Bad Day For A Road Trip

by Jason Offutt

  The Joy Mission Church at the corner of West Third and Maple rested quietly at the edge of the neighborhood. Didn’t anyone go to church anymore? Donnie was sure yesterday had been Sunday; the calendar in the kitchen said so. But the little white church just sat there like a boring, unchurchy lump. Not one car pulled up, not one old lady in a hat walked up those steps and not one annoying child ran screaming from the front doors after the services were over. Mother used to tell Donnie the world was going to hell in a hand basket. Donnie was never sure what that meant, but now, as everything slowly stopped being normal, he thought maybe she was right.

  Donnie didn’t see many people nowadays, although Mr. Miller from down the street walked by sometimes. Donnie hadn’t seen him today, which was fine. He didn’t like it when Mr. Miller came by the house; Mr. Miller just staggered down West Third Street, his overalls and blue work shirt stained something awful. It was embarrassing to be out drunk so early in the day. Donnie hadn’t seen anyone else in a long while.

  Something heavy hit the living room wall. Donnie smiled. It was Mother; she must be hungry. “Coming Mother,” Donnie said and walked into the kitchen to slip on his shoes. Can’t wear shoes on the carpet, no sir. They have to stay by the back door; can’t track anything dirty into the house, especially since the electricity’s still off. The vacuum sweeper won’t work without electricity. Donnie had tried to call the electric company about the power, but the telephone didn’t work either. Neither did the water, but he had bottled water, lots of it and had filled the tub when Mother got hungry. Something in his head told him he might need it.

  Donnie unlocked the door and stepped into the back yard; a sturdy six-foot-tall privacy fence kept the neighbor’s dirty, dirty dogs off of their property, although he hadn’t heard them in a while. Hmm, maybe his neighbors finally got sick of all that yipping and shot those dogs in their stupid little heads. Donnie stopped on the back step, his head cocked to the side. Hey, that’s funny. Gary Grimes’ dad was in Donnie’s back yard. What was Gary Grimes’ dad doing in the back yard and why was he tied to the basketball goal with part of Mother’s clothesline?

  “Donnie. Oh, Donnie. Why are you doing this?” Mr. Grimes wheezed, his voice dry and cracked. “You gotta let me go. You gotta let me go, Donnie. I was getting out of here. Going to Omaha. It’s safe in Omaha. Come with me, Donnie.” Mr. Grimes stopped, his voice nearly gone. “Please come with me,” he whispered.

  Donnie looked around the yard. Partial skeletons, rotting flesh still hanging from some of the bones, lay in heaps at the foot of the maple tree and the clothes line poles; a section of rope tied around each. What looked like it may have been Connie Benjamin from down at the Family Market hung limp from the post with the happy purple birdhouse on top. A rope kept most of that mass of bone and flies lashed to the eight-foot four-by-four.

  “Why are you doing this, Donnie?” Mr. Grimes rasped. “I’ve known you all your life. You used to play at my house when you were little. You remember that? You used to play pirates with my boy Gary up in his tree house. You remember?” Tears started flowing down Mr. Grimes’ dirty, worn face. “You remember, Donnie? Tell me you remember.”

  Donnie looked at him absently. He knew this man. He was sure of it. He did play at his house, in that tree house with the green roof, but that wasn’t yesterday, was it? “Mother’s hungry,” Donnie said, his voice hollow, empty.

  “No, Donnie,” Mr. Grimes screamed, his voice raw. “You can’t do this. It’s not right, Donnie, it’s just not right. Let me go. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET ME GO.”

  Mother’s room opened to the back patio through a sliding glass door. Mother liked lots of glass in her house and so did Donnie. It let in so much light. Donnie wrapped his fist around the end of a pole he’d attached to the door handle to Mother’s room and slowly pulled the sliding glass open. Then he quickly stepped back inside the kitchen door as Mother, still in the Sunday dress she’d worn the day she got hungry, lurched out of the doorway and went to say hello to Mr. Grimes. She always looked so pretty in that dress. Donnie smiled as the kitchen door clicked shut, Mr. Grimes’ screams almost drowning out the sound. They must be having fun.

