Ride Around Shining (23 page)

“What?” I asked. I turned and looked at her and held the look as I made my efficient and professional way down toward the city, with all its strong and its broken homes, their lights blending together below us indistinguishably.

“Nothing,” she said. “Good work. Take me home.”

“Oh yes ma'am,” I said.

We reached a length of straight decline and I let us coast, cracking the window to take the air. I felt the wet earth beneath the trees, and my fast blood. I thought of which house of the three I'd most like to go to, and sighed at the banquet before me, and reached down to click the child locks in place.

The locks had moved, though. I must've been feeling so Jag I forgot which car I was in. I had to reach down and feel around a little. It was no trouble, not at first, when it was just another winking light at the bottom of the hill, blended with the houselights. Even as it grew, I didn't think much of it. To be in front of us now, Goat would have to either be a savant or so addled it wasn't worth pondering. By the time I got the locks, the light had come up pretty near—it looked like a motorcycle out for a late ride. Then I watched the light twist at the strangest angle, like the lamp was separating from its housing, and it swept over me and I turned to see the light pass over Antonia's terrified face. I could see the fine colorless hairs above her lip, and within her nose, and then with impossible suddenness the broad sidewall of the Maybach swept in front of us, and the air broke loose with angry metal birds. I felt my arm fly out, a thin thing I every day passed up the chance to strengthen, and my hand closed over hers on the far door's handle, but I knew it wouldn't hold.

Before the hospital
, there was just a little pain, and a new looseness in my arm I didn't want to think too hard about. Before the reckoning, there was just her still-warm seat and her chewing gum flat against the windshield, and before the search that came before all that, there was just the feeling that it wasn't such a bad crash and that she'd somehow ended up lying gracefully on top of me in a long white dress. The car was very quiet and I didn't want to open my eyes. We seemed to be at peace in stillness and in movement at once, like we'd run a long way to a pier at the edge of the world and thrown ourselves onto the deck of a great ship just as it was leaving, and now could rest as it carried us out amid the white noise of its massive peace, through the island wilderness, a continent unto itself, bearing us across the sea. And then I reached out with my good arm to touch her gently wherever my pure, protecting hand should fall, and of course it was just the air bag that had made her seem so light and near.

I opened my eyes, and my dread was made visible and crept along the edges of my vision like some millipede mounting a bank of black muck. I made myself turn and look at her, and she wasn't there at all.

This seemed, at first, a slight relief. I could have opened my eyes on anything, anything: some foreign matter like uncooked sausage spread over the dashboard, fragments of teeth sunk into the cheap plastic of the glove box, her soft hair covering a head no longer quite round. And though I could do nothing to shield her from any man manic enough to come head-on into our lane in his massively heavy car, to have seen so much as a broken finger or a thin stream of blood dripping quietly from her nose would have been unendurable. Because even if I was just some deviant aspirant to the servant class, worming into the heart of their days with my amateur manners, they had put their lives in my hands, from the first day, and hers was, with our lingering patriarchy and her little bones, the more delicate life, and I had not even tried to stop. He'd come on us and my only feeling was a sort of indignation, a desire to backhand his faulty life choices out of our way and keep on, suave and undeterred. I wasn't willing to credit his hulking car even with being cause for alarm, and had tried to dodge him casually along the shoulder. We'd gone head-on and I hadn't once touched the brake.

But then I looked again, and her absence was no relief anymore.

The air bag, deflated now, hung over her seat like an insufficient parachute. I registered optimistically that it wasn't discolored with any kind of fluid, and the windshield too was pure, save for a single crack, long and clean, and then her chewing gum, fixed against the glass. I touched it with the tip of my finger and it felt cemented on. At what speed must it have left her, to land there before the bag could deploy?

I looked out through the split windshield for some sign of Goat's car in the skewed glare of our surviving headlight, but the road was all dark. She'd been belted in. I sat a minute, uncomprehending. Then I saw a bit of colored paper stuck beneath the wipers.

