Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road

by Rio Youers

  The train was a cyclops with one giant beacon that shone, dim and ghostly, through the morning mist. It moaned and shrieked, slowing as it approached, belching plumes of smoke. I thought it looked like a thing out of time but had little opportunity to dwell on the peculiarity of it. The engine passed, a distorted head with too many teeth, long and black and riveted, arranged into an unnatural smile. A few railcars followed after it, each one passing a little slower than the one before, until the metal behemoth let loose a final scream and stood still before me. There, in an open box car, with his legs dangling from the side was the Gentleman. He grinned out at me, much the same way the engine had, and I wanted to vomit.

  “Did you think on it?” he called out.

  I couldn’t speak a word. I sat frozen with confusion and swallowed hard.

  “What’s that you say? I can’t hear you. Roll down your window.”

  I opened my door and swung my legs out and stood to my feet before I realized what I was doing. I didn’t feel in control of myself. “I’m dreaming,” I blurted.

  “You have some shit-ass dreams, then,” the Gentleman said. “Do you want my help or not?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a shit-ass liar, too.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how come your eyes are saying you do?” He hopped from the boxcar and walked toward me.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “Stop what?” he put his hands into the air, showing his empty palms, doing his best to appear harmless.

  “What do you want?”

  “Not much at all,” he said. “I need to deliver a message and I need you to help me deliver it.”

  “I don’t have time to help you. I told you, my mother is dying, and I need to get to her. Now. Right now.”

  “Well, now that’s convenient because that’s just exactly where I need you to go.”

  “What?”

  “Your ma a church-going woman?” he asked, stopping just short of my car, resting his hands on the hood and leaning into the question. He gave me a look like he had something to sell. Something he knew I’d want to buy.

  “The goingest you ever seen. What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked, shaking my head.

  “That’s about what I figured. I need to talk to her.”

  “Yeah? Good luck with that. She’s old-fashioned, man,” I said. “She’s not going to talk to a strange dude. Especially not some hippie-looking motherfucker like you.”

  “I didn’t say she had to talk to me. I’ll do the talking. All she has to do is listen. One sentence. Five seconds. Then I’m gone, and you’ll get another shot at that girl you’re missing. You have my word.”

  “What sentence? What do you want to say to her? And why my ma? She ain’t nothing to nobody.”

  “Can’t say,” he said. “Now listen, you don’t stand to lose a thing here, but you sure as shit have something to gain. I’m not gonna lay a finger on your ma, and hell, she’s knocking at death’s door anyway. What can I do that’ll make it any worse, huh?”

  “I don’t know, man. This is weird. How the fuck did you even get here? How did . . . that train?”

  “I know this all seems weird. Trust me, I understand, but that’s just how some things are. You’re wasting my time and your time and you’re sure as shit wasting what’s left of your ma’s time. You’re sweating these details—shit that don’t even matter,” he said. “And you wouldn’t believe me even if I did give you all the answers, so can we move on and help each other out or should I hop this train and let you be on your way?”

  “Is this some kind of fetish thing you’ve got?”

  “Okay. I read you loud and clear. Good luck with your shit,” he said, turning back toward the train.

  “No. Wait.”

  Stage Four—Depression

  She hardly looked like the woman who had raised me and my brothers, this pale and fragile thing, but there she was laying in my ma’s bed, wearing my ma’s clothes, and mumbling something low and somber in my ma’s voice. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I knelt on the floor next to the bed and held her hand, watching her eyelids flutter and her lips quiver. I hadn’t talked to her or anyone else in the family in years—had no clue she was even sick—and now here I was, feeling her slip away for the last time. They had stopped calling when gay marriage became legal and I ruined the sanctity of the whole thing by opting in. They had even liked Karen before that, but something about us making things official just set them off. My friend, they always called her, but after the wedding they just couldn’t see themselves calling her my wife, so they decided to call us nothing at all. I hated myself for crying over that.

