by ed. Pela Via
Act of Contrition
by Craig Clevenger
She flared in the dark like some wild animal’s lone eye in my headlights. White sweatshirt and ragged sunbleached hair, a ghost with her thumb to the road. I slowed to the right and stopped just ahead of her. My tires straddled the broken black edge where the dirt shoulder dropped below the asphalt, the car sloping passengerwise like a sinking boat. Its lopsided timing shuddered through the wheel and into my arms. I nursed the gas, nudged the idle back to its center and kept the engine alive. My brake lights bathed the hitcher in blood then she turned white again, stopped at my passenger side and looked back down the road. Maybe somebody else would stop. But she bent to the window and her eyes said she was long past working those odds or any other. Her sunburn ran deep, patches of skin flaking from her face. Lower lip split open and dried to a hardened hairline of blood.
How far you going? she asked.
I named some place. I lied.
Okay. She climbed in and pulled at the door but it pulled back.
Try again. Hinge is real stubborn.
She did. On her third pull I saw headlights in my mirror, a diesel rig snailing around the one-lane curve to my back. Her door was still open when I punched the gas. With no shoulder grade to the road I reckoned maybe six-inches of crumbling curb beneath my chassis. I torqued left onto the highway and scraped my oil pan across a yard of jagged blacktop. A sound I heard through my teeth.
———
Crystal was fifteen and she was my cousin. She wore jean shorts frayed at the top of her thighs, snug like she’d cut off the legs last summer before she started looking the way she did. The way she cocked her hip and bent to scratch her bare foot or chewed a lock of hair tickling her face, oblivious to herself. She caught me looking at her once and I froze, squeezed out a smile with my mouth full of cold meatloaf. She gave no read at all, just picked up the remote and turned her back to me. She caught me a few times after that but never got creeped or let on that she did. But her spell broke anytime she opened her mouth. She was just a kid again, wanting help with a bicycle flat or a ride to the mall.
I pray every day. Crews on the job site got quiet when I came around. Work was drying up and the scarce jobs were going to friends of foremen and subcontractors first. I had to give up my place. I prayed for help. My aunt and uncle had a room and there was lots of development out where they lived. They let me slide on rent, long as I built a new railing for their deck and kept an eye on Crystal from time to time. I prayed more.
The grid went down during a heat wave so the job cut us loose early. I collapsed on the couch with a cold beer and some solitude. It was August, there was no school. My aunt and uncle were gone for the weekend. I heard the back door open and close and there stood Crystal, bronzed from her afternoons in the backyard and smelling like coconut, wearing a two-piece I could ball into my fist. She looked taller in the doorway. Legs and gold hair meeting at her hips where a more modest suit had cast a shadow of pale winter skin. She drifted toward me, strips of wet light shining from her skin and I saw her every movement in quarter time.
Got any more of those? She didn’t sound like a kid this time.
No. These are my last six. Sorry.
She didn’t whine or plead like she did when I turned down certain movie rentals or enforced her bedtime.
I’ll help myself, she said, and stuck her tongue out. She left the room, catwalk-style and I followed the curve of her waist, the shoelace knots at her hips and the stretch of bright yellow fabric in between sliding into itself with each step. A minute passed, slow and hot. I heard the hiss of a bottle cap crimping open.
I shot to the kitchen and she tucked the bottle behind her and ran so I chased her and grabbed her before she could pour it on me and had to pin her and she wouldn’t stop laughing and the beer foamed all over both of us.
I knocked that clip out of my head.
I grabbed her wrist and squeezed until the bottle hit the kitchen floor, beer foaming around the shards of brown glass. I can’t remember what I said but I may have held her wrist too hard. Crystal locked herself in her room. She didn’t come out and I didn’t knock. At 4:30 the next morning I slipped a hundred bucks under her door with a note that said her parents would be home after the weekend. Then I left for good.
———
The hitcher looked older up close, hard years beneath the sun damage.
