by Adam Golaski
The bull was now at the side of the road. It’s flank was not mud covered but an open wound—a great, wet hole—and Roger knew that it too was dead, that the dead were not just people but animals, too—the raccoon—and this gave Roger a terrible, lonely feeling—desperate. From now on, he would only stop for gas. The bull bellowed. Roger got into his car and drove away.
In no time at all, Roger drove past Anaconda, where the dead were lost in the Washoe Theater, confused by the golden deer painted on the theater’s curtain, by the copper fixtures that dimly shone, by the rams’ heads carved into the ceiling. Those still alive in Anaconda—a dog and a brother and sister, hid from their mother, who knew where her children were, but could not remember how to open the door to the basement.
There are stretches on 90 through Montana where the mountains are far from the road—always in view, but distant. Once far enough west, the mountains move in, the road curves up and among them. Snow drifts in May. When Roger saw the opportunity to fuel up, he did. Gas pumps were rarely manned and were often old—no slot to swipe a card. This worked. If a station looked disorderly or dark, Roger fueled up and left, no worries. He would have welcomed the sight of a police cruiser in his rearview. Once, a car passed, headed east, the back piled with household belongings, and two girls huddled together in the backseat. The driver’s expression a warning: the dead were everywhere.
Forty miles outside of Missoula, Roger’s cell phone received a flicker of reception, and immediately the phone rang. Roger dropped speed, from 90 to 80, and answered, “Martin.”
It was not Martin, but Vivienne.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“About six hours, Viv. Less.”
“Oh six hours I’m sick I don’t know if I can hold on to my thoughts Roger six hours that’s a long time and Roger the thought of you your handsome eyes where is my memory?” something metal hit the floor; someone shouted, Vivienne screamed.
Roger didn’t shout into his phone, didn’t cry out his sister’s name. He dumped his phone onto the passenger seat, reception gone.
Two years before, the day after he left San Francisco, he stopped in Missoula, early in the afternoon. He stopped because he still had a day or two before he had to be in Decker, where he’d gotten a job delivering frozen food. He stopped for no other reason than to sightsee, which he did, he wandered aimlessly, amazed by how good it could be in a city that was not cosmopolitan, that was not San Francisco or New York, the two poles his life had him caught between—had once had him caught between. Spokane had been nice, had shown Roger a little city, emptier on a workday than he’d thought possible and Missoula was like that too, though less industrial, more kind. He ate a fish taco in a restaurant where people could still smoke, and he liked the way people were dressed, some for office work, surely, but many more for enjoying the place they were in and nothing else.
That Roger was romanticizing this place was evident even as he was doing so; a stop at a dingy bar cleared his head, kept the idea that maybe he’d settle in Missoula from fully forming. Afternoon light slanted into the dark bar decorated with license plates and empty bottles, some quite old, all beneath a film of dust. A few obvious alcoholics sat at the bar, a grad student who either thought the alcoholics were noble or who was a young alcoholic himself, and a skinny red head who turned out to be the bartender. She served Roger his beer, washed some glasses in a metal sink, then disappeared into a back room, the door marked with a sign that read: “hot dogs $1.” A man in a once shiny baseball jacket turned to Roger and began to talk, without an invitation to do. He told Roger that he accepted his people’s defeat, “Indians,” he said, “didn’t have weapons as good as yours and that’s how it goes, I accept that, that’s okay. But you should know, you might not have known this, but we have Custer’s leg.”
Roger, amused, asked, “What?”
“Custer’s leg. The Blackfoot. We have it in a bag.”
“The whole leg?”
“It’s dust now.”
The Blackfoot opened his mouth—presumably to smile—but without teeth, what his open mouth indicated was unclear.
“We pass it from tribe to tribe. Depending on the season.”
“You mean, Custer, like, ‘Custer’s last stand’ Custer? The general?”
“The government wants it back, so we pass it, tribe to tribe, keep it safe in a medicine bag.”
Roger drove, he pushed 100. The feel of the car changed; eventually felt right. He checked for reception—as he passed through the Hellgate, reception returned, and Roger redialed.
