by Rio Youers
“So, when can you get out here?” Stan asked.
Jonathan was already thinking that through. He had holiday-time at work, but would have to clear it with management—give them notice. And he would have to check with Julie, to make sure they had nothing planned (weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, and anything else your typical male would forget). And, of course, he had to book the flight.
“How about the end of the month?” he suggested.
“No dice,” Stan replied at once. “That’s three weeks away, and I want my payday, dammit. I want this car gone.”
“Okay,” Jonathan said. It was his turn to frown. “What were you thinking?”
“Shit, I was hoping you’d come tomorrow.”
“That’s impossible, I’m afraid. I can’t just up and leave. I have—”
“Well, when can you be here?” Stan asked, and Jonathan—a perceptive individual, by nature—caught the tension in his voice, and for the first time thought, Does he need the money that badly, or does he just want to get rid of the car? Alarm bells chimed deep down, but were enveloped by the madness of fireworks.
“I’ll talk to my boss,” Jonathan said. “And I’ll look into flights, too. I’ll call you tomorrow and give you a definite date. Is that okay?”
“If you leave this too long, I’ll have to make other arrangements.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Jonathan said.
He was right; his enthusiasm, coupled with a fantastic sense of destiny, swept him onward. He had no problem getting the time off work at such short notice, and Julie encouraged him to leave as soon as possible, lest this golden opportunity slip through his fingers. He even found a great deal on a flight, connecting to Norfolk, VA through Philadelphia. Everything fell into place with improbable—perhaps even slightly disconcerting—ease.
“I’ll be there in five days,” he said to Stan when he called him the following evening.
“That’s about four days longer than I wanted, but I guess it’ll do. I’ll be waiting.”
It was a whirlwind: a frenetic series of decisions and actions that whipped him up and away, without even time to think it all through. One moment, it seemed, he was reading Stan Lannett’s auspicious e-mail, and the next he was blazing across the Atlantic. Between booking tickets, packing bags, and catching flights, he barely had time to embrace the fact that the dream was coming true. Given the speed with which everything had happened, it seemed so unreal. It was only after he had checked into his hotel in Norfolk, VA that it finally hit him. He was jetlagged, exhausted, but too excited to sleep. He donned his iPod and cranked it to ear-adjusting volume, then danced around his hotel room as Elvis sang “Promised Land.” Fifty-one years old, but suddenly with the heart of a bird. The music lifted him. His wings flickered against the room’s high ceiling. He imagined the blue highway unrolling before him, and the wind combing through his hair.
He called Julie.
“Hello, darling. I’m here. Norfolk, Virginia. The first city mentioned in the song. This is where it begins.”
“I’m happy, Jon. Very.” She sounded sleepy. “You be careful, okay?”
“Of course, my love.”
“It’s ten past eleven here.”
“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”
“Yes, but I’m glad you called.”
“I won’t keep you. Go back to bed.” The excitement crashed through him, making his fingertips tingle.
“Okay, honey.” She yawned. Such a sweet sound.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said. “Next stop: Raleigh, North Carolina.”
“Yes…call me.”
He wished her sweet dreams and blew a chain of kisses into the phone before hanging up. Still too excited to sleep, he took a long walk around the downtown core, listening to the sounds of the city as the summer evening cooled. He followed the Elizabeth River, glimmering orange in a belt of sunset, to Town Point Park, where children giggled and played amongst the fountains. He saw the USS Wisconsin berthed beside the Nauticus museum, and finished the evening with some live music and a few beers at an Irish-themed pub on Granby Street. It was almost midnight (five A.M. in England, he reminded himself) by the time he got back to his hotel room. He stripped to his undies and fell into bed. Sleep hit him like an angry man. He fell without a sound.
And awoke with a scream, to darkness, tatters of dream blowing in the open doorway of his mind. Unsettling and powerful. Young Elvis sitting in his pink Cadillac, sneering beautifully, while blood flowed through the gaps in the dashboard casing. It dripped into the footwells, gradually covering Elvis’s blue suede shoes.
