by Joe Hill
“Got to go,” he said at last. “Got a lot of driving to do.”
“Go where?” she asked, startled.
He blinked, then said, “Like, Vic . . . dude . . . were you listening?”
“Closely,” Vic said, and it was true. She had been listening. Just not to him. She had been listening for the phone. She had been waiting for it to ring.
After Louis and the kid were gone, she walked through the rooms of the brick town house on Garfield Street that she had paid for with the money she made drawing Search Engine, back when she still drew, back before the children in Christmasland started calling again, every day. She brought a pair of scissors with her, and she cut the lines leading into each of the phones.
Vic collected the phones and brought them to the kitchen. She put them in the oven, on the top rack, and turned the dial to BROIL. Hey, it had worked the last time she needed to fight Charlie Manx, hadn’t it?
As the oven began to warm, she shoved open the windows, switched on the fan.
After that, Vic sat in the living room and watched TV in her panties and nothing else. First she watched Headline News. But there were too many ringing phones in the CNN studio, and the sound unnerved her. She switched over to SpongeBob. When the phone in the Krusty Krab rang, she changed the channel again. She found a sports-fishing program. That seemed safe enough—no phones in this kind of show—and the setting was Lake Winnipesaukee, where she had spent her childhood summers. She had always liked the way the lake looked just after dawn, a smooth black mirror wrapped in the white silk of early-morning fog.
At first she drank whiskey on the rocks. Then she had to drink it straight, because it smelled too bad in the kitchen to go in there and get ice. The whole town house stank of burning plastic, despite the fan and the open windows.
Vic McQueen was watching one of the fishermen struggle with a trout when a phone began to chirp, somewhere near her feet. She looked down at the scatter of toys on the floor, a collection of Wayne’s robots: an R2-D2, a Dalek, and of course a couple of Search Engine figures. One of the robots was a Transformers thing, black with a bulky torso and a red lens for a head. It visibly shivered as it chirped once more.
She picked it up and began to fold the arms and legs inward. She pushed the head down into the body. She snapped the two halves of its torso together and suddenly was looking at a plastic, nonfunctional, toy cell phone.
The plastic, nonfunctional, toy cell phone rang again. She pressed the ANSWER button and held it up to her ear.
“You’re a big fat liar—” said Millicent Manx. “And Daddy is going to be mad at you when he gets out. He’s going to stick a fork in your eyes and pop them out, just like corks.”
Vic carried the toy into the kitchen and opened the oven. Poisonous black smoke gushed out. The cooked phones had charred like marshmallows dropped in a campfire. She threw the Transformer in on top of the melted brown slag and slammed the oven shut again.
The stink was so bad she had to leave the house. She put on Lou’s motorcycle jacket and her boots and got her purse and went out. She grabbed the whiskey bottle and pulled the door shut behind her, just as she heard the smoke detector begin to blat.
She was down the street and around the corner when she realized she hadn’t put anything on besides the jacket and her boots. She was tramping around greater Denver at two in the morning in her faded pink panties. At least she had remembered the whiskey.
She meant to go home and pull on a pair of jeans, but she got lost trying to find her way back, something that had never happened before, and wound up walking on a pretty street of three-story brick buildings. The night was aromatic with the smell of autumn and the steely fragrance of freshly dampened blacktop. How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in high July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.
At that time of the night, she had the street almost to herself, although at one point three men on Harleys rolled by. They slowed as they went past to check her out. They weren’t bikers, though. They were yuppies, who were probably creeping home to wifey after a boys’ night out at an upscale strip club. She knew from their Italian leather jackets and Gap blue jeans and showroom-quality bikes that they were more used to Pizzeria Unos than to living brutal on the road. Still. They took their time looking her over. She raised her bottle of whiskey to them and wolf-whistled with her free hand, and they grabbed their throttles and took off, tailpipes between their legs.