Roger left San Francisco shortly before Vivienne married Martin. Martin’s family thought it rude that Roger left town before the wedding, and one of Martin’s aunt’s was foolish enough to say so in Vivienne’s presence. Vivienne didn’t lose it, in the way she’d lost her mind from time to time while living with her brother, but she did explode, at first delivering a rich assemblage of Czech profanities, followed by an eerily calm explanation of Roger’s importance in her life and of his right to do just exactly what he felt he had to do, and concluded with an un-invite of Martin’s aunt, which was not reversed, as everyone on Martin’s side of the family—even Martin though he never admitted as much—assumed would happen. As Roger was never discussed by his own family, he was never discussed by Martin’s.
The phone connected to Martin’s phone, and Roger heard noise like people arguing. Roger shouted his brother-in-law’s name, shouted, “Vivienne!” A voice, high and hysterical. Roger said, “Vivienne?” But it wasn’t Vivienne. “Martin. Shut up. Stop carrying on.” A clatter, as if in the phone, the phone must have been dropped. Martin’s voice, Martin apologized. “Fine,” Roger said. “What’s going on with Vivienne?” Martin’s explanation made little sense. He said something like:
“The doctors don’t know. An epidemic. Hardly any staff here at all. Vivienne is sick, man, sometimes she seems okay and sometimes she loses her mind. And that’s what the doctors say, too, that people are losing their minds, like, not crazy, like, their minds are dying. You gotta get us out of here. We can’t get out. And Vivienne wants to go.”
A scream, Vivienne’s, for sure. An animal loped onto the highway. At 100 miles per hour, Roger could not stop for it, dropped his cell phone, gripped the steering wheel so as to keep the car steady, and drove into the animal. Its pliant body burst over the hood of the car, a dog, perhaps, or even a wolf. The car skidded a little, but Roger kept control. The wipers cleared the windshield adequately. When he found the phone, the connection was gone, and no reception.
Roger slowed to navigate the winding roads of Idaho, but was in Washington in less than an hour. Out this way, Route 90 was rarely heavily trafficked, but there was simply no traffic. A couple times Roger swerved to avoid an abandoned vehicle, but he no longer worried about oncoming traffic, and straddled both lanes, preferring to stay clear of the shoulder, where many cars were either abandoned or was the site of unwholesome activity, peripheral glimpses of writhing and bloodied men and women. He crossed into Washington state. Soon, Spokane was below him. Here, he passed cars and trucks, people driving slowly to survey the damage, people heading east. He passed one car headed west, a little Rabbit that quickly receded in his rearview mirror, a red speck on faded gray highway.
Past Spokane, he stopped again for gas. He didn’t look for an attendant. He was grateful the pumps were on. He considered the very good possibility that gas stations would dry up, maybe not in the next few days, maybe not in a week, but soon enough. He thought maybe he’d find a gas can and fill it. Maybe grab some food, too, though for now what he’d bought in Billings was plenty. Roger’s freezers, back in Decker, were still humming, drawing power from the generator shed. Peter, who’d volunteered to drive Roger’s route, didn’t make it out of the driveway, crashed Roger’s truck into a tree; Peter’s head smashed open against the steering wheel.
A man, “Hey, man.”
Roger’s shotgun lay across the roof of his car.
&n
bsp; “Hey man, can you give me a lift?”
The man was not dead, he was a young guy in torn jeans and a waffle shirt, with a dusty pack and dusty boots. Roger weighed the pros and cons of a passenger.
“This pack is killing me.” The man dropped his pack between his feet, which revealed a bleeding wound on his shoulder. “I feel terrible, too. Look at this bullshit.” The man pointed to his shoulder. “There’s some fucked up shit going on.”
Roger remained cool, determined to wait until the pump clicked off, then to fill the neck. No gas can, though. Roger sighed. No time, now.
The man asked, “Where are you headed?”
“Seattle.”
“Great!”
“To see my sister.”
“Seattle’s great.”
“She’s sick. In the hospital.”
