And if life’s so fragile, I thought, putting up my thumb along old reliable Route 66 somewhere outside a town in Ohio, how come we cling to it? Why not think of life as lightly as we think of a snot rag?
Truth is, some of us do.
A Cadillac de Ville, four-door limo style, once chocolate brown but now more the shade of dried mud, veered toward me and hit the berm, splashing gravel as it skidded to a stop. I picked up my backpack and trotted over. Opening the front passenger door, I bent down to look in. My breath clouded now. Snowflakes fell, just a few so far. It would be a blizzard the diner’s radio had said.
She was older than I am. Small, with a weathered face and sun-streaked brown hair. Her smile melted years off her. Her eyes looked lively. “Where you headed?” she asked in a smoke and whisky voice.
“More away than toward,” I said. “Can you take me maybe to the next town, ma’am?”
“Ooh, ma’am, is it? A polite one. Sure, hon, hop in. I can take you as far as the border, if you want.”
Borders. Lines to be respected. Crossed.
“Sounds good. Thanks.” As I slid in and set my backpack on the floor between my legs, I caught a whiff of something. It was bitter but sweet. My nose itched.
“Patchouli,” she said. “Wards off demons.”
“It’s nice,” I said, wondering if I meant it, then wondering about which part of what she’d said alerted me to possible lies.
“It’s retro. Sixties, they tell me.” She spoke easily, her voice edged with roughness but still warm. “Not that I remember them. If you remember them, you weren’t part of them, huh?” She laughed back in her throat but with good humor. “Not that I’m old enough anyways.”
Nervous, I thought. Drawing attention to her age meant she wanted me not to notice. She’s breaking the ice. I should say some things, put her at ease. “Well, ma’am, I’m not old enough either but I’ll tell you, I read about those years, and I think it was a shame, what Nixon did. Seems to be how power works, though.”
She nodded and avoided a pot hole I had not seen coming. She knew the area, I realized. Drove it often. “You live around here? I mean, you don’t hafta go out of your way for me. Border’s a ways off.”
“I go back and forth a lot.” Her body, under the hoodie, sweat shirt, jeans, and work boots, looked lean from work. Some women take good care of their bodies. For others, it’s the other way around.
I thought about the coasts. “Don’t we all?”
She laughed. “Looking for some work?”
“I do odd jobs when I need money. Doesn’t come up often. Got used to being on my own.”
“What do you do for food?”
“Dumpster dive.” I said it proudly, like I’d discovered it, even though I’d last eaten in a diner favored by long-haul truckers. “You’d be surprised how good you can eat from what gets thrown away.”
“I guess I would.”
“I wonder if that’s what manna from heaven really was: Wasted, discarded food from midden heaps.”
She glanced at me, her frown one of assessment, but said nothing.
I wondered if I had revealed too much of my thoughtful side. Many did not like intelligence, I’d found.
To cover, I switched from the abstract to the concrete. Opening a pocket on my backpack, I pulled out a twenty dollar bill. I set it on the dash. “For gas.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary. Please. I offered you a ride. It’s fine. It’s on the house.”
“No, it’s all right. Money’s tight these days, gas costs money, and I don’t have much use for it.”
She drove for a few moments as if I weren’t there. I felt her go away and come back. Then she nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Not a problem.” And it wasn’t. Money, of all things, is always there for the taking, wherever you look. It’s the real stuff that’s getting hard to find, like love, loyalty, and joy. And don’t even mention faith, hope, and charity. Those sisters are long gone on permanent vacation, probably to some secret location. Maybe they fled to an undiscovered village in a jungle. A jungle yet to be slash-burned for cattle pens so the rich can choke down more hamburgers and hasten their own coronaries. Or maybe they’re in a gulag, there are so many these days, or pirates have them in the brig of a black ship. Wherever they are, they’re likely being tortured to death, ground up to feed the roses or sharks.
People are strange and hate themselves.
We drove for a while in silence.
