The Suicide Motor Club (8 page)

I USED TO THINK I'D DO ANYTHING TO GO BACK TO THOSE DAYS, BACK TO BEING
twenty, twenty-three years old, running shine into Asheville and Spartanburg. You know, I was handsome then. You won't believe it, but I had just hanks of hair, honey-colored hair the gals'd say. There was always girls then, all proper on Sundays in a clean yellow dress, or robin's-egg blue, in church with Mammy and Pappy, but they was only thinking about one thing just like the boys was, couldn't wait to get you back behind the garage and go hoistin' up that Sunday dress, push your head down there, lookin' over their shoulder for a place to lay flat and fuck you. They'd come by thick as flies when I was bootlegging, one'd be walkin' up to the gas station to meet me, watchin' another one leavin' thinkin' huh, that little gal's got a look on her face like maybe she just fucked but no, even Luther wouldn't be bare-assed bastard enough to stand on that porch and wait for one when he just diddled another, but she was right the first time. Yep. She was. Part of it's havin' a big cock-a-doodle-doo, they talk you know, them little church hens, they can't help it. They get with a fella packin' a hogleg and they can't wait to tell the other girls, all coverin' their mouth and lookin' around like they hope the wrong person don't hear, but they're sittin' there tellin' the wrong person 'cause every one of them little Baptist gals is now thinkin' she's gonna get her legs around that Luther Nixon if she has to die to do it.
And that's the friends she's got. Born down in the holler with a broke-ass daddy drinkin' shine outta soup cans, only book in the house is a Bible full a' finger smudges and pressed weeds, gonna have to ship off to Charlotte and work in a munitions factory when we go to war with Tojo, but that's later. Now she's just tryin' not to get lice and chicken pox off her nine little brothers and here come Sally and Jane to fuck her man out from under her. Life's a whore, huh? Only I wasn't never her man to start with, any more than the spittoon owns the fella spittin' in it. Luther Nixon didn't belong to nobody except maybe the devil, and did he ever come to claim me, but not in them days. Them shine days. I was goddamn good at it, too. Sheriffs'd lay for you, revenuers too, tryin' to bust you on not payin' tax, but they couldn't afford to mail in parts from California to soup up their cars, no sir. And didn't none of them want to die just to take you in. That's the difference. You go shavin' the curves on a twisty-ass country road, and those roads weren't nothing but packed mud, you gotta know what you're doin' and you gotta be ready to die. The shine'd throw you, too, like a lard-ass square dancin', you had to know how much weight you was carryin', put special springs on your back wheels to help the shock, but an assload of eighteen, twenty cans of hoss eyes'd roll you right over if you fucked up. Burn you, too. Fella named Clem Welsh went and cracked up near Pigeon Lane, and he packed his load right, big drums of it, none of this mason jar shit—that's how you tell an operator from a shit-nose, but you had to put it in the big cans, right? Yeah, Clem had him a bunch of blankets all between them cans to cushion 'em and he'd soaked them blankets in horse piss to mask the corn smell in case the revenuers come makin' him pop his trunk, figurin' nobody'd want to go putting their hands in horse piss. But I don't guess the devil minded too much, because he got him a load of shine and a skinny white boy on Pigeon Lane that night. Wasn't nobody even chasin' Clem, he was just showin' off for his brother, rumbling down the road bigger than hell, clippin' them curves, but his wheel hooked and wouldn't come back and he rolled, cracked them cans. That was good
shine, too, not hoss eyes, but damn near, hunnert and twenty proof or more, but something sparked and he went up like the Fourth of July, blowed all the leaves off them trees, made a black char mark they say won't never grow back. I didn't see it. I was in the jailhouse that night, first time I went. Mitch Lily came and got me out, did it because I was makin' him too much money, and the sheriff was scared of Mitch. Hell, everyone was. Mitch said, “Hey, kid, did you hear about Clem?” “No,” I said, “is he dead?” and he said, “Yeah, how'd you know?” “Just the way you said it,” I said, “ain't nobody alive when somebody says ‘did you hear about so-and-so,'” and he said, “Yeah, well he might have been in jail or beat up, or maybe he got the syph, and I'd'a said the same thing,” and I said, “Yeah, but it's the way you said it. I just knew.” And he punched me in the nose real hard for bein' smart, and that was a good lesson. You can be smart all you want, until you go makin' somebody else feel dumb. Especially somebody stronger than you. And Mitch was stronger than everybody. Except Hitler. Hitler shot his ass out of the sky over Romania somewhere, Ploesti, that was the name of the place, bunch of oil fields, and here I still am, though Hitler fucked me up pretty good there too for a while. I loved Mitch. But I fucked his woman. And she didn't tell him 'cause he'd'a killed us both. Women today, they'll cheat on a fella and then tell him about it to show him she's stronger, but it wasn't like that in those days, not in the mountains. You cheat on a hard-ass operator like Mitch Lily, and you'd better sew that mouth up with iron wire or you'd get found ass-up in a well and everyone'd know why and nobody'd say boo. She was fine, too, freckles on her like cinnamon dust, red hair curly and thick and it smelled like clean laundry on the line and pine sap and river gravel all at once. Yeah, I miss those days some. But all I gotta do is get a whiff of blood, anybody's blood, and all those days of sunlight on girls' hair and sunlight on chicory flowers and the hot wind blowin' in your face and shine money and sheriffs swearing a blue streak 'cause I cut their tires, all of it just blows away. If Mitch Lily was still alive and walked in some bar, I'd drink with him and talk about
old times for as long as I could stand it, and then, when that hot brick of hunger started cookin' my guts, I'd ask him what he's drivin' now, and he'd say, “Aw, nothing like in them days,” and I'd say, “Show me anyway, Mitch Lily,” and out we'd go to the parking lot and I'd bend him down between two cars and first he'd think I was playin' a joke and I'd laugh, too, and then he'd try to stand up and say, “Quit horsin',” and say, “I ain't,” real cold and he'd smell death in my mouth under the whiskey and he'd get a little scared and start tryin' hard to stand up and push me off and he'd be surprised that he couldn't stop me and I'd open up his throat and drink. Because as strong as he was, I'm stronger now. And as good as those days were, these nights are better, and the reason is blood and blood and blood. No shine, no pussy, and no love of Jesus ever tasted as good as the dirtiest nigger junkie's blood, and that's how it is. And that's all right. Life, or whatever this is, is all right.

