Appendix (A): On Old Taylor Mill Road

 

 

From the recent past, up along the N-string:

 

This one detail, very important: She didn't want to take the scenic route, in the first place. Never did. She said so right from the outset. “If we have to go, then I want to go by the quickest route possible.” And she thought that was pretty fair, all things considered.

Seemed like they passed a yellow deer-crossing sign every half a mile.

The whole freaking road was a deer-crossing zone.

Rubby said they weren't even deer. “They're woodland caribou.” He had a story to go with that. Something about going along with his brother, hunting, playing with big guns, being tough and manly, getting wasted on grain alcohol and warm beer, and killing innocent creatures for sport and meat. The sort of story she could hardly pay attention to.

She was nodding in and out of sleep, lulled by the ceaseless motion of the (long) drive, dreaming about Jesus, the Second Coming, and the end of the world. Dreaming about watching monochrome news clips—Jesus as Dan Rather, perhaps, or Peter Jennings. Jesus saying, “Yes, folks, you heard that right: According to NASA, a golf ball the size of Texas is about to collide with the Earth. We're just eleventeen hours from impact.”

He was long and thin, with handsome Yemeni features, yet far too Caucasian to be believable. Big white chompers. Thick, groomed eyebrows. Piercing green eyes. In one hand he held a basketball-sized model of the killer golf ball, and, in the other, an artist's rendering of a hundred bloodied babies in a pile. Intolerably realistic, almost like a photo. These two items were related only by the absurdity of dream logic. The Redeemer went on, “Authorities are hurrying to empty out all the incubators, expecting the meteoric golf ball to impact in Kuwait at twenty-nine hundred hours, central standard time. What a holocaust we're going to have, ladies and gentlemen!”

It couldn't make sense in any language.

This went on and on: Jesus explaining how dangerous giant golf balls (in space) really are. Jesus talking about shelter, penance, charity, chastity, and something about mustard seeds. Jesus saying, “This is the big league, friends. No kidding around. The real deal. The pooch has truly been screwed, this time. Holy cow, it's really something.” Also: He was grinning constantly.

And she was thinking, “Please, Jesus, use your mighty superpowers to save us. Amen.”

This was an extremely light sleep, mind you.  She remained aware of the music on the radio, classic seventies, and the burning stink of his cheap, rum-flavored cigar. A yellow butterfly hit the windshield like a cream-filled missile, nearly cracked the glass, pop, and jolted her immediately into total wakefulness. She muttered something about bomb shelters as she came to. Her tongue was dry like cracked plaster. She thought maybe the truck was going too fast. The surface of the road was smooth, fresh gravel. Rubby was taking this opportunity to drive like a moron, like a superhero. Smoking and driving like an asshole. She wanted to reach out and punch him in the neck and tell him to slow the hell down.

Half an hour back, before turning onto the gravel, she'd asked him, “Do you think our relationship is poisonous?” but he'd declined to answer. She thought perhaps he was still mulling it over. She said, “What do you think about what I said back there?”

He asked, “Back where? What did you say?”

“I asked you what you thought about the nature of our relationship.”

“I thought it was a rhetorical question. You went to sleep.”

“I'm tired as hell. My eyeballs are on fire.”

“Sadly, you're missing it. The view, this view. This is God's country.”

“I don't care. I'm beyond tired. Why don't you put that thing out? (Cough.)”

“Oh, look at this poor bugger, Juney.”

“Huh?”

There was a fellow with a blue rag tied around his head, thumb in the air, half a kilometre ahead. Just twenty seconds away. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. Enough time for Rubby to decide that the poor dude was desperate. Sixteen, fifteen. In need of serious assistance. Fourteen, twelve, ten. His posture suggested defeat and his eyes were wide and pleading.

