by Joe Hill
I glanced at his face and flinched. His eyelids weren’t fully shut, and I could see the slick, gray-tinted whites of his eyes. His fleshy red lips were wet with drool. The thermos was open nearby. The whole room reeked of motor oil and something else, a stink I couldn’t quite identify.
Geri shoved his shoulder. “Hey, jack-off, my friend wants her money back.”
His head lolled, but otherwise he didn’t stir. Jake crowded into the room behind us, while Nancy stood outside among the horses.
Geri picked up his thermos, had a whiff, and poured it out on the floor. It was wine, a rosé, and it smelled like vinegar.
“He’s pissed,” she said. “Passed out drunk.”
“Guys,” I said. “Guys, is he—We sure he’s even breathing?”
No one seemed to hear me. Jake pushed past Geri and began to dig around in one of the guy’s front pockets. Then, abruptly, he recoiled, yanked his hand back as if he’d been stuck by a needle. At that moment I finally identified the rank odor that had only been partially masked by the aroma of WD-40.
“Pissed is right,” Jake said. “Holy fucking shit, he’s drenched. Christ, I got piss all over me.”
Geri laughed. I didn’t. The thought took me then that he was dead. Wasn’t that what happened when your heart stopped? You lost control of your bladder?
Jake grimaced and went through the guy’s pockets. He dug out a battered leather wallet and a knife with a yellowing ivory handle. Three scrimshaw horses charged across the grip.
“No,” Nancy said, entering the room at last. She grabbed Jake’s wrist. “Jake, you can’t.”
“What? I can’t take back what he stole?” Jake flipped the wallet open and picked out two wrinkly twenties, all that was in there. He dropped the wallet on the floor.
“I had a fifty,” Nancy told him. “Brand-new.”
“Yeah, that fifty is in the cash register at the liquor store now. Ten bucks is just about exactly what it would’ve cost for another bottle. Anyway, what are you arguing about? Paul saw him pocket the money.”
I hadn’t, though. I was no longer sure I’d seen anything more than an old man with a weak bladder adjusting his junk. But I didn’t say so, didn’t want to argue. I wanted to make sure the old bastard was alive, and then I wanted to go, quickly, before he stirred or anyone else wandered by the carousel. Whatever grubby sense of delight there’d been in this expedition had fled when I caught a whiff of the operator and saw his gray face.
“Is he breathing?” I asked again, and again no one replied.
“Put it back. You’ll get in trouble,” Nancy said.
“You going to report me to the cops, buddy?” Jake asked the operator.
The operator didn’t say anything.
“Didn’t think so,” Jake said. He turned and took Geri’s arm and pushed her toward the door.
“We need to turn him on his side,” Nancy said. Her voice was unhappy and shaky with nervousness. “If he’s passed out drunk and he vomits, he could choke on it.”
“Not our problem,” Jake said.
Geri said, “Nan, I bet he’s passed out this way a thousand times. If he hasn’t died yet, he probably won’t die tonight.”
“Paul!” Nancy cried, sounding almost hysterical. “Please!”
My insides were knotted up, and I felt as jittery as if I had chugged a pot of coffee. I wanted to leave more than anything and can’t explain why I reached for the operator’s wrist instead, to search for his pulse.
“He’s not dead, asshole,” Jake said, but he waited nonetheless.
The operator’s pulse was there—raggedy and irregular but measurable. Close up he smelled bad, and not just of urine and booze. There was a cloying odor of caked, rotten blood.
“Paul,” Nancy said. “Put him on his bed. On his side.”
“Don’t do it,” Jake said.
I didn’t want to, but I didn’t think I could live with myself if I found myself reading his obituary in the weekend paper, not after we jacked him for forty bucks. I put my arms under his legs and behind his back and lifted him out of his chair.
I lumbered unsteadily to the camp cot and set him on it. A dark stain soaked the crotch of his green velvet pants, and the smell aggravated my already twitchy stomach. I rolled him onto his side and put a pillow under his head, the way you’re supposed to, so if he threw up, it wouldn’t go back down his windpipe. He snorted but didn’t look around. I circled the room, pulled the cord hanging from the ceiling to switch off the light. On the radio, the Gypsy was telling Pat Boone’s fortune. It wasn’t good.