I got out, tilting my head so I'd not have to look at my arm. When I opened the door, some shards fell from the stump of rearview and joined the litter of plastic and glass on the roadway. Our narrow bumper lay mangled in the damp earth a little ways off, seeming to shrug in apology. Next to it a trail of long footprints ran through the soft earth along her side of the car.

I pulled the paper from the windshield, which gave a little when I pressed on it. Written in shaky caps over the print on the back of a taco coupon were the words “GONE 4 HELP.”

On any other day, in any other circumstance of my ordinary life, I might've been able to sit and wait. The small wisdom I'd gleaned from my history of accidents suggested the passive approach was a sound one, and I expect I could in any other season have quietly patted myself down for undiscovered internal injuries, reached for my phone to make sure someone was coming, and then leaned back in my seat in the hopped-up relaxation of a superficially mangled man who has escaped death, and dreamed consolatory daydreams of all the ways it could have been worse.

I took the sleeve of my good arm between my teeth and gritted down on it, in a weakling's preparation for a difficult business, and then I pulled up my other sleeve and looked at my elbow. There was an ugly well of color on the inside of the joint, but no bones seemed out of place and nothing had broken the skin. I've never had any tolerance for pain, and I knew I'd need a hospital in time, but none of that felt pressing when my arm smelled faintly of her perfume.

I tried to start the car, expecting silence, or at most a grinding denial of a sound that kept on as long as I could turn the key, but after a moment the engine woke smoothly, miraculously to life. I turned back to the road and the wheels shrieked against the bent frame. About a third of the front end was crumpled in, the remaining headlight gave almost no help, and I was leaking air and who knew what else, but so long as I never saw a cop or had to make a turn I thought I might make it part of the way to wherever I was going.

A few blocks back toward the city, I saw the gleam of newly spilled gas and figured Goat had gone the same way. I flipped on the brights and the fog lights to try to follow his leaks, and got almost to the fork between the OHSU hospital and downtown before I saw another car. It honked at me in three short bursts, and I slowed and shut off the brights until it passed. When I turned them on once more, it was just in time to see a few drops of yellowish fluid lead me away from the turnoff to the hospital.

When choosing between incompetence and malice to explain the mistakes of others, a life in the softer parts of the most comfortable America has mostly led me to the former. I've always had it in the back of my mind that further experience would reveal people to be much more twisted than I'd so far seen, but I'd walked many years among the middle of the middle keeping up the self-satisfied feeling that a basic empathy could be found for nearly anyone, while I waited for my naïveté to be punctured. Still, that day I was hurt like I'd rarely been hurt, and guilty like never before. It was possible Goat just didn't know where the nearest emergency room was, but as I crept back toward the center of the city, feeling the throb build in my arm, it seemed more and more like he wasn't taking her to a hospital at all.

In the industrial south end I pulled over as gradually as possible and took the GHB from my pocket. It was a cap full of clear liquid, as innocuous as anything in a vial can be. I picked up the key and turned it in my hand. It was chainless, so bright and new that I could imagine it hanging uncut that very day in a hardware store. I wondered how many others like it had been made.

Sure my call would go unanswered, I picked up my phone and tried her. After the third ring, there was a click and I thought I heard breathing. Then the phone slid away, and there was only dirty noise, a passing bass beat, and the unintelligible exuberance of some far-off kid telling the universe his plans. I looked at the address on the yellow slip and put the car in gear again.

It was a street off Killingsworth, in one of the old black neighborhoods. Renewal was a ways off there yet, a promise but not yet a fear, and the main blocks felt thick with the life of all the folks pushed there by our initiatives elsewhere. Goat's mangled car was parked in the driveway of the house, the destruction evident even from behind. I went on by and the street kids who'd been gathered around the horror of his ride exclaimed in delight at the horror of mine. I went around the corner, the dread thickening again in my throat.

