by Tyler Keevil
Then something crunched, and a big white fist punched me in the face.
chapter 45
‘What about the date?’
‘The date?’
‘Do you know what day it is?’
‘Sunday? No, wait – Monday.’
A man and a woman stood over me. They were both brown and thin and brittle-looking, as if they’d been put together out of twigs. They took turns asking me questions.
‘Well, what month is it?’
I had to think about that one.
‘July?’
‘Close enough,’ the man said.
They both laughed. Nervously. The man held a tyre iron at his side, and was wearing some kind of smock, spattered in black and ochre stains. His wife had a gummy smile, with most of the teeth missing from the lower front row. I was sitting at their feet, leaning back against a concrete pillar. I smelled stale gasoline.
‘How many fingers do you see?’
The man held up three fingers. I could see them clearly.
‘Three.’
He changed the set-up.
‘Four.’
The man nodded and lowered his hand. Just beyond them, I caught sight of my Neon, nosed up against a dumpster. I asked them what had happened. They tried to explain, talking over one another. I heard something about coming too fast into the gas station, crashing, and being knocked out. It took me a while to understand that I was the one who’d done all this.
‘It’s that turn,’ the woman said. ‘It’s too tight. We know it. We’re getting it fixed.’
‘And the dumpster. Sorry about the dumpster. It shouldn’t be there.’
The man pointed at the dumpster with his tyre iron. It trembled in his hand. He might have had some kind of palsy, or he might have just been incredibly jittery.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘I mean, I crashed my car, didn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ the woman said. ‘But you crashed it into our gas station. So, in a way, it’s our fault, isn’t it?’
In my condition, that almost seemed to make sense. I reached up to touch my head, prodding for damage. It felt big and heavy and empty, like a hollowed-out pumpkin.
The man asked, ‘You aren’t going to sue, are you?’
I promised them I wasn’t going to sue. Then I tried to stand. It wasn’t easy. I got my legs beneath me, squatted for a minute, and lurched upright in one motion, like a weightlifter making his jerk. They stayed a few feet back, out of reach, watching me sway. I was starting to remember things, in flashes and snatches.
‘What about the other guy?’ I asked. ‘The biker.’
They exchanged a glance. ‘What biker?’
‘The one chasing me. The one with the gun.’
‘Oh, right,’ the old man said, elbowing his wife. ‘That biker.’
‘He followed me from the mountain.’
‘I guess this is all his fault, huh?’
I rubbed the back of my neck and peered down the highway. The desert landscape I’d crossed was stained rose-red by the rising dawn. I could see for miles, but I couldn’t see any mountain or twin peaks. Then again, we’d driven a long way, during our chase through the night.
‘There was a shoot-out, and a terrible diner, and a hitchhiker…’
‘I’m sure there was, son.’
I shook my head, which hurt, and shuffled over to the car. The old people scurried along behind me, keeping their distance. The Neon’s front bumper had crumpled on impact, and one of the headlights was cracked. The airbag dangled like a deflated balloon from the steering wheel. My cat lay on the passenger seat. Her left ear was bloody, and she wasn’t moving. But when I reached down to touch her, she opened one eye, yawned, and stretched out her paws – as if she’d just woken from a long dream. Bits of glass, tiny as diamonds, were scattered all around her.
‘See,’ I said, pointing at the mess. ‘He shot out my window.’
The woman smiled. ‘Of course he did, dear. Unless it happened in the crash.’
‘And I took this bottle of mezcal from him. It’s priceless.’
I held it up as proof. They both peered at it, then nodded and shuffled their feet and made vague noises of assent and agreement. Neither of them would look me in the eye.
‘What?’
‘Well,’ the man said, ‘they don’t put snakes in mezcal. Only worms.’
‘But maybe yours is special,’ the woman said.
