by Jeremy Bates
Meanwhile, Austin had crawled into the gap beneath the hood and now he shouted, “Jeff’s alive! He’s breathing!”
While Noah and Austin discussed what to do next in urgent tones, Steve patted Jenny on the cheek, urging her to wake up. All the while his heart was filled with guilt. He had invited her on this trip. She had wanted to spend the weekend studying, but he’d insisted they needed a break from school, he’d wanted her to finally meet his friends, and now here she was, lying on the damp earth, bloody and broken.
Her eyes fluttered open.
“Jenny!” he said. “Thank God! Are you okay?”
“Okay…”
“You hit your head.”
“Hurts…”
“It’s just a little—”
The rest of the sentence died on his lips.
He could smell gasoline.
Gas? Jenny thought slowly. What was Steve talking about? Were people camping nearby?
“We have to move away from the car,” Steve was telling her now, though it remained difficult to hear him through the ringing in her ears. “I’m going to carry you.”
“I can…okay…”
Steve helped her to her feet. Pain flared in the left side of her head. She almost toppled over, but Steve caught her in his arms.
“Let me carry you,” he insisted.
“No, I…” She couldn’t find the right word. “Just…dizzy.”
Jenny allowed him to lead her away from the wreckage. Without warning her trembling legs gave out beneath her. She dropped to her knees. Steve was saying something to her, though the words seemed suddenly far away. Her vision blurred, darkened—and then she was floating above her body, which was lying on the operation table in the cadaver lab, nude and lifeless. Nine fellow students were gathered around the table, everyone wearing brown lab coats and dishwashing gloves to protect against formaldehyde. Nobody seemed shocked or saddened that Jenny was the cadaver today. Professor Booth was giving some sort of eulogy in Latin that she couldn’t understand. She wanted to tell them she wasn’t dead, but she couldn’t speak, only hover, insubstantial, like a ghost.
Belinda Collins stepped to the table. She was one of the gunners in the class, ambitious to a fault. Ever since Jenny scored higher than her on their first assignment, Belinda had done her best to make life miserable for Jenny, and Jenny knew she would be thrilled to be performing the dissection.
Belinda raised her scalpel to make the first incision. Jenny squeezed her eyes shut against the anticipated pain. She felt nothing. Surprised, she opened her eyes again. The cadaver lab had disappeared, replaced by a cold night filled with nacreous fog and towering trees.
“Jen? Jen!” Steve said. “Can you hear me?” He was cradling her head in his lap.
“Where…?” she said, disorientated. Then she remembered with a punch of dread: the hearse, the accident. “Jeff? Mandy?”
“Mandy’s fine. Jeff’s…okay. I have to go help get him out of the car. Are you going to be all right for a couple minutes?”
She tried to sit up. It took all her strength, but she managed. She saw the upside-down BMW for the first time. Mandy and Cherry stood on one side of it, Noah and Austin on the other. Everyone was speaking and gesturing wildly.
“Where’s Jeff?” she asked.
“He’s still inside the car,” Steve said. “I’ll be right back—” He frowned.
“What?” she said.
“How do you feel?”
“Pummeled.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Two. Steve, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. You hit your head though. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Yet the concern that had appeared on his face a few moments ago was still there. She suddenly wondered whether she’d been disfigured somehow. She touched her lips, her nose. “What’s wrong with me, Steve?”
“Nothing.”
“Steve!”
“Nothing—it’s just your eyes. One’s dilated a bit more than the other. Probably nothing more than a mild TBI. It’s not a big deal.”
Jenny went cold. A traumatic brain injury. If it was indeed mild, she had nothing to worry about. But Steve had no way of knowing whether it was mild or not. It could very easily be moderate or severe. She could have intracranial hemorrhage or brain herniation, both of which could lead to disability or even death. She’d need a CT scan to determine the true extent of her injury.
Noah and Austin, she noticed, had started working to get Jeff out of the BMW. Jenny said, “Go help them.”
Steve glanced at the car, then back to her. “You’re not going to pass out again, are you?”
“No.”
“Because you can’t pass out—”
“I know! Now go. I’m fine.”
He hesitated, nodded, and hurried off.
