Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  “Dude, you have got to stop thinking about stuff like this.” Buzz Cut went back to wrenching on the bike. “It’s messing up your head.”

  He couldn’t stop thinking about it, if pictures counted as thought. Didn’t even have to close his eyes to see the raggedy pilgrimage, the snaking lines of pirates and bedsheeted ghosts and fairy princesses, and the kids you felt sorry for because they had those cheap store-bought costumes instead of ones their mothers made for them. All of them trooping with their brown paper grocery bags or dragging old pillowcases, already heavy with sugar loot, from the sidewalk up to the doorbell and back out to the sidewalk and the next house, so many of them right after each other, that it didn’t even make sense to close the door, just keep handing out the candy from the big Tupperware bowl on the folding TV tray. And if you were some older kid—too old to do that stuff anymore, practically a sneering teenager already—standing behind your dad and looking past him, out through the front door and across the chill, velvety-black night streets of suburbia, looking with a strange-crazy clench in your stomach, like you were first realizing how big and fast Time was picking you up and rolling and tumbling you like an ocean wave, head over heels away from the shore of some world from which you were now forever banished—looking out as though your front porch were now miles up in the starry-icy air and you could see all the little kids of Earth winding from door to door, coast to coast, pole to pole, stations of a spinning cross …

  No wonder these guys think I’m messed up. He had managed to freak himself, without even trying. Like falling down a hole. He tilted his head back, downing the rest of the beer, as though he could wash away that world on its bitter tide.

  “So how’s the nitrous setup working for you?”

  Blinking, he pulled himself back up into the garage. Around him, the bare, unpainted walls clicked into place, the two-by-four shelves slid across them as though on invisible tracks, the cans of thirty-weight and brake fluid lining up where they had been before.

  He looked over toward the garage door and saw the other motorhead, the red-haired one, already sauntered in from the house, picking through the butt-ends of a Burger King french fries bag in one hand.

  “The nitrous?” It took him a couple seconds to remember which world that was a part of. At the back of his skull, a line of little ghosts marched away. An even littler door closed, shutting off a lost October moon. “Yeah, the nitrous …” He shrugged. “Fine. I guess.”

  “You guess,” said Buzz Cut. “Jesus Christ, you pussy. We didn’t put it on there so you could guess whether it works or not. We put it on so you’d use it. Least once in a while.”

  “Hey, it’s okay.” They’d both ragged him about it before. “It’s enough to know I got it. Right there under my thumb.”

  Which was true. Even back when he and the motorheads had been installing the nitrous oxide kit on the ’Busa, he hadn’t been thinking about ever using it. The whole time that the motorheads had been mounting the pressurized gas canister on the right flank of the bike—“Serious can of whup-ass,” Buzz Cut had called it—and routing the feeder line to the engine, all 1298 cubic centimeters of it, they’d been chortling about how much fun would ensue.

  “There’s that dude with the silver Maserati Quattroporte, you see all the time over around Flamingo and Decatur. Thinks he’s bad ’cause his machine can keep up with a liter bike.”

  “Hell.” A big sneer creased Red’s face. “I’ve smoked the sonuvabitch plenty of times.”

  “Not by much. That thing can haul ass when it’s in tune and he’s not too loaded to run it through the gears.” Buzz Cut had tapped an ominous finger on the little nitrous can, tink tink tink, like a bomb. “But when this shit kicks in, Mister Hotshot Cager ain’t gonna see anything except boosser taillight fading in the distance.” He had looked away from the bike and smiled evilly. “Won’t that be a gas? For real?”

  He had supposed so, out loud, just to shut the two of them up. Neither motorhead, Buzz Cut or Red, had a clue about potentialities. How something could be real—realer than real—if it just hung there in a cloud of still could happen. Right now, the only way that he even knew the rig worked was that the motorheads had put the ’Busa on the Piper T & M dynamometer at the back of their garage and cranked it. Stock, they’d gotten a baseline pull of 155 point nine horsepower. Tweaking the nitrous setup with a number 43 jet, they’d wound up at 216 and a half, with more to go. “Now that’s serious kick,” Buzz Cut had judged with satisfaction.

