Worse Than Myself

by Adam Golaski

  “So go out to my car—it’s silver, it’s the last one in the driveway. Go out to my car and wait for me. I’m going to get Sarah.”

  She said, “Sarah? Fuck Sarah. What do you need Sarah for?” I sensed her control was limited, or running low, and so she obeyed me, started toward the driveway. Better to do as I said, then to do what the man from the peak asked her to do. I went through the near-empty rooms, finally went into the backyard, where I knew everyone must be.

  I tried not to understand too much of what I saw. Since there was no moonlight, no stars, I couldn’t make out the exact details anyhow. But the yard was lined with bodies. Many stripped of their clothes, all flat on their back. The bodies, piled like sandbags, formed a wall along the edge of the woods. They were neatly stacked but for a few strays—I saw Michael’s body, not five feet from where I stood.

  And then I saw Sarah, on her feet, wandering in a daze. I became aware that “Heart and Soul” had stopped. I could hear Sarah’s feet brush through the grass.

  I couldn’t speak—had no impulse to. I ran to Sarah, put my arm around her and guided her toward the side of the house, away from the patio door which was opening, away from Richard, who staggered out into the yard, singing, “Heart and Soul.” He fell in love, he sang, “madly.”

  Prudence was not in the driveway, and I thought fine, if he has her, that’ll buy me and Sarah some time, and I’m going to live, and Sarah, too. I pushed Sarah along the driveway, dragged her. I opened the car and put Sarah into the passenger seat, then started the car and backed up to turn around. In the headlights, the car still facing the wrong way, toward the house—I saw Prudence, on her back. Her body must have been just out if sight, just under the front bumper. She jerked, once. I couldn’t help watching her breasts: a spray of freckles that vanished into her cleavage.

  The mountain road was so rutted, I couldn’t go fast, not without taking the chance of breaking an axle.

  We were close. Very close to the bottom of the mountain when I heard the bang from the inside of the trunk. I jumped on the accelerator and I could feel a heavy weight shift. Sarah stared calmly ahead, as if we were on a day-trip. There was another bang, and the trunk burst open. I couldn’t see anything out the rear-view mirror—just the silver trunk lid. I drove, swerving around boulders, bouncing in and out of pot holes, cursing each time the front end of the car ground into the dirt, until, incredibly, the man from the peak stared at me through the windshield. He clung to the hood on all fours, his arms and legs wide apart, face inches from the glass. He wasn’t hiding himself: his teeth were bared and he was filthy with blood, dribbling blood onto the glass, foaming blood from his nostrils.

  I felt, suddenly, quite serene. I brought the car to an easy stop. Sarah and I stepped out.

  The man from the peak hid himself again. He hopped off the hood with a single, graceful flex of his legs. I heard stones crunch under his shoes as he walked up to Sarah. He looked at me while he put a hand on her right shoulder. And she relaxed completely—I wasn’t sure what kept her from collapsing. He grabbed her hair and yanked, forcing her head to the side. She winked at me as if she were about to get a treat she’d been waiting for all day.

  Did I make a move to stop him? No. His eyes locked onto mine. And any desire for survival I’d had, any wish for Sarah to live, just slipped away—was leeched from my thoughts. I reached into my breast pocket, slowly removed my cigarette pack, took a cigarette, tamped it against the box, lit it and smoked. I stood, smoked, watched as he tore a chunk of flesh from Sarah’s throat with those stupid buck teeth of his and opened his mouth to the jet of blood that burst from her artery. I watched him and he watched me and was he grinning while he drank? Oh, surely he was and I smiled back at him, smiled and smoked my cigarette, smoked so hard the filter flared up before I finally dropped my cigarette and stamped it dead.

  I looked up after watching my own foot twist a cigarette butt out on the dirt road and they were gone. He and Sarah were gone. I stared up at the top of the mountain. Stood for at least an hour. Finally, I was released. Trembling, I slid into the driver’s seat and drove down off the mountain into Rattlesnake Valley, as blue light crept across the sky.