—

“BUT I KNOW IN MY BRAIN THAT IT AIN'T THE SAME AS BEIN' HOT MEAT AND
twenty-three. I know you want you a . . .
promotion
, and that might could happen, but you should enjoy the ride where you are now. There's time for the other, and there ain't no takin' that back.”

“Yeah,” Woods said, but he thought,

And as soon as you turn me you don't have a daybitch, and who's gonna find your knocked-down barns and rusty old junkyards? Who's gonna ditch your skins and carry your shitty bags of clothes? Who's gonna pitch a pup tent in the field across the way and watch your asses through the scope of his Garand? I'm stuck here till one a' you eats sunshine or you find another sucker to drive that truck.

“That's right, old hoss,” Luther said, and, as was often the case between them, Woods wasn't sure if Luther had read his mind or if he was just talking. He knew they could put thoughts in your head, but could they reach in and fish them out?

You know what I'm thinking, you dirty old redneck? You dead old possum-fucker?

Luther looked at him.

There's worse things than fuckin' possum
popped into Woods's head, but he wasn't sure if Luther put that there or if he thought it himself. Either way, it was true.

Woods looked at the woman on the porch swing next to him. He was tempted to pick up her wrist and see if she was getting stiff already, but he didn't want to let Luther know any more than he already might. He knew Woods disposed of their leavings; he might ask where and how, but he never asked what happened to them before. Woods liked the look of this woman, with her hawkish face freckled with dried blood, her half-lidded eyes that seemed to be watching something in the middle distance, something he couldn't see yet. Her eyelashes looked like bits of plastic or rubber, like the nibs on new bike tires. He might pull those off first.

He began to feel a pleasant pressure under his fly.

