by Jeff Strand
How long could you be stuck in a car wash without someone noticing? he thought. Would I even want to know the record?
He squinted out through the bubbles again and decided that the washing stage should be done by now, at the very least. He thought it should definitely be time for some different machines to come crawling over besides these scrubbers. He knew there were more machines out there. And people. He could hear them all. He crawled into the back seat again, and smeared his hand through the fog to peer out toward the mouth of the clown. A new machine lowered onto his trunk, and between the rhythm and bounce of this cylinder of shredded beach towels, Jason could see some light through the garage-door’s windows, and then, past that, the shimmering dark outline of the empty road. He had to keep wiping away his breath to see, and he told himself that maybe there was a long line of cars filing past, that maybe cars were going by unseen, every time his hand cleared the steam from the glass. He climbed into the front again and sucked in a deep breath, preparing for his space walk. Then he gently pulled up on his door handle and cracked his car open like a soda. Hot needles of white water peppered his arm, and he was ready to make a run for it when one of the green scrubwheels suddenly lurched towards him and slammed his door back shut. He forced a laugh and opened it again. But the door stopped against the scrubbing wheel and bounced violently under his hand. The noise of the wash was impossibly loud now that the seal had been broken, and his head ached with the tidal sounds of the machinery. He leaned his shoulder against the door and pushed. The door would only open a crack, vibrating so hard he bit his tongue from the force. He put all his weight against the door, gaining a few more centimeters, but not enough for even his shoe to hold it open. He pushed harder, then threw himself against it in a tantrum, worried for a moment that he might lose control of his bowels, like a baby. He thought about a video he saw once where a woman was giving birth and defecated at the same time. It had made him sick, and at the time he thought it was because it had made him realize humans were mere animals. But now he knew it was so disturbing because of the possibility of raising the wrong one as your child.
He shoved hard and a jet of hot water filled his mouth and his drowning reflex kicked it.
How do you make a dead baby float? Take your foot off its head. How else do you make a dead baby float? One can of root beer and two scoops of dead baby. How do you spoil a baby? Leave it on the side of the road …
The door slammed shut, and as he coughed and spit out the fluids, he was suddenly worried that fighting a door to the death might mean he’d be discovered in a car wash with shit in his pants, never mind the dead baby. So he stopped pushing and forced himself to relax. All the windows and mirrors were fogged, even the chrome on the radio knobs. He couldn’t see the whirling mechanisms surrounding him at all anymore, and he started work to control his breathing, slowing his exhales so that all the glass would clear and he could see what was holding him captive, so he could work on getting out.
“You know what you never hear?” Jason practically screamed at the dead baby over the static and the bashing hurricane of the wash.
He worried the speakers were broadcasting the beat of the machines, maybe even before he got there. Maybe that’s what he’d been tapping his foot to for hours.
Can you hear a car wash through your radio? If it was loud enough. I swear I heard a hockey game once that wasn’t being broadcast. No one believed me, but how did I know it went to a shoot-out and had six fights? In the parking lot.
“You never hear someone make up a joke. No one’s ever around to see it happen. Just like you can smell a skunk on the road but never see it. Just like you hear the tires squeal and never hear the crash. And even though we know the dead storks bring the dead babies, don’t you ever wonder where jokes come from?”
For the first time since he’d picked up his tiny hitchhiker, Jason forced himself to look directly at it. Its eyes and mouth were looking at him, just like he knew they would be. But it was much worse that he’d feared. He stared at the thing long and hard, until the baby blurred and finally faded from his vision. Jason knew that this always happened when he stared at things too long, and this was the first time it had ever happened as a defensive measure, but he told himself it was really just the impenetrable steam inside the car that had mercifully swept the baby away.
“So let’s make a dead baby joke! Right here, right now. You know, just to pass the time. Now, how do jokes usually start?”
He blinked and his vision cleared, and the baby was back in his head, burrowing behind his eyelids. He waited until it faded again.
“So, a dead baby walks into a bar … shit! That doesn’t work, does it?”
He slapped himself upside the head and vigorously scratched the back of his neck to focus.