I thought we were done, but when I came out, I found Geri getting her own revenge. She’d helped herself to the operator’s pocketknife, and she was carving a message into Judy Garland’s horse: FUCK YOU. It wasn’t poetry, but it made a point.
On the walk back to the boardwalk, Jake tried to hand the forty dollars to Nancy, but she wouldn’t accept it. She was too angry with him. He stuck the bills in her pocket, and she took the twenties out and threw them on the pier. Jake had to chase them down before the wind could snatch them away and cast them to the darkness.
When we reached the road, the traffic was already tapering off, although the bars were still doing brisk business. Jake told Nancy he was going to get the car and asked if she would please buy the beer, because obviously they weren’t going to have sex now and he was going to need more alcohol to drink away his blues.
This time she took the money. She tried not to smile but couldn’t quite help herself. Even I could see that Jake was adorable when he made himself pathetic.
WHEN WE TOOK OFF for my parents’ summer cottage, I was in the passenger seat of the Corvette, with Geri on my lap and Nancy squeezed between my hip and the door. They all had bottles of Sam Adams, even Jake, who drove with one nestled between his thighs. I was the only one who wasn’t drinking. I could still smell the operator on my hands, an odor that made me think of decay, of cancer. I didn’t have the stomach for any more, and when Geri rolled down the window to chuck her bottle out into the night, I was glad for the fresh air. I heard her empty Sam Adams hit with a musical crunch.
We were careless, irresponsible people, but, in our defense, we didn’t know it. I’m not at all sure I’ve made you see the times clearly. In 1994 those Mothers Against Drunk Driving ads were just background noise, and I had never heard of anyone getting a ticket for littering. None of us wore seat belts. It never even crossed my mind.
I’m not sure I have properly shown you Geri or Jake Renshaw either. I’ve tried to show you they were dangerous—but they weren’t immoral. Maybe they even had a stronger sense of morality than most, were more willing to act if they saw someone wronged. When the universe was out of whack, they felt obliged to put it back to rights, even if that meant defacing an antique horse or robbing a drunk. They were entirely indifferent to the consequences to themselves.
Nor were they thoughtless, unimaginative thugs. Nancy and I wouldn’t have been with them if they were. Jake could throw knives and walk a tightrope. No one had taught him how to do those things. He just knew. In his last year of high school, after showing no interest in drama for his entire life up until then, he tried out for the Senior Shakespeare. Mr. Cuse cast him as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and damn it, he was good. He said his lines as if he’d been speaking in iambic pentameter all his life.
And Geri did voices. She could do Princess Di, and she could do Velma Dinkley. She could do an amazing Steven Tyler from Aerosmith; she could talk like him, sing like him, do his acka-acka-acka-yow!, and dance like him, whipping her hair from side to side, hands on her narrow waist.
I thought she was beautiful and gifted enough to be an actress. I said we should go to New York together after I finished college. I’d write plays, and she’d star in them. When I told her this, she laughed it off—and then gave me a look I didn’t understand, not then. It was an emotion with which I was not familiar, a feeling no one had ever turned on me before then. I know now it wa
s pity.
There was no moon, and the road grew darker the farther north we traveled. We followed a winding two-lane state highway through marsh and pines. For a while there were streetlights, spaced at quarter-mile intervals. Then there weren’t. The wind had been strengthening all evening, and when the gusts blew, they shook the car and sent the cattails in the swamps into furious motion.
We were almost to the mile-and-a-half-long dirt track that led to my parents’ cottage and the end of the evening when the Corvette swung around a horseshoe curve and Jake hit the brakes. Hard. The tires shrieked. The back end fishtailed.
“What the fuck is . . . ?” he shouted.
Nancy’s face struck the dash and rebounded. Her hardcover, All the Pretty Horses, flew out of her hand. Geri went into the dash, but she rolled as she slid forward and caught it with her shoulder.
