by Max Barry
“Quiet.” The air was beginning to glow: an approaching car. Eliot walked onto the road.
Wil looked at the cop. His eyes were glassy. Blood congealed around his body, staining the road salt. “What about the word voodoo?” Eliot didn’t answer. “Why didn’t you persuade him?”
A pickup crested the bridge. Eliot waved his arms and the pickup stopped and the driver leaned out the window. A young guy with sandy hair. Eliot was going to kill this guy—him and anyone else in the car, and then whoever passed by. Wil started to run, slipped on the ice, and banged his knee on the blacktop. By the time he reached them, Eliot had his gun pointed at the driver. “Fifty,” the guy said. “I don’t know what you want—”
Eliot said, “Do you love your family?”
“Eliot!”
“Of course I do, man, please don’t kill me, I have two girls and I love them so much—”
“I won’t kill you if you tell me this,” said Eliot. He was becoming brighter, almost glowing. Another car approaching, Wil realized. “Why did you do it?”
“Eliot.” He put his hand on Eliot’s arm and tried to steer the gun down. “Please don’t shoot this guy.”
“Is this about . . . ?” said the driver. “Oh, Jesus, forgive me, I did it because I had to.” Eliot lowered the gun. The truck driver’s breath came out in a rush. “Thank you, thank you—”
“Geetyre massilick croton avary,” Eliot said. “Take this. Shoot cars. Run away from cops.”
The driver took Eliot’s gun. Eliot opened the pickup’s door and the driver stepped out. He looked up and began to walk toward Wil.
“What . . .” Wil said. The guy raised the gun. Wil had time to plug his fingers into his ears. The guy fired, and Wil turned to see a car behind him, a dark wagon. It braked and began to reverse, its beams swinging crazily from side to side. The guy broke into a run, following.
Eliot seized his arm. “Walk.”
He walked. “Why?” Wil said. “Why?”
“Shut up,” Eliot said. There was a flatness in his voice. Wil shut up.
• • •
Once they were clear of Grand Forks, the road was empty. After about half an hour, three police cars blew by in the opposite direction, all noise and light, and Wil didn’t say anything and neither did Eliot.
He watched the sky begin to lighten. “You’re not a good guy,” Wil said. “You say you are, but you’re not.”
“I don’t believe I ever said I was a good guy.”
“You could have used your words on that cop.”
“He was compromised. He was two seconds away from calling us in.”
“You could have tried.”
A sign drifted by, announcing two hundred miles to Minneapolis.
“You’re just as bad as Woolf,” he said.
Eliot braked. Wil’s seat belt grabbed him. The car slid to a steaming halt.
“I will take a lot of shit from you,” Eliot said, “but I will not be compared to Woolf.”
“She—”
“Shut up. The worst thing I have ever done is allow Woolf to become what she is. I will wear responsibility for everything she does, from Broken Hill until the day I put her in the ground. But we aren’t the same. Not even close.”
“You kill people.”
“Yes, I kill people, when the alternative is worse. That’s the world. That’s the reason you and I are still here.”
Wil looked away. “I’ll come with you. I’ll do what you say. But not because you’re right.
Eliot put the car in gear. “Fine,” he said. “Close enough.”
• • •
At the Minneapolis airport no one stopped them or looked twice at their passports and they boarded a Delta E-175, its engines roaring outside the windows. Eliot rolled his coat into a tight bundle and wedged it between the headrest and the wall. “I’m going to sleep.”
Wil looked at him. “Really?” They were flying to Winnipeg. It was forty minutes.
“Really,” said Eliot, and closed his eyes. His face relaxed. His lips parted. Wil began to think he wasn’t breathing. When they lifted off, the plane yawed sharply and the woman across the aisle let out a shriek, and Eliot’s head flopped onto Wil’s shoulder. “Eliot?” He put his hand beneath Eliot’s nostrils. He couldn’t feel anything. He licked his skin and tried again. A faint current of air. Very faint. He tried to relax.
