Snow came with the winter, and it was the season which most made Dale Shaw remember things he wished he could forget. So one morning before first light he packed his worldly possessions into a canvass tote sack and crept down the hallway past the landlady’s door. He coasted out of the parking lot with the Dodge in neutral and only when it hit Summit Avenue did he give the engine a crank. It started up with a racket like a thousand crows flying from the branches in a panic. A tail of gray exhaust smoke charted his departure and he did not look back.
He changed the oil and filled the tank at a station outside of Farrago. The harbor nearby and the wind plinked the captains’ bells on the boats docked there. To the east dawn’s silver threads were beginning their runs up the sky.
Heading south. No map, a thermos of coffee between his knees. The snow settled thick on the ground, but the truck had good Michelin R20s, not yet a year old, and it took the curves and bends true. He avoided interstates where he could, kept mainly to the secondary highways and old logging roads. Highway 16 swept through Wilson’s Mill and into New Hampshire. Cedar valleys burned white under burgeoning snow.
He ate turkey and hash at a diner in Dixville Notch; at a train crossing in Oil City, with the Allegheny on his right, he passed the remnants of a road kill deer, rippled red carcass scattered across the asphalt.
Smoking menthol cigarettes with the windows up, drafting behind semis. Some distance south the snow turned to sleet, then to rain. Through the steel towns with their dead mills and their padlocked gates. The relics of old factories, smokestacks reaching up like monuments of an extinct civilization.
He drank bourbon and beer in roadhouses in Damel, Hancock, Minter’s Point. An all-night truck stop in Chilhowie: a big-rig driver calling himself Dizzy, one lick of pomenaded hair plastered over his head, prickly eyes that blinked constantly and were the color of pumpkin, who said he was hauling a load of mannequin heads to Clearwater, Florida. Dale Shaw shared his smokes with the man, sitting across from him in the booth, drinking coffee and both waiting out an electrical storm flashing over the mountaintops. As they parted Dizzy slipped him a wad of napkin with four white pills inside.
Knifing through the Appalachians, into Tennessee. Kingsport to Morristown, Morristown to Knoxville, Knoxville to Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge: grubby land the color of marrow, balding pines with few nettles on their spindly branches, a jaundiced sky sheltering a sickly sun. No wind.
Cookeville to Dickson, Dickson to Humboldt, Humboldt to Memphis. Across the Mississippi. A wet chill floating over the Delta with its canvasses of empty fields. The blue lights of Little Rock ahead on the highway, shining like jewels on a music box. He met a dancer named Nora Kay; they shacked up for two days and three nights in her house trailer, drank half gallons of table wine. His stake was running low—Sunday morning and her still asleep, he took four twenties from a rolled black stocking hanging off the arm of the sofa and closed the door softly as he left.
The land evened out, flat and smooth as the glass surface of a placid pond. An enormous hollow sky overhead. he prairie carried phantom sounds over its whispering gloamings: crackles and bleeps, switch-signals banging at railroad crossings nowhere in sight, radio static, transistor voices drifting on the wind. Echoes that to a lone traveler in the dark can sound like gods talking through busted speakers.
Skidmore to Rockport, Rockport to Fillmore, Fillmore to Holbrook. Cellular towers and refinery fires fanning the horizon.
Highway 34 dipped south, into a town called Sanderson, becoming State Street for its straightaway through the municipality. He rolled through around 10:30 pm and thought he might stop for the night. Traffic lights blinking yellow and rocking on their cables, the gusts from the prairie scattering litter down a thoroughfare deserted of life. There was one neon sign for a place called Red’s Tavern. He pulled to the curb.
“Goddamn place is goddamn deader than my goddamn granddaddy.”
The words were loud, but CB was mindful to keep his voice low and hushed, leaning far over the tabletop with its ashtrays and assorted empties, scratching at his deformed ear. He didn’t want to attract Wylie’s attentions; the big barman was running his rag over the bar top a few paces away. He knew the proprietor of Red’s didn’t care for him, but would tolerate his presence so long as he and Joony didn’t cause a stir. So they always kept to the table farthest to the rear of the place. He looked over at the girl beside him: her big eyes looking the place over but registering little, slurping from a red straw at the dregs of another one of the weak rum and cokes Wylie made her. Mostly her eyes strayed to the jukebox in the corner.
CB lit another cigarette from the burning butt of his last and swiped again at his warped left ear. His eyes flicked over the barroom. “Same shit every night. Same couple of goddamn drunks, same shit-heel sad sacks. Same fat, white-haired bastard wiping down the bottles. Come here a hundred years from now and it’ll be like a time capsule. Place’ll be goddamn identical.”
Joony broke off a slurp. “We could play the jukebox again.”
“What for? I know the whole thing by heart.” At the end of the bar an older man in a weather beaten cowboy hat was paying his tab. “Every goddamn song on there, every one of them. Hear em in my sleep, been hearing the same bunch of songs my whole goddamn life.” His eyes fell on her. “And I’m not dropping any more coin on you tonight. You haven’t brought in a red cent since we got here. Just drinking your three dollar drinks and pumping quarters into that goddamn machine. No ma’am—bank’s closed.”
Her denim cutoffs were riding up and pestering her private places and she squirmed in her seat and tugged at their sides to pull them down a bit. She plucked the last piece of ice from her glass and ran it over a narrow scab on her knee until it melted completely. “We just going to sit here, then?”
The man in the cowboy hat had left. “Try Earle again,” jerking his head towards the only other patron remaining.
“I tried Earle already. Tried him twice. He ain’t buying any tonight. He can barely sit up straight.”
“Wish you’d tell me what that’s got to do with any goddamn thing.” But even as CB was speaking, Earle rose unsteadily to his feet and pushed a couple of bills the bartender’s way. He looked back at Joony with sad drunk eyes and tipped the bill of his cap. “Night, sweetie.”
“Night. Say hi for me to Jessie and Earle Jr.”
He nodded and lurched off in search of the exit.
CB sagged back in his chair, letting his limbs go slack. Now Wylie would be giving last call and turning up the lights to send them packing. And CB, not for the first time in his relatively short life, wondered why, with all the luck in this world, he could never quite manage to tear himself off just a teeny-tiny strip of the illustrious stuff.
