ow
“I’m so sorry, Billy,” he will say. “I
es- thought you were a ghost. I had no idea
nd that all this time . . . ”
is
By the hearth, he will not remember the
bury cold or his father’s words.
mo- “Stay put,” his father will tell the boy.
sed “Be with your dog. I need to put Billy to
ture bed.”
ven
He will follow his father farther into the
rk cavernous house. He relies heavily on the
a stiffness of the gun to guide the shuffle of
his limp.
“When was the last time you slept in a
warm bed?” his father will ask. He won’t
know.
In the room, his father will shed him
he of his wet clothes and he will realize for
maybe the first time that he is completely
the wrapped. He will put on the pajamas his
father gives him and climb beneath the
blankets on the bed. He will know this is it.
. He Home.
His father will extinguish the lights and
sit at the edge of the bed.
ey!
“You are home now, Billy,” he will say.
“I’m so sorry I avoided you all these years.
I love you, son.”
His father will gently wipe his hand
of across his soaked, bandaged brow before
you.” replacing the hand with the cool barrel of
the shotgun.
” the He will try to speak, but will not know if
ke the words emerge. His father will hush him
with soft coos. He will not remember the
discharge of the round, or even the boy, if
only to wonder if the boy’s back will snap
tight at the recoil.
in as What he had wanted to say was thank
the you. Thank you, Daddy.
se as
• • •
teps
Ben Driscoll woke up to a real discom-
nd fort for the second time that day. Splayed
across the carpet, he opened his eyes to
oor, discover a cantaloupe growing on his
ump- forehead. Sniffing the lingering rotten scent
in the air first tugged Sam back to his foggy
all mind. Sam! There were new signs of a
struggle in the basement and after checking
all of the rooms and closets he burst out
through the broken window into the storm,
wondering what to do besides get wet.
-
There was not a light pitched at the other
nd Sloane place. He started towards it any-
that way, but then stopped and spun, searching
the inky darkness for any signs of life, but
found only fake phantoms evaporating as
soon as his eyes adjusted. He could not
lose Sam, too, not like this. In his rush, he
hadn’t even grabbed his jacket. Already
bone-soaked in a flannel shirt and jeans,
how long could he really expect to make it
out here concussing, a fruit blistering on his
not brow?
He knew two places that thing liked
NOVEMBER 2, 2017 // 23
to frequent and he was standing in one of
them alone. So he got in the Satellite and
began to slowly orbit the washed-out roads,
ready to pick up a few hitchhikers.
Maybe it was the petulant rain, or the
fact that he didn’t know the area, or the
dull wonk increasingly enflaming upon
his brain, but he couldn’t find the highway
before he ran out of gas. He could see the
headlights about half a klick to his right,
through about 1,000 pounds of rain and a
nebulous squiggle of forest. Ben tossed on
the emergency lights, closed his eyes and
smacked his head against the horn, letting it
blast, muted, into the storm, till the battery
died alongside most of him.
“I’m sorry,” he told the steering wheel,
but it couldn’t answer. “Jessica,” he said.
“We’re lost.”
• • •
She was parked in a truck with a boy as
the rain trotted against the roof with enough
force to imagine they were being socked
by a trillion dollars worth of pennies. Jessie
and Audrey sat at opposite sides of the
cab, perforated by the knob of the manual
transmission, but the Suzy A. in her felt as
though they might as well have been on op-
posite sides of a middle school gym. They
were parked miles north of Hug Point, even
farther away from Tongue Point. She won-
dered when he would make a move, and if
he did, would Suzy A. dig it like a grave?
Outside the cab, the darkness glossed
like onyx as they listened to a Top 40
station. She could see headlights blinking
on the highway through a grove of trees
behind them, and heard a horn roll long off
in the distance.
“So, is this pretty much what you do
around here for fun?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Jessie said, his tone less excited
than rain. “Pretty much. I was supposed
to take Kevin up to Seaside tonight to see
this girl he knows and drag the gut, but I
wanted to hang out with you instead. He’s
kind of pissed.”
“What’s dragging a gut?”
“You know,” he said, “like cruising
around.”
“Cool,” she said.
“What do you for fun in Spokane?” he
asked.
“Same,” she lied.
“Cool,” he said.
“So. Where are we exactly?”
“You mean, like, in our relationship?”
“No!” Audrey laughed. “No! I mean,
like, are we still in Cannon Beach?”
