shotgun, Hartley’s calm blue eyes in the backseat. Then he sees the gray compact following behind. He lunges forward and heaves the cement. Glare obscures the windshield of the little car, until, in the last half moment before impact, the leafy shadow of an overhanging branch reveals an aged, wide-eyed face behind the wheel.

  The windshield spiderwebs, caves inward. The car careens, losing speed, drifting slowly up onto the parkway along the cemetery’s fence, until it sits at idle.

  Billy stands in the road, his heart drumming his ribs. Kate’s car taps the brakes at the end of the block, then banks hard, peeling out of sight. In the foreground, the wounded vehicle whines and sputters, but the driver’s silhouette doesn’t move. Slowly Billy approaches, popping the passenger door to find an old man behind the wheel, gasping shallowly.

  “You okay, buddy?”

  The man gives a faint headshake.

  Billy snatches a small handgun off the passenger seat and pockets it. Beneath where the gun had lain, he discovers a slip of paper on which his son’s name has been scrawled.

  “What’s this about, old-timer?”

  The man’s mouth levers open, but no words come out.

  Billy’s phone vibrates. Kate. He silences it. He holds the paper in front of the man’s eyes. “This is my son, you shithead.”

  The old man’s tongue moves up and down, the back of his throat flexes soundlessly. “It’s coming,” he finally rasps. “The dream again.”

  Billy’s cell buzzes again. “What is it, Kate?”

  “What happened?” she gasps.

  “I’ve remedied the situation. Tell Hartley everything’s taken care of.” Billy pauses so that Kate can report his heroics. Overhead, the dark portion of the sky has grown considerably.

  “Billy,” Kate pleads, “what is happening?”

  He leans back into the car to watch the old man suffer for breath. “I’m not entirely sure yet. I’ve thwarted a plot of some kind. But really, I think it’s best if none of you knows any specifics.”

  “Billy . . .”

  “You guys go out to dinner or whatever and I’ll check in later.” He ends the call, then gets into the passenger seat and closes the door. The car smells like burned oil. From a piece of newsprint on the floor, the skeletal face of Abe Lincoln gazes out of a cornfield. The old man lays his head against the window, his chest pulsing weakly. Billy pats down the man’s clothes. There’s no wallet or phone, only a clutch of casino chips in each pocket, which he digs out two and three at a time. The glossy gray markers look real enough, but when they’re all lined up on Billy’s thighs—eight thousand dollars’ worth—he begins to doubt. Not since getting all that cash back from the Sensei Gary debacle has he held so much money at once.

  “You don’t look so lucky to me,” Billy says.

  The old man’s eyes loll. His head tips forward and saliva runs down his chin.

  Billy stuffs everything into his own pockets, puts his foot down into the well below the steering column, and presses the accelerator, reaching across to steer the car down the parkway and through the cemetery’s open utility gate. The gravel road crackles as he winds deeper into the burial grounds, eventually cutting across a meadow of small flat plaques and into a stand of low-hanging willows that shield the car from the road.

  “Hey old-timer, what was it you were saying before, about dreams coming again?” He clutches the old man’s chin, tipping the head up. As he does this, a small metal hoop slides out of the man’s mouth and lands on his shirt pocket. When Billy dries it off there’s a slim gold wedding ring pinched in his fingers.

  He turns off the car and gets out, walking back through the low-slung willow reeds. He scans the empty cemetery. Overhead, the gray-green trouble devours more and more of the sky, the temperature dropping as the light runs off, the air filling with electricity. The world in every direction is void of people. It feels, he thinks, like he’s reentering his nightmare. The darkness will descend soon. The living dead will be along any minute now.

  Billy walks a loop around the cemetery, looking for someone—a mourner, a cemetery employee, anyone to interrupt the eerie vacancy. He sits on a headstone and smokes his last four cigarettes in an unbroken chain. He tries to think.

  Back at the gray car, he taps the window where the old man’s scalp smudges the glass. “You’re fucking with my head, grandpa.” He raps the gun against the window. “I can see you breathing in there, motherfucker.” He knows he’s being cruel, but this still feels like part of his heroic performance. He imagines himself recalling these events later to the family he’s saved. His family. Even the boy’s stepfather will be rapt by the first-person account of such daring and sacrifice.

  When his phone vibrates again he skips formalities and goes right into a description of the progress being made. “My investigation is nearly complete,” he says. “I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of this bag.”

  “Bag?” Kate asks. “What bag?”

  “I’ve been working on this case since last night, it turns out. I’ve been dreaming the facts. There’s a satanic element to it, I think, and this Strangler person may also be connected somehow.”

  “Billy, are you drunk?”

  “I’ve been trying to chant my way through this, Kate, to see the signs from God and all. But it’s simpler than that. It has to be.”

  Kate doesn’t understand what he’s getting at. She passes the phone to their son.