Got no radio? She spoke slowly, words from a morphine drip.
Radio works fine, was all I said.
She didn’t touch the radio. No one ever does. I’m okay with just the humming road but most people need noise, the talk shows and morning deejays. They need the ad jingles, something they can hum silently to help forget their forty hours every week. She sat frozen with her hands folded in her lap, gearing up to do whatever the ride or a few bucks called for, her body flying solo while she looked away from somewhere inside her head. I didn’t want anything. The silence was enough for me, like a sleeping guard dog between us.
———
Crystal and her backyard tanning routine were seven-hundred miles away. I filled my tank, then blinked and found myself staring into the open back hatch of my car. A stray socket wrench, hot to the touch. A ballpoint pen with no cap, a few pennies and bits of dog kibble though I’ve never owned a dog. I loaded up the provisions I couldn’t recall buying moments earlier. Two gallons of drinking water, a dozen granola bars and a canvas knapsack. I had a thin recollection of the air conditioner and the bored liquor store clerk, but they could have been from another stop on a different day. Whatever was clipping the time from my waking activity was getting greedy. I used to zone out for a few seconds, maybe a minute or two. Then the stretches of time got longer and longer. I’d be parked at a job site with my keys in my lap and the half-hour commute wiped clean from my morning. Lately I’d practically been leaving my body.
Hey. Can you spare any change?
Straight black hair and pale skin. She was a year older than Crystal, judging by her curves, and dressed for the heat. Gossamer skirt rippling high on her legs and a babydoll top with pink script across her breasts that I couldn’t read without staring so I didn’t. She was too clean to be homeless and too young to be panhandling.
Do you have fifty cents?
Sorry, I said. Can’t help you.
What’s your name?
The thin silver chain around her waist looked like a wire of sunlight. The cold free-fall rush blew through me and I reckoned every wrong twist of backstory before my keys hit the ground. There was a stepfather or stepbrother in the scene. She didn’t know where to get help but she was learning the angles, and I could be one of them. She came through the heat, twisting a rubber band between her fingers. Her flip-flops slapped the soles of her feet but the way her hips moved made everything else quiet.
Ezekiel, I said.
For real?
Yeah.
Sounds like a Bible name.
It is.
But you don’t have any money?
None to spare. I didn’t look below her neck. And I didn’t look around. If I wasn’t doing anything wrong then it didn’t matter who saw me.
Someone peeled out of the gas station and set my pulse loose like a racing dog. A matte-black Nova with a bondo patch on the driver’s door screamed through the intersection. I picked up my keys and when I stood up she’d found another mark, a middle-aged business man with a map spread across his steering wheel. Her hazy skirt rode on the current of heat, flaring up to her hips in slow motion. Pale crescents of skin flexed at the tops of her thighs. The skirt settled around her again, like something cast off and drifting to the bottom of a swimming pool.
———
The hitcher’s fingers danced nervously on her lap and tickled the edge of my vision. They went still if I looked at them straight on. Maybe she was playing with me. Maybe she was thinking this ride was her last, that I had a rag for her mouth and a shovel in my trunk. The highway was empty one s
econd and the next I was bearing down on a five-hundred pound elk standing on the dotted yellow divide. I hit the brakes and we swerved. The elk bolted. Big enough to take out my front end and kill us both but it darted like a squirrel, so quick I wasn’t sure I’d really seen it.
The fuck was that? The hitcher had braced herself against the dashboard, elbows locked and eyes wide but she wasn’t asking about the elk. The accusation was silent but clear. Maybe I hadn’t seen anything.
Keep your hands still, I said. It’s distracting. I was parked right where the phantom elk had been, crossways in the dead middle of the highway, a broadside collision set to go.
You fucking crazy?
You got a problem then walk, I said, then hit the ignition.
