by Ronald Malfi
“I told you already, it’s not the same thing.”
“Yes, it is. You can’t even tell me why it’s not.”
“Because we’re not actively hurting anyone. Those people, they were going to shoot us, kill us. Don’t you see?”
“You’ve got a gun right now. You’d shoot somebody, too, if they tried to get me. How is that different?”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“But if I could help all those people who are sick—”
“Enough!” he shouted at her. “Okay? Enough. I’m your goddamn father and you’ll do what I tell you.”
She said nothing, just kept staring at him. He could feel her gaze on him, an icy javelin pressing against his flesh until it cooled his entire bloodstream. Another glance at her and he saw she had the shoe box’s lid open. She was caressing the eggs inside the nest.
He turned back to the road, feeling as if he’d just sprinted a mile. He forced his breathing to calm down. When the yellow lines on the highway began to blur, he rubbed his eyes and wished he had a cup of coffee or maybe some pills to keep him awake. For whatever reason, the image of Ellie’s stuffed elephant jumped into his head then—the elephant that had been her favorite toy that was now lost forever since they deserted the Oldsmobile. For whatever reason, the damn thing seated itself in the center of his brain, as if there was something vitally important about it. The more he concentrated on it, trying to figure out its significance, the more texture it took on in his head. And then it was there, a dinosaur-size elephant undulating beyond the trees at the horizon, its thick hide pink in the waning dusk, its tremendous bulk toppling trees and causing the earth to shake, its massive face turning, tusks like lances severing the treetops, the gleam of a single melancholic eye, brown-yellow, agonized, a pupil as black as ichor, as deep as space, and as it charged them, David could make out its every detail, down to the minute blond hairs in the creases of its knees, the fat white mites scuttling through the caverns of its ear canals, the dried black mucus pressurized into a pasty gruel at the corners of its mouth—
David cried out. He jerked the steering wheel sharply to the left and felt the car fishtail. He overcompensated, spinning the wheel to the right. The tires screamed and gravel peppered the windshield. Ellie screamed.
There was a loud pop then a shushing sound. The Monte Carlo canted to the left and the steering wheel began to vibrate. The shushing sound followed them as they bucked along the road—shhh-fump, shhh-fump, shh-fump.
Ellie sat up straight. “What happened, what happened?”
“Flat tire,” he said. He slowed the car down and eased it to a stop on the shoulder.
“Now it’s your nose,” Ellie said, pointing at his face.
He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror and saw a fine thread of blood dribbling out of his left nostril.
43
Blessedly, there was a spare tire and a jack in the trunk. He changed the tire while jacked up on the shoulder of the highway, working up a sweat despite the autumn chill in the evening air. Ellie stood beside him, studying him for a time, then turning her attention toward the headlights that occasionally cruised along the road. She held the shoe box against her chest, cradling it in both arms.
“All right,” he said, standing up and wiping the grease from his hands. He was out of breath and trembling, though less from exhaustion and more out of anxiety. For some reason, he felt like they were standing still while the whole world shifted beneath them. He felt as though he might be knocked flat at any moment.
He opened the passenger door for her. “Come on. Get in.”
Back in the car, he cranked the ignition but nothing happened. Not a series of clicks, not a grumble from the engine, not the stubborn rrr-rrr-rrr of the motor struggling to turn over.
“No. Come on.”
He cranked it again. Again. Again.
Dead.
“Son of a bitch!” He pounded the steering wheel with a fist. Then he ran his shaking hands through his hair. Ellie stared at him from the passenger seat. After closing his eyes and counting to ten in his head, he turned to her, forced a smile, and tried not to let her see the fear in his eyes.
“It’s broken,” she said. It was not a question.
“I’ll have a look under the hood. Is there a flashlight in the glove compartment?”
She opened the compartment, but it was obvious there was no flashlight in there.
