Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  Inside, the wrong girl took my order for a vanilla shake and fries. Yes, it was Nichole, but she was still the wrong girl. I couldn’t take my eyes off her in her tight white pants and red apron, but she had no trouble ignoring me.

  “Here’s your change,” she said, dropping it in my open hand.

  “Hey, about—”

  “Ellis, I’ve got customers.”

  I had to move away from the counter to let the next guy put in his order. Sitting disconsolately in a plasticized booth, I dipped warm, salty French fries into cold ice cream and loaded them one after another into my mouth.

  During a lull in business she came over. I’d been sitting with an empty shake cup and a greasy bag of salt for quite a while.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Ellis. I told you I had a date, didn’t I?”

  “But you’re working.”

  “Roy’s picking me up after I close.”

  “Oh.”

  She glanced back at the counter, which was still empty of customers, then sighed, took off her stained apron, and sat down.

  “Last night—”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “It didn’t make sense.”

  I concentrated on my empty shake cup, turning it in my fingers.

  “I don’t regret it or anything,” she said. “I don’t mean that.”

  I looked up.

  “But it wasn’t like me. I had some kind of crazy dream and then I woke up and you were out there, and it all felt kind of . . . wonderful.”

  “But it’s not so wonderful today?”

  “I don’t know, Ellis. Roy and I—”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well. Guess I have to get back to work.”

  “Okay. See you at school next week.”

  “Right,” she said, looking morose.

  I was opening the driver’s door of my car when she came running out of the restaurant. She halted ten feet away, holding her apron with the tie strings trailing on the ground, and we stared at each other, and I knew she was my girl. That was that, and the hell with Roy Hathaway.

  “I close at nine,” she said. “Get here at eight-thirty and help me. It’s against the rules, but I don’t care. Maybe we can slip out before Roy shows up. Go for a drive or something?”

  “I’ll be here,” I said, grinning.

  Behind the counter at the A.C. the air was hot and greasy. I helped Nichole wipe things down, drag the thick rubber step-off mats out back, sweep and mop. We did a halfass job but did it fast and didn’t care. The cook, who was sixteen and looked like a plucked chicken or something otherwise destined for the boiling grease vats himself, reluctantly agreed to be the last rat off the ship and lock the door behind him. Another no-no for Nichole, who was supposed to wait.

  She liked to drive so we jumped in her yellow Nova and she cranked the engine. We were both wrenching our necks looking for Hathaway’s pickup. By the time we hit First Avenue we were laughing and in the clear, or so we thought. The big getaway.

  “God, he’s going to be mad,” Nichole said, steering with one hand and dialing through the AM band with the other, finally landing on “Heart Of Gold.”

  “How mad?” I asked.

  “He’d kill us.”

  We both laughed—Nichole somewhat less heartily than I. Of course she knew him better.

  We headed south towards Des Moines. There was a new marina with a big parking lot. “Perfect,” according to Nichole, “for necking.” But way before we got there she said:

  “I think he’s behind us.”

  “For real?”

  She nodded and stepped on the accelerator. I twisted around in my seat. A pair of yellow headlights loomed. We hit the S curves that followed the bluff north of town. Nichole didn’t reduce speed. I could feel the Nova wanting to drift. Facing forward again, I snapped my lap belt on and cinched it too snug. The tires squealed.

  “Hey, take it easy,” I said.

  She hunched over the wheel, white knuckling it with both hands.

  We came out of the S curves at a flat forty miles per hour. Nichole braked at the controlled intersection marking the north end of Des Moines. The Nova skidded a couple of yards over the stop line.

  Immediately a dark blue pickup truck swerved around us on my side and stopped. The driver’s seatbelt, pinched in the door, dangled over the running board. Hathaway had his window down. When I rolled mine down he said:

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  He was a square-headed guy with a sketchy unibrow who looked older than a high school senior. His beard stubble looked like black sand paper.

