Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  A skeleton man dove off a high diving board into the swimming pool, and his bones scattered across the water on impact.

  A zombie lady ran on a treadmill. I’d arrived just in time to watch her left leg fall off.

  There were iron-maiden saunas and hot tubs filled with boiling oil.

  “Hey, breather, do you want to be my spotter?”

  I turned around and saw Garth, still noseless and wearing only pajama bottoms. A big patch of skull was missing on one side of his head.

  I followed him to the barbell bench. I stood over him, staring at the open cavity on his face.

  “This is great for working off the flab,” Garth said. “You don’t want to be stuck with deadweight.”

  I just kept staring at him.

  “It’s a fucking joke, man,” Garth said. “Lighten up.”

  He lifted the weights over his head about forty times. He looked exhausted but he wasn’t panting. That’s for us breathers.

  “You know, you look a lot like him,” Garth said, wiping sweat and a bit of rotted skin, too, from his face with a towel.

  “Who?”

  “Frank. Who else?”

  I built up enough nerve to ask, “So, what’s the story with him? Why did he kill himself?”

  “I don’t know the whole story,” Garth said, sitting up. “Just some. Frank was the king of South Dallas. He had it all going on down here. Girls, money, drugs. There were legends about him on the street. The kind of things that poor mothers in South Dallas would tell their babies in their cradles, like stories about the boogeyman. But I’m kinda jumping ahead of myself. You have time to hear the whole thing?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. It’s not like I have any appointments down here.”

  He wheezed out a dry laugh. “Yeah, I guess not. Well, after getting back from Nam, I didn’t get many VA benefits, and any job I landed didn’t pay worth shit, either. Things were fucked for me. I mean, look at this face. Not exactly the kind of look folks wanted to see hanging around the water cooler, ya know?

  “When I came back to the States, I found out Connie had gotten hitched to a cop. A fucking cop. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been living in a fleabag apartment in South Dallas. I drifted from girl to girl, job to job. Got some pity fucks—that’s the one good thing about being a veteran. The only good thing, as far as I could tell.

  “Eventually I fell in love with Diane. She was a waitress at an Italian place, and after three weeks of dating, we got married. We were married about seven years. The first two were great, the next two were okay, and the last three were pure hell. Diane wanted a divorce. I didn’t have many friends, so Connie helped me through the bad times.”

  “Were you sleeping with her?”

  “No. But I was sleeping with Fiona Bloom, and that was my big mistake.”

  “Fiona . . .” That name again.

  “Diane didn’t want to do it anymore,” Garth said. “It was like one day she realized she was married to a guy without a nose. Go figure. So I started going to hookers, and one of my favorites was Fiona. She was beautiful. Long dark hair. Pretty blue eyes. Fiona was Frank’s girl. But things had taken a bad turn after he got cancer.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Prostate cancer. He lost his hair and even his teeth from the radiation and chemotherapy.”

  Well, that explained a lot. Though I suppose I’d already had it figured out. Slowly but surely, I was turning into Frank.

  “The chemo also gave him constant nausea and vomiting,” Garth added. “He lost his appetite and a lot of weight. Thing is, it didn’t even fix the cancer. He was turning into a wreck.”

  I found that odd, considering the weight I’d gained. Frank must have been a really big man.

  “Frank had kept money, drugs, and cars from his drug arrests. He didn’t turn them in. Let the criminals go but kept the goods. He’d built a small fortune. But that changed after the cancer. He was spending too much time and money in the hospital, instead of on the streets. To make matters worse, another gang started moving in on his turf.

  “Maybe he had a crummy health insurance plan. Or maybe he’d turned down having the insurance premiums deducted from his paycheck. A goofy macho bastard like that—he probably thought he’d live forever. Connie never told me the whole story of what was happening.

  “His girls and dealers were getting nervous. Fiona was busted for soliciting. She plea-bargained, agreed to get wired and bust Frank. But of course Frank found out about it. You can’t keep cop secrets from cops. So he fucked her up pretty bad. Black eye, bloody lip, maybe busted ribs. She came over to my place, frightened to death. Said she was going to her apartment and get some stuff and stay with a cousin in California. She never made it back to her apartment.