Rubby eased his right foot onto the brake pedal and Juney said, “What? You aren't stopping, are you? He looks crazy. We don't have room. He could be a child molester. You can't take chances, out in the world. This guy could be anybody. He might be a convict, or worse.” And she was still talking as the cherry red pick-up coasted to a soft, deliberate halt on the crackling gravel, just twenty feet past the spot where the sweat-stained hitcher stood.

It was true that Juney was afraid of everyone and everything, pretty much, and always had been. She compared herself to a pink bunny-rabbit in a world of wolves and bears. But Rubby knew that before he ever offered to marry her, so he wasn't in much of a position to go complaining about it now.

“We're barely ten clicks from Cabal,” Rubby said, running his right hand through his wife's dark, road-dusty hair, “and smack-dab in the heart of cottage country. Half the population is Mennonite. The other half are married to Mennonites. You aren't going to encounter anyone crazier than the average walleye fisherman.”

“My Uncle Gary was a fisherman, if you've already forgotten.”

“Your Uncle Gary was a maniac.”

“That's my point, Rub.”

“You need to relax. It's five hundred degrees in the shade. The guy looks pathetic.”

Rubby was Juney's polar opposite in almost every way that counted, and if she was inclined toward unwarranted fear and timidity, cautious to a fault (her pink bunnyness), then he was stupidly brave, even reckless (his wolfy bearness). “And to your own detriment as much as anyone else's,” she liked to remind him.

“The poor guy's going to roast like a pork sausage out here,” Rubby said.

“The worst he'll get for it is a sunburn,” said Juney. “It won't kill him. This isn't Ecuador.”

“It's hot and he's harmless.”

“Nobody's harmless.”

“You needn't worry. If he gets out of line, I'll whup him and toss his ass right out of the truck.”

“Big talk, honey. It doesn't work like that. It never does.”

“He's no danger, I tell you.”

“Just do whatever you want. You always do. You're already stopped.”

The forest terrified her. The rolling unendingness of it all terrified her. The possibility that the locals were all deranged, inbred yokels had her wanting to climb out of her own skin and run all the way back home. Rubby dismissed these ideas with laughter. She'd spent her whole life on the prairie, and any place that wasn't prairie might as well have been Neptune or Mars.

“I'll murder anyone who looks at you funny,” Rubby had promised.

“Sure you will.”

The blue-ragged stranger came to Juney's window and she reluctantly rolled it down. For a fleeting moment he looked like Newsman Jesus, but without the beard. His face was all dirt and perspiration—streaked with sweat and tears and maybe panic, as well. He said, “Thank you for stopping. The worst has happened. The very worst. We had an accident and now my baby is all twisted and backwards.” He pointed back to where he'd been standing, ten yards behind the truck, where the gravel was smooth and scattered and the clay surface underneath had been blackened by skidding tires. In the ditch was a vomit-yellow husk of metal that appeared to be smouldering.

Approaching from the west, neither Juney nor Rubby had spotted it there, as it had been obscured by willows, and now, looking back, it wasn't much more obvious—just a wheel and a fender poking out of the grassy woods, plus the odd spark of reflected sunlight. (Not exactly screaming for attention, like a busted thumb, but not the sort of thing that can be ignored once glimpsed, either.)

That image of hundreds of bloody, charred babies flickered in Juney's mind—newborns, a whole pile of them, broken like yesterday's dolls—and her stomach turned over.

“What happened?” asked Rubby, leaning across the cab to better hear the stranger. “You had an accident? Is that your car, down there? Is anyone hurt?” He was always chomping at the bit, ever ready to be a man and do his manly-type things, Juney knew all too well. So eager to be everyone's hero.

“We flipped it,” said the stranger, “Maura and me. Mostly me, as she was merely a passenger. The fault would lie with myself. A deer ran in front of the Blazer and I lost control [By deer he meant woodland caribou, Juney knew]. I didn't think I was going that fast. The ground just come out from under me, if you get the idea. Must have rolled three or four times. Don't know for sure. But Maura is there, still there, yonder, and it's not very good. Would either of you happen to be a doctor?”

