by Jeff Strand
Goodbye heat, and sun-baked rocks. Goodbye Mexican culture in modern America: cheap clothing and craft shops, good food, taco shacks and iced frutas, the romantic-sounding babble of Spanish. Goodbye honest friends and smiles. Goodbye home and goodbye dad, maybe for a long, long time.
″You′re going to love Boise. Grandma and grandpa can′t wait to see you again.″
I wonder what school will be like.
″And I′m proud of you, Alex.″
The bruising under her right eye threatened to undermine her smile, but the warmth and honesty there, momentarily, outshined the dull copper ring in the sky. And in that midmorning instant, he saw his mother as beautiful and radiant again. Alex felt good for a moment, and felt that things would be okay in the future, and not a disparaging jumble of confusion, anger and sorrow. Together, the three of them would make it work. His father wouldn′t follow them, and it′d be okay after all.
Then Alex felt the pureness of his newfound optimism suddenly fall away, like the sun slipping behind a cloud again. The dullness of the morning sun felt like a spreading bruise on the sky and Alex was reminded of fear, anxiety, and uneasiness. Especially of the unknown. He watched the silhouettes of the passengers move behind their darkened windows, people with different sizes, shapes. Different motives. All hidden; all unknown.
Alex stepped awkwardly up on the first step, and adjusted his weight, using his metal walking braces. Lexi put a cautious hand on the back of his neck.
″I...I got it. I got it, mom.″
He took the remaining steps cautiously and began to work his way down the aisle towards the back, to an open seat on the right side of the bus. After a moment, Lexi kissed her daughter′s pink skin.
″Idaho here we come.″ The words felt like a hushed prayer, and she followed her son to the rear of the bus.
The unsettling, old man with the weather-beaten hat got on the OverTrail bus in Phoenix.
Alex suddenly shivered uncontrollably, and unexplainably.
Slowly, the man made his way down the aisle, looking left and right at the seats as he progressed, flashing his teeth. Despite the early March heat of Phoenix, the man wore a long-sleeved shirt with a leather vest. His hat was something that Alex thought Indiana Jones might wear, or perhaps an ancient explorer on an African expedition in the 1800s. The battered thing barely escaped the ceiling of the OverTrail bus.
″Is this seat taken, ma′am?″ he asked Lexi, indicating the one next to Alex. The man′s body was a muscular rope of a torso on spindly legs. His head seemed smallish on his neck, a peering pebble on a muscular stalk, but his smile was wide.
″No,″ Lexi replied. ″But can Alex remain in the window seat?″
″Of course,″ the man said. ″Personally, I like the aisle seat myself. More leg room, and easier to make it to the restroom back there if need be,″ he said, his smile faltering when he noticed the yellow, green, and purple on her face.
He nodded perceptibly, and proceeded to fold his thin body into the aisle seat. The man turned to Alex and smiled into the dull sunshine like a lizard, his teeth square boulders, yellowing in the desert sun.
″I′m Jimbo.″
After a moment, he realized the man was awaiting a response.
″H-hi. I′m Alex,″ he said.
″Nice to meet you, Alex. I know this is a long trip and I′ve miles and miles still. I′m going to try to get a little shuteye."
But before Alex turned away, he thought he saw a momentarily flicker of worry and discomfort break the shell of Jimbo′s façade, a crack in what was behind his unnatural smile. The old man′s eyes quickly scanned the horizon and sized up each passenger on the bus. Alex tried to follow his gaze, seeing nothing out of the ordinary.
The bus began to roll, eventually moving towards Flagstaff, then moving onto Las Vegas. Then, there would be a bus change before moving up through Nevada, towards Reno and onto Boise, Idaho. The journey from El Paso already seemed so long to Alex though. He watched the passing palm trees of Phoenix and dirty square city blocks pass in the window. Outside, the monotony of the road continued, the shops and stores of the inner city fading into the industrial sections of town before finally giving way to the harsh and empty environs of the desert. After several miles, they began to climb from the valley floor into the canyons and mesas of northern Arizona.