They landed roughly but still Eliot didn’t move. Wil dug his elbow into his ribs. “Eliot.” He shook his shoulder. “Tom.” He shook him harder. He put his thumb and forefinger on Eliot’s forearm and pinched.
Eliot’s eyes opened. They were like glass. His face was gray and drawn. He looked dead.
“We’ve landed.”
Eliot’s eyes stared at something beyond the plane’s ceiling.
“We’re here. Eliot. You have to wake up. Eliot.”
He focused. “What?”
“You look terrible.”
“I’m fine,” Eliot said, and all of a sudden he was. He pulled the coat from the headrest and tucked it under his arm. “Move.”
• • •
In Winnipeg they caught a flight to Vancouver, and again Eliot fell asleep as soon as they were on board, and again rousing him upon landing was like trying to reanimate a corpse. In Vancouver they crossed to the international terminal and passed through security without incident. The Korean Air flight attendants wore blue paper hats. Eliot settled into a window seat with his rolled-up coat and closed his eyes. “Wake me if we enter an unexpectedly steep descent.”
“Uh,” said Wil. But Eliot seemed to be already asleep. “Yeah. I’ll do that.” He flicked through the in-flight magazine, then put it back. He didn’t think he would be sleeping.
From: http://discuss.isthatjustme.com/forum/topic—11053—r.html?v=1
OK, I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories, but you read about this guy who shot up Grand Forks? They said he’d had a fight with his girlfriend, so we all thought, “Oh, that’s why he flipped out.” But notice nobody has actually said there’s a connection. They’ve just let us assume that because why else would they mention it.
I’m not saying there’s something here with this specific incident, but I see this ALL THE TIME. If you watch TV news, every story is like this: “There was a fire and the owner was in financial trouble.” They’re not saying he burned down his own place. But that’s all they’re going to tell you.
That bothers me because we think we’re being clever, putting the pieces together, but it’s a set-up. We’ve only been given pieces that fit together one way, but if it turns out they make the wrong picture, well, they never said it was right.
Unless it’s a really big deal, like a national story, all the reporting comes from one reporter who writes down what the cops say. That goes on AP and the news services all share it. So it can look like they’ve all done their research and found the same facts, but it’s usually just everyone parroting one source.
Now, probably the guy in Grand Forks really did just get pissed off with his girlfriend. But I think it’s worth noting that literally nobody has claimed that’s why he started shooting. If they’d said it was a mystery, then people like us would get curious and ask questions, but apparently all it takes is one unsubstantiated hint and we’re satisfied, because we think we figured it out.
[FOUR]
She became promiscuous. It wasn’t planned. It was because there was nothing else to do. She thought of herself as promiscuous rather than easy because she was in charge. If a boy came into the clothes store where she worked and had a look in his eye that meant he’d heard about her, she would play dumb and sell him new khaki pants. But if—and it didn’t happen often, only sometimes—there was a boy with curly hair and dark eyes and he was genuinely shopping, then something inside her would yearn. She would walk over and say can I help you, and if the boy was orbited by a badly permed blonde, which he usually was, she would recommend shirts and eye him while his girlfriend fingered skirts. An
d he would look back and there would be something there. When the girl decided to try something on, Emily would walk directly to him and kiss him like a predator. And he kissed her back, every time, and if she reached down, he was hard as stone. “How’s it going?” she would call, her eyes on the boy, and the girl would say something about fit around the shoulders and color and did they have it without the bows. She didn’t always take it further than that: Twice the girl came out early and the boy walked out of the store on loose legs, throwing her glances. But twice she did. The last time, the boy had been accompanied by a black-eyed girl who didn’t even answer when Emily came over and said hello, and she liked the look of this boy, he was friendly and dumb and played football, so she not only invaded his pants while his girl was behind a change room door but kept going when she came out again. She watched the boy’s face as the girl revolved about the store, fascinated, because he looked so scared yet didn’t stop her. The girl inspected dresses and made a catty comment about the decade in which she believed one of them belonged, and the boy grunted and twitched in his jeans. Emily walked behind the counter. He looked at her like he couldn’t believe she was abandoning him. Like he thought she had a plan to help him out or something. But she didn’t care about that. The interesting part was over, as far as she was concerned. The boy stood rooted there a few seconds, then blurted a bunch of mostly unrelated words, the spillage from two or three trains of thought that had just collided. The girl didn’t even look up. “Okay,” she said, turning over a fluffy hooded jacket.