“The best jokes always start with the words ‘what’s worst.’ This we know. I once heard this little girl telling dead baby jokes and she kept saying the words “what’s worst” instead of ‘what’s worse,’ and it’s so much better that way. So what’s worst? Driving over a baby on the road or … getting the baby out of your … fuck, we already did that one. Okay, what’s worst? Trying to get the dead baby off the hood ornament or …”
Jason closed his eyes to keep it together.
“What’s worst? Trying to get a dead baby out of your grill? Or trying to get it out of your head?” Jason looked around for answers, his spit drying and foaming on the back of his tongue. He looked at the baby and saw its mouth was closed. Then it blinked. It was time to go.
Jason slammed his back against his driver’s seat and pulled his gear shift down hard. His foot stabbed the pedal and he straightened his arms to brace against the dash, waiting for the crashing and sparks and sunlight as he broke through the clown’s mouth and splintered its metal tongue, bouncing and scraping his car out into the road in a shower of fireworks.
Nothing.
He pushed the gas down flush against the floorboards, stomping so hard he felt the pedal actually bend to the curve of his foot. He heard the engine screaming with all the power it had and he wished he could remember what kind of car he drove so he could visualize maximum performance in the commercial. He still wasn’t moving.
Are my wheels off the ground? That’s not how these things work. You ever notice how you never see a hockey fight during overtime? Time to focus. Let me the fuck … out.
He tried to remember what had happened when the red light flashed on and the car wash first pulled him in. There was no way it could be holding him up with his wheels up in the air. There was something very wrong, and he was leaving. He shoved himself back in his driver’s seat even further, grunting and punching the horn with his fist, then his feet, walking his legs up and over the steering wheel onto the glass of the windscreen. Then Jason started jack-hammering the with his heels. He kicked hard, then harder, then faster, almost running in midair, hearing the rubber on his shoes squeaking and watching the crazy patterns they were smearing in the vapor. He thought of a kaleidoscope, one that he’d had and loved as a boy, a toy that he just had to break open, and how two rolls of black tape couldn’t fix it after he cracked it open to see what was inside. Nothing really, nothing like what he seen through the hole anyway. He tried refilling it with sand and bugs and screws and apple juice and marbles, and even after all that labor, it still never worked again. He shook the image out of his head, cracked his neck in both directions, and pushed the muscles in his legs faster and harder than he ever had before.
His sneakers kick-started a spider web of cracks between the steaming bubbles and wax splashing across the glass, and his frantic heels squeaked and spasmed. He imagined an army of spiders on the outside of the windshield, in a furious competition to finish their design first, all while he drove off down the road, RPMs redlining on the curves, trying desperately to find a straightaway long enough to gather the speed to blow the passengers off.
His ankles ached, one of his shoes slipped, and a flailing knee turned the radio back on.
Static and voices fought for his attention, even without the antenna, distorted singing and crying rising up from the passenger’s seat that couldn’t be coming from the speakers, and Jason kicked the windshield with everything he had left. And finally, his legs locked straight behind the knees, both feet went smashing through the glass.
Coming out breach, he thought. Got no choice, doc.
His hands came up to protect his head.
Just don’t let the cord wrap around the neck …
Then a snowstorm of safety glass cubes splashed his crossed arms and showered his face. The roar of the wash and the hot water riding in with it, dragging the shards across his nose and forehead. A shard stung him over the eyebrow, then another bee sting under his nostril. He fought the urge to wipe them away, knowing this would make the cuts deeper. Then he pulled his feet back inside and surged forward, trying to exit head first, eyes pinched closed, ears getting the worst of the scalding wax. His shoulders got stuck, and he sliced through his shirt working his way free, grinding the sand of the windshield into his chest and stomach as he strained and contorted his body to widen the hole. Eventually it was big enough, and he exploded out, rolling across the hood and flopped onto the ground gasping for air.
He stood up tall outside the car, watching the machines dancing and spinning around him, seemingly keeping their distance now as the pink, blood-streaked water pooled on his dashboard under the jagged hole where he’d come from, crimson and foam running down his throat, past his legs, and gathering between his toes. He turned, and the clown’s mouth started to open for him, just like the baby’s had, and he finally stepped out into the sun.