As we crossed a rickety bridge she asked if I liked country music. I hate it with a passion because it reminds me of my father pounding my mother to a pulp to the whine of steel guitars and nasal accents but said, “Sure,” and she turned on the radio. It was set to a station that played mostly old stuff like Cash, Owens, and Pride. Their songs I liked. They spoke about real people, real situations. They were not all plastic cowboy hats, plastic hair, and plastic emotions.
I still prefer Metallica and Marilyn Manson, though. Blunt, strong, and unflinching are the ways to sing. Make a joyous noise unto the nothingness. Isn’t that what some book of holes said? Cry in the wilderness.
Yes, the wilderness is indifferent to suffering, but no one wants to hear you whine. Suffering in wilderness is the next best thing to suffering in silence. Ask society.
“How are you going to kill me?” she asked then, slowing and putting on her right turn signal. She drove off the highway, bumping the car down off the verge onto a dirt road that scraped across barren fields toward a stand of trees in middle distance blur.
“How—what?” I was startled but also hurt. Did I seem such a beast?
“It’s okay to tell me. I won’t fight. Unless you need me to. I know how men can be.”
I stared at her, seeing how pretty she might once have been, seventeen and confident. She had retained the confidence but the years had burdened her with a heavy radiance, a glow like weight. She had gravitas that half-blinded. She was hard to get a good look at.
Reaching the trees, I felt their shadows crowd the car into a held breath. It was not a bright day, and those woods blocked any chance of one. Dense underbrush moved without wind. Bark peeled like leper skin. Leaves clotted the rutted path she drove on. The heavy old car bottomed out a few times as if crushed from above. I thought about the Bataan Death March, how fallen people had been flattened into the ground.
She gunned it over the high spots, each time with a smirk. Maybe it was a cringe.
“It’s just up here,” she said, gesturing with her face, keeping her hands on the wheel.
I expected a rustic hunter’s cabin, or maybe a squatter’s shack made of mismatched scrap wood, parts of old signs, and duct tape sticky and peeling like a hobo’s awful luck. Instead I saw a squat white building with a steeple and thought, holy shit, a church.
It slouched, its stained glass dull from years without care, but still, there it stood proclaiming the revelatory word of real estate for an absentee landlord.
She pulled up, looked over at me, and smiled as she cut the engine. She left the keys in the ignition. “You can have the car, after.” She got out.
My scalp tingled. When I opened my door my legs did not at first respond. My heart beat fast. Shutting the car door, I trotted to catch up to her—second time that day, I realized—as she mounted the seven steps leading to the high, narrow doors.
She glanced back, gave me another smile that was almost coy. If it had not also been challenging it might have stiffened me. She pushed open the doors. I reached her and we both walked in, she with a purpose, me from inertia.
We swim in slipstreams, drawn by any passing ship.
“What makes you think I’m the kind of guy who’d do a thing like that?” I asked. “Like what you’re asking.”
My voice echoed, and I winced at its aural slap. It felt like a rebuke. I was a little boy shouting out in church. Heads turned, eyes glared at me.
Keep them in my head, I thought. Those memories are no good if they get loose.
This church was empty. Some of the pews lay canted or fallen. All were grimy. On the wall behind the altar cobwebs made the crucifix into a Celtic cross or maybe a guilt-catcher. The carved dead man hung cocooned. Spider Christ, I thought.
“He’s not going anywhere,” she said, laughing.
I watched her the way you’d watch a rabid dog. She stood her chosen ground in work clothes, her hair loose, her hands empty. “How will you kill me?”
I looked away from her gaze. “Why would I kill you?”
“Someone has to.”
“Maybe, but not me. I don’t have to do anything. So why me?”
She just smiled.
“Wrong place, wrong time, is that it? Story of my life, huh?” My chuckle conveyed no mirth.
She stared and smiled, calm and steady. “Purity shows through skin. Did you know that? Here.” She started taking off her clothes.
“Wait.”
She did not wait and soon stood naked. “See the glow? That’s purity. I’m old but I’m a virgin.”
