by Dale Bailey
“You okay, man?”
“I gotta have change,” Nick whispered.
“Try the machine. By the car wash.”
The cashier lifted his head, making eye contact with someone behind Nick, a dismissal. Nick scooped the quarters into one hand, snatched the bills off the counter with the other, and turned away, every cell in his body singing with resentment, the precious seconds burning away. He felt the impact—
“Careful, friend—”
—before he saw the man he had run into. He staggered, reeling headlong into a display of motor oil posed by a life-sized cardboard cutout of some NASCAR hero. They went over together, him and the cardboard statue of the guy in the Pennzoil crashsuit and four or five cases of medium-grade 10W40. Nick’s hand shot out to break his fall. The quarters bounced away, lost in the clatter of motor oil raining to the floor, twenty or thirty plastic jugs, but it seemed like more, a hundred, a hundred and forty, a thousand. He landed with his knee square on a bottle of Pennzoil. He didn’t know which was worse: the pain which shot from his kneecap like one of those county-fair strength tests, the sledgehammer firing the pin straight up his spinal cord and setting all the bells ringing in his brain; or the sickly farting sound as the no-drip spout blew open, jet-propelling a gout of golden sludge across the slick tile.
“Steady there, cowboy, you all right?”
Nick looked up, everything blurry with pain except for two meaty hands right in his face, one clutching a twelve of Milwaukee’s Best—
—the Beast Tucker used to call it—
—the other extended to give him a hand up. And then his head cleared, a shape resolved itself behind the hands. The fat guy: thick glasses, a beard, a massive gut jutting through his open leather jacket like the prow of an ocean liner, distorting the silver-screened Harley on his black T-shirt. On the seventh day, the T-shirt announced, God bought a hog.
Nick felt himself pass through some kind of internal border checkpoint, crossing over from the province of low-wattage hysteria into the nation of full-out panic, passport stamped and dated, no return visa, and enjoy your trip. He could see it happening, but there was nothing he could do about it. Time leapt forward—
—click click click—
—seconds whipping past like a loose end of film in a projector reel. Too fast, too fast.
Nick scuttled away from the out-stretched hand like a crab, knowing he ought to grab hold of it and let the guy haul him to his feet, knowing he should apologize and pay for the spilled oil, but for Christ’s sake he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t spare the time—
He came halfway to his feet, yanking himself up with one hand on a rack of newspapers. The knee screamed, his leg tingling with numbness. He planted his other foot in the puddle of spilled oil, and started for the door. The world blurred as he went down again. A quart of 10W40 skidded across the tile; it fetched up against a freezer full of Eskimo Pies with a sigh, pent-up oil bubbling to the floor.
“Hey!” the cashier exclaimed as Nick clambered to his feet yet again, leaving tracks across the face of the tumbled NASCAR driver. “You gonna pay for—”
But it was too late.
Nick was outside, the door swinging closed behind him. The December air straightened him, pausing time for a heartbeat, maybe two. And then it all collapsed upon him once again, time blurring past, Finney, Sue, everything. Limping, he sprinted across the lot toward the car wash and the automatic change machine.
The bill changer didn’t like the taste of the ten. It spit out four quarters for the one willingly enough, but when he fed it the second bill, the machine drew it halfway in, decided it didn’t like the flavor and shot it right back at him.
“Shit!” he cried. “Shit, shit, shit!”
Nick struck the machine with the flat of his hand. He could feel himself edging out of the Kingdom of Panic, into some place worse—
—madness—
—some place he dared not name, for fear that naming it might invoke it. He could hear it, though, a siren song just the other side of the border.
He forced himself to slow down, using a trick his mom had taught him, a little nonsense rhyme—
—the grand old Duke of York—
—out of Mother Goose he could use whenever he was upset or afraid. He sang it under his breath, barely moving his lips as he coaxed the wrinkles out of the ten with his thumb and forefinger. The scrap of doggerel recalled an image of his mother, there in his bedroom under the eaves, the book of nursery rhymes open across her lap, light coppering her hair.
He fed the ten into the changer once again. This time the machine swallowed it down, vomiting a cascade of silver in exchange. Nick felt the pressure in his breast ease a little, the siren song of madness retreat to a high-pitched keen at the far edge of consciousness. Abruptly, absurdly, he felt better, as though he had plugged a cartwheel into a Vegas slot and scored jackpot bars straight across the board, the money ringing into the change tray more than a mere ten bucks in quarters, the score of a lifetime, the fortune, at long last, he had always dreamed would be his.
The good feeling didn’t last. It took him five minutes to hunt down the area code for D.C. in the tattered white pages dangling below the phone on a stainless steel cord. It took him another two to figure out how to dial long-distance directory assistance—
—1-202-555-1212—
—slotting in the quarters one two three, and stabbing blindly at the buttons with a trembling index finger.
Precious seconds ticked away.
“What city?”
“Washington.”
“What listing?”
“Senator Phineas Durant.” He drummed his fingers against the phone. “His office listing,” he added, glancing back toward the store. The fat guy with the beer was climbing into an ancient pickup, fifties vintage. Nick watched as he fumbled with something in the seat beside him, then tilted a can of beer to his lips.
