The Donzerly Light

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “I just want to satisfy myself that you aren’t carrying any contraband, sir,” the officer said as he patted Jay down and reached into pockets where bulges drew his attention. He first pulled the bottle of Darvon from the breast pocket of Jay’s jacket, examining it closely. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Jay Marcus Grady.”

  The officer set the bottle on the trunk deck and reached into the front pocket of Jay’s chinos. Next to the bottle he dropped what he’d removed, a meager handful of change. Change Jay had received in Albuquerque for the junk food, and had not put in the fanny pack for some reason.

  Or maybe for this specific reason, he suspected, as he saw the five coins showing heads to the bluing sky, and in them saw numbers.

  The officer’s hands came off of him, and he told Jay he could turn around and stand however was comfortable, with the cast and all.

  “I hope you understand my caution, sir,” the officer said.

  “I do,” Jay told him, but the numbers were flashing in his head, almost monopolizing his thoughts.

  “We get people coming through here, come up to the top of the world to get high on contraband substances, and, well, we’ve got to stay on top of that. But I can tell you’re not under any influence, except maybe of the cold, and the long drive, so you best get in the car and get your heater cranked up and head on to sunny California.” The officer smiled a real smile right then and removed his glasses, and revealed a deep purple scar that looped around his left eye, the pupil of which was cast off at a slight and unnatural angle. “I hear it’s nice out there.”

  “Me too,” Jay agreed, then gathered his change and his pills and hopped back to the car.

  When he was inside and had the window rolled up, Mari seemed surprised. “Aren’t I driving?”

  “Huh? What?”

  “He’s letting you drive without a license?”

  “He didn’t ask for one,” Jay told her.

  “But every cop, that’s the first thing that they—”

  He saw the knowing swell in her gaze, and he nodded. “He has a mark.”

  “I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise.”

  “No,” Jay said. “You ready to write?”

  Write? He had said ‘write’? “You got something?”

  “When he checked my pockets. There was change in one that I forgot about.”

  Mari dug the paper on which she’d been keeping their directions and mileage tally from the pocket of her pants. For a while it had stayed on the legal pad, but she’d started to worry that if they picked up another hitchhiker, well, the person might get nosy and might ask and that would be a fun little dance to do, wouldn’t it? So she’d put it away, and now she unfolded the few sheets on one leg of her jeans, and took the pencil from its hole in the dash and wrote what Jay told her. When he got to the time she looked quick to her watch.

  “Zero six thirty eight, Jay. That’s in like ten seconds.”

  The cop behind them beeped, and Jay stabbed the key fast into the ignition and turned it. The old motor turned, and turned, and tried, and tried, and coughed a few times before getting its breath and starting to pulse. Sickly, to be sure, but running it was. Jay shifted into gear and rolled the window down once more to look back before entering the road, as the sideview was frosted over. He thumped the rime from it, and steered onto the interstate. Behind them the cop made a tight U and headed back toward Albuquerque.

  In just minutes they were coasting, gravity pulling the Honda down the mountains, and something else pulling them somewhere. A something and a somewhere that Jay was beginning to give less and less a damn about.

  Forty Two

  Doubt

  They drove that Monday 221 miles, first west on Interstate 40, then a short jaunt up State Route 264 to US 666—the devil’s highway.

  The number creeped Mari out a bit, but Jay just drove on, saying little, thinking much more. Thinking how much he was now hating the coins, despite what good or glorious things they might had caused him to do. Because now...now he had the distinct feeling that they were being toyed with. That their time was being wasted. North again they were heading, when back in Kansas they could have just continued west without a trip down Texas way, and would be ahead of the game now.

  Though maybe ahead was not what was intended, he knew. Knew, sure, but didn’t like. No, didn’t like it at all.

  As they pulled into Monticello, Utah near noon that Monday, he was half considering chucking the whole thing and telling the coins they could fuck themselves.

