Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  “Okay,” Sandoval said.

  “What’s the pattern you’re picking up here, Mark? What are the common threads?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Good.”

  “And call you.”

  “Excellent. Shut up and call me,” Tad said.

  It was undeniable, the relief that flooded through him, the net that Tad was throwing his way. He imagined Tad Hemphill standing next to a chest-high stack of greatcoats and furs on some four-poster bed at a garish, droll lawyer party out in Lake Oswego somewhere. He felt his terror quieting. He felt suffused with a grand, encompassing love for the man.

  Talking to Tad, he knew immediately that he could live with this act in the long run. Live with its knowledge. That he could still manage to flourish in some way. That he was one of those people who could diminish and quell a memory staunchly enough to move beyond it, to still live something resembling a life.

  Hadn’t he done it before?

  Christ, look at him! His entire life was a testament to that, if nothing else. He raised an arm and ghost-Sandoval raised an arm in the window, both of them covered in their raised glyphs and symbols and lines, their drink in a curled fist. He could survive this.

  “Do you understand, Mark? Are you with me?”

  “I hear you,” Sandoval said.

  “That’s the life preserver I’m throwing your way. That’s my piece of advice: call me if anyone contacts you.”

  “Thank you, Tad.”

  “Just play it cool. Be patient. It was the Jag, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it in the garage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the hood’s parked away from the garage windows?”

  “There’s no windows down there.”

  “Okay,” Tad said. “Okay.” He coughed, cleared his throat. It was a stentorian, old man–sound that went on for a while. “And Mark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s the book coming?”

  “The book?” He felt sucker-punched, pulled out of their shared narrative.

  “The book you’re writing. The monster one. Monsters of America or whatever.”

  Sandoval bristled. “Well honestly, the book’s not going too good, Tad,” he said archly. “Why?”

  “Well, because now might be a good time to head out of town. Maybe it’s time to tackle some research for a while. In Uganda or something. Do you understand me?”

  He did.

  4

  He dozed fitfully that night, his sleep scattershot with half-lit dreams: the bus trip, the rest stop, the cold light in the clearing. He awoke ash-mouthed and dumped out four aspirin from the jumbo bottle on his nightstand, chewed them to bitter pulp, a body on automatic. He lay there splayed like a dead starfish on silk sheets, an idiot organism reduced to the simple machinery of pumping heart and lungs. Eventually a stutter-quick flashflood of images and textures came to him—Viv’s freckled chest, a blackened pinecone on the glossed bar top, the silver crack in the windshield. The car’s halted velocity juddering up into his hands. The black-on-black silhouette of a sprawled body in the rearview mirror.

  He rose up, padded to the bathroom, glanced briefly at the chalky flakes of blood still rimming his nostrils, the pinecone ash still ribboning his cheeks like some goth chorus girl, and heaved into the toilet.

  Showering, he tested the edges of his panic like a man defining the walls of a darkened room. Evaporated was last night’s brash notion that he’d be fine, that he could live with himself. Hadn’t he seen the man move in the Jag’s rearview mirror? Maybe even start to rise, simply dazed and shaken? Some part of him seized on it, tried to reshape the moment to fit the desire, even as he knew it was bullshit. Whistle past the graveyard, liar. You know he wasn’t moving.

  He stood dripping in his bedroom. He cracked the blinds that looked out onto the hills, the city below. Wind shuddered the tops of the trees. He shaved, dotting the occasional cut with a spot of toilet paper. He dressed in slacks, a button-up, a three-hundred-dollar Robert Talbott tie, its pale pink offsetting the blue of his shirt. Hands shaking the entire time. Waiting all the while for the knock at the door. Cops in riot gear, plastic shields and beanbag shotguns, his door splintered to shards by that big handheld iron they used. But no, that insidious, calculating, mercenary part of him insisted: he was rich and white. They’d come to the door and knock. Even with a warrant, they’d knock first.