“Oh,” Jessie said, flipping the bulk of
his sandy hair so that it smothered the
left hemisphere of his brain. “Yeah. Still
Cannon Beach. You know, they call this
Bandage Man Road. So there’s like this
dead logger all wrapped up like a mummy
who jumps into the back of kids’ trucks
when they’re making out—”
“I’ve seen him,” Audrey said flatly,
buckling her own knees as Suzy A. sailed
away and Audrey remembered the mon-
ster’s toxic spark, the eek of its palm as
it smeared the window. “Why would you
bring me here?”
Somewhere beyond the heavy rain, the
continuing drone of the car horn wailed like
a cosmic moan.
“You’ve seen him? Like the real
Bandage Man?” Jessie said skeptically.
“It’s like everybody knows about him, but
nobody’s seen him. He’s just a story, babe.
Something parents came up with to stop
kids necking out here.”
“I think I need to go home,” Audrey
said, switching the radio from FM to AM.
“Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor
looking into the burglary at the Democratic
National Committee’s offices at the Water-
gate Hotel, has been fired. President Nixon
accepted the resignation of his attorney
general and . . . ”
“You’re, like, following this stuff?”
Jessie said.
“I find it soothing,” Audrey said, looking
out the window. “You hear that, right?”
As soon as she spoke, the car horn
vanished and every decibel it released
filled with rain. Jessie shrugged, switching
the radio back to FM to find Springsteen
Dylan-ing through a verse of “Blinded by
the Light.”
As Jessie faced Audrey, the weight of
the cab slunk to the rear and Audrey could
hear boots in the bed of the pickup truck.
Then one bandaged palm clapped against
the rear window of the cab.
“Holy,” was all Jessie could say as he
spun into the empty road in reverse.
There are many different dimensions of
chaos. With the rain slapping against the
windshield, the road curved and slick, Jes-
sie puffing a cloud of curses as he slammed
the gas, jittering the creature in the bed of
the truck, Audrey felt as if they were travel-
ing through each of them.
She had to snuff a breath for 30 seconds
to realize it was the creature screaming in
the bed of the truck and not her. It didn’t
fume rotten like a carcass; it hadn’t even
given ink to the window. Instead, it swam
through the Chevy’s bed, trying desperately
to fix its gauzy grip to the side of the truck.
Its eyes were blue, not rimmed with red. It
called Jessie by name.
This was not the thing she had faced
before.
Looking closer, she recognized the pack-
aged boy.
“Jessie?” she asked. “Is that Kevin?”
Jessie snaked his eye to the rear window
as they sluiced through the darkness. When
his foot gave off the gas as he nodded to his
old friend playing a practical joke, Audrey
screamed at the dead station wagon in the
road.
“Hold on, Suzy!” Jessie said, flooring
the break, as Kevin launched out of the bed
of the truck directly towards the station
wagon ahead of them.
She grasped at her name, seeing her
father rise up above the steering wheel of
the stalled station wagon while an airborne
teenage mummy approached his wind-
shield like a one-hundred-and-sixty-pound
mosquito.
The bumpers of the cars kissed before
each vehicle flailed backwards on impact,
shooting human shrapnel into the air.
• • •
He will not understand why they are
wrapping his face even as the bandages
soak through. When he tries to speak, the
paramedics will look at him cross-eyed.
“Just calm down, buddy,” one of them will
say, patting his chest, enlivening a wound.
He will fury at them, unsure of the col-
lision that splattered his mind. Who will he
be? He will yank the IV from his arm and
strike one of them across the face before
tumbling out of the ambulance into the cold
rain. The rain will wake him like it is morn-
ing. He will remember Audrey and Sam and
Jessica as the light approaches. An orange
light will sit bulbous in the sky. He will run
at it, thinking he can launch into a harvest
moon, and see her again, and again, and
again, forever.
• • •
That rainy evening would splash infa-
mous as “The Saturday Night Massacre,” not
because of what happened to Audrey, Ben
and Kevin on a lonely road nicknamed after
a monster in Cannon Beach, Oregon, but
because nearly 3,000 miles away, in Washing-
ton, D.C., President Richard Nixon accepted
the resignations of his attorney general and
deputy attorney general just to find a guy
who goes by Bob Bork, who would lob off a
special prosecutor named Archie Cox.
The girl — who the only survivor of
the crash, the driver, Jessie Travers, would
mark as Suzy A., of Spokane — was
stacked in the morgue as a Jane Doe, hav-
ing no fingerprints or dental records on file.
There was no money found in the well of
the Satellite. Yet, a few months later, resi-
dents would begin to notice massive repairs
to the house at the end of Carronade Lane.
Contractors, who worked the job, will still
tell you stories about the boy with the eye-
patch holding the dog, who would stare out
the upstairs window every foggy evening
as if he was waiting for someone. CW