The Danger of Being Me (34 page)

And I let it.  Because it was mine.  It was as much a part of me as this sizzling blood and these brushed-chrome eyes and this hammering heart, and I let it wrap me up in crimson solitude.  As I stood in the center of the vortex, I saw Amber slumped against the wall in her hallway, holding her forehead with one hand.  Shoulders trembling silently.  Crying.  Refusing to let anyone know it.

But I knew it.  I saw it.  And I would never, ever forget it.  But there was only one way that I could live with that memory.  So I reached to the Shelby's window, and ran my gloved fingertips across the surface of the glass.  Tenderly, almost apologetically.  I felt a flash of pity for the truck.

Then I sucked in a fiery breath and inhaled the smoky fumes of that scarlet veil.  All of the fury and the hatred and the violence surged out of that long, dark tunnel.

I swung the tire iron in a barbaric arc.

The window imploded with a sound like a beer bottle smashing against a wall.

Glass splattered against concrete.  Then came silence.  I lowered my arm, wondered when I'd had the presence of mind to shield my face.  I looked through the jagged hole in the Shelby's window, listened to the sound of traffic six floors down.  And I realized that the alarm had failed.

I laughed out loud.  The sound had a jagged quality to it that made me think of splintering glass.  I clamped my mouth shut and reached for the door with my free hand.  Alarm or no, this still had to be a quick job.  I punched out the last shards of glass, popped the lock, hauled the door open.  I grabbed the CD wallet off the passenger's seat, stuffed it into my bookbag, grabbed the glovebox latch and dropped it open.  A pile of receipts tumbled out into the footwell, and I grabbed the paperwork underneath.

I rifled through the door pocket, found a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and an adjustable wrench.  I jammed them into a pocket of the bookbag, stepped up onto the running board of the passenger's side, leaned inside.  I grabbed for the stereo at the center of the dashboard.  My grip failed, and I tried again, faltering a second time.  Then I swung a fist down against it instead, shattering the Kenwood faceplate and snapping it off the dashboard.

Then I looked up and found the Italian horn hanging in front of my face.  The polished stone caught a glimmer of ambient light, reflecting a wink of soft cerulean.  The horn had been waiting all this time for me to find it, to come for it, to take it away from this dismal place.

To take it home.

I blew out a breath, and reached across the scattered shards of the window.  I closed my fingers around the thin silver chain, wrenched it down.  I fought the resistance for a moment, pulled harder.  Then the entire mirror ripped away from the glass.  I ducked as the apparatus tumbled into the footwell and flopped under the seat.

I looked into my hand.  In the palm of my batting glove lay the thin steel chain, and dangling from it, carved out of blue jasper, was the
cornicello
.  The Italian horn.

I stuffed the chain and the horn into my pants pocket.  Then I reached under the seat for the rearview mirror.  It seemed like a nice memento.  A trophy. Maybe I could pack it up in a manila envelope and mail it back to Hank from wherever I wound up.  I dug around the smashed stereo faceplate and swatted a couple of receipts aside, got my fingers around something solid jammed up between the springs under the middle of the bench seat.

It never occurred to me to wonder how a rearview mirror would have gotten itself jammed up between the springs of the truck's bench.  I just tightened my grip on the thing under the seat and yanked until it twisted free.  But it wasn't the rearview mirror that came up when I brought my hand out from under the bench seat.  It wasn't even the Kenwood stereo faceplate.  It was a gun.

I stared at the little snubnosed revolver for longer than I could spare.  At the words SMITH & WESSON stamped in tiny print along the short chrome barrel, and the stylized S and W entwined in a logo imprinted onto the black grip.  I angled the pistol toward the floor, looking through the cylinder.  At least four of the chambers were loaded.

Fresh lightning crackled in that bloody thunderhead.  The revolver seemed to weigh nothing at all, an illusion out of a feverish nightmare.  My heartbeat quickened inside my throat at the sight of it in the palm of my own gloved hand.  It was an object of elegant simplicity, designed for a single purpose.  To carry out that darkest, most cancerous impulse of human nature.  To kill.

The thing from under the seat masqueraded as metal and plastic.  As inert matter.  It lay buoyant in my hand and absently pleasing to the touch, a thing infinitely skilled at projecting the appearance of meaninglessly arranged molecules.  But I felt its dark pulse.  And I knew.

