The Other Side of Death

by Judith Van GIeson

  The car that was passing me on the way up La Bajada wasn’t a good car, it was a familiar-looking junker, a big gray American model that probably had a Garfield clawing at the window, although it was too dark out for me to see. Not a real low rider, it just naturally hung down almost far enough to scrape the highway. Still, it was passing me, which some people would consider an insult. There are people who shoot each other over things like this, but I took it calmly. What the heck, the legger wasn’t really my car anyway, just a rental. I let the junker have its little victory, but I got pissed when it cut me off and slowed down so I was faced with the choice of creeping along behind it or passing. Creeping isn’t an option I like to consider so I swung into the passing lane, stepped on the gas. “Come on, legger,” I coaxed, “get yourself in motion.” But just as I’d come to expect, it hesitated. Meanwhile the junker—which must have had a clutch and real gears—sped up, burned rubber and climbed over the top of La Bajada. The legger finally brought its attention back to the highway and went into passing mode, but it was too late, the junker was gone, another macho victory won.

  Going down La Bajada was an improvement. Even the legger could speed downhill. I let it run, around the curves, down the dip, past the place where the pink cliffs rise from the arroyo. In the flat spot across the wash the rent-a-Ford headlights picked out a parked car poorly concealed by a couple of scrawny piñons. In the unlikely event a policeman was out patrolling I-25, I checked my speedometer—eighty—and slowed down. The waiting car pulled out behind me as I passed. There wasn’t any blue light blinking from its roof or its dashboard either. It followed right along on my tail while I scrupulously obeyed the speed limit of sixty-five, and then, just to make sure I knew it was there, turned on the high beams. They weren’t as bright as the A-bomb test sites where the scientists looked through their own skin and saw their bones, but bright enough to make me aware of the fragility of my skeletal structure. There wasn’t anything I could do about it but keep on driving. To stop alongside the highway with someone behind me that I couldn’t see didn’t strike me as wise. LadySmiths were no good blind. We happened to be going up an incline and I couldn’t go any faster. I leaned forward to avoid the blinding reflection from the rearview mirror. The move was probably visible to the person behind me, who was beginning to feel like a predator with me as the prey. We moved along like this testing nerves, but I guessed mine were stronger, because the junker picked up speed and passed me. I slowed down and let it go, watching the taillights move into the distance and disappear over an incline.

  I’d been concentrating so hard on avoiding the high beams that I wasn’t paying attention to where I was. An exit was coming up. There aren’t many on this stretch of highway and few of them offer services. When you leave Albuquerque or Santa Fe you have to make sure you have enough gas to get to the other place, because there’s nowhere to buy it in between. Experience indicated the junker would be waiting down the road to continue the chase, so I made a snap decision and took the exit. There were no highways leading to Santo Domingo Pueblo or Los Alamos here. I happened to have taken Budaghers, the exit to nowhere. I wasn’t going far on this road, but ahead of me on the interstate lurked a full-moon crazy, so I decided to wait it out. The junker’s driver would eventually get tired and move on, it wouldn’t be coming back this way, anyhow. Maybe a caravan would come along that I could follow for protection, or maybe I would just stay here and wait for daylight and the pack of commuters. I had LadySmith, my personal protection, to get me through the night. I drove a couple of hundred feet to the Day-Glo fence that marked the end of the road and the beginning of desert, parked, turned off the lights and engine, put the car keys in my pocket, got the LadySmith out of the glove compartment, laid it on the seat and waited.

  Waiting isn’t my forte, but I’ll do it when I have to. For once I wished I had a car phone. I’ve always suspected that people use them to dial the weather so they’ll look good in traffic, but if I had one now I’d call 911, if there was a 911 in a place that doesn’t exist. One way to get help would be to signal with my headlights, but who would get the message? There wasn’t a house or building in the twenty-mile radius I could see. There weren’t even any trees or piñons to hide me from the moon’s light. I was at the top of an incline, visible to anyone who happened to look up from the highway, but no one was likely to. They’d be more interested in where they were going. My vantage, however, gave me a clear view of the interstate, two lanes heading north, two south, white lights coming, red going. The traffic was light in both directions. Although this wasn’t a place I felt at home, it was better than confronting a moving vehicle. Cars are weapons, too, just as deadly as guns.