The hotel room was silent, lost in the stillness of the early hours. Jonathan got out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and splashed cold water on his face. It was just after four A.M. He watched TV through half-closed eyelids and eventually slipped into blank sleep. He awoke at eight-thirty, had breakfast at the hotel, and took a taxi to the Greyhound station. Six hours—two hundred miles—until he arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, the second stop on the “Promised Land” itinerary.
RALEIGH, NC.
The trip was fine. He listened to his iPod and read a little of the John Grisham paperback he had picked up at the airport. A portly, Hispanic lady sat next to him between Williamsburg and Richmond, where the bus terminated and he had to transfer. He sat alone for the remainder of the journey, so was able to spread out a little, edging his butt into the next seat and cushioning his head in the angle between the headrest and the window. He closed his eyes and captured glimpses of sleep, feeling the road vibrate through the glass. Bursts of his dream recurred: the pink Cadillac filling with blood. He arrived in Raleigh just after six P.M.
He hadn’t booked a hotel, so checked into the first one he found: a Days Inn on North Dawson Street. The excitement of being here—in America, living the dream—had lost a little of its shine, and the effects of it all happening so quickly were beginning to take their toll. Jonathan was exhausted—tempted to pull the thick hotel curtains and crawl into bed. But he knew he would sleep until morning, and his bus to Birmingham left early (a fifteen-hour trip that he was not looking forward to in the least). If he wanted to see more of Raleigh than just the inside of a hotel room, he would have to do it tonight.
He’d promised to call home, but it was approaching midnight in the U.K. and Julie would be sleeping. He’d woken her the previous night, and although he wanted to talk to her, he didn’t want to wake her again. After some deliberation he decided to call anyway (a man of his word), and smiled—a little sadly, perhaps—when the ringer clicked over to the answering machine.
“Hello, sweetheart. It’s me. I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina, the second stop on the tour. And yes, I’m fine…just tired. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Bad dreams. So yes, very tired but otherwise fine. Hope everything is okay at home. I won’t call you tomorrow because I’ll be on the bus all day. So I’ll call you…what day is it? Wednesday? Thursday? Oh, I’ll call you in a couple of days. I love you.”
He took a cool shower, which helped revive him, albeit minimally, and then left the hotel to absorb what he could of Raleigh. A pleasant stroll, maybe a drink and a bite to eat, but it wouldn’t be a late night. Not only was his body aching for shutdown, but he had to be up at five-thirty A.M. If only he were twenty years old again—even thirty—and able to draw upon those fathomless vats of youthful energy. He would happily have painted the town red. Bright red.
“Blood red,” he said, and the bad dream broke through his mind. The Cadillac, little-girl-pink, with Young Elvis splashing his blue suede shoes in the blood filling the footwells. Jonathan paused on the sidewalk and pressed his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes.
Just tired, he thought, but he waited until the dream had faded. Maybe I should just go back to the hotel. Go to bed. He opened his eyes. Dark spots floated across his field of vision. The sky was stained with falling light
“Welcome to the Promised Land,” a voice said.
“Sorry?” Jonathan said, even though every instinct in his body warned him to keep walking. Don’t look at him, and certainly don’t talk to him—what are you thinking? But his words had trapped Jonathan’s attention.
Welcome to the Promised Land.
“What did you say?” Jonathan asked. The spots faded from in front of his eyes and he took a step closer to the doorway.
“I said, ‘Will you give a poor boy a hand?’” The vagrant had a terrible speech impediment, which explained why Jonathan had misheard him. He edged from the shadows a little. Jonathan could see more of his wasted body. He was scuffed and stained. The color of bones.
“I thought you said something else.”
“I just need a few dollars, if you’d be so kindly, sir. Just a few dollars so’s a poor boy can eat.” Although the broken sounds that came from his mouth more closely resembled: I duth eee a vu dollar, eef ooo be doh ginely, dur. Duth a vu dollar doze a b’oh boy gan eeed.
