by Vicki Grove
look at it directly and decide if it’ll kill you. It’s not only that you
can’t drive a car in this condition, it’s that you can’t drive your
own life in this condition. So really, what’ve you got to lose?” I’ve never cried in my life, but I came close then. “I’m
too . . . tired,” I pushed out.
Young Tucker, you innocent wonder, you can be our designated
driver tonight!
I was the slimiest creature in that entire muddy river. I felt
hooked, harpooned. Harpooned right through the heart by a
massive weapon, struggling in the water, a thing too disgusting
to struggle but struggling still, just out of habit.
I needed an escape route. Not from the water, but from
myself.
“Guilt is unbreathable,” she whispered, and her windy voice
came drifting raggedly across the water. “Guilt is what’s killing
you, Tucker Graysten. You’ve been drowning in it since the moment you saw that burning Mustang.”
I moved my arm slowly against the strong current and stuck
three fingers inside the sodden denim of my back pocket. I felt the rough edge of the coin Mrs. Beetlebaum had given me. I didn’t know how it worked or why it worked, but I was suddenly
sure it was the portal out of myself.
I extended my arm, my closed fist. “What you want is in
my hand.”
Her mouth dropped open and her eyes glittered. “Hold
on!” she called, and she tossed her pack lightly across several
feet of water and onto the top of Bud’s car. An instant later she
just sort of leaped out of the water herself and was suddenly sitting on her pack in the center of the green oval island that was
all that was left of the Olds.
She leaned far forward, stretching both hands toward me
and wiggling her fingers like a kid reaching for candy. “Toss it to
me now, Tucker Graysten!”
I raised my arm, but as I pulled back for a good pitch, somewhere behind me I heard glass breaking, then Bud bellowed,
“Hey, kid, don’t give her nothin’, you hear?”
I saw her eyes shift from soft, green inviting pools to dark
and luminous stones as she jerked her head up and looked past
me, at the house. My muscles went weak and wobbly. Something like an electric current had been pouring through me
from her eyes, and it’d suddenly been switched off when she’d
shifted her attention.
I shook my head, trying to clear my wits, and felt water
lapping at my chin. I was up to my neck and the river was still
rising.
I tried to turn toward Bud’s voice, but my legs were sunk too deep in the mud. I lost my balance and gulped brackish water, but on my second try I saw the old house with my peripheral vision. The river was lapping at the porch, but Bud was leaning out the upstairs bedroom window where he’d been before. It was outlined in jagged glass, and he held one shoe like a
hammer in his blunt-fingered hand.
“Don’t listen to that fairy girl, kid!” he bellowed. “Stick that
coin back in your pocket and park it there for another fifty, sixty
years! Seventy, even!”
“Look at me, Tucker Graysten!” the crazy hitchhiker girl
screeched.
I snapped my head back around to face her. For a fraction
of a second I glimpsed something dark and shaggy crouched
atop the Olds. It gave off a rank wind that stirred the water into
small and angry waves. Then, in the space of an eyeblink, it was
gone, the water flowed along quickly but normally again, and
the crazy hitchhiker girl had taken the place of that thing on the
almost-submerged roof of the car. She was sitting on the edge
now, kicking both boots through the water and scratching her
hair energetically with both hands. Her brows were knit in an
expression of, what? Indecision? Hard thought?
Bud yelled, “Leave off on the kid, can’t you? You done it
before, remember? There on that battlefield in Korea? My buddies all in pieces and me the only survivor in that trench slick
with blood? I wanted to go with them, I begged you even, but it
wasn’t my time. So why can’t you give this kid the same break?
He’s confused! He’s even younger and greener than I was, and
let me tell you, I was plenty confused.”
Her eyes bugged with frustration and she threw up her
arms. “I’ve tried to give him a break, Bud, but it’s complicated!
I’m not perfect, I admit it, okay? Bud, you didn’t have an obolus
to tempt me! Hardly anyone has them these days, so I hardly
ever get paid!”
There was a sudden frantic splashing and the dog bobbed
up from nowhere, just appeared from under the water! He swam
to the Olds and pulled himself up onto the roof with a great
scratching commotion, then he began shiver-shaking himself. She groaned. “Just what I need! Cherry Berry, why didn’t
you go home like I told you to?” She shielded her face with an
upraised hand and leaned away from the mess. “You don’t belong in this dimension, and you smell like wet dog!” The dog sank down with two of its chins on its paws and
the other one in her lap. She shook her head but automatically
began scratching his ears. After a few seconds she got that calm
look on her face that people get when they’re scratching the
head of a dog.
“Oh, Tucker,” she murmured, “Bud’s got a point. I’m not
some sort of monster. Like I told you, I’m just a simple laborer,
and money means a lot to me. With enough coins, I can maybe
retire and try for that street magician gig? But they quit making
those coins hundreds of years ago, so there aren’t that many
around. The thing is, I can practically feel that obolus of yours
in my hand, so tantalizing. But like Bud said, I do cut deals with
kids like you sometimes, especially when they’re as innocent as Bud was, there in that trench in Korea. It turned out he’d issued a pickup call mostly from sheer panic, partly from grief, also partly from shock and pain. When he’d told himself his story,
we both knew he wanted desperately to live.”
