by Egon Grimes
“Fine, just tell us where to meet you.”
Maurice spotted a vacant lot below a bridge, a rest stop without traffic, a wide creek ran along and Maurice wheeled into the right lane. “Look, Honey, I’ll call you later,” he said and then hit End.
The cell phone in his hand stuck briefly to the mess of Alice’s fluid and he had to flick the little device onto the seat to loosen the gluey grasp. With a quick secondary glance, he surveyed the little riverside park, some birds, a picnic table, a trash bin and a Harvey’s bag, but no onlookers. Quickly, he ran to the slow low river and began performing a hobo’s shower over his clothes and skin. It took some effort, his white shirt was pink and his pants took on a brownish shade.
Maybe it’ll look like I was working on a car or something, he thought as he viewed the crusty denim. What in the hot hell happened anyway?
You’re nuts and if you’re not nuts, then isn’t it obvious? Can’t you see? This is bigger than you. Go home, your wife, your daughter, they need you.
So does Rosalind.
Maurice jumped back into the Jeep and hit the road stopping at the first tourist joint he saw, barely noticing the thirty-minutes it had taken him to arrive, passing an outlet mall along the way. Flags and kayaks lined the exterior wall of the long, cabin-like building. Children ran around inside, shooting at one another with cap-gun ammunition. The small twosomes of adults ignored their children and turned their attention to the filthy, soaking man that squished his soggy sneakers in the door.
Maurice lowered his head and walked straight toward a rack of clothing. Everything bore a cartoon hawk sporting a hockey glove, but he wasn’t there for style and purchased a hat and t-shirt. On another rack, he found knockoff Guess Jeans. He’d created more of a scene than he liked. There was nothing he could do about the eyes and quickly hit the road, drove another twenty-minute stretch and stopped at an old motor lodge to allow Lou and Rhoda to catch up.
45
Within minutes of landing, Ivan felt a shift inside himself and around the other passengers—mostly men—no longer took interest in him. The pull had gone, yet the hand remained firm and unpleasant within.
He wondered what kind of god would allow that kind of power, the kind of power that could topple a society if used under the right conditions, the kind of power that could change mankind on a whim, the kind of power that could turn him into something he hated.
He wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Suicide was better than living as he had the last day.
Ivan stared out a window, looking back to the sky, watching the fluffy nothingness float by and ran about one hundred scenarios of how he’d kill the man. The small plane began its decent when a mammoth notion rocked his already battered psyche, how do you kill a god?
Mindlessly, the invisible hand tightened around Ivan’s brain. A slave, that’s what he’d become. He departed the terminal, bags in hand. A strange weightlessness overcame his legs and he seemed to float to the Avis desk where he rented a Chevy Malibu with a non-existent credit card, the attendant acted as if he’d filled out the paperwork and paid. The man simply moved and nothing stood in Ivan’s way for long.
After locating the car, he sat and waited, uncertain and unwilling, but unable to move. He watched as the sun dipped lower and lower, before the hand on his brain squeezed and he felt the man closing in.
46
Lou watched as his once precious car turned scrap metal heap rolled away behind the bed of a tow-truck, two wheels still giving the old college try and two giving up on the task completely. The weekend earlier, like every weekend, Lou scrubbed and polished, wiped and waxed, it was his hobby, his sanctity when things in the house grew afflictive, his love when marriage got too difficult.
He was all out of things to love. First his wife, that is pretty bad, and then his car, much, much worse. Don’t forget about the kids. Of course, the kids, maybe see them on weekends.
Rhoda called National car rental service, the closest to the scene according to the slob of a tow-truck driver. They couldn’t come, or possibly just wouldn’t come and then she called Enterprise. They were further and took more than an hour. The officer watching over the scene sat in his car discussing world news, or baseball, or cuts of meat, something, with the Geo’s driver.
