Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  One afternoon I drove to Connie’s house. I had been invited over for a backyard barbecue. I wasn’t sure what the occasion was, but I never turned down free food.

  School was out. I had a few payments left on Monster, and I was making more money at my job. The only better news I could have received was if Darrin told me the insurance companies had decided to settle. But that seemed too miraculous to be possible.

  If that happened, I would definitely shout, “Amen.” Or maybe, “Toga.”

  But still, I had the strange feeling I was in the eye of the storm. At any moment the hurricane would resume and blow my life back to fucking smithereens.

  The song “Come as You Are” by Nirvana was playing on the radio. Kurt Cobain kept singing, “I don’t have a gun . . ., ” which gave the song a dark sense of irony, considering he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

  For thy sake we are killed all day long . . .

  Toga.

  I parked Monster in the driveway. I could smell steaks sizzling on the grill. It was going to be a sensational Sunday after all.

  I walked back to the patio and saw that Connie was wearing a one-piece black swimsuit, dark sunglasses, and a cooking apron. Her hair was parted to one side, shading her left eye. The style made her resemble the 1940s actress Veronica Lake, who I sometimes caught on Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics. I had always thought Veronica was a hottie. The end result was that today Connie looked more alluring, a little younger, and a hell of a lot more arousing.

  Maybe this would be a sexy Sunday, too.

  Connie glanced up from the grill and grinned. She gave me a Miss America wave with the spatula. “Get yourself a beer. Watch some TV. The steaks are almost done.”

  I nodded and walked into the kitchen. I checked out the fridge and grabbed a Bud. Then I went into the living room, sat on the sofa, and turned on the tube.

  Suddenly I was spinning around and around, as if I were on a Tilt-A-Whirl gone berserk. The room was rotating. The beer I’d already swallowed came back into my mouth, trickled out the corners, went up my nose.

  The ride halted as abruptly as it had started. I was still on the sofa, and now Connie was in the room, too. She was naked and handcuffed, and some man was slapping her on the face, tits, and hips.

  He walloped her and then leaned over her, growling, “So, are you fucking that noseless Nam freak again?”

  She cried, “No, Frank.”

  He swatted her again. “I could murder the both of you—you know that? I could kill you and get away with it. Being a cop, a guy learns how to do certain things. And exactly how to get away with them, too.”

  Connie strained against the cuffs, bruises purpling her wrists. She had a black eye and a bloody nose. “Please, you’ve got it all wrong—”

  “Assume the position. You know the one, bitch. Head down, legs spread.”

  Frank had his back to me, so I only caught glimpses of the side of his face. I didn’t want to be witnessing any of this, but dreams—or hallucinations or whatever this was—were funny that way. You can’t not watch. Just as you can’t not sneak a peek at a highway accident or a train wreck. Or a plane exploding, cracking open in the sky to shake out people like bits of pepper from one of those fancy restaurant grinders.

  I heard him unzip his pants. She was down on her knees, still handcuffed

  “Do it,” he commanded as she started sucking his cock. “Oh yeah,” he groaned.

  Frank stopped for a moment. Then he spread her legs apart roughly. “Wider. You can do better than that. You probably fuck that freak like a contortionist.”

  Connie winced as she spread wider. It was at the point it looked like it would be painful.

  “It’s nice and hard now,” he said. And then he was on her.

  I heard him grunting and moaning, piggish glottal stops. Then he said, “That’s it, baby. Good. You love it, don’t you? See? Not only do I have a nose, but I have a big dick, too.”

  No fade-out. No darkness. No bolt of bright light, either, to say it was over. I was just back on the sofa in real time. There was a stock-car race on TV. No younger naked Connie, no handcuffs, no sadistic, slapping husband.

  Same old Connie stood in the doorway. “I said the steaks are done. You’re about as deaf as my old man was.”

  The steaks were delicious. So was the corn on the cob and the pecan pie. We washed it all down with Budweiser. The combination of cold beer and hot barbecue was absolutely sublime.