“Sorry to hear it, man. But that’s good for me. I could get this shit looked at, maybe get something for this damn headache.”
The pump clicked. Roger squeezed the pump trigger, once, twice, then locked the cap.
“No,” Roger said.
“‘No’ what?”
“I won’t give you a ride.”
“Why not, man?”
“You’re sick.”
“You’re going to a hospital!”
“You’re sick and you’re going to die.”
“Why the fuck would you say that?”
“How does it feel?”
“I feel pretty bad, that’s how I feel.”
“No. How does it feel?”
Roger lifted the shotgun from the roof of his car.
“You gonna shoot me? You’re fucked up, you know that? Stay the fuck away from me. I’ll get a ride from a human being. So just stay the—”
And Roger saw it happen. A moment of confusion, a jerky step back, a tremor that traveled the spine to the eyes.
“—fuck—”
Discharging his shotgun at the gas station would be stupid, and the man was no threat. Roger put the shotgun on the passenger seat, and brought out the tire iron.
“—away—” The man shook his head, as if to clear it.
There was plenty time for Roger to get into his car and drive away. The man saw what Roger held and stepped back, appeared to struggle with himself, took another step back. “Just let me go, man.”
With the iron raised, Roger closed the distance between himself and the man, brought the iron down, let its own weight do most of the work, splitting open the left side of the man’s head. Not rotten yet, Roger thought. The man jumped, something electric lifted him from the ground, and Roger swung again, up from his leg, and knocked the man to the dirt with a blow to the man’s shoulder. He’s still alive. Another blow, to the chest, broke ribs. The man cried out. Roger leaned over the man, beating him with the iron, beating him to death.
Roger tossed the tire iron into the passenger-side foot well, and drove away, his interest in the man gone, his need to reach his sister all the more keen.
When Roger left San Francisco, he quit a lucrative job and sold most of what he owned shortly after he learned of Martin’s competent handling of a suicide attempt by Vivienne. Martin had returned from work and found Vivienne on the floor of their bathroom. He called for help, removed what pills were still in her mouth, and kept her awake. Once Vivienne was out of the hospital, Roger fully expected Martin to break up with Vivienne, leaving her once more in Roger’s care. Instead, Martin took her on a short vacation and proposed. Roger waited for a little while after, suffered quietly and admired Vivienne’s ring when she came home, which wasn’t all that often. The night before Roger left, he and Vivienne spent one last evening together. They fell asleep together, in Roger’s room, warmed by a fire and with no fuss at all.
Roger drove the rest of Washington in a haze. Deep forests. The falls of Snoqualmie. A white barn painted with the word “Cherries.” All the energy it took to make the drive came from Roger’s body, a knot of anger and lust and confusion untied from Decker to the bridge to Seattle.
Route 90 terminates as a long bridge that crosses Lake Washington into Seattle. He would not be able to drive into the city. The sun was up, the sky, clear. Not blue, exactly. More—white. The bridge was crowded with people, a great, sluggish crowd, biting and clawing at each other and at nothing, spitting blood, smeared with blood, coated and crusted with blood. Roger thought of his sister. Maybe. He needed to get across the bridge. He filled his pockets with shells. He would clear a stretch of the bridge, get back into his car and drive until he needed to clear another stretch. He would drive across a bridge of corpses. When the path became too narrow for the car, he would walk. I am ready to destroy whatever monsters lie between me and my sister and I’m ready to keep her alive forever. He unlocked the door, stepped onto the bridge, and took aim.
WEIRD FURKA
KADE, a commercial radio station in Furka, Montana, was moving in a few months from its current location, the “Furkabick Hotel,” as the DJs had dubbed it, to a new location with a greater broadcast range. The Furkabick Hotel was a three story house, built during the copper rush. The house ceased to be a residence in the mid-thirties, and became KADE shortly after. The station has broadcast nearly continuously, with only short interludes of dead air. KADE broadcast country and bluegrass music and syndicated radio shows until the late 1950s/early 60s, when the last episodes of “The Lone Ranger,” “Have Gun, Will Travel,” and “Gunsmoke” were aired. The station switched over to an all-country format, which it has remained, adding several politically conservative drive time talk shows, in the early 1990s.
