by Jeff Johnson
They all died, but I didn’t find out the final death toll for an entire year. When I couldn’t find anyone left alive and every scumbag had run straight to a payphone at the sight of me, I’d stolen a car someone had left idling in front of a 7-Eleven. By the time the last of those young lights winked out, I’d been on my way to Portland, a place I’d heard about from someone else, who had heard about it from they couldn’t remember where. A place with trees and hippies, café jobs, kind and gentle prisons, bridges, and all the wild berries you could eat. Cherry trees. In Old Town I’d found a familiar ecology, but I never tried for the role of king again. I never got back in the shell, either.
I sighed. A little of the fantasy feel of the foggy night, the cleanness of the plaza, the soft sounds of the water, and the rich smell of the sea settled back around me. The bright lights of the bar were closer, and I could hear people laughing inside. Letting my mind wander around the edge of a potential crisis kicked up the oddest tortures every time. It was the same for everyone, I knew, but for me the rawness of certain years made daydreaming at night a bad idea. Delia knew some of those stories, and thankfully she’d never suggested therapy, probably because she feared that in some way all those things were too much a part of me, too wrapped around my core to peel away to any good effect. Then again, she might have been worried that I’d get arrested.
The bar was half full. I ordered a scotch on the rocks and carried it outside to one of the patio tables. It was peaceful enough.
The logic behind gutting my way through some twisted version of American apelife in Old Town had its roots everywhere. There was some kind of reason why that memory came to the surface with such instructional clarity, and the wheels in my head coughed it up around midnight and drink number five.
All planning aside, all the twists and turns, feints and blinds, potential tools and bridges for gaps, all of it was semi-worthless in the end. The same thing that kept me trapped in my world was the very same thing that gave me my best advantage. My survival rate. The doors to the history inside of me closed and the bar came alive, like someone had turned up the volume.
It was the escape artist who always won. Always. Even if he was escaping back into the same box he just broke out of. I left the bar and walked, and for a solid hour I enjoyed the nowness, a spirited and occasionally whimsical impostor in a twilight paradise, unashamed, smoking cigarettes and touching the salt air with my eyelids and fingertips. We were all born at some moment to ourselves, and for me, it was in the window of a Laundromat with a neon CLEAN sign. A rich, splattery smoothie of signs and omens and tellings to be sure. Maybe it was finally time to embrace it, and maybe it was just a long wire of PTSD. In the end, it probably didn’t even matter.
But I was glad I couldn’t see my reflection.
Early the next morning I dumped a generous load of Bling’s cash at the front desk. Then I gassed up the BMW, got a large black coffee, three packs of smokes, two donuts, and some teriyaki beef jerky, and headed back to Portland, the rising sun to my right. The coastal pines were magnificent at dawn, sculpted by a steady wind, brushed into gnarled organic fans, and the intermittent glimpses of ocean were fields of gold crested with shimmering silver blue. The gas station coffee tasted good because of it. I found a jazz station and slumped into a relaxed road posture, hit the cruise control. BMW seats were designed for men much fatter than myself.
The fog burned off as I busted into the desolation north of Sacramento an hour later. The random, jangling pieces were all settling into place in my head. Being partly distracted by the mundane task of driving kept a lid on the past. Doing nothing at all was something to avoid for a few days.
The dawn gave way to a bright morning, so I put on my shades and thought about Delia, how she’d still be sleeping, and how flagrantly evil it would be to call and wake her up and tell her in poetic detail about the phenomena of sunlight. Straight-up lying would have to cover the scenery, however. Outside it looked cold, with barren fields, groves of deadish trees, and rocky patches with huge metal barns that could have held anything or nothing at all. Maxwell to Red Bluff, all the way to Redding an hour after that. By noon, I’d left the flats of the valley and I was climbing into the forest again. As I approached Mt. Shasta, my cell phone rang, breaking me out of the meditative road trance. The shop.