“Fine by me.” Truth was she looked pretty good for being older. Belly sagged a little but her breasts were small and shaped well, and her thighs and ass seemed tight. She was muscular, lean.
Yeah, I could be with that, a voice in my head said.
She smiled bigger. Had she heard my thoughts?
My heart pounded enough to make me twitch as she approached me. “Go ahead.” She took my right hand and closed the fingers, folded down the thumb. “Hit me as hard as you can. Hit me in the throat. Break my jaw. I’m a woman, but you’re a man.”
“Lady, damn it.” I stepped back and tripped on the edge of a pew. As I flung my arms up to grab for balance, one of them struck her an uppercut under her chin. She spun back and fell down.
“Oh, god yes,” she said.
My arm ached where I’d hit her. I got up and stood over her.
“Kick me. Stomp my throat. Kick my guts out. You can kick me in the ass, in the teeth. Think how good it feels to do that. Think how you’ve always wanted to.”
Shivering, I raised my hands, palms out. “Look, I’m not into this, whatever it is.” There was a brighter glow coming off her now to rival the moonlight. It made me a little dizzy, a little breathless. “If we could just—”
“You can fuck me if you want. As long as you kill me after. Or during, or even before, I don’t care.” She opened her arms and legs and smiled. It was a sweet smile, no guile. She looked like she genuinely wanted me.
I was so scared a few drops of urine dribbled from me, marking my jeans, and yet I wanted her somehow. Sexuality was older than any of our rules and guidelines. Older than our feelings. It takes over.
“You see?” She caressed herself. “All yours.”
My body reacted even if I did not, especially when she half-closed her eyes and reached down to run a finger along her labia, bottom to top, slowly.
“See how clean I am? Laser.”
She would be smoother than the silk of inside thigh skin, my voice said. One of my voices. Maybe it was hers, in my head already. I felt pressure from her gaze.
“Lady, please. Get dressed. Let’s get out of here.” I sounded like a scared little boy now, and it angered me. I took a step away from her.
A growl sounded from the altar.
Dog? Raccoon? Could a bear have mistaken this old church as a good place to hibernate?
Was it winter? I shivered again. My breath made clouds that evaporated. My cloth coat from a Goodwill store had snowflakes on it from outside. They had not melted.
Another growl swiped everything out of my mind but alertness and a tinge of fear. I wanted to run. Instead, I watched her go to the altar, walk around it, and shove the podium over. It crashed and rolled to one side exactly like a guy in a bar fight going down unconscious.
“What the hell?”
“Gotta show them who’s boss,” she said.
“Show who? What are you talking about?”
“Relic demons. Guess my patchouli is wearing off. Want to run out to the car and get the bottle from the glove compartment?”
Okay, she’s crazy, my voice said. Naked or not, and as small as she was, she scared me. “I’m outta here. You’re a head case, lady.”
Another growl, louder and longer, stopped me.
“It doesn’t like when you move,” she said. “Can’t you see it?”
What do you say to a crazy naked lady and her invisible demon? “I can hear it,” I said.
“That’s a good start.”
She watched me for a moment. I watched her. I wondered if she felt the cold. She did not shiver. Her nipples were pert though. Then I noticed her breath did not cloud, either. How could that be? Was she cold inside and out already?
“Kill me and he’ll go away.”
Back to that again. “I don’t want to kill you.”
“Fuck me, then.”
“No, lady. Look, no offense.”
“My name’s Clara Mitchell.”
Hell of a time to introduce herself, I thought.
Time stretched or tilted. Stained glass windows with dust cataracts dimmed as dark finished itself off outside. Wind blasted the church, rocked the steeple. Blizzard’s hitting, I thought. We might be buried in here.
She leaped at me, fingers clawed, eyes flashing. Her mouth was open. She tried to bite me as I slapped her aside.
I pushed her harder the next time she came for me. She moved so fast I barely had time to react. I felt cornered even though I stood in relatively open space.
Her fury subsided as quickly as it had pounced. Her gaze roamed the far reaches of the church where shadows pulsed like sacs of spider eggs. When her eyes focused on something I could not see, she smiled.
