by Hines
He supposed he could sit here another half hour, breaking regulations and privacy laws by opening each and every box in the storage container to reveal what was inside. But he doubted he’d find anything terrifying.
Brain damage, indeed. Maybe he’d obliterated the part of his brain that stored any kind of common sense. Certainly wasn’t the first time he wondered such a thing.
Kurt jumped off the flatbed and pushed the door to the storage container closed again, shaking his head as the DANGEROUS CARGO markings came into view once more.
He’d wasted enough time. He needed to hit the highway, something he was more eager than ever to do now that the dead man’s shoes were at the bottom of the canyon.
He walked back to the cab, released the brakes, shifted, and pulled back onto the interstate.
61a.
Twenty minutes later, he saw a hitchhiker trying to catch a ride.
Hitchhiking, of course, was illegal on the interstates. But that didn’t prevent people from doing it. Kurt bit his lip as he considered. Normally, he didn’t want other people around. At all. But right now, another voice—a real one—would be welcome.
Kurt looked at the hitchhiker as he came into clearer focus. A bit bohemian, with wild hair barely contained by a blue bandanna, a large nylon pack on his back. A sign that said MISSOULA in large, markered letters. College student, probably, trying to thumb it back to UM after a long weekend in Seattle. According to corporate regulations for Cross Company, Kurt was never allowed to pick up hitchhikers because of liability issues.
But Kurt was in no mood to follow the rules just now. He’d already broken more than a few by opening the storage container and the boxes inside it.
He slowed to a stop just past the hitcher, watching in the side mirrors as the kid ran up to the cab. In a few moments, the blue bandanna popped into view as the kid opened the door, wearing a big grin on his face. “Thanks, man.”
“No problem.”
The kid unshouldered the backpack, put it on the floor, scrambled into the passenger seat. “I’m Jonas,” he said, thrusting a hand Kurt’s direction.
“Kurt,” he said, shaking the kid’s hand. He threw the Peterbilt into gear and steered back onto the roadway.
Jonas fumbled with some things on his backpack, dug through his pockets, adjusted his bandanna, finally gave a big sigh and seemed to settle in. “How far you going?” he asked.
“Chicago. Trying to get there the day after next.”
The kid nodded, as if he’d made the trip before.
“I’m headed back to the U from Spokane.”
“You’re from Spokane?”
“From all over. Just visiting a friend in Spokane.”
“What’s your friend do?”
Jonas smiled. “Sells drugs, mostly.”
Kurt glanced at the backpack on the floor. “And I suppose that’s just dirty laundry you’re bringing back.”
“Nah. It’s all clean. Some books too—gotta get a degree, you know, so I don’t end up one of those ‘You want fries with that?’ people. Fate worse than death, if you ask my parents.”
“I’m hoping you’re not going to say your parents deal drugs.”
“Nope. Solid blue-collar folks down in Colorado. Security guard and an assistant at a title company.”
Kurt nodded. “So you’re gonna be the great college-educated savior of the family.”
Jonas returned the nod. “You get the picture.”
“And what are you studying?”
“Pharmacy.”
Kurt laughed. “Why am I not surprised?”
Jonas turned. “Hey, I told you my friend sells drugs—and she does. She’s a pharmacist. On the job about six months now, after graduating last year. Just getting some big-picture stuff from her.” He smiled. “Gotcha.”
Kurt laughed, relaxing. “Yeah, you’re a clever one. No wonder Mom and Dad wanted to ship you off to college.”
They watched the mile markers tick by for a few minutes. No voice since the kid had been in the cab with him, and that was good. And being a pharmacist . . .
“I got a question for you,” he said to Jonas.
“No, I can’t get you free drugs.”
Kurt smiled. “Uh, not really what I was going for. But it is about drugs. Maybe. Kind of.”
“Okay.”
“I . . . uh . . . say I have a friend who’s had some brain damage.”
“What part of the brain?”
