by James Siegel
“Are they saying why I would do something like that?”
“To give you… credibility. Is that the right word? Make you the center of attention.”
“I guess it worked, then.”
“Huh? Didn’t you just say they’re wrong?”
“Someone stole my gun. I was trying to be funny.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Can you call Sam Weitz and tell him I’m out of town? That I’ll be back in a week or so? He’ll want to know why I’m not at bowling.”
“Sure.” Silence. “Tom?”
“Yes?”
“What are you looking for?”
“Credibility, Norma. Just like you said.”
Dennis was right about Seattle.
It was raining when we got there, a soft, steady downpour that caused clouds of steam to drift off the asphalt.
We drove through the downtown area because Dennis wanted to see Safeco Field where the Mariners played. Once upon a time Dennis used to be a baseball fan, but that was before reading the box scores began hurting his head. He used to be able to recite every player’s statistics by heart. Maybe that’s why he’d bunked out in the shadow of Detroit’s baseball park after he’d ended up on the streets. To feel the nurturing presence of America’s pastime.
We drove past the fish markets and restaurants that flanked the water and Safeco before we hit the highway going south.
The first VA hospital on our itinerary was on the border between Washington and Oregon-in the city of Tellings, population 159,000. At least that’s what Dennis read off the map.
“Sound familiar?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“The city name. Tellings? Does it ring a bell?”
“Population 159,000,” he said.
“Right. I’m asking if you recognize the name-if maybe you were there?”
“Dunno.”
Dennis had begun swatting his face even though there were no actual bugs there. He sometimes whispered things to himself, but when I asked him what he said, he’d ask me what I was talking about.
I tried to imagine what we might look like to passing motorists.
A broken-down Miata sporting another car’s front bumper and a man in the passenger seat mumbling to himself when he wasn’t killing phantom flies.
Then I knew exactly what we looked like.
At least to one motorist.
THIRTY-NINE
It had gotten dark almost without me knowing it.
One minute it was light enough to easily make out passing license plates-Dennis had begun reading them off again in lieu of road signs-then it wasn’t.
He had to lean forward and squint, each license suddenly immersed in individual pools of sickly yellow light.
“Speed up,” he said. “Can’t see the last number.”
I told Dennis he might want to give it a rest-eventually it grated on you, being assaulted by the constant drone of numbers and letters, the only relief provided by vanity plates like IAMGR8T and LUV2BWL.
Dennis was oblivious to my entreaties; I didn’t press the matter since it gave him something to do, at least.
M65LK1…
RLN895…
I’m not exactly sure when it occurred to me.
L983HT4…
K61MN0…
Have you ever had the car radio on and begun listening to a certain song only when the next one’s already playing? Your mind meandering down its own roads, and the music far away as if it’s coming from a half-open window?
VML254…
HG54MT…
Dennis’s litany of licenses was a kind of music-steady, low, and rhythmic. A tune I mostly tuned out, but half didn’t.
QR327N9…
KL61WT…
At some point, I began to actually hear it, at least become cognizant of a certain repeat phrase.
MH92TV…
Something about those letters and numbers. They seemed, okay, familiar. As if he’d mumbled them before, and before that, too.
MH92TV.
Twenty minutes ago, maybe, then sometime later, and then now.
MH92TV.
So what? There were hundreds of cars on this highway going in exactly the same direction we were-even all the way to Tellings. Even as I attempted to placate a bad case of the jitters, I knew that I’d heard those numbers before twenty minutes ago.
Dennis had been reading license plates since Iowa.
“Dennis… that license plate-which car?”
“Huh?”
“MH92TV? Which car?”
He seemed pleasantly surprised that something I’d previously expressed annoyance at had suddenly captivated my attention. Cool.
“Over there,” he said.
“Over where?”
“There.” He motioned to his immediate left, but when I slowed to let the red Mitsubishi to our left inch forward, its license plate said GAYSROK.
“That’s not it, Dennis.”
He shrugged. “No, not that one. Behind us, I think.”
“Where behind us?” I scanned the side- and rearview mirrors, but it was pitch black and all I saw were vague shapes obliterated by crossing high beams.
“Dunno, man. Maybe it’s in front of us.”
“Okay. What kind of car is it?”
I knew what his answer would be before he said it.
I was Karnak the Magnificent, the answer already pressed against my forehead, even though I was praying for something else, any other car on earth, really. A Honda Accord, a Saturn or Caddy, a sensible Dodge minivan or VW bus or Volvo.
No such luck.
“Pickup,” he said.
My hands gripped the steering wheel so tight that my knuckles went white.
“You’re sure?”
“Uh-huh. He’s been following us since we left, man.”
“Since Iowa? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Well, you know. Maybe I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing.”
“Okay. What color? What color pickup has been following us since Iowa?”
“You’re getting kind of specific, man.”
I threw out pretty much every possibility I could think of, every color in the rainbow-Dennis shaking his head at each one, uh-uh, nope, don’t think so-until the inevitable process of elimination led me to the last color I wanted to hear.