  “Internal Affairs was trailing Frank. They had some proof but not enough. That night he broke into my apartment at gunpoint and took me to his garage. He’d had a lot to drink, and he still had it in his head that I was fucking Connie. He put a gun to my head and blew my brains to kingdom come.”

  I had seen this already, so I wasn’t too surprised.

  “On the way to the garage, he told me, ‘You’re going to be my scapegoat, boy. I’m going to blame everything on you. Then I’ll say you were executed by the Vietnamese Mafia. That’ll get Internal Affairs off my ass.’ I guess that’s what he did. But it turns out, I died for nothing. He killed himself before the cancer could do him in.”

  I thought about what Garth had said. Then I asked, “So why am I here?”

  “Wow, you don’t get it, man,” Garth said, surprised. “Frank is seeping into your body more and more. He’s trickling into you, and trickles have a funny way of turning into floods. He’s a part of you and a part of this place, too.”

  “Yeah.” It was all starting to make sense. “That’s why I keep coming back. I mean, I’m driving his car, sleeping with Connie. But wait a minute. I started coming here before I even met Connie. I didn’t have any connection to him before that.”

  Garth stared at me, a puzzled look plastered on his ridiculous face. “You sure about that? I mean, are you really sure?”

  “I guess”—I blinked, and in that split second, I found myself back in Connie’s bedroom, my hand on the doorknob—“not.”

  I opened the door and went into the dark hallway.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  LOVE ME AS IF—

  It was still night; I had no idea what time. I walked into the living room. Connie had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the TV, which was showing an infomercial for a machine that drained the grease off meat while it cooked it.

  I stood over Connie. “Come on. Let’s get you into bed.”

  She grunted and opened one eye halfway. “Nah, I’m gonna stay here. I’m fine.” Then she smiled sleepily. “Unless you want to have a little fun.”

  “Yeah, let’s have some fun.”

  With a dreamy nod, she pulled herself to her feet and trudged to the bedroom, shedding clothes along the way. That was one good thing about Connie. She was always ready for action, even when she was semiconscious.

  We were both naked by the time she reached the bed. She flung herself onto the mattress and spread her legs. “Send me off to dreamland, baby,” she cooed.

  I climbed into the bed and onto her. I started thrusting myself between her open thighs. Yep, time to try out the new dick.

  Seemed to work perfectly fine.

  Connie murmured something else. I wasn’t sure if it was in pleasure or pain. She fell fast asleep half a minute later, but I kept right on doin’ what I was there to do.

  Suddenly I was on top of somebody else—Fiona, the dead blue lady. We were both naked on a sofa in a dank basement. I didn’t know where the hell I was. It didn’t matter.

  Fiona stuck her cold tongue inside my warm mouth. It tasted like rotten meat and rightly so. She tightened her legs around me, and cockroaches scittered out of cracks in her sides. It didn’t matter.

  “Love me as if I were alive,
” Fiona moaned.

  Then I was no longer making love to either Fiona or Connie.

  I was driving Monster. Naked. In the middle of a desert highway. I pushed the accelerator down harder, but instead of the engine’s triumphant roar, the car moaned like Fiona had moments before. The car was even more turned on than she had been. I was getting hard myself. I pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor; Monster moaned with delirious approval. I was getting more turned on than a drunken frat boy visiting a strip club for the first time.

  I kept pushing the gas pedal harder and harder. I wasn’t sure how fast I was going, because the speedometer’s needle had busted off. I was pushing the car far past its Plymouth factory standards. I was going so fast, the landscape was a swirl of color and sound.

  Then the whole breakneck hyperdrive stopped as I came inside Connie.

  “Yeah, baby,” she muttered between snores. “Oooh yeah.”

  The next morning, Connie decided to go to the Canton flea market.