Steve reached Noah and Austin just as they were easing Jeff out of the mangled cab and onto the ground. Bloody lacerations raked Jeff’s face in a dozen places. Several of them appeared deep enough to require stitches. A chunk of glass was embedded in his left cheek like a grisly jewel.
“We have to move him farther away from the car,” Steve said.
Noah shook his head. “I don’t think we should move him anywhere.”
“Can’t you smell the gas?”
Noah and Austin raised their noses and sniffed, like prairie dogs trying to catch wind of prey.
“Shit, you’re right!” Austin said. He eyed the car apprehensively. “You think it might explode?”
“No,” Steve said simply. He didn’t know much about cars, but he was pretty sure you’d have to shove a torch into the gas tank for something as dramatic as an explosion to happen. But the fact they could smell gas meant the seam between the fuel tank and the rest of the fuel system had been broken, or the fuel lines had been sheared. Either way, gas was leaking from somewhere, and an electrical spark could turn it into a full-out blaze.
He faced Mandy, who had come around the vehicle. She was knuckling her mouth and staring at Jeff, her complexion bloodless. “Mandy, give us a hand moving him,” he told her.
She didn’t respond.
“Mandy!”
She blinked, pulled her eyes away from Jeff. “What?”
“We need help moving Jeff.”
Abruptly flames whooshed to life in the BMW’s engine.
“It’s gonna blow!” Austin cried hysterically. “Grab him!”
Steve took Jeff’s arms, Noah and Austin his legs, and they dragged Jeff twenty feet from the burning wreckage to where Steve had brought Jenny—only now she was on her side, eyes closed, limbs askew.
“Jen!” Steve dropped Jeff’s arms and dashed over to her. “Jen? Jen!” He turned to the others. “We have to get her and Jeff to the hospital. Now!”
“Do you know where it is?” Noah asked.
“Someone in town can tell us.” He scooped Jenny into his arms and stood. “You guys carry Jeff.”
Noah and Cherry grasped Jeff’s legs, Austin and Mandy, his arms. On the count of three they lifted him off the ground. However, they only made it a few steps this time when Jeff’s eyes flailed open and he screamed.
“Set him down!” Steve ordered.
They rested Jeff on his back. He continued to scream with tremendous force. When he expelled the last of the air from his lungs, he began to hyperventilate. His eyes, glossy and as wide as silver dollars, stared at the black sky overhead.
“Jeff?” Steve said. He’d set Jenny down on the ground and was bending over his friend. “Jeff? Can you hear me?”
“It hurts!” Jeff bleated through clenched teeth. “It hurts it hurts it hurts!”
“Where does it hurt?” Steve asked him. The calmness in his voice didn’t match the panic chilling his blood.
“Back…my back…” Jeff’s face had flushed liver pink. It was sheathed in perspiration. The tendons in his neck were bunched into ropey cords.
Steve took Jeff’s hand, as if they were shaking, and i
nstructed him to squeeze it.
Jeff let loose another choked scream and crushed Steve’s hand in his. He squeezed tighter and screamed louder before falling abruptly silent. His eyes slid closed. His grip slackened.
Steve snatched his hand back and clenched and unclenched it against his chest.
“What the hell was that?” Austin said, running his hands through his Mohawk. The wildness in his eyes made him appear ten years older.
“He said his back,” Mandy mumbled. Tears streaked her cheeks, while her hands were clamped over her ears, as if in anticipation of more screams. “Did he break it?”
Steve shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“But he squeezed your hand,” Austin said. “So he’s not paralyzed, right? At least he’s not paralyzed?”
“He could be from the waist down,” Steve said.
“Don’t say that,” Mandy whispered.
“It’s not going to change the fact if he is.”
She sobbed and turned away.
“Maybe we did it,” Austin blurted. “We moved him. You’re not supposed to move someone with a broken back. Maybe we made it worse.”
“If we left him in the car,” Steve said, “he would be dead right now.”
They all glanced at the burning BMW. Stout yellow and orange flames now engulfed the entire vehicle, feeding off the foam and leather seats and other combustible items. Grayish smoke streamed upward into the black night.
Noah broke the silence. “How are we going to move him now?” he said quietly.