Kurt smiled, thought of his many sessions with Todd, thought of the few scans and tests he’d agreed to, thought of the doctors who would have loved to sink their hooks deeper into his case if he’d let them. “Temporal lobe.”
“Right or left?”
“Um . . . both.”
The kid looked at him, doing a bit of a double take. “Is your friend a vegetable?”
Kurt smiled, shrugged. “That’s the thing: he’s supposed to be. But he’s a walking, talking miracle. And he’s been fine with this brain damage for years now. No real problems. But after that time . . . could he start having . . . hallucinations?”
Jonas turned and stared at him a few moments. “I’m not a doctor, you know. Not even a pharmacist yet.”
“But you have to study brain function, right? Effects of different drugs, that kind of thing.”
Jonas scratched at his chin. “Brain’s a funny thing. You start messing with it, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. So, yeah, I’d say it’s possible; might be the brain finishing its remapping, establishing new connections.”
The same kind of thing Kurt had told himself. Maybe even Todd had said something to that effect, long ago. “Even after all that time?”
Jonas shrugged. “Like I said, the brain’s a funny thing. So yeah, even after all that time there could be some healing. You read about cases of people coming out of comas after years.” He paused. “Your friend should see a doctor, though, especially if he needs to do, um, do a lot of driving. There are drugs, choline acetylase inhibitors and others, that can offset some of those symptoms.”
“Okay. I’ll do that. I mean, I’ll let him know.”
A few minutes later, the blue bandanna turned his way again. “My feet are killing me. You mind if I slip off my shoes?”
Kurt kept his eyes on the road, shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Jonas sighed as he bent to remove his shoes. “Okay,” he said. “True confession time.”
Kurt looked at the kid, noticing something was . . . odd . . . about his passenger’s skin. It was flecked, black and white, and a bit out-of-focus. As if he were an image on a television screen with poor reception.
“My dad wasn’t really a security guard. He was a Russian gangster. Own brother tried to kill him. Long story.”
“Okay,” Kurt said, unsure where this was going.
“And I’m not really a pharmacy student anymore,” Jonas said. Kurt noticed the kid’s voice was a bit more distant, more tinny. More static-filled. “I’m dead.”
Kurt tried to laugh, but it caught somewhere in his throat.
Static filled the cab of the truck, and Kurt aimed for the side of the road, hitting the brakes as much as he could without jackknifing his trailer.
“Give her a ride, Kurt,” Jonas said before he faded from view with a final burst of static and white noise.
Finally at a full stop, the air brakes hissing, Kurt stared at the empty passenger seat beside him. No Jonas, no backpack, no nothing.
He reached out, tried a tentative touch of the seat. Empty. Just as it looked. Then, as he pulled away his hand, something on the floor caught his eye.
Shoes.
Shoes that looked very much like the ones he’d bought in lot 159. Shoes that had a large, reversed numeral 3 on the inside of the tongue. Shoes that had been thrown down a steep canyon miles ago.
Shoes that had been left inside his truck by a ghost named Jonas.
Kurt stared at the shoes as if they themselves were radioactive, wondering what to do with them.
He couldn’t let them stay—they’d already come back to haunt him once, and they’d cracked open the door to the dead even farther. The ghost who occupied the shoes had actually been in his rig, right here. So yes, the shoes had to go, had to be destroyed, because they were obviously a beacon of some sort. A magnet for the ghosts that had before only spoken to him.
A knock came on the passenger door, followed by the muffled voice of a woman. “Everything okay?”
Kurt sprang back from the noise in surprise, painfully jamming his elbow on the steering wheel. He rubbed at his arm for a moment as he looked at the passenger door.
“Hello?” the voice asked again, hesitantly.
Not sure what else he could do, Kurt leaned across the cab and popped the door release, then pushed it open. On the ground, just beside the door, stood a thin woman with pale, milky skin. Her brows furrowed when she saw his face, and he realized he was sweating, panicky.
She turned toward the back of the truck, pointed down the road behind them. “I . . . I saw you go by me just down the road back there, and you were . . . um . . . looked like your truck was having problems.”
