Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  He put the car in gear and pulled back out onto the highway. “Jesus Christ, baby!” he said to the urn. “I try to call for help and what do I get? ‘Weirdoes ‘R’ Us! I should’ve listened to you, baby, I’m sorry.”

  By now the snowfall was fairly steady; combined with the light wind, it looked as if he were driving on a sheet or slowly roiling fog.

  “We’re fine, baby,” he said to the urn, not looking at it. “We’ll get you there, no worries. We just gotta make an extra stop, that’s all. Get that guy some help.” He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and leaned slightly forward, though why leaning forward would do anything to help visibility, he couldn’t say. He’d always done this when driving in bad weather. If nothing else, it lessened the distance between his skull and the windshield should anything happen.

  Damn cheerful fellow you are.

  Merge Right.

  “Fuck!” he made a fist and hit the steering wheel. Less than half a mile since the last one, and still not an orange construction barrel in sight.

  He merged, and the concrete divider came closer to his side.

  “Sorry, baby,” he said. “I didn’t mean to swear like that. I know how you hate it.”

  Three miles until the exit. No problem. He’d maintain, he had to maintain, he wanted to do this right, wanted to go to sleep later tonight knowing that he’d done the right thing, that he’d helped another human being before it was too late, and honored his wife’s last request. Maybe that would make it easier for him to sleep nights, easier to get up in the morning and face himself.

  Two miles to go. He relaxed his grip on the steering wheel and even put in a new CD – Pat Metheny this time. Somehow, Metheny’s guitar playing always sounded joyous, and he needed to hear something joyous and hopeful right now. Damn, his nerves had gotten the better of him – and a lot sooner than he’d thought they would.

  One mile to go, and he saw the blinking taillights in the emergency lane ahead. This time he would stop, if for no other reason than to see if the other driver was as confused by all the Merge Right signs as he was.

  And to make sure he’s all right, said Lauren’s voice. To check and make sure he’s okay. Like you should have done when you realized how long I’d been up in the tub.

  He looked at the urn. “That’s a lousy thing to say to me, baby. I always respected your privacy, y’know? I just thought—”

  No, honey, you just knew, that’s all. You knew, and you just sat there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, a single tear slipping from his eye and streaming slowly down his face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

  This time it was an SUV of some sort, and the windshield wipers were going so Matt had a decent view of the inside, but no sooner had he come to a stop alongside the other vehicle than the wind kicked into a higher gear and the snow became a churning mass of white, so it didn’t matter if the other vehicle’s wipers were going; the wet snow plastered itself against the passenger windows of Matt’s car and blocked his vision as much as did the tears.

  He pressed his hands against his eyes and rubbed hard, pulling in his breath to steady himself. Get a grip, pal; just get a fucking grip already.

  He looked over at the SUV, and then pulled back a bit and blinked his lights, hoping the other driver would see and blink in return; when that didn’t happen, Matt hit his horn three times. The driver of the SUV did the same. Matt didn’t want to approach the other vehicle without having given the driver some sort of warning.

  Reaching into the back seat, Matt grabbed his coat and put it on, zipping up and covering his head with the hood. He dug out his gloves, put those on, took a deep breath, said, “I’ll be back in a minute, baby”, and climbed out.

  The weather reports had called for a low of 27 degrees, but what Matt stepped out into felt damned near arctic. It was so cold that his breath turned to iron in his throat, the hairs in his nostrils webbed into instant ice, and his eyes watered and stung. In the faint starlight and bluish luminescence of the snow, everything beyond a few yards of his gaze swam deceptive and without depth, glimmering with things half seen or imagined. He listened beneath the low, mournful call of the winter-night wind and could detect no sounds save for those made by himself, the purring motors of the two vehicles, and the thunka-thunka-thunk of windshield wipers. Everything else in the world might have already died out in this cold.

  He raised a hand to wave in greeting as he approached the driver’s side of the SUV and realized that the driver had already lowered the window. Matt walked up to the door and offered his hand.

  The SUV was empty. Not only that, but the window had been down for quite some time; a thin layer of snow covered a good portion of the front seats and part of the back. Despite the cold, the heater wasn’t running, and appeared not have been running for quite some time; the snow had frozen into clumps in places.

