Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  And then: “Heidi told me you’re a writer? Which I think is fascinating, but beyond that I don’t really know anything about it. What kind of stuff do you write? Is that a terrible question?” Sandoval’s fork hovered in the air over his duck.

  His hopes had been sputtering and misfiring but still rising like some sci-fi rocket. Now they immediately plummeted. She didn’t know. Heidi Hemphill hadn’t told her? Had just told her he was some writer? Shit. “Um,” Sandoval said, drawing it out, managing to smile and frown at the same time. He held up one finger and poured another glass of wine.

  “What?” Viv laughed. “You looked pained, Mark.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out how to answer your question.”

  “Oh, it can’t be that bad. You’re published, right?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Do you write under a pseudonym? Self-help books? Don’t tell me its erotica?”

  “I’m a little hesitant, to tell you the truth.”

  She set her glass down and leaned forward, grinning. “Oh my God. It is erotica, isn’t it?”

  “No, no. Sorry.”

  “Pop psychology! Young adult! Ooooh, this is fun.”

  Sandoval and his work. His books. The first one had formed him, and thusly had always been his armor. But if The Long Way Home (and what it signified, and what had happened to him to instigate the book itself) was a buoy, it was also the anchor around his neck. His sword and hair shirt both. The books after that were not so integral to him, so enmeshed with his personality, his coda, his guilt, who he was. But The Long Way Home had been written years ago, by a different man. What band wanted to get up on stage and play songs that were twenty years old? But bands did it all the time. Everyone did it, one way or another. Monsters Americana, his supposed Next Great Book, the one he’d been working on for so long now, was frozen, mired and immobile. Unwieldy. The only book that had truly terrified him. But The Long Way Home was the one that had built the myth of Mark Sandoval. And you couldn’t fuck with the myth.

  Without the myth, what was left of him? His regret? His scars? His willingness to discard people like trash?

  “I wrote The Long Way Home,” he said, frowning at his plate.

  There was a moment of processing—he could practically see her working out the equation, all the tumblers falling into place. Viv’s face brightened in vague recognition and then shifted as she searched her data banks for the story. It happened often enough.

  “Mark,” she said slowly, drawing his name out. “I know this name. Mark . . .”

  “Mark Sandoval. Yeah.”

  “That was the book about the aliens,” she said cheerfully, her voice rising on the last word. Her dismay obvious. “Right?”

  “It was,” Sandoval said.

  “Wow,” Viv said, and Sandoval snorted and poured another glass.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought Heidi told you.”

  “No!” Viv said, still smiling, eyes darting over each of Sandoval’s shoulders. “I mean, it’s fascinating! What a story. Wow, what an experience. No, Heidi just told me you were a writer. So, goodness. Abducted by aliens. Wow,” she said, trilling a high, nervous little laugh. “That must have been something.” She looked around the room like he was holding her hostage and she was trying to find someone to slip a panicked note to. “I loved the movie,” she blurted.

  He drained his glass, set it down and spun it lightly between his fingers by the stem. He heard the warble of a cell phone a few tables over. He said, “There’s something freakish about it, right? Shameful.” He frowned at his glass. When would he learn? The world became smaller the older he got, not the other way around. He vowed to have a word with Heidi. Many words.

  “I mean, either it happened,” he said, annoyed at the slur in his words, “and it’s stunning and historically significant. Globally important. Or it didn’t happen, and it’s an elaborate joke, a sham. One or the other, right, Viv?”

  Sandoval unbuttoned his sleeve, started rolling it up.

  He held up his forearm between them. The candlelight jittered and wavered along the underside of his arm, the scarred rhombuses and trapezoids and circles.

  “Which is it, Viv? Am I a test subject or a fucking liar?”

  Viv’s facade gave way. With her mouth in a tightly knitted line, she took her wallet from her handbag, removed a credit card. She gave him a smile so rich with pity that Sandoval felt a paroxysm of hate toward her—real hate, as raw and luxurious as it was scalding. He resisted the urge to squeeze the tender globe of his wineglass, squeeze its shards into his palm, render the whole fucking thing a red-pulped mess.