“What’s up?” Big Mike asked. Mikey never came off as bubbly, but at least he didn’t sound depressed.
“On my way back. Should get in late tonight.”
“You get your stuff?”
“Nah, but I know who has it. I’m still thinking about what comes next.”
“Bummer. Or good. Delia wants to talk to you.” He handed the phone over. He’d been a decoy. It was a trap.
“I tried to call you last night, asshole.” She didn’t sound irritated. Just tired and disappointed.
“I know. I sorta had a shitty day.” I told her the entire story, pausing every now and then when she let out a sulfurous string of curses. While I was talking, I heard the door to the back of the shop open and close, followed by the familiar creak of the chair at my desk. I could almost picture her sitting there with her boots up.
“Motherfuckers,” she neatly summarized when I was done.
“That was pretty much my conclusion, too.”
“I told you I should have come with you.” Petulant.
“You sure did. And now you can rub it in for the rest of eternity, add it to your list.”
“So now we’re on the lookout for cops and imported criminal scumbags?” Incredulous.
I thought about it for a minute. “No more than we usually are, I guess. Not yet. Actually, probably. So yes. If Bling called the police about the whole beating robbing thing, I would have been arrested in San Francisco or Monterey, and I bet this Dong-ju guy thinks he’s chased me off. But … he knows I have his location, some shit on him, that kind of thing. He isn’t playing ball my way, but I’ll bet he’s playing something. Look at it this way. He’s entered the tattoo world somehow, with that idiot shop and Bling on a leash. We aren’t old-school villains like Wally and the carnival burn squad, but he has to know that this isn’t like fucking with the neighborhood Kinkos, either. He’s in the game, and I guess we have stuff he wants. But until we know more, let’s be kinda quiet. The last thing we want is to give Nigel any reason to start packing a gun again.”
“I guess. Where you want me to leave your key?” Annoyed.
“Keep it for now. It’s a spare.”
She gave me a detailed report on the cats and how she’d changed their box, which had been shamefully overdue for it, and was just launching into what was sure to be a long, graphic account of why her butthole was tender when I cut her off, claiming I had an incoming call.
“Lies.” She hung up.
I caught up with the rain again around sundown in Northern California. The gas tank was three quarters empty and the jerky was gone, so I took the Shasta exit and spent a few minutes roaming around the strange little town looking for a station that was open. The vibe was creepy, in a mountain witch kind of way. Most of the storefronts were dark, even though it was early evening. The only places open were flagrantly hippie, UFO-fearing teahouses, militant lesbian cafes advertising granola bagels and vegan three-bean soup, and a truly scary antiques place with teddy bears all over everything and a pale old woman in a faded dress, staring out the showroom window like a ghost. No bar neon anywhere. A hot dog stand would have been burned to the ground in that place.
I finally found an open gas station after a long hunt and pulled up to a pump. I was paying at the counter when I glanced up at the security monitors while I waited for change. There were three grainy black and white screens, one on the pumps, the second on the register, and the third monitoring the lot behind the store where they kept the propane tanks. There was a black Lincoln Town Car idling out back. I squinted. It looked familiar.
“That your car?” I asked the clerk. He looked up at the monitor and laughed.
&nbs
p; “I work at a gas station, dude,” he replied. He was a zitty kid with shaggy brown hair, maybe sixteen and in serious need of his first shave. “As in I drive a skateboard. Probably just some dude taking a nap or beatin’ off.”
“Huh.” I looked again. “He been there long?”
The kid glanced up again and then shook his head. “Just pulled up. Happens all the time. Not really worried about a guy in a brand-new Lincoln like that stealing propane. Saw a dude in a Jeep get a blowjob out there last week. One time, I swear I saw this lady change her diaper out there, and I mean her diaper, dude. She was, like, way old. Left it right on the ground, too.”
“Bummer,” I said. The kid smiled.
“Good one.”
I took an extra twenty out of my wallet and passed it to him, then jotted my cell phone number out on the back of a Keno card and slid it across the counter.