I’ve been good my whole life, walking that barren firebreak between feeling the rush of caving to temptation but still having the strength to resist. A girl came to my hotel room once, after I called an ad in the paper. Somewhere in west Texas. She took off her clothes and asked me what I wanted. I said I didn’t know. Then she opened my door and a guy was waiting there, big guy with a tattoo on his shaved head and lots of earrings. He held out a badge but not for very long. Said he could arrest me or fine me on the spot. I asked him how much the fine was and the girl laughed. Another hitcher had offered to thank me for the ride. I stopped at a liquor store and gave her money for condoms and beer and when she got out I drove away. It was always the same. I never did anything wrong but I never stopped thinking about those things I never did.
I’d lied to that girl in the parking lot. My name wasn’t Ezekiel, not yet. That was up to God.
When the girl and the big guy left, she’d stuck her business card in my Bible. The big guy laughed when she did that. The glossy pink card had a picture of her chest and a phone number. It was marking the Book of Ezekiel.
I knew a sign when I saw it.
It’s easier to hear God in the desert. Fewer obstructions, so God’s got a halfway decent view, plus a man’s got fewer things clouding his own sight. Jesus, John the Baptist, all of them, the desert was where they heard God loudest and clearest, where they had their showdown with the Devil. I’d been driving around the desert for weeks since I’d left Crystal’s house. Driving and praying, waiting for God to show me where to stop.
———
We hit the truck lot after midnight. A row of fueling bays the size of a city block with a cashier’s booth in the middle, a coffee shop, a cheap motel on either side and a couple dozen eighteen-wheelers. Two hours since I’d picked her up and I don’t think she blinked the entire trip, at least not since the elk that I may or may not have imagined, that may or may not have nearly killed us.
This is good, she said. Right here.
The cashier’s booth was lit up like daylight. I could almost read the newspaper headlines from the far edge of the lot.
Just stop right here, she said.
Let me get you closer. No sense in you walking through a parking lot this size in the dark. You want the coffee shop or just that little convenience store?
Let me out of this goddamned car.
I stopped. Probably a couple hundred yards out on a stretch of empty asphalt. She’d been so docile until now and I was nervous. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Her bag strap had caught under the seat. She was fighting with it and cursing under her breath, louder and louder. She flung the door open and jumped out. Then she screamed. She hugged herself and closed her eyes and screamed as loud as she could. She stomped her feet and beat her fists against her head then pointed at my car and screamed for help.
I couldn’t lift my hands or move and I felt hot all over.
She screamed that I’d tried to kill her and then she ran toward the coffee shop.
The dome light came on in a nearby semi. I reached over and closed the door and drove away as fast as I could, found the nearest onramp and doubled back toward where I’d just driven from. It didn’t matter which way I went as long as I kept driving. I prayed for forgiveness, told God I was sorry, that I was ready and just needed a sign. I passed the truck lot on my left, kept to the speed limit and watched for square headlights in my mirror. After a while I was back where I’d first picked her up. At the next juncture I took the unfamiliar road.
She was the last one. No more inhaling the vapor in Hell’s vestibule. I promised God, no more.
I loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. Ford, Peckinpah, Leone. But I had a weakness for the second-rate gunfighter films with cowboys and Indians and cattle barons and railroads. They hotwired the classics then stripped them down in some B-movie chop shop and recycled the good parts as their own. Like when the hero walked into a saloon for the first time and everything stopped. The music went quiet, folks would stare for a minute and then go back to their whiskey or cards. But everyone had to look at the good guy.
My Sunday school teacher had taught us about life in the Holy Land. She wanted to make the Bible real for us. She taught us about the desert, how the heat wave we once had was nothing compared to life in the Middle East. We learned how they had to preserve food and how risky it was to travel. It took the Israelites forty years to make it to the Holy Land. They only survived because of miracles. John the Baptist ate insects. I’d been driving through the American desert for weeks, where all of those frontier towns from the cowboy movies used to be. The pile of maps and guidebooks in my glovebox agreed on the highways and major roads and most of the big dots but little else. The small towns and the little roads, especially the dirt ones, never matched up. They couldn’t agree on exactly where the desert began, or the exact annual rainfall or average temperature. We know as much about the desert now as those people in the ghost towns did. It’s hard to make a deep map of a territory that can kill you in a matter of hours.
