Hitchers

by Will McIntosh

  There was a photo of Dave dangling from the safety line, looking chagrined after a fall; another of me in my stupid hat with the Velcro flap, about to start a climb. We had such a ball on that trip.

  I closed the album. I shouldn’t have let a month go by without calling Dave. Now it was too late.

  It wasn’t fair. I’d already suffered my losses.

  I pressed my palm to the photo album, got up and wandered into my studio. The thought of working made me want to scream. Five or six more days and we would be at code red—the syndicate would be out of strips. Typically they liked to have an eight-week cushion; I was trying their patience, to say the least.

  When I first got control of the strip Cathy Guisewite warned me that coming up with a strip each and every day was more difficult than I thought. Add to that the prospect of creating something funny while thousands of bodies were being bulldozed into mass graves in Central Park, and you had the perfect storm. Steve said Toy Shop was more popular than ever, that the new look was catching on in a big way. It would be a shame to start printing reruns.

  I threw on a coat, went downstairs, through the empty drive-in snack bar, and pushed through the big swinging doors that led outside.

  There was a layer of thin snow on the benches surrounding the empty bumper boats lagoon. I swept a spot and sat for a moment, hands in my pockets. Washed-out images of Tina and Little Joe in maritime outfits covered the fence that surrounded the lagoon. A tiny lighthouse sat on a concrete island in the center, the base dented and scratched, evidence that once motorized rubber boats had careened madly off of it.

  I’d put my share of dings in that lighthouse during the eighteen months that Toy Shop Village was open. So had Kayleigh. We rode for free, the grandchildren of the owner, wide-eyed eleven-year-olds astonished by their luck. Hard to believe that had only been nineteen years ago—Toy Shop Village looked fifty years old.

  What had my grandfather been thinking when he let Dad talk him into this? We couldn’t even sell the property now, out in the middle of this industrial purgatory. Anyone who bought it would have to demolish and haul away tons of metal and concrete before it would be usable for anything. How had they thought people would drive all the way out here to play miniature golf? Cheap real estate is cheap for a reason. That hadn’t even been their biggest mistake, thinking people would haul their asses out to the middle of this depressing area, across the highway from a junk yard. Their biggest mistake had been their choice of businesses, which was thirty years behind the times.

  I tossed a piece of windblown Styrofoam into the concrete pond. Maybe it was time to brave the Wal-Mart. I’d spent the past week living off canned goods from the pantry and forgotten frozen entrees from the back of the freezer, all of the crap that had looked good in the supermarket but sat uneaten year after year.

  My butt still felt strange on the Avalon’s leather seat. I rolled down the windows, sniffed the cold air as I sped down Johnson Road.

  I coughed, tried to relax my aching throat. The twitching just kept getting worse. It felt like there was a gerbil in there.

  I hung a quick right on West Marietta and picked up speed. The near-empty roads looked so strange. I’d always hated the congestion of Atlanta, the intersections perpetually clogged with vehicles, but now I missed it. I wanted things to return to normal, or as close to normal as it was likely to get.

  There was a lot of talk on TV about the long-term effects the attack would have on Atlanta. The city had literally been decimated, having lost around ten percent of its population. That was the theoretical cutoff point for when irreparable damage is done to the psyche of a community.

  There was a tank in the Wal-Mart parking lot. The place was packed; I had to park across the highway in a strip-mall, on the lawn. In the parking lot I passed two people, both wearing white medical masks, who looked at me the way my eighth grade English teacher used to when I forgot my homework. I wasn’t wearing a mask, I realized. That was a no-no. Most people didn’t seem to grasp that I wasn’t endangering them by not wearing a mask, only myself. Anthrax wasn’t contagious, you could only inhale the spores if they were around, and they weren’t likely to be in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart ten miles from ground zero this late in the game.

  At the entrance two National Guard troops stopped me.

  “Mask,” one of them said, pointing at her face.

  “I know, I forgot.”

  She jerked her thumb at the doorway. “On your left. Put one on right away.”