  “I should probably go,” she said. “It was nice meeting you, Mark.”

  “You too. You can put your card away. I’m gonna go ahead and order another bottle.”

  She didn’t argue. The sound of her heels marked her exit, a sound quickly lost in the crowd.

  Moments later the waiter appeared at his side. “Finished?” he asked, motioning at Viv’s plate.

  “Ah, just getting started, actually.” He had the plates sent away and ordered another bottle, carefully buttoning his sleeve again.

  2

  A few hours later he found himself at the bar next door. One of those hip-shit joints full of reclaimed steel buttresses and type trays inset into the walls, a place where the servers wore fedoras and had handlebar mustaches and sleeve tattoos. Drill. He ordered a cocktail and the bartender served it to him with a charred pinecone kind of rammed onto the lip of the glass. Sandoval sat down on a barstool and scratched his nose and looked at his cell phone for a minute.

  He sent Viv a text message. A terrible, mean-spirited message. He realized only after he sent it that it was full of typos.

  It was a weeknight and the place was dim and mostly quiet. A few couples sat at tiny tables along the wall, leaning close together. Everyone seemed very beautiful, enmeshed in their private lives. He set his pinecone on his napkin, and then lifted it, smelled it. It smelled like alcohol and a forest fire. How, he wondered, did they char the pinecones? A blowtorch? On a stove? He watched the bartender make drinks, and when his cocktail was finished, he put up a hand. The bartender came over, a blue sparrow on his throat, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Another one, please,” Sandoval said, concentrating on his posture, his words. He’d lost track of the amount of wine he’d drank at the White Bird.

  The bartender seemed to think about it but took the bill Sandoval pushed across the bar. A minute later his drink appeared, with another burnt pinecone that he smelled and once more set carefully on a napkin. He nodded in time to the music piping softly through the speakers. The wine and cocktails sang in his blood, heavy, heavy. He gazed at the deep gloss of the bar, the lacquer liquid and gleaming in the light. Someone at a little table in the back had a laugh that ran along his nerves like a broken bottle down a silk sheet.

  He texted another terrible thing to Viv, something lewd and cruel and shitty, his heart like a cinder inside his chest, beneath his ribbons of scars. No, he thought. Actually, his heart was like a blackened pinecone. Ha. That was it. He sipped his drink and his teeth knocked against the glass. Viv’s text said she would call the police if he sent her a message again. Everything roiled inside him, outside him, he felt like destroying the bar and sliding down to the floor and weeping, and grabbing the bartender by the neck and holding onto him like a brother and also ramming his face into the gleaming bar top.

  He drained his new drink, the dregs burning the back of his throat. He set his glass down loud on the bar, loud enough to be heard over the Appalachian hillbilly shit they were now playing over the speakers. Loud enough to turn some heads, and to send the bartender toward him with a look on his face that said No more.

  Sandoval picked up his burnt pinecones and, boom boom, threw them at the bartender. He staggered out.

 
He could hear the rain when he stepped outside, see it in silver strings falling from the dark belly of the bridge he stood beneath. He tried to remember where he’d parked the Jag while his hands absently roved his pockets for his keys. Laden with a chorus of fury inside him, a nameless kind, the kind that did no one any good, the kind that had never done anyone any good in man’s long love affair with fury; it was the kind that just heaved around inside you like a tornado. His hands were black with ash from handling those stupid fucking pinecones. He thought of holding them under the falling water but instead ran them down his face, pulling his jaw down into a rictus.

  3

  Forty minutes later he was bloody and lurching around his living room in his boxer shorts, hyperventilating and holding a reddened dishrag to his face.

  Much of his sprawling four-bedroom West Hills home was comprised of windows, and he spent a few frantic minutes trying to drunkenly free himself of his bloody clothes while yanking down all the blinds on the ground floor. The whole goddamn house seemed to be made of windows right then, and he ripped a number of blind cords in his haste, his heart a bumbling slurry of booze and panic.

