Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  Yet these folks stay in their houses for years, dime-store religious items piled up around them like the walls of a fortress, their cheeks growing more hollow, eyes sinking into their sockets, constantly shivering in spectral cold spots. Even the folks at the Amityville house were there for a long time, considering the stench, flies, and glowing pupils peering in the windows. And we mustn’t forget the countless sequels.

  People stay for good reasons not having to do with the sheer joy of being one out of millions to be given the honor of being frightened.

  They stay because they can’t afford to simply pick up and leave.

  A house is a big investment.

  And so is a car.

  Making new arrangements wouldn’t come cheap. I couldn’t afford another car. That was the downside to the cut-and-run-for-my-life argument. With all my expenses from the accident, my maxed-out credit card, and my student loans—not to mention the fact I was hardly able to work—I could barely afford the Barracuda.

  Ah, but the upside. I had an easy financing plan—no credit background check, no cosigner needed. I only had to bring Connie to a climax, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. And in a hot tub no less, which wasn’t terrible at all. As a matter of fact, I think this particular water sport was doing more wonders for my back than physical therapy. There were pluses to be considered.

  But the real nitty-gritty of my situation boiled down to this: you’re nothing in this country without an automobile. The US of A was built on mobility. If you’re not mobile, then you quickly get left in the dust. Actually, you get left eating the dust. There used to be an ancient people—the Sumerians, I think—who had that as the primary exercise in their hell. Eating dust, that is.

  Was I scared?

  Damn straight.

  But I’d been slammed around by life so much, I figured I could tolerate anything. If I could survive a fall out of a Ferris wheel, hell, what couldn’t I survive? If I could get through being twisted around in a dodge ’em car contest with a truck, then I could endure one measly ghost inside my Barracuda. I suppose I somehow had this faith that the Creator would put on armor and kick Satan out of the automobile for me, leave him on the side of the road eating dirt cookies.

  The very thought that the problem was a ghost—and not me—was kind of a relief. Hey, it wasn’t my fault. Nothing wrong with me. It was that motherfucking ghost.

  That’s all.

  I developed a sense of black humor over the situation. I named my car Monster. I even bought vanity plates to let the world know I was driving a monster. Which was kind of stupid, I guess. Those plates were expensive, and here I was the personification of brokedom. To manage it, I didn’t pay my share of the rent to my stepsister, which really pissed her off.

  I told her lamely, “Well, my brains were scrambled in the accident, you know? Not thinking straight. I am so sorry. Never happen again, I swear.” Then I turned to walk away. I stopped, faced her, and said the whole thing over again. “Well, my brains were scrambled . . .”

  I went through it, waited for the wrinkles to appear in Caitlin’s forehead, and finished by adding with a straight face, “What? Did I already say that?”

  I was a little ashamed, okay? But the vanity plates were like a badge, proof that things were beginning to turn around for me. As the hours turned into days and the days numbered three weeks, the only dead voices I heard over the speakers were the ones off the KDBN playlist.

  I skipped my economics class to meet with Darrin Wagner, an old high school friend of my stepsister’s. He was now a lawyer in Irving and had agreed to see me.

  I had seen a TV commercial for Darrin, and it was all I knew about him, apart from a few vague things Caitlin had told me. The ad had been on late at night and went something like: “Have you had an accident, won the lottery, or need to file bankruptcy? Call Darrin Wagner today.”

  Cheesy voice of God stuff. It didn’t give me a lot of confidence. And when I saw his office, strategically located in a strip mall and sandwiched between the Titsup Topless Bar and Beautiful Nails by Lo etta (the light in poor Loretta’s r had gone out), I had even more doubts.

  Did I say he was a lawyer in Irving? Well, Darrin lived in Irving but practiced on that part of the Northwest Highway that was near the toxic pollution of Bachman Lake. Irving had no topless places. No bars. Like most of the Metroplex, Irving was a loop on the Bible Belt. The flesh places were in Dallas. My guess was, Darrin had always dreamed of having an office next to such a place so he could honestly say, “I see beautiful nekkid women all day.”