  A mountainous display of pale blue medical masks met me just inside the door. I grabbed two boxes, opened one and retrieved a mask. It smelled like rubbing alcohol.

  Half of the shelves were empty in the grocery area. Most of the basics were there—milk, water, cereal, ramen noodles—but non-essentials like olives and Snickers bars were pretty much nonexistent. Signs beside each item listed the maximum number you could buy. Mostly that number was one. Troops patrolled the aisles, evidently making sure no one took more than their share.

  When I finished grocery shopping I didn’t feel like going home. After a week in solitary I wanted to be around people a while longer. I pushed my cart around the store, feeling punchy as I wandered past laundry detergent, between walls of pink girls’ toys. My Little Princess. Barbie Snip ’n Style Salon. A dozen big-screen TVs flashed identical Dentyne ads. In the pharmacy area I discovered licorice toothpaste. That was a new one. Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it before. I picked up a tube, then sought out the candy aisle, suddenly craving real licorice.

  They had licorice, both black and red. I chose the black, opened it with my teeth and pulled out a fat stick. I felt like a rebel, the way I was opening packages before I’d paid for them.

  I hadn’t eaten licorice since I was a kid. Kayleigh and I used to each take an end and pull, stretching the stick until it snapped. We’d compare our stretched pieces to see who got the longer.

  I’d been thinking about Kayleigh a lot lately, I realized. She was never far from my mind, even now, eighteen years after her death, but usually her presence was just an untethered ache of guilt. Lately I was getting more concrete flashes, like Mom taking the call from Grandma, dropping the phone when Grandma told her Kayleigh had drowned. Or the moment I realized it was my fault. Kayleigh agreed to jump off the thirty-foot pier if I did first, but she hadn’t really expected me to do it, and she’d chickened out. Kayleigh didn’t like to chicken out—she was the fearless one, the athlete, the doer. I told everyone about my courageous feat, rubbing it in, so she stayed behind when we went out to eat.

  And she jumped, and she died.

  Kayleigh, who was beautiful and outgoing, who always watched out for me. When she died I escaped into comic strips. Not even comic books—the cool nerds went for Spider-Man and The X-Men, I went for Peanuts and For Better or For Worse.

  As I dropped my purchases on the conveyor belt and nodded a greeting to the exhausted-looking cashier, I realized that despite all of the awfulness of the past week, despite the recurring thoughts of Kayleigh, I felt okay. Maybe I was simply feeling grateful to be alive. Everyone around me had lost someone now. Some had lost whole families. In the face of that, my own losses didn’t seem as staggering as they used to.

  “You look tired. You near the end of your shift?” I asked the cashier.

  She shook her head mournfully. “I’m on till four a.m.”

  I winced in sympathy. “That’s got to be rough.”

  “Mm hm,” she nodded, working her gum as she jiggled the licorice across the scanner, trying to get the price to register. It must be maddening to spend eight hours waving packages in front of that scanner, trying to get it to beep so you can move on to the next package.

  “I never said I was perfect,” I said. The words burst out in a deep, horrible croak that raked my throat.

  The cashier looked stunned.

  “Sorry,” I said, my voice returned to normal. I had no idea why I’d just said that. It had just come out. I rubbed my t
witching throat, swallowed.

  I got out of there as quickly as I could.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said as I launched the Avalon out of the lot. “I never said I was perfect”? Why would I say that to a stranger? I felt like an idiot. I closed my hand over my throat, felt my racing pulse through my fingertips. Maybe it was a one-time fluke. Massive fatigue; a post-traumatic hiccup.

  CHAPTER 8

  Maybe it was my stroll down the toy aisle at Wal-Mart, or maybe it was just getting out of the apartment, but by the time I got home the ideas were flowing. I was hungry, and suddenly had real food (well, real frozen microwavable food), but I was afraid if I stopped to eat I’d lose the mood, so I went straight to my studio.

  My throat constricted.

  “One thirty-nine for a head of lettuce?”

  Just like in the checkout line, the words forced themselves out as if they’d been trapped inside me. It sounded like gas rising from a fetid swamp, and it was something I would never say voluntarily. I was not a complainer about the price of produce. I rarely bought fresh produce, for that matter. I massaged my throat. Something was very wrong with me.