  After the blinds were drawn, he made a greyhound in the kitchen and sat down on the couch in his underwear, willing his heart to slow. His watch read 1:13 a.m. Seemingly every light in the place burned. He dialed Tad Hemphill and left a message, his voice shaky and cracking. The greyhound, instead of calming him, turned him slower, turned the panic into an even more resolute, fanged and beastly thing. Nausea boiled inside him. The dishrag pressed to his nose stank of his own blood.

  His laptop sat on the curio next to the fireplace, and when he heard the ping of an incoming message, he walked over to it, his head tilted back, under some drunken assumption that it was possibly Tad getting back to him. He barked his shin on the Michael Amini cocktail table, three thousand dollars’ worth of fucking uselessness and brutally sharp angles. He cursed into the dishrag, pain singing an aria up his shin, and hopped on one leg, nearly staggering onto the glass top of the table. Tad Hemphill, he of the cotton-white pompadour and hairy ears and ceaseless supply of anti-Semitic lawyer jokes. Tad! Golf buddy of judges, deadly litigator, husband of pleasant, well-intentioned, oblivious Heidi Who Macraméd. Goddamn if he didn’t need Tad Hemphill tonight like a kid needed his mother. The Jag had a silver spiderweb of glass running in a crazed line up the windshield, a divot in the hood. Blood undoubtedly dripping from the undercarriage onto the garage floor, a forensic wet dream of DNA, even as he himself sat there bleeding on the couch.

  He gingerly took the rag away from his face: a Missoni Home cotton towel sent to oblivion. That shit was not cheap, either. He let out a sputtering, slobbery gasp, and knuckled a single tear away. Tad hadn’t called him back; it was an email he’d gotten. Peering down, he didn’t recognize the sender’s name on the screen. Something with umlauts. His vision trembled and he gazed down at the fire engine–red of his blood on the rag. He spun around and stormed back into the kitchen, heaved a torrent of wine-dark gruel into the sink. His guts like God’s hand inside them, squeezing. He tried to free himself from the briar-tangle of his thoughts, to simplify them.

  The Jag was parked in the garage.

  The garage door was shut.

  It was locked from the inside. There were no windows in there. It was a cement cube.

  It was contained.

  It was contained.

  He dropped the bloody dishtowel in the sink, his reflection a pale ghost in the window above the faucet. If the cops came in right now—what would they see? A drunk? A celebrity? An alien abductee? Not a killer, not for sure. He was still in good shape for a guy in his fifties, pecs not sagging the way most men his age invariably let them. He still had his hair. His gut was reasonably flat, especially considering how much he drank. This—the reminder of his drinking—was enough to tangle him in the briars again and he had to close his eyes, breathe. Feel his feet on the cold tile. The kitchen reeked of alcohol and bile.

  He heard his phone ring and he raced back into the living room, cursing again as he bounced off the doorframe.

  “What’s up, buddy?” Tad cried, his voice reedy with booze and exuberance. Sandoval could hear the heartbeat-thump of music in the background. “How’d the date go?” Lower, he said, “You dip your wick? Vivian is a particularly good-looking woman, is she not?”

  Sandoval choked out, “Tad, I’m fucked. I’m totally fucked.” He could feel himself starting to unravel, like the fear had been held together with twine and cloth and was starting to come unwound now that he could confess. He tumbled toward the unraveling almost gratefully.

  “Hold on,” Tad said.

  “I’m so fucked.”

  Sharply, Tad said, “Mark, shut your mouth. Hold on a second.” Sandoval sat down on the couch.

  The disco-thump of background music vanished. “Okay. I’m back. Talk to me slow and steady. Where are you at?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “You by yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Tad said. “What’s up? Go slow.”

  Sandoval let out a slow, shaky breath. “I hit somebody.”

  A pause, the moment drawn drum-tight. “Who, Viv?”

  He leaned back and laid a forearm over his eyes. “No, Christ. With my car.”

  Tad gave a pained little exhale, like someone out of shape doing a sit-up. “Okay. Question still stands. Viv? Pedestrian? Another car?”

