“That’s terrific,” Barb allowed, crying a little at just how rare and terrific it was.
“Yeah,” Peg echoed. “Really groovy.”
“Groovy,” he said. “Fuck, how I hate that word. I never want you to say it again.”
“Okay,” Peg said, smiling and starting to drool again. Luther wiped her chin, then licked his hand, staring straight at a waitress who saw the whole thing. She wrinkled her mouth in distaste and hurried a teetering plate of rib bones inside, dropping a fork with a ting-tank. The waitress thought she saw sharp teeth on him but wasn’t sure, never told anyone, not even when she saw the papers in the morning. The police would ask her what she remembered about the man, but the truth was she remembered nothing about him. Several people who dined at Honey’s that night offered careful descriptions of the women, right down to their pumps and the white piping on Barb’s mod but tasteful crimson dress, but nobody could say who the man was or what he looked like. Only one remembered the car, though any who heard him start it might have said it grumbled like storms coming, like the beginning of a biblical plague, that it was a noise Pharaoh would have noted and hardened his heart anyway.
Luther Nixon stood up.
Barbara Atwater and Peggy McMullen stood up, too, watching him.
“You girls pay already?”
They nodded.
“You park close to here?”
They nodded again.
“Where?”
Barb pointed at a bottle-green two-door across the street and one block down.
“Chevy Nova. Small-block V-8. Sixty-three?”
Barb nodded.
Luther Nixon pointed at it and a large, hairy-looking fellow in a neck brace and sunglasses appeared from an alley and walked over to it, leaning against the trunk like it was his.
“Not too shabby. What’s your name, sassy horsy?”
“Barbara.”
“Barb,” he said, leaning close so only she heard, “you nickel-plated bitch, I’m going to watch you shave all that pretty blond hair off your head tonight and then you’re going to die, and die bloody. That cool with you?”
“Sure.”
“Groovy,” he said, flicking his cigarette at a passing car. “Let’s go for a ride.”
12
THE SLIGHT, YOUNG-LOOKING WOMAN MADE HER WAY THROUGH THE TALL GRASS close to the shoulder of Route 66, carrying her messenger bag, her Indian-print dress wet with night dew. Her face shone white beneath a chip of moon floating over fast-moving clouds. The wind made the trees hiss. She waited until she saw headlights, only one set, then mounted the shoulder so her pale skin would blaze in the headlamps and the driver could not help but see her.
The car that pulled over was a Chrysler Windsor; she knew it by the big grille like the fat half of an upside-down triangle. The driver was fat, too, and when she leaned down to the window she smelled his stink of sadness and loneliness even under his excess of aftershave. He was an ordinary man well into homely middle age, with his friar’s crown of salt-and-pepper hair, a second chin starting under the first, a belly blooming out over the belt that seemed to bisect him. A sticky-looking coffee mug lay on its side on the passenger seat next to a tie like a dead snake. A worn briefcase slouched on the floor as though it had been kicked there.
“I don’t normally do this,” he said, “but you look like you might be in trouble.”
“I am,” she said, smiling like she and trouble were friends.
“Where ya headed?”
“Depends. Where are you headed?”
He stiffened. She had played the wrong card. She saw the wedding ring now. She had to catch his eyes before he drove off.
“I don’t mean any offense by this, but you aren’t a—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I just meant that I have to get away from here. They hit me.”
“Who?”
“They,” she said, “here.” She pointed just above her left eye and, while she knew there was no mark on her, she hooked his gaze with hers. She pulled him with her thin-ice eyes, so gray they were almost clear, and he fell through them and into her. It was almost as though he knew she was going to say, “Open the door,” almost as though he were saying it with her.
She looked at his gas gauge, then tossed the coffee cup into the grass she had emerged from and sat down, shutting the door. She dug for the safety belt and cinched it tight around her tiny waist, buckled it.
“Drive,” she said, and he did.
A preacher station babbled on the radio, almost out of signal range.