“Blue? Was it blue, Dennis?”
“Uh-huh,” Dennis said. “That’s right, sure. Blue.”
You’re it.
Standing at the bottom of the stairs with a metal tool in his hands.
Playing Auto Tag with me on a desert highway.
Trolling down Third Street while he sighted a.38 Smith amp; Wesson through the window. My Smith amp; Wesson.
Bang.
I checked the rearview mirror.
Then the sides. Right, then left.
My heart was jackhammering. It was going to do an Alien and burst right out of my chest. I veered into the next lane, nearly got obliterated by an eighteen-wheeler hauling toilet fixtures, swerved back, slowed down, worked my way to the exit lane.
“Hey… what are you doing? We stopping?”
The next exit was coming up. Dennis had dutifully read it out loud two miles back.
Wohop Road.
“I need to pee,” Dennis said.
Back to my left side mirror. I wanted to see if someone crossed lanes. There were several cars in the next lane-two separate and distinct pair of headlights. Then, suddenly, there was one.
I squinted into the mirror. What happened?
“I need to pee like a motherfucker, Tom.”
He’d turned off his lights.
There were two pair of headlights and now there was one.
He’d turned off his lights.
I floored the gas. Passed eighty and kept going.
“I don’t need to pee that bad,” Dennis said. “I won’t do it in the car.”
Eighty-five… ninety… ninety-five…
“Maybe I will.”
/> When the turnoff for Wohop Road appeared, Dennis didn’t bother reading it. He couldn’t. He was crouching down with his hands up over his eyes-the crash position familiar to any airline passenger.
Wait… wait…
Now.
I yanked the steering wheel hard to the right.
I’d almost passed the exit-on my way to the next one for sure. I took the turn on two wheels-my first wheelie since fourth grade-barely held the curve, then flipped back on all fours and rolled onto a mercifully empty service road where I kept right on going.
Listen.
Nothing.
How was it possible?
How could he know I was here?
At the trailer park in Iowa?
On the road to Tellings?
How?
Think.
Okay. There was one way. Sure there was. Assuming he hadn’t followed me all the way from Littleton-one way.
My ATM withdrawals.
My credit card.
The one I’d used at gas stations, at the Nevada Stop ’n’ Shop and the Sioux Nation Motel in North Dakota.
Like big, fat crumbs any good bird dog could follow with his eyes closed.
All the way from Iowa to Seattle to here.
Only…
You would need a special kind of access.
To get that kind of information-private bank records, credit card receipts, the kind of stuff they’re supposed to guard with their lives-you would need a special sort of access for that.
“Uh, I really got to pee, man.”
“A few minutes, Dennis.”
I was getting there-I was close. I’d sat down on a stool at Muhammed Alley and begun drawing something, and now it was beginning to emerge. If I peered really hard at it, maybe I could even whisper what it was.
I had to move faster. I had to Texas two-step.
As far as I could tell, the plumber hadn’t made the turnoff.
I’d shaken him.
I drove another twenty miles before I gave in to Dennis’s increasingly pitiful demands-I have to goooo, man-and turned in to a twenty-four-hour Exxon station.
FORTY
You never want to end up in a hospital.
Not if you can help it.
You most definitely don’t want to end up in a VA hospital.
The army and navy and air force and marines pour most of their funds into trying to kill people, not heal them.
VA hospitals stink of neglect.
The one in Tellings was no exception.
There was a man in a wheelchair yelling in the visitor’s lobby. His waste bag had broken and no one was fixing it. He’d been yelling for two hours, he said.
The admitting nurse seemed oblivious to his ranting, as if she were hooked up to an invisible iPod and grooving on R amp;B.
She was only half-oblivious to us.
“Yeah?” she asked, a few minutes after we presented ourselves at the front desk.
We’d already skirted the grounds, walked the pathway circling the three innocuous-looking buildings that made up the complex. I asked Dennis if he remembered the place.
“Was this it, Dennis? Was this where you were?”
He didn’t have a good answer. He looked like a tourist contemplating something he’d read about in guidebooks-things half-familiar and half not.
There was an easy way to find out.
“Have you worked here a long time?” I asked the admitting nurse.
“What?”
“Have you worked here for more than a week?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. “You making some kind of comment on my abilities?”
“Have you seen either one of us before?”
“What exactly do you gentlemen want?” she said, in a tone of voice that said she’d seen enough of Dennis to know he wasn’t gentleman material. Me either. Spend enough time in a car and you start looking as if you live in one.
“We have a prescription,” I said. “Any chance you could fill it?”
“You see the word pharmacy written anywhere?”
“No.”
“Then why you asking me to fill a script?”
“Okay, fine.”
“Is he a vet?” she asked, motioning toward Dennis. She could’ve asked Dennis directly, of course, but she’d obviously been around enough psych patients to know one when she saw one.
“Saddam’s pumped me full of petros,” Dennis answered her anyway.
“That so?”