“Okay.” David nodded at her. His arm ached. Again, he felt light-headedness threaten to overtake him. He took several deep breaths to regulate his respiration. “Just sit tight. I’ll go have a look.”
He climbed out of the car and pulled up the hood. His arms felt like rubber. As he stared at the assemblage of mechanical parts, his vision threatened to pixelate. He felt his respiration ratchet to a fever pitch . . . yet at the same time it seemed impossible to suck any air into his lungs.
This is it, said the head-voice. This is the end of the road. This is as far as you were meant to go. The Night Parade stops here and death takes over. What will it be? A heart attack? Or maybe Kapoor and that Craddock guy weren’t pulling your leg after all—maybe it’s the Folly that’s getting ready to take you down. You will die of a hemorrhage and leave your daughter stranded all alone and in the middle of the night on the shoulder of a Colorado highway.
“Go fuck yourself,” he muttered. His voice sounded hollow and tinny in his ears.
The blast of an air horn caused him to jerk upright and slam the back of his head against the hood. He twisted out from beneath it in time to see two large headlights settling behind the Monte Carlo on the shoulder of the road. The stink of diesel exhaust filled the air.
Ellie had gotten out of the car and was standing on the shoulder again, her small shape silhouetted against the approaching headlights. David winced at her, as if it hurt to see her. “I told you to stay in the car.”
“Daddy?” she said, fear in her voice.
He reached out, touched her shoulder. She felt very much real. “Get back in the car, honey,” he told her. Then he continued toward the truck, one arm up to shield his watery eyes from the glare of the headlamps.
He heard the hiss of air brakes and, a moment later, the sound of someone’s boots crunching along the gravelly blacktop. A man’s hard voice said, “Shitty place for car trouble.”
“Yeah,” said David.
The man was nothing more than a barrel-shaped silhouette until he stepped around the side of the Monte Carlo. He was a big guy in a nylon vest and a flannel shirt, a John Deere hat pushed back on his head. He pressed his large fists on his hips as he approached David, sizing up the Monte Carlo with evident disappointment.
“Hate to say it,” said the trucker, “but American-made cars ain’t what they used to be.” The man turned toward David, his frown brightening into a grin. In the glow of the truck’s headlights, the man’s teeth looked as large and as gray as tombstones. “I’m Heck. Hector.” He held out one thick hand.
“Tim,” David said—the first name on his mind. He shook the man’s hand. “You wouldn’t know how to fix it, would you?”
“That depends. What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes. “Everything was fine until we blew a tire. I changed it with no problem, but when I went to start it up again—nothing. Not a sound.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Heck asked while simultaneously leaning in through the open driver’s window. He reached for the keys in the ignition, then saw Ellie in the passenger seat. “Well, hello, sugar.”
“Hi,” said Ellie.
Heck cranked the ignition a few times with nothing to show for it. “Bummer, ain’t it?” he said to Ellie.
“Sucks,” said Ellie.
Heck chuckled. “You said it, darling.” He withdrew from the window, then went around to the open hood. David trailed behind him. Those large meathooks parked back on his hips, Heck surveyed the engine in silence. After a full minute had
passed, he stared at David and said, “Can I make an admission?”
“Sure.”
“At the risk of having to turn over my Man Card, and despite the fact I make a living driving that big rig back there, I really don’t know piss-all about cars.” He grinned, exposing those tombstone teeth again. “You and your kid live around here?”
“No. We were heading for a campground about a hundred miles northwest of here.”
“Well, I’m heading in that direction myself, so I’ll offer you and your girl a ride. Or if this puts a damper on your camping weekend, I can drop you someplace else. Just hate to see you folks stranded out here with night closing in.”
“That’s very kind. I’d appreciate it. The campground will be just fine.” It wasn’t lost on him that Hector was observant enough to see through Ellie’s disguise and recognize her as female. It made him slightly uncomfortable, and he would have preferred to part ways with Hector right away, but they needed this man to get them to the campground.