  Connie rubbed up against me and purred. “Let’s take a dip in the hot tub.”

  Visions of her handcuffed and abused made me feel uncomfortable. “But I didn’t bring my shorts.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “So we’ll go skinny-dipping, like we always do. What? You afraid somebody’s on the other side of the fence with a camera?”

  She slipped out of her swimsuit. She stood on the patio and wiggled her butt at the neighboring house, its roof barely visible above the fence. “No time for modesty now. Va-va-voom.”

  I kept hearing those slaps, seeing her with the tortured wrists, the black eye. Heard Frank pig snort, pig snort. “But we might get cramps. You’re supposed to wait about an hour after you eat, ya know?”

  Connie sighed. She had already climbed into the spa. The bubbles effervescing clouded her with a veil, making me see Veronica Lake again.

  I stood by the spa with those imaginary angels back on my shoulders.

  The good angel whined, “Jeremy Daniel Carmichael. ‘Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy . . . . On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.’”

  The fallen angel hopped closer to my left ear and said, “Toga.”

  The good angel continued his speech. “‘For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.’”

  “If you play your cards right, kid,” the wicked angel whispered in the other ear, “she’ll swallow it and that would be heavenly.”

  The good angel was getting angry. “‘You shall not commit adultery.’”

  “It’s not adultery if the husband’s dead,” the bad angel countered.

  Suddenly both angels disappeared. I just stood there, watching the spa waters splash on Connie.

  I quickly undressed to join her.

  She gasped. “Honey, you’re lookin’ good these days. Your back is all healed. And you’re getting some muscles. You been working out? If those scars on your face go away, pretty soon you’ll be beatin’ the women off, and I don’t mean with a stick.”

  I sat down next to her.

  The warm, swirling waters gurgled as she wrapped her arms around me. She whispered, “Come to Mama . . .”

  Something happened to me in a wink and a heartbeat. The waters became ice-cold. I was suddenly chilled to the bone. I started shivering, my teeth chattering. I was in the middle of a hot tub on a typical sweltering summer day in Dallas when even the mosquitoes are booking flights to Alaska, and I was freezing my ass off. It made no sense.

  “Are you okay?” Connie asked.

  I tried to reply but couldn’t answer—my teeth were banging together so hard, jaws creaking. I couldn’t even see her, the steam in the tub turning into frost smoke so thick you’d expect a pack of half-starved wolves to come creeping out of a snowy forest in it.

  “Jeremy?”

  My body was starting to feel numb. I began losing consciousness, slipping down under the water, under the solid surface of ice.

  Blue. Gray. White on white.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was slumped in a lawn chair. Connie had somehow pulled me out of the tub and wrapped a quilt around me. I was still cold, pins and needles in my arms and legs. The quilt’s material provided some warmth, but it also felt weird again
st my skin. It smelled even worse than it felt.

  I raised myself up to get a better look at my blanket. It was leather but hadn’t been tanned very well. The surface was made of ragged-edged squares and triangles that ranged from peach to yellow to a darker brown. Some of the blanket was smooth and spongy; some was wrinkled and stiff. Parts of it had crosshatched scars, and other parts had what appeared to be fine hairs clinging to it. When I found a patch with a nipple on it, I started gagging and heaving at the same time. I felt my own scars and nipples writhing like worms on a hot sidewalk.

  I tossed the quilt off me. I launched off the chair and vomited meat chunks, creamed-corn niblets, pecans, and tequila onto the grass. I shivered again but would have rather died from hypothermia than have that disgusting thing on me.

  “Jesus, Jeremy.” Connie hurried over to me, using a paper towel to wipe puke off my chin. “You get food poisoning off my steak?”

  I pointed at the blanket. “What the fuck is that thing?”

  She glanced at it. “It’s a quilt Garth made for me when he was in Vietnam. I always kept it out in the shed. I didn’t want Frank to find it, ’cause he was so jealous.”

