“I’m sure someone will come by, I’m sure of it,” Jack whispered, trying his best to believe his own words.
“You said that hours ago,” Laura replied, not opening her eyes. She kept them shut all the time now.
“Yeah, I did.”
Jack had no energy to encourage her to keep up hope. He had none for himself. Hope is not boundless. What is given to others depletes one’s own stock, as if in the giving, the other’s despair is exchanged in return. Strength must be given. It is not self-manufactured. It is a gift. Jack’s supply was almost gone. Laura’s had vanished hours earlier.
He sat there and thought about a time when he was in grad school. Jack had an instructor who rode his butt harder than any person he’d ever met. Nothing he did and no amount of preparation could quell the fire of the professor’s condescension. Jack had wanted to quit.
Laura was the rock then. She encouraged him to keep pushing, and with her strength he had succeeded. Very rarely had he viewed her as the strong one. He had forgotten that time until now, all these years later. He wore his degrees like badges of honor, thinking himself a self-made man. Was he?
He glanced over at her and noticed that she appeared to be sleeping. He didn’t know why, but he was struck by an acute sense of loneliness. He reached over and nudged her arm. She stirred but did not wake up.
“Hon?”
“Hmm,” she groaned.
“I love you.”
“I know.”
The sun dipped below the western mountain, and shadows stretched their fingers eastward across the valley. The shade bathed the car and Jack felt the relief on his skin. Night was coming and still no sign of life. He looked at Laura, sitting right next to him. He felt scared. Alone. Weak. He feared for himself like the coward the school yard bully always thought he was.
He looked down at his watch. It too had stopped. 9:15. Some meaning in this? Perhaps the time the coroner would presume that they both ceased to be.
14
Punching through the desert night, the black pickup truck drove with abandon through the badlands’ dust, kicking up a jet of sand and rock. The dim headlights fought to illuminate the path ahead, but Colten was driving on instinct. He knew this trail. He had been out here a long time. Waiting like a prisoner before the parole board who knew that no reprieve was ever in the cards, savoring the denials like a fine wine. Relishing in absolute abjection.
He drove on toward the western hills. It was a hike from the gas station in Goodwell, and he fought with himself constantly about the need to keep up the charade. It was as good an outpost as any. He felt exposed in the bigger cities. It was always a risk to go fishing there.
No, Goodwell was the right choice. His hick exterior blended in well, and his choices were limited.
He passed the trail’s termination point and proceeded on the ruts grooved by many passes of the truck. No one ever came out here. It was off the map, right in the crease of the fold that a traveler couldn’t adjust their eyes to. Objection left his mind. This was right where he was supposed to be. For now.
The two-track up the mountain was cut from the rock. A slithering gouge, wide enough for his truck, that snaked up the mountain from the desert floor. The road ended in a clearing encircled by sheer walls of gray limestone, streaked sporadically with layers of blood-red sandstone. The folding veins of the earth.
He stopped the truck and killed the engine. Walking toward the rock, he went into a small cave above the valley. The air parted in front of him like a bowing servant as he made his way to the back . . . where she was.
Molly huddled in the back, silent, her legs pulled up against her chest. Her hair hung about her like the burnt wings of an angel as she watched him enter the hollow. He dropped a bottle of water and a packaged pastry by her feet and walked to the other side of the cave, where he stood looking at her. She grabbed the water and downed it quickly, only realizing when it was gone that she should have rationed it.
“I want to go home,” she whispered.
“Naw, you don’t want that.”
She ran the pastry through her bleeding fingers, wondering if by eating it she would in a sense become obligated for the food. She was thankful that she had not been violated as of yet, but the future kept fear in her chest.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
He lit a cigarette, and the smoke made the unbreathable catacomb toxic.
“Why? Ain’t no sense asking why. Why’d you run out here? Don’t matter, does it. Point is, you’re here. Right now.”
“I want to go home,” she repeated, a bit more assertive than the first time.
“You sure they want you back? You ran off. Cut that thread good and clean. Huh, they probably don’t want you back. Probably sitting together right now thinking, ‘Glad she’s gone.’”
She thought of them. Her mom, the classic suburbanite profile. Her father, successful and boring. Why had she felt so smothered by them? What fake disdain had she groomed in her heart to the point of becoming real? Their love was overbearing. Smothering goodness that she ran from. For freedom. For this. Perhaps Colten was right. Perhaps she could not go home again. Too much time had passed, she had come too far to ever go back, she thought. Too far to walk back into the house and expect them to hold her again, to accept her back into the fold.
———
Colten suspected he knew her thoughts. Walking over to the girl, he crouched down to stare at her, basking in the hopelessness that came pulsating through her pores. He puffed in a toke and held it until his lungs ached for release. He cocked his head to the side and blew out the smoke.
The girl stared back at him, pursed her lips, and spit in his face.
