Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  There was one man who held a bucket in front of him, which I first took to be full of popcorn. The logo on the bucket declared Salty and Buttery. Yum. Upon closer inspection, I could make out the charnel-house spill of his intestines from a gaping abdominal gouge caught in the bucket so the loops wouldn’t trail to the floor.

  A lady held a handkerchief over her face, snuffling into it. When she pulled it away, I noticed she was missing most of her bottom jaw. She dropped the hanky, and one of those efficient ushers seemed to coalesce from the darkness to pick it up for her. He grinned and bowed. His teeth jiggled in his mouth, like Scrabble letters in a cup.

  I turned. Even my date was dead. She was a skeleton with long blonde hair, the current trend for anorexia chic taken to its ghastliest final stage. She wore a red polka-dot dress that barely covered her bones. She kept running the stiff white sticks that were her fingers up and down my thighs. I’ve dated some skinny women and never ever thought twice about the overly sharp definition of ribs like the beams of a tornado-ravaged barn.

  Then the movie started. It began with a chase scene—no beginning credits rolling—just crazy action with tires squealing and mad streaks of million-miles-per-hour surrealness. What? No pretentious scroll of Somewhere in Another Part of the Cosmos in the Land of the Living So Fuckin’ Far Away . . . ?

  I had an ominous sense of déjà vu. Been there, done that. Been there, felt that. My palms were sweating, and perspiration was trickling down the back of my neck like the long wet tongue of a fat ghoul.

  I realized that the car on the screen was my car. And that the truck barreling toward it was the truck that hit me. I could see myself flopping around inside the madcap vehicle. Wreckage from the inside out. At one point there was a close-up of my terrified face, my eyes bulging like that silly rubber doll you squeeze in your fist. This immediately prior to my head meeting with the windshield and rearranging my expression forever.

  “Ah, a biography,” someone commented.

  It looked even worse on film than what I remembered. Poetic license, I guess. What filmmaker doesn’t take certain liberties?

  My car was getting smashed like a bug on a sidewalk. And everyone was laughing. As a sound, it was coughed up in phlegmy wads of black mucus from collapsed lungs. It was snorted out of crumbling sinuses that spewed powder like volcanic ash. It hawked lugies of bile and stewed stomach contents, farted shit and blood from a rotten rectum. It was actually worse than the noise of ripping steel on the screen. Actually more horrible to me than the sound of my own screams stretched out in soundtrack reverb.

  I had to get out of here. The movie was showing—in a curious mélange of film noir black and white with unglorious Technicolor—my car getting hit from the opposite angle. Boom.

  Boom. Boom. Out go the lights.

  My car was struck again and again. Which produced more explosions of laughter as if this were the very height of vehicular slapstick.

  I jumped up in raw panic, but my date tried to stop me. Her bony hand clung to my shirt, holding me down. I slapped at her, and the skull snapped off the ridge of vertebrae with a sickening crunch. Then it rolled down the aisle like a kid’s lopsided ball.

  As I hurried down the aisle, the audience made wisecracks.

  “Wait. This is the really funny part. You don’t want to miss it.”

  “Don’t ya like comedies? I’m laughing my ass off and my lungs out.”

  “Come on, bud. Just tell yourself: it’s only a movie, only a movie.”

  One of the ushers stepped from the shadows, his shape congealing out of thick curtain and theater night. His face shimmered with illuminated effects from the movie. I could see my car getting struck and torn apart on his features as if they were a curved screen. And there, reflected on his huge spit-shiny teeth was the film version of me screaming in his mouth.

  “There is no leaving before the end. May I show you back to your seat, sir? This way, please, this way.” He grinned, reflecting my pain-twisted face back at me.

  I struck out, a hard right punch to his midsection. My fist sunk into him as into a soft mound of yeasty dough. He doubled over, all his teeth falling out and striking the theater floor—tink, tink, tink.

  Another usher emerged from the shadows, sweeping them up with a whisk broom and a dustpan.

