Shoebox Trainwreck

by John Mantooth

So are you, I said. My finger actually tightened on the trigger. I had every intention of shooting him, but then Mama’s car came down the road and pulled into our gravel drive.

  You see? You see your boy? Bobby said. What he’s going to try and do to me?

  Mama got out of her car. She was crying.

  Davy, baby, she said. Put down the gun. You’re not like this. Please, don’t be like Cody.

  At those last words, I spun around, aimed the gun at her. Don’t be like my brother? He’s the only one I’d ever want to be. He killed Cody, Mama.

  I know, baby. I know.

  And I’m going to do what I have to.

  You ain’t got the damn guts, Peewee, Bobby said.

  Yeah, and Cody wasn’t going to come back either, was he?

  That wasn’t real, he said, but his eyes told a different story. They looked haunted. They looked like they had seen something that would forever float before them even when the lights were out and his eyes were closed. Especially then.

  I aimed the gun at the space between his eyes, right above the bridge of his nose. I imagined the bullet tearing through his forehead, little bits of bone and flesh scattering across the front yard like hayseed. Imagined Mama screaming, crying, losing it, losing it all.

  And I remembered Cody, sitting on my bed last night, telling me that Bobby was already dead. And I wondered if I’d be dead too if I shot him.

  Slowly, reluctantly, I lowered the gun. I heard Mama let out a groan of relief.

  Bobby struggled to his feet, the tension in his face draining away.

  Give it to me, he said. Give it over.

  I turned toward the wheat field and slung the gun as far as I could across the road and into the swaying stalks.

  Mama was crying and I went to her and we embraced. She held me tight and for the first time since I was a little boy, I allowed myself to cry.

  Mama asked Bobby to leave that afternoon. He left us with a shower of curses and threats. After he was gone, she took my hand and told me things were going to be different. I wondered if she’d climbed out of that hole Cody had told me about. I wanted to believe she had, but I’d known Mama for too long to drop my guard.

  A week later, Bobby was back, grinning like nothing had ever happened. Mama mumbled something about a fresh start, a new beginning. I didn’t argue. Instead, I started out through the wheat and made my way to town where I found the Family Services Center and a woman named Victoria. I told her about my mother and her boyfriends. I told her about Bobby and my brother.

  I spent the rest of my teenage years with foster parents. Like most foster kids, many family situations I found myself in were less than ideal, but I hung in there, reminding myself nothing could be worse than Bobby Jackson, Jr. And when I felt like giving in, I thought about Cody and how he’d come back for me. It kept me going.

  I’m fifty-seven now. I have a wife and three kids. I have cancer. Terminal. The kind the doctors like to call efficient. I won’t see fifty-eight. But lately, when it rains, or when I see a wheat field on the television, or when someone mentions a young person who was willing to sacrifice themselves in a way far beyond their years, I wonder where Cody is, and what I’ll say to him when I see him again.

  This is Where the Road Ends

  2010, Texas

  They’d finished eating lunch when Wanda excused herself and went into the diner’s restroom. Jonas pushed his plate away and looked out the window at the dirt parking lot, which was inexplicably almost full with cars, trucks, and a row of motorcycles that clearly belonged to the group of men dressed in heavy leather at the counter. He could be out the door and gone before she came back. He’d leave the keys on the table, hitch a ride with some trucker. Lose himself somewhere. It was a damn big country. Big enough to live with himself and what he’d done? He had his doubts about that, but he’d try. What else could a person do?

  The other option was to tell her. It had been on his lips since New Orleans when they lay in the dark of the motel room, his hand on her newly swollen belly, his heart beating against her shoulder. Telling her was just as bad. It was as if he stood atop a tall skyscraper and somebody was ordering him to jump. He could jump left or right, but the result was always the same: smashed on the concrete below.

  He rehearsed the words in his head. Once, three years ago, I was drunk—

  You don’t drink, he could hear her say. You’ve never been one to drink.

