The Suicide Motor Club (9 page)

Missouri

CLAYTON BIRCH LIKED HITCHHIKING AFTER DARK. HE WAS A GREGARIOUS CREATURE
, and, of all human society, he most enjoyed the company of the brave and the mad. Who else would stop for a short, ill-shaven young man standing by the side of the road with an antique leather pack at ten
P.M.
, eleven, midnight? It was imprudent; he looked like trouble, and he was. He wore his chestnut hair longish, after the fashion of the generation he appeared to belong to. His dress suggested a thrift shop habit, but he in truth he had purchased some of his dated clothes new. He had hitched from Florida in a series of short jaunts that introduced him to a recently paroled safecracker, a Black Panther with a trunk full of tear gas grenades stolen from the Georgia National Guard, a divorcée on her way back from a séance, a homosexual with a lazy eye and six cats, and, most recently, three flower children in a repurposed and wildly painted milk truck. Of these, he had bitten all but the flower children, whose blood-stew of LSD, cannabis, and Beefeater gin promised a rarefied headache and a hard morning piss, besides making the driver, an unfortunately featured young woman who looked like nothing so much as Ringo Starr's fraternal twin, too enthusiastic to charm. He had given them five dollars for gas, accepting and pocketing the fat joint they offered him in parting; it would make excellent currency
with a certain sort of motorist, and he hoped to be in California by midmonth, if nothing more interesting presented itself in the meantime. He had not seen San Francisco since shortly before the quake, news of which had depressed him so that he could not bear to see its ruin, recoiled from pictures of it filling up with boxy, soulless buildings. Only now that the nation's youth had been pouring in and filling it with music and art did he think he could accustom himself to its new face.

Clayton liked people and did not enjoy killing them. Killing, Clayton felt, was often foolish, usually unnecessary, and always inconvenient. Sometimes, however, it was unavoidable. The divorcée had died as he fed, and he wasn't sure why. Shock? The unhappy coincidence of an aneurysm? The postséance wrath of some importuned spirit? He hadn't taken more than a mugful of the woman's lonely, floury blood, he was certain of it, but still she had started to shake and, in the end, vomited all over her own lap and expired in a great, wet wheeze that sounded uncannily like disappointment. He was disappointed, too. He had been forced to dispose of her by driving her car into a nearby lake, which he had spent the remainder of the night in finding. Standing on the sandy shore, Clayton had been so aware of his silence as the car frothed and bubbled and filled that he had shamed himself into saying a few ceremonial words:

“God or gods, such as you are, I did not know this woman. I did not mean to kill her. I blame you completely and utterly for her untimely passing, which, as I am powerless to punish you, is certain to occasion a belly laugh on Olympus, in heaven, or hell, or wheresoever you currently abide. You are a bastard or a pack of bastards, if you exist. If you do not, then I am a fool for speaking to you. Take . . . damnation, what was it, anyway?” He had rummaged in his pocket here, fishing out the Florida driver's license bearing her wan smile. “. . . Cheryl into your care, or do not, but do not let it be said that her
sad death went unremarked upon, for I remark upon it here. Amen and yours sincerely, C. Birch, of the Boston Birches, upon whom you have liberally shat. Also, please let there be no alligators in these waters, for I am in no mood to witness carnage.”

So saying, he undressed as a wary great blue heron looked on, hiding clothes, hat, and pack under a mess of brush. At first light, he knifed into the piss-warm, murky water, swimming into the flooded backseat of the car, curling into a fetal ball behind the lap-belted, still-bleeding body of Cheryl Heffner, dental hygienist, owner of three Ouija boards, and, until very recently, the youngest resident of her Clearwater, Florida, apartment complex. Suppressing a vampire's intense dislike of water had been one of the most useful disciplines Clayton Birch had mastered, but it was not the only one.

That had been weeks ago.

Now, just past sunset, Clayton walked backward down Route 66, just southwest of Lebanon, Missouri, smiling his biggest smile, gouging the warm summer breeze with his thumb.

When not one but two cars, both loud and grumbly, pulled over, that surprised him. The driver of the first car, a cagey, bald fellow of coarse manners and poor breeding, eyed him from shoes to hat. The passenger, a large, hairy man in a neck brace, did the same, but it was the bald fellow who spoke. He raised his voice to be heard over the engine.

