Foodchain

by Jeff Jacobson

  At first, he didn’t think the trunk key was going to work. He gripped it tight, ready to shove the key through the lock, through the metal, through the goddamn back seat if necessary, but forced himself to calm down. If the key broke, he’d have to walk back to the highway and take his chances.

  After a few moments of restrained wriggling, the key clicked over, the trunk popped open. The whole thing was lined with plastic, but under that the carpet was as clean as the rest of the car; the whole thing probably got washed and detailed at least every other day. He yanked at the bottom of the trunk, pulling up the floor, something he’d been unable to do when he’d been locked back here with Red. A black leather bag lay nestled within the spare tire. It held a screwdriver, a jack so tiny it was pretty much useless, and a tire iron, one of those condensed tools, shaped like an L. At the bottom of the L was the shell for the lug bolts; the other end was flattened to a dull blade.

  He looked at the screwdriver. It was a Phillips and utterly useless for the cuffs. That left the tire iron. He held the top half of the iron between his wrists, wedging the blade against the plastic strip, while bracing the bottom half of the L against his chest. Then he slowly forced his wrists towards his chest, willing the plastic to snap. It didn’t work. So he settled his hands on the bumper and leaned over, using his weight to increase the pressure on the cuffs. At first, he felt a little awkward with his naked ass sticking out in the chilly night air, but gradually, the pain in his wrists replaced the embarrassment, and nothing mattered but breaking the plastic.

  It took a while. In the end, both wrists and the center of Frank’s chest were bleeding, but the plastic finally split, sending the blade into the soft tissue of his left palm. He barely felt it. He threw his head back and hissed in triumph, spreading his arms wide to the glittering stars.

  * * * * *

  He lived in hotels for six days, never really sleeping. The windows always drew him. It didn’t matter if he could see the flat, alien mountains of the west or a view of I-80 and a couple of neon casinos, he’d turn off the lights and the TV and sit at the little round tables in those stiff, narrow chairs in the faint light from the parking lot and stare, watching the long back car in all that neon, just watch all the lights and finish a bottle of Jamaican Rum.

  Until finally, inevitably, he went to answer the door, expecting pizza, and found the two quiet gentlemen instead. They wore expensive suits. Frank was wearing boxers and one sock.

  He carried a half-empty bottle of Appleton Estate.

  They carried revolvers.

  * * * * *

  Both suits were roughly six or seven sizes too large. Frank felt like a ten-year-old dressing up in his father’s clothes. Although, he reflected, this wasn’t really at all like his father’s suit. His father had been tall and painfully thin, like Abraham Lincoln, except slouched and without the beard; his father shaved twice a day. He was a preacher and he believed; every moment on this Earth was a test from the Holy Spirit.

  His father had handled swamp rattlesnakes in a large shack filled with half-burnt pews stolen from other churches, sliding his hands slowly around, caressing two or three snakes at a time, as more rattlesnakes and cottonmouths slithered around his feet. A bunch of desperate people surrounded Frank’s father and the snakes, all of ’em leaning into it, clapping too quickly, eyes wide and dull, singing kinda’ low, while Grandma slapped her upright piano and moaned a little now and then.

  * * * * *

  He found a map under the driver’s seat and figured out he was in the high desert mountains of central Nevada. He headed north. The shoes didn’t fit any better than the suit; in fact, they fit worse, so Frank drove barefoot. News of the zoo would have probably reached Castellari by now, so he couldn’t head south, back to Las Vegas. They had his picture, and in Las Vegas you couldn’t stick your hand in your pocket to scratch your balls without two or three surveillance cameras catching you. He couldn’t head west either; California was full of lying fucks who would happily call Castellari for the slightest hint of a reward.

  Frank hit I-80 with an empty stomach and an emptier gas tank. He turned west, towards Reno. Nearly four hours had passed since he’d gone for a dip in the alligator tank. He needed cash. Quickly and quietly. Gas stations and convenience stores were out; that was for guys with brain damage, guys with PCP habits bigger than Texas, guys who thought shooting the camera would wreck the videotape.