I popped the trunk, hoping there'd be a lug wrench or something to wield, but in the well with the spare there was just a can of Fix-a-Flat. I found one of Calyph's team hoodies in a pile of old clothes and slipped it gingerly on.

When I came around the block, the kids were coming toward me, talking about the Maybach, what a nice ride it was and what a shame someone had gone and done that to it. “We could tear the rims off and boy wouldn't even
notice
,” the tallest one said. I walked right by them on the grass and they didn't look at me; with the hood up I was transformed into a routine neighborhood figure.

One yard over from the house I stopped under the block's only tree. There was a light burning in a window off the porch but no sign of movement. Pharaoh's car was nowhere to be seen, but if Goat was doing what I feared I couldn't imagine he had help.

The door was unlocked and the front room empty, but in the bedroom off the porch I found her facedown and unmoving with her torn underwear round her ankles. Her wrists were curled together under her chin, as if she had fallen asleep somewhere safer. Her dress was pulled up to her ribs. The room was bare but for a double mattress laid on the floor, an industrial work lamp that covered the room with harsh, barred light, and a blinking radio crudely simulating the sound of a train.

I knelt on the mattress. When I touched her cheek her face remained slack and senseless, and I put the back of my hand beneath her nose as I'd seen done in some film. She was breathing. After I shook her she just lay where she fell.

She wasn't bound and I couldn't see any sign of struggle but for the tear in her silks. Both her knees and the heel of one of her hands looked swollen, from the crash I supposed, along with the belt bruise that purpled already across her waist. I knew what I must check next, but I wasn't sure if I should turn her or what. Hearing my breath loud in my nose I leaned back and turned her hips and looked. She looked undisturbed, the soft hair unmatted, through it was hard to be sure.

I stood again and glanced out, but the front room was quiet. Looking round the room, I snatched up a short length of wooden curtain rod from above the window.

It was a tiny bungalow of a house and there weren't many places for him to be. A drained fish tank in the main room let out a dull blue glow, and the only other light in the place came from beneath the bathroom door. I stopped a moment outside the back bedroom, in case he was making preparations in the black, but then I heard the toilet flush.

When I was small I once picked the lock of the bathroom door with a butter knife, and I remember my mother explaining that these doors couldn't be serious because otherwise children with greater initiative than I might hole up behind them and drink all the poisons under the sink. I put my foot to the door and it flew inward; I heard the inner knob puncture the wall plaster. I had the jump on him perfectly, but it was impossible. He was sitting on the toilet, pants down, with a long-lensed camera around his neck and blood running down his face, crying. When he saw me he put his hand up to his crotch to hide himself within the porcelain, and I felt with wild certainty that he'd just finished jerking himself off into the bowl. He turned his face away in shame, like a beaten paparazzo, and I saw his nose was misshapen and likely broken.

“I only wanted the pictures,” he whimpered.

“How bad is she hurt?”

“She hit me,” he cried piteously, holding his free hand up to the blood slowly sheeting from his nose. “Look at this. I was never going to do anything.”

“He gave you a vial, too,” I said.

He nodded, sniffing, then abruptly reached around for something to cover himself. There were no towels, and he stretched down and took up the stained bathmat and set it in place. Its fringe drooped over his lap pathetically.

“How was she when you took her?”

“Fine. She's fine. She was out and then she woke and I told her we were going to the hospital. She said she felt sleepy but I thought it was just the stuff.”

I had a brief image of him feeding knockout drugs to an unconscious person I vaguely loved. “Give me that camera,” I said.

He reached for the strap obediently. “There's nothing on it.” But as he lifted it over his head I saw him hit a button with his thumb.

“Good,” I said. Then I turned it on again and took a picture of him. I took up the rod and smashed it into the sink to get his attention, sending the plastic round the cold tap into pieces. He cowered and I took another.

“For a few thousand,” I said. “If he went ten you'd have made a snuff film?”

“You think I'm doing this for a check?” he said, almost haughtily. “I owed him, after that servant girl. He knows enough people, I'd be done if I didn't square with him.”