  I waited. The rhythmic coming and going of lights—red, white; white, red—had a hypnotic effect, not enough to lull me into indifference or sleep, but enough to emphasize the break in the rhythm, whites where there ought to be reds, lights moving north in a southbound lane. Partners of light danced up the interstate, too regular, too evenly spaced, too fast, too bright to be fireflies or peregrinos. Someone was driving up I-25 the wrong way. A car heading south put its brake lights on and swerved to avoid a collision. The full-moon crazy stayed in the fast lane and kept on coming. When the vehicle got to the Budagher’s exit, the driver flicked on the turn signal and pulled off. It was the gesture, maybe, of a compulsive person, but the driver left the signal on and it continued to flash as the car climbed the incline, drove to within about thirty feet of me and stopped. I turned my headlights on when the other car’s went off. The driver got out and began to cross the no man’s land between us in the glare of my high beams. He had draped a sleeping bag around his shoulders like a cape, the kind of cape that makes a boy a myth; its large, ominous shadow billowed and spread behind him. It was Dolby, the cute teenager, who had a junker of his own. I stepped out of the legger, pointed the LadySmith at him.

  “Hey.” He grinned. “Don’t shoot.”

  “Drop the sleeping bag,” I said.

  “I might get cold.”

  “Drop it.”

  “Okay.” He did it, a scrawny boy in a T-shirt and jeans who wore gardening gloves and had a bruise around his elbow.

  “Walk over to my car, turn around, put your hands on the roof.”

  “You’re the boss.” He did as I said, put his hands against the roof and looked down. I walked up close and inspected his arm. Around his right elbow was a tattoo of a spiderweb with an insect in it. “Where’d you get the tattoo?”

  “Guide Line. I heard you went there.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Checker.”

  “You were there, too?”

  “Yeah. After you left I followed you up here. I saw you go to my mom’s.” She was his mother; it seemed like a stretch to call her a mom. “What’d you go see her for?”

  I gripped the gun tight, took a deep breath, plunged in. “Because I want to know what happened the night Lonnie Darmer died. All of it.”

  He looked down at the ground, squirmed and poked the dirt with his shoe. “I don’t remember. I was home, watching TV.”

  “I was in her house that night. I saw you leave with her.” It wasn’t the truth, but it might lead me there.

  “You mighta seen somebody but it wasn’t me.”

  “Who was it then?”

  “Don’t know, maybe my mom’s boyfriend. Coulda been him.”

  “Yeah?” I tightened my grip on the gun.

  He looked up from under his arms with a maybe I’ll tell you, maybe I won’t expression, then he looked down and said, “Coulda been the other guy.”

  “What other guy?”

  “The one she picked up on the street when she came home. That guy got thrown out of his house, see, in his T-shirt, no jacket or nothin’, and Lonnie gave him her sleeping bag to keep him warm.”

  “What time was that?” I asked.

  “Don’t know, you’d have to ask him.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “Three
, maybe.”

  “Did she take him to the ruins with her?”

  “She mighta. She was kind of messed up and she wanted to hike into a cave and light a fire and stay there all night and watch the sun rise and then chant like the Indians did, you know. Don’t know for sure, but I think he went. And after he got up there he’d want her to do somethin’ to him, but she wouldn’t want to, see. It was something his mother, no, his baby-sitter used to do to him. It was his babysitter, pull on him, you know, when he was little, sometimes she tied it to the drawer handle, shut it and pulled it open again. He liked it, but she laughed at him and he didn’t like that. Your friend Lonnie, she wouldn’t do nothin’.” The words were pouring out of him like piss. Maybe he was bragging, maybe he was confessing. I was pointing a gun at him, but it didn’t seem like fear was making him talk.