“You need a ride, mister?”

“Maybe.”

Clayton walked to the driver's side, his intuition telling him this man fought the impulse to step on the gas when he passed in front of the bumper. This was a car with blood in its very seams.

As he got closer, the bald man squinted his eyes at him.

“You what I think you are?”

“A Seventh-Day Adventist?”

“Jocular fellow. I like that.”

His eyes didn't say he liked it.

“What precisely is it that you think I am?”

“A sumbitch,” Luther said, dropping the charm that hid his fangs.

“You, sir, are correct,” Clayton said, not returning the courtesy of showing his fangs.

The two dead men eyed each other. Clayton, despite his almost scientific curiosity about other
nocturnals
, as he called them, had just been about to walk into the field and away from this vulgar specimen. Luther, not impressed with this northern smartass, was on the fence about whether to invite him along or to grab his head and drive.

Calcutta craned from the passenger seat of the black car, appraising the newcomer.

“He can ride with us,” she said.

“SO WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN YOUR BAG?” CALCUTTA ASKED. “YOU CAN TELL A LOT
about somebody by what they carry with 'em, especially when they travel light.”

“Shrunken heads from the island of Borneo.”

“Tell me really.”

“The lost diary of William Shakespeare.”

Behind them, something banged in the trunk.

Thump

“No, tell me.”

“Watercolor paints and brushes.”

“Are you gonna tell me for real or are you gonna make me open up that sack and see for myself?”

“I prefer not to.”

“You know, I thought you were gonna be fun when I said come along. Being secret's just not neighborly, not with family anyway.”

Thump

Cole flicked an eye into the rearview mirror, said, “Man don't want to tell you what's in his pack, he don't have to. But I do believe he is a painter. Painter's fingers on him.”

“Well, that's boring,” Calcutta said. “How long till we gas up? I gotta call my momma before she goes to bed.”

“What, being a painter's boring but you calling your dried-up old momma's a party? We'll stop before long,” Cole said. “I got a quarter tank left, but I'll bet Luther's eatin' fumes.”

“Your mother is still alive?” Clayton asked.

“Yep.”

“You must be young.”

“Luther stopped my clock seven, eight years ago. Luther made us all, all but Neck Brace. Why, how old are you?”

“I'd rather not say.”

“What, like fifty?”

Calcutta turned around in the front seat to look at him.

“Not like fifty,” he said.

“I oughta be thirty-three, I think, but I lose track.”

“That's normal. I lose track, too.”

“Liar,” she said. “You don't seem like the track-losing type. So tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“Like what's the first thing you remember.”

“My mother holding my hand out the window to feel the rain.”

“That's sweet. But something that tells me what year it was. Like what kind of car you rode in.”

“John Quincy Adams's cologne smelled of ambergris and leather. I sat on his lap.”

“Huh,” she said, her eyes betraying her brief but unsuccessful attempt to place John Quincy Adams. “Who made you?”

“She never gifted me her name.”

Thump Thump

Cole said, “I'm about sick of that shit.”

“Stop and charm it.”

“I ain't stopping.”

Cole jerked the steering wheel back and forth, causing the weight in the trunk to shift side to side. Something squealed and kicked hard.

THUMP

“It don't learn.”

Cole jammed down on the brake then let up, jammed down and let up, bucking the car, rolling the contents of the trunk forward and backward. Then he fishtailed side to side again. After a moment of this, he slid into neutral, his sharp ears listening past the engine's throaty idle to pick up muffled crying.

“That's right,” Cole said. “Less bangin' and more boo-hoo.”

Clayton suppressed a wince.

He knew it was their intention to keep the one in the trunk alive until the following night. He also knew they were an undisciplined gang of thugs and that if they did chance to murder their guest, they would simply invite another one. Shortly after they had taken him on board, they had gone hunting in the suburbs of Springfield, Missouri. He had watched with mixed shock and admiration as Calcutta, attracted by the turquoise glow of a pool light, had bellied up to the fence of a suburban house and peeped over. The pops and shrieks of amateur fireworks could still be heard from all compass points, along with beery guffaws and the fuzzy jangle of electric guitar on someone's backyard radio.

“Want to go to a party?”

“I . . . I've got friends coming over. Who are you?”

“Your new friend,” Calcutta had said, the charm finally taking. “Your best friend. No, you don't need your shirt. Let's go!”