  I’d always thought that was a stupid name for an outdoor bazaar. I mean, they don’t sell tiny bloodsucking insects. Anyway, Canton’s is one of the biggest flea markets in the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area. It is so big that people can never see it all in one day and often get lost. It has several large buildings, a few were even air-conditioned, as well as many acres of open stalls.

  That’s where Connie was, and she would be there for hours. And that was okay. I needed the time alone. I didn’t have to work and didn’t have any therapy or anything else scheduled, so I finally had a free day to just putter around the house.

  I slipped on my gray shorts and a KDBN 93.3 FM The Bone T-shirt.

  KDBN was a station in town started by some former employees of KZPS, and it was becoming very popular. Lots of people thought other classic rock radio stations were wimpy by comparison. I listened to The Bone KDBN almost all the time, but the BOSS 95.5 was my favorite flip station. A flip station is sort of like channel surfing with the remote while watching TV. It’s what you flip to when your usual station is playing crap.

  When BOSS played those drunken good ole boys Lynyrd Skynyrd—or Boston, bland corporate rock by Northern eggheads, overblown and overplayed—I would flip it back to The Bone.

  The Bone was still my number one choice. I listened to the radio for a bit that morning and heard, “This is Beau Roberts in the Bonestar State on the New 93.3 Bone. Classic Texas rock that really rocks.” Beau said the 93.3 as “ninety-three-three.”

  It wasn’t all Texas rock on The Bone, but it was the best of everything, never anything limp or sappy, never any Elton John or softies like that. They even had a group of chesty ladies who they used in their commercials and on-site promotions at places like Hooters.

  I’d won the T-shirt at Hooters, but that wasn’t where I usually went. The bar I visited the most was Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth. They used to be a simple country bar, but they expanded the place until it was enormous, with fourteen stages. Many tourists went there as well as locals. The place was so huge, if you went in with a friend and got separated, you might never find them. See? Everything really is bigger in Texas, from flea markets to bars.

  After a while I got tired of the radio, so I made my way to the basement and played a few games of pool. I’m an adequate pool player. Texas Slim here would be no match for Minnesota Fats. Connie had a 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox, like something off Happy Days. The coin slot had been taken out, so all you had to do was pick the selections and get the tunes for free. Free like everything around Connie’s place. Free music. Free rent. Free food. Free sex.

  I looked at the selections—entirely country and western. Country music isn’t my all-time favorite, but it’s everywhere in Texas, like blues music in Chicago or zydeco music in New Orleans or grunge in Seattle.

  I prefer the older country music, not the watered-down pop crap that is called “new” country, like the old country was broken and needed to be fixed.

  I selected Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” That was followed by more Cash songs: “I Walk the Line,” “Big River,” “Folsom Prison Blues.” All that country music was giving me the urge to drink. Something about those twangy guitars, drawling vocals, and heartache lyrics made a person thirsty for beer or whiskey. I walked over to the bar’s refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Bud.

  Hank Williams’s “There’s a Tear in My Beer” started playing. How appropriate. Maybe I needed a good cry in my brew. It was free beer, too. Connie had bought a case yesterday and only finished half of it. What’s the best kind of beer? Free beer.

  More beer and Hank Williams songs followed: “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” “Hey, Good Lookin’.” And right in the middle of “Honky Tonk Blues,” I struck the cue ball so hard it flew off the table and hit a nearby cabinet, and the door flew open. Some papers and folders fell on the floor.

  When I picked the ball up, I saw a dusty scrapbook that had the word private written on the cover in black marker. I wiped some of the dust off the cover. It hadn’t been opened in years. So of course I had to open it. Writing private on the cover of anything is practically an invitation to read what’s inside. Hell, what kind of person wouldn’t look inside a scrapbook marked private?

  An abused wife, maybe. One with a psycho cop husband, perhaps. Yeah, she’d probably leave the damned thing alone. She’d be afraid to touch it. After all, it was . . . private.

  On the first page was a newspaper clipping with the headline: Sweet Patience Man Drowns in Red River. Sweet Patience. Those words rang a bell. A distant one.