“Do me a favor,” I said, nodding up at the monitors. “If that car leaves in the next few minutes, try to see who’s driving it, will you? Then call me.”
The kid looked skeptical, but he didn’t put the twenty down. “I don’t really do that kind of thing, man. I just, like, work here.”
“Right,” I said, smiling easily. “It’s just that …” I leaned in a little. “I think that I’m being followed. Some crazy bitch I can’t shake. Wants me to meet her family, do my laundry, whole fuckin’ nine yards. We only went out once. I didn’t even kiss her.”
He glanced up at the monitor again. “She hot?”
“Not really. Sort of hairy, you know? Questionable skin, smells a little like scalp. Local hippie. I’m just down here for a few days to hit the slopes. Met her yesterday and she followed me around the whole time. Damned woman is going to ruin my vacation. I even feel like a dick just talking about it.”
“Got it,” he said. The twenty and the Keno slip disappeared. He smiled hugely and I had to smile back.
I hit the road again with one eye on the rearview. The Lincoln didn’t pull out behind me, but ten minutes later I spotted headlights less than a quarter mile back. Traffic on the road was thinning out. If the Lincoln was following me, it would be harder to do it without being noticed from there on out.
My cell phone rang and I hit receive.
“Looks like you’re clear, dude,” the clerk from the gas station said. “I went right out there and looked in the car after you split. I mean, I could use a crazy chick, hairy or not.”
“It wasn’t her?”
“Nah. Some big dude. Had a weird fucked-up eye. Probably just passing through, like I said. Rude as fuck, though.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, so I’m working tomorrow night. You see this girl again, maybe scrape her off on me, know what I’m saying? Name’s Ron, but the ladies call me Ronnie.”
“If I see her.” I hung up.
I had the cruise control set to seventy, but now I clicked it off and slowly accelerated up to ninety. The BMW handled well on the rain slick road, but even so I was nervous and getting more so. The Lincoln kept pace with me and I swore like a sailor. I hit one hundred, my knuckles turning white. The trailing car kept up with me.
I knew from the drive down that we were about to hit a long stretch of nothing. It stood to reason that the driver of the Lincoln suspected from my speed and Ronnie’s stellar reconnaissance that his cover was blown, though he made no move to overtake me yet. He was either waiting for me to lose control and wreck, or he was unwilling to drive any faster.
A lone truck stop came into view and I braked hard and took the exit. The Lincoln was less than a hundred yards behind me when I pulled into the brightly lit parking lot and cut the engine, directly in front of the place. The Lincoln cut its lights and idled in the darkness at the edge of the lot next to a bank of semis.
I got out and rushed into the truck stop, then made a beeline for the restrooms, sure I was being watched through the truck stop’s wraparound windows. Maybe he’d think that I was desperate to take a leak or had a sudden case of diarrhea and that his cover was still intact.
I washed my hands and looked in the mirror. Same old face, but pale, and the vein in my right temple was really pulsing. It was strange, but at that instant I realized I should start moisturizing in the near future. The restroom was empty. I thought better of being alone in there and went out quickly, hand cupping the ball bearing in my jacket pocket.
I glanced through the windows as I walked casually into the dining section. The Lincoln was still out there, unmoved, exhaust gently seeping from the tail pipe, a moist silhouette with a glittering edge. I took a seat in a booth where I could keep an eye on both the parking lot and the front door.
The truck stop wasn’t busy. A family of four were eating burgers a few booths down. In the booth next to me, four big truck drivers in flannel shirts and mesh-backed hats were hunkered over their table, carving away at thin gray steaks and scooping up powder and milk mashed potatoes and fluorescent green peas, grumbling quietly about gas prices and deer hunting. A scrawny, incredibly dirty kid in his late teens wearing sunglasses and neck to foot denim was drinking coffee at the counter and chatting up the waitress, who detached from the counter and drifted in my direction. A few other people were scattered through the place, reading the local tabloid or staring out at the rain.