I brushed the glass off my seat, slumped down facing them, and fumbled for my pack of smokes. I couldn’t manage to light one. My grandpa’s Zippo wouldn’t work. It was out of flint, or fluid, or something. Eventually the man had to light the cigarette for me. While I sucked on it they hovered beside me. The man was still holding his tyre iron. He saw me looking at it, and tucked it into a loop on his toolbelt.
‘We didn’t know if you’d be friendly. Thought I might have to bean you.’
‘But he didn’t,’ the woman added.
They still looked nervous, though. I guess living near the desert will do that to you – always waiting for the next nutball to stumble out of the wastes, or crash into your dumpster.
I gestured at my car. ‘Can you do anything about this?’
The guy nodded. He patted the hood.
‘The damage is mostly superficial.’
That depressed me, for some reason. I couldn’t even crash a car properly.
Their gas station had a tiny garage, filled with tyres and oil drums and mufflers and hubcaps. It had a shop, too. The man worked in the garage and the woman looked after the shop. He said he could replace the airbag, repair the headlight and knock the dents out of my bumper, but he’d have to order in a new window, which would take a few days. I told him not to worry about it. I could do without the window.
While he worked on the car, I wandered into their little shop to get us a bottle of water. I splashed some into the cat’s beer-can saucer, and drank the rest myself. It had been a long time since we’d had any water. I couldn’t believe how good it tasted. I went back in and bought three more bottles for the road, along with some dry cat food, and a can of lighter fluid for my Zippo. It was that kind of shop – the kind that sells almost everything.
‘Is that all?’ the woman asked.
‘I’ll take a postcard, too,’ I said, ‘and a stamp.’
I sat by the gas pumps to wait for the Neon. While I did, I shook some food out on the ground for the cat, and refilled my lighter. Then I wrote on the postcard. I didn’t write very clearly, or very much. I just needed to write something, so I wrote to Bea again.
Beatrice.
I’m still alive, still on my way. I don’t know if any of this is helping or what. I got lost in the desert for a long time. There were no women out there and it was a terrible place, full of men and testosterone and loneliness and aggression. I’m out of it now, though. I found a cat, too. I’m bringing her with me, if I ever get there.
From Trevor, in the middle of nowhere.
That’s what it said on the postcard: The Middle of Nowhere. The backdrop was a generic desert photo of cacti and tumbleweeds. I stuck the stamp on, stood up, and stretched. A few feet away, next to the gas pumps, was a squirming puddle. The cat had taken one of her wormy dumps.
‘Goddammit, cat,’ I said. ‘You can’t just shit anywhere you like.’
I went back into the shop to buy napkins to clean it up, and mail the postcard. On a rack near the counter they had a bunch of road maps for sale. That reminded me that I had no idea where I was. I selected one of the maps and flipped it open. The woman was watching me. All my coming and going and strangeness had made her even more nervous than usual.
I took the map over and unfolded it on her counter.
‘Do you think you could tell me where we are?’
She studied it for a moment, pursing her lips in and out like a feeding goldfish. Then she pointed to a tiny road, almost an invisible road, in northern Nevada.
‘Right here, near Denio Junction.’<
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‘How far is Winnemucca?’
She slid her nail along the road.
‘Just a few hours.’
I’d be there by mid-afternoon. Then it would only be a matter of finding the brothel.
‘You don’t have any condoms, do you?’
She shook her head. You could tell she found condoms, and the concept of selling them, completely appalling.
‘What about worming tablets?’
She shook her head again. Those were the only two things they didn’t carry in their shop, apparently. Instead she offered me a pamphlet, from a stack next to her till. The front showed a picture of a guy who looked like a bum, with a backpack and walking stick, hiking towards some hills. Way up in the hills was a giant cross. There was a caption at the bottom: Saving Yourself – Advice & Wisdom from ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ for Modern Christians.
‘You look as if you could use some guidance, dear.’
I took it. I didn’t have the energy to argue with her.