  “It’s . . .” I paused, grossed out. I’d seen a lot of weird shit in the Land of the Dead, but somehow seeing something so ghastly in a suburban Texas home seemed even worse. I mean, I’d read about soldiers doing this sort of thing. Nazis using skins from Jews to make lampshades and book covers and stuff. And there was that scene out of Apocalypse Now where the guy collected—what was it, ears? But, well, how the fuck did he even get that thing back to the States? Didn’t the government check soldiers for contraband or drugs? “It’s human skin? No problemo.”

  Connie made a face as if trying to keep from laughing. “Yeah, so Garth had a few issues. I’ve never been attracted to ordinary guys.”

  I stared at her as I put my clothes back on. I was a little warmer. But I felt as if I’d been smeared in rancid grease from having that quilt on me. I felt as if all the zombies in the Land of the Dead had just had group sex in a monkey pile, with me as the bottom monkey.

  “Hey, I’m an ordinary guy,” I insisted.

  Now she smiled slyly. “Oh no, you ain’t, baby. I knew soon as we met. I can spot the dark side in a man a mile away.”

  I felt hot and cold. Disoriented as hell. It was the kind of sick you got from being on a binge for days. Mixing whiskey, cheap Blue Nun, and double jalapeño nachos. Rum, Boone’s Farm, and hot fudge sundaes. Absinthe, ecstasy, and Fritos bean dip. And then getting to the nitro state by believing you can headbang and swing dance at the same time.

  I actually staggered as I walked to the driveway.

  “Where are you going?” Connie asked. She probably couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed with me or worried about me.

  “I gotta get out of here,” I said. “Don’t worry. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just don’t feel very good.”

  I opened the car door and aimed myself to make it into the seat. I slid in. Then discovered to my horror that I had just landed on my butt in the jungles of Vietnam.

  I was in the middle of the war. Huey helicopters buzzed overhead like giant mosquitoes, machine-gun fire spewing out the doors. Mosquitoes as fat as cockroaches were all over me, biting down, slurping up sweat and blood. There were worms in my wet boots and beetles in my pockets. It was so fucking hot, worse than the nastiest humid summer day. It was what the inside of a chili pot had to feel like.

  I watched a soldier walk beneath a tree, his rifle ready in his hands, waiting for anything to move. There on a branch above him was a grenade in a tin can, its pin pulled, attached to a trip wire. He brushed the wire and the grenade fell, exploding right on top of him.

  I turned, seeing a .30-caliber machine gun on a tripod, an ammunition belt fed in, and the lever jerked back. There was a VC lying alongside it, about to open up on a patrol of GIs coming through the bushes. Then another American soldier put a round in his head from behind.

  This man bent over the VC, taking a slim knife from his boot.

  “Hey, Garth. Come on,” another soldier called to him from across a patch of waving grass.

  “Just a minute,” he yelled. “Just a minute and about six inches square.”

  This Garth had his nose. A real honker, too. So that’s what it looked like before it got shot off. They couldn’t have missed it—too big a target. His eyes were small and as blue-black as wasps.

  The VC moaned and twitched, obviously still alive. The bullet had only creased the skull, not gone into the brain. He shrieked as Garth tore open his black shirt and began to fillet a patch from the man’s chest, with the nipple in the bull’s-eye of it.

  More helicopters flew overhead, blades sawing at blue sky. Treetops thrashed. Gunfire came from all directions. A plane swooped down low over the enemy and dropped napalm, burning jelly penetrating into the skin, into the blood, into the bone . . .

  Garth bent over another body. Was this one dead or alive?

  In the back of my head I was thinking, Yeah, apocalypse now more than ever. Fetishes and souvenirs. The horror, the horror in mosquito vision, exploding gut-o-vision, shit-blown-out-the-backbone vision.

  “Ooh, niiiiiiiice,” Garth crooned, rubbing a finger against the cheek of a child soldier squirming from a line of fire that practically severed him at the hips. The kid was staring up at him. The tip of his little tongue rested on his chin where he’d bitten it off. “Wait’ll Connie gets a load of this.”