  It didn’t matter to him, though. He sat in his usual perch on the greasy workbench, where he always sat when he came by the motorhead house, adding empty beer cans to the litter of tools and shop catalogues, and thought about the way their heads worked.

  They didn’t work the way his did. That was the problem, he knew. Nobody’s did. Or maybe mine doesn’t work at all. He had to admit that was a possibility. There’d been a time when it had—he could remember it. When it hadn’t gone wheeling around in diminishing circles, like a bike whose rider had been scraped off in the last corner of the track. Gassing on about Hallowe’en and nitrous oxide buttons that never got punched, and somehow that made it all even realer than the little ghost kids had been—

  Inside his jacket, his cell phone purred. He could have burst into tears, from sheer relief. He dug the phone out and flipped it open.

  Edwin calling, from the funeral parlor. He didn’t have to answer, to know; he recognized the number that came up on the postage-stamp screen. And he didn’t have to answer, to know what Edwin was calling about. Edwin only ever called about one thing. Which was fine by him, since he needed the job and the money.

  “I’ll see you guys later.” He pocketed the phone and slid down from the workbench. “Much later.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Buzz Cut had finished with his customer’s bike, standing back from it and wiping his hands on a shop rag. “Maybe next Hallowe’en.”

  “So what is the big deal?” Behind Edwin, the grandfather clocks lining the hallway ticked like ratcheting crickets. “You take it from here, you take it to there. You drop it off. And you get paid.” Edwin’s manicured hand drew out an eelskin wallet; a finger with a trimmed, glistening nail flicked through the bills inside. “So why are you making it so hard on yourself?”

  The tall clocks—taller than him, way taller than Edwin—were part of the funeral parlor decor. They had been Edwin’s father’s clocks, back when the old guy had run the place, and Edwin’s grandfather’s, who had started it all. Edwin had inherited the family business, right down to the caskets in the display room. You could hear the clocks all over the place, in the flower-choked foyer and past the softly murmuring, endlessly repeating organ music in the viewing rooms. Maybe they reminded the customers in the folding chairs of eternity, or the countdown to when they’d be lying in a similar velvet-lined box. So they had better talk to the funeral director on the way out and make arrangements.

  “I don’t know …” He looked down the hallway. Past Edwin’s office was the prep room, where the public didn’t go, where it was all stainless steel and fluorescent bright inside, and smelled chemical-funny. Edwin had taken him in there one time, when it had been empty, and shown him around. Including the canvas-strapped electrical hoist mounted on the ceiling, that Edwin’s father had installed when his back had gone out from flipping over too much cold dead weight. “This is kinda different …”

  “What’s different?” Edwin’s face was all puffy and shiny, as though he hadn’t actually swallowed anything he drank—the glass with the melting ice cubes was still in his hand—and now the alcohol was leaking out through his skin. “It’s the same as before.”

  “Well … no, actually.” It puzzled him, that he had to explain this. “Before, there was like a van. Your van. And all I had to do was help you load it up, and then drive it over there.”

  “The van’s in the shop.”

  That didn’t surprise him. Everything about the funeral parlor was falling apart, gradua
lly, including Edwin. Things stopped working, or something else happened to them, and then they were supposedly getting fixed but that never happened, either. Which was the main reason that all the funeral business now went over to the newer place over on the west side of town. With a nice big sweep of manicured lawn and a circular driveway for the mourners’ cars, and an overhang jutting out from the glass-walled low building, so the casket could get loaded in the hearse without the flowers getting beaten up on a rainy day. All Edwin got was the occasional cremation, because the oven his father had installed was right there on the premises, in a windowless extension behind the prep room.