  The next day, as they left Monticello after a night in a motel and another spot of telling change at a coffee shop where he’d eaten little of his breakfast, Jay decided to do just that. Enough was enough.

  * * *

  “Jay, it looks like we’re going to end up in a place called Skipjack,” Mari told him, plotting their route on the atlas in her lap. Up Route 191 they were heading, 87 miles up it to where it met Interstate 70, the same road they’d begun this journey on back in Missouri. They’d left at four, or sixteen hundred hours to be true to the coins, and had only eighty seven miles to travel that day. Less than two hours. A short hop to...to whatever came next, she thought. She only hoped it was a fast eighty seven miles, because Jay wasn’t looking good. His leg was killing him, she could tell, and he hadn’t taken a pill yet that day. Not that she’d seen, anyway. He’d only insisted upon driving, and had kept his eyes fixed ahead, saying hardly a thing, just like the day before, only now she suspected he was working something over in his head. He had that kind of look to him.

  And that look intensified as they passed through Moab, and his hands began to flex on the wheel, and when Mari asked him a question once, a simple inquiry about what looked like a fog up ahead, he had taken a slow, slow breath and told her it looked like a dust storm. Told her like he was suppressing some anger. But what could he be angry at?

  She didn’t know, and had no more time to think about it, when, ten miles out of Moab and maybe ten from their destination, he heeled the car into a hard left turn and steered off of the highway and onto a sandy road through the scrub.

  “There!” he screamed, looking up as if through the Honda’s roof. “There! What do you think about that?! Huh?!”

  “Jay!” Mari yelled to him as he drove the car over ruts and bumps, small plants and large plants, its old frame groaning and banging with each bump it took. “Jay! What are you doing?!”

  “I’m doing what I want!. Not what they want! Not what the God damn coins want anymore!”

  “Jay!” she yelled, pulling her knees up and covering her face as he barreled along the dry and rutted road, the dust storm he’d identified for her coming upon them now, or they upon it, its gritty cloud and blasting winds enveloping the car in a crystalline haze that whined like a jet as it scoured and pecked at paint and glass alike. They could see almost nothing ahead, even in full daylight, all that was beyond the windshield and to either side of the car a dusty brown radiance flying by in the tiniest of pieces, but still Jay pushed on, his eyes staring madly at the tan nothing outside.

  “No more! No more, dammit! You don’t run the show anymore! You hear me?! DO YOU HEAR ME?!!!”

  “JAY!!!” Mari shrieked, catching sight of the high mound just as it was at the front of the car. The Honda hit it, and vaulted upward, landing hard and stopping, its nose pointed down and its rear seeming up in the air.

  The jolt tossed both of them forward against their seatbelts, which they were wearing, though the restraint could not prevent her from thudding her head fairly hard on the roof as the Honda had gone airborne.

  The engine died of its own accord, and Jay shook off what he could of the impact. The anger raged full in him, more now than before, because if this little bump was some reminder of who really was in charge, then there was more to be said about that. Yes there was, and with that he flung open his door and rolled out of the car, kicking the door shut with sand whirling all around and pushing himself up to stand on h
is good leg and bad. He made a fist and thrust it at the murky brown sky, because wasn’t that where the powers of the universe lay, or had he been lied to in Sunday school?

  “Come on! Come on! Is that the best you can do?!” The sand ground upon his skin, and into his eyes and his mouth, and he had to shield his face with his free hand and spit the grit from his lips so he could breathe. But it did not stop his tirade. “Is THIS the best you can do, whatever you are?! Is this it?! Play with the car and kick up some dust?! HA! You are NOTHING!”

  Jay took a step, his fist still to the unseen sky, the roar of burdened wind in his ears, and his foot caught on something. He looked down, squinting against the onslaught of sand, and saw a dark band at his foot. He put his cast to it. It was hard. And just beyond that one dark and hard band was another. And another. And...

  He spun back toward the car and saw a distant pinpoint of light picking through the storm, and he saw where the car was now—hung up on a set of railroad tracks.