She wound up at a bookstore. Closed, of course. It was a little indie, with a big display of her books in one window. She had given a talk here a year ago. She had been wearing pants then.
She squinted into the darkened store, leaning close to see which one of her books they were peddling. Book four. The fourth book was out already? It seemed to Vic she was still working on it. She overbalanced and wound up with her face smooshed to the glass and her ass sticking out.
She was glad book four was out. There had been moments when she didn’t think she would finish it.
When Vic had started drawing the books, the phone never rang with calls from Christmasland. That was why she had started Search Engine in the first place, because when she was drawing, the phones were silent. But then, midway through the third book, radio stations she liked started playing Christmas songs in the middle of the summer and the calls began again. She had tried to make a protective moat around herself, a moat filled with Maker’s Mark, but the only thing she had drowned in it was the work itself.
Vic was about to push away from the window when the phone in the bookstore rang.
She could see it lighting up over at the desk, on the far side of the shop. In the gusting, warm silence of the night, she could hear it quite clearly, and she knew it was them. Millie Manx and Brad McCauley and Manx’s other children.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the store. “I’m not available to take your call. If you’d like to leave a message, you’re shit out of luck.”
She shoved away from the window, a little too hard, and reeled across the sidewalk. Then the sidewalk ended and her foot plunged over the edge of the curb, and she fell, sat down hard on her ass on the wet blacktop.
It hurt, but not as much as it probably should’ve. She wasn’t sure if the whiskey had muted the pain or if she had been on the Lou Carmody diet for too long and was now carrying a bit of extra padding back there. She worried she had dropped the bottle and broken it, but no, it was right there in her hand, safe and sound. She took a swallow. It tasted of the oak cask and sweet annihilation.
She struggled back to her feet, and another phone rang, in another shop, a darkened coffeehouse. The phone in the bookstore was still ringing, too. Then another went off, somewhere on the second floor of a building over to her right. And a fourth and a fifth. In the apartments above her. Both sides of the street, up and down the lane.
The night filled with a choir of phones. It was like frogs in the spring, an alien harmony of croaks and chirrups and whistles. It was like bells ringing on Christmas morning.
“Go the fuck away!” she screamed, and threw the bottle at her own reflection in a store window across the street.
The plate glass exploded. All the phones stopped ringing at the same time, revelers shocked into quiet by a gunshot.
A half beat later, a security alarm went off inside the store, an electronic wang-dang-doodle and a flashing silver light. The silver light silhouetted the wares on display in the window: bicycles.
The night caught and held in place for one lush, gentle moment.
The bicycle in the window was (of course) a Raleigh, white and simple. Vic swayed. The sensation of being threatened shut itself off as quickly as if someone had flipped a switch.
She crossed the road to the bike shop, and by the time she was crunching across the broken glass, she had her plan worked out. She would steal the bicycle an
d ride it out of town. She would ride it out to Dakota Ridge, into the pines and the night, would ride until she found the Shortaway.
The Shorter Way Bridge would take her right over the walls of the Supermax prison and on into the hospital ward that held Charlie Manx. That would be a hell of a sight, a thirty-one-year-old in her underwear, gliding along on a ten-speed through the long-term-care ward of a maximum-security lockup at two in the morning. She pictured herself sailing through the dark, between convicts sleeping in their beds. She’d ride right up to Manx, put the kickstand down, yank the pillow out from under his head, and suffocate the filthy man-burner. That would end the calls from Christmasland forever. She knew it would.
Vic reached through the broken glass and picked the Raleigh up and carried it out to the road. She heard the first distant wail of a siren, a yearning, agonized sound that carried a long way in the warm, damp night.
She was surprised. The alarm had only gone off half a minute ago. She didn’t think the cops would respond so quickly.
But the siren she heard wasn’t cops. It was a fire truck, heading toward her town house, although by the time it arrived, there was not much left to save.
The cop cars showed up a few minutes later.