Something clicked in the telephone. A whir. A computer voice began to reel off the number. Nick squeezed his eyes shut, struggling to keep the digits in order. But already they were slipping out of his grasp, intangible as time itself. He’d have to call again. Anguished tears welled up in his eyes. The computerized voice at the other end said:
“The number can be automatically connected for a charge of forty-five cents. Press one at the tone.”
Yes.
Nick plugged two more quarters in the slot. He pushed one. Another computer voice spoke up: “Please insert two dollars and ninety cents for the first three minutes.”
Cursing, Nick dug in his pocket and slotted twelve more quarters into the slot. The line hummed. He glanced at the Rolex—
—3:24—
—and turned to study the cruiser. It looked like the last survivor of a demolition derby, mud-splashed and banged up, with broken branches lodged in the grill and a bullet-hole in the windshield. From where he stood, one shoulder socked into the privacy hood, Nick could see the driver’s side of the car, the empty hole where he had shot out the side window, the battered quarterpanels. He couldn’t see the other side—the side that had fetched up against the boulder—but he could imagine it: smashed up and peeling paint along its entire length, shiny steel glinting through. That and the interior, the blood-splashed interior with two guns lying in plain sight on the floorboard.
Abruptly, he thought of Pomeroy, handcuffed to a tree not half a mile away. Screaming.
Stupid, he thought. Stupid to come here.
He saw Sue’s pinky tumble to the desk.
How long before a cop happened by? He should be on the road, he should never have stopped—
He closed his eyes, invoked that talisman.
The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men—
The line was ringing. A warm voice, female, rich with the kind of southern accent that exudes mint juleps and long lazy afternoons on the verandah. Finney’s oiled accent.
“Senator Durant’s office. How may I direct your call?”
“Hello?”
“My name is Nick Laymon,” he said, the words rising unbidden to his lips. “I know Senator Durant’s son, Finney. We’re good friends, we go to school together in Ransom, North Carolina. Ransom College. I—I need to speak to the Senator, okay? I need to speak to him, please.”
The woman at the other end of the line was unfazed. “The Senator is in a meeting, Mr. Laymon. If you’d like to leave a number—”
“Ma’am?” he said. “Ma’am, you need to listen to me, okay? I have to talk to the Senator, okay? Even if he’s meeting with—with the President or something—it doesn’t matter. You have to get him.”
“Sir, I can let the Senator know—”
“I can’t wait, okay?”
The temperature of the voice dropped twenty degrees, unpleasant without quite crossing the line into rudeness. “If you’ll hold please, sir.”
“No, please—”
But she was gone. Music, something classical with lots of strings, a harpsichord. Bach maybe. He didn’t know.
Nick swallowed.
He glanced at the watch again—3:26—and felt a renewed wave of panic crash over him. He glanced toward the store. The cashier looked up simultaneously, and for a moment their gazes locked. Nick saw himself stagger into the fat man and go down, the oil spreading in a pool over the tile, and once again the stupidity of the whole chain of events washed over him. Likely enough, the cashier had called the cops—
Someone broke into the Bach. The computer voice again, dunning him for another twelve quarters. Three more minutes.
He plugged them into the slot one by one, the weight in his jacket noticeably diminished, and then there was another voice. The woman.
“If you could just tell me what your call is regarding, sir.”
“Do you like your job, ma’am?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you like working for the Senator?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Because if you do, you want to get him on the phone, okay?”
“Mr. Laymon, I don’t think there’s any need for threats, now do you? I hardly see—”
“Goddamnit, get me the Senator!”
The line went dead. Nick bashed the receiver against the phone’s metal casing, once, twice, a third time. He heard an ominous crack, plastic giving. He fumbled for more change and plunged half a dozen quarters into the slot. Two more tumbled away. One spun to a stop on the pavement maybe a foot away. The other dropped into a sewer grating.
Gone.
Punching out directory assistance with a palsied finger, he requested the number once again. This time, he didn’t even bother to try to memorize the number, just had the machine put it through. The world seemed to be growing hazy beyond the shell of the privacy hood. He had that sense of border crossing once again, that siren song growing louder, and now he let his conscious mind put a name to it: madness.
Somone picked up the phone.
The woman.
“Now, listen,” he said, “you have to—you have to let me speak to him—”
“Mr. Laymon?”
“Please—”
“If you could just calm down, sir, I’m sure—”
“—if you don’t let me talk to him, Finney—Finney is going to die—”
Silence.
Nick sagged, hating himself for the lie. Finney was dead, he knew. Had to be. Yet still doubt wormed at him. Had he seen Finney’s hand close around that bullet? And if so, if Finney had been alive when Evans slammed the trunk, then wasn’t that worse? For Nick had failed to help him, a further betrayal—
But it wasn’t his fault. How else could he have chosen?
Nick rested his head against the phone. That scrap of rhyme danced through his head—
—he marched them up the hill and he marched them down again—
—abruptly powerless. It seemed a small thing suddenly, a child’s magic, too small to help him now.