Juney shook her head. “Have you called for an ambulance?”

“No, ma'am, I don't have a phone. And you're the first vehicle that has come by.”

“How long ago—”

“Don't know. Losing track of things. Ten minutes, maybe?”

Rubby already had his cell out, folded open, and was dialling 911. He'd been in a similar situation, back in the early nineties, in the golden days before wireless (when having a redial button on the house phone was considered cutting edge, in this neck of the woods), and had watched an accident victim nearly bleed to death on the side of the road. Nothing anyone could do about it, back then, in the dark ages, unless they had a CB radio—and even that was touch-and-go because CB radios had been virtually extinct since the seventies. And, yes, the subject had survived, but only barely, and only by the grace of God, or chance, or whatever. At least, according to Rubby. (And the tale changed by degrees every time he told it.)

He had told the story to Juney two dozen times or more, usually in defence of his exorbitant cell bills, though he'd never revealed the identity of the victim nor how he/she ended up bleeding on the side of the road in the first place. (She suspected booze and general recklessness, or idiocy, had played pivotal roles, as was often the case.) Rubby said he wasn't ever going to get caught with his pants down—never again—and that the cellular phone was probably the second- or third-most important technological advancement in the last thousand years of human history. “A person almost lost their life!” Naturally, there was no chance of Rubby downgrading to a cheaper phone or service plan, and the story was played like a trump card every time Juney suggested doing so. (He had an anecdote to support every argument, it seemed.)

And now, Juney realized,  that three-year, locked-in contract—and the top-of-the-line, four hundred dollar phone that came with it—was about to pay off, big time. Jesus would surely agree that one hundred and ten dollars multiplied by thirty-six months, plus roaming charges and miscellaneous bullshit fees (plus the four hundred dollars for the phone itself), equalled one human life, saved from the precipice of oblivion. She'd probably never hear the end of it.

“What did you say her name is? Your wife?”

“Maura.”

“We're not twelve miles from town. There ought to be a crew here within minutes.”

“Do you think so?”

“You bet I do. These are my stomping grounds. I have faith in these people.”

“I appreciate your optimism.”

Rubby would have gone on to say how his brother, Chris, helped lay the region's fiber-optic network, back at the end of the nineties, that now connected every part of the globe with every other part, and that rescue was practically inevitable because of it, but his phone clicked and buzzed as it linked to the 911 system, proving his point before he could make it. The emergency service operator came on the line and Rubby explained the situation to her.

He said there was a vehicular accident on the old Taylor Mill Road, ten or twelve miles west of Cabal. No more than fifteen. “Two victims, maybe more, very serious.” He said there was blood and smoke and time was already running out. He told the operator that she had to hurry, and she assured him that paramedics had already been dispatched to the scene. She wanted him to stay on the line while she asked more questions.

The stranger said to Juney, “Can you take a look at her? Maybe you can help.”

Juney said, “I told you, I'm no doctor. Not even close.”

“But maybe you can help her. Maybe you know something.”

“Not me, mister. I don't know anything. I could only make things worse.”

“Things couldn't get much worse, ma'am.”

This guy could have been anyone. Creep or saint or pervert, missionary or murderer. And maybe this scene was nothing but a ruse in order to trick unsuspecting motorists into pulling over, like lambs stopping in for their own slaughter. That sort of thing actually happened in the world, she knew it all too well (though mostly from TV and movies). Predators and thugs were lurking everywhere. Even Rubby's pals, back home, whenever the beer began to flow, could turn into fierce creatures. Truly bad ones. On a dime.

The stranger introduced himself as Don Carver. He stood about six feet, same as Ruddy. Juney climbed out of the truck to shake his hand and stretch her legs. (More the latter.) She felt like a dwarf next to him, like a stick-person, but she was used to feeling like that. Don leaned against the truck, lit a cigarette from a dirty, crumpled pack, and offered one to her. She accepted, even though she hadn't smoked in six years. She held it in her fingers and declined to light it.