It was only when he saw the boy lying there outside that Jason’s heart started to slow to a normal speed. Gray, soggy rags wrapped around his arm, mouth frozen in a yawn, and stretched out in a grass-angel he’d worn into the ground around him. Headphones covered his ears, and the boy was slowly sitting up on his elbows and realizing that Jason was there.
The boy squinted and pulled the headphones down to his throat, absently picked dirt and stones out of the skin on his arms, then checked his watch and shrugged with a
“What the fuck?”
Jason turned to watch his car exit the clown’s mouth behind him, safe, wheels locked on the tracks, windshield gutted yet gleaming, and right on schedule. That’s when Jason knew his car had been in neutral the whole time he was gunning it in there, that he hadn’t been inside the wash any longer than normal.
So he went back for the baby. And this time, when he strode out through the scalding foam and the sting and the Turtle Wax snapping, a dead baby clenched tight against his chest, soft translucent head under Jason’s chin, brittle snakeskin like an accordion around its neck. He covered the open eyes and open mouth with a loving, protective hand when the blast of the last machine came down over both of them, blowing the water out of his ears like they were candles, and he didn’t hesitated to look anymore. It was his baby now.
He stopped to let the machine finish, feeling the tiny single rubber wheel on the blower rolling down the back of his neck, the hot wind filling up his eyes and roasting away any bad memories, evaporating the pools inside his ear and turning the static back to music.
What’s worst? Finding a dead baby on the side of the road? Or wanting to?
He walked to the boy in the grass and yanked the headphones from his head, surprised they weren’t connected. He used the rattle in his hands to lead the boy’s eyes around like a drunk test, imagining how powerful he looked after his rescue. Even if he’d only gone back in to get the antenna.
DEAD END
BY KRISTOPHER TRIANA
_____
With the body securely locked in the trunk, all Jake had to do was shatter the mirrors and he would be ready to leave. It didn’t matter where to. It never did. The only important thing was to keep moving.
Perpetual motion. Keep the body strong by pumping blood.
So much blood.
Some was even speckled across the high heel he now used to shatter the side mirrors of the car. Getting in, he broke the rear view in the same fashion, the cracks bursting like lightning across the reflection as he averted his gaze. He pulled his bandana from his jeans and used it to wipe the shoe of any prints before throwing it out the window. It landed in the gutter of the motel lot, swishing in the rain swill, adrift with so many cigarette butts and condom wrappers.
Old Vegas. A candy colored monument to wretchedness.
The motel was like so many on the outskirts of the city, shit-sandwiched between bail bond joints and discount wedding chapels. This was the side of Vegas they didn’t advertise, far from the expensive glamour of the main strip. To Jake, that whole stretch was so soft-boiled you could sop it up with a biscuit. The true exploitive sleaze was to be found on Fremont and beyond, down where the buses stopped running. He’d drifted around here for a few months, pushing his own disciplined time limits because he’d been enjoying himself perhaps a little too much.
Don’t stay in one place. Don’t show a pattern. Don’t allow yourself to have an M.O.
As the exhaust belched to life the car shuddered forward. The trunk gave a soft thud as the bar whore’s corpse flopped about before settling. Jake wondered if when the whore had first gotten this car if she had thought anyone would have ever ended up in the trunk, let alone she herself. It was an uncommon stroke of luck for him that she had one at all. When he’d finished with her he’d rooted through her purse and found the keys. It had one of those beepers on it to unlock the car. He’d gone outside and hit the button and the Dodge honked, identifying itself. It made sense. From the lived-in look of the motel room it was obvious that she’d been living there. It was a foreign concept to Jake. Not living in a motel room, but living anywhere. He knew, just as surely as he knew he would kill again, that there was no such thing as home.