  I rushed to the exit but found the double doors locked. At that moment the dead audience members sprang from their seats and staggered toward me. They were slow and ungainly like those George Romero zombies again. More gruesome than the walking corpses in the gritty sixties Night of the Living Dead, they looked more like the lurid, mall ghouls in the groovy seventies Dawn of the Dead.

  Somehow I couldn’t outdistance those goddamn slow zombies, as if there were different rules in play here for use of speed and progression through space. The living were restricted to what they could perform, but there was no limit to what the dead might manage. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. And in the semidarkness—with only the glow from the movie as it replayed in slow-mo, with pratfall special effects, the horror of my accident—they looked even more vicious and bestial hungry.

  My headless date was in the front of the crowd, the red polka dots on her dress looking more like blood spatters on a coroner’s shroud. She grabbed my shoulder and started shaking me.

  “I’m sorry but we’re closing in a few minutes.”

  I opened my eyes. My heart felt like it was going to pound right out of my chest, but there was nothing to be afraid of. No bony claws, no zombie legions. Just the assistant librarian shaking my shoulder. She had a head, flesh on her fingers, all the usual Land of the Living stuff.

  I cleared my throat, rubbed my eyes, and said, “Oh. Okay.” I grabbed my philosophy and math books and stumbled to the checkout counter, handing her my card.

  The assistant librarian scanned the books, then stamped them with the due date.

  At that moment, I had a vision of this assistant librarian in a Honda, pumping the brakes, pumping, pumping, even as it became an exploding fireball.

  “These books are due in two weeks,” she told me.

  I was simply standing there, gawking, limbs gone rigid from the image in my mind. What was happening? What was I seeing? What new slice of hell was this? First, zombie theater patrons, now flammable librarians.

  “Yes? Something else?” she asked.

  I swallowed spit to open my throat, which had suddenly gone dry. I managed to say, “Do you drive a Honda?”

  “Yes, I do,” she replied, startled.

  “You better get your brakes checked.”

  She laughed. “Now you sound like my ex-husband.”

  Ever since the accident, I found myself having more and more weird moments like that. They were like the things I saw on shows like A Haunting, which I’d always thought were so much bullshit.

  It had started a few weeks after I began living with my stepsister. I knew what the next song on the radio would be before it played and who was on the phone before the caller ID revealed the name on the digital display. Shame I couldn’t guess the numbers for the next lottery drawing, but fate and near-death hangovers are too selective for fun and profit.

  But this was different. I saw the assistant librarian’s death, and it was a ghastly one. Too close to what I’d experienced myself—only hers was pyrotechnic on top of it. No amount of therapy could put ashes and charred sticks of blackened bone back together.

  This scared the shit out of me. But what could I say? “Excuse me, but you’re gonna fry.” Or maybe I could have gone all young Jerry Lewis spastic nerdy on her. “Be careful, pretty library lady, with the hurting and the burning and the Honda going kerplooey.”

  There’s no easy way to tell folks they’re doomed.

  On the other hand, there was no easy way to tell myself: Dude, you’re going crazy. Southern fried shit house rat with a side order of belfry bats crazy.

  I had to know if what I’d seen was really going to happen.

  As the sun
set bloodred, courtesy of the gory glorious Dallas dust and pollution, the color of the sky made my Barracuda look even more menacing.

  I got in and rolled out of the parking lot. Paused at a light, I looked out the window, and something up in the air caught my eye. Perched along a telephone line were several crows. They stared down at me with their baleful, dull black eyes. They rustled stiff, dark wings that reminded me of black leather jackets, like a gathering of Goths outside a blood-sippers’ nightclub.

  I’d once read that crows were harbingers of death. I shuddered, tensing my hands on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change, afraid of nothing more than one of those filthy birds taking a crap on my precious classic car. I looked around, wondering if anyone would see if I ran the light. Luckily, no birds dumped.