  More than anything, he needed rest, so he took the next off-ramp. It curled down into a low gully filled with tumbleweeds. He followed the narrow road until a sagging pole barn loomed up ahead in the darkness. He found a dark place to park behind the barn and killed the engine. For a while, he just sat still and listened to the dull roar of the freeway, watching the distant headlights scatter shadows across the hills.

  * * * * *

  Frank had been to Jamaica once, with a filthy rich widow who owned dozens of racehorses. She’d wanted a “friend” to go along. What the hell, she paid a lot. He fell in love with the island, and all he wanted out of life was to simply make enough money to buy himself a little concrete shack, right off of a palm-strewn beach, maybe pick up a sweet and sassy little Jamaican honey. A place where he could lay in the sun, swim in the ocean, and quietly drink himself to death in peace.

  He bounced around the radio for a while, but couldn’t concentrate on anything. He closed his eyes, but the surging, boiling water of the alligator tank kept leaking out. Teeth slammed together, tails slapped metal, and segmented white bellies flashed in yellow light as they rolled and rolled and rolled—

  Something clamped itself around his right ankle.

  Frank screamed and flinched awake in the driver’s seat of the long black car and found his ankle wedged underneath the brake pedal. He jerked his knees angrily up to the steering wheel and sat up. His stomach growled impatiently. But he could handle that. It was the irritating, thirsty itch in the back of his mind that really bothered him.

  * * * * *

  He headed west again. He needed a place to clean himself up. He pulled into a nearly empty rest stop and parked at the far end. The place smelled of diesel and dog shit. An open area full of maps, brochures, and pay phones split the building in half; the women’s room on one side, men’s on the other. He counted three trucks in the parking lot and no cars.

  He waited a while and was just about to meander on over to the building and see if they had any vending machines with food, when a semi hissed itself to a stop in the truck lot. Frank kept still, watching through the rearview mirror. A man jumped out of the cab, stretched, and walked slowly to the men’s room.

  Twenty minutes later the guy was still inside.

  Frank got tired of waiting. Maybe the guy had stomach flu or something. He slid the tire iron up the inside of the suit’s right sleeve, up along his forearm and curled his fingers around the lower half of the L.

  He climbed out of the car, tire iron hot and tight in his fist. He clomped across the parking lot as fast as possible in the loose shoes. It would have been easier barefoot. But he didn’t want any unnecessary attention and since a guy wearing an ill-fitting black suit and oversize shoes didn’t seem as strange as being barefoot, he slogged forward, keeping his toes flexed so the shoes wouldn’t fall off.

  Frank stepped into the light in the middle of the building, scanning for food. There was a vending machine for soda, but that was all. No candy bars, no chips. Not even those bags of fake health mixes, with chunks of petrified nuts and dried fruit that tasted like horse shavings. He stopped for a moment, watching the snoring trucks and listening intently. Except for the fast food wrappers dancing in the wind, nothing moved.

  Frank stepped inside the men’s restroom.

  Searing white fluorescent light stung his eyes. Bleached gray tiles covered the floors. The stalls waited on his left. On his right, the sinks and reflective metal mirrors. Two air hand dryers. The place smelled burnt, not only through the temperature from the desert air and those hand dryers, b
ut chemically as well.

  One of the stall doors was shut.

  Frank skied across the tiles to the nearest sink. He twisted the handle, and as water hit the porcelain, he bent over to see what waited under the closed door.

  A pair of gray snakeskin cowboy boots.

  Frank splashed water on his face, then bent and drank deeply. The water tasted foul and smelled of sulfur, but since he hadn’t had any liquid at all in over eight hours, he didn’t mind. He gulped it down, pausing only to suck in a quick breath now and then.

  The stall door swung in, slowly. A voice, rough and low, whispered, “Hey man. Hey. Look at me.”

  The guy on the toilet was close to Frank’s age, maybe low thirties, sandy beard, wearing a Mack Truck cap, and a plaid western cut long-sleeve shirt. His jeans were bunched around his ankles, and his right hand was stroking his erect dick.

  Frank slowly straightened, wiping the water away from his lips with his left hand, keeping his right hand with the tire iron hanging loose at his side. “I’m sorry?”