Wylie rinsed out Earle’s glass and started moving down the bar, dumping ashtrays. He glanced at the back table; that one-eared, would-be pimp and his cow-eyed girl were the last ones in the place. As they were three or four nights a week. The barman’s mouth tightened at the corners, as though tasting something putrid. He didn’t care for that kind of trade and wondered again why he allowed them to ply it in his establishment. Still, outside of that one time he’d had to yank CB’s tail—the imbecile actually sent Joony over to proposition Deputy Hatcher—they never caused any real trouble. Privately, Wylie was forced to admit that occasionally they actually managed to drum up a little business for him, for the fact that the mere presence of a young girl in a place not heavily frequented by female clientele kept his regulars, older lonely men for the most part, stimulated and kept them drinking, more that than any of them necessarily coming in principally to pay for a piece. And Wylie didn’t really blame Joony for her part in the whole seedy enterprise—the girl clearly didn’t know any better. One could look at her and tell that. She was equipped only with the sense the good lord gave her, and he wasn’t feeling any too generous that particular day. But CB now—that was different. The boy had come from a good family; a better man than old Bill Stromeyer would have been hard to find. Honest, tough, a good provider, head foreman over Harrod’s Gas and Electric before his heart attack, he had doted on that boy. Like most do for their only child. More so perhaps because of the weird ear; Wylie couldn’t remember if CB had been born that way or if it was some childhood accident. Dog attack, maybe. A father’s pity for his child having to make a way in the world with such an unsightly burden was natural enough. In any case, Stromeyer poured everything he had into his son, and all that devotion had begot him nothing but this spoiled, good for nothing delinquent. Wylie could only agree with what many had said: it was his wayward boy that had caused Bill Stromeyer’s heart to give out. The man had died of out-and-out shame.
Wylie cleared his throat. “I’m shutting her down, you two. Come ahead and pay up.”
The cowbell over the door clinked and a man walked in and took a seat on the first stool he came to. Nondescript, average size, wearing a mesh-backed cap with no writing on it. He returned none of their looks. He placed a silver and green cigarette pack on the bar and rubbed at the corners of his eyes. Finally he nodded Wylie’s way.
The proprietor was tired, wanted to close up shop for the night. But a customer was a customer and money was money. He moved down to the newcomer. “Hiya. What can I get you?” He stared into a pair of gray eyes that contained no readily discernible expression, nor could Wylie confidently approximate his age.
“Any beer you got, in a bottle. Thanks.” A bottle was open and placed on a coaster.
“And if I could also get a shot of whiskey neat.”
“Whiskey preference?”
“Nothing but cheap.” Behind the eyes opaque to the bartender, Dale Shaw’s brain worked a quick calculation. He was down to his last forty-eight bucks.
Taking a slug of beer, he peered over the neck of the bottle and noticed the couple in back. Both youngish, the girl not much more than a kid. She had big eyes surrounded by thick purple makeup, and despite the freezing temperatures outdoors she was dressed in some kind of cheap summer garb: a cream tank top, ripped slightly at one shoulder, denim shorts that looked too tight on her hips, and spangled red shoes with plastic heels. The man had a shaved head and his scalp blazed naked and white out of the shadows like a sodium lamp. And there was something askew about the proportion of the head, something off-kilter in the angle of it, although Dale Shaw could not ascertain exactly what it was.
He took a sip of whiskey and raised his eyes to a muted television set on the wall above the bar. The local news, the weather report. Lettering at the bottom of the screen. Chance of flurries.
After some untrod tract of time, Dale Shaw grew aware of movement to his back. The girl, walking with such affected deliberation that she appeared to be pantomiming a streetwalker stricken with polio. She headed to the jukebox, brass and gold paint gleaming even underneath the heavy film of dust, coins jingling in her small fist. She sent him a long stare over her shoulder, one no doubt intended to convey some smoldering message but which only heightened his impression of a person not entirely in command of her motor functions. Inserting the coins into the machine’s slot was also a poorly conducted orchestration; she dropped a few on the floor and broke character when she squatted down in an ungainly manner to retrieve them. He turned back to his liquor and the TV.
The strains of a country ballad broke over the room, a breathy female vocalist cooing and the faint crackles of a vinyl record spinning. He did not remember ever hearing this particular tune before. The speakers were not strong and the volume was low—he couldn’t pick out all the words—but nothing in the melody plucked a memory. He polished off the whiskey in the glass and raised his finger for another. He picked up a sticky fragrance, somewhere between lemon scent and licorice, in the air around him and heard the stool adjacent creak a bit as she slid onto its seat. “Mister, you got any change for the machine?” She crossed her pale, dimpled legs and he saw a picked-over scab on one knee.
“You need quarters, I guess.”
“Yeah. I got a dollar if you got any.”
“Afraid I don’t. I’m sure the man here will break your bill for you.”
Her eyes shot down and to one side, as if looking to steal her next line off a hidden cue card; having no luck, she was forced to change unsteadily to another topic. “I like this old-timey music, don’t you.”
“Yeah. It’s fine.” Behind her he caught the dim figure of her companion sitting ramrod erect at the back table, and in the opposite periphery the barman standing at the sink, trying to appear busy while eavesdropping. Dale Shaw nodded his chin towards the one at the table. “Say, is that fella your boyfriend?”
The bluest parts of her saucer eyes lit up: she was comfortable going up an avenue like this, now she was being fed the right lines. “Oh, him? Naah. He’s just a friend. Just kind of watches out for me. No way, not him, not me and him. We aren’t really together or nothing like that.” But her voice scratched at the end of the untruth, like if the needle were to be yanked from her record, and her face tremored a fraction to make such a statement about her and her man; her heart snagged too, a little part of it, winced at the doubt and possibility conjured by her own words.
Dale Shaw rubbed sprouting bristles on his chin and didn’t blink and swiveled back around in the stool to face the TV again. A coda of steel guitar from the speakers and the song faded away.
Joony grew timid staring at the stranger’s profile. She hated all this play-acting, goofy, baby-doll stuff. Only served to make her feel stupid. Like when the teachers used to make the kids get in front of the class and read their assignments or book reports or whatever aloud to everybody. She’d dread having to do it to the point of making herself sick. Didn’t want to stand before all those pairs of dark eyes, sensing that they sensed she didn’t know what she was talking about. And that this made them uncomfortable, or turned them mean, and there was a sort of hate in those eyes staring back at her. By the time she was fourteen, whenever she was supposed to do one of those out loud things, she’d tell the teacher beforehand how she was having bad woman troubles that day and needed to be excused.
CB clawed at his bad ear and shook his head in fury when Joony started back to the table. No! Turn around! His face was red as a blood-blister. What was she trying to do to him—he wanted to tear out her hair, wanted to rip out her fingernails. Couldn’t she see this guy was their last chance to salvage anything of the night? Tomorrow morning the rent man would be banging on the door again, and they were into him for five hundred bucks in back payment tacked on to this month. We need this! She could read the desperation in his eyes, it was not a new look. She sloughed her shoulders and huffed and again turned back, retreating in her retreat. But she wasn’t going to tackle the man again, burn up in embarrassment, without her songs, even if they were down to their last couple of dollars. She plucked a couple of contraband coins from her pocket and fed them into the jukebox slot, not caring if he protested.
Another weepy ballad, another sashay up to the man at the bar.
She coughed. The man didn’t budge. She coughed again. “Hey, mister. You wanna dance? Or something.”