She shifted her weight every few seconds while she leaned against a cement divider. It was hot. The sun beat down on her back and the white cement shot a glow to her face. The air stank of emissions and tar, she wanted to kick something, kick someone, Lou, Maurice, the young girl from the smashed Geo, the stupid hillbilly woman driving the truck…that one got to drive away from the mess and there was Rhoda, baking as vehicles whizzed by at eighty miles per hour.
—
“Lou,” she said softly behind the wheel of the rental car, watching the bumper-to-bumper traffic headed north bound on the hot summer’s day.
Lou didn’t answer. He didn’t even so much as twitch.
“Lou!” she yelled, her eyes still focussed and her back leaning slightly forward in her seat.
Lou turned his head, his mouth scowling heavily. “What?”
Rhoda eased her attitude a few notches. “Could you please text Maurice and find out where in the heck we need to be only?”
Lou turned his gaze back to the road. “Vaughan.”
She took a deep breath. “I know he said Vaughan, but he didn’t say exactly where and I feel like he is just doing whatever comes to mind. He also said he’d be leaving Vaughan, or already left, he was pretty vague... So please send him a text and find out where he is.”
Rhoda flashed a little smile when Lou pulled a phone from his pocket and began a slow waltz of his thumbs on the keyboard. The effort was there, barely. She had trouble holding her eyes to the road. Lou typed as if it was a great masterpiece. After more than a minute, Lou hit send.
Rhoda turned on the radio and found a pop station, trying to cool herself.
“Anything yet?”
Maurice had responded immediately, but Lou kept the information between him and his phone, planning to torment Rhoda, because, like Denise, she was a woman and women did awful things like file for divorces and taint the minds of children.
“Sure.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
Boiling. “What the fuck did he say? Where is he?”
Lou smirked. “He said he’s just went through a town called Innisfil and will stop soon.”
“Is that north, yet?”
Lou shrugged.
“Do you think you could type it into your phone and find out?”
“No,” he answered and stared forward.
“Why the hell not? I can’t understand how Denise puts up with you.”
Lou looked at Rhoda and wanted to shove his fist up her ass, pull his hand out and smear a new, repulsive flavor of foundation on her cheeks, but huffed, remembered Moe and spoke slowly, “A sign about five-minutes back said Innisfil is just ahead a bit, I just figured you’d seen it. The way you’ve got your face pressed against the windshield, I assumed you had to have seen it, but I guess it is a disadvantage, you know?” Lou trailed.
“What is?”
“Having a vagina and attempting to drive at the same time. I mean, wow. The difficulty you all have. It’s kind of like being retarded, yeah?”
A road crew on a coffee break added to Rhoda’s mental tension, but she fought back hard, reassuring herself that it would all be over soon enough and that they’d all get home and she’d never let Lou in their home again.
47
As it had been since the trip began, Vadrossa followed willingly at his brother’s whim. Dhaksa was tough, but never led him anywhere not in the La’aklar’s best interests.
Letting the tongue and the brain go seemed irrational and reckless to Vadrossa, he questioned his brother and instantaneously saw clarity within. If something happened to him, while out on the road, the tongue and brain could find their way back. Dangerous business to murder.
Up until that moment, Vadrossa never suspected that he might not come back. “So what do we do?” He sat in the back of a pickup truck that rolled quickly up the highway.
No words formed, but a need seized him. He wrapped against the window, the Native man with long straggly hair turned and then smiled with a nodding of his head. It was likely that when he saw Vadrossa he immediately felt a brethren or kinship to him, hair and skin of similar tones to his own. But appearances can deceive. The La’aklar weren’t human. The La’aklar remained pure.
If it hadn’t been for the nosey Christians, willing their skewed moral abominations everywhere, the people could have thrived and multiplied, slowly, but surely. Now they were down to two, and the spirits of the deceased. Vadrossa assumed everything would work, he’d been told his entire life that the La’aklar would someday rule over the Earth, why would he question it?
He hopped out of the truck and his legs did the work usually set aside for the brain. The pull was nice, it meant he didn’t have to think, he could just flow along with the traffic of his brother’s whims.