It was the malevolent attempt to control life and death.  A machine designed by men to make themselves into dark gods.  Or perhaps fallen angels.  Because the device in my hand did not give life.  It took life.  It destroyed.

It was fury and hatred.  It was violence.

It was death.

2.

I buried the revolver in a side pocket of my bookbag.

I backed out of the Shelby, slid the tire-iron back into the bag, zipped it shut.  I closed the passenger door and pressed my shoulder into it to latch it.  Then I slung the bookbag over my shoulder, reached through the truck's window, fastened the lock.  Crumbs of glass crunched beneath my sneakers as I left the Shelby Dakota.

I heard no police sirens.  I didn't bother to check for witnesses.  If someone had seen me, there was nothing to do about it now.  The garage was dim, so I hunched over to shave a few inches off my height and hiked back out of the building the way I'd come in.  I almost took the stairs to save a couple of minutes, then decided against it.

Four minutes later, I reached the ground floor.  As I slipped along the space between the exterior wall and the line of parked cars, I pulled off my batting gloves, stuffed them into my pants pocket with the chain and the horn.  Then I turned the corner and stepped into the brightness outside the building.  I crossed the sidewalk, squinting against the unfiltered light of a supernova.

I checked for traffic, found none, crossed Benson. I crested the curb on the opposite side of the street, and that was when I heard the shrill braying from the massive brick and concrete structure of the parking garage.  The sound echoed and reverberated, and I paused on the brick-laid sidewalk.  I glanced back to the building behind me as the Shelby cried out its keening, belated screams.

Panic flickered in my chest.  I crushed it.  Because I had become the author of my own life.  I made my own luck.  I shaped my fortune out of the inert matter of the universe.  I turned my back on the parking garage and followed the walkway of laid stones between two houses toward the wooden gate.  I walked casually, almost indifferently.

I pushed through the gate, closed it, latched it again.  Hiked between the buildings toward the buckled sidewalk of Auburn Street.  Beyond that narrow cut of asphalt, I saw an uneven gravel parking lot surrounded by a chainlink fence.  That fence had a gate, and that gate stood open.

And hunched to one side of that parking lot I spotted a grimy green dumpster.  So I crossed Auburn Street, and that uneven gravel parking lot, and hiked all the way up to that dumpster where I saw the letters BFI stenciled on the front. A sliding metal panel in one side stood open a few inches, and I dragged it further with a grating squeal.  A thick, putrid smell grabbed me by the face with its rotting fingers.  My eyes watered.  I ignored the stink as I hauled my bookbag around to my chest and unzipped it.

I dumped Hank's CD wallet into that fetid stench, and his screwdriver and pliers and wrench.  I dug out every scrap of Hank's paper, flung them all into the dark bowels of that grimy green dumpster. After discarding everything, I checked through the bag again.  On the second pass, I felt the side pocket where I'd stuffed the Smith & Wesson.

I paused.  I considered getting rid of the revolver.  I knew that I should.  But I also knew that I couldn't.  Not yet.  Because the little snubnose had one last job to do.

I searched the bookbag one last time, found nothing more of Hank's.  I dug my batting gloves out of my pants pocket, stuffed them into the bag, zipped it shut. I heaved the sliding metal panel on the dumpster shut again, all the way this time to stifle that stomach-churning reek.  Then I turned, jogged across the parking lot, back to the Jeep at the foot of that imposing wooden porch and balcony.

As I reached the Wagoneer's driver-side door, I could still hear the Shelby's unanswered siren from the far side of Benson.  And I felt a flash of pity for the truck.  The Dakota hadn't chosen its owner, after all.  But there was nothing to do about it now.  The pickup was collateral damage.

I climbed back into the Wagoneer, dropped my bag into the passenger's seat, started the vehicle.  The clock blinked 1:32.  I stared at the numerals for a long moment,

then laughed out loud.  It sounded less like splintered glass this time.  It sounded just fine to me.

So I did it again.  Just because I could.  I backed out of the space behind the line of elegant three-story redbrick rowhomes, and I steered the Wagoneer back up along that narrow cut of asphalt toward South Broadway.  I paused, waited for an opening in the traffic, and made a left.

I was convinced that I'd never see Hank again.

