“Don’t question the devil’s authority—or mine,” the man said with a laugh.
“Dad,” I shouted. “Mom. I want to ride. Tell him I can ride.”
“He’s not that short. Really, I don’t see what harm it would do to let him have just one ride.” Mom gave the man her best
oh-pretty-please face.
“The boy’s been looking forward to it,” Dad said, fishing a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket. “Maybe this will cover your safety fees.”
The man shook Dad’s hand, palming the bill in the process. “Pleasure doing business with ya, sir. I can see the boy’s a slave to the wheel. Who am I to stand in his way?”
A few minutes later, the man lowered the metal safety bar across my lap. While he was leaning over me, I noticed he had beer on his breath. I was still carrying my toy horse Dr. Midnight, and the man spotted it. “Hang on to your horsey. I ain’t buying you a new one if you drop it.”
He loaded a few teenagers in some of the other seats, and soon the ride began.
I waved at my parents, and they waved right back. The two of them were smiling with so much pride you’d have thought I was manning a rocket to the moon.
Yeah, I was spoiled.
At first it was cool, looking down at the whole carnival, but after a couple minutes I found it pretty disappointing. The carnival really wasn’t all that big, and the aerial view only brought that to my attention.
Suddenly I noticed Maddy and the two big blondes standing by Mom and Dad.
“Look, Dr. Midnight,” I said to my toy horse. “That girl is going to fall in love with me. She won’t cry anymore after we get married.”
The Ferris wheel kept spinning, and I moved Dr. Midnight so he could get a better view of Maddy. But then the ride jerked, and the horse slipped out of my hands.
He fell onto the bar and slid down it a ways, and I squirmed in my seat to reach him. But then he fell forward off the bar. I was at the top of the ride at the time. I lurched forward to grab him—after all, the attendant wasn’t going to buy me a new one—and the whole seat pitched forward, too.
I was flung right out of my seat. I guess I really was too small to be held down by that bar. I was thrown out at an angle, so I didn’t fall straight down onto one of the other seats.
I sailed out toward the carnival, screaming, “Nononononononononono.”
Down, down, down, down, down, howling my denial like Lucifer falling out of heaven, toward a very beautiful, very surprised young lady with auburn hair and beautiful green eyes.
When I hit her, I heard a loud snapping sound.
But it wasn’t me who’d snapped.
Then everything went black.
When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed.
I received a slight concussion and some sprained joints, but I didn’t break any bones. Unfortunately, Maddy hadn’t been so lucky. Breaking my fall had broken her spine.
I never did get Dr. Midnight back.
Mom and Dad were talking to a doctor and to a police officer who was crying; I guess he knew Maddy. He had really bushy black eyebrows and funny teeth. They seemed to have stripes on them. Little yellow and light brown stripes. I found out years later that some people get teeth like that if they grow up drinking water with too much natural fluoride in it. Others get teeth like that from taking certain medications as a child.
He stared at me like I was a murderer. I remember hearing him say he thought all of us should “get the chair.” A horrible image passed through my mind: an entire family strapped into an electric chair, with old bushy brows pulling the switch, frying the family into one stinking, charred, coal-black mass. The family that fries together, dies together.
While Mom and Dad were talking to the doctor and the
policeman, I noticed I had a hair caught under one of my fingernails. It was snagged in a break in the side of my right thumbnail.
A long auburn hair.
I remember that hair. Everything else was foggy and fuzzy and swirling away from me, but that single hair was in sharp focus.
I felt much better a couple days later, so my folks decided to continue on to Grandma’s house. I guess they had worked through whatever legal difficulties my accident had caused. Actually, I suppose if anyone had been guilty of any sort of illegal behavior, it would have been the attendant. Negligence. A shocking disregard for public safety. Utterly deplorable.
We didn’t stop at any more carnivals on the way.
At one point, I fell asleep in the car and had a nightmare. I dreamed that I was on the Devil’s Spinning Wheel again, and it was spinning as fast as hell, flinging off all the other passengers. But I was safe because I was strapped into my seat with huge ropes of auburn hair wrapped round and round my limbs. I looked down and saw a wasteland of flaming rocks and glowing sand, and yet about a block away was a quaint little neighborhood grocery store. Mom came out of the store, and even though she was way far away, I could still hear the nonsense song she was humming. Suddenly a black pickup roared over the rocks and sand, plowing into Mom as a twisted silhouette behind the truck’s wheel laughed and laughed and laughed.
We eventually reached our destination, where Grandma proceeded to fawn all over me. My folks had called ahead to tell her about the accident, and she wanted me to talk about it. She was one of those people who think you have to talk about every little thing right there and then, so it doesn’t fester inside you and become a trauma, obsession, whatever. I told her everything except the nightmare. I didn’t want to scare her. The details in the dream had seemed so crisp. So real.
Grandma was sick, but hey, she still enjoyed herself. One day my parents went to run an errand, and Grandma, cuddled in a stack of pillows on her bed, said, “Be an angel and go get me the bottle under the sink in the basement and the orange juice from the kitchen.”
I fetched the juice, then the bottle. The contents looked like water, and since it was that clear, I’m guessing now it was actually vodka or gin.