Rubby came around the vehicle, phone still pressed to his ear, and said,  to Don Carver, “They're coming. They've already sent a crew. She wants to know about your wife. She wants to know about Maura. Is she down there, still..?” He pointed toward the ditch, to the shadowy disturbance in the thick greenery where the yellow Blazer lay hot and mauled, on its side.

“She's still there,” said Don, nodding. “I tried not to move her much.”

“And is she conscious?”

“I don't know what you mean by conscious.”

“Is she awake?”

“I can't even say if she's breathing. Not with any certainty.”

Rubby passed the phone to Juney, cussing under his breath, giving her a stern look that said, “Don't drop my four hundred dollar phone,” and then loped down the embankment toward the wreck. She couldn't imagine what he was going to encounter down there. (Horror, likely, and buckets of it.) She wouldn't go if Rubby, Don Carver and Jesus Himself each held a shotgun to her head and told her to “git”. She put the cell phone to her ear and listened, but the line had gone dead. Click.

Sunspots or interference or generalized impatience, no doubt.

“We were on our way up to see her mother,” Don said. “Up out of Lockport. She was so looking forward to it. Hasn't seen her since I don't know when. And here we are. These are Maura's old stomping grounds. Do you suppose your man can help her?”

“He's no doctor,” Juney said, “as I already told you. Neither of us. I'm a waitress.”

“And what does he do? For a living, I mean.”

“Not very much.”

“But do you think he might be able to help her? He seems pretty confident, to me.”

“I find that he mostly talks out of his ass, myself.”

“Kind of boastful, you mean?”

“Maybe kind of. Yeah.”

“Do you think he knows CPR?”

“He couldn't find it on a map, but he'd surely try.”

Juney noticed, for the first time, the blood on Don Carver's hands and wrists, all the way up to his elbows. Brown and greasy, like moist garden dirt. And there were skidmarks across his shirt, where he'd tried to wipe them off. The image of all those dead babies came back to her, like an electrified peepshow, and her throat closed up, lumpy and tense. Most likely, this rotten sonofabitch is going to take the time to rape me, while my fiancee farts around in the ditch.

Rubby hollered from down below, “Oh my living Christ!” and the terror in his voice caused Don Carver to bury his face in his gore-stained palms and weep.

“Are you okay?” Juney called out.

“Nothing is okay,” Rubby called back. “Nothing is okay!”

“Is it bad? Honey? Is it bad down there? Is the woman okay?”

“Nothing is okay! It's all bad! Bring me the phone! Bring me the phone, down here!”

“There's nobody on the phone anymore, Rub! They hung up!”

“Bring it here.”

“How about I throw it to you?”

“Don't throw my phone. It's four hundred dollars. Walk it down here!”

“But I...”

“Just bring me the fucking phone!”

Man, she wouldn't do it. No chance of that. Uh uh.

She had a tattoo on her left breast that said Robert and Juneau Forever, and for the first time since it was inked, and completely out of nowhere, she thought she might like to have it lasered off.

It was a strange thing to think, at the time, given the circumstances, and so she looked up at the cloudless blue sky and tried to imagine a half-million balloons floating there—if only because a balloon seemed to her like the most inoffensive item in existence. She imagined balloons in all the colors of the spectrum, but deliberately reduced the number of red ones in consideration of the violence that lurked nearby (red being the color of blood, especially Maura's blood), and so increased the quantity of yellows, pinks and whites. And that was a pity because she normally had quite an affinity for red, especially in skirts and summer dresses.

“Juney...!”

With the horizon now a rainbow of imaginary dirigibles, she decided that this would be the perfect instant at which to stop time—to stop the universe itself—and mail the whole thing off to God in the form of a postcard. Wish you were here, and all that crap. A snapshot of eternity. No need to go any further. No need to see what horrors are waiting in the ruined vehicle.

 

 

“Juney...!”