  Or used to get—Edwin had managed to screw that up as well. To keep the money from dwindling away quite so fast, what he’d gotten after his dad died, he’d taken on a contract from the local animal shelter, to take care of the gassed dogs and cats, the ones too ugly or old or mean to get adopted out in ninety days. An easy gig, and reliable—the world never seemed to run out of stiff, dead little corpses—but Edwin hadn’t been picky enough about raking out the ashes and the crumbly charred bits from the cooling racks. Edwin had still gotten some human-type jobs, family leftovers from his father and grandfather running the place, and some old widow had opened up the canister that nothing but her husband’s remains was supposed to be in, and had found the top half of a blackened kitten skull looking back all hollow-eyed at her. Things like that were bad for business, word-of-mouth-wise. Even the animal shelter had unplugged itself from Edwin, and then the state had revoked the cremation license, and now the oven also wasn’t working, or Edwin hadn’t paid the gas bill or something like that. Edwin had told him what the deal was, but he hadn’t really paid attention.

  “I don’t get it.” He pointed down the ticking hallway, toward the prep room. “Why do they keep dropping jobs off here, anyway?”

  “Hey.” Edwin was sensitive about some things. “This is still an ongoing business, you know. Mortenson’s gets booked up sometimes. They’re not that big.” That was the name of the other place, the nicer one. “So I can take in jobs, get ’em ready, then send ’em over there. Split the fees. Works for them, works for us. This is how you get paid, right?”

  Barely, he thought. Hard to figure that the other funeral parlor did a fifty-fifty with Edwin, since they would do all the flowers and the setting up of the casket in the viewing room, the hearse and the graveside services, all of that. The actual getting the body into the ground. What would they pay Edwin for providing a slab-tabled waiting room? Not much. So no wonder that the most he got from Edwin, for driving the van back and forth, was a ten-dollar bill or a couple of fives. Only this time, there was no van.

  “Actually,” he mused aloud, “you should pay me more for this one. If I were to do it at all. Since I’d be providing the wheels.”

  “How do you figure that?” Impatience lit Edwin’s pudgy face even brighter and shinier. “Gas is cheaper for a motorcycle than a van. Even a hopped-up monster like yours.”

  If he hadn’t finished off the six-pack, back at the motorheads’ place, he might have been able to come up with an argument. It’s my gas, he thought. I paid for it. But Edwin had already steered him down the hallway, past the clocks, and right outside the prep room door.

  “Just do it, okay?” Edwin pushed the door open and reached in to fumble for the light switch. “We’ll work out the details later.”

  Edwin had another sideline to get by with, dealing cigarettes dipped in formaldehyde, that being something he had gallon jugs of. The customers at the funeral parlor’s back door were all would-be hoody teenagers, slouching and mumbling. Their preferred brands seemed to be Marlboros and those cheesy American Spirits from the 7-Eleven. Edwin fired one up, puffed, then handed it to him. “Just to calm you down.”

  It had the opposite effect, as usual. The chemical smoke clenched his jaw vise-tight, the edges of the contracting world burnt red. He exhaled and followed Edwin inside the prep room.

  “This better not be a bag job.” He handed the dip back to Edwin. “Like that one that got hit by the train. That sucked.” He’d hated everything about that particular gig, including hosing out the van afterwards.

  “All in one piece.” Edwin pulled the sheet off. “Looks like she’s sleeping.”

  He looked down at what lay on the table, then shook his head. “You sonuvabitch.” His fist was ready to pop Edwin. “This is not right.”

  “For Christ’s sake. Now what’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter? Are you kidding?” The table’s cold stainless-steel edge was right at his hip as he gestured. “I dated her.”

  “How long?”

  He thought about it. “Four years. Practically.”

  Edwin took another hit, then snuffed the dip between his thumb and forefinger. “Not exactly being married, is it?”

  “We lived together. A little while, at least.”

  “Like I said. Come on, let’s not make a big production about this. Let’s get her over to Mortenson’s, let’s get paid, let’s get you paid. Done deal.”