  ***

  The thumping told him Mother was back in her room. Donnie hesitated; a line of black clouds was approaching down I-80. It hadn’t stormed in two months and Donnie wanted to see it rain. A picture on the wall rattled on the next thump. Boy, she really must be tired. I bet she played hard today. Donnie walked away from the front window, the black cloud moving like something alive over a spot on the western sky. He went into the kitchen and put on his shoes. Mother liked her house tidy and Donnie was doing his best. His only problems were dust and garbage. Mother had plenty of food for Donnie, mostly his favorites. Cans of SpaghettiOs with meatballs (not with those nasty hot dogs), Campbell’s cheese soup, chili, pork and beans, pears and peaches, lined the pantry, although there weren’t as many there as there were before Mother got hungry. Donnie knew he’d have to go down to the Family Market sometime to get more groceries. He hoped it was open, but he wasn’t sure because parts of Connie Benjamin were in his back yard. He wondered how she’d gotten there. He put the trash in big black bags and threw them in the garage. It was starting to stink in there, but he didn’t know when the garbage man would come by his house. It was supposed to be every Thursday, but the man was late, really late.

  Donnie pulled on his shoes, unlocked the back door and listened. The pounding had stopped, but faint musical tings came from the wind chimes he’d hung from Mother’s ceiling so she’d have something in her room to keep her company. He knew she got lonely in there after Daddy left. Daddy got hungry, too and walked out the front door. Donnie hadn’t seen him since. He thought about Daddy sometimes, about the way they played catch in the back yard before the back yard was full of so many bones. How did all those bones get there? Well, life’s a mystery.

  Donnie slowly opened the door; the air smelled of copper, the concrete under the basketball goal wet with blood. Where’d Mr. Grimes go? And why did he leave such a mess in the yard? That was rude. He’d expected more from a neighbor; Donnie hoped Mr. Grimes wasn’t rude to Mother.

  The wind chimes were louder outside; the soft jingling of metal butterflies and fairies bouncing off each other flowed through the open door to Mother’s room. Donnie grabbed the wooden pole on the door and slid it shut. A body slammed against the glass. Donnie smiled as his mother pawed at the door, red streaks of blood smeared the glass; her face was slick with it.

  “Hi, Mother,” Donnie said. It always made him smile to see Mother, her pretty face gnawing at the glass, foamy, bloody spittle running from her mouth. “Sorry, but I don’t want to play today.” He pointed at the sky. “Look, it’s getting dark. It might rain. I have to go back inside.” He waved as he stepped back into the kitchen and locked the door.

  ***

  The car came ahead of the storm; the small silver vehicle weaved around a series of tractor-trailers and SUVs that sat dead on the highway. Donnie used to wonder why the drivers had left all those trucks on there, but the trucks were all just part of his world now. His quiet, quiet world. He rarely noticed them anymore. If it wasn’t for the cloud coming, the deep black cloud he stared at through the living room window, he wondered if he would have seen the car at all. How many cars have gone by while I was feeding Mother, or pooping? There was something strange about that cloud, but he couldn’t figure out what it was, especially when that car cruised by Julesburg on the Nebraska side of the state line and turned off the highway onto Road 187, then he forgot about the cloud. At least for a minute. Donnie hadn’t seen a car on I-80 for months; which was fine with him. All the good people were still in Julesburg, even drunk old Mr. Miller; everyone on the highway was bad. The world’s going to hell in a hand basket, Mother had said. Mother was never wrong. But Mother didn’t talk much anymore, although she always let him know when she was hungry and Donnie was running out of friends for her to play with.

 
He squinted through the window and thought the car stopped on Road 187, but he couldn’t be sure. It was too far away. He had to find out more about Mother’s new friends.

  Donnie ran to the hall closet and threw open the door, the bang of the doorknob against the wall sent Mother into another fit. Dang it, Donnie. Mother likes the house quiet. You have to be quieter. He pushed the family’s winter coats off to the side, his blue ski jacket, Mother’s long red insulated coat and Daddy’s thick beige Carhartt and found the black leather case of Daddy’s Jason 10x50 binoculars hanging from a peg in the back of the closet where he knew it would be. “Don’t play with those damned things, boy,” Daddy yelled when he had caught Donnie in the garage with the binoculars, looking through the next door window into 16-year-old Vanessa Hagen’s bedroom. Daddy snatched the black, heavy spyglass out of his young hands and slid it gently into the hard case. “Those were Grandpa Dooley’s. He used those to watch birds, not get a boner. If I ever catch you playing with those I’m going to smack you right into next week.” And he walked away, leaving fourteen-year-old Donnie standing alone in the garage with a painfully tight erection.