This was probably not what Eliot had meant when he told her to work hard and discipline yourself. But she was a million miles from everywhere, doing an otherwise excellent job of concealing the fact that she was the most skilled practitioner of persuasion ever to grace this dustbowl, and she needed something. She couldn’t have muscles and not flex them.
She had slept two nights in a bus station before realizing the town was full of empty houses; you only had to break in and make yourself at home. She found a job at Tangled Threads, Broken Hill’s hippest clothing store for young and old and anyone else interested in one level of fashion above denim and wifebeaters, and it paid cash, which meant she could rent something with electricity. It was all simpler than she had imagined. She even bought a battered old car. Which was a little risky, because she didn’t dare attempt to acquire a driver’s license, but the town had only two cops, both from segments she understood well, and she was really sick of the bus.
She was “the American girl.” Her story was she had come to connect with the earth—a ludicrous idea, patently false to anyone who watched how she squinted at the sun, hugged herself against the wind, grimaced at dirt, but seriously, why else would you come here? How long are you staying? people asked, leaning across a counter to marvel at her, this person who had left America to come here, here, even as every other local youth with half a brain fled at the earliest opportunity. The older ones, who’d lost the ability to imagine life elsewhere, or maybe never had it, seemed to view her as the first of many, as if Emily were the harbinger of a hip new fad sweeping the globe, where young people in big cities sweated and saved and dreamed of one day traveling to connect in Broken Hill, and give the town a future. She told them I think maybe a year, because she didn’t want to give false hope and couldn’t bear the thought that it might be longer.
But a year passed and then another and there she was on her twenty-first birthday, watching senseless Australian television in a four-bedroom house with hardly any furniture. She sometimes wondered if the organization existed. Whether she had imagined it. Sometimes, when the door jangled open at Tangled Threads, she would think for a second it was Eliot, come to tell her it was okay, it was over, she could come home. But it never happened. It was just day after day of waiting. So she could take control of a good-looking boy now and again. She could do that.
• • •
One night after closing, she walked to the rear parking lot and found a group of girls in short skirts and fur-lined jackets waiting for her. One hopped off the hood of a car as she approached, the dirty-blond girlfriend of the football player, and Emily realized she had a problem. She turned to flee to the store but two more girls were blocking the path. She held up her hands. “I don’t have any money.”
“Not interested in your money, bitch,” said the girl, letting something drop from her hand. A metal chain. Emily felt despair, not so much for herself but for the girl and Broken Hill, Australia, because a chain was ridiculous. If you pulled that shit in San Francisco, you would get yourself shot. “You know who I am?”
“I think you came into the store one time.” The girls encircled her. Five in total. No other weapons in sight, which made running a good option. “If you want to return something, we open at nine.”
“I don’t want to return something, you slut.”
“And it’s not a store,” said a girl who was thin as a dead tree. “It’s a shop.”
“Okay,” said Emily. “Can we talk this over, please?” She drew out the word please, made it sound like police, to remind everybody that shit like this could get you arrested. “Oh. I know you. I know your mom.” This was not true, but totally believable in a town this size. The point was to bring moms into the picture, to join police.
“You came on to my boyfriend,” said the girl.
This Emily recognized as a speculative assertion, what they called test balloons in class. When people made speculative assertions, they hoped to be disproved. It meant the girl wasn’t going to hit her with the chain. If she had said, I’m going to fuck you up for what you did to my boyfriend, Emily would have been in trouble. But she was just standing there, waiting for Emily to respond and explain how it was all a crazy misunderstanding. She almost felt disappointed, because it had been an interesting mental challenge there for a minute.