‘I sure could,’ I said.
chapter 46
Since we were out of the desert, I had to drive at the speed limit, and on the right side of the road. It took me a while to get used to that. I kept drifting over the centre line. We’d been on our own for so long, but now there were all these other cars, and signs of life and civilisation. We passed barns and farmhouses and a country church, with a steeple that had been scorched black by lightning. We passed a makeshift windmill, built out of scrap metal, and we passed a barefoot girl selling eggs at the roadside. I honked and waved at her, and she waved back. ‘Look at these people,’ I said to my cat. ‘They’re living next to that wasteland, and somehow they’re getting by. We’re tough as rats, us humans. We can live almost anywhere: near a desert, up a mountain, in the snow. Except the Antarctic, I guess. Only penguins can live there. But anywhere else. We can take it. How do we do it, cat? What drives us on?’
The cat ignored me. She was busy nibbling on the scraps of the Christian pamphlet. I’d put it on the seat and she’d instantly shredded it into all these tiny pieces. She obviously didn’t think The Pilgrim’s Progress would be of much use to us, on this journey of ours.
‘Maybe you’re right, cat. Maybe we need new stories, new religions, new gods. But you know what?’ I held up a fist, and solemnly proclaimed, ‘God is just a metaphor for the human spirit – a metaphor for our ability to endure anything, like the people living out here.’
The cat spat out a bit of the pilgrim’s arm. She wasn’t interested in my philosophy, but I didn’t care. I was having one of those bouts of euphoria that accompany starvation. I rolled down my window and leaned way out, opening my mouth to taste the wind.
‘Hear that, America?’ I shouted. ‘I can take it! I’ll endure!’
Just then, an oil tanker came roaring by in the opposite direction, and I had to pull my head in, super-fast. The vacuum left by the tanker’s passing sucked at the car and rattled the windows. I held up my hand, palm out, in apology. She could be so damn tetchy, America. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I get it. I wasn’t trying to be lippy.’
A road sign floated by. We were less than forty miles from Winnemucca. It got me thinking about what I intended to do there. I checked my glovebox, to make sure I still had my map to the Pussycat Ranch. Then I picked up the mezcal from beside the cat, and studied the label as I drove. The guy had lied about the percentage. It was a hundred and fifty-four proof, not one-sixty – but it still looked pretty potent.
‘I don’t care what those old people say,’ I told the cat. ‘We went through some serious shit to get this twixer of elixir. I might have imagined some of it, but not all of it.’
I unscrewed the cap and took a sniff. It smelled rich and smoky, like wood chips.
‘Think it’ll put lead in my pencil, like he said?’
The cat sniffed and wrinkled her nose.
‘In Winnemucca I’ll put it to the test.’
She turned her back on me and stared out the broken window. Apparently she didn’t want to hear about my plans for Winnemucca. I tried to pat her on the head, but she bit my hand and shied away. She wasn’t that kind of cat. So instead I just chatted to her. I started telling her all about the other cat we’d had – the one with the cancerous ears.
‘She was sort of wild, and hated being petted or stroked – a lot like you. She didn’t trust people, and wouldn’t let anybody touch her. Actually, that’s not true. There was one person my cat trusted. They only met once, the first time she visited Vancouver…’
As soon as I said that, I stopped. I don’t mean I stopped talking. I mean I stopped doing anything: talking, thinking, driving. It was as if I’d had a seizure. We rolled to the roadside and ended up parked at an awkward angle, beside a fallow field. Flies were buzzing around in the heat.
‘I’m sorry, cat,’ I said, turning off the engine. ‘I just haven’t thought about that person for a while. I’d managed to lose her in a haze of peyote and booze.’
A fly landed on the cat’s ear. She shook her head, and the fly flew away.
‘I’ll tell you about her soon. Just not yet, okay?’
The cat lay down among the remains of the pamphlet, and lowered her head on her paws. I sat in a daze for a few minutes, gazing at the field. A scarecrow stood planted out there, crucified on a stick. He must have been on a swivel of some sort, because he would occasionally pivot in the wind, turning back and forth, as if he was looking for something.
chapter 47
‘Do you take pets?’