  Yeah, walking to and from work across the parking lot.

  I sat in the cramped waiting room, which was really only a partition by the doorway, flipping through a current issue of Robb Report. I wasn’t reading, only trying to appear nonchalant. In reality, my heart was pounding like a heavy metal drum solo, which didn’t mesh well with the twangy country music being played by the blonde receptionist. She had a little CD player and kept repeating “Achy Breaky Heart.”

  From next door at Titsup came the grinding sensual rhythms of—what I assumed to be, anyway—music for dancers gyrating around a pole. The walls and ceiling rippled with it, and I thought I could feel the bones in my hips dissolving.

  “Mr. Carmichael,” said the receptionist as she popped a chewing gum bubble. With the level of class in this place, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her spit tobacco juice. She smiled, but it was as artificial as her enormous bustline. I wondered if Darrin had recruited her from Titsup. “Darrin is ready to see you now.”

  “Thanks, Judy,” Darrin yelled over the divider.

  I walked into a confining office the size of a frat room, crammed with a metal desk, a scuffed computer, shelves buckling under heavy academic law books, and a couple of giant posters of Dilbert—for whom Darrin was a dead ringer. Here, one still suffered from the repetitious nightmare of “Achy Breaky Heart” and the unseen pelvic thrusts of topless dancers. But now sweaty claustrophobia and cartoon desperation were added to the mix.

  Darrin was talking on the telephone when I walked in. He was scrambling to find a particular paper in the trash heap of documents on his desk, and as I fidgeted, he simply pointed to the seat in front of his badly dented desk. I wondered if he’d acquired all this junk at Office Furniture from Crime Scenes “R” Us.

  “I told you before, the check is in the mail. That payment should have reached you two weeks ago, Mr. Kitterman. Stop bothering me at work. It’s against the law to pester folks at their place of business. I’ll press charges if you continue. I’m a lawyer, you know. I’m not some uneducated honky-tonk cowboy who doesn’t know his rights.” He hung up with a sigh of exasperation.

  I felt like bolting.

  “So you’re Caitlin Carmichael’s little brother,” Darrin said, flashing improperly bleached teeth.

  I nodded.

  “Justin, right?”

  “No, Jeremy.”

  “Oh yes. Jeremy. Caitlin told me about the accident and the troubles you’re having with the insurance companies. Insurance companies. They’re like buzzards in business suits.”

  I tried to smile. Then what did that make lawyers? The maggots that got whatever was left?

  “Most cases with an insurance company are a David and Goliath battle. But with you it’s more like David versus Goliath, Goliath & Goliath, Inc. We’re talking three different insurance companies in this case: yours, the trucker’s, and the trucker’s employer’s. Wait. Were you on the job, too? Delivering pizzas? Okay, four insurance companies, including your employer’s.

  “Now, your employer didn’t own the vehicle you were driving. You did. And it was an older model. But you totaled it. If you don’t have at least two thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the car—regardless of the injuries to your body—it isn’t even worth my expenses to take it to court. You see, the insurance companies will claim that if you didn’t have that much damage to your vehicle—even if it was totaled, the value would be low because
of the car’s age—then you couldn’t possibly have been that physically injured. Catch-22, I know.

  “But it gets much worse. In Texas you have only two years to settle the case. As I recall, the accident happened nine months ago. This would leave only fifteen months to go to court. The insurance companies have a battery of lawyers at their disposal and can afford to stall you out. They’ll pretend they never received papers, faxes, or even certified letters you sent them. Did the police give the trucker a ticket?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s typical. Police in Dallas County don’t write tickets for accidents anymore. They just write out a police report. They don’t assess blame, leaving it to the insurance companies to hash out. The insurance companies have got it all sewn up in Texas. Hey, in most states if you get stopped for a traffic violation, the cops ask for your driver’s license and registration. Not in Texas, boy. Here they ask instead to see driver’s license and proof of insurance. Why? Because insurance is king here.”

  The picture he’d painted for me was so grim, it made me feel nauseous. “Is there anything you can do for me right away?”