“Ruth was a beautiful woman. But it was not just for her beauty that Ruth was allowed to glean from the corn, and in these days (pfffft) less fortunate could take some part of the corn that fell, so that they should not starve. The greater part of (pffffft) was given this privilege, her beauty notwithstanding (pfffft) shown kindness unto her mother-in-law. For the lord Jesus knows, doesn’t he, that this is not always easy.”
The radio preacher laughed at his own joke.
The woman turned the volume knob so hard she nearly broke it, and the radio fell silent.
“Jesus, Jesus!” she said. “You like Jesus?”
“I love him,” the big man slurred.
“You love him like you wanna give him big wet sloppy kisses?”
“No,” he said, “I just lub him.”
“You lub him, huh? You sure? What’s your name?”
“Edgar.”
“Edgar, mash that gas harder.”
“Where are we going?”
“Straight on. You just keep going straight on, and I’ll tell you when to turn.”
She watched the needle float a hair nearer to the E.
“Talk to me, Edgar, and tell me everything you’re thinking.”
“Why?”
“Did you grow up on a farm, Edgar?”
“No.”
“So you never killed a chicken?
“No.”
“Never cut its head off?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Poke a nail in its eye and fish around to see what its brain looked like?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Me neither. Not a chicken, anyway. I grew up in Amish country, they had all the chickens. Start talking.”
“What about.”
“I dunno, how about me.”
“What’s your name?” he said, drooling a wet one on his collar. She used his tie to wipe his chin.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Janice.”
“Then my name is Janice. What did you think when you saw me? Just talk and don’t leave anything out.”
“I thought, what’s a hippie girl doing out by herself at night so far from town, the Munger Moss Hotel is a bit back in Lebanon and I almost stopped there for the night but then decided I’d try to get home to Shirley it’d make her happy . . .”
“Hell with that cow. Talk about me, I said.”
“Sorry. Thought hippie girl kinda like Cleopatra with all that makeup on your eyes and them beads sewn in your hair, thought maybe you was a whore then maybe you had a gun but that didn’t seem likely and I wouldn’t feel good about myself I left a skinny girl alone in the night when she was askin’ for help so I pulled over thinking maybe you were sick maybe a junkie that skin on you too white and I couldn’t see your mouth right, like your teeth were blurry and when you leaned in close I smelled them hippie oils on you but under that something like a dead thing or dirt in a basement and I knew you’d smell worse if you were hot but you aren’t, you aren’t no warmer than the night air outside . . .”
“Yeah, but am I pretty? Did you think I was pretty?”
“At first I guess but I don’t like skinny girls too much that way, but yeah you got a pretty face I thought until I smelled that smell and I knew it was a trick you’
re a trick like a new paint job on a car that’s been wrecked but it was too late because I looked at you in the eyes and stuck like on flypaper and my mind ain’t right now and I wish you’d let me go from whatever you’re doing to me and why are you laughing, what’s funny Janice, what’s funny, can I stop talking now ’cause I can’t keep spit in my mouth it keeps falling out.”
The woman had been laughing, laughed even harder when he called her Janice.
“Jesus, Jesus!” she said. “Okay. Now shut up and keep driving. I want to go fast.”
He pressed the pedal.
The needle floated up from forty-five to fifty-five, reached the zenith of the arc-shaped speedometer at sixty.
“Faster.”
The needle struggled to sixty-five.
“That’s good,” she said, watching the fuel gauge.
A hill bled some of the speed from Edgar’s car, and at the top of the hill they passed a billboard showing a tangly-headed youth, the legend to his right reading
BEAUTIFY AMERICA—GET A HAIRCUT
Edgar was so focused on the road and the speedometer that he didn’t really see that. Nor did he see the car behind the billboard, sitting still with no lights, a shark in the murk, a shadow on the lung. She saw it, though. Her eyes saw lots of things his missed. They rolled on into the night for another ten minutes, taking Interstate 44, then diverting onto Route 66 again near Waynesville.
