by Jack Ketchum
“It’s just that the Stockyard’s going to be so crowded.”
“I don’t mind the Olive Garden.”
“I don’t know.”
He glanced at her. “You all right?”
She was frowning, her mouth turned down, tight brows squinting her eyes. He heard her fingernails pluck at the styrofoam container.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m driving okay, aren’t I?”
He was doing fifty in a sixty zone, riding the straightaway in the slow lane, the Thunderbird on cruise control, not another car in sight in front of him or behind.
“Yes, dear. You’re doing fine.”
He knew that.
“So? What, then?” he said.
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong. Something’s not right.”
“You worried about your brother?”
Ed had prostate cancer. It was still too early to tell if the treatments were going to take.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
He glanced at her again. The dashboard lights gave off a pale greenish glow. Her face was set, immobile.
He thought for a moment that this was what she would look like dead and then dismissed the thought.
Hell, she’d outlive him by ten years, if not more.
She’s just tired, he thought. Tired and nervous being out this late, with me driving.
We’ll be home soon.
He concentrated on the road ahead and did not look at her again.
Five and a quarter miles behind them Annie Buxton held to a steady sixty in the rented red Nissan and thought about how amazingly clear her head was.
Three weeks ago by about this time at night she’d have been sipping her sixth or seventh vodka and tonic. Or she’d have switched to Stoli straight up. Either that or she’d have passed out altogether.
She glanced down at the gas gauge and saw she was down to a quarter of a tank. She’d make it home to Bradenton. Barely. Who cared?
The point was she was going home.
She considered turning on the radio but it was entirely possible that anything the slightest bit sentimental—hell, any song with the word love in it—would get her crying again. She was weepy these days.
Her sister said that was to be expected. Annie was picking up the pieces of her life and putting them together again and there were so many pieces and so much putting together it would make anybody weepy now and then.
Anyhow, Madge said, you always cry when you realized that against the odds, you’ve survived.
Still she decided against the radio.
It was better to have just the silence and the wind and the highway’s bleak flat sweep in front of her.
She took a Marlboro from the pack on the dashboard and lit it in the orange coil glow of the lighter. Cigarettes were something she would continue to allow herself, she thought, at least for the time being. She’d quit them too one of these days, maybe get the patch. But first things first. Or as all the literature read, one damn step at a time.
My God, the air felt good pouring in through the window.
For a week and a half she’d seen nothing but the inside of her sister’s stuffy bedroom. The first two days of that, she’d spent strapped to the fourposter bed.
Tough love, Madge called it.
You won’t go into a goddamn hospital, okay, fine, we’ll do it this way.
She saw rabbits on the bed with her and snakes who swallowed the rabbits whole. She floated out to sea on that bed, sunk and drowned and rose again. She howled and sweated and hurt and stained the sheets.
Tough love. That it was.
Three weeks, total, at her sister’s house. Most of that time a virtual prisoner, held hostage against her own vices, trapped inside her own feverish sweaty body while she waited for her system and then her mind to clear themselves of the poisons that were killing both her and her six-year marriage to Tim.
Two weeks before Madge would even allow her to light up a smoke.
By then she’d called her sister every name in the book. Early on, even swung at her a couple of times. Even while she knew in her heart that big sister was busy as hell with the nasty job of saving her silly life.
It was only later, when she was sane enough to talk about things, talk until they were both exhausted, endless exhausting exhilerating nights, that she realized she actually wanted to save her life, and that some of the facts about her life, like Tim’s being a respected English teacher while she’d barely finished high school, like the fact that so far they were childless and she was pushing thirty-five, like the fact that at the moment he was busy with his life and she was not, that these kinds of things didn’t matter half as much as she was simply letting them matter. It was wilfull destructiveness. She was obsessing on the trivial and ignoring one great big beautiful fact—that Tim loved her, hell, he adored her. Even adored her when she was drinking.
Though the drinking was poisoning him too.
So many times she’d sent this gentle quiet man into a towering rage.
So many times she’d pushed and pushed at him.
You’re just like Mom! Madge said. You damn fool. You love him to death and he loves you and all you care about is that you’re jealous, that at the moment you’re fucking bored and unemployed and you feel stupid and useless because he’s not. You know how crazy that is? You’re exactly like her! You’re not just missing the forest for the trees, you’re burning the goddamn forest!
She brushed her cheek with her fingertips and, in the oncoming glare of headlights moving south toward her, saw that her fingers came away glistening and black with mascara.
You really are a fool, she thought. You might as well turn the radio on after all. You’re going to be crying anyway. Why not just wallow in it?
She smiled at herself and stubbed out the cigarette and took a deep breath of the warm night air.
It was over. She’d get into a program if she had to—though she’d never been much of a joiner. Anything. There was no chance in hell she’d ever touch a drink again. She suspected there was going to be a lot of coffee around for a while. His voice on the telephone when she called to say she was coming home to him, the break in his voice, the sob when he said thank God, told her as clearly as her own finally steady voice did that nothing was ever going to be the same from here on in.