  I listened to the radio for three days. I had the dial somewhere between stations. Sometimes one came in stronger, sometimes the other. I heard news, I heard a minister Bible-teaching, organ music, chants—when both stations grew weak I heard a murkier broadcast: two voices, disharmonious music, swamp-static. I’d ordered all my meals by delivery for the last few days. Greasy wax paper curled in on itself; half-eaten sandwiches, flat soda, Styrofoam. I spent the day in a leather arm chair. I slept there—I woke often to be sure that all my windows were fastened, that the bolts on the door had been shot—that I hadn’t been careless after a delivery boy had come by, though, each time I closed the door on a delivery, I locked up, leaned against the door and double-checked the locks. I worried the skin around my fingers and smoked—I’d found a stale pack in my bedroom; not my brand, someone else’s cigarettes, some woman I’d brought here had left her cigarettes. I tried to think of ways that I could have stopped what happened from happening, but there was nothing I could’ve done. I could’ve done little things differently—not waited so long to take Sarah away (not sent Prudence on her own). Yet, even these small acts seemed out of the realm of possibility to me—that I couldn’t have behaved any way other than the way I behaved. My own personality, my own desires, took on monstrous shapes in my mind.

  On the third day I remembered the book that I gave to Sarah—that slim collection of short stories. An image of that book popped into my head, completely unbidden. And once that image was there, I couldn’t shake it—try as I might. As if the image of that book were being broadcast directly into my head. The book must still have been at Richard’s house. I could picture it in each room: on the bar next to a clear, empty bottle; in the guest room on the couch; etc. The book, then the empty room all around it. My thoughts returned incessantly to the book. The book as object. The book as icon. The book as literature—how did those stories tie in with the events of that night? At times, just as sleep would come over me, the stories in that book would seem clearly prophetic—how could I, having read the book, not have known what was going to happen at Richard’s party?

  I left my apartment to retrieve the book. A small part of my brain screamed at me not to, pointed out that going anywhere near Richard’s house was lunacy. I drove up the mountain, tapped the steering wheel, chewed on the end of an unlit cigarette and drove under the no trespassing sign to Richard’s. I would get the book and leave. I would have the book. The sun was high and bright, there was nothing at all to going into Richard’s house and getting the book and then leaving with it, set on the passenger seat or, perhaps, on my lap. Once I had the book, I would be able to settle back into my rational life.

  Prudence’s body wasn’t in the driveway. I remembered the wall of corpses the man from the peak had made.

  I was glad there was still a mess from the party—bottles, ash trays full of butts, objects displaced, leftover dip, etc. If the man from the peak had taken the time to clean the house—that might have made me crazy—if the house had looked as it did on the occasions I’d come to visit Sarah when Richard was away, I’d’ve been greatly disturbed. There had been a party. The man from the peak had come.

  The moment I touched the book I knew that I hadn’t come for it after all, and that I hadn’t come of my own will.

  The peak was a black spike surrounded by sun. I climbed toward the peak. I sweated heavily in my dark clothes—if someone had stood at Richard’s front door, would they have been able to see me at all? Just shy of the boulders that crowned the mountain, I found the crevasse I knew was home to the man from the peak. “I live in the peak,” he’d said.

  I sat down at the edge of the crevasse. A jagged, open crescent in the side of the mountain, as if a sliver of the moon had burned its impression onto the side of the mountain. When I leaned over, I f
elt a gust of wet air, like breath; it reeked of ammonia and dirt. I’d smoke until my cigarettes were gone and by then there wouldn’t be much light left. I didn’t want to be here but I found that it was impossible to leave.

  THE DEAD GATHER ON THE BRIDGE TO SEATTLE

  The raccoon wasn’t eating garbage—the can hadn’t been knocked over—it was eating another raccoon. From across the yard, Roger could see that the raccoon’s little mouth glimmered with gore. Roger unlocked the trunk of his car, unzipped a narrow case and removed a shotgun. He looked for the raccoon with his flashlight—it was no longer standing above its cannibalized mate. He jumped when the light fell on the raccoon—large as a dog and shambling toward him. Roger called out, once, a single profanity eaten up by the surrounding woods. The raccoon wasn’t startled, didn’t draw back or run as any raccoon would when confronted by a man. Roger cursed again and shot the raccoon. It burst open, as if rotten.

  The phone in Roger’s mobile home rang.