Inside, passengers seated before Alex shifted, laughed, bobbed their heads, whispered, spoke in dull chatter, and moved as monochromatic shades in the gloom of the approaching evening. And somewhere on those ancient mesas where indigenous Native American tribes like the Yavapai, Apache, Hopi and Havasupai sometimes crossed paths, in that foreign land before there were interstate exits to Prescott, to Camp Verde, or Sedona, Alex felt his eyes grow heavy with the dull roar of tires against blacktop, and acknowledged the presence of sleep almost like a vision. His head nodded forward and came to rest against the glass.
Uh... folks, this is your driver. It appears that we have a pretty strong spring storm picking up and dropping in from Northern California via the Gulf of Alaska. I believe we′ll make it to Flagstaff on time and even a few stops to the west, but we may... we may need to stop and ride out the storm.
The window was cool against the right side of his head, the thrum of the road felt like a familiar lullaby that he knew in his skull, in all his bones. And Alex heard his baby sister Savannah wake from a sleepy reverie and his mother′s own comforting sounds to reassure her that everything was going to be alright.
Right now, there′s...uh, there′s a lot of uncertainty about the path of the storm and exactly how much snow to expect. But rest assured...OverTrailwe′ll take good care of you.
When the bus jostled over a pothole, Alex snapped awake. The passenger overhead light was on next to him and Jimbo sat in quiet rumination.
″You′re awake,″ Jimbo said, his voice gravelly.
Alex saw only darkness outside the windows. His mother was another still shadow against the darkness of the passing landscape, shades of silver, and grey.
″Y-yeah,″ he said, rubbing his eyes. ″What time is it?″
″Dunno.″ The bus was eerily quiet; even the throb of the bus tires against the ground seemed distant.
″But I scored us a ginger ale and a root beer,″ Jimbo said. He pulled two cans and two plastic cups out of a pack on the floor.
Alex took the proffered plastic cup of root beer and took a sip. A&Whis favorite.
″Where are we?″ Alex asked.
″I′m afraid we′re ghost riders on the storm,″ Jimbo said, his mouth full of too many teeth. And then more to himself: ″The thunder and snow comes first, then the shrieks, the violence...″
Alex took another long pull on the sugary drink. It reminded him of sitting around the faux-fireplace at Christmastime with his family. El Pasoans almost never needed to use an actual fireplace. But Alex and his family would drink root beer together instead of eggnog during the holidays.
Jimbo reached into the back pocket of his dirty khakis, and pulled out a piece of paper.
″Here. Have you ever seen this before?″ Jimbo handed over the dog-eared photograph. He drained the plastic cup of ginger ale and then pulled out a silver flask from an inside pocket of his vest, and unscrewed the top.
Alex took the photograph and examined it. There was a black and white photo of a rabbit standing on his hind legs. Above his head, large black horns jutted in a series of abrupt, sharp protrusions. Alex drained the last of his root beer and shook his head.
″I thought you′d like the root beer,″ Jimbo said. He took a long pull from his flask, rescrewed the cap and placed it back inside his vest pocket.
″What is this, J-Jimbo?″ Alex gestured to the rabbit in the photo.
″This,″ he said pointing at the old postcard. ″This, my young friend, is what they call a jackalope.″
Alex looked confused, and tipped the empty cup back again to chase any stray droplets of root beer.
″A jackalop
e,″ Jimbo continued. ″A jackalope is a so-called mythical creature often thought up by lonely cowboys and those crossing the great expanses of the western territories. It is a rabbit with antelope horns, or a sort of hybrid creature rarely encountered in people′s everyday life.″
In front of the bus, far across the darkened horizon, Alex caught a brief white flash in the sky. The precursor of an oncoming storm. Alex handed the postcard back.
″Is it r-r-real?″ he asked.
Jimbo laughed quietly for a period of time and then looked left and right before pulling out his flask again. After another nip, he leaned in close to Alex, his teeth predatory in the occasional flashes of lightning. Alex suddenly felt weird and stared at the man′s teeth. They seemed to morph.