Brandenburg, Kentucky
HE SAVED THE HARDEST PART FOR LAST: IN MAY 2012, NATHAN Demeter hauled the engine out of the Wraith with a chain fall and spent two days rebuilding it, cleaning pushrods, and replacing the head bolts with parts ordered from a specialty shop in England. The engine was a big 4,257-cc straight-six, and sitting on his worktable it looked like some vast mechanical heart—which was what it was, he supposed. So many of man’s inventions—the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun—were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.
“Be cheaper to rent a limo,” Michelle said. “And you wouldn’t get your hands dirty.”
“If you think I’ve got a problem with getting my hands dirty,” he said, “then you weren’t paying much attention the last eighteen years.”
“Something to do with your nervous energy, I guess,” she said.
“Who’s nervous?” he asked, but she just smiled and kissed him.
Sometimes, after he had been working on the car for a few hours, he would find himself stretched across the front seat, one leg hanging out the open door and a beer in hand, playing it back in his head: the afternoons when they went low-riding in the west field, his daughter behind the wheel and the weeds slapping the sides of the Wraith.
She had passed her driver’s test on her first try, just sixteen years old. Eighteen now, and she had her own car, a sporty little Jetta, was planning to drive it all the way to Dartmouth after she graduated. The thought of her out on the road by herself—checking into shabby motels and being checked out by the man behind the cash register, by the truckers in the hotel bar—made him antsy, revved him up with nervous energy.
Michelle liked to do the wash, and he liked to let her, because when he came across her underwear in the dryer, colorful lace from Victoria’s Secret, he began to worry about things like unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease. He had known how to talk to her about cars. He had liked watching her figure out how to work the clutch, how to steer true. He had felt like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird then. He didn’t know how to talk to her about men or sex and was unsettled by his sense that she didn’t need his advice on these matters anyway.
“Who’s nervous?” he asked the empty garage one night, and toasted his shadow.
Six days before the big dance, he put the engine back in the Wraith and closed the hood and stood back to consider his work, a sculptor studying the nude that had once been a block of marble. A cold season of banged knuckles and oil under his fingernails and rust flakes falling in his eyes: sacred time, important to him in the way transcribing a holy text was important to a monk in a monastery. He had cared to get it right and it showed.
The ebony body gleamed like a torpedo, like a polished slab of volcanic glass. The rear side door, which had been rusty and mismatched, had been replaced by an original, sent to him by a collector in one of the former Soviet republics. He had reupholstered the interior in kidskin leather, replaced the foldout trays and drawers in the rear of the limo with new walnut components, handmade by a carpenter in Nova Scotia. It was all original, even the vacuum-tube radio, although he had toyed with the idea of installing a CD player, bolting a Bose subwoofer into the trunk. In the end he had decided against it. When you had a Mona Lisa, you didn’t spray-paint a baseball cap on her.
He had promised his daughter on some long-ago, hot, thunderstormy, summer afternoon that he would fix the Rolls up for her prom, and here it was, finished at last, with just under a week to spare. After prom he could sell it; fully restored, the Wraith was good for quarter of a million dollars on the collectors’ market. Not bad for a car that cost just five thousand dollars American when it was released. Not bad at all, when you considered he had paid just twice that to buy it in an FBI auction, ten years earlier.
“Who do you think owned it before you?” Michelle asked one time, after he mentioned where he got it.
“Drug dealer, I imagine,” he said.
“Boy,” she told him, “I hope no one was murdered in it.”
It looked good—but looking good wasn’t enough. He didn’t think Michelle belonged in it, out on the road, until he had clocked a dozen miles on it himself, seen how it handled when it was all the way up to speed.
“Come on, you beautiful bitch,” he said to the car. “Let’s wake you up and see what you can do.”
Demeter got behind the wheel, banged the door shut behind him, and turned the key.