He turned so slowly Joony was reminded of the minute hand of a clock, and the face she confronted looked older than it had before. “Sweetheart, you and your boy need to pony up somebody else. Nothing doing here. And just so he doesn’t tee off on you, you tell him I only got a few bucks on me, not near enough to afford talent such as yours.” He winked. “Thanks anyway.” He turned back around.
Marching back she kept her head down, felt a white kind of heat emanating from CB as she sat. Talking fast: “It’s not my fault, he ain’t got any money. He told me to tell you that. He would, otherwise, but he don’t have the money. Not enough anyway, he says,” during her explanation keeping her eyes focused on the rings of moisture bled into the table varnish so as not to look him in the eye.
He knitted his jaws so tightly together a knot of muscle bulged under one cheek. Then his entire body seemed to cave in, a burst of air flying from his mouth as though something heavy had been dropped on his chest. “What’s the goddamn point anyway. There’s no use. Can’t catch a break no way, no how. No reason for you to worry about anything—guess we’ll just sleep under a bridge somewhere and see which comes first, freezing to death or starving. No, no, don’t fret over it. Not a goddamn thing in the world you can do.”
She fought back a yawn. “Nobody’s gonna starve.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever you say. You know so goddamn much, after all.” He tipped his chair onto its back legs and looked up at Wylie, who had propped his elbows on the bar and was talking to his customer.
After his encounter with the girl, Dale Shaw thought the barman’s disposition changed, seemed to turn more amenable. A new beer was set before him unsolicited, and the oversized, white-haired man leaned in so that their faces were level—up close, the big man’s was a map of pockmarks and the random red blossoms of burst blood vessels. He spoke in a quiet voice, just over a murmur: “Those two try and turn their little tricks in here more nights than not. There’s only two joints in this town, mine and the Silver Dollar. Guess they don’t have a lot of options.”
Dale Shaw lifted his face slightly and the bare light in the place caught in his eyes and, though they showed only the same inscrutable opacity as before, Wylie imagined there was implied within their gray-gold depths some manner of castigation, a rebuke for him that would permit and sanction such activities.
“But it doesn’t do in this business,” Wylie hurried on, “to take things to heart. I mean, I’m not running a church house here. I figure the lives and souls of others are their own to do with as they see fit. One thing, though, I won’t stand for, and that’s anybody dealing drugs. I find out you’re pushing in here, and your ass is out the door. “These two,” waving his hand in the direction of the pair in question, keeping his voice just soft enough for them not to hear, “I keep an eye on them. Make sure they aren’t messing with that stuff under my roof. Otherwise, them and some fella reach an agreement, so long as they do the deed elsewheres, I figure it’s not my place to interfere. Or judge anybody. I’m not running a church house here, you know.”
Somewhere in the other man’s ramble Dale Shaw felt the alcohol hitting him, the full warm surge of the whiskey leavened by the beer. The lighting in the place took on a softer hue and the jukebox music slipped into his brain and set reeling a slow carousel. Sweet heat rising from his innards, spreading wings around his heart, and he did not see how it could be so cold and harsh outside these walls when his soul felt so full of welcome. Surely the only fitting atmosphere for the world right now would be a dancing summer night, June stars only couple of hours in the sky, the smell of sugar maples carried on a languid breeze. Not the iron winter he knew was marshalling. Yes, a fine drunk was settling upon him and he surrendered to it, not thinking past this moment in this place, not thinking about things left behind or the prospects that may or may not lay ahead, not thinking even about his dwindling bankroll—thirty-six dollars he estimated, after his latest round. He abruptly stuck his hand out ahead of him with one finger pointing; the barman was forced to step back to avoid being jabbed in the eye. “What’s that all about,” said Dale Shaw.
“What’s what all about?”
“The picture up there. In the frame.” Wylie followed the trajectory of the man’s finger, over to the wall and a black and white photograph hanging in a mahogany frame, occupying a privileged position over the top shelf of rocks glasses.
“That was my brother,” said Wylie, although in fact the picture was of a car, or the wreckage of a car. An older model Cadillac with a crushed grille, a shattered windshield, a caved-in roof. The tires were splayed flat underneath the body of the vehicle as if the entire frame rested on giant serving dishes. Only the swooped fins at the rear were unblemished, and the arcs of them glistened even in the faded sepia print. In the picture a thick tow chain was attached somewhere at the vehicle’s rear and the caddy was being hoisted out of some sort of ravine. Rock walls surrounding the operation, stone cliffs in the background like guard towers. A silver stencil at the bottom of the frame, engraved with lettering: William “Red” Searpoint, 1949-1999. Lest We Forget.
“We guess he nodded off on his way back home. He used to own this place, left it to me when he passed. He’d closed her down the night it happened. One way or another he lost control of the car and pitched into Rexson’s quarry. Was off Ellisburg Highway, when it was still in business—the company shut down a year or two back. Car fell two hundred feet or so. Anyway, they say he would have been killed instantly. Newspaper took the picture you see here and I asked for a copy.”
“Looked to be a fine automobile.”
“Yeah, a ’62 Eldorado Brougham. God, how he loved that car. Used to wipe the thing down with a diaper, wouldn’t quit until you could count your eyelashes in the shine. Always said when we were kids, if he ever made it big, he was getting himself a Cadillac. Well, he made it big all right, worked hard for everything he had, and not only this place: he had a couple of trailer courts too. So he bought his dream car, and didn’t own it three months before it killed him.” Wylie stopped talking, all at once lost in the world of the picture—its memories and sensations. Trapped in the cool morning from years before when they pulled the car from the quarry’s pit; inhaling that odor of burnt rubber and transmission fluid; and the sound of the young trooper’s gasp when they finally cut his brother’s body out of the heap.
Dale Shaw said, “I’ll take another whiskey if you’re pouring.”
Wylie shivered, returning to the present and shaking off his trance like a dog shakes water from its coat. With sagging eyes he looked at the clock on the wall, inching towards midnight. He knew he should close down, but he foresaw the solitary drive home, walking back into the silence of the lonely house that awaited him, the lifeless rooms somehow darker after he had turned on the lights, the growling static of his television—and did not know if he could bear it. He refilled the man’s whiskey and, done talking about anything for the time being, nodded his head for no real reason and walked through the swinging doors behind the bar, back to the supply room and dry storage.
A yellow tinge to these rooms. Years before the walls had been painted a slate color, but now were peeling off shavings and slivers that scattered over the concrete floor. The pale lights buzzed when the switch was on. The rooms had a certain aroma, of disinfectant and grime, and the staleness of places never touched by sunlight. Cases of towels and rags, stirrers, straws, packets of iodine, were stacked to the ceiling. A mop, broom and a bucket on a blue tarp in a corner. .