A woman, barely beyond her teens, in short blue jean shorts and a plaid shirt, only two buttons fastened, watched Vadrossa and stepped toward him.
“Hey, mister,” she started, Vadrossa could smell men on her, “twenty’ll get you a handy, forty’ll get you a blowy, and a hunid’ll get you all access to my holes. I got good holes. I’m so wet jus’ think’ ‘bout it.”
Her name was Stacy Fleury, and in a snap, Vadrossa saw it all.
A few years earlier, she lived with her mother and a string of touchy feely men who couldn’t keep their dicks to themselves, or at very least to her mother. She fled, but always ended up right back, she told her mother finally. Stacey’s mother blamed every failed relationship on the daughter, the girl was a whore, had to be, or why would all the boyfriends want her? Stacy hadn’t been home in months and slept in the backseats of unattended cars.
Vadrossa looked at her with wide eyes, he’d always wondered about sex; saw it so often used and damn if it didn’t look like fun. Dhaksa, about sixty years earlier, caught Vadrossa giving his manhood a tug and explained the need to reserve the special seed, that seed was why he existed and how the La’aklar had their power. Vadrossa only stopped doing it where he’d be caught. He loved to touch it, but simply touching it grew tedious. His attractions expanded, not a tree with a sappy crack was safe, nor was the pink pucker of goat’s backside.
Looking at the girl, he wanted to try her backside, but the pull in his head had another idea.
“You want it’er not?” Stacey asked. She was on the come down and need a topper.
Vadrossa reached out his boney fingers and touched her hand. Her back straightened and she turned and walked into the little burger joint.
Downtrodden, Vadrossa moved amid the parked cars, stopped at a little sedan, and leaned in wait.
Stacey strode through the glass doors, catching the angry eyes of the employees of Webb’s Burger Shack. There she was. With quick light steps, she walked right up to a worried looking man and his half-eaten cheeseburger resting on a plate in front of him.
The man fingered the heavy-duty camera on the table next to his burger. Neil Crane. When he looked up, he saw not Stacey, but Rhoda, worry shot through his veins.
“Hey, look, sorry I…” he started.
Stacey motioned him with a wave to follow her outside.
Vadrossa watched Stacey return and excitement pitched a trouser teepee in his pants. But, almost as quickly as he stood, did he fall. Neil Crane walked behind Stacey and toward the car.
“Hey, look, I have every right to do my job. The public has a right to know,” Neil said.
Those boney fingers reached out again and touched Neil. Fear washed away and his stare turned blank, he reached into his pocket and hit the unlock button twice. Vadrossa and Neil got into the car, both on the driver’s side, one in front, one in back, while Stacey stood in the dusty parking lot. Vadrossa felt the hold loosen momentarily and he hit the button to lower the window. His boney fingers reached out and cradled Stacey breast. Her face remained a blank canvas and Neil backed out of the lot and drove away.
For the next two hours, Stacey stood in place, a thick caking of dust covering her. The hold left her then and she shook her head, wondering why she stood so long, and then took five steps toward the restaurant, she fell to her knees, and began to wail. From inside the employees watched and waited, she didn’t move more than her mouth.
An ambulance arrived with all the pomp and circumstance of an air raid, and while paramedics lifted her to a gurney, she shuddered. The atoms of her body loosened on a molecular level and splashed into a great waste of humanity, sticky, awful, and unbelievable.
The paramedics stood dumbfounded and terrified.
—
Neil drove Vadrossa like a well-mannered chauffeur. It was an odd sensation flowing through Neil, he hadn’t any direction but knew exactly where he had to go and keep going. After twenty-two minutes of driving his mind clicked back in, what in the hell are you doing? Who is that old man?
“Uh, where are we going?”
Vadrossa wondered himself, before long, his brother spoke through him. “You will get your scoop, so long as you don’t fight it.”
“My scoop?” Neil scrunched his face and then pouted his lips before nodding. “Fair enough, I suppose, but how do I?”
“Shh,” Vadrossa said and Neil complied.