The attractive blond woman, wearing only a red polka-dot bikini, had stumbled dripping from a side door in the fence, her eyes bloodshot and her skin reeking of chlorine, and climbed into the open trunk as if settling in for a pleasant nap. A man from the house called
the woman's name, but he wasn't concerned yet. He never looked over the fence.

It happened just that fast.

—

“I'M GONNA LIGHT IT.”

“Wait till midnight,” Cole said.

“It is midnight, slow horsy.”

“It's almost midnight. We said
midnight
.”

“Well, midnight ain't the Fourth of July no more and I want some Fourth of July in this sumbitch. Lady Liberty should be holdin' her torch high and proud tonight, yessir.”

Luther lit the sparklers, their reflected image twinned in the mirrored aviator's glasses he wore to protect his eyes from sparks. Luther in his overalls and lace-up leather work boots, some dead soda jerk's soda shop shirt on, the collar off-white from blood and bleachings. He liked that it said
Mike
on the shirt and he wasn't Mike. Mike was in a patch of woods near Erie, Pennsylvania, all tied up with bicycle chains and rolled in office carpet. Just to be funny, Luther had written
NOT MIKE
on Mike's chest with Calcutta's eyeliner. That woman had no shortage of eyeliner.

That had been last year.

Now the two monsters and the dying woman sat in a wobbly car just at the top of the Ferris wheel. Luther wished there were a bleeder in every car, all moaning as their lives pulsed out into vampires' mouths, and this made him think of dates at a drive-in, everybody doing the same thing, private but not private. He had another thought that made him angry, a thought about a drive-in, but he shook this away.

“I'm a golla,” Lady Liberty mumbled, drowsy with blood loss.

“You are a golla!” Luther agreed, securing the hissing torch of
sparklers in the beer can taped to the woman's palm, just above where the wrist was taped to the broomstick holding her arm aloft. Her plastic Lady Liberty crown, purchased at the Stuckey's where they met up with Woods, sat crooked on her head. Her head drooped.

“Hold that crown up now, you luscious golla you.”

She tried but couldn't.

“I think she said
goner
,” Cole said.

“I know it. But I like
golla
better.”

Luther held her head up for her, hearing Calcutta and Rob's cheers coming from below them. Woods watched in awe and glee, looking very like he did the first time he ever saw fireworks. Neck Brace stared with all the animation of an Easter Island moai.

The sparks made Lady Liberty wince; she turned her face away from the crackling light in her hand, her brutalized throat now illuminated, along with its runners of drying blood.

She turned her groggy head back to face Luther.

“Tay mee um,” she slurred, her head lolling, but her open eyes fixed on the reflective plates of Luther's sunglasses, where doubled eruptions of sparklers blazed.

“You are home,” he said with something in his voice that might have been regret.

“Tay mee um,” she said again. “UM!”

Luther's voice hardened again.

“Give me your poor, your sick, your huddled masses.”

“I wa go um.”

“And I'll light sparklers in AAALLLL their asses!”

“Um. Mleeze.”

“
Mleeze
, huh? I was never one to resist a lady with good manners. Home you go,” he said, sucking hard from her gouged neck, so hard he arched his back, until her legs shook and the only part of her that
did not wilt was the arm taped to the broomstick. Cole pulled her leg wide and attached himself at the femoral artery. Her heart stopped shortly before the sparklers died, and Luther did not light more.

—

“IF Y'ALL WANT ANY, YOU'D BETTER GET IT WHILE IT'S WARM,” THE BALD ONE WITH
the mirrored shades said from the top car of the Ferris wheel where the smaller, well-dressed one silently fed. The tall one called Rob skittered up the rusted wheel's frame, making Clayton think of a roach running up a drain pipe. The biggest one just watched, standing near the oddly martial statue of Christ, fingering under his dirty neck brace as if he had an itch. This one, despite his size, tended to eat last and least, which probably made him the youngest. Clayton had yet to hear him speak. Of the victim, Clayton only saw a limp spill of blond hair; Liberty's crown, now askew; and a dead arm taped aloft to a broomstick. These killers favored macabre spectacle, and this would be their undoing. None of them had been nocturnal more than two decades. They would not see three. Clayton determined to part company with them the next night, or perhaps one night later. He would make them talk to him, if he could, and he would write down what he learned for posterity's sake. He might well paint the girl on the Ferris wheel once he was clear of them and had a place to work unmolested.