A floor freezer against one wall; Wylie heaved his bulk onto it, feet barely touching the floor. He uncinched his belt and opened the bottom button on his shirt, freeing up his paunch. From the drawer of an unused filing cabinet next to the freezer he pulled his own bottle and a dusty glass. He blew into the glass and poured out three fingers of dark liquor. He did his own drinking alone, did not think it seemly to consort with the patrons. Drinking alone in this room because it was quiet, only the thrum of the freezer and the lights, and it left his mind free to wander. Lately though, if forced, he would have confessed his thoughts felt anything but free; in fact, he had taken to brooding. His brain would chew over the same bits and fragments constantly, never finding satisfaction or insights or illuminations, no matter the subject. He swallowed a large gulp of whiskey— he knew he was faltering. Letting things slip. In his business, in his life, in his home. His home—before there had been a wife, now there wasn’t. The house falling into disrepair. The front porch was buckling from a leak in its roof left too long unattended; a window broken for more than a year was still covered over with a sheet of plywood. There was a clogged kitchen sink, the galvanized drain rusted and stopping up, and his solution had been to stop using the thing altogether; now dishes were piled two feet high and there was a growing roach problem. What was once his home was now only a house, no more inviting than the space he was drinking in at this moment.
Here too, at the bar; the simplest tasks had become unbearable—three nights in a row, he hadn’t even changed out the bar drawer. The thing so stuffed with twenties, tens, and fives it wouldn’t open or close without a struggle. Such a basic duty, now for some reason insurmountable; he was glad Red wasn’t here to see the disgrace his little brother had become. Wylie drained the rest of his glass and filled it again—something terrible is happening to me.
On a shelf mounted to the wall opposite where he sat were three video monitors, twelve inch screens that relayed fuzzy images from three different hidden cameras: one over the back door to the place, showing the back lot and the overflowing dumpster; another over the front door, under the awning, affording a view of the immediate exterior and a dozen or so feet of sidewalk to the entrance’s left and right; and the third a wide-angle shot of the barroom itself. He’d had these installed a few years back, when he was a more conscientious man, wanting to cut down on possible theft and after being informed the cameras would drop his liability and cut down on his insurance premiums. There was a dim flickering movement on the third screen; Wylie leaned in close to make it out. Young CB had advanced to the bar and stood now beside the stranger’s seat. CB’s back was to the shot, but Wylie was sure his mouth was moving.
CB made a point of scuffing against the neighboring barstool so the man would not be caught unawares by his arrival—it was not his intention to startle anyone and he didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot by doing so.
Dale Shaw, who had been admiring the shine off his silver Zippo, was alerted to the man’s approach by his apparition, ghostly and insubstantial, in the lighter’s metallic mirror. Dale Shaw did not acknowledge him, not even when the man knocked against a stool to give signal as to his presence.
CB had no firm plan walking up to this way. Only that he had to make a stab, try and connect with another human being. Somehow, someway, to make a little scratch in the flinty topsoil of the harsh, closemouthed world. Maybe get a fair audience from a man, have himself heard out in kind, and perhaps from a chance encounter and a little conversation walk out into the night a fuller, richer man. Besides, if he had to sit for another iota of a second with Joony, and hear her nasal breath, and listen to her sucking at a straw from a glass that had been empty the better part of an hour, he feared his final reserves would give out and he’d wrench her chubby neck until could bend this way and that.
Upon being ignored by the man, CB did the usual fidget around his bad ear and his brain filled with scampering thoughts; before he could stop it fast, harried talk started to spill from his mouth in a high-pitched voice that sounded as if it had outran puberty, the words tumbling out like dice: “I’m not here to bother you, I’m not here to do nothing but say hello and introduce myself. The name is CB and that is my real name, it’s not a nickname or initials or something. It doesn’t stand for anything. I just wanted to come up and say, ‘well, hello’ and just see what’s going on. I mean, here we are, the only ones in the place for awhile now and it just seems to me two fellas should at least say hello to each other and see what’s going on.”
Dale Shaw watched his latest cigarette burn down and curl into the brown nub of the filter, leaving a rail of ash. With one finger he tipped the ash into the tin ashtray and then raised and pressed with the same finger at a point between his eyes, as though searching for a pulse. His eyes closed. Then they opened and met CB’s stare. “And what exactly is going on?”
“Well, it isn’t for me to say really. Because nothing but nothing is going on with me, and that’s the best reason to strike up a new acquaintance, because you ain’t got nothing going on yourself, and nothing is happening. You know how it is, you sit in a place, stay in the same spot for too long and then you come to figure out, ‘hey, I’m spinning my wheels here, spinning ‘em all the time and just watching things pass me by. Opportunities. Watching other people do this or that, watching them flat hustle and keep all their balls in the air and you say, ‘hey, that’s what I gotta do. I gotta make something happen right here, right now.’ So that’s why I’m standing here, talking this way. To you.”
Dale Shaw had lit another cigarette and reclined in his seat, neck tilted back on his shoulders. He blew out the smoke and watched the floating cloud swarm the glass shades of a ceiling fixture. “So you came here to say your name is two letters and you got nothing going on but you wish you did.”
“Well, I got a last name. My family name is Stromeyer, CB is just my given name. You know, my handle. Mind if I sit,” he said as he was pulling out the stool.
“Go ahead. I don’t own it.” Dale Shaw looked the man’s face over, for the first time not from a distance or just in profile. And he was unnerved. From a few dozen feet, the odd proportion of the head had seemed more a matter of excess than of absence, the lack of protuberance on his left side perfectly in keeping with the clean, shaved curve of his very round skull, while the bulge of the normal ear looked discomfiting, a superfluous abutment that knocked the entire cranium out of whack. However, up close, he saw the grisly fine points of the man’s deformity: instead of the full shell of an ear, there was a chasm disappearing into the side of the head, its surface a chapped red, and out of this slit slipped a tiny sprig of cartilage, fleshly-white and fresh as baby’s skin, which Dale Shaw realized was the crest of the ear that conventionally would have been there in entirety. He did not see how it ever could have been whole—no accident or mutilation could have caused such a thing. Must have been a birth defect—he fleetingly wondered about impurities in the local drinking water, pollutants in the rivers and streams. Chemical plants close by, the lights of the refineries he had seen on the trek here. He tried not to look at the glaring pox on the man’s head, a cored apple with a grub worm poking out.
CB did not notice the man trying to rein-in his own eyes. “You know old Wylie?”
Dale Shaw knew he meant the barkeep. “I knew his brother. ‘Red’, we called him.”
“Oh, yeah. The dead one. Before my time. I was still in school when that happened. Well anyway, let me tell you, that Wylie might seem all buddy-buddy, but he’s really a mean, no good son of a bitch. Nothing but a mean motherfucker. He cracked me upside the head one night, in this very room. With a billy club.”