  He chuckled because that was funny. The kid in the booth next to him—the same one that had been bawling his eyes out during most of their meal—caught his eye and grinned a huge grin. A Marcus grin. No, no, don’t start thinking like that again. It was a kid’s grin. No more, no less.

  See, I used to drink. Before I met you. Everything changed when I met you.

  She’d smile then, crinkle her eyes and give him the look. The look that said, you can do no wrong in my eyes, Jonas Withers.

  That’s the problem, he thought. That’s always been the problem.

  The door swung open. He held his breath. He hadn’t made a decision yet. Not good. Putting it off was unacceptable. He’d been doing that for the better part of three years. He waited, frozen by the decision that sat like a lump in his chest. A waitress came out. He let out a breath. The damn waitress. She was the blonde, pretty one with the narrow hips. Probably never had kids. He envied her that, even though he’d never actually been a father either. The baby was coming though, and then there was Marcus.

  “Time is running out,” he said under his breath. The kid in the booth looked at him like he was crazy. Kids have a sense about these things, right? He supposed he’d have to admit that they did.

  2006, Alabama

  Jonas hit the kid on a warm fall afternoon, the sun flattening out over the horizon in a spectacular crush of gold. Sometimes, especially late at night when the house was quiet and he’d gone out to look at the stars, he almost convinced himself it was that sun, not the seven beers he’d had over lunch with Bryant Keith that had caused the accident.

  The worst part was that Jonas had been expecting him, bracing for him even. How many times had he made the turn by the Mitchell farm and seen the fat little kid trudging home from his bus stop? Dozens, at least. Probably more. The kid had always had the common sense to stay on the left, out of harm’s way because even a fat little kid knew the turn was as blind as Stevie Wonder. Sometimes, he’d even wave, but most days he’d just huff and puff his way on past, like the little kid that could, trying to make it home from his bus stop in time for a glass of milk and a bagful of cookies before the reruns on channel eleven started at four. Once Jonas saw him on his knees, investigating a dog carcass. It was the only time he didn’t look comical, like the little fat kid you see in the movies that doesn’t run because he waddles, the kid that got all the bad genes and all the bad luck. But even then, poised above the dead dog like a prayerful Buddha, he had been on the left side of the road.

  The day Jonas hit him, he was on the right.

  Jonas tried to brake, but all that did was give the kid time to look up from watching his feet. Their eyes locked for a long second and then there was a sound like you hear when somebody sits on your hood and the sheet metal pops. Then the kid was airborne, and somehow one of the boy’s feet got snagged on Jonas’s side mirror, and his body twisted violently before the foot was wrenched free. Jonas felt his seatbelt lock as the car came to a hard, tread-burning stop.

  What followed was silence. This was the moment that could still make Jonas a blubbering idiot. He could think about all of it now, all of it except that one moment when he had to actually make himself get out of the car. Make himself see what was left of the kid.

  When he did get out, he was blank. Can the mind ever be completely blank? At that moment, climbing out of the car, his was. It was as if his brain was in the process of rebooting itself, of clearing
the old memory, deleting programs that would no longer be relevant, and getting ready to adapt to a new operating system, one that came with viruses and malware, and an impossibly steep learning curve.

  After the blankness, when his mind started working again, the only thing he could think was it isn’t real. There is not dead boy on the road. There is not an impending 911 call.

  He was lying just off the side of the road, a lump of breathing flesh. His sweatshirt had gotten twisted around his neck and his bare belly was exposed. Jonas watched it heaving for a full twenty seconds before he realized what this meant.

  The kid was alive. That meant Jonas had to move. Fast.

  Jonas’s mind knew this, but the signal wasn’t getting to his body. He kept walking, his pace leisurely, if a not a little crooked. At any moment, he might fall down. He did not want to look, to see what his drunkenness had caused, but he knew he was being a coward. He quickened his pace and knelt beside the boy, steeling himself for the worst.