The only exception to this format was an ambient/electronic/experimental music show broadcast Monday mornings, from 1 AM to 4, a time-slot that failed to draw any advertising dollars. The show was created and hosted by Craig Watson, a friend of the owner’s girlfriend. Craig lived in one of the few houses left in Furka. He worked as a bartender and occasionally manned the pumps at Manny’s. Once KADE moved, and its range increased, and advertisers became interested, his show would be cancelled. He called his show “Songs of Degrees.” Virtually no one listened. Craig liked the idea that a sleepless radio listener might roll the dial low and come upon his broadcast, drawn in by unfamiliar sounds.
Craig was usually the only person at the station when his show was broadcast. He loved the Furkabick Hotel, and thought it a shame that the station was abandoning the old house. One more step toward turning Furka into another Montana ghost town. The nature of what he broadcast left him with long stretches when he didn’t have to man the boards—twenty minute compositions of water dripping, of string instruments recorded inside vast underground caverns, of people’s voices phased into a fold of noise, and phased back into a conversation. Besides, he didn’t like to talk too much during the show’s broadcast—he didn’t want to explain; he wanted listeners to encounter, and take from their encounter what they might. During these long stretches he liked to wander through the empty house. Other than the studio itself, a long unused recording studio, and an office and a front desk on the first floor, the Furkabick was still very much a house, replete with old furniture, paintings and knick knacks. He’d explored the top, second and first floors very thoroughly; the only treasure he’d found was a volume of western themed poetry, which he brought into the studio and read while broadcasting, and occasionally read selections of to his listeners.
Craig decided, that before his show was cancelled, that he needed to explore the basement. He hadn’t done so yet because the door to the basement was locked with an old padlock—a skeleton key fit in its face. On the first Sunday of October, with a single swing of a small sledge, he sent the padlock singing across the floor. He located it and hung it back on the latch. With a camping lantern in hand, he carefully picked his way down the wooden steps—nearly falling through a rotted plank. After the nervousness of the moment passed, he thought, “It’d be a long morning laying down there with a broken leg.” The air smelled of dust and mildew, and he sneezed more than once as he
peered around in the dark space.
The basement was nearly empty. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and wooden support pillars with bark shredded like fur ran in even rows from one end of the basement to the other. Bare wooden bookcases lined one wall. Just beyond the boiler and the oil tank, both red with rust, was a set of bunker doors, which he reasoned must be how the owner and the maintenance people got in and out to check the gauges and the fuse box. On the other end of the basement was a door-less doorway. Craig walked to it and shone the lantern inside. A bare room, with a cement floor, without windows, but with a very intriguing feature: a wooden trap door in the floor. Craig looked at his watch and ran back upstairs—careful to avoid the rotted step—to put on another CD. He sat in the warm studio—the only room with any heat at that hour—listened to the drone piece he’d put on, and contemplated the trap door. The basement had been enough to make him a little uncomfortable—the thought of opening the trap actually scared him a little. “This is silly,” he said aloud. The track he was playing had another 30 minutes to it, so he went back down to the basement to finish his exploration.
The trap door was locked with another old padlock that resisted several blows from the sledge, but the latch itself finally gave, cracking out of the wood of the door with such a noise that Craig jumped back, startled, afraid he’d disturbed some animal’s nest. He glanced at his watch, calmed down a bit, and lifted the trap.
A strong odor rose up in a gust: a vinegary smell, mingled with the acid smell of old paper. A wooden ladder led into the sub-basement. Craig laid on his belly and hung his lantern down into the darkness. With the light suspended into the small space, the basement around him was pitch dark. The room was furnished with metal bookcases, and the bookcases were filled with records and boxes of reel-to-reel recordings and electrical equipment. Craig was briefly overcome with a nervous, tingling sensation. He started to climb down into the room when he caught a glimpse of his watch. “Damn,” he said, and ran back upstairs to the studio. He looked for a CD with a long running time, put it on, and went back downstairs.