Another stolen glance at the ear, CB swiping at it with one hand like a cow’s tail switching away flies. “Well, smacked me in the face with it, I should say. Cracked one of my teeth, busted my lips. Hurt my mouth real good.”
“Looks okay to me.”
“Well, this was awhile back. I heal pretty good. Thing is though, I wasn’t causing any problem. No disturbance, I mean. I was just trying to straighten out Joony back there. She was making a big row about nothing at all, nothing important, I mean, and well, I had to step in. You know women…” and here he paused, expecting the man to give some sort of affirmation, perhaps a jocular nod or a wry grin, then getting neither, moved on “… and how they are. She was embarrassing herself and everybody so it was up to me to deal with the situation. And for the effort that fat fuck lays into me with a club. Goddamn!” At the oath, he shot a glance over his shoulder; the last thing he needed was Wylie collaring him now, just as he was making real headway with this guy. Then his blunder occurred to him, and CB could have went upside his own head—he had forgotten to ask the man his name. The most obvious formality in discourse between strangers and he had neglected it completely. Just rambling on and on about himself. What a fuckup I am, he thought, running my mouth like I’m being paid by the word, completely disregarding age-old protocols. And making such a big holler about my own name to boot.
He shifted to damage control: “Listen, mister—hey, what’s your name by the way?” The other man stared, not blinking, for several seconds. Really, he rarely seemed to blink at all. Then:
“My name’s Dizzy, just call me Dizzy.” He extended his hand and CB did the same.
They shook on it.
More and more, when he wasn’t not blinking at CB, and carefully avoiding gawking at his abnormality, Dale Shaw’s eyes were drawn to the girl, still sitting in her chair at that back table. Light attached to her there, in a way that reminded him of a cathedral’s light, of icons and plaster virgins and the sun filtered through stained glass. Her head was bowed as if deep in prayer or confession, the tumble of her hair drawn like a tapestry over half her face. He cast his eyes down her body. A fantasy mingled its way into him, of rescuing her, of rolling the young whore up in a rug and sweeping it into his arms, her swaddled head secure in the crook of his shoulder, striding out the door to leave her simpleton pimp squalling and the thick barkeep scratching his head. He’d tote her to his pickup and unfurl her gently on the seat beside him, roar the eager engine to hallelujah their getaway; and they would catch one another’s eyes and laugh like children at the delirious daring of such an escape. They’d hoot and clap as the pickup tore out of Nowheresburg, population two less than when the evening began. Somehow, he’d procure a magnum of champagne, and two paper cups, and they’d toast one another as the staid, vacuous night broke apart before them. She’d put her hand on his leg and curl up close to him. Whisper velveteen words that would float like dark, humid planets in his brain.
He shook off his reverie and forced his eyes off the girl and now intentionally forced his eyes’ focus on the warped ear a few feet in front of him—her outline blurred back into the background as he shifted perspective shifted. He wished in a thousand small choices made over the thousands of days of his life, that he had done things differently.
The swinging doors opened and Wylie emerged, carrying a black plastic tray. CB dropped his eyes out of instinct and Dale Shaw watched the barman walk the boards with a heavy footed gait, his body rocking side to side. He looked at the man’s face—bonfires smoldered under his cheeks, eyes brimming wells shot through with traces of red. That man is drunk, thought Dale Shaw. Drunk, or near to it.
Wylie did not look at them. He lumbered to the register and set the tray on a small stand fronting the array of liquor bottles. It was an antiquated register and he pulled a lever on its side and a bell rang and the drawer slid open, banging him in the gut. He removed the tray inside with one hand and replaced it with the one he’d brought from the back. The tray taken from the register was set on the stand and he pushed the register shut.
Both the men saw the piled stacks of cash nearly spilling from the tray on the stand. All the different slots for the various denominations of money were running over. Each made quick tallies of their personal holdings: Dale Shaw figured that, after settling his tab, he would be left with twenty dollars or so; CB’s total came to even less. How much must be in the till only a few feet from them now, over the barricade of the bar, under the bleary watch of Wylie’s eye? Five hundred? Six hundred?
It could not have been said to be even a thought, certainly not a stratagem. Dale Shaw’s bottle of beer, more full than not, tipped over and beer flooded over the bar’s surface. “Hell, I’m sorry.” He stood up and backed away a couple of feet. “Always have been clumsy.” CB jumped back as well.
Wylie muttering. Turning his back to the money, grabbing a rag from the well and mopping at the tide of spilt beer, mainly succeeding in sweeping it one way and another over the bar top. He worked at this drunkenly and was panting some when he considered the cleanup completed, a sudsy sheen still on the formica. “Now I’m closing her down for real. Everybody pay up. CB, you two owe me eight dollars. And you…” here the man halted, unable to work the exact tab in his head. “Let’s call it twenty-five.” Dale Shaw felt the enterprise crumble; Wylie obviously meant to put their money in the tray behind him. But after taking Dale Shaw’s money, and after CB had pushed over a few wadded bills, the loaded barkeep slid the money into his pants pocket and moved in the opposite direction, to grab a coat on a hook hanging from the wall. Then he was turning up the lights in the room and putting on the coat, jerking head toward the front door.
Joony had nodded off thinking of nothing in particular, not her surroundings or the voices of the men who inhabited them. Somewhere in the back channels of her mind she was aware for a time that she was dreaming; then she was being roused awake. She opened her eyes on a bright room she did not at first recognize, and a man she did barking for her to “goddamn, get up already.” She rose to her feet and walked to CB and let her eyes close again for a second or two, wishing she could slip back into the folds of the dream she could not recall and into a sleep she wished could be without wake. The lights in the place went dark again—Wylie lowering some dimmers. He nodded to her and his eyes were not unkind and he looked like he needed to rest as well.
They all four stepped outside together and the wind was scalding in its cold. The sound of clinking keys. The tumblers of locks being thrown on the front door, steel-framed and a face of insulated glass. Then she saw Wylie turning up his collar, waving her goodbye as he disappeared around the corner of the building. She made a beeline to their car, parked on the street a block away and, though CB soon followed, she noticed how he and that other man lingered for a few moments, by a lamppost, seemingly gazing back through the glass to the inside of Red’s.
Dale Shaw stood on the sidewalk for a few more seconds and watched first Wylie, then CB and the girl, walk away from him, before he turned and walked westward to his truck. Inside the cab he lit a cigarette and started the motor and stamped his feet on the floorboards and rubbed his hands together. He idled for a couple of minutes until the engine warmed and then he moved up State Street, on the way out of town.
A mile on and Sanderson was already ending, tapering off into a few dark homes and dormant warehouses. And ahead the infinite black maw of the endless night waiting to swallow him once more. He looked down at the fuel gauge, the needle running below a quarter of a tank. He tapped the brake and pulled the wheel left, making a u turn on the shoulder. Headed back to town. No car passed him, he saw not a single other soul.