“We’re not,” Steve said. “Austin, Mandy, Cherry—you guys stay here with Jeff. Noah and I will take Jenny to the hospital and bring help back.”
“What do we do if Jeff comes to again?” Mandy asked. She’d finally removed her hands from her ears.
“Just talk to him. Tell him an ambulance is coming. But don’t move him.”
“That’s all?” she said.
“That’s all,” he said. “We’ll be back soon.”
CHAPTER 4
“Goddamn foreign TV. I told ya we should’ve got a Zenith.”
Gremlins (1984)
Cleavon sat in his recliner with one eye squeezed shut, the other open, because this seemed to help keep the headache thumping against the inside of his skull at bay. The Sony color television glowed softly in the dark room, though it didn’t produce any sound because the volume knob was busted. On the fourteen-inch screen, a customized ’86 Toyota Xtra Cab sporting a lifted suspension and oversized tires idled at the track’s starting line some five hundred miles away in Mississippi. Then the flag dropped. The truck leapt forward. A dozen cameras flashed.
The truck shot toward the bog, windshield wipers waving back and forth. When it hit the water it sprayed curtains of mud down both flanks, turning the bright red and blue paint job—BAD TO THE BONE airbrushed across the hood—a shitty brown. A few seconds later it got caught up and stopped, shimmying back and forth, dipping and rising, smoke billowing from the raised wheel wells. It made Cleavon think of an antelope or zebra losing their battle to cross a muddy river on one of those nature shows.
“It’s them big fat tires,” Earl said from his own recliner a few feet away. “They just slow you down, am I right?” He reached for a fresh beer from the six-pack in the cooler resting between the two of them. The recliner squealed in protest at the sudden shift in his six-foot-seven, four-hundred-pound body. It was no wonder the fucking thing hadn’t collapsed under his weight yet. It wasn’t made for someone so big. Clothes weren’t either. Earl always had trouble finding clothes that fit him, not that he bought clothes much, a pair of jeans, a few wife beaters every few years, if that. The white, stained tank top he had on now stopped halfway over his gut, above his bellybutton. The jeans stopped a few inches shy of his ankles. He looked like a fucking retard, Cleavon always told him, but Earl didn’t care. Cleavon didn’t either. He just liked telling him he looked like a fucking retard.
“The skinnier the better, ain’t that right Cleave?” Earl went on. “That’s what you always say. Leave them fat meats to the pretty boys who can pay someone to change the bearings and seals every year. That’s what you always say, Cleave.” He burped, a loud, maggoty one smelling of food left in the sun for a few days. “And he don’t got no sense using a stick shift. Not for a big old slophole like that. Am I right, Cleave? Am I right?”
Cleavon grunted but said nothing to his brother. On the screen a young fella began wading into the waist-deep muck to attach a tow strap to the truck’s front hook. Suddenly the picture hiccupped, then went haywire, flickering all over the place.
“For fuck’s sake!” Cleavon said.
“It’s all right, Cleave,” Earl said. “You just gotta leave it for a bit, is what you gotta do.”
Cleavon eased himself to his feet and crossed the room, delicately, like he was walking on egg shells, one hand pressed to his forehead. He smacked the top of the TV, the headache making him hit it harder than he’d intended.
“Hey!” Earl said. “That ain’t helping—”
“Shut it,” Cleavon growled. He began fiddling with the rabbit-ear antennae. “Get the light, Earl, I can’t see shit in the dark.”
Earl set his beer on the floor, which his gorilla arms reached sitting like he was. Then he heaved his monstrous bulk out of the recliner, which sprang back and forth with what might have been joy. He lumbered across the room, burping once again, and hit the light switch. The sixty-watt bulb dangling from the socket where their parents’ chandelier used to hang blinked on.
Cleavon fiddled with the antennae for a full minute, but all he managed to do was wake his fucking headache. Grimacing, he tore the rabbit ears loose and tossed them across the room.
“Hey, Cleave, why’d you do that?” Earl said, going to pick them up. “That’s not helping, throwing them like that. How’s that helping? You gonna break them. And you break them, and that’s it, they just won’t work.”