  I was back in Connie’s driveway. Back in the questionably safe confines of my car.

  I was absentmindedly scratching at my arms where there were dozens of red welts from mosquito bites.

  Connie stood inside the house, watching me through the front window. Just watching.

  I turned the key in the ignition and backed out into the street. About three blocks away the radio started playing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through the Jungle.”

  I pulled Monster to the curb and managed to yank the door open before I began vomiting violently again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE TOOTH FAIRY

  One day I felt a need to seek my real family, whoever, whatever, wherever they might be. And so I did.

  I quit my job and left my lover—both were pleasant enough but so predictable, so tiresome—and drove south in a little black car. South seemed very right to me.

  I didn’t bother to say good-bye to the kind imposters who had raised me. I had never felt any real affection from them, the potbellied farmer and his thin, nervous wife. For years they had foisted toys and baseball mitts and footballs and paper routes upon me, hoping to shape me into a regular guy. Yeah, right.

  I drove through a farming community plagued by biting golden beetles. I stayed in a city filled with toy factories. The fumes from the plastic vats reminded me of lilacs. I came across a charming suburb where both the people and the dogs were obese and had yellow eyes.

  When my hair began to fall out, I chewed my nails with worry. I worried more when the nails came loose in my mouth. By the time my dewclaws emerged, I was resigned to—and certainly intrigued by—my various changes.

  I stopped at a restaurant that served raw reptile meat as the specialty of the house. I walked through a cemetery dotted with tombstones of warm green stone. I dallied in a brothel staffed by things that looked like Roswell aliens with tits.

  I was delighted when filigreed gill slits opened up along my jawline. I was drawing closer, closer to my family.

  By this time, the car no longer needed gasoline. I drove naked, and the car simply absorbed the thick golden sweat that poured from my flesh in this so very strange, so utterly Deep South.

  I drove down a muddy lane bordered by dark orange orchids. Huge mosquitoes soared round and round me; their stained glass wings fanned my ridged brow. The little black car sang, “You’re going to see your family, your family, your family . . . wherever they might be.”

  The orchids soon gave way to pale ro
ses with pulsing, veined petals. The lane brought me to a blue-green marble tower. I parked the car and walked up to the tower. I knocked and knocked on a door of coarse black wood.

  The door was answered by an amazing creature. The size and shape of this being changed constantly. It transmogrified, in turns, into a crystal snail, a mouthless old man in a purple silk robe, a praying mantis with the head of a tiger, a bat-winged octopus, a beautiful woman covered with copper scales . . . and more, more, more.

  “Daddy?” I whispered.

  The creature studied me through eyes on fleshy stalks. Through glistening compound eyes. Through frantic pink rabbit eyes. “Of course not,” it murmured slowly, sleepily. “I’m your brother.”

  I heard movement within the tower, a pattering of countless feet. The pattering quickened and grew louder, then thunderous. My brother stepped aside just as my daddy reached the door.

  An opalescent paw grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the tower. I wanted to gaze into my daddy’s eyes and tell him how happy I was to be with him, to be home, to be safe, to be accepted at last, at last, at last. But his was a face of great complexity, and I could not find his eyes.

  Then my brother closed the tower door behind me, sealing us in family darkness.

  I woke up in a sweat. But I don’t think it was because of the dream, though it had been as weird as hell. I have no idea why I’d dream about my dad and stepmother being imposters. Well, maybe my stepmother was sort of an imposter—not the real thing—but I didn’t have any problems with that. I knew I wasn’t adopted; I looked too much like my dad and a little like my real mother, too. This wasn’t like any of my visions in the Land of the Dead. This was more of a . . . what? The Land beyond the Land of the Dead? Mega Oz? Follow the yellow brick road right off the map into the place where you reeeeally belong?

  Brother. Was that strange, shifting creature supposed to be Peter, a long-forgotten dead baby? That bothered me, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. I don’t think it was Peter or this life at all. It was like I was having a memory of a previous existence. Or an existence to come.