"Wait," O"Sullivan said. "I thought they were in a cabin. Where"d the beautiful woman come from?"
"Never mind that," Smokey said irritably. "She"s just there."
"Oh," O"Sullivan said.
"So anyways," Smokey said, "first thing, the Frenchman drinks a half a bottle of vodka, but he pa.s.ses out before he finishes."
"A p.u.s.s.y," O"Sullivan said.
"Just like you," Smokey said. "Now it"s the American"s turn. He drinks the whole bottle of vodka, but before he can get outside to shake hands with the bear, he gets stupefied and pa.s.ses out, too. Right? Now, finally there"s the Russian. He drinks down the whole bottle of vodka, no problem. Then he marches out into the woods. You hear a lot of roaring and thrashing around out there, but finally he comes back inside. He"s a little messed up, breathing hard, clothes a little ripped, but he"s still standing, and he looks around the cabin.
" "Where is beautiful woman?" he says. "I have to shake hands with her, and then I am winner!" "
O"Sullivan was silent for a while. He considered.
"I don"t get it," O"Sullivan said.
5.
They had been driving for a long while, and as the afternoon waned it had begun to seem to O"Sullivan that they were traveling along the same identical fifty miles of interstate over and over, the landscape scrolling past the windshield as if it were a film strip looped and repeated-fields and farmhouses, exit signs and fast-food oases. Lots of roadkill. Dogs, cats, deer, racc.o.o.ns, skunks. Even once a fox, which made him inexplicably sad.
Things always seemed to go bad when O"Sullivan was around, he thought.
He had been trying to put this thought out of his mind, or at least to get things into perspective. He hadn"t killed anyone, he reminded himself. He had only stolen a little from his various employers, most of whom deserved it in any case; he had sold drugs, but only briefly, because he was desperate for money; he had lied-a lot, it was true-to nearly everyone he knew, and had taken advantage of friends" generosity until they ceased to be friends. He had-in the three years since graduating from college-acc.u.mulated mountainous debts, not even including his student loans, and there seemed no escape from it, nothing but an endless stream of bad jobs that made him depressed so he charged something on the credit card to make himself feel better or he drank too much at night and couldn"t get up the next day to go to work ... clearly it was a bad cycle, something had to be done.
O"Sullivan had decided to make afresh start out west, O"Sullivan thought. The interstate unreeled beneath the eighteen-wheeler"s rumbling bulk Things had gone bad for O"Sullivan in Chicago and as he sat in the cab of his brother"s semi truck he stared fixedly out at What now? O"Sullivan thought as he stared moodily out at the unreeling interstate highway O"Sullivan didn"t know what lay before him but a vague sense of dread hovered as he stared out at the unreeling s.h.i.t.
He would have to throw himself on the mercy of his parents, he thought. He would have to beg them to help him. To save him from the inevitable f.u.c.kup from which he couldn"t escape. And they might even find it weirdly satisfying, both of them high school dropouts, they might be secretly pleased to discover that college was nothing but a scam, a big Ponzi scheme being perpetrated on the hopeful youth of the nation.
He sighed. Out the window, O"Sullivan could see that a motorcycle was pa.s.sing on the right-hand side, and when the motorcycle rider saw O"Sullivan looking down he gave a big grin and a jokey, two-fingered Boy Scout"s salute. All afternoon they had been leapfrogging each other down the highway, Smokey"s semi and the motorcycle, one pa.s.sing the other, then slowing and being pa.s.sed in turn. O"Sullivan watched as the motorcycle advanced past them, swerving around several slower-moving vehicles and skating onward toward the horizon, the silver spokes of its wheels glinting in the sunlight, the rider"s long hair flapping like a pennant.
O"Sullivan swung onto his motorcycle and gunned the engine. He had nowhere to go, no responsibilities, nothing held him down. The great unreeling expanse of the highway opened before him and he grinned, his long mane of hair unfurling behind him in the wind of velocity and his Unfurling?
Undulating?
His long hair undulating behind him as he sped toward
6.
The semi truck has come to rest on the berm on the edge of an embankment. A corrugated metal guard rail runs parallel to the highway, and beyond the guard rail is darkness. Trees. A cliff, perhaps?
What now? O"Sullivan thought Outside of the cab, illuminated by the blinking of the semi"s orange hazard lights, O"Sullivan scratches his head. He is still having a hard time believing that they didn"t hit anything.
Behind him, Smokey has unzipped his pants and is taking a whiz alongside his truck. O"Sullivan can hear the sound of pee pattering on the tire.