  I remember the last time she called. She asked me not to tell my brothers. I felt such shame in that moment. The conversation wasn’t anything special, really, just a lot of the usual—her going on about what she had planted in her garden, what was doing well and what wasn’t, but it crushed me to know that such idle chatter which at one time would have annoyed me was now something precious. Something we had to keep secret. Before she hung up, she told me something I know I’ll never forget, no matter how hard I try.

  “I love you, sissy. Even if I can’t say it, I hope you know it in your heart.”

  There came two short raps on the bedroom door and she gasped. Her eyes opened just a little and I could see her pupils scanning from side to side. I stood to my feet and crossed the room to the door. I opened it and saw the Gentleman standing there. He craned his head around the door frame, trying to look into the room.

  “Is she still with us?”

  “Jesus, you fucking vulture. Yes, she’s still alive,” I said, closing my eyes as hard as I could to block out his face. I couldn’t believe I was letting this happen. “Make it quick, okay? She’s completely out of her fucking gourd, so I don’t know how much good it’s gonna do you but knock yourself out.”

  I let the door swing into the room and the Gentleman stepped through. He stood over my ma, looking up and down the length of her. I closed the door and leaned against it, watching him as he bent at the waist, lowering himself gently onto the bed. A pain stabbed my heart when she opened her eyes as wide as she could and looked at me.

  “Why, sissy?” she asked, twisting beneath all her layers of blankets. “Why did you bring him here?” She squirmed, trying to move away from the Gentleman’s approach, but her attempts were pitifully weak and soon he was staring directly into her eyes. He held her gaze for a long moment and dropped his head onto the pillow next to hers. His mouth lingered near her ear and a harsh rasp rose up out of his throat, more insect than human. Her chest began to heave, and she sobbed with all she had in her, clapping her hands over her ears and whimpering. “Sissy, no . . . ”

  I had become Judas to my mother’s Christ—a snake loosed upon the garden. A chill crawled over my skin.

  I pushed myself off the door and shot out one hand, grabbing hold of the Gentleman’s arm. I knew then that I had somehow grasped something I would never quite comprehend. I hadn’t seized the flesh of a man at all, but the horrible nature of a man. He wasn’t warm, and he wasn’t cold, and he wasn’t like anything I could ever hope to describe. He was void. A voice no longer heard by God. He turned and looked at me with a sadness in his eyes as honest as I’d ever seen. He knew what I had felt in him. His gaze fell to the floor and he stepped out of the room. “Thank you,” he said and closed the door.

  Stage Five—Acceptance

  I never saw the Gentleman after that. He left through the back door, walked across the property, and disappeared into the woods out past the pond. Ma couldn’t sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time without terrible screams ripping her from an already fitful rest. She passed just a few days later. Karen arrived in time to say goodbye and she hugged me through the night when I finally let myself feel everything that had been building inside me. She wiped at the tears that fell down my cheeks and smiled at me through her own.

  “I’m so sorry, darlin�
�,” she whispered as she rocked me in her arms. I could feel the urgency in the way she held onto me and I knew she needed me as much as I needed her. “Let’s go home.”

  ROOM 4 AT THE HAYMAKER

  JOSH MALERMAN

  The U-Haul was two hours gone, Evelyn was behind the wheel of her Buick Skylark, a single suitcase on the back seat, fooling herself into considering it light travel when actually she was leaving an entire sullied life behind. Sherry and Mark were driving the U-Haul, younger lovers, excited, it seemed, to be given a road trip, tailor made; moving Sherry’s mother cross country. At last. It wasn’t that they were eager to get rid of her, Evelyn knew better than that; the pair appeared genuinely thrilled at the prospect of hundreds of miles and a radio, no partition between them on the U-Haul front bench.

  “Twenty-five year olds,” Evelyn said, her hands on the wheel of the parked Skylark. “They don’t know yet.”