Lives were to be made as best you could and then remade if necessary.
Not broken.
Never broken.
When he climbed into the car that night George Hubbard didn’t really know what he was going to do.
He was going out for a drive. Going out to shake the blues. Forget about Sandy. Forget about his mother. Get out of the lonely bare condo and drive before he drank too much to impair his judgement or get his ass arrested.
Meandering through the streets of town he was fine. It was only when he turned out onto I-75 that the darkness began to envelop him.
The darkness began in his mind, in some corner of his mind where his mother lived and Sandy lived and mostly, where anger lived and had for a very long time. It reached out from that place to embrace his future, a growing black clot of pain which dimmed his senses and fed itself on ghostly images of future prosecutions by his demon mother, by the authorities, by doctors, images of the long lonely loveless sexless months ahead of him while the AIDS virus ate away at his immunity, of wasting away alone, of bedsores and coma and that single crystal meth spike in his arm so long ago that was also his mother’s demon spike, his mother’s revenge, his mother’s hydra venom, the reality and consequences of which for both Hubbard and for Sandy he had finally admitted to her and which had driven her away from him in horror and in fury.
The darkness inside spread as the AIDS spread, inking his conscience black.
On I-75 it reached out from his fingertips and turned off the headlights.
And then turned him south into the northbound lane.
He was only half aware of the pickup truck going off the shoulde
r. Only that he was still alive and whoever was inside was still alive and that so was everybody else on this miserable planet and that none of these things would do.
He drove.
Within and without he was only darkness.
It was probably the glaucoma. Pete never would have seen it were it not for Jan, never did see the car really or not much of it, her eyes good and fixed on the road ahead, his wife worried, nervous about being out so late, Jan startling him so much when she screamed his name that he stomped on the brakes and wrenched at the wheel away from the black hurtling mass ahead of him skimmed by light and the Lincoln rolled, skidded on its side and rolled again and for a moment they were weightless and then they were crashing down, air bags suddenly inflated, his door caving in and the front fender throwing sparks across the highway, the shoulder-strap harness biting deep into his chest and thighs and pulling his shoulder out of its socket with a sickening thud of pain, the air bags enveloping them both as the car slid and righted itself and rolled to a stop at an angle across the highway.
He pushed his way free of the air bag and looked for Jan beside him but only the passenger-side bag was there, the brown and red remains of his dinner from the styrofoam container dripping over it. Her harness was empty. Had she been wearing it? God! had she had it on her? Her door was wide open, its window shattered. He tasted metal and smoke.
Only then did he panic.
“Jan! Jesus Jan!”
He shoved at his door but it wouldn’t move and pain raced hot through his shoulder. He tried again but he was weak and hurt and then he heard her pulling at it from the outside, calling his name.
“Other side!” he said. “Your side. I’m coming! I’m okay.”
Thank God, he thought. Not for himself. For her.
He got out of the harness and edged himself across the seat past the air bag to the door. By the time he got one foot out on the tarmac she was already there in front of him, leaning toward him, crying and smiling both, her pale thin arms reaching out to him to ease him gently home.
Maybe this is a mistake, he thought.
People just kept going by me.
Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. It was possible.
Near the exit to Toledo Blade Boulevard he pushed it up to eighty, sightless of the speedometer in the roaring dark.
There were lights out there in the distance.
I’ll get flowers, she thought. I’ll make dinner.
Candlelight.
No wine.
Everything new, she thought. People could start over. People could forgive and if not forget exactly they could take up life sadder and wiser than they were and make something good of it, they could make love again and find a halfway decent job and maybe even someday make a baby, she wasn’t too old, she had her health now that the poison was gone and the dark cloud over her life was gone, she had strength.
I’m coming, Tim, she thought. I’m coming home.
I’m alive. I’m fine.
Chain Letter
I’m waiting for the postman again. I promised myself I’d stop that but here I am.
Most days nothing comes. Not even junk. Nothing.
Which is all to the good, I suppose.
I dreamed last night that I’d broken my leg, so I had to take a cab back to my hotel. Which is silly because there are no cabs here and I live in a little house at the end of a long dirt road and there are no hotels here either. Anyhow I took a cab and got distracted, I was looking out the window and I must have let the driver take a wrong turn somewhere because the next thing I knew I was lost. I cursed the driver. I hated that stupid sonovabitch. By the time we found my hotel we were in deadly emnity. I had whined and bullied. For his part he wouldn’t say a word to me.
I got out without paying and went directly into the bathroom and found two old sticks to which I’d attached some rusty nails and I whipped myself over the back and shoulders until I’d done myself real harm.
As I say, it’s all ridiculous, because I live all alone out here at the end of this narrow dirt road, it’s so wild that I’ve got a nest of garter snakes just under my doorstep. There’s a beaver dam thirty yards away. There aren’t any hotels.
Yesterday I waited too. I waited all day long.
Jesus! Shit! Fuck the postman!
Think I’ll go to town.