Up ahead, he can just barely see a thin white shape in the darkness. He thinks maybe it"s a tree, or the skeleton of a road sign. For a second, it might even be the shape of a person standing there.
"h.e.l.lo?" he says.
He takes a couple of steps down the road. The blinking light from the semi has a mild strobing effect, so that the figure appears to move forward and then draw back into the darkness, forward and back in the steady pulsing hazard lights. Is that a scarecrow? O"Sullivan wonders. He squints.
About fifteen yards down, O"Sullivan sees a white cross.
It is a little bit shorter than O"Sullivan himself is, and it is wearing a hat. Or-rather-a hat has been attached to the top of the cross, a baseball cap. At the base of the cross is a pile of brightly colored objects. There are some plastic flowers-pink roses, yellow daffodils, white lilies-and a green Christmas wreath, and a cl.u.s.ter of stuffed animals, bunnies and teddy bears and duckies, and ribbons, which wave lethargically in the light breeze. There is something written on a banner, but he can"t make out the words. As they"ve driven across the country, he has been noticing that there are a lot of these little roadside memorials dotted all along the highway. A lot of people die in car accidents, obviously.
But it seems like there are more of them these days. Or maybe it is just that they are more elaborate. When did people begin to decorate these accident sites as if they were shrines?
"Hey, Smokey," he says. "Check this out."
And then he notices another one, just a few yards farther down. He can only barely make it out in the darkness. Another cross with a circle of offerings beneath it.
7.
They were pulling into an interstate oasis, and the sudden reduction in speed slowed the conversation into an ellipsis.
"... " O"Sullivan said, and Smokey shook his head silently.
"I"ve got to get some gas."
When they stopped, O"Sullivan got out of the cab and walked quickly toward the bathrooms and vending machines. He was hoping to quickly throw up and then buy himself a Dr Pepper and a candy bar to cut the taste of vomit. It had occurred to him, suddenly, as his feet touched the asphalt, that he might die. His heart was pulsing alarmingly against his rib cage, and as he stumbled woozily toward the restrooms, the distant door frame began to waver. The solid rectangle appeared to quiver gelatinously, and an irregular twitch started up under his left eye.
Am I having a heart attack? he wondered.
Then he was in the stall, holding the metal-gray graffiti-scratched walls as he retched.
Then he felt a little better. He stood there at the sink, cupping cool water in his palms and pressing his face into it. He looked at himself, drawn and sallow in the mirror, and dipped back down.
"Are you okay, man?" said Smokey, behind him.
"Sort of," O"Sullivan said, but then, when he lifted his head, it wasn"t Smokey. It was actually some other guy who he didn"t quite know, and the guy was now standing at the row of fluorescent-lit sinks beside him. O"Sullivan felt certain that he recognized this person from somewhere. He had the uncomfortable presentiment that it was one of the many people he had wronged in his life.
"Hey, man," O"Sullivan said familiarly, as if he completely recognized the person. "What are you doing here?"
Then he realized: It was the motorcycle guy. They"d pa.s.sed each other probably a dozen times in the past three hundred miles. Once, he"d seen the guy pumping gas at the same gas station where they were pumping gas. Later, the guy was throwing away his trash at a fast-food place just as O"Sullivan and Smokey were walking in.
"Dude," the guy said, "you have a little fleck of puke on your chin."
"Oh," O"Sullivan said. He brushed at the spot with his fingers. "Thanks," he said.
"No problem," the guy said. He considered O"Sullivan"s face for a moment, not unkindly. "Get some fresh air, man. I"ve been there before myself."
"Yeah," O"Sullivan said.
"You"ll be all right," the guy said. He patted O"Sullivan on the back with his black-gloved hand. "I hope you"re not driving," he said.
"I"m not," O"Sullivan said.
"That"s good news for the rest of us," the motorcycle guy said, and gave a grin, the same grin he"d had when they pa.s.sed on the interstate, the one O"Sullivan would see in his mind a while later, when he thought back to this day, when he thought about the bad things he had done in his life.
O"Sullivan lowered his face into the cold water. When he raised up, the guy was gone.
Then O"Sullivan found himself standing outside the rest stop, holding an RC Cola and a Reese"s peanut b.u.t.ter cup, taking in the sharp late-autumn air. His brain felt unusually empty, and when Smokey finally came up behind him, he was standing near the dog-walking area, trying to remember the names of constellations he should"ve been able to recognize, after a full semester of astronomy.
Sagittarius? Pegasus?
Centaurus?
"Jesus Christ," Smokey said. "I thought you died. Where the h.e.l.l have you been?"