The engine slammed roughly to life—a ragged, almost savagely triumphant blast of noise—but then immediately settled down to a low, luxuriant rumble. The creamy leather front seat was more comfortable than the Tempur-Pedic bed he slept in. Back in the days when the Wraith had been assembled, things were built like tanks, built to last. This car, he felt sure, would outlive him.
He was right.
He had left his cell phone on his worktable, and he wanted it before he took the car out, didn’t want to wind up stranded somewhere if the Wraith decided to throw a rod or some such shit. He reached for the latch, which was when he got his first surprise of the afternoon. The lock slammed down, the sound of it loud enough that he almost cried out.
Demeter was so startled—so unprepared—that he wasn’t sure he had really seen it happen. But then the other locks went down, one after another—bang, bang, bang—just like someone firing a gun, and he couldn’t tell himself he was imagining all that.
“What the fuck?”
He pulled at the lock on the driver’s-side door, but it stayed down as if welded in place.
The car shuddered from the idling force of the engine, exhaust piling up around the sideboards.
Demeter leaned forward to switch the ignition off, which was when he received his second surprise of the day. The key wouldn’t turn. He wiggled it forward and back, then put his wrist into it, but the key was locked into place, fully engaged, couldn’t be yanked out.
The radio popped on, playing “Jingle Bell Rock” at top volume—so loud it hurt his ears—a song that had no business playing in the spring. At the sound of it, Demeter’s whole body went rough and cold with chickenflesh. He poked the OFF switch, but his capacity for surprise was running thin, and he felt no special amazement when it wouldn’t turn off. He punched buttons to change the station, but no matter where the tuner leaped, it was “Jingle Bell Rock” on every channel.
He could see exhaust fogging the air now. He could taste it, the dizzying reek, making him light-headed. Bobby Helms assured him that Jingle Bell time was a swell time to haul around in a one-horse sleigh. He had to shut that shit up, had to have some quiet, but when he spun the volume dial, it didn’t go down, didn’t do anything.
Fog churned around the headlights.
His next breath was a mouthful of poison and set off a coughing fit so strenuous it felt as if it were tearing away the inner lining of his throat. Thoughts flashed by like horses on an accelerating carousel. Michelle wouldn’t be back home for another hour and a half. The closest neighbors were three-quarters of a mile away—no one around to hear him screaming. The car wouldn’t turn off, the locks wouldn’t cooperate, it was like something in a fucking spy movie—he imagined a hired killer with a name like Blow Job operating the Rolls-Royce by remote control—but that was crazy. He himself had torn the Wraith down and put it back together, and he knew there was nothing wired into it that would give someone power over the engine, the locks, the radio.
Even as these notions occurred to him, he was fumbling on the dash for the automatic garage-door opener. If he didn’t get some air in the garage, he would pass out in another moment or two. For a panicky instant, he felt nothing and thought, Not there, it’s not there—but then his fingers found it behind the raised hump of the housing for the steering wheel. He closed his hand around it, then pointed it at the garage door and pressed the button.
The door rattled up toward the ceiling. The gearshift banged itself into the reverse position, and the Wraith jumped back at the door, tires shrilling.
Nathan Demeter screamed, grabbed the steering wheel—not to control the car but just to have something to hold on to. The slender whitewalls grabbed at the pebble drive, throwing rocks against the undercarriage. The Wraith fell straight back like a kart on some mad backward rollercoaster, plunging three hundred feet down the steep grade of the drive toward the lane below. It seemed to Nathan that he screamed the whole way, although in fact he stopped well before the car was halfway down the hill. The scream he heard was trapped in his own head.
The Wraith didn’t slow as it approached the road but sped up, and if anything was coming from either direction, he would be T-boned at close to forty miles an hour. Of course, even if nothing was coming, the Wraith would shoot across the road, into the trees on the other side, and Nathan assumed he would be launched through the windshield on the recoil. The Wraith, like all the cars of its period, had no safety belts, not even lap belts.