  Roger dashed up the back step into the kitchen where he’d left the portable. He glanced at the wall clock—a little past eleven—then at the caller I.D.—his sister Vivienne. “Viv,” he said. “Oh, hello, Martin,” he said. “Is everything all right?” he asked. He said, “Fine. Martin, what’s this about?” Roger set the shotgun down on the kitchen table. He picked up a pizza crust left from his dinner. He took a bite. “She’s sick?” He tossed the crust down. “How long have you been at the hospital?” The light above the table dimmed. “I don’t know what I can do.” Roger pushed the kitchen door shut. “It’s fifteen hours,” he said. “She asked?” Roger looked again at the wall clock. “I’ll leave in a few hours.” “No? OK. I’ll be on the road in an hour. Still, I won’t be there until tomorrow evening.” “Five o’clock. I’ll call from the road.” “Yes,” Roger said, “I’ll call.”

  Roger stared at the shotgun on the table; he let his eyes un-focus over the dull gleam it gave. He thought about the raccoon, and of how sick it must have been, and of how it sickened him. He tried to recall what had woken him. The phone wasn’t what’d woken him, neither the raccoon—he was surely accustomed to the noise animals made during the night. The prospect of the drive did not appeal to him, but for Vivienne to ask him to make the trip, all the way from Decker, from Montana to Washington, to Seattle, was extraordinary.

  With the cell phone he’d been given by his employer, he called Peter and asked him to cover his route. Peter said he was feeling ill and didn’t think he could do it; Roger pressed and Peter agreed. Roger said, “I’ll leave the keys to the truck and the freezers on the driver’s seat.” Roger went out, carrying his shotgun and a ring of keys. He returned the shotgun to the case in the trunk of his car. He checked the freezers—three freestanding units. He unlocked the generator shed and topped off the fuel. He added gas to the truck’s tank, too, and placed the keys on the driver’s seat. After he’d shut the door to the cab, he reopened the door and took the key for the padlocked generator shed off the ring. The time was just before midnight. He set his alarm clock for one AM, and lay down.

  Roger slept, but hardly.

  He called his boss: “I won’t be able to make the deliveries this morning,” he said.

  His boss said, “You can’t call in sick.”

  “Peter’s covering the route.”

  “Pete’s only been out with you once or twice. You can’t have the morning off.”

  “Don’t hand me that, Harry. You can help Peter if he gets lost.”

  “You can’t just call in like this.”

  “Harry, I haven’t taken a day off in the two years I’ve worked for you. I’ve covered for everyone, I’ve even covered for you. Peter will do the route. He’ll do it tomorrow too. I’ll pay him out of my check so don’t worry about payroll.”

  “Okay, okay. What’s this about, anyhow?”

  “Personal.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No, but thanks. I have to go.”

  The sky brimmed with stars. A shooting star, another. A bright, raspberry cloud of light flickered in the sky. Roger squinted at the cloud, perplexed by the sight—not Northern Lights, he didn’t think. An animal moved behind the trees that bordered Roger’s yard.

  Roger filled a thermos with coffee. He hadn’t been away since he’d first moved out to Decker. He locked the windows and behind himself the front door. The leaves of the big cottonwood rustled; a sound like a brook. Stars fell, one after another: a shower. Roger had never seen a shower so full, and would’ve stopped to watch, had he the time. The grass and the trees were black. The car turned over smoothly; the gas tank was full, the oil clean, tire pressure good. Roger kept his car neat. On the passenger seat were a handful of CDs, all gifts from Vivienne. Vivienne was the only family who kept in touch with Roger since his move. He drove off his property, onto the dirt road that began his daily delivery route. In an hour, Roger would be on the highway, headed away from his customers, away from Decker. With enough coffee, he thought, and some No Doze he’d buy at the gas station in Lodge Grass, he might not have to sleep.

  Roger’s car was all he’d kept from his former life. The car didn’t belong in Decker, and he rarely drove it, a black Saab sedan, a forty-thousand dollar car purchased when forty-thousand wasn’t a whole lot of money for Roger to spend on a car or on anything else. When he left San Francisco, he decided to keep the car because it was solid. A powerful engine, four-wheel drive, and black.

  The roof of his car reflected the stars. Roger picked up 314.