″Real?″ he asked. ″Most people think the jackalope is a hoax, something made to sell souvenirs in far off places. Places like rural Wyoming, or Nebraska. Sometimes Colorado. But...″
Jimbo′s breath was thick with whiskey, and something else... pride. Reverence, perhaps.
″But I know better. They exist.″
Lightning flashed again, closer.
″I found a massive tribe here in Arizona, up in the Superstition Mountains. These... these things...they′re evil, and much worse than people think, much, much worse than anyone knows,″ he said. Savannah cried uneasily and his mother slept dead-to-the-world.
″They are unbelievably evil, evil creatures. I could tell you stories.″
The lightning flashed again, and suddenly Jimbo′s overhead light extinguished, and in the lightning-strobe Alex saw the man′s fervent expression, his teeth open in mid-sentence, and also his mother slack-jawed in sleep with her back against the wall of the adjacent seat, little Savannah waving her arms quietly in the darkness of the bus.
″I′m... I′m n-not feeling so... not normal,″ Alex said to the man, dropping the plastic cup on the floor.
″I have the carcass of their leader in the undercarriage, hidden among the baggages. They′ll want it back, I′m sure.″
Alex′s head swam with the shadows of the night, the flashes of reality, and the pounding of his blood in his temples.
″But they can′t have it. Did you know they are said to breed only in thunderstorms?″
A barrage of lightning lit up the mountains in the distance and the following thunder was a low throb, the pulse of the landscape.
″...and even angry, even mightily pissed, they are said to ignore the innocent, and the sleeping...″
Alex fell asleep for a second time and thought about a rare snowfall preceded by an earth-shattering thunderstorm. In a dream, he was back in his house in El Paso and his father stalked outside, searching the yard for him and his mother. Inside, chasing infantile dreams, Savannah slept oblivious to the threat of violence. The sky shuddered and was rent into shades of neon purple and white, oblivion-black, while his father stood framed against the brilliance of the nature′s fury, his own anger boiling within the coiled sinews of his muscles and clenched fists. Nearby, from his own sheltered rabbit hole, Alex heard his mother′s soft weeping, and tears falling first like an approaching rain, and then as a furious downpour. And Alex, wanting to be so strong, trying to be the new man of the house, hunkered down and took shelter from the storm instead, curling up into a fetal position.
The wheels spun and the dreams roiled about Alex like a kaleidoscope night,
uh...folks, this is your driver again. the snow is really...
and Alex felt himself swimming, floating through various sections of warmth, and nocturnal pools of cold,
it′s getting pretty ugly out there now...and I hear they′ll be closing...
of light and darkness,
down uh... the interstate soon... and between real and unreal.
Tap-tap-tap.
Ten-year-old Alex woke up briefly and noticed the seat next to him was empty and the bus rocked in the wind. Way up front, snowflakes spun by like stars in an endless darkness. The OverTrail bus slipped, slid, and barreled headfirst into the storm. Lightning still whispered around them, almost simultaneously with the strongest thunderclaps he′d ever heard. Alex felt that great slabs of some unseen mountain were being cleaved into sliding avalanches of rubble. It was getting closer.
″Hey, hon.″ His mother said. ″Thundersnow. Beautiful, isn′t it?″
Tap. Tap. A door was unlatched.
Another intense blast of light and he saw that she was smiling, not normally, but rather with a mouth full of dull, yellowing stones that seemed too big for her head.
Behind him, the restroom door tapped loosely against its frame. Alex peered back at the door and thought he saw the dull green sheen of eyes staring back at him, and then inexhaustible sleep took him again.
Grumbles from the great below and piercing Arctic coldness. Alex sat up again and the first thing he noticed was that the bus wasn′t moving. It didn′t even seem to be idling.
″M-mom?″ he said.
But she wasn′t there. The bus was empty and even the parking lot appeared barren. With his eyes, he traced the track of people through the snow to the front door of a 24-hour truck stop. There wasn′t a sign of anyone inside the lit interior covered by opaque windows.
Why would everyone leave him out here alone?