  “Nobody special,” I said, going for modesty.

  “Dickwad.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s Ellis. Ellis Herrick. I don’t know any Richard Wad. Is he a senior?”

  Nichole laughed out loud, which was just the frosting on my smartass remark. Hathaway banged his door open against the Nova. As soon as he had one leg out of the truck, Nichole punched the accelerator and we were gone.

  We decided to postpone the necking. Nichole violated various laws and rules of the road and got us through town and up the hill to Pacific Highway in record time. Here there was more traffic, and one set of headlights pretty much resembled another.

  “Do you see him?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He was really mad, wasn’t he.”

  “Yeah. Nichole?”

  “Hmm?” She was fiddling nervously with the radio dial again.

  “Why him?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Ellis. Because he’s strong and uncomplicated and knows what he wants. Because he wants me, but kind of acts like he doesn’t care and treats me like shit. And I know it’s screwed up, so don’t tell me.”

  “It’s not that screwed up,” I said, thinking of her father passed out drunk on the sofa in front of a hissing TV screen and her mother gone off somewhere. Not really that screwed up at all.

  A pine tree air freshener dangled from the rearview mirror. I flicked it with my fingernail, and Roy Hathaway pulled up on Nichole’s side. We were just coming to the big four-way intersection by Sea-Tac Airport. The light was yellow.

  “Shit.” Nichole had been slowing to stop, but now she took her foot off the brake, hesitated, then jumped the gas again. The hesitation is what did it. The light had gone red, and we rolled into the intersection without conviction.

  A black sedan struck us first, broadside just behind my door, and the Nova spun around. Nichole screamed. Time seemed to attenuate. The air freshener was still swinging wildly when the bus came on. I glimpsed a pair of headlights higher than my head, started to turn, caught a hurtling wall of silver, and then it smashed into us. My door frame buckled like pasteboard. The Nova launched into the air, tumbling. Hotels and lights and traffic and even a landing 737 flipped upside down, right side up, upside down. The windshield fractured like a sheet of ice. My lap belt dug painfully into my waist, unbearable. Then, in an instant, the force broke my restraint and flung me through the windshield.

  An interval of darkness. Out of it, very distinctly, my brother said: Don’t be afraid, Ellis. Which was dumb, considering.

  Then somebody let there be light. But no noise. A black puddle with a rainbow sheen on its surface. In the puddle lay a human hand severed raggedly at the wrist, white dowl of bone protruding, the pinky finger erased to a bloody nub. It didn’t strike me as particularly horrible; I felt pretty detached myself.

  Without moving my head I looked around. I mean 360 degrees. The Nova was flipped onto its roof, windshield gone, and Nichole was hanging from her lap belt, hair falling straight down, mouth open. Her eyes were closed, but I knew she was alive and mostly unhurt. If she were dead, we’d both be looking around with Super 360 Omnivision, right? But she wasn’t dead, and somehow looking at her I could feel her strong heart beat and even sense the quiet electrical impulses of her brain. She was unconscious and undreaming.

  My brother Jeremy and my mot
her had died together in a car wreck. October thirty-first, 1968, coming back from the store with a load of Halloween candy. Some teens driving around in monster costumes and drinking beer crossed the center line and hit their car. A policeman came to the door to tell us. I stood behind my dad, still wearing my dumb homemade Star Trek uniform. My mom had glued shiny gold sequins onto the officer’s patch, and she’d helped me make Spock ears out of cardboard and “flesh” colored tape. I was a little old for trick-or-treat, I guess, but this was my last time. My brother had been away in the army for almost a year, and I’d missed and idolized him. As soon as he got back from the store, he was going to walk with me around the neighborhood. My big brother. I remember looking at that policeman and thinking his uniform was a costume, thinking that until my father burst into tears. Trick-or-treat. Now I wondered if my mother and brother had witnessed a muffled tableau similar to the one I was seeing tonight.