  The kid’s face was implausibly alert despite one eye that kept looking off to the left at a gnarled stump, as if it were something constant, a way to deal with his shattered fate. Jonas fumbled for his phone. Dropped it. Picked it up again. Pressed 911. Waited. There was nothing. The kid was sucking in air like a great steam engine, eating it up in loud, painful snorts, but he was alive, wasn’t he? That was something.

  Why wouldn’t his phone connect? His head hurt. Hungover. What did he expect? Jesus. He looked at his cell. 811. He’d hit eight instead of nine. He cancelled the call.

  The kid took a great suck of air, like an anteater clearing out a hill, except, he wasn’t taking in ants, he was taking in air, the last he’d ever take.

  Jonas pressed 9—

  And then waited. Silence. A squirrel running out to the end of a branch, the creak under its weight. A breeze.

  He waited for another breath. It didn’t come. His thumb was poised over the one. His hand quavered and he dropped the phone. It landed on the kid's face and slid off into the grass where brain matter and blood had begun to coagulate in the dirt. Jonas reached for it gingerly. His thumb touched something wet, and he dropped it again.

  He stood up. The boy was dead. The boy who he’d passed dozens of times on his way home from work—when he’d had a job—and dozens more times since he’d been unemployed and on this latest drinking binge. He’d hit the kid and killed him, and there was nothing anybody could do for the dead. Death was one of those things that made everything else too late.

  Except there were stories right? Miraculous surgery room recoveries. The body gets lighter as the spirit leaves. Spirit sees its old body from a bird’s eye view and comes back in. Ten minutes later a man comes back alive, a young girl calls her mother’s name, an old woman recovers from flatline to live ten more years, extolling the virtues of clean and right living to anyone who will listen to her story of the light at the end of the long, black tunnel.

  Jonas reached down for the phone again. This time he rubbed it across the ground, scraping the congealed brain matter off before opening it and dialing the number quickly.

  “911 dispatch,” the voice—female—said. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “I . . .” He looked at the kid. A fly landed on his nose. His face was peaceful now. His spirit probably already gone, watching Jonas from somewhere in the trees. He felt an absurd urge to lift him, to check his weight, to see if he weighed less than he should.

  “Hello? Please state your location. Sir?”

  “I . . .” Jonas was frozen. Immobilized by fear, maybe shock, a hangover now pounding in his head like a volcanic pulse. “I dialled the wrong number.”

  The operator said something then, but Jonas was closing the phone and couldn’t hear.

  He took the boy’s hands in his, amazed by the warmth in them, the way they felt just like living hands and pulled him away from the road into the trees.

  Afterwards, when he had time to think about what had happened, Jonas realized that he’d almost acted unconsciously. He was drunk or at least still feeling the effects of alcohol. He’d already had his license suspended once, a year ago, and before that, he’d done a seven week community service stint for reckless driving. None of this came to mind exactly, but it was all there bubbling under the surface. What did come to mind was one thing: you can’t help the dead. Over and over again, a litany in his head. Call it shock, whatever, but Jonas couldn’t make his mind think clearly.

  At first, he sat beside the boy and cried. This would be one of the things he left out if he decided to tell her. The crying part. Not because he was embarrassed about showing emotion, but because of what was causing him to cry. Not the dead boy. He cried for himself, for the pestilence that had been dropped on him like a Biblical plague. He was like a little kid—scared out of his mind—and he couldn’t even make himself think. So he just cried. Finally, he remembered the Mitchell farm and the little barn that was situated on the south end of the pasture. There would be tools in there, a shovel, maybe.