Jonathan shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, patting his pockets. “I don’t have any—”
“Five dollars…please.”
Vive dollar…bleeee.
The cracked, clay hand trembled, and then the vagrant’s face emerged from the shadows. Jonathan gasped and took a step backward, his hands clutching his chest. His sensitive receptors flashed their hazard lights and urged him to look away, but he was magnetized by horror and fascination. Don’t stare, a voice in his mind snapped. It was Julie’s voice—his dæmon of good sense and prudence. But he ignored it, because the vagrant’s face was a car crash, a train wreck, an exploding plane, an atom bomb, a meteor strike.
“Please, sir.”
Bleee, dur.
The vagrant had a strawberry-sized (and, remarkably, -shaped) hole in his face where his nose should have been, rimmed with loose skin and mucus, some of it crusty, most of it not. Blistered lips receded from teeth as black as the heads of spent matches, and his left eye was scarred, half-closed, and blind: the eye of a tomcat that has gotten into one too many fights. His hair was shoe-polish black but threaded with dirt. His beard looked like the scratched-raw pelt of a flea-ridden animal. When he inhaled, the loose skin around the crater in his face flapped with a slight rippling sound, and the mucus was drawn inward, like pea soup down a drain hole.
Jonathan shook his head, in part to deny the vagrant’s request, but mostly to deny the horror of what his mind was trying to compute.
“Just five dollars, sir…so’s a poor boy can eat.”
Jonathan translated the impaired words, then had an image of the man slotting a hotdog, not into his mouth, but into the cavity where his nose should have been. The street suddenly looped in a long, dizzying circle, as if it had been lifted, pitched on a pivot, and twirled a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
“I…can’t…no …”
“Please …”
“Money…no …” Jonathan tried to pat his pockets again but missed.
“You’ll sleep easier,” the vagrant said, “knowing you helped me.”
Oool leep eedyer doh-ween ooo elp bee.
“Really must be…going, I …”
“Do you really want to see this face in your dreams?”
“No!” Jonathan barked. He ran his hands through his thinning hair and considered, briefly, giving the man money—hell, throwing his wallet at him (another grim image: the wallet hitting the hole in his face, and lodging there, like a child’s peg wedged in the wrong-shaped slot). But he found his legs and staggered away, slowly at first, and then with more urgency. He didn’t look back, not even when he heard the vagrant cry out:
“Ahhn gohnah awwwn oooo.”
He could have said anything, to be fair: I’m going to want food, or I’ve got a sore tooth. But what Jonathan heard was, I’m going to haunt you. He let out a yelp of fear and scampered around the corner, then across the road, and despite his fatigue he hurriedly put four or five blocks between him and the vagrant. He glanced over his shoulder before dipping into a convenience store, where he bought a bottle of water, then sat on a bench and guzzled it in two hits.
“Get a grip, Jonny-boy,” he said to himself, wiping runnels of sweat from his brow. He looked up and down the street, as if expecting the vagrant to be there, lurching toward him, the evening breeze whispering across the hole in his face with a deep, vibratory tone, like a child blowing across the lip of a bottle. He uttered a nervous laugh, wondering how much paranoia he could attribute to exhaustion. Just a homeless person, the reasonable iota of his mind assured him. A poor, penniless old Joe with face cancer, or something, and you ran away from him as if he were the Grim Reaper. You should be ashamed of yourself.
He wiped his eyes and the world tilted. So tired. All he wanted to do now was go back to his hotel room and sleep. Forget Raleigh. Forget strolling through Oakwood and photos of the State Capitol. But the hotel was back there—in the same direction as the creepy vagrant. He didn’t want to go back there just yet, and even if he made it to his hotel without seeing the vagrant, he wondered just much sleep he would get anyway.
Do you really want to see this face in your dreams?
He couldn’t go back yet, as much as he wanted to. He decided to find a bar and have a couple of calmative beers—help settle the jitters—then he could get a taxi back to his hotel.