  Matt opened the door and leaned in, looking into the back seat where he saw a blanketed infant’s seat buckled into place. Scrambling inside, he reached back and pulled away the blanket to find that the infant’s seat was empty, as well. Jesus Christ – what kind of a moron would bring a baby out into a night like this? The taking-a-leak scenario didn’t hold up this time, because no one would leave a baby alone in a car on a night like this, regardless of how much they needed to go. Which meant that this person – whoever they were – was out there someplace with a baby.

  Matt took a deep breath, feeling the cold slice into his throat, and tried to get a handle on the panic he felt rising in his gut. Okay, maybe they’d had some kind of car trouble – like the heater going out – and they’d decided that, rather than risk the baby’s health, they’d call AAA Roadside Assistance and get a ride into the next town. But why leave the vehicle running like this? Dammit, dammit, dammit – this made no sense.

  He looked around the interior of the car for anything that might be a clue, checking the door pockets, under the visors, even opening the glove compartment, but found nothing to indicate why they’d left the vehicle – or, for that matter, who “they” even were. The glove compartment held no registration papers.

  Then he saw the three square buttons over the driver’s visor: a GPS system. Sliding into the driver’s seat and closing the door, Matt then raised the window and pressed the button with the imprinted phone icon.

  After a few seconds, a voice said, “UniStar, how may I assist you?”

  “Thank God,” said Matt. “Listen, this isn’t my car, I found it abandoned a few minutes ago. Whoever was driving this took a baby with them and it’s snowing like crazy outside and – ”

  “One moment please while I confirm your location.”

  The next five seconds seemed like fifty, but at last the voice came back: “You say you found the car abandoned?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have a fix on your location, Mr. Leigh, and will—”

  “Hold on a second.”

  “Yes?”

  “How do you know my name? I didn’t tell you.”

  “I apologize, sir. It’s something we do automatically. As soon as anyone calls in, their name, vehicle make, and location shows on the screen. I was just reading the name off the screen. Force of habit.”

  “That still doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Sir, the vehicle that you found is registered to a Matthew and Lauren Leigh.”

  Matt stared at the button, then looked out at his own car. “Lady, there must be some kind of mistake. I’m Matthew Leigh, and I can assure you I’ve never owned an SUV.”

  “Perhaps your wife—”

  “My wife is dead. She’s been dead for several months.”

  “Perhaps this is just one of those odd coincidences you hear about from time to time, Mr. Leigh. Perhaps the owners of this vehicle just happen to have the same names and yourself and your late wife.”

  Matt didn’t like the flippant tone in the voice. “That’s not funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny, Mr. Le
igh. Regardless, we’ll have assistance to your location shortly.”

  Matt looked at the baby seat in the back and knew that, despite this bullshit about the names, he couldn’t just leave this vehicle if there were any possibility that he could do something to help find a missing infant. “How soon will someone be here?”

  “Mr. Leigh?”

  “What?”

  “The only way to get home is never to stop. Never to stop. Never to – ”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  There was no answer. He repeated the question twice more, and, receiving no reply, decided to wait it out in his own car. As he was climbing back out into the freezing night, the voice said, “Assistance will be there in five minutes.” Click.

  The wind seemed determined to nail him to the spot – God, the temperature must have dropped at least eight more degrees while he was in the SUV – but he managed to make it back.

  “Miss me?” he asked the urn as he climbed inside and closed the door. Removing his gloves, he reached down and turned up the heat, then grabbed his cell phone. Screw UniStar and their promises of assistance and their…whatever-in-the-hell it was that helped them to identify him; he was going to call the police. Punching in 911 he listened for a moment, heard nothing, then pulled back the phone and looked at the screen. No Available Signal.

  “Horseshit!” he snapped, closing the phone and slowing his breathing. “You can’t drive a mile down any stretch of highway without passing a goddamn cell tower these days, and I’m supposed to believe that a little snowstorm kills the signal? I don’t think so.” He looked at Lauren’s urn. “I mean, c’mon, baby – for what we pay for this service every month, I damned well ought top get a signal. Isn’t that their guarantee? Christ, I’d settle for weirdoes again.”

  He flipped open the phone once again and thumbed in 911. This time he got results.

  “911. Please state the nature of your emergency.”

  “I found an abandoned vehicle with an empty baby seat in the back. I think the driver and the baby might be lost in the snow.”

  “What is your location, Mr. Leigh?”

  Matt pulled the phone away and stared at the screen. Instead of displaying the time and the number he’d just called, the words Voice Mail Waiting were showing.