She made herself a drink out of the orange juice and the booze and said, “That’s the stuff. It’s time for Grandma to take her medicine. Be an angel and put the bottle back where you found it.”
I thought I was being an angel, but in fact I was more of a bartender.
After I’d hidden her booze, I returned to the bedroom. Grandma was braiding her long white hair when I entered. She looked very pretty and girly. The drink had brought some color to her cheeks. She turned to me and said, “Do you ever have funny dreams?”
Because of my recent nightmare, I didn’t want to answer the question in case she wanted details. So I said, “Why? Do you?”
“Oh yes. Lots of dreams. Dreams that . . .” Grandma looked me in the eye, and her face suddenly went sad. “Dreams that tell me things I don’t want to know. My grandma used to have dreams like that. I was just wondering if you do, too. Have those dreams, that is. Maybe they skip a generation.”
I asked her what a generation was, and she explained that, and then she started talking about her hair and the various ways she’d worn it over the years, and we never did return to the topic of dreams.
But that made me worry more and more about my nightmare.
A few days later, Dad came into the living room and threw himself down on the couch, blubbering and crying his eyes out. I was only ten, but even then I thought he was acting like a baby. I just watched him for a while as I played with my toys, not sure if I should say anything.
Eventually Grandma came into the room, sat on the arm of the couch near his head, and asked in a quiet voice what was wrong. Dad wiped his nose on a cushion and said a hit-and-run driver had killed Mom right outside the grocery store less than three blocks away.
I started crying, too, but I wasn’t surprised. I’d already seen it in my dream. I kept right on playing with Captain Bravo and my little toy sports car.
PART ONE
CRASH AND BURN
FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS
Oh, please, whatever you do,<
br />
don’t let your friends drive
dead.
They run over fire hydrants,
dogs, nuns, homeless people,
whatever.
Just last week, a dead guy
ran over me, and now I’m all
maggoty and itching to hit
the open road, or better yet,
a busy intersection.
Won’t you help?
Won’t you please help?
—Jeremy Carmichael, poem for English composition
CHAPTER ONE
THE LAND OF THE DEAD
Fast-forward twelve years later.
I was no longer a bratty kid going to carnivals and falling off Ferris wheels. I had entered adulthood and was attending the University of Dallas, and the only falling I was doing was falling in love with a beautiful coed named Sheryl. Then came the turning point, a Tuesday I think it was, when I was driving around town, delivering pizzas, because that was my crappy job at the time, and I died behind the wheel.
I couldn’t believe it—it happened so fast. I saw the truck barreling toward me and heard the screeching tires. I didn’t even have a split second to consider how to get out of the way. There was no avoiding this. The truck was a juggernaut, and the intersection at Harry Hines and Northwest Highway was kismet.
My ears were filled with the tortured whine of metal colliding/crunching/crushing/combining with even more metal.
There was plenty of blood all over the place. Red, red everywhere.
My heart had stopped; my breathing had stopped. My one-man world of red-hot knitting-needles-everywhere pain was growing darker and darker. It was just like in a bad movie or TV show, where the dying hero or the loyal comic-relief sidekick or the second-choice love interest or whoever gasps and says, “It’s all going black.” Yeah, like that.
There is a moment when any living being knows it is going to die, when life is packing the last of its things and preparing to slam the suitcase. It’s not something that can be delineated into picoseconds or nanoseconds or increments of space-time continuum atoms. It’s just a moment, nothing more. And I knew that I had died. The suitcase had officially been slammed. Case closed, baby.
And then my eyes fluttered open.
I looked up.
I was in the middle of an intersection, but there was no truck. No ambulance. No police cars. No crowding spectators.
It was like the accident hadn’t happened.
But I was still in pain, and my car was still smashed the fuck up with me inside it.
I couldn’t really turn my head but could see enough in my peripheral vision to tell that this wasn’t where Harry Hines and Northwest Highway came together. It wasn’t anyplace I recognized as being in Dallas.
I thought, Oh, this is only shock. I don’t recognize it because I’m in shock. That’s easy. Good to have that explained and out of the way.
I glanced up at the traffic signal, and it looked back at me. Instead of red, yellow, and green lights in the traditional trio, it had just one green cat’s eye giving me this curious look that seemed to say: “Hey, buddy, what the fuck are you doing in the middle of the road?” It had a pupil and an iris, and it blinked at me.
Was this shock, too?
I guess so. What else could it be?
Realizing I had to be in shock actually helped. My brain was playing tricks on me. No sense in screaming or shitting my pants. It was only a dream or some kind of hallucination. It was simply trauma’s way of telling me, “It’s cool, baby, so don’t get weird. Just smile at the funny eyeball and go with the flow.”
Still, I found it disconcerting that the eye was held above the intersection by an elongated severed arm instead of the usual traffic pole.
For about two seconds, that traffic-light eyeball reminded me of something. Something normal and cool.
My job at that time had been making deliveries for Mr. Pizza. We had a cook named Moose—a good name, since that was what he looked and smelled like.