Neil began to panic. Something about this situation smacked of an ending. He was going to die and then thoughts came to an abrupt stop when he wheeled his sedan into a parking lot, passing a Jeep with Indiana plates as he did.
“Genner!”
48
Maurice waited, impatiently, for either his wife and partner, or some kind of message from his daughter. He had long passed the point of worrying how it came, or whether or not it was smart to follow.
After texting Lou his location, he flopped back onto the bed skipping through channels, mentally willing the television to become a portal into the world that gypsy fortune-teller showed him. It did not come. Nothing did. Not how he’d saw it coming. His body ached for rest, but he couldn’t.
He took a long blink.
A knock on the door called his blink to an end, he looked around in worry and then a shout through confirmed the worry; his wife was there and she was mad.
“Coming, just a sec,” he said as he popped from one of the beds to the door.
Rhoda had her arms folded over her chest. “It’s a damn good thing you’re still breathing. What do you think you’re doing really and don’t feed me any crap? I’m not taking any more of it.”
“Hey, Lou,” Maurice said looking over Rhoda’s shoulder.
Lou just nodded and dropped, face down onto the bed nearest the door.
“You all right?” Lou raised a hand halfway off the bed, signalling at least his physical health and dropped it back hard against the bedspread.
“Never mind him! Tell me exactly what this is supposed to be!”
Maurice took out a cigarette, giving a wave to Rhoda’s scowl, lit the tip, inhaled deeply and began, from the start, leaving not a strange occurrence out. By the end, Lou sat up with a cockeyed.
“So, now what?” Rhoda said.
Maurice shrugged. “We wait for a sign.”
Lou grinned. “Bud, you might be bananas.” His grin faded when Maurice gave him a cold glare. “So, we wait then.”
Rhoda’s guts grumbled and no matter what, they had to eat. “I’d best go get us some pizza. If I look at you another second I might lose it.”
As soon as the door closed, Lou spoke. “Thought she’d never leave. So how do we plan to find this prick? We go now, she can take a comfy bus back and we find this prick and slaughter him.”
“You know what, Lou? You need to learn to shut up. If you want to help me, you’ll just have to go with me on this until you understand.”
“Eat shit,�
�� Lou said, smiling.
“Why can’t you just listen? Surprised Denise hasn’t brained you yet, listening how you do.”
“The bitch wants a divorce. The bitch cheats on me and then has the nerve to ask for a divorce and I’ll be damned if I let her take my kids. She’ll be meeting me in court every goddamned step of the goddamned way.”
“Denise wants a divorce and full custody?”
“Man, that bitch has another thing coming if she thinks I won’t put up a fight.” Lou stared out the window. “You know that whore bitch said she was going to call up Chuck fucking Nagel. I bet she’d suck him off on video and send it to me. That’s the kind of whore bitch cunt she is.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Don’t know, Moe.” Lou took a long sip of air. “I don’t know.”
The partners watched the flipping through of the twenty-four channel set three full revolutions in silence, before Lou finally broke. “I gotta get her back,” he said, his lips tight to his teeth, his jaw clenched and his eyes wet, but not quite reaching teary.
“You know, she could just need some time to blow off some steam and if you give her space, she could change her mind.”
“You think?”
“Sure buddy, she married you in the first place, people don’t just lose all traces of love overnight,” Maurice said and to his rescue, there was a knock on the door. “Must be Rhoda.”
“Wait, just a second, do you really think if I give her space she’ll just take me back?”
“If I don’t let her in we’ll both be worrying about finding divorce lawyers.”
“So I should get a divorce lawyer?”
“Man, I just don’t know.” Maurice opened the door to find two pizzas and a six-pack of craft beer: Creemore Springs. But his wife was gone. “Rhoda?”
Maurice picked up the pizza and the Creemore box and set it down on the bed. Something clicked in his brain, he ran to his phone, and dialed Rhoda’s number. A vibration sound followed by a synthetic piano melody chimed from within Rhoda’s purse on the bed.