Kurt stared at her a few moments. “Problems,” he echoed.
She itched at her cheek a moment. Kurt noticed she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt only, no jacket of any kind on this chilly Montana morning. She carried a baglike purse with her but that was all. Looked like she hadn’t showered or combed her hair for a few days. Probably a junkie of some kind, coming down off a high. Different kind of pharmacist, ha-ha.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I thought you were having some kind of problem with the truck at first, the steering or something. But when you got it pulled to the side here . . . ” She let the sentence trail off, looked up at him again for a few seconds.
“You thought maybe I was the one having problems, rather than the truck,” he said.
She nodded.
“I’m fine,” he said, getting his bearings again. He tried to ignore the dead man’s shoes and concentrate on the woman. “Just dropped something on the floor, tried to get it. Stupid, I know.” He tried a smile.
She didn’t return the smile, and he knew she didn’t buy the story at all.
“Okay,” she said. “I just, uh . . .” She seemed at a loss for words. “I’ll let you get back to it.” She backed away, as if willing him to close the door again.
The words returned to him again. Give her a ride, Kurt.
Yeah, well, that might be a trick. He guessed the last thing on her list of things to do right now was crawl into the cab of a diesel that had come to a shuddering, uneasy stop with a sweaty, manic-looking driver behind the wheel.
But: Give her a ride, Kurt. What if he didn’t? What might happen then? Would that itself be the bit of pressure that busted open the ever-weakening door between his reality and the ghosts’ reality?
“You need a ride?” he asked, surprised when his voice didn’t crack.
To her credit, the terror in her eyes flared only briefly. “I . . . uh . . .”
“Look, there’s a truck plaza down the road about ten miles. Me, I think I probably need to pull off for a quick break. I’ll buy you breakfast.”
Her hand returned to her cheek again, and Kurt felt the blood draining from his face when he noticed the tattoo peeking out from beneath the sleeve of her right arm.
“Your arm,” he said, studying the tattoo.
She looked at it, as if unaware it was there, then back at him. Almost unconsciously, she folded her arms, trying to hide the tattoo. “What about it?”
“It’s a catfish,” he said.
“Long story,” she said.
“What do the numbers mean?” he asked.
She wrinkled her eyebrows. “Numbers?”
“Numbers, kind of hidden inside the tattoo—right at the snout of the fish.” He pointed, realizing it wasn’t doing any good—he was in the cab of the truck, and she was on the ground—but he still pointed. “See? Starts with a one—”
The woman gasped. “1595544534,” she said, looking at her arm and reading the numbers. Suddenly, any trace of fear disappeared from her eyes. She climbed into the cab and shut the door behind her. “I guess I will take that breakfast.”
62b.
“Hash browns and gravy,” she said to the waitress.
“Hash browns and gravy,” the waitress repeated. “Got it. What about you, honey?” she said, glancing at Kurt.
“Coffee, to start with,” he said. “And I’ll do steak and eggs, over medium, wheat toast.”
“Hungry?” the tattooed woman said to him after the waitress left.
“Always.” Plus, Kurt was . . . waiting. He’d given the woman a ride, as the ghost in the shoes had asked him to do quite clearly. Now that he’d done that, he was waiting for something else to happen.
Dreading it, yes, but waiting.
The woman spoke again. “I’m Corrine,” she said. “I suppose we should get that out of the way.”
He nodded. “Nice to meet you, Corrine. I’m Kurt.”
“And what’s your story, Kurt?”
He smiled. “Still working on it.”
“Guess that’s as much as I’m gonna get right now, huh?”
“Trust me, you really don’t want to know.”
She smiled. “You think I’m worried about you escaping from a prerelease program?”
The waitress brought his coffee; he watched Corrine across the table as the hot, dark liquid sloshed into his white ceramic cup. Well, what was the harm in telling her? Maybe that’s what the ghost wanted.