Moose was big boned and kind of sloppy fat, with a flabby gut and a chunky butt, but he also wore little, round glasses and dyed his hair blond, then cropped it real short. Kind of like a cross
between a couch potato and a James Bond villain. He’d fattened up, because he’d busted his knee in high school football. If it weren’t for that, he’d have probably made a fine athlete. But that sore knee prevented too much exertion, and he did like to cook, so there was always plenty of food at his place.
He could get really goofy, which was what I liked best about him. What kind of guy carries a sock puppet in his pants pocket? I always joked with him about how he was “packing a sock.” The puppet was a lime-green frog called Boom-Boom, because sometimes Moose would be working that puppet and he would suddenly croak, “Boom, boom, out go the lights.” Moose didn’t even try to minimize his lip movements. He was no ventriloquist; that’s for sure.
Moose was always getting into trouble, because he liked to make what he called “eyeball pizzas,” and too many customers complained. Personally I thought they were great. He’d heap sliced black olives in the center, put the meat and tomato sauce in a circle around that, and pile shredded white and yellow cheese all around the outside. Presto: a huge jaundiced eyeball. He’d even put a dollop of sour cream on the pile of olives, so there would be a little gleam in the eye. Here’s looking at you, kid.
It wasn’t like he did anything so wrong. If people wanted their ingredients mixed up more, well, all they had to do was mush them around with a fork or their hands if they wanted to get down and dirty. But I guess people don’t like having their food staring at them. That’s why they cut the head off a fish before they serve it; that dead, glassy stare’s not about to improve anybody’s appetite.
But back to my agonizing death.
I tried to grin at that traffic-light eyeball staring at me. But its curious look soon gave way to a distinctly hateful expression—one that said, Now you’re gonna get it, you son of a bitch.
I had to get moving. I sat up, gripped the blood-splashed steering wheel, and put my foot down on the gas pedal. Despite its dreadful condition, the car miraculously started to move. It wobbled like hell but it moved.
So did the eyeball. It followed me like an eye in a haunted portrait in a cheap horror movie, swiveling in its socket, maintaining contact with me until the last second.
The sky looked different. It was bloodred. I’d seen horror-movie skies like that before. It was a Roger Corman sky. A Hammer Films sky.
The road was red, too. Slick with blood, which made that convulsing, fucked-up car even harder to drive. I wondered if I’d lost a tire and was driving on a rim, bumping along like a dog on three legs.
I’d been in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, too, where the soil was actually red. Where, when it rained, the ground appeared to bleed and then form hemoglobin puddles. It was as if Satan had slashed his wrists and all his life fluids were oozing to the surface. But this I could smell, like a swamp of rust, copper, and clots. Nothing that could be confused with a natural odor from any wholesome soil. This was a slaughterhouse stink.
I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. I must have driven away from the accident and not known it, ending up in a part of the city I’d never seen before. And my shock-addled brain was adding freaky new details to the landscape. Boy, was I going to be in trouble, leaving the scene of an accident like that. Even though the truck caused it.
I just kept moving. As long as I was moving, I knew I was still alive. So what if the cops caught me and yelled, “You left the scene of an accident, asshole.” The police would surely take another look and say, “Yeah, but maaaan, are you messed up. Not your fault maybe.” You can get sympathy from people when the Grim Reaper has let himself in your house and is breathing down your neck.
I decided to keep driving until I saw something I recognized. Then I could get my bearings, maybe head for the nearest emergency room. Where I’d been hit, the nearest hospital was Parkland. Hey,
if it was good enough for Kennedy to die in, it was good enough for me, right?
Then I saw the sign on the side of the road. In big red cartoon drippy letters it read, Welcome to the Land of the Dead.
I hit the brake, a natural reaction to something so unexpected. The car started to wobble, then shake and slide all over the goddamn place; the bloody road had no traction. I was sliding straight into hell. I might as well have been trying to drive through slush. Or roadkill.
On either side of the road were curbs made of some yellowed, bony substance, rising like the pointy spines of impossibly long prehistoric snakes, bisected only at the intersections. And dipping down next to these—between them and the street of blood—were moderate scoops like normal streets for rain runoff to sewers and such. Except with the thick crimson coating of the road, they
resembled troughs designed for particularly nasty feeding.
Made me sick to look at it. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand and saw a pinkish smear. There was a funny, slick taste in my saliva backwash of moldy Asadero cheese and the organ meat some of the local Mexican restaurants used in their menudo. I had to wonder if I was tasting my brain, because I knew it must have been knocked loose in the collision. The shock had to be getting worse for me to be seeing these crazy-ass scenes. Maybe my brain was filling up with blood, giving everything I saw a crimson tint.
No, that wasn’t possible. But the notion gave me another wild bout of nausea.
I continued sliding down the road, and frankly, it was embarrassing. I mean, we don’t get a lot of winter shit in east Texas. When we do—in ice and sideways winds—we don’t know how to drive. The whole Metroplex becomes a bumper-car rink with only the Yankees driving slow and sure on it, laughing at us.
But I had to remind myself: this wasn’t ice.
Luckily there were no other cars on the road or I’d have careened into another wreck. I wouldn’t have been able to drive away from that one like I obviously had from the first.
Monster Behind the Wheel Page 2