“Shut the fuck up, Earl,” Cleavon snapped. “I’m in no mind for your bullshitting right now. I been in the garage all day, I’m beat to shit, and also, I got a headache like a motherfucker. So shut the fuck up with your bullshitting.” He went to the cooler, rubbing his forehead. There were no beers left. Four empties sat in a line next to Earl’s recliner. “You drank all the beer, Earl?”
“I did not, Cleave,” Earl said. “We shared them. They were sitting there, we were sharing them.”
“I had two, you had four. That don’t sound like sharing to me. That sounds like you having twice as much as me, you fat shit.”
“I wasn’t counting.” Earl shrugged his big shoulders. “Besides, I got them, didn’t I? I went to the shed, I told you, I said, the TV got a signal, some monster truck racing, you wanna watch it, have some beers. Then I filled up the cooler with ice and a six pack. You didn’t do nothing but come in here and sit down—”
“Aw, shut up, Earl,” Cleavon said. He left the den and went down the hallway to the kitchen. The headache felt like a drill behind his eyes. While he’d been sitting in the recliner, it had almost faded to nothing. But all that fussing around with the TV had pissed it off, and it was drilling like a sonofabitch now.
He stepped into the kitchen and stopped at the sight of the Corn Flakes scattered on the floor, the soured milk puddled on the countertop. “Floyd!” he shouted, then cringed as the headache drilled deeper. “Floyd!”
There was no answer. Cleavon expect one either. Floyd was deaf as a fencepost and had been that way for a good ten years now. You wouldn’t believe what happened to the stupid fuck. Cleavon didn’t at first. He could still see Floyd as clearly as if it were yesterday, come stumbling back to the farm, clothes torn, blood pouring down his face, looking like he’d gone insane. But he and Earl had never changed their story, not once, so Cleavon believed it happened the way they’d said it happened.
Floyd and Earl had been hunting rabbits. What they’d do, they’d catch one of the rabbits in a trap, tie a stick of dynamite aroun
d it, light the wick, and let it go. Nine times out of ten it’d head straight underground. When the dynamite blew, Thumper might turn a couple of his pals inside out, but the rest would leave the warren and hop around in loopy circles. You could stroll right over and pluck them up by their ears, just as easy as picking daisies. Floyd and Earl caught as many as two dozen a day this way. They sold them to Pete Scoble in town, who in turn butchered them and sold them as meat in Akron. It didn’t make anybody rich, but it paid the bills and put food on the table.
On the day Floyd lost his hearing he’d been sitting in the pickup while Earl strapped a stick of dynamite to the rabbit they’d caught in the trap. When he let it go, however, it didn’t go underground; it made like the devil to the pickup, TNT strapped to its back, fuse burning. Earl had his rifle and tried to shoot it, but he didn’t have the best of aim, and a moving rabbit was a tough target. The critter took cover under the truck. Earl yelled at Floyd to haul ass, but Floyd had never been quick upstairs, not even back then.
According to Earl, the truck did a big cartwheel, flipping ass over tits before landing on its wheels again. Floyd received a dozen deep gashes to his face and complained of ringing in his ears for a good week. None of the cuts healed properly because he kept picking away the scars, and his ears didn’t heal either, because he kept digging his fingers into them all the way to the knuckles.
Nevertheless, Cleavon thought now, being ugly and deaf didn’t give him the right to be a pissing slob. Who couldn’t make a bowl of cereal without spilling shit all over the place? Cleavon scowled. He would get the lazy oaf to clean up the mess later; he didn’t want to deal with any more idiocy right then. He just wanted a beer and a cigarette and some peace and quiet.
Stepping on the cereal, crunching it beneath his boots, he opened a counter drawer and rifled through Scotch tape and screwdrivers and a bunch of other junk until he found a bottle of Aspirin. He popped the cap and upended the container to his mouth. He chewed the five or six pills that flopped onto his tongue, thinking they’d get to work faster ground up. Then he opened the old Kelvinator refrigerator and snagged a cold Bud. As an afterthought he bent back down and scanned the near empty shelves. There were another six beers, a bag of carrots, a carton of milk, a couple loafs of bread, a bowl of eggs, a jar with two pickles floating in it, and not much else.
