Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

by Sarah Pinsker

  The window opened and closed again. Lynette felt an unbearable need to do something. She reached over and jabbed at a button they hadn’t hit before. It lit up.

  The whale surged forward.

  “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know.” Lynette hit the button again, but the light didn’t turn off.

  Dahlia gave her a panicked look. “The pedals aren’t responding.”

  The speedometer edged up to eighty. Ninety. They approached a semi, and Lynette braced for impact, but the whale swerved around it.

  “I didn’t do that! The car did. What the hell did you press?”

  Lynette looked at the button. “It’s a flower.”

  “I told you not to press anything. Shit.”

  “Can you pull the emergency brake?”

  “Not at ninety miles an hour.”

  “Call the cops? So that if they clock us they know we’re having technical difficulties?”

  “Officers, please come catch me speeding . . .”

  “Runaway-truck ramp?”

  “Those are only in the mountains.”

  They both sat silently for a minute. Lynette resisted the overwhelming urge to apologize. If Dahlia hadn’t been so annoying, she wouldn’t have hit the flowery button of doom. “At least we’ll make good time?”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  Lynette kind of thought it was funny, as long as they didn’t die: the car was even more deadline oriented than the Boss. She reached into her pocket and wrapped her fingers around her lucky coin.

  The miles ticked away. After a while, Dahlia started fiddling with her phone. Lynette wondered what would happen if they passed a cop while the driver checked her phone with no hands steering. She pictured a chase, cops lobbing harpoons out their windows, tossing nets at them, shouting, “Thar she blows.” She had to admit she felt safer than when Dahlia was in control and took her attention off the road.

  “It’s got to stop soon,” Dahlia said after a couple of hours. “We’re running out of gas.”

  They didn’t get to the end of the gas; at thirty miles to empty, something went wrong in the engine and the whale shuddered and slowed to a stop in the middle of the lane, all lights flashing.

  “You’re going to have to get out and push before we get hit,” Dahlia said, putting a hand on the wheel. “I think I’ve got steering back again at least.”

  Lynette searched for her sneakers under the granola-bar-wrapper sea that surrounded her ankles. When she got out, there was another surprise.

  “Ah, Boss—Dahlia? Can you come out here a sec and tell me if this was here before?”

  Dahlia flung her door open and got halfway out. “Huh.”

  The whale now sported a ten-foot unicorn horn, deployed from a hole in the head above the windscreen that Lynette hadn’t noticed before. “I guess it’s a whadayacallit. A narwhal, not a whale. I’m not sure it would be legal to drive a car with a spear sticking out the front. It’s kind of Mad Max-y.”

  “A narwhal is a whale too, and I think that’s the least of our concerns. Push. We’ll deal with that when we can drive it again.” Dahlia shook her head and ducked back into the car.

  It took Lynette a few tries to find a good place to push from, since she couldn’t get purchase on the smooth body or the tail, but they eventually managed to guide the narwhal off the road.

  Dahlia fished under the dashboard until she found a latch for the hood, which unhinged the whale’s jaw. Lynette hung back; she didn’t really know cars. She was a good driver—the only reference the Boss had actually asked for was a copy of her clean driving record—but she had no idea how to change a tire, and while she could find the oil dipstick, she didn’t know what you looked for when you took it out and stared at it. Not to mention, who knew what lurked under a narwhal’s hood. Krill, maybe.

  “Dammit,” the Boss said from the vicinity of the engine. “Some belt’s shredded.”

  “Hmmm. Do you want me to look online to see what to do?”

  “No. I. Dammit. Dammit. I need to call a tow truck.”

  She slammed the hood shut. She looked genuinely distraught as she dialed a number and marched off in the direction they’d been traveling. Lynette wondered whether Dahlia would keep walking in her determination to stay on schedule. Let Lynette and the car catch up when they were ready to do their part again.

  She returned, frowning. “They said they couldn’t send anybody all the way out here for a few hours. I offered two hundred dollars to put us next in line and they said they’d see, but it’ll be forty minutes at least. Honestly.”

  Lynette tried to imagine what it would be like to have enough money to drop two hundred dollars that casually, or to offer that money before knowing how much the car repair would cost, or to expect that money would let you automatically jump the line.

  A tractor-trailer whooshed by, shaking the car and blasting them both with hot, gritty air. Lynette spit and looked around. She’d never seen an emptier place. On either side of the road was rocky, grassy plain. Ahead and behind, the same. The sun burned June-hot, directly overhead in a cloudless sky, and everything smelled like what she guessed was cow. It figured that when they finally stopped, there was nothing worth seeing.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said, then quickly added, “I promise I’ll be back before the truck gets here. I need to pee.”

  She set off through the field. Five minutes, ten. The landscape was so flat, ten minutes didn’t take her out of sight. From a distance, at a standstill, the car looked like a landmark rather than a vehicle. A small whale beached on the highway. Narwhal. If the truck had arrived early she would have sprinted back, since she had no doubt she’d be left behind if she made them wait. She made it back to the car with time to spare.