Cole’s reaction was pure reflex. He backhanded her across her face, sending her reeling against the rock. The girl whimpered slightly and then composed herself again. She did not want to give Cole the satisfaction of making her cry, though her cheek stung something fierce. She brought her eyes back to bear on his face.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Nothing you don’t want.”
“I don’t want this.”
“What do you want then?”
“I want to go home,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
“Naw, we both know you don’t want that.”
15
Jack awoke to a dark night where the stars burned like orphans in a field of black. He did not remember falling asleep. He looked over at Laura, who was in the reclined seat next to him. He touched her arm, but she didn’t move. The skin was warm but lifeless. He sat up more with a quick start and said her name. She groaned a bit and then fell back into sleep. Jack grabbed the last water bottle, which held a thimbleful of moisture in its base, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small amount into his wife’s mouth. It sat there between her parched lips, but she did not drink.
Jack looked at her, but his mind was too fatigued to process any solution. They were dying, and he knew it. He accepted it now. His only wish was that Laura would sleep through it. Why awake to this horror again? He envied her in dreamland. He did not remember the last time he envied her.
The car door opened with a squeak and Jack stepped out onto the blacktop. The heat still nipped at his ankles, but the air was cooler. He had no idea what time it was.
Jack thought himself an interesting sight for any animal that might be lurking off the highway. He staggered half dazed in his sandals and his boxers toward the center line, then turned around, hoping, praying for a sign of life. There was none. No haze of city light, no moving headlights in the distance. Just moonlight, stars, and heat. If he could have spared the water, he would have cried.
Here he was, reduced to a loincloth in the middle of nowhere, forced to watch his wife die a slow death by heat exhaustion, only to follow close behind. Yet his mind could not accept his fate. He still hoped for rescue. He still hoped that he was watching a movie, and all he had to do was wait for the c
redits to roll and the lights to click on and be ushered out.
His legs collapsed and he slumped to the road. The tar singed the back of his legs, but he didn’t struggle. What was the use? By daybreak he wouldn’t have the strength to beat back the sun. The heat would slowly cook him and he would die. He prayed that they would go quickly. Before the tearing and the ripping of the coyotes and birds.
How quickly they had come to this. Just this morning, they were happy to leave the strip, content that they would be back by midafternoon and play in the pool, have a nice dinner, enjoy the city. The idea that they would die on a highway seemed ludicrous. But here they were.
“I don’t deserve this,” Jack repeated to himself.
He reached down and felt the dimpled surface of the road. Why build such a thing? Jack thought about the day laborers who must have poured their sweat into laying the road. So much work for a road going nowhere. Why bother? Who traveled this narrow, deathly stretch of earth that they would require pavement?
Why does a dark road grip the heart in fear? When on foot, a person quickens their pace at night as fears of stalking boogeymen come haunting up behind them. A flash of headlights causes the muscles to tense in anticipation of complete terror. What is coming? Jack stared off into the night, looking at the faded yellow lines vanish in the darkness. Forty-two was buried in blackness.
He would have killed for that sensation of anticipating the approach of a stranger. At least that would have meant discovery. But there were no boogeymen out tonight.
“Jack? Jack?” Laura groaned from the car, sounding scared and exhausted. “Jack!”
He crawled over to the door and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“I’m here . . . I’m here.”
She still had not opened her eyes. “I thought you left me, I thought . . .”
“I’m here. Go back to sleep, hon.”
She drifted off into space as he sat there looking at her. The pain gripped his heart and tore his soul.
“I don’t deserve this,” he whispered, “I don’t deserve this.”
Soon, darkness took him too.
16
It may have been the slow tapping on the windshield that woke him, or it may have been the sudden feeling of his soul’s first attempt to leave his body. It took a moment for his eyes to focus, the moonlight shading the inside of the car a subtle hue of crypt-like eeriness. It was still night and his head hurt. What time was it? Jack tried to rub the sleep from his eyes but could barely lift his hands and succeeded more in slapping his face. Once conscious, he looked out the front of the car.
On the windshield a spider the size of Jack’s fist sat staring back at him. Its hairy legs tapping on the glass in slow, rhythmic staccato. They stared at each other. The only two beings on earth locked in a silent gaze, Jack now fully awake. The tapping stopped. The beast content in its work.
Jack glanced over to his left. The door was still open from when he had crawled in after his journey to the center line. The spider seemed to follow Jack’s eyes, realizing the car was open for inspection. It looked at the open door and stretched its legs. It slowly stalked across the glass with silent footfalls to the doorjamb, its front legs feeling its way.
Jack lost sight of the creature in the jamb. But he knew it was coming. Soon, two legs moved through the air like antennae listening for sound. Slowly, the spider reached into the car and pulled itself inside. Its thick black body pulled along by its hairy legs. Jack’s heart stopped as he watched it inch its way onto the dash, resting in between the steering wheel and the windshield.
It resumed its staredown of Jack now from the vinyl shelf inside the car, studying him with what seemed to be a hundred eyes. Jack sat paralyzed. Fear gripped him as hard as he gripped the seat he was sitting on.