“Actually, he came on to me,” Emily said, and she must want to be hurt; it was the only explanation. The girl stared at her, trying to believe her ears, and another girl said, “Oh, it’s on, bitch,” and Emily ran. She almost got through a girl with bad acne and scared eyes but someone grabbed her collar and dragged her to the ground. The girl with the chain came at her in pure rage, and despite the imminent ass whipping Emily felt a mild pleasure at successfully pushing her beyond precortex control. That wasn’t easy. You really had to sock a person in the core of what they believed to do that. She threw her arms around her head and curled into a ball.
Pain exploded on her back. She tried to roll over and that was a huge mistake, because the chain caught her across the face. Her mouth disappeared. She found her knees and tried to crawl away. Something bright and bloody lay in the dirt. A tooth. She felt sad and stupid and wanted to go back in time and not be such a dick.
Lights flared. She couldn’t see where they were coming from but apparently they were relevant because the girls fell away. Shoes slapped concrete. There were no new blows. That was an improvement.
Someone took her by the shoulders. She flinched. He said, “It’s all right, relax, I’m helping.”
“Moof,” she said, which was supposed to be My tooth. The man’s fingers invaded her ribs. He went away and she felt lost. He came back and snapped something around her neck. She tried to rise but he said, “No, no,” restraining her with one hand. All she could see was his hair, which was long and the color of sand. He slid something beneath her butt, which turned out to be a trolley. “Muh toof,” she said. He ratcheted her up and sailed her across the parking lot to a white van that she knew passed for an ambulance out here. Before he closed the doors on her, his eyes scanned her in a quick, professional way.
By the time the vehicle stopped and hands began to unload her, she wasn’t sure where she was. “Pub brawl?” someone asked, and the man said, “Girl fight out back of Tangled Threads.”
A woman bent over her face. “She’s lost a tooth.”
“It’s in my mouth,” said her rescuer. This sounded funny to Emily, and she smiled, and after that
she didn’t remember anything. Time must have passed, though, because she was sitting in a hospital bed in an open ward with morning light streaming in. She was wearing a thin gown and her neck was encased in a brace. Her back was full of golf balls. She had a loose tooth in her mouth and probed it with her tongue but thought she should probably not do that. Her head was glass but otherwise she felt pretty okay.
A nurse stopped by. Emily had seen her buy soy milk at the local supermarket sometimes. “Morning, darling. How are you feeling?”
“Good,” she said.
The nurse put her hands on Emily’s face. “Open up. Good. You’re leaving that tooth alone?”
“Yeth.”
She released Emily’s mouth. “What happened?”
I lost control. I proved that I belong here. “Nothing.”
“Gary wants to talk to you.”
“Whoth Gary?”
“The police sergeant.”
She tried to shake her head. She didn’t want to press charges. She had no identity. “How long do I wear this?”
“Six weeks. And count yourself lucky.”
She did. It could easily have been worse. “Who picked me up?”
“The para?”
She didn’t know what this meant. “The man with the ambulanth van.”
“Paramedic. That’s Harry. He kept that tooth viable.”
“Can I thank him?”
“He’s off duty,” said the nurse. “But I’m sure you’ll see him around. It’s a small town, if you’ve noticed.”
“Yeth,” said Emily.
• • •
She had seen that van around. White with yellow and orange stripes; she must have seen it twice weekly since she got here. But, of course, now that she was released from the hospital, leading with her chin because of the brace, it was nowhere to be found. Sometimes she caught a flash of white and turned to see if it was him, pain spiking through her neck, and when she was too slow, she thought, I bet it was.
It was very junior high, being attracted to an ambulance driver. Falling for a man who had rescued her. She felt girlish. But her thoughts kept returning to how he had carried her tooth in his mouth. Also his hair in the ambulance headlights. She felt hot and restless, and went for lots of walks, during which she might encounter a white van with yellow and orange stripes.