  I went on asking—I had to. “Did he kill her because she wouldn’t do it?”

  “Don’t know. You’d have to ask him. He didn’t want to hurt her or nothin’, he just wanted to do it his way. She wouldn’t, but I don’t think he killed her. I think he just put the bag over her face because she was crying—like a cat, see—and he hates that. She’d probably be alive today if she’d stopped crying. But he didn’t kill her, he just put the bag over her face and she left.”

  I’d heard what I needed to. I should have shot him then, walked away and argued self-defense, if anybody cared. What was the point of wasting tax money keeping psychopathology like that alive? There was lots more of it around to study; science could proceed without his brain. But I didn’t; I knew Bunny Darmer and everyone else would want their day in court. So, as if I was conducting a routine deposition, I continued the interrogation. “Where did she go?”

  “Into the being of light. That’s what Ci calls it.”

  “Does Ci know about this?”

  “Only what he told her.”

  “Why didn’t Lonnie struggle or fight back?”

  “When she went out of the cave to look at the stars she left her coat. He took her pills, smashed them up and put them in the wine she was drinking so she got pretty messed up. She couldn’t do nothin’ once he put the cape on anyway, see. Nobody can do nothin’ to him and nobody can laugh at him then, either, not his mother, not her boyfriends, nobody. After that he was sittin’ on her and holding it to the ground right over her face so she couldn’t move too much. She jerked around a little and when she was quiet he stood up and did it himself the way he wanted, but on the sleeping bag, see. He didn’t leave her messy or nothin’ and he put her coat over her to keep her warm. She looked like she was sleeping. Maybe she was. Yeah, I think she was sleeping when he left.”

  I only had one more question. “How did he get home?”

  “He walked to the highway and hitched back in the morning. Slept all day when he got home. His mom couldn’t figure out why he was sleepin’ like that. He didn’t hear her boyfriends comin’ and goin’ or nothin’. I know how he did it. You want me to show you?” He looked up from the ground, turned around, faced me.

  “You stay where you are.”

  “It won’t hurt.” He dropped his hands, grinned a grin that had gone the fractional distance from cute to deadly and started walking toward me. “I’m just a kid, see, only sixteen years old. I couldn’t hurt nobody.”

  Sixteen years old and invincible as Batman. Bullets would bounce off him, knives wouldn’t pierce his skin, sixteen years old and a killer. He kept on coming, wanting me, maybe, to kill him. When you’ve got the disease, it doesn’t matter who gets killed, but if that was what he wanted, I wouldn’t do it. I wanted him to pay and pay for what he did. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted to blast away his killer’s grin. I pointed the gun at his legs and pulled the trigger. There wasn’t any explosion, kickback or speeding bullet, just a small, quiet click. I pulled and the trigger clicked again and again. His grin widened and fixed like a manic Garfield. I was stunned stupid by the gun’s failure and he was on me, quicker and stronger than I would have expected. He grabbed my hand, twisted the gun out, pushed me to the ground, knelt down and straddled me. I struggled to get up, he slapped me back with his gloved hand and my head hit the ground so hard it bounced. The malice had spread from his heart to his fingers. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the missing bullets and began inserting them in the chambers one by one. “You shouldn’t have left your window open when you parked your car at Checker’s, see, you shouldn’ta done that. Anybody can get in through an open window. This wouldn’t be happening now, if you hadn’t done that.”

  One inch of window and my death would be all my fault, because with killers like him it’s always what you did that caused it. They may feel sorry—briefly—later, but it’s your fault. You left your windows open or you didn’t; you wore high-heel shoes, you wore Keds. They kill you if you wear a skirt, or Levi’s. They kill you when you cry, when you don’t. They kill you because you’re a twenty-year-old who fucks around, because you’re an eighty-year-old virgin. They kill you if you’re a cat, or a woman, because they have the killing disease, because you get in the way. Killers kill whether you plead, yield or fight back, but at least if you fight back you have a chance to escape.