His breath was now labored. He tried to remember every Discovery Channel show he ever watched. He was sure this thing had come to devour them whole. To wrap them up Frodo Baggins–style and pull them back to its lair.
The spider turned and scurried over to the passenger side, onto the door, and slipped down onto Laura’s leg. It sat there looking back at Jack, rubbing its forelegs together, preparing to dig in.
He was powerless. Does he scream her name? Wake her up? Sit there and watch this thing bite into her leg? It sat there for an eternity, and then it moved slowly toward Jack.
Creeping ever so stealthily, it moved across Laura’s bare legs and reached for the center console. Its eight legs stretched across the cup holder as its body sank into it.
He could jump out of the car back onto the road. But could this thing jump too? Would it leap after him? What if Laura woke up and saw that he had left her there with that thing squatting next to her? He was in full-blown panic mode, indecisive, as his heart did its best to force itself out of his rib cage.
The spider moved across the center console and onto Jack’s thigh. He shut his eyes and waited for the thing to strike. The anticipation was killing him.
Just do it! he thought, but the spider just sat there. Do it!
The bug moved again, across Jack’s other leg, and headed out the door. Jack watched as it hit the pavement and scurried off across the road. He shut the door with all the strength he could muster. The sweat poured off his face, the last of what fluid remained in his body. He looked over at Laura, who slept, oblivious to the events that had just slithered across her body. His body loosened and he passed out.
17
Morning light skirted the eastern ring of the valley as gently as an Easter sunrise.
“Jack,” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Jack . . . water?”
“No.”
“It’s all gone?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay.”
They drifted in a daze between waking and oblivion.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you left.”
“Nope.”
“Okay.”
18
It must have been early afternoon when Jack heard sounds outside the car. His strength was gone and he could not open his eyes. He was completely wasted. It sounded like a clomping on concrete, and then a slow huff of air forced out of huge nostrils. He cracked his eyelid and was blinded by sunlight. He had no strength to move his head, was barely able to comprehend the images in his peripheral vision. He thought he could see a horse in the passenger side mirror, but then the door swung open.
Jack could hear rustling in the passenger seat as someone reached in, grabbed Laura, and lifted her out of the car. The door was kicked shut and he could see again in the mirror. A man lifted Laura and draped her across the back of the horse. Then he was gone from view and Jack was left looking at his wife slung like a bag of mail across the animal’s back.
The driver’s side door swung open and a shadow fell across Jack’s face. A hand grabbed his chin and turned it toward the door. Water poured into his mouth.
“You awake?” a voice boomed.
Jack could only muster a grunt.
“Drink some more. I’m leaving you a bottle. My horse can’t carry you both. I’ll be back. You awake?”
Jack could feel himself being shaken. “Y . . . yes.”
“Good . . . I’ll be back. Don’t go dying on me.”
And with that, the car door slammed shut. Staring at the passenger side mirror, Jack watched the man, horse, and Laura disappear. He had no idea what had just happened. No strength to get up and follow, no strength to care if a mountain man had just come down and stolen his wife. No strength to care about anything. With his eyes now open, he looked down at the water bottle placed between his legs. He struggled to lift it, but it seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. With all his strength, he lifted it to his mouth. Water spilled down his lips onto his chest. The coolness startled his senses and he dropped the bottle, its contents pouring out onto the floorboard. He had not the strength
to pick it up. He did not care anymore.
Staring out the windshield, Jack looked down the two-lane blacktop. The heat rose off the pavement like waves of water drifting in limbo, obscuring the base of the mountains an unknown number of miles away. He watched as it moved, hypnotized by the cadence of the desert ocean. The convection slowly reached out to him, lapping at the ground, moving closer and closer. He stared.
Then they slowly appeared. First, one dancing shadow moved its way into reality, followed by others. They sat there at the bend of the road blinking at the car. Could they see him? Were they really there? They moved with the waves, performing a slow dance of twisted matter. The leader was larger than the rest. His form was liquid, shape shifting with the air and the other shadows around him.
The silence intensified inside the car. Jack could hear his breath, his heartbeat inside his ears. The wind gently blowing across the road. They looked at him. From miles down the road, he could tell they were sizing him up. The breeze intensified and the shadows danced. They began to whip themselves up into a slow fury, like teenagers in a mosh pit. Battering each other, the shadows moved; some baring enigmatic teeth and devouring the shape next to them, only to have the victim materialize again. But the one kept staring, refusing to be jostled from its position.
His heart beat a steady cadence and the shadows moved with it. The cloud drifted slowly toward the car, churning like a thunderhead. It crept closer and closer in a macabre cabaret. The breeze shifted and intensified, blowing the shadows closer with each passing second. The one leading, with the others wrestling in its wake. Jack counted off their approach with each disappearing center stripe of the road. The mountains in the distance became obscured as they now took on a more solid composure. Faster, faster, his heart raced as their pace quickened.
Purgatory Road Page 4