  Grandpa Dooley’s binoculars, then Daddy’s binoculars, now Donnie’s binoculars, had sat on that peg in the back of the closet ever since Vanessa Hagen. Yeah, they’re my binoculars. Donnie looked around the hallway before he reached into the dark closet and gently lifted the case from the peg, half expecting Daddy, his face pale and crazed, his teeth gnashing, to reach out and grab his wrist with a bony hand and drag him into the depths of nightmares. But Daddy got hungry, he’d rushed out the door growling, yes, growling, running after the little Robinson girl on her bicycle, although Donnie didn’t know why anyone would let a little girl outside on a bicycle once people started getting hungry for each other. Daddy chased the Robinson girl around the corner and behind the church, then Donnie heard a gunshot. Probably the neighbors shooting those darned dogs. That’s the last time he ever saw Daddy.

  Daddy wasn’t in the closet. Daddy couldn’t be in the closet; he was gone somewhere, probably somewhere important, like Washington, D.C., or New York City. Some place important people go when important things happened. And Daddy was important. He was city manager of Julesburg, Colorado. Donnie’s hands shook as he clutched the binocular case to his chest and slammed the door, Mother raising heck in the other room. Donnie didn’t try to talk her quiet, it only made things worse.

  The sun glinted off the silver car’s windshield as Donnie stood looking through the big plate glass window in the living room. He smiled. They were there, not too far from home, people. Bad people. Bad people Mother would like to meet. He pressed the binoculars up to his face and searched for the car. Geez, all that trash on the road. Plastic grocery bags clung to weeds on the roadside, a refrigerator box lay below the road in the scrub, beer cans, a shredded tire and a couple of rotting corpses were strewn on the highway between the stalled vehicles. The bodies didn’t make Donnie hesitate in his search for the car, he knew the bad people deserved whatever left them lying in the road. They were the reason the world was going to hell in a hand basket. The landscape bobbed through the heavy binoculars as Donnie swung them around, trying to find Road 187 and the bad people.

  There they were.

  Four of them. Two men, one with a cast on his left ankle and two women stood at the open trunk of the car. The woman with red hair, Watch out for those gingers, Donnie, bent over, pulled a canvas camping chair from the trunk and popped it open for the man with the broken ankle. Something stirred in Donnie, something down deep, something he hadn’t felt since ginger-haired Vanessa Hagen pulled down her panties all those years ago while he watched through these binoculars. Something Mother scolded him about until late into the night. You’re going to want to play with your pecker, Donnie. Your health teacher at school is going to tell you it’s okay, it’s natural. But it’s not. It’s not natural, Donnie. If I ever catch you playing with your pecker I’m going to slap it with a ruler. You hear me, Donnie? I’m going to smack it. It’s for your own good. I just want you to go to heaven, baby boy. The path to hell is littered with boys who play with their pecker. Donnie’s breath grew short, his face flush, as he stared at the ginger girl through the binoculars. Mother’s voice, Mother’s words, were gone. His underwear, baggy white Haynes, became tight as his erection grew. The ginger girl helped the man into the chair, pulled her long curly hair behind her head and tied it into a knot. She leaned forward and kissed the gimpy man. What’s happening? What’s happening here? Donnie held the binoculars with his left hand and pulled at the front of his pants with his right. His penis had grown as hard as his thumb, like it did when he woke in the morning, but he always had to pee in the morning. Donnie didn’t have to pee. His hard penis had something to do with the ginger girl and Mother wasn’t going to slap it with anything; she was locked in her room. A warm rush filled him when he pulled at the front of his pants. Donnie slid open his brown J.C. Penney’s belt, unzipped his Dockers and like he wanted to do when he watched Vanessa Hagen, he took himself into his hand.