Someone showed up in one of those Old West towns by himself, no railroad or wagon train, of course people were going to stare. Because he was supposed to be dead. That’s how you knew who the good guy was.
I passed three more elk that night. No close calls but their electric Roswell eyes hovering in the dark startled me every time. It was four in the morning when I found a rest stop with an RV slumbering in the lot and four other cars parked as far apart as they could manage. A stretch of grass with picnic benches, fire pits and a brick hut split into restrooms, its curbside face a mottled black and white mural like a blown-up newspaper photograph. The collage of leaflets came into focus once I was up close.
Missing
Have You Seen Me?
Missing
Missing Since—
Last Seen On—
Missing
Missing
Missing
Young teenagers and children. Mostly Caucasian, mostly female, last seen wearing anything and everything from the Junior Miss Department.
The bathroom smelled like an outhouse and had almost as little light. The floor was wet. I held my breath long enough to take a leak then went back to my car. I passed a station wagon with expired tags and a coat hanger twisted around the loose muffler. One of its back windows covered with duct tape and a garbage bag. I locked my doors, let my seat back as far as it could go and draped a T-shirt over my eyes. Before long there came a tentative knock, the way someone knocks to see if you’re awake without disturbing you if you aren’t. Definitely not a cop. I sat up and saw the face fogging up my window, hands cupped around his eyes to see through the dark. If he’d needed money, gas or a jump start he wouldn’t have been smiling the way he was. I gave up on sleeping, started my car and he made the looping pantomime signal for me to roll down my window. I couldn’t exactly race my engine, but he got the message that I was driving off and the placement of his foot didn’t worry me.
The high desert had too many elk and too much plant life. Too many places to hide or disappear. And it was full of people hiding or disappearing. If you walked out of nowhere into a room full of strangers nobody would give you a second look. The high desert was no place for a prophet.
By
10:00 that morning it was ninety-five degrees. Nothing on either side of the road but bleached sand and brittle shrubs as far as I could see. The mountains ahead of me hadn’t changed size since sunrise. An hour later my temperature gauge was reaching for the red and the bottle of water in my passenger seat was hot to the touch. I turned on the heat and rolled down my windows and the needle eased back. I drove on, eyeing the mountains and the needle but neither one moved. At the stroke of noon my dashboard blacked out and smoke billowed from my hood. I coasted to the shoulder and once the hissing and smoking stopped, I stepped out and just stood there in the desert. Heat like nothing I’d learned about in Sunday school, silence like I’d never felt in church. A short distance off the road and I’d be standing where no human being had ever walked. It was like being on Mars. A place where a man finds redemption beneath the unyielding sun that burns away his sins and what is left of that man becomes a prophet.
I opened the map and found my place, a scratch of north-south highway hardly worth printing. The nearest town of Jackdaw Flats lay forty miles due west on a faint pencil mark of road roughly parallel to mine, with neither a direct route nor an inch of shade in between. I emptied the hot bottle of water over my head then cloaked myself in a beach towel. John the Baptist didn’t wear sunblock. I packed the granola bars and my Bible into the canvas knapsack, slung it over my shoulder then took up a gallon water jug in each hand. There hadn’t been anyone else on the road all morning. I crossed the highway without looking, stopped at the edge of the road and prayed. The triple-digit temperatures would drop below freezing after dark. There were definitely diamondbacks, possibly coyotes and the narrow chance of a flash flood. I could be in Jackdaw Flats by morning.
When I come in from the desert, everyone will stare at me. And my name will be Ezekiel.
——————————