  “Hartley, tell your mother she may have been right about me.” Billy yanks the driver’s-side door open and watches the old man tumble to the ground. The fall is very convincing. “It turns out I’m not unflappable. My emotions may be detached after all.”

  He ends the call. The dark half of the sky churns wildly now. The wind makes chaos of the reedy strands of the willow tree. He unbuttons the old man’s shirt, pulling it down his arms, twisting the fabric around the bony wrists, befo
re shutting the shirt’s hem up into the car door. Leaving the man in the dirt with his hands bound behind his back, Billy walks across the cemetery, climbing over the now-locked gate, across the street to where the bouncer sweeps the curb in front of the bar.

  “You Armstrong?” Billy asks.

  “And you’re the pecker who loses all his charm after ten beers.”

  “Where the fuck are my keys, Armstrong?”

  The bouncer thumbs over his shoulder.

  Inside, it’s empty and wet and everything smells like the mop. The bartender sees him coming and drops the keys loudly onto the bar top. Billy orders a beer.

  “We’re not doing this again,” the bartender says.

  Thunder rolls across the county. It begins to pour. Billy looks over his shoulder to watch the bouncer duck inside. The wind holds the door open against its hinges. A garbage can rolls down the street.

  “Only one beer,” Billy promises, trying to soften his voice. “I just need a minute here to figure out what exactly is going on.” He takes the ring from his pocket. Watching the delicate gold hoop turn and shine calms him, transports him momentarily back into his own long-lost marriage. When he looks up again, the bartender is still wearing his doubtful face.

  “Look,” Billy says, trying for humor now, “my wife already thinks I’m drunk, so this is actually an attempt to meet expectations.”

  The bartender pushes the keys closer. “As I understand it, the ring is supposed to stay on the lady’s finger.”

  //

  At the bar’s one window, with the bouncer eyeing him, Billy stares out into the storm’s madness. Thunder shakes the building. The lights flicker. He feels it clench more tightly around him, the curse of the mint-green pill. He nudges the door open and the wind rips it wide. The sky is dark now. Lightning in all directions. A large piece of the tree across the street has fallen down and mangled the cemetery’s iron fence. A dumpster lies on its side in the middle of the street. The long white body of a dead swan turns circles on the pavement like the hand of a clock. When he steps out into the sideways rain he can feel that there’s ice involved, sticks, pebbles.

  Back inside his car, he digs sleet from his ear. The windows are a whiteout. The weather and the hallucinations merge into a diverse mania—satanists and serial killers encircle the car, howling and scratching, angry girlfriends, bouncers. The scrambled din of all Sensei Gary’s chants roils inside his head at once. He pulls the ring out again, pinching its narrow band, not unlike the one he once gave Kate. Later, of course, she gave it back. He’d refused, but she’d insisted. He didn’t understand what she was getting at. Mr. Gupta, it turned out, was making it official. The day of the wedding, he took the ring down to Mel’s and pawned it for cash. A decent return, he’d thought at the time, though later a vague remorse surfaced. A shadow of stress perhaps. But as he holds it now he feels a small measure of hope that the precious things he’s forfeited in life might someday return.

  The dead swan slaps the windshield, its pus-yellow eyes like tentacle suckers on the glass, dragging him to the bottom of the new sea beneath Sensei Gary’s great flood. But then the storm’s madness begins to back off. First the wind, then the raindrops clarify to individual strikes on the car’s roof, until there’s almost no sound at all. The windows clear, a smooth black sky coming on behind the departing tempest, stars poking through, a moon rising.

  When he can no longer hear thunder, he gets out and crosses the section of fence taken down by the fallen tree, hurrying toward the old man, finding him exactly where he’d fallen, soaked and mud-splattered. Billy lifts him back into the driver’s seat of the gray compact, pulls the shirt back over his bony shoulders.

  “Okay,” he tells the man. “I get it. You’re all messed up. I can see that. I’m sorry. But I’m just not sure how I was supposed to have played this.”

  One side of the aged face is sunken and lifeless while the other jumps with seizures. A scallop of mud hangs in the hairline.

  Billy picks willow reeds off the man’s cheek. “Was this some kind of vengeance operation?” He searches the darkness for the neon bar light at the far edge of the cemetery, but the power is out everywhere. He pats his shirt pocket, but his cigarettes are gone. It occurs to him that maybe this is exactly what stress feels like. A doubt in one’s prospects? A sense that recent behavior will not be received well when discovered by others? Certainly a crime has been committed, with a deadly hunk of cement. And he supposes additional charges may be in order for having held the man for so many hours, for having called this elderly gentleman “shithead” and “motherfucker.”