A dog looked at us—its green eyes flashed in the headlights—and then it slunk out of the road and lumbered into the trees. If it was a dog . . . and not a bear. It certainly looked big enough to be ursine rather than canine. We could hear it crashing through the brush for several seconds after it disappeared.
“Christ,” Jake said. “Now I’m the one who looks like he pissed himself. I dumped my beer all over my—”
“Shut up,” Geri said. “Nan, honey, are you okay?”
Nancy leaned back, her chin lifted, her eyes pointed at the ceiling of the car. She cupped her nose with one hand.
“I smached my node,” she said.
Geri twisted around to stretch an arm into the rear of the car. “There’s some rags in the back.”
I contorted myself to reach past Geri’s feet to collect Nancy’s book. I grabbed All the Pretty Horses—then hesitated, my gaze caught by something else on the carpet. I plucked it off the floor.
Geri settled back into my lap, clutching a ratty Pink Floyd tee.
“Here, use this,” she said.
“That’s a good shirt,” Jake said.
“That’s your girlfriend’s face, you prick.”
“Fair point. Nan, you okay?”
She balled up the T-shirt and held it to her thin, delicate nose, dabbing at blood. With her other hand, she gave a thumbs-up.
I said, “I got your book. Hey . . . um. This was on the floor with it.”
I handed her the novel—and a crisp fifty-dollar bill, so clean and new-looking it might’ve been minted that morning.
Her eyes widened in horror around the bloodstained wad of shirt.
“Un-uh! No! No! I looked for it, and it wadn’t there!”
“I know,” I said. “I saw you look. You must’ve missed it.”
Water quivered in Nancy’s eyes, threatening to spill over.
“Hon,” Geri said. “Nan. Come on. We all thought he stole your fifty. Honest mistake.”
“We can tell that to the cops,” I said. “If they show up asking whether we rolled a drunk on the pier. I bet they’ll be very understanding.”
Geri flashed a look like murder at me, and Nan began to cry, and I immediately regretted saying anything, regretted finding the money at all. I glanced anxiously at Jake—I was ready for an icy glare and some brotherly malice—but he was ignoring the three of us. He stared out the window, peering into the night.
“Anyone want to tell me what the fuck just walked across the road?” he asked.
“Dog, right?” I said, eager to change the subject.
“I didn’t see,” Geri said, “’cause I was trying not to eat a faceful of dash at the time.”
“I never seen a dog like that,” Jake said. “Thing was half the size of the car.”
“Maybe it was a brown bear.”
“Maybe it wad Sasquadge,” Nancy said miserably.
We were all silent for a moment, letting that one land—and then we erupted into laughter. Nessie can hang it up. Cryptozoology never came up with a cuter beast than Sasquadge.
Two poles with reflective disks attached to them marked the one-lane dirt road that led to my parents’ summer cottage, which sat on the estuarial pool known as Maggie Pond. Jake turned in and rolled down his window at the same time, letting in a warm slipstream of salty air that blew his hair back from his forehead.
The lane was cratered with potholes, some of them a foot deep and a yard across, and Jake had to slow to about ten miles an hour. Weeds hissed against the undercarriage. Rocks pinged.
We had gone a third of a mile when we saw the branch, a big oak bough across the road. Jake cursed, banged the car into park.
“I god it,” Nancy said.
“You stay here,” Jake said, but she was already throwing the passenger door open.
“I need to stredge my leds,” she said, and tossed the bloody Floyd shirt on the floor of the car as she slammed the door.
We watched her walk into Jake’s headlights: cute, fragile little thing in pink sneakers. She hunched at one end of the broken branch, where the splintered, reddish wood shone bright and clean, and she began to tug.
“She ain’t gonna be able to move that alone,” Jake said.
“She’s got it,” Geri told him.
“Go help her, Paul,” Jake said to me. “It’ll make up for you being such a douche a couple minutes ago.”
“Oh, shit, man, I wasn’t even thinking. . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” I said, my head sinking between my shoulders under the weight of my shame.
Out in the road, Nancy managed to turn the eight-foot branch most of the way to one side. She went around to grab the other end, perhaps to try rolling it out of the road and into the ditch.
