Highway 24

by Jeff Chapman

  On impulse he grabbed the shoe and scrambled out the door. With all his adrenaline-laced strength, he pitched it toward a field. The shoe turned end over end, a brilliant white baton from a relay he did not wish to run. As the shoe descended, the darkness swallowed it. He didn’t hear it strike the ground. Amazing out there in all that silence. Maybe it landed in a soft furrow. He drove away, resuming the trip he had begun hours before.

  A sense of victory buoyed his spirits, which rose in proportion to his distance from the shoe. Warily he chanced a glance in the rear-view mirror. No green eyes. No shoe. Nothing but empty road and yellow dashes. He returned his gaze to the highway in front of him.

  At the first hint of color, he applied the brakes. No. No. No! An amorphous, pink bundle lay across the road. Ten yards from the body, he stopped. Was this insanity, its physical incarnation? The supine figure wore a bloody halo. Horror followed him, sneering and laughing, nipping at his heels. Across his path lay a Cerberus guarding the gates of his guilt-ridden nightmare, beyond which he could not venture.

  “What do you want?” he shouted, but he didn’t need to ask. He turned to the passenger seat where he knew the talisman would be. The well-traveled white shoe pointed forward with a tapered toe. It glowed, the white aura brightening the seat. He was beyond fear of touching anything at this point. Desperation to put an end to the business drove his hand toward the shoe, grasping an opportunity to reunite them, but when he turned back to the road, the body had vanished, leaving the pavement unblemished. He dropped the shoe in the seat. Frustration gave way to anger.

  “What do you want, bitch?” he shouted. “I’m sorry!”

  He slapped the steering wheel three times with both hands. Venting brought a modicum of emotional relief but not physical. He pressed his palm against his forehead. His headache had returned.

  Paul turned the car around toward Wailing Creek. Was it braver to push on or to go back? He didn’t know the answer. Without a clue as to what he would do, his conscience drove him back toward the creek where this mess began. He had to return to the beginning, he reasoned, and find the right path out.

  Two bright balls of white, tinted with yellow, marked his approach. When Paul drew even with the lights, he saw a sheriff’s seal emblazoned on the door, a five-pointed bronze star enclosing the scales of justice. A broad-shouldered man, with his arms folded across his chest, leaned against the rear door of the cruiser. He wore a beige uniform and a wide black belt cinched at an angle around his waist.

  Paul looked the sheriff in the face as he coasted past. He recognized a familiar sadness in the man’s features, a hollowness about the eyes, the same unrelenting remorse that had forged a barrier between Paul and his father. The sheriff stared back, unwavering, questioning. Paul wondered what crime the sheriff suspected of him. Maybe someone reported his erratic driving, but who? The sheriff was the first light or human he’d seen in hours. What would the sheriff make of the purloined shoe? Paul watched in the rearview mirror the cruiser’s taillights fade into the darkness and disappear when he crossed Wailing Creek.

  * * * *

  At half past three, Paul entered Cawker, the first town he came to, a small dot on an empty space of map. As previous trips had revealed, there was no place to stay here. The last motel was a husk of a building with weathered plywood covering the windows and paint peeling off the once red doors. No one had bothered to knock down the eyesore.

  Iced coffee from a gas-and-sip recharged his senses. Paul drove without purpose, following a meandering path through the streets of the small town, a wholly different landscape than the highway. Interlocking branches closed above him, forming a cave, a catacomb to his rattled imagination with each darkened house a recess for the dead. He convinced himself at intervals that the girl on the road had never been there, some sort of hallucination from sleep deprivation and too much alcohol and caffeine. Then he would catch sight of the shoe in the glare of a streetlamp, his pleasant explanation would vanish, and he would have to convince himself all over again. His stunned psyche mirrored the stunted shopping district, a plague of vacant stores. In the corner of a grocer’s parking lot, he stopped beneath the branches of a massive oak. An orange glow on the eastern horizon declared the grip of darkness was slackening, that this strange night would indeed end.