  The driver was a Jesus man and made sure they knew it. After his initial wonder at transporting a whale, and did they know the Jonah story, and wasn’t God good to have brought him to this day, he was all thank God they’d called him, thank God he’d gotten to them, thank God it was only a belt, thank God he was out with the flatbed instead of the other tow. Lynette sat in the middle, sandwiched between the driver, named Haskell, and Dahlia.

  Whatever shock absorbers the truck had possessed were long gone, so Lynette folded her arms around her backpack, braced both feet against the center console, and practiced being as small as possible so her thighs wouldn’t graze the thighs beside her. A large cross decorated with macaroni and spray-painted gold dangled from the rearview mirror, and it whacked her forehead every time the truck hit a bump.

  Dahlia kept fiddling with her phone, scrolling west on a map, as far as Lynette could tell. After about ten minutes, she looked up. “What town did you say you’re taking us to again?”

  “Springfield.”

  “Is there a repair shop in Baleful? It looks like it’s only ten miles farther west. I’d love for you to take us there instead.”

  “There’s a shop, but it’s not my shop. It’s farther than your insurance pays for, too.”

  “I’ll give you cash for the difference, and for whatever you think the repair would’ve cost.”

  “Okay. Cash. Yes, ma’am.” He picked up his own phone and called a dispatcher to explain the change in plans.

  Lynette watched longingly as they passed Springfield. The ride took them an endless, thigh-grazing, cross-whacking ten miles farther west, made better only by the fact that the windows were open. Thank God.

  The driver took the Baleful exit north, then turned left—west again—and traveled through what was presumably the town named on the exit sign. Main Street looked abandoned except a bar and a real estate office, windows papered with property ads.

  When they reached the shop, Haskell pointed them to the waiting room. Lynette went in; the Boss stayed outside to supervise the whale’s lowering. The vending machin
e was broken, but a blue cooler beside it had “HELP YOURSELF” written in permanent marker on a piece of printer paper taped to the top, the sign itself water-stained. She fished a generic orange soda from the ice water it floated in.

  There was nobody else in the waiting room, not even a receptionist. Lynette took a grape lollipop from a bowl on the desk and fanned out the magazines. Nothing looked worth reading. A brochure display stood under the desk, and she browsed those instead, selecting a couple as souvenirs. If she couldn’t visit places, at least she’d have proof she’d gotten close.

  The Boss came through the door from the garage, her movement so purposeful that for a moment Lynette thought she was an employee. A mechanic followed.

  “A fan belt takes twenty minutes to fix,” the Boss was saying.

  “Yes, that’s if there isn’t another car ahead of you in line, which there is, and if it doesn’t do any other damage when it snaps, which yours did, and if there aren’t really bizarre modifications to your engine making me second-guess myself at every step, which yours has, and if we have the right one in stock, which we don’t. They’ll have one in Springfield, but I can’t get over there again until tomorrow morning.”

  “Then let me borrow a car from you and I’ll go get the part myself.”

  “Nothing here I can let you borrow.”

  “Rent, then?”

  The mechanic shook her head. “I’ll have you on your way tomorrow, if the damage isn’t any worse than it looks, I promise.”

  The Boss scowled, then looked Lynette’s way. “You see? This is why I didn’t want to stop frivolously. You never know when something’s needlessly going to make you lose an entire day.”

  She seemed to have forgotten they’d just travelled two hundred miles as prisoners of a speeding automated whale. Lynette and the mechanic exchanged a look.

  The Boss pulled out her phone and jabbed at it for a minute. The mechanic pulled a buzzing phone from her own pocket. “You’re on Oddjobz, too, huh? I don’t think anyone else is going to take you up on this. I’m the only one in town who claims parts runs. How about you check into the motel down the road and kick back for a night?”

  The Boss looked so distraught, Lynette felt momentary sympathy. “We’re ahead of your schedule, Dahlia, and you’d wanted to check this town out in any case. I’m sure the garage will look out for your car, right?”

  The mechanic gave another grateful look. “Of course. I’ll even lock the gate out front tonight so nobody messes with it. We’ll take good care, I promise.”

  The Boss exhaled. “Okay. Okay.”

  Both women took their overnight bags from the car. The Boss shouted back over her shoulder as they reached the sidewalk. “If you don’t know what it does, don’t touch it.”

  “You’ll see her tomorrow,” the mechanic responded from the far bay.

  Lynette followed Dahlia, who set off as if she knew exactly where she was going. West, of course. Always west. Immediately past the garage, a thrift store and a small discount grocery shared a parking lot. The sidewalk was cracked, with grass invading the spaces between buckled slabs of concrete. Beyond the stores, the sidewalk ended abruptly, leaving them walking the shoulder.

  A grassed-over parking lot followed, and beyond it a long chain-link fence surrounding a crumbling movie theater. Not the majestic kind that people fundraised to revive; it looked bland and suburban. The beige brick façade and its flat marquee were all that remained, and whatever the name had been, the letters had been removed at some point. The left side listed THE LAST STARFIGHTER and MATINEE: THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN, and the right side promised COMING SOON: PURPLE RAIN.

