Everything Breaks

by Vicki Grove

  “Didn’t I tell you she was a looker?” Bud asked huskily. “I’m glad to see she’s been kept real nice in the shed out back, too.”

  Any other time, with my head not hammering and my lips less cracked, I would have given a respectful whistle. All those square and shiny black surfaces. The elegantly thin whitewall tires, a tidy spare mounted like an ornament just beneath the left window. The smooth running boards beneath the two doors, like in gangster movies.

  The crazy hitchhiker girl was driving. That is, the ferry girl was driving, though she seemed too flimsy to be driving anything, let alone something like this truck. Her bright hair was all of her that was visible above the steering wheel. It looked like a parrot on a curved black perch.

  She came up even with us and braked when her driver’s window was maybe ten feet from my passenger window. She let the truck idle there, burping and rattling, as she pushed open the door with her boot. She slid down from the high driver’s seat, spread her motorcycle jacket on the running board, and sat on it.

  Then she planted her elbows on her bony white knees and smiled at me, holding a crooked yellow cigarette between her middle finger and her thumb.

  “Got a light?” she called, shading her eyes with her free hand. The day had become incredibly clear and bright. The sun was bleaching everything but the deep blue sky and the deep black car to the brown tones of old photos.

  I dug Trey’s lighter from my pocket. “You’re gonna kill yourself with those cancer sticks,” I muttered with false swagger, trying not to show her how sick and weak I was. I’d yanked that splinter of poison truth from my heart, and like she’d warned, I’d nearly bled out. I hadn’t died, but if she knew how miserable I felt, how filled with self-disgust and hopelessness, she might decide I was close enough.

  “It’s a roll-your-own like they smoked in the 1930s. I found it smashed in the seat of this truck. You could lose a small cat in the padding of these seats.”

  I glanced over at Bud, who still sat motionless behind the steering wheel of the Olds, staring straight ahead. Quietly, I opened my door and shuffled painfully across to the truck. My hands weren’t all that steady as I flicked the lighter, but it lit.

  I held the flame down to her.

  “Cigs won’t kill me,” she said when she’d lit up. “Nothing will kill me. But I’m not allowed to eat on the job. I get to smoke and chew gum, but I don’t get to eat. And since I work every second of every single day that means no chocolate cake, ever. Not even half of a banana Popsicle. Not. Ever. Not once in eternity.”

  She took a deep drag, then breathed out a large, smoky sigh of regret over all that forbidden dessert. I noticed her eyeing my pockets, looking again for the obolus.

  “You’re greedy, you know,” I heard myself say, covering that pocket with my hand.

  “Yeah,” she agreed with a shrug. “I’m greedy, you’re greedy, everybody’s greedy for something. I’m greedy for passengers because once in a rare while they pay me and I like money. With enough money I can maybe retire in a few thousand more years and become a street magician and eat cake to my heart’s content. You’re greedy for . . . what are you greedy for, Tucker Graysten? I told you, now you have to tell me.”

  She changed, became sharper-edged so that her face looked snake-like, all scales and bones. I thought I even saw the pupils of her eyes stretch upward to become vertical as she added, in something like a hiss, “Tucker Graysten, what are you greedy for? Say it!”

  “I’m greedy for . . . for life.” I thought my chest would implode with pure, raw shame.

  She smiled and nodded and relaxed back against the truck door. “You look really horrible, worse even than when I first put eyes on you three minutes ago, my time. But your eyes then were frantic, and now they’re sad. No, you’re not anywhere near ready to go where we’re going, Tucker. You just want to go home, where all the trails begin.”

  “But it’s not fair for me to . . .”

  That’s as far as I could get. There was a lump in my throat I couldn’t push past.

  “. . . to crave life so much when Trey is dead? And Steve and Zero are dead as well? No, it’s not fair, you’re right. You were their designated driver, after all.”

  She took another long drag on that home-rolled cigarette. Then she noticed a tiny bug bite on her knee and bent to give that all her attention.