Nothing could help him now.
Cold. So cold. He sighed and he could see his breath clouding the air around him, and then he couldn’t see much of anything at all beyond the blur of tears.
“I’m sorry?” the woman said. Breathless. Shocked.
“Die,” he whispered. “If you don’t help me, they’re all going to die—”
“Hold one moment, please,” she said, a new urgency in her voice. And this time the wait was just a minute, maybe half a measure of Bach and the tiny computer voice asking for more quarters. Nick dug in his jacket without looking up; he slotted quarters into the machine until his pocket was empty. Another coin chimed to the pavement and rolled away. This time, Nick didn’t even bother to watch it, just gave himself over to sobs, that vision of Finney’s hand closing around the bullet, his last gesture.
Save her, Finney had said. He had chosen, it was his fault.
“Sir—”
A man’s voice.
“Senator—”
“Sir, my name is Gerald McClain. With the Capital Police. I understand there have been some threats—”
“No, no threats. Just, please, you have to help me. You have to help Finney, you have to help us—”
“Sir, if you can just calm down, explain to me what’s happening—”
“My fault,” Nick said, and it was like a light going on inside his head, illuminating every secret he had hoped to hide from itself. Exposing him. His weakness. The dark self locked away inside his heart. His guilt and jealousy. My fault, he thought, my fault, I did it, I let Finney die, I wanted him to die.
And now Sue would die, too. Because of his delay, his stupidity in failing to recognize a truth his father had known all along: you had to take care of yourself. The system didn’t care about people like him.
McClain said, “I understand you’ve made some threats to Senator Durant’s family—”
“I need to speak to him,” Nick whispered.
“Maybe in a little while,” McClain said. “But first—”
“Goddamnit, he may not be dead if you’d just listen to me—”
Nick slammed the phone into its cradle.
Finney, Finney—
He was dead, Nick thought. He was already dead when Evans closed the trunk, I didn’t leave him there to die, I didn’t—
He had to know, he had to know for himself.
He turned, staggering back toward the car like a man half-drunk. Tears blinded him. He fumbled for the keys. It took him a minute or two to fit the key into the right slot, and then he had the trunk open. Finney lay crumpled within, still half-wrapped in heavy, clear plastic, smaller somehow than Nick had ever seen him.
And still. So still.
Nick went down to his knees, his arms outstretched, in prayer or sorrow, he could not say.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
And for a moment—just a moment—he stepped fully across that borderline, into the land of madness. He surrendered himself to that siren song, let it sweep him away, everything lost, pain and fear and responsibility. Guilt. Hatred for what he had become. For a moment, seduced into madness, Nick Laymon was nothing more than a husk, lungs like bellows, heart throbbing, blood whirling through his veins, but empty, empty of self, or soul. And then a voice:
“Sir? Are you all right?”
Nick turned.
The cashier. He stood maybe twenty feet away, younger than Nick had thought, twenty-one or two, no older, his face taut with concern. He was Nick’s age. But for the rattle of a car hurling itself over the form of a sleeping policeman he might have been Nick. But he wasn’t.
“Sorry about the oil,” someone said; it took a moment for Nick to recognize his own voice, the absurd apology.
“Were you in an accident? You need me to call the police?”
The cashier took a step closer. He cocked his head, like he was trying to see something. Trying to get a look into the trunk.
At Finney.
Nick stumbled to his feet. He slammed the trunk.
“No,” he said. “Don’t call anyone.”
And then he was in the car, jabbing the key into the ignition and wrenching it hard to the right. The engine coughed, hesitated for a moment, caught. The digital clock on the dash flared to life.
3:44.
Fifteen minutes and Sue would lose another finger. He could see the cigar cutter, gleaming in the light. He had never seen anything so clearly.
He forced the thought from his mind, dismissed Sue and the Pachyderm and all that had happened in the past two days. That road led to the country ruled by madness. She was out there, he could hear her—
—madness—
—crooning his name softly, like a lover, like Sue had not twelve hours ago.
There would be time for that, but not now. He couldn’t afford that luxury right now. Already he had wasted another hour—
—another finger—
He would not waste anything more.
Nick yanked the shifter into reverse. The car surged backward, the steering wheel spinning through his hands. In the rearview mirror, he caught a glimpse of the cashier darting out of his way, but that didn’t matter either, not anymore. Yanking the gear shift into drive, he punched the gas. He hit the road without slowing down and pointed the cruiser’s nose toward the mountains, toward Sue—
—toward the Pachyderm—
—the seconds crashing like mortar fire all around him.
Tuesday, 3:45 to 4:36 PM
The drive to Knoxville—his third in less than seventy-two hours—was a nightmare ride on a runaway roller coaster. Nick tried to fill his mind with waves, to lose himself in that relentless surf—but the memory of the phone call kept coming back to him, the cop’s voice—
—you’ve been making some threats—
—so infuriatingly soothing, as if he could talk all the insanity away.
He wanted to pull over, rest his head against the steering wheel, let madness take him once again, but he forced himself to go on, clinging to that image of Sue—
—Hurry, Nicky—