  Spread out, sixty miles north, a little south of the Yellowstone River, were the foundations of fur trading posts. Crumbled dust foundations. To the west of Custer is Junction, which was no more a town but a graveyard, left to its own except for dinosaur bones. Buffalo grazed the plains. Roger drove through the Wolf Mountains with his stereo off. What was dead in those mountains lay still; the wolves ate their kill. Long stretches of 314 were unpaved. Roger’s high beams bounced and blurred ahead of his car. Rodents scurried to the sides of the road. He drove as fast as the road permitted, steering wheel firmly gripped as the irregular road wrenched the car right and left, toward black trees and boulders. The Rosebud battlefield, the little rivers.

  Lodge Grass, greasy grass, the first full-service gas station on Roger’s route. The needle still at full, Roger topped off the gas. Two truckers stood mesmerized by the meteor shower, ball caps tilted back on their foreheads. Roger bought No Doze and poured water into a little cone. The clerk said, “There’s stars falling all over the North. The radio says it’s something special.” Roger nodded, waited for the clerk to count his change. As Roger broke open the box of No Doze, a news item caught his attention: a man presumed dead, and in that state for some hours, was revived. A good omen, Roger thought. At the gas station, Roger had a brief window of cell phone reception, so he dialed Martin.

  “I’m on the road,” Roger said. “I’m calling so you’ll have my cell number.” Roger said, “I should go,” but before he ended the call he asked, “How’s Vivienne?” Bad, was the answer. “Do the doctors know what it is?” Roger asked. Only that it’s an infection.

  From Lodge Grass: Rt. 90 all the way to Seattle. The highway was empty. Roger kept his high beams on and an eye out for deer and bighorn sheep, apt to simply be in the road. Roger watched for their eyes. He passed Garryowen, Crow Agency, and Hardin. Billings would soon emerge as a cluster of light. South of Billings, opposite Boothill Cemetery, near The Place of Skulls, was Sacrifice Cliff, where two Crow rode on the back of a single white horse, a horse blindfolded so it could be made to ride off a cliff. Two young Crow returned from a hunt to find their tribe dead by smallpox. They mourned, singing, yelling, clutching one another on the back of a blindfolded white horse. The place where the white horse went down. A blind horse, snuffing, kicking dust, led by two anguished Crow off the edge of a cliff.

  The city of Billings was electric ligh
ts and dark industrial shapes, all set in a cup of mountains and rim rocks. The traffic around Roger grew heavier. Trucks, mostly. Roger wanted a real breakfast, but knew he couldn’t spare the time. He’d stop in Billings, though, relieve himself and buy an egg and sausage sandwich from a gas station.

  All along the highway were parked cars. People had driven out of Billings to get a better look at the star shower, still in full. The sky carried an aura, a hint of color, a haze of red.

  When Roger moved to San Francisco, five years before, Vivienne came with. The realtor who sold Roger his home assumed Vivienne was Roger’s girlfriend, and was visibly relieved when Roger corrected her: “She’s my little sister.” Vivienne’s room in Roger’s house—the guest room—was small but sunny and featured floor-to-ceiling, built-in bookcases. Vivienne bought books with Roger’s money and quickly filled those shelves. Roger’s room was large and always felt empty, except on the nights when Vivienne, afraid or drunk or sad would sleep in Roger’s room, curled into the green leather chair set beside the fireplace.

  Roger exited the highway for the first gas station he saw with its lights on and topped off the Saab’s tank. He liked the needle at full. He washed the car’s windows and lights. He borrowed a key for the restroom in back, where he washed his hands and face as well as he could with the soap-grit provided. The paper towel dispenser was empty, so he dried himself with his un-tucked shirt. Inside the mart he found a sausage sandwich, which he heated in the microwave and ate while he picked up a glass jar of peanuts, several tall bottles of water, and two apple juices. The clock above the microwave read 2:17. He added elk jerky and crackers to his purchases.

  Outside, a man stood by the pumps, lit by fluorescent bulbs peppered with moths and flies. He leaned over and removed the cap from a bright red gas can—Roger heard the ping of a spring-release. A star fell, died behind the mountains; the star shower was over. Another man, wearing a John Deere cap, emerged from shadow, from behind the last pump. Something in the way he walked—the angle at which he held his head—struck Roger as off. Roger put his groceries down on the roof of his car and took a step toward the pumps. The man with the gas can, bent over, pumping gas, touched the bill of his hat, acknowledging Roger. Roger nodded, took another step toward the pumps. John Deere moved like a man short on sleep, someone just up from the thick of a dream.