I stop running once I am far enough into the forest to be hidden. Veronica’s headlights shine in the distance. Her interior light goes on, and I know he is rooting around, looking for something to harm me with.
For one terrifying instant, I let myself feel the insanity of my situation. I’m so fucking sick of myself. My weak side bubbles, percolates brown like coffee. I push it down, hold in the pitiful why me? I wrap my fingers in my tangled hair and pull. A hint of red comes away with my fingertips. Blood Sweater flashes through my mind as if it’s the title of a book of poetry or on a movie poster.
Behind me is darkness. In front of me are Lowell and my Veronica, her headlights still shining into the night. I thread through the trees to come out of the woods in front of the van.
At the edge of the dark, dark wood, I put the gun in my pocket. I step into the middle of the road.
I move right into the beam of the headlights, and Veronica is not fifteen feet away from me. Lowell, back in the driver’s seat, turns on the brights. He did not expect me to present myself—a normal girl would stay hidden—and this is part of why he likes me in the first place. I do not flinch. I do not squint. I am not normal. I lower my arms and wait. He could decide to put his foot on the gas, run me over. But he won’t. He will see me. He’ll think that I need him and this’ll make him feel strong, violent. This will be his undoing.
The driver’s-side door opens and his boot hits the ground.
“Lowell, please don’t leave me here.” I sound so sincere.
He says nothing. His boot doesn’t move.
“I won’t make it out of here alone. I’m scared, Lowell. Please. I made a mistake.”
I can’t see his face. The headlights are blinding. I want to blink, but I force my eyes to stay open. They begin to water and I encourage them, spilling tears down my cheeks so that Lowell will see I am weak.
“Radio says there’s a storm coming,” he says. “A big one.”
“Help me,” I whisper.
“Say you’re sorry,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” I’ve said it too fast. I should have paused. Struggled a little with the admission. He is quiet for a long time.
“You are not sorry and you are not scared,” he says.
I rub my cheeks with the back of my hand.
“I know you, Emma Powers. I know who you are.”
I have not told him my last name. In fact, I’ve told him next to nothing real about me.
“You should read a fucking paper. Turn on the news. Buy a milk carton.”
My hand is in my pocket finding the gun.
“I know you, and your brother, Raymond Powers,” he says from behind Veronica’s door. “I know they are trying to find you in relation to his death. I could have called you in a hundred times but I didn’t. I’m your goddamn hero. You need me.”
“I didn’t ask you to be my hero.”
“You asked for a ride. You let me pay your way.” He pauses. “You care about me.”
“I don’t give a shit about you, Lowell. Step away from the van. I’m taking it.”
“I get the impression that you fucked him too. Did you? Your brother? That’s some nasty shit.”
“He was my stepbrother and it’s not your business.”
I have this image of Ray that won’t leave me. It’s this moment somewhere in the mix of the first years of knowing him when we fell asleep in his bed. Both of us kids not yet turned fourteen. I woke up first and there he was next to me. His eyes shut. His lips parted.
“I’m a bad person. I know that. But you’re … you’re fucked up,” Lowell says.
“Get away from the van, Lowell.”
“No,” he says. “They say you’re sick. Like you might need care or something.”
“You can get the shit you need out of the van and let me go,” I say, and bring the gun out of my pocket. I don’t point it at him yet, but I hold it at my side away from my body so he can see it. “Turn off the headlights, Lowell.”
He moves then. First leaning into the van to turn off the headlights and then putting two boots on the ground. The absence of the light leaves us in complete darkness. My eyes are slow to adjust, and I can’t tell if he has a weapon.
“I’ll shoot you in the foot.” I take aim at the space below the shape that must be the door.
“You can’t possibly hit my foot. You don’t know how to shoot.”
He’s right, but the dark woods are making me feel brave. Veronica is waiting to be saved.
I pull the trigger and am surprised by the kickback and how the noise slices into my brain. I stumble, but Lowell’s boots remain firmly on the ground. The bullet has disappeared into the dark.