Creeped me out.
Shaking, I sat on a pew. It creaked but held. I panted, adrenaline ebbing now. My chest hurt. My hands and feet tingled.
“Tie me up and burn the church down around me,” she said then. “Fire cleanses.”
“I thought you said you’re pure.”
“You can see it glow.” She touched her body again, ran her hands over it. Her nipples hardened. A blush formed at the base of her throat and spread. “I love how flesh feels.”
Still her breath did not cloud.
Mine did.
I felt like I was on Stephen King’s idea of a Candid Camera revival. Or that Scare Tactics show, only with better production value and on cable, for the nudity. It was faintly ridiculous and altogether frightening.
I started to tell her something, but I giggled instead. The sound shocked me but also struck me funny. My voice had gone high-pitched, wild. I laughed until I could not stand straight. I was trying to deal with too much at once. It was cutting me down to splinters of myself.
Hysteria, I knew.
Not funny, gagging on hysteria. Mean things were getting loose inside me, trying to dig their way out.
Wiping tears from my eyes, I caught my breath and stood up again. What the hell? I had been bent over slapping my thighs and vomiting laughter as if it were poison. I’d been braying like a donkey on acid. I’d fallen over, sprawled on the floor, an ache in my right shoulder, curled into a fetal ball moaning out laughs I did not have breath for. I’d been gasping, clenched and tortured by hysterical giggles that left my ribs bruised, my lungs quivering, and my head aching.
Her crazy was seeping into me, I thought. Maybe I breathed it in, or maybe she sent out crazy waves.
I had to get out of there.
I took a shaky step and felt abandoned. I looked for the woman, the naked Clara Mitchell, and saw nothing in the church but debris, cobwebs, and my own breath. The small clouds I made were luminescent in the faint light still filtering through the storm and dusty stained glass. Her puddle of clothes was gone.
The sky rumbled, and I thought about thunder snow. An omen, one of my voices told me.
At the tall, narrow doors I glanced out and saw the dirt path covered by a foot of snow. No car, no tracks. Had I pass
ed out? Had she driven off while I lay gasping? Wouldn’t I have heard the car? How much time had stepped over me?
Trees groaned under the weight of snow. I heard branches cracking. Falls of snow were snatched by winds playing tag through the trees. These white flails looked like ghosts dying all over again. I felt sorry they were being shredded.
Shivering, I closed the doors and turned back to the debris. Going to the altar area, I broke wood from the podium and moved the empty font. It was ceramic, about the size of a bird bath. I filled it with crumpled hymnal pages to light a fire. I sat on a carved wooden chair and huddled at my bowl of light and heat, feeding it now and then with pieces of wood I broke off the pews and altar.
My stomach echoed the sky, then gave a long moan, like one of those snow ghosts lamenting its brief, meaningless flight.
I opened a tin of beans from my backpack and set it at the edge of the fire. When the beans warmed I ate them slowly, savoring each bean.
As I chewed I thought about the woman. Where had she gone? The storm was bad. Roads would be impassable. It was no night to be driving. Would she end up in the ditch? Or maybe she already had. Time was not behaving well for me.
I was dozing when she came back in. Still naked, no snow or ice on her, not blue from the cold, and glowing the brighter in the dark church.
“Oh, you have a fire going,” she said. “Good.”
“You hungry?”
“Not anymore.” Her smile was wistful, a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth. “It could have been you.”
I nodded. “Want to sit by me and warm up?”
“Is that how you’re going to kill me?”
“Yeah.” I nodded again. “Sure.” What else could I say? “That’s how I’m gonna kill you.”
“Okay,” she said. I watched her walk like a cat toward me, soundless, naked. She stopped so close to me I could have kissed her belly without tilting my head. Her fingers combed through my hair, sending a cascade of tingles down my spine, into my groin.
When she pushed at my forehead, I lay back, obedient as a little boy with his mommy.
Deep Cuts Page 5