"Right here," O"Sullivan said.
"Well, let"s go, then! This isn"t some fuzzy-chinned collegeboy yankabout. I"m a working man."
"All right," O"Sullivan said.
"It"s time to hop," Smokey said. "I hope you don"t mind if I put the pedal to the metal, as they say in truck-driving parlance."
"All right," O"Sullivan says. "Let"s hop."
8.
Smokey comes walking down the berm toward the roadside memorials, where O"Sullivan is standing.
"What have you found, little brother?" Smokey says, wiping the high beam of his flashlight down O"Sullivan"s face and across his chest. Then he stops.
He shines his flashlight into the darkness beyond the memorial, and O"Sullivan notices another one, just a few yards farther down. He can only barely make it out in the darkness. Yet another cross with a circle of offerings beneath it.
He catches his breath. Because just beyond that cross is another one. And another. Five. Six. Seven crosses! Cl.u.s.tered there at the edge of the road.
And then-O"Sullivan stands frozen in the flashlight beam-he sees the deer, coming slowly toward him. The deer is stepping delicately through the little forest of memorials-clip clip, clip clip, the sound of hooves slowly approaching over asphalt- "Well," Smokey says. "There"s your f.u.c.kin" deer, I see."
The deer, the buck, is standing about fifteen yards away. It pauses for what seems like a long while, peering at them alertly, and then bolts abruptly. O"Sullivan has a glimpse of its sudden, jagged startle and leap, and in a moment it is gone, in a moment it is little more than a dark shape, a flicker, vanishing into the trees; there is a shudder of leaves and the shadows in between them.
"Oh," O"Sullivan says. It"s funny, because all of a sudden, okay, now he gets that joke. The Russian guy had mixed things up. He"d f.u.c.ked the bear and then was going to shake hands with the beautiful woman, instead of vice versa.
He doesn"t know why the memory of that joke should make him shudder. He doesn"t know why the sight of the living deer should fill him with such dread, such a weird sense of What now? O"Sullivan thought as he stared out at the unreeling Such a weird sense of something missing, something unremembered-a stove burner that you might have left on, an alarm clock that didn"t go off. Instinctively, he puts his hand to his front pocket, to feel for his keys, but he has no keys. No car. No apartment.
He gazes at the cl.u.s.ter of crosses, the blank face of a stuffed bear, a silver pinwheel revolving slowly, glinting with the red of Smokey"s emergency lights, the shuddering rustle of plastic flower petals, a ragged bit of ribbon flapping, undulating like long hair blown back in a breeze.
It will come to him in a moment, O"Sullivan thinks, though actually he doesn"t want it to. It"s that awful, inevitable feeling, the sound a bicycle makes when it is on its side, as the wheel"s spinning slows and comes to a stop. The ticking of a roulette wheel as the marble finally settles in place.
"Oh my G.o.d," O"Sullivan says.
Shepherdess.
1.
This girl I"ve been seeing falls out of a tree one June evening. She"s a little drunk-I bought a couple of bottles of hopefully decent Chardonnay from Trader Joe"s on my way over to her house-and now she"s a little drunk and a little belligerent. There is something about me that she doesn"t like, and we"ve been arguing obliquely all evening. It"s only our fifth real date, and though we"ve slept together once-it was the week after my mother died; pity s.e.x, so it doesn"t exactly count-we don"t know each other that well.
For example, I just found out that she has an ex-husband who lives in j.a.pan, who technically isn"t an ex-husband since they haven"t officially divorced.
For example, I didn"t know that she thought I was a bad kisser: "Your kisses are unpleasantly moist," she says. "Has anyone ever told you that?"
"Actually, no," I say. "I"ve always gotten compliments on my kisses."
"Well," she says. "Women very rarely tell the truth."
I smile at her. "You"re lying," I say cleverly. But she doesn"t seem to catch the interesting paradox. She looks at me blankly and downs the last bit of wine in her gla.s.s. Then she turns her attention to the tree that rises up alongside the railing of her deck, her eyes following the trunk upward to where it branches out. She locates her cat, Mr. Niffler, about ten feet above us, where he has fled to escape the terror that is me, his claws affixed tightly into the bark, an expression of dyspeptic alarm on his face.
"Mr. Niffler," she calls. "Kitty, kitty, kitty. What are you doing up there?" And then she gets up and goes to the base of the tree. She hoists herself up on the two-by-six ledge of the railing and stands there, teetering for a moment.
"You know," I say, "that doesn"t seem like such a good idea."