  Darrin rubbed his nose and cocked a scruffy eyebrow. He glanced down at a salsa spot on his tie. “I can try to get the doctors et al to accept a Letter of Protection—what we call LOP—which basically state that they are willing to wait to be paid until your case is settled. But they don’t have to accept an LOP. They can pressure you all they want for their money.” He turned to the phone and muttered, “Except at work. They can’t bother you at work.”

  He brought his attention back to me. “And if your insurance company—or the company of the person who hit you—is playing the I’m-not-taking-those calls game—then you can’t get those bills taken care of. You’re liable to pay, no matter what shape you’re in. It sucks, but it’s a case where everybody is victimizing you again and again. I’ll tell you what, kid. The medical profession and the insurance companies here don’t have permits to ease human suffering. They’ve got licenses to diddle the helpless, so help me.”

  “So, you’re telling me I’m screwed?” I felt cold panic run up and down my spine. And that was mild compared to the cinder block sinking in my gut. The ceiling and walls rippled, and the damned receptionist’s blaring CD player sank its claws into my achy breaky heart. This was why people went psycho. If I were to casually look around, could I discover something—anything—I might use as a weapon of mass destruction? Was it possible to successfully run amuck with a rusty stapler and a paper-cut-dispensing Dilbert poster?

  Darrin put his hands in the air and wiggled his fingers. “I’m not going to lie to you. It’s going to be tough. We’re talking major balls to the walls here. Since I’m a friend of your stepsister’s, maybe I can make some phone calls and write some letters. It’s not much but it might work.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was the best news I’d heard in months.

  Darrin saw the tiny glimmer of hope in my eyes and seized on it. Smiling like a sharkskin version of Santa Claus, he told me, “Insurance companies sometimes change their tune when an attorney phones them. Just hearing from an accident victim—well, I’ve already gone into how much weight they carry in this state. And I’m known as ‘that ambulance chaser from TV.’ It pays to advertise.”

  “How much is this going to cost me?” I was afraid to hear the amount. After buying those vanity plates, I was pretty much tapped—except for the installment for Connie. And those were sacred funds. Didn’t dare touch those.

  “Gratis. Free. I only collect if you do. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even get them to settle this out of court. If any settlement is reached, my slice of the pie is a straight third of the total. But if it’s sitting lame, I’m out of here. Does that sound fair?”

  I nodded.

  “So, how’s Caitlin?”

  “She’s doing fine. She’s a dental assistant for Doctors Hoshi, Moreau, and Zinn. Helps fill cavities, bleach teeth . . .” I gulped, looking at the bad job done on whitening Darrin’s chompers. Don’t stare, fool. Don’t want to insult him. But he didn’t pay any attention. Maybe he knew his teeth looked like speckled Chiclets and wasn’t too concerned.

  “She told me about her job,” he said. Then he leaned forward—as much as he could on the messy desk—and squinted. “Is she seeing anyone? A lot of chicks dig lawyers, ya know.”

  I could see the angle all too clearly. Darrin was only taking my case so I would pimp out my stepsister. Diddling the helpless . . . I really supposed I had no choice. Almost every lawyer in Dallas County and a few in Tarrant had turned my case down. I had the old my-crap-car-got-busted-and-I-look-like-shit-and-now-no-shylocks’ll-dance-with-me blues.

  “Yeah . . . well, she sort of is.” I was stretching it to call what she was doing seeing. If that was seeing, then Cait needed a Seeing Eye dog. Actually, she was shacking up with different bikers. They all seemed to be called Dog and were constantly busy living up to that name. There was Scurvy Dogg, Junkyard Dog, Sheep Dawg, and her latest was Mad Dog. The biker of the month would move in with us, drinking frosty longnecks and smoking dick-sized joints while Cait was at work. Eventually they grew tired of the free ride, stole some of her shit, and left town. Sometimes they also stole my medications.

  “Well, tell her I said hi. And put in a good word for me,” Darrin said with a wink. If he’d been sitting beside me, I’m sure I’d have gotten a wink and a nudge. “I’ll give you a call if anything develops.”

  He said good-bye, then so did Judy the receptionist, with a long-nailed wave and another pop of her pink bubble gum.