  He turned back toward the table. At least she was dressed; that much was a comfort. She had on her usual faded jeans, with a rip across the right knee, and a sweatshirt he remembered buying her, back when they’d been an item. The sweatshirt said UNLV across her breasts. For some reason, she’d had a thing about college basketball, even though they’d never gone to a game. There was a cardboard box full of other Rebels junk, sweats and t-shirts and caps, that she’d left when she moved out of his apartment. Plenty of times, he’d come home drunk and lonely and horny, and he’d pull the box out of the closet, kneel down, and bury his face in its fleecy contents, lifting out the tangled sweatshirts and inhaling the faded, mingled scent of her sweat and Nordstrom’s cosmetics counter perfumes, more stuff that he’d bought, usually around Christmastime. He still kept in his wallet the list she’d written out for him, the stuff she wore. Which meant that now, every time he opened it up to pay for a drink, he’d catch a glimpse of the little folded scrap of paper tucked in there, and his equally frayed heart would step hesitantly through its next couple of beats, until the wallet was safely tucked in his back pocket again and he was recovered enough to continue drinking. Which helped. Most of the time.

  He didn’t have to ask how she’d wound up here. She’d had bad habits, mainly the drinking also, back when they’d been hooked up. But he’d heard they had gotten worse after the split-up. He had mixed feelings about that. On one hand, there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that she was as screwed up about him as he was about her. On the other, a certain pang that came with the thought of her heart wheezing to a stop under the load of some cheap street crap.

  Which was apparently what had happened. He could tell. Whatever prep work Edwin had done, it wasn’t enough to hide the blue flush under her jawline. He’d had buddies go that way, and they’d all had that delicate Easter egg color beneath the skin.

  “So you’re gonna do it, right? Don’t be a schmuck. Think about her. For once. If you don’t take her over to Mortenson’s, I’ll have to dump her in a wheelbarrow and take her over there myself.”

  “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.” He knew it wouldn’t; Edwin got winded just heading upstairs to get another drink. “This is gonna be double.”

  “Fine. You got me in a jam. Just do it, okay?”

  It struck him that maybe this was some elaborate joke on Edwin’s part. What would the punchline be? Her sitting up on the table, opening her eyes and flashing her old wicked smile at him?

  I wish. That was something else that wasn’t going to happen.

  “Exactly how do you propose I’m gonna get this done?” He knew from previous jobs that she wouldn’t be stiff anymore. She didn’t even smell stiff. “Maybe I could sling her over the back of the bike and bungee her down. Or maybe across the front fender, like those guys who go out deer hunting with their pickup trucks.” He nodded. “Yeah, just strap her right on there. Who’ll notice?” The dip load in hi
s brain talked for him. “Maybe we could make a set of antlers for her out of some coat hangers.”

  “Look,” said Edwin, “you don’t have to get all pissy about this. I’m the one doing you a favor, remember? I thought of you because you’re always going on about how you need the money.”

  Which was true. He nodded again, deflated. “All right. So what exactly did you have in mind?”

  Edwin had already thought it through. He pulled the handcuffs out of his jacket pocket and held them up. “These’ll do the trick. We just sit her on the bike behind you, throw her arms around your chest, clip these on her wrists and you’re all set. Anybody sees you, just another couple cruising along. Young love.”

  “No way. She never liked to ride bitch.” He’d found that out after he’d already pulled the stock seat off the ’Busa and put on a Corbin pillion for her. “She always wanted her own scoot. Remember, I was gonna buy her that Sportster? The powder blue one.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Edwin gave him a wearied look. “It’s not as if she’s in a position to complain about it, is she?”

  The guy had a point there.

  Took a lot of wrestling—for which Edwin was no frickin’ use—but he finally got on the road. With her.

  He rolled on the throttle, in the dark, kicking it up from fifth to sixth gear as the single lane straightened out. The chill of her bloodless hands, icy as the links of the handcuffs, seeped through his leather jacket and into his heart.

  He stayed off Boulder Highway and the bigger, brighter main streets, even though it meant racking up extra miles. There was a helmet law in this state, though he’d never heard of the cops enforcing it. Or anything else for that matter—you’d have to shoot the mayor to get pulled over in this town.

  Still, just his luck, the one time some black ’n’ white woke up, to get nailed with a corpse on back of the ’Busa. Cruel bastards to do it, though. He could see, without looking back over his shoulder, how her hair would be streaming in the wind, a tangling flag the color of night. With her pale cheek against his neck, she’d look as though she were dreaming of pure velocity, the destination that rushed just as fast to meet you, always right at the headlight’s limit.