Red’s Tavern coming up on his right now, the neon sign switched off. Across the way a used car lot, surrounded by a cyclone fence topped with loops of barb wire. Beside the lot ran a narrow gravel alley shot through with weeds. He reversed the Dodge into the alley opening, nose pointing out towards the bar. He put it into park and killed the lights, stubbed out one cigarette and lit another.
The door had two locks, single cylinder. A break in the glass and a hand could reach in and open both bolts. There were no pull gates, no bars. And the money was still there, that Wylie so pie-eyed he had closed up without it. Dale Shaw was betting he wouldn’t be coming back. Five hundred dollars, six hundred maybe. Maybe seven.
Minutes passed. He studied the scene, he procrastinated. Cracking his window to let the smoke slither out. No reason he couldn’t change his mind again, head back for the highway. Accommodations could always be improvised, a tank of gas could always be got on a snatch and run—he’d done it before. Looking over the situation again, the bar front, the borders of the street, a flat fresco bereft of movement save for the dried leaves and fluff the breeze pushed over the blacktop—and another faint flickering in the bottom left of the frame. A block south on State, curbside across the street, a parked car: an aqua-green Chevrolet Caprice, the roof and hood peeled over and starting to rust, inside a dim dome light on, and the flickers he’d seen the shades of the occupants inside, gesturing and gesticulating. Radiating silhouettes playing behind the frosted screens, two outlined figures. His observation began to bring into focus hands and heads, one which looked askew even at this distance. He smiled and leaned back in his seat. Maybe he could just wait them out. They might only be having a spat before they departed. Maybe they aren’t thinking along the same line that I am.
But the Caprice did not move, and in his bones and his blood, growing thicker by the second, he knew he couldn’t wait much longer. His drunk was going slack on him, and exhaustion was moving in, and his brain itself felt chilled. He never wore a watch but knew it must be at least one in the morning at this point. The time had come to push forward or pull out. Inhaling sharply. In a cup holder he found a dirty scrap of napkin and plucked one of the white pills the trucker had given him and he swallowed it dry.
He got out of the truck and pushed the door closed. Walking across the street with both hands in his pockets. Up to the Caprice. Now the figures behind the smoked windshield remained perfectly still as if encased in ice. He rounded the front of the car to the driver’s side window and bent down and rapped on the glass. Some seconds, then it was lowered with a few stray squeaks. He was greeted with a view of the lopsided, shaved head, then the numb, dumb eyes of CB, a look of vacant surprise ill concealed by a feigned expression of apathy.
Dale Shaw leaned his face into the car. “I don’t know if you’re waiting on me like I’m waiting on you. But we ain’t got all night. If we’re going to do this thing, then let’s do it.” With that he straightened up and started the march to Red’s.
CB opened his door, turned back to Joony. “You stay here, keep the engine running.”
“I’m not staying here by myself.”
“I told you to watch the car, we might have to get out of here in a hurry.”
“And I told you, I’m not staying here all by myself.”
“You got to,” he said. “Don’t you argue with me right now.”
She didn’t argue but got out on her side, slammed the door shut, and followed the other man up the block. CB wanted to rant and storm at her insubordination, but he stifled it, chastened by the cold as much as anything, and he tailed after them.
Dale Shaw removed a rolled flannel shirt he’d brought from the truck from the sleeve of his jacket. He looked up and down the long thoroughfare, lifeless as ever, then began tying off the shirt around his right fist. In the shadows under the awning his eyes narrowed to pierce the new darkness, and he brought his fist bunched in fabric up to the glass sheet of the door, just left of the lower lock. He reared back and struck the glass. A weak report, like an air gun popping, but the glass held, pristine. And it held the following four times he punched at it. Joony stared at her ankles, nipped by the frigid wind and sprouting goose bumps. CB spun a couple of times like a top but was lost as to what to do; he put down an impulse to fleet but was unsure of how to aid the endeavor, stuck between keeping his distance and keeping watch. This town, where he had lived his entire life and which he always said was full of nothings and nobodies, now felt fervently alive with a thousand feverish eyes, pinpointed like rifle scopes on him alone, a rabid invisible citizenry of hanging judges and jurymen.
The door finally splintered. Dale Shaw scraped and pushed against the spider webbing of cracked glass with the ribboning glove of the shirt until the mealy grid at last gave way and fell with a crackle onto the floor inside. He cut his palm slightly reaching into the opening to throw the deadbolts; he did not at first feel it but with eyes fast adjusting to the darkness he caught sight of his own blood dribbling onto the ground. The batteries inside his skull pulsated with wild thoughts of laboratories and microscopes and DNA tests, but he pressed on.
The gang of three returned back to recent habitats that now felt alien and new. The cowbell made a mocking clink when they opened the door, and all in the room was positioned as before, but an ethereal light, supplied by the streetlight, hovered over everything, steeled and diamond hard like blue ice. Still, there it was: positioned seemingly in a kind of spotlight, the prize pot of wrinkled, lived-in cash money. A magnetized draw to it, the men moving hungrily its way. Behind the bar. Hands grasping: “We divvy it up fast, right now. I don’t see any wires but there could be a still alarm here. Let’s hurry up.”
CB: “Lets just grab it and go. Better to do it anywhere but here.” The two men’s talk like hissing steam.
“Doing it out in the open won’t get us caught for sure, huh? Why don’t we just do it outside, under one of the big street lamps?”
CB shaking his lopsided head: “We don’t have to be out in the open, we can do it in the car.”
Dale Shaw sensed the other man was talking sense but went ahead with his own method. The paper felt so brittle in his hands he feared it might dissolve to powder. The amphetamine was beginning its buzz between his ears, he became lost in the crinkling sound the bills made as he sorted through them. So entranced he did not hear the other noise issuing from the rear of the place, a clunking noise followed by another, then another.
CB did hear it, and instantly he retreated. He fell back to the other side of the bar, between it and the nearest table. Then Dale Shaw finally heard, and dropped the money and about-faced and went around the bar. Dropped to a crouch. I should break for it now, he told himself. Run for the door.
He didn’t. Joony had stationed herself against the opposite wall, pressing her back to it so hard she might have been attempting to push the whole structure down. A swishing sound: those swinging door opening from the back rooms. A broad figure filled the door frame, blacked out but for slivers of light catching in the white hair. He moved forward with a heavy step, hollow on the floor. He hadn’t seen them yet.
He stepped up to the tray of money he had forgotten, grumbled to himself, then was scratching at his head, lathed along with one shoulder in the same vibrant glow peculiar to just those few cubic feet.