Lowell slams Veronica’s door shut, but the sound of it is low and distant under the ringing of the gunshot still in my ears, my jaw.
“You have to keep your eyes open when you shoot,” he says.
“I’ll do better next time,” I say.
He steps toward me.
“You’re shaking,” he says. He takes another step in my direction. “I’ll make you stop.”
His offer is real so I shoot again but see no impact and so I shoot again. This time he sinks. Drops backward and stays there. I’ve hit him. It makes me giddy. I did it. I fucking shot you, Lowell.
I walk up beside him and am proud of myself, my face is flushed, my arms strong.
“Lowell?” I’m standing over him. His eyes are clenched shut, his jaw tight. I look for blood. I expect him to gush—blood and curse words rolling forth—but he is strangely silent, as if he is holding it all in, blood and breath and screams, but then he lets go and the moan is long and bubbly. The blood is pooling around the switchblade he’s dropped next to his thigh. I kick the knife away from us and watch it skid under Veronica.
“You fucking shot me.”
“Looks like your leg. That’s survivable. Do you know how to make a tourniquet?”
“Jesus,” he says, but he’s awkwardly taking off his belt even as he’s saying it. He wraps it around his leg near his groin and pulls it tight.
“You’ll have the knife back when I pull away.”
I reach for Veronica’s door handle.
He leans forward and grabs my ankle, pulls, and I lose my balance. The gun hits the pavement and my head hits the van. I’m on the ground looking up at the starry sky before the world goes black.
* * *
When I open my eyes, a dark shape circles overhead. Something come to swoop me up. Lowell’s body is under my legs. I’ve landed half on top of him. Not much time has passed. Minutes? Seconds? We are lying on the asphalt in the dark. Veronica’s interior light is the only illumination. Lowell’s tourniquet is now in place and there is blood on my clothes. I roll off of him.
My head aches but I focus on standing and gaining distance from Lowell.
“You’ll die out here,” he says. “Snow’s coming. A blizzard. I can smell it. You don’t have any idea what you’re up against.”
I open the back of the van and pull out some blankets for Lowell. Some energy bars. A bottle of water. My head is thudding.
“You shot me,” he says when I return. He’s breathing hard now. The pain is getting to him. “Good for you. I didn’t think you could.”
“I could and I did. I’ll get to a gas station and call 911. They’ll be out here in a few hours. Maybe we’ll both live through the night.”
“I’ll tell them who you are and where you’re going.”
“You do that,” I say. The Badlands are close, and what Lowell doesn’t understand is that once I’m there I’ve reached my goal. What happens after that doesn’t matter.
“You don’t know anything about these hills,” he says. And he’s both right and wrong. Ray taught me a lot about them. I know, for example, that they are a small and isolated mountain range with such extensive tree coverage that they look black from a distance. The Lakota Sioux believed that if seen from above, these hills would look exactly like the human heart.
The gun is where I dropped it so I grab it and shove it back in my pocket. I hop inside the van and pull the door shut.
“Emma!” Lowell begins to scream, and it is genuine this time. Terrified. “At least leave me some drugs.”
I crack the window enough to say, “I’ll send help.”
“You can’t let me die out here. I have a daughter.”
“You’ll be fine,” I say, and start the engine. It’s the exact line Ray and I used to say to each other when life got to be too much. The last time I said it was just before I let him die.
TWO
I sing along with “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction as loud as I can. I beat my hurt hand against Veronica’s steering wheel as Lowell’s mixtape gives me voice. With the windows rolled up and the dark pressing in, Farrell’s words keep me driving.
This Black Hills highway, with the dense woods on my right and a bottomless drop-off on my left, is too narrow to turn around on so I keep going up, up, up into the increasing darkness of night before I start making turns onto side roads that I hope will lead me back down.
Harney Peak is the highest point in these black mountains, but if this is 244 like I think it is, Mount Rushmore can’t be more than a dozen miles away. Civilization of some kind should feel closer. There is surely going to be a tourist stop or public restroom. So far, nothing.