The desk clerk peered at me. Shrewdly. He was a tall guy with a lazy eye. His scalp was completely bald except for this ring of shaggy red hair, encircling it like a clown’s wig.
‘What kind of pet?’ he asked.
‘A cat.’
We’d stopped at a motel on the outskirts of town. It was an innocuous stucco building, brown and weatherbeaten, laid out in a U-shape that enclosed the parking lot.
‘Cat had its shots?’
‘Yep.’
‘It’ll be ten bucks extra.’
I’m pretty sure he made that up. I paid it anyway. Our room had a water-stained ceiling and peeling wallpaper, but the sheets looked clean, at least. I left the cat on the bed, and switched the TV on for her. Then I went into the bathroom to get ready.
There was a mirror above the sink. For the past few days, I’d only caught the odd glimpse of myself, in the side mirrors or the rear-view. Now I had the whole picture, and I could see why those old people at the gas station had been so nervous. I still had cuts and bruises all over my face from my fight with the man-tiger. My nose was swollen and didn’t look right, and the whites of my eyes were bloodshot and oddly yellow, like rotten egg yolks.
I stripped down and got in the shower. Water piddled over me. It created a brown puddle in the bathtub. At first I thought it was my own filth, but, once that drained off, the puddle stayed brown. Apparently the water in Winnemucca was as dirty as me. But it was warm, at least. I hung my head in the stream, letting it trickle off my hair. I opened one of those bars of cheap hotel soap and lathered myself up. It smelled bland and generic, like candle wax.
Afterwards I closed the curtains and got changed. I didn’t have any clean boxers, so I went commando. My jeans and shirt still smelled of the road. I compensated by smearing on extra deodorant. The cat watched all these preparations with a dubious expression.
‘What?’ I said. ‘I’m just going out for a drink, is all.’
She crept over to the stick of deodorant, sniffed it, and turned her nose up.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a brothel, okay? To get my groove back. My sex drive. It’s no big deal. A lot of guys pay for sex. So don’t give me any of that feminist bullshit.’
She narrowed her eyes, disgusted. I tossed a pillow at her and went into the bathroom to finish getting ready there – combing my hair and brushing my teeth and shaving my jaw.
By six o’clock I was good to go – except I was still sober.
I hadn’t even cracked open my twixer of elixir yet. I stretched out on the bed with the bottle resting on my belly. The snake inside was wound up on the bottom like a coil of rope. Its eyes were foggy and forlorn, and it had inch-long fangs. I guess it had been poisonous, at one time. In the liquor, flecks of snakeskin swirled around like soggy snowflakes.
I filled up a plastic cup and tried a sip, smacking my tongue to accentuate the taste. It had a bitter, smoky flavour – like a cross between tequila and whisky. It settled in my guts and started to smoulder. I imagined it going to work down there, warming up the engine that had quit. I drank two cups – maybe a quarter of the bottle – and chased with a beer. By then it was getting close to seven and I felt pretty loose. I sat with the cat a while longer. She was watching a game show in which people leapt around this obstacle course like complete idiots.
‘Ha-ha,’ I said, nudging the cat. ‘What losers, eh?’
She shifted away from me.
Just before I left, I went back into the bathroom again. I took a piss and checked myself in the mirror. Also, I checked my dick. It was still limp and lifeless.
‘Come on,’ I said, jiggling it around. ‘This is it. The big show.’
I tried splashing a bit of mezcal on the tip. I thought that might help. It didn’t. It just burned and made my foreskin go red. When I came out, the cat stared at me in a revolted sort of way. I flipped her the finger and paced around the room, trying to figure out if I’d missed anything. The only thing I could think of was my visor. I felt naked without it, but there was nothing I could do about that. I poured some mezcal into an empty beer can to take with me.
‘I’m going now,’ I said. ‘Wish me luck, cat.’