  It was fascinating, outside of time. The glitter of glass and blood. The way the Greyhound had ended up, right angles to the direction it had been traveling when it struck us. The people on the bus, their boiling states of anxiety and confusion and fear, the driver’s paralyzing shock as he stared at the body in the street (mine?). Hathaway’s pickup had jumped the curb and struck a power pole. I got nothing from him. Dead air.

  I wanted to explore every detail. I wanted to see. I was like a baby in a bassinet. A nice well-fed baby—a being of pure experience, absorbing every facet of the world.

  That was me: Baby Ellis. Goo goo—gah!

  It did seem strange that I couldn’t depart from this one place, intriguing though the place may have been. Weren’t the dead supposed to be able to ghost around unfettered by physical limitations? Was I dead?

  Here came the cars and trucks with pretty flashing lights. And a crowd was gathering. I recalled that Ray Bradbury story, where it’s always the same crowd, appearing out of nowhere at accident scenes, eager to claim a new member. Was that my fate, to die and join The Crowd?

  And wasn’t it strange that there should be trees among the people. Eight foot tall, leafless trees swaying out here in the middle of the intersection. I saw my brother speaking with one of them. Jeremy was smoking a cigarette, just like he used to do in life, holding it between his thumb and first two fingers, the glowing end turned inward when he pulled it away from his lips.

  I wanted to see my mother, too. All of a sudden I wanted desperately to see my mother. I was the baby in the bassinet and I began to cry.

  At once emotion overtook me, drowning my sublime detachment. And then pain. Unimaginable pain. Something inside me—upper left abdomen—was on fire. There was a dreadful pulsing at my wrist.

  Noise burst upon me. Sirens. Jet engines. People yelling, hard shoes gritting on pavement.

  The smell of gasoline and scorched rubber. I lay on my back, staring at the washed-out star field, my omnivision lost. A soap bubble the size of a Volkswagen Beetle drifted above me, and a shadow moved inside of it.

  Someone touched my arm and I screamed.

  chapter two

  I had a cartoon hand. Bandaged, wrapped and gauzed to outsized proportions. And endlessly throbbing, itching. For the first few days they kept the room subtropical. Okay, a slight exaggeration. But it had been hot in there. The doctor told me that heat was necessary to keep the blood vessels dilated and prevent clotting after my “hand replantation.”

  Now more than a week had elapsed. The room was cooler, but I still found it stiffling. I had a new scar on another part of my body, as well, where they’d cut a vertical seam starting just below my breast bone through which they had reached in to remove my ruined spleen. That one hurt, too, and itched. Inside. Which was strange, according to the doctor.

  I was heavily drugged and drifting in and out of soft-focus reality. During one drift cycle the room was empty and then it was not. Over by the moon-glazed window something loomed like a tree with twisted branch arms and legs. I lifted my head off the pillow, blinked slowly, and the tree was a gnarly man. One more slow shutter blink and watery morning light was flooding the room and rain was tick-ticking on the window.

  A doctor I’d never seen before came in. She was tall and thin with a narrow blade of a nose and black framed glasses.

  “I’m Dr. Jane,” she said, and proceeded to read my chart and examine my war wounds. My brain slogged around in a swoony bath of nausea juice. I focused on her lapel pin, blue enamel with the stylized letters: UI in silver.

  Dr. Jane partially unwrapped my hand, snipping first with a small pair of scissors. She breathed mostly through her nose, a quiet rasping. The rasping halted for a beat when she revealed my wrist and forearm scars, which had already faded, making the stitches stand out like an unnecessary violation of flesh. Her breathing resumed until she got to the “bud.” The bud shouldn’t have been there. Even I knew that. The surgeon had amputated the ragged stump that had once been my pinky finger. But instead of a blunt termination of flesh and bone and a sutured sneer there was now a one-knuckle-high node of pink regenerated finger. It had torn the sutures and their ends stuck out like black bristles. Dr. Jane actually gasped. I wanted to hear her do it again, so I pulled my shirt up to show her my splenectomy scar, which was nothing more than a dim pink line. I’d pulled the stitches out myself in my spare time. She stared, touched it with her index finger. Then she wrapped me up again and went away. She should have seen my face a week ago, right after the Nova’s windshield had tried to turn it into a Picasso portrait. Not one scar remained.