  It occurred to me as I cleaned my inking brush that I could be developing Tourette’s syndrome. The thought got me panicked.

  Turning to my computer I looked up Tourette’s on Wikipedia and read frantically, my heart thumping, until I saw that it always developed in childhood. But what else could it be? Some other, rarer, neurological disorder? Or maybe it really was a second-order symptom of anthrax exposure.

  I would call my doctor in the morning. There was nothing to do until then, so I tried not to think about it and kept working.

  CHAPTER 9

  I sprawled on the couch with a carton of Ben and Jerry’s and a spoon while Letterman did his monologue against a backdrop of the New York City skyline at night. My throat was especially sore after having a scope on a rope pushed down there by Doctor Purvis earlier in the day, so the ice cream felt good. I relished these mundane moments—they made things feel normal. Things weren’t normal, not by a long shot—the city was still crawling with National Guard, many businesses were still shuttered—but things were at least moving in the direction of normal. There were olives and Snickers bars to be had, and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

  My throat twisted up. It was getting easier to identify the telltale signs that I was about to blurt something. I made a concerted effort to stifle it.

  “Poor little thing, down in that black water.”

  I set the ice cream on the coffee table, my appetite for it vanished. The poor little thing was Kayleigh, I knew instantly. Suddenly I felt incredibly isolated in this apartment, in the middle of rusting amusements surrounded by industrial sites.

  I didn’t have a superstitious bone in my body, but the image of Kayleigh down in the black water, still twelve, gave me the shivers. For years after she died I had nightmares of discovering Kayleigh in unlikely places, her hair and clothes soaked, seaweed clinging to her face. Guilt will do that to you. When you’re partly to blame for someone’s death, they show up in the most unlikely places.

  How could this problem be psychological?

  In the meantime let’s have you consult with a psychiatrist, just to cover all of our bases, the neurologist had said matter-of-factly.

  It seemed like it had to be something physical—a brain injury or something, though I’d dutifully made my appointment with the psychiatrist Doctor Purvis had suggested.

  On the other hand I was grateful to the doctor for giving me a dignified medical-sounding term with which to refer to my weird and undignified outbursts. Vocalizations. I should practice using it in a sentence.

  Please pardon my vocalizations. My neurologist says they’re either myoclonic jerks brought on by a rare neurological disorder, or I’m batshit crazy.

  It occurred to me the psychiatrist would probably want to know what sorts of things I was blurting. I wrote down what I’d just said, and some of the others I remembered.

  “You all know the comic strip Toy Shop, right?” Letterman asked his audience.

  “What?” I looked up at the TV, my heart suddenly pounding.

  “Nice old strip, right?” Letterman said. “Cute kids running a toy store.” I couldn’t believe it. Letterman was talking about my strip.

  “Have any of you read Toy Shop recently?” Murmurs rolled through the audience.

  “Unbelievable,” I whispered.

  “Well in case you missed it, Finn Darby, the grandson of the guy who started the strip, has made a few changes. For example he added a talking toy robot werewolf doll to the cast.” Letterman paused for laughter. “A talking toy robot werewolf doll.” He enunciated each word in that droll mock-incredulous tone. “Word is he’ll be making more changes in upcoming strips, including adding another new character: a badger roadkill clown cashier.” A symbol crash punctuated the punchline as Letterman swung his arm like a pitcher getting loose.

  I dragged a hand through my hair, trying to grasp this. I’d just been mentioned on Letterman.

  When I resurrected Toy Shop two years ago, no one noticed. It was like I’d pushed an old, comfortable piece of furniture back into place—people were happy enough to sit in it, but no one had missed it. There’d been a few little features in magazines, a filler feature on NPR. When I overhauled the strip, it had gotten a little more attention. But Letterman? This was unbelievable.

  Inspired, I cloistered myself in my studio and worked on another strip. The vocalizations continued to squeeze from my throat. I wrote them down.