Veronica is about out of gas. I couldn’t go back for Lowell even if I wanted to and I don’t want to. There is a fork in the road ahead, a patch of clear black breaking up the otherwise perfect line of trees, and Veronica inches forward toward the dark, turning right just as the moon slides behind a cloud. I flip on her brights. The road snakes through pine trees for a few miles before it becomes more pothole than road.
Something’s up ahead. A building? It shines in the dark despite the lack of moonlight. The road straightens out and Veronica eases into a large parking lot before she sputters to a halt and dies.
“I’m sorry, sweet girl.” I rub the dashboard with the palm of my bloodied hand. The pain zips up my arm, grounding me.
The place is deserted. On the other side of the empty lot, there are two gas pumps, a phone booth, and an old silver dining car. Ray told me about the ghost towns in these Black Hills. Abandoned buildings from the gold rush that still stand, stubborn. He’d hand me facts about a time or place, something dark he was obsessing over, and I’d weave it into a story in which we were the heroes. Ray loved my stories. In them we were powerful, facing the decaying buildings and bodies with equal parts ferocity and humor. This diner looks just like the kind of place he would have given me, putting his head in my lap so I could run my fingers through his hair. Back when I calmed him. When I helped him shut his mind down so he could dream of things not quite so dark.
The moon pushes out from behind a cloud, bright and full, and the diner shines its full silver. Below a row of windows that stretch across the front are the words “Good Food” and above the windows in larger block lettering EARLENE’S DINER.
I put Veronica in neutral. The wind whispers high up in the trees. The only sound. Once out in the cold, I put my weight into her doorframe to push her across the lot. A light snow begins to fall. Veronica rolls grumpily forward.
“There could be gas in those tanks, old girl. I know you’re hungry.” I push Veronica as close to the gas pumps as I can and then jump back into the driver’s seat, pushing down the parking brake with my left foot just before she hits the old-fashioned pumps.
My eyes adjust a bit and the moon obliges by peeking down at me so I can lift one of the gas pumps and apply pressure. No gas comes out, not a drip.
“It might not mean there isn’t any,” I say to Veronica. “It could just mean I need some sleep and sunshine to figure it out.”
The woods are quiet. I let myself notice that now. The forest gives off an unnatural, deafening silence. Ray would say, “This land was promised in perpetuity to the Lakota Sioux in 1868 and then we took it back as soon as we found gold. That’s the silence you hear, Emma My Emma. A silence we white people bloodied ourselves for.” Ray always spoke like that, with the full drama of having been there. Culpable in ways that he could not imagine his way through. And that was his problem, really. In his art and in his mind. Ray would find a horror to circle and he’d feel it with his whole person, researching it until there was nothing left to read and then regurgitating the information in various art forms—painting the same bloody black hole of history over and over again until the obsession became so self-indulgent, so personal and painful that he’d break from the world for a while, shutting himself in his room for days.
Ray was a welder, a painter, a muralist. His best work came from his darkest moments and so I never stopped him when he was in the midst of it. Never said enough is enough. Not until he was exhausted and weepy from lack of sleep. Then, and only then, I’d soothe him. Interrupt the circle of thoughts he was trapped in and talk to him until he slept. I see now that another person, a less selfish person, would have tried to stop him long before he needed me, but I always wanted to see what he’d make next, and if I’d be in it. I longed to be that horror, the thing he obsessed over for so long that he understood and loved all of its truths and ugly spots and yet still wanted to know more. I wanted to be his muse.
A breeze picks up, the light snow floats across the lot toward the diner and the tiny scattering sound, as quiet as it is, breaks the spell. The diner door is ajar, I see that now, and the wind is moving toward it, as if the building is breathing in. Its inhale pulls at my body, tugs at the hairs on my arms.
Then there’s a scraping noise that is not the wind.
“Hello?” I say.