•
Jake was a misogynist, but that wasn’t why he primarily murdered women. He chose them because the act of killing was so intimate and emotional. The methodical taking of a life was the one act that made him feel connected to the human race in any way. It almost felt homoerotic for him to kill a man unless it was out of blind rage, which had occurred on a few occasions in his wasted youth. He chose to kill women just as straight men would choose to sleep with women; it was an instinctual, sexual impulse as natural to him as eating or taking a piss.
Not that Jake could explain it or put it into words. The dollar-store education of a renegade orphan didn’t get him much further cognitively than his bad genes and the mild brain damage he’d suffered in the womb from his mother’s drug use.
The world had been cruel to Jake from the beginning.
He’d gone from the dumpster they’d found him in right into the hands of the state, allowing apathy and bureaucracy to further poison his future. He was shuffled through orphanages, never fitting in or getting along with even other abandoned children like himself. By thirteen his bad behavior and petty crimes led him to a reform school that was really nothing more than a juvenile detention hall; a sort of pre-prison. It was there that he learned to be a much better fighter and thief.
It was also where he’d learned to hate mirrors.
He’d always been uncomfortable with his own reflection because whom he felt he was never looked back at him in a mirror. His image haunted him, always looking so alien and never matching the image he felt was imposed upon the mirror. He was like a dog seeing its own reflection in a sliding glass door and barking, never seeing the image as itself. As he reached his teens the identity denial worsened, and so did the mirror image: pimples, uneven facial hair, and an awkward body struggling through growth spurts. The greasy hair never settled right, the skin always oily and inflamed, the chest birdlike and freckled. He didn’t think of it as a body so much as an inescapable shell, a prison that had him bound in a manner far more debilitating than the bars of any jail.
He hated what he saw in the mirror.
But he hated what
others saw in it more.
•
“You’re looking kinda pretty there, boy,” Larry had said from behind him.
Jake wore only a damp towel around his waist. He’d just finished in the shower room and was standing before the sink where the long mirror stretched from one end of the bathroom counter to the other. As usual, he had been avoiding looking into it, so he hadn’t seen Larry walking up behind him.
Larry was one of the bigger bullies in juvie hall. At eighteen, he had a few years on Jake then to boot, years that packed on meanness as well as size. Jake had felt his hand on his shoulder before Larry spun him around. He’d watched Larry’s nose crinkle in confusion as he looked at Jake, then at Jake’s reflection, and then back again.
“How come you look so pretty in the mirror when you look so ugly in real life?” Larry had asked him.
Jake was silent. Larry got so close to him he could smell his morning cigarette breath. Fear made his legs tremble, and that just seemed to excite Larry. He’d spun Jake back around to make him face the mirror.
“Your reflection makes you look real pretty don’t it?”
Larry had grabbed him by the jaw then and made him look at himself, but Jake only saw the same ugly boy who always greeted him. He couldn’t see what Larry meant. But that hadn’t stop Larry from bending him over the sink.
The whole time, Larry had stared at Jake’s reflection in the mirror.
•
He drove through the Nevada desert now, excited by what unseen curiosities might lurk within the tangerine haze beyond. Red sandstone formations were all that lined the sides of the state road now, the dilapidated ghetto of Vegas’s outskirts far behind. The rocks were magnificent in color, bleeding orange and forming psychedelic swirls of lavender upon their jagged edges. On some of them Jake could see the rock art petroglyphs that an ancient race had left behind some three hundred years before Christ. While Jake didn’t know or care much about history, he’d heard many whispered ghost stories during his time in Old Vegas; the tall tales of the old tribes of the valley that were said to practice ritual sacrifice so to be favored by the things that lurked in the core of the basin. Things that were said to make a man go mad at the sheer sight of them. Because of its haunted history, the locals regarded it as some sort of Bermuda Triangle where any kind of supernatural nightmare could become reality. Now the high walls of the desert told a similar story with their carved images of stick figures splitting one another in half, impaling each other, and even feeding each other to horned serpents. The engravings were ominous, titillating Jake’s vicious psyche. They were images of a Hell on earth, etched into a landscape that looked as if it could be quite the happy home for Satan himself. He gnawed on his thumbnail as his blood throbbed beneath his sweaty flesh, the horrible summer heat making him and the desert boil together.