The fuel needle had reclined left, kissing the E.
“They’re after us, Edgar. The people who did this to me. Get me away from them. FAST!”
He looked at the rearview mirror, and, though he saw no headlights in the distance, he mashed the gas all the way down to climb a steep hill.
Now the road descended and the needle arced down the right side of the speedometer to seventy-five.
Eighty.
The man knew this was wrong, even deeply in thrall, and he let a small, fearful noise escape his throat.
“Shhh,” she said into his ear, turning up the Patsy Cline song starting on the radio, then resting her hand on his where it white-knuckled the steering wheel.
“Flash your lights, Edgar.”
He did as instructed. She looked at the rearview mirror, waited for the car running dark behind them to flash its lights in answer. It did.
Nobody else on the road.
At the bottom of the long downward grade, a telephone pole loomed, solid and real, black with creosote at its base. A copse of young trees stood behind it. It was far enough off the road that the headlights never swept it, but she saw it anyway.
“My name’s actually Calcutta,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
She moved the wheel to the right, the Chrysler bucking violently on the grass and gravel.
“Please,” Edgar said, his charm wearing off at the last second, too late to fight her for the wheel, too late for anything.
Calcutta, if that was her name, steered the careening vehicle expertly, jerking the wheel fractionally right at the last instant so the car would slam into the pole at something like a forty-degree angle. The pole would catch the Windsor just behind the engine well, just in front of the rearview mirror, all of its brutal counterforce bull’s-eyed into the driver’s section.
At the last possible instant, the woman ducked her head between her knees, cupping her hands over her eyes.
Edgar had pressed his lips together again to form the puh in please, but that wasn’t the awful, wrenching sound that exploded into the world.
—
CALCUTTA ENTERED A BLACK PLACE AND THEN CAME TO A PLACE OF SHOCKING pain. She might have screamed if she had any air in her lungs, but she did not; they had been speared flat by her broken ribs. Now that she was still, the damage done, things began to shift back. The lungs pushed the ribs out and those ribs found their bone-stems and became whole, this in the darkness of her body, which lay in the darkness of the mangled car. Something hot spritzed her face, though whether it was blood or radiator fluid she hadn’t the apparatus to determine with her jammed-shut eyes and her flattened nose. Her right ear picked up the hiss of steam, the spinning of a wheel, a harsh rasp she could not identify. With her mostly whole right arm she felt where the roof had peeled back like the tongue of a shoe, felt night air on her skin. That was when she heard the doors of the Camaro chunk shut.
They were coming.
“Beautiful,” Rob’s voice said, meaning the spectacular wreck she had created.
“You don’t mind if we start?” Cole said to her. “Though that’s kind of a rhetorical question, seeing as what kinda shape your mouth’s in.”
Calcutta’s less-damaged right eye came in enough for her to see something moving against the stars, a blurry image that soon clarified into the compact form of Cole, his boyish face pale, his slender body moving through the goldenrod with foxlike grace. He ran his fingers through his wavy central mass of hair and stepped out of Calcutta’s limited field of vision. Rob followed behind, taller, less forceful, his hangdog slouch a counterpoint to Cole’s vulpine slink.
“Oh, he’s not quite there, is he?” Cole said. “Good, good.”
Calcutta now realized that the rasping sound to her left that she had taken for some dying part of the car actually belonged to what remained of its driver.
“Hey, mister. How’re they hangin’?”
The rasp again, louder.
“Naw, I ain’t gonna kill you just yet. Better that heart of yours keeps the tap runnin’ a minute or two.”
Calcutta’s insulted legs unfolded themselves from beneath her, and she found she was able to draw them forward. Her left eye tuned in just in time for her to see Rob remove the one intact windshield wiper blade, hand it to Cole. She heard him squeegee it across the hood, heard him slurp what he had squeegeed. Rob did the same. Her pain diminished, started giving way to hunger. Now Rob loomed into view, squinting at her forehead, his chin bibbed in blood. He laughed.