“Wonderful,” Heck said, removing his cap and sliding a thick-fingered hand through the buzzed gray bristles of his hair. “I’ll give you a hand loading your stuff into the truck.”
“Uh, we don’t have any stuff,” David said. “It’s just us.”
“Guess you ain’t a Boy Scout. Camping with nothing more than whatever’s in your wallet.” Heck jerked a chin at David’s bandaged arm and the blood on his shirt. “What happened there?”
David hugged the injured arm to his ribs. “Sliced my arm changing the tire.”
Another whiskied chuckle rattled up out of Heck’s throat. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, shaking his head and moseying around the side of the car again. “No Boy Scout, all right.”
44
Hector Ramirez’s current gig was hauling eleven hundred cases of Valvoline motor oil from Trenton, New Jersey, to Lakewood, Colorado, a run he looked forward to because it took him through some beautiful countryside. He had been a trucker since he could vote, starting out for a small company based in Utah before cutting his corporate ties and buying his own cab. Now he worked for himself (“I’m an honest-to-God businessman,” Heck said. “CEO, president, vice president, and grunt worker all rolled into one.”). For his fiftieth birthday, his wife, Rita, had surprised him by having his cab airbrushed with the nighttime cityscape of Gotham City, complete with Batman swinging from his bat-rope that filled up most of the driver’s door. He was a friendly enough guy whose slender wedding band seemed to be cutting off the circulation of his chubby ring finger, and he talked for nearly the entire duration of their trip like someone who’d just been rescued from a desert island and hadn’t seen another living soul in several years.
Before getting back on the road, Heck insisted he have a look at David’s injured arm. When David removed the wrapping—the napkins had soaked all the way through and were now as colorful as Christmas decorations—Heck whistled through his teeth, then nodded like a bobblehead doll.
“Yeah, okay. That’s a gash, all right. Prob’ly needs stitches. Hold tight.”
Heck slipped through a narrow opening between the front seats that led to a small compartment in the rear of the cab. There was a cot back there, a stack of magazines and books, an open bag of Doritos. A moment later, Heck returned with a first-aid kit. Utilizing a roll of gauze and a few butterfly bandages, Heck wrapped David’s arm after first cleansing the wound with peroxide. After he was done, Heck sat up straight, grinning and evidently pleased with himself.
“Not half bad for government work,” Heck commented.
“Better than some Burger King napkins and a rubber band,” David said.
Then they hit the road.
Heck was a talker, the kind of guy who filled the silence with anecdotes about his life and his career, or just random trivia in general—anything to keep the silence from dominating. During the only lull in the conversation, Ellie, who sat perched between them on the bench seat, pointed to a framed photo of a young, dark-haired boy that was fixed to the truck’s dashboard. “Is that your son?” she asked Heck.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s his name?”
“Benicio,” Heck said. “We called him Benny.”
David noted the past tense. He also noticed the rosary draped around the boy’s picture. He touched one of Ellie’s knees, but she didn’t take the hint.
“How old is he?”
“In that photo, he’s about six. Bit younger than you, my dear.”
“I’m eight. But I’ll be nine in a couple of days.”
“That’s right,” David said. In all the commotion, he had forgotten.
“Well, happy birthday . . . in a couple of days,” Heck said, and tipped his hat at her.
“How old is he not in the photo?” Ellie asked. “Like now, in real life, I mean.”
“Oh, well, sweetheart,” Heck said. “My boy, he ain’t with us no more.”
“Where did he go?”
“Ellie,” David said.
“It’s okay,” Heck said. He smiled down at Ellie, a pleasant enough smile despite the liquid shimmer suddenly visible in his eyes. “Benny passed on.”
“He died,” she said.
“He got sick. Lots of people getting sick nowadays.”
“I’m sorry,” David said.
“He was a good boy.” Heck’s gruff voice hit a snag, like a piece of thread from a sweater getting caught on a hook.