  He stepped out of the black shoes. The tile was cold and clammy beneath his feet.

  “Look at this, man.” The breathing and stroking grew faster. “Look at it. Yes…You like it, don’t ya? You like my cock. I can tell.”

  “Yeah,” Frank agreed as he took three quick steps towards the stall and brought the tire iron down on the trucker’s head before the man could even let go of his dick. The iron bar hit his skull with an unsatisfying, brittle thud. So Frank hit the guy again, cracking the corner of the L into the trucker’s nose. The guy finally let go of his dick and instead of protecting his head, went for his jeans. Frank cracked him a few more times and the guy twitched and flopped for a second or two like a fish on a flat rock, but eventually he stopped trying to move at all.

  Very little blood hit the floor. Most of it was running down the guy’s face, down his neck, soaking into the plaid shirt. The guy’s eyes had rolled up, showing nothing but white slits. His mouth hung open. His hands hung straight down on either side of the toilet, arms more limp than his dick. Frank left the guy’s jeans down around his ankles and snagged the wallet. Eight crisp twenties waited inside.

  Frank shook his head. His luck was making him nervous. The trucker had a fistful of pills in a plastic baggie in his shirt pocket. Frank tried the boots. They fit much better than the shoes, a little tight, but not bad. The suit legs were so wide that the cuffs nearly obscured the snazzy snakeskin; Frank felt like he’d just stepped out of some seventies exploitation movie.

  Frank slipped the large black shoes on the trucker’s feet, rearranged the limp arms in the man’s lap, and locked the stall door from the inside. Frank slipped under the door and backed away, scrutinizing the closed door. It simply looked as if the trucker, with his jeans down around his ankles, draped over some large black shoes, was simply taking a long, unhurried shit. Maybe he was reading the paper. It would have to do. Frank tucked the money and baggie of pills away in the inside pocket of the suit jacket, flexed his toes in the boots, and left.

  * * * * *

  He hit Reno an hour later and headed north, rising suddenly into the Sierra Nevada mountain range. He came around a hill and nearly had a heart attack when he saw the border station. With much of the state devoted to agriculture, California had established permanent roadblocks around its borders, stopping every car that crossed over into the state, asking everyone if they were bringing any fruits or vegetables across. But the officer, a young woman with a face as round and smooth as one of the state’s peaches, hadn’t shown the slightest interest in Frank. Even before he shook his head to her question, she was already waving him through.

  He bought a bottle of rum and spent and hour in a tiny town called Milford. It wasn’t exactly Appleton Estate, but it would work. He parked near an old cemetery full of genuine gunfighter skeletons, sipped from the bottle for a while, and finally slept.

  His dreams were dark, full of slippery shadows and galloping hooves on tight sand.

  * * * * *

  The midmorning sun hammered through the windshield like the stern gaze of God and left Frank sweating and confused. The bottle, half-empty, sat upright in the passenger seat as if waiting to be seatbelted into place. He screwed on the cap and threw it under the seat. That was fucking smart, leaving an open bottle in plain sight within the vehicle. Sucking at the sweet and sour film on his teeth, he found an empty campground near Honey Lake and took a shower. It felt good to scrape off the slime from the alligator tank, not to mention the piss on his leg.

  Frank slid back behind the wheel, feeling clear and level. He decided the bottle could wait. He wasn’t sure what to do. The long, black car had half a tank of gas left. The urge to keep running still seethed through his veins, so he decided that he needed more ground between him and the zoo.

  * * * * *

  He followed a rough two-lane road northwest, through vast plains of sagebrush and patches of bleached, gray husks of trees, scorched long ago by forest fires, still standing guard like silent ghosts. The pavement curled out through lava-strewn hills, eventually spitting the long, black car into a narrow valley. To the southwest rose the steep, forbidding Sierra Nevada Mountains. To the west and north, more mountains. To the east there was nothing but the high desert wasteland beyond the few low foothills.

  He spotted the water tower first, a dying Martian crouching over a cluster of white buildings and a few scattered homes. The green, bullet-specked sign read, “Welcome to Whitewood. Home of the Wildcats.” The population was three figures; he figured that might be a generous estimate.