She narrowed her eyes and focused them on me. “You aren’t
that innocent, though.”
I felt that electric current sizzle through my brain and into
my arms and legs again.
“Bud and I have to hit the road,” she said as thunder
boomed. “It’s now or never, Tucker Graysten. Pull that splinter
of truth from your heart and take a good look at yourself. You
can’t drive because . . .”
Her eyes narrowed to laser beams. I felt them cutting and
cutting, going soul deep into me through all the layers of lies
and justifications and outright denials I’d wrapped around
the fragile truth as I’d tried my dead-level best to hide it from
myself.
“. . . I flunked my designated driver’s test.” It slid from me
in a whisper, but she was right—it felt like I’d yanked a huge,
rough splinter from my heart. I screamed a long, gut-wrenching
scream, and at the end of it I couldn’t move.
I felt paralyzed in every muscle, rigid as a stick or a small
log, snagged in the bottomless mud. I couldn’t think, or talk, or
figure out how to breathe the watery air.
XIII
I was drowning
. At first I couldn’t make my brain take that in, but when my lungs began to burn, things got real in a hurry—I was drowning! I was stuck to my knees in mud, and I could tell by the clammy pressure against my ears and the skin of my face that the rising water had finally covered all of me but the very top of my head. I felt the air leaving a farewell fingerprint the size of a quarter on my scalp, and I knew with great, sad clarity that I wouldn’t be feeling the air against my skin or anything else much longer because I had just taken my first deep breath of cold water.
Bright pain hit my bronchial tubes, then eased as my mind began going numb. I saw my arms floating up, and I began to fall slowly backward into the arms of the river.
The last breath I would ever take was leaking from me in a fountain of bubbles when something big plummeted into the water, scattering those tiny globes of air and churning everything to mud. I felt jolted in three places as the dog grabbed me by the denim behind my left knee, by one belt loop of my jeans, and by my left ear, which it held gently inside its right set of teeth. We flew straight upward from the water.
I came around enough to look down, where I saw a small whirlpool that marked where I’d been trapped until a second or two before. It happened so fast, in an instant, and with my ear immobilized in the dog’s jaws, I couldn’t turn my head to see more details. All I know is limp parts of me were hanging from each of its mouths like scraps of clothing it had pulled from someone’s laundry line.
I was dropped onto my side on top of Bud’s car, where I drew up my knees and began coughing my guts out. I sucked in about as much water as I coughed back out until I finally realized the entire roof of the car was submerged a couple of inches. I rolled painfully onto my back and stared up at the purple, stormy sky, trying to get my muscles to quit spasming, retching up muddy water and saliva and a bit of blood. Each time I grabbed a breath, the tangy smell of dog spit hit me and cleared my head for a second.
I finally forced myself to sit up. Where was everybody? The house was still mostly above-water, but it looked like there could be a foot or so of flooding downstairs. If Bud was still inside, he might be trapped by that much water. Where were the hitchhiker girl and the dog? I closed my eyes and slumped there, my elbows on my knees, trying to get my brain to work well enough to make a plan for getting to Bud.
I eventually noticed that my right hand was still clenched tight around Mrs. Beetlebaum’s coin. I used my left hand to peel back my fingers. When the coin was exposed to the air, steam came off it. Or maybe it was smoke because right after I twisted to the side and eased the obolus back into my rear pocket, I felt a sharp stab of pain and watched an angry blister the size and shape of that coin rising on my palm.
While I was staring at my hand, I heard a quick swishing sound, like the last ounce or so of bathwater going down a drain. I looked up and the floodwater was gone, every drop of it. There was just the old house with its shattered window on a rise of bright wheat and me on the hot roof of Bud’s car. The dry stalks of grain whispered hoarsely as the wind rocketed through them. An autumn sun beat down on things with all its might.
I sank to my back again with my arms spread wide, letting the sunshine into every molecule of me. I’d nearly drowned, so I knew I wanted to live, and I hated myself for wanting that since I couldn’t imagine living my life now, knowing what I’d done. But there it was, the cowardly truth. I didn’t want to die.
I folded my arms across my face and lay there groaning and rocking side to side.
“Come on down here, boy. I got a couple things to tell you right quick.”
“Bud!” I flipped to my stomach and hung my head over the edge of the roof. He was in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel, right where he belonged.
“Come on down, son,” he repeated, still gazing straight ahead.
I swung through the open passenger window and dropped into the seat beside him. My legs throbbed in a new way that made my stomach turn, like they were filled with something toxic that was rising to fill the rest of me. “Bud, let’s get outta here, now!”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “I want to be sure you can still locate the small hill from this vantage, the one with trees I spoke to you about earlier.”
I was too jittery and sick to sit still for this. “Sure I can, Bud. Now let’s go!”
“Good.” He just sat there, gripping the wheel.
Should I try to get him to trade seats with me? Could I drive, even if he’d let me? Bud and I had both flunked driver’s tests, and the one I’d flunked was so much worse. I held on to my own arms to keep from shaking apart.