  The morning sun blared through the car window into his sleepy face. He rubbed his forehead as he roused, and remembered the nightmare that had brought him here. A black shadow of a heeled shoe cut across the passenger seat. He screamed and slammed his back against the door, instantly alert. The shoe dangled from the rear-view mirror, secured with his tie. He poked it. The shoe bobbed, coming directly at his face. A solid stroke with his hand broke the loose knot and sent the shoe tumbling to the floor.

  He looked over his shoulder. The girl wasn’t in the car, but she had left a message. He shuddered, imagining the green-eyed girl crouching over his sleeping form. A sweet, fleeting scent of lilacs teased his nose. He grabbed the necktie and flung it into the backseat, where he had left it the evening before. The speckled band coiled loosely across the upholstery.

  The shoe lay upside down in a patch of morning sun. The fresh perspective jolted his memory. In a box in his parents’ garage, that was where he’d seen it. The memory shot to the forefront, clear and vivid as the sunny Saturday afternoon on which he had seen it. The shoe had lain on top of the box, out of place amid the household junk and the earthy scent of sawdust. The worn belt from a vacuum cleaner hugged the heel. A deep scratch extended across the sole starting at the toe. He examined the shoe in front of him and found a similar—no, the same exact—scar marring the sole.

  “It can’t be,” he said aloud.

  He remembered questioning his father about the shoe. “What are you going to fix with this?” he had asked, holding up the shoe.

  “Put it back,” his father had snapped. “It’s one of your mother’s old shoes.”

  Paul doubted the story; his mother never wore heels that high. “What’s it doing out here?”

  “How should I know? She probably lost the mate.” His father wrenched the box from him. His gaze flitted across his son’s face. The old man—for Paul always remembered his father as an old man, worn out and given up—thrust the box against the wall under a workbench.

  Paul never saw the shoe again, nor did he pursue more of an explanation. He had assumed it would lead to an illicit tale, something he didn’t want to know. In the months following his father’s death, his mother had chucked out or donated all of the man’s belongings. He assumed the shoe had ended up in the trash, rotting away in a junkyard.

  A yellowish garbage truck in sore need of new paint lumbered down an alley toward Paul’s car. The sound pulled him out of his thoughts and reminded him he was supposed to be at work. He called his manager to plead sickness. They bantered about being stuck out in the sticks. He told a plausible story about a headache from all the driving, partially true. What other words would describe him now except sick? He complained of the poor signal quality when the garbage truck roared past him and thus put an end to the call. His manager had a habit of prattling on.

  Paul turned his attention back to the scratch on the shoe’s sole. For twenty years his father had driven the same route that Paul now traveled. One day the old man quit without notice and took a lower-paying job. Paul remembered his mother’s rage. She didn’t speak to the man for a month. More family time his father had claimed, but no one believed him. Paul figured his father had quit because he wasn’t moving up anymore and was on the verge of getting canned anyway.

  This was about the same time a rift seemed to come between them. His father’s gaze no longer held his own. When they spoke, however sporadically, a palpable barrier separated them, like the grill in a confessional, only his father refused to confess. Every night and weekend the old man retreated to his workshop behind the garage, where he found sanctuary crafting rocking chairs and tables. That’s where they found him one November mornin
g, collapsed over an unfinished table, with a clamp held in his stiff fingers and yellowish wood glue puddled on the floor.

  Paul began to craft a theory to fit the facts of the last few hours of his life and the last twenty years of his father’s. Maybe his father had struck that girl, all those years ago, and picked up her shoe. Perhaps the old man couldn’t rid himself of the shoe either and tossed it into a box to forget it, but always kept it close. Keep your enemies closer, wasn’t that the saying?

  The old man quit because he feared passing that road again. He must have known the police were looking for him. Maybe there was a witness, some telltale damage to the car. Didn’t his father get the windshield of his car replaced? Yes, Paul remembered, his mother had fumed about the expense. Maybe the old man tried but couldn’t get a different route. The salesmen didn’t give up their routes, all those relationships built over the years. So the old man quit and imploded from guilt eating away at his core.