  He took his laptop, padded into the kitchen. It was afternoon by now. Wary of a search warrant that would get his computer confiscated—even hungover he was still thinking—he checked the local news sites but didn’t type anything specific in a search engine. Checked local Twitter sites. Facebook. Nothing. No mention. If anything, the panic intensified, grew barbs. Sandoval’s guilt was like a nameless shape writhing in a canvas bag.

  He checked his email, saw a message from his editor. He didn’t click on it—he knew the refrain: How is the book coming along? Getting to the point where you can send anything to us? The unspoken thread, rising increasingly toward the surface these days: You know we paid you a lot of money for this book, right, Mark? You know you’ve sucked at our teat for years now without giving us any blood in return, right, Mark? You know I’m trying to keep my bosses from suing you for breach of contract, right? Mark?

  The other message was from someone with an email handle of khauksdottir. He vaguely remembered the mad jumble across the room, barking his shin on the coffee table. (It was blue this morning.) He marveled for a moment at the juxtaposition: he was torn between running for his life and taking the Range Rover down to Powell’s and spending another unsuccessful afternoon dicking around in the café with the swollen, unwieldy shitstorm that Monsters Americana had become.

  He broke his own brand-new rule and googled countries with no extradition to US. Short of Algeria—hadn’t Burroughs lived in Algeria for a while?—they all sounded like terrible places to live. He bounced back to his email window and clicked on the khauksdottir message. It was as brief as it was odd:

  Mr. Sandoval,

  I am a fan of your books. I apologize for my English, I don’t often have need to use it when I write. I live on a small island called Hvíldarland, near Iceland. My children and I live on a small farm on the north end of the country. I was a witness to something sneaking onto our farm at night recently. This is the video I took.

  This is not a hoax, I promise you. Perhaps you would be interested in hearing more? Please feel free to contact me if so. I believe you are the best person to contact.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  Karla Hauksdóttir

  He watched the attached video.

  Watched it again.

  A third time.

  A plan began to unfold then. Now might be a good time to head out of town.

  He sent Karla Hauksdóttir an email. Why yes, he was definitely intrigued by the footage, would she be available to talk soon? Ideas tumbled, tumbled into place. Always with that remembrance of the juddering steering wheel beneath his palms.

  He took the Range Rover out, double-checked to make sure the garage was locked, drove down the winding road into the city. Ordered a latte from the café in Powell’s. As always, he felt enveloped by the susurration of voices and movement around him. He fired off an email to his agent and his editor, and included the Hauksdóttir video. Said he was willing to return the entire advance for Monsters Americana if he didn’t turn in a manuscript for this idea in six months. He stepped outside onto the sidewalk, legs too caffeine-choked to sit anymore, Burnside traffic slow and ceaseless next to him.

  He left voicemails for both men. The same message for both: “Call me. I’m dead fucking serious about this. This is a moneymaker. This is a gift from me to you. You send me out there and I write this thing and we’re talking two million
copies sold, boom. Merchandising lines, tie-ins, everything. I give you this book in six months or I sell my house and give you your money back. It’s a win-win. Call me.”

  He went into the parking garage, got in the Range Rover. His phone pinged: a message from Karla Hauksdóttir. Her phone number, times she was available to talk.

  He tapped out an email to Dani, told her he was sending her monthly payment early and not to give him any grief about it because he’d be out of the country. His thumbs were a blur over the screen. He was cooking, sweating out his hangover.

  And now it was hope galloping in his chest. Terror getting booted down the stairs, further and further down.

  Sandoval drove back out onto the street with the triphammer of maybe, maybe yodeling in his blood, this animal, insistent aria. A light rain began falling again, couples holding hands on the sidewalks. His phone chirped. It was his agent. He put it on speaker, tossed it on the passenger seat.

  “You have got,” his agent said, “to be fucking kidding me. A new book? A unicorn book? Jesus Christ, Mark. These guys want your blood at this point.”

  “I’m not kidding you,” Sandoval said. He grinned with those perfect teeth, caught himself in the mirror for a second. “I’m not kidding about any of it. This is gold.”