  “Was it the lady my son hit with his car? Was she someone to you?” Billy touches the man’s shoulder, he rebuttons the shirt, fixes the collar. He’s using his kindest tone now. He only means to talk with the old man, one last conversation, to let him speak his piece before the end. “Okay, yes, that was an awful thing Hartley did, getting into that car. But you don’t know my son. Hartley’s a good man, a forgiving man.”

  Billy thinks of the one letter he got from Hartley, postmarked from Grassland. In this note, the boy had described his concerns about Sensei Gary. He’d been pleased to hear his father was living a healthier life, but he’d asked some very simple questions about the guru, which, by the time the letter had reached Billy, were proving prophetic. And at the end, Hartley added a postscript explaining that if forgiveness meant something in the course of his father’s self-improvement then Billy was indeed forgiven, and that on some primal level it had actually pleased Hartley to know his father cared enough to want to break him out of jail.

  “Forgiveness!” Billy exclaims, swiping the old man gently on the shoulder. “For a crime I didn’t even commit!”

  Then his phone vibrates again. Kate and her questions. Ignore.

  The moon rises higher and the car grows cold. Billy tells the old man stories about Hartley as a boy—naïve but loyal, savvy with a dollar, good to his mother. His phone buzzes again and again. Hartley, then Kate, then Hartley. The day’s voice mails, when he listens to them all in a row, tell a dramatic narrative. At first there’s much excitement over a man who’s thrown a rock at a car, then warnings of a terrible storm. The most recent message offers an address where Billy might seek refuge with his family until the highways are navigable. But he isn’t looking for refuge, and he doesn’t want to talk to anyone except the old man.

  Headlights appear in the distance. He thinks it’s bar traffic at first, but when he retrieves his bearings he realizes it’s someone driving one of the cemetery’s winding inner roads, ranging closer then farther, a single bifocal light source in the power outage.

  Then the headlights turn and sweep and the willow tree’s stringy wet branches explode with light. Billy’s heart thrashes inside his rib cage. The lights mercifully curve away. The tree darkens. When his eyes recalibrate, the truck is closer than he realized, only a few hundred feet away now, moving left to right. It’s the green truck from his dream. He thinks of the young satanist in his car that morning, an undead girl with living monsters on her flesh. In this way, reality feels irretrievably lost. Everything forfeited to false and damaged memory. He lays his palms on his thighs, feels the wedding ring nestled beside the pistol, the clutch of casino chips. There’s a rich man inside you, he tells himself. You have a wife and family and everything lost can still be recovered.

  The truck makes another U-turn, the tree illuminating then extinguishing. The pickup bumps past at only fifty feet now. Behind it, the moonlight sparkles on a cloud of yellow gas. The mist billows toward him, pushing in among the low-slung branches, until the car is engulfed, the world beyond a muffled ghost. It’s coming, he thinks, the dream again. This is the part when everything gives way to clouds.

  He turns to his companion, wanting just one answer. “Hey, come on, are you seeing this?” He jostles the old man’s shoulder. “Hey, old-timer, come on, I got a question for you.” He touches the man’s face, wipes the mud off his brow, sweeps the
hair to a tidier angle. “Hey, come on, seriously, you hearing me?” But the old man doesn’t move, not even to breathe. Billy runs his fingers down to the man’s neck. He waits and waits. He thinks of the letter he might’ve written. He knows he didn’t write it, but he wishes he had. He wishes he’d broken Hartley out of jail, or at least been there today to welcome him free. Some days he fears what he’s capable of, others what he’s not.

  “Hey,” he whispers, giving up on the search for a pulse. “Hey, old-timer, come on now, just tell me this one thing, I gotta know, please.” He waits for a sign of life, a sign of God, anything. Outside, the world is powerless and he’s floating through dreams inside a golden cloud. “Old man,” he whispers, “tell me, please, I gotta know, seriously, what does the Soyfield Strangler dream of?”

  WE’VE LOST OUR PLACE

  One entire wall of the psychiatrist’s office is lined with self-help books. Bright softcover tomes that betray the doctor’s otherwise stuffy academic style, lend the space, from the right vantage point, the feel of a child’s room, gaudy with cheer. On some of the shelves are gaps in the books where little hand puzzles and squeeze balls sit, as well as a big red clock that has never, in three-and-a-half years, been off by so much as one minute.

  Victor glares at the minute hand, waiting for it to jump. Time has a tendency to leap on him these days, sneaking past when he isn’t looking. “I just wish,” he says, “that I could recall coming back to life. I remember heading for the guardrail, but then nothing else for days afterward, weeks really. No memory at all of my recovery. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  Dr. Simmons rubs his eyes, stealing his own glance at the red clock. “Victor, don’t you think our time would be better spent discussing the fact that Hartley Nolan went free today?”

  “I thought he got out yesterday.”

  The psychiatrist shrugs. “Either way . . .”

  Victor looks out the window now, at a dimming green sky. “Yeah, but is there a name for what I’m describing? For feeling like maybe I didn’t survive?”