“I’ve got petroleum in my veins. I need a lube job.”
“Are you in charge of him or something?” she asked me.
“Or something.”
“You here to commit him?”
“No. Just looking for a refill.”
“You might want to rethink that. He doesn’t seem so good.”
“No, he’s okay. He just needs his meds.”
“Well, then. I’ve got a hospital to take care of.”
“Okay, sure. And you’ve never seen him before-right?”
“Right.”
We walked back outside, where a Support Our Troops sign was hanging off the front archway.
I did what I always did when we walked outside now-when we walked anywhere. I looked for a blue pickup truck.
“How many pills I got left?” Dennis asked.
“Not that many. By the way, you know they’re all different colors?” Dennis’s mom had anointed me keeper of the meds-put them in an old Band-Aid box and stuffed them in my pocket. I couldn’t help thinking there was something metaphoric about that-futilely sticking Band-Aids on a terminal wound.
“I’m hungry,” Dennis said.
“Okay, we’ll get something on the road.”
I’d been trying to conserve my cash because I was loath to hit the ATM again. Not that it mattered-I’d already filled the tank just before we hit the hospital, slipping my credit card into the reader like the notes UPS delivery personnel slip through the mail slot of your front door:
I was here.
The next hospital was a hundred miles away in Oregon.
Eisenhower Memorial.
Up till recently, I’d never been close to Oregon in my life. Now twice in two weeks.
“Dennis, if you see that license plate again, you’ll tell me, okay?”
“Sure,” he nodded. “What license plate?”
“MH92TV.”
“Oh, right.”
It was almost midnight. I’d decided there was safety in motion-no roadside motels where I’d need a credit card or cash withdrawal. Where someone in a blue pickup truck might creep up on us in the dark.
We reached Eisenhower Memorial at about 1 a.m.
It looked a bit like the elementary school I went to as a kid-only triple the size. A squat, red brick building with the requisite flagpole out front, the Stars and Stripes dishrag-limp in the sticky summer heat.
“What’s this?” Dennis asked when I pulled into the parking lot. “Where are we?”
That didn’t bode well.
When we walked up to the front desk, we suffered through a repeat of Tellings. This time the admitting nurse was a pale, owlish-looking man who asked us what we wanted, claimed to have never seen Dennis before in his life, then inquired about Dennis’s sanity when he swatted a bug that wasn’t there.
We took a little walk around the place anyway, just as we had in Tellings. It was a washout; Dennis had never been there.
We went back to the car, drove through the front gates.
I steeled myself for a long ride; the next VA hospital was more than three hundred miles away.
Dennis was acting fidgety.
I put him on license-plate duty. It gave him something to do. It gave me a semireliable sentry-scouring the passing jumble of numbers and letters for the ones we needed to fear.
Somewhere around 3 in the morning, I felt the kind of tiredness you just can’t shake. Dennis had already fallen asleep on the job and was snoozing noisily against the side window. I was p
erilously close to following him, the highway’s broken yellow lines like individual Sleep-ezes I was ingesting one at a time on the way to bed.
When I realized I’d drifted into the next lane-had literally been sleeping at the wheel-I searched for the next exit. Three miles later, I turned off the highway, looking for someplace we could grab a few hours’ rest.
I found a twenty-four-hour gas station.
I pulled in-past the lit window where I could see the Indian proprietor, all the way to the back so we couldn’t be seen from the road. I turned off the engine and promptly fell asleep.
Dennis woke me when there was just the faintest pink corona on the horizon.
I looked down at my watch: 5:30.
We were surrounded by low brush just beginning to emerge out of the morning gloom. I could hear the crackling of two massive power lines strung right over the station, the occasional ghostly whoosh of a passing car.
“I gotta make,” Dennis said. “My stomach hurts.”
“Okay, Dennis. Over there,” pointing out the restroom door at the back of the station.
Dennis opened the car door and sat there for a moment, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Then he pulled himself out in sections, first his feet, then both arms, finally the rest of his body. He stumbled off to the bathroom and went inside.
I was dead tired; I must’ve gone back to sleep. When I woke up again, I wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been a dream-Dennis waking me to go the bathroom. My ex-wife had been like that-holding conversations with me at 2 in the morning, then accusing me of making it up.
But Dennis wasn’t in the car. The pink light had morphed into pale yellow.
It was 5:40.
I got out, walked to the bathroom door, and knocked.
“Dennis, you okay in there?”
I heard an answering grunt.
I walked around to the front of the station in search of food.
When I entered bleary-eyed through the front door, the Indian-he was probably a Sikh since he wore one of those red turbans-didn’t even acknowledge me. He was hunched across the front desk, reading a newspaper.
I walked down the aisle looking for something to eat. Gas stations were evidently oblivious to the latest nutritional guidelines. This one was pretty much restricted to the food group ending in — os.
Cheetos. Doritos. Tostitos. Rolos.
It was quiet enough that when I pulled two bags of Doritos off the shelf, the resultant crackle seemed as jarring as a gunshot.