She watched it unfold, slowly, terribly, inexorable: the other man kneeling was concealed by the flank of the bar, but CB had frozen in mid-cower, spine like a pulled bow, and would be immediately visible as soon as Wylie looked that way. He was peering down, scratching his head still at the two stacks of bills. She saw Wylie’s back flex; he lifted his head, a buck pricking up at strange scent. A creeping cold drafted from the hole in the glass. Joony wanted back inside her dream. Wylie turned around.
CB squawked. The big man exploded like buckshot and came barreling around the corner. His legs slammed into the other man crouching and both crashed to the ground like charging animals snared in a net. Thrashing bodies, strangled yelps and cries. A body in shadow flipped over and landed with a thud. She saw great arms grab at CB, around his torso, and then he was flat on the ground. Then Wylie was wrestling with something at his back, a wraith-like form all in black, and she saw fingers scratching at his pale face. A scream. Then she screamed. The men entangled like baby rats, two and three heads and extra limbs flailing. CB on the ground, his face banging the floorboards. A big hand had gripped him about the throat. A face swam up into the light and she did not recognize it, saw only a ripped, flapping nostril and streams of blood. Now the face was taking punches. She saw the other man stoop over and fists were striking at his ribs. CB back up and swinging wildly. Grunts. Hard pants. A table knocked over, chairs flying across the floor. Glass shattering. Joony squeezed her hands over her ears and sank to her knees. Still the noises found her. Another scream, more desperate now. She lifted her head because she had to. The men now in one mass, blacker than the shadows. Movements slowing down, motions become halting and spare. A great wrenching heave and she the mass quake like it, they, were atop a detonating grenade. A sharp crack, and a horrible guttural howl. A hard bang. Then the room went quiet. Even breathing had seemed to cease.
The silence and the stillness were tangible things, with density, things of mass and weight. Then CB and the other man were both standing but stooped over, panting with their hands braced on their knees. Both streaked in blood. She stepped forward, a half-blind puppy uncertain of her way. Wylie lay on the floor: a vile crease ran across his neck and around his throat. His head rested at an impossible angle flat against one shoulder. The eye nearest her was wide open and it bulged from the socket, rimmed with yellowing film. Like the awestruck eye of a gutted fish.
Dale Shaw looked around at everything except the fallen thing by his feet; his ears were ringing and he could have sworn he heard the wails of approaching sirens, but soon the sound died away. “We gotta get out of here. Get the money and go.” No sooner, however, were the words out of his mouth than the situation presented itself to him fully—the body would be found probably no later than the following afternoon, and it would be well known in town that CB and Joony had been at the establishment the previous night, CB who had once been beaten by the dead man. He would be the first one the cops came after. Coming for him twelve to fifteen hours from this point, at the latest. He looked over at him now—the man child was reeling this way and that over the killing floor, pressing his shoe soles into the washes of blood, wavering like a rushing reed in a hard river current. CB would crack. No doubt about it. And Dale Shaw knew he himself wouldn’t make it far before the APB went out for a man of his description, driving his make and model of truck. No, he told himself, I have to think clearly. Have to buy more time. To his surprise, inside his battered head his brain was blessed with clarity, cylinders firing clean and smooth: I have to manage this situation, me alone. We have to move the body.
After they decamped remnants of their presence were left behind: a square of cardboard torn from a packing case found in the back and taped over the missing piece of glass in the door; a few rags piled in one dark corner, the evidence of vain efforts to wipe clean their fingerprints from every surface they feared they might have touched; some shards of glass on the floor; a table and two chairs lain on their sides; and, where the body had been, dark blood shimmering in the intruding streetlight like the moon bobbing on a black ocean.
Then there were things left unchanged, one being a covert cable ran tight to one baseboard, up a wall to bundle with other cables and cords, over the beer signs and television set. A small video camera perched behind a speaker, the red recording light patched over sometime before by Wylie with black electrical tape. It was on the same wall as the photograph in the mahogany frame, the one of the wrecked Cadillac being pulled from the quarry. The quarry that was now abandoned. Again, Dale Shaw had pointed at this picture, extending one finger to the wall where it hung. CB and Joony looked over to where he gestured. It occasioned the last words said in the place: “Do either of you know the way there?”
The body must have weighed every bit of two hundred and twenty, and they were attempting to lug it in a blue tarp they’d found in the storage room. Joony had pulled the Caprice around to the back lot, where it waited now with the trunk open and her in the back seat.
They hoisted their load carefully—within seconds of dying, the man’s bowels had exploded and the corpse was smeared with mess. Now they carried the reeking mass in the tarp and it sagged in the middle between the sides each one held, scraping the ground with every step taken. Feet in black-soled shoes would slip out through the open fold of the material and one could glimpse how the corpse’s shirt rode up the torso, exposing a broad, white, hairless stomach with a deep navel nailed in its center. An unspoken fear was shared between them that they might spill their cargo and his wrecked face would fall out and they would lose nerve on seeing it and flee in opposite directions.
Joony shivered on the upholstery. The car’s engine on and idling, sounding so malnourished there was a taunting edge to the exhalations it made, as though it might well sputter to a halt and abandon them all there, red handed.
They tried lifting and swinging the corpse into the trunk but weren’t synchronized and managed only to bang the slab off the rear fender. On the second heave they landed it in the trunk, but the compartment was already stacked too full: a spare tire, a lug wrench, paint cans, broom handles, a couple of hub caps, mounds of fast food bags and paper cups, other detritus. Wylie’s body was raised as if on an altar, setting too high to close the lid.
“Goddamn, goddamn,” CB nearly screamed. He kicked at one of the dead man’s hands that had flopped onto the bumper. Dale Shaw watched as he commenced to slamming the lid down, over and over, again and again. The blows against the body went from at first a dry thud to something thicker, something wet. Finally, there was the soft click, the latch closing.
They would caravan to the spot; Dale Shaw insisted upon it. He was not going to leave his vehicle here and be stuck without it. He would follow them to the quarry and keep an eye on CB and Joony and their transport of the body. And this afforded him a chance still to take off, if on the road there he decided to veer off somewhere in the night, make a run away from the disaster. However, headed down State Street, following behind the Caprice, he could not bring himself to desert—he had to see this through. Instead, alone with time to absorb just what had occurred, he wished someone else, anyone else, was traveling with him. An awful despair descended upon him; he blanched and quivered in his seat like a cat caught in a hailstorm. As the weak bloodstained parade of two vehicles moved onto Ellisburg Highway, he looked out the window and tried to divert the wretched path of his thoughts with a view of the razor crescent quarter moon, festooned in the infinite sky, smoke rings of charcoal clouds drifting over its delicate face. He knew he would never recover from something like this, would never be whole again. How he envied the naïve, deluded man he had so recently been—a fool forever in exodus, a self-imposed exile always on the run, running from things he now could not even recall. Fleeing always from his past, to run headlong into a thing from which there could be no escape. He would give anything to trade places with the man he had been one day ago, one hour ago. He would certainly give far more than the two hundred and twenty-six dollars now stolen away in his pocket.