  “Oh, Jesus. MARI!”

  He hopped fast to the car, falling once as one of the wooden ties tripped him up. But he got up and made it to the door on his knees, and pulled at the handle to get in. But it would not open. He looked at the lock plunger, and it was down. But he hadn’t locked it! He hadn’t!

  But something most clearly had.

  “MARI!” he screamed, pounding on the glass. He could see her inside, her head bobbed down as if she were asleep, and though that was frightening, what he saw past her out the opposite window was worse. The light that had been just a pinpoint, it was bigger now, swelling like the moon falling down. Coming at them. A train was coming right at them.

  And he can’t see us, Jay thought. Not in this storm he couldn’t.

  He pushed himself up as the sound of the train engine rose in the distance above the steady thunder of the wind-whipped storm, and without any hesitance he drew his fist back and thrust it hard through the driver’s side window. It shattered inward in shower of glass blocks. He unlocked the door and jumped behind the wheel, Mari seeming to come to as he turned the key to crank the engine.

  “Jay? Jay? What’s...” Her words drizzled away and she lifted her head, touching the knob rising above her forehead. Touching that and wondering what was going on. What Jay was doing. And what those sounds were, the wind and that other one.

  She looked right out her window and screamed at what was there. What was coming. “JAY!! A TRAIN!!”

  He had the engine going and the car in gear, but it was going nowhere, its motor just whining high as he stepped on the gas. Had something broken in the abrupt stop? The driveshaft? No, it was a Honda. A front wheel drive, and the front wheels weren’t catching! They were on the rails!

  He flung his door open again and put his casted foot out, digging the heel against the near rail. He dropped the gear selector into R and gunned it as Mari wailed at him. He gunned it and pushed with all of his might and screamed out in agony as his broken leg went afire. Screamed and pushed, the light coming now, the train almost there now, almost on them now, and pushed, and pushed, and pushed, just needing to get those front wheels to grab some sand and pop over the far rail and the near one and then they’d be safe.

  “JAY, GOD, PLEASE!!!”

  “ALL RIGHT!!!” he howled, but not to her. To someone, or something, as if submitting, and gave it all that his battered leg could stand and more, and the car slipped back, an inch, then two, the coming light hot and white and gleaming off Mari’s screaming face, then three, and four, and the car bucked, one wheel catching, then the other, the Honda lurching backward and over one rail as Jay’s good leg mashed the accelerator, and then jolting over the last rail and slipping madly down the berm upon which the track had been laid.

  The world before them turned white, then black, the a flutter of dull colors and flashes of light as the train zinged by, boxcar after boxcar cutting the storming day into pieces.

  When it had passed, the storm seemed to follow it, skipping low across the desert toward the south.

  Jay and Mari could only breathe for several long minutes. It was she who spoke first.

  “Promise me, Jay, that you’ll never doubt the coins again. You’ll do what they say. Promise me?”

  He swallowed, and nodded, and wiped the sand from his eyes. He could see the power of this now, and it was a thing he could never have imagined. “I promise.”

  She hugged him, and after a moment more they nursed the Honda back to the highway.

  Forty Three

  Debt Free

  They made it to Skipjack just after eight that Tuesday night, and were lucky to get there at all. The car was pulling hard right the whole way, making Mari fight it to stay on the road. She had taken over for Jay once they’d gotten back to the highway. His leg was in bad shape, and had taken three of the white pills almost forty minutes to settle the sharp throb to something he could stand. By the time they pulled into the small town just off the interstate, Jay was grogged up, and Mari didn’t even ask him what he thought they should do. She found the first garage that still had a light on and pulled right in.

  Ten minutes later she was getting Jay out of the car and onto his crutches, taking her purse and stuffing the fanny pack in it.

  “Where are we?” Jay asked, his eyes swiveling left and right in his head like wobbly green marbles.