“Was it the illness?” Ellie asked. “Some people call it the Folly.”
“It was,” said Heck. “He was one of the lucky ones. He went very quickly. I was on the road when it happened.”
“He was alone?”
“Come on, Ellie,” David said, squeezing her knee.
Heck raised a hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “No, dear, he was with his mama back home.”
“Oh.” She leaned forward, scrutinizing the photo of the handsome little boy. “When did it happen?”
“Last year.”
“Do you have any other kids?”
“No, pepita. Now we’re alone.”
Ellie looked up at Heck. The trucker glanced down at her, smiling, his eyes glassy and red. Ellie reached up and placed a small white hand on the man’s broad shoulder. David felt his heart racing a mile a minute.
The big man cleared his throat and said, “You wanna hear me blast this air horn, darling?”
“I heard it when you drove up behind us,” Ellie said. “It scared me, it was so loud.”
Heck chuckled. A single tear spilled down his cheek and merged with a crease at the corner of his mouth. “Well, now, I suppose that’s true. You’re a frank little lady, aren’t you?”
“I guess so,” she said.
“What you got in that shoe box?”
“Bird eggs. Three of them.”
“Yeah?”
“Oriole eggs, I think.”
“Now, where’d you go and find bird eggs?”
“In the bushes outside my house. The mother never came back, so I adopted them.”
“Well,” Heck said. “Isn’t that nice. I reckon something like bird eggs is about as rare as a dinosaur fossil these days.”
“I’m sorry your son got sick and died,” Ellie said.
“Thank you, baby. But ain’t nothin’ nobody could do.”
Ellie’s hand slid off Heck’s shoulder. She turned her gaze toward David.
45
It was ten after nine when Heck pulled his truck up the paved path that led toward the entrance of Funluck Park. David saw that condos had been built along the road leading up to the park, ugly brick buildings with only a few lights on in the windows. The surrounding forestry was overgrown and poorly maintained.
“Road’s a bit narrow,” Heck said. The truck’s air brakes whistled.
“We can walk the rest of the way from here,” David said. “Thank you so much, Heck. You were a godsend.”
“One good deed, and all that.” Heck tipped his hat at Ellie. “And it was a pleasure
meeting you, little miss. You have fun camping with your old man, y’hear? And take care of them bird eggs!”
“Good-bye, Mr. Ramirez,” Ellie said. She held out her hand and Heck laughed, but he shook it. Then he patted her head.
David climbed out of the truck, then lifted Ellie out. “Thanks again, Heck. You saved our butts.”
Heck leaned across the passenger seat and said, “That really your little girl, Tim?”
David felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. “Yes,” he said.
“I ask, because I get the sense that something’s a little off-kilter with you both, if you catch my meaning. I mean no offense by it.”
“I appreciate your concern, but we—”
“Campground with no camping gear,” Heck went on. His tone was not accusatory; he was merely commenting on the truth as he saw it. “That gash on your arm you said you got from changing the flat. It would bother me if I didn’t say something, you understand?”
“All right, Heck. Then say what’s on your mind.”
“For one thing, are you really that girl’s daddy?”
“I am.”
“It also seems like you’re both in a panic to get to wherever you’re going.” Heck chewed on his lower lip, then added, “Or maybe you’re just trying to get away from someplace fast.”
“Maybe it’s a little of both,” David said. “But I promise you it’s for the good of my daughter. I hope you can understand that.”
Heck jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating his cargo. “Stuff back there don’t mean shit, in the grand scheme of things. Hell, this’ll probably be my last trip. Didn’t even want to take this one, truth be told, but it’s just so darned pretty out here, don’t you think?”
Again, David nodded.
“It’s takin’ care of your family that matters,” Heck said. He glanced down at the picture of his son. “I can give you both a ride to wherever you need to get. No questions asked.”
“That’s incredibly nice,” David said, “but this is our next stop. We’ll be okay from here.”