  The pain continually expanded beyond my drug protocol’s ability to cancel it. No one knew it at the time but my body was metabolizing the pain killers at a super accelerated rate. It would be years before I discovered on my own that smoking drugs was the only effective way of vectoring the effects into my pain centers—physical and emotional. And forget about Zing, that was fifty years or so off in my endless future.

  So I was awake, writhing after a comfortable arrangement of limbs and torso, when “they” came for me. The sheets were damp. I felt a little desperate. But past experience had taught me there was no point in buzzing the nurse. Nothing would persuade them to administer any more percodan ahead of the appointed hour.

  The two men who entered my room wore tailored suits and didn’t look like hospital staff. Little blue and silver pins winked on their lapels. UI.

  “Good,” one of them said. “You’re awake.”

  “It hurts,” I said. I felt reduced. A child.

  One suit turned to the open doorway. “Nurse,” he said, and a young woman I recognized as part of the overnight staff came in.

  “Morphine,” the suit said. He said other things, too, regarding dosage and whatnot, but I latched onto the one word like a life-preserver in a sea of pain.

  The other suit was taking down the side of my bed and disconnecting me from a saline drip. I worked up some spit and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “You’re being transferred to a private facility.”

  That made no sense, but then the nurse appeared with a hypodermic needle brimming with sweet if temporary relief, and I ceased to care what did or did not make sense. She looked uncertain and held the hypo as if she’d never touched one before. But she did as she was told and found a vein.

  I processed the drug, and “they” administered two more shots during the course of the long drive.

  *

  A private hospital and a private room, all tan and antiseptic smelling, a picture of red poppies on the wall and a narrow window that overlooked the garden where I was allowed to stroll, discretely escorted, in the mornings. I had the TV and whatever books and magazines I asked for, but my door was locked at night.

  Three months.

  Then one evening a key tuned in the lock and an orderly let my dad in.

  “What’s the occasion,” I said, not meaning to sound nasty but sounding that way anyhow.

  He winced and I wished I could take it back. He pulled off his cap and held it in t
he fingers of both hands, turning it nervously. Being seventeen I couldn’t exactly apologize.

  “Dad, I want to go home.”

  He nodded. “They think you should stay.”

  “I know that, but why? Look at me.” I hopped off the bed, spry as a cat. I flexed my left hand as if squeezing an invisible rubber ball. The fingers were a little jerky and weak, especially the pinky, but they worked better than they had at first and the articulation improved on a daily basis. Plus the pinky is a pretty useless digit to begin with, and this one didn’t even have a right to exist. The pain was over, and I was used to the constant tingling and itching inside my hand and abdomen. It was a very weird sensation, but that was all.

  Dad nodded again in that tired, beaten way that had come over him, and I wanted to scream. When I was a little kid and there were four of us in the family instead of two and he had a good job, my dad had been strong and funny and full of life. But that guy was long gone. Dad was probably about fifty now but acted like the dragging end of seventy.

  “The thing is, Ellis, it’s because you’re doing so good that they want you to stay.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The doctors say you aren’t healing right.”

  “But I feel great!”

  “Yeah. But they think you shouldn’t feel so great. Or I mean that your healing is abnormal. I’m not saying it right, you’ll get the full picture from that lady doctor. But they say it’s important, what’s happening to you.”

  I stared at him. “What’s important about it?”

  He started walking around the room. “You know, this place is pretty nice. Not everybody gets treated like this, especially when there’s no insurance. You have to think about that, too.”

  “I just want to get out of here.”