This was not like after prom, when the girl with the green sequined dress had worked and worked with hand and mouth in the backseat of his borrowed car until her lipstick was wrecked and his thighs were covered in cool spit and she cried and pleaded to know what was wrong with her. This was not like it was with Donna, who would come home to their shared studio apartment behind the garage after her shift at the diner and swear at him as a limp-dick and a queer and make him lick her until she held her breath and turned purple and came. The turning purple was the only part that turned him on, made him twitch just a little, but by then it was too late and Donna had gotten up to stand in front of the icebox and eat from the bag of vinylly french fries she had brought home from work, lit up by the fridge light, her ludicrous false eyelashes blinking with every third chew. He had been able to get off while she was gone, imagining her shot in the head and
thrilling to the desecration of putting it in the hole. Then he had met Calcutta, pretty as a living girl, cool as a dead one, her whole body a wound. Calcutta was a walking desecration. She shouldn't be moving, but she was. He could take her with her head in a bathtub the whole time, her smile beaming under the water like a mermaid's smile, like a drowned nymph. He could strangle her as tight as he liked with an electric cord and she would noiselessly throw those bony hips. Cuts in her flesh would close up around whatever was put in them, and that felt like nothing else in the world; she didn't permit this often, but when she did, it only took him seconds. Best of all, she didn't mind if he had other girlfriends. She never said a thing about it. And neither did they.

THE FIRST THING WOODS SAW WAS THE VERY THING LUTHER TOLD HIM TO LOOK
for. Tilted, rusted, not a big Ferris wheel to begin with, it slouched above the foothills wearing a shawl of vines, several of its once-white cars missing like baby teeth. Next he saw the jet fighter, a Korea-era Sabre jet with its wings swept back and its intake gaping in an idiot
O
. The jet, once the terror of MiG Alley, now listed to its right as if lame; it now wept rust from the cracked, verdant bubble of its cockpit, its skin pocked with absent panels. A statue of Jesus Christ stood nearby. He was twice as tall as a man, his hands resting on a sword that he seemed intent on pulling from the ground, more resembling King Arthur than a prophet, except for the halo and the incongruously beatific expression on his linebacker's face. Old paint flaked on his mighty chest and biceps, as it flaked on the sign beside him.

The Avalon Garden of Wonders and Motor Lodge stood on the Missouri side of the Oklahoma border, just a bit east of Hornet, Missouri, not far from the Devil's Promenade. Built in 1948 by Arthur Britton, who called himself “King of the Brittons,” it enjoyed a brief spasm of popularity in the early fifties but found itself closed when the interstate opened and starved Route 66 of cars. Like many roadside attractions, it suffered from a lack of identity—not that it would have
necessarily survived had it declared itself a military museum, or an amusement park, or a botanical garden, but the grafting together of all three provoked a sense of unease in even the youngest visitors. The greenhouse seemed, even when it had all its panes, too fragile to exist near the gaping mouth of the Sabre jet parked outside, as if the engine might roar to life, breaking the glass of the greenhouse and inhaling the stargazer lilies, birds of paradise, and other rare biota. The Christ, even when his white paint gleamed, had seemed embarrassed to stand before the cluster of motel rooms, as though he knew what sort of things went on behind their blue doors even as freckled boys shouted
Marco!
and
Polo!
at one another in between splashing and peals of laughter.

As Woods idled the F100 truck through the rubble that had once been a driveway, he considered the pool with its cracked and grassy lip, the trumpet-mouths of three stray tiger lilies blaring at him in the golden light of early evening. The motel rooms sagged, mired in their thickets of chicory, Queen Anne's lace, and other less photogenic weeds. Some of the doors stood open, inviting him in. 9. 12. 17. The chipped and water-stained door to 9 seemed to open just a little farther, the darkness beyond revealing no hint as to what had moved it. He looped the pickup around the pool, starting as a great black shape flew up from it. He jogged the steering wheel in surprise and nearly drove into a mossy stone bench.

“HUH!” he cried. The winged thing flew up past the lip and then back down again. A vulture. Overcome by curiosity, Woods veered closer to the pool to see what else was in there. Three black-cowled carrion birds hunched and shouldered each other out of the way to get at the pink-gray, stringy guts of a doe. The carcass was flat, dried up, the fur of the neck dyed crimson. Luther had told him deer blood was second best after man's.

Could there be another one of
them
here? Luther always told him
to watch out when scouting ruins, that they weren't the only creepy-crawlers hiding from daylight in shamble-down buildings.

Number 9 opened a little farther.

He accelerated then, his tires spraying gravel till they caught. He lumbered blindly from behind the hedge of brush that hid the motel from the highway so that he nearly drove beneath the wheels of a semi bound for Tulsa. It blared its horn at him in a long, flat blatt that rang Woods's ears; he fishtailed but stayed straight, gunned the engine, veered past the truck in the left lane, and went on toward the Stuckey's gift shop west of Joplin. He would meet them at the Stuckey's. Luther, Neck Brace, Rob, and Calcutta. Even Cole. His monsters. And they would protect him.