  He kept the gun pointed at me, and I didn’t move. I waited for my head to stop throbbing and my vision to clear. He got off me and walked over to the legger, dragging a shadow that was ten feet long until he turned the headlights off. The moon’s light made him underbelly pale, but at least it brought him back to human size. I slid my hand in my pocket, felt the car keys there. He picked up the sleeping bag, draped it over his shoulders like the empowering cape he thought it was and began walking back holding the gun on me all the while, but shooting wasn’t his modus operandi, the one that had memories and meaning for him. His MO was the ritualized act of a serial killer, one that was going to turn me into bones beside the highway. Still, hot fear climbed my throat like vomit when he knelt over me and put the gun against my neck.

  “You want to pull it?” He grinned.

  “Get off of me, you little shit.”

  “Hey,” he said. “You shouldn’t talk like that, not to me, see.”

  He had to put the gun somewhere so his hands were free to do their killer work. He stuck it into the waistband of his jeans and then, kneeling on me with his knees pressing my shoulders into the ground, he lifted the cape. This can’t be happening, I thought. It’s a dream. Any minute now I’ll wake up in my bedroom and he’ll be gone. He pulled it over his head and for a long moment he was invincible and we were both in darkness. Then he bunched it up and pressed it over me and me alone, the cape of smothering oblivion. “Get off of me,” I tried to scream, but the words got squashed in my throat. I didn’t give a shit about beings of light or what was on the other side. I was looking at death, black death with every bit of the responsibility, and life was what I wanted, air, light and life. Lonnie, Lonnie, Lonnie, I thought, why didn’t you fight back? His knees pinned my arms to the ground, but my legs were free. I jerked them up, kicked and bucked. There was no technique or plan to it, just fear, adrenaline and a fierce desire to live. I put everything I had into motion. He was in his killing trance, not expecting resistance. I couldn’t reach his body with my kicks but I did throw him off balance. As he put his left hand on the ground to steady himself, my right arm came loose. I reached into my pocket, clutched the car keys in my fist and stabbed at him. He put his hand up to stop me and the keys stabbed his palm. I stabbed again and gouged his face. As he jerked away from me, he dropped the sleeping bag and the gun fell out of his waistband. I lunged at him. He smacked my hand hard, the keys flew out onto the ground and he grabbed them. Then he went for the gun, but I had gotten there first. He knelt on top of the sleeping bag, keys in hand, and stared at me with a dazed comprehension that maybe he, Dolby and Jim were one, that this wasn’t a boy’s game, that I wasn’t his mother, that the gun was in my possession now. He jumped up and began to run. I fired at him and hit his arm, which he clutched to his side. I pu
lled the trigger and grazed his leg, but he continued running crookedly toward his car. I shot the car, blew a front tire. He darted over the incline, heading for the interstate.

  I saved my bullets in case he came back. When I couldn’t see him anymore I crawled over, sat down and leaned against my car. My head was throbbing. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but sit there, try to calm the trembling gun and listen to cars pass like waves on the interstate. After a while a flashlight came over the rise. Whoever was holding it could see me a lot clearer than I could see them, but I was ready to fire.

  “She’ll shoot you, Tomás, if you don’t turn that thing off.”

  The flashlight went out. “Don’t shoot,” Tomás said. “We’re peregrinos on our way to Chimayo. We won’t hurt you.”

  I could see by the moonlight that they were two dumpy guys with a day pack and a water jug. They’d probably been hiking for twenty miles and felt every bit of it.

  “We crossed over the highway and were waiting down there for Tomás’s wife, when we heard the gunshots,” the other guy said. “Then we saw the boy running away.”