When the waitress left, he spoke, avoiding her eyes while he did so. If he looked into her eyes, the whole thing would dissolve like sugar.
“I had a brain injury several years ago. Since then, I . . . well, I can hear ghosts. Ghosts in the clothing of dead people.”
Her jaw tensed for a moment. “And what do the ghosts say?”
He shrugged. “They ask me for help. Finding relatives, giving messages to others, that kind of thing.”
“And you like doing that?”
“I don’t.”
“Why don’t you like it?”
“No, I mean I don’t do it. I . . . ignore them.”
She sipped from her glass of water. “You don’t do it.”
“I go to estate sales, auctions, buy all the clothing that belongs to dead people so I can listen to the ghosts inside,” he said. “But I don’t talk to them. I don’t answer them. I don’t help them.”
She leaned back in the leather booth, shifting her weight to get more comfortable. Kurt waited, listening to the sounds of metal utensils clanking on plates all around them. The comfortable sounds of dining.
“Well,” she finally said, “it would seem you’re one sick puppy.” She raised her glass of water to him in a toast, smiled, and took a drink. “Welcome to the club. I’m the president.”
“What qualifies you to be the president?” he said.
“Cancer, for one,” she said. “But that’s not the half of it. You got an e-mail account?” she asked.
Odd question, but they were in odd territory. “Yeah.”
“Get spam?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Well,” she said, “you can thank me for that. You’re about to have breakfast with a woman who sends out a million e-mails every week for fake degrees, online prescriptions, and—what’s a delicate way to say this?—male enhancement. Bon appetit.”
He waited for a few minutes, and was about to ask her about the tattoo when she looked at it herself, as if reading his intentions.
“Those numbers on my arm. I didn’t even know they were there, but—they’re kind of what brought me here.”
“Well, if you don’t mind going a bit deeper into the twilight zone,” he said, “one of the ghosts told me I was supposed to give you a ride. Just before you showed up. So—no offense—I’m a little worried this is all some kind of hallucination. The brain injury I told you about.”
&n
bsp; She shook her head. “Oh, I’m real, Kurt. I’m so real it hurts.”
The waitress brought their food. Kurt took a bite of steak, picked up his ceramic mug, drank from the hot, dark liquid. It looked like black tar, he thought. Like the boxes in the shipping container. Maybe he was hauling nothing more than some strange Chinese coffee. He closed his eyes, exhaled loudly.
“So about the numbers . . .” he said, opening his eyes and focusing on her once more.
“I don’t know much about them.” She forked a bite of hash browns into her mouth. Part of the gravy dribbled down her chin, and she dabbed at it with her napkin, looking embarrassed.
“You don’t know? So why’d you get them?”
“I didn’t ask for them. I didn’t even know they were there until you saw them.”
“But they mean something to you, don’t they?”
She paused for a long time. “Yeah, they mean something.”
“They . . . they mean something to me, too,” he said. “I just can’t put my finger on it now.” He continued staring at the tattoo, as if searching it for more hidden answers.
He found none.
The waitress brought the check, and he paid the tab. As he put away his wallet, Corrine dug in her bag for a few minutes, then quickly pushed her way out of the booth.
“Be right back. I’m going to the restroom.”
He watched her walk away. He had no illusions about her really coming back. Not after what he’d just told her. He’d be lucky if she didn’t sneak away somewhere and dial 911.
Actually, that might be good.
He stood, noticed something on her side of the booth; she must have dropped it when she got up to leave. He bent over and picked it up: inside a plastic sandwich bag, a napkin with the numbers 1595544534 scrawled on it. The same numbers hidden inside her tattoo. He caressed it between his thumb and forefinger, lost in thought. What was so special about this napkin, these numbers, the catfish connection?
(brain damage)
“So where you headed?”
He spun around, slipping the plastic bag and the napkin into his front pocket as he did. “Huh?” he asked, flustered by her sudden return. “Oh, Chicago.”
Was she actually hoping to catch a ride with him? Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.