In the lead car the air was sick with panic, a fearful scent of aluminum sweat and drying blood. And urine—Joony had lost control and let go a little in her panties. She felt it between her legs as it went from a warmth to a damp chill. CB in the driver’s seat with his hands gripping a perfect ten and two on the wheel. A crazed light shone in his eyes, as though ahead on the highway were pillars of fire, beckoning him on.
They parked on a bluff above the old quarry. She stayed in the car, the engine shut down but the headlights on, throwing wild, painted colors, Halloween orange and desert orange, on the sheared limestone walls which rose above everything. Lights like bonfires burning on the cliffs.
Dale Shaw on all fours stuck his head over the ledge and looked down. The expanse fell into utter blackness after three hundred feet or so—a steep drop of smooth stone, straight as a plumb line, no abutment to interfere. He spat on the ground and got to his feet, a string of yellow saliva coating the bristles of his chin. CB was on his knees, monk-like, legs curled under his body and palms flat on his pants. His eyes gaped so wide their lids looked to have been scissored clean off.
“Take the feet,” said Dale Shaw. “I’ll get him around the head.” CB complied. “We got to put our weight into it now. C’mon.” The body had begun to stiffen and there was less sag now in the center. They started swinging the bulk back and forth over the precipice. On the eighth swing they pitched it forward. The bundled blue tarp, its dead freight, was paralyzed in midair for an unbearable moment, as though suspended in time —then it dropped from sight. Gone into the abyss as if it had never been. Dale Shaw listened—was that the sound of impact, that slight noise, he heard from so many hundreds of feet below? Must have been.
Task completed. Immediately they detached from each other. Dale Shaw, crab-like, began the scramble up the stony pass back to the bluff where the vehicles were stationed. He had only made it a few feet, however, when some new sound caused him to turn around.
CB had collapsed back on his knees, still facing the chasm. He was crying. Some seconds more, his whole body shaking, and the cries turned to great sobs, long and wounded, pitiful.
He clutched himself about the shoulders, as if he were his own infant. Wails broke down into whimpers and gasps.
“Oh Christ, Oh Christ. I never done something like this before. Never would have done it. Jesus Christ, I knew him since I was a kid. Oh God, oh goddamn what have I done.” And he pitched forward face first into the gravel and dust, clawing at the ground. Like an animal he tore at the earth, as if to dig a hole to disappear into, to steal away from the bona fide predators of the earth that owned nights such as this. Wails rising again, to splash off the crags and rocks that surrounded him. He beat with his fists, but the world below steadfastly refused to be give purchase. He fastened to it so tight he looked to be attempting a merger. Dale Shaw watched the boy in the man’s shirt sob into the dirt and the parched ground drank up his tears. “Oh fuck me, Oh fuck me, what the fuck has happened to me. Please help me, goddamn help me, help me, help me, goddamn help me…”
Dale Shaw brought the rock down hard on the back of CB’s head. It gave a small pop like an egg cracking on a bowl. The sobs broke off into a small gurgle in the back of the throat. Dale Shaw hit him again—it was a small rock but solid and fit well in his hand. Now he raised it with both hands, high above his head, and when he brought it down to strike the skull again the rock sank a couple of inches into the fissure that had split open just behind the boy’s deformed ear. He hit him again, and would have done so one more time but the last vestiges of strength had flown away; and now it was his turn to collapse.
Lying atop the prone figure; CB spasmed, left leg kicking: one time, three times, five times, seven. Then a couple more times for good measure. Then nothing at all.
The cold seeped up from the earth, through CB’s body and into his own. Dale Shaw lifted his eyes to look at the inverted world above him and beyond him: the shorn cliffs hanging like grisly upper molars, the earth hovering over a bedrock of air, the moon a tiny cinder smoldering beneath the stitched horizon. The bluff once above him now below. Where she awaited.
Joony still huddled in the backseat. She was afraid, and sat immobile as a statue, except for the rising and falling of her chest and the random shivers. But as the minutes stretched on, and they had not returned, she started to fidget. She ran her fingers over the door handle, over the buttons of the seat cushions. She started tracing patterns on the fogged window, designs of figure eights and triangles, star-shapes. The key was in the ignition but the engine was off; she thought about starting it up, to get some heat working, and leaned up and touched CB’s key ring but didn’t follow through—she did not want to startle him. He might think she was deserting him, taking off and leaving him here. She knew how nervous he could get, how most of the time he was more afraid of things than she was. Many nights she had sat up late with him, cradling his head in her lap when he was scared and grieving, about things he could not even put into words. She’d kiss him on his damp eyelids, on his different ear. Some mornings they’d wake up in just this position.
But she was so cold, felt like she might freeze to death. She pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dash—if they’re not here by the time the lighter clicks, I’m starting the car. It clicked out in a few scant seconds. She pulled it from the round slot, the red eye staring out balefully from the cup of her hands. The cold was so severe it almost seemed a good notion to rub the hot metal against her skin. Would burn at first, sure, then it might feel good. No, no, it would be the reverse; a little bit of comfort, then the pain.
She wasn’t going to do that to herself. Not anymore. Used to she did that kind of stuff though, back when she was young. Fourteen and fifteen. Sixteen, even. Started off making these little cuts on her forearms and around her ankles. She’d sit on the toilet with the lid down and the door locked and slash sideways with a safety razor. Shallow cuts, just little scratches. It wouldn’t even hurt, just a little sting. Afterwards, she’d feel better. Thin scratches, barely anything, and nobody ever noticed them or called attention to them. In a few days’ time they’d be all healed up. Some time later she began doing more stuff, like burning herself and whatnot. In her bedroom late of an evening, striking matches and bringing the flaming head up to touch the most hidden parts of her body: her armpits, inside her bellybutton, deep inside her thighs. The sensitive areas. Matches hurt more than the razors ever did, and took longer to heal, but afterwards she’d feel even better. Cleaner, somehow. Not all the burns healed fully; she still carried a few scars in various places, puckered marks the color of black cherries. This was before she even met CB; he never asked about her scars. Maybe he’d never noticed them either.
The cold had become a scalding thing and the shivers rocked her body violently and she couldn’t stop them. She needed to turn on the heat. She started at fifty and began counting backwards in her head, thinking if they were not back by the time she got to zero, she was starting the car for sure. The lighter was still in her hand; it had died down and was now just another cold thing to touch her.
She quit all that stuff because she figured it must be wrong. To hurt your own self. There was no reason for that, none she could see. So she simply stopped. Completely. Beginning such things alone, she ended them alone. A crazy habit, thinking back on it now. Mutilating oneself, with razors and matches and cutting and burns. She shuddered again, more from the memory than the winter. Remembering that she had ever treated herself that way. Never would do something like that again. Something bad like that. Something unforgivable.
She came to zero.