Alex looked for his walking braces, but they weren′t propped next to him against the side of the bus. They also weren′t on his mother′s side of the bus.
He scooted over to the aisle seat, and stood up holding on to the back of the next seat.
One step at a time, he told himself. You′re strong. You can do this.
But wisps of his dreams came back and he remembered cowering in a cold, muddy hole, unable and unwilling to do anything but wish away the storm, and to wait out its fury.
That′s not me.
Alex stole several looks at the silent and closed restroom door at the back of the bus and tried to will himself to take a step further. He thought he heard a faint noise nearby, a sort of scratching, maybe below in the baggage area. He cocked his head and listened. The lightning came less frequently now, but still fierce like a war-cry. The heavily-lit sign advertising to the interstate drivers suddenly went dark.
A split second later, all lights went out.
Panic. Screams muffled by the swirling snowfall. Alex collapsed against the window, his breath making fog against it, and he frantically scanned the darkness for something, for someone. Shadows spilt from the front of the store, heading for the bus, followed by the dull glow of green. Eyes. Dozens. Hundreds. Little bouncing green emeralds; smoldering coals, herding them. Hunting.
More blinding light scratched the sky, and Alex saw his mother running towards the bus. And the green poured forth from within the building, from around the sides, from the surrounding landscape, a dark mass in the lightning, with odd-shaped, sharpened antlers held aloft like battle flags.
The scratching beneath the floor, in the belly of the bus, intensified. Several people stumbled up into the bus. The bus driver, whimpering and wiping blood from his forehead, hysterically sat in his seat, buckled the belt, and screamed for those who were going to get on to hurry the bejesus up!
″Alex?″ He heard his mother yell hysterically. Savannah was screaming.
Dang dang dang dang dang, the bus driver breathed. More shadows threw themselves onto the bus, the doors closed and then the bus rocketed forward.
Alex, then, felt himself falling back into the abyss of unnatural sleep.
Once Alex closed his eyelids, he knew that there was still something important waiting for him there, perhaps, a forgotten memory. But while he fell into a deeper nocturnal hole, he imagined the click of millions of small claws, and darting green eyes of dirty little beasts following him deeper, downward into himself. He could hear the gnashing of great yellow teeth, and feel carnivorous breath on his neck, as great bony protrusions scraped against the sides and ceilings of a small tunnel, causing sparks and shrieks in the dark.
&nbs
p; It was freezing cold here. Alex opened his eyes and saw the silhouettes of his father and mother through the gauzy curtain of their bedroom in their home in El Paso. His father, Mark, was inside, arguing, and his mother leaned against the closet, tapping her wedding ring against a half-full Pellegrino bottle. Inside, his father sounded upset and his mother was barking at him aggressively. Alex stood on his tiptoes outside, trying to hear. In the twilight, it began to rain lightly and Alex shivered in the rain.
His mother was shouting, infuriated, full of excuses and blame.
Losing his balance momentarily, Alex slumped forward against the house and a walking brace slapped against the glass. There was an awkward silence to the previous thunder of harsh words. Steadying himself, Alex looked up into the window and saw his father′s figure rise.
″Someone′s out there. What if Alex is lis″
″Don′t change the subject, Mark!″
Mark approached the window, and Alex saw his mother move to intercept him. There was a sickening crunch and the sound of breaking glass as he watched her arm arch around with the glass bottle and connect with the side of his father′s face. With fear thick on his tongue, Alex made his best to head out into the yard. The rain made the metal braces slick and Alex felt the sky opening up, a loosening of emotions, and the desert landscape welcomed the rain, the sudden downpour, with a hungriness. He felt sick, and afraid of the violence.
In a depression under a honey mesquite tree, Alex huddled down on the embankment and curled up under the sparse branches, his right hand underneath his head. Shivering, in a fetal position underneath the tree, he imagined being somewhere else. Somewhere far away, up north like Alaska or something. He remembered the last time his grandparents on his mother′s side had visited — the Thanksgiving the year before. His grandfather gave him a gift, a powerful blue laser pointer.