  “Remember when Janet said she didn’t want to take chances with you?” she murmured, scratching. “But you said all the chances had already been taken?” She spit on her finger and rubbed that spit into the bite. “Boy, were you wrong.”

  She jerked her head up and snapped her fingers and I instantly began seeing a homemade movie flickering against the shiny door of Bud’s old truck. It turned out to feature quick little everyday snippets of my life. Me learning to walk, climbing a tree, going off the high dive at the pool, riding the TiltA-Whirl in fourth grade four times in a row until I was too dizzy to stand, kissing Jerilyn Brookner in fifth grade, punching Trey when he stole my pocketknife, touching my tongue to a frozen mailbox, buying a crossbow, breaking my arm, breaking my other arm, going out for soccer, getting punched by Trey for losing his harmonica, hugging my dad before I went to bed on the last night I saw him . . .

  She snapped her fingers again and the movie vaporized, taking the wind out of me along with it. I bent with my hands on my knees, disoriented and breathless, panting like I’d panted the night I’d been running along the bluff road and had come upon the nightmare sight of those broken white guardrails, those thick knotted wires still bobbing in the hot wind of the Mustang’s recent passing on its way to fiery oblivion. . . .

  “Just a small sample, Tucker. About one-tenth of a percentage of the big chances you took before the age of thirteen. There are new chances every day. Quit taking them and you start sending out a signal for me to pick you up. There are a thousand things to make you stop taking chances and only one reason not to stop, that reason being life. So. You flunked your designated driver’s test. It was a big deal. Now you’ve smartened up and you’ll take the test again. You’ll only have to take it every time you get behind the wheel, that’s somewhere around seventy thousand to two hundred thousand more times.” She sighed. “Do you think spit works on bug bites? I heard it did, but I’m beginning to doubt it.”

  I sucked in air and asked, weakly, hoping my question wouldn’t trigger a great reveal by the shaggy thing I’d glimpsed three or four times today, “If you’re Charon, why aren’t you a dark-haired ugly old guy with a beard and a Greek toga?”

  She shrugged, still scratching. “That’s how the Greeks saw me, at least the guys who hung around in the Agora writing plays and telling stories while their poor wives stayed home and did the drudge work. They figured I’d look like them—male, bearded, solemn, only not as golden and handsome as they saw themselves and those so-called heroes they were so dazzled by. But let me tell you something, those ‘heroes’ they liked to go on and on about were basically a bunch of spoiled little boys with too much leisure time on their hands. That Achilles, for instance, always picking fights, never letting anyone else have a fair turn in any sporting competition.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I decided to experiment with fashion because of them, frankly. Why should I stay dull and ugly and male all the time just because dull, ugly males imagined me like themselves, only duller and uglier? I can change the look, the voice, even the attitude. It just takes a second. I mean, I’m a good mimic, granted. But the difficult thing is actual fashion. Creating your own unique self. Only humans can decide who and what they’re going to be or if they’re going to be.”

  “You’re supposed to have a boat,” I told her.

  I was thinking about Zero’s uncle’s boat and how glad I’d been to have it match the illustration in Mrs. B.’s book. When I tried to picture my friends crossing that mysterious, fogshrouded dark water, I needed every bit of comfort I could get.

  “I keep my boat anchored at the river Acheron. There used to b
e a full-time guy that brought passengers to me, his name was Hermes? Well, the boss gave him other jobs, and now I have to link people up with connecting transport all by my lonesome. I don’t mind. I get a kick out of letting the good guys pick their rides.”

  She stood and gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “Like Bud back there?” she whispered. “He’s a great guy, a real gentleman, and he deserves to be taken to the river in his own beloved truck.”

  I looked up and over her shoulder. Sure enough, a shadowy form now occupied the passenger side of the truck. I turned to look behind me, where I’d just left Bud at the wheel of the Olds. No one was in the Olds. I’d left my door open, so there was no mistaking the long, empty expanse of yellowish vinyl bench seat. As I watched, the keys to the Olds gradually materialized until they lay sprawled on the dashboard.

  When I looked back, she was staring at the Bic dangling from my fingers. I hadn’t had the gumption to pocket it.