“Couldn’t you just’ve stuck that fifty under the seat? Nan ain’t gonna sleep tonight now. You know she’s going to cry her head off as soon as we’re alone,” Jake said. “And I’m going to be the one who has to deal with it—”
“What’s that?” Geri said.
“—not you,” Jake went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “You pulled your same old Paul Whitestone magic. You took a good evening, and abra-fuckin’-cadabra—”
“Do you hear that?” Geri asked again.
I felt it before I heard it. The car shook. I became aware of a sound like an approaching storm front, rain drumming heavily on the earth. It was like being parked alongside a railroad track as a freight train thundered past.
The first of the horses thundered past on the left, so close that one shoulder brushed the driver’s-side mirror. Nancy looked up and let go of the branch and made a move like she was going to jump out of the road. She only had a moment, maybe a second or two, and she didn’t get far. The horse rode her down, hooves flashing, and Nancy fell beneath them. She was prone in the road when the next horse went over her. I heard her spine crack. Or maybe that was the big tree branch, I don’t know.
A third horse flashed past, and a fourth. The first three horses kept going, disappearing past the headlights, into the darkness. The fourth slowed close to Nancy’s body. She’d been half dragged and half thrown almost thirty feet from the Corvette, right to the far edge of what the headlights could reveal. The tall white horse lowered its head and seemed to gum Nancy’s hair, which was bloody and matted and twitching in the breeze.
Jake screamed. I think he was trying to scream Nancy’s name but wasn’t able to articulate words. Geri was screaming, too. I wasn’t. I couldn’t get the breath. I felt as if a horse had run over me also, stamped all the air out of me.
The horse that stood over Nancy had a mangled face, one side pink and flayed as the result of a long-ago burn. Both of its eyes were white, but the one on the ruined side of its head bulged sickeningly from its socket. The tongue that slipped out and lapped Nancy’s face wasn’t a horse tongue at all. It was as thin and black as a serpent’s.
Jake’s hand clawed blindly for the latch. He was staring at Nancy, so he didn’t see another horse standing alongside the car. None of us did. Jake’s door sprang open, and he put his foot on the dirt, and I looked over and had just enough time to shout his name.
The horse a
longside the car dipped its powerful neck and clamped its big horsey teeth on Jake’s shoulder and snapped its head. Jake was lifted out of the car and hurled into the trunk of a red pine at the side of the road. He struck it as if he’d been fired from a cannon and dropped out of sight into the tangled underbrush.
Geri heaved herself from my lap and into the driver’s seat. She grabbed for the door as if she were going to go after him. I got her by the shoulder and hauled her back. At the same moment, the big horse beside the car turned in a clumsy half circle. Its big white rump hit the door and banged it shut on her.
The next I saw Jake, he was pulling himself across the road, into the headlights. I think his back was broken, but I couldn’t swear to it. His feet dragged in a useless sort of way behind him. He cast a wild look up at us—at me—and his gaze met mine. I wish it hadn’t. I never wanted to see so much terror in anyone’s face, so much senseless panic.
The white stallion trotted out after him, lifting its hooves high, as if it were on parade. It caught up to Jake and looked down upon him almost speculatively, then stomped on him, right between his shoulder blades. The force flattened Jake into the dirt. He tried to rise, and the stallion kicked him in the face. It crushed in most of his skull—nose, the ridge of bone above his eyes, a cheekbone—put a red gash right in the middle of his movie-star good looks. The destrier wasn’t done with him. As Jake fell, it lowered its muzzle and bit the back of his Levi jacket, pulled him off the ground, and flung him effortlessly into the trees, as if he were a scarecrow stuffed with straw.
Geri didn’t know what to do, was fixed in place behind the wheel, her face stricken, her eyes wide. The driver’s window was still down, and when the black dog hit the side of the Corvette, its shaggy head barreled right through. It put two paws on the inside of the window and sank its teeth into her left shoulder, tore the shirt from collar to sleeve, mauled the taut, tanned flesh beneath. Its hot breath stank.
She screamed. Her hand found the gearshift, and she launched the Corvette into motion.