  He brought the phone back and said, “How do you know my name? What the hell is going on?” His only answer was a burst of white noise from the other end. He disconnected the call and tossed down the phone, leaning back against the headrest and closing his eyes.

  You’re stressing, honey, said Lauren’s voice.

  “I know,” he whispered. “But, Jesus, baby…this is weird.”

  No arguments here. Out of curiosity, how long had I been up there before you thought something might be wrong?

  Matt opened his eyes and sat forward. The UniStar folks knew the location of the SUV and were sending assistance, so he’d done his good deed for the day. The 911 thing…okay, maybe he got one of those stations that automatically pulls up the cell number and the name of the person it’s registered to, maybe that was it.

  He checked the time and saw that he was over an hour behind schedule. Reaching into his coat pocket, he removed the slip of paper with the name and number of the hotel. He’d call and tell them he was running late, that they were to hold the room. If it turned out there were any extra charges for this, so be it. (Part of him knew this was unnecessary – he’d given them a credit card number to guarantee the room – but another part of him, the part that always worried, the part that always assumed the worst was going to happen, wouldn’t let him not call.)

  He flipped open his cell phone and saw the Voice Mail Waiting message again, and so pressed OK, entered his password, and waited for the message to play.

  “Sorry we’re not going to make it by midnight, baby,” he said to Lauren. “But we’ll get there. You just relax.”

  “I’m not worried, honey,” came Lauren’s voice from the cell phone. “I know you’ll get us there eventually. Just remember, the best way to get there is never to stop.”

  Everything inside Matt’s body locked up. For a moment, there was nothing more to the world than the echo of his dead wife’s voice.

  “To replay this message,” came the electronic voice-prompt, “press ‘1’. To save it to the archives, press ‘7’. To delete it, press ‘9’.”

  Matt pressed “1”.

  “It’s really cold out here, Daddy,” said a child’s thin voice. “When you gonna get here for me an’ Mommy?”

  Matt dropped the phone as if it were a hot coal and pressed his back up against the driver’s side door, instinctively pulling his knees up and remembering something a Psych 101 professor had said back in college, about how childhood and fear are forever connected in the mind, because even an adult, in the grip of fear, will resort to the fetal position.

  On the floor, the cell phone’s screen blinked at him as the child’s voice kept speaking: “…at, Daddy? It’s so cold here. You have to come get me an’ Mommy. Please, Daddy?”

  Matt pushed out one leg and closed the cell phone with his foot, then pulled his leg back so quickly he heard his knee crack.

  A sudden bright light appeared in the rear-view mirror. Turning around in his seat (still keeping his knees pressed tightly against his chest), Matt saw the distant headlights closing in fast.

  “Okay,” he said, but whether it was to himself or to Lauren, he didn’t know and didn’t care; for the moment, he need the sound of his own voice to fill the silence.

  Silence?

  He looked down at the CD player; the Metheny album had been playing when he’d gotten out of the car and he hadn’t stopped it.

  I always hated Pat Metheny, said Lauren. All his stuff sounds the same to me after a couple of songs.

  He leaned forward and saw the ejected disc, now snapped in two, lying on the floor in front of Lauren’s seat. As he reached down to pick it up, to make sure it was real and not just something brought on by the stress, his cell phone began ringing. He pulled back so quickly that he slammed his elbow against the steering wheel, right smack dead-bang on the funny bone, and the pain shot both up and down his arm as he grabbed his elbow and bent his arm, crying out.

  The headlights down the highway were getting much closer now, and his cell phone – which should have switched over to voicemail after the fourth ring – was still going off, insistent, its volume growing louder and louder. He bent down – taking care to keep his throbbing arm a good distance from the steering wheel – snatched the phone from the floor, looked back to see how close the other vehicle was, and answered.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “You’re beyond the laws of nature, time, gravity, friction, all of it,” said a voice that was a combination of Lauren’s soft Southern lilt and the child’s tiny whisper. It sounded almost computerized. “Picture two people standing apart from one another on a frozen lake. They’re tossing a basketball back and forth between them. Each time one person receives the basketball, the force of the other’s throw pushes them farther away along the ice. The two players are the matter particles which are being interacted with, and the basketball is the force-carrier particle which affects them. One important thing to know about force-carriers is that a particular force-carrier particle can only be absorbed or produced by a matter particle which is affected by that particular force. For instance, electrons and protons have an electric charge, so they can produce and absorb the electromagnetic force-carrier, the photon. Neutrinos, on the other hand, have no electric charge, so they cannot absorb or produce photons. Isn’t that interesting? I wish I’d gotten to teach some of this to my students…not that they would have paid much attention.”