  “Uh, listen, I promised Cherry Berry I’d tell you something.” She looked around, chewing her thumbnail, then leaned closer to whisper, “We both signed confidentiality agreements when we got our jobs with the transportation and delivery department, but we both break the rules sometimes, our little protest now that working conditions have gone downhill. We seldom get paid, we have no backup help, et cetera. Anyway, this is confidential and CB and I would both be in trouble if our boss knew I’d . . . blabbed.”

  She dropped her cigarette butt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. “Okay. Nearly everybody has some little thing to say when they’re crossing the river. Last thoughts, pleas to be spared, mournful songs, angry accusations. It’s strictly against the confidentiality rules to divulge a pickup’s last words on the trip or upon disembarking, but Cherry Berry has a lot of lapses, lots more than I have, and is always bragging about what they say or scream when they see him, the guardian of the underworld, teeth bared, three heads. Anyway, he wanted you to hear what your friend told him, the red-haired one, Trey.” She leaned even closer. “As Trey got from the boat, he asked Cherry Berry to tell you that he wasn’t going to let you drive that last stretch from the zinc mine fields to the bonfire. He said if Cherry Berry took you the green Bic lighter, it would prove it since you’d know he, Trey that is, only bought new cigs and brought along his lighter when he planned to make a grand entrance behind the wheel of his car, smoking. He said you were, let’s see . . . something, something, and you would go nuts if CB didn’t take you the lighter and give you that message.”

  I was frozen, rooted. My eyes burned and I had to struggle to keep my chin from quivering like a small child’s. “Did he say ‘innocent wonder’?” I finally croaked out.

  She frowned. “Nah, that wasn’t it. Oh! I remember. He said you were ‘awesomely loyal,’ that was it. ‘Tucker is awesomely loyal and he’ll go nuts if he doesn’t know.’ I remember because Cherry Berry and I didn’t think there was such a word as ‘awesomely.’”

  I just stood there, my chest on fire and my throat burning, so I couldn’t speak.

  “Well, time to travel,” she said. She crawled into the driver’s seat of the truck. She put her boot to the gas pedal and looked down at me.

  “Last chance to come with.” She snorted a laugh. “Just kidding!”

  I strained to see Bud, and by letting my eyes go unfocused, I could make out the shadowy contours of his proud chin and his few flyaway head hairs.

  I raised my hand to tell him good-bye, but he didn’t respond. Bud was never one for sentimental leave-takings.

  “You gotta officially sign off with a negative,” the weird hitchhiker, that Charon, called down to me. “The standard gesture will do, just to show headquarters you’re officially rescinding the pickup call.”

  I solemnly shook my head as Bud must have done on his long-ago battlefield. She gave me a nod and a thumbs-up to show that was acceptable, then she gave it some gas.

  I watched them rattle down the long, rutted lane that was a mere scratch through all that blowing wheat. When they were maybe a hundred yards away, the dog, Cerberus, materialized in the truck bed and watched me, eagerly lolling all three tongues like dogs do when they expect you to throw them a treat.

  They kept going and going through the long expanse of unbroken, trackless wheat, angling slightly upward until at some point they must have reached the sky. I could see them as a shrinking black speck against the clouds for quite a while.

  And then at some point, I couldn’t.

  I dropped to my knees then with my face tilted toward the sky and my arms stretched open. I let out a howl that went on and on. I felt pain everywhere, inside and out. It was flowing through me like I was a tiny part of a wire connecting all the grief and regret and hope and fear of the right side of the world to all those same things on the left side.

  I didn’t even notice the farmer who stopped his gigantic combine and came running to help me. It was nearly dark by then, and he told me at first he thought I was praying.

  I didn’t correct him. I have prayed off and on all my life and none of it felt anything like this. Still, maybe it was supposed to.

  XIV

  I was at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha when Officer Stephens came into my room the next morning, settled into a chair beside my bed, and listened to my whole story from the time I’d found Bud unconscious in his car to . . . well, the whole story. I hadn’t planned on ever telling anyone about the hitchhiker girl, the flood, the black truck. But Officer Stephens deserved better than a mouthful of mumbled lies like I’d given him the night of the wreck. When I finished, he didn’t say anything.