It was hot, damn hot, and not even the barest trace of a breeze. Not a whisper, almost as if she actually had willed time to stop. So hot that the mosquitoes and blackflies had all dropped out of the air, dead. And above the sound of Don Carver's shallow, muted weeping, Juney tuned in on the hum of a fat little bumblebee, not far away, sampling the wild clover at the edge of the road. The tiniest hmmmm, tinier than the whirring of gears in a wind-up wristwatch at thirty paces, and yet it seemed capable of drowning out any other noise the eternal forest could conjure up. She chose to fixate upon it, lest she lose her bloody marbles.

“Juney! For Christ sakes!”

Rubby was still hollering, but she chose not to hear it. Shouting, swearing, banging about, down there in the bushes. He might as well have been fifty or a thousand miles away. She blocked it all out. Or, she pretended that she did. She pretended that she didn't hear Rubby say, “This woman is dead!” She pretended that she didn't hear, “Oh God! This woman is dead! Her head has come all the way off!”

Don Carver hollered back, “Is she breathing, yet?” Pure madness. Voice breaking.

“Her head is off! Mary, mother of Christ! Her head is come off!”

“I'm so sorry,” Don Carver whispered, biting his lip before turning into a wet, blubbering mess. He slid down the side of the pick-up, limp, bawling, face buried in his hands, becoming nothing but a quivery slab of gooseflesh. He rolled onto his side and spattered the gravel with tears and snot, and slowly de-evolved into fetal misery.

He could have been anyone. He could have been a pervert or child molester or worse. He burbled about love and loss, fidelity, chance, synergy, the agony of pure faith, and the inevitability of destiny, all in less than fifteen seconds. He said he'd tried his darnedest to put Maura's head back onto her neck—that her windpipe was still mostly intact—only slightly torn—and that maybe she was still getting the right amount of oxygen into her lungs and brain. More insanity. The kind of ridiculousness that most medicine, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, has been never been able to correct.

“I just thought, as long as her tubes were all connected...”

There was a nice padded room awaiting him, somewhere, probably back at Lockport.

Juney thought backward twenty miles or so. She thought back to the turn-off, from Highway Six, when Rubby announced that he knew a better route into town. He said it was the scenic route. He said, “This is Taylor Mill Road. It's beautiful at this time of year. I used to come hunting and fishing down this way. This is where I killed my first bear. Me and my brother used to do all our hunting and fishing down here. You'll love it. It's just a half an hour to town.”

They were on their way to visit Rubby's family. Mom Marilyn and brother Chris, plus Chris's wife and kids, and a few uncles, aunts and cousins. This would be Juney's first time meeting any of them, her first time in Cabal, her first time being more than a hundred miles away from her own home.

She was just as alien to Cabal as Don Carver.

He was nearly catatonic.

It could have been her on the ground, she figured, moaning and kissing the hot clay with cracked and bleeding lips. It could have been her in the yellow Blazer, dead and twisted all the way around, backward. That was how it might have been, in a parallel reality, or on Neptune or Mars. Maybe there was no such thing as Rubby and Juney. Maybe Rubby and Juney were just imaginary versions of Don and Maura. And maybe, since Juney was Maura, or vice versa, and the other one didn't really exist, then it was Juney's own head that had come all the way off.

If that was so, she wondered, would she still hear the bees? If right was up and down was left, if Earth was Neptune or Mars, and had been all along, would she be able to hear Ruddy hollering and swearing over her corpse, still demanding the goddamn cell phone?

Maybe not.

There were vehicles coming now, fast. She could sense them rolling in from the east, from Cabal, driving just two clicks below dangerous. Two, maybe more. Their response time was startling, even impeccable.

 Too little, too late, no one left to save.