  His agent didn’t say a word for two blocks. Sandoval sweated, drove, willed him to say yes.

  Finally his agent let out an embattled sigh and said, “Shit. Let me make some calls.”

  5

  The last time he’d seen Don Whitmer, all those years ago, the man had been sitting behind his desk then, too. They’d both been a hell of a lot younger, and Whitmer had winced and said, “You can’t float on charisma, Mark. We need you here.”

  And a young Mark Sandoval had said in return, “I hear you, Don.” Young, dewy-eyed, lost, practically dripping with sincerity. And maybe, okay, just a tiny little bit dope sick. “I’m sorry.”

  Just like a tiny little fingernail’s worth of a little bit, though.

  Whitmer shook his head, looked over Sandoval’s shoulder. “You say that, but you’ve said that before. You’re just not putting in the hours. Your class load is suffering.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re not here when you need to be here, Mark.”

  It was December 16th, 1994. Seattle. They were seated in Don Whitmer’s generously sized office inside Washington College of the Arts, and sleet was turning yesterday’s snow to a gray, obscene mud in the gutters outside. It was the day the perfect storm touched down in Mark Sandoval’s life. The catalyst for all that would happen to him afterward.

  Seriously, it was crazy how shit went down sometimes.

  Don Whitmer in 1994 was a different man. A thin man with an astonishing network of veins tracing his arms, Whitmer back then had fairly writhed with a kind of wire-bound vitality; he almost literally thrummed like a power line and seemed nearly incapable of staying still. He had been Sandoval’s professor, and was now Sandoval’s boss. And Don was unhappy. In ’94, he still had a full head of curly hair and wore large square eyeglasses that continually caught the overhead lights, frequently turning the lenses into white, unreadable cubes. Even then, with half of his face obscured by those glasses, those sometimes-white lenses, he’d vibed his discontent at Sandoval hard.

  WCA was a small liberal arts campus that through catastrophic mismanagement would go bankrupt in five years (of course neither of them knew that at the time, and Sandoval wouldn’t have given a shit anyway) but on that particular Friday, Whitmer’s office was cavernous and studded with dark leather chairs and large potted plants in the corners. Sandoval felt the hammer coming down and resisted the urge to gnaw on the shredded meat that had been his fingernails.

  Whitmer’s desk was massive, polished to a gleam, populated only with an In/Out tray for paperwork, a blotter, and a single thread-wrapped bird skull, the bones of which had taken on the fine yellowed quality of an old newspaper. Whitmer was the chair of the WCA Anthropology Department, and this was a suddenly-not-inconsequential thing to be, given the recent generosity of a particularly benevolent donor (and a colleague of Whitmer’s) who had died and surprised everyone by leaving his entire and not inconsiderable fortune to the anthro department. The school suddenly found itself in a windfall, and the dean saw stars and hearts whenever Whitmer walked by.

  None of this bode particularly well for Mark Sandoval, who was at that moment pretty well immersed in the sitches, which his cute pet name (“sick” + “itches” = “sitches”) for being maybe just a little dope sick and wanting to scratch at his very minute scabs, which were the byproduct that came from being a mostly social and very intermittent IV dope user, which was not, admittedly, a particularly creative or smart thing to be in Seattle in 1994, given the number of his ex-friends and acquaintances that were sliding or nearly sliding from this mortal coil with alarming regularity via OD, bad dope, holdups, etc. But all told, his sitches and cramps aside, Sandoval also felt pretty bad for Don Whitmer. He’d put Don in a shitty position, and Don really was a good guy, and a solid anthropologist, and even now, as he was axing Sandoval from the department (because that was clearly what was going to go down), the man’s eminent fucking reasonableness and kindness were the things that sang out the most.

  He’d bucked Sandoval up countless times, thrown him bones (pun intended) academically again and again: research credits on papers, hustling up funding for him to come along on site digs—Death Valley, Arizona’s Gila River, even a battery of hill forts in Gloucestershire—and had gone so far as defending him from other department heads in regard to his growing fuckups. It was a small school, and Sandoval had, yes, been screwing up massively as of late, and it was also true that he himself hardly understood Whitmer’s fierce loyalty, even as he recognized it as such. But even he could see that the man had finally hit a wall. Enough was enough.