  That stuck up son of a bitch Schulz. (I sounded like my grandfather. I have nothing but respect for Charles Schulz.)

  You’re never going to make it with that attitude.

  Bend that elbow, Danny. I paid for a whole drink. (I’m not much of a drinker—a glass of wine, maybe one martini after a long day. I don’t know any bartenders by name. Again, I sounded like my grandfather, who made a point of knowing every bartender within twenty miles of his house by name.)

  As I was putting the finishing touches on my second strip of the night (a blistering pace for me), I was interrupted by a call from my mother.

  “Are you watching the news? They found them,” Mom said.

  “Who?” I asked, then instantly realized it was a stupid question.

  “The nuts who carried out the attack. The news people are yammering back and forth without much information to report, but they found the guys—that much is clear.”

  I hurried into the living room and dug around in the couch cushions for the remote. “When will they know who it was?”

  “They’re waiting for the police to make a statement.”

  I located the remote, clicked on the TV to a shot of an empty dais packed with microphones.

  “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” I croaked, startling myself. I would never get used to that horrible sound.

  “Oh, Jesus, Finn,” Mom said. “It doesn’t sound any better. Is the medication making it any better?”

  “Not really,” I said. The cameras shifted to a figure coming out of police headquarters. “Here he is.” A red-eyed chief of police with a bushy mustache stepped in front of the microphones.

  I was nervous, as if learning the identity of the killers could somehow make the situation better or worse. Or maybe it was that this felt personal; the killer or killers had taken my two closest friends.

  Mom and I stayed on the phone, but stayed silent as the police chief told us who it was. It wasn’t Al-Qaeda, or China, the Tea Partiers, or Russia. It was four men, each with a different reason for doing what they did. When the SWAT team burst into the mastermind’s apartment they found the four of them dead from barbiturate overdose, each tucked peacefully into a bed, their personal rant/manifesto/diary on the nightstand beside them.

  The mastermind was a Russian scientist who’d emigrated to the U.S. in 1988. He’d been part of the team commissioned to bury Russia’s secret stockpile of weaponized ant
hrax, but before doing it he secreted some away. What was his reason for killing six hundred thousand people? He wanted to get back at his wife, who ran off with his protege. There was also an unemployed college professor, an anti-government nut, a Jehovah’s Witness who believed Atlanta was the epicenter of all sin. They’d met at an AA meeting, then going for coffee together after meetings to rant.

  When I’d seen enough I said goodbye to my mom and went for a walk. I hit some baseballs in the Toy Shop Village batting cage, where I’d set up life-sized cutouts of Tina and Little Joe to use as targets. They’d originally been mounted in the facade of the penny arcade. I swung hard, so I hit a lot of weak bouncers, but when I connected it felt good.

  I didn’t know what I’d expected to feel when the terrorists were found. What I felt was a mixture of disgust and relief. I guess any reason for murdering innocent people was going to seem petty or insane. It was over, though. Case closed. Move along, nothing more to see here. Maybe we could all stop talking about it every minute of every day and try to move on now.

  CHAPTER 10

  I heaved a big, fat sigh and poised my pencil over the first panel. Draw something—anything—to get the ball rolling. On the heels of my epic two-strip output two days ago, I was having trouble keeping the momentum going.

  I dropped my pencil onto the Bristol board and went to the window. From my apartment on the second floor of the crumbling drive-in projection/concession building I couldn’t tell what season it was. There were no trees, so no leaves, or lack thereof, to clue me in. As far as the eye could see there was only cyclone fencing, weeds, industrial sprawl, and, across Columbia Avenue, a junk yard. Grandma was getting seventy percent of the revenues from Toy Shop, but she was letting me live in the apartment—which had once been occupied by Toy Shop Village’s manager—for free. When I first took over the strip, that was a good thing because thirty percent of the revenue from a marginally popular comic strip was not much (certainly not enough to stay in the apartment Lorena and I had shared before she died). I had no idea why I was still here. With Wolfie dolls hitting the stores in a few weeks, I could buy a nice condo in Buckhead and pay cash.