“No shit,” he said. “You don’t see that every day.”
So saying, he pulled something from her head, something that ground on the way out, held it before her eyes like a magician showing a card. A tire pressure gauge, her blood and hair on it. Even as she watched, the hair disappeared. She felt her skull weave itself whole. She had to flatten out one of her hip bones to wriggle out of the busted architecture that enclosed her, retearing the skin on her thigh and calf, shedding her ruined dress like a husk as she wriggled nude through folds of crumpled steel. Once free, and once she had removed every shred of her bloodied dress from the wreck, she joined the other two and fed on the driver. They did not bite him—there was no need. They licked, they sucked, they took up pieces of torn metal or broken glass and cut, then squeezed to milk the cut. They undressed, rearranged, yanked free, got at all parts of the wheezing, rasping man where blood yet moved. His wide eye watched them until his heart at last gave out and the eye froze and dimmed, and still they fed, Cole sated enough to slow his ministrations and say “Good” or “Damn good” in between.
When she had taken her fill, Calcutta wrestled her messenger bag out of the wreck and removed the brick-red dress and denim jacket she had rolled inside, climbing into these. Her belly pooched out from the blood she had taken in, made her look four months gravid. Her hair shone and her eyes sparkled and she knew she looked alive, healthy, womanly. She opened her mouth, showed her teeth to the stars, felt the night breeze in the wet hole of her mouth, held her arms up. Somewhere in the sparse woods to the north, a coyote yipped.
She drew in the first lungful of air since the wreck and answered it in a high, yipping voice of her own.
“Jesus! Jesus!”
13
WOODS HAD BEEN IN THE MIDDLE OF A DREAM ABOUT TORNADOES WHEN HE FELT the slap on his face. Little wonder that tornadoes figured in so many of his dreams since his hometown of Beasley, Michigan, had lost its general s
tore to one in April 1956, during a freak outbreak in the upper Midwest. When he remembered the tornado in waking hours, he saw a still image of it, the one in black and white that made the paper, but in his mind’s eye the iron-black funnel lay silhouetted on a sky the dirty green of creek water. He remembered wind and yelling. He remembered how angry his little brother was that his father wouldn’t look for Flash, their dog, before shutting them all in the basement. He especially recalled the sound of his mother singing “Jesus, be good to us,” over and over again as if it were the chorus of a song, though he was pretty sure she made it up. She had keened it like a spell, as though the storm would spare them if she could keep singing that refrain loud enough to be heard over the wicked engine of the wind. Aside from turning Manny’s General Store into a pile of kindling, the thing had flipped a police cruiser, dropped a tree through the barn roof at Becker’s Dairy, and snatched the slide in the park clean away. Becker’s Dairy was visible from the road, and Woods remembered marveling at the spectacle of that upside-down tree, its roots pointed straight at the sky, exactly in the middle of the barn, as though an engineer had measured everything beforehand. Nobody died, not even cows. Flash had come back when everything was over, tail between his legs, head low, blinking like he expected to be swatted on the ass for whatever it was he had done wrong to make such a noise and mess. Maybe his mother’s spell had worked. Maybe she was a sort of witch. Woodrow Fulk certainly didn’t think the chaos of April 3, 1956, had much to do with Jesus.
The truth was, Woods liked tornadoes, and his dreams about them were less like nightmares and more like eerie adventures. He knew that he was in mortal danger when he saw them, six or eight at a time, at all compass points, kicking up giddy flights of debris; yet he always felt that they would pass him by. Diving into a basement was out of the question—they would hold his fear in contempt and destroy him if he tried. No, the only way for him to negotiate these malign, black stovepipes was to stand amid them and trust them to harm only others. Not only would they harm others, they would let Woods watch.
The Suicide Motor Club Page 7