  That was another thing that had started happening since the accident. Every now and then I would see those big black birds gathering. I first spotted some crows outside my hospital window, doing sentry duty along the ledge, peering in, eyes shuttering like cameras, taking photographs for a progress report of my slow undoing. They seemed to be watching me at other times, too. I’d noticed them while I was taking my prescribed walks. They would circle overhead or peck at some dead and unrecognizable roadkill only a few feet away.

  I hated myself for feeling so paranoid, hence crazy, but I couldn’t help thinking that those damned birds were following me.

  I found a parking space and sat in my car, gazing at the white Honda Accord across the street in the faculty parking lot. It had apparently spent some time on the Gulf Coast, because it was pitted all to shit with rust, making it look like it was covered with red polka dots. Like the dress on my date at the movies in the Land of the Dead.

  I knew what was going to happen. I should have just gone home. There was nothing I could do. Like I said, people don’t like being told they’re going to bite the big one, and I’m not talking about a Quarter Pounder. She would have never believed me. She probably would have called the cops. There were stalking laws, and I would have been thrown out of school.

  Do understand that I really almost got out of the car and ran across the parking lot, shouting, “Wait. Don’t drive that. Let me give you a lift.” Riiiight. I’d have found out exactly how much she’d learned at those martial arts classes she might have been taking. I could just imagine her on the phone that night: “Mom, you’d have been so proud of me. I kicked a weirdo in the nuts.”

  It was like sitting ringside at a circus watching the trapeze artists sailing back and forth, then you notice that one of the ropes on a swing is badly frayed and there’s no net. You’re paralyzed, you know? It’s a combination of helplessness and voyeurism that marks us for the useless race we sometimes are. Still, I was compelled to see the events unfold with my own eyes. I had to be sure.

  The assistant librarian opened her door and got inside the rusted car. Maybe she had lived in Galveston until recently. Perhaps she was addicted to lying on the sunny beach, soaking in the heat. She might have been fond of deep-sea fishing; I don’t know.

  She pulled out of the Richland College parking lot and turned right onto Walnut Street. I started my car, got on the road, and tailed her from a respectable distance—far enough away so I didn’t look like a stalker, a creep with a plan, a freak drooling and waiting to watch her die horribly. She turned on the Honda’s headlights. I kept mine off, driving with the dusky brilliance from the setting crimson sun.

  I flipped on the classic rock station The Bone KDBN 93.3 FM and heard Jimi Hendrix playing the fuck out of the guitar on “Traffic Jam.” I enjoyed listening to the radio while behind the wheel, especially the oldies—rhythm driven, physical as a V-8 engine.

  After you pass Audelia Road and before you get to Friendship Park, there’s a railroad crossing on Walnut Street. The guardrails were down and the lights were flashing. I could hear a mournful baying, the warning of the train flashing down the tracks, silver sides reflecting red streaks from the sunset until the train seemed to be on fire.

  I turned my car around and watched in the rearview mirror as the Honda tried to stop. The brakes were jammed up. The rusty car crashed through the rails and into the side of the speeding locomotive. The impact caused a giant fireball, like the one I’d seen in my vision. Part of the train was in flames, too, dragging the Honda along, setting alight dry grass. The engineer was trying to stop, but it would take hundreds of feet before the leviathan could slow down.

  I didn’t even blink, unable to close my eyes. So I’d followed along to see this, and now I couldn’t turn away. The Honda looked like a crumpled beer can in a bonfire. Hanging out of the driver’s front window was the deep-fried body of the woman, soaking in the heat.

  I wanted to tell someone about the hell dreams and the visions and the crows. To be specific, I wanted to tell Moose, since he was my best friend. I sure wasn’t going to tell Connie. My relationship with her was freaky enough.

  But like there’s no good way to tell someone they’re doomed, there’s also no good way to tell someone, even your best friend, that your life is turning into a supernatural sideshow. He wouldn’t believe me. Who would? He’d only slap on that frog sock puppet and tease me.

  Car crashes? “Boom, boom, out go the lights.”

  That’s exactly what he’d say.