  Whitmer said, “You’ve got to show up. That was a final yesterday.” Outside, ugly spats of sleet made halos of the lights that lined the pathway outside the Sciences building. Barely afternoon and the world already going dark.

  “I am so sorry, Don. I—I don’t know what to say. I’m mortified. Seriously.”

  Whitmer adjusted his little bird skull, then leaned his chin into a palm and just sat there looking at Sandoval, who was clamping down pretty hard on his knees in order to not worry the scabs in the crooks of his arms. Whitmer said, “Mark, I’m just . . . How is the school supposed to address this issue? How am I?”

  “Like I said, Don, I’m mortified. I could blame the power company, but that doesn’t matter in the long run, does it? This is a recurring theme, and I understand that. I have no excuse.”

  Whitmer puffed out his cheeks, slowly exhaled. His lenses caught the light again. “That’s right,” he said wearily. “A power surge, wasn’t that it?”

  “Like I said, I had my alarm set for six forty-five. But my apartment building’s a hundred, hundred and ten years old. Fuses are constantly blowing. The whole place is held together with chicken wire and rats, you know? I woke up to the clock flashing 12:00, over and over again.”

  He kept wanting to rattle off a catalog of all the ways he’d get his shit together, starting right now, if he just got one more shot. All these things that he couldn’t actually say: he and Marnie would get off the dope, he’d pay Dieter back for the package he’d been floated, he’d grade his papers, he’d show up to the fucking classes he was supposed to teach—

  “Mark,” Whitmer said, and in just that one word, any last foolhardy vestige of hope disappeared, vaporous as a squirrel fart. That one word, his name, had the finality of the guillotine. Whitmer opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a manila folder. He licked his thumb and leafed through a few pages. Gazing at Sandoval over the tops of those big square glasses, he said, “You mind if I read you something?”

  “Sure.”

  And Whitmer held the
paper before him, squinting, and listed the dates in which Sandoval had been “absent, tardy, negligent or unprofessional in regard to his assistant professorship” under Whitmer’s tutelage for the past fifteen months. Some of them were from Whitmer’s own records, but others, he was dismayed to hear, were from other professors or even, in more than a few cases, his students. Whitmer droned on and on, and then flipped a page and kept going. Sandoval chanced a surreptitious scratch of his arms while the man was busy reading; the relief was simultaneously delicious and gone before it started.

  Whitmer finished reading and set the folder down. Dope sick or not, Sandoval felt the hot flush of shame on his cheeks. He scowled at a cigarette burn in the dirty canvas of his shoe.

  The silence stretched out. Whitmer looked at him, cleared his throat, expectant.

  Sandoval finally lifted his gaze, angry. Whitmer saw it and Sandoval was surprised to see the old man level a finger at him.

  “Listen to me, Mark. You were a fantastic student, and I was thrilled to offer you this position. But this . . . If it was anyone else, you’d have been out on your can a long time ago.”

  “Okay,” Sandoval said, and shrugged. In lieu of scratching, he ran a palm over his stubble.

  Whitmer took off his glasses, set them on his desk. There was a dark purple indentation on the bridge of his nose. “That was a final exam, Mark, and you weren’t there. You understand, as an assistant professor, that the fact that you missed handing out a final exam to thirty-one of your students the day before their winter break begins is a significant event, right? That this has caused significant hardship for people other than yourself?”

  “Don, come on. Of course I do.”

  “Carlisle wants you gone, Mark.” Whitmer put his glasses back on. And that was that, wasn’t it? WCA was not a big school, and if the dean wanted you gone, you were gone. Sure, Sandoval could request hearings, submit letters of appeal, but if the deck was stacked—and they had plenty of his missteps on record, apparently, and Whitmer had clearly stepped away from his corner—he was done.