“All right, so I’ve told you where the cemetery’s at, and the other thing I got to tell you is to change the oil real often with a big car like this. Now listen, I’d never let her go past three thousand miles. And there are tools in the trunk. Don’t be tempted to take them out and use them for whatnot around the house. Keep them there in the trunk so when the need arises, they’ll be handy.”
Then Bud suddenly turned to face me for the first time and I nearly jumped from the car. His eyes were wrong. They were too . . . I want to say flat, but that’s not exactly right. The light in them had gone out, that was it. They seemed made of glass.
“The little fairy girl was kneeling beside Tommy when daylight finally reached into that trench in Korea,” he said in a precise whisper, as though giving me a play-by-play of something he was just now watching. “Then presently, she stood and whistled through her teeth, one long, sharp whistle. And that fine roan horse Tommy had back home in Nebraska came galloping right toward us across that battlefield. I saw its legs pass through at least a dozen dead boys as easily as a hot knife passes through butter.”
Bud turned from me to stare into the distance at his family cemetery. “I believe she provides folks with their most fondly remembered transport when she takes them.”
“Buh—Bud?” I stammered. “By . . . by fairy girl, you mean . . . you mean ferry girl, right? Like she . . . ferries people across . . . across the Acheron to the . . . land of the dead?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he answered in an offhand way, like I’d asked if he used ketchup with his fries. “So I heard an engine shortly after the mortar shell hit, and I thought I saw a motorcycle fly out of that trench with that poker-playing city boy Clark Jackson atop it. I figured at the time I was seeing things, hallucinating from my own bad wounds. But now I think different. Notice how we came straight to the Ford truck last night once she joined us in the car? She drove us right to it.” He shook his head, smiling. “I sure didn’t expect to find my dad’s truck still up here at the old homeplace. I admit I had no real idea where it ended up, but I sure am glad to know it was never sold.”
What was he talking about? We hadn’t come straight to the truck. The truck had been a wild-goose chase that ended with the Chiefs game that ended with . . . her.
“Bud, you . . . you don’t look so good.”
He shrugged. “Tommy stood up in that bloody trench, then swung up onto his horse with both his legs like they’d been before the shell hit,” he whispered. “And then she was somehow up there in front of him, straddling that bareback roan with the reins in her hands. She looked at me over her shoulder, then she joined her eyes to mine in such a fierce way I had no choice but to let her into my head. Sometimes I think we were locked there for hours, me helpless and about to bleed out and her looking down at me from atop that horse, reading my thoughts. Other times I think it surely couldn’t have took more than a minute. I was suffering physical pain and I guess what you’d call emotional pain. I remember all that real clear. I wanted to die, living hurt so bad. But while that fairy girl plumbed my mind, I began to think more and more about my Mary back home and how much I needed to see her again. So finally, I shook my head, and the fairy girl turned around forward and flicked the reins. Tommy’s roan took off at a gallop and they sailed right away. Next thing I knew, I woke up in the field hospital.”
He added, so softly I barely heard,
“When we were both young boys, I often rode behind Tommy on that horse, so I reckon she saw a chance to take us tandem and spare herself some effort if I was of a mind to go right then. She got me to understand it wasn’t enough to say yeah, yeah, okay, so I wanta live, not with what I’d seen and the wounds I had. No, the deal was if she agreed to leave me there, I had to agree to fight hard to live, hard as in any other battle. With all the blood I’d lost and all those soul tattoos, I couldn’t have survived for long even in the hospital without a real decision behind it.”
Bud suddenly looked worse than exhausted. He looked greenish around his mouth and eyes. I needed to get food into him immediately, and then I needed to get him home to his La-Z-Boy and his quiet routine. I was sick and soul-tattooed myself, and I longed to be in the deep green grass beside the radishes in the hoop house, where I could try to begin figuring out how to live with myself, or at least how to go through the motions.
“Bud . . . do . . . do you have the keys?”
“No, I imagine she’s got ’em, but don’t worry about it.”
I slumped in the seat, shaking my head. One of us would have to drive out of there. I’d watched Trey hotwire the Mustang to start it a couple of times, so I dropped to my side and swung my head down beneath the dashboard, hooking my legs over the back of the front seat. I was hanging upside down like that, searching for the right wires, when a mechanical sound started up somewhere outside. The noise was so shockingly man-made after all the hours of only blowing wind and rushing water that I raised my head, banging it hard and opening the cuts from Trey’s locker vent.
I swung back upright, wiping away blood with my sleeve. “What’s going on, Bud?” I demanded in a whisper. That rhythmic thrum was growing louder and louder, but I couldn’t see where it could be coming from. “Bud! What is that, do you know?”
“My truck,” Bud answered matter-of-factly. “What else would it be, huh?”
He was staring at the back west corner of the house. At first nothing was different over there, but then sure enough, a truck came rumbling from around that corner, so shiny black it strobed against the blue Nebraska sky. It had big round headlights mounted on delicate chrome stems. My mouth fell open.