  “Skipjack,” Mari told him, and kept an arm ready at his waist as she got him walking.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We need food,” she said. “You especially.” She also thought he needed a doctor, but the mechanic had told her the nearest one was in Moab. No plan there, it was clear.

  “Where...where’s the car? Why are we walking?” He shook his head and tried to focus, and found that if he really concentrated he could. It was something like treading water, he discovered, almost as if he could keep his head above the fog the lower half of his body needed desperately right then.

  “The car needs some work,” Mari told him, and guided him up the sidewalk. “We’ll find a diner and get some food.”

  Jay looked to the sky. It was almost black. “A mechanic at this time of night?”

  “He said he’d do the work.”

  “What work?”

  “Some kind of joint must have broken when we hit the tracks,” she explained.

  “Jesus, Mari, we hardly have any money left after the motels and food.”

  “It’s okay, Jay. You don’t worry. I took care of it.”

  She took care of it?

  She TOOK CARE OF IT!

  Visions of his mother and how she’d acted after stopping those times at Chuck’s Filling Station flooded into his present memory. He knew what his mother had done. Not then, but later he had. What she had done for old Chuck, the sick grease monkey bastard! And now this! And Mari!

  Jay stopped dead on the sidewalk and grabbed both of her arms, his crutches falling away as he balanced on good and bad leg both, pain nothing now. Not a damn thing. “WHAT DID YOU DO?!”

  She pulled against his grip on her upper arms, wincing, fearful at what was raging behind his eyes right then. “Jay! Let me go!”

  “WHAT DID HE MAKE YOU DO, MARI?! WHAT DID HE MAKE YOU DO?!”

  “What are you talking about?!” she screamed back at him. Eyes in passing cars looked their way, but no one intervened.

  Jay’s chest heaved with anger, old anger and new blended to something that was pure, white hot hate. His stare burned at Mari, burned for her. Burned for a time long gone now.

  “What is with you, Jay?!” she demanded, and he finally let her go. Her arms jerked back, but she did not run.

  When he spoke now, it was not in a yell, not with fire bellowing forth, but from a fire long smoldering within. “What did you do to get him to fix the car? We didn’t have enough money. What did me make you do?”

  “He didn’t make me do anything, Jay! I chose to do something!” And then she reached down through the collars of both shirts she wore, sweat an
d tee, and pulled into view a simple gold chain. “I gave him what was on here, okay. The engagement ring Charles gave to me when he was down on one knee in...” Tears began to well, but she staunched them and went on. “...in Boston when he asked me to marry him. Okay? I traded that to get my car fixed. All right? Does that answer your suspicions?”

  She turned and walked away from him, up the sidewalk in the direction they’d been heading. Jay could only swallow his stupidity right then, swallow it and let it burn in his gut like a bitter pill he knew he deserved, then he knelt to the ground and gathered his crutches and went after her.

  It took some doing, but he caught her up at the corner of the block. “Mari. Wait. Please, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  She stopped, but couldn’t face him right then. “I know what you thought I’d done.”

  “It was stupid. I had no right.”

  “I would have, you know,” she said, and now turned toward him, having let it out. “I would have if it would have kept us going.”

  “You would do that?” Jay asked, incredulous.

  “I’d do what it took, Jay, to find the end of this. To get my reason.”

  He could only stare at her with awe, knowing so much, and knowing so damn little about anything. His gift meant nothing here, in this moment, because this was true. True...loving. Of a kind he had never understood until now.

  “I understand,” he told her, and he wished so desperately that he could say that to another right now. But that he could not do. All he could do was go on.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked him, her voice a bit quieter now, as if she didn’t know what to think of him, or didn’t know what he might think of her now. But he did not look away, she noticed, nor did his eyes brim with any disgust for what she had said. No, his gaze seemed to go soft just a bit as it lay upon her, as if he were being gentle, wielding it with care.

  “Starving,” he told her, putting the moment behind. Going on. Going on in a better way. “Where should we eat?”