Half-a-mile down the street, I passed a sign for the North-South Freeway.  The way home.

A quarter-mile after that, I made a left onto Atlantic Avenue.  I didn't know the way by heart, but I had been through New Jersey enough to know that the Freeway was a branch of Interstate 676.  And I-676 crossed the Delaware River into the Independence State, so that was the way I went.  A quarter-mile up Atlantic, the Jeep rolled beneath an overpass.  I followed the curve of the looping entrance ramp into the northbound lane of the Interstate.

The highway leveled out.  I slipped into a slim gap between a Mercury Bobcat and a Volvo 240 and merged into traffic.  The current swept me on, channeling me along an inescapable route that would take me back into my own personal undiscovered country. I was content just to drive, and be carried by a tide beyond my understanding.

The universe had trusted me, after all.  Had bent to my infinite will. My mad plan had not been the best laid scheme, and maybe that was why it had not gone terribly askew.  The least I could do was show some trust in return.  If there was somewhere for me to be and something for me to do when I got there, then surely I my long and curving path would take me wherever I needed to go.

And if I found myself riding some unfamiliar road to nowhere, then perhaps that was where I needed to be.  Migratory.  Untethered.  Surely I could find something to do along the way.  Maybe it was as simple as enjoying the ride while it lasted.  Maybe that was all that anyone was ever meant to do.  To revel in the thrill of the journey.

I snapped the radio back on, twisted the volume up.  Kelly Schaefer screeched over Rand Burkey's discordant guitar riffs, reminded me that my soul was young, that it lacked response to the things I saw.  That some must learn the hard way.  I laughed.  I had learned the hard way.

I had learned that there was nothing but the journey.  That destinations were illusions out of the medicated dreams of a dreamer who is dreaming, because life was all middle.  There was only ever one real destination, one final destination.  And it wasn't a doorway.  It was nothing but the deep and terrible End of the All.  The grand resolution to this unsolvable paradox called life.  One last, sweet reward for making it all the way to the finish line.

A mile up the Freeway, traffic slowed, and slowed, and came to a stop in all three lanes.  I kept to the rightward edge of the highway, and saw the left-turn signals of the vehicles up ahead flickering.  Further ahead, above the clot of standing traffic, red lights flashed.  My first panicked thought was that Highway Patrol had set up a roadblock.  They were searching for me.  On the heels of that came a crazed impulse to flee.  Just grab my bookbag out of the passenger's seat, ditch the Jeep right here on the highway with the keys in the ignition, and take off on foot.

But I didn't do it.  The universe had trusted me; I could show some trust in return.  I never considered the loaded Smith & Wesson in the side pocket of my bookbag.

I dug into my pocket, pulled out the
cornicello
.  The Italian horn.  Protection against the evil eye.  Time to find out if it really worked.  I slipped the thin steel chain over my head without looking at it, tucked it into my t-shirt.

The blue jasper felt cool against my chest. My heartbeat slowed inside my throat.  I drew in a long breath, held it, then let it out again.  I eased back against the driver's seat, and watched the blinking signals of the vehicles up ahead.  And I felt sure for no real reason at all that no one had set up a roadblock.  No one was looking for me.  This was just another bit of meaningless absurdity along the way.

I sat at a dead stop for nearly fifty minutes.  I listened to the radio as Zero Hour gave way to Greyhaven and Greyhaven gave way to Watchtower and Watchtower gave way to Mudvayne.  I waited, and everyone waited around me.  The afternoon wore on, and the vehicles ahead inched over into a single lane at the left of the Freeway.

Three o'clock came and went, and no one mourned its passing.  Not long after that, the Wagoneer rolled within shouting distance of the ramp for exit 5-A to ML King Blvd and Campbell Place on the Waterfront.  And I saw what had blocked up the Interstate for half the afternoon.

Four cars lay spread across two lanes and most of the exit lane.  A pickup truck on its side.  A beat-up Cadillac Cimarron crammed nose-first into the concrete barrier along the right side of the Freeway.  An Acura Legend gushing steam from under its hood.  A minivan with a crushed side-door, spun around to face the wrong way.

I saw a girl leaning against the concrete barrier next to Cimarron in a pink tube top half-a-size too small, a faded pair of boy-shorts, and flipflops, smoking a cigarette.