  I gave the story a quick read. Apparently Frank Edmondson’s dad, Earl, had drowned while fishing with his son. Earl had chugged too many beers and had fallen overboard. He was too drunk to swim so he drowned.

  I turned the page.

  Maddy Edmondson Killed at Carnival.

  I saw the black-and-white photo of Maddy smiling. It was a face I knew.

  From my childhood.

  It was the face of the woman I’d fallen on, straight out of the Ferris wheel, killing her instantly.

  I couldn’t fucking believe it. She’d been married to Frank. It almost seemed impossible. Then it started to make some kind of sense.

  I’d accidentally killed her. Frank had killed himself in the Barracuda.

  And now I was driving his car, playing pool in his basement, drinking beer out of his fridge, and of course, screwing his second wife.

  It seemed like an incestuous dysfunctional family.

  I looked through the rest of the pages, dreading what I might see next.

  Lots of pictures of Frank getting medals and certificates for his police work. Apparently he had been a great cop early in his career.

  But what was this?

  Texas Woman Dies in Hit and Run.

  It was a story about my mother, who had been killed shortly after the Ferris wheel ordeal. What the fuck was that doing in here?

  Even stranger, the scrapbook also held a copy of my mom’s autopsy report and all kinds of police photos, even a copy of the police report.

  I turned more pages and felt like throwing up. Not because I was looking at anything nauseating, but because I was looking at things that had no business being here. Not in a million years.

  Pages and pages of photos of . . . me.

  Newspaper clippings. A picture from an old yearbook. Part of a poster for my band Second Banana. Polaroids of me and Sheryl, coming out of restaurants. There was even one of me and Moose walking into a record store. Police photos of my crashed car and a copy of the police report about my accident. More and more pictures from my past. A grainy black-and-white photo of me, my parents, and Grandma when I was about five. How the fuck did he get that one? I hadn’t even seen it before.

  I flipped through more pages. I found a newspaper story about Garth being killed by the Vietnamese Mafia and a story about a hooker who’d overdosed on drugs. By the photo I could tell it was Fiona Bloom.

  I had to study this s
crapbook later. Maybe at a library. Connie never went to one of those. My mind felt like it was turning in crazy circles like an out-of-control merry-go-round.

  I closed the book and decided to hide it in Monster’s trunk. So I carried it out to the garage.

  When I opened the trunk, I saw a faint reddish glow. It was coming from a metal bar wedged behind the spare tire. The bar had come with the car, and before that day, I’d never given it a moment of thought. It was one of those things you noticed and then immediately forgot, like a bird on a tree branch or a crushed beer can in a parking lot.

  So why was the bar glowing?

  I touched the bar with a fingertip; it wasn’t hot, though the glow made me think that it might have been. I pulled it out of the trunk. It looked vaguely familiar. Another distant bell, tolling out doom . . . doom . . . dooom.

  And at that moment—

  I relived the whole carnival incident from my childhood. I was on the Ferris wheel, having fun with my toy horse, not really thinking about anything. Then the safety bar broke, and I fell into the dark sky, free-falling like a brown bat or a black crow, until I fell onto Maddy and heard the sickening sound of her back breaking.

  I experienced physical pain just thinking about it again. My whole body felt like it had been run over by a semi.

  That fucking safety bar.

  That’s what I was holding in my hands.

  So why had it been in the back of my car?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SEND IN THE CLOWNS

  That night I was driving around and saw an old bar I hadn’t been in for a while: the Sweet Charlotte. I’d gone there with Moose a few times because the booze was cheap, but eventually we’d realized all the chicks were more like dried-up old hens. I had only a few bucks on me, and I wasn’t looking for female companionship, especially of the geriatric variety, so I figured it was time to say hello to Sweet Charlotte once again.

  The gap-toothed old man behind the bar squinted at me when I came through the door. “Well, if it isn’t old what’s his name. You sure look older, though. Has it been that long? You used to come here with some big ox. That was his name, wasn’t it? Ox?”