  Still, he couldn’t get up. He had a plan now, but he found himself transfixed by the boy’s peaceful face, the way the top of his head had been torn off, the vividness of the blood, the blue of his eyes like you always imagined blue eyes when you heard about them in a song, the fat, blubbery cheeks, and the way his mouth was stuck in an elongated o, seemingly still trying to suck in that one last breath. Maybe it was because Jonas didn’t really know death, had never experienced death this close before. He’d missed all the wars—too old for the Gulf war, too young for Vietnam. Both parents still living. He’d even had good luck with pets. His one childhood dog had died when he went away to college, so he was spared even that. Spared death, but not heartache, he supposed. Up until this point, his life had been a series of disappointments, filtered through the lenses of weekend binges and dead sober resolutions that made life seem dry and pointless and devoid of anything meaningful. In short, death had never concerned him because he was too busy dropping the ball that was his own life to think about it. Now, faced with death, he wanted to live so much it paralyzed him, and he sat for a long time just thinking.

  Sometime later, in the dark, he made his way up to the Mitchell barn. When he’d been a kid—maybe sixteen—he’d worked for old man Mitchell, but when Mitchell had a heart attack, his son, Porter Jr., refused to rehire Jonas the next summer. It had been a good job too, the only one Jonas had ever loved. Jr. had let the property go, focusing on Sr.’s other real estate ventures as a means of supporting himself. For these reasons, Jonas had always held a kind of irrational loathing for Porter Jr.

  What he had remembered as a barn, looked more like a shed to Jonas now, and he began to doubt he’d find what he needed inside to bury the body. The entrance was overrun with kudzu, and he had to tear the vines apart just to get inside.

  Twice, he remembered the boy—his body twisted and inert, so vivid against the grass in the shade of the trees—and twice he had to stop and put his hands to his face, taking deep breaths to calm his nerves in order to go on.

  There was no shovel, just an old hoe, which he took. He’d return the hoe when the boy was buried.

  He felt sick because of what he was doing, worse because he knew he was going to get away with it.

  This end of the county had been dead for twenty years or more. There were signs that it had once been thriving—the half-crumbled gas stations and convenience marts that hadn’t opened their doors since the eighties, but still stood, resolute, haughty even, despite the ravages of time. Kudzu was the thing out here. It ran over trees, and buildings, and cars if they sat still long enough. Sometimes, Jonas liked to walk the road from his house out to the highway and just look at all the shapes the kudzu had made as it swallowed everything in its path, rolling relentlessly on.

  Out here, he could bury the boy underneath the dirt, but there would be a second burial when
the kudzu rolled over him, and this was good. Out here, things would stay buried.

  He began to work methodically, chipping away at the ground. Occasionally, he stopped to look at the boy, to make sure he was still dead. He was having an argument inside his head now because he felt like maybe he wanted him to stay dead, that this was actually easier. But then some other part of him—his conscience?—kept reminding him how truly sick that was. So he just went back and forth until he finally spoke the question out loud to the surrounding trees: “If he woke up what would you do, Jonas?”

  “I’d call 911, get him some help.” This helped settle him down. Of course, he would. He wasn’t a murderer. But the boy was dead. The dead do not wake up. Nothing in this world for the dead.

  When it seemed deep enough, Jonas bent and put his hands on the boy’s shoulder and waist. He paused because this seemed like one of those moments of no return. Was this what he wanted?

  There were only two options, right? And neither one of them were any good for the boy. He was still dead no matter what Jonas did. One of the options helped Jonas. Hiding the boy meant he’d escape a messy trial and possible prison time. He’d made a mistake, sure, but this was enough to keep him from ever doing it again. Lesson learned.

  As he began to push on the boy’s shoulders, another thought came to him. The family. The kid would have a mother, a father probably. Maybe even brothers and sisters. Weren’t they owed the truth? Didn’t they deserve to know their loved one was dead, not missing? Shit, he hadn’t thought of that.

  His hands ached to push the kid into the hole, but he pulled them away. Couldn’t he make it up to them? Yes, he’d find out who they were and be like a guardian angel. Dedicate his life to making sure theirs was as perfect as possible. Behind the scenes, just little stuff that could be meaningful for them later. He could do that. It was better that way because he’d still be able to live his life—to turn his life around, actually, something that he needed to do badly. So, when he looked at it the right way, this was the only choice.