Five minutes later Jonathan was sitting at the bar of an all-American establishment, drinking beer from an ice-frosted glass as the light from two-dozen TVs flashed in his eyes. Before long, his encounter with the vagrant started to blur around the edges. He even rediscovered his appetite, and ordered a burger, although his stomach slow-rolled when the barman asked if he wanted mustard and relish—recalling, against his will, the greenish-yellowish phlegm caked around the vagrant’s blowhole. Needless to say, he declined; mustard and relish was not a step he was ready to take.
He ordered another beer, hoping the alcohol would suitably weight his head and ease him into sleep, into a place where there were no pink Cadillacs filled with blood, and no disfigured vagrants. He felt that sleep, in itself, might not be enough. He wanted to snuff out all of his interior candles and shake off the burdensome chains of thinking and being, and exist stone-like for a salubrious stretch of time, to awaken reborn and refreshed, ready for whatever the world could throw at him, like Lazarus of Bethany.
This didn’t happen. He took a taxi to his hotel (it passed the office building where he had seen the vagrant, but it was too dark to see if he was still huddled in the doorway), and, following a perfunctory face-splash and teeth-brushing, Jonathan crawled gratefully between the pristine sheets. He thought he would cannonball into sleep, like a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound drunk springboarding into a pool, but his mind was electrified. Half-thoughts, half-dreams, as bright as fishhooks, denied him the rest he needed. He clutched the sheets around his trembling body, too fearful to open his eyes, positive that he would see the vagrant (the poor boy, Jonathan had started to think of him) standing at the end of his bed, staring with his one good eye. At one point Jonathan was sure he could hear him breathing—drawing drifts of air into the wet hole in his face with a sound like a broken exhaust.
Precious little sleep. It came like frost: cold and thin, melting quickly away.
Elvis, young and beautiful, visited him, too. A vision/dream so remarkable in its clarity that Jonathan was momentarily dazed when he snapped out of it. “Come with me, man,” Elvis said, and led him out to the hotel parking lot. The pink Cadillac was there, shimmering in a touch of burnt dawn light. Elvis curled his upper lip. “Here’s your ride,” he said, and opened the driver’s door. Gallons of blood flooded out and spread across the lot. The radio flicked into life. Human screams bla
red from the speakers. Jonathan covered his ears and cried, standing ankle-deep in blood. The cuffs of his pajama bottoms were soaked.
He got out of bed a little before five A.M., giving up on the idea of sleep and rest. He showered until his pale skin was pink and sore, then dragged his suitcase to the lobby and checked out. A quick breakfast of coffee and dry toast, and then he crossed the road to the Greyhound station. His bus left at six-fifty A.M. and he wanted to make sure he was on it. Maybe he’d finally get some shut-eye (doubtful, but he could hope), but more than anything he wanted to put some miles between him and Raleigh, NC.
The bus left on time, only half-full, so he had a seat to himself. He watched the city scroll by the window and his mouth twitched in a weak smile. So this is the dream, he thought with some disappointment. But it wasn’t the dream. Not yet. The dream would truly start the moment he sat behind the wheel of the pink Cadillac. The thought comforted him. His smile stretched with more surety. He spread out on the seat, rested his head against the window, and closed his eyes.
Shaky sleep, until the ‘hound pulled into the town of High Point, where a particularly large woman decided to take the seat next to his. Her plentiful rump squashed him against the window, and any hopes of further sleep were duly forsaken. Not only that, but she persisted to fart throughout the remainder of the journey (and she went all the way to Atlanta—nine hours, in total), producing a variety of aromas that could strip the chrome off a Harley-Davidson. Jonathan—too polite, too British, to ask her to either move, or to quit cutting the cheese—sought relief from the overhead cooling fans, but succeeded only in aggravating the smell, as if it were a living organism, like something from a 1950s science-fiction movie. Most of the farts were what his fourteen-year-old nephew called Ninja Farts: silent assassins, although some were less stealthy warriors. “Ooh, scoozie me,” she offered after one such resonant trumpet, when even her ample ass flaps couldn’t moderate the thunder.