“Hey hon,” the waitress said. She plopped a sticky plastic menu down on the table in front of me. She was a stoned, chunky dishwater blonde in her early twenties, with a spray of acne in a bong-hole circle around her mouth. She might have been pregnant in the way she leaned back to take a little drag off her belly. “Coffee?”
“Sure,” I said. I turned over the cup on my paper place setting.
“Rainy, huh?” She had a faint southern accent. I’ve never understood how so many Okies found their way into Northern California roadsides, but they were everywhere on that lonesome stretch of I-5.
She sloshed some watery coffee into my cup and wandered off, pausing to refill the cups at the trucker’s table as she passed, holding her lower back with one hand as she smiled and gave up a little banter. I picked up the menu and looked it over. It wasn’t promising. When she drifted back past I went with ham, three eggs over easy, and hash browns.
The food came on a greasy white platter ten minutes later, and with it inspiration. I dumped Tabasco on the eggs and wolfed them down in three bites. The hash browns were a basic grease and potato matrix, so I shoveled them up as well. The ham had a faintly green and blue prismatic sheen on one end so I left it alone. The Lincoln never moved.
The truck drivers got their thermoses filled before they hit the road. I sampled my coffee and shuddered.
“Hey, dudes,” I called out. “Those your trucks out there?”
They looked up from doctoring their thermoses with nondairy creamer and sugar packets. Their heavy faces were gray with exhaustion. I gave them a solid frown.
“Not that it’s any of my business, but you see that black Lincoln parked out there next to your rigs?” I tossed my head, eyes still forward.
As a group they peered out into the rainy parking lot. One of them adjusted his hat, pulling it lower over his oily hair.
“I’d keep an eye on that one,” I continued. “Guy was just monkeying around testing cab doors out there. Tracksuit, it looked like. Fat dude. Might be waiting for someone to head out there alone. ’Course, maybe you guys know him.” I shrugged and took another sip of coffee.
They paid and pulled their coats on, grumbling to each other and glaring suspiciously out into the rain. I could sense their group vibe going from stale to shitty.
“You sure?” one of them asked, squinting at me.
“What I saw,” I replied.
They walked out in a loose formation. I watched as they conferred in the door alcove for a full minute and then they headed straight for the Lincoln, marching slowly and with purpose. When they got to the car one of them rapped on the driver’s window.
I tossed a twenty on the table and slid out of th
e booth, keeping low. The dirty kid and the waitress watched me with blank expressions.
“Keep the change,” I said. I went into the little concession area that wrapped around the side of the place, where they sold everything from maps to cowboy hats, fossils to snake bite kits. I waved at the cash register girl and went out through the side door.
Immediately I could hear raised voices over the rain. I sprinted out past the gas pumps away from them and circled back in the darkness behind the semis, stopping just behind the last one. I knelt in the cold gravel and mud and peeked under it.
The four truck drivers had surrounded the driver of the Lincoln. I could only see their legs; four sets of work boots and faded jeans, and in the middle the long, stout tree trunks of a man wearing giant Reeboks and track pants. But I recognized the flat voice.
“I didn’t touch anything. Fuck off,” said the big guy from Dong-ju Trust. I wondered how long it would take him to figure out that I had handed his own trick back to him, a variation on the one he had used to get me into the cop car. Too cutesy by half, I thought.
“You mind staying here while we look through our cabs?” one driver asked.
“We aren’t looking for any trouble, fella,” another guy said, calmly but forcefully. “No need to call in the law. Let’s just stay put while we check everything out.”
“Don’t!” someone shouted.
There was a blur of motion. One of the truck drivers went down hard, and then another. The blows that echoed through the parking lot sounded like someone smacking the side of a cow with a baseball bat. A third truck driver went down. It looked like the last one had a little more scrap in him, getting in a few good gut kicks before Dong-ju’s man locked up with him. There were three sharp smacking sounds of forehead to face and the last trucker dropped.