  Not long after his father changed jobs, Paul had stood in the kitchen and told his mother that he would never give up, never give in to weakness, never quit the way his father had. She had laughed, ridiculed him, and that was the last time he told her anything important. Paul bit his lip. So far he had followed his father’s trail, taking the shoe and fleeing the scene. Maybe his mother knew her son better than he knew himself?

  Paul didn’t believe in ghosts, except maybe the Holy Ghost and that only tenuously. After the events of the previous night, though, he questioned his sanity. Wasn’t that a sign of sanity, the sense to question your sanity? And the shoe was real, with weight and texture, and solid in his grip. He needed confirmation, some tangible evidence to identify the girl.

  His ignorance of her name narrowed his options. He could guess where and probably how she died, but as for her name or when, he was lost. He concocted a story to tell the sheriff and promptly dismissed it, doubting such a story would fool any law enforcement officer. Their success depended on spotting lies.

  But I’m innocent. I didn’t kill her. She was already dead. Or do I share the guilt? The sins of the father haunt the son. I took the shoe and ran.

  He left the shoe where it had fallen, lying upside down under the dashboard. For a moment he saw it as an article of clothing, nothing more, something discarded and forgotten, a piece of junk in the garage that no one had bothered to throw out. Not a relic from the grave, here to haunt him for his father’s crime.

  Paul closed his eyes. Fatigue, frustration, and confusion threatened to consume him. He wanted to go home. The only way he could do that was to find out what really happened, talk to the sheriff. Tell him there was a girl on the road, he decided, the aftermath of an accident, and his cell phone battery had run down.

  Swiftly and resolutely, he left the car and walked along the cracked sidewalk toward the center of town with its mishmash of brick and limestone facades crammed together like refugees in a bread line. He passed the open door of a doughnut shop and heard the clink of coffee cups and old men drawling. The scent of freshly fried dough drifted past him on the breeze, as enchanting as a siren’s song. He hesitated, wondering if he should fortify himself before confronting the sheriff. At least he would empty his bladder. He found the unisex toilet at the back of the shop. The loose door handle wiggled in his hand. Once his thoughts turned to relief, he couldn’t move fast enough.

  Back in the main part of the shop, he passed the woman behind the counter, who wore a floor-length white apron stained with cinnamon and maple frosting. Her thick curls strained against a hairnet.

  “Could I help you?” she asked. Paul shook his head no. She frowned and made no effort to hide it as he stepped toward the exit. He kept moving. Sustenance would be his reward for talking to the sheriff.

  As Paul approached the intersection beyond the doughnut shop, a man on the corner caught his attention. He held an open, soft-cover book that draped over the fingers of his left hand while gesticulating wildly with his other hand. Two onlookers smiled with bemusement and curiosity.

  “The Lord spoke to Moses and His people.” The man’s voice boomed, without apparent effort, a natural orator. “But did they listen? No. They fashioned a calf, a golden calf, to honor with their greed and their wickedness. ‘You shall have no other gods,’ He commanded. You shall not make idols.” He punctuated each of the last three words with a shake of his right fist.

  Paul turned to walk behind the preacher, but the man stepped backward, blocking Paul’s path without losing eye contact with the others in his audience.

  “‘You shall honor your father and mother. You shall not commit adultery.’ And,” he exclaimed, turning to Paul, “you shall not steal a life.” The man stared for an uncomfortable duration. Paul finally looked away. “Can I help you, brother?”

  “No, I have an appointment.” Paul moved to the man’s left, but the preacher stepped forward, again blocking Paul’s path.

  “Are you lost, brother? I can always tell a soul that’s lost.”

  The word lost struck a chord in Paul’s exhausted mind. Maybe the preacher man could help, at least speed him on his journey. “Do you know where to find the sheriff?”

  The preacher raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Follow me.” Paul hastened to keep pace as the man glided along the sidewalk with surprising speed. “Are you in some sort of trouble? I could intercede for you.”