  She’d been sitting that way, parked, hands at ten and two, her glasses wiped spotless, for the full one hundred and twenty minutes since her daughter and son-in-law pulled away from the curb and disappeared around the first turn on Belcrest. She’d told them not to wait for her, claiming a desire to travel at her own pace, unrushed, giving her time, of course, to process the move. And they surely understood: Evelyn Davies was leaving the house she’d lived in for thirty-one years, since the day she and Bob bought it in 1987, a week after returning from their honeymoon in Hawaii. They’d been twenty-five themselves then and probably looked no different than Sherry and Mark, but boy did it feel like her and Bob were wise while it was happening. Hell, Sherry still liked getting candy at the movie theater and Mark sometimes drank like he was in college. They looked the parts, too. But herself and Bob? Why, they’d been young professionals then, adults on the cusp of a full life together, day one, Bob had called it, a title that came off as romantic at the time but, in hindsight, sounded more like the words of a man making note of the beginning of his prison sentence.

  Day one.

  How many days had he made it? How long exactly did Evelyn share the house with Bob before he . . . before he . . .

  Still with her hands on the wheel, Evelyn looked right, through the passenger window, to the front door of the ranch house she was already moved out of. The window to the right of the front door was where she’d stood for the first two weeks following Bob’s fleeing, right at the very glass, thinking now must be the time he’d come back. Now must be it. It had to be any minute now.

  Or any day now. Or week. Or month. Until friends, good friends, finally got Evelyn to accept the fact that her husband had left her. Not even a hundred day sentence of being forced to live with the woman he’d married, the woman he’d vowed to be there for, through sickness and health, thick and thin. Three months of petty arguments that had developed into seemingly mortal wounds, things Bob either couldn’t or refused to get over; the man hardly resembled the one she’d spent five days with in Hawaii, the carefree and shirtless fellow who seemed primed to climb volcanoes and swim with the jellyfish. Why, on that trip they’d made love twice the number of nights they’d paid for. They’d eaten better than either had in their lives. They’d had fun.

  “Weak,” Evelyn said, thirty-one years later, turning to face the road through the windshield, the road she’d lived on all this time, in the house she’d been left in.

  She started the car.

  She knew why Sherry and Mark were so enthusiastic about this trip from Detroit to Denver. And she knew why they’d agreed when she insisted she drive alone. It wasn’t that they were excited at the prospect of having somewhere to visit. It wasn’t even that they were young and ungrounded enough to want to be in motion, on the road, across America.

  It was because they were ecstatic to see Evelyn was moving on.

  “Move on,” she said.

  She shifted the car into drive.

  She tried not to look back at the house, tried not to think of how it looked in 1987, when the now yellowing bricks were browner. She succeeded, but not without looking to the neighbor’s house, where, thirty-one years ago, a very confident Arthur Morrison stood on his front porch and, work shirt unbuttoned to his chest hair, hands on his hips, thinning hair flapping in the wind, waved to them for the first time.

  Evelyn ended up living next to Arthur and Linda for ten years. They helped her out in the early days, immediately following Bob’s departure. Helped her out a lot.

  “He fled,” Evelyn said. Then she wished she hadn’t. If Sherry and Mark heard her say that, would they think she wasn’t moving on, after all? Would they say she was only . . . moving?

  She pressed on the gas, made it a couple feet, and stopped. It wasn’t easy, no, leaving a place you’d spent more than half your life. A place you’d moved into with hope and were leaving with damage control. A home in which you had gotten married a second time to Larry, had a baby girl named Sherry, and lived with that second husband for four years before he died in an accident at the plant. No, it wasn’t easy saying goodbye to a thing that haunted you for so long, even when another man was living under the same roof, the fact that someone had once left this place without saying goodbye.

  “Fuck you, Bob,” Evelyn said, looking once more to her (not hers anymore) front door.

  Then she drove. Away from the house and the bitter life she’d led within it. But not from the gnawing nagging voice that still, thirty-one years later, would not stop asking . . .

