Bent Highway
Chapter Fourteen: Fire-Water
I didn’t know what day it was, nor the time, or even month—for damn sure, not the year. Something in this century.
The heat had been building since I was dropped off in front of the mobile home. Dropped off, right—more like kicked out on my ass. It had to be summer, but I couldn’t tell if it was just starting or ending. A wave of black birds swooped and crested into a boomerang shape, shifted into long line, and then dissipated across the wide expanse. I pictured her at the wheel of the truck. Waiting for me to do something. Waiting for me to change what happened.
I’d sat here before, I knew that, though I couldn’t remember when. She knew I would remember. I saw it in her face before she drove away. Gaps in my memory filled in, my time in the white room had helped. Walt had been trying to show me what I’d forgotten.
I looked at the mobile home, or was it a trailer? It didn’t matter. I saw where the flames would bust out of the windows. A hawk soared high above, screeched, moved in for the kill.
A sense of time filled me. I now understood that I’d been on the highway much longer than I thought. That day when I left the hardware store, the crappy little town, and the one who I thought was my friend, was a long time ago. I didn’t even want to think about how long. Harold was not who I thought he was. I didn’t know who the hell he was—or when he was.
Again, I saw her white face in the truck. Chalk Girl was waiting. Hoping that somehow something would change this time. She must have brought me back farther and farther each time, thinking if only she brought me back far enough, I could do something, change what happened. She finally understood that being there when the fire had already started wouldn’t work. It had to be before.
But it wasn’t from lack of trying. That one time—I clenched both hands, feeling the heat of the metal door as I pulled it open, shirt up to my mouth and ducking low. It was no use, I was too late. Her screams, a long keening wail, filled the walls of my mind, and I shook my head to let them go. I’d heard the screams before, and I would hear them again.
How old am I?
Visiting myself. In all the times I’ve went through a rip, I don’t think I’d done that before. Maybe that’s why Walt picked me up all those years ago. Because of course it was Walt who started it all. He knew my memories were distant by choice. I didn’t think a lot about my growing up. I didn’t think much about the past at all. Walt must have guessed that I would be hard to break into. How do you crack open something that has been sealed for so long?
But now I travelled farther back into my memory, doorways that were closed opened up to me. Now you’re awake, that’s what he said. And that’s how I'd remembered it was Walt I’d met first, not the girl with blood stained lips. She came later.
“You need a ride?” Walt asked.
“What do you think?”
“Get in.”
“What about the dog?”
“You got a problem with animals?”
“Nope, just wondering.”
Even when I see myself on the side of the highway hitching, and then getting into the car with Walt and the wolf-dog, I question if that was the first time we met. Walt had been on the highway a long time. How long had I been on it? For now, I had to believe that this was Walt picking me up for the first time. To contemplate further, to think on the circles within circles, would strain my mind, possibly to the point of breaking. Everything would snap like a dry elastic stretched too far. Hell, you could take your eye out with that thing.
In the car, Walt started to talk to me about how time was like a highway. There were straightaways, bends, exits, and parts that just seem to disappear into the horizon. I thought it was all pretty damn trippy, and I wasn’t even high at the time. Fine. I didn’t care if the giant-like driver wanted to spout off about his weird view of the universe. I just wanted the ride.
“Where did you say you were headed?” Walt’s voice rumbled and bounced in the car.
“Anywhere.”
“That seems a bit pointless.”
“Yeah, well it’s a pattern with me,” I said.
That first drive with Walt lasted a long time, days turned into several months, maybe longer. He drove that car right through the calendar. We stopped in small towns, usually avoided the cities, ate in diners that started to look the same, in motels that were so alike that they could have been the same place, it was all the same, all of it.
Then we hit a rip.
More like, Walt drove us right into one. I blacked out and came to in a bar, with an empty shotglass in front of me and a coffee can full of cigarette butts. Now, it wasn’t the first time I’d blacked out and woke up in a drinking establishment. The difference here being the dirt floor, the long oak bar, the swinging doors… and oh yeah, the horses outside. There was a time in my life when I dropped acid. I hadn’t done it for some time, but I did consider if this was one of the longest, and oddest trips of my life. Walt pulled up a chair next to me. He wore a huge black Stetson, making him look even more like a giant, a cowboy giant.
“Now do you see what I mean?” he asked.
“Am I dreaming?”
“What do you think?”
A sharply dressed man with a bowtie came and refilled my shot glass with a dark liquid. He put down another for Walt and poured.
“Two bits,” said the bartender.
Walt flipped him a coin.
“I don’t usually go this far back, but I needed to know he wouldn’t follow,” Walt said.
I sipped at the edge of my drink. It wasn’t quite as good as gasoline.
“Someone is following you?”
“Yes. Is this making sense?” he asked.
“As much as any of my life does. Or has.”
“Drink up.”
Walt slid his shotglass in front of me. I spent the next hour or so getting plastered. Damned if I didn’t start actually liking the fire-water. Walt kept talking. At one point, the wolf-dog wandered into the bar. Nobody said anything. Walt talked about needing my help. He had been trying to maintain some sort of control, but this other guy, the one he said was following him, kept pushing. Walt didn’t know how much longer he could hold him back.
“So what’s this other guy want?” I slurred.
“Nothing but complete and utter chaos.”
“Sounds like my kinda guy.”
“Trust me. He is not.”
The look on Walt’s face told me things had just moved from serious into deadly… worth your life, serious.
“I need to tell you—you are going to forget a lot over the next while. You’ll forget this place, how we got here, you’ll forget the last few months, and you’ll forget me. All of it,” he said.
“Well, I'm probably gonna have one mother of a hangover—but you’re kinda hard guy to forget.” The room started a slow spin under my feet.
“You are going to need to straddle a line. To be in different places, at the same time. It’s going to get messy. On your brain, I mean. And maybe your soul. I know he’ll find you, but if you keep moving you’ll be okay. I have someone that can help you.”
“Is she cute?”
Walt gave a rare smile. “How do you know it’s a she?”
“Sounds like I will—”
I stopped in mid sentence—too much in shock to scream out—and stared at the blade stuck deep into my leg. Walt released his grip on the handle.
“Goodnight.”
* * *
Under the poplar, I rubbed my leg where the knife had gone in. It wasn’t bleeding now, but I knew it would be again soon. A lonely wind swept through the leaves, like God was whistling.
The long green nose of a sedan emerged from a dust cloud on the road. A line of blood appeared on my leg, then was sucked in again, like someone had a Hoover on the other side of my skin.
Tires crunched and stones hit the metal underbelly, and everything got louder and louder. A cloud of blue followed the car, reminding of those first shot glasses Walt poured for me. That’s what my insides were doing while I poured that fire-water down them. The Pontiac Laurentian pulled up beside the mobile home and shut off the engine. It backfired and chugged to a stop. The mobile home was currently not on fire.
The guy who stepped out was a lot thinner than I remembered. He had a five o’clock shadow, a bolo tie over a crisp white shirt tucked into a pair of skinny black Levi’s. His body was divided into white and black, right at the waist. Somehow that made sense. His skin had also cleared up—he must have given up soda. If not for the goofy grin he gave while walking toward me, I might have mistaken him for someone else. But I knew it was him. I’d been waiting.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“Yeah. I think you do, Harold.”
I'm starting to wonder if the narrator goes back to a time that he did not live through...
We start to get sense of how long M has been on the Bent Highway in this one. The perspective of time.