  Dahlia dropped her bag and stood staring.

  “Are you okay?” Lynette asked.

  “The movies are still the same. The movies are still the same as in the photo.” After a moment, she nodded and grabbed her bag’s handle again. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  The White Diamond motel was another quarter mile down the road. One story in a U surrounding an empty pool, one car in the parking lot.

  The motel lobby held two folding chairs and another brochure rack, which Lynette paged through while Dahlia attempted to negotiate down from an already reasonable nightly rate. Why did rich people always try to get better deals? She pretended not to know the other woman, taking one of every brochure, then walking out again to wait outside.

  Dahlia emerged dangling two keys on diamond-shaped keychains. Lynette was relieved at the thought of her own room; she needed a break from her travelling companion. She dropped her bag inside the door and spread the brochures on her bed, hoping to find something within walking distance, since it wasn’t yet too late in the day to go out, for once.

  Most were too far to reach by foot, attractions she’d never be able to convince the Boss to go for when they got moving again. Scenic routes would take too long, even the kind you drove through on your way to your destination. Ditto state parks and national monuments and reptile museums. She added them to her collection, for another trip she’d take someday. She’d spend two months, she told herself. She’d stop at every historic house, every kitschy roadside attraction. Every single one.

  Only one brochure offered an address in Baleful. “The Museum of the Incident.” More a bookmark than a brochure, really, black ink on yellow cardstock. It didn’t say what incident. Just the name and an address and the hours, 2-7 PM on Fridays. No phone number, no website.

  Lynette had to look at her phone to figure out that it was, in fact, Friday; she’d lost track on the road. According to her phone, the address was a mile east, which probably put it in the deserted downtown area. She dumped her backpack’s contents on the bed, repacked it with wallet, phone, and room key, and headed out the door. She was going to do one touristy thing on this trip. One, and she could say she’d been somewhere.

  Dahlia sat in a deck chair by the empty pool. Her bag still lay next to her; it didn’t look like she’d gone to a room at all. Lynette desperately wanted some time alone, but the slumped posture twinged her guilt.

  She approached the low wire fence. “Hey, I’m going into town. Do you want to come?”

  Dahlia’s face was puffy. It reminded Lynette that she had only recently buried a parent. “No. I’m good, thanks. Have fun. I’ll text you in the morning when the car is ready.”

  Lynette stopped in the grocery to buy some granola bars to replace her dwindling supply and a microwave soup she’d eat for dinner if she didn’t find someplace with food.

  Past the garage, where the whale rested inside the open middle bay. She fought the urge to wave to it. Past the bar and the real estate office, with signs declaring it the place to find acreage PERFECT for cattle. Then one left turn, and she found herself on a residential street. The houses stood one story tall, each with a peaked roof hinting at attic space and a truck or bald-tired sedan parked in front of an attached garage. A grain silo a few blocks away dominated the neighborhood.

  The house matching the brochure address was smaller than the others, stone rather than wood, with no garage. A small tree grew in the rain gutter. It didn’t look like a museum. Disappointment again; the only chance she had to see anything, and it didn’t exist.

  No sign marked it as a museum, but beyond the screen, the door was open.

  “Hello?” Lynette called.

  “Hello?” somebody repeated.

  “Is this the museum?”

  “Is this the museum?”

  The door opened when she tried the latch, and she stepped into a tiny foyer with a coat tree and a mirror. The mirror reflected the room to the right, which showed her the response had come from a green parrot in an enormous cage. An old man slept, face up and snoring, on a couch under the front window. She rounded the corner to get a look at the room and decide what to do. Every museum she’d ever visited had a reception desk where you paid, and maps, and signs, and souve
nir counters. She still wasn’t sure if this was even the right place.

  “Hello?” she said again, daring the parrot to repeat. It eyed her but kept quiet. “I’m here for the museum.”

  The parrot shrieked, and the man opened his eyes. He was younger than she’d first thought, though not by much, and his skin had the leathery look of someone who’d spent a lot of time in the sun. He levered himself to a seated position. Shaggy white hair took off in several launching trajectories around his face. “For the museum? Excellent. That’ll be eight dollars. Five if you’re a senior or student.”

  She still had her community college ID for the current year, even though she’d withdrawn before the spring semester. On the other hand, this place looked like it needed the money, and she’d spent way less than she’d expected to on the trip so far. She reached for her wallet.

  “So, what’s ‘the incident,’ anyway?” she asked, counting out a five and three ones.

  He reached for her money, but cocked his head, looking a little parrotish himself. “You’re here but you don’t know? I think that’s a first.”

  “My car broke down and I’m stuck here overnight. Your museum was the only attraction within walking distance of the motel.”

  He looked a little miffed, and she realized that could be taken badly. “I’m happy it’s here,” she said in all honesty.

  He gestured toward the room’s closed second door, labelled “Museum” on a wooden sign she hadn’t noticed before. “Hit the wall switch when you go in.”

  The door swung closed behind her faster than she expected, leaving her in total darkness. It occurred to her she had just walked into a strange house without telling anyone where she’d gone. She groped for the wall switch.