By the side of the road he saw a child long dead, small birds feeding on its entrails. It was impossible to tell if the child was male or female. It stank terribly. There was a horse with a bullet in its brain further on. Just at the town line he stopped to watch some boys nailing a woman to a barn. He watched for a long time. They had put two nails in each hand, one through the palm and another just below the wrist. The woman was naked. Her blood ran down her arms and over her breasts, which were small and tanned. The boys beat her with thin birch switches about the face and head. One of them pushed his thighs against her but he was still too small.
Mr. Crocker was busy with a customer so he sat down at the soda fountain to wait. In the paper’s op ed page there was a debate over whether whoever finally was to be at the end of the chain letter was determined by chance or personality. A lot of bullshit. Mr. Crocker poured him a cream soda and they watched the building burning across the street. Leary’s drugstore.
“Don’t like that,” said Mr. Crocker. “Could just as well be me.”
“Nobody’d burn you out.”
“Hard to say what some people will do these days, Alfred.”
“You don’t have to worry.” He opened a package of potato sticks.
“Postman arrive up your way yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Been here already this morning. Henley got his letter, y’know.”
“Did he? No, I didn’t know.”
“Got it yesterday.”
“What did he do?”
“Passed it on, of course.”
“That was sensible of him.”
“Wouldn’t expect otherwise of Henley.”
“No. I guess not.”
He finished his soda and paid Crocker his dollar eighty and walked outside. So Henley had got his letter. He wondered how he felt. It was the first time anyone he knew personally had ever got one. He thought about Henley’s shy stutter and wondered. Of course now he was a free man. There was no need for him to worry anymore. Though it must have been a shock nevertheless. Alfred himself had taken to worrying far too much these days. It might be better to have it over with. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he envied Henley.
Though now you couldn’t trust him.
He walked across the street to the cafe. Jamie was sitting there in front of a cup of coffee, squinting at the smoke from the drugstore.
“Damned nuisance,” he said.
“It is.”
“I saw you come out of Crocker’s. He tell you about Henley?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Too bad.”
“You think so?”
“Sure.” He took a sip of his coffee. The mug was all but buried inside his hand. His broad bearded face dipped down to the hand and rose again. You barely saw the transaction. “Henley was a decent enough guy,” he said. “Mean drunk sometimes but otherwise he was fine. Now what have you got. Another bloody butcher. Either that or he’ll be having second thoughts or regrets or whatever and he’ll sit himself in a corner somewhere and wait for the brains to crawl on out of him. Either way we won’t be seeing much of Henley anymore. Too bad. I’ll miss him.”
“I suppose.”
“You’re a cold one.”
“I didn’t know him all that well.”
“Sure you did. Anyway I knew him.”
He ordered coffee just to sit with Jamie awhile. It was too soon to go back. He really didn’t want to go back.
“You ever hear of anybody the same after the letter?” Jamie said. “Damned right you haven’t. They all change. Always for the worse, seems to me. And they call this a religion. Bullshit.”
“There’s somethin
g of a . . . religious nature about it.”
“Sure. In the old days they used to rub shit in their hair.”
“At least there’s the problem of conscience.”
“There is that.”
The two friends sat silent for a moment. The wind had shifted so it was pleasant sitting there. Alfred wondered if Henley had put his name down. Or Jamie’s. The letter might be waiting for either of them.
“See the paper today?” said Jamie.
“Yes. They’re wondering what kind of man it will be who stops the letter. Again.”
“A saint of course.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“What kind then?”
He shrugged. “Some fucking lunatic. Somebody tired, disgusted. No promethian, you can bet on that. Somebody without the stomach for it, without the imagination—I figure suicide is about lack of imagination. Somebody missing the urge to make use of all that permission.”
“You?”
“Hell, no. I’ve got a few scores to settle. Enough to keep me busy for a while. I’ll take my turn. I expect to enjoy it. The freedom I mean. I don’t swallow a word of it but I’ll play the game according to the rules and then I’ll probably blow my damned fool brains out. Far too late for heroics or sanctity or whatever the fuck they’re calling it, but probably it’s inevitable. My imagination will just give out on me. What to do next? Followed by instant remorse. Conscience will hit me far too late to do anybody any damn good but it’ll hit me eventually. And then of course I’ve had it. I think of conscience as a kind of pulling of the blinds, you know?”
“I have no desire to hurt anybody. Nobody.”
“Sure you do. Just wait.”
It was the age they lived in, he thought—but that was hardly an explanation. Somewhere along the line he’d lost the track. It was the age they lived in but how? And why? It was impossible to see an evolution going on from the inside. All you could do was point to its most outlandish deformities, its most hideous incarnations. But the substance of the change lay hidden. Some mystery of the blood.
He walked the same route home.
The woman was still there, bleeding against the barn. He wondered if she was still alive. The boys were gone. The dead horse and the child were gone too. He wondered for what amusement they’d been dragged away. Someone had been using plastic explosive on the second-growth timber along the roadside. Trees cracked and scarred everywhere. No life exempt.