  ***

  Darn it, Donnie. Darn it, darn it, darn it. Mother banged on her wall, pictures shook all along the living room side. She wasn’t hungry again. No. It was too soon; she’d just played with Mr. Grimes. So, she must know. She must know what he’d just done in front of her pretty pane glass window, into her potted rubber plant. She knew, she darn well knew. But how? Did she smell it? Did she smell my spunk? It was Vanessa Hagen all over again. “Those were Grandpa Dooley’s,” Daddy had scolded him as his penis grew hard watching the neighbor girl slip her pink panties to the floor of her bedroom.”‘If I ever catch you playing with those I’m going to smack you right into next week.” Donnie flinched, but the blow never fell because he was alone. He was bad and alone. A wet spot grew on the front of his khakis when he pulled them up and zipped them. The stain a sign of his weakness.

  Through the binoculars, the ginger girl, the bad, bad ginger girl, sat on the hood of the silver car next to the black-haired girl, both men in the camping chairs drank beer. Daddy drank beer; there were still ten of them in Daddy’s beer refrigerator in the garage. Donnie had never had one; Mother said they make you stupid. Donnie thought he might just get stupid today.

  Something was different outside Donnie’s house, something had changed over the minutes, or hours, good lord, it felt like hours, while Donnie shamed himself. The sky was darker. The black cloud, undulating now, covered a large section of the western sky and it was closer. Much closer. He swung the binoculars toward the cloud.

  “Oh, dear gravy.”

  It wasn’t a cloud, at least not a cloud formed by evaporated water. Birds, thousands of them, flocked in a flowing mass over Interstate 80 and the baddies on the hill just sat watching them. Why? Why did they stop? Something moved under the mass of birds; good people, about twenty of them like Mother, walked eastward on Interstate 80, moving around the empty vehicles, the sea of birds flapping overhead like a, like a, like a what? Like a fleet of bombers in advance of infantry. The sky over Julesburg soon grew dark, the cloud of birds leading the death parade. Donnie lowered the binoculars and watched the cloud flow like a living river over the highway.

  The good people moved slowly; they always moved slowly unless they wanted to play with someone. Donnie watched them for at least a half hour or so, he guessed, with the electricity off, the clock on the wall didn’t work anymore. The birds kept their slow pace, circling in a rippling blanket overhead. They were miles away when Donnie turned his binoculars back toward the silver car. The bad people were all turned facing the birds. What were they doing? Donnie wondered, then nodded to himself, a smile grew across his face. They were hiding. Yes, that’s what they were doing. They were hiding. The good people frightened them. The man, the one with both feet, dragged a tent bag from the trunk and walked into a patch of weeds at the roadside. A tent? They were going to stay put for a while. Mother thumped in the next room. Oh, yes, Mother, don’t worry. I�
�m going to get you some new friends to play with.

  ***

  The quarter moon shone softly over the Great Plains, but there wasn’t enough light for Donnie to see jack shit. At dusk the bad people set up a camp stove and cooked something out of a box, but as soon as the sun set, Donnie’s peekaboo world blacked out. “Darn it,” he hissed as the last light of the day took away his advantage over these people. Nothing moved. He’d hoped they would have started a campfire, at least if he couldn’t see what they were doing, he could see where they were.

  Donnie had no idea how many hours he’d sat in front of that big window in Mother’s comfy flower print chair watching, waiting for something to happen with the bad people in the silver car. Two, three, 78? Well, Donnie knew it wasn’t 78, but time didn’t mean much to him anymore. After people got hungry and the garbage man stopped running his route on Thursday, what was the point? But, as Donnie stared from his dark living room into the night, he thought of time again. They wouldn’t stay there, living in a tent forever; they would leave soon. There were plenty of empty houses in Julesburg they could live in. Soon after Mother started living in the back bedroom, Donnie had gone down to the Red Rooster Café to get a sandwich and chips and the thing was locked up tight as a bank. Nobody was outside in town; it was like an episode of a scary movie Donnie had seen on the Syfy Channel. The town was just empty. The next day he saw drunk old Mr. Miller, then found Connie Benjamin and caught Mr. Grimes outside hooking a trailer to his pickup. Donnie knew he wasn’t alone, but the people he found weren’t good like Mother, they were bad. But mostly, the people in town were just gone. The bad people in the silver car might look for some place to stay in Julesburg, but Donnie didn’t think that was right. If they were going to do that, they wouldn’t have driven onto some country road to camp. They would have driven into town.