Hypocrite,
he thought,
at least these are honest ghouls.

He caught the diurnal they called Woods looking sideways at him from beneath the cheap Indian bonnet he had shoplifted from the Stuckey's where they met and fueled up.

“I really do like your headdress,” Clayton said. He felt jealousy pouring off the disturbed young man-child in waves, and he understood that this came from some attachment to the female who had invited Clayton to ride along. He also understood that this creature was serving to watch the dead by day, and that alienating him would
be unwise. He stepped away from Calcutta and put his arm around Woods. “The actual headdresses of the Plains States war chiefs were impressive things, or so I've seen in photographs. They had to earn each feather through an act of hardship or loyalty, so a man whose headdress reached the ground was a man to be reckoned with. Of course, I know yours is just a bit of panache, but there's little enough of that in the world anymore.”

The hostility Woods had felt a moment before dampened considerably now that the boy felt himself acknowledged and respected. Calcutta sensed the tension ease as well and gave in to the hunger that propelled her toward the Ferris wheel and the exsanguinating young woman in the crown and swimsuit.

“You're not talking about photographs at all, are you? You're talking about things you've seen.”

“Maybe so, maybe not.”

“Tell me.”

Clayton allowed a gleam to visit his eye as he said, “There was a minor chief named Smiles at Horses who wore a bonnet that stood straight up, all in a circle around his head. Not so many feathers as other chiefs had. It was said he kept the others under a bear skin in his teepee, that he would not wear them all, for he wanted men to judge him by what he did now, not what he had done before.”

“Did you see the buffalo?”

“Which buffalo?”

“The great herds.”

“I saw a buffalo.”

“You didn't see the herds?”

“Alas, no. I also once saw Buffalo, in New York. Does that impress you?”

Woods smiled a crooked smile. Clayton clapped his arm in fraternity, then wandered off. He would find some house and charm the occupants therein, take his necessary tribute and leave unremembered,
sheltering with this pack through one more day, two at most. Why did these insist on killing? He had been tempted to scale the carnival ride and take his share, perhaps more tempted than any of them—older stomachs rumbled louder, and he did not gorge himself lionlike as these did, which might see him through two or three nights of fast—but he felt no kinship with them and would not break bread with them unless expediency demanded it.

“Hey,” Luther said from his perch as Clayton wandered off down Route 66. “Where the hell're you goin?”

“Nowhere I shall not soon return from, sir.”

“Just see that you come back alone.”

“I shall deserve your every confidence.”

“What?”

“I will come back alone.”

“Yeah. Or not at all would suit me, too.”

Cole said, more quietly, “Shut up, asshole, I kinda like him.”

Clayton heard them tussle now, but good-naturedly, and not so hard that either would be pitched from the squeaking car lest Cole should tear his shirt.

There's something more to these two than friendship,
Clayton thought.

Or there was.

—

TWO HOURS LATER.

Luther and Clayton sat on the floor of the mold-furred room Luther claimed as his own. He had brought Luther half an RC Cola bottle full of blood as a peace offering.

“Who'd you take this off of?”

“The daughter of a squash farmer two miles off.”

“It's good. She's as pure as North Carolina rain.”

“Her father was no less tainted than she. Baptists of the rare variety, and by that I mean observant.”

“You're a funny bird, you know that?”

“How so?”

“Way you talk.”

“I can't seem to help it. In my household we were punished for lazy speech and rewarded for sounding like gentlemen. They were trying to make senators and rail barons of us, and our sisters the wives of such.”

“What happened?”

“Smallpox. Scandal. Vampirism. We were already undone before I was whisked off into the night. My last remaining brother succumbed to fever at Andersonville while enjoying southern hospitality.”

“I ain't from Georgia, Cole is. Anyway, that's before my time.”

“And after mine.”

Luther raised his RC bottle in salute, swirled it to discourage coagulation, then throated it back. He picked up a bottle of Old Crow bourbon and rinsed it around in his mouth, seemed to think about it, then swallowed. Clayton looked at him with some surprise.

“I love the shit outta whiskey. I still swallow it sometimes. Mostly spit it out but sometimes it's worth a headache and pissin' fire.”