  Sandoval pressed his face against the crook of his arm and then sat up, reached for the greyhound glass that held a last few ice cubes, a dredge of pink water at the bottom. He rose and walked to the kitchen. He opened the blind above the sink, and the night beyond the window was intractable, distant; he took some odd measure of comfort that the world was moving on without him in spite of what he’d done. The great and grinding wheels of life would continue to chew everyone up. “Some guy,” he said.

  “Some guy?”

  “I hit a guy with my car, Tad, and then I drove off. Some bum. He came out of nowhere. He was laying in the street.”

  “A literal bum? Or, like, ‘You lousy bum?’”

  “A fucking homeless guy, Tad, alright?”

  “Christ on a chariot,” Tad hissed. “Clearly you’ve been drinking.”

  “Clearly.”

  A beat, two. “That complicates things, Mark. Significantly. I won’t lie to you. Jesus wept.”

  “I hit my face on the steering wheel. I’m covered in blood. The windshield’s all cracked. The hood.”

  “Did you run him over?”

  “I don’t know. He kind of bounced off.”

  A pause. “Was there, like, a thump thump? Did the wheels go over him?”

  “Fuck, I don’t know, Tad! Does it matter?”

  “Sweet lord, everything matters, my boy. Start from the beginning.”

  He made another greyhound, so much vodka in the glass that this time there was only the palest wash of watercolor-pink among the ice cubes. He pressed the phone hard against his ear and found the story coming easily enough now that he’d started. He was in a rush to be free of it. He told Tad Hemphill about the terrible date with Viv, going to the hipster bar, even the bit about the pinecones—Tad actually snorted with laughter at that, and surely he’d be okay if his lawyer was laughing, right? Surely?—and then how he’d finally found the Jag. How he’d sped up along the rain-slicked streets, mostly empty at that hour, and he’d only looked away for a second—he’d thought he’d felt his phone vibrate in his jacket and he’d had an absurd, ludicrous thought that it might be Viv reaching out to him—and then the terrible percussion had transmitted itself through the hood, the windshield, thrummed up into his hands, into his face as he bounced off the steering wheel. It was only when he talked about leaving the man in the street an
d seeing that brutal arrangement of limbs on the gleaming pavement that Tad interrupted him.

  “Anybody follow you?”

  “I don’t know. It was down in the industrial section, southeast. I didn’t see any other cars. I’d hardly even been driving, only a few blocks.”

  “A few blocks from where you got into your car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were there a bunch of guys there, hanging out? Other hobos?”

  “Hobos? I don’t know, Tad,” Sandoval said helplessly. “I just . . . I took off. I didn’t wait to see who took out a magnifying glass and wrote my fucking license plate down. You know?”

  “Alright.” Sandoval heard him breathe. “This is the deal, Mark. Have a seat.” Sandoval was still at the sink, looking at his reflection. A man holding an empty glass, blood-smeared and ashen, nearly nude, succumbing inevitably to age and mortality. Strange latticed scars spanning his body, a few drops of blood buried in his gray whorls of chest hair. He wondered where Tad was—in a coatroom at a party somewhere? Sweating and drunk in a club bathroom? He had trouble picturing portly Tad Hemphill in anything but a five-thousand-dollar Italian suit with a drop of Alfredo sauce on his tie.

  Tad said, “Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “But are you hearing me, Mark?”

  “I’m right here, man. I’m with you.”

  “Because this might be the most important bit of lawyerly advice I will ever give you. I can’t technically advise you to cover anything up, and I can’t technically assist you in hiding evidence. But you should know that you have the right to keep your mouth shut if anyone asks you about this. If someone does that, I would strongly urge you to just shut the fuck up. If anyone asks you about this, call me. If anyone asks where you were tonight, you zip it and call me exactly one second later, okay? If anyone knocks on your door, don’t answer, and call me. If it’s the cops and it sounds like they’re going to break in, ask them if they have a warrant, then run upstairs and call me. Okay?”