  I turned right onto Audelia Road to take the long way home. I needed time to think. Now I turned the headlights on. I heard sirens, but there was no way I could wait around to be a witness. What if I babbled that I’d “seen” it was going to happen? They might think I was nuts or high from abusing my pain meds, giving them an excuse to yank my license. What if they found out I sort of knew the woman from the college library? And then they’d decide that maybe I’d tampered with her brakes.

  What if her ex-husband had tampered with them? I didn’t see that in the vision, only that the accident was going to—no, had—happened because something was wrong with the brakes. Hey, there were a lot of reasons not to get involved. There were a lot of reasons to go home and hide under the blankets.

  On the radio was Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”—bombastic bass and drum rhythms, swirling guitar line mixed with an Eastern string section. Shades of mystic percussion, the kind that made you think of visionaries and the veils between the worlds.

  The music suddenly stopped.

  A voice said, “You can’t fight destiny, boy.”

  “Who’s in here?” I said, peeking into the backseat.

  Nobody there.

  The music continued. I must have imagined the whole thing. Maybe I was abusing those pain meds. That was an easy explanation, neatly wrapped up.

  But, somehow, I didn’t believe it. Too much other strange shit was going on for a tidy excuse like that to be the answer.

  I’d heard the voice loud and clear. It sounded like an older man who had spent too much of his life smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey. An I-eat-sandpaper-for-breakfast sort of voice.

  Was I getting weird like Grandma, with all her talk about dreams telling her crap? Hey, everyone has somebody in their family like that, right?

  Then something occurred to me. Maybe Moose had hidden a walkie-talkie in the car. That Moose, always the prankster, with a touch of sick fuck.

  “This ain’t no joke, boy,” the voice said, as though it were reading my mind.

  I then realized it was coming out of my car speakers. I turned the knobs on the radio, but it didn’t do any good. “Who are you? Stop calling me boy.”

  “It’s your old buddy Frank Edmondson.” The voice gave me a ragged, sadistic little laugh. This wasn’t Moose’s handiwork. There was something hateful in that laugh. Repulsive. Evil.

  The name was familiar. And he seemed to know I was thinking it, because then he said . . .

  “Boy, where do you get off, fucking my wife and driving my car?”

  I slammed on the brakes. Good thing there was nobody immediately behind me, because they’d have plowed right up my ass. That was all I neede
d—another accident. I threw open the door and scrambled out of the car.

  I stared in complete confusion at the Barracuda. Then I realized I was standing in the oncoming lane, and cars were heading my way.

  I had to get back in. Had to do something. Couldn’t just stand here like a jackass.

  So I took a deep breath and climbed inside. There were no voices on the radio now. Just Led Zeppelin.

  I shifted into drive and headed home.

  PART TWO

  DANGEROUS CURVES

  TERROR OF THE HEART

  the feeling of love

  like fluttering butterfly wings,

  giddy, fanciful, lighter than air

  maybe it aspires so, but

  it resembles more

  the gnawing of fear,

  like the conqueror worm

  coiling in the gut

  wound tight around your heart

  squeezing, squeezing

  until your very breath is gone

  —Teri A. Jacobs

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MONSTER

  I was tempted to get rid of that damned car after hearing Connie’s dead husband talk to me over the speakers.

  I was sure as shit that this was, in fact, a supernatural occurrence. I wasn’t hearing voices in my head. Wasn’t whacked-out on my pain meds. Wasn’t turning into a psycho. It had to be, therefore, and to wit and whatever, a genuine fucking haunting, warts and spooks and all.

  I felt like one of those people who live in haunted houses—like in those Amityville “based on a true story” movies—who stay for so long, no matter what. They’ve been groped by icy hands and terrorized and threatened by phantom goings-on, ghostly writing on the walls, and blood oozing out of the refrigerator’s ice maker. The kids even get pinched, scratched, pulled out of snug little beds and thrown across the room. And their dolls burst into flames with plastic heads spinning around in the teen Linda Blair tradition.