It’s coming from the side of the building. There is a five-foot gap between the diner and the phone booth and from inside that dark hole someone or something is watching me. The sound comes again, like something is being dragged along the diner’s metal frame.
As the moon makes a full appearance, I move to the outside curve of the diner car. I see it. A glare, a shine of silver that isn’t the diner. A pair of eyes, human eyes. Green and bright and peeking out from behind the eyeholes of a mask that looks winged.
The creature stares back at me for one held breath before it turns to run.
I leap forward, five long strides to the edge of the building but I’m standing alone. There’s nothing. No one.
I’m tired. I have to pee. I need sleep. I need perspective. Surely some sunshine will make everything seem doable.
There is a smear of blood on my jeans so wide and thick that I know there is no getting rid of it. It’s Lowell’s. Better-off-dead roadkill Lowell. I move to the phone booth and once inside, see that I am shaking. My hands make the receiver clatter against the metal before I yank it back. I dig into my inside pocket where I keep my medication. A nearly full bottle rattles comfortingly. I take one. Just one pill and the peace of it settles in my throat, my belly, my veins. One pill doesn’t mean I haven’t quit.
Lowell is probably already dead.
There is a dial tone. My heart leaps and I push 911. The numbers beep back at me but then the dial tone returns as if unaware of my request. I try it again. Nothing. This is when I look up and notice the sign in the booth. I pull my Zippo out of my pocket and hold it up high. A big ape of a man with fangs dripping blood, hair all over his face, his arms too long for his body. The words above him big and bold as if announcing a movie premiere: BIGFOOT SIGHTING? REPORT YOUR FINDINGS. DIAL 555.
Like a fool I dial 555.
“Hi and welcome to Earlene’s Diner where the incredible can happen. From finding the best pancakes in South Dakota to finding your own nugget of gold. Think you’ve seen the Sasquatch? Leave us your story and make a wish.”
The voice is followed by a beep and then silence.
“The Sasquatch lives in the Pacific Northwest. I’m not in the fucking Pacific Northwest.” I slam down the phone. My hand res
ts on the receiver and the moon slides out, shines through the glass of the booth like the sun, and there is blood under my fingernails. It looks like dirt. I rub it on my jeans, but the blood is there too. Most of it is Lowell’s and there is no getting rid of it. No calling for help. No finding Lowell again. The pain in my belly shoots through me harsh and fast, and I crouch down into a ball in the booth. The pill isn’t quick enough. Not one anyway. Two would be perfect, but I’m going to hold back. Wean myself.
Ray had an intimate knowledge of genocide and atrocity and the Lakota Sioux were a particular fascination. He built himself up a hatred for humanity so thick it could not be undone.
I push back the pain to rise and dial 555. When prompted, I say, “I shot a man. He’s in the hills. Bleeding out on the side of the highway. Someone should find him before he is all the way dead.”
I stick my hands in my armpits to steady them and exit the phone booth. The snow is falling, fast enough to make me keep my chin down. I put all of my weight into the door of the diner to get it to budge. It shudders with effort, and then stops after ten or twelve inches, stuck solid on the warped tile floor. I slip in.
Once fully inside, I raise my lighter again and flick it back on. The flame doesn’t do a whole lot, but I hold it up anyway for the little bit of light that it does give. It’s a small diner with only a few booths against the front wall and a long counter with a dozen or so stools. I can make out salt and pepper shakers, the coffee station, and strange little figurines lining the high shelf behind the counter. The place is remarkably tidy. The napkin dispensers are full and everything sits in its place.
The air is warm, much warmer, in fact, than an abandoned building has any right to be. I reach into my jacket pocket. The pill is tiny in my hand. What harm can it do? I swallow and the pain turns to a soft, warm fuzz—a ball of fur I can manage, cradle, tickle behind the ears.
I shouldn’t be here. I realize it fully and confidently even as my sweetly dulled senses keep me still. There is a threat here that I can’t see or name. Something that wants me.
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