  I tried to feel upbeat, even bowing in my crippled fashion to a couple of megaboobed ladies exiting the bar next door. A glimmer of hope was still better than no hope at all.

  I convinced myself to stay in a good mood as I drove on 635, the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway. I always referred to it as Fascination Street, because something fascinating was always happening here. I didn’t even mind when a semi cut me off and when I kept getting behind people who drove like old folks fuck.

  I even managed to laugh when I saw a red Mustang whipping in and out of traffic, zipping into tight spots where there was almost no room for him, racing up behind people to cling to the air only three feet behind their bumper, then blowing his horn because they wouldn’t speed up. Across his back window was plastered one word in silver vinyl: Aggressive.

  The radio was cranked up full volume on KDBN, and the song “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf was playing. The butt-shaking beat of the drums was offset by a trippy Hammond organ and soaring guitar solo that all merged perfectly in a kaleidoscope of sound. You don’t hear groups like Nickelback or Godsmack or Insane Clown Posse sounding like that. When I went to the University of Dallas, I used to get shit from my friends for liking old-school rock, but I’d grown up listening to my mom’s records. Real vinyl even. I’d inherited her taste in music as well as her albums.

  A commercial for a brake company came on with squealing tires and then the sounds of a crash, metal crunching metal for several seconds so loud and close it seemed to be happening in my lap. It caused everything in me to clench as I slammed on the brakes—shit, I was lucky Aggressive hadn’t been snug up to my tailpipe—freaking out, sure it was happening all over again.

  I pulled off to the shoulder of Fascination Street and told myself it was only an advertisement, but fear and sense memory had a stranglehold on me. It was a case of major dream-state horror. I relived the whole accident again and felt the pain being reborn in my body—every place a bone had been reset or a stitch had been sewn or a skin graft had been knitted. I heard my spine crackle with electricity, a shuddering static that popped every vertebra like a knuckle. My face seemed to slide down to my chin, carved away at the edges and flayed off with windshield scalpels. I could feel the cartilage in my nose melt, soft as a taco chip wilted in a bowl of chili. And there went my eyes, washing down in blood from bursting capillaries and mucus from suddenly divested sinuses, floating bene
ath the collar of my shirt.

  I gripped the steering wheel as tight as I could, sweat pouring down the sides of my head. That was probably what I thought was my face melting away into zombie goo. My eyes were closed tight, and I opened them up just enough to cry.

  A radio ad spot for Hulting Jewelers came on. Something about meaningless romantic nonsense and I started to come down to earth. There was no accident, except the one I’d nearly caused by suddenly pulling off to the highway shoulder. Everything was okay. But when you’ve been through hell, even okay can seem like a complete impossibility.

  I was finally back in Garland. I felt like a demented Dorothy clicking her ruby-red slippers together in Oz and repeating: “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

  I was in dire need of some cash, so I pulled Monster into the drive-through ATM at MetroBank, the unlucky recipient of all my student loans after graduation.

  While punching the pin numbers to get into my account, I noticed the keypad was in Braille and that made me laugh. I mean, blind people at a drive-through. Have we become that politically correct?

  Several wilted bills spat out of the ATM. I tucked them into my front pants pocket.

  I didn’t feel like paying Connie a visit, but it was time to pay the fiddler—or should I say, I had to fiddle around and pay her afterward. A weird automotive variation on prostitution. It was the reason I had Monster in the first place. Fiddle diddle. Diddling the helpless. Ha, no way was Connie helpless.

  “Mas tequila. Mama needs more tequila,” Connie said, slurring the m’s and t’s out of all proportion with the vowels.

  I always hated it when she said “Mama this” or “Mama that.” Probably because she was so close to my own mother’s age and I felt like a nasty nekkid boy, slicked down from head to foot in incest-spawned bacteria, spewing devil-headed sperm into her sterile womb. Sorry, boys, no eggs in there for you to ram with your goat-horned microheads. Thoughts of highway crashes and melting eyes merged with naughty visions—blind ones, of course—of Oedipus wrecked.