  I wondered if he believed me. I sure wouldn’t have. “So, Mr. Heisterberg was with you when you located the body?” he finally asked.

  I guess police get used to saying things like that, but it took me by surprise and I winced. “Yeah, he turned off his combine and we went into the house and found Bud still sitting in his chair by the broken window in that upstairs bedroom. Then I borrowed Mr. Heisterberg’s cell phone to call you at the police station back home. I called you instead of Janet because I figured it’d be good if she heard it in person, from a friend.”

  He folded his arms and nodded. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Good thinking.”

  Officer Stephens hadn’t even asked me on the phone if he should drive Janet up here. He’d just told me that he’d be doing it and they’d be here in three or four hours unless Janet wanted to wait until morning, which he very much doubted she would. They’d arrived last night, while I was being treated. They’d come by the hospital, been told to come back in the morning, then driven out to the Heisterbergs’. Mrs. Heisterberg had invited them to stay overnight so Janet could more easily make funeral arrangements.

  “After Mr. Heisterberg called the coroner from the old house and the body was picked up, he brought you in his truck directly here, right? To this hospital?”

  I nodded. I hadn’t argued when Mr. Heisterberg had strongly suggested it. It was obvious even to me by then that my legs had become infected, big-time. As they prepped me last night, they kept telling me the treatment they’d be doing would hurt a lot, but it hadn’t hurt nearly as much as my legs had all on their own for the past couple of days.

  Now I was bandaged from thigh to ankle up and down both legs, and I was attached to an IV of antibiotics. One strict nurse had mentioned I’d be lucky if I didn’t end up needing skin grafts down the line. No one here was one bit happy with me. It was touch-and-go whether they’d even let me out in time for the funeral this afternoon.

  “I guess this was stupid,” I mentioned, dipping my head to indicate my legs.

  Officer Stephens grimaced, then gave a small smile. “Pretty much.”

  And then he filled me in on how Bud and Janet still had Nebraska relatives and Mr. Heisterberg had notified them. Yesterday, at Janet’s request, Mrs. Heisterberg had called the local funeral home. Janet had decided it would be a simple graveside service.

  “Is Janet .
. . here?” I asked Officer Stephens. “I mean, here at the hospital?”

  He crossed his arms. “You boys had her plenty worried,” he said gruffly.

  I nodded and looked down at the little hoop house that framed my legs, keeping the blankets from touching my bandages. My eyes began burning and things went blurry.

  He walked to the door, and when he opened it, Janet pretty much fell into the room. I guess I expected she’d have plenty to say, but she just eased herself between the bed and the IV cart, then dropped forward to sprawl across the pillows, cradling my head in her strong waitress arms with her ear settled like a suction cup against my forehead.

  After a while she kissed my cheek and let me go, then pulled herself up to sit on the edge of the mattress, where for a long time she just looked solemnly down at me, pushing my hair from my face. I closed my eyes and relaxed into her stroke, like I remember doing when I’d come home banged up from stupid bike stunts in fourth grade. I felt tears burning against the backs of my eyelids.

  “Oh, Tucker,” she whispered sadly, “you often seem as young and breakable to me as when you were eight years old. You probably don’t remember, but sometimes your dad went out by himself at night even back then. And Bud was no good as a babysitter after his bedtime at nine o’clock, so if I had to work the night shift, I used to go talk to your mother’s picture. I’d just tell her I was about to leave, and I’d ask her to be there through the night for you. We’ve always been in cahoots, darling boy, me and Cynthia Anne. It’s why I wanted her picture hung higher, so you’d see her and know that even during this awful time, your mother that you loved so dearly is still nearby, protecting you.”

  She sat up straight then and grabbed a bunch of hospital tissues. She buried her face in them as Officer Stephens came and took her elbow and eased her back off the high bed and around that wobbling IV cart.

  I grabbed her wrist right before she got out of range. “I know my mom is nearby, Janet. I always know that’s exactly where you are.”