  . . . why?

  ***

  Up Belcrest and a left on Donner and Evelyn wondered if this wasn’t the same exact series of directions Bob had taken so long ago. It was the only way to leave town and there was no question he’d done that much. In a neighborhood the size of Maris Oak, Evelyn would’ve known if he was anywhere near the strip malls and chain stores she’d passed almost every day on her own. Christ, if he’d been living in downtown Detroit she would’ve known. It was easier to find someone these days. Back in ‘87? Hell, Bob Davies up and vanished like a coin in a good magician’s hand. She’d looked for him, when the internet came along, when social media came along, a search that was allegedly accidentally discovered by Sherry, a thing that prompted her daughter to begin talking to her about leaving Maris Oak for a change.

  For a while.

  For good.

  You’re obviously not over it, Mother. And you need to be.

  It was a scary thing, searching for him online. Typing his name into search bars and watching the spinning icons that told her the computer was thinking. She’d checked different spellings, the names of his parents, any place he’d ever expressed interest in seeing, wedding announcements, obituaries. She checked Hawaii because it was the last time they’d had a good time and, often, she imagined him flying back, starting something over again that she hadn’t been aware needed redoing.

  A mile to the highway and Evelyn wished she had a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked since Sherry was born but it seemed like the right time to have one now. She rolled down the window, then rolled down the window on the passenger side, and let the cool Spring air give her the relief she was looking for. But the colder air acted more as an instigator, made her feel tremendously alive, too alive, too awake, as if, for the first time since deciding to leave Detroit, she realized she was doing it.

  Ahead, a hitchhiker on the shoulder of the entrance ramp.

  A dim distant figure but a hitcher, no doubt. Had her thinking back to the late 70s, when something like that was safe, both to do and to assist with. She’d been too young then to offer rides to the people her mother and father passed as they drove from Detroit down to Florida, but she’d wanted to stop, to pick up a stranger, to hear that stranger’s story. To a much younger Evelyn, there was something especially mysterious about inviting an entirely foreign life into the car, sliding over on the bench, making room for a world she knew nothing about. But Mom and Dad didn’t like the idea and Evelyn watched the many figures pass by her window like she might the many doors to so many secrets.
>
  If she was honest with herself, she’d admit she didn’t feel that way anymore. She had no desire to ask a strange man, young as this one looked, into her car. Yet, wasn’t that exactly why she’d arranged to drive alone? To leave her practical life behind? To become someone new, here, at fifty-six? If she didn’t do something just like this, what was she doing at all? Was she planning on driving the eleven hundred miles with her heart and head wrapped in foam just so she could unpack it exactly as it’d been for thirty-one years?

  The hitcher looked younger the closer she got. Had his thumb out the way people used to do. Had a worried look on his face, a thing she could spot from the distance she was at.

  The car ahead of her slammed on its brakes and Evelyn came to a sudden stop, too. Ahead, the young man in a brown leather coat, short dark hair, eyebrows that nearly met in the middle, looked familiar. As if her parents had passed him without giving him a ride, many years ago.

  The car behind her honked as she squinted, trying to make out the man’s features. Familiar, to be sure, but in a way that she didn’t feel comfortable with. As if the man was the son of a friend, in trouble, and here Evelyn had caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.

  Did the man have a sign? Was he homeless? Maybe that was it. Maybe she’d seen him before, panhandling.

  The car behind her honked again and Evelyn saw the traffic was clear, a clean shot to the entrance ramp, no reason for her to be idling in the middle of the road. So she drove, closing in on the young man, the hitcher, as he wagged his thumb out, his face neither hardened by drugs or hard living, after all; a fresh faced youth looking for a ride.

  “Oh!” Evelyn suddenly said. The one syllable was like an inverse hit, as if she’d suddenly hit back at all and everything in the negative space surrounding her body; the inside of the car, the outside of the car, the city of Detroit, her home, her history, her abandonment.