  “No. I saw an accident last night.”

  “An accident. And you stopped to help no doubt.”

  “There didn’t seem to be much I could do.” Recalling the facts without thinking about the apparition entrenched his sense of absurdity. But recalling how the shoe hung from its gibbet in his car sent him back into the realm of ghosts. He followed the preacher across a street paved with red bricks. Rugged weeds clung to life in the fissures that crisscrossed the uneven sidewalk. They passed a greasy spoon and a tavern.

  The courthouse burst into view as they rounded a corner. It jutted from the land, rising above the mundane like a Mayan pyramid emerging from the jungle, a monument to a former era. The limestone bricks shone golden in the morning sun, and the central spire towered seven stories into the unblemished sky. A white clock-face with black roman numerals marked the four points on the compass. The massive structure held dominion over a city block and formed the hub for eight sidewalk spokes which branched toward the street and cut across the manicured lawn. All roads led to the courthouse.

  “Is the sheriff’s office in there?”

  “Oh no. It is a lovely building. A grand expression of an ideal. Justice.”

  While the preacher prattled about justice, Paul imagined the men in the quarry. Their shirtless backs wet with sweat, and plow horses straining against their harnesses to move carts laden with stone slabs for the rising courthouse tower. Those men labored to create something that would outlive themselves and their children. His father had left him a shoe, someone else’s shoe. Paul felt cheated.

  “Have they achieved it?” the preacher asked.

  “Achieved what?”

  “Justice.”

  Paul shrugged. “Only the guy who did it really knows, I guess.”

  “That’s a matter of guilt or innocence. Justice is far more complicated.”

  Paul sensed an invitation to debate. The preacher waited. “So where do we find the sheriff?”

  “Yes, the sheriff. He’s with the county jail in that tin hut on the corner.”

  A one-story, flat-roofed hovel hid beneath a row of trees in a back corner of the courthouse lot. Clearly a squatter, the dull-brown, corrugated metal shed cowered beneath the larger building’s stony shadow. Bars secured the small apertures at the back of the building. Air conditioners projected from the lower halves of the front windows.

  They crossed another street paved with bricks. Tar filled holes, where the original bricks had crumbled, gave the impression that a black, splotchy fungus had taken root. The sidewalk that girded the courthouse suffered no uneven cracks. Despite the late autumn date, the la
wn sprouted thick and green as moss in a clear, flowing stream. Japanese maples grew on either side of the walk, and their branches formed a series of living arches overhead.

  The preacher stopped in front of the county jail, at the foot of steps leading up to a glass door. A surge of doubt washed over Paul and breached his hastily constructed wall of courage. What seemed practicable less than an hour ago, while he sat beside the shoe, now seemed ludicrous. The sheriff would brand him a nutter, another petty annoyance on his list of broken windows, missing lawn chairs, and lost dogs. Paul hesitated, his outstretched hand halfway to the railing. The three rickety, white-washed wooden steps would be equally at home in a trailer park.

  “You’ll miss him if you don’t hurry. He goes out on patrol before lunch.”

  Paul ignored the comment. If he hadn’t picked up the preacher, he could have turned and left this whole ridiculous business behind. The preacher stared with a gaze that bore through him. Paul didn’t believe in telepathy, but if anyone could know his thoughts, he suspected it would be the preacher.

  “Courage, my son. Resolution and faith. Those are your friends, sometimes your only friends. You must trust them.”

  Paul rolled his eyes. “Thanks for your help.” The railing moved under the pressure of his grip and the steps creaked like a horde of crickets.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “It’s not really necessary. I’m just reporting an accident.”

  The preacher nodded but made no move to leave.

  Paul entered the office, thinking only of putting a physical barrier between himself and the preacher. A gush of warm air enveloped him. A young woman in a long-sleeved, red blouse looked at him from behind a gray, metal desk. Her short-cropped hair barely covered her ears. Her mouth formed a severe, red line, and the green eyes that studied him exuded a callousness bordering contempt.

  “Can I help you?” asked the woman.