  Frank pulled into the gas station on the right side of the highway at the edge of town. Behind the gas station, there wasn’t much but empty desert and rolling foothills. He stopped next to the pumps, remembering this time that the tank was on the passenger side of the car. The place only had two pumps, no roof, just a tiny store next to the one car garage.

  Frank climbed out and nearly went to his knees in the heat. “Good fucking Christ,” he blurted in venomous surprise as two hours of air-conditioning bled out of the car. The air smelled dry and full of lead.

  A three-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch sat directly across the street from the gas station. The house looked old, hurt. The wood may have been painted green once, a long time ago. Somebody had started nailing up aluminum siding along the north wall, but gave up after a while. Chunks of shingles were missing. Most of the windows were covered in flattened cardboard boxes, swollen and splotched from rain. The place looked like it was suffering from a serious case of gangrene.

  The surrounding yard wasn’t much better. Ten or twelve cars had been eviscerated in the patches of dead weeds and smooth dirt. Amongst the tires, car doors, bumpers, and broken glass, was a rusted horizontal freezer. A pair of lawn chairs flanked a gigantic satellite dish, nearly eight feet across, perched awkwardly at the edge of the yard like some fat vulture, and looked like it was capable of picking up signals from one of the moons of Jupiter. Frank got the feeling it was some kind of shrine.

  A leafless oak tree, gnarled and twisted in slow-motion agony, rose from the center of the yard, rising into stumps of limbs nearly forty feet in the air. It took him several seconds to realize the dead tree was full of children.

  Frank froze, holding the gas nozzle in midair. The children’s silent stares made him powerfully uneasy. Still keeping his eyes on the tree, he jammed the nozzle into the gas tank and squeezed the handle. The clicking tank behind him made him feel a little better, but not much. He had a little over forty dollars left, more than enough for the gas, but while looking at the deserted streets, he’d been thinking of breaking one of his own rules, seriously considering robbing the gas station. But now that was out of the question.

  One of the kids had a slingshot.

  The kid, a boy with a flattop that may have been trimmed about three or four months ago, raised the slingshot. It had some kind of brace that came out of the bottom of the handle and wrapped around
the kid’s wrist. He was seven or eight, wearing shorts that hung to his calves and a #54 Chicago Bears football jersey. He stretched the elastic surgical tubing back, straightening his left arm, pulling his right hand back to his jaw, and let fly.

  Something popped into the rear window, about a foot from Frank.

  Frank tried hard not to flinch, but knew he was too late. Then he got pissed. He knew from hearing the deep crunch that it had left a small crater in the window. He left the clicking tank behind and started across the empty street. Weeds grew from cracks that zigzagged across the pavement. He put his hands in his black suit pockets to hide them in case he suddenly had to curl his fingers into fists. He just wanted to talk to the children, not scare them. Not yet, at least.

  Frank stopped in the middle of the road feeling like he’d just stepped onto a cast iron skillet that had been left on the campfire for too long and wished he hadn’t left the sunglasses on the dashboard. “Hi there.”

  The children didn’t say anything. They stood on limbs, leaning against the trunk or quietly hanging from the branches with both arms. In the vicious afternoon light, the kind of light that carves shapes into greasy slivers of silhouettes, it looked like the burnt husk of a tree full of skeletons. To Frank’s sunblasted eyes, the tree looked like it was still on fire.

  He shielded his eyes from the glare and tried again. “Hey there.” He realized he didn’t know what the hell to say.

  “Nice boots,” a girl’s voice sniggered, as the kid with the slingshot fired another projectile at him. Frank heard the rock or whatever it was whistle past his head and thwack into the car.

  Suddenly, nearly every boy produced their own weapon. Most of them had slingshots, but a couple had BB guns, long narrow pistols and skinny air rifles.

  Frank took a step forward, no way in hell that he was letting a tree full of children scare him away, and heard hissing snaps as the kids began pumping the BB guns, priming them to fire.

  A low growl prickled the hairs on the back of Frank’s neck. He faltered, stopped as a dog wriggled slowly out from under the porch and padded silently through the junk, stopping just short of the pavement.