“Hey! Hey!” she heard Rubby shout. He was frantic, turning blue in some places, furiously waving his arms about. Like a maniac—like an idiot. He tripped over something, perhaps another bloody piece of Maura, maybe the stump end of her left arm, or her right foot, or her whatever, and he leaned against the yellow wreck to vomit. Cheeseburgers and fries (with gravy) from Grumpy's Drive-Thru, which was no longer an actual drive-thru, technically, back at Ponton. Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he yelled, hoarsely, “Juney, I mean it—Bring the phone! I need to call them back!”

She pointed to her ears, feigning something akin to deafness, then pointed down the road, saying, “They're coming. I hear them coming! They're almost here.”

“I need the phone!”

“But they're already on the way!”

“Jesus Christ! Bring the phone! I need to call somebody!”

“I can't hear you! I'm not coming down there! I don't want to see it!”

And so it went.

This one detail, very important: She didn't want to take the scenic route, in the first place. Never did. She said so right from the outset.

She closed her eyes and thought about Jesus in his on-air sports coat. “The weather is next. Hard rains rolling in from the bay. And then Leeza will be here to talk to us about fashion. What are you going to wear for the end of the world?” She thought about splattered butterflies and ruined dreams, of killer golf balls and mounds of doomsday's children. She reckoned that Don Carver should have been more attentive to what was going on in front of him. If he truly loved the woman he wouldn't have been driving like an asshole.

No?

Seemed like they'd passed a hundred yellow deer-crossing signs.

“What was he thinking?” she asked herself. And then she put it directly to him, since he was lying only three feet from her: “What were you thinking? Didn't you see the warnings?”

He was too ruined to respond coherently. Nothing but a quavering lump. He talked about destroying his family before he'd even had a chance to build it. More of that sputtering gibberish. He said, “Tomorrow was going to be two years,” and she couldn't get a sense of what he meant by that. Two years of dating? Two years of sobriety? Two years of driving down meandering dirt roads? One guess was as good as any other. Then he added, “I watched her coming apart even while we were still rolling through the air. Her airbags didn't work quite so good. But I tried my best to put her back together again.”

She wished they'd never stopped for the man with the blue rag tied around his head. The cigarette he'd given to her was nothing but a flaccid paper tube, now. In less than ten minutes, she'd nervously rubbed all the tobacco out of it. Couldn't smoke it if she wanted to, which she most surely did.

She asked him for another cigarette.

And still, Rubby was shouting for his cell phone.

“Juney! Come down here! Juney! Jesus! The phone!”

Why he didn't just come up out of the ditch and get the damned thing, himself, she didn't have a clue. When the authorities arrived, when the shouting was over, when Rubby was all done with his tantrum and his lips turned from blue-black-blue back to a nice pinky maroon, Juney reckoned that she would break up with him. And for good, this time. No specific, singular reason for it, at all. She was a bunny-rabbit and he wasn't. Simple as that. And beyond such pure, ungarnished logic, nothing else mattered.

She didn't want to meet his family, anyway.

He would eventually tell Juney that the woman, Maura, was broken in five pieces, not two, owing to a fantastical sequence of violence—that both the engine and windshield, snapped in two perfect halves, seemingly conspired, against the laws of logic and physics, to take the poor woman entirely apart. These specific pieces, and where they landed, Juney immediately erased from her memory (though she was doomed to forever recall what Don Carver had said about the head still being somewhat tethered to the neck). Rubby hadn't been able to discern whether he was looking at one victim, or many, and this was the reason, he claimed, that he acted like “such an asshole.”

Juney told him that she wasn't interested in his excuses, legitimate or otherwise. And, for the record, his stupid cell phone still hadn't saved any lives. His score remained a big, fat zero.

One of the police that arrived on the scene—the one who took Don Carver's statement, and then promptly arrested him in order to deter his suicide—said that stupidity was a graver sin than pride. Juney didn't think he got that line out of the Bible, or out of any Holy book, for that matter, but she managed to take comfort in the notion that Don Carver might roast like a pork sausage, after all.

Or maybe sunburn would be the worst he'd get.

...