  “Why are you doing this, baby?” said Matt into the phone, bursting into tears once again and feeling diminished, inept, and so goddamned weak he just wanted to die.

  “Shhh, honey, don’t get upset,” said the voice of his dead wife and child. “All matter, be it the car
in which you’re sitting or a meteor in space, is composed of quarks and leptons. Both quarks and leptons exist in three distinct sets. Each set of quark and lepton charge-types is called a “generation” of matter – charges +2/3, -1/3, 0, and -1 as you go down each generation. All visible matter in the universe is made from the first generation of matter particles – up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. This is because all second and third generation particles are unstable and quickly decay into stable first generation particles.

  “Now, think about something, honey. Imagine that we’re – little Cynthia and I – imagine that we’re a first-generation quark and you’re a first-generation lepton, and that your guilt, your grief – whatever you want to call it – imagine that it has become so powerful that it’s engineered a specific first generation force-carrier which, upon interaction with the first generation quarks and leptons, scrambles them into an instantaneous decay pattern and reduces the object to a harmless spray of subparticles. Do you see?”

  “Oh, God, no, no, I don’t! What’re you talking about, baby? Where are you?”

  “Right beside you, honey. A bunch of particles in a jar. The Universe is no longer a great mystery, Matt. In fact” – and here she/they laughed – “it’s kind of a bore. Everything was always a bore without you by my side to share it with. Even death.”

  Click!

  He had to get out. He suddenly didn’t give a flying doublefudge fuck if he got to Niagara Falls or not, or whether or not he found some help for that other car stranded way back there, or if he ever saw another sunrise; all he cared about right now was getting away from the car and the urn and the phone and the guilt in his gut, all of it.

  The headlights were almost here, so Matt tossed down the still-active phone, flipped up the hood of his coat, threw open the door, and stepped outside—

  —and no sooner was his first leg out of the car with the rest of his body instinctually following that he immediately felt himself drop with such suddenness and force that he barely had to time to think The ground’s disappeared! before his arms were flailing out, hands seeking purchase, and he somehow managed to grab hold of the seat belt that pulled out to its farthest length and then locked in place as he hung there, his head at the level of the running board, gripping the seat belt, swinging back and forth, the rest of his body hanging over an endless, seemingly bottomless, black, black, black chasm. He pulled up his free arm and threw it over the running board, trying to grab onto the gearshift, but the first time he missed and almost lost his grip on the seat belt but managed to grab the brake pedal in time, and that was good, yes, definitely, but it wasn’t enough because the cold, the goddamned arctic cold turned the pedal to fire against his skin, so he took a deep breath, feeling his throat turn to iron, pressed his chest against the running board, and made a second, frenzied grab for the gearshift, and this time he nailed it, got a solid grip around the thing, and began pulling himself up and forward, his legs kicking out and back as if he were swimming, trying to balance his torso evenly between the seat belt and the gearshift because he wasn’t sure how much of his weight either one of them could handle and that’s all he’d need, for one of them to snap off or tear away, he’d be royally screwed then, no way could he get another grip in time, and for a moment he pictured himself freefalling away from the car, screaming as he watched the bottom of the car rise higher and higher as he plunged down into whatever in the hell waited below – if anything waited below – and forced himself not to think about it, just kept concentrating on keeping his weight balanced and his grips firm as he put his shoulders into it, rolling them slowly forward, then back, forward, then back, and soon he felt his hand slide up the seat belt, felt his elbow touch the edge of the running board, and as soon as the first elbow was inside and locked in place the rest was easy, he twisted sideways and lay his left shoulder on the floor, shifting the majority of his weight onto the gearshift and praying that it would hold, and it did, and soon there was his knee coming over the edge of the running board, his hand sliding a little farther up the seat belt, and with a last, painful effort, he got the rest of himself back into the car and onto the seat, still clutching the seatbelt that he at once pulled across his chest and locked into place, throwing his head back